DAZED by a powerful mix of failure and foreboding, the would-be suicide bomber looks up into the eyes, not of the Archangel Jibril, but an Israeli Shin Bet interrogator for whom there is one overriding priority.

“Were you working alone, or is there another one out there?” And so the interrogation begins: who, what, where, when, how, how many?

“Why?” may be asked as an afterthought, once the alert is over and the full apparatus of the State — police, cameras, checkpoints, army, informers, wiretaps, mobile phone scanners, spies and ruthless interrogators — have reported back that no one else appears to be on the loose.

A failed bomber is a prize for any intelligence agency, be it the Israelis, Indians in Kashmir or Americans in Iraq. “We need their buddies, not their bodies,” went the dictum of Avi Dichter, a former Shin Bet chief.

But strangely the real prize may not be the survivor. Whether highly intelligent or duped recruit, they probably know few of the bomb-making cell that dispatched from Jenin, Nablus or Bethlehem one of the 142 suicide bombers Israel has experienced in the five-year intifada.

“Capturing one of the bombs is often more important than capturing the bomber,” one Israeli official told The Times yesterday. “Once you have got that intact then you can get a signature off it, and learn a lot from that. Once you are content that there isn’t another bomber on the loose you turn to finding out who drove them, who recruited them and so on.”

Cracking the cell — often a group of just three or four Hamas, Islamic Jihad or al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades godfathers — can be done from a name, an address, a meeting place or telephone records gleaned from interrogation.

Often the bomber is very low down the chain, knowing only the person who contacted him. Sometimes they crack easily, suffused with a sense of failure that is readily exploited by trained questioners. Other times they give up more than they intended to, simply by repeating the mantras they learnt from their handlers.

“Sometimes we use their weaknesses against them — bravado or indoctrination to get them talking, get them boasting,” the source said. “Once they begin talking the more you learn about them, and when details start coming in from family, friends and informers you have more to put to them. Sometimes just the psychological shock of surviving when they didn’t expect to jolts them out of the brainwashing they were given.”

In Iraq there are different problems and priorities for the Iraqi and US-led multinational forces facing daily bombing attacks. The Israelis have had 38 years during their military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza to create a network of informers and intelligence agents; not so the Americans.

There the insurgency draws volunteers from across the Arab and Muslim world, so the focus is on gleaning intelligence to crack the supply chain. US intelligence officials in Baghdad say one problem is that the bombers often know little themeselves. They are typically fanatics kept waiting across the border in Syria until hours before their operation, then smuggled into Iraq, united with their weapon, and dispatched to the chosen target.

Interrogators have established that bombers are brought across the border by people-smuggling rings motivated more by money than ideology. They are then brought to the Islamist group inside Iraq which, in turn, often relies on detailed intelligence provided by their Baathist co-insurgents who have intimate knowledge of the terrain.

One Iraqi intelligence officer said that some suicide bombers are heavily drugged when they are caught, and need two or three days to recover their senses before interrogation.

Interrogators say that some of the foreign jihadists are very willing to talk once captured, being naïve young idealists who have become disillusioned with what they have witnessed of the Iraqi insurgency, such as kidnappings, car thefts and tribal debt-settling. While easier to question, they often have less to tell, often not knowing exactly where they are.

Some home-grown Iraqi suicide bombers prove much tougher to crack, and therefore constitute a far richer source of potential intelligence. These men are likely to face instant interrogation, including physical beatings, to divulge their knowledge of safe houses, lists of comrades and weapons caches.

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