The Israeli Mossad has cleverly crafted a reputation of being uber-skilled and the Alpha of intelligences agencies. But this is all hype and as a former director of the C.I.A. once stated: The Mossad gets a C for actual intelligence and an A for public relations.

The Mossad is anything but effective when it comes to gathering usable intelligence. The only thing it excels in is killing innocent Arabs, including a Moroccan waiter in Norway who was mistaken for a Palestinian (who was also innocent). The hunt for Nazi official Eichmann was also riddled with clumsy behavior. Per The Economist:

Those who like to believe that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is the epitome of spookish efficiency may find themselves blinking at some of the mishaps and near-disasters that its posse encountered in Argentina. Clumsy snooping alarmed the Eichmanns, though not enough to prompt them to go into hiding. Having caught their quarry, the Israeli spy chiefs risked detection by ordering a further, madcap attempt to find another fugitive Nazi, Josef Mengele, a doctor responsible for hideous experiments at Auschwitz.

As former C.I.A. officer Robert Bear once stated, “Let me tell you something, what people most err in in the Middle East, and I am responsible for my words to the end, is related to Israeli intelligence. To be sure, they can kill somebody in Paris or Rome or killing the wrong person in Finland or wherever else they did that in. To be sure they know Europe and Palestinians, and they know many things about Palestinians, but when it comes to the rest of the Middle East, I have not seen anything from their part that indicated their knowledge of those countries.”

Nonetheless, the American media - sympathetic to Israel - still clings to the falsehood that the Mossad is professional which is not surprising in a nation at love with Zionism and keen to exaggerate its supposed good.

But for those who cling to realism, a new story demonstrates once again the fallacy of the Mossad self-created image:

South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers [sic].

It is a shame for Israelis that the old White Apartheid regime is no longer in power. Ideological kins, Israel had close relations with the Apartheid government (trade, state visits, defense contracts, ect...), and had such infiltration taken place during that time the White government would have acquiesced to it since the Israelis are only (and typically in their racist world view) targeting blacks and Muslims.

And even the airport police in a developing nation could spot the Israeli spy.