The producer behind an Australian television program's involvement in a mother's botched child-snatching operation in Lebanon has lost his job, as the show's founder on Friday dubbed the debacle "the gravest misadventure in the program's history".

The comment by Australia's 60 Minutes founder Gerald Stone came amid the release of a damning internal review into the incident, in which the program paid a so-called child recovery agency to snatch an Australian woman's two children back from her estranged Lebanese husband.

Sally Faulkner said her children's father, Ali al-Amin, took them from their home in Australia to Beirut on a holiday last year and never returned. In April, Faulkner and a 60 Minutes crew covering her story went to Beirut in a bid to get back the children. But after agents hired by 60 Minutes grabbed the children off a Beirut street, the four-member TV crew, Faulkner, two agents from the Britain-based Child Abduction Recovery International company and two Lebanese men were jailed on kidnapping charges.