Hyped by Hollywood, TV and books as James Bond-style superheroes (or supervillains, depending on who you ask), Israel’s intelligence services are anything but invincible. Sometimes, their agents’ antics feel decidedly less like John le Carre, and more like Naked Gun.
Here are ten of the top flubs, faceplants and fiascos that proved impossible to conceal.
Explosive pants
In 1954, Israel’s Aman military intelligence activated a network of Egyptian Jews to plant bombs at cultural centers, movie theaters and post offices across Cairo and Alexandria.
The objective of the mission, codenamed Operation Susannah, was to cause chaos and blame the Muslim Brotherhood and Egyptian communists, but more importantly, paint Gamal Abdel Nasser’s fledgling revolutionary government as unfit to assume control of the Suez Canal from Britain.
The plot collapsed when one of the incendiary devices ignited prematurely in agent Philip Nathanson’s pocket outside Alexandria’s Rio Cinema, burning his legs and causing him to pass out. Hospitalized and questioned by police, Nathanson’s apartment was searched, exposing the identities of all of his coconspirators.
Compounding Nathanson and company’s problems was the fact that their handler, Avraham Seidenberg, turned double agent and sold out the entire spy ring to Egyptian intelligence. This allowed police to case the theater long before Nathanson arrived with his trouser bomb.
It’s still a mystery why Seidenberg betrayed his men, with historians debating whether he was caught and flipped, was working for money, or simply used as a scapegoat by incompetent superiors (a claim he maintained until the end of his life in 1993).
Whatever the case, the plot was such a spectacular failure that it forced Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon to resign, and henceforth became known by historians as the Lavon Affair.
Most importantly, the affair added credibility to suspicions that Israel was responsible for a string of other false flag terror plots across the region – most notably the 1950-1951 Baghdad bombings – thought to have been carried out by Israeli agents to “encourage” local Jews to emigrate to Israel.
Hypnosis gone wrong
In May 1968, Israeli Navy chief psychologist Benyamin Shalit convinced Aman to undertake a harebrained scheme: brainwash a Palestinian prisoner, transform him into a Manchurian Candidate-style killer (Shalit was explicitly inspired by the 1962 film), and let him loose on Yasser Arafat – who was then Fatah’s fresh-faced new leader.
Finding his perfect agent, an “easily influenced” and “not particularly smart” 28-year-old codenamed Fatkhi, Shalit spent the next three months conditioning him, first through intense anti-Arafat propaganda, then working to convince him that Arafat was a poor leader for the Palestinian national movement, hypnosis designed to make him forget his mission after completing it, and culminating in tactical and firearms training.
Shalit showed his pet project to Aharon Levran, one of three members of a secret military committee plotting Arafat’s murder.
“Fatkhi stood there in the middle of the room and Shalit spoke with him, as if they were just carrying out a normal conversation,” Levran later told Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman.
“Suddenly Shalit banged his hand on the table and Fatkhi began to run around the table. He reacted automatically to all sorts of gestures by Shalit. Then he put him in a room and showed us how Fatkhi raised his pistol to firing position every time Arafat’s picture popped up from one of the pieces of furniture. It was impressive.”
After months of intense training, Shalit’s agent was dropped off in Jordan with a pistol, bomb and radio to infiltrate Arafat’s HQ, and confidently marched off…straight into a local police station, where he exposed his entire ordeal. Shortly after, he “made a passionate speech in support of Yasser Arafat,” per Bergman. MK Ultra this was not.
The hit that missed
In 1972, Israel launched Operational Wrath of God – a string of assassination attacks targeting Black September - a militant offshoot of Fatah responsible for the 1972 Munich Olympics Massacre – a hostage-taking operation-gone wrong thanks to a botched rescue attempt by West German commandos.
Through the rest of the 1970s (and longer if you count spinoffs), a Mossad rampage swept the globe, killing Black September members, supporters, fundraisers, intellectuals and leaders, with the aim being to wipe out the group’s entire political and logistical backbone.
In July 1973, a Mossad team found Black September’s leader – Ali Hassan Salameh, tracking him down at a public bathhouse in the small Norwegian ski resort town of Lillehammer. Shadowing him and his pregnant wife to a local cinema the next day, agents pumped 13 bullets into the man’s head and body. The operation was a success. Munich’s organizer was no more.
Or so Mossad thought. The next day, media reports on the killing revealed that the dead man was actually Ahmed Bouchikhi – a Moroccan immigrant living a quiet life in Lillehammer with absolutely nothing to do with Munich, or any national, regional or international political cause.
Some agents involved in the mission warned ahead of time that the man they’d spotted did not look like Salameh, or behave like the leader of a dangerous international group.
The killers got caught after the license plate of their car, rented legally at Oslo Airport using agents’ real names, was spotted by an onlooker and given to police. Two agents were arrested when they returned the car. Two more were found at a Mossad safehouse after one agent spilled his guts during interrogation. Two others fled to the apartment of the Israeli Embassy’s security officer, where they were also caught.
Five of the six were convicted on charges of accessory to murder, espionage, and using forged documents. In May 1975, all five were quietly released and deported to Israel after an intense Israeli lobbying and pressure campaign.
Steven Spielberg, notably, didn’t mention the Lillehammer Affair in his 2005 film Munich, supposedly because it involved “a different hit team” than the one portrayed in his movie. (Press X to Doubt.)
Sloppiness so bad it erased a whole agency
In 1984, Lekem – the now defunct Bureau of Scientific Relations intelligence service, recruited Jonathan Pollard, an eccentric and emotionally unstable US Navy Intelligence researcher with high-level clearance who volunteered on his own accord to become Israel’s willing tool.
Over the next 18 months, Pollard handed Lekem a goldmine of priceless information: ~2,300 documents, including 1,500 intelligence briefings, and 800+ highly classified reports on everything from Arab countries’ armies, to coordinates of the PLO’s Tunisia HQ, details on Pakistan’s nuclear program, Soviet arms shipments and operations across the Middle East, satellite reconnaissance, info on classified US electronic warfare equipment, and the holy grail: the NSA’s ten-volume SIGINT handbook.
Pollard was sloppy. Incredibly, unbelievably, phantasmagorically sloppy. A 1999 journalistic investigation by Seymour Hersh revealed that the spy would just openly carry off documents, in plain view of colleagues – in his briefcase, in shopping bags, and on at least one occasion, in a handcart packed so full security guards had to help him with the door.
Worse yet, he openly bragged to coworkers about his links to Israeli intelligence, and his supposed “active operations” in the Middle East. Superiors initially dismissed his words as empty, eccentric braggadocio, until one coworker spotted him carrying a bundle of classified documents to his car in the middle of a workday, which triggered a probe.
Realizing the FBI was onto him in late 1985, Pollard ordered his wife to scrub their apartment of 32kg worth of classified documents he had laying around (they handed the papers to their naval officer neighbor).
After being questioned and released under surveillance, the first thing Pollard did was contact his Israeli Embassy handler. Failing to take a hint to flee the country immediately, Pollard stayed in Washington for nearly three more days before deciding to drive to the Embassy, trying to shake an FBI vehicle and a helicopter tail along the way, crashing through the gates, and claiming asylum, only to be taken off the premises and arrested.
Sentenced to life in prison, Pollard was not as lucky as some of the other agents in this list, serving seven of his 30 years in solitary confinement. He was released in 2015, and emigrated to Israel in 2020 after his parole ran out. His main pastime these days seems to be giving interviews demanding that Israel drop nukes on Iran, and prepare for war with Egypt and Turkey.
In 2026, Congress approved an amendment to the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act that would force the US to share sensitive intelligence with Israel, effectively rendering the job Pollard did obsolete.
As for Lekem, the Pollard scandal proved so embarrassing that Tel Aviv disbanded the entire organization (its duties likely folded into other agencies).
A near lethal dose of incompetence
In 1997, Mossad agents disguised as Canadian tourists proceeded with a plot to assassinate Khaled Mashal, then leader of Hamas’s political wing, in Amman, Jordan, cornering him outside his office and jabbing him with a device that injected a deadly synthetic opiate toxin into his ear.
Mashal did not immediately realize what happened until hours later, when he became violently ill, and then fell into a coma. However, his driver and bodyguard chased the two would-be assassins, catching them with the help of bystanders and handing them over to police for questioning.
After King Hussein was informed of had happened, he gave Israel an ultimatum: hand over an antidote or your agents will be hanged, and the 1994 Israel-Jordan normalization pact is history. President Clinton urged Netanyahu to comply.
The antidote was delivered, Mashal was revived, and Jordan even forced Israel to free Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and dozens of Palestinian prisoners. Netanyahu then flew to Amman to apologize to Hussein personally. The blundering agents were released.
And Mashal? He’s still alive today, and working as the chief of Hamas’ political bureau abroad, even briefly serving as an interim leader twice in 2024 after the assassinations of Ismail Haniyeh and Yahya Sinwar.
Why hasn’t Israel targeted him since? Perhaps because he’s considered a “moderate,” having proposed a long-term truce based on the 1967 borders, and preferring to align with Qatar, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood instead of Iran.
‘Lying as an Art’ course teacher turns out to be…a liar
Just two months after the Mashal scandal blew up, Israeli police arrested Yehuda Gil, a retired spymaster and revered Mossad academy instructor who specialized in training cadets how to lie effectively.
The charges against him? Fraud and embezzlement – delivering fabricated reports about alleged Syrian plans for a blitz offensive to take back the Golan Heights – attributed to a mole – ‘a top Syrian military source’ made up by Gil himself (who pocketed the bribe money meant for his fictional ‘source’).
Gil was caught because his reports about Syria’s imminent attack violently clashed with Aman’s physical surveillance and other agency sources. The Mossad launched an internal probe, putting Gil under surveillance.
His defense? Basically that he was bored after retiring in 1989: “The only explanation I can give, looking back, is the personal crisis caused by my retirement. I needed to continue to prove myself, that I was still strong and that they still needed me.”
Gil was convicted in 1999, serving less than two years of that, and released in December 2000 on good behavior.
Gil’s lies almost pushed Israel to mobilize for war with Syria, and deeply eroded the unquestioning trust Israel’s political leadership had previously placed in the Mossad over the decades.
Spies as stealthy as a sledgehammer
In February 1998, five Mossad agents descended on a sleepy suburb of Bern, Switzerland, their mission being to install listening equipment to monitor Abdallah el-Zein, a Lebanese national with suspected ties to Hezbollah.
Entering the basement of the apartment bloc where el-Zein lived in the dead of night to tap a telephone junction box, the agents proceeded to make so much noise scraping and drilling that a neighbor reported the suspicious behavior to police, who quickly arrived and arrested them all.
Four were released, somehow convincing police they went to the basement to engage in passionate lovemaking. They immediately fled the country.
The fifth was less lucky, having been caught red-handed with sophisticated spy gear and multiple false passports in his satchel. He was tried by a Swiss Federal Tribunal and slapped with a suspended sentence, barring him from entering Switzerland for five years, and sent home to Israel in mid-2000.
And el-Zein? Turns out he was just a businessman who ran a local Shiite community center. Swiss investigators found no proof of any links to Hezbollah, or any illegal activity at his center. How the Mossad fingered him as a potential coordinator of attacks against Israeli interests across Europe and Latin America is anyone’s guess.
The el-Zein scandal proved the last straw for Mossad chief Danny Yatom, who was still reeling from the bungled hit job in Jordan. He resigned shortly after his agents in Bern got caught.
What’s with the accent, cuz?
In 2004, a Mossad cell entered New Zealand with one mission: to obtain a New Zealand passport – highly prized for their visa-free access into a large number of countries, including most of the West and the Arab Gulf states.
Submitting a passport application using the information of a severely disabled young man whose identity they’d stolen, everything seemed to going well for the spies until a passport official made a routine call to one of the applicants to verify some details.
The scheme unraveled instantly: the official became suspicious after the ‘applicant’, who was supposed to have lived in New Zealand all his life, began answering him with a distinctly North American accent. The official called the real identity holder’s family, who informed him that the man ‘applying for a passport’ was a tetraplegic in residential care.
New Zealand’s domestic intelligence services and police were informed, and set up an electronic and physical surveillance dragnet, culminating in a sting operation involving a travel courier company. Operative Uriel Kelman was busted after arriving to collect his passport. His companion Eli Cara was nabbed keeping a lookout. A third agent managed to flee the country before he could be nabbed.
The two men immediately pled guilty to passport fraud, but vocally denied working for Israel. Prime Minister Helen Clark didn’t buy it, having obtained info proving otherwise from the intel services. She froze high-level diplomatic contacts, and delayed accepting a new Israeli ambassador. Tel Aviv was forced to make a formal apology.
The agents got six months in a high security prison and were ordered to pay a fine to New Zealand’s Cerebral Palsy Society, but were released early and booted out of the country later the same year.
Surprise gift for Hezbollah
Mossad agent Ben Zygier was down on his luck. Assigned to a boring desk job in Tel Aviv after flunking an assignment to infiltrate European firms doing business with Iran and Syria, Zygier decided to try to get into his bosses’ good graces by launching a rogue operation in 2008 to turn an Eastern European contact with ties to Hezbollah into a double agent.
To prove his credentials, Zygier gave the contact the IDs of two top Lebanese informants spying on Hezbollah for the Mossad. The contact immediately passed their names to the militant movement, both were arrested and eventually sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Zygier was arrested in January 2010 by Shin Bet, and jailed under the alias “Prisoner X” at Israel’s notorious Ayalon Prison awaiting trial.
The Lebanese informants’ fate wasn’t even the only reason Zygier was caught. While studying for his MBA in Melbourne in 2009, he bragged about his top-secret work for the Mossad to classmates, putting him on the Australian intelligence services’ radar. As it turned out, one of the classmates also had suspected informal links to Iran.
Zygier’s story wasn’t all slapstick. He allegedly hanged himself with a bed sheet in his “suicide-proof” cell in late 2010. Some journalists and public commentators suspected foul play, citing bruises on the man’s arms, and traces of sedatives in his system.
Smug spymaster unmasked by his own book
In 2021, Yossi Sariel, commander of the IDF and Aman’s elite Unit 8200 SIGINT force, published “The Human-Machine Team” – a book outlining a plan to create a symbiotic synergy between human and artificial intelligence that would become the blueprint for the automated kill chain systems Israel deployed in Gaza two years later – Lavender, Gospel, Where’s Daddy?, etc.
The book, self-published by Sariel under the pseudonym “Brigadier General Y.S,” wasn’t selling particularly well, but had its own niche audience on Amazon.
Everything seemed to be going fine until 2024, when journalists discovered that the Kindle edition of the book linked back straight to Sariel’s personal Google account, containing his name, unique ID and even links to maps and calendar profiles (what kind of elite cyber commander has a Google account, anyway)?
The subsequent scandal was an embarrassment. In the intelligence world, field commanders, operatives and officers are supposed to keep their names and roles classified for security and operational safety reasons. It was bad enough that Sariel used his real initials publishing the book. Now his whole name was public knowledge.
Sariel resigned the same year, formally due to the catastrophic intelligence failures behind October 7, 2023.
On the plus side, his book’s sales surged. Sariel is now working in the private sector for a generative AI and robotics training startup. No harm, no foul (well, except for all the people killed by his AI kill chains).
Bringing up these cases is by no means meant to underestimate the Israeli intelligence services’ viciousness, tenacity and reach. But it is to say that they’re not comprised of invincible, big-brained supermen who will stop at nothing to bring glory to Israel and smite its enemies. As for the Israeli intelligence community as a whole, the recent wars against Iran have revealed that Israeli intel is not nearly as omnipotent and unstoppable as it presents itself to be.