By Andrew Gilligan, Telgraph

Suspects wanted in connection with the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, clockwise from top left: Michael Lawrence Barney, James Leonard Clarke, Stephen Daniel Hodes, Paul John Keeley, Melvyn Adam Mildiner Photo: AP
Mahmoud al?Mabhouh, the Hamas terrorist quartermaster, was not the only international man of mystery to die in a Dubai hotel recently. So did James Bond. The CCTV pictures of Mr Mabhouh’s tubby, balding Mossad hit team, in their T?shirts, trainers, white socks and baseball caps, will have destroyed any last illusions that intelligence is a glamour business.

For all their felonies against fashion, however, the squad carried out their main crime with remarkable speed. At about three in the afternoon of January 19, Mabhouh landed at Dubai International Airport. By 8.45, he was dead – and by midnight, using their extensive collection of fake European passports, most of his killers had left the country.

Gaza will explode if US stays on sidelinesIt was the latest shot in a growing campaign of assassination, designed to intimidate Israel’s two biggest enemies, Iran and Hamas, which began in December with attacks in Damascus and Gaza. And it was the climax of a long, bloody, mostly hidden war between Mabhouh and Israel, waged since at least 1989, when he murdered two Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

Last year Mabhouh, who had a key role in Hamas’s arms supply chain, is thought to have masterminded an attempt to smuggle weapons into Gaza from Sudan. Fascinatingly, Mabhouh had just come from Sudan when he arrived in Dubai – and, even more fascinatingly, he was en route to China.

In the first days after news of the murder emerged, reaction tended towards the smug. Asked about Israeli involvement in the hit, the interior minister, Eli Yishai, smiled and said: “All the security services make, thank God, great efforts to safeguard the security of the state.” Excited journalists, in Israel and abroad, hailed a further effortless triumph for brutal Mossad efficiency. When the Israeli tennis player Shahar Peer won her match in a Dubai championship, the Tel Aviv website Ynet piped: “Another flawless operation in Dubai.”

But now the doubts have started to creep in. Was it really so flawless? True, even for a camera-saturated, rolling-news age, what happened in Dubai’s hideous Al-Bustan Rotana hotel was pretty special: the world’s first televised secret service assassination. But isn’t that a bit of a contradiction in terms? Are not highly trained Mossad intelligence operatives supposed to avoid getting themselves on camera, especially while engaged in the delicate task of bumping other people off?

From both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide, criticism is growing. “It looks unprofessional to me,” said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at Dubai’s Gulf Research Centre. Amir Oren, of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, wrote: “What must have seemed to its perpetrators as a huge success is now being overshadowed by enormous question marks.”

Few, inside Israel or elsewhere, seriously doubt that, given the target and methods, this was a Mossad, or Mossad-directed, hit. The Dubai police chief, Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan, says he is “99 per cent” sure. But it was probably not supposed to be so obvious. The method of killing – suffocation – was probably chosen in the hope that it would look like natural causes (and it nearly did: the pathologist who examined the victim said that pronouncing him murdered was the most difficult judgment he’d ever had to make).

There would always, of course, have been strong suspicions about the sudden death of an Israeli enemy, but a note of ambiguity and mystery would have served Mossad well. And, especially without a definite crime, the expectation must have been that the Dubai authorities would not investigate very thoroughly, pull all the CCTV footage or comb through the immigration records.

For all Dubai’s permissiveness (by Arab standards), its reputation as a look-the-other-way staging-post for arms and illegal money, it appears to have grown tired of being a venue for other people’s vendettas. Last year, the authorities were distinctly annoyed when Sulim Yamadayev, the former Chechen leader, was shot dead in one of their underground car parks.

So they investigated, hard, and the result, shown to the world on Monday, was the bumbling spectacle of Team Mossad going into toilets and emerging with fake beards, but still perfectly recognisable. Far from being secret agents, they are now the Keystone Spooks, the most famous 11 spies on the planet, their faces in every newspaper and media website, and completely unemployable in any field capacity ever again.

Then there is the even trickier matter of those passports. One can, of course, sympathise with Mossad’s difficulties. Although Israeli passport-holders are not absolutely banned from Dubai, they are rather noticeable. Totally fabricated travel documents won’t work any more, either. These days, border police have near-instant access to international passport databases, so the fake passports used by spies have to match the real ones in the databases.

According to British sources, the Israelis got hold of the real passport details of six UK citizens living in Israel by taking their passports for “examination” as they passed through Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, copying the details and returning the original passports after a few minutes. The six fakes, along with German, French and Irish passports, were used to leave Dubai.

And thus it was that, on Tuesday morning, half a dozen angry Brits woke up to find their names on an Interpol “red list” – and the Israelis had more than some embarrassing television pictures on their hands: they had a major diplomatic crisis.

The victims included Michael Barney, a 54-year-old writer of software manuals who has had heart bypass surgery. As he put it: “I’m not exactly spy material.” Then there was Melvyn Mildiner, 31, an IT consultant. “I went to bed with pneumonia and woke up a murderer,” he said. “It’s been horrific.” A third “spy,” IT worker Jonathan Graham, 31, protested: “It’s not me. I’ve got enough of my own life to deal with.”

The angriest Brit of all, however, was David Miliband, a 44-year-old Foreign Secretary. Any abuse by Israel would be an “outrage”, he said, as anonymous British officials briefed that “relations were in the freezer before this. They are in the deep freeze now.”

The Foreign Office denied claims that it had been tipped off about the use of British passports before the hit, insisting: “We only received details of the British passports a few hours before the [February 15] press conference held by the police in Dubai.”

But the Irish foreign ministry has confirmed that it knew Irish passports had been used by the hit squad as early as February 4 – and it would seem surprising if Britain did not know at least that soon too. The use of “European” passports in the hit was being claimed by the Dubai authorities as early as January 29. Not for the first time, the British government may not be being wholly frank about what it knew and when it knew it.

The fact that Britain may have waited to get angry until the story got on TV tends to support the view of one Israeli government source that the UK is merely “going through the motions of outrage to mollify the media”. According to one former intelligence source, MI6 has been reassuring Mossad that everything “would blow over”.

But if it can live with the anger of David Miliband, Tel Aviv may have created some more serious problems for itself. Hamas is sure to retaliate. Relations with moderate Arab states like Dubai, which were gradually warming up, have been damaged. And the operation cynically endangered at least six Israeli residents – with the possibility of parliamentary inquiries, legal action by the victims and political controversy.

There’s not much lost sleep in Israel over Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. As the Jerusalem Post?’s leading article put it: “Mabhouh deserved to be killed.” But there is some concern that murdering him might not have been, in the words of Ben Caspit of the Maariv newspaper, “worth” the aggro.

Yoram Schweitzer, a research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, makes the point that Mabhouh was not an absolutely central leadership figure in Hamas. “He had a very specific job, therefore the blow [to Hamas] is much less severe and the vacuum he left is easier for Hamas to fill,” he said.

Appointing Mossad’s current head, Meir Dagan, in 2000, the then prime minister, Ariel Sharon, ordered him to run the spy agency “with a knife between its teeth”. We still don’t know whether the Keystone Spooks have plunged that knife into Hamas – or their own feet.

Additional reporting: Richard Spencer in Dubai and Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem