Ex-Mossad and CIA agents astounded at sophistication of pager attack

In theory, little about Mossad should come as a surprise to Avner Avraham. The retired lieutenant colonel spent 28 years inside Israel’s famed foreign intelligence service, escorting prime ministers to international peace summits and working as an agent on clandestine foreign missions he can still not discuss today.

In his final years at Mossad, Avraham served as curator for its in-house spycraft museum, becoming a leading historian on some of its most daring operations. Among them: the 1960 mission in which Mossad agents abducted Adolf Eichmann from Argentina, smuggling the former senior Nazi to Israel so he could be charged with war crimes and executed. Now, Avraham serves as an expert consultant on spy films and television series, including in Hollywood.

Retired Israeli lieutenant colonel and former Mossad agent Avner Avraham. 

Yet when news broke this week of Israel’s stunning detonation of thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, Avraham was astounded. It seems Hezbollah operatives turned to the rudimentary devices in a bid to avoid electronic surveillance by Israel. Before they arrived in Lebanon, however, the pagers had been filled with small amounts of explosives and turned into bombs ready to explode at any moment.

“This was a crazy, creative idea,” Avraham says in a phone interview from Israel. “It’s so creative that very few countries or organisations could think of something like this, let alone do it. Two days ago, I would have thought this would have been a crazy, unrealistic idea for a television series.”

A day later, walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives began exploding. The back-to-back attacks killed an estimated 37 people and injured more than 3000. It was a humiliating blow for the much-feared militant Islamist group, which suffered the most casualties since its 2006 war with Israel. And its communications abilities were crippled.

Hezbollah members carry the coffin of a comrade who was killed on Wednesday when a handheld device exploded, during a funeral procession in the southern suburbs of Beirut.Credit: AP

While Israel has neither claimed nor denied involvement in the operation, security and defence experts have no doubt it was behind the attacks. According to reporting by Al-Monitor and Axios, Israeli officials believed Hezbollah was about to uncover the secret pager operation, leading Israel to quickly detonate the devices before the scheme was exposed.

Former CIA agent Marc Polymeropoulos, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council think tank, this week called the pager and walkie-talkie strikes “the most impressive kinetic intelligence operation I can recall in my career”.

“The scale and scope of it was just staggering,” Polymeropoulos said. Israel had achieved “complete intelligence domination” over its Lebanese adversary after these attacks and its July killing of Hezbollah’s top commander Fuad Shukr, he said.

Less impressed was a group of experts led by Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and a University of Sydney law professor, who labelled the attacks “a terrifying violation of international law” and demanded a war crimes investigation. Two children, including a nine-year-old girl, died in the attacks, according to the Associated Press.

“This sort of thing hadn’t happened before in the Middle East, or for that matter, elsewhere,” says Australian National University professor Amin Saikal, an expert on Middle East politics. “To me, the Israeli action is at the intersection of state terrorism and technological innovation.”

On Friday, Israel followed up by launching dozens of air strikes across southern Lebanon, targeting Hezbollah rocket launchers. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed “tough retribution and just punishment”, putting Israel on the brink of another war. The question being asked in capitals around the world: will Israel’s attacks restore deterrence against Hezbollah and other Iran-backed proxies, or will they trigger the broader regional conflict that global leaders have been desperately seeking to avoid since the October 7 Hamas attacks?

Saikal fears the latter. “I think we are closer to a regional war than we have been at any time in the last 11 months,” he says.

Border residents

To know why Israel would risk such a war while still fighting Hamas in Gaza, you don’t need to interview an academic or a former intelligence operative. Instead, ask an egg farmer.

In October, just days after Hamas launched its shock attacks in southern Israel, photographer Kate Geraghty and I travelled to Margaliot, on the Israel-Lebanon border.

“We are in the most dangerous place in Israel right now,” egg farmer and community leader Eytan Davidi told us as the pungent smell of chicken manure pierced the mountain air. Just hundreds of metres across the frontier, you could often see Hezbollah soldiers moving around inside apartment buildings, he said. During our visit, two guided missiles fired across the border landed nearby, demonstrating the daily danger locals faced. The Hezbollah rocket fire, which has intensified since the start of the Gaza war, forced the Israeli government to evacuate dozens of communities along the border, turning them into ghost towns.

Far from afraid of a war breaking out, Davidi was eager for it, seeing it as the only way to weaken Hezbollah enough to bring safety back to border communities. “We cannot live here with guns pointed at our children playing in their backyards,” he said.

Almost a year later, an estimated 60,000 Israelis remain displaced from their homes in northern Israel because of the threat of rocket fire from Lebanon. It’s a situation many Israelis find intolerable.

This week Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant announced that the nation was “at the beginning of a new phase in the war”. Resources are increasingly being shifted away from Gaza to the border with Lebanon. The goal, he said, was “to return the residents of the northern communities to their homes safely”.

Israel’s confidence that it has weakened Hamas to the point it no longer poses a significant security threat in Gaza means the prospect of an Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon looks increasingly likely.

Avraham, who served in Lebanon during his time with Mossad, believes the time has arrived for such a conflict. He thinks Israel should have decisively taken on Hezbollah months ago.

“After the massacre of October 7, we cannot allow our enemies to be so close behind the borderline,” he says. “I believe that the only solution is to have a limited war with Lebanon so that an agreement can be made and people can return to their homes.”

However, Saikal believes Israel could be walking into a trap by escalating the fighting in Lebanon. “Hezbollah would like Israel to engage in a land invasion because then it will be trapped there as it has been in Gaza,” he says. Like other analysts, he says Hezbollah poses a far more formidable military threat to Israel than Hamas: it has an estimated 150,000 rockets and missiles in its arsenal, capable of striking heavily populated Israeli cities like Tel Aviv. The 34-day Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006, which killed an estimated 1300 Lebanese people and 165 Israelis, allowed Hezbollah to entrench its dominance in southern Lebanon and emerge as a stronger fighting force.

Saikal expects to see Hezbollah launch retaliatory attacks against Israel soon, possibly in co-ordination with Houthi rebels in Yemen and other Iranian-backed proxy groups. If the tit-for-tat fighting morphs into an all-out war, he expects it to be more significant and deadly than the 2006 conflict.

In other words, this week’s shock explosive attacks were a morale boost for Israel and a tactical triumph for Mossad. Whether they were a strategic masterstroke or a prelude to calamity remains to be seen.

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