87. Mossad Pager Attack: Crippling Hezbollah (Ep 2)

19:39Gordon:I like to think that the time lag in the two months was that one of the Hezbollah buyers or a cutout legitimately posts something on here trying to figure out where this battery is from and if anyone's used it. And then someone in Mossad at some point is doing research online on their own battery and comes across this post and says, oh, crap, we need to respond to this. And so then they join the forum and respond and say that this battery is great. And again, in September of 2023, so a year before the attacks, a site called electronicspowerbatteries.com is registered. On the 12th of October of 2023, puristbattery.com is registered.

20:20Gordon:And these are battery stores, online battery stores that have the LIBT783 plastic explosive laden battery listed in their catalog.

20:29David:What if someone else had tried to order the batteries from them? You can't sell them exploding batteries. So I guess you go, oh, we're out of stock at the moment.

20:38Gordon:Apparently, the Israelis, when they did get legitimate outreach from buyers that weren't Hezbollah, they made the price so outrageous that the conversation just stopped. And we'll see they'll do the exact opposite with Hezbollah. So now all of these users disappear from these forums on the 20th of September, 2024. So immediately after the pager attacks and the websites are scrubbed from the web. Now, Hezbollah buys maybe 5 ,000 of the painters. And as I just hinted, there apparently was a negotiation in which maybe some of the uncertainty around the newness of this battery was starting to give the Hezbollah buyers pause.

21:18Gordon:But they are apparently convinced because the saleswoman, who may have been Teresa Wu, we're not sure, just kept lowering the price, just kept bringing the price down. So anytime the Hezbollah guy started to walk away, she would say, no, we'll do it for less. And she offered the first batch free of charge. And Hezbollah takes delivery of these in February of 2024, which is right around this point where Nasrallah, Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general in the organization, this sort of paranoia about the extent to which Mossad has penetrated the organization, has reached a fever pitch. And they finally have a potential answer to this penetration by Mossad, which is these dumb pagers that won't actually allow the Israelis to target us or to know where we're located or what we're saying to one another.

22:09Gordon:The pages are handed out and they just sort of sit there dormant for a while.

22:14David:So there with Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah having obtained what they think are the perfect secure means of communication, freeing them from the tyranny of surveillance by the cell phone, we'll take a break. And when we come back, we'll look at how these pages get used and perhaps also if we can try and get to the reason why and what the impact will be. See you after the break. Hey parents, how do you make smarter choices for your kids' college today? That's where Sally can help. With Sally, you can find scholarships, funding options, tools, and guidance all in one place. And if you need a loan, Sally has options for different families and different situations.

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24:12David:welcome back so hezbollah has taken delivery at these remarkably cut price pages which have been mysteriously supplied to them by someone which this never happens to me who's offering to keeps lowering the price until you buy something but they've got them unknowing unbeknownst to them what's hidden inside the crucial question is are they going to get used and why with those explosives inside.

24:39Gordon:That's right. And this is probably the point to bring the conversation directly into kind of the Israeli decision-making calculus, because Hezbollah has got these things. And as we had mentioned in the first episode, the Israelis, by the time we hit the fall, or I guess autumn, Gordon, of 2024, they are in this kind of war of attrition with Hezbollah.

25:04David:Low-level conflict, isn't it?

25:06Gordon:It has been deadly, but you're right. It is a low-level conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that is going on in the north as the Israelis are fighting in Gaza. And I think it's worth spending a little bit of time on kind of the view from Tel Aviv, the view from Netanyahu's chair, the Israeli prime minister, as he looks north, right? So Hezbollah has, for really the entire year of the conflict up to this point in September of 2024, Hezbollah has explicitly linked the northern front that they are maintaining to the conflict in Gaza. Even though Nasrallah doesn't want a full-on war like he got in 2006, he wants this low-level conflict to show solidarity with Hamas, and frankly, because the whole point of Hezbollah really is to fight Israel.

25:56Gordon:Given what Israel has been doing in Gaza as of 2024, this is a problem for Netanyahu because the Israelis are not going to stop in Gaza, as we've seen. So Netanyahu is facing the prospect of this two-front conflict in perpetuity. By summer of 2024, just to kind of set the stage for what Netanyahu and his team are looking at, there have been 8 ,500 cross-border attacks between Israel and Lebanon. Israel has conducted about three quarters of them. They've killed maybe 600 people in Lebanon. 21 Israeli soldiers have died, maybe a dozen civilians. Hezbollah rocket fire from the north has started forest fires.

26:33Gordon:It's burned about 3 ,000 acres. The Israeli government has evacuated 60 ,000 people from towns in northern Israel, sending them down south, and maybe 20 ,000 more people have left on their own. So this has created a kind of de facto buffer zone, which has then enabled Hezbollah to fire much more frequently at some of these northern towns without incurring the civilian casualties that would have escalated the conflict. So in And kind of a way, the sort of depopulation of parts of the north has made it easier for Hezbollah to just keep firing without escalating things. So the Netanyahu government is in this kind of awkward and, I think to them, unsustainable stasis because the Hezbollah attacks are growing much more sophisticated.

27:15Gordon:They're using drones and precision guided munitions. it's kind of turning into a bit of a lab for Hezbollah to test Israel's capabilities to kind of study the way the conflict is morphing. They can look at defense and surveillance systems in Israel. They can kind of poke around for weaknesses. And in the summer of 2024, Hezbollah has actually begun hitting Israeli positions with drones, in some cases without triggering air raid sirens. Hezbollah is sort of getting better at targeting the Israelis over the course of this conflict. And crucially, you know, we mentioned in the last episode that one of the things that had spooked Hassan Nasrallah was the assassinations by Israel of elite Hezbollah commandos, members of this Radwan force.

28:00Gordon:And what the Israelis are concerned about in 2024, and I think we should say, I'm not sure how justified it is, but they are legitimately concerned about it, is that these Hezbollah-Radwan forces, which are their kind of special operations units might be considering or planning a kind of 7 October style attack across the northern board.

28:23David:I mean, I remember some of that speculation because you're right that the conflict had been going on. The Israelis are worried about escalating the war. There was that talk about the northern front. But there was also, I think, that slight sense in Israel as well, which is we have an opportunity to strike at all our enemies now. We're effectively in a war with Hamas, but we might as well take out other parts of the axis of resistance because they're ultimately going to do it, of course, with Iran as well and take on Iran. And Hezbollah is part of that. You feel like they are also seeking to use the moment and the opportunity to basically go after their enemies as hard as they can.

28:59David:I agree it's hard to really be sure what the justification is versus the reality. And it might have been different as well between some of the military and some of the politicians, because we know there are some differences there in Israel. And there is also this question, I think, with the pages as well, whether there was a fear that the capability, which they've obviously put a huge amount of effort into to put in place, could expire, it could be discovered, and therefore needed to be used. So I think there is an element of mystery, isn't there, as to exactly why they decide to go for it at this moment.

29:30Gordon:I think you're right on all counts. I mean, it had been, I think, Israeli policy, But certainly, you know, sort of the aspiration was that eventually Hezbollah would be pushed sort of back from the border in the north, pushed north of the Latane River and forced to comply with the UN Security Council resolution that had ended the 2006 war, which Hezbollah did not comply with. And going back to just the aftermath of 2006, I think most in the Israeli government and security apparatus that another all out conflict with Hezbollah was inevitable, right? It was coming. It was just a matter of when.

30:06David:My sense is it's just the Israeli risk calculus has changed about what they're willing to tolerate. Their willingness to tolerate things post-October the 7th has changed, whether that's Hezbollah doing things north or whether it's Iran and its nuclear program. And that rather than it being a specific threat, they just made this decision. We're not going to tolerate these threats being on our border anymore because our kind of mentality has changed post-October the 7th. And they're going to go for it. But I do remember at the time there was definitely reporting, and I don't think it was ever confirmed, that someone in Hezbollah was also getting onto the pages and might have discovered something about them, and that that was also a kind of trigger for Israel doing it.

30:47Gordon:And I think it is a both and situation, not an either or. I mean, I think that Netanyahu and the people around him both thought that sort of a decisive burst of violence was in order in order to essentially reestablish deterrence with Hezbollah, but also to potentially do significant damage to the organization. And then at the same time, and I think some of the reporting from Ronan Bergman at the New York Times, who has broken, I think, in addition to the Reuters team, a lot of the kind of more higher level political drama around this. I mean, because Ronan has exceptional sources inside Mossad.

31:25Gordon:I mean, I think he has essentially said it was either use it or lose it on the pagers. You had a moment in the conflict where Netanyahu and his team thought we need to do something about Hezbollah. It's becoming intolerable. to have the North depopulated and constantly dealing with these attacks. And at the same time, we have this tremendous capability that's going to go away if we don't do anything, right? So I think both of those sort of streams connect. It's interesting, though, because obviously, there's tremendous risk to not doing something. And there's also huge risks if you do something too, because you think about what happened in 2006.

32:00Gordon:And if this burst of violence leads you into an unwinnable conflict like you faced nearly 20 years earlier, maybe the Iranians join in too, you end up potentially with a disastrous situation.

32:14David:It's an interesting one. If you've built up that capability, I think, and if you think it might be discovered, whether you trigger it, I think that's an interesting call, whatever the risks are. It's a tricky one. But I guess, I mean, all we know is that there's going to be a decision which must have come from the highest level in Israel. I mean, that's got to be a kind of prime ministerial decision to do that.

32:35Gordon:And so it is mid-afternoon in Lebanon on the 17th of September, 2024. Hezbollah, Gordon, apparently had actually handed out more of the pagers after conducting checks on them that morning. And in Arabic, a message appears on the screen which says, you have received an encrypted message. Which of course means you've to pull it up, push the two buttons simultaneously to decrypt it. At around 3.30 p.m. local, the explosions begin. And we should say the sort of scene in many of these cases is absolutely horrific, right? Many of the victims, again, because as you read up front, the intent here wasn't necessarily to kill people.

33:16Gordon:It was to dramatically injure them, right? So victims are rushed to the hospital. Many have eye injuries. They're missing fingers. They have holes in their abdomens. Reuters witnesses saw a bunch of this sort of indicating like how close the devices must have been to these people at the time of detonation. The blast apparently sent grown men flying off motorcycles, slamming under the walls.

33:34David:I remember a famous one of a guy who's just at a market and he's walking along by the fruit market and you just see this kind of bang next to him and he falls over. It's astonishing.

33:44Gordon:And in some cases, hands literally fly off of victims' bodies. I mean, there's some real tragic cases in here. I mean, in one case in a village out in the Bacah Valley, there's a young girl named Fatima Abdullah who just come home from her first day of fourth grade. She hears the beeper going off, according to her aunt, and she picks up the device to take it to her dad and was holding it when it exploded. So she's a nine-year-old innocent girl. One of the injured was apparently the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon. And then less than a minute later, the Israelis detonate the rest of them, the ones that someone didn't decrypt the message and the rest of them blow up now the early social media reports speculate that it's a like a firmware hack that's actually designed to overheat the battery and

34:29David:trigger an explosion yeah there was a lot of speculation that instantly people that's a cyber attack everyone's so attuned to cyber attacks that some somehow a a cyber attack had sent a message to these things to overheat the battery a bit like you know lithium ion batteries on planes sometimes catch fire but it was pretty obvious straight away they heat up and catch fire in those situations. If you overheat a battery, they do not go bang like that. Because I can remember this very vividly covering it on the day. It was obvious very quickly that this was not a cyber attack overheating a battery in that sense, but was something kind of very, very different.

35:04Gordon:And then the next day on the 18th of September, remember those walkie-talkies we talked about that the Israelis had rigged up years earlier with explosives? Those blow up in the same way. And across both of these sort of operations, at least 37 people are killed, including at least two children. 3 ,000 people are injured, including a bunch of civilians. And it really, I think, is the opening salvo of an Israeli attempt to sort of reestablish deterrence with Hezbollah and to do precisely what the Israelis were unable to do in 2006, which is really flatten morale inside the organization and deal a blow to its ability to actually have command and control during a conflict.

35:44David:Yeah. I mean, one of the things we maybe should have thought about, discussed a little bit is who actually was given these pages because thousands were given out. And it looks like it's not just top military commanders in Hezbollah, is it? And it goes back to how we explained what Hezbollah was, which is it's a terrorist organization, but it's also part of the state. And it has a kind of reservist militia, has thousands of people who are, if you like, on their books to fight, even if they are not soldiers on the front line fighting that day. And those are a lot of the people, it looks like, who had these pagers.

36:17David:Because I'm guessing that these were people who might be summoned to duty to fight for Hezbollah by a pager message. Because there are pictures of people just shopping in a market who are suddenly getting these going off. This is not all fighters on the front lines and at battle. And it's people like that who are actually being targeted by the operation, which arguably is what, from the Israeli perspective makes it very successful because you are taking out a wide swathe of people who are associated enough with Hezbollah that they've been given a pager and are part of it, even if they are not fighting at that moment.

36:50David:And you can imagine the psychological blow that deals to Hezbollah as an organization.

36:55Gordon:The blow is much heavier than if you had just hit maybe more pure military targets, right? It's much more devastating, I think. I think it speaks to, an Israeli understanding of the psychology of the conflict because you walk it down to the individual level. And let's say you're a part-time Hezbollah fighter who actually does some training. You have another job. You have a life. You actually probably consider yourself to be largely a civilian, but when called upon by the organization, you'll go fight. the ability for the Israelis to reach out and touch you and to maim you or members of your family.

37:36Gordon:You just think about how that is just a devastating blow to your ability to recruit manpower for a wider conflict.

37:44David:I mean, it does get us to the question, which is the kind of morality of it, to some extent. Because as you said, not only are they not soldiers on the front line, but nor are they, if you like, terrorist operatives who are in uniform or fighting at that time. They are in this weird kind of militia role within an organisation which is, yes, internationally designated a terrorist organisation, but also as a resistance organisation, also a political party. It's something very complicated. And you are hitting thousands of those people at one moment. Now, I can completely see the Israeli view is, you know, this is a group that wants to destroy you and wipe you off the face of the earth while you do it.

38:20David:But it is an interesting one, isn't it? Because as you said, those people are civilians rather than soldiers.

38:27Gordon:I don't think in the Israeli calculation, there's any real distinction between those two. I mean, I think there is a distinction on maybe the family members and certainly the children. And if the claims about the way the explosives were tested are to be believed, there was thought given to not killing people in the direct sort of vicinity of the person who was operating the pager. But I'm sort of hearkened back to the episodes we did on the assassination of Mosem Fakhrizadeh in Iran, who is the head of their nuclear program. And we cited a quote from the former head of the Mossad, Mertagan, who talked about killing to save lives.

39:05Gordon:And I think in the Israeli mind, the morality of this is to avoid the broader conflict where tens of thousands of people are killed. We are going to destroy Hezbollah's ability to fight, its will to fight, and its command and control structure. And part of that will be the pagers. Because I think also, you know, it's important to note here that it wasn't just the pagers and walkie-talkies.

39:27David:It's the start, isn't it?

39:28Gordon:It's the start. It's the opening salvo of what's going to become a 12 or so day campaign to do as much damage as possible to Hezbollah, where there's additional strikes that continue to hit Hezbollah leadership. I mean, the entire special operations command of the Radwan force, that elite unit, is wiped out at an airstrike on the 20th of September. So two days later, there's an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon. This time, they don't actually get stuck like they did in 2006. Thousands of Hezbollah fighters are killed, and the air campaign in particular conducted by the Israelis will destroy maybe half of Hezbollah's arsenal.

40:04Gordon:So this was an extreme burst of violence designed to essentially decapitate Hezbollah and neuter its ability to fight. And then, I mean, most sort of dramatically after the pagers, on the 27th of September 2024, the Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah is in a military operations command center down in a bunker kind of deep in South Beirut. At this point, he has been leading Hezbollah for 32 years, and Israel has sent out a handful of aircraft that are carrying maybe up to 82 ,000 pound bunker buster bombs, probably of U.S. manufacture, which can penetrate targets underground, and each has a lethal blast radius of maybe up to 1 ,200 feet, which is 58 soccer fields.

40:48Gordon:It's still a lot of murk around this, but there's some reporting that there was maybe a human asset that had reported to Mossad handlers that Nasrallah had arrived at this bunker, maybe 60 feet underground, but we don't really know. The Israeli planes dropped their payload, and it's described by some Beirut residents as one of the loudest explosions they've ever heard, which is saying something in Beirut. And it works. Hassan Nasrallah is killed by the Israelis. And then on the 28th of September, in an attack, I think, Gordon, that sort of has vanished beneath the chaos after Nasrallah's death and all the headlines associated with that, a Hezbollah official named Nabil Kaouk, who is leading the investigation into the pagers, is himself killed in an airstrike.

41:32Gordon:And of course, in the aftermath of all of this, I mean, I think this is where you sort of draw that comparison between 2006 and what happened in 2024. I mean, Hezbollah's ability to sort of run itself as an organization is, I mean, really destroyed. And the Israelis, as they always do in these things, don't claim responsibility. But very interestingly, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu goes to Washington to meet Donald Trump in early 2025, he gifts him a golden pager. So that's claiming responsibility there without claiming responsibility, isn't it? Yeah, of all the gifts.

42:12David:So, I mean, it's an astonishing story. It's one of the more astonishing operations in recent years. I guess we've talked a bit about the morality of it, which I think is more complicated than some other covert operations that we've seen. And we do know innocent people were killed.

42:27Gordon:We would be remiss if we didn't say that there's that Israeli perspective of killing to save lives. And then on the other side, there would be the perspective that, well, this is a terrorist attack.

42:38David:Yeah, because you're basically attacking civilians. You're blowing up a civilian device to attack a lot of people who are, I mean, you know, we discussed the kind of ambiguity of the status, but in many ways, certainly not traditional military targets. So it is a, you know, a complicated one that one i mean certainly in terms of efficacy i mean you can argue it worked as part of a campaign with all the other actions because what didn't happen was hezbollah didn't suddenly unleash rockets and start a war and israel didn't get kind of bogged down in lebanon i think you certainly felt in those days afterwards that the nature of the pager attack plus the taking out of Nasrallah and the senior leadership basically left them kind of rudderless and weakened in a fundamental way.

43:25David:So again, morality is certainly a question, but efficacy from the Israeli point of view, I think they would have judged it as successful or effective.

43:34Gordon:I think the point you made on it being part of a broader campaign is the important one. And I think to show the achievement of that campaign and the pager attack played a role, I mean, after the attack, Khoslav Nasrallah, who at that point is still alive on the 17th of September, gives a speech. And he essentially says, you know, Hezbollah won't surrender. We're not going to give up. And then 12 days later, after he's dead, Hezbollah agrees to a ceasefire. It's not a full surrender, but essentially admits defeat. And it's a very unfavorable ceasefire to Hezbollah, right? They agree to withdraw weaponry from south of the Latani River.

44:09Gordon:And now, I mean, even a year later, there is sort of a growing chorus of international actors and Lebanese who were saying Hezbollah needs to put down as weapons, finally. I think the efficacy piece is actually a pretty clear story. The Israelis won this round tremendously, and in part, that was because of this pager operation.

44:26David:Yeah. And then the other broader thing that I think is so interesting about it is this notion of supply chain attacks. And it's interesting because in the last few years, whenever people have talked to me about supply chain attacks, they've normally been talked about cyber vulnerabilities. Is there a kind of backdoor in this piece of software or this piece of kit, Or is a defense company buying something from a supplier? And is that supplier, you know, have they been penetrated by the Russian or Chinese cyber intelligence hackers to kind of get in then to the American system? But this is about a very physical hack to get inside that supply chain.

45:02David:And also, I think, to play on people's fears about communications and communication security. And I think that that element of it is particularly interesting. Interesting.

45:11Gordon:I mean, modern supply chains offer just so much surface area for an adversary to muck around with you. I mean, as this story shows, because you have to think in the grand scheme of things, how important were these pagers to Hezbollah's kind of overall architecture and supply chain? Like I would wager prior to this, it didn't seem all that important. It wasn't way down at the bottom, but it wasn't the sophisticated sort of military equipment and all the supporting architecture that they would need to sustain it, right? It was somewhere down the line. I mean, looking kind of at just how complicated a modern supply chain is.

45:50Gordon:I mean, the average American aerospace company, Gordon, relies on 200 tier one suppliers. So those are companies that directly provide materials for the manufacture of an airplane and as many as 12 ,000 tier two or higher suppliers. So suppliers that are then supplying the tier one. So you think about just the amount of space there is. If you are trying to sabotage a weapons system, if you are trying to gain access to someone's production facilities, it's astounding how much opportunity there is here. And that is a global point for spy services, irrespective of what's going on in Lebanon with Israel and Hezbollah.

46:30David:that's right i think it really highlights that vulnerability and what can be done with it and you can bet that after this operation not only is everyone looking at their kind of pages and electronic devices but you know what else could be done through those kind of supply chains i mean i remember at the time it was noted that you know not many people used pages actually and i think it was hezbollah and britain's national health service which i think had 10 of the the world's supply of pages those were the two groups who were basically still using pages so But the problem in the future is not going to be pages.

47:02David:It's going to be something else within that supply chain, which someone is going to weaponize and use and cause trouble on either spy or sabotage. So I think it's a really interesting story, both in the context of Israel and Hezbollah, but also about technology risk and dependency, I think.

47:22Gordon:I agree. I think that's a great place to end it, Gordon. I mean, we should note that this story isn't done because, Gordon, there's a club episode coming out on Friday, an interview that we've conducted with James Pearson, who's on the Reuters team, who broke the story. And we're going to have a fascinating discussion with him all about kind of how this story broke and many of the interesting tools that he and his team used to get to the bottom of exactly how the Israelis built this pager and this battery. So go join the club and give that one a listen. It's an absolutely cracking interview.

48:00David:Yeah, I found it fascinating because it is about how you investigate companies, front companies, how you do kind of open source intelligence and investigations, you know, as a journalist, as well as an intelligence agency. So it gives a real insight, not just into this operation, but more broadly, what the kind of tools an investigator can use which are out there. So thanks for listening, everybody. And we'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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