(473.4683) WISE-Amsterdam -She lives with her husband Ofer, a former major in the Israeli intelligence service, in a secluded villa in Orlando, close to Disney-world and the John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. She has breakfast with friends, swims in a luxury pool complex and drives a sports car to work most afternoons.
Her notorious role in the September 1986 capture of Vanunu, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for exposing Israel's nuclear program in The Sunday Times, may have been the pinnacle of her career as a Mossad agent. Posing as an American tourist in London 10 years ago, she lured Vanunu to Rome with the promise of romance. He was drugged and bundled off aboard a boat back to Israel, where he was charged with treason.
Nobody has seen or spoken to Cindy, whose real name is Cheryl Ben Tov, since publicity caused
her to go underground in 1988. She was believed to have been dispatched by Mossad to South America
to lie low. Vanunu thought she might be dead, murdered by the people who kidnapped him.
When then Prime Minister Shimon Peres was told that Vanunu should have told the world the truth
about Israel's burgeoning atomic bomb capacity, he was outraged. "Bring the son of a bitch back
here," he ordered Nahum Admoni, then head of Mossad.
Vanunu, lonely and confused, had been advised repeatedly by The Sunday Times to be careful in his private life as he awaited publication of his revelations. In particular, he was exhorted not to go abroad. But when "Cindy", apparently a trainee beautician from Florida, caught his attention during a "chance" encounter in Leicester Square, he as hopelessly smitten. When she invited him to her sister's vacant apartment in Rome, he was lost. No sooner had they arrived at the flat than the young Moroccan-born Israeli was knocked unconscious, drugged and spirited to Israel on a Panamanian-registered vessel waiting off the Italian coast.
The world was outraged but impotent. Vanunu was convicted of betraying his country's secrets and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He has been in solitary confinement ever since. Appeals for clemency from every quarter have met a stony response from Israeli authorities, who seem determined that he should serve every day of his sentence. Though still defiant and protesting the moral justice of his case, Vanunu's mental health is said to be deteriorating.
Source: Uzi Mahnaimi in The Sunday Times, 6 April 1997
Contact: Campaign to Free Vanunu. 89 Borough Rion St., London BE1 NL, UK.
Tel & Fax:+44 171 3789 324
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