Vanunu had been made redundant in November 1986. In his security file at Dimona it was noted that he had displayed “left-wing and pro-Arab beliefs.” Vanunu left Israel for Australia, arriving in Sydney in May of the following year. Somewhere along his journey, which had followed a well-trodden path by young Israelis through the Far East, Vanunu had renounced his once-strong Jewish faith to become a Christian. The picture emerging from a dozen sources for Admoni to consider was of a physically unprepossessing young man who appeared to be the classic loner: he had made no real friends at Dimona; he had no girlfriends; he spent his time at home reading books on philosophy and politics. Mossad psychologists told Admoni a man like that could be foolhardy, with a warped sense of values and often disillusioned. That kind of personality could be dangerously unpredictable.
In Australia Vanunu had met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian journalist working in Sydney, while he was painting a church. Soon the garrulous journalist had concocted a bizarre story with which to regale his friends in the raffish King’s Cross quarter of Sydney. He claimed he had helped a top Israeli nuclear scientist to defect with details of Israel’s plans to nuke its Arab neighbors and that, one step ahead of Mossad, the scientist was now hiding out in a safe house in a city suburb while Guerrero masterminded what he called “the sale of the scoop of the century.”
Vanunu was irritated by such nonsensical claims. Now a committed pacifist, he wanted his story to appear in a serious publication to alert the world to the threat he perceived Israel now posed with its nuclear capability. However, Guerrero had already contacted the Madrid office of the
Guerrero’s fantasies were swiftly exposed under questioning. The Colombian began to feel he was about to lose control over Vanunu’s story. His fears increased when the
Guerrero watched Vanunu and his traveling companion board the flight to London, his misgivings deepening by the minute. He needed advice on how to handle the situation. The only person he could think of was a former member of the Australian Security and Intelligence Service (ASIS). Guerrero told him he had been cheated out of a world-shaking story, and described exactly what Vanunu had smuggled out of Dimona—sixty photographs taken inside Machon-Two, together with maps and drawings. They revealed beyond a doubt that Israel was the sixth most powerful nuclear nation in the world.
Once more Guerrero’s luck ran out. He had chosen the wrong man to call. The former ASIS operative contacted his old employer and repeated what Guerrero had told him. There was a close working relationship between Mossad and ASIS. The former provided intelligence on Arab terrorist movements out of the Middle East to the Pacific. ASIS informed the
It took a Mossad sayan on the staff of the king of Nepal three days to discover that Vanunu’s sole purpose in going to the embassy was to enquire about the travel documents he would need to take a vacation in the Soviet Union at some unspecified later date. He had been sent on his way with a pile of brochures.
In the hours that had passed since Vanunu was being flown to London by the
