Convicted Israeli Spy Finally Out of Isolation

For more than 11 years, his world has been limited to solitary confinement in a maximum-security Israeli prison.

He has been starved for conversation, his brother says, and his mind has wandered down strange alleys of conspiracy theories and become filled with paranoid thoughts after being denied normal contact with others for so long.

But that is changing for Mordechai Vanunu, the technician who revealed details of Israel’s secret effort to develop nuclear weapons. On Thursday, the Israeli government permitted Vanunu contact with other prisoners for the first time since he was arrested in 1986 for spilling Israel’s nuclear secrets to the Sunday Times of London.

“He was very excited. He felt a certain sense of freedom,” said Avigdor Feldman, Vanunu’s lawyer, hours after the chief warden of Shikma prison in Ashkelon informed Vanunu of the Justice Ministry decision.

The easing of Vanunu’s isolation was hailed as a victory by his family, his lawyer and human rights activists, who have argued for years that the lengthy solitude was cruel and unwarranted punishment.

“The road is still long for us, but we’re happy that something finally happened,” Vanunu’s younger brother Meir, who has spent most of the past 11 years campaigning on Mordechai’s behalf, said in a telephone interview. “This may shorten the road to his freedom.”

Parliament member Dedi Zucker said, “I am happy for Israeli democracy even more than I am happy for him.” Zucker, of the liberal Meretz Party, had visited Vanunu several times.

“This solitary confinement was a punishment not [ordered] by a court but by the security services,” Zucker said. “I think that for us, most of all, it was a stain on the state.”

According to Feldman, Vanunu declined the warden’s offer on Thursday to be moved in with other prisoners. He will remain in the same cell he has occupied for years, but now he will be allowed to take part in social activities and converse with other prisoners.

Vanunu’s cell is 9 feet by 6 feet, with a shower and toilet and several shelves for books. Over the years, he has exercised by himself in an outdoor courtyard, with canvas sheets lining the area to shield him from seeing anyone and from being seen.

Aside from weekly two-hour visits from his two brothers and the guard who brings food, Vanunu was been denied regular human contact since his arrest. The visits took place with a metal screen between Vanunu and his brothers, Meir said, and with a guard present on each side of the screen. The brothers could just manage to touch fingertips with Vanunu through the screen.

Israeli authorities previously had insisted that Vanunu’s isolation was necessary to keep him from disseminating sensitive information to anyone else.

But David Bar-Illan, spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, said Thursday that the decision to end the solitary confinement stemmed from a new assessment in which officials balanced the potential risks to state security against humanitarian concerns for Vanunu’s health.

Bar-Illan denied that the decision had come about because of pressure from human rights advocates. Over the years, many prominent people have lobbied against Vanunu’s imprisonment, among them playwright Harold Pinter and actresses Susannah York, Julie Christie and Emma Thompson.

Vanunu is the most controversial figure in the annals of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. He is considered a traitor by many Israelis for revealing state secrets but is regarded as a hero of conscience by advocates of nuclear nonproliferation around the world.

The Moroccan-born Vanunu, 43, took a job as a low-level technician at the secret Dimona nuclear research center in the Negev Desert in 1976 and worked there until 1985.

In 1986, after having been fired in part for political statements against Israeli policies, Vanunu traveled to London and, over the course of five weeks, gave interviews to the Sunday Times laying out what he knew about the weapons program to nuclear experts contacted by the newspaper.

He also turned over 60 photos that he had clandestinely taken inside the Dimona facility.

The disclosures and photos seemed to offer the strongest corroboration yet of suspicions that Israel had become a nuclear power. According to the experts who saw Vanunu’s material, Israel could have manufactured as many as 200 sophisticated nuclear weapons.

Israel has never acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons. But an Israeli arsenal of up to 100 nuclear warheads is now widely presumed to exist, according to the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Vanunu was lured to Rome in 1986 by an Israeli agent and has charged that he was drugged, abducted and taken back to Israel against his will to face a closed-door trial on charges of espionage and betrayal of his country.

Vanunu, who was sentenced in 1988 to 18 years in prison, has always maintained that his arrest and imprisonment were illegal.

“I am not a spy, but a man who helped all the world to end the madness of the nuclear race,” Vanunu wrote in a letter from prison last year, published by the Guardian, a British newspaper.

According to Meir, Vanunu’s first 2 1/2 years of confinement were the worst--the brother said Vanunu was kept under fluorescent lights 24 hours a day. Recently, the prisoner was allowed to have a television.

“Mostly, he is in very good shape,” Meir said. “He is very sharp in his thinking, memory, expression and so forth.”

But he is often given to paranoia: “He sees everything in terms of conspiracies of secret services . . . because of lacking any touch with the reality outside,” his brother said.

Vanunu has written that he renounces his Israeli citizenship and his Jewish faith, that he is now a Christian and wants to be a U.S. citizen. He has used a new name, John Crossman, signing letters: “Vanunu Mordechai, John Crossman--JC.”

Meir Vanunu hopes that his brother’s outlook will improve with human contact, but he added:

“The damage is done already. . . . How can somebody come out of 12 years of isolation and suddenly be with other people?”