Because Vanunu was a good worker, he
was cross-trained in many areas and when he finally realized he was but a cog
in the making of weapons of mass destruction, he decided to document the facts
by photographing the evidence and soon after resigned and left Israel.
I began a series of interviews with Vanunu in 2005, and that was when he told me that he obtained the keys to the top secret restricted areas after they had been carelessly left in the shower room by a supervisor. Vanunu shot two rolls of film in the underground facility but did not develop them until ten months later while in Sydney, Australia after meeting Peter Hounam, an investigative reporter with the London Sunday Times.
After the two developed the film, they flew to London and Vanunu spent three days with Nuclear Physicist, Frank Barnaby, who had been employed by the London Sunday Times. Barnaby concurred that Israel had manufactured upwards of 200 nuclear warheads by 1985 and he also testified at Vanunu's closed-door trial.
Just days before the Sunday Times
published the front page story with some of Vanunu's photos, Vanunu was lured
from London to Rome, where he was clubbed, drugged and kidnapped by the Mossad.
Vanunu was convicted of treason and espionage, sentenced to 18 years in jail-11 - years in solitary- and has been kept under 24/7 surveillance denied the right to speak to foreigners and leave the country ever since he emerged from his windowless tomb sized cell on 21 April 2004.
During Vanunu's trial, Barnaby testified, "I very vigorously cross-examined Vanunu, relentlessly asking the same questions in a number of different ways and at different times. I found Vanunu very straightforward about his motives for violating Israel's secrecy laws he explained to me that he believed that both the Israeli and the world public had the right to know about the information he passed on. He seemed to me to be acting ideologically. Israel's political leaders have, he said, consistently lied about Israel's nuclear-weapons programme and he found this unacceptable in a democracy. The knowledge that Vanunu had about Israel's nuclear weapons, about the operations at Dimona, and about security at Dimona could not be of any use to anyone today. He left Dimona in October 1985 and the design of today's Israeli nuclear weapons will have been considerably changed since then. Modern nuclear weapons bear little relationship to those of the mid-1980."
Vanunu also informed me, "That
President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons. In 1963,
he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile
plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister
said, "The nuclear reactor is only for peace.'
"Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection. The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then,the Dimona descended seven floors underground. In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.
"Kennedy demanded inspections. When
Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators
would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis
would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963
to '69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest
of the Dimona from them.
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