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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
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Picture: Vanunu holding the palm of his hand towards the
camera with information how he had been kidnapped from Rome to Israel.
It was only in this way that the world found out what had happened, and
this led to the revelation of the Mossad "Honey- trap" agent "Cindy".
[SUNDAY TIMES - 6 April - Dateline Orlando, Florida]
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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.
.
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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