The mayor of a town in northern Germany has invoiced the government of Israel asking them to pay the bill after a pair of bungling secret agents needed help getting their car out of a field from which they were spying on a new submarine.
Klaus Langer, mayor of Quarnbek, has issued the €1,263 charge to Israel’s foreign affairs department to pay up for the rescue the town’s fire department – as well as a local farmer and a tractor – provided two Mossad agents when their vehicle got stuck in mud.
Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, is known the world over for its elite agents’ abilities to counter terrorism and carry out covert operations to the highest standards of espionage skill. But the two agents caught red handed in Quarnbek have left the town’s mayor scratching his head.
“If they’d gone back to their embassy and said, ‘Hey, we mess up, we need to pay for this,’ and then sorted things out from their side, none of this publicity would have been necessary,” Langer told The Local.
“But, unfortunately, they didn’t and now it’s come to this.”
Undercover and seemingly under orders from the Israeli government to report on a new German submarine that was making its maiden voyage through the Kiel Canal, the Mossad spies drove their rented Ford Focus into a field which had been marked with an ‘Entrance Forbidden’ post, according to NDR.
A copy of the itemised bill sent to the Israeli Embassy in Berlin [NDR]
When an elderly woman spotted their suspicious behaviour, she walked up to the pair to ask what they were up to.
Pointing to the canal, they replied that they were there to scout a route for a sailing regatta, which the old woman thought unlikely on the narrow stretch of water.
Alerting the police, officers arrived on the scene to discover that the pair had driven their car into mud and could not get it out again. The spies then revealed to the law enforcement officers that they were acting on the authority of the Israeli government, supplying the papers that proved they were allowed to carry weapons.
The local fire brigade, and then a farmer and his tractor, were called to help dig the men out of the hole in which they found themselves.
The two Mossad agents thanked the German police, shook the officers hands, then continued on their way.
But now the mayor has sent a bill to the Israeli Embassy in Berlin asking to be compensated for the costs incurred rescuing the pair. The costs include paying the firefighters, volunteers who must be compensated by individuals when replying to calls not involving fires, as well as the fire service’s tools and the use of the tractor.
