The Israeli media has been making great play of the comparisons between Mr Yehuda Gil, the Mossad agent who has confessed to fabricating information that last year brought Israel and Syria to the brink of war, and Harry Pendel, novelist John Le Carre's Tailor of Panama. Pendel makes a lucrative career in spying and wreaks international havoc by manufacturing intelligence secrets purportedly gleaned from his clients.
But the comparison is mistaken, and Mr Gil's intelligence fabrications the more astounding. For while the fictional Mr Pendel was an outside informant, a paid source, Mr Gil was, for more than 20 years, a Mossad insider, a veteran, highly-regarded operative, tasked with recruiting informants and channelling their information to the highest echelons of his intelligence service and thence to the Israeli government itself.
Mr Gil (63) has been held in jail for more than a month, and charged with fraud, embezzlement and passing information with intent to damage national security. His trial is set to open late next week.
In remarks published by an Israeli newspaper yesterday, he said he couldn't really explain why he'd manufactured misinformation and passed it to his superiors for years. He insisted that he hadn't done it for the money, although police found $35,000 of Mossad funds in his home safe - cash that should have gone to one of his informants - and there are reports of $150,000 more gone missing.
He asserted that he wasn't politically motivated, although this is undermined by his intermittent membership of the far-right political party Moledet, and by the fact that his false material almost started an Israeli-Syrian war last autumn and served for years to undermine Syrian President Assad's claim to have made a "strategic choice" for peace with Israel.
"The only explanation I can give, looking back," he went on, "is the personal crisis caused by my retirement . . . the need to continue to prove myself, that I was still strong, and that they still needed me."
The multilingual, Libyan-born Mr Gil, a father of three, was recruited to the Mossad in the mid-1970s. He was renowned for his ability to recruit and prise information from his sources.
One of his key informants was a man named Jadid, a "ministerial-level official with the Syrian military", according to Mr Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent who wrote a book, By Way of De- ception, about the service. Mr Gil recruited Jadid through his brother, Magid, in Copenhagen, and paid them tens of thousands of dollars each month for information.
Mr Gil retired from the service in 1989, but he had jealously guarded his Syrian source, and he was recalled as a consultant after his retirement to reactivate the relationship. It seems, however, that the Syrian source was no longer in a position of influence. So Mr Gil, whose Mossad work had included giving lectures to new recruits on "Lying as an Art", made up his own material instead.
Some intelligence officials apparently harboured suspicions about the integrity of Mr Gil's informant, but it was only about a year ago that questions were asked about Mr Gil himself and his deception finally exposed.
In his published remarks yesterday, Mr Gil said he knew his reports wouldn't do much harm "because the system never relies on one source only". But it is impossible to assess whether his false information on Syria has affected Israeli government attitudes to peacemaking with Damascus over the years.