Algerian Police Arrest Mossad Agent

The Israeli foreign intelligence agency has to be the most overrated. The Mossad likes to present an image of cunning and skill, but this is a cultivated myth (added by a pro-Israel U.S. press) that is intended to embed a sense of defeatism amongst Israel's enemies.

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If the Israeli Mossad is omnipresent and can kill with impunity, then Israel assumes that the Arab world will grow demoralized. Such is the goal of the Mossad P.R. But the reality is much different. As former C.I.A. director Stansfield Turner once remarked, the Mossad earns an A for public relations and a C for actual intelligence.

The record vindicates him:

Botched operations

Israeli intelligence failures began very early on. In 1954, the Egyptian regime uncovered a network of Egyptian Jewish spies who were engaged in terror attacks on British and US targets in Egypt in what later came to be known as the Lavon Affair.

When the Egyptian government tried the spies in court, Israeli media claimed that Cairo had no case, was perpetrating lies and conspiracies against Tel Aviv, and fostering "anti-Semitism". This knee-jerk reaction has become an almost automatic response whenever Israeli policies are scrutinised.

But of course, the Egyptians turned out to be right; the operation was such a debacle that it led to the eventual resignation of Pinhas Lavon, the then Israeli defence minister.

The second case was that of the Israeli spy, Elie Cohen who was smuggled into Syria, where he posed as a Syrian citizen with considerable financial resources and with Arab nationalist convictions.

The case was turned into a cheap paperback novel and into two movies, at least. But the ability for a Mossad operative to successfully infiltrate the highest echelons of the Syrian regime is wildly exaggerated.

Cohen was never the high-ranking person that Israeli propaganda made him out of to be. To be sure, he did operate his house like a brothel, and invited prostitutes to entertain various Syrians, but he was not really privy to state secrets of any relevance.

The story of his relations with then president Amin Hafiz was invented by Israel and echoed by his enemies within Syria. The affair concocted by the Israelis was even mired in historical inaccuracies. The Israelis had widely disseminated the notion that Cohen had met Hafiz when he served in Syria's embassy in Argentina. But Cohen's presence in Argentina did not match the years that Hafiz spent there.

Munich

And Mossad's real achievements have been in the realm of public relations.

According to Mossad propagandist literature, one of their greatest achievements has been the pursuit and elimination of the "red prince".

The Mossad supposedly scored its biggest hits when it killed the Palestinian Black September perpetrators of the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

But in fact, the Mossad had no clue what Black September was all about. They assumed the group was being led by Abu Hasan Salamah - the red prince, while his role in the faction turned out to be rather minor.

Not only did the Mossad spend years in pursuing Abu Hasan but they also managed to kill an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway in 1973, mistaking him for the Palestinian.

The Mossad agents behind that bungled assassination were captured by Norwegian police but subsequently released. Israeli agents later assassinated Wael Zuaytir, a Palestinian scholar who had nothing to do with the Black September group.

In 1979, Mossad agents assassinated Abu Hasan in what was described as a surgical kill; a massive car bomb exploded as his motorcade passed through downtown Beirut, leaving scores of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians dead and wounded.

In what would be a further intelligence failure for the Mossad, Black September's real mastermind emerged years later as Abu Dawoud, the nom du guerre of Mohammed Oudeh, a PLO commander who returned to Palestine in 1996 under the Oslo peace agreements.

In 1999, he published his memoirs and revealed that he had been the brains behind the Munich operation. He is believed to be living in Syria.

Kidnapping Nasrallah

Through film and literature, the media has romanticised the undercover world of intrigue, espionage and targeted killings and in doing so has elevated the Mossad to a station it does not deserve.

Mossad blunders are not as widely known as its invented successes, and Western governments have been more than keen to protect the image of the "formidable" Israeli spy agency.

But Israeli intelligence failures during the war on Lebanon in 2006 crippled the Mossad's image in the eyes of the Arabs

During the summer of 2006, as Israeli jets pounded Beirut, the Mossad claimed they had captured Iranian soldiers in South Lebanon. That, and the kidnapping of a poor Lebanese farmer because his name is Hassan Nasrallah, later turned out to be in error.

Arab media were left scratching their heads; could the Mossad have been so inept as to fail to distinguish that there are many Arabs who have the name Hassan Nasrallah and in doing so capture a farmer who had nothing to do with Hezbollah?

As it turned out, the Mossad had a very inaccurate picture of Hezbollah capabilities and abilities; it failed to kill one Hezbollah regional or national leader despite blustering threats.

The stupidity of the Mossad was recently further unveiled in Dubai. In case you have not heard:

A Mossad terrorist hit team of 11 men (one of them is in drag) recently went to Dubai under fake British, French and Irish passports.

This team of 11 men were sent to kill one - just one - Palestinian official in Hamas: Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Just consider that fact first, that Israel needs to send eleven men to kill one Palestinian. And an unsuspecting Palestinian who is not some James Bond whom would require additional agents to take down.

But it is not just that. After the killed him, and left the country a few hours later; it took Dubai police just a few days to identify and issue arrest warrants via Interpol for all the Israelis. They clumsiness of the operation is incredible. Public videos show the Mossad terrorists wearing obvious disguises and faux, say, tennis wear as a cover. And they clearly trail their target. It is such an amateurish plot. And they used fake passports that the British and Irish governments have now called them out on it. And it was all captured on video.

The Lebanese government also recently humiliated the Mossad...to the point of death:

Israel has quietly suffered a string of setbacks in Lebanon, a front-line state with which it has often been at war. Lebanon’s security service says that since November 2008 it has broken up no fewer than 25 Israeli spy rings. The reported arrest this month of a colonel in Lebanese army intelligence, identified solely by the initials GS, brings the number of those charged to 70-plus; 40 of them are in Lebanese police custody.

For a force better known for its failure to manage traffic, let alone resolve Lebanon’s sorry catalogue of political murders, the counter-intelligence sweep is an unprecedented coup. The arrests are said to have exposed a series of agents for Israel, ranging from a retired Lebanese army general who ran a housecleaning service to a garage owner who specialised in supplying Hizbullah, Lebanon’s Shia party-cum-militia, with vehicles that he secretly fitted with tracking devices.

Some are said to have worked for the Israelis since the 1980s, whereas others were recruited after Israel’s war against Hizbullah in 2006. Earlier this month a Lebanese court sentenced two such agents to death for blowing up a Palestinian Islamist leader and his brother in a car in 2006. One is charged separately with killing two top Hizbullah men, as well as the son of Ahmad Jibril, past head of a Palestinian guerrilla group.

Another clue may have pointed to the importance of the signals trail. Last summer, as the spies were being rounded up, a senior man in Unit 8200, the section of Israeli military intelligence tasked with eavesdropping on Israel’s enemies, shot himself in his office. Colleagues blamed “unrequited love”.

And now Algeria:

Algerian authorities have arrested an Israeli Mossad agent carrying a fake Spanish passport in the city of Hassi Messaoud near an Egyptian office providing service for oil companies, Algerian Ennahar El Djadid newspaper reported on Tuesday.

According to the Algerian sources, the Mossad agent entered Algeria under the fake identity of a 35-year old Spanish man named Alberto Vagilo, and spent over ten days in the country prior to his arrest.

The report came a week after an Israeli citizen who went missing for several days in Algeria, who was also carrying a Spanish passport, raised suspicions that he might have been kidnapped by al-Qaida.

'O how the mighty have fallen. 'O wait, it was never mighty.