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SOLITARY MAN

Mordechai Vanunu interview
The Independent on Sunday, February 2005

THE Rector of Glasgow University is not supposed to be speaking to me, or anyone like me. The Rector of Glasgow University is banned, by the state of which he remains a reluctant citizen, from meeting journalists, or foreigners. The Rector of Glasgow University, in sitting down this bright Jerusalem winter’s morning with a foreign journalist, is breaking the law twice. The Rector of Glasgow University couldn’t care less.
  “Yes,” says Mordechai Vanunu. “I am not respecting these restrictions.”
  We’re sitting by a window, overlooking the courtyard of St George’s Anglican cathedral in East Jerusalem. The beautiful and tranquil stone complex includes a guesthouse, in which Vanunu has lived since his release from gaol last April, and a cafe, whose truly shocking coffee must occasionally make Vanunu nostalgic for the catering at Ashkelon’s maximum security Shikma prison, where he was parked for 18 years, eleven and a half of those in solitary confinement.
  “I have one small room here at St George’s,” he explains, “like anyone else who stays here. This is a nice place. It’s quiet, it feels a little bit like it’s abroad. I can speak English, I can meet foreigners.”
  I’d been introduced to Vanunu a week previously, and I’d asked if he’d grant an interview in honour of his election by the students of Glasgow University – he finished ahead of a field which included former Scotland rugby international John Beattie, actress Jenni Keenan Green from Scottish soap “River City”, and Indonesian human rights campaigner Annas Alamudi. Vanunu had readily agreed to discuss his new post – although, as it turns out, he has some rather more dramatic concerns that he wishes to address. First things first, though.
  “I met some Scottish people here in July,” he recalls. “I gave them some interviews, and then I heard about this Rector’s job. I don’t know exactly what my job is, or how I will do it from here, but I think it is good that the students have chosen my issue, of nuclear weapons.”
  Vanunu’s story has been told many times, but seems nonetheless the heady stuff of overcooked airport thriller for the repetition. In 1985, before leaving his job as a technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear research centre, Vanunu shot photographs of the plant’s interior. In 1986, while travelling in Australia, Vanunu fell in with a group of Anglican anti-nuclear activists, whose convictions persuaded him down two paths which would change his life. He renounced Judaism for Christianity, and decided to tell the world that Israel was secretly manufacturing nuclear weapons – as many as 200 warheads.
  Vanunu went to London, and took his photos to The Sunday Times. By the time The Sunday Times published, in October 1986, Israel had already struck, with the ruthlessness it reserves for its enemies. Vanunu met a woman in Leicester Square, who persuaded him to join her for a romantic weekend in Rome. Rarely has a holiday failed so drastically to resemble the brochure. The woman worked for Mossad, Israel’s security service. In Rome, her colleagues drugged and bound Vanunu, and shipped him clandestinely back to Israel. While being driven to court for a secret hearing, Vanunu famously had the wit to scrawl a precis of this bizarre tale on the palm of his left hand (“Vanunu M, was hijacked in Rome. . .”), and press it against the car window. This iconic image founded Vanunu’s image as a sort of a Che Guevara for the atomic age: steadfast, defiant, much beloved by students. It is, also, hard not to believe that Vanunu’s halo has been burnished further in recent years by the increasingly virulent anti-Israel sentiment at large among the western left.
  Vanunu got eighteen years, for treason and espionage, and served every day of it. Most of it was spent in solitary confinement, only occasionally visited by families, lawyers and priests. Amnesty International described his treatment during this period as “cruel, inhuman and degrading”. Israel’s Minister for Public Security in 1997, Avigdor Kahalani, described it as “five star”; Mr Kahalani had clearly stayed in some odd hotels. Vanunu was finally permitted to mix with other prisoners only after Israeli psychiatrists decided that further isolation would damage his mental health.
  Though released, Vanunu is hardly free. Interviews like this are forbidden to him, and not without hazard for the interviewer – in May 2004, the British journalist Peter Hounam, who wrote the original Sunday Times story, was arrested and briefly detained in Israel after talking to Vanunu for the BBC. In January, Israel refused to renew the visa of Simon Wilson, who had been acting chief of the BBC’s Jerusalem bureau when the interview took place. Vanunu is not permitted to leave Israel – until, in theory, the first anniversary of his release – or visit foreign embassies, or loiter in the vicinity of ports or airports. He is also subject to more direct persecution. He was arrested last November, after a raid on St George’s by armed police; they took his computers, held him for a day, and warned him to stop speaking to media in particular, and foreigners in general.
  “I told them,” he says, “I am meeting foreigners because I am a human being, I have the right to meet other human beings. I cannot ask for their passports first.”
  The night before Christmas, Vanunu was lifted again. He ordered a taxi, and attempted the short drive to Bethlehem, to attend a service at the Church of the Nativity. Bethlehem lies beyond the Israeli army’s checkpoints, and is therefore off limits to Vanunu.
  “They told me two weeks before that they knew I was going to go to Bethlehem, and warned me not to. They said if I wanted to go I should ask the police for permission. I said I would not ask for permission. They were waiting for me. They searched every car trying to find me, and they found me. I wasn’t trying to hide myself.”

AND despite these harassments, he still isn’t. Meeting Mordechai Vanunu isn’t as tricky as you might think, or as the Israeli government might prefer. Indeed, if you hang around the right places in East Jerusalem, he’s pretty difficult to avoid. Before we were introduced, I’d twice seen him in the restaurant of the Jerusalem Hotel, where the clientele of earnest young Europeans in newly-purchased keffiyeh scarves approached him for handshakes and autographs. In summer, he enjoys the pool at the American Colony Hotel. At St George’s, he mixes with other guests at mealtimes, and receives groups of tourists. During the day, he meanders about Jerusalem, and answers emails from admirers around the world.
  “I like to go in the street,” he says, “I enjoy seeing people. The only hostility is from Israeli people, and they are not in the east side of Jerusalem. Here, I get a lot of support from Palestinians, foreigners, Christians. And I get about 30 to 50 emails each day. I try to reply to them, but I think I need a secretary, with the fast writing.”
  Vanunu is, in short, a celebrity, which must have made emerging from so oppressive a regime of incarceration even weirder.
  “Yes,” he says. He begins many replies this way, the “Yes” emphatically delivered. “When I was released, I thought maybe there’d be five or six people waiting. But I saw about a hundred media people, and it was broadcast live all over the world. It took me a few months to understand. I thought only my friends, and a few anti-nuclear campaigners, would know who I was. But I’m used to it now.”
  Vanunu, a startlingly healthy-looking 50, also appears accustomed to having his pronouncements waited on by eager followers. All his statements this morning – some of which are, to put it charitably, eccentric – are delivered in a tone of unbroachable authority, and a deep, curiously accented voice; he sounds like Henry Kissinger with the bass turned up. He doesn’t invite conversation; if I offer any sort of observation, or indeed anything that isn’t a direct question, he gazes out the window, or fidgets solemnly with a napkin, waits for me to finish, makes no response at all. I’m inclined to let this slide; his last couple of decades can’t have been good for his people skills. When I put to him follow-up enquiries, especially about his views on history and politics – some of which are, to put it more accurately, weird – his responses are impatient, even irritable. He seems utterly sure of himself, about everything, and I suppose he has needed to be.
  “In spite of this very difficult, hard life in isolation,” he recalls of the years in prison, “I was fighting it every day. To try and keep my sanity, to be normal, not to lose my way, not to adopt some crazy behaviour. I had my routine every day, I had my rules set for every day, and tried to keep myself free, make my own decisions. So even though I was behind a wall, I was free.”
  Vanunu’s air of implacable gravity is enhanced by his appearance; he’s a short, stocky man with a handsome but forbidding visage, of the sort found glowering from church walls at piously intimidated congregations. In an hour, he only smiles once, at the most tactful question I can assemble about how it affects a chap when he is betrayed by a woman, then deprived of female company for 18 years, and then – to judge by the awestruck admirers who queue for his attention in the Jerusalem Hotel’s restaurant – meets a good many of them who are, presumably, at least as seduced by his fame as by his personal qualities.
  “Yes,” he grins. “The Israeli psychological spies in prison tried to make me very angry about that, but I didn’t become anti-woman for that reason. She was doing her job, like all the others who took part in the kidnapping. But for 18 years I was missing women, yes. When I came out, I met. . . well, some of them like me because I am famous, I like them because they are beautiful, and we can have a happy time together. But the best thing is to have a family, a wife, a home, a normal life. I would like that.”
  Vanunu cannot envisage this life occurring inside Israel. He sounds determined to be on the first plane departing after his travel ban elapses.
  “Israel cannot keep me forever,” he says. “They can’t put me back in prison. I am not interested in Israel. I’m a Christian. They don’t need me here.”
  It’s not surprising that a man kidnapped, imprisoned and subsequently pestered by a state should have little affection for it, but I wonder if there’s anything about Israel he’d miss. Family?
  “We have a big family,” he says. “My parents are alive. I have brothers and sisters. But all of them are very Jewish, they are orthodox people with the black coats. I have three brothers who are open to seeing me, but they will not come here and I will not go to Israel [Vanunu regards East Jerusalem as outside Israel]. My parents came to see me in prison in the beginning. When they saw I was continuing to be a Christian, they stopped coming. For them, the Christian issue was more problematic than the nuclear stuff.”
  This, Vanunu believes, is the reason for Israel’s zealous grudge against him: that he is, in their eyes, two kinds of traitor, to country and to faith. I ask him if he cares, at all, about Israel.
  “I care,” he booms, “about the Palestinians. We don’t need a Jewish state. Israel is an apartheid state for the Jewish by the Jews. Palestinians don’t have equal rights, Israel does not give them their rights or their land. Israel should not have a religious Jewish state, they should have a democracy. They say Israel is proud to be a democracy, and if it is a democracy, it should not be a Jewish state.”
  The reason I ask, I explain, is if he ever worries that when he sacrificed 18 years to tell the world about Israel’s nukes, he’d actually done Israel a favour. There seems little point in having nuclear weapons unless your enemies know you have them. And, if that threat is leaked by an unofficial source like Vanunu, Israel’s governments can maintain an official line that they don’t have nuclear weapons, while their neighbours know, or at least strongly suspect, that they have.
  “Yes,” he says, and the strange vertical furrow between his eyebrows deepens. “When I went to The Sunday Times, they thought maybe I was serving the Mossad, that it was a Mossad conspiracy to help Israel. So we knew we would make Israel more powerful by this publication. Maybe in the beginning Israel gained from that, but on the other side there might be interesting results. For example, if they are so powerful, why not make peace? Why are they afraid to give the Palestinians their land? Maybe also the world will start pushing them to destroy their nuclear weapons.”
  I’m not sure I’d hold my breath waiting for any of that to happen.
  “Yes,” he says, a bit sadly. “Well, what we finally thought was, is is true or not? Is it fact, or not? If it is, we should publish it.”

UP until this point, Vanunu has seemed to me an earnest, intense sort, but certainly a man who has survived his unimaginably excruciating ordeal with singular poise. This is, also, what most other recent reports of encounters with him have suggested: that Israel’s vengeance has not dimmed the determination of the world’s favourite nuclear martyr-saint (Vanunu has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize every year since 1989, most recently by 1976 Peace laureate Mairead Maguire). Well, maybe nobody’s ever asked him about his wider beliefs before, or maybe nobody’s wanted to print the answers. But while I still don’t doubt Vanunu’s courage or strength, I fear that he may not have survived his 18-year psychological scourging entirely unscathed.
  Our extensive wander through the realm of the surreal starts innocently enough.
  “My target,” he says, “is to write a book. I have developed new ideas about what is going on in the world, and has gone on in history. I would like to research these new ideas.”
  And these ideas would be. . .?
  “Politics, world history, especially the spies behind many world events, many important events in the last 200 years. I was under spy control, every day, I was following them, I spent a lot of hours every day trying to understand what they are doing. You are living a normal life, you don’t see anything, but by spending time every day you find out many, many underground things.”
  Have you come to any conclusions?
  “My view is that there is a secret government in many democratic states. They are the real people behind many world events. Most leaders who were assassinated, or died from heart attacks or health problems, are all a conspiracy by spies. A lot of world events, even World War II, World War I, Cold War, all was invented and controlled by secret powers. It wasn’t that some crazy leader like Hitler decided to do what he want. Or crazy leaders in World War I deciding to fight each other. There were spies behind all these big events.”
  Mmm. How does this work, exactly?
  “Every state, every superpower, decided they cannot let the state be controlled by some politicals who are elected for four years and then can disappear and a new party take power. They decided that the state should have a program for many years, and they are controlling the governments, like puppets, to accomplish their policies. That is my theory.”
  Do you have any ideas about who “they” are?
  “Secret government,” he says, beginning to sound annoyed. “Secret powers. A small group, who have all the security services in their hands. They know everything about the government, the army. They understand pyschology, they understand media power. A small group in every state. They know what they want, and how to do it.”
  Do you have any names?
  “No. You cannot find them. They hide inside the security service. You cannot identify these people. It’s not even the head of the security service. There are some sections that are secret even to the head of the secret services. Like the head of MI6, he does not know exactly all the sections that he has. He is also controlled by these people.”
  There’s a question I have to ask him at this point, I tell him. Belief in a system of sinister secret global control is often a code with which anti-semites traffick their nonsense. Vanunu is, it must be said, often clumsily dismissive of “the Jews” and “the Jewish” – though I believe this is more a reflection of his disgust with Israel than anything more unsavoury. So, does he believe that this secret government is a Jewish enterprise? That it’s what American crypto-fascist cyber-paranoiacs call the Zionist Occupying Government?
  “No,” he says, as resoundingly as he often says “Yes”. “Not Jewish. Every state have their own best people to put in this. They know who is the best in every subject.”
  It turns out that Vanunu believes that the Jewish conspiracy theory is itself a decoy floated by the secret powers.
  “In 1920 or 1930,” he explains, “spies wanted to start this secret government, so they convinced people there is this Zionist secret world government. This idea they sold to Hitler and many other people. That’s what created World War II.”
  How deep does this rabbithole go, though? Do you, for example, think I might have been sent here by someone?
“They can arrange it,” he insists. “Without you even knowing you were coming here. If you have some friend who works with them, he can arrange that you think about it, he can remind you.”
  Do you really think it’s all as minutely organised as that?
  “That is the very big question,” he concedes. “The system does need a lot of people. To watch, to hear, to create these situations. I don’t know how the system is working. But maybe it is really very simple. I believe they are hearing us now, these secret powers.”
  You think this place is bugged?
  “This place, your watch, my watch, my mobile. But I am ignoring them. I am leading a normal life. They are not controlling me. In spite of all of this, I am not paranoid.”
  There is, it provides me with no joy to relate, a good deal more of this. Vanunu holds these secret powers responsible not just for the favourite manias of the tinfoil hat tendency – Kennedy, September 11th (I forget to ask about the Moon landings) – but any number of other major events, up to and including the tsunami which had, a week before we met, laid waste to swathes of Asia.
  “This tsunami,” he hisses, “also by conspiracy. Believe it or not.”
  I’m fairly firmly in the “or not” column on this one, I tell him.
  “Okay. So, wake up, Mr X.”
  Mr X?
  “The super secret government have the power to cause earthquake.”
  How?
  “Modern science, technology, can create such a thing. They can create climate change, natural disaster, earthquake.”
  Taking this seriously is not made easier by the fact that Vanunu’s accent renders this last word as “earthquack”. It occurs to me that maybe he’s pulling my leg, but I can’t detect the hint of a twinkle in Vanunu’s unblinking eyes, or the beginnings of a smirk around his lips. A lot of people, I tell him, will read this, and decide that he has gone quite mad.
  “Yes,” he admits. “So I don’t know how to speak about it to the public. But if we succeed in convincing the mob that this is true, the secret powers will lose power. The secret power’s job is to keep the mob sleepy, and believing in the same old stuff. Did you see ‘The Truman Show’?”
  I did.
  “That’s what I’m talking about. Secret power. It is not imagination or science fiction. You see a man living, and someone creating artificial life. If someone says good morning, they have been told to say good morning.”
  That’s really how life in Israel works?
  “Everywhere in the world,” he affirms. “Not just here. If they want me, they can reach me. If they want you, they can reach you. They can organise your day today.”

IT’S not difficult to see how Mordechai Vanunu could have arrived at the belief that all aspects of life are organised, to the tiniest detail, by malevolent forces answerable to nobody. For 18 years, all aspects of his life were organised, to the tiniest detail, by forces which were certainly unfavourably disposed towards him, at least, and over which he could exert no control. The surprise, really, is that he has maintained any semblance of sanity at all.
  The more lurid sections of this interview will, of course, be gratefully seized upon by supporters of Israel who believe that Vanunu is an irredeemable scoundrel, richly deserving of yet further punishment; his peculiar theories about covert overlords triggering calamitous earthquacks at the flick of a switch will be gleefully emailed, gloatingly blogged, and used to discredit the truth he tried to tell the world nearly two decades ago. It also seems a safe bet that there will be speculation, from Vanunu’s legion ardent sympathisers, that this feature is itself a set-up, an Israeli psy-ops sting intended to sabotage Vanunu’s reputation. Such are the passions that Mordechai Vanunu still arouses. I wonder if he’ll ever get used to it.
  “I live,” he decides, “to be free from fear, because to fear will not help you with anything. You must act, and use your mind as a normal free man, and hope the system will not succeed.”
  With that, we shake hands, I wish Vanunu the luck he will assuredly need from hereon, and the Rector of Glasgow University is gone, back into the hall of mirrors in which he’ll always live, wherever he lives.

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