There has been a lot of attention this week to the news that Switzerland considered sending special forces to free its two citizens detained in Libya.

Even the international media has reported, with surprise, on the revelation that this famously neutral country should have contemplated such a thing.

Personally I’m surprised there is surprise. I would be more shocked by a government which didn’t at least consider such an option on behalf of its citizens.

But in Swiss government circles now there is consternation that this information should be in the public domain. Why? After all, none of it became known until Max Göldi was safely back home. I suspect what is really worrying the mandarins at the defence department and the department of foreign affairs is how chaotic the rescue plans look. It appears that only those two government departments knew anything about them—the rest of the govt was not informed.

And the plans themselves have raised some eyebrows. I, perhaps naively, had pictured a Swiss rescue mission to Tripoli as a Saigon-style operation, with a red and white helicopter—kind of like the ones that come to the rescue of injured skiers—hovering over the Swiss embassy, with Max Göldi and Rachid Hamdani being gratefully winched to safety, while angry Libyans shook their fists in the air.

But apparently it was more complicated and a number of quite bizarre operations were reviewed, including spiriting the two men off to the coast, where a submarine—yes, you heard that right—would be lurking, ready to take them back to landlocked Switzerland. Now I know the Swiss military may have some secrets, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have a submarine.

Back to the drawing board then—how about taking them out of Libya via a land route across the desert in fact, guided by Tuaregs, maybe on the backs of camels? This too was apparently considered, and possibly even approved, ’round about the same time as the then Swiss president Hans Rudolf Merz, blissfully ignorant of this plan, was climbing into his presidential jet to Tripoli and rehearsing his apology to Muammar Gaddafi, in the hope of bringing the hostages back himself.

Unfortunately Libya’s leader had got wind of the Tuareg camel conspiracy, and that’s why, some now claim, Mr Merz’s mission to Libya ended in abject failure.

Now that the crisis with Libya is pretty much over, we can all have a bit of a laugh about the bumbling wannabe James Bonds in Bern, but maybe inside those government departments they need to have a think about this story, and how it became public. Because there is nothing wrong, even for a neutral country, in considering using force to rescue citizens in danger.

So if, heaven forbid, something like this happens again, make the plans, involve the government, and once everything’s over, tell the public yourself. Don’t leave it to leak out, and don’t leave government ministers in the dark.

That’s what really looks ridiculous, not the submarines and the camels.