How I escaped Mossad's clutches

[Christa]

Israel’s secret intelligence service is ruthless but reckless because it doesn’t care about international opinion, says Peter Hounam, who was imprisoned by them.

If Mossad was behind the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel last month it should shock nobody. From my experience of the Israeli intelligence agencies, it is not their ruthlessness that is so remarkable but their disdain for international public opinion and tendency to take short cuts.

Hit teams dispatched by the spymasters of Tel Aviv have been surprisingly clumsy in exercising their licence to kidnap or kill around the world. Many operations have been botched, causing huge embarrassment to friendly countries.

My experience of them happened six years ago after I had gone to Israel on behalf of the BBC and The Sunday Times. The aim was to get the first interview with nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu on his release after 18 years in jail, 11 of them spent in solitary confinement. I ended up being accused of nuclear espionage myself.

Full article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/features/7272511/How-I-escaped-Mossads-clutches.html

[leveymg]

1. Did Mossad take American woman's identity to kidnap Vanunu in Rome? That's what Hounam says here:

(Vanunu) said nothing to me of his dangerous liaison (with an Israeli agent masquerading as an American tourist) until it was too late. After hearing about his meetings with "Cindy", I warned him she might be an Israeli agent but he dismissed the notion. I suggested meeting them for dinner that evening but he cancelled. Then he disappeared. It was several weeks before Israel announced it was holding him on treason and spying charges.

Mossad had failed in its object of halting publication of Vanunu’s story – we went to print the week he vanished – but our star witness was missing and I now concentrated on exposing who was responsible. I remembered seeing two people in a car watching my house early one morning and now realised it was a big operation. But who was the mysterious Cindy?

It took nearly a year to track her down. We succeeded because Mossad had taken too many short cuts. It was Vanunu himself who gave us the crucial clue.

Leaving a Jerusalem court in a prison van, he was photographed holding up the palm of his hand bearing a scribbled message. It revealed he had gone to Italy on a particular British Airways flight and that his ''hijacking’’ had taken place in Rome.

Boarding passes showed he had flown with a Cindy Hanin, and the most likely Cindy Hanin we eventually found lived in Orlando, Florida. She was due to get married and was clearly not a direct suspect but she was Jewish and I had a hunch the real spy might have a family connection.

The trail led conclusively to Cheryl Bentov, her future sister-in-law who had left Orlando as a teenager, joined the Israeli military and was now living in the seaside town of Netanya, north of Tel Aviv.

I set off to Israel to confront her. Cheryl Bentov and her husband Ofer, also in military intelligence, were living in a rundown bungalow beside the Haifa highway, handy for the new Mossad headquarters on West Glilot junction just a few miles to the south.

The assumption of Cindy Hanin's identity by Cheryl Bentov may have been voluntary, if we read between the lines here, but it was nonetheless illegal.

[invictus]

2. Mossad is nothing but a terrorist organization.