Mordechai Vanunu

Mordechai Vanunu (מרדכי ואנונו) (born October 13, 1954) is a former Israeli nuclear technician who publicly exposed Israel's possession of nuclear weapons. When Israel learned of this, he was abducted by Mossad (although upon release Vanunu claimed it was the CIA) from Italy and tried in secret. Convicted of treason he was sentenced to 18 years in prison, more than 11 years of which were served in solitary confinement. Vanunu was released from prison on April 21, 2004, and is subject to a broad array of speech and travel restrictions. On November 11, 2004, following multiple alleged violations of those restrictions, he was arrested again after an interview by the media.

Vanunu was seen by many human rights groups as a prisoner of conscience, and they often compare him to the German pacifist Carl von Ossietzky. Amnesty International described his treatment as constituting "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment [...] such as is prohibited by international law." (See also: International human rights instruments) Vanunu has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year from 1988 to 2004 and was elected as Rector of the University of Glasgow in December 2004; however, the Israeli government considers him a traitor.

Background
On , , the newspaper ran the story on its front page under the headline: "Revealed — the secrets of Israel's nuclear arsenal."
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On October 5, 1986, the British newspaper The Sunday Times ran the story on its front page under the headline: "Revealed — the secrets of Israel's nuclear arsenal."

Vanunu was born in Marrakech, Morocco to a Jewish family. He had 11 brothers and sisters, and emigrated with his family to Israel in 1963. Vanunu completed his three years of military service in the sapper unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, with the rank of sergeant. After being honorably discharged, Vanunu became a philosophy student at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he became critical of many policies of the Israeli government, forming a group called Campus with four other Jewish students and five Arab students. Vanunu also admired his professor, Evron Pollakov, a left-wing professor at Ben-Gurion University who had refused to serve with the IDF in Lebanon and had been jailed because of it. Vanunu also was affiliated with a group called Movement for the Advancement of Peace.

Between 1976 and 1985, Vanunu was employed as a nuclear technician at the Negev Nuclear Research Center, an Israeli facility which, according to the majority of defense experts, is used for manufacturing nuclear weapons; it is located in the Negev desert south of Dimona. There he became increasingly troubled about the Israeli nuclear program on which he worked. In 1985, he was laid off from Dimona and left Israel. He arrived at Nepal, and considered a conversion to Buddhism, later traveling to Burma and Thailand. In 1986, he traveled to Sydney, Australia. While in Sydney, Vanunu lived in a hostel in the Kings Cross and worked odd jobs, first as a hotel dishwasher and later a taxi driver.

Vanunu also began to come to the local church, St. John's. There he met the Reverend John McKnight, who worked with the homeless and drug addicts. Vanunu converted to Christianity and was baptized into the Anglican Church. This isolated him from his family. While still in Sydney, he met with Peter Hounam, a journalist from the Sunday Times.]

In early September 1986, Vanunu flew to London with Hounam, and revealed to the Sunday Times his knowledge of the Israeli nuclear program, including photographs he had secretly taken at the Dimona site. Anxious to avoid being duped by another Hitler Diaries-sized hoax, the Sunday Times spent extensive time verifying Vanunu’s story with leading experts. Allegedly bored and annoyed by the length of time Hounam was taking with his research, Vanunu approached a rival newspaper, the tabloid Sunday Mirror, whose owner was Robert Maxwell. In 1991, a self-proclaimed former Mossad officer called Ari Ben-Menashe alleged that Maxwell, who was Jewish, had tipped off the Mossad about Vanunu. It is also possible that enquiries by Sunday Mirror journalists to the Israeli Embassy in London alerted the Mossad. On September 30, 1986, an American Mossad agent, Cheryl Bentov, operating under the name of "Cindy" and masquerading as an American tourist, began an affair with Vanunu, eventually persuading him to fly to Rome with her on a holiday. The Israeli government had promised Margaret Thatcher that they would not conduct operations on British soil. Therefore it was important to get Vanunu out of the country under his own steam. Once in Rome, Mossad agents kidnapped and drugged him, and returned him to Israel on a freighter. That marked the beginning of what was to be more than a decade of solitary confinement in Israeli prisons.

BBC Transcript of "Israel's Secret Weapon" (part 1)
Transcript, BBC World Service, 29 June 2003

http://www.serve.com/vanunu/archive7/sum03weapon.html

Israel declared over the weekend that it is cutting off ties with the BBC to protest a repeat broadcast of a documentary about non-conventional weapons said to be in Israel. The program was broadcast for the first time in March in Britain, and was rerun Saturday on a BBC channel that is aired all over the world. The boycott decision was made by Israel's public relations forum, made up of representatives from the Prime Minister's Office, the Foreign Ministry and the Government Press Office. It was decided that government offices won't assist BBC producers and reporters, that Israeli officials will not give interviews to the British network, and that the Government Press Office will make it difficult for BBC employees to get press cards and work visas in Israel. Before the broadcast Saturday, Israeli officials tried to pressure the BBC to cancel the broadcast, saying that the program was biased and presented Israel as an evil dictatorship. Here is a complete transcript of the program.

Correspondent: ISRAEL'S SECRET WEAPON

Tx Date: 17th March 2003
...

00.09.50 Olenka Frenkiel: For the Eoloffs, Mordechai Vanunu is the ultimate conscientious objector. When they first visited him in 1997 it was his eleventh year in solitary confinement.

00.10.03 MARY & NICK EOLOFF, Mordechai Vanunu's adoptive parents: And we waited and they brought him in and he looked like an old man. I didn't anticipate that. And he came up to us and he put his fingers through the bars through the cage, because it was a steel cage. We were crying. We felt so awful to see him like this.

00.10.33 Olenka Frenkiel: Vanunu writes regularly. It is the only communication he is allowed with the outside world. But his letters take months to arrive and are always censored.

00.10.46 Mary Eoloff: He says, don't feel so bad, we can bear another year.

00.10.50 Nick Eoloff: My, what courage!

00.10.54 Mary Eoloff: The early letters that we got were totally cut out. This isn't even an example because they were cut out more than that, this. They use a highlighter and then they bring it to Mordechai, and he has to cut out the things they've highlighted.

00.11.11 Mary Eoloff: One time, he said they weren't paying attention. And so he just put the pieces in the envelope and we got them, because we said, you know, we got the pieces, and they're really not even significant. I think it's control, total control.

00.11.34 Olenka Frenkiel: Today Jerusalem is a ghost town, drained of life. Israel's nuclear weapons have proved useless in its latest war. The suicide bombers have frightened the tourists away. The economy has collapsed.