To have a dozen of your agents identified in police tapes after an extrajudicial killing is embarrassing. To have almost 30 operatives left with their covers blown — as appears to have happened after Dubai police released fresh details of the Hamas assassination last month — might be considered reckless.
On the official website of Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, is the biblical verse from Prophets, 11:14 — “where no counsel is, the people fall, but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety”.
Unfortunately, so many of its “counsellors” seem to have been caught on CCTV, wearing wigs and other disguises, that it was as if an early Purim carnival was being held in Dubai’s hotels and airports.
On top of the diplomatic fallout — Australia was the latest country to chastise Israel, the lead suspect in the murder of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh — is the growing question of how Mossad, the famously surgical scalpel of Israel’s covert defences, could have allowed so many of its people to blunder into full view of security cameras and have their faces flashed around the world in weekly instalments presented by Dubai’s police chief.
The scale of the revelations is leading some experts here to question the motives and/or competence of Dubai’s police chief, Lieutenant-General Dahi Khalfan Tamim, who has released the falsified travel documents of 26 suspects, 12 of them British.
“There is no doubt that more than a little of the information that he is disclosing or leaking to the media is part of a ploy in which bits of disinformation are planted,” said security commentator Yossi Melman in the daily newspaper Haaretz.
“He’s throwing out a lure in the hope that someone in Israel will swallow the bait and respond by incriminating himself or disclosing confidential information.”
Others have expressed concern that Mossad — whose director, Meir Dagan, has even been called upon to resign by some critics — should be concentrating more on gathering intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme, recalling how it went on a spree of revenge killings after the Munich Olympics massacre in 1972 and missed the signs of a looming attack by Arab armies a year later.
Yet some intelligence sources are unflustered by the hoopla, pointing to the fact that such a large team was able to infiltrate Dubai, kill their target without detection and escape, leaving only a few pictures behind of suspects.
One source told The Times that for all the expertise the Dubai police have shown in assembling images of the killers, they appeared to fail to identify which of them was actually involved.
He pointed to the fact that two of the suspects “escaped” to Iran, Israel’s sworn enemy, as evidence that not all of those exposed could have been involved.
And given that the actual agents involved are professional spies they are likely to be able to operate again without too much fear of detection, he said.
“You could take all 26 of them and put them in a line walking next to the police chief of Dubai and he wouldn’t recognise them,” said the security expert.
The fact that Dubai has one of the highest densities of closed circuit TV in the world meant that the agents knew they would screened and regularly changed their disguises.
That is also why, in killing al-Mabhouh, they induced a heart attack to make it appear like a natural death. It took the Dubai police, and Hamas, ten days to figure out that he had actually been murdered, by which time his killers were long gone.
“The deterrence for Hamas is more than doubled,” said the intelligence expert, adding that those who carried out the hit are “probably sitting in a hotel room clapping their hands”.
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
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