A FEW months ago, an Egyptian trainee technician at the Cairo subsidiary of an Israeli textile firm was invited to visit company headquarters in Israel, writes David Horovitz in Jerasalem. Touring the firm's main factory in northern Israel, Imad Abdel Hamid Ismail was given a gift - a small parcel of the underwear the firm produces - to take back to Egypt.
Out of that parcel of underwear a full scale spy scandal has erupted that is deepening the crisis in ties between Israel and Egypt.
Last month, Mr Ismail was arrested by the Egyptian secret police, and is said by them to have confessed to spying for Israel. According to Egyptian press reports, Mr Ismail says he was recruited during the trip to Israel and that, in return for considerable sums of money, he passed Egyptian military and economic information to his controllers.
On November 6th, an Israeli Arab, Azzam Azzam, was also arrested in Cairo and he is set to stand trial next week, again on spying charges, having allegedly helped recruit Mr Ismail. Mr Azzam, a 35 year old Druse, was Mr Ismail's boss at the Cairo factory in charge of training the technicians.
The plot thickened further yesterday, when Egyptian government officials said they planned to try two more Israelis in absentia - two Arab women from the Galilee - with involvement in the spring.
Predictably, Israeli officials from the Prime Minister, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu, on down have vehemently denied the spying claims. Equally predictably, every Egyptian spokesman, including President Hosni Mubarak, is adamant that a serious Israeli espionage ring has been exposed.
Israeli officials, and Mr Azzam's own family, have been doing a pretty good job of describing Mr Azzam, currently being held in a faintly notorious Egyptian jail, as far too dumb to be of much use to Israel's Mossad intelligence agency. "Azzam a spy? It's a bad joke," said one of his company bosses. "He's got far too big a mouth." His own brother, Sami, was even less complimentary: "He hasn't got the brains to be a spy, or the education."
Mr Azzam's arrest last month coincided with a Middle East economic conference in Cairo - a somewhat unsuccessful Arab Israeli business parley held under the cloud of relations badly harmed by the deadlock in regional peace efforts. President Mubarak has, been one of the harshest critics of Mr Netanyahu's government, and ties between the two countries are under more strain that at any time in the almost two decades since they signed a peace treaty.
While some Israeli ministers have accused the Egyptians of manufacturing the spy allegations to justify still colder relations, Mr Mubarak insisted in a recent interview that he would have happily resolved the affair quietly if the Israeli media hadn't brought it into the headlines.
But the Egyptian president was insistent that the proof was incontrovertible. "After all," he told his interviewee, the Egyptian worker had been caught red handed "with invisible ink and other equipment."
Invisible ink? For spying in 1996? Apparently so. The Egyptians claim is that when Mr Ismail visited Israel, the gift package of underwear was soaked in invisible ink - for use in transmitting his information.