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The story behind Mossad’s exploding pagers by Eatcrueldog

The idea for the pager operation originated in 2022, according to the Israeli, Middle Eastern and U.S. officials familiar with the events. Parts of the plan began falling into place more than a year before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack that put the region on a path to war. It was a time of relative quiet on Israel’s war-scarred northern border with Lebanon.

Among the half dozen Iranian-backed militia groups with weapons aimed at Israel, Hezbollah is by far the strongest. Israeli officials had watched with increasing anxiety as the Lebanese group added new weapons to an arsenal already capable of striking Israeli cities with tens of thousands of precision-guided missiles.

Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service responsible for combating foreign threats to the Jewish state, had worked foryears to penetrate the group with electronic monitoring and human informants. Over time, Hezbollah leaders learned to worry about the group’s vulnerability to Israeli surveillance and hacking, fearing that even ordinary cellphones could be turned into Israeli-controlled eavesdropping and tracking devices.

Thus was born the idea of creating a kind of communications Trojan horse, the officials said. Hezbollah was looking for hack-proof electronic networks for relaying messages, and Mossad came up with a pair of ruses that would lead the militia group to purchase devices that seemed perfect for the job — equipment that Mossad designed and had assembled in Israel.

The first part of the plan, booby-trapped walkie-talkies, began being inserted into Lebanon by Mossad nearly a decade ago, in 2015. The mobile two-way radios contained oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive and a transmission system that gave Israel complete access to Hezbollah communications.

For nine years, the Israelis contented themselves with eavesdropping on Hezbollah, the officials said, while reserving the option to turn the walkie-talkies into bombs in a future crisis. But then came a new opportunity and a glitzy new product: a small pager equipped with a powerful explosive. In an irony that would not become clear for many months, Hezbollah would end up indirectly paying the Israelis for the tiny bombs that would kill or wound many of its operatives.

Because Hezbollah leaders were alert to possible sabotage, the pagers could not originate in Israel, the United States or any other Israeli ally. So, in 2023, the group began receiving solicitations for the bulk purchase of Taiwanese-branded Apollo pagers, a well-recognized trademark and product line with worldwide distribution and no discernible links to Israeli or Jewish interests. The Taiwanese company had no knowledge of the plan, officials said.

The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to reveal, was a former Middle East sales representative for the Taiwanese firm who had established her own company and acquired a license to sell a line of pagers that bore the Apollo brand. Sometime in 2023, she offered Hezbollah a deal on one of the products her firm sold: the rugged and reliable AR924.

“She was the one in touch with Hezbollah, and explained to them why the bigger pager with the larger battery was better than the original model,” said an Israeli official briefed on details of the operation. One of the main selling points about the AR924 was that it was “possible to charge with a cable. And the batteries were longer lasting,” the official said.

The whole story here: https://archive.is/ieCwr#selection-921.0-1103.363

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