TEL AVIV, 18 April 2004 — With one newspaper interview, Mordechai Vanunu blew away Israel’s cherished nuclear secrecy.
Now Israeli policy makers fear the 49-year-old whistleblower could emerge from prison with new claims about his work at the Dimona reactor and that fantasy may be as harmful as fact.
“Who will guarantee that he will only speak the truth? What is to stop him imagining things?” Shabtai Shavit, a former chief of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, told Reuters. “The main consideration should be his intent to go on causing damage to Israel,” said Shavit, who took part in secret deliberations on keeping Vanunu under surveillance when he ends an 18-year jail term on Wednesday.
In statements made through relatives, Vanunu has said he has nothing to add to his 1986 disclosures to Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper — which led analysts to conclude Dimona had produced as many as 200 nuclear bombs and made Israel a military superpower.
A mid-level Dimona technician, Vanunu was fired in 1985 and converted to Christianity. After the Sunday Times interview, he was abducted by Mossad and tried as a traitor. By all accounts, Vanunu is angry and distraught at his treatment and vowed to continue campaigning to expose Israel’s nonconventional capabilities.
Israeli security veterans are worried by this mix of ideology and ire.
Some question the government’s decision to keep Vanunu in the country, tap his phone and bar his access to the press for a probationary period after his release.
“I think it is a mistake to gag him,” said David Kimche, a retired Mossad operative and Foreign Ministry chief of staff.
“It only bolsters Vanunu’s supposed credibility and, in turn, pretty much anything he may choose to concoct about Israel.”
Keen to ward off Middle East foes while avoiding regional arms races, Israel maintains a “strategic ambiguity” over its nuclear program. The policy also allows it to skirt US bans on supporting countries that proliferate nonconventional arms and thus receive $2.8 billion in annual aid from Washington.
The official Israeli reticence means a ready audience for individuals claiming to have been privy to national secrets.
Military censors are empowered by law to block reports that could be seen as a threat to Israel’s security — but only those containing bonafide information, not invention.
Israeli officials say that is how false reports got into newspapers that Israel had tested nuclear-type missiles in the Indian Ocean and that it tried at one time to develop a bomb that could target Arabs based on their genes.
The legality of what Israel can do is also an issue with Vanunu, who according to security sources was so set on having his say that last year that he rejected early release because it would have meant promising not to discuss Dimona in public.
“Punishing a man who has spilled his secrets and done his time, on the assumption of a future guilt, seems little more than vindictive,” said Vanunu’s former lawyer Avigdor Feldman.
A Justice Ministry source allowed that, even within the generous parameters of emergency law, the case was problematic.
“There is no double jeopardy when it comes to treason. The non-disclosure contract Vanunu signed at Dimona is still in force. He can be prosecuted if he talks again,” the source said.
“But as for him making things up — our options are more limited. We hope he understands that the ban on him leaving the country is open-ended, and will be lifted based on him showing good faith. After that we can only hope for the best.”
The last convicted Israeli traitor to go free was Marcus Klingberg, who was jailed for 20 years for passing the Soviet Union information about his research on biological and chemical weapons at a secret plant outside Tel Aviv.
Klingberg, 85, moved in with relatives in France last year and avoids the public eye.
By contrast, Vanunu has been disavowed by many family members and is far from retiring. In prison letters, he has said he wants to emigrate, start a family, and lecture on American history. Many believe he will carry psychological scars from his incarceration, 12 years of which were spent in solitary confinement.
“Mordechai is not crazy, but he is very angry and sometimes suffers from notions that there is a vast Israeli conspiracy against him, all around,” said Vanunu’s brother, Meir. Critics suggest Vanunu might be tempted to sell his story once outside Israel and maybe even embellish it.
As precedent, Kimche cited “By Way of Deception”, a 1990 expose by former Mossad recruit Victor Ostrovsky. Israel went to court to try to stop its publication in Canada. That just boosted sales.
“We made that ridiculous book a best-seller,” Kimche said. “Israel should not leverage Vanunu into a similar position.”
When Ostrovsky came out with a sequel four years later, a leading Israeli political commentator, Yosef Lapid, called on Canadian Jews to kill him. That prompted international outcry.
