The extraordinary military power of keeping secrets

Two things in warfare are worth more than bullets or guns or money:  The skill to analyze problems and the ability to keep secrets.  

Take analysis.  Say the problem you have is that you want to get behind the enemy, so that you can attack him from the rear.  You can’t go around the enemy position from the left, because there’s a river in your way, and crossing rivers is the most dangerous thing you can do in a war.  But you can get around the enemy on the right if you go over a mountain.  So, what is the best way over the mountain?

You have some heavy stuff to carry with you, so you can’t go up and over the steepest part of the mountain, where the enemy would be least likely to expect your movement, thus you lose the element of surprise.  Part of the mountain is wooded, which would provide good cover and concealment, but getting through the trees would slow you down.  The other part of the mountain is the least steep and most easily traversed, but that’s where the enemy would expect you to come from, so it would probably be the best defended section.

But because it’s less steep and rocky and isn’t covered with trees, it’s the fastest.  If you use darkness or bad weather as cover, and you move fast, you stand a chance of surprising the enemy and getting behind him, where he doesn’t expect your attack.

But what if it’s impossible to attack the enemy on the ground?  His defenses are too well established – think:  Russian positions along the front lines in Ukraine.  If he is too well dug in, attacking from the air or using artillery and rockets wouldn’t be effective.  What if the enemy is so spread out, a narrow, targeted attack wouldn’t kill or wound enough of them to have a decisive effect?  What if the enemy is not an identifiable uniformed army but is rather part of the population, diversified through towns and villages until orders are given to coalesce and take up positions for an attack against you? 

That’s a pretty good description of Hezbollah in Lebanon.  They’re not just a military but a political force, winning parliamentary seats in elections, holding cabinet positions in the government, running schools and hospitals and social programs, feeding children, even picking up the garbage in towns that Hezbollah controls.  They have popular support; they run television stations and other news organizations.

Hezbollah also has a strong military component.  Al Jazerra estimates that Hezbollah has as many as 60,000 fighters, including regular and reserve forces.  They are armed with everything from rifles to mortars and artillery and anti-tank guided missiles, and it is believed Hezbollah has as many as 45,000 short and long range missiles, some of which can reach the port of Haifa and Tel Aviv.  The government of Israel believes Hezbollah has 150,000 rockets, some of which can reach the southernmost Israeli city of Eilat.  Hezbollah is backed by Syria and Iran.  Ominously for Israel, yesterday the Egyptian foreign minister, Badr Abdelatty, called his counterpart in Lebanon and the country’s president to convey his “full support” for Lebanon and offered to provide any help the country needs.

This has been Israel’s problem throughout its military confrontation with Hezbollah on its northern border.  How do you damage such a diverse and popular movement? Israel has bombed them from the air or hit them with guided missiles from the ground.  In late August, Israel used more than 100 warplanes to attack thousands of rocket-launcher positions throughout southern Lebanon.  The preemptive strike was to prevent a large missile and rocket attack that Israel believed Hezbollah was planning.  Hezbollah responded by hitting Israeli military positions with dozens of drones and short-range missiles. 

That’s where things stood in the standoff between Israel and Hezbollah until yesterday when Israel sent a signal to thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah militants as communications devices, causing them to explode.  Twelve people were killed and as many as 3,000 were injured, filling hospitals throughout the country with the wounded.  Today there are reports out of Lebanon that walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah militants have exploded, killing nine and injuring 300.  And now there are late reports of rooftop solar systems exploding in Lebanon.  It is unknown how many were killed or injured by solar system explosions.

Israel has not taken responsibility for any of these events, but all of them are obviously the work of Israel’s Mossad, its intelligence agency that also carries out military operations and assassinations.  The head of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, announced today that Israel has “many capabilities that we have not yet activated,” and said they were “preparing plans going forward.”

The question of the day is, how did Israel manage such a wide-ranging and innovative attack?  The answer is:  by keeping secrets.

Take the pager attack:  Pagers are no longer in widespread use in most of the world, but in developing nations, there is still a market for them because they provide a way to communicate that is separate from cell phone networks and satellite communications such as Starlink and other internet-based systems.  Pagers are old-fashioned:  They use a radio signal that can be sent to as many as a million of the devices.  Each pager is assigned a different identity, usually a conventional phone number.  Pager signals are sent in the same a radio station sends its signal carrying music or other programming that can be picked up using radios. 

If you send a page, it is received by the central network and repeated from a radio tower to every pager on the network.  But the page you send can only be received by the person carrying the pager with the number you put in.  That is why groups like Hezbollah have used pagers.  You can’t “tap into” thousands of individual pagers that receive radio signals unless you have the thousands of numbers associated with them.  Thus, the messages sent over pager networks are secure.

Or so Hezbollah thought until yesterday.  Pager networks can also send signals to multiple pagers.  An example would be a hospital pager network.  A signal could be sent to multiple people with pagers to report to the emergency room because of a patient with a heart attack.  (Hospitals use low-power pager networks that can only send and receive within a limited area.)

But pager networks can send signals to larger numbers of pagers, which is what happened yesterday.  A signal was sent out to everyone with what we will call a “Hezbollah pager,” and that signal detonated an explosive charge within the pager, injuring the carrier and people in the immediate vicinity with the resulting small explosion.

Now the question becomes, how did Israel manage to get 3,000 pagers into the hands of Hezbollah militants, and how did Israel get explosives into every single one of those pagers? 

The answer is that Israel’s Mossad has had deep-penetration agents within Hezbollah (and Hamas and other militant groups) for decades.  They were planted as so-called sleeper agents to be used for exactly this sort of attack.  The sleeper agent would have entered Hezbollah years ago as a member and worked his way up through the organization until he got to a position where he could be involved when something comes up like, “Hey, we need new pagers.”

Other Mossad deep-cover agents were planted years or even decades ago in electronic companies for just this reason.  They were activated when the order came up for several thousand pagers. 

Even more agents were inserted into what are called “supply-chain” networks that would get right down to the level of manufacturing plants, trucking outfits, or even air-shipment companies. 

Let’s look at what had to happen for this attack to have occurred.  Hezbollah needed new pagers.  A Mossad guy was there to learn about the need and report back to his chief in Israel.  Then the other agents were called up.  Someone within Hezbollah had to place the order.  A Mossad agent had to know the number of pagers needed and what sort they were:  numerical or text-and-numerical, that can send brief text messages.  The pagers were reportedly manufactured in Hungary in a factory that licenses the pager design from a company in Taiwan.  Mossad had to have bought dozens and dozens of pagers in advance to plan for the possibility of using any one of the designs in its plans.  So, in Israel, there was a building run by Mossad where these things were disassembled and examined for how an explosive could be inserted, along with a detonator, in such a way that the pager would still operate, and the detonator had to use a 1.5 volt charge to go off, because almost all pagers use 1.5 volt ordinary AA or AAA batteries.

When the order came in from Hezbollah for several thousand pagers, the supply-chain Mossad guys swung into action.  The pagers had to be taken from the factory, apparently in Hungary, to a location where the explosive could be inserted, and then returned to the supply-chain to be shipped to Syria or Lebanon where they would be delivered to a central Hezbollah location and be distributed to the militants they were issued to. It is not known what sort of explosive was used, but it is probable that it was Semtex or another “plastic” type explosive that could be either rolled into a small button or tube shape or laid out in a thin slice.

Think of the secrets that had to be kept!  The identities of all the deep-penetration Mossad agents within Hezbollah, of course.  But also, the Mossad agents at the factory, in the supply-chain, and in the building where the work was done on the pagers. 

That is a lot of people who had to keep a lot of secrets over a fairly extensive period of time in order for the Mossad pager conspiracy to work. 

Additionally, there had to be someone inside the pager company that controlled the radio tower and system to send pages, or that system had to be hacked into without being detected, in order that the detonation signal could be sent out to some 3,000 pagers all at once.  This may seem far-fetched, but it is possible that Israel owned a front company that owned the pager manufacturing plant in Hungary and the pager company in either Syria or Lebanon.  It’s possible that Mossad was running the entire network right under the noses of Hezbollah the whole time.

You want to know how I know this?  Because back in the mid-1970’s when I was working for the Village Voice and traveled to Israel and Lebanon to write about terrorism, I met a guy at a party in Israel who told me that he worked for an electronics firm.  A couple of weeks later, my friend Jonathan Broder and I were walking down a street in Beirut when we saw that guy we had met in Israel walking straight towards us.  When he recognized us and we recognized him, all three of us turned and walked in different directions.  We later learned he was a deep cover Mossad agent who lived a life in Beirut, yes, working for an electronics firm, as a Palestinian.  He had been undercover in Lebanon with a Palestinian identity for years.  When we met him at the party in Tel Aviv, he was on “vacation” in his home country, probably meeting with his Mossad bosses.  In Beirut, he had told his electronics firm he was traveling on business, which he actually did to some third or fourth or even fifth countries, before covertly going to Israel, and then returning covertly to his “business trip” that took him back to Beirut.  He even had a family in Beirut.  That’s how deep undercover he was.

That was in 1975.  Now imagine that same sort of operation going on for 50 years, through multiple variations of Palestinian radical militant movements such as the PLO and PFLP, through the establishment of Hezbollah in the 1980’s to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, through the 1990’s into this century.

You end up with a Mossad operation that uses exploding pagers to hit an entire network of Hezbollah militants, up and down the chain of command.

Today it was revealed that Mossad had also penetrated Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies they use to communicate over short distances, probably from one rocket emplacement to another to coordinate timed-attacks on Israel, and those things started exploding all over southern Lebanon.

How was Mossad able to do all this?  I don’t have any sources in Mossad, but if I were to guess, a lot of the deep-penetration of agents and the turning of Hezbollah militants into providers of information to Mossad was done with sex.  Intelligence agencies famously use the weaknesses of the enemy against them, and where Muslim militants are weak is around sex.  The religious strictures on Muslim women make pre-marital sex dangerous if not impossible for young Muslims, so the men turn to non-Muslim sources for sex, which you can read as prostitutes who are Christian or some other religion, dangled as “honey-traps,” and bingo.  You’ve got Hezbollah militant either talking to a Mossad “prostitute” or you’ve got them on a secret camera doing very un-Muslim things, and you use the un-Muslim videos to encourage them to cooperate with their friend who turned them on to the friendly young woman from Beirut, and…you get the picture.

There is sometimes a high price to pay for holding extreme religious beliefs, and I think it’s highly probable that Hezbollah is paying that price right now in Lebanon for having allowed adherence to those beliefs to have led them down a path strewn with rose-pedals and lacy lingerie straight into the arms of Mossad. 

Funny how that happens, isn’t it?  In this country, when fundamentalist preachers and politicians climb into bed with women who are not their wives or men who aren’t their wives, they lose their careers.  In Lebanon, when the women or men who are not their wives end up being from Mossad, fundamentalist Hezbollah militants lose their lives.