At that point he did not know what he wanted to do next, but he was damned sure it would not involve further interaction with a bureaucracy.
Being no dummy, he also fully anticipated the response to his outrage. And sure enough, he found he had transformed himself into a high-profile security risk that Mossad suddenly found very interesting. Israel's intelligence service remembered all too well the case of Mordecai Vanunu, the thirty-one-year-old technician who had worked at the plutonium separation facility at the Dimona complex for nine years, then left in a huff and sold pictures and a detailed description of the facility to the London Sunday Times. Mossad had no intention of letting it happen again.
Dore Peretz was interrogated for weeks, threatened repeatedly, then placed under close surveillance. They had no grounds to arrest him, but they were going to intimidate the hell out of him.
Their harassment, however, achieved precisely the opposite effect. They galvanized his anger. In a degree of soul searching quite foreign to his normal mental activity, he found himself wondering why he owed Israel such allegiance in the first place. This was their thanks for all his service.
So why not give it back to the bastards, in spades? He became a "scientific adviser" to the PLO.
That only confirmed Mossad's fears and intensified their harassment: his phone was tapped, his mail opened, his stylish Tel Aviv apartment repeatedly and blatantly searched in his absence. The overall effect was cumulative, rendering him an ever-more-vociferous critic of Israel's conservative coalition government.
It was at this time, when his name was being linked to the PLO, that Sabri Ramirez got wind of him and knew he had found a gold mine—a disaffected, activist Israeli nuclear and rocket expert looking for a cause. He sounded perfect, and he was. Ramirez approached him at a demonstration supporting a Palestinian homeland, and made him an offer he could not refuse. How would he like to get rich? He would not need to betray his country, merely lend his skills to help teach the Americans a lesson.
Fuck Israel, he had declared. Then in a lower voice he had added—come to that, fuck the Palestinians, who were basically a pain in the ass. Acquiring personal wealth was a much more inspiring cause. He could not get work in Israel, any kind of work, and he was fast running through his savings.
Ramirez advanced him thirty thousand American dollars on the spot, in crisp hundreds. He immediately dropped his PLO affiliation and began lowering his profile—much to Mossad's relief. Their surveillance eased up as they gratefully turned to more pressing matters, and four months later he took advantage of his new freedom to slip into Jordan one night and from there make his way, a week later, to Beirut. It was in that ravaged city that he and Sabri Ramirez worked out the technical details of the plan.
. . . Which thus far had gone perfectly.