News, March 2004, www.aljazeerah.info
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'Israeli nuke whistle-blower gives vivid details of Mossad kidnapping'
Jordan Times, Wednesday, March 3, 2004
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (AP) — Outlining vivid details about his abduction by the Mossad spy agency, Israel's most famous nuclear informer wrote in a letter published Tuesday that he was lured by a young woman to agents who drugged, bound and shipped him from Rome to Israel. Mordechai Vanunu, whose 18-year prison sentence ends in April, recently issued a statement through his brother saying he has no more nuclear secrets to reveal.
But Israel, citing security concerns, has said it would keep Vanunu under strict supervision, possibly confiscating his passport, when he is released from prison on April 21.
Vanunu was nabbed by the Mossad in Europe in 1986 after he gave details and photos of Israel's top-secret nuclear plant in the Negev Desert to The Sunday Times of London.
He was later convicted in an Israeli court of treason and espionage. He spent more than a decade in solitary confinement.
It was unclear how the letter, first shown on Israel's Channel 2 TV late Monday and republished in the Maariv daily on Tuesday, passed through prison censorship. Israeli defence ministry officials were not immediately available to comment.
It is widely believed — largely based on photographs Vanunu provided the British newspaper — that Israel has the sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world.
The CIA recently estimated Israel has between 200-400 atomic weapons.
Israel has an official policy of "nuclear ambiguity," saying only that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East.
In the letter, Vanunu said he would not "concede or fold, regret or apologise, be deaf or shut up." Vanunu wrote that on Sept. 24, 1986, he first met an American woman in Leicester Square in London. Six days later, he wrote, she persuaded him to come with her to Rome to visit her sister.
In 1988, The Sunday Times reported that American-born Cheryl Bentov, 27, was the Mossad agent who persuaded Vanunu to come with her to Rome. The Times said her parents lived in Orlando, Florida, and that Bentov had moved to Israel as a teenager.
In his letter, Vanunu said he and the American woman flew to Rome on a British Airways flight. A man who identified himself as an Italian friend of the woman's sister met them at the airport, Vanunu wrote. The Italian man drove them in a private car to an apartment outside Rome, he wrote.
"As soon as I entered the apartment I was attacked by two men who then drugged me with needles," Vanunu wrote in Hebrew.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank, like a Python (Alquds, 1/25/03. |
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