Gideon's Spies полностью

The next issue of the Sunday Mirror contained a large photograph of Mordechai Vanunu, together with a story holding the technician and Oscar Guerrero up to ridicule, calling the Colombian a liar and a cheat, and the claim about Israel’s nuclear capability a hoax. The report had been dictated by Maxwell who had also supervised the prominent positioning of Vanunu’s photograph. The first shot had been fired in a major disinformation campaign orchestrated by Mossad’s psychological warfare department.

After reading it, Vanunu became agitated to the point where he told his Sunday Times “minders”—the reporters who had watched over him since he had been brought to London—that he “wanted to disappear. I don’t want anyone to know where I am.”

The panic-stricken technician was staying at the latest hotel his minders had chosen, the Mountbatten near Shaftesbury Avenue in Central London.

Following the Sunday Mirror publication, sayanim in London were mobilized to find him. Scores of trusted Jewish volunteers had each been given lists of hotels and boarding houses to check. In each call they gave a description of Vanunu from the photograph published in the Sunday Mirror, each caller claiming to be a relative checking to see if he had registered.

On Wednesday, September 25, Admoni received news from London that Vanunu had been located. It was time to bring into play the next stage of his plan.

The link between intelligence work and sexual entrapment was as old as spying itself. In the fourth book of Moses, Rahab, a prostitute, saves the lives of two of Joshua’s spies from the king of Jericho’s counterintelligence people—the first recorded meeting between the world’s two oldest professions. One of Rahab’s heirs in the love-and-espionage business was Mata Hari, a Dutch seductress who worked for the Germans in World War I and was executed by the French. From the beginning Mossad had recognized the value of sexual entrapment. For Meir Amit:

“It was another weapon. A woman has skills a man simply does not. She knows how to listen. Pillow talk is not a problem for her. The history of modern intelligence is filled with accounts of women who have used their sex for the good of their country. To say that Israel has not done the same would be foolish. But our women are volunteers, high-minded women who know the risks involved. That takes a special kind of courage. It is not so much a question of sleeping with someone. It is to lead a man to believe you will do so in return for what he has to tell you. That does not begin to describe the great skills that are called into play to achieve that.”

Nahum Admoni had handpicked an agent who possessed all those qualities to entice Mordechai Vanunu into Mossad’s hands.

Cheryl Ben-Tov was a bat leveyha, one grade below a katsa. Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Orlando, Florida, she had seen her parents’ marriage end in a bitterly contested divorce. She found solace in religious studies, which led to her spending three months on a kibbutz in Israel. There she became immersed in Jewish history and the Hebrew language. She decided to remain in Israel. At the age of eighteen she met and fell in love with a Sabra, a native-born Israeli, called Ofer Ben-Tov. He worked for Aman as an analyst. A year after they met the couple were married.

Among the wedding guests were several high-ranking members of the Israeli intelligence community, including one from Meluckha, Mossad’s recruiting department. During the marriage feast he asked Cheryl the sort of questions any bride might expect. Was she going to go on working? Have a family at once? Caught up in the excitement of the celebrations, Cheryl had said her only plan was to try to find a way to give something back to her country, which had given her so much, referring to Israel as “family.” A month after she returned from her honeymoon, she received a call from the wedding guest: he said he had been thinking over what they had spoken about and maybe there was a way for her to help.

They arranged to meet at a café in downtown Tel Aviv. He astonished her by citing with complete accuracy her school grades, her family history, how she had met her husband. Perhaps sensing her anger at having her privacy invaded, he explained that all the information was in her husband’s file at Aman.