Pager attack used well-worn spy tactic to inflict new devastating human toll

The attack on the militant and political group Hezbollah via exploding pagers and walkie-talkies this week, widely believed to be conducted by Israel, was a novel use of a well-trodden spy tactic and a devastating intelligence blow to Hezbollah, according to experts who spoke with NBC News.

The attack killed at least 37, including two children, according to Lebanon’s health minister. The explosions also injured thousands of Hezbollah targets and civilians.

It’s taken journalists days to begin to unravel the details of how it unfolded.

As news has trickled out about the complex and deadly operation, it appears that Israeli intelligence agencies introduced the exploding devices via the supply chain to get modified devices in their targets’ hands.

While supply chain interference isn’t unheard of in the world of spies and espionage, the attack on the militant and political group Hezbollah opens a new chapter in covert operations as historically such supply chain compromises or supply chain attacks have been part of yearslong surveillance operations rather than to engineer a violent mass casualty event.

“We have examples where supply chains were compromised in very elaborate, long lasting, super sophisticated ways for espionage. We don’t have that many for actual attacks. This may be the first supply chain attack that actually really deserves to be called a supply chain attack,” said Thomas Rid, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies the history of intelligence operations.

Much about how Israel was able to get rigged versions of the two types of communication devices into Hezbollah’s hands is still unknown. Lebanon’s Telecommunications Ministry said Wednesday that the model of walkie-talkies that exploded were Icom V82s, though they had not been licensed. On Thursday, Icom said it had discontinued the V82 model in 2014, and that devices made since then were counterfeit.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that, according to three intelligence officers briefed on the matter, Israel didn’t intercept pagers bound for Hezbollah, but rather created the entire supply chain, as a web of shell companies to make and distribute counterfeit models, including shipping the explosive ones to Hezbollah. NBC News has not verified that reporting.

Emily Harding, a veteran of the CIA and the U.S. National Security Council, said that supply chain compromises are key tools for intelligence agencies but often are kept from the public.

“Supply chain compromises are tried and true in intelligence work,” said Harding, who is the director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I literally cannot think of a single example that is unclassified.”

But she said the combined scope, planning and violence behind the pager and walkie-talkie operation made it a unique incident in the history of supply chain compromises.

The history of elaborate supply-chain compromises for gathering intelligence goes back at least to the Cold War. After World War II, a now-defunct Swiss company called Crypto AG rose as a dominant global seller of various types of messaging equipment, such as encrypted communications devices and software. Starting in 1970, the company was acquired and largely run by the CIA, according to a 2020 joint investigation by The Washington Post and ZDF, a German public news station, which acquired a classified CIA description of the operation.

A CIA spokesperson declined to comment to NBC News. The report concludes “It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the Post reported.

Later, the National Security Agency allegedly developed a practice of intercepting computer networking gear to implant spy devices on them before they reached their target destinations.

An agency newsletter article from 2010, later stolen and leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden, described the process.

A former NSA employee from that time who was directly familiar with the practice, who requested to not be named to talk about a classified operation, confirmed the operation’s existence to NBC News.

The NSA did not provide a comment to NBC News by its deadline.

More recently, the FBI and the Australian Federal Police allegedly were the developers behind Aom, a proprietary smartphone and messaging app marketed to criminals for its supposed security. In reality, according to court documents and the book Dark Wire, police could decrypt every message sent through Anom’s messaging service, leading to more than a thousand arrests around the world.

Neither the FBI nor the Australian agency responded to requests for comment.

Countries and militant organizations have long accused opponents of sabotaging weapons and munitions to hurt the soldiers who use them.

There’s also precedent for agencies sabotaging specific items for targeted assassinations, ranging from the CIA’s varied plots to kill former Cuban leader Fidel Castro with tainted cigars in the 1960s to Israeli intelligence allegedly killing Hamas explosives expert Yahya Ayyash in 1996 by adding explosive to his cellphone and detonating it when his father called.

While the attack in Lebanon broke with spy agencies’ tradition by using a supply chain for an attack rather than for espionage, it could benefit Israel’s military objectives and have larger political implications.

“This is a big, embarrassing morale crusher” for Hezbollah, Harding said.

“This is also a physical disruptor, and it’s also an intelligence boon, because now if you have video of all these things blowing up, you know exactly who they were attached to, and you can dive in on who that person is and try to figure out who their contacts are. It’s an intelligence bonanza.”

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com