Mossad struggling under pressure

11.45am

JERUSALEM - With al Qaeda and Iran now topping an already hefty "hit list" of Israel's enemies, Mossad may have too many missions and too few spies to carry them out.

Two Israelis jailed yesterday for trying to obtain a New Zealand passport by assuming the identity of a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy victim displayed the rashness of intelligence agents under pressure to perform, experts say.

"When you step up the war on terrorism abroad, the stakes are higher. Professionalism can suffer," said a Mossad veteran involved in the 1973 killing in Norway of a Moroccan waiter mistaken for a top Palestinian guerrilla wanted by Israel.

At the time Mossad was hunting the masterminds of a Palestinian attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics in which 11 Israeli athletes died.

These days, experts say, the agency is racing to stop attacks by al Qaeda -- a diffuse network notoriously hard to penetrate and anticipate -- and keep an eye on arch-foe Iran's atomic programme, making for heavier risks and likelier mistakes.

"New Zealand is famed for being politically moderate and its citizens are welcomed everywhere. They could be very useful for Mossad," intelligence analyst Yossi Melman of the Haaretz newspaper said. "A government-issue passport is much more foolproof than a forged one, of course."

Israel has kept mum on the spy allegations against Uriel Zoshe Kelman and Eli Cara. But New Zealand suspended high-level contact with Israel last night saying there were "very strong reasons" to believe they were intelligence agents.

According to former Mossad chief Danny Yatom, such scandals are no gauge of the agency's real feats.

"Mossad is one of the best intelligence agencies in the world," Yatom said. "Yet even the best agencies are bound to suffer mishaps. Because of the secret nature of intelligence gathering, most... achievements are never made public."

Yet many intelligence experts say Mossad has lost its edge since the 1960s and 1970s, when it assassinated Arab guerrilla leaders and abducted Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann for trial, earning a reputation for ruthlessness and ingenuity.

In recent decades, the Jewish state has been more worried about arms programmes in the Arab world and Iran -- the main purview of Israeli Military Intelligence, leaving Mossad to deal primarily with Palestinian threats abroad and back-door diplomacy.

But Mossad got a new mandate in 2002, after al Qaeda bombed an Israeli-owned hotel and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner in Kenya. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Mossad chief Meir Dagan to hunt down the perpetrators worldwide.

At least two Lebanese accused by Israeli security sources of al Qaeda ties have since died in booby-trapped blasts that locals blamed on Mossad. The agency has also tried to boost recruitment with a new website advertising "special tasks".

Spycraft skills are apparently still lacking. Kelman and Cara were caught in a police sting after an accomplice, who is still at large, tried to order the passport by phone and his foreign accent aroused suspicions.

"We don't think this was an isolated act," New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff told Israel Radio after all high-level contacts with the Sharon government were frozen.

Thirty years on, the Mossad veteran and five other agents who took part in the Norway killing are still barred from entering the country.

"Our zest to get the enemy at all costs sometimes costs us dearly in terms of international standing," Yigal Eyal, a counter-terrorism lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said.

- REUTERS