Vanunu had accepted all the restrictions with a shrug. There had been many other shrugs during Dagan’s final effort to understand his mind-set. The night before his release, two Mossad interrogators had questioned Vanunu on camera about why he had betrayed Israel. He had shrugged them off and launched a strong attack on Mossad and how he had been tricked into captivity. He had spoken of his “cruel and barbaric treatment in prison which was organized and approved by Mossad.”
Now, on the television screen, Vanunu was repeating the same allegations to the cheers of his supporters. To Dagan if “this was a man we had brutalized he looked in very good shape.”
As Vanunu was driven away to pray in St. George’s Anglican cathedral in Jerusalem, Meir Dagan turned back to other matters. Vanunu was free. But he would never be out of Mossad’s grasp.
Like millions of others, “Cindy,” the Mossad agent who had played a key role in the capture of Vanunu in 1986, saw the news of his release on television. She knew that to many Israelis she was still a heroine, someone who had used her guile for a classic sexual entrapment. To others, she remained a Mata Hari, a calculating seductress who destroyed the life of an idealist who felt he was driven by the higher cause of world peace.
But Cindy (the code name she operated under for Mossad) had little to say publicly after she saw Vanunu emerge from his prison. “It’s all in the past. I did my job. End of story,” she said (to the author). Just as Vanunu had spent his long years in jail, reliving what he had done and each time concluding “I did the right thing,” so Cindy had undoubtedly also tried to come to terms with what she had done.
Today she lives in an expensive home beside a golf course twenty-five minutes outside Orlando. She looks good for her age, the color of her hair helped by hairdressing skills to hide the effects of the Florida sun. Deeply tanned, she favors loose-fitting casuals to hide the spread of early middle age. Her two daughters are now teenagers who attend an exclusive private school and never, in public at least, speak about their mother’s past. But friends at the golf club where Cindy enjoys taking lunch say she has developed a real fear that Vanunu or one of his supporters will come and harm her.
Vanunu has denied he has any interest in doing so. “For me, she is just someone who happened. I was young and lonely. She was there. I took her on trust,” was how he summed up the fatal mistake that allowed her to entice him to Rome on the promise of sex. Instead, he fell into the hands of Mossad.
In 2004, Cindy—who is listed in local Orlando records as Cheryl Hanin Bentov—is a Realtor, working with her husband and her mother, Riki Hanin, who lives nearby. All three are active members of their Jewish community. The Israeli newspaper
If that is true, then it was a high price to pay for becoming Mossad’s most infamous seductress.
On Meir Dagan’s desk was a report from the New York consulate that there was no need for concern over the much promoted CBS television documentary on the death of Princess Diana. The full role of Mossad was still securely hidden and seemed likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The documentation (which had enabled part of the story to appear in this book) had been sealed in Mossad’s archives with a printed warning on the box. “Not to be opened without prior written order of Director General.”
Of far more concern to Dagan was another report, this one from the Washington embassy, that once more the Bush administration, like its predecessors, was preparing to block the release of a whistleblower as dangerous to America as Vanunu had been to Israel. He was Jonathan Pollard, who was serving a life sentence in a high-security prison in Bulmer, North Carolina, having been found guilty of being the greatest traitor in the history of the United States. Pollard, unlike Vanunu, had been sentenced to die in jail.
Dagan knew the reason for this harsh sentence was the forty-sixpage affidavit Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of defense, had made for Pollard’s trial in 1987. It was so secret that it had never been made public. Every attempt to do so had been blocked by federal lawyers in various Washington courts. In April 2004, the affidavit was still classified “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information” (SCI). This is a restriction to protect the most sensitive data in the U.S. intelligence community.
