Jerusalem - An apprentice spy for Israel's once vaunted Mossad overseas intelligence service was arrested by rank and file police during an abortive training exercise in the country's metropolis of Tel Aviv.
"Let's hope the Mossad is more effective abroad," commented Israel's commercial Channel 10 television as reports of the incident swept an aghast Israeli media on Tuesday.
The want-to-be James Bond was spotted on Monday planting a dummy bomb under a vehicle in the bustling commercial capital by a woman passer-by who swiftly alerted a passing policeman, the media reports said.
It was only after questioning at the the local police station that the rumbled trainee assassin managed to convince his captors that he was indeed a member of the famous spy agency.
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The Mossad never warns Israel's uniformed security services in advance of its exercises in a bid to give the training an element of reality.
The recruit's arrest was the latest in a series of blunders to tarnish the agency's reputation over the past two decades.
In Cyprus, four suspected agents were detained by police during a bungled attempt to bug the Iranian embassy in 1991, and two more were jailed in 1998 for spying on a naval base in the south of the Mediterranean island.
The same year an Israeli was given a suspended prison sentence in Switzerland for trying to tap the phones of Lebanese nationals.
In 1997 in the biggest blunder of all, Mossad agents attempted to assassinate Hamas official Khaled Meshaal in an abortive operation that nearly led to the rupture of relations with peace partner Jordan and forced it to free the Islamist movement's then leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in a conciliatory move. - AFP
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