Are being a puppet and getting tricked mutually exclusive to you? Intelligence assets rarely have the full picture of what their handlers plans for them or their target are. Most of them think or are made to think that they are indispensable to the their masters.

Really hard to think that al-Julani consciously accepted to shake hands with western high level politicians and made the new free Syrian leader one day and the next Israeli media is making him the next Osama bin laden, while he has to flee Damascus because Israeli bombs.