Is that a Pager in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?
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As Paul suggested there are a great many angles to the exploding pager story…
The pagers began beeping just after 3:30 in the afternoon in Lebanon on Tuesday, alerting Hezbollah operatives to a message from their leadership in a chorus of chimes, melodies, and buzzes.
But it wasn’t the militants’ leaders. The pagers had been sent by Hezbollah’s archenemy, and within seconds the alerts were followed by the sounds of explosions and cries of pain and panic in streets, shops and homes across Lebanon.
Powered by just a few ounces of an explosive compound concealed within the devices, the blasts sent grown men flying off motorcycles and slamming into walls, according to witnesses and video footage. People out shopping fell to the ground, writhing in agony, smoke snaking from their pockets.
Some long range planning:
By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the operation. They said at least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.
B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive PETN, according to the three intelligence officers.
It’s not yet clear whether the Israelis managed to plant the idea among Hezbollah’s senior leadership that its communications were unreliable. I doubt that it would be necessary to fabricate much in order to create that perception; cell phones are necessarily a vulnerable way of sharing critical information, and in the past there have been a great many exploits that have either revealed information or revealed the location of personnel. But the Israelis were certainly ready to exploit this insecurity.
My biggest question regards the timing; this is something you can only do once, and so it’s best to time it around some other bigger operation that you’re planning. Evidently the Israelis caught wind that Hezbollah was about to sniff the operation out. I’m not yet sure that the strikes that Israel is currently undertaking against Hezbollah were part of the overall plan, but the point of destroying communications is to paralyze an organization at a critical moment. A second wave hit Hezbollah’s backup communications yesterday.
The entire operations is pretty sketchy from the point of view of international law, both in terms of the lack of discrimination (knowing that targets could be separated from civilians) and because there are specific prohibitions against booby-trapping civilian devices. This is probably why Israel hasn’t acknowledged the attacks.
The long-term implications are significant:
American officials intercepted giant Chinese-made power generators during the Trump administration that they believed had been altered to insert a “kill switch” that could be triggered from outside the country. And for more than a year now, American officials have been warning about “Volt Typhoon,” a Chinese intelligence operation to lace U.S. power grids with malware that could turn off the lights and the water supply, especially during a conflict over Taiwan.
Before the Chinese intelligence services wormed into America’s power grid, Russia did the same — and, to deter Moscow, the United States planted code in the Russian grid.
The early evidence, however, suggests that such techniques can bring about a tactical advantage but few strategic effects. Even the American-Israeli cyberattacks on the centrifuges in Iran — a highly classified, expensive operation code-named “Olympic Games” — set the Iranian program back by only a year or 18 months. Eventually it drove the program farther underground.
But attacks like the one on the centrifuges, or on power grids, are directed at big infrastructure, not hand-held devices. And so the attacks in Lebanon may herald a new wrinkle in such sabotage, made to infect hand-held devices.
“Certainly, if Chinese or Russian intelligence could overheat electronic devices to cause fires, it might help keep defenders reeling in the early phases of a crisis,” Mr. Healey said. “But that seems a touch far-fetched, as there have been more than enough examples of going for physical destruction of electrical grids, for example.”
And for all of this magnificent operational planning… Israeli intelligence was unable to sniff out the intricately planned and carefully prepared for attacks by Hamas on 10/7. Keep that in mind when you read laudatory accounts of the lethality of Israel’s intelligence organizations.