Shlomo Gazit, 86, has known a lot about research, the army and management ever since Israel's nascent years. He has written factual and conclusive articles; he was Moshe Dayan's bureau chief; he headed the research division at Military Intelligence during the Six Day War, and all of Military Intelligence for five years after the Yom Kippur War; he established the mechanism for coordinating activities in the territories; he managed a university, and much more.

A week ago, Gazit fell into a trap. In a column he distributes online to a large mailing list, he told readers about a report by Dr. Franklin Lamb he had read online. The title: "U.S. Preparing for a Post-Israel Middle East?" - a question that is also an answer, a declaration that also resounds from a statement by Henry Kissinger that Gazit quotes without question: "Israel will cease to exist by 2022."

On August 28, on the Foreign Policy Journal website, Lamb made a sensational revelation: The American intelligence community initiated the writing of an 82-page analysis that concludes that "the American national interest in [sic] fundamentally at odds with that of Zionist Israel. The authors conclude that Israel is currently the greatest threat to US national interests because its nature and actions prevent normal US relations with Arab and Muslim countries."

Lamb enumerates the 16 military and civilian organizations constituting the American intelligence community, and notes that their combined annual budget is about $70 billion. He assesses that Israel's friends in Congress and in think tanks - people from the Republican right - will attack both the findings of the study and President Barack Obama. Thanks to Lamb's diligence, readers have been made aware of a sharp series of American intelligence assessments, including: "Israel... cannot be salvaged any more than apartheid south Africa could be when as late as 1987 Israel was the only 'Western' nation that upheld diplomatic ties with South Africa and was the last country to join the international boycott campaign before the regime collapsed;" Israel spies inside the United States and meddles in its internal affairs; and the American taxpayer must not continue to fund "Israel's segregationist occupation infrastructure." No serious publication has published Lamb's article but his scoop spread on the Internet like an epidemic - and thus reached Gazit a month and a half later.

Foreign Policy is considered a reliable journal/website, an agile rival to the veteran Foreign Affairs. The site that hosted Lamb ostensibly bore the Foreign Policy name - but with the addition of the word "Journal." This is a fringe site, which publishes propagandists and eccentrics.

Not only was Lamb's secret study never conducted, it could not possibly exist. It is not formulated in the style of research officers. No one would be foolish enough to authorize a government organization to scribble words about the approaching end of a friendly, living, existing, fighting state - one that some say is also prepared to use the Doomsday weapon in order to prevent its own destruction. Certainly no sane director of an intelligence agency would do any such thing to his political boss on the eve of an election.

At the end of Lamb's article, the editors of Foreign Policy Journal note that "While this report does not mention the source for the information concerning the alleged draft report, FPJ with permission from the author is able to disclose that the source is a staffer with a certain research unit of the CIA."

A more logical guess is that someone wrote a paper, one of many, and mailed it to intelligence, with a copy to Obama. A reasonable guess as to who that someone might be: Dr. Franklin Lamb, a resident of Beirut, a fan of Hezbollah, the director of an association to perpetuate the memory of the victims of Sabra and Chatila. His wife and collaborator was killed, together with their unborn child, in the 1983 terror attack on the American Embassy in Beirut, where she had come to try to promote the interests of survivors of the slaughter.

The attack was carried out by the Iranians and Hezbollah but Lamb does not blame them. His entire inventory of blame is put to use against Israel and Lebanese elements that have reservations about Hezbollah. The following day, Gazit wrote in his column that "in parallel" to the distribution of the column he tried to "clarify who was behind" Lamb's publication. He would have done well to have pursued that beforehand. He wrote: "No proof has been found that this study indeed exists and if it does - that this is what its contents are. Foreign Policy Journal is known as a digital publication of which many of the editorial board members are Arabs whose positions are anti-Israeli. Hence it is very possible that the story of the research study is nothing more than a slander campaign and psychological warfare against Israel."

Readers from Israel who hastened to contact Lamb, even before Gazit's correction, elicited a confused response from him: "Good morning - about to leave for Damascus - give me a couple of days to send you the latest we have [from a contact in Washington D.C.] re the CIA research paper.". Four or five days later, the updates hadn't arrived.

But what about the bleak prediction attributed to Kissinger? No one who spread the quote from Kissinger bothered to check its veracity. Jessee LePorin, Press Officer to Henry Kissinger, appreciated the query. LePorin, speaking from Kissinger's Associates office in Manhattan, noted she "had the opportunity to speak to Dr. Kissinger on this matter and the quote is in fact a complete fabrication."

The story of the fall of mighty serious people (and others) into Lamb's snare exemplifies the difference between professional and amateur media, between those who are committed to verifying, checking and cross-checking information before publishing it and those who are content to recycle. If this difference is not enough to save traditional journalism, the kind that is liable no longer to exist a decade from now, it could serve as a draft for its eulogy.