Mossad chief Meir Dagan sees no reason to resign over a scandal-fraught assassination in Dubai, and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is unlikely to ask him to, a confidant of the Israeli spymaster said on Thursday in a Reuters report.
Resignation would be tantamount to taking responsibility, the confidant said. Dagan's success in other and ongoing operations against Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran would outweigh any desire by Netanyahu to have him fall on his sword, said the confidant, who also hails from Israel's intelligence community. "There are national priorities here," the confidant added.
Dubai police this week released names, photos and passport numbers of 11 members of an alleged hit squad that killed Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last month in Dubai.
Dubai police said that all 11 carried European passports. But most of the identities appeared to be stolen, and a number matched up with real people in Israel who have claimed they were victims of identity theft. Only the British passports, however, were believed to have involved stolen identities.
The confidant anticipated that Mossad would quietly lobby counterpart agencies of the countries whose passports were used for the Dubai mission to mellow their governments' scrutiny on Israel.
"This may not work, given the anger that some of these foreign ministries are signaling," the confidant said. "But even if there's only a process of internal deliberation, that might be enough to take the sting out of the recrimination," said the confidant.
In response to the circumstances surrounding the Dubai assassination, the British Foreign Office on Wednesday evening “invited” Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor to a meeting Thursday to discuss the suspicions that British passports were used in the assassination of Hamas military commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last month in Dubai.
The foreign nationals included six Britons, three Irishmen, a German and a Frenchman.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Wednesday that he was taking the misuse of British passports in the assassination very seriously and that he had ordered a full investigation in the matter.
“We have got to carry out a full investigation into this. The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care,” said the prime minister. “The evidence has got to be assembled about what has actually happened and how it happened and why it happened, and it is necessary for us to conclude that before we can make statements.”
Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Wednesday there was no reason to assume the Mossad was behind the operation simply because Dubai had released the information about the passports.
“I don’t know why we are assuming that Israel, or the Mossad, used those passports,” Lieberman told Army Radio in Israel’s first official comments on the affair.
But Lieberman did not deny involvement outright, saying Israel rightly maintained a policy of ambiguity where security operations were concerned.
“Israel never responds, never confirms and never denies,” he said. “There is no reason for Israel to change this policy.”