Outing The Mother of all Weapons of Mass Destruction

November 25, 1999


Israel Eases Secrecy Over Nuclear Whistle-Blower\'s Trial

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Israel Clings to Its \'Nuclear Ambiguity\' (June 21, 1998)
Week in Review: Shhh! That\'s a (Not Very) Secret. (Jan. 14, 1996)
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By DEBORAH SONTAG

ERUSALEM -- The Israeli government Wednesday allowed a newspaper to publish censored excerpts from the classified transcript of a treason trial of 12 years ago. They provided the first glimpse ever into the courtroom where Mordechai Vanunu was convicted for blowing the whistle on Israel\'s secret nuclear program.

The excerpts, published by the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, contained no earth-shattering revelations about an infamous case with a spy novel plot. But their release signaled the government\'s increasing awareness that it can no longer maintain absolute silence on whether it has nuclear weapons.

The state attorney, avoiding a court challenge, pre-emptively released more than 1,200 pages of censored testimony to the newspaper, which had been fighting to obtain the documents.

\"Things have changed since the trial and it was decided by defense officials that anything that will not harm the security of the country will now be published,\" said Devora Hen, a lawyer for the state attorney.

Officially, Israel refuses to confirm or deny reports on its nuclear weapons program, maintaining a long-held policy of what it calls \"deliberate ambiguity\" about its offensive capacity.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, citing what it said was a classified United States Department of Energy study, said this fall that Israel has the sixth-largest nuclear arsenal in the world.

\"I think that there is an evolving understanding that a long-term policy of complete secrecy is untenable and creates whistle-blowers like Vanunu,\" said Avner Cohen, an Israeli scholar whose book, \"Israel and the Bomb,\" was published last year in New York. \"There is stuff that really should be classified, but not the fact of the nuclear policy itself.\"

Though Cohen\'s study was initially banned in Israel, it was recently approved for publication in Hebrew in Israel, another sign of a relaxation of the government\'s strict secrecy.

Yediot Ahronot devoted almost 10 pages of its newspaper Wednesday to the case, and it dominated the airwaves.

The documents showed that Vanunu, a former nuclear technician, testified in his closed-door trial that he had exposed Israel\'s nuclear warchest in an effort to force the government to acknowledge its existence and accept international supervision of the program.

\"I wanted to confirm what everyone knows,\" he said about the information he sold to the Sunday Times of London in 1986. \"I wanted to put the matter under proper supervision.\"

Vanunu further testified that as a result of his revelations, Shimon Peres, who was prime minister at the time the article was published, could not \"keep lying to Reagan and telling him that we do not have nuclear weapons.\"

In the fall of 1986, the Sunday Times published Vanunu\'s claim that Israel had stockpiled roughly 100 nuclear weapons. Vanunu, a Moroccan-born Jew who grew up in a religious home, had worked at the Dimona nuclear reactor for nine years before emigrating to Australia and converting to Christianity. The newspaper paid him to fly to London and collaborate on the story about Israel\'s nuclear capacity.

\"It was clear to me that Vanunu was in danger,\" Peter Hunam, an English journalist for the Sunday Times, testified, according to the transcripts.

\"I wanted him to move to another hotel, but I realized he was exceedingly nervous and was talking about leaving London or the country.\"

After his interviews with the newspaper, but before the story was published, Vanunu was lured from London to Rome by a blond female Mossad agent called \"Cindy.\" There he was kidnapped and flown to Israel to stand trial as a spy and a traitor.

\"I didn\'t know if they were going to shoot me or kill me,\" he said about his abduction during the trial.

The documents show that the prosecution believed that it had the authority to sentence Vanunu to death but refrained from requesting this. In 1988, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison, where he has served 13 years, mostly in solitary confinement. Only recently has the government allowed even a photograph of him in jail to be published.

Peres, who is credited with organizing Israel\'s nuclear program as a young aide to David Ben-Gurion, Wednesday denounced the release of the transcripts for bringing to the surface a subject that is best left suppressed.

\"The public knows that there are certain things it does not want to know,\" he said in an interview with Israeli television.

Earlier in the day, on Israel radio, Peres said, \"The whole Vanunu affair makes my blood boil. One day a man gets up in the morning and he decides what is good for the country. Does he carry the responsibility?\"

During the trial, Yediot Ahronot reported, Peres said that he believed that the revelations in the Sunday Times had injured Israel, increasing \"beyond what is desirable, suspicions and reservations about Israel.\"

Vanunu\'s detailed allegations about the scope and sophistication of Israel\'s nuclear weapons program have never been challenged by Israeli officials or by knowledgeable Israeli civilian defense experts. Independent assessments by international arms-monitoring organizations have also concluded that Israel\'s nuclear stockpile is exceeded only by those of the United States, Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom.

Cohen said the Israelis have long maintained that Vanunu\'s revelations accelerated Arab nuclear projects. \"I do not believe this,\" he said, \"even though in my opinion Vanunu had a serious effect on the Arab press and attention to the subject.\"

\"It was not Mordechai Vanunu who caused the Iraqi nuclear program to move fast,\" Cohen continued. \"It was an Iraqi decision following Israel\'s bombing of its nuclear reactor in 1981.\"

In 1981, Moshe Dayan, then the defense minister, said publicly that Israel had no active \"atomic bombs\" but had the capacity to assemble weapons for attack in short order.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company