The Hezbollah blasts and Mossad’s history of unlikely explosives

From remote-controlled machine guns to viruses, the Israeli intelligence service has a track record of using technology to kill its enemies.

Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, won its reputation for ruthlessness through its determination to hunt down Israel’s enemies around the world.

Adolf Eichmann, who designed Hitler’s Final Solution, was kidnapped from Argentina. The men who carried out the Munich Olympics massacre of Israeli athletes in 1972 were tracked and killed one by one over the next 15 years, along with innocent victims, one a case of mistaken identity.

In recent years, the principle has remained the same but the technology has improved. If the mysterious case of Hezbollah’s exploding pagers is found to be the work of Mossad, as most people in Lebanon were assuming last night, it would simply be the most striking example yet of this trend.

Iran's President Hassan Rouhani (L) at the award ceremony and badge of merit for Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh (R) in Tehran, 2020. Picture; AFP.

It is certainly the most startling and embarrassing blow to Iran, whose ambassador is being treated for his injuries, and its allied militias since the death of Tehran’s chief nuclear weapons scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, in November 2020. He was shot dead near Tehran by a robot machine gun loaded on a pick-up truck and controlled via satellite communications.

The methodology was so futuristic that the initial accounts by the Iranian security forces were assumed to be a blind to cover up their own failings.

But even on that occasion, human hands on the ground must have been involved, either Israelis or local agents, to get the machine gun into the country, to load it on the vehicle and then get it into position.

How this was done has never been made clear but an indication of the scale of planning and the number of people involved could be inferred from a previous assassination, of the Hamas arms procurer Mahmoud Mabhouh in Dubai in 2010.

CCTV footage shows Mahmoud al-Mabhouh (front) as he is shown to his room while two suspected assassins, in tennis gea, follow him from the lift of his hotel in Dubai in 2010.

He was killed by having a toxin injected into him in a hotel room during a stopover between Damascus and Sudan.

The Emirati authorities were able to trace the fake passports of 26 presumed Mossad agents thought to have taken part in the operation — all were clones of genuine passports belonging to diaspora Jews from Britain and other western countries with visa-free access to Dubai who had moved to Israel in previous years. The agents had been coming to the emirate for months to prepare.

We do not yet know what caused the pagers in Lebanon and Syria to explode, whether the devices had been packed with mini-explosives or whether the mechanism itself was somehow altered. But the operation’s execution must have been more “hands off”, with up to a thousand devices detonated remotely at the same time.

Whether the pagers were tinkered with at the time of manufacture or delivery, once they arrived in Lebanon it was clearly conducted remotely.

In that, it bears more similarity to perhaps the most ingenious high-tech Mossad operation, believed to have been carried out with the help of the CIA, in 2010.

Again, what happened was at first mysterious, because it was so far-fetched: the Iranian nuclear program’s centrifuges, the spinning devices that enrich uranium, suddenly started speeding out of control until they became useless.

Then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, (C), visits the Natanz Uranium Enrichment Facility in 2008. Picture: Iranian President's Office.

It eventually turned out that a virus had been installed in the Siemens computer systems that operated the centrifuges.

The ingenuity was the method of transmission. The virus, a computer “worm” called Stuxnet, had been loaded on to a flash memory drive which was introduced into the Iranian computer network.

The worm had been programmed to seek out the Siemens operating system, lying dormant in computers in Iran and around the world as it spread until it finally reached Natanz, the Iranian enrichment centre, where it “recognised” its prey and sprang into action.

The go-ahead for this latest operation, if it was conducted by Mossad, would have been given by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his war cabinet in the past few hours.

Three weeks ago, a salvo of rockets from Lebanon, fired by Hezbollah in retaliation for the assassination of its military chief Fuad Shukr in a strike on an apartment building in Beirut, was aimed at Mossad’s headquarters north of Tel Aviv. Israel said none hit but it would be tempting to think this latest operation was Mossad’s revenge.

That might indeed be the message intended. It was almost certainly much longer in the planning.

The Times