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With al Qaeda and Iran now topping an already hefty "hit list" of Israel's enemies, Mossad may have too many missions and too few spies to carry them out.
Two Israelis jailed for passport fraud in New Zealand displayed the rashness of intelligence agents under pressure to assume new identities for an operation, experts say.
"When you step up the war on terrorism abroad, the stakes are higher. Professionalism can suffer," said a Mossad veteran who was involved in the 1973 killing in Norway of a Moroccan waiter mistaken for a Palestinian guerrilla.
At the time, Israel was hunting the masterminds of a raid on the 1972 Munich Olympics in which 11 of its athletes were slain.
These days, Mossad is racing to stop attacks by al Qaeda - a diffuse global network that is notoriously hard to penetrate and anticipate - and keep track of arch-foe Iran's atomic programme, making for even heavier risks and likelier mistakes.
"New Zealand is famed for being politically moderate and its citizens are welcomed everywhere. They (New Zealand passports) could be very useful for Mossad," said intelligence analyst Yossi Melman of the Haaretz newspaper. "A government-issue passport is much more foolproof than a forged one, of course."
New Zealand suspended high-level contacts with Israel on Thursday, saying there were "very strong reasons" to believe Uriel Zoshe Kelman and Eli Cara were government spies.
Israel kept mum. "The only rule in these cases is: Don't get caught," ex-Mossad agent Gad Shimron told Israeli television.
According to former Mossad chief Danny Yatom, such scandals are no gauge of the agency's real feats.
"Mossad is one of the best intelligence agencies in the world," Yatom said. "Yet even the best agencies are bound to suffer mishaps. Because of the secret nature of intelligence gathering, most ... achievements are never made public."
Back on the counterterrorism trail
Yet many intelligence experts say Mossad has lost its edge since the 1960s and 1970s, when it assassinated Arab guerrilla leaders and abducted Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann for trial, earning a reputation for ruthlessness and ingenuity.
In recent decades, the Jewish state has been more worried about arms programmes in the Arab world and Iran - traditionally the purview of Israeli Military Intelligence. Mossad has often been relegated to dealing with Palestinian threats abroad and back-door diplomacy.
But Mossad got a new mandate in 2002, after al Qaeda bombed an Israeli-owned hotel and tried to shoot down an Israeli airliner in Kenya. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Mossad chief Meir Dagan to hunt down the perpetrators worldwide.
At least two Lebanese accused by Israeli security sources of al Qaeda ties have since died in booby-trooped blasts that locals blamed on Mossad. The agency has also tried to boost recruitment with a new Web site advertising "special tasks".
Spycraft skills are apparently still lacking.
Kelman and Cara were caught in a police sting after an accomplice - still at large - tried to order the passport by phone, in the name of a cerebral palsy victim, but aroused clerks' suspicions with his foreign accent.
"We don't think this was an isolated act," New Zealand Foreign Minister Phil Goff told Israel Radio.
Thirty years on, the veteran of the botched Norway "hit" and five fellow agents are still barred from entering the country.
"Our zest
to get the enemy at all costs sometimes costs us dearly in terms of
international standing," said Yigal Eyal, a counterterrorism
lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
