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MOSSAD AGENT "CINDY" NOW WORKING
OUT OF FLORIDA
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SHIMON PERES ORDERED THE KIDNAPPING
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[MER - While Mordechai Vanunu, Israel's "nuclear prisoner of conscience" languishes in solitary confinement, "Honey Trap" Mossad Agent "Cindy" is living the good life in Florida. According to this investigative article from last Sunday's SUNDAY TIMES, Cheryl Ben Tov continues to work for the Mossad.]
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FOUND: GIRL WHO TRAPPED VANUNU
by Uzi Mahnaimi
[SUNDAY TIMES - 6 April - Dateline Orlando, Florida]
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THE news is certain to mortify Mordechai Vanunu, jailed in Israel for revealing his country's nuclear secrets. As he struggles to keep his sanity after years of solitary confinement, the agent of his downfall, a woman he once knew as "Cindy", is enjoying all the comforts of a sunny, palm-fringed corner of America.
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Her notorious role in the capture of Vanunu, who was sentenced to 18 years in prison for exposing Israel's nuclear programme 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 aboard a boat back to Israel, where he was charged with treason.
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Today she is reaping the rewards of service to Mossad. The last Vanunu saw of "Cindy" may have been her features going fuzzy as he was knocked unconscious and given an injection by her accomplices in Rome.
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Nobody had seen her or spoken to her since publicity caused her to go to 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.
Far from it. She has resurfaced in Florida, the sunshine state, where a Sunday Times reporter confronted her last week.
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While Vanunu's repeated pleas for the right to mingle with other prisoners are rejected with monotonous regularity by Israeli judges, Cindy, whose real name is Cheryl Ben Tov, zips about in a red convertible and sells time-share accommodation to ageing Jewish "snowbirds" migrating south for the winter.
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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 the sports car to work most afternoons.
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She refused to give an interview to the reporter, but speaking in fluent, if deeply accented Hebrew, she did not deny her role in the affair. Her primary concern, she said, was that any story about her should not "harm" her position in America.
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Her fears are understandable. According to acquaintances in Israel, the 37-year-old is on assignment abroad for the same employer as ever: Israeli intelligence.
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Ben Tov was never cut out to be a time-share operative. Neither was her husband an obvious candidate to work for an Orlando real estate firm. Yet, so far as their friends in Orlando are concerned, such occupations faithfully reflect the people they know ­ a pleasant, hard-working couple, participating in the highly competitive Florida version of the American dream.
To the prosperous Jewish residents of Orlando, the Ben Tovs are models of propriety. They send their two young daughters to nursery school at the local Jewish community centre. They observe high days and holy days and do nothing that would draw attention to themselves.
There is, by all accounts, family money: Cheryl's American father, Stanley Hanin, is a wealthy man; he recently sold his Florida tyre business for $32m to sail the world in an expensive yacht.
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But a closer study of the Ben Tovs reveals that they spend most of their free time with other expatriate Israelis. Though they may seem wedded to the local scene they yearn, it seems, for home.
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They keep a comfortable home in Israel, in the upper middle-class neighbourhood of Kohav Yair, northeast of Tel Aviv, where neighbours know a very different couple. Many of Israel's security establishment live in Kohav Yair, under guard night and day. It is home to Ehud Barak, the former chief of staff, who is expected to be elected leader of the Labour party next month, as well as to Ehud Yatom, current head of Mossad. The Ben Tovs' villa is large, with extensive gardens: what is odd is that they should have walked out on such a privileged existence: nobody among their former friends and neighbours doubts that the couple remain devoted to their country's cause.
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Ben Tov continues to work for Mossad, according to her Israeli neighbours. She and her husband, they believe, have rented out their house while she is engaged on an overseas assignment, and are expected some day to return.
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It was in 1977 that Cheryl Hanin, who grew up in luxury in Florida, initiated her long love affair with the Jewish state. Her parents were going through an acrimonious divorce and, on the advice of her rabbi, she threw herself into her academic and religious studies, culminating in a three-month residential course in Israel. On the course, which was funded by the World Zionist Organisation, she learnt Jewish history and Hebrew.
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Not long afterwards, she left America at the age of 17 and, effectively until 18 months ago, never went back.
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Having scored high marks in army tests, she was recruited into the Nahal unit, which divided its time between military service and agricultural labour. Working in the Yad-Hana kibbutz, one of the most left-wing in the country, she met Ofer, a bulky, native-born Israeli who would later join military intelligence. They fell in love and were later married.
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The fact that Cheryl was unusually intelligent ­ she scored 140 in an IQ test ­ in addition to her American background and obvious commitment to Israel, made her a natural recruit for intelligence.
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Mossad contacted her under the guise of an invitation to the "prime minister's office". Three days of exhaustive psychological tests were followed by two years of intensive training, during which she was taught, among other things, to shoot a man from 100 yards, navigate speedboats, spot "tails" and use sophisticated radio equipment.
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Then she was told she had been chosen to be a female escort, participating in Mossad operations all over the world. She was disappointed. The best women were sent to Arab countries to work undercover.
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In September 1986 she was in Israel, enjoying a long, lazy weekend over a Jewish holiday when she was summoned to the headquarters in Tel Aviv of the overseas Kaysaria unit. She was told merely that she was to fly the same day to London under the name of Cynthia Hanin, her sister-in-law. A team of Mossad agents was already assembling in London from many different parts of the world, under the direction of Beni Zeevi, the agency's deputy head. The message of prime minister Shimon Peres was clear: find Vanunu and bring him to Israel alive.
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Peres was livid that Vanunu, a lowly technician in the country's nuclear research centre in Dimona, should have told the world the truth about Israel's burgeoning atomic bomb capacity, which Israel had vigorously denied. "Bring the son of a bitch back here," he ordered Nahum Admoni, then head of Mossad.
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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, attracted his attention during a "chance" encounter in Leicester Square, he was 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.
The instrument of his misfortune, meanwhile, has become a pampered member of Orlando's middle class. It may not last long. It is illegal under American-Israeli diplomatic protocols for Mossad to operate in America.
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