A week later, the Sunday Times published an interview and pictures of the secret reactor given by Vanunu that constituted the first evidence that the Jewish state possessed the nuclear weapon.

On April 21, Vanunu, termed the world's most famous whistleblower, will be thrust back into the spotlight after 18 years spent in the shadows of his Ashkelon prison, several of them in solitary confinement.

In the course of the nine years he worked as a technician at the Negev-based facility before being fired in 1985, Vanunu grew increasingly distressed over his country's nuclear program.

In the heart of the Cold War, he first fled to Nepal, where the Jewish Orthodox-educated then 30-year-old flirted with Buddhism and unsuccessfully attempted to defect to the Soviet bloc.

He then traveled to Australia, where he became a Christian and was baptised under the name John Crossman. He met Peter Hounam, a correspondent for Britain's Sunday Times, who arranged to fly to London with him in September

There, Vanunu produced pictures of the Dimona complex he had secretly taken and revealed what he knew about the program which is now widely accepted as making Israel the world's sixth largest nuclear power, despite obstinate official denial.

Then Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit recently admitted that Vanunu's assassination was considered upon learning about his revelations, but the espionage agency instead engineered a plot to abduct him and whisk him back to Israel.

On September 30, Vanunu was befriended by a young blonde woman, who posed as an American tourist under the name of Cindy.

The undercover Mossad agent Cheryl Hanin Bentov managed to lure Vanunu to Rome for "holidays".

Upon entering a flat in the Italian capital which "Cindy" had said belonged to her journalist sister, the whistleblower was wrestled to the ground and injected with a sedative.

He was freighted back to Israel and sentenced to 18 years in prison for treason after a seven-month trial. On October 5, 1986, the Sunday Times published the earth-shattering interview.

The international community then expressed little condemnation of Israel's abduction on foreign soil and, bar Arab states and a group of non-proliferation activists, few expessed real concern over Israel's unsupervised nuclear program.

In Israel, the kidnapping was seen at the time as one of the spectacular overseas operations that contributed to Mossad legend, but the affair is now equally remembered for the shortcomings of the Israeli establishment prior to his capture.

Vanunu's shift to the extreme left and contacts with a communist Arab student organisation were known to the political subversion branch when he underwent security screening for employment at the country's most secret plant.

Some senior Israeli security officials have recommended keeping Vanunu under administrative detention when his term in prison expires, for fear he had more secrets to betray.

But it was decided not to gag Vanunu by holding him without trial, and most commentators argue that whatever information he may not have revealed to the Sunday Times is now 18 years old and unlikely to have a cataclysmic impact.

WAR.WIRE