This is Agent Cindy, the Mata Hari who seduced Mordechai Vanunu and cost him 18 years of his life after he was drugged, kidnapped, smuggled back to Israel and jailed for espionage.
Vanunu, now 49, was released on Wednesday after serving his sentence for exposing Israel's atomic secrets in 1986.
His exposé also fingered South Africa as Israel's nuclear partner.
Vanunu faces a risky future. He cannot leave Israel, where the majority of people regard him as a traitor, and supporters fear he may be assassinated.
| 'She is just a tourist who is critical of Israel. I think you would like her' |
Cindy, the woman who betrayed him, now lives a prosperous life in Florida, America, and refuses to talk about her role as the honeytrap that destroyed Vanunu's life.
Their story reads like a purple-prose spy novel that readers would dismiss as over-the-top improbable fiction.
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It begins in 1986 when Vanunu, then a technician at the Dimona nuclear plant in southern Israel, decided to expose Israel's atomic secrets.
The young idealist went to Britain and revealed his secrets to the London Sunday Times. The exposé a caused international controversy - and fury in Israel.
Enter Mossad, Israel's feared secret service, whose mission was to bring him back to Israel.
| 'There I was chained for seven days, we speak only English' |
Their honeytrap was Cheryl Hanin, codenamed Cindy, who then was an attractive, and, to Vanunu at least, very friendly 26-year-old.
Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, the Secret History Of Mossad, wrote: "She was sent on practice missions, breaking into an occupied hotel room, stealing documents from an office.
"She was roused from her bed in the dead of night and dispatched on more exercises: picking up a tourist in a club, then disengaging herself outside his hotel. Every move she made was observed by her tutors."
After her training, Hanin joined the Mossad unit that worked with Israeli embassies.
Her final mission began when she engineered a meeting with Vanunu in Leicester Square and suggested a coffee, saying she was a beautician on holiday.
The next day they met in the Tate Gallery and began to see more of each other.
Peter Hounam, the Sunday Times journalist who had debriefed Vanunu, warned him that she could be a Mossad agent, but Vanunu insisted: "She is just a tourist who is critical of Israel. I think you would like her."
Vanunu said he would bring his new girlfriend to Hounam's house but he cancelled because he was "going out of the city".
Vanunu had fallen for the Mossad trap - Cindy had lured him into going to Rome, where it would be easier to stage a kidnapping.
On Wednesday, Vanunu revealed for the first time what had happened.
At an impromptu press conference he said: "I was kidnapped in Rome, Italy, by Israel's spy on September 13, and I was brought to Israel, arrived to Ashkelon prison on October 7."
After saying he was proud of what he had done and challenging Israel to allow nuclear inspectors into the country, he gave more details of the drama in Rome.
"I was kidnapped immediately after we land in Italy.
"We went to an apartment. As soon as I went into the apartment they attacked me, one Israeli and one Frenchman.
"They drug me, they drug me, they drug me. They took me in a car. From the car we went to the beach, an isolated beach, a commando boat, from the commando boat to a small yacht.
"There I was chained for seven days, we speak only English. I ask them: 'Who are you?'
"They say we are here Israelis, French, English. After seven days we arrived near to Caesaria beach."
Vanunu was then tried secretly on an espionage charge and began his 18-year sentence, much of which was spent in solitary confinement.
Hanin went to Israel in triumph but when the Sunday Times discovered her living quietly in the Israeli town of Netanya in 1988, she left for her native United States.
Since then, Israel's largest circulating newspaper, Yedhiot Arhronot, says she and her family have been living a prosperous life in a house in worth more than R3-million.
She and her husband, also a former Mossad agent, refuse to talk about her past.
"For me this is a black story and I just want to erase it and forget it," Yedhiot quotes Hanin telling a friend. - The Independent, Reuters and Sapa-AP
- This article was originally published on page 1 of The Star on April 22, 2004
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