A group of Israeli commanders were in a state of dismay earlier this year after discovering that explosive pagers, sent by the Mossad, killed or wounded thousands of Hizbollah fighters and Lebanese civilians.
Then they meet a former European spy. Instead of blaming the administration for Israel's corruption, the former intelligence chief poured out his high spirits with an unforgiving assessment.
Jobs must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legally recognized in the country, the former intelligence chief told them during a business conference. On that count the explosive pagers “didn't meet my test”.
The coordinated bombing on September 17 of thousands of Hizbollah's electronic gadgets left security officials around the world stunned by the sophistication of the work and surprised by the companies previously hired by Israel to supply booby-trapped equipment.
Yet the attack, a reinvention of the Trojan horse in the digital age, has sparked a wide-ranging debate among western security chiefs that has left them grappling with two key questions about modern intelligence.
Are their communication systems similarly vulnerable to interception? And will they ever agree to do the same – because the pager attack killed 37 people, including four people, two of them children, and injured about 3,000?
In interviews with more than a dozen current and senior security officials from the four IsraelThe most important western allies, all agreed that the pager attack was an unusual act of espionage. But only three would agree to the same act.
Another said it set a dangerous precedent that non-state actors, such as terrorists or criminals, could use. Another concern was that these explosive-laden pagers were being smuggled across Europe and the Middle East, endangering property and life en route.
Leon Panetta, the former head of the CIA, even described the pager attack in a television interview as “a form of terrorism”. Other officials take a similar view of the operation which, with dark humor, some call the name “Operation Grim Beeper”.
The former intelligence chief said: “That was the way the Russians would do it. “I don't think any other western intelligence service can handle that kind of work, it does thousands of people.”
“I like the determination, but on balance it wouldn't have worked as it wasn't completely targeted,” said a senior defense official. “There was a chance that the pagers could, say, kill the child who was carrying them.”
“It was an extraordinary operation – one that many western countries would consider murder,” said one former senior intelligence official. “Defense forces around the world will now ask themselves: how do we protect ourselves from the same destruction?”
People familiar with the operation say it was carried out by a small but powerful plastic bomb hidden in pager batteries and an X-ray invisible detonator that was triggered remotely.
Israel initially denied any involvement in the attack, but a few weeks after it happened, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Le Monde that he personally accepted the operation.
It is part of another program of Israel's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. In 1972, Israeli businessmen the phone blew up they planted explosives, which were used by the representative of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Paris. The man, Mahmoud Hamshari, lost his leg and later died. In 1996, they repeated the strategy with Yahya Ayyash, a skilled Hamas bomber.
Another important difference with the 2024 pager attack was its scale. In addition, the next day another series of explosions – this time booby-trapped walkie-talkies used by Hizbollah operatives – killed another 20 people and wounded 450, according to Lebanese authorities.
Outside the region, the work has raised urgent concerns about the risk of copycat sabotage operations.
Sir Alex Younger, the former head of Britain's MI6 intelligence service, warned that the attack was a “valuable wake-up call” about the vulnerability of western supply chains.
“Because supply chains are invisible, we ignore them,” he said. “But the west must put a proper value on the risks that exist in supply chains – be it Russian energy, Chinese electronics, or now – and put aside other risks, such as AI, drones and cyber warfare.”
That includes the possibility that supply chains could be hijacked by terrorists, a point made by Ken McCallum, head of Britain's domestic intelligence service MI5.
Asked about the operation of the pager at a rare press conference in October, McCallum replied that an important aspect of MI5's work is to “stay before terrorism gets there”.
Supply chain disruption and assassinations are as old as spycraft itself. Medieval armies used spies as merchants to find out what their enemies were buying. They can poison the water, according to Calder Walton, an intelligence historian.
More recently, during the cold war, the CIA smuggled defective computer chips into the supply chains used by the Soviet Union for western technology through former commercial companies.
The most successful example of a CIA operation was the software malfunction that broke a gas pipeline in a three-kiloton explosion in 1982. No one was killed, and the repairs cost the Kremlin millions of rubles it could not afford.
In a recent meeting in Washington, a group of American officials worried that if Israel could seize electronic devices such as pagers, a whole range of Chinese technology – such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, almost anything with a battery. -rather than weapons.
“The new digital world allows for previously unimaginable ways of doing damage,” Walton said.
Not all officers interviewed believed the operation was disproportionate or unnecessary. As one put it bluntly: “War is about violence”.
Young said he did not judge the attack as an indiscriminate use of violence because the pagers were used by Hizbollah operatives, and Israel was fighting an armed group. However, he warned that “beheading operations are very much in the context of a wider strategy – it is not the end of them”.
One senior western security official even called it “a very good campaign . . . I am jealous”. Western countries may recoil at Israel's indifference to civilian casualties caused by the attack, the official said, but it pales in comparison to the ferocity with which the Israeli army attacked Gaza and Lebanon.
“They (the Israelis) have their own way of assessing that – with a different margin,” the official added.
What seems clear is that targeted killings remain central to Israel's security operations in a way that it has never been among its western allies, where civilian casualties during war are seen as unacceptable.
In the first 17 years of this century alone, Israel carried out more than 2,000 targeted assassinations, according to Ronen Bergman, a historian of Israeli assassinations. During the same period, the US authorized less than a fifth of that amount.
John Raine, a senior adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies said: “Israel's security calculus is different from that of the West. “They live in a brutal environment and they've been brutalized by it. The saving grace is that Israel knows this. The worry is that it doesn't seem to care that much.”
Those considerations leave open the question of whether western intelligence agencies would ever approve their own version of Operation Grim Beeper.
As one official commented: “If our country is also faced with an existential threat similar to that of Israel, what would we do?” The answer is that it all depends on the circumstances that we cannot anticipate until we get there.”
Illustration by Bob Haslett