Israel’s not-so-secret nuclear weapons

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If you're ever looking at a nuclear bomb when it goes off, and I sincerely hope that you're not, but if you do, you're going to see two bright flashes.

A bright flash, a slight dimming, and then a brighter brighter flash.

It's caused by the interaction between the light and the shock wave caused by the nuclear explosion.

This is one of the telltale signs that distant American spy satellites look for to try and detect nuclear explosions.

On September the 22nd, 1979, an American spy satellite detected a double flash in the South Atlantic consistent with a nuclear explosion.

The double flash came from somewhere near the uninhabited Prince Edward Islands, about halfway between South Africa and Antarctica.

A booming sound was also picked up on a US Navy underwater microphone on an island in the Atlantic.

Strange electromagnetic signals were picked up at an observatory in Puerto Rico.

A few weeks later, unusual radiation readings started showing up in the thyroid glands of sheep.

grazing in parts of Australia that get breezes from the Indian Ocean.

Usually when something like this happens, the leader of one country or another will soon come out and announce that they are now in the nuclear weapons club and you better not mess with them.

But in the case of this incident in 1979, nobody has ever owned up to it.

Experts are pretty sure they know who it was though.

They say it's the one country that we all know has nuclear weapons, but still steadfastly refuses to acknowledge it.

While Israel denies it possesses nuclear weapons, observers believe there's strong evidence to the contrary.

The recent war that broke out between Israel and Iran was based on the agreement among most countries that the Islamic Republic of Iran can't be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

That agreement underpins most of the extremely complex political situation in the Middle East right now.

But the question that logically follows is: why does Israel get to have them?

Of course, Israel's response is: maybe we do, maybe we don't.

Along with this promise.

Israel undertook upon ourselves

not to be the first country to introduce atomic weapons in the Middle East.

This was our policy, and this is our policy today.

In this episode, we're telling truly one of the most extraordinary stories we've ever told on this show.

The story of how Israel got its nuclear weapons, how we found out about them, and why the global community seems to be fine with the whole thing.

It's a story of espionage, kidnapping, a secret bunker, and the ramifications of keeping too many secrets.

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're You're Listening.

1960 was an exciting year for infrastructure in Israel.

There were water projects under construction, new ports being built, and AMF, yes, the bowling alley company, was building them a new nuclear reactor.

It was part of US President Dwight Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program.

We looked at that in our last episode about the birth of Iran's nuclear program.

So in Israel, in 1960, there was a lot of construction and a lot of cool new toys.

To show it all off, the U.S.

Ambassador to Israel was taken on a helicopter tour of the projects by a government official named Addie Cohen.

Whatever the ambassador wanted to see, his secretary or his economic advisor, counselor,

asked me, I arranged it.

As they flew over the Negev Desert, they spotted a large construction site near the town of Demona.

He says, what's this?

And I

said, what's this textile plant?

I had limbed it.

It's a textile plant.

It was the first thing that came to mind when Addie Cohen realised he needed to improvise a cover story for what the construction site really was.

And a friend of his really was building a textile plant somewhere else.

And despite the fact that building a textile plant in the middle of the desert felt a little strange, it did catch on.

The Israeli government yes-anded this little bit of improv.

For years, it was described as a textile factory.

Explained away as a textile factory.

Flying over it to find out whether it actually was a textile plant was strongly discouraged.

An Israeli pilot who accidentally flew into the airspace a few years ago was just shot down.

And if you wanted to go and check it out on foot, well...

The plant's just over those hills over there, but this is about as far as anyone can hope to get.

The whole area around the plant is protected by an electrified fence and the ground in the inner perimeter is kept constantly plowed so that even a single footprint can be picked up by the mobile helicopter patrols.

In the hills all around here there are military lookout posts and missile batteries.

The CIA didn't need to go on foot though.

This was the Cold War.

It had spy planes and spy satellites in 1960, so it didn't take long for them to figure out that this was not a textile plant.

It was a nuclear enrichment facility.

Israel hadn't disclosed the facility to the International Atomic Energy Agency or signed any treaties that would require them to give access to the IAEA inspectors.

The US wasn't having it though, and demanded that American inspectors be given a tour.

They were allowed in for 40 minutes.

There was this

two-storey building sticking out of the desert, and the inspection teams were allowed into that.

But on occasions when the inspection teams arrived, parts of the corridors were bricked up and plastered over.

So the lift shafts leading six floors underground were not visible.

The Americans did notice that fake wall, but they couldn't really do anything about it.

They demanded more detailed and more frequent inspections, at least twice a year.

The Israelis apparently decided that building the fake wall twice a year was a bit of a hassle, so they only allowed one inspection each year.

And even those inspections were eventually cut off.

There have been no international inspections since 1969.

A team of American senators who tried to get in on a fact-finding mission in 1979 were just turned down flat.

They didn't build this facility on their own.

They had help from France, Norway, the UK, and apartheid South Africa.

1979.

The CIA reports that an explosion off the South African coast is a joint Israeli-South African test.

Officially, the U.S.

government said that the incident in 1979 was a false alarm.

And yet...

1980.

The Washington Post quotes U.S.

intelligence as saying that Israel may have 200 atomic bombs.

The U.S.

has never publicly declared that Israel has nuclear weapons.

The problem

under our laws would be if the Israelis are exploding nuclear devices,

they may no longer be eligible for U.S.

aid.

This would have caused an almighty political uproar in the United States.

We have no practical way of halting an Israeli nuclear effort which is in progress.

The most we can hope to do is keep its political profile low enough so it doesn't catalyze a broader process of proliferation throughout the world.

Okay.

I mean, good luck with that.

Now, a Sydney Bible study group seems like an unlikely place for the secrets of Israel's nuclear program to spill out into the world.

And yet...

I can remember the night quite distinctly.

It was a Friday night.

I was in the church with one other person

and Morty just walked in and started to look around the church.

This is Reverend John McKnight of St.

John's Anglican Church in Sydney's King's Cross.

And the man Reverend McKnight had just encountered would end up changing his life.

He explained that he was from Israel on holidays in Australia.

Over the months we got to know him as a very sincere person.

He was very quiet.

He had a dry sense of humour.

He was a person who liked classical music.

He was fairly intelligent.

His name was Mordecai Venunu, the son of a rabbi.

The Venunu family was religious.

His father still makes a living selling religious artefacts from a stall in the local market.

He remembers Mordecai as the best of his 11 children.

But by the time he arrived in Sydney in 1986, he was in the midst of a crisis of conscience.

This rabbi's son was going on a spiritual journey, too.

He converted to Christianity, and soon after being baptized, he mentioned something interesting in Reverend McKnight's Bible study group.

He said that he had worked at the Demona nuclear power plant for several years and had taken some photos of a secret nuclear enrichment facility.

The rolls of film he'd taken at the Demona reactor were still in his baggage, unprocessed.

He said if people were interested he would be happy to put on a slide night for them.

It was funny he was very casual about it.

I mean the idea of us having a slide show about his work in Israel now seems rather comical.

He's very casual about it.

He did say this is a secret plant which he worked at.

The Bible study group weren't the first ones to see the pictures.

Venunu also mentioned them to two new friends he'd made, two men who had been hired to paint the church's fence.

So he said to me, I want to destroy the film.

I don't want to do it.

I don't want to forget about this.

I just looked at him and I said, you can't.

You can't do that.

And he knew he couldn't.

That's Roland Saulitis, one of the two painters.

Unfortunately, the other one was a Colombian con man named Oscar Guerrero.

Israel's nuclear secrets were revealed to the world in this shop front in King's Cross.

To a layman, they mean nothing.

But as soon as Oscar Guerrero saw them, he smelt money.

Guerrero set about trying to find someone who would pay him for the photos and the story.

Venunu was jumpy.

He'd grown up a conservative Israeli patriot and had only recently shifted to being a critic of the Israeli government.

He got to know the problems of students and Palestinians.

And from then on, he began to change.

He moved to the left.

He was affected especially by Israel's involvement in the the Lebanon war and the Palestinian question.

He even joined Arab students in demonstrations.

Just months after leaving his job at Demona, he was now about to spill Israel's greatest secret to the press.

It came across quite strongly that there was a quietness about him, there was a loneliness about him.

And I just feel that he was a really torn person.

Sensing that Venunu was unsure about the situation, Guerrero hedged his bets.

As he was setting up meetings with journalists to sell the story, Guerrero organised a sit-down at a cafe in Sydney's Martin Place with an Israeli diplomat to see whether Israel might pay him for information about a traitor.

He then left for Europe to find a buyer for the photographs.

By the time Guerrero returned with a reporter from Rupert Murdoch Sunday Times, seven spies from Israeli intelligence agency Mossad were on Venou's tail.

And if I've learned anything in the last couple of years, it's that Mossad being on your tail is a very, very bad thing.

Venunu and Guerrero left for London with the Sunday Times reporter Peter Hownham.

And by then, it wasn't just Mossad.

Australian and British intelligence were following them as well.

A telex had been sent by ASIO, the Australian intelligence organisation, to their counterparts here, MI6, warning them that I was coming back to London with Venunu.

And the telex even mentioned that Venunu had details of Israel's nuclear weapons plant.

In London, everything fell apart.

Concerned that his windfall wasn't coming from the Israeli government or from the Sunday Times, Oscar Guerrero betrayed both of them and gave copies of Venunu's pictures to a rival tabloid, the Sunday Mirror.

The editors there ran a picture of Venunu alongside allegations that the whole thing was an elaborate hoax.

Venunu called St.

John's in Sydney distraught.

He seemed alone, worried, disturbed, disillusioned.

And he spoke about the damage that Oscar had done.

Not in detail, but just that Oscar had done them a great deal of damage and that he didn't feel safe anymore, that he was feeling very alone.

He wasn't very alone.

You're never really alone when Mossad, MI6, and ASIO are all jostling for position behind every royal male postbox you walk past.

But he felt very alone, and that's the point.

And that was when Venunu met a woman in Leicester Square.

He was alone.

So was she.

And he plucked up the courage to start talking.

She told him her name was Cindy and she was an American beautician.

She suggested a cup of coffee.

It It must have been some coffee because Venunu and Cindy really hit it off.

So much so that within days Cindy had convinced Venunu to take a spontaneous trip to Rome with her.

When they arrived Cindy took him to an apartment she'd booked.

Venunu was totally unsuspecting because he thought he'd made the first contact.

And it was in this apartment where Venunu realized that Cindy might not be an American beautician after all.

As Venunu walked in, he was jumped by by two men.

During the struggle, Cindy produced a syringe.

He was held to the floor and chained.

It was then that Cindy gave him the injection.

I mean, we've all had bad holidays, but finding out that your beautiful new girlfriend is actually a beautiful Mazard honeypot has got to be on the list of top five worst holiday experiences.

Venunu, unconscious, unconscious, was taken to the Italian coast and put on a speedboat.

When he came to, he was still chained and in the cabin of a cargo ship.

For six weeks, there was no sign of Venunu.

His friends back in Australia heard nothing until finally the Israeli government gave a statement.

The government would like to inform that Mordecai Vanunu is detained in Israel by law under a court order.

Mr.

Vanunu is a different type of criminal.

That's all.

He is a criminal who violated his country's laws, who betrayed his country, who submitted the most sensitive secrets to those who were not allowed to know them.

Ehud Olmer, who would later become the Prime Minister of Israel, said he had no sympathy at all for Venunu.

To the best of my knowledge, we didn't break any law.

But it's true that sometimes countries ought to work in self-defense.

You have secret services in Australia, I'm sure.

What are you doing with your traitors?

Are you portraying them red carpets with orchestras?

Do you salute them?

Or do you try them?

And do you catch them?

And make sure that they will be in prison where they belong.

Venunu, for his part, thought that he was standing up for democracy.

He argued it this way.

In Britain, in France, in America, you know you have nuclear weapons.

You know where they're built.

You know where they're tested.

So it's up to us to vote when an election comes for the party that's going to either deliver them or dismantle them.

Ehud Olmer disagreed.

Is it any obligation of Israel to tell you or everyone every secret matter that we have in this country?

What obligation do we have to tell you in the first place?

And who is Mr.

Vanunu to pass a judgment about decisions which were made in the democratic process in a democratic country?

All of that is obviously nonsensical.

You can't claim to have decided through a democratic process to build nuclear weapons if you never admit that you have them.

Verunu was charged with treason and imprisoned for 18 years, including 11 in solitary confinement.

He was finally released under strict conditions.

I am proud and happy to do what I did.

I am very glad that I succeeded to do what I did.

He still cannot leave Israel and he can't talk to foreigners without official approval.

His phones and internet are tapped.

I can't see him because I'm a journalist.

I couldn't see him because I'm a foreigner.

What other restrictions are there?

He's not allowed to be near embassies.

He's not allowed to enter the

airports.

Israel has not forgiven him for what he did.

His mission was to tell the world, because this is a vitally important issue for everybody.

Now, it's very difficult for a country which thinks of itself as a tribe, as a beleaguered tribe, to accept the fact that one of its sons says, no, I'm not only a tribesman, I'm also a man, I'm also part of mankind.

In a poll taken the year of his release, three-quarters of Israelis acknowledged that their state possessed nuclear weapons and most thought that they should keep them.

Six decades ago, Israel secretly developed nuclear weapons.

Five decades ago, they probably conducted a secret unsanctioned nuclear weapons test in the Indian Ocean and lightly irradiated some Australian sheep.

Four decades ago, they kidnapped a whistleblower in a European country and have been holding him against his will ever since.

Israel's leaders are always careful to stop short of admitting that they have nuclear weapons, even though everybody knows they do.

It's like how everyone in my life knows that I only wear three nice shirts on rotation because most of my medium-sized shirts don't fit me anymore, but I'll never admit it and go and buy a set of large ones.

Regardless, they say that their

measures are justified because of the threat they live under.

For decades, the tyrants of Tehran have brazenly, openly called for Israel's destruction.

They've backed up their genocidal rhetoric with a program to develop nuclear weapons.

But isn't it possible that Israel's actions actually increased the level of threat?

If Israel hadn't developed nuclear weapons in the 20th century, would Iran be bothering to try and develop them now?

And the other thing is, if most other countries secretly develop nuclear weapons in an underground bunker, the United States would not be handling it like this.

It wouldn't be don't ask, don't tell.

There would be calls for regime change and for bunker buster bombs to be dropped on that secret underground nuclear weapons facility.

And because Israel still doesn't acknowledge the weapons, they don't have to sign on to any of the agreements that their allies are part of.

They have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and they allegedly violated the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with no ramifications.

It's led to a permanent culture of suspicion around Israel.

When you keep massive secrets and never confirm or deny anything, you leave the door open to conspiracy theories.

If they're keeping a large nuclear weapons arsenal secret and the Americans are helping them to keep it under wraps, what else are the Israelis hiding?

We'll look at the effect of that next on if you're listening.

This episode was written by me, Matt Bevan.

It was produced by Jesso Callaghan and Cinnamon Nipart.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Adair Shepard.

So we're coming to Canberra next month to do our live show at the Canberra Theatre Centre.

If you're going to leave the coast and go to Canberra, August is definitely the time to do it.

On the night of Thursday the 21st of August, we've booked the 600-seat Playhouse and the event will be ticketed in order to avoid a Newcastle Conservatorium incident.

Please do not insurrect.

Or if you feel the need to insurrect, go do it elsewhere.

There's plenty of good options in Canberra.

Seriously, though, I do hope to see you there.

Details are in the show notes.

We're also going to be at South by South West in Sydney later this year, and we're booking dates in other cities too.

On Tuesday, we're going to be doing an episode about Masad Honeypots.

The full details of the story of Mordecai Venunu and Cindy the Beautician are crazier than you can imagine.

I'll catch you then.