Mossad's ineptitude

"Mossad has enjoyed an equally inflated reputation, its history dotted with examples of comic ineptitude. When I was correspondent in Jerusalem in the 1990s, a retired Mossad officer was detained because it had finally been ascertained that Israel's main spy in Syria, whom the officer claimed to control, did not exist. There had once been a highly placed Syrian agent, but he had disappeared years earlier. Since this event would have adversely affected the career of his Mossad controller in Tel Aviv, he simply made up the agent's reports and claimed that the Syrian would meet with nobody else but himself. Acting on the spy's information, the Israeli army was once partially mobilised in expectation of a wholly fictitious Syrian attack." (thanks Ali)