The Israeli Mossad, still reeling from the aftermath of its recent botched assassination attempt on a Hamas official in Jordan, is emerging as the apparent cause of another, even more significant, Middle East intelligence fiasco.
While many elements of the new saga are still being barred from publication by the Israeli military censor, it appears that, for several years, one or more officials in the Mossad have been deliberately passing disinformation about Syria to successive Israeli governments, attempting to create a negative impression of Syria's attitude to peacemaking with Israel and even to suggest falsely that President Hafez Assad was about to go to war.
First indications are that the Mossad official or officials involved were politically-motivated - presumably holding right-wing political views opposed to trading the Golan Heights for peace with Syria.
The two most crucial periods during which the disinformation is believed to have played a part were the summer of 1993 and the autumn of 1996. In July and August of 1993, the then-Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, was trying to ascertain whether President Assad was ready to enter substantive negotiations for a full peace treaty.
Apparently receiving mixed assessments from military intelligence and from the Mossad, he elected to place talks with Syria on the back-burner, and instead devoted his efforts to peacemaking with the Palestinians, shaking hands with Mr Yasser Arafat to inaugurate the Oslo process.
Mr Shimon Peres, who become prime minister after Mr Rabin was assassinated in November 1995, tried briefly to resuscitate peace efforts with Damascus, but there has been no concrete progress.
Even more dramatically, in September and October 1996, Israel and Syria almost went to war.
President Assad moved one of his military divisions towards the Golan Heights, the Israeli media published screaming headlines based on intelligence assessments that a Syrian strike against the Golan was imminent, and pressure came from within the Israeli defence establishment for reserve troops to be called up.
Israel's Defence Minister, Mr Yitzhak Mordechai, and the army's chief of staff, Gen Amnon Shahak, inundated with conflicting intelligence information, took the calculated risk not to call up the reservists, for fear that this in itself might trigger a conflict.
A series of secretive international mediation efforts eventually managed to persuade each side that the other was not about to launch an attack.
While most Israeli officials are refusing to comment on the affair, Mr Mordechai said yesterday that he did not believe any "significant damage" had occurred as a consequence of the false information, and that the "right decisions" had always been made. This may be true of last year's near-conflict, but may not be so accurate as regards the events of 1993.
Mr Uri Saguy, the retired general who headed the Israeli army's intelligence division in the early 1990s, said yesterday that the affair was "very embarrassing and very bad". Mr Saguy has always argued that President Assad is determined to make peace with Israel, while his opposite number at the Mossad in the early 1990s, Mr Shabtai Shavitt, disagreed.
If one or more politicised Mossad operatives led Israel to pass up a real opportunity for peace with Syria, the damage to the credibility of this once world-renowned intelligence service would be far greater even than that caused by September's bungled Amman hit, which saw two Mossad hitmen captured after attempting to assassinate Hamas's political chief in Amman, Mr Khaled Mashaal.