Prisoner X

The urgent phone call comes from behind the barbed wire. 'This is Ayalon prison,' says one of the guards urgently. 'Listen, he hanged himself, we need an ambulance.' Ben Zygier, known only as Prisoner X, was just 34 years old when he was found slumped in a small bathroom, separated from his cell by a transparent door. Locked behind bars in one of the most high-tech solitary jail cells in the world, it must not be easy to kill yourself. But Ben Zygier managed to do just that. Spy, double agent or young man with too many secrets? The charges against him were never made public but the Mossad, the much-feared Israeli intelligence agency, believed he was a threat to national security. He left behind a wife, two young children, his parents and a sister, In Prisoner X, Rafael Epstein traces the journey of an idealists into the murky world of international espionage and its tragic consequences. Book jacket.