Triple Cross: Israel, The Atomic Bomb & The Man Who Spilled The Secrets by Louis Toscano

Author:Louis Toscano [Toscano, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780615822686
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

Seizing Mordechai Vanunu should have been a simple task for Israeli intelligence. He was a confused, restless and frightened man, stranded in a strange country. He harbored doubts about his actions and was anxious to elude the people who had helped put him in his current situation. Above all, he was alone—cooped up in a hotel room with no friends or family to offer advice, no one to sound alarms or provide protection. He was, by any measure, a supremely easy target.

But Peres' order to avoid any acts of illegality in Britain meant the Mossad needed to figure out a way to persuade Vanunu to voluntarily leave London. Some weakness would have to be exploited to convince him to drop his guard. A woman seemed the best bet.

The Mossad knew Vanunu was desperate for a romantic relationship. The subject of his sexual frustrations had surfaced in interviews with people who knew Vanunu in Israel, and the surveillance of Vanunu in London had been so tight that agents actually overheard the target himself complain to Max Prangnell one day that he wanted to meet some women.

Like most spy agencies, the Mossad had enjoyed great success with the use of "honeytraps." The lure of sex had led to one of Israel's greatest intelligence coups. In 1966, an America-born agent traveling on a U.S. passport had gone to Baghdad and lured an Iraqi fighter pilot to Paris with promises of a sexual tryst. There, she talked him into flying to Israel, where he was persuaded to defect with one of Iraq's brand-new Soviet-supplied MiG-21 jets, the first to fall into Western hands.

The Vanunu case was a bit more mundane, but to the Mossad planners a honeytrap was the right approach. Now all they needed was the bait.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.