Matters had looked very different on that morning in late March 1985 when Ari Ben-Menashe had caught the early-morning British Airways flight from Tel Aviv to London. Eating his kosher airline breakfast, he reflected that life had never been so good. He was not only making “real money,” but had learned a great deal at the elbow of David Kimche as they trawled through the Byzantine world of selling arms to Iran. Along the way, he had also furthered his education in the continuous interplay between Israel’s politicians and its intelligence chiefs. For Ben-Menashe, “compared to my former colleagues, the average arms dealer was a choirboy.” He had identified the problem: the aftereffects of Israel’s Lebanon adventure, from which it had finally withdrawn, battered and demoralized. Anxious to regain prestige, the politicians gave the intelligence community an even freer hand in how it waged pitiless war against the PLO, whom they saw as the cause of all Israel’s problems. The result was a succession of scandals where suspected terrorists and even their families were brutalized and murdered in cold blood. Yitzhak Hofi, the former head of Mossad, had sat on a government commission, set up after intense public pressure, to investigate the brutality. It concluded that intelligence agents had consistently lied to the court about how they obtained confessions: the methods used had too often been gross. The committee had called for “proper procedures” to be followed.
But Ben-Menashe knew the torture had continued: “It was good to be away from such awful matters.” He regarded what he was doing, providing arms for Iranians to kill untold numbers of Iraqis, as “different.” Nor did the plight of the Beirut hostages, the very reason for his wheeling and dealing, unduly concern him. The bottom line was the money he was making. Even with Kimche’s departure, Ben-Menashe still believed the merry-go-round he was riding would only stop when he decided—and he would step off a multimillionaire. By his count, ORA’s business was now worth “hundreds of millions”—most of it being generated through the house in the London suburb from where Nicholas Davies ran ORA’s international operations.
Ben-Menashe knew Davies had continued to amass his own fortune, far in excess of the sixty-five-thousand-pound yearly salary he was paid as foreign editor of the Daily Mirror; Davies’s commission from ORA was almost always as much in a month. Ben-Menashe didn’t mind if the newspaperman took “an extra slice of the cake; it left plenty to go around. It was still champagne time.”
...
Admoni’s first call was to Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who ordered every step be taken to “secure the situation.” With those words Peres authorized an operation that once more demonstrated the ruthless efficiency of Mossad.
Admoni’s staff quickly confirmed Vanunu had worked at Dimona from February 1977 until November 1986. He had been assigned to Machon-Two, one of the most secret of all the plant’s ten production units. The windowless concrete building externally resembled a warehouse. But its walls were thick enough to block the most powerful of satellite camera lenses from penetrating. Inside the bunkerlike structure, a system of false walls led to the elevators that descended through six levels to where the nuclear weapons were manufactured.
Vanunu’s security clearance was sufficient to gain unchallenged access to every corner of Machon-Two. His special security pass—number 520—coupled with his signature on an Israeli Official Secrets Acts document ensured no one ever challenged him as he went about his duties as a menahil, a controller on the night shift.
A stunned Admoni was told that almost certainly for some months, Vanunu somehow had secretly photographed the layout of Machon-Two: the control panels, the glove boxes, the nuclear bomb-building machinery. Evidence suggested he had stored his films in his clothes locker, and smuggled them out of what was supposedly the most secure place in Israel.
Admoni demanded to know how Vanunu had achieved all this—and perhaps more. Supposing he had already shown his material to the CIA? Or the Russians? The British or even the Chinese? The damage would be incalculable. Israel would be exposed as a liar before the world—a liar with the capability of destroying a very large part of it. Who was Vanunu? Whom could he be working for?
Answers were soon forthcoming. Vanunu was a Moroccan Jew, born on October 13, 1954, in Marrakech, where his parents were modest shopkeepers. In 1963, when anti-Semitism, never far from the surface in Morocco, spilled once more into open violence, the family emigrated to Israel, settling in the Negev Desert town of Beersheba. Mordechai led an uneventful life as a teenager. Along with every other young person, when his time came he was conscripted into the Israeli army. He was already beginning to lose his hair, making him appear older than his nineteen years. He reached the rank of first sergeant in a minesweeping unit stationed on the Golan Heights. After military service he entered Ramat Aviv University in Tel Aviv. Having failed two exams at the end of his first year in a physics-degree course, he left the campus.
In the summer of 1976 he replied to an advertisement for trainee technicians to work at Dimona. After a lengthy interview with the plant’s security officer he was accepted for training and sent on an intensive course in physics, chemistry, math, and English. He did sufficiently well to finally enter Dimona as a technician in February 1977.
Vanunu had been made redundant in November 1986. In his security file at Dimona it was noted that he had displayed “left-wing and pro-Arab beliefs.” Vanunu left Israel for Australia, arriving in Sydney in May of the following year. Somewhere along his journey, which had followed a well-trodden path by young Israelis through the Far East, Vanunu had renounced his once-strong Jewish faith to become a Christian. The picture emerging from a dozen sources for Admoni to consider was of a physically unprepossessing young man who appeared to be the classic loner: he had made no real friends at Dimona; he had no girlfriends; he spent his time at home reading books on philosophy and politics. Mossad psychologists told Admoni a man like that could be foolhardy, with a warped sense of values and often disillusioned. That kind of personality could be dangerously unpredictable.
~~Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad -by- Gordon Thomas
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