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The Mossad lost this race – despite a kidnapping

The bait? A woman, of course, young and good-looking.

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The Mossad lost this race – despite a kidnapping

The bait? A woman, of course, young and good-looking. Because the target person was lonely and longed for female company. So "Cindy" came into play, an alleged tourist from the USA. She approached the almost 34-year-old man and persuaded him to interrupt his stay in London, which was already autumnal, for a joint trip to Rome, which was still warm in late summer. There, on September 30, 1986, a classic “honey trap” snapped shut.

The target was Mordechai Vanunu, and the supposed "Cindy" was actually named Cheryl Bentov. What they both had in common was that they were bearers of secrets from the State of Israel: Vanunu as a technician who had just left the Dimona nuclear center but was sworn to absolute secrecy, Bentov as an agent of the Mossad secret service.

As soon as the two arrived in Rome, Vanunu and Bentov got into a taxi. It drove them to an apartment in the city where three other Mossad agents were waiting. They overpowered Vanunu and injected him with a powerful sleeping drug. At night a white van came to take the Mossad commando and the abductee to the port; the car had been carelessly rented from the Embassy of Israel in Italy.

With a ready motorboat, Vanunu was driven to the ship "Noga", which was anchored off the coast. Normally it was used for electronic reconnaissance, but it had been ordered to Rome at short notice. The ship took seven days to return to Israel.

When the "Noga" arrived, it was already too late. Though Vanunu was prosperous, his betrayal had not been able to stop his kidnapping, undoubtedly illegal in every respect. Because on October 5, 1986, the British newspaper "Sunday Times" published the article based on his information. London journalists estimated that Israel had already manufactured more than 100 nuclear warheads in the past decade and a half.

This shattered the Jewish state’s ironclad principle of “nuclear ambiguity”: no one should know for sure whether and how many nuclear weapons Israel had at its disposal – this was part of the small country’s nuclear deterrent to the much larger ones and from many more people inhabited Arab states.

Modechai Vanunu broke this principle and betrayed Israel's most important secret. Why? He was not a trained agent, nor was he a "self-supplier" in the service of a foreign power. Rather, he was a confused political activist. His life up to the point of betrayal and kidnapping hardly allows any other conclusion.

Born on October 14, 1952 in Marrakesh as the second of eleven children in a Jewish-Orthodox family, he emigrated to Israel with his parents and siblings in 1963 - the anti-Semitic atmosphere in Morocco had grown too much. Initially, the family lived in a hut without electricity or a sewage system in Beer Sheva on the edge of the Negev desert in the south of the country.

Modechai Vanunu was a good student. He broke away from the strict beliefs of his parents and refused to attend a religious school. He joined the army but was unable to pursue his dream of becoming a pilot and served as a sapper. He was deployed in the Yom Kippur War – as far as is known, that was the only time Israeli nuclear weapons were deployed. Honorably discharged in 1974, he began studying physics in Tel Aviv, but dropped out for financial reasons after failing two exams.

In 1976 he applied to the Negev Nuclear Research Center near the southern Israeli city of Dimona. This plant, built around a French-style reactor, was officially used to desalinate seawater in order to clear the Negev desert. In fact, since about 1964, plutonium for nuclear weapons has been "bred" here. Western and Arab secret services had always suspected this, but there was no reliable information from inside the facility. Until Vanunu, who had been working at the plant as a nuclear technician and shift supervisor since February 1977, revealed their secret.

There had been evidence of his unreliability. In 1979 he enrolled again at a university, this time in Beer Sheva, first in engineering, then in economics and also in Greek philosophy. That spoke for an unstable personality.

In the autumn of 1980 he backpacked through Europe, in 1983 he flew to the USA with a stopover in Ireland; Dimona employees were only allowed direct flights. All of this should have made the security department prick up their ears, because as the bearer of secrets, Vanunu should lead as inconspicuous and low-risk a life as possible.

Around the same time he began to develop into a political activist. He had already refused to serve in the Lebanon war in 1982, now he refused military exercises and preferred to do kitchen duty instead of maneuvers in the field. In 1984 he founded a radical left group with some Jewish and Palestinian students. Vanunu, who was born in Maghreb, was particularly embittered that there was a dominance of European, i.e. Ashkenazi, Jews in Israel. He felt discriminated against by his superiors because of his origins.

In May 1984 he was warned and reminded of his duty of confidentiality. Briefly fired due to cuts in 1985, he returned to work in Dimona thanks to union protests - and smuggled in a camera that took a total of 57 shots. At the end of October 1985 he resigned himself and received a severance payment of at least 7500 US dollars.

With the money, Vanunu set out. He traveled from Haifa to Athens, flew from there via Moscow (where he stayed for a few days) to Thailand, then to Nepal and Australia, where he intended to settle. Here he also converted to the Anglican Church.

A Colombian journalist persuaded Vanunu to sell his knowledge for up to $1 million. The not yet traitor traveled to London to meet with an editor of The Sunday Times. Around the same time, the Mossad became aware of Vanunu.

Now a kind of race began: Would Israel pull the secret bearer out of circulation before the disclosure story was ready for publication? The Mossad didn't want to kidnap Vanunu from London because that would have put Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher under domestic pressure. So the traitor had to be lured to another country. Just to Italy.

Upon his arrival in Israel, Vanunu was accused. The trial was closed to the public and ended with 18 years in prison for treason, most of which he served in solitary confinement. On April 21, 2004, Vanunu was released five months early, but under strict conditions. So he is not allowed to leave the country and not talk to journalists. Since then he has presented himself as a left-wing activist.

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