86. Mossad Pager Attack: The Long War with Hezbollah (Ep 1)

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30:08Welcome back. We're looking at the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which is going to result in this remarkable operation using pages against them. And we've arrived at the moment, I guess, of the 7th of October, 2023, this day when out of the blue, Israel is going to get attacked, not by Hezbollah, but by Hamas. The 7th of October, 2023, 846 Israeli civilians are killed, 278 soldiers. Hamas takes 251 hostages. It's the deadliest day in Israel's history. And this takes Hassan Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership, I think, by surprise. But as we discussed earlier in this episode, even though Hezbollah and Hamas, they fought actually on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, both of these organizations are part of this axis of resistance.

30:57They're both dedicated to this fight against Israel. They're both partnered with the Iranians. Nasrallah is, I think, wary of a broader conflict with the Israelis, because even though he quote unquote won in 2006, he won at tremendous cost in Lebanon, right? And he's not, I think, at this moment, keen for a broader conflict with the Israelis. But because Hezbollah is sort of carrying this banner as the preeminent resistance organization to the Israelis, all of a sudden, I think with the Israelis then starting to effectively pound Gaza and Hamas, Nasrallah doesn't think that Hezbollah can just sit this out.

31:38For Hezbollah's status across the Middle East as one of the leading resistance organizations, you get the feeling what he's trying to do is to show that they are supporting Hamas and the people of Gaza, but without necessarily quite getting into a full-scale war with Israel. So they start launching missiles and drones, don't they, against the Israelis? But it's fairly limited in terms of what they're doing and where they're doing it. It is. I think it is limited relative to what Hezbollah might have been able to do. But of course, it's still massively disruptive in Israel. And it's deadly. I mean, there are 150 ,000 civilians that get displaced on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border in the first month after the 7th of October.

32:22And I think Hezbollah and the Israelis kind of settle into this back and forth, almost kind of staring contest slash war of attrition in which it's not quite a full conflict, but at any point in time, you get the sense that a miscalculation from one side or this sort of conflict spiral could happen where you end up back in a conflict like the 2006 war, this kind of full scale conflict between both sides. And amid this broader war of attrition, in November of 2023, so just a couple months after the 7th of October, the Israelis began targeting and killing senior Hezbollah commanders, including members of an elite Hezbollah group called the Radwan Force, which is Hezbollah's premier special operations unit.

33:12They start to kill these commanders. It happens kind of throughout the winter. It happens again in January when there's another Radwan commander and actually a top Hamas official in Beirut are both killed in kind of an Israeli targeted killing. And these targeted killings in the first few months of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah convinces Hassan Nasrallah that he's got some problems. And he's thinking, you know, are my commanders and my fighters being tracked by their cell phones, as you read at the beginning? Which was the opening statement where he goes, the cell phone is the collaborator.

33:46This is leading them to know where we are. They can pinpoint your location. Clearly, that is what's in their mind that the Israelis are in the telecoms, in the cell phone network, which I'm sure they probably were, and therefore able to track and pinpoint specific commanders. So obviously, they've been doing what they can to protect their operational security, but they've still got that fear, haven't they, that they're going to get hit through the cell phones or at least located through them. We should also note that Hezbollah has a private fiber optic fixed line telecom network, which at this point in 2023 is maybe 20 years old.

34:19It runs from those Hezbollah strongholds in the south of Beirut down to southern Lebanon and east into the Bukat Valley. The Iranians had helped them set it up. And it's a bit unclear from the publicly available reporting, but it seems that Hezbollah believes that even this had been breached by the Israelis probably prior to the 7th of October. I thought banks and trading companies were the only people who had private fiber optic fixed line telecoms networks, but clearly Hezbollah as well. But anyway, there you go. Yeah, it turns out if you're running an extremely paranoid paramilitary slash terrorist organization in a constant state of war with the state of Israel, you probably want the best possible telecommunications infrastructure.

34:56Oh, and by the way, the Israelis are also going to find a way into it. So as the Gaza war kind of unfolds, Hezbollah's telecom specialists are starting to actually break that overall fiber optic network down into a cluster of smaller networks to limit the damage if it's breached again. So you get the sense of this organization that is feeling squeezed by Mossad, by the Israelis. And on the 28th of December, 2023, Hezbollah sends a telegram message out to residents of southern Lebanon, basically telling them to disconnect security cameras from the internet, because Hezbollah is concerned that the Israelis have access to these security cameras throughout the south, which would allow them to use that to create targeting packages for the Israeli Air Force.

35:39So everyone's being told to get rid of their phones, basically. Phones, security cameras, everything, because they know the Israelis are in them. That's right. And by early February, so around the time of Nasrallah's speech, which you read, there's another directive that goes out, which is that Hezbollah fighters cannot have their cell phones anywhere near the battlefield. And there's a Lebanese source that's quoted in this period who said, quote, today, if anyone is found with their phone on the front, he is kicked out of Hezbollah. And so soldiers, Hezbollah soldiers begin leaving their phones behind when they carry out operations.

36:10And Hezbollah actually has administrative officers who are carrying out snap checks to make sure no one's got phones. So I guess the question is, if you can't use your phone, what do you do? And if you have suspicions about your fiber optic landline network, what do you do? Well, Gordon, how about pagers, right? What about a pager? A pager would be an interesting way to solve some of these problems, wouldn't it? When this happened, and I did a news report about it, lots of people said to me, what is a pager? Young people out there, young people out there do not know what a pager is. So I think we should maybe just do a brief explainer about what a pager is.

36:45Because I had the pager when I started work as a journalist, actually. It was late 90s. I'm dating myself. Sorry, David, you are probably still at school, but we didn't have mobile phones. So we were given pages and it's a one way communication device. So it can receive broadcast text messages from someone you can send from one place to many. And, you know, you can receive a message which normally said on the pager, please call the news desk. So it's a kind of simple way of communicating with a lot of people. but the idea is because it's a one-way broadcast out to the pagers it's not tracking where the pager is and the pager itself is not sending data back to the other side in the way a mobile phone is or through cell phone towers or other things simply the the message goes out and the pager picks it up so in that i guess is why if you're worried about being tracked you would think a pager is is a more secure communications device and you would be right wouldn't you i mean despite the tremendous disaster that will befall Hezbollah here, you would be correct in that.

37:48I mean, it's not connected to the internet, and it's not going to give away your location or even your identity. And it would still allow you to communicate, and which from the perspective of an organization like Hezbollah makes a ton of sense. So the concept for this operation inside Mossad probably originates in 2021 or 2022, so more than a year before the 7th of October. The broader concept of rigging communications devices with explosives inside them goes back even further. There's some reporting from the Washington Post. Maybe this is like 2015, where the Israelis had successfully embedded explosives in thousands of walkie-talkies that Hezbollah was using.

38:32But the issue with the walkie-talkies is that they're only used in battle. Large numbers of them would sit idle in kind of storehouses, and they wouldn't be kept on a person. So it's not the most effective tool for really dealing a blow to Hezbollah's command and control structure. And so those walkie-talkies are sitting idle on the 7th of October, even though they do have some rigged. Now, the Israelis have tremendous insight into Hezbollah's decision making, both from a signals intelligence standpoint and a human intelligence standpoint, right? And the Israelis know that Hezbollah has been looking for sort of hack-proof electronic networks for relaying messages.

39:18And by, at least by 2022, the Israelis see that Hezbollah is interested in pagers. And so the idea inside Mossad becomes, how do we sort of infect Hezbollah's supply chain with pagers of our manufacture? And it's a simple concept, but essentially taking over part of your adversary's supply chain is really not an easy intelligence operation to pull off. It's very complicated. And we should note here, Gordon, because we're going to go into the nuts and bolts as we understand it today of how the Israelis did this. We should say, fair warning for listeners, it is complicated. The way that the Israelis set this up, it is designed to be very difficult for anybody, whether it be Hezbollah or journalists, investigative journalists, to understand what you're looking at when you look at the web of organizations and people and the actual creation of these products.

40:21So we're going to do this justice, but just be warned that there's a lot going on here, right? Because what do you need to really infect your adversary's supply chain? Well, overall, you need a seemingly legitimate operation that is fed by clean cash that has zero connection to the state of Israel. And there's a real balance here because to do that, you need to appropriate legitimate legal and organizational structures, but you also need enough flexibility so that you can essentially below the waterline produce a product that has explosives in it. Right? So that balance is very hard to strike.

41:06Yeah, because of course, what you can't do is just suddenly create a made up pager company or brand, because that would immediately look suspicious. And yet you still need to be able to control this enough to do what you're going to do in terms of, as we'll see, explosives and things inside pages, and to have enough control of it. So that's the tension, isn't it, between legitimacy and control, effectively, in the cover story you develop. If you're going to purchase a product, and especially if you're running procurement for a large organization, you don't want to buy from some no-name brand that has no established track record, right?

41:42So the first thing you want is a big brand that you, the Mossad, can sort of work under or appropriate. Because, again, if you're the Hezbollah procurement guy, it's going to be hard for you to justify buying something from some unknown company that's got no sort of digital trail, no reviews, right? So what the Israelis do is that in, again, probably 2021, 2022, the CEO of a Taiwanese-based pager manufacturer known as Gold Apollo, it's a big name in pagers, and he is approached by a former employee of his, a woman named Teresa Wu, and she is working with someone named Tom. Now, we don't know Tom's last name.

42:26I think there's good reason to believe that Tom is either an officer under non-official cover for the Mossad or a witting asset of the Mossad. We don't know, we should say. Now, Tom is Taiwan based. He's Austrian. He is apparently the big boss of this operation. And he and Teresa Wu ink a licensing agreement with Gold Apollo, which will allow them to distribute pagers under the Gold Apollo brand. And of course, Gold Apollo, the big Gold Apollo in Taiwan, they're not going to manufacture the pagers, right? Mossad needs to do that. And so they need a few more layers to obscure everything from the eventual buyers in Hezbollah.

43:08And now a few different organizations enter the picture here. And again, this is confusing by design. Also note that all the people that we're going to discuss here have since vanished from public view after the pager attacks. They're nowhere to be found. The first organization is a group called BAC Consulting. It is based in Hungary. It's founded by a woman named Dr. Christiana Barsoni. BAC Consulting is a strange corporation. It looks from the outside like a company that's got a lot of different kind of ideas that maybe don't necessarily connect. When you look at Christiana Barsoni, her online profile is a little bit more like she's an influencer rather than the CEO of a company that's actually a real going concern.

43:55But she has a PhD in particle physics. She does, from UCL. And that's true. She does have that. A very prestigious university, I should add, in London, UCL. A very serious. That's right. And alma mater of our intrepid producer, Becky. Now, pretty much everybody in this story has a hyphenated nationality. So Dr. Christiana is a Hungarian-Italian dual citizen who has her PhD in particle physics from UCL. She's done some very interesting fabrication on her CV, even though she does actually legitimately have the PhD. She says she has degrees from SOAS and the London School of Economics. What does SOAS stand for, by the way, Aaron?

44:37School of Oriental and African Studies. African Studies, that's right. So she spent a lot of time in London, by the way. That's right. I mean, those are three London universities, UCL, SOAS, and LSE. Yeah. Now, she doesn't actually have the degrees from SOAS and LSE. That's not true. She also says she's a board member at the Earth Child Institute, which is not true, and claims she was a project manager at the IAEA when, in fact, she was just an intern for eight months. She is also trying to dabble in morel mushroom trading from Patagonia. So she's kind of all over the place, right? Yeah, that's an unusual mix.

45:09It is. Mushrooms and particle physics. I mean, that's like... Particle physics. Yeah. We should note here, there is a team at Reuters that has done absolutely stellar work to break this story. And we will actually, for our club members, be having a conversation with one of the members of that team, James Pearson, at the end of this series. On how he did it. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, and exactly like how they broke this story. But we should say immense credit to that team here, because we basically wouldn't be able to tell the story without the exceptional work done by Reuters. So we've got BAC Consulting in Hungary, Dr.

45:45Christiana Barsoni. And interestingly enough, Gordon, in sort of 2023, Dr. Christiana mentions to friends that BAC Consulting has just recently gotten an investor, Paris-based investor. Reuters, again, uncovers that Dr. Barsoni actually went from borrowing cash from friends to lending it after she gets this mysterious investor who sort of pumps BAC Consulting with some cash. I think there's potentially reason to speculate that it is our mysterious guy, Tom, who is maybe the investor or someone connected to him. and BAC Consulting, it is a subsidiary of a group called Frontier Group Entity. Love it.

46:31Which is... What does that mean? Sounds like something that I don't know. Universal import export. It's in that world, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Like, chat, if I was like, give me a name for my cover business, I think ChatGPT would come up with something like that. And I think this is probably how the Israelis pumped BAC with cash, so that BAC essentially becomes a front for the Israelis to acquire the stuff to build the pagers, right? So BAC pays a firm in Hong Kong for logistical services. They pay a firm to make the display module for the beepers, and they sort of purchase additional parts for the beepers, like metal chains and crystal display panels, things like that.

47:10And crucially, BAC Consulting acquires the license to distribute beepers under the Gold Apollo brand. So when Tom and Teresa Wu are going to, you know, sort of big Gold Apollo in Taipei, they are actually acquiring the license from Gold Apollo and buying it on behalf of BAC Consulting. Now, BAC is going to pay about three quarters of a million euros to Gold Apollo to acquire that license. Apparently, BAC, which is based in Hungary is going to use Middle Eastern intermediary banks that cause all manner of headaches for the gold Apollo accountants in Taiwan. And that licensing relationship goes back to like 2021 and 2022.

47:53And this takes us back to the money, because again, remember, you need clean cash to, you know, set up your front organizations here. But where's the money coming from? Because BAC Consulting, remember, prior to this investor had not really been in the black, right? I mean, it had been kind of Dr. Christiana dabbling in mushrooms and a lot of different things that kind of weren't actually generating cash flow. So here we have another strange company, which enters the picture. It's called Norta Global. And pay attention to this I'm actually going to read it directly to make sure I don't get any of these countries wrong.

48:29It is a Bulgarian company that is established by a man named Rinson Jose, who is a Norwegian Indian man who lives in Oslo and he has set up the company via the Bulgarian embassy in Oslo. Wow. So again, purposely confusing here. And we should note here, basically everyone else in the story, Rinson Jose, who's the head of - I was going to say, where is Rinson Jose now? He's vanished. Oh no, you surprised me. Yes, yes. He's disappeared magically. And we'll talk more with James Pearson, the Reuters journalist in our club interview about this, but Reuters got Rince and Jose on the phone after the pager attacks happened.

49:10And as soon as one of the journalists mentions Norta Global, Jose hangs up and he's never heard from again. So anyway, while Rince and Jose is running Norta, the company sends 2.6 million euros to BAC Consulting in transactions that are marked in the Norta Global books as services, right? Now, that's probably the money used to finance the fabrication of the pagers. And interestingly, just as you know, sort of dig into who Rinson Hosea is, he had a profile on an Israeli website, which connects entrepreneurs with Israeli investors. He had also tweeted once at Malala, the activist Malala, sort of defending Israel back in May of 2021.

49:53So again, it's not proof of anything, but he maybe looks like the sort of guy who, you know, if he's tapped on the shoulder by the Mossad might be happy to help. And so I don't think we know precisely what he was. He's probably not an actual Mossad officer, but he's somebody who would have sort of looked favorably on a request for help from the Israelis, most likely. Now, where did the 2.6 million euro come from? The sort of digging that's been done since, like if Hezbollah starts to dig, you want this to be really challenging for them and you don't want them to end up with like, oh, it came from a bank in Tel Aviv.

50:32Right. So the money came from two Hong Kong based companies that handle remittances. They're run by an Italian and a Swiss national, both of whom don't actually exist. Right. And one of those Hong Kong based companies, Ellenberg Trading, this is where you actually do get a connection back to Israel, paid Norta from a bank in Israel. So there's another layer here. It's money laundering, isn't it? It's a bit like when we've done stuff on criminal money laundering. We famously did the kind of billion dollar heist with the North Koreans stealing money. I'm half expecting someone to turn up in a casino in Macau here with suitcases of money in order to kind of launder it and hide the origin.

51:09But we can see that they fairly effectively moved the money to build it and, you know, create this cover story, which is pretty well distanced from Israel to do it. But the next question is, you've got to actually build these pages, haven't you? You have to make them. And that is a little bit more mysterious, isn't it? Where exactly they were made. That is still one of the unanswered questions about this whole operation. And Reuters looked at promotional videos of the pagers, because by the way, the Israelis created videos that are available on YouTube that showed the product, right? And there's a there's a USB stick in the video that's made by a German company.

51:52There's a wood desk in the video where you're kind of showing the pager. And in that video, there's this kind of short segment of silence. And when you amplify it, you get a hum that's at 50 hertz. That is consistent with a power frequency in Europe or in Israel, but not in Taiwan, where the hum would have happened at 60 hertz. Right. And so we can assume that these were not actually manufactured by gold Apollo in Taiwan because of that. Given what we know, I don't think we're giving too much away to say that there's going to be something very nasty inside these pages, something explosive. If you were Mossad, would you risk making them in a third country, like in a kind of, I don't know, in Hungary or Europe or somewhere?

52:35I'd have thought you'd do it in Israel to kind of if you've got to kind of get that much explosives and material into it. because we're talking about a lot of stuff and to keep control of it and to avoid any kind of thing going bang by mistake. So as you said, we don't know. My guess is they do it in country, but who knows? I wouldn't do it in Israel. You wouldn't? No, I don't think so. I mean - Where would you do it, David? Where would you build some exploding pages? I would do it in Hungary. I would do all of the design and testing in Israel. I'd have your prototype built there. You'd figure out exactly how you put it together.

53:07You'd test it a bunch. and then once you've got sort of your blueprints for it, I would do it in Hungary because I would source everything from Europe and I would not have any of the pagers that are being sent to Hezbollah ever on Israeli soil, period. But anyway, it's a fascinating trail which has led us to this point where all of these front companies have been set up, which clearly has the Israeli hand hidden Merkley in the background. But with that, let's stop because next time... will understand how they come into the hands of Hezbollah and, crucially, what's inside them and what's going to happen when they get triggered.

53:47But, Gordon, members of the Declassified Club, and we would encourage all of you to join, will not only get access or have access to the second episode and conclusion of this thrilling series right now, but they will also get access to a raft of bonus content, including our interview with James Pearson, the Reuters investigative journalist who was so critical to breaking the story. So we hope you join. We'll see you next time. See you next time.

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