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A group of Israeli executives were in shock earlier this year about how explosives sent by the Mossad killed or maimed thousands of Hezbollah fighters and civilians in Lebanon.
Then they meet a former European spymaster. Instead of extolling his chief executives over his misdeeds against Israel, the former intelligence chief blasted them with an unapologetic assessment.
Operations must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legal in this country, the former intelligence chief told a business conference. On that count, blasting pagers “didn’t meet my test.”
A similar detonation of thousands of Hezbollah electronic pagers on September 17 stunned security officials around the world at the audacity of the operation and puzzled the front companies Israel had set up to supply the bombed-out devices.
Yet the attack, a Trojan horse reworked for the digital age, has sparked a wide-ranging debate among Western security officials and forced them to confront two fundamental questions about modern espionage.
Are their own communication systems similarly vulnerable to hacking? The pager attack killed 37 people, including at least four civilians, two children and injured about 3,000?
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior security officials, four IsraelMost important Western allies have all acknowledged that the pager attack was an unusual act of espionage. But only three of them said that they would allow the same action.
One sets a dangerous precedent that non-state actors such as terrorists or criminals can exploit. Another concern is how IEDs are smuggled into Europe and the Middle East, endangering property and lives en route.
Former CIA chief Leon Panetta described pager attacks as “a form of terrorism” in a television interview. Other officials have taken a similar view of the operation, which some have nicknamed “Operation Grim Beeper,” with a dark sense of humor.
“It was the kind of thing the Russians do,” said one former intelligence chief. “I don’t think any other Western intelligence service even cares about the actions that are maiming thousands of people.
A senior defense official said, “I like the courage, but on balance, I wouldn’t have approved the operation because the operation was completely untargeted.” “There was a chance that the Pagers could kill the boy who held the boy.”
Another former senior intelligence official said: “This was an unusual act – even if many Western powers would consider it an assassination.” “How do defense ministries around the world protect themselves from similar attacks?” They ask themselves.
Those familiar with the operation say it was carried out by a small but powerful plastic explosive hidden in pager batteries and triggered remotely by an X-ray invisible detonator.
Israel initially denied any involvement in the attack, but several weeks after the incident, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Monde that he had personally authorized the operation.
It is similar to the rest of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. Israeli operators in 1972 Phone exploded A representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Paris denied the use of explosives. The man, Mahmoud Hamshari, lost his leg and later died. In the year They repeated the trick in 1996 with Yahya Ayash, an expert Hamas bomber.
One important difference with the 2024 Pager attack was the scale. In addition, another series of explosions the next day – this time using booby-trapped walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives – killed another 20 people and wounded 450, Lebanese officials said.
Outside the region, the operation raised urgent concerns about the dangers of counterfeiting operations.
Sir Alex Young, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, warned that the attack was a “significant wake-up call” about the vulnerability of Western supply chains.
“We don’t pay attention to supply chains because they are invisible,” he said. But the West needs to properly value the risks in supply chains — Russian energy, Chinese electronics, or now this — and other risks like AI, drones, and cyberwarfare.
This increases the risk of supply chains being hijacked by terrorists, a point made by Ken McCallum, head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5.
Asked about Operation Pager at a rare press conference in October, McCallum replied that an important aspect of MI5’s work was “pre-empting where terrorism is likely to come from”.
Supply chain sabotage and assassinations are as old as espionage itself. Medieval armies used spies as traders to find out what their enemies were buying. They also poison water supplies, according to intelligence historian Calder Walton.
More recently, during the Cold War, the CIA smuggled computer chips into the supply chain that the Soviet Union used to steal Western technology through commercial front companies.
The most successful example of a CIA operation was in 1982 when some faulty software blew up a gas pipeline in a three-kilometer explosion. No one was killed, and the repairs cost the Kremlin millions of rubles.
At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of U.S. officials wondered if Israel could snoop on a variety of Chinese civilian technology — like electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, anything with a battery — like a pager. – It can also be a weapon.
“The new digital world allows for previously unimaginable forms of fraud,” Walton said.
Not all officials interviewed believe the operation is disproportionate or unnecessary. As someone clearly put it: “War is about violence”.
I don’t believe the youth attack was an indiscriminate act of force because the pagers are being used by Hezbollah militants and Israel is at war with the militant group. However, he cautioned that “decapitation operations are very effective in a broader strategy – they are not an end in themselves.”
A senior Western security official said: “A wonderful job . . . “I’m jealous” Western countries may claim that Israel paid any attention to the civilian casualties caused by the attacks, but they are surprised by the brutality of the Israeli military in Gaza and Lebanon.
“They (the Israelis) have their own methods of evaluating that – and they have a different standard,” the official added.
What seems clear, however, is that targeted killings among its Western allies remain at the center of Israel’s security operations, where civilian casualties are seen as unacceptable in times of war.
In the first 17 years of this century alone, Israel has carried out more than 2,000 targeted killings, according to Ronen Bergman, a historian of Israeli assassinations. During the same period, the US allowed less than a fifth of that amount.
“Israel’s security calculus is different from that of the West,” said John Ryan, a senior adviser at the Institute for International Strategic Studies. “They live in a rough neighborhood and are brutalized because of it. The saving grace is that Israel knows this. What’s troubling is that he seems to care less.
Cases like these raise the question of whether a Western intelligence agency would approve its own version of Operation Grim Reaper.
As one official said: “What would we do if our country faced the same existential threat as Israel?” The answer depends on the circumstances we can’t wait until we get there.
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