He cannot leave the country, nor can he even leave the town he settles in without permission and he is not allowed to approach any port, airport or border crossing. He cannot have a passport, and he is banned from contact with foreigners or with foreign embassies in Israel. He is not allowed to tell anybody, including Israelis, anything about his work at Israel’s nuclear weapons production facility at Dimona, or about the circumstances surrounding his kidnapping by the Israeli secret services.

Buying silence

“They say I have additional secrets,” said Vanunu, who is appealing the restrictions, “but that is a lie, an excuse, a cover-up. All that was known to me has been published. Anything I can say will be a repetition.” And a senior Israeli security official more or less confirmed that to the Independent newspaper in Britain, admitting that “He may have no new secrets, but it is sufficient that he will mount a campaign. People around the world will use him as a banner. There is no reason for us to allow this kind of provocation when we can stop it.”

Mordechai Vanunu was one of eight children of a poor family of orthodox Jews who immigrated from Morocco to Israel in 1961, and after doing his army service he got a job as a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev desert, where Israel manufactures its nuclear weapons. After working away quietly in a relatively low-level job for nine years, he was laid off in 1985, probably because his friendly contacts with Palestinians and his links with a group called the Movement for the Advancement of Peace had alarmed Shin Beth.

He travelled across Asia and ended up in Sydney, Australia. He was already much troubled about his role in helping to make nuclear weapons, and a journalist he met in Sydney put him in contact with the Sunday Times in London. He told reporter Peter Hounam the whole story, flew to London to meet nuclear scientists there for further debriefings — and then, catastrophically, got frustrated by delays in publication and dropped some pictures off at the Daily Mirror as well.

Futile effort

He did not know that the Mirror’s publisher, Robert Maxwell, was a dedicated Zionist with close links to the Israeli government. Maxwell sent Vanunu’s pictures of the Dimona plant to the Israeli embassy, which immediately put a female agent called “Cindy”, posing as an American tourist, in Vanunu’s way. “Cindy” persuaded him to fly to Rome with her on holiday, and Israeli agents at Fiumicino International Airport kidnapped him and flew him back to Israel.

Eighteen years later he has come out of jail. The two hundred fission-based nuclear weapons that Israel was estimated to possess then may have doubled or tripled in number in the meantime. The thermonuclear weapons that it had just developed then are probably now quite commonplace. And the thousand-mile-range Jericho missiles, that can deliver those weapons as far as Rome and Tehran, will soon besupplemented by submarine-launched cruise missiles that will let Israel strike almost anywhere.

Everybody who matters knows this, including all the Arab governments, but Israel maintains a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” in the hope that Arab governments will be under less public pressure to match that accomplishment. It was the challenge to that ambiguity, not the betrayal of nuclear secrets, that Vanunu was really sent to jail for, and that is why they are still trying to shut him up now. They are unlikely to succeed.