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Agent Cindy: Israel's sex spy
April 22, 2004
This is Agent Cindy, the Mata Hari who seduced Mordechai Vanunu and cost him 18
years of his life after he was drugged, kidnapped, smuggled back to Israel and
jailed for espionage.
A defiant Vanunu, now 49, was released yesterday after serving his sentence for
exposing Israel's atomic secrets.
He walked out of Ashkelon's Shikma Prison - about 60km from Jerusalem - under
severe restrictions, to face a wave of hatred that drowned out cheers of
international supporters.
Hundreds of Israelis who regard him as traitor went ballistic and a cry of
"They should have put you up a chimney like the Jews at Auschwitz!" echoed
their anger.
Vanunu answered them at a press conference: "To all those who are calling me
traitor, I am saying: I am proud, I am proud and happy to do what I did."
He complained bitterly of "cruel and barbaric treatment" at the hands of
Israel's security services and spoke briefly about the spy who had lured him
into her bed - and destroyed his life.
Their story reads like a purple-prose spy novel that readers would dismiss as
over-the-top improbable fiction.
It begins in 1986 when Vanunu, then a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in
southern Israel, decided to expose Israel's atomic secrets.
The young idealist chose the London Sunday Times as the vehicle for his
exposé, which caused international controversy - and fury in Israel.
Enter Mossad, Israel's feared secret service, whose mission was to bring him
back to Israel from Europe.
Their honeytrap was Cheryl Hanin, codenamed Cindy, who then was an attractive,
apparently open and, to Vanunu at least, very friendly 26-year-old.
Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, the Secret History of Mossad, wrote:
"She was sent on practice missions, breaking into an occupied hotel room,
stealing documents from an office.
"She was roused from her bed in the dead of night and dispatched on more
exercises: picking up a tourist in a nightclub, then disengaging herself
outside his hotel. Every move she made was observed by her tutors."
After her training, Hanin joined the Mossad unit that worked with Israeli
embassies, where she apparently posed as the wife or girlfriend of other
agents.
Her final mission began when she engineered a meeting with Vanunu in Leicester
Square and suggested a coffee, saying she was a beautician on holiday.
The next day they met in the Tate Gallery and began to see more of each other.
Peter Hounam, the Sunday Times journalist who had debriefed Vanunu, warned him
that she could be a Mossad agent, but Vanunu insisted: "She is just a tourist
who is critical of Israel. I think you would like her."
There were plans for Vanunu to bring his new girlfriend to Hounam's house but
he cancelled because he was "going out of the city".
"Going out of the city" meant Vanunu had fallen for the Mossad trap - Cindy had
lured him into going to Rome, where it would be easier to stage a kidnapping.
Yesterday, Vanunu revealed for the first time what had happened.
At an impromptu press conference he said:
"I'm speaking only in English. I'm not speaking in Hebrew. If Israel don't let
me to speak to foreigners, I'm not speaking in Hebrew.
"I was kidnapped in Rome, Italy, by Israel's spy on September 13, and I was
brought to Israel, arrived to Ashkelon prison on October 7."
After saying he was proud of what he had done and challenging Israel to allow
nuclear inspectors into the country, he gave more details of the drama in Rome.
"I was kidnapped immediately after we land in Italy. We went to an apartment.
As soon as I went into the apartment they attacked me, one Israeli and one
Frenchman."
"They drug me, they drug me, they drug me. They took me in a car. From the car
we went to the beach, an isolated beach, a commando boat, from the commando
boat to a small yacht."
"There I was chained for seven days, we speak only English. I ask them: 'Who
are you?'"
"They say we are here Israelis, French, English. After seven days we arrived
near to Caesaria beach."
Vanunu was then tried secretly on an espionage charge and began his 18-year
sentence, much of which was spent in solitary confinement.
Hanin went to Israel in triumph but when the Sunday Times discovered her living
quietly in the northern Israeli town of Netanya in 1988, she left for her
native United States.
Since then, Israel's largest circulating newspaper, Yedhiot Arhronot, says she
and her family have been living a prosperous life.
The newspaper reported that she had "a red Cutlass convertible" and estimated
that her house in Florida is worth more than R3-million.
She and her husband refuse to talk about her past.
"For me this is a black story and I just want to erase it and forget it,"
Yedhiot quotes Hanin telling a friend in Israel.
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