Everybody understands that he has no more secrets. What can a technician know after 18 years in jail, during which time technology has advanced with giant steps?
But gradually it becomes clear what the security establishment is really afraid of. Vanunu is in a position to expose the close partnership with the United States in the development of Israel's nuclear armaments.
This worries Washington so much, that the man responsible in the State Department for "arms control," Undersecretary John Bolton, has come to Israel in person for the occasion. Vanunu, it appears, can cause severe damage to the mighty superpower. The Americans are afraid of sounding like the lady in the dark cinema.
(By the way, this John Bolton is an avid supporter of the group of Zionist neo-cons who play a central role in the Bush theater. He opposes arms control for the United States and its satellites, and was installed in the State Department against the wishes of the Secretary of State himself.)
In the short address Vanunu was able to make to the media immediately on his release, he made a strange remark: that the young woman who served as bait for his kidnapping, some 18 years ago, was not a Mossad agent, as generally assumed, but an agent of the FBI or CIA. Why was it so urgent for him to convey this?
From the first moment, there was something odd about the Vanunu affair.
At the beginning, my first thought was that he was a Mossad agent. Everything pointed in that direction. How else can one explain a simple technician's success in smuggling a camera into the most secret and best-guarded installation in Israel? And in taking photos apparently without hindrance? How else to explain the career of that person who, as a student at Be'er-Sheva University, was well-known as belonging to the extreme left and spending his time in the company of Arab fellowstudents? How was he allowed to leave the country with hundreds of photos? How was he able to approach a British paper and to turn over to British scientists material that convinced them that Israel had 200 nuclear bombs?
Absurd, isn't it? But it all fits, if one assumes that Vanunu acted from the beginning on a mission for the Mossad. His disclosures in the British newspaper not only caused no damage to the Israeli government, but on the contrary, strengthened the Israeli deterrent without committing the government, which was free to deny everything.
What happened next only reinforced this assumption. While in Fondon, in the middle of his campaign of exposures, knowing that half