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By Claire HarveyJuly 16, 2004THE bungling Israeli "spies" at the centre of a major diplomatic row would make Maxwell Smart look like James Bond.And they were caught by an observant passport official. On March 19, New Zealand Passport Service officer Ian Tingey received an urgent passport application in the name of an Auckland man, Mark Smith. Something just felt odd to Mr Tingey - the applicant was 33 but claimed to have never held a passport. Even stranger, Mr Tingey detected a Canadian accent when "Mr Smith" rang to ask about the application's progress. "When I quizzed him on his accent his explanation to me was that he had not travelled or held a New Zealand passport before but had spent a lot of time in New Zealand with Canadian friends and family," Mr Tingey later told the High Court in Auckland. Mr Tingey looked up the applicant's name in the Auckland White Pages, and rang Mark Smith's father, who said his son was a tetraplegic cerebral palsy sufferer who was confined to a wheelchair and could not speak. Mr Tingey contacted police, and together they laid a trap. "Mark Smith", who police say was really Israeli national Zev William Barkan, 37, was told his passport was ready. Barkan said he would send a friend to pick it up from an inner-city apartment block on March 24. As police watched from an unmarked car, the passport was collected by a taxi driver, who delivered it to Israeli citizens Eli Cara, a Sydney-based travel agent and Uriel Kelman, a former military intelligence agent. When confronted, Cara tried to argue he had never met Kelman before, and Kelman started running away, throwing his mobile phone into the bushes. Both were arrested and charged with passport fraud. Police then learned all three men had travelled in and out of the country dozens of times in the preceding months - Cara with an Israeli passport, Kelman on a Canadian passport and Barkan with US documents. Police and Kiwi intelligence services told Prime Minister Helen Clark they suspected all three men were Israeli spies. In April, Cara's mother gave the game away, telling an Israeli newspaper that her son and Kelman "had left Israel on a mission to New Zealand". "I don't exactly know what they (Cara and co-accused Kelman) were doing there, but I hope that everything will be okay," Zahava Werner said. At yesterday's sentencing, the defence said the men's lives would be in danger from terrorists. How about a $NZ50,000 donation from each man to the Cerebral Palsy Society to make up for it all, suggested defence counsel Stuart Grieve. Judge Judith Potter accepted the idea - and sent them both to jail for six months as well.
Topic: I thought the Israeli's had the best spies out there. (Read 874 times)