Israeli Who Told Nuclear Secrets Is Championed

An unrepentant Mordechai Vanunu, the technician most Israelis still brand a traitor for revealing nuclear arms secrets, told an international conference seeking his release Monday, “I am happy for revealing what I revealed.”

Actress Susannah York read Vanunu’s one-line statement, which was smuggled out of the prison where he has spent 10 years in solitary confinement, to a conference in Israel called to demand his release.

International scientists, lawyers and human rights activists listened as Nobel Peace Prize winner Joseph Rotblat, who worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the first atomic bomb, appealed to Israel to free Vanunu.

“Vanunu is not a traitor but a whistle-blower,” Rotblat said. He said Vanunu’s 18-year sentence was out of proportion to his crime--giving details of Israel’s nuclear program to the Sunday Times of London.

At the gathering--unprecedented in Israel, where he is still vilified as a spy and where nuclear issues are shrouded by official censorship--participants talked openly about Vanunu and the nuclear arsenal Israel has never acknowledged having.

“This is a landmark in the Vanunu affair,” Vanunu’s brother, Meir Vanunu, told Reuters. “The fact that [Israeli] papers are allowed--yes, allowed--to write a lot more freely about it shows a change.”

The case began in 1986 when the Mossad intelligence agency learned that Vanunu had passed on information about the Dimona nuclear complex in southern Israel.

It sent a woman agent code-named Cindy to lure Vanunu from Britain. Israel did not want to jeopardize its relations with then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by operating on British soil.

Vanunu flew to Rome with Cindy, where he was kidnapped by Israeli agents, drugged and spirited back to the Jewish state.