A new page in warfare

On Tuesday afternoon across Lebanon pagers started beeping. As the pager’s owners looked to their devices, they discovered that what they thought were familiar, safe, mundane everyday objects, carried around with them with their wallets and keys, were lethal weapons placed into their hands by an enemy looking to injure or kill them. This was followed up by another set of explosions on Wednesday, this time affecting radios.

The most well-known deception involving a military convincing an enemy to accept an object purporting to be one thing only for them to later discover at great cost, that it was a weapon to be used against them, was the Trojan Horse. The Greeks who had been besieging Troy left a great wooden horse outside the impregnable walls as a gift to honour the Trojan’s defence of their city. The Greeks then appeared to sail home. The Trojans pulled the gift inside their walls. As night fell and the parties started, concealed Greek soldiers slipped out of the horse’s hollow belly and opened the gates allowing the returned Greek army to sack the city. This mythic episode gave its name to a Trojan horse attack, a type of malware involving a malicious program disguised as a legitimate file. But this complex attack in Lebanon, that would have taken months if not years of planning, was not virtual, its physical logistics and impact have more in common with the original Trojan horse than any cyberattack.

While pagers are no longer in common usage, Hezbollah has long used them as a way to communicate due to concerns around Israel’s ability to track and intercept mobiles. In February, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned against carrying mobiles, claiming, “Your phone is their agent.” Supposedly, after this, Hezbollah placed an order for about 5,000 pagers, which became the agents of their enemy in a way Nasrallah had not considered, by concealing within them most likely RDX or PETN explosive, which can cause significant damage with as little as 3-5 grams, especially if in close proximity to the body. The gap of a few seconds between beeping and exploding was enough time for the pagers’ owners to bring them close to their face to read the incoming message, hence the high number of eye injuries.

Israel has not claimed responsibility. However, there are few that suspect anyone else. An attack of this complex nature strongly suggests a state intelligence agency of high capability and high-risk tolerance – in other words, an agency like Israel’s Mossad.

On 16 September, the Israeli government announced it had approved a new war objective: to return all Israeli residents who have been displaced by Hezbollah rocket fire since October last year. In recent weeks, key military units have been moved from the Southern Command (responsible for Gaza) to the Northern Command, responsible for the border area with Lebanon.

Israel has a history of infiltrating the supply chain of its enemies. In August last year, Iran accused Israel of trying to sabotage its ballistic missile program through introducing faulty connectors, used to attach electronic components of a missile or drone, into their supply chain. These connectors contained small amounts of explosive primed to explode at a given time, that would damage the weapons before they could be used. In 1996, a single booby-trapped phone was used by Israel to assassinate the Hamas leader Yahya Ayyash.

While precisely who conducted the attacks is seemingly obvious, how they did it is less clear. An explosive device needs a container, a battery, a triggering device, a detonator and an explosive charge. A pager already has the first three. At some point the operatives would have needed to add a detonator and a charge.

The exploding pagers appear to be AR-924 models, a brand of the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo. There are no records of direct exports of Gold Apollo pagers to Lebanon. The company claimed this week that they had authorised use of its brand by a Hungary-based company called BAC Consulting KFT. There is an address in Budapest on its website, but multiple companies are registered there. Its chief executive is listed as Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono, who confirmed to the US broadcaster NBC that her company worked with Gold Apollo but only as an intermediary, not as a manufacturer. Hungarian officials confirmed the pagers had not been made in the country.

BAC Consulting’s webpage is no longer accessible, but archives of the site have no mention of pagers, although company documents on Bársony-Arcidiacono’s LinkedIn page stress the diversity of their operations. Previous posts and comments on the same site by Bársony-Arcidiacono feature a reference to “US colonisation” and pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian comments.

Just like fraudsters and tax avoiders, intelligence agencies regularly use shell companies and opaque ownership structures to disguise their involvement. Some companies they set up only exist virtually to provide cover for other activities. Others are physically set up to conduct specific tasks associated with an operation while hiding the involvement of the agency. Sometimes existing companies are co-opted. Not everyone involved in these companies will be aware of who is behind the company or the true intent of the venture they were involved in. Individuals can be selected because they have a particular skill set or are likely to be sympathetic to a cause that fits the overall deception.

At some point, however, officers from the intelligence agency must be directly involved, working covertly to make the connections between those who are knowingly assisting them, those who are not conscious of their involvement and have been co-opted into the operation by deception, and the targets of the operation. They will be pulling together the logistics and feeding in the information to convince all those involved to take the actions needed for the successful completion of the operation, often at great risk physical risk.

In the Greek myth, Sinon, the Greek warrior, was tasked with remaining behind to convince the Trojans to take in the horse. Sinon was found outside Troy after the rest of the Greek army had sailed away (to their nearby hiding place rather than back to Greece), and was brought to, Priam, the King of the Troy. He posed as a deserter and told the Trojans that the wooden horse was intended as a gift to the gods to ensure their safe voyage. He told them that the horse was made too big for them to move it inside of Troy, because if they did, they would be invincible to later invasion. The psychology of his story worked, and the operation was a success.

In this case, intelligence officers needed to take possession of the pagers and other devices to covertly open them and insert the explosives and detonators before retuning them to the supply chain, or needed to introduce the devices that the intelligence agency has itself manufactured with the explosives built in. Either way, the logistics would have been highly complex. It is likely that separate agents run by the intelligence officers would also have to had made the introductions to those in Hezbollah who were looking to purchase the pagers perhaps back in February, and the companies that were able to provide these altered pagers. Most intelligence agencies do not embed their own officers in terrorist groups.

It is possible to create shallow cover stories supported by documentation that would stand the test of internet research – this works for short term tasks – and even fly into countries under an assumed identity (although advances in the use of biometrics at international borders has made this more challenging).

But to embed in an organisation with its own internal security teams and gain the trust of senior decision makers can only be done by someone with a genuine history within a community and who has long-standing friends and family who can provide guarantees for them.

Whilst that agent assumes most of the risk, living in the community, hiding their activities from friends and family, meeting regularly with members of a terrorist organisation, the intelligence officer is always conscious of the risk of the agent being a double agent.

This is what happened in Afghanistan when the CIA thought they had recruited Jordanian jihadi blogger Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, but he was instead using them to gain access to a US base. In 2009 he was brought into Camp Chapman for a meeting and once inside the perimeter, he detonated a suicide vest killing seven CIA officers and contractors, one Jordanian intelligence officer and one Afghan.

Anyone involved in the procurement of those pagers will now be under investigation by Hezbollah. There is a chance that this operation has burnt well-placed agents, and potentially put them and their families at great risk. This is part of the risk calculation intelligence agencies should do.

Considering the effort and risk that must have gone into the operation, and the potential loss of future intelligence gains (from both the pagers and agents), the obvious question is: why now? One reason could be that the operation was about to be discovered. Another is that this attack is a precursor to a larger military action. Since the attacks we have seen Israeli airstrikes in Beirut. There are many who fear that this is all part of shaping the battlefield for a larger ground offensive.

Netanyahu has long been clear about his desire to eradicate the threat of Hezbollah and a nuclear Iran, but he is under increasing pressure from the US to wrap up the campaign in Gaza and de-escalate regional tensions. The building series of attacks against both suggest he is either testing Biden’s resolve to enforce his red-lines or provoke Iran or Hezbollah into a major retaliation that would force the US to then back further “defensive” Israeli actions.

The shifting polls leading up to November’s US election are also influencing Netanyahu. There are concerns that if vice president Harris wins, his options become become limited. Israel is dependent on a steady flow of American munitions; they do not have the local capacity to manufacture at the scale needed to fight a longer conflict with either Iran or Hezbollah. If the new president Harris were to put restrictions on the export of weapons to Israel in response to Israeli escalations, it would be a serious handbrake on Netanyahu’s stated strategic aims.

The failure to retrieve the Israeli hostages held by Hamas and be able to return those living at the northern border are both sources of constant pressure on Netanyahu’s beleaguered premiership. Any progress on either relieves some of that mounting pressure. There are other politics in action as interests within his coalition compete and politicians and civil servants vie for power and survival. War is the continuation of politics by other means, actions on the battlefield are often driven as much by politics far removed from the direct conflict as military strategy. The ingenuity of the attack has distracted from the harm it did and the recklessness of Netanyahu’s escalations.

The Lebanese health ministry said that around 2,800 people have been wounded and at least nine people have died. In a speech on Thursday, Nasrallah claimed the attack crossed “all red lines” and promised a “just punishment.” After the Greek success at Troy and the subsequent bloody massacre of the Trojans, few of the victorious Greeks made it home. According to Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus whose idea the Trojan horse was, took ten years to find his way home.

Even the supposed winners of wars pay a high price for their actions. As Netanyahu continues his journey across red-line after red-line, he may soon discover that ancient lesson.