CIA director John Brennan made an unannounced visit to Israel to discuss the situation in Syria with Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon on Friday.

They reportedly compared intelligence assessments on Syria and its two-year civil war and talked about Israel’s intent to continue striking shipments of advanced weapons destined for Hezbollah from Iran via Syria.

Syria has threatened to strike back at Israel the next time it strikes a weapons system on its soil, Britain’s Sunday Times reported.  Two alleged Israeli airstrikes on Syrian military sites earlier this month reportedly targeted long-range missiles in transit from Iran to Hezbollah.

Brennan also met with Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz and Mossad head Tamir Pardo, according to reports.

Australian Mossad agent Ben Zygier, previously known as the ‘Prisoner X’ who committed suicide in an Israel jail, unintentionally sabotaged a Mossad top secret operation to bring home the bodies of three Israeli soldiers missing Lebanon.

One of the missing was American-Israeli Zachary Baumel, whose remains never have been located.

The Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC), which broke the original story identifying Zygier and his suicide, reported Tuesday that his reckless and unauthorized operation, which he wanted to use to help him advance in the Mossad ranks, exposed a top Mossad agent.

Israel had been trying for three decades to locate and bring home the remains of Baumel, Yehuda Katz and Tzvi Feldman, all of whom were killed by Syrian forces in a battle in Lebanon’s BekkaValley in 1982.

The ABC report reveals why Israeli authorities jailed him in the highest security cell in Israel, in the same wing that held Yigal Amir, who assassinated former Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin.

The report also explains the fears that must have been going through Zygier’s mind while in jail and which led him to hang himself.

He faced 22 years in prison for espionage and treason as well as the life-long disgrace for his family in Israel and Australia.

He hanged himself in December 2010 after being secretly jailed several months earlier in the year.

Zygier butchered a detailed Mossad operation to bring home the remains thorough an agent whom he exposed when trying, on his own, to recruit a Lebanese man who then double-crossed him.

The exposed agent is Ziad Al Homsi, whom the Mossad recruited in 2007 in Lebanon. He told ABC the Mossad recruited him by using a Syrian who claimed his brother in Europe was working to return the remains of missing Israeli solders.

Al Homsi previously had led Lebanese soldiers in the war against Israel in Lebanon and knew of the battle in which the three missing soldiers were killed.

The Mossad believed they were buried in Lebanon although pictures from Syria showed their bodies being paraded through the streets of Damascus.

Israeli secret agents handed over to Al Homsi the location of the graves, and he was supposed to exhume them and leave the remains for other Mossad agents to retrieve.

But Zygier had exposed him.

The Australian native’s career as a spy was not going well in 2008, when he was put to work at a desk job near Tel Aviv.

He decided to prove himself by trying to recruit a Hezbollah operative as a double agent, who in turn pressured Zygier to prove his credentials as a Mossad agent.

Zygier obliged by informing him of the identity of Al Homsi. The would-be Mossad agent Zygier tried to recruit then double-crossed him and spilled the beans to Lebanese authorities.

They arrested Al Homsi before he could exhume the remains and sentenced him to 15 years in jail. He was released thee years afterwards. ABC said that Al Homsi claims he actually was a double agent and that Lebanon knew of his Mossad activities.

Riad Yasmina, who writes for the Dubai-based website ITP, announced, back on April 7, that the group ‘Anonymous’ had managed to get a list containing the names of 37 thousand Mossad agents deployed around the world, and has disseminated the same list to many like-minded Internet websites for publication.

You may recall that Anonymous announced the day before that it started its major campaign to wipe Israel off the internet and has hit a large number of Websites belonging to the Israeli government. The whole thing lasted a few hours, causing some discomfort to users, but Israel’s Internet providers were able to block the attack handily and the websites were back online within minutes, give or take a half hour.

Yasmina celebrated this, announcing that the Anonymous group also “gained access to credit cards belonging to Israelis, and disabled many of the major sites of Israeli companies and banks.”

Why she would be so delighted that the credit card information of innocent civilians be hacked I’m not so sure, but in reality none of that took place in any significant measure, according to many news sources.

But the best part of this entire article, comes at the end:

“Correction of the news: Unfortunately, after we published this news, we recently received numerous complaints from our brothers the Palestinian Arabs inside the 1948 borders, including from individuals who are most hostile to the Zionist entity, saying that their names were mentioned in the list (of collaborators). After checking to make sure with several sources regarding the list and its credibility, we discovered that it is false and has nothing to do with Mossad agents. The names may have been collected for other reasons, and perhaps leaked from any of the branches of the Israeli security.

“We are sorry if we caused any harm with this misleading information, it was because all of us took pleasure in the victory when we published the list, and we promise not to do it again.”

Ali Abunimah, Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, sworn ally to any Jew hater in the cosmos, related the following tale of horror:

M. arrived at work last Friday morning in a city in the north of present-day Israel. As she walked in, one of her colleagues approached her with a look of concern and asked her to step outside. “Your name is on a list of Mossad agents,” M. recalls the colleague saying.

“‘Then congratulate me,’ I said, thinking this was all a strange joke,” M. recalls responding.

But then M. found that many other people at her workplace were talking about a list, a file obtained by hackers and circulated on social media purporting to contain the names of agents of Israel’s notorious spy and assassination agency Mossad.

The vast majority of names on the list are Hebrew names of Israelis.

“I looked at the list, it had my name on it, my ID number and other details. By the end of the day everyone knew about it and was talking about it.”

M., however, is a Palestinian, a citizen of Israel, with an Arabic name – although like all the other names on the list her name was written in the Hebrew alphabet. She was stunned.

The false accusation or suspicion of being an Israeli agent can be absolutely devastating for any Palestinian.

The Electronic Intifada was able to independently verify the identity of M. Because of the serious implications for her and her family, M. agreed to speak to The Electronic Intifada on condition that we not use her real name or initials or identify the city where she lives.

“After work I went home and started to google this list and I was horrified by what I found,” M. said. “It was everywhere.”

M. doesn’t know how she got on the list but looking at it she thinks that the information could come from the database of a store’s loyalty card program or an online commerce site that was hacked into. “I saw the names of many companies as well as individuals on the list, including shoe stores and baby clothing stores.”

M. is not the only one affected in the Palestinian community. “My dad’s cousin is on the list as well, among many other people I know,” she said.

Panet, a website for Israeli Arabs, warned its readers that the list was fake, adding its own tale of horror:

The Arab resident of one of the villages in the Upper Galilee, clicked to news site Panorama, to discover his name in the list of Mossad agents. Sparking surprise and dismay, he said in an interview: “I was shocked after I noticed that my name and my details appear in the list of Mossad agents, and to my even greater surprise and dismay, some people I have dealt with were listed, too. This is pure fabrication and extremely dangerous.”

Sure it’s dangerous, because Arabs understand that in their society folks regularly reverse the order of asking questions and shooting.

According to Ali Abunimah, On Friday, March 22, the English-language account for The Red Hack, a group of Turkish activist hackers, announced that it would be releasing “a large file regarding Israel.”

Meanwhile, another the group Sector 404 was launching a denial of service attack on the Mossad’s public website (lots of exciting job opportunities there, by the way, including for all of you language majors).

The Red Hack announced that the list it had acquired included the personal information of 35,000 Israeli officials — and then anti-Israel bloggers and The Red Hack themselves were goading each other to make more ambitious claims, “until finally they were 35,000 Mossad agents,” writes Abunimah.

Abuminah traced the list (on a PDF file) to GaZa HaCHeR, who published it in late November, 2012. It turns out to be a list of 35,000 names, phone numbers, addresses and emails of Israeli customers of imported goods.

“All the names are in Hebrew, but are accompanied by email addresses and phone numbers in Latin characters giving it all an air of authenticity,” explains Abunimah, adding: “People who don’t speak Hebrew – almost certainly the vast majority of people circulating the list – would not have noticed that many of the names were those of businesses or Palestinians or that there was other information that points to this being a list of customers and not a list of government personnel.”

Ben Zygier, the Australian Jew who became a Mossad spy and committed suicide in an Israeli prison cell two years, ago was arrested in Israel for acting without orders to carry out a bungled attempt to turn a man close with Hizbullah into a double agent.

The scheme backfired and led to the exposure and jailing of two valuable informants for the Mossad, Der Spiegel reported Sunday.

If the report is true, it exposes the missing key to the mystery surrounding Zygier’s arrest. His identity was revealed several weeks ago following an investigation by the Australian ABC news agency.

A joint investigation by the German newspaper and Australia’s Fairfax newspapers concluded that Zygier was demoted to a desk role after his self-assigned venture and faced at least 10 years in jail in a maximum security prison, such as the one where was found dead after he hanged himself.

He had tried to win over to Israel’s side a man of European descent and who was close to the Hizbullah terrorist organization. Zygier supplied the man with information, including the names of two top Mossad agents in Lebanon. The unidentified man double-crosses Zygier and turned over the names to Hizbullah, which arrested them in 2009 and sentenced them to 15 years of hard labor.

The investigative report also stated that the capture of the two agents, Ziad al-Homsi and Mustafa Ali Awadeh, may have foiled a possible effort to assassinate Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Zygier reportedly confessed to his unauthorized operation.

The Mossad wiretapped the Tunis office of Mahmoud Abbas, now chairman of the Palestinian Authority, shortly before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Yediot Acharonot reported.

Shabtai Shavir, who headed the Mossad at the time, reportedly told officials at an emergency meting that  ”a Fatah-affiliated man within the PLO leadership”  placed  wiretapping equipment in Abbas’ office to gather information on the relationship between him and PLO boss Yasser Arafat.

The agent was known to the Mossad as “Golden Fleece.”

One month later, PLO personnel discovered the equipment and destroyed the devices.

Australia has confirmed that “Prisoner X,” since identified as Ben Zygier, worked for the Israeli government, and it warned Israel it faces a strong protest if it is proven his home country passport was misused.

Zygier, alias Ben Alon and Ben Allen, hanged himself in an Israeli jail two years ago after having been arrested for an unknown charge, but his identity was not revealed until last month.

It is assumed he worked for the Mossad and at some point acted against Israel’s interest, possibly through a treasonous act.

Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr told reporters in Australia that a Dept. of Foreign Affairs (DFAT) report has raised serious problems on how the case was handled.

He also said there are still many unanswered questions, one of the most serious being the issue of passports.

“Certainly if Australian passports were misused here, that’s something we are forced to take very seriously,” Senator Carr said. “No country can allow the integrity of its passport system to be compromised.

If it is confirmed that Israel misused his passport, “We’ll be registering the strongest protest,” Carr added.

He dismissed reports that Zygier was involved in the assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai in January 2010, when some of the killers used Australian passports.

The incident prompted the expulsion of an Israeli diplomat from Australia, one of the most pro-Israel countries in the world.

Israeli and Saudi-backed intelligence agencies are behind Syrian rebel suicide bombings, according to a Syrian website that is loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad. The accusations are a new twist on Syrian government accusations that Israel and the United States are behind the suicide bombings.

Quoting “informed” sources in the Syrian opposition, Dam Press said a join operation room in northern Lebanon serves as headquarters for coordinating attacks on Assad’s security forces.

The website stated that “Ayman Abdel Nour, a well-known Zionist hireling,” provided logistical support for a recent suicide bombing in Damascus.

He supposed received explosive devices “from Mossad-affiliated Hungarian agents and delivered the Israeli and Hungarian made lethal materials to the Nusrah Front, which is backed by the Saudi intelligence service.”

Iran’s regime mouthpiece Press TV added its own re-writing of history, stating that six months after the Arab Spring uprising began, “Assad started a reform initiative in the country, but Israel, the US and its Arab allies are seeking hard to bring the country into chaos through any possible means.

It added that the Palestinian al-Manar weekly reported that Saudi Arabia and Qatar have been financing and supplying armed rebels in Syria with more explosive materials they have recently purchased from the US, Israel and Britain.

Prime Minister Netanyahu on Sunday responded for the first time to the scandal that shook up Israel and Australia, over the suicide of former Mossad member Ben Zygier in an isolation cell in Israel, as Netanyahu’s own office was futilely attempting to block its publication.

Netanyahu emphasized the importance of security – even at the expense of freedom of expression. “Over-exposure of security and intelligence activities may seriously harm state security,” Netanyahu said.

Netanyahu chose to refer mainly to the public debate that surrounded the attempt to silence the story at first, and the sweeping gag order imposed on the entire affair.

“I would like to say that I completely trust the security forces of the State of Israel,” he said. “They are completely dedicated and committed to ensure that we can live in this country. I also trust absolutely the legal authorities in Israel.”

The Prime Minister said that “the security and intelligence forces of Israel operate under the full supervision of the legal authorities, which are completely independent. This combination of maintaining security and maintaining the law, also preserves the freedom of expression.”

He emphasized the special security conditions of the state of Israel, saying: “We are not like all the other countries. We an exemplary democracy and maintain the rights of detainees and human rights not less than any other country, but we are also more threatened and challenged, and so we must take care to maintain the proper operation of our security forces.”

He concluded: “And so I ask everyone, do let the security forces continue to work quietly, so that we can continue to live in security and peace in Israel.”

Meanwhile, Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr said he was seeking answers from Israel over the 2010 death of “Prisoner X” in an Israeli jail, as part of its own probe into the case.

“We have asked the Israeli government for a contribution to that report,” Carr told reporters. “We want to give them an opportunity to submit to us an explanation of how this tragic death came about.”