A group of Israeli leaders were in an exuberant mood earlier this year after seeing how explosive pagers sent by the Mossad had killed or maimed thousands of Hezbollah militants and civilians in Lebanon.
Then they met a former European spymaster. Instead of praising leaders for Israeli sabotage, the former intelligence chief doused their good humor with a merciless assessment.
Operations must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legally authorized in this country, the former intelligence chief told them at a business conference. On this point, the explosive pagers “did not meet my criteria.”
The September 17 synchronized detonation of thousands of Hezbollah electronic pagers left security officials around the world stunned by the audacity of the operation and perplexed by the elaborate front companies Israel set up to provide trapped devices.
Yet the attack, a reworking of the Trojan for the digital age, also sparked a broader debate among Western security chiefs that left them grappling with two fundamental questions about modern espionage.
Are their own communications systems also vulnerable to interception? And would they ever approve a comparable operation — given that the pager attack killed 37 people, including at least four civilians, including two children, and injured about 3,000 people?
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior security officials from four of the IsraelNATO’s most important Western allies all recognized that the pager attack was an extraordinary feat of espionage. But only three of them said they would approve similar legislation.
One said it sets a dangerous precedent that non-state actors, such as terrorists or criminals, could exploit. Another concern was how the explosive-filled pagers were being smuggled through Europe and the Middle East, posing a danger to property and human life along the route.
Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA, even called the pager attack in a television interview a “form of terrorism.” Other officials have taken a similar view of an action that, with dark humor, some have dubbed “Operation Grim Beeper.”
“It was exactly the kind of operation the Russians would carry out,” said a former intelligence chief. “I don’t think any other Western intelligence service would even consider such an operation, mutilating thousands of people.”
“I like the boldness, but overall I would not have approved the operation because it was not fully targeted,” a senior defense official said. “There was a chance that the pagers could, for example, kill a child who was holding it.”
“It was an extraordinary operation, even though many Western states might consider it murder,” said another former senior intelligence official. “Defense ministries around the world will now ask: How can we protect ourselves against similar sabotage?
People familiar with the matter say it was caused by a small but powerful plastic explosive hidden in pager batteries and an X-ray-invisible detonator that was detonated remotely.
Israel initially denied any involvement in the attack, but a few weeks later Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Le Monde that he had personally approved the operation.
This operation is part of other operations carried out by the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad. In 1972, Israeli agents blew up a phone they had planted explosives there which were used by the PLO representative in Paris. The man, Mahmoud Hamshari, lost a leg and later died. In 1996, they repeated the operation with Yahya Ayyash, a skilled Hamas bomb maker.
An important difference from the 2024 pager attack was its scale. Additionally, the next day, a new series of explosions – this time from booby-trapped walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members – killed another 20 people and injured 450, according to Lebanese authorities.
Outside the region, the operation raised urgent concerns about the risk of copied sabotage operations.
Sir Alex Younger, former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, warned that the attack was a “valuable wake-up call” about the vulnerability of Western supply chains.
“Because supply chains are invisible, we don’t pay attention to them,” he said. “But the West must properly assess the risks inherent in supply chains – whether Russian energy, Chinese electronics or now this one – and put them alongside other risks, such as AI, drones and cyberwar. »
This includes the possibility of supply chains being intercepted by terrorists, a point raised by Ken McCallum, head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5.
Asked about the pager operation at a rare press conference in October, McCallum replied that an important aspect of MI5’s work was to “stay ahead of where terrorism might happen”.
Supply chain sabotage and assassinations are as old as espionage itself. Medieval armies used spies to act as merchants to find out what their opponents were buying. They would also poison water supplies, according to espionage historian Calder Walton.
More recently, during the Cold War, the CIA smuggled faulty computer chips into supply chains that the Soviet Union used to steal Western technology through commercial front companies.
The most successful example of the CIA campaign was faulty software that destroyed a gas pipeline in a three-kiloton explosion in 1982. No one was killed and repairs cost the Kremlin millions rubles he couldn’t afford.
At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of US officials expressed concern that while Israel could trap mundane electronic gadgets such as pagers, a range of Chinese civilian technologies – such as electric vehicles, solar panels Solar power, wind turbines, almost anything with a battery – could also be weaponized.
“The new digital world enables previously unimaginable means of sabotage,” Walton said.
Not all officials interviewed believed the operation was disproportionate or unnecessary. As they say bluntly: “War is about violence.”
Younger said he did not view the attack as an indiscriminate use of violence because the pagers had been used by Hezbollah operatives and Israel was at war with the militant group. He cautioned, however, that “decapitation operations are most effective in the context of a broader strategy – they are not an end in themselves.”
A senior Western security official went so far as to call it a “very good operation.” . . I’m jealous.” Western countries might balk at Israel’s apparent disregard for the civilian casualties caused by the attack, the official said, but that pales in comparison to the ferocity with which the Israeli military attacked Gaza and Lebanon .
“They [the Israelis] have their own assessment methods – and a different threshold,” the official added.
What seems clear is that targeted killings remain at the core of Israel’s security operations, unlike its Western allies, where civilian casualties in war are widely considered unacceptable.
In the first 17 years of this century alone, Israel carried out more than 2,000 targeted killing operations, according to Ronen Bergman, author of a history of Israeli assassinations. During the same period, the United States authorized less than a fifth of that amount.
“Israel’s security calculations are different from those of the West,” said John Raine, a senior adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They live in a difficult neighborhood and have been brutalized by it. The saving grace is that Israel realizes this. The problem is that he seems to care less and less.
Such considerations leave moot the question of whether a Western intelligence agency would ever approve its own version of Operation Grim Beeper.
As one official commented: “If our state also faced an existential threat similar to that of Israel, what would we do? The answer is that it all depends on conditions that we cannot anticipate until we get there. »
Illustration by Bob Haslett
