Israel Tattletale

It has been a year of jolting change for Mordechai Vanunu. Until last November he had worked as a technician in Israel's top-secret nuclear research center at Dimona in the Negev desert. Then Vanunu, 32, was dismissed from his job, ostensibly as part of a government cost-cutting move. He left Israel last spring on a vacation trip that took him to Greece, Bangkok and finally Sydney, Australia, where he reportedly converted to Christianity. Then he and a shadowy Colombian journalist hit upon a plan: they would sell Vanunu's inside account of Israel's nuclear defense program, never before publicly acknowledged, to the press.

The resulting story appeared in London's Sunday Times under the banner headline REVEALED: THE SECRETS OF ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL. The account told how an Israeli research team, starting in 1964 with a 26-megawatt nuclear reactor supplied by France, secretly upgraded it to 150 megawatts, large enough to produce plutonium for ten nuclear bombs a year. In the process, said the article, they turned Israel into the world's sixth largest nuclear power, after the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China.

The Sunday Times, which had been badly stung by publishing the faked Hitler diaries in 1983, treated Vanunu's account with caution. The paper flew the former technician to London, where he was debriefed for two weeks by a team of reporters and scientists. Before publishing, the newspaper also invited comment from Israeli government officials. They declined -- and quickly ordered up a search for the Times's talkative source.

^ Vanunu suddenly vanished in early October, under circumstances that are increasingly mysterious. His disappearance is thought to have involved the Israeli intelligence service, MOSSAD; he may have been lured by MOSSAD agents aboard a ship berthed on the Thames and later transferred to an Israeli navy vessel on the high seas. Other observers suggested last week that Vanunu's abduction was considerably messier and may have violated British law. Still others speculate that the Vanunu affair may have been part of a deliberate Israeli propaganda campaign aimed at impressing the Syrians with Jerusalem's nuclear capabilities.

Vanunu is believed to be undergoing interrogation by Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, at a former British fort south of Tel Aviv. He could be charged with violating the country's Official Secrets Act or, worse, with treason, which carries a possible lifetime prison sentence. However, Israeli officials are leery of placing Vanunu on trial. Reason: a verdict of guilty, they concede, would have the effect of confirming his story.