Hezbollah pager attacks reveal textbook covert operation: ex-spies

“We are looking at something that was a very careful, very thorough, well-calculated and meticulously tailored process,” said Avi Melamed, a former Israeli intelligence official, who likened it to a “long-term chess game “.

The attacks appear to have blinded the militants’ communications, but the strategic objectives of the coordinated blasts remain unclear, leading to questions about timing and intent.

The chaos and carnage began on Tuesday when pagers used by Hezbollah members began ringing before they detonated en masse across Lebanon. The next day, walkie-talkies used by the Iran-backed militant group met a similar fate as they began detonating in large numbers.

The back-to-back attacks killed at least 30 people and wounded around 3,000 more, including Hezbollah fighters, and overwhelmed local hospitals.

Hezbollah, Lebanon and Iran blamed Israel for the deadly attacks. Israel has not claimed responsibility, but the country has a long history of conducting clandestine operations beyond its borders. He quickly became the main suspect behind the blasts, with some media reporting that the Israelis were behind the events.

Israel assassinated a Hamas bomb maker in 1996 with an exploding phone, but what’s different about these attacks is that thousands of devices were tampered with and exploded simultaneously.

While the scale of the attack is still being determined, the level of sophistication is becoming increasingly clear.

Earlier this year, the militant group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, decided it was better to avoid using mobile phones because they could be too easily tracked and monitored by Israel’s vaunted intelligence services. They began to switch to older devices such as pagers, creating an opening for their enemy.

The pagers and walkie-talkies reportedly had small amounts of explosives hidden inside, rigged to detonate at some point during the supply chain process, which clearly required extensive planning dating back many months – if not by years.

Achieving this required technical mastery on a large scale. Operators had to insert the explosives and detonator without leaving any traces on the devices and do so quickly enough to avoid damaging the dispatch data in a way that might raise suspicion, all the while knowing that just one careless pager could give thousands of people.

Hezbollah failed to detect the counterfeit devices in time, probably because it did not scan them properly or did not disassemble them and inspect their components.

Melamed, the former Israeli intelligence officer who is the founder of Inside the Middle East, said maintaining an edge over an adversary is not just about having technological advantages.

It’s more important to have “ingenuity” and the ability to plan several moves ahead of an opponent, he noted. He said that was a notable component of this week’s attacks.

But if Israel is indeed behind the attack, it raises questions about why the country would choose to detonate the explosives now, after going through all the trouble of such a sophisticated and lengthy infiltration process.

“Supply chain operations are tough,” said Douglas London, a retired senior CIA operations officer with experience in the Middle East. “When you have that success, it’s incredible. You hold on to it and you don’t expose it.”

Hezbollah will investigate the massive security breach and plug the necessary holes, making it more difficult for an adversary to conduct another supply chain operation in the future, added London, author of “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence” .

The attacks began shortly after Israel indicated, in no uncertain terms, that it would increase military pressure on Hezbollah so that people who have been displaced by the constant fighting between the two bitter enemies can return to their homes.

Israel and Hezbollah have traded cross-border strikes almost daily since Hamas staged its Oct. 7 massacre, forcing tens of thousands of people from northern Israel and southern Lebanon to flee their homes. The two warring sides have avoided all-out confrontation, despite constant fears that escalation would lead to that scenario.

The pager and walkie-talkie attacks were certainly disruptive and would have made Hezbollah vulnerable to immediate Israeli military action, experts say. But if the explosions were supposed to precede an Israeli ground offensive in Lebanon, that doesn’t appear to be the case yet.

“Relatively speaking, the payoffs don’t seem worth exposing that capability,” London said.

He said this capability could have been a tool for more strategic goals, such as gathering intelligence on Hezbollah’s membership, facilities, weaponry and movement. Such advantages could then have translated into precision attacks instead of inflicting indiscriminate casualties for psychological effects.

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Thursday that the war was now in a “new phase” and “the sequence of our military actions will continue.” On Friday, Israel and Hezbollah exchanged more fire.

It remains to be seen whether Israel is heading for a ground invasion of Lebanon. Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said there may not be a direct correlation between this week’s device explosions and any Israeli invasion.

“But that doesn’t mean it’s not something that could happen in the immediate future,” he said. “This was an operation so extensive and so daring that it was designed to unbalance Hezbollah for a period of time. Obviously they will recover, but not soon”.