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Long walk to freedom


Long walk to freedom
Mordechai Vanunu served 18 years in an Israeli prison for blowing the whistle on the country's nuclear weapons programme. Last week he was arrested again - but not before he had given Duncan Campbell the following exclusive interview 

Monday November 15, 2004
<http://www.guardian.co.uk>The Guardian
It was precisely noon in Jerusalem and the bells in the tower of St George's Cathedral were echoing over the city. The short, trim man in the apricot shirt and dark trousers who was ringing them was smiling broadly. "Down there," he said, when he had given a final pull to the centre bell and was gazing from the turrets to the sprawling civic building below, "down there is where they sentenced me to 18 years in prison. This is my way of saying I am still here."
That was 10 days ago. Since then, Mordechai Vanunu, who emerged from his 18-year sentence for revealing that Israel had a nuclear weapons programme only seven months ago, has been re-arrested and accused of disclosing classified information and of breaching the restrictions that forbid him from associating with foreigners. This week, the Israeli attorney general will decide what action to take. For the time being, he is back under house arrest in a small room at the cathedral.
The inscription at the foot of the cathedral's bell tower reads: "When He beheld the city, He wept over it. O, pray for the peace of Jerusalem." For the past few months, Vanunu, who converted to Christianity in 1986, had been climbing the steps to the top of the tower thrice daily, partly to keep fit but, more importantly, to behold the city. Once at the top, he was in no hurry to descend, pointing out the Mount of Olives in the distance, the sun glinting on the dome of the Russian church, the Palestinian school, the Hebrew university, the gardens below with their pomegranate and fig trees and the rose and lavender beds that give the impression of an English country churchyard transplanted to the Middle East.
"I was very hungry for these views," he said. "One of the greatest cruelties of prison is that you become like a blind man, you do not have any views. But I would still rather be on the top of the Tower of London."
It was from London that Vanunu was lured abroad to Italy 18 years ago by a woman who was working with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. Vanunu, a former nuclear technician, had been in England giving information about the Dimona nuclear plant to the Sunday Times, but, depressed by the delay in publication, had wanted to get out of the city, ironically because he feared that Mossad was on his tail.
"It was a race between me and Mossad, so my concern was to publish immediately. When the Sunday Times delayed publication I decided to leave London," he said. But despite his realisation that Mossad must have known his movements, he was persuaded by the blonde American woman he met in Leicester Square - who pretended to be a tourist and critical of Israel - to accompany her to Italy for a romantic break. Once there, he was overpowered, drugged, bound and shipped back to Israel where, after a secret trial, he was jailed.
He does not feel anger towards the woman, who called herself "Cindy". "I see her as a spy, part of a team, rather than as a woman," he said. "They would like me to be angry with her as a woman but I am not." And he said that the woman, since identified in the media as Cindy, supposedly a Mossad agent living in Florida, was not the one who lured him to Italy.
"She was pure American, she could have been CIA, she could have been recruited by Mossad but she was not an Israeli woman," he said. He believes that possibly British, French and Italian intelligence services were all involved. One of the people on the ship that carried him clandestinely back to Israel was a Frenchman, he said, and his flight to Italy from London had been delayed, possibly, he surmised, because British intelligence services were cooperating.
Famously, when he was bundled into court for his secret trial, he scrawled the message that he had been kidnapped on his hand. "They told me I could not talk about the kidnapping or even mention the word 'Rome'. I hoped that by revealing the kidnapping on the palm of my hand it would make the government of Italy demand my release." But the Italian government did nothing and he was jailed for 18 years.
Vanunu was 10 when his family arrived in Israel from Morocco. When he was 18, he resolved to travel the world, but he ended up first doing his national service in the Israeli defence force and then becoming a student studying geography and philosophy, watching football and basketball and enjoying college life. He became active in student politics, and identified with the Palestinian students he met. It was then that he became concerned about peace issues, not least because one of his professors was jailed at the time for refusing military service.
Despite his radical student past, he was cleared to work as a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in the Negev desert and it was there that he became disquieted by his discovery of a secret weapons programme, which is still not officially acknowledged. He took photos of the plant and smuggled them out. What prompted him to take such a risk?
He was aware, he said, of what Daniel Ellsberg, now himself a vociferous admirer of Vanunu, had done by leaking the Pentagon papers, which had helped to end the Vietnam war. He was also inspired by the 1979 film, The China Syndrome, the story of a nuclear whistle-blower, which starred Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas - "You remember the man inside taking photos, trying to bring it to the attention of the media and they killed him" - and, later, by Mike Nichols's 1983 film Silkwood, the true story of Karen Silkwood, played by Meryl Streep, who leaked her concerns about the nuclear industry before dying mysteriously. But his main motivation was Hiroshima, he said. "I didn't have any real role model, it was more the danger of the atomic bomb."
He did not know what to do with his information, which he first divulged to a church group in Sydney, where he had arrived on his travels. He was encouraged by an erratic Colombian freelance journalist there to go public with the information, which led him eventually to the Sunday Times.
If he has regrets about what he did, it is about the way he chose to leak the story. "It was a mistake to go with one newspaper but I didn't have any experience with the media," he said, sitting in the cathedral's garden in the morning sun with news of Arafat's impending death hovering in the background. "My target was to bring information to the world, so the best way would have been a press conference or to send it to 20 newspapers so that it would not be controlled by anyone. Now things have changed and the internet has made it much easier for information to be passed on."
For more than 11 years he was kept in solitary confinement, initially in a two-metre by three-metre cell. "There was a lot of pressure, a lot of attempts at brainwashing," he says. "They would talk to me about the Holocaust and say that the Palestinians are terrorists or the Arabs want to destroy the Jewish state so they need an atomic bomb. I didn't accept this: the Holocaust is not the real issue, it does not justify having the atomic bomb or taking the Palestinian land. Also I was very angry about the trial; if I had received a fair trial, an open trial, that would have been different."
In prison his main motivation was survival. "I decided from the beginning that they could have my body in prison but my spirit, mind, brain, I would keep free, under my control; that would be my way out. I used my Christianity as my defence, my barrier." He would sing hymns to himself, he said. He was visited by a priest but there was a glass between them and they were only allowed to communicate by exchanging notes. After five years, he decided that he wanted to meet the priest in person or not at all. The meetings ended.
His conversion to Christianity, which had happened in Australia in 1986 before he went public with the secrets, has been one source of division, not least with his family, who live in an orthodox community in Bnei Brek, near Tel Aviv. They do not visit him and dissociated themselves from him years ago, with the exception of two of his brothers, Meir, a photographer now travelling the world after guiding Mordechai's first steps outside jail, and Asher, now teaching in Chile.
Rumours have abounded since he was released. After he spoke by video link to the European Social Forum in London last month, word went round his supporters in Scandinavia that he had "escaped" and was in England. There were also reports that he had married.
"That is the Israeli media - maybe to prevent other women's interest in me," he said with the wide smile that frequently punctuates his often intense manner. "There was a woman who came here, a friend; she was very friendly. The bishop encouraged me to marry and the rumours started and they published a picture of us together. Now every time I go on the street the Palestinians say: 'Are you happily married now?' But she is now in the United States. But I do plan to find a woman and have a family."
Currently barred from leaving the country at least for a further five months, he still hopes to live abroad, preferably in the United States, where his adoptive parents, an American couple, live. Some people have asked why he wants to go to the one country in the world that had actually used an atomic bomb.
"They made a mistake. At least America has not made that mistake again. That is good - 50 years without the atomic bomb. I am going there because of its democracy, its freedom, there's a lot of possibilities to write, to learn. I hope my future will be in the academic world, reading, teaching. I don't know if I can do it, but that is what I would like. Also I want to continue to seek the abolition of nuclear weapons around the world, not only in Israel but in England, France, the US, China, Pakistan, India. The enemy now is terrorism but you cannot use atomic bombs against terrorists. I will try and find a way to contribute. I would like to work with the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) in Vienna or with the UN."
There had not been much coverage of his case in the American media with the exception of the leftwing Pacifica radio network. "Most of the American journalists are worried that they will be expelled [if they talk to him] and no one wants to be expelled," he said. "Also their bosses don't want to be in conflict with Israel. They don't want to sacrifice their situation here for my case. The US media is very pro-Israel; they never wrote about their nuclear weapons. They don't want to be called anti-semitic."
On the current situation between the Israelis and Palestinians, he said: "If President Bush decided to do something, they could solve it. What we have now is an apartheid state. There used to be 30% Christian [Palestinians] in east Jerusalem, now it is less than 2%. A lot have emigrated. If I was a Palestinian, I couldn't live under occupation. What kind of life is that?
"But the way to resist the occupation and aggression is not by terror but by non-violence, civil disobedience and, all-important, to build a society, an economy, universities to prove that they are no less educated and developed and compete with them. To have a classical orchestra, sports teams that can compete abroad, a scientist who can compete with the Israelis. That is the way. Since the second intifada, the reality is very, very bad. I used to have optimism but when I came out and saw the wall and saw the reality ... young people who live here don't have any hope.
"Non-violence is still the only way to resist. The fact is that Israel wants the Palestinians to react, they make use of the terror for two things: to raise a new generation who will be much more anti-Palestinian and more rightwing and they use the terror for more occupation, building the wall, justifying what they do to the Palestinians."
Vanunu had decided to talk despite the fact that the restriction on him having any contact with foreigners has just been renewed for a further six months. "I don't know what is the best way to overcome this restriction - is it by silence or is it by speaking? I decided it was by speaking," he said, talking a few days before he was seized by the Israeli army. "If I speak, they can see I have no more secrets, all I am doing is expressing my views and also I am teaching them that they cannot silence anyone ... If they take away your right to speak, you are not a human being any more." He did not speak at all about Dimona.
Officially, the reason given for him not being allowed to talk or leave is that he may divulge more secrets. However, Jerusalem-based correspondents say that some government ministers privately believe that the restrictions were an error, imposed at the behest of an intelligence service who were wrong-footed by the disclosures in the first place and are anxious to avoid further embarrassment. It is generally accepted that his information is now so old as to be of little significance.
Vanunu continues to provoke strong reactions. He is lionised in many countries, particularly in Europe, as a whistle-blower who was prepared to risk his life to draw attention to the dangers of nuclear warfare. He has recently received the Lennon Ono peace prize in New York and the CND building in London was just named after him. Daniel Ellsberg, on a recent visit to London, hailed him as a hero. Supporters threw a 50th birthday bash for him last month, complete with personalised cake. Performers, including Susannah York, Arthur Smith and Mark Steel, appear this week in a benefit concert for him in London.
In Israel, however, he is still regarded by many as a traitor and when he emerged from jail, extremists tried to attack him, rushing his car and making throat-slitting gestures as he left the prison gates. Now he faces the courts once more. How had people reacted to him?
"The people in east Jerusalem are very sympathetic and very happy to see me; they shake my hand and invite me to coffee. Three or four times, Israeli youths have shouted at me but I ignore them," he said. "I have received some hint of threats that they could kill me. If they want to do something, it's not a big problem for them but I am not in fear, I am just living my life. Fear will not help me."
He has no income and lives modestly. His room is free, courtesy of the Anglican bishop. Friends and supporters - and he has a number of dedicated Israeli peace campaigners who have been battling for him since the early days - have given him clothes and a laptop. His days have been spent talking to visitors, walking the nearby streets, swimming at a local hotel. And, until he was re-arrested at least, climbing to the top of the bell tower to savour the chimes of freedom.