Cheryl Bentov
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Cheryl Ben Tov, née Cheryl Hanin (1960-) was an Israeli Mossad agent who became well-known in 1986 when, under the name "Cindy," she persuaded Mordechai Vanunu to go with her to Rome, where he was captured, drugged, and transported to Israel. Vanunu faced a secret trial and was sentenced to 18 years in prison, spending nearly 12 of them in solitary confinement. Vanunu publicly released confidential information on Israel's nuclear reactor and claimed that Israel had created nuclear weapons, becoming the sixth nuclear power and the first since the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. The Israeli government considered Vanunu to be a traitor who broke his oath of secrecy.
A feature in The Times revealed that she was American-born but had moved to Israel as a teenager. Hanin grew up in Pennsylvania and Orlando, Florida in a Jewish family. Her father, Stanley Hanin, had founded Allied Discount Tires.
She spent a semester in Israel during high school, and upon her graduation in 1978, joined the Israeli Army. In 1985, she married Ofer Ben Tov, himself an Israeli intelligence officer, and at some point before 1986 was recruited and trained by the Mossad. In 1986, she participated in the kidnapping of Mordechai Vanunu.
Calling herself Cheryl Hanin, she now works as a real estate agent in Longwood, Florida, with her husband and their two daughters.
Acquaintances in Israel are under the impression that she is still on assignment with Mossad. This cannot be proven and is just conjecture. In 1988, newspaper journalists traced her to her home in Netanya, Israel, where she still owns a villa that she rents.
She does not deny her role in the "Cindy" affair.
Vanunu, immediately upon his release from prison in April 2004, said that he did not believe "Cindy" was a Mossad agent: "She was either an FBI or a CIA agent. I spent a week with her. I saw her picture. Cindy was a young woman from Philadelphia."
External links
- Jerusalem Post article from April 7, 1997 (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Israel/Bentov.txt)
- "The Spy -- And the Man She Busted" (http://www.sptimes.com/2004/03/21/Worldandnation/The_spy___and_the_man.shtml) in the St. Petersburg Times
- "The Girl Who Trapped Vanunu", by Uzi Mahnaimi (http://www.middleeast.org/archives/vanunu2.htm)