Cleric Fails to Find Israeli A-Technician : Reports Official Stonewalling on Ex-Worker at Dimona Complex

An Australian clergyman on the trail of former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu said Tuesday that his inquiries into the fate of the missing man have been spurned repeatedly by government officials and that he will leave Israel today.

The Rev. John McKnight, an Anglican priest who befriended Vanunu and then converted him to Christianity in Sydney earlier this year, said he is still convinced that Vanunu, a former employee of Israel’s top-secret Dimona nuclear reactor complex, is being held in an Israeli prison, reportedly in Gedera near the coast south of Tel Aviv.

Vanunu, who sold information to the Sunday Times of London about Israel’s nuclear program, disappeared Sept. 30. There have been unconfirmed press reports that he was abducted by agents of the Mossad, the Israeli security service, and brought here to face treason charges.

No. 6 Nuclear Power

Based on data and more than 60 photographs supplied by Vanunu, the Sunday Times reported early this month that Israel has been manufacturing atomic warheads for 20 years and that, with about 100 nuclear weapons in a secret stockpile, Israeli now ranks as the world’s No. 6 nuclear power.

Israeli officials have refused to make any substantive comment on the Sunday Times article or on the reports of Vanunu’s abduction, although they have confirmed that he is a former employee of the country’s Atomic Energy Commission.

“I’ve now tried to visit and talk with a variety of government departments, and each time I’ve met with a silence,” McKnight told a Jerusalem news conference Tuesday. “I’ve not been able to talk to any minister or any member of the government about the matter. All my telephone calls have never been answered.”

Letters Not Accepted

On Tuesday, the clergyman said, he tried without success to leave two letters for Vanunu with a government office, suggesting that they were rejected out of fear that acceptance could be construed as confirmation that Vanunu is being held here.

McKnight said he will return to his parish in Australia and continue to do whatever he can on Vanunu’s behalf from there.

Vanunu was fired from his job last winter. He went to Australia, smuggling out with him unprocessed film of what he said was a secret underground complex at Dimona used to produce nuclear weapons.

McKnight has said that Vanunu showed up at his parish last spring during a Friday night open house. They became friends, and later the Israeli asked to be baptized.

Gag Order on Press

Although McKnight failed in his attempt to find and talk with Vanunu, his trip to Israel appears to have increased pressure on the government by the Israeli news media to be more forthright about the Vanunu affair. The government had imposed what amounts to a gag order on the local press, permitting it to report only what foreign news agencies have written about the case.

But McKnight’s visit, in the course of which he held two press conferences, opened at least a small crack in the censorship. The Israeli press has expressed little sympathy for the clergyman’s requests for information, but it has criticized the government for not being more candid about the underlying issues of national concern raised by the case.

“Israel owes Rev. McKnight no explanation,” the Jerusalem Post said in an editorial Tuesday, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir “is surely under no obligation to arrange a meeting for him with Vanunu, assuming the latter is in the country.

Inapplicable Precedents

“But the question is whether Yitzhak Shamir may not owe it to the people of Israel to be more forthcoming in the matter of Vanunu,” the editorial continued. “Old precedents for the secret jailing, interrogation and trial of persons who committed grave security offenses followed by their secret incarceration are not only extremely few; they are also wholly inapplicable.”

Since Vanunu acted “in full view of the whole world, tight secrecy about his whereabouts is not a viable alternative,” the Post said. And to make matters worse, it said, the prime minister’s spokesman insisted after McKnight’s first press conference, on Sunday, that “we do not know anything about this matter.”

“Telling obvious, and therefore stupid, lies is neither a viable political option nor a patriotic duty,” the Post said.

Spy Movie Behavior

The leftist paper Al Hamishmar, in a partially censored editorial Tuesday, cited reports that Vanunu had been abducted and asked whether action appropriate “for spy movies and irresponsible regimes” is also fitting “for states of law.”

Earlier, the independent paper Haaretz and the centrist Davar expressed concern over what appears to be a major security lapse that allowed Vanunu to leave the country with his film.