Spies Against Armageddon (41 page)

Vanunu was in a soul-searching mood. His first destination was in the Far East, where he explored alternative religions. He went on to Sydney, Australia, in May 1986, and found a job at an Anglican church. And he found the light.

The wayward Israeli became friends with the priest and converted to Christianity. He also met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian vagabond with no fixed address and no fixed profession. Vanunu confided in him that he had worked at Israel’s top-secret reactor and had two interesting rolls of color film with him.

The Colombian, a highly entrepreneurial traveler, marveled at Vanunu as a chicken about to lay golden eggs. He persuaded the Israeli that the story could be sold, and for enough money to last a lifetime. The idea appealed to Vanunu.

Guerrero appointed himself Vanunu’s literary agent, in effect. They developed the snapshots, and Guerrero contacted several international publications to offer a “sensational scoop.” Strangely, no one was interested except for the British
Sunday Time
s. The free-spending newspaper, owned by the Australian-born press magnate Rupert Murdoch, sent an investigative reporter to Sydney to meet the Israeli and assess his fantastic tale.

The reporter was impressed, and a deal was struck. Vanunu provided the photos and was flown to London in September 1986 for further debriefings. The
Sunday Times
cut out the middleman, refusing to deal with Guerrero.

In London, Vanunu was taken care of by Insight, the investigative team of the
Sunday Times
, which placed him in a nice hotel and promised him a book deal, with an advance of roughly $300,000 if his story could be verified. Assisted by nuclear scientists, the journalists started to grill Vanunu. He told them everything he knew, which included a lot that he never should have known if security at Dimona had been conducted properly.

He provided a detailed sketch of six hitherto unknown, below-ground-level sections of the Dimona complex. That could explain why the American inspectors in the 1960s inside Dimona never saw the truly important parts. Above ground, the building appeared to be a two-story, little-used unimportant warehouse.

Scientists corroborated Vanunu’s story, and the
Sunday Times
was preparing to publish one of the world’s great exclusives: an accurate and detailed look inside Israel’s secret nuclear bomb factory.

Near the end of September, the British newspaper sought a comment from the Israeli embassy in London by giving it an outline of the Vanunu story. The embassy issued a denial and portrayed Vanunu as a minor technician who would not know anything, anyway.

What later tipped the balance in favor of publishing the story was the somewhat panicked reaction by Peres, now the prime minister. He summoned a group of Israeli newspaper editors and briefed them, off the record, about the coming big story from London. Peres begged them to play it down.

As is perversely customary with off-the-record briefings in Israel, the information was quickly leaked.

The
Sunday Times
realized that despite the embassy’s denial, Israel’s most senior authorities were taking the Vanunu story very seriously.

In the meantime, angry at both Vanunu and the
Sunday Times
for abandoning him, Guerrero went to a rival newspaper—the
Sunday Mirror
—with his own, slightly garbled version of the nuclear revelations. The
Mirror
did not believe in the Colombian at all, but paid him some money and used a couple of Vanunu’s photos to publish a two-page barb that poked fun at the
Sunday Times
for falling for patent nonsense.

Israel’s nuclear potential was being used as a weapon in a newspaper circulation war that raged between Murdoch and his arch-rival,
Mirror
owner Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, a Czech-born Jew who converted to Christianity, had become a born-again pro-Israel activist. After he mysteriously fell off his yacht and drowned in the Mediterranean in 1991, published rumors would claim that he was a Mossad agent who in 1986 provided a tip-off about Vanunu. Some books suggested that the Mossad sent frogmen to murder their sayan, or helper, to shut him up. Those tales made little sense.

Moreover, the Mossad did not need Maxwell to know about Vanunu and his escapades. The agency learned about it from the
Sunday Times
reporters. At least twice, they contacted Israel for comment and verification: once, calling the embassy, and even earlier calling a journalist in Israel to ask about Vanunu’s credibility. The journalist thought he should inform his brother, who happened to be a senior Aman officer. Now the intelligence community knew.

Prime Minister Peres ordered the Mossad to find the former nuclear worker and bring him back to Israel. At Mossad headquarters, some senior members suggested that the best solution would be to assassinate Vanunu. But that was ruled out. Since the death of the kidnapped Alexander Ibor in 1954, no Israeli citizen was killed by his own government.

The Mossad had to come up with a snatch mission to bring Vanunu home to face trial for spilling secrets.

One more string was attached: Peres ordered that the kidnapping not take place on British soil. He feared that whether it was a success or a failure, Britain’s Iron Lady—Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher—would be very angry at Israel if her nation’s sovereignty were violated.

Caesarea operatives—closely supervised by the department head, Shabtai Shavit—stepped up efforts to find Vanunu in Britain. They flew in, using false passports and armed with cover stories. Shavit’s deputy was the on-the-spot project manager in London.

It would not be easy, with Vanunu changing hotels regularly. The Mossad manhunt benefited from the pure luck of a labor strike against the
Times
. There were picket lines outside the newspaper’s offices, which provided a perfect cover for a Mossad team to pose as a television news crew, hoping to spot Vanunu and his minders from the Insight team as they came and went.

That worked. And from then on, it was relatively easy to keep an eye on Vanunu. Still, they faced two problems: how to establish contact with him, and how to compel him to leave Britain so that Peres’s orders could be obeyed.

Good luck stroked their mission again. Vanunu was angry, by now, about the delays in publishing his story. He told his handlers from the
Sunday Times
that he would love some female companionship. The newspaper team would say later that it did not arrange for a prostitute, out of fear that eventually that would make them look like pimps.

Frustrated and lonely, Vanunu became careless about his security, and the
Sunday Times
handlers could not hold him back. He started wandering the streets of London alone, and one evening eye contact was made.

Vanunu saw a woman who seemed interested in him. She was plump and bleached-blonde, wearing high heels and playing hard to get. She introduced herself as “Cindy,” but years later her true identity would be revealed by the
Sunday Times
: Cheryl Bar-Hanin, an American Jew who moved to Israel, married an intelligence officer, and was recruited to work for Caesarea.

Mordecai and “Cindy” went out on a few dates over the next week. The Mossad was exploiting his sexual hunger and his frustration with the British press. Cindy then suggested a way to get away from it all. She said that her sister had an apartment in Rome, and that they should fly there for a memorable weekend.

Against the advice of his
Sunday Times
babysitters, Vanunu took the bait. After hearing about the girlfriend, the British reporters cautioned him not to leave the country. But he did leave.

After landing in Rome, he drove with Cindy to what he assumed would be their love nest. It was a Mossad honey trap. Kidon team members were waiting for him in the apartment. They pounced on Vanunu, injected him with a sedative, put him in a rental car, drove to a marina 200 miles from Rome, and boarded a yacht. It pulled out and rendezvoused with an Israeli Navy ship, the
Noga
, which had cadets on board on a training mission.

The cadets and the crew were told to go below deck—and not look—when the strangers arrived. The Kidon team members, carrying their sedated prisoner, locked themselves inside a cabin, and the ship sailed to Israel.

While Vanunu was a captive in chains in the eastern Mediterranean, the
Sunday Times
finally published its major spread—with a front-page headline screaming, “REVEALED: THE SECRETS OF ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR ARSENAL.” It included Vanunu’s inside story of the work conducted at Dimona, and a physicist’s assessment that Israel must have around 200 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs.

The world was not really surprised. It always assumed that Israel had a substantial atomic arsenal. Yet, it was fascinating to see Vanunu’s photographs.

Several governments deplored his having been kidnapped in Italy’s capital, but officials also admired Israel’s decisive action: bringing a citizen home to face trial for violating the law by revealing sensitive secrets. Vanunu had revealed them only to a newspaper, not directly to an enemy. Still, he was indicted for espionage and treason.

Israel’s supreme court rejected a claim by Vanunu’s lawyer that the former Dimona worker had been brought illegally to the country. Vanunu was sentenced to 18 years in prison, and he served the entire term. Israeli officials were not even tempted to grant leniency to the nuclear spy, even though prison officials reported that he was almost losing his sanity in a long period of solitary confinement.

That harsh attitude was the product of Yehiel Horev’s pressure. The Malmab chief would not forgive or forget the Israeli who betrayed one of Israel’s sacred secrets.

There certainly was an element of revenge, but also a measure of face-saving. Security chiefs were ashamed of their initial failures to stop Vanunu, and they compensated for their own shortcomings by taking it out on him.

The vendetta against him continued, even after he served his term. He was released in 2004, yet Shin Bet and Malmab claimed that he continued to be a security risk because of the knowledge in his head. Thus, they insisted that he be banned from leaving Israel, and his movements were restricted.

Even in 2012, Vanunu could occasionally be spotted strolling the streets of Tel Aviv or sipping coffee at an outdoor table –almost always alone. He certainly had friends worldwide, and even a couple in America that formally adopted him, but his quest had been a lonely one: trying to force his country to tell the truth about its own strength.

Israel’s leaders still preferred ambiguity and showed they would take action to preserve it.

Chapter Eighteen

Spying on Friends

Inside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia—in a corridor leading to the toilets, in a segregated section where foreign visitors come on official business—hung a large poster showing a notorious spy.

It was a photo of Jonathan Jay Pollard, an American who in 1985 was caught spying for Israel. The poster’s implicit message to employees of the United States intelligence community was: Don’t do what he did, and you won’t end up like him. Pollard is serving a life sentence in prison.

When Mossad liaisons were the visitors, the poster conveyed an extra meaning. It was a bitter reminder of the difficulties the organization has had in dealing with the CIA, and more widely with the entire U.S. military and security establishment.

“Those were harsh times for us,” said a former Mossad head of station in Washington, referring to the Pollard fall-out. “There was a decade in which we were punished for a crime we did not commit.”

He said he was reminded of the Biblical phrase about the sins of the father being visited upon the children. The Mossad visitors felt they should not be punished by the Americans for something that other Israelis had done; indeed, the CIA acknowledged that it was not the Mossad, but another unit, that ran Pollard. Still, it added up to Israel betraying the United States.

The secret operation unraveled on November 21, 1985, when Pollard sat nervously in his Ford Mustang just outside the front gate of the Israeli embassy in Washington. With him were his wife, Anne Henderson-Pollard, their birth certificates, family photographs, their cat, and the cat’s vaccination records. The Pollards were hoping to flee the country right then and there, if possible simply by vanishing into the world of diplomatic immunity.

When the heavy steel doors opened for a few moments, Pollard gunned the engine and pulled into the Israeli compound. Security guards looked puzzled and drew their guns, even as the driver told them that he needed help—refuge from the FBI agents following him.

Indeed, several carloads of FBI agents lurked outside the gate, and they used an intercom placed there for visitors to tell the Israeli guards that the people who had just driven inside were wanted for questioning. The embassy’s administrator and chief security officer turned away the Pollards. They were forced to leave, and the FBI arrested them outside the grounds.

Pollard was a civilian who had worked for the U.S. Navy for six years, most of that time in intelligence and counterterrorism units. Lest that sound too swashbuckling, he was only a desk man. But he was a man whose desk included a computer with access to almost every secret collected and stored by America’s huge intelligence network.

While Pollard considered himself a loyal American, he was also a fervent supporter of Israel. He was born in Texas in 1954 to a Jewish family that moved to South Bend, Indiana.

Pollard went to Stanford University, one of the nation’s finest, where his international relations professors found him to have an overactive imagination. He claimed to be a colonel in the Israeli army, and he even told acquaintances that the Mossad was grooming him to be a spy in America.

Pollard’s stories always involved Israel, and he left some people with the impression that the Mossad was paying his tuition fees. While the tales did not all seem credible, they were told with such conviction that it was hard to believe they were totally false—but they were.

He was hired by the United States Navy as a civilian intelligence analyst in 1979, and he was later assigned to an anti-terrorism center that was created in 1984 in response to the upsurge of Hezbollah attacks in Lebanon. His job gave him access to facts, clues, and rumors collected by U.S. agencies and agents across a wide range of countries.

Pollard also held Washington’s most valuable library card—a “courier card” that permitted him to visit high-security archives and carry documents back to his office for analysis.

The nightmare of why his American employers failed to detect his erratic personality traits in school, his exaggerated boasts and his outright lies, would go on to haunt security officers in Washington for years.

Before joining the Navy, Pollard had applied for a more prestigious job at the CIA but was rejected. The Agency never told the Navy about its assessment of Pollard as “a fanciful liar, a closet spy, a Zionist zealot, and a drug abuser.”

Pollard set out to live his fantasies. Through a New York businessman he knew, Pollard was introduced in May 1984 to an Israeli air force colonel, Aviem Sella, who was on leave in New York, studying for a post-graduate degree.

It was conspiracy at first sight. Pollard told the colonel that he had absolute proof that the United States was not sharing all the intelligence data it should with Israel, and Pollard said that made him livid. For instance, he said, Iraq had a highly active chemical weapons program, and America was not giving that information to Israel. Pollard hastened to add that his goal was to help the Jewish state, which he truly loved, and not ever to hurt America.

Sella, one of Israel’s finest pilots—one of the élite who who had bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor—listened with interest.

Colonel Sella dutifully sent a message to the air force in Tel Aviv about the angry American intelligence analyst who offered to keep Israel fully informed. His report made its way to Aman and to the Mossad. Yet the Mossad director, Nahum Admoni—who succeeded Yitzhak Hofi in late 1982—immediately decided that he did not want to risk angering the United States by running a spy there.

The report also went to Rafi Eitan, the veteran “Mr. Kidnap” who now had the very limited role of directing Lakam—the small defense ministry agency for technological and nuclear espionage. Eitan had grand ambitions to expand his agency, and the offer made by Pollard as a “walk-in” seemed to be great timing.

In weighing whether to use him, Eitan had to consider what most Israeli intelligence chiefs had decided many years earlier: not to use local Jews as spies for Israel inside their own countries. Egyptian and Iraqi Jews who served Israel had been tortured and hanged after being caught, and their families and communities had suffered.

Yet, Israeli officials might be forgiven for assuming that they could get away with almost anything inside the United States. Ronald Reagan, who became president in 1981, got off to a somewhat bumpy start with Israel—as he sold sophisticated weapons to Saudi Arabia, steamrollering opposition by pro-Israel lobbyists, and then condemned Israel for its invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

After attacks by Syria and Hezbollah on Americans in Lebanon, though, Reagan turned strongly pro-Israel. He gave enthusiastic backing to a formal memorandum on strategic cooperation with Israel, which included more port visits to Haifa by America’s Sixth Fleet, the pre-positioning of U.S. military equipment in Israel, joint training exercises, and heightened cooperation between the intelligence communities.

CIA veterans with long years of service in the Middle East concluded that Israel could do almost anything and be forgiven by official Washington. One American intelligence officer told a Mossad contact, only half jokingly, that Israel was lucky it never became the 51st state.

“Why are we so lucky?” the Israeli wondered.

“Because then,” said the CIA agent, “you would only have two U.S. senators, and this way you have at least 60.”

Still, the intelligence communities of both countries knew enough to be suspicious of each other. The FBI was especially wary of Israel’s aggressive acquisition of technology.

No one was better qualified than Rafi Eitan to know about the sensitivities of spying in America. He himself was involved in the suspected disappearance of uranium from Numec in Pennsylvania. As a seasoned professional, he also knew enough to be suspicious of an over-eager walk-in like Pollard. It could be a “sting” operation by the U.S. authorities or a trap of another sort.

Eitan also knew, however, that the young American’s input could be priceless. Despite formal exchange agreements, Israel’s intelligence community always assumed that the United States was not sharing everything. Pollard could fill the gaps.

Knowing that Lakam had enjoyed unquestioned backing from the top political echelon in decades past, Eitan felt he had an implicit green light to proceed.

He used “Avi” Sella, on his study break in New York, as a local case officer. The colonel was instructed to continue his contacts with Pollard, and he had several guarded conversations with him from telephone booths. In the summer of 1984, Sella met with Pollard in Washington and purposefully forged a friendship. They spoke for hours about Israeli history and strategy.

Pollard also handed over classified documents. The Lakam agency’s science attachés in New York and Washington assisted Sella by photocopying papers and rushing the copies to Eitan in Tel Aviv.

The results were astounding. Now the Israelis could see what the Americans had: a lot of information on issues of major importance to Israel’s defense.

There was information on some of the newest weapons systems obtained by Israel’s Arab neighbors: lists and descriptions of arms recently purchased by Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. Because those three countries were seen as pro-America moderates, the United States had always refused to share its intelligence about them with Israel. Now, Eitan realized, Israel had a new window into those countries. And this was just a sample of what Pollard could deliver.

The American agent’s enthusiasm was overwhelming. After he was promoted within the Navy’s anti-terrorism center in October 1984, he told the Israelis that his higher security clearance could get them almost any document in the American intelligence networks—including photographs taken by spy satellites. Israel, at that time, did not have its own roving eyes in orbit.

Eitan was so pleased that he decided to launch a new phase. Pollard and Anne Henderson, then his fiancée, were flown to Paris at Lakam’s expense in November 1984. There, a little surprise awaited them. Sella was on the scene, taking them out to fancy dinners—and then introducing Pollard to his new case officer, Yossi Yagur.

Yagur, an employee of Israel Aircraft Industries, was now Lakam’s science attaché at the Israeli consulate in New York. In case the worst should happen, Yagur was protected by diplomatic immunity.

As a further surprise, Pollard got to meet the legendary Eitan, whose exploits (such as kidnapping Eichmann) were outlined to the young American to impress him. Eitan was introduced as director of the entire operation involving Pollard. Eitan and Yagur sat down with their volunteer agent to discuss their next moves, including specific documents they hoped he could acquire.

In more relaxed moments, Sella encouraged Jonathan and Anne to admire the windows of some of the French capital’s most elegant jewelry stores. When Henderson saw a large sapphire and diamond ring she liked, Sella urged, “Go ahead and buy it.” The Israeli paid, on condition that they make it their engagement ring.

It cost around $10,000, and in many ways it was the tangible mark of the Pollards’ engagement by Israel. The couple would marry the following August in Venice and spend a three-week honeymoon in Italy—which was not only paid for by Israel, but included a detour to Tel Aviv to meet Eitan again.

In compensation for expenses and as a token of their appreciation, the Israelis told Pollard, he would be paid $1,500 a month. In addition to Anne’s ring, Pollard was immediately given $10,000 in cash, and Eitan told him that a Swiss bank account had been opened for him. His fees would be deposited directly, for Pollard’s use in 10 years.

By then, the American replied, he would hope to live in Israel. Yagur responded to that by showing him an Israeli passport already prepared for Pollard with his photograph and the false name “Danny Cohen.” Pollard was pleased.

The diamond ring and the cash were part of a classic technique to ensnare a secret agent and keep him. The spy who tells his controllers he is acting voluntarily, out of ideological affection for the country he is helping—or disgruntled hatred of the nation he is betraying—can easily be overcome by fear or change his mind. Being a volunteer, he feels he can withdraw at any time.

A paid agent cannot. He feels obliged to deliver, and in the background lies the threat of blackmail.

Pollard’s motivation was a combination of Zionism and excitement. He felt certain that he was helping Israel defend itself, and he had the thrill of being a spy, with exotic trips and secret payments.

As soon as he returned from Europe, Pollard got right to work. He brought an entire suitcase full of documents—and the fabled satellite photographs of the Middle East—to a house in Maryland, where he met Yagur. The Lakam officer taught Pollard some code words to be used in case communication or cancellation of an expected meeting was necessary.

Yagur told Pollard to come, every other Friday, to a special photocopying facility in a Washington apartment building where Irit Erb resided. She worked as a secretary for the Lakam office in the Israeli embassy.

The apartment she used belonged to an American Jew, working as a lawyer in Israel, who apparently did not know what the defense ministry was doing in his Washington residence. There was so much high-speed and high-quality copying hardware there that a special electronic shielding system was installed, to block electromagnetic waves from causing interference to the neighbors’ television sets.

The Israeli handlers knew how to keep Pollard interested in his work: They stroked his ego. Yagur frequently told Pollard that he was extremely valuable, and that various parts of Israel’s intelligence and defense communities were using the information he had provided. Because Pollard was in the business of analyzing such matters, he was not satisfied by generous but general platitudes. He insisted that Yagur find out, line by line, agency by agency, who in Israel was using the secret documents and how.

The various agency chiefs in Tel Aviv—and officials as senior as the prime minister himself—had to have known that Eitan’s scoops were coming from Washington. After all, only an American source could have provided satellite photographs. Yet no one asked Eitan who his agent was. Revealing details would violate compartmentalization.