A group of Israeli leaders were elated earlier this year after watching exploding pagers sent by Mossad kill or maim thousands of Hezbollah fighters and civilians in Lebanon.
Then they met a former European spymaster. Instead of cheering the executives over Israeli sabotage, the former intelligence chief drowned out their elation with an unforgiving assessment.
Operations must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legally authorized in this country, the former intelligence chief told them during an economic conference. In this regard, the exploding pagers “failed my test.”
The synchronized detonation of thousands of Hezbollah electronic pagers on September 17 stunned security officials around the world at the audacity of the operation and astonished the sophisticated front companies Israel had set up to supply the booby-trapped devices.
But the attack, a reworking of the Trojan Horse for the digital age, has also sparked a broader debate among Western security chiefs that has left them grappling with two fundamental questions about modern spy technology.
Are your own communications systems similarly vulnerable to eavesdropping? And would they ever authorize a similar operation, given that the pager attack killed 37 people, including at least four civilians, two of them children, and injured around 3,000?
In interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior security officials from four of them IsraelThe US’s key Western allies all acknowledged that the pager attack was an extraordinary feat of espionage. But only three said they would support a similar law.
One said it sets a dangerous precedent that non-state actors such as terrorists or criminals could use. Another problem was how the explosive-filled pagers were smuggled through Europe and the Middle East, posing a threat to property and lives along the route.
Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA, even described the pager attack as a “form of terrorism” in a television interview. Other officials took a similar view of an operation that some darkly dubbed “Operation Grim Beeper.”
“It was exactly the kind of operation the Russians would carry out,” said a former intelligence chief. “I don’t think any other Western intelligence agency would even consider such an operation that would maim thousands of people.”
“I like boldness, but all in all I would not have approved the operation as it was not fully targeted,” a senior defense official said. “There was a possibility that the pagers could, for example, kill a child who happened to be holding them.”
“It was an extraordinary operation – even if many Western countries would consider it an assassination,” said another former senior intelligence official. “Defense ministries around the world will now ask themselves: How do we protect ourselves from similar sabotage?”
People familiar with the operation say it was caused by a small but powerful plastic explosive hidden in the pagers’ batteries and by a detonator invisible to X-rays that was triggered remotely.
Israel initially denied any involvement in the attack, but a few weeks later Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Le Monde that he had personally approved the operation.
It is in line with other operations by the Israeli foreign intelligence agency Mossad. 1972 Israeli activists blew up a phone They had implanted explosives that were used by the Palestine Liberation Organization representative in Paris. The man, Mahmoud Hamshari, lost a leg and later died. In 1996, they repeated the trick with Yahya Ayyash, an experienced Hamas bomb maker.
A key difference with the 2024 pager attack was its scale. In addition, according to Lebanese authorities, another series of explosions occurred the next day – this time involving booby-trapped walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives – killing another 20 people and injuring 450.
Outside the region, the operation has raised urgent concerns about the risk of copycat sabotage operations.
Sir Alex Younger, former head of Britain’s MI6 foreign intelligence service, warned that the attack was a “valuable wake-up call” about the vulnerability of Western supply chains.
“Because supply chains are invisible, we don’t pay attention to them,” he said. “But the West needs to properly assess the risks associated with supply chains – be it Russian energy, Chinese electronics or now this – and place them alongside other risks such as AI, drones and cyber warfare.”
This also includes the possibility that supply chains could be intercepted by terrorists, which Ken McCallum, head of the British domestic intelligence service MI5, addresses.
When McCallum was asked about the pager operation at a rare press conference in October, he replied that an important aspect of MI5’s work was to “stay one step ahead of terrorism”.
Supply chain sabotage and assassination are as old as espionage itself. Medieval armies used spies as traders to find out what their opponents were buying. According to Calder Walton, a spy historian, they would also poison the water supply.
More recently, during the Cold War, the CIA smuggled faulty computer chips into supply chains that the Soviet Union used to steal Western technology through commercial front companies.
The most successful example of the CIA campaign was faulty software that blew up a gas pipeline in a three-kiloton explosion in 1982. No one was killed, and the repairs cost the Kremlin millions of rubles that it could barely afford.
At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of U.S. officials worried that if Israel were to use mundane electronic devices like pagers, a whole host of Chinese civilian technologies — like electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and almost anything with a battery — could become booby-trapped can also be used as a weapon.
“The new digital world enables previously unimaginable means of sabotage,” Walton said.
Not all officials interviewed believed the operation was disproportionate or unnecessary. One person put it bluntly: “War is about violence.”
Younger said he did not view the attack as an indiscriminate use of force because the pagers were used by Hezbollah militants and Israel is at war with the militant group. However, he warned that “decapitation operations are most effective in the context of a broader strategy – they are not an end in themselves.”
A senior Western security official even called it a “very nice operation.” . . I’m jealous.” Western countries may bristle at Israel’s apparent disregard for the civilian casualties caused by the attack, the official said, but it pales in comparison to the ferocity with which the Israeli military has attacked Gaza and Lebanon.
“They (the Israelis) have their own methods of assessing this – and a different threshold,” the official added.
However, it seems clear that targeted killings remain central to Israel’s security operations in a way that is not the case with its Western allies, where civilian casualties during war are widely viewed as unacceptable.
According to Ronen Bergman, author of a history of Israeli assassinations, Israel carried out more than 2,000 targeted killings in the first 17 years of this century alone. During the same period, the US approved less than a fifth of that amount.
“Israel’s security calculations differ from those of the West,” said John Raine, a senior adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They live in a rough area and have been treated brutally as a result. The salvation is that Israel is aware of this. The worry is that it seems to care less and less.”
Such considerations ignore the question of whether a Western intelligence agency would ever authorize its own version of Operation Grim Beeper.
One official commented: “If our state also faced an existential threat similar to that of Israel, what would we do?” The answer is that everything depends on conditions that we can only foresee once we get there.”
Illustration by Bob Haslett
