The media outlets that ignored the gag order on the so-called "rogue agent" or only partially complied with it made a mockery of Israel's rule of law. Their belittling of the media embargo was out of line. Israeli judges who accommodate the defense establishment when it seeks gag orders do the right thing. When such decisions lack merit or wisdom, they should be challenged at a higher court and possibly overturned completely. But what if the judges clear the publication of such a news item from the get-go and then that turns out to have been a colossal mistake? In that case, turning back the clock and restoring the cloak and dagger aura of the story will have been made impossible. If such a case occurs, anti-gag order newspapers would find it hard to engage in the regular criticism of those who disobey court orders or undermine the rule of law. If a paper gets to determine its own code of conduct on legal matters, what stops a settler in Migron from claiming he has the same right to break the law at will? There is hardly any difference. Both cases involve people who believe their views are divine wisdom and that all others lack an understanding of reality. But, by the same token, the request to impose a media blackout on an item that had already been aired by an Australian network shows that Mossad chief Tamir Pardo's perception of the media is stuck somewhere in the 1970s. Today's media landscape is a world apart from that era; it involves much more rapid and expansive reporting and no court order can keep it truly under wraps. Those who say the Mossad could not have adapted to this new reality are wrong, because the agency was long aware that an Australian television crew was investigating the case. Sooner or later the details would have come out; too many people were in the know. Too many reporters knew, and too many officials in Canberra and Melbourne knew as well. Even if the "rogue agent" left any footprints that could embarrass Israel or hurt it, the Mossad had ample time to act properly and cover its tracks. The events surrounding the "rogue agent" are part and parcel of the wars among intelligence agencies. An agent occasionally goes rogue. He sometimes gets caught. He might be apprehended, detained or imprisoned. Sometimes the Israel Prison Service lacks sound judgment and fails to ensure that he does not take his own life. It is all rather unfortunate. All of those things are bad and they all have to be investigated. But all of this is within the norm in the world of the spooks. In such circumstances there is no point in asking, or demanding, that media outlets suppress the news, and there is no good reason to exploit the naïvet of judges such as the one in this case by asking them to embargo the story. The Israeli government should have kept silent about the report after it came out in the Australian media. Silence should have been the only response. It would have been the wise choice when it became clear that Mordechai Vanunu and Victor Ostrovsky had betrayed the country (the former compromised Israel's alleged nuclear secrets and the latter is believed to have revealed classified information on the Mossad). The case of Yitzhak Yaakov, a retired military officer who wrote about Israel's defense industry, who did not seek harm to the state but went down the wrong path, should have also been met with silence. What is most troubling is that the Mossad's top echelons have not made an attempt to learn from their past mistakes.
