On the face of it, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman's mission looks easy. In the aftermath of the broad indictment, which was much ballyhooed a year ago, the little that's left is a small clause pertaining to the appointment of Ze'ev Ben Aryeh as ambassador to Latvia as a reward for leaking information about the investigation into the minister. Now all he has to do is convince the court that he was in no way involved in the appointment and claim that the Foreign Ministry's eight-member appointment committee voted conscientiously. In reality, this is almost a mission impossible.

For Foreign Ministry officials to vote "conscientiously" when it comes to a nominee whom the minister wants to advance is tantamount to professional suicide. Before Foreign Ministry officials enter the committee's conference room, they bid their consciences farewell. For the last 29 years in which I have been covering the Foreign Ministry, I cannot recall even one incident in which a committee member dared to defy the minister or his representative on the committee. (In Ben Aryeh's case, the representative, who also chaired the meeting, was Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon.)

The officials know full well that a "nay" against the minister's nominee is declaring war on the man who determines their professional fate. In an interview to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz last year, the Foreign Ministry's Inspector-General Victor Harel leveled scathing criticism at Ben Aryeh's appointment as ambassador to Latvia and before that to Belarus (where he had handed Liberman the confidential material).

"We vetted him when he was the ambassador in Minsk and arrived at the conclusion that he was dysfunctional," Harel related, and elaborated: "Employees were on the breadline and he wasn't even aware of that." According to him, Ben Aryeh's appointment to Latvia was fundamentally wrong since eight months earlier the director-general's office disseminated an internal report about the ambassador's lacking performance in his previous tour.