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Hirsh Goodman: Still Baffled over Vanunu

He took dozens of photos with an old Yashica camera, large, noisy and not easy to hide

To this day I do not know if the whole affair of Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who sold his story to the Sunday Times of London, was for real. What I do know is that Israel's handling of the case, from the start, has been bizarre.

Vanunu worked in the inner sanctum of Israel's most secret and sensitive facility, its nuclear plant in Dimonah where, the paper reported on the basis of his information, nuclear warheads are produced. He took dozens of photos of the inside of the plant with an old Yashica which was large, noisy and not easy to hide and, while still working there, attended supplementary courses at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, where he was an ardent, vocal and open opponent of the Jewish state, posing with the Palestinian flag and distributing vicious anti-Israel propaganda. He then left his job and traveled to Australia, where he tried without success to sell Israel's nuclear secrets to several newspapers and where he converted to Christianity. After that, he went to London, where he again tried to sell his story -- being rejected by publication after publication until he reached the Sunday Times, which accepted his story but having been humbled by publishing the fake Hitler Diaries three years earlier, invested heavily in checking it out before publication. The rest is history.

Although I was then the Israel correspondent of the Sunday Times, I was kept out of the story until the very end. The assumption, I suppose, was that had I been part of the inner circle working on it I might have forewarned the Israeli authorities. Three days before scheduled publication, however, I was asked to get the government's formal reaction to Vanunu's claims -- there was none -- and then to fly to London, where I was asked to play devil's advocate in order to find any holes in the story. I told them then -- and I think I still believe this to this day -- that somewhere, somehow, something just did not fit. It was impossible to get a camera into the Dimonah facility, I argued, certainly not the one Vanunu claims to have used; the workers' locker room where Vanunu said he kept his camera was separate and distant from the heart of the plant itself; and his open and erratic behavior at university would have been noticed and reported, since everyone with a top-secret security clearance was monitored closely. I told them about a senior officer in the intelligence corps who had been fired just weeks before because a routine clandestine check on his behavior revealed that he�d had sex with a prostitute at Tel Baruch beach, north of Tel Aviv.

Moreover, I said that when I went to the Prime Minister's Office to get officials� reaction to the imminent publication they were not surprised, and that I had learned they knew all about Vanunu's attempts to sell his story in Australia and in England, and knew that the Sunday Times had been working on it for weeks. Why, I asked the editors, had the Mossad not silenced Vanunu earlier, if they thought he was a danger to the state?

By the end of the exhausting exercise there was enough doubt in the room to lead to a decision to postpone the story for a week, do more fact-checking and get more expert advice and, in the meantime, keep Vanunu safe and ready for a press conference planned for the Monday after publication. As it happens Vanunu never made the press conference, having met "Cindy" and gone off with her to Rome -- where he landed up bound, drugged and gagged, and placed on an Israeli Navy vessel en route to Haifa.

Vanunu has now completed his 18-year jail term for treason and espionage, but the essential enigmas about this case remain. Could security at the Dimonah facility have been so poor as to allow Vanunu to get in with a camera? Ten years earlier, an Israeli Mirage fighter had been shot down because it strayed too far in the direction of the reactor, and now one could walk around inside Israel's deepest secret taking pictures almost openly over a period of months? Two years before, I was not given a security clearance because in the early 1970s I had signed a petition against house demolitions in the territories, and now Vanunu could run around the Beersheba campus flailing the State of Israel with impunity? Again, if he was such a danger to the state and if we already knew about him trying to sell his pictures and story in Australia and later England, why was he not picked up then, before the supposed damage was done? And is it not strange that somehow Vanunu's story was ultimately printed in a highly credible newspaper, but that he was captured before his credibility could be put to the test by other journalists?

If the answer to all of the above is incompetence, which I fear it may be, all I can say is that we had best be worried about a security failure so glaring as to be almost unthinkable. Conversely, if one believes in conspiracy theories -- and that Vanunu served Israeli deterrence by telling the world this little country had an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them over great distances -- the failings make sense as part of a master plan in which Vanunu played a critical part without knowing it: "They" knew about his spying and decided to let him go on with it, since it would be good for the Jews if he told his story. Who knows?

Friends who have been in government tell me that there was no master plan, that what we see is what we get, that the Vanunu affair, like the Yom Kippur War, was an intelligence failure of massive proportions with hasty damage-control thrown in at the end. Again, who knows?