How Israel pager and radio bomb attacks against Hezbollah revive old tactic

For at least 150 years, armies have sought to provide everyday supplies to their foes, rigged with bombs and electronic bugs

A Lebanese army bomb disposal specialist wearing a protective gear prepares to detonate a walkie-talkie that was found at the parking of the American University Hospital, in Beirut, on Wednesday. AP

Live updates: Follow the latest on Israel-Gaza

The exploding pager and radio attacks on Hezbollah, while unprecedented in scale, follow a long history of one side in a conflict providing an unsuspecting enemy with rigged or explosive equipment, experts said, pointing to the devastating psychological effects of the assault.

The two waves of attacks killed 32 people, including two children, and wounded about 3,200. The attacks, which have not been claimed by Israel, have dealt a major blow to Hezbollah and pushed fears of all-out war to the highest level since cross-border fire with Israel began on October 8, spurred by the war in Gaza.

“Hezbollah’s members are inevitably going to be really suspicious about whether they can trust the equipment they have or get,” says Larry Regens, a professor of military history who has worked on intelligence projects for numerous US government agencies. “It will create serious problems at least in the short term. The group’s leadership is going to have to replace its existing communications with new devices and figure out how it was compromised.”

Paul McGarr, professor of intelligence studies at the King’s College Centre for the Study of Intelligence in London, outlines just how common the tactic has been.

“In historical terms, efforts to sabotage everyday equipment or materials and transform them into weapons isn't new. The Special Operations Executive developed exploding coal during the Second World War (and also exploding wood), and it was hoped the enemy would throw such devices into industrial furnaces and ship and locomotive boilers and that havoc would ensue. Bizarrely, the SOE also developed fake dead rats packed with explosives for the same purpose, having discovered that factories and ships often disposed of unwanted vermin by throwing them into boilers.”

About 160 years ago, the tactic was used as the US was torn by conflict, as secessionist southern states sought to stymie their northern enemy, who were richer in raw materials.

“The coal exploding coal idea actually dated to the American Civil War, when Confederate forces had employed the same tactic,” Prof McGarr said. “The results were, at best, minimal, and more of an irritant to enemies than anything. It was, as with the Israeli attack justified primarily a psychological weapon that would sow doubt into the minds of factory workers and force the enemy to invest time and resources in improving the security of its supply chains.”

Modern efforts use fake companies for this end and there has been widespread speculation as to the identity of BAC, a Hungarian firm apparently licensed to build copies of pagers used in the explosions, which were designed by Taiwanese company Gold Apollo. The company firmly denied any knowledge of the plot, while BAC’s website disappeared shortly after the blasts.

The idea of supplying an enemy en masse with compromised communications devices was famously illustrated by the Crypto AG affair. A non-lethal plot, it involved the CIA and West German intelligence agencies buying a Swiss company and maintaining its private sector facade and specialisation in encrypted communications technology. The intelligence agencies controlled every aspect of business, including hiring staff.

From 1971 onwards, the firm sold equipment to Iran, Pakistan and numerous governments in Latin America and Africa – thousands of machines in 120 countries. This enabled the US and West Germany to monitor highly classified cables between foes, or governments of interest, who believed their communications were safely encrypted.

So sophisticated was the operation that many senior staff were unaware of the operation, named Rubikon, until it was investigated by German media in the early 1990s. A separate Cold War effort in the 1980s, Operation Intering, supplied faulty electronics to the Soviets, also through front companies.

“Some supply chain attacks targeting physical hardware, such as Crypto AG, could be seen to have delivered strategic dividends. But I'd argue this was rare in a Cold War and a post-Cold War context. Cyber supply chain attacks, such as Stuxnet in 2010, have generally proved more impactful,” Prof McGarr says, referring to the Israeli use of a virus on memory sticks smuggled to Iranian nuclear compounds, which crashed computers controlling uranium enrichment.

Many of these attempts to sabotage supply chains are tactically important, Prof McGarr says, but may not have the war-winning strategic effect hoped for.

Kill switches and hidden bombs

Equipping a foe with technology that you can covertly access, and even destroy, was carried over to Afghanistan, where the West and numerous global allies equipped the Mujahideen to fight the Soviet Union.

Aware that some Afghan factions were increasingly radical, the CIA managed to obtain Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, originally given to the Afghans, fearing they would be used against commercial planes by extremists. Some of the weapons were secretly fitted with explosives so they could be remotely disabled in the wrong hands.

Other operations have supplied enemies with exploding ammunition. The most well-known example of this was Project Eldest Son, a CIA effort to capture and then dismantle ammunition supplied by China to the Vietnamese Communists. Gunpowder was replaced with high-explosive and ammunition was then covertly inserted into jungle supply dumps secretly by Special Forces.

But the tactic isn’t just something Hezbollah and its Iranian backers should fear. For years, the US worried that adversaries would be able to smuggle defective microchips into military equipment, shutting down high-tech weapons with a signal to a defective semiconductor, one of thousands in a modern jet. The idea was popularised in Ghost Fleet, a 2015 novel by August Cole and Peter Singer, which became required reading at some US military education centres.

Today, the US Department of Defence runs a process of evaluating whether semiconductors are tampered with through its Microelectronics Quantifiable Assurance process.

In 2018, there was heated debate as to whether this fear had become reality when engineers at Amazon discovered mysterious chips the size of a grain of rice on circuit boards in servers made by US firm Supermicro, which had production in China. A Bloomberg report later alleged that the chips had been installed covertly by a Chinese intelligence agency, including on devices for the Pentagon. The “spy chips” claim was firmly denied by both Supermicro and the US government.

Mr Regens warns that the West has been far from immune from these tactics.

“Exploding electronics isn't a new way to launch an attack. They just never have had this level of complexity and simultaneous execution. Probably the best previous example was in 1996 when the Israelis modified a phone to target a Palestinian terrorist bomb-maker. Another good example was the failed 2010 attempt by Al Qaeda to use exploding printer cartridges on cargo planes.”

While hugely disruptive, commercial aviation kept going, and Hamas became stronger, something Prof McGarr says Israel would do well to bear in mind.

“Tel Aviv and Washington are cognisant that attacks such as the pager operation are strategically inconsequential, if not strategically damaging. Senior Hezbollah figures don't use electronic communications. Shin Bet know this and in targeting foot soldiers were harvesting low-level intelligence and, when the operation appears to have been compromised, eliminating and injuring individuals that can easily be replaced. Psychologically, Hezbollah has been dealt a blow. But it will recover quickly.”

Prof McGarr says ultimately, these conflicts, sometimes called “irregular,” wars due to the fluid nature of militias involved, can often only be settled politically.

“It will expend time and effort reviewing its supply chain and internal security arrangements. But none of this alters the strategic security or political calculus within the region. While some in Israel and elsewhere might crow over a major success, Netanyahu among them, there are plenty of more sober heads in the security establishments of the US and Israel who will recognise the limitations, and indeed the long-term drawbacks, associated with the pager operation. As with Hamas, a hundred pager-type operations can't substitute for a political settlement.”