fonte: Ha'aretz

Who's afraid of Mordechai Vanunu?
By Yossi Melman

In June 1976, after a chance conversation with a friend who was employed at the nuclear reactor in Dimona and had good things to say about his place of work, Mordechai Vanunu decided to try his luck there. On the advice of his friend, he scoured the want ads in the papers for one for workers at the Dimona Nuclear Research Center, as it is officially called (or, according to the Hebrew acronym, Kamag), and when he found such an ad, he submitted an application. He was invited for a preliminary meeting, followed by a more comprehensive interview and a security-clearance process, which he passed successfully. A month later, he was informed that he had been hired. The document approving his entry into a preliminary course was signed by Aryeh Felman, then the head of the security screening department in the Shin Bet security service.
Vanunu's preparatory employment course lasted two months. It was an accelerated program in which newcomers were taught basic terms in English, math and physics, and given an introduction to the world of nuclear reactors. In his testimony in Israeli courts after revealing the secrets of the Dimona reactor to the Britain's Sunday Times, Vanunu said: "At the end of the course we had an exam. The majority passed. But a few people were rejected, one for a drugs background, another because he had left-wing relatives, things like that."

Vanunu wasn't rejected. He was accepted for a training course at the nuclear plant. The fact that he was hired was the first in a series of security blunders that characterized the affair from the outset. It now emerges that Vanunu had applied for a job at the Shin Bet a few years earlier, but was rejected on grounds of incompatibility. His application form and the reasons for the rejection appeared in his personal file at the Dimona facility. But despite this, the security officer there, Zvi K., authorized his employment without bothering to check the matter with the Shin Bet.

In 1980, Zvi K. was promoted to director of personnel at the reactor. He was replaced as security officer by Yehiel K., who had completed a tour of duty as security officer of the Defense Ministry mission in the United States. Yehiel K. held the post for seven years, until October 6, 1987 - the formative years of the affair. In 1987 he was appointed internal comptroller of the Dimona facility; he retired two years ago.

The division of power and responsibility for protecting the nuclear reactor were not precisely established or formalized in that period. The security officer received his salary from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), which is responsible, among other things, for the facility. Professionally, the security officer is accountable to the chief security officer in the Defense Ministry (known by the Hebrew acronym Malmab), at the time Chaim Carmon. He also receives instructions from several units of the Shin Bet: The protective security department, which in the Vanunu period was run by Savinoam Avivi, is supposed to provide the security officer with professional guidance. The security screening unit carries out the reliability tests and background checks of candidates for jobs in plants under the auspices of the defense establishment or other highly sensitive places. The counterespionage and political subversion branch has the task of supervising, collecting information and thwarting subversive activity by both foreigners (including diplomats) and Israeli Jews. (A different Shin Bet unit, the Arab Affairs Department, deals with political subversion by Arab citizens of Israel.) The head of the counterespionage branch from 1981 to 1985 was Peleg Radai.

All these individuals bear responsibility, to one degree or another, for the security blunders in the Vanunu affair. The junior technician from Be'er Sheva, one of 10 siblings in a family that emigrated from Morocco in 1963, succeeded in fooling everyone. This is the secret that hasn't yet been told in the affair: the story of the security fiasco that made it possible for Vanunu to do what he did, and the story of the subsequent attempts at cover-up, whitewashing and protection of senior figures in the defense establishment, who were bent on divesting themselves of responsibility for the failure.

What makes Horev run?

The 18-year prison term to which Vanunu was sentenced - which will end on April 21 - is almost exactly the same period as that in which Yehiel Horev has served as chief of internal security in the defense establishment. Vanunu's success in divulging Israel's nuclear secrets to The Sunday Times - which ran the story on October 5, 1986, headlined "Inside Dimona, Israel's nuclear bomb factory" - hastened Horev's appointment to the high-ranking post, and since then he has viewed himself as the guardian of the secrets of the nuclear reactor in Dimona. Fortunately for Horev, in the critical period when Vanunu was fired and went abroad, he was on study leave at the National Security College. However, he was involved in the affair before that, as deputy chief of security at the Defense Ministry, and also after Vanunu's abduction and arrest, as a member of an investigative commission.

Yehiel Horev (Zilberman) was born in Tel Aviv in 1944, and at an early age moved to Kibbutz Hulata, in Upper Galilee. He did his army service in the Golani infantry brigade, reaching the rank of lieutenant. In the course of his reserve service, in the Armored Corps, he was promoted to the rank of major. At the end of the 1960s he took part in an Israel Defense Forces mission that trained the army of Congo. Returning to Israel in 1969, he was recruited as a security officer in an IAEC unit in the center of the country.

In 1975, Horev was promoted and made responsible for the physical protection department in the Defense Ministry. From the latter's headquarters at the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv, he oversaw the protection of all the facilities, sites and plants of the defense establishment. The most closely watched "jewels in the defense crown" were the nuclear facility in Dimona and the Biological Institute at Nes Ziona, south of Tel Aviv, where, according to foreign reports, Israel's nonconventional weapons (nuclear, biological, chemical) are manufactured. The physical protection department is responsible for the connection with the security officers of the plants and for issuing their instructions, and its task is to oversee and ensure that they are doing their work properly.

Even at this early stage, the basic traits that characterize Horev to this day were noticeable: devotion to duty alongside blandness, pettiness and acute suspiciousness, but also personal integrity and a strong desire to expose corruption and failures, as well as a penchant for vengefulness. The affairs of the secrets that leaked from the two places considered Horev's holiest sites - the Biological Institute, which produced a senior spy in the person of Prof. Marcus Klingberg, and the Dimona nuclear plant, about which secret information was revealed through Mordechai Vanunu - were formative events in the development of his world view.

Shortly after taking office as chief of securityat the Defense Ministry, Horev began to take punitive measures to hobble Vanunu. He is responsible for the harsh conditions in which Vanunu was held, which included years in solitary confinement, and the sharp limitations on the number of visitors he could have. A few years ago, Horev removed from his office Amiram Levine, a senior official in the department of special affairs and information protection. In Horev's view, Levine displayed carelessness by not censoring properly the transcripts from the Vanunu trial that the Supreme Court allowed to be published.

Today, after failing to persuade the political echelon to place Vanunu under administrative detention (arrest without trial) even after he completes his prison term, Horev is fighting a rearguard battle to prevent Vanunu from leaving Israel and to place him under supervision and restrictions that will be tantamount to house arrest. Horev has always been considered the strictest of all the security chiefs in Israel, especially in regard to the protection of institutions such as the Dimona facility and the Biological Institute. He is apprehensive that if Vanunu goes abroad, he will continue to be a nuisance by stimulating the public debate over Israel's nuclear policy and the nuclear weapons he says Israel possesses.

A good many experts, both in the Shin Bet and the IAEC, take issue with Horev's unrelentingly rigorous approach. According to these experts, who are afraid to be identified by name, Horev, by imposing restrictions on Vanunu, will achieve the exact opposite of his intention, as international attention will then be focused on Vanunu and on Israel's nuclear secrets. Moreover, many people wonder what Vanunu could possibly reveal beyond what he already has. What additional secrets could be known to Vanunu, who for nine years worked as a junior technician and was a shift manager at the nuclear plant in Dimona, and for nearly 20 years has had no contact with his former place of work?

The fact is that almost everything relating to the Vanunu affair has been made public. The secrets of the Dimona reactor, including its units and structure, were published, in the wake of Vanunu's information, by The Sunday Times. Also known are the circumstances of Vanunu's abduction in Rome in an operation mounted by the Mossad espionage agency, which was closely overseen by Shabtai Shavit, then the deputy chief of the Mossad. Even the identity of "Cindy," the Mossad agent who lured Vanunu to fly with her from his place of hiding in London to the apartment of her "sister, the journalist," in Rome, where she was supposed to grant him sexual favors, was exposed in the international press: Cheryl Hanin Bentov.

The feeling, then, is that all the hyperactivity being displayed by Horev and those who support his approach is intended only to divert attention from what has not yet been revealed: the security blunders and their cover-ups. This is also apparently the reason that all the senior officials who were responsible for the blunders refused to respond or be interviewed for this article.

Formative resolutions
Mordechai Vanunu attended Beit Yaakov, a religious elementary school run by the ultra-Orthodox Agudat Israel movement. He went on to Ohalei Shlomo, a high-school yeshiva, but dropped out and entered the IDF at the age of 17. He served in the Engineering Corps and reached the rank of first sergeant. In 1973, he enrolled for a preparatory program at Tel Aviv University and excelled in mathematics and physics. However, extended reserve duty in the 1973 Yom Kippur War combined with a shortage of funds forced him to break off his studies and return to his parents' home in Be'er Sheva. These were the circumstances that prompted him to look for a job with the Shin Bet and then with the Dimona nuclear facility.

On January 1, 1977, Vanunu joined one of the special buses that took employees from Be'er Sheva to the reactor every day and passed through the gates of Israel's most secret plant. The new employees were taken to the facility's school, where they signed a pledge of secrecy and undertook not to talk to anyone about their work. Vanunu then received his security pass, whose number was 9657-8. He underwent a medical check and was found fit, and was sent to take another course, this one more advanced, in nuclear physics. This course placed emphasis on uranium and radioactivity.

For the next 10 weeks, the new employees went through another round of training for their work at the reactor. The training period concluded at the end of June 1977, and Vanunu and his colleagues were formally admitted to the "holy of holies" of Israel's security religion. Vanunu received another security pass, numbered 320, which gave him entry to "Machon [Institute] 2" where, according to what he told the Times, nuclear weapons are manufactured. He was also assigned a locker (No. 3) for his personal effects.

Most of his work was on the night shift in the control rooms of Machon 2, from 11:30 P.M. until 8 A.M. After the first flush of excitement wore off, Vanunu found the work boring and monotonous. In the summer of 1980, after returning from a trip abroad, he left his rented apartment in Dimona and for $20,000, including his savings and funds from his siblings, bought a small flat near Ben-Gurion University (BGU) of the Negev in Be'er Sheva. Around this time he also made two resolutions that would shape his life: to attend university and to keep a personal diary.

After initially enrolling to study economics, he changed his mind and opted for geography and philosophy. According to his brother Meir, Mordechai began delving deeply into the writings of classical philosophers and gulped them all down - from Aristotle to Spinoza, and from Kant and Descartes to the moderns such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre. He became familiar with abstract thought, which emphasizes the self, the individual and his responsibility. The information about his readings in philosophy is contained in his diary, in which he always made the entries at night, during the long hours of his boring shift at the nuclear facility.

In the eyes of his employers, Vanunu was an outstanding employee during his first five years of work at the plant. There were no complaints against him or reports about unusual behavior. Beneath the surface, though, Vanunu began to change.

"His political world view was also shaped at the university," says Meir Vanunu. In his youth, Mordechai had identified with the extreme right and saw nothing amiss with the racist ideas of Rabbi Meir Kahane and his Kach movement, but he now embarked on a long journey that led him to the political center and finally to the extreme left. He was elected to the student council on the ticket of Campus, a Jewish-Arab students' organization, was active in promoting the rights of Arab students, took part in demonstrations against the war in Lebanon and the occupation, and submitted a request to join the students' association of Rakah, the Communist Party.

In the summer of 1982, when he was called up for reserve duty at the height of the Lebanon War, Vanunu, who objected to the war's goals, refused to serve in field tasks in his Engineering Corps unit, preferring instead to do kitchen duty. In the next two years he became known on campus as a radical in terms of his world view and as an eccentric in terms of his behavior. He was photographed, for example, dancing naked at a campus party and was a nude model for art students. It turns out that all this activity was known to the security officials at the Dimona reactor.

Drift to the left
Yehiel K., who was the Dimona reactor's security officer in those years, created for himself - in the plant and at BGU (where a number of Dimona employees at the nuclear facility were studying, teaching or doing research) - a network of "loyalists" whose task was to report unusual occurrences. To this end he also made use of the good working relations he developed with the university's security officer, Zvi Schwartz.

In 1982, reports started coming in to Yehiel K. from Schwartz and others about Vanunu's "deviant" behavior on campus: his participation in demonstrations against the Lebanon War, his connections with Arab students, his nude dancing at the party and his pronouncements against Israel's nuclear policy. At the Dimona facility, whose staff has a highly developed security sense, any and all evidence of unusual behavior, however minor, is supposed to receive immediate and thorough treatment.

Indeed, as soon as the reports started coming in, Yehiel K. felt that there was a "real problem" and took action at a number of levels. First, he reported the matter to the personnel director at the nuclear plant, Zvi K., the former security officer, and also to the director general of the reactor facility, Avraham (Roberto) Saroussi. In addition, Yehiel K. sent reports on the subject to the Defense Ministry security chief, Chaim Carmon, and to the professional unit in the Shin Bet - the Jewish Department in the counter-espionage branch - and kept copies of all the reports in his office.

Vanunu thus became a "checkee" - someone who had to be checked and placed under supervision. According to the instructions and the procedures in the defense establishment, once an employee becomes a "checkee," his employers are barred from taking any action against him without the authorization of the security officials, so that they can keep him under tabs without arousing his suspicion. But at the Dimona plant people ignored the instructions and continued to treat Vanunu as an outstanding worker. They even sent him to an advanced course for senior staff. This period saw several waves of dismissals at the reactor, due to budget cuts. Accordingly, Yehiel K. sent Zvi K. and Avraham Saroussi a list of employees who must under no circumstances be laid off without his prior approval. One of the names on the list was Mordechai Vanunu.

The counterespionage branch also issued a directive not to fire Vanunu. For Yehiel K. this was superfluous, as he had already issued such an instruction. At one stage, Peleg Radai, head of counterespionage, convened a special meeting in which it was decided to call Vanunu in for questioning. On the same occasion it was also decided to recruit Vanunu as a department informer to win his loyalty, but mainly "to put him into a framework" in order to keep him under close watch.

The mission was assigned to Avraham B., head of the unit in the Jewish Department that dealt with subversion by the extreme left. Avraham B. and his immediate superior, Yisrael G., the head of that department, met with Vanunu at least twice. Avraham B. asked Vanunu about his political activity and for the names of the friends he had met with, and sought information about the parlor talks in which Vanunu had taken part and about his membership in various organizations. Mainly, though, he wanted to know whether Vanunu had told any of his associates in the political groups, and especially the Arab students, about his job.

Vanunu, who was tense and nervous at the meetings, replied in great detail to all the questions. He said that none of his friends in the political groups knew that he worked at the Dimona facility, even though he had spoken out against Israel's nuclear policy. He explained his deep political involvement as stemming from his opposition to the war in Lebanon. Vanunu was warned that he had signed a secrecy pledge and that he had to report any attempts to make contact with him to the reactor's security officer. Avraham B. advised Vanunu to break off his relations with the Arab students and stay away from them, hinting that otherwise Vanunu's advancement at work was liable to be affected.

At the conclusion of each meeting, Avraham B. drew up a report describing the stages of Vanunu's slide into the radical-left organizations. However, the language of the reports was not especially acute. Nor did Avraham B. recommend taking immediate action against Vanunu. There are three versions about one important issue: Was it suggested that Vanunu become a paid informer? One version is that the attempt to recruit Vanunu as an informer for the department had failed. Vanunu simply refused to cooperate. According to a different version, Vanunu did cooperate and agreed to report on his friends, but his handlers afterward broke off the connection with him because his reports were considered unreliable. In retrospect, former Shin Bet officials say that the decision to break off the connection with Vanunu was a mistake and that the organization should have continued to run him "on empty" and reward him for his reports, in order to maintain close contact with him. The third version is that no one suggested he become an informer.

Ha'aretz