Better a Spy Than A Whistle Blower


        If you're in a position to pass along nuclear secrets in Israel, you'd be better off selling them to a foreign government than revealing them to your fellow citizens.
        That's a lesson to be learned from some Israeli spy cases reported in the March/April Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by P. R. Kumaraswarmy, a research fellow at the Harry S. Truman Institute, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
        The author cites the case of Shimon Levinson, one of many KGB agents who joined the Jewish exodus to Israel in the last decade of the old Soviet Union. Convicted of spying on Israel's nuclear weapons program, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
        While Levinson now goes free, Mordechai Vanunu is in his 13th year of an 18-year term for going public with information about the nuclear weapons program.
        Of half-a-dozen spy cases cited by Kumaraswarmy, only one has served longer than Vanunu. Marcus Klingberg, sentenced in 1983 to 20 years for spying for the Soviets on Israel's chemical and biological warfare program, now suffering from incurable cancer, was released last year to house arrest.

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