The agent has a history of vigilante and maverick behavior, but his skills, personal contacts, and resourcefulness remain unmatched.
New York, September 13 – Senior commanders in Israel’s secret intelligence service voiced frustration and anger yesterday with an operative who went against explicit orders by causing Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to lose consciousness and collapse on Sunday.
In an urgent meeting with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Mossad chief Yossi Cohen, the operations department head and two of his deputies detailed the ways in which the unnamed agent had violated basic security procedures and independently arranged for Ms. Clinton to ingest a toxin whose effects mimic pneumonia, including a false positive bacterial culture. Despite the tight control the Mossad exerts over the Clinton and Trump campaigns, campaign executives and staffers were taken by surprise, as the collapse and apparent illness were not part of the plan the agency had given them. The campaign’s unpreparedness for the incident resulted in a bumbling response and a blow to Clinton’s credibility beyond that which was engineered by Israeli intelligence.
The agent in question, said a deputy director, has a history of vigilante and maverick behavior, but his skills, personal contacts, and resourcefulness remain unmatched, and the agency has often had little choice but to give him assignments no one else could handle. That situation makes the incident doubly frustrating, as the Mossad has little way of reining in the operative, who perennially causes just enough trouble to make everyone else’s work more complicated, but never crosses the line into harming Israeli interests.
“This is the guy who hired a bunch of people to look Jewish and dance when the Twin Towers collapsed,” said the deputy director. “It was apparently his idea of a joke. Obviously, we don’t share his sense of humor, and it’s taken quite a bit of work to relegate that report to the fringes of the media for fifteen years.”
“There was also the time Agent Letz stuffed a bomb into some guy’s underwear and got him onto a plane,” added Director Cohen, referring to the man by his code name. “It was never going to work as a bomb – he was meant to be caught – but I’m telling you, I was supervising North American operations at the time, and the fallout was not pretty. This guy will go to extreme lengths for a joke. But we’ve got no one else like him.”
Cohen explained that Agent Letz was the one who downed Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s aircraft in 2010 and made it look convincingly like a Russian operation. “No one else can do that. We’re in a bind. We’re just afraid one day he’s going to go too far. I’m both hoping he retires soon and apprehensive we won’t have him available after that.”
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