Double agent disaster led to spy's downfall Outfoxed: Ben Zygier was responsible for one of the most serious security breaches in Israeli history. Australian-born former Mossad agent Ben Zygier was responsible for one of the most serious security breaches in Israeli history, a breach that led directly to the arrest and imprisonment of two of Israel's most prized Lebanese informants. After a months-long investigation initiated by Fairfax Media and completed by a team of reporters assembled by Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, it can be revealed that Zygier was outfoxed in a game of cross and double-cross that ended with tragic consequences. Unable to bear the shame of his downfall, and facing a minimum 10-year jail sentence with no prospect of a return to the Mossad, Zygier took his life on December 15, 2010, hours after a last telephone call with his mother, Louise, in Melbourne. "Zygier wanted to achieve something that he didn't end up getting," says one highly placed Israeli official who is familiar with the investigation into the Zygier case. Then he ended up on a precipitous path. He crossed paths with someone who was much more professional than he was. Recruited to the Mossad at the start of 2004, Zygier, who took up Israeli citizenship in the mid-1990s, was first assigned to work in Europe trying to infiltrate companies that had business links with countries hostile to Israel, in particular Iran and Syria. According to the chief executive of one company that Zygier infiltrated, while Zygier was "extremely sharp," he also lacked focus. When Zygier started behaving rashly with clients and costing the company important business, a decision was made "to let him go." Unable to achieve the kind of results expected, Zygier was pulled back from the field and assigned to a desk job in Tel Aviv, a psychological blow that proved to be the beginning of his undoing. In an attempt to improve his reputation within the intensely competitive atmosphere of Mossad, and get back into a coveted operations role, Zygier embarked on a rogue mission without informing his superiors. Acting on information surrounding the identity of an eastern European man known to be close to the militant Lebanese Shia movement Hezbollah, Zygier set up a meeting with the man towards the end of 2008 with the intention of turning him into a double agent who could pass information about Hezbollah activities back to Mossad. Instead the reverse happened, with Zygier becoming the conduit for information flowing from Tel Aviv to Hezbollah's headquarters in Beirut. Contact between the two went on for months, with the east European repeatedly demanding that Zygier prove his bona fides as a Mossad agent by giving up real intelligence. Zygier complied, giving up the names of Israel's two top Lebanese informants, Ziad al-Homsi, and Mustafa Ali Awadeh. Both were arrested in the spring of 2009, possibly thwarting a chance to strike Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Each was sentenced to 15 years in prison with hard labour. It can also be revealed that when Zygier was arrested on January 29, 2010, he was carrying a compact disc loaded with yet more intelligence files that it is believed he might have been intending to pass onto his Hezbollah contact. Finally confronted with the allegation that he was responsible for passing such sensitive information to the other side, Zygier is believed to have confessed early on. When negotiations over a plea bargain ended with Israeli prosecutors offering no fewer than 10 years in a maximum security facility, it proved too much for Zygier to bear. Israeli government officials declined to comment on the Zygier revelations. ""We have not commented on the particulars of the case and that has not changed,"" said Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A former deputy director of military intelligence at the Israeli Defence Force, Meir Elran, would not comment on the Zygier case specifically but said of field operatives in general: ""Duplication of agents is a major issue for any intelligence service - whenever you start working with anybody you are bound to be faced with the problem of double or triple whatever the agent's loyalty is. Mr Elran, now a senior research fellow and director of the homeland security program at the Institute for National Security Studies, said the big challenge was to select the right people and follow very careful what they were doing, since they could be "duplicated" at any time. ""This is becoming more of a case if you are talking about a person who is not really one of your own, but who has been recruited from the outside. ""We have unfortunately seen several cases ... even your own flesh and blood might be tempted to cross the line. ""It is a dangerous business - you can be caught and you can be put in very, very unfortunate situations. It is very dangerous for the person involved, it is very dangerous for the mission - people do get killed when things go wrong. with Ruth Pollard