Did Israel attempt to assassinate Robert Mugabe in 2002, or was it a character assassination?

[tangaroa]

State Department cable 02HARARE786 of 2002-03-26 opens by discussing a meeting with Zimbabwe MDC secretary-general Welshman Ncube who mentioned a "Canadian company at the center of the alleged assassination plot" against Robert Mugabe. It gets to be an interesting story:

Ncube has been charged with treason along with MDC leader confidential confidential

Mr. Confidential Confidential appears in hindsight to have been Morgan Tsvangirai. The company, Dickens and Madson, approached the MDC with an offer to spy on the US and Canada for the MDC and call it lobbying, claiming to want in return only a small sum of money to meet a legal requirement. The director of this "Canadian" company was none other than Ari ben Menashe, an Israeli agent who gained a high profile by speaking on the Iran-Contra affair. The US ambassador advised Ncube that the MDC could avoid the future risk of doing business with unreputable persons by informing the US of everyone they choose to associate with. Heh.

Norm Dixon of Green Left Weekly claimed that the assassination plot was a con job arranged by Mugabe to discredit Morgan Tsvangirai. Dickens and Madsen recorded video of a meeting between ben Menashe and Tsvangirai in which they discussed plans to 'eliminate' Mugabe, and then released the video. They may have been working for Mugabe all along. The event is not currently mentioned on Wikipedia's biography of Tsvangirai. There's a likelihood that ben Menashe was freelancing by 2002.