New details have emerged about the Ben Zygier case and the offences that led to his imprisonment in Israel.
Ben Zygier. Picture: Twitter Source: Supplied
AUSTRALIAN-born Mossad agent Ben Zygier inadvertently compromised an Israeli intelligence operation, it has been revealed.
The operation was aimed at recovering the remains of three missing soldiers and Zygier's action drew the wrath of his spy agency bosses.
That is the latest chapter in a story detailing the demise of the Melbourne-trained lawyer who committed suicide in 2010 after spending 10 months in a maximum-security cell, reports ABC TV.
The offence, which prompted the Israeli government to detain Zygier in a top security jail, has remained a mystery but had been linked to his naming of Lebanese citizen and double agent, Ziad al-Homsi.
Al-Homsi admitted to ABC TV having been approached by Israeli contacts about the whereabouts of the bodies of three Israeli tank crewmen killed during Israel's incursion into Lebanon in 1982.
Soldiers Yehuda Katz, Zvi Feldman, and Israeli-US citizen Zachary Baumel were captured by Syrian troops and paraded through Damascus before their deaths. Their bodies had never been recovered, despite Israeli efforts.
Israeli agents initially made contact with al-Hamsi in a bid to retrieve the missing soldiers.
"After one year of meeting with them, at the last meeting they informed me about the location of the corpses, exactly ... I had to find a way (to) bring the bodies and keep them," al-Hamsi told the ABC.
However before the operation progressed, al-Hamsi was named as a Mossad informer and jailed in Lebanon.
While Zygier's motive remains unconfirmed, the ABC said that following a mediocre start to his career in espionage, the Australian had been keen to impress Israeli spy bosses. He made unauthorised contact with an agent of Lebanese Hezbollah with the view to recruiting him as a double agent.
By way of proving his credentials to his Lebanese counterpart, Zygier allegedly named al-Hamsi as an informer.
The ABC reported when Zygier named al-Hamsi he unwittingly subverted one of his agency's most important operations.
When the repatriation operation subsequently fell over, Zygier was imprisoned and after 10 months in a window-less cell, he killed himself.
Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr is still waiting for Israel to respond to a request for more information about the circumstances leading up to the death of the dual citizen.
The ABC spoke with unnamed medical professionals who had contact with Zygier in the weeks leading up to his death.
One man, identified only as "the doctor", said Zygier needed help.
"It was obvious that he needed to be in therapy with someone from the organisation where he had worked. Someone who would say to him, you made a mistake, but everything will be ok," the man said.
Former Mossad agent Rami Igra simply said: "He was psychiatric, full stop".
Despite being housed in a high-security cell with CCTV and audio recorders, Zygier's death was not captured on camera. Prison authorities reported that the cell's bathroom recorder was inoperative at the time.
