The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy

An Israeli Asset

By October 1986, Jonathan Pollard had yet to be sentenced and there were many in the U.S. intelligence community who were convinced that he had one and perhaps many more accomplices inside the government—men or women who were supplying Israel with the identification of highly classified documents that Pollard could then be assigned to retrieve. The hunt for “Mr. X,” as the government called Pollard’s alleged accomplice, had only begun.

Israel was in the news, and so was spying. The Sunday Times of London had every reason to anticipate that its October 5, 1986, revelation about Dimona, based on its interviews with Mordecai Vanunu, would be a sensation. It was the first inside account of the Israeli nuclear establishment, based on a publicly named source. It also was another story of betrayal involving Israel: Vanunu and Pollard were primarily driven not by financial gain (although both accepted money), but by the conviction that they were doing the right thing.

The intelligence communities of the world were riveted by the Sunday Times account. One key American nuclear intelligence official acknowledged that the Vanunu story and Pierre Pean’s 1982book on the early French involvement at Dimona “together presented the evidence that filled in all the question marks. What we and Z Division didn’t know, they provided.”

But the press paid little attention. The Sunday Times’s competitors on Fleet Street ignored the story, and so did much of the world’s press. The Washington Post and the New York Times dismissed it in subsequent days with a few paragraphs buried inside their newspapers, and the major wire services treated it the same way.

Peter Hounam, the primary reporter and writer of the Vanunu story, knew it was the most important of his career. He expected anything, except apathy. There were not even any calls from the major newspapers in the United States. It might have been different, Hounam knew, if Mordecai Vanunu had been available in person. The Sunday Times had worked out a careful public relations campaign to help promote the story. There was to be a news conference on the day of publication (the newspaper would also announce that Vanunu had agreed to write a book and that syndication rights had been sold to Stern, the West German news magazine). But Vanunu had dropped out of sight the week before, and the Sunday Times was unable to produce him when he was most needed.

The article had been given a lurid headline: “Strange Case of Israel and the Nuclear Conman.” The alleged con man in the headline was not Vanunu, but Vanunu’s agent, Oscar E. Guerrero, an opportunistic journalist from Colombia in South America who had befriended the hapless Vanunu in June, while he was still in exile in Australia. It was Guerrero who convinced Vanunu that his story and spectacular photographs were worth as much as $1 million. After failing to interest Newsweek magazine, Guerrero approached the London Times in late August, and within a few days, Peter Hounam was in Australia, interviewing Vanunu.

Guerrero, apparently fearful that he would be cut out of Vanunu’s agreement with the Sunday Times, also approached the Sunday Mirror—known for its checkbook journalism—while Hounam and the Sunday Times’s “Insight Team” were preparing their story. It was that approach that put Ari Ben-Menashe and the Israeli intelligence community into the picture.

Hounam and the editors at the Sunday Times did not know that as they worked, Mordecai Vanunu had been compromised to the Israelis by a Fleet Street colleague named Nicholas Davies, the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, sister newspaper of the Sunday Mirror. Davies’s contact was Ari Ben-Menashe. He and Ben-Menashe had been partners in an international arms sales firm initially known as Ora Limited, which had operated out of Davies’s London home since 1983. Ora Limited, set up with the approval of the Israeli government, according to Ben-Menashe, was designed to get arms flowing into Iran—one of many such undercover operations around the world. “Davies was my main backup on all the Iran arms sales,” Ben-Menashe said.

Davies, reached by telephone in London at a number listed for Ora Limited, acknowledged that he knew Ben-Menashe but denied any involvement in arms sales: “All I will say is just keep investigating.” Ben-Menashe, he added, was only a news source: “He’s got amazing information.” At one time, he said, he and Ben-Menashe had discussed collaborating on a book, but the prospective publisher was not interested. Ben-Menashe was now telling stories about him, Davies said, in revenge. “If any allegations are made in England,” Davies warned, “I’ll be seeing my solicitor.”

But, in addition to the cable cited above, Ben-Menashe’s allegations were explicitly confirmed by Janet Fielding, a London actress who was the second wife of Nicholas Davies from 1982 to 1985. She said that she knew that Davies was selling arms in partnership with Ben-Menashe at the same time he was serving as foreign editor of the Daily Mirror. Eventually, she said in a telephone interview, she became “appalled” by her then husband’s activities. “Nick would try to tell me stuff [about the arms sales] and I said I didn’t want to know. I left him because of it.”

She had first known him as a journalist who had written critically of the massacres at Sabra and Shatila during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon: “And then he gets involved with Ari.” She especially recalled, she said, serving Ben-Menashe lunch at her home in late 1984: “I’d gone to the trouble of getting kosher salami and Ari didn’t like it.”

Asked whether she knew that Ben-Menashe was an Israeli intelligence operative, Fielding responded, “It wasn’t difficult to put two and two together. Do you think I’m bloody stupid? I shut my ears and walked”—out of the marriage.

Soon after Guerrero approached the Sunday Mirror, Ben-Menashe said, Davies learned of it and immediately telephoned him in Israel to tip him off: “The next I knew I was on the night plane to London. Some shithead from Colombia was peddling the pictures in London. Nick arranged a meeting with this ‘hot’ American journalist—me.” At the meeting, Guerrero, eager for another sale, displayed some of Vanunu’s color photographs. Ben-Menashe’s problem, he recalled, was that he simply had no idea what they showed or whether they were significant. They would have to be seen, he knew, by experts in Israel. “I told him I needed copies.” Guerrero balked. “I said, ‘You want some money? I have to know they’re real.’ I told him Nick will vouch for me.” Guerrero turned over copies of three Vanunu photographs.

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Vanunu’s photographs, which had been shipped by Ben-Menashe directly to Israel—he was under strict orders to stay away from the Israeli embassy—created havoc. Ben-Menashe was told the next morning, “They’re real.” He was also told that Peres was personally handling the crisis. Ben-Menashe learned one of the reasons a few days later: there was fear that Vanunu knew that Israel had deployed nuclear land mines along the Golan Heights—and that he would talk about it. The land mines had been put in place in the early 1980s, when Vanunu was still working at Dimona.

That news propelled a major disinformation effort by Israel, Ben-Menashe said: “To stop every story. To put out the word that it’s bullshit.” Davies did his part at the Sunday Mirror, Ben-Menashe said, working directly with Robert Maxwell, publisher of the Mirror Group newspapers, the largest group of popular tabloids in Great Britain, which included the Daily and Sunday Mirror. Davies provided the framework for the September 28 Vanunu story, Ben-Menashe recalled, and then “it went to Maxwell. He was dealing directly with Maxwell.” At one point, Ben-Menashe said, Davies set up a meeting for Ben-Menashe with Maxwell at his ninth-floor office. Maxwell made it clear at the brief session, Ben-Menashe recalled, that he understood what was to be done about the Vanunu story. “I know what has to happen,” Maxwell told Ben-Menashe. “I have already spoken to your bosses.”

The Sunday Mirror reporting and editing team that handled the Vanunu story had no contact with Nicholas Davies, whom they knew only as the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror. What the reporters did know, however, was that the story that appeared under their names had been dictated in tone and content by the newspaper’s editor, Michael Malloy. There were heated debates with the Mirror’s reporting team, led by Tony Frost, insisting that the real story was not about Guerrero and his antics, as Malloy wanted to make it, but about the Vanunu photographs. Whatever Guerrero’s problems, the Vanunu photographs could be real. If so, it was one hell of a story. The reporters recommended that the photographs be “splashed” across the front of the newspaper, with the accompanying story raising questions about their authenticity. But Malloy wanted none of Vanunu’s photographs published and insisted on holding up Vanunu, and the Sunday Times, to ridicule.

The crunch came on the Thursday before publication, when Frost and a colleague named Mark Souster were ordered by Malloy to take the Vanunu photographs and data to the Israeli embassy. John C. Parker, then Malloy’s senior deputy, understood that Maxwell himself had given the order. Parker and his colleagues were extremely concerned about what going to the embassy meant for Vanunu. It could lead to his arrest and even put his life in danger from assassination. “It’s an editor’s prerogative,” Malloy told them, and the newspaper’s staff did his bidding.

Frost knew that he and his colleagues had not participated in journalism’s finest hour: “I was hoping one day that the full story would come out on this,” he said.

Malloy, who was forced out in 1988 as editor of the Sunday Mirror, acknowledged that he had discussed the handling of the Vanunu story with Maxwell, but said there was “nothing sinister or strange about Maxwell’s involvement. I told Bob about it because of his involvement with Israel. He does have powerful friends there and close links.” Told of the complaints by Parker, Miller, and Frost, Malloy said that he himself had misjudged the importance of the Vanunu photographs. “My news instincts were bad,” Malloy, now a free-lance writer and novelist, explained. “It sounded to me like a setup.” It was Maxwell, however, Malloy recalled, who ordered the staff to take the photographs to the Israeli embassy. “I think he [Maxwell] probably said, ‘Oh, let the Israelis have a look at it,’ and that’s how it came about. It wasn’t as if we were handing them to a foreign enemy.”

Handling Robert Maxwell’s Sunday Mirror was one thing, but the Sunday Times was still known to be at work on the Vanunu story—and the Israeli intelligence community had no clout at the top at the Times. “Those guys were not us,” Ben-Menashe said. “They wanted the real story.” The next step was to find Vanunu, still hiding out in London, and somehow manage to get him out of England. “We didn’t know what hotel he was staying at,” Ben-Menashe added. “We asked Nick to ask around and find out where the fuck he was. Nick did it, and we spotted him.” Within days, the lonely Vanunu, who did not know about the land mines, Ben-Menashe said, was entrapped by the Mossad’s Cindy Hanin Bentov and en route to Rome.

Ben-Menashe’s involvement in the incident ended at that point, but he maintained his business ties with Davies until his arrest in New York in 1989. He initially sought to keep secret Davies’s role in the ongoing arms sales, Ben-Menashe said, as any good intelligence operative would, but he decided to talk after Davies made no move to come to his defense. Davies, in fact, retained a New York attorney in a successful effort to resist being deposed by Ben-Menashe’s attorneys in the case.

If he had chosen to do so, Ben-Menashe claimed, Davies could have proven to the American prosecutors that the sale of the C-130s to Iran had been sanctioned by the Israeli government.

* Watters wasn’t surprised to learn that Davies was in the newspaper business: “He called from what sounded like a very open room with lots of people talking and typewriters going. I always wondered where he was.” Before agreeing to set up the company on behalf of Ora Limited, Watters added, he sought to check out Ben-Menashe and his London firm. Watters was also working under contract on a communications project for the U. S. Border Control and, through a friend there, was put in touch with officials of the U. S. Justice Department in Washington. “They said, ‘Go ahead. Do anything he wants. Just keep us informed,’ ” Watters said.

† Miller was fired in November 1990, after he was accused initially of neglect of duties and later with conspiring with another Sunday Mirror employee to sell a photograph of Lady Diana, the Princess of Wales, dancing with John Travolta, the American actor, to rival publications after it had been printed in the Mirror. Miller, who was the publisher of a local London newspaper and magazine when interviewed, contested the firing before Britain’s Industrial Tribunal, and in June 1991 won his case against Maxwell and the Sunday Mirror. The Tribunal, as of August 1991, was considering how much compensation to award Miller. Frost, now the deputy editor of the Sunday Sun in Newcastle, England, was also dismissed by Maxwell. He did not contest Maxwell’s action against him.

‡ Malloy said he knew nothing of Davies’ ties to the Israelis but depicted him as serving as “sort of equerry for Maxwell. When Bob travels, he always has an entourage and Nick became part of that entourage.” Davies, Malloy added, “always was a kind of entrepreneurial character—selling and importing on the side.”

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