The Guardian claims that the Mossad may have tried to dry up the Nile

From The Guardian, reporting about a secret cable from the South African spy agency:

Israel has been trying for decades, the report says, to undermine Egypt’s vital Nile water source so that it becomes preoccupied with water shortages rather than the Arab-Israeli conflict. “Towards this end Israel’s Ministry of Science and Technology conducted extensive experiments, and eventually created a type of plant that flourishes on the surface or the banks of the Nile and that absorbs such large quantities of water as to significantly reduce the volume of water that reaches Egypt.”

The Guardian then adds its own color to try to make this absurd claim seem more realistic:

Intelligence agencies such as Mossad have a long history of conducting sabotage operations. There are shrubs, such as the tamarisk, that absorb vast amounts of water and can exacerbate drought. Advocates of removing the tamarisk claim that a full-grown tamarisk can consume more than 200 gallons of water a day. The tamarisk, though originally from Asia and the Middle East, can now be found in the American west.

It then concludes:

The allegation against Mossad could be true or preposterous. Either way it offers an insight into the thinking of intelligence agencies. If true, then Mossad is guilty of reprehensible tactics. If untrue, the South Africans are guilty of naivety in presenting this as fact.

It's 50/50! Could be preposterous! Could be true! After all, doesn't Israel regularly open up dams to flood Gazans?

The rest of the article shows pretty conclusively that the South African spy agency would report completely unfounded rumors as fact:

But in the world of espionage, today as in the past, spies peppering reports with half-truths, rumours, the outlandish and the downright ridiculous is par for the course, the secret cables show – and not that remote from the lucrative fantasies and inventions of Graham Greene’s fictional MI6 agent in Our Man In Havana.

Many of the reports, in spite of being marked “confidential”, “secret” and “top secret”, contain information openly available elsewhere, often written by journalists. One South African intelligence report on Israel’s Mossad quotes Chris McGreal, the Guardian’s former correspondent in Johannesburg and Jerusalem, who is now based in the US. “Chris McGREAL has claimed that ‘Israel provided expertise and technology that was central to South Africa’s development of its nuclear bomb’,” the report says.

Yet The Guardian reserves judgment about the Mossad Nile plot, giving credence to the idea that somehow South Africa's intelligence services infiltrated the secret Israeli program to dry up the Nile rather than assume that the rumor is just as absurd as the other ones it reports.

(h/t Jim)