Letters Show A Conflicted Prisoner

A decade ago he was a devout Christian, newly converted to the faith and certain that Jesus would shield him from the consequences of revealing the nuclear secrets of his government.

Today he remains nominally a Christian but complains about what he believes to be the church's penetration and subversion by agents of the Israeli secret service.

That is the self-portrait that emerges from "Faith Under Siege," a newly published collection of prison letters from "Vanunu, Mordechai, JC." The initials stand for John Crossman, the Christian name taken by the former nuclear technician at the baptismal font of an Australian Anglican Church in 1986, two months before he blew the whistle on his government's secret bomb factory in the Negev Desert.

The 32-page volume, edited and annotated by Samuel H. Day, Jr., coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu, reprints letters written by Vanunu from his isolation cell at Ashkelon Prison in Israel to the Rev. David Smith, an Australian priest who befriended him soon after Vanunu's arrival in Sydney, where he joined an Anglican community and converted from Judaism to Christianity.

The letters, edited only for clarity, show a sharp break in Vanunu's state of mind - almost a personality change - after his first five years of solitary confinement, following the Israeli Supreme Court decision upholding his 18-year sentence for espionage and treason, and the death of a trusted Jerusalem-based Anglican cleric who had visited him regularly in prison.

Following those events Vanunu retreated into a three-and-a-half year self-imposed silence. He resumed writing in 1995, seemingly a different man. In letters to Smith, while saying he was still nominally Christian, he mocked some tenets of Christian belief and said he was no longer interested in religious matters.

"Faith Under Siege" may be ordered from the address on the home page for $3 for individual copies or $2 each for 12 or more copies, postpaid.

  last updated Sep 21 98