Sounds like another Mossad amateur night

Seal of The Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations (Mossad). The biblical inscription in Hebrew reads "Where no stratagem is, the people fall; but in the multitude of counsellors there is salvation" (Proverbs 11:14).

The Israeli Government will neither confirm or deny it, but the average Israeli citizen is sure of it, and quite pleased by it.

After all, who else was going to go after him? Well, theoretically it could have been the rival Palestinian political organisation Fatah, which has been more or less at war with Hamas for almost three years now. (Fatah runs the West Bank; Hamas controls the Gaza Strip.) Proponents of this theory argue that the Dubai hit was too clumsy and sloppy to have been a Mossad operation.

Would any serious spy agency put 11 people on a hit team? Why would seven of them be travelling on British passports borrowed or stolen from British-Israeli dual citizens resident in Israel? Would they let themselves be caught repeatedly on video surveillance cameras as they set up the killing? This was just not a professional operation.

It certainly was amateur night in Dubai, but that doesn't necessarily mean Mossad was not behind it.

The Institute for Espionage and Special Operations, to give it its proper name, may be legendary, but some of its past operations have been anything but professional.

Take the case of the Norwegian waiter.

In the20 years after Palestinian terrorists massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972, Mossad killed more than a dozen people it suspected of involvement in the operation.

Most of them had some link to it, but Ahmed Bouchiki had none at all.

Bouchiki was a Moroccan immigrant to Norway who worked in a restaurant in Lillehammer.

Mossad mistakenly thought he was Ali Hassan Salameh, the planner of the Munich atrocity, so an Israeli hit team murdered him as he walked home with his pregnant wife.

But the two killers committed the elementary error of driving to the airport 24 hours later in the same car they had used for the getaway (which had been spotted by the police).

They were arrested, and the woman of the pair broke down and confessed they were working for Israel.

The man had a telephone number on him which led the police to the safe house where the other three members of the team were staying.

One of them had a list of instructions from Mossad on him, and they all ended up in Norwegian jails.

Amateur night again.

Or take the Mossad attempt in 1997 to kill Hamas' political chief, Khaled Meshaal.