10 Terrifying Government Plots That Nearly Succeeded

2. Operation Susannah (The Lavon Affair)

The Objective: For the Israeli government to secretly create an instable, violent environment in Egypt so that the British government would retain their troops in the Suez Canal zone. The Plan: In the Summer of 1954, the Israeli military intelligence recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to bomb American, British and Egyptian-owned civilian targets. The plan was then for the Israeli government to blame the Muslim Brotherhood, local nationalists, and Egyptian Communists for the series of terrorist attacks. Why it failed: Just about everything went wrong in the operation. The cell managed to detonate bombs at an Alexandrian post office, as well as the libraries of the U.S. Information Agency in Cairo, but the homemade bombs either failed or didn't do enough damage to cause any fatalities or injuries. Later, one of the members of the cell, Philip Natanson, was arrested after a bomb accidentally ignited in his pocket. Egyptian authorities discovered incriminating evidence in his apartment, and Operation Susannah was a resounding failure. The operation was officially denied by Israel for decades, until President Moshe Katsav presented the surviving terrorists with a certificate of appreciation in 2005.