Mordecai Vanunu

Mordecai Vanunu was a former technician at a nuclear facility near Dimona, Israel, who became a whistleblower, exposing details of Israel's nuclear program to the London Sunday Times in 1986.¹²

Background and Early Career

Vanunu was born in Morocco to a right-wing Jewish family that migrated to Israel in the early 1960s. He grew up in Beersheba and was drafted into the military, where he was trained as a technician at the Dimona. After his military service, he continued to work there as a civilian. He began sympathizing with the Palestinian cause and was horrified by Israel's nuclear capabilities.¹

Work at Dimona and Security Breach

Vanunu began working as a technician at Dimona in August 1977 and spent much of the next eight years assigned to various tasks inside the reprocessing plant, formally known as Machon 2 and informally as the Tunnel. This plant, handling highly radioactive materials, was the most sensitive area at Dimona, with only 150 of Dimona's 2,700 employees working there. A special pass was required for entry, and all movement was theoretically closely monitored. However, Vanunu found that the stringent security existed only in theory.²

Constantly in trouble for his public pro-Arab views, Vanunu was laid off in mid-1985 as part of a government-wide cutback. He appealed through his union and won back his job. It was at this point that he smuggled a camera into the reprocessing plant during an overnight shift and wandered around undetected for some forty minutes, taking fifty-seven color photographs. A few weeks later, he was fired after calling for the formation of a Palestinian state during an Arab rally. Even then, with union help, Vanunu negotiated a settlement from Dimona's management, receiving severance pay and a letter attesting to his good record.²

Exile and Attempts to Share Information

A combination of factors - disenchantment with his life, distress at the treatment of Arabs in Israel, and what he had learned inside Dimona - drove him to exile in Australia and eventually to the London Sunday Times. Vanunu first traveled to Thailand and Nepal, where he converted to Buddhism. He carried with him photographs and undeveloped film of the inside of the Israeli nuclear facility. In Nepal, he contacted the Soviet Embassy in Kathmandu and offered them the photographs, but received little in return.¹²

Vanunu later traveled to Australia, where he preached about the evils of nuclear power and shared his top-secret photos with a church prayer group. He converted to Christianity and worked as a part-time taxi driver. Oscar Guerrero, a freelance journalist, saw the photographs and proposed publishing them for a fee.¹

Mossad Operation and Capture

Israeli intelligence learned of Vanunu's activities and sought to stop him. Copies of some of Vanunu's sensational photographs were made available in London - before publication of the Sunday Times story - to an Israeli intelligence agent masquerading as an American newspaper reporter. The photographs were sent by courier to the office of Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who ordered Mossad to get Vanunu out of London and into Israeli custody. Cindy Hanin Bentov, a Mossad agent, enticed Vanunu to leave for Rome a few days before publication. Once in Rome, Vanunu was drugged and returned to Israel by ship to stand trial. He was sentenced in March 1988 to eighteen years in a maximum-security prison for espionage and treason.¹²

Impact on American Intelligence

Vanunu's Times interview and his photographs of many of the production units in the Tunnel, or Machon 2, provided the American intelligence community with the first extensive evidence of Israeli capability to manufacture fusion, or thermonuclear, weapons. American intelligence also obtained copies of many of the Sunday Times's interview notes with Vanunu, which provided more specific detail of the inner workings of Dimona. Senior American officials and nuclear experts uniformly agreed that the unpublished Vanunu notes are highly credible, with one official describing the scope of the operation as "much more extensive than we thought."²

The most exhaustive analysis of the Vanunu statements and photographs was conducted by the Z Division, a special intelligence unit at the Livermore Laboratories. While Z Division's only debate was over the numbers, as Vanunu claimed Israel's nuclear stockpile totaled over two hundred warheads (a number significantly higher than CIA and DIA estimates), American nonproliferation experts independently learned of a boost in Dimona's cooling capacity, further evidence of Vanunu's credibility.²

Nuclear Program Timeline and Capabilities

Vanunu's revelations helped American intelligence experts date the progress of the Israeli nuclear arsenal. He revealed that Unit 92 in the Tunnel had been painstakingly removing tritium from heavy water since the 1960s, indicating that physicists at Dimona had been attempting to manufacture "boosted" fission weapons from the earliest days of production. In 1980, he was assigned to work at a new production plant for lithium 6, another essential element of the hydrogen bomb. In 1984, a new facility (Unit 93) for large-scale production of tritium was opened, suggesting that full-scale production of neutron weapons began then.²

Dimona Facility Structure

As described by Vanunu, Dimona includes the reactor (Machon 1) and at least eight other buildings, or Machons, with Machon 2 (the chemical reprocessing plant) being the most essential. Machon 1 is the large silver-domed reactor, sixty feet in diameter, where uranium fuel rods remain for three months and are cooled by heavy water. The steam created is vented into the atmosphere, creating a radioactive cloud. Machon 3 converts lithium 6 into a solid for insertion into a nuclear warhead and processes natural uranium for the reactor. Machon 4 contains a waste treatment plant for radioactive residue from Machon 2. Machon 5 coats uranium rods with aluminum for consumption in the reactor. Machon 6 provides basic services and power. Machon 8 contains a laboratory for testing samples and experimenting on new manufacturing processes, and is also the site of Special Unit 840, where Israeli scientists developed a gas centrifuge method of enriching uranium. Machon 9 houses a laser-isotope-reprocessing facility for uranium enrichment. Depleted uranium is chemically isolated in Machon 10 for shipment to the Israeli Defense Force or sale to arms manufacturers.²

Production Capacity

The Tunnel (Machon 2) remained in operation around the clock for thirty-four weeks a year, producing a weekly average of 1.2 kilograms of pure plutonium, enough for four to a dozen or more bombs annually, depending on warhead design. This production rate suggests the reactor operates at about 120 to 150 megawatts, more than five times its officially stated output, consuming nearly one hundred tons of uranium ore a year. The precision involved in machining plutonium hemispheres and placing them around gases for boosted nuclear weapons was achieved through advancements in robotics, a field in which Aharon Katzir was world-renowned for his research at the Weizmann Institute of Science.²

The Sunday Mirror

Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian who had attached himself to Vanunu in Sydney, offered the story to the Sunday Mirror while The Sunday Times was still checking it. Two Mirror reporters, Tony Frost and Mark Souster, argued that the photographs looked genuine and should lead the paper. The editor, Michael Malloy, overruled them and wanted none of the photographs printed. On the Thursday before publication he ordered Frost and Souster to take the photographs and data to the Israeli embassy in London. His deputy, John Parker, understood that Robert Maxwell had given the order. Malloy said later: "I told Bob about it because of his involvement with Israel. He does have powerful friends there and close links." Of the embassy visit he said: "I think he probably said, 'Oh, let the Israelis have a look at it,' and that's how it came about. It wasn't as if we were handing them to a foreign enemy."²

The paper ran two pages on September 28, 1986, headed "The Strange Case of Israel and the Nuclear Con Man," which quoted the Israeli press attache as saying that Vanunu had been a junior technician. Parker said: "The Sunday Mirror had the biggest story in the world at that time and it collapsed because of the line they took. It was a classic exercise by the Israelis in disinformation." The news editor, Peter Miller, said the line "cost the Sunday Mirror a world-beating exclusive." Frost said: "I was hoping one day that the full story would come out on this." Maxwell dismissed Miller in November 1990. The Daily Mirror dismissed its foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, on October 29, 1991, for denying that he had been in Ohio in 1985 at the home of an arms dealer, after a rival paper printed a photograph of him there. Maxwell died a week later.²³

Peter Hounam of the Sunday Times met Seymour Hersh and Ari Ben-Menashe three times in one day when Hersh's book was offered for serialization. He found that Ben-Menashe's statement that the Mirror's photograph of Vanunu had been flown in from Israel was false, since Hounam had taken it himself in Australia and given Guerrero a copy. The Sunday Times did not serialize the book.⁴

Peres and Thatcher

On September 21, 1986, after a meeting with Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, Prime Minister Shimon Peres reportedly telephoned Margaret Thatcher about what Vanunu was telling the press. Cheryl Bentov had arrived in London the day before. Vanunu flew with her to Rome on September 30 on British Airways flight 504. Israel confirmed on November 9 that he was in custody, denied that he had been kidnapped on English soil, and said there was "no basis for the report that Mr. Peres contacted Mrs. Thatcher in order to tell her something that did not happen." Israeli officials then told British correspondents privately about the call.⁴

In the Commons the Conservative members Dennis Walters and Anthony Beaumont-Dark called for an inquiry. Asked by Dale Campbell-Savours whether she had discussed Vanunu with Peres or any Israeli official before his departure, Thatcher answered: "No." Asked whether any Israeli official had communicated with her office to procure his return, she answered: "No, he was not returned to Israel from Britain; he was returned from another country." Before the full debate Peres telephoned her again, and said afterward: "It was a very friendly conversation and I think that our misunderstanding has been cleared up." The British ambassador to Israel, Clifford Squire, was told by Peres's aide Yossi Beilin that Israel had nothing to add. No British inquiry was held.⁴

Rome

The Roman magistrate Domenico Sica traced a van hired by the Israeli embassy on the day of the abduction whose mileage matched a journey to La Spezia, and an Israeli cargo ship that had declared a false itinerary. Vanunu's brother Meir, who had learned the details by speaking Moroccan Arabic to him in prison, testified twice. An Israeli court issued a warrant for Meir's arrest, and the British Home Office refused him asylum on the ground that he "faced prosecution, not persecution." An official of the Israeli foreign ministry said: "If Dr. Sica comes it would be very, very embarrassing for our government." Sica closed the inquiry in June 1988 with the finding that Vanunu had been working with the Mossad and that "the whole affair had been a disinformation exercise." He reasoned that no one could be found who had seen Vanunu arrive in Rome, that professionals would not have used a flat in a crowded district, that the message Vanunu wrote on his palm was in better English than he commanded, and that the photographs showed no staff. Meir Vanunu replied: "If this is a disinformation exercise, release my brother." Peter Hounam of The Sunday Times wrote: "I made six visits to Rome to brief Sica and provide him with every scrap of evidence of the abduction. He never once advanced the view that The Sunday Times was the victim of a hoax, as his report intimates." The woman, he pointed out, had not used her real name, as Sica supposed, but that of her sister-in-law.⁴⁵

Bentov

Cheryl Hanin was born in Orlando, Florida, in 1960, went to Israel in the late 1970s, served in a Nahal unit, and in March 1985 married Ofer Bentov, a major in military intelligence and a general's son. Hounam and David Connett, who had seen her with Vanunu in London, found her at an address in Netanya in July 1987. She asked, "Are you going to publish this?" and then said: "I deny this, I deny everything." A family friend recalled her telling her mother that "there were other things that I did for the Israeli government which were even more pertinent and involved than this." The CIA and the FBI examined her records at Edgewater High School in Orlando, and the CIA's London station asked the British services whether Israel had given warning of the operation. The Sunday Times photographed her in Florida in January 1998.⁴

The 1988 Expulsions

In April 1987 British police found an arms cache kept by Ismail Sowan, a Palestinian working for Israeli intelligence inside the Palestine Liberation Organization in Britain. The Mossad had known of it for a month and had not told the British. Thatcher wrote personally to Shamir. After Sowan was sentenced to eleven years in June 1988, the government expelled Arie Regev, the Mossad's liaison with MI5 and MI6, and other Israeli officers, on the initiative of the Foreign Office and MI5 and over the objection of MI6. Abba Eban came secretly to London to see Thatcher for forty-five minutes. Intelligence sharing resumed by December.⁴