A group of Israeli executives were in an ebullient mood earlier this year after seeing how exploding pagers, sent by the Mossad, had killed or maimed thousands of Hizbollah militants and civilians in Lebanon.
Then they met a former European spymaster. Instead of high-fiving the executives over the Israeli sabotage, the ex-intelligence chief doused their high spirits with an unforgiving appraisal.
Operations must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legally approved in this country, the former spy chief told them during a business conference. On that count the exploding pagers “did not meet my test”.
The synchronised detonation on September 17 of thousands of Hizbollah electronic pagers left security officials around the world stunned by the operation’s audacity and mystified over the elaborate front companies that Israel set up to supply the booby-trapped devices.
Yet the attack, a reworking of the Trojan horse for the digital age, has also triggered a broader debate among western security chiefs that has left them grappling with two fundamental questions over modern spycraft.
Are their own communication systems similarly vulnerable to interception? And would they ever approve a comparable operation — given that the pager attack killed 37 people, including at least four civilians, two of them children, and injured about 3,000?
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior security officials from four of Israel’s most important western allies, all acknowledged that the pager attack was an extraordinary feat of espionage. But only three said they would approve a similar act.
One said it set a dangerous precedent that non-state actors, such as terrorists or criminals, might use. Another concern was how the explosive-packed pagers were smuggled across Europe and the Middle East, posing a danger to property and human life along the route.
Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA, even described the pager attack in a television interview as a “form of terrorism”. Other officials took a similar view of an action that, with dark humour, some have nicknamed “Operation Grim Beeper”.
“It was just the sort of operation the Russians would do,” said a former intelligence chief. “I don’t think any other western intelligence service would even consider that sort of operation, maiming thousands of people.”
“I like audacity, but on balance would not have approved the operation as it was not fully targeted,” a senior defence official said. “There was a chance the pagers could, say, kill a child who happened to be holding it.”
“It was an extraordinary operation — even if many western states might consider it murder,” said another former senior intelligence official. “Defence ministries around the world will now be asking themselves: how do we protect ourselves from similar sabotage?”
People familiar with the operation say it was caused by a small but potent plastic explosive hidden in the pagers’ batteries and a detonator invisible to X-rays that was triggered remotely.
Israel initially denied any involvement in the attack, but several weeks after it happened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Le Monde that he personally approved the operation.
It is of a piece with other operations by Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. In 1972, Israeli operatives blew up a phone they had implanted with explosives, which was used by the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s representative in Paris. The man, Mahmoud Hamshari, lost a leg and later died. In 1996, they repeated the trick with Yahya Ayyash, a skilled Hamas bombmaker.
One important difference with the 2024 pager attack was its scale. In addition, the next day a further series of explosions — this time of booby-trapped walkie-talkies used by Hizbollah operatives — killed another 20 people and wounded 450, according to Lebanese authorities.
Outside the region, the operation has raised urgent concerns about the risk of copycat 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 pay them no attention,” he said. “But the west has got to properly price the risks inherent in supply chains — be that Russian energy, Chinese electronics, or now this — and put them alongside other risks, such as AI, drones and cyber warfare.”
That includes the possibility that supply chains could be intercepted by terrorists, a point addressed 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 get to”.
Supply chain sabotage and assassinations are as old as spycraft itself. Medieval armies used spies to act as merchants to discover what their adversaries were buying. They would also poison water supplies, according to Calder Walton, a historian of espionage.
More recently, during the cold war, the CIA smuggled flawed computer chips into supply chains that the Soviet Union used to steal western technology via commercial front companies.
The most successful example of the CIA’s campaign was some malfunctioning software that blew apart a gas pipeline in a three-kilotonne explosion in 1982. No one was killed, and the repairs cost the Kremlin millions of roubles it could ill-afford.
At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of US officials worried that if Israel could booby trap mundane electronic gadgets such as pagers, a whole range of Chinese civilian technologies — such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, almost anything with a battery — could also be weaponised.
“The new digital world allows for previously unimaginable means of sabotage,” Walton said.
Not all of the interviewed officials believed the operation was either disproportionate or unnecessary. As one put it bluntly: “War is about violence”.
Younger said he did not judge the attack to be an indiscriminate use of violence because the pagers were used by Hizbollah operatives, and Israel was at war with the militant group. However, he cautioned that “decapitation operations are most effective in the context of a broader strategy — they are not an end in themselves”.
One senior western security official went so far as to call it a “very beautiful operation . . . I am jealous”. Western countries might balk at Israel’s apparent disregard for civilian casualties caused by the attack, the official said, but it paled in comparison to the ferocity with which the Israeli military had attacked Gaza and Lebanon.
“They [the Israelis] have their own methods of assessing that — and a different threshold,” the official added.
What does seem clear is that targeted killings remain central to Israel’s security operations in a way that they do not among its western allies, where civilian casualties during wartime are widely seen as unacceptable.
In the first 17 years of this century alone, Israel conducted more than 2,000 targeted killing operations, according to Ronen Bergman, author of a history of Israeli assassinations. Over the same period, the US authorised less than a fifth of that amount.
“Israel’s security calculations are different from the west’s,” said John Raine, a senior adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They live in a rough neighbourhood and have been brutalised by that. The saving grace is that Israel is aware of this. The worry is that it appears to care ever less.”
Such considerations leave as moot the question whether a western intelligence agency would ever approve its own version of Operation Grim Beeper.
As one official commented: “If our state was also facing a similar existential threat as Israel does, what would we do? The answer is that it all depends on conditions that we can’t anticipate until we get there.”
Illustration by Bob Haslett
Read the full article here
