A group of Israeli executives were in an excited mood earlier this year after they saw how explosive pagers, sent by Mossad, killed or maimed thousands of Hezbollah fighters and civilians in Lebanon.
Then they met a former European spymaster. Instead of congratulating the executives on Israel's sabotage, the former intelligence chief soaked their high spirits with an unforgiving assessment.
The former intelligence chief told them during a business conference that operations must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legally approved in this country. Accordingly, the explosive pagers “did not meet my test.”
The simultaneous detonation of thousands of Hezbollah pagers on September 17 left security officials around the world stunned by the audacity of the operation and mystified by the complex front companies Israel had set up to supply the bomb devices.
However, the attack, a reworking of the Trojan horse for the digital age, also sparked a broader debate among Western security chiefs, leaving them grappling with two fundamental questions about modern espionage skills.
Are their communications systems similarly vulnerable to interception? Would they agree to a similar operation – given that the Nidaa 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 IsraelAll of the United States' Western allies acknowledged that the attack on the pager was an extraordinary act of espionage. But only three said they would approve a similar law.
One said it set a dangerous precedent that could be used by non-state actors, such as terrorists or criminals. Another concern was how pagers packed with explosives were smuggled through Europe and the Middle East, posing a risk to property and human life along the way.
Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA, even described the attack on the pager in a television interview as “a form of terrorism.” Other officials took a similar view of the operation, which some dubbed, with dark humor, “Operation Dark Whistle.”
“It was just the kind of operation the Russians could do,” a former intelligence chief said. “I don’t think any other Western intelligence service would think of this kind of operation, which leads to the mutilation of thousands of people.”
A senior defense official said: “I like the boldness, but overall I would not have approved the operation because it was not completely targeted.” “There was a chance, for example, that the pager could kill a child it was carrying.”
Another former senior intelligence official said: “It was an extraordinary operation – even if many Western countries considered it murder.” “Defense ministries around the world will now be asking: How do we protect ourselves from similar acts of sabotage?”
People familiar with the operation say it was caused by a small but powerful plastic explosion hidden in pager batteries and an invisible X-ray detonator triggered remotely.
Israel initially denied any involvement in the attack, but several weeks after it occurred, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Le Monde newspaper that he had personally approved the operation.
It is part of other operations carried out by the Israeli foreign intelligence service, Mossad. In 1972, Israeli agents He blew the phone They were planted with explosives used by the representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Paris. The man, Mahmoud Al-Hamshari, lost his leg and later died. In 1996, they repeated the trick with Yahya Ayyash, a skilled Hamas bomb maker.
One significant difference between the 2024 Pagers' offense was his size. In addition, the next day, another series of explosions—this time with explosives-laden walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives—killed another 20 people and injured 450 others, according to Lebanese authorities.
Outside the region, the operation raised urgent concerns about the dangers of copycat sabotage operations.
Sir Alex Younger, the former head of Britain's foreign intelligence service MI6, 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 any attention to them,” he said. “But the West must properly price the risks inherent in supply chains — whether that be Russian energy, or Chinese electronics, or now — and put them alongside other risks, such as artificial intelligence, drones, and cyberwarfare.”
This includes the possibility of terrorists intercepting supply chains, a point raised by Ken McCallum, head of Britain's MI5 domestic intelligence service.
Asked about the appeal process at a rare press conference in October, McCallum replied that an important aspect of MI5's work was to “stay at the front of where terrorism could reach”.
Supply chain sabotage and assassinations are as old as espionage itself. Medieval armies used spies to act as traders to discover what their opponents were buying. They also poisoned the water supply, according to Calder Walton, a historian of espionage.
More recently, during the Cold War, the CIA smuggled defective computer chips into supply chains that the Soviet Union used to steal Western technology via commercial front companies.
The most successful example of a CIA campaign was some 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 not afford.
At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of American officials expressed concern that if Israel could rig up ordinary electronic devices like pagers, a whole host of Chinese civilian technologies — such as electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, and almost anything containing Battery – can also be armed.
“The new digital world allows for methods of subversion that were previously unimaginable,” Walton said.
Not all officials interviewed believed the operation was disproportionate or unnecessary. As someone put it bluntly: “War is about violence.”
Younger said he did not consider the attack a random use of violence because pagers were used by Hezbollah members, and because Israel was at war with the armed group. However, he cautioned, “decapitations are most effective in the context of a broader strategy – they are not an end in themselves.”
One senior Western security official went so far as to describe this operation as “a very beautiful operation…” . . “I'm jealous.” The official said that Western countries may reject Israel's apparent disregard for civilian casualties resulting from the attack, but that pales in comparison to the ferocity with which the Israeli army attacked Gaza and Lebanon.
“They (the Israelis) have their own methods for assessing this — and a different threshold,” the official added.
What seems clear is that targeted killings remain central to Israeli security operations in a way that does not happen among its Western allies, where civilian casualties during war are widely viewed as unacceptable.
In the first 17 years of this century alone, Israel carried out more than 2,000 targeted killings, according to Ronen Bergman, author of A History of Israeli Assassinations. During the same period, the United States authorized less than a fifth of this amount.
“Israel’s security calculations differ from those of the West,” said John Wren, a senior adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They live in a rough neighborhood and have been brutalized because of it. The saving grace is that Israel recognizes this. The worry is that they seem less concerned than ever.”
Such considerations leave moot the question of whether a Western intelligence agency would approve its own version of Operation Grim Beeper.
As one official commented: “If our country also faces a similar existential threat that Israel faces, what will we do? The answer is that it all depends on the circumstances that we cannot anticipate until we get there.”
Illustration by Bob Haslett
