Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - How Israel’s Spies Penetrated Hezbollah - with Ronen Bergman

Episode Date: January 2, 2025

🔗 Watch video episodes of Call me Back on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CallMeBackPodcast🔗 Visit our website to sign up for updates, access transcripts and more: https://arkmedia.org/🔗 Dan on X: https://x.com/dansenor🔗 Dan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dansenorThe string of Israeli successes against Hezbollah — culminating in the killing of Hassan Nasrallah — last September was partly the work of Israeli military and intelligence agencies infiltrating Hezbollah’s networks, planting booby-trapped communication devices, and tracking the leaders’ movements to dismantle the group's military capabilities. This campaign crippled Hezbollah by also destroying thousands of missiles and disrupting its leadership, delivering a blow to Iran’s regional strategy. An investigative report recently published by the New York Times delves into how deeply Israeli intelligence had penetrated Hezbollah ranks. Our guest today is one of the report’s authors: Ronen Bergman. Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and Senior Correspondent for Military and Intelligence Affairs for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily. Ronen has won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Israel-Hamas war and the pre-war intelligence failures. The New York Times’ investigative report, co-authored by Ronen: “Behind the Dismantling of Hezbollah: Decades of Israeli Intelligence” - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/world/middleeast/israel-hezbollah-nasrallah-assassination-intelligence.html

throughout this time since the end of the war in August 2006, Israel was very restrained in not using its understanding of Hezbollah. So basically, not Nasrallah, nor anyone else, the leadership understood how deep Israel infiltrated their ranks and the Israelis did something very, very untypical to Israelis. They were patient. It's three o'clock p.m. on Wednesday, January 1st here in New York City. It's 10 o'clock p.m. on Wednesday, January 1st in Israel. The assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was the result of decades of meticulous Israeli intelligence work and operations culminating in a September 2024 offensive

that combined advanced surveillance, covert sabotage, and precision airstrikes. Israeli agencies infiltrated Hezbollah's networks, planted booby-trapped communication devices, and tracked the leaders movements to dismantle the group's military capabilities, including the mistresses of one of those leaders. And of course killing Hassan Nasrallah and other key figures in an underground bunker while the Prime Minister of Israel was giving an address at the UN General Assembly in New York City.

Impressive. The campaign crippled Hezbollah by destroying thousands of missiles and disrupting its leadership, delivering a blow to Iran's regional strategy. An investigative report from the New York Times was just published days ago and it illustrates how deeply Israeli intelligence had penetrated Hezbollah's ranks. With us today is one of this report's authors,

Ronen Bergman. Ronen, good to be with you. Dave here, thanks so deeply to get that. Ronen, before we get into the story of the Israeli intelligence operations against Hezbollah, a sort of related story, which is just emerging right now as you and I are talking, former Defense Minister Yoav Galant, who is still a member of Knesset, even though he is no longer defense minister, is announcing tonight, Israel time, that he is resigning from the Knesset entirely.

Again, before we jump into the story of Hezbollah and Israel's operations there, I did want to give you a moment to react to Galant. I know he is an important part of the story. We're gonna be talking about today. Yeah, well, basically everything that happened in Israel on the national security level, is with the participation and the imprint of now the former Minister of Defense Galan from October 7 onwards.

And the Defense Minister Galan since four days after the war onwards was one of the more hawkish leaders that pushed for more and more action against Hezbollah and was one of the supporters of the IDF and the intelligence community when it came to more aggressive steps and after this has been done Hezbollah was decimated, he was fired by the prime minister. I think it's not a coincidence that what we will see, I assume, in the next few weeks after Gallant's now resigning will be a long and very meticulous detailed argument

about credit. Who said what, when, who was in favor of killing Nasrallah who was in against that in any case Gallard had a decisive kingpin role in the development since October 7 especially since the decision to turn the focus to the north and start the campaign against Hezbollah and he was the key figure in the war cabinet who was pushing for action against the North and Hezbollah in the days after October 7th. While most of the government was focused on Hamas

and most of the world was speculating on what Israel's response was going to be to Hamas in Gaza, Gallant was saying, let's use this opportunity to take a preemptive strike against Hezbollah. They're going to join this war regardless. Let's catch them off guard while everyone is focused on the south and deal with what is a more dangerous enemy for Israel in Lebanon.

He said, they are the stronger enemy. Let's take them out first, because we will need to take them out anyway. And from the 8th of October, when the secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, started to make his lethal mistake, his unbelievable miscalculus to connect his fate with Hamas, to say, I'm going to bomb Israel as well and continue with that until the war is over in the South. This just empowered, of course, those people at the IDF and the Ministry of Defense, Gallant, who aligned with them to say, we have to hit first. Gallant and the military came to a cabinet decision at minus four under the Ministry

of Defense, deep in the bunker. It was a heated debate. There was a phone call from President Biden, who pressured, according to the story, a pressure Prime Minister Netanyahu not to go for it. There was a vote. There was a majority against it. And ever since that moment, throughout the next year,

Ghana kept on saying again and again and again, this was a mistake, we should go and attack his phone again and again until there was one very disturbing bit of information coming from his mother on late August but you want to keep this off the woods yeah we're gonna get to that so let's turn to your article here titled behind the dismantling of Hezbollah decades of Israeli intelligence so just to set the table here Ronan how much of this story that you reported on was known to you before you worked on this investigative piece much of this obviously was a surprise to too many of your readers as a surprise to me. What surprised you? This is a very tricky question, Dan.

There's a heated debate in Israel now about an investigation. I'm not going to get into the details because it's very complicated, into a leakage of information from the ITF to people at the prime minister's office who were arrested for leaking that information to foreign press. They are under arrest. They are going to face trial. People say many years in prison. Then people close to the prime minister are now spreading rumors as if this is like sort

of selective enforcement because other people also have access to classified information and they mention my name as one of them. So anything I'll say here could be interpreted in the wrong way. I would say this, since the inability of Israel to win the war against Hezbollah of 2006, inability to win the war is a nice way to say failure because Israel did not fulfill any of its goals in that war, a war that started with kidnapping two Israeli soldiers. Nasrallah, this is an amazing story how the same leader who was seen as knowing, understanding the Israelis better than the Israelis understand themselves, did the same mistake twice. In March of 2006, the secret negotiator between

Israel and Hezbollah on bodies and hostages, someone from German intelligence, Gerhard Konrad, is traveling to see Nasrallah to negotiate an exchange between Israeli hostages and Hezbollah prisoners. And he says to Nasrallah, he says, I see that you are trying to kidnap Israeli soldiers to make the exchange. I warn you, you don't know the Israelis. You think that they are weak. You think that they will contain. You think that they will not go all out war.

You are mistaken. And Nasrallah laughs at him. That is March 2006, Nasrallah burst in laughter and said, oh my friend, it's either you're naive or you know that you are lying and you just carry Israeli propaganda. I know the Israelis, they will not react with war. Then they kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Israel reacted with war,

flattened the Dachia quarters where Hezbollah headquarters is. So this meeting you're talking about is in March of 2006, and then the war between Israel and Hezbollah following Hezbollah's kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers or taking hostage is in the summer. Is it July? Yeah, it's happened on the 12th of July, then August.

Now Israel performed very poorly in the war. We'll get back to this. But Israel did flattered much of the Shiite headquarters in Beirut. So next time the German mediator, Mr. Conrad, goes to Beirut, he sees the whole view line has changed. It's just all flattened. He meets with Nasrallah and Nasrallah says, you were right. I was wrong. I didn't get the Israelis right.

And then irregardlessly, Nasrallah makes a speech on TV and says that, he said, if I would know that the Israelis would go ballistic, would go nuts, I wouldn't do that. And I asked the civilians, the population of Beirut, I asked for your forgiveness. And he did a lot to rebuild the Dachia quarters. And amazingly, he did the same exact mistake 18 years later. But back to Israel, Israeli intelligence was very surprised in its inability to understand Hezbollah, to know that they are going to kidnap the soldiers,

but more to help the fighting forces to be able to defeat Hezbollah and Israel that went to Lebanon with the goal of pushing Hezbollah north to the Litani River. Failed miserably in doing that, lost many soldiers, and basically was not able to fulfill any of its goals. And just to be clear, the war lasted 34 days. Roughly how many casualties did the Israel suffer during that time? Roughly a hundred soldiers and 50 civilians. But it's not just the casualties. Of course Hezbollah had many more.

But it's not just the casualties. Hezbollah was able to fire the exact number of missiles on Israeli cities every day until the last day of the war. Israel was not able to diminish their firing power, to take out their fortresses close to the border, to drive them back, to dismantle them as they promised. None of the war goals was achieved. Since that day, it all changed. But it changed secretly. The estimation is that 70% of the overall resources, budget, manpower, efforts of Israeli military intelligence since that day until today were shifted to look at his Bala from that point on because

everybody knew that they will need, this is a war that they will need to fight again one day. So that's post summer of 2006. And yes, I take your point that it was widely regarded within Israel to have been a failed war, but then Israel started to, as you're alluding to here, take advantage of its presence in Lebanon and take advantage of the intelligence it gathered during the war to build the foundation that it ultimately used in this war. It gave Israel, first of all, a taste of what they will feed Hezbollah in the next war.

The ability to intercept into the supply chain of equipment, of highly advanced military equipment from Iran to Hezbollah, the long-range ballistic missiles, Fajr 3 and Fajr 5, they were able to put geolocators on the missiles, geolocators that were identified by IDF Air Force on the third night of the war, and they were able to take out all of these missiles, all of these silos in one night. This was the first demonstration that a new modus operandi that Israel was starting to develop against Hezbollah that is about building a network of companies, of cover identities, of channels of commerce and supply chains in order to be able to intercept Hezbollah's supply chain and supply Hezbollah with what they call the buttons or red buttons, tempered equipment that is either sending intelligence, helping

Israel with collecting intelligence from the heart of the enemy, or booby trap devices or equipment that can be triggered with the word that everybody expect comes here be triggered from Tel Aviv. Okay. So hold on. I'm going to want to get to that, but before we do my understanding, both from your report and others I've spoken to, Israel developed an extraordinary network of human sources inside Hezbollah, inside Lebanon after 2006.

So can you talk about that, why that was, what that was and why that was a whole kind of step function improvement in Israel's intelligence reach inside Hezbollah? So Hezbollah took upon itself to rebuild the Dakhia, this Shiite massive neighborhood of Beirut that was, much of it was flattened during the 2006 war. It gave opportunity for Hezbollah to build bunkers because new buildings, the ability to start from scratch and not build underneath an existing building. It gave Israel a lot of opportunity to collect intelligence about these kinds of places.

Also, Hezbollah spread much of its arsenal in houses, private farms, private garages, on private balconies all over Lebanon and paid rent for families for a missile to be situated, monthly rent for a missile to be situated, or a monthly rent for a missile. And if Mossad was able to recruit the people who knew where are all these secret sites, or people who can get into the bunkers and put wiretap devices there, the reporting that my colleagues, Shira Frankel and Mark Mazzetti brought and myself for this story in the New York Times, was that it was a massive network of sources that enabled the flow of information from Lebanon that was taken by the Israeli NSA, 8200.

I think that the disastrous results of the 2006 war, what they brought was a much better fusion, harmony, cooperation between two entities. One is the Mossad, the civilian foreign intelligence agency, and 8200, the equivalent to the NSA. It's not a coincidence, by the way, that the headquarters of these two agencies, these were the two targets, the two main targets for both Iran and Hezbollah during the war, because they understood who their main enemies are. So it's the combination between human and SIGIT, human intelligence and signal intelligence. And in Bosa, they even developed a new paradigm. It's called GUKIT, human for SIGINT. So just for our listeners,

human refers to human intelligence. SIGINT refers generally to signal intelligence, meaning information you get from data, from telecommunications, rather than from human spies, basically. Yes. Let's say that you want to hack a computer. You cannot do that from afar. But you can't do that if you have an agent who will take a flash drive,

let's stick it into a computer. It's an agent, it's a live agent that is doing work for SIGINT. So human, for SIGINTint and in short, Jungint. Got it. All right. New term, new term, always expanding the nomenclature for the call me back community. Okay. 2012 was a turning point.

So between 2009 and 2012, 8200 was running a massive operation, they ended up with basically stealing massive data from Hezbollah that identified all the important hideouts, storage, military sites, underground sites, bunkers, and headquarters. It was important not just because of Hezbollah, it was important also because that time, 2009 until 2012, was also the time of deliberation in Israel whether to strike the Iranian nuclear sites. So in 2012, the commander of 8200 invited Prime Minister Netanyahu to come to headquarters and they printed out all the massive data

that they stole from Hezbollah. And it was a pile, they say, almost the height of Netanyahu. And they showed him the results. And the commander of 8200 said, look, now you can go and bomb Iran, meaning now we are able to supply the IDF with enough data to paralyze Hezbollah so Israel should not be afraid of Hezbollah and can go Bob Yvonne.

Of course Israel didn't do that, but that's another story. But this is a turning point. I think that from that point on, and for many more operations, the Israeli intelligence felt, I think, self-assured that in the next war, they will prevail. They will have the upper hand and with lesser price taken from Israeli villages, communities, urban cities.

And here's a contradiction there, because nobody understands. People say, so why were people so much afraid of Hezbollah? Why were Israel so much deterred? Because the fact remained, on one hand, Israeli intelligence was getting more and more and more information. And on the other hand, as more they got from the intelligence, it seems that Israeli leaders, the military leaders,

and the political leaders were very, very concerned not to go to war with Hezbollah. It's a contradiction. It could be explained in the fact that Israel is a democracy and that until October 7, to explain to the audience, to the population in a democracy, why you as a leader decided to go through a preempt attack, why you decided to start a war when it's not seen as a necessity to go to war. Or an imminent threat. It wasn't an imminent threat.

It wasn't like the Six Day War where Israel had to strike preemptively because they knew a war was about to start. This was not an imminent threat. And there was the estimation over time that there was something like 200,000 rockets, some of them far-reaching and precision-guided rockets that had very sophisticated precision capabilities could strike into the heart of Israel

and paralyze the country, paralyze Tel Aviv, do real damage to essential utilities and other essential resources within Israel, yeah, there's a question like why are we doing this? Now, but part of that, Ronan, is that, and we'll get to this, there was this sense, which I for one totally bought into, I'm not the only one obviously, that Hezbollah had extraordinary capabilities. So it wasn't just Israel could wind itself up in a war with a seriously capable foe it was that the sense of has was capabilities we now know we're totally over estimated that's the thing i can justify support both views one that would say it was over estimated the other one is a was not over estimated.

overestimated, but with the intelligence, with the surprise, with the total misconception of Nasrallah, all of that led Hezbollah to a total disarray that basically deprived them from much of what they could have done. Look on late August, I met with the strategic advisor to one of the chiefs of the intelligence. And he said, we are confident that we can reign on Hezbollah, something like the 10 plagues of Egypt. And he laid down the additions of that plan. Now, in mid-August, to have someone from the intelligence coming with such a sort of self assurance after October 7th, you know. How about a little humility guys? That's what you were thinking.

Yeah, and I was polite, but to me I said, well, maybe it's a little bit too much. And after that meeting, that person, he said, I'm going to send it to you on WhatsApp. So like the predictions, because he wanted to be able to show me afterwards. And I must say everything, the dismantling, the destination of Hezbollah, all came true and basically paralyzed the ability of Hezbollah to fire back because of the way that this was planned and executed i would say.

The threat was not exaggerated but it did not calculate the ability of this to either initiated attack or stop a surprise attack when it comes from the from the other side because two thousand twelve was this turning point of sorts. Is your understanding that anyone in the Hezbollah leadership knew they had been infiltrated? No. Throughout this time, since the end of the war in August 2006, Israel was very restrained in not using its understanding of Hezbollah. So basically, no Nasrallah, no anyone else at the leadership understood how deep Israel infiltrated their ranks. And the Israelis did something very, very untypical to Israelis. They were patient. They were just keeping their breath. And though throughout many,

many instances throughout the last two decades, they had like, they could ignite, they could do something, they could kill someone, but they were very, very restrained and not showing what they know and how deeply they infiltrate in sense of obtaining information, but also in the ability to cause damage deep inside enemy rings. Okay. That's a perfect segue to the pager attack. At the time of the execution of the operation,

I guess in September of this year, there was a lot of reporting and speculation about how long this capability was in the works. 10 years, 15 years, your article dates it back to 2014. So explain how the idea for this capability was developed and as part of that how the Mossad incentivized Hezbollah to use the equipment that was essential to this idea being turned into something that could be actualized. So remember their story about putting geolocators of missiles. In a way, it's like a case study of the same thing. It's not a button that you push in Tel Aviv and explodes a missile in Beirut,

but still it's the ability to intercept, to understand that there is a supply chain to Lebanon of something, and the ability to surveil that and intercept that supply chain with some kind of tempered equipment that will help you when you need that in wartime. Now this is not the first time that Israel is using these kinds of techniques. One of the ideas back in the times in 1991 when they wanted to kill Saddam Hussein was to supply Saddam Hussein with a new TV studio, something he was looking for, that would be installed in one of his bunkers. And then once the dictator gives a speech to the Iraqi people,

press the button until it even explodes everything. So this did not came from a petition, but this is just one example of this kind of buttons. The button needs to stay inside the foundation of the enemy, the foundation of the building of the enemy military might and stay there. Now, it started the other way around than it was executed. It started with the walkie-talkie. It started back in 2006, basically, when they saw that on bodies of Hezbollah troops, they have the same kind of vest that they're using, the

same kind of wireless tactical communication. And they were thinking of how can Israel be present in the gear that the troops of Hezbollah will carry with them to the front line. And bear in mind then, it was already that Nasrallah was developing what he called the Radwan plan, the plan to conquer the Galilee. And so the idea was Israel was thinking what can they supply those front line troops in order to be able to kill them when they are going into battle. 8200 found out in 2013 that they are looking for something called ICOM, which is the encrypted

wireless communication tactical that can be put on the vest left upper pocket, just above the heart, how convenient. And they were able to basically intercept into the supply chain, replace parts of the 15,000 walkie-talkies supplied to Hezbollah, and have them stored in Hezbollah warehouses, waiting for Hezbo brother to recruit the forces. Equip each one of them and israel will be able to basically kill the world. So rodent you're talking about the development of the walkie talkie capability for those of us that were following events in real time in september the way reported out was that the, the beeper operation was executed first, and then the walkie

talkies was the next day. And you're in terms of the way the capability was developing, you reverse the sequencing that the walkie talkies was the capability that was first developed, which you just described here. So now tell me about the pager capability, which came after the walkie talkie capability. So the pager capability was created again, from a 200 understanding what his balance needs.

Now his bala, they had the thing against cellular phones. They were trying to get their people speak less than useless because they thought that Israeli intelligence is able to hack into every phone they have. Pegasus, they know where they are. and they wanted to move to other means of communication one of the means was the page you know that old device from the eighties page from the point of view of his brother is like magic because it can only receive information it cannot send information the second was that in 2018-19, Mossad heard that the pages that they were buying, so legit

Bonafide pages from an Asian company called Apollo, they were nice, cool, sort of sexy high-tech devices, but if you drop them on the ground, they will probably break. They're like poorly made. And his brother were looking for something tougher, very stable that would not break after two weeks. And then there was an idea by a woman intelligence officer in Mossad in 2018. And she said, if they're moving to pages, why don't we move to pages after them? But it took three more years, maybe more, to develop a pager that could contain all the necessary additional gear to a regular pager. So the reception to receptors to sarcophagus frequency transmission that will explode and the few grams of explosives.

And it took quite a lot of time. But at the end, Mossad was able to come up with a new device that will be called an Apollo pager, but it was called rugged. So something much tougher, something much more rigid, that will be dustproof and waterproof and fall proof. It's not as sexy as the previous one, but something much more adequate to military condition. And Mossad was creating a sort of a company that would propose, would pitch Apollo, come

to them and say, listen, we heard that your devices are not very stable. Maybe we can help you. We will be your subcontractors to the Middle East, hoping that they will market their product to Hezbollah. And it worked. But I want to come back to something you said earlier. You said that Hezbollah leadership and the Iranian leadership and others were worried that the Hezbollah rank and file were too dependent on their cellular phones, their smartphones. They want to get them off smartphones, but that sounds like it didn't happen by accident because you wrote in the

article that another part of Israeli intelligence was launching this information operation against the leadership of Hezbollah with these articles in Arabic actually that were appearing on Arabic news sites on how much Israel had penetrated smartphones and specifically smartphones in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world as a means that information operation overstated the degree to which Israel had penetrated the smartphones because it was designed to push the Hezbollah leadership into adopting these non-smart, more basic capabilities.

Israel intelligence basically viewed the cell phone world on Hezbollah as the lost refuge because they understood that they are like, they're cautious, they're not using it, they're not taking it into military bases. And so while accelerating the threat, they made it do two things. One, to resort to all the other means of alternative infrastructure of communication that Hezbollah created for itself.

That was heavily penetrated by Israel, but also believing that by neglecting, by deserting the cell phone, basically they deprived Israel from its main spine tool, so they felt safe. Now of course, the pager is considered to be very safe, again, because it does not send, it does not beam any kind of electromagnetic pulse. And one of the things that the pages did not do was to supply intelligence to Hezbollah on their jail location.

Mossad and 8200 didn't want to take the risk. The Hezbollah or the Iranians will try to measure them, try to see if they are sending, they are beaming into anything, so they didn't. So from their point of view, it was totally safe. And it was the device that they were hoping will call the reserves, will turn Hezbollah in case Israel attack, it should have called Hezbollah immediately into an emergency status. So people, 5,000 people carrying pages,

will immediately mobilize towards the storage and call their troops. They will be killed. Then the people surviving will go to the storages, will get the vest, will get the icon of walkie talkie, turn it on, go to the front, and then die. This was supposed to be part of embedded part into the Israeli war plan of Hezbollah. In 8200, there were units since 2014, the 24-7 had

only one job, make sure that this is not exposed and alert if there is any threat that these operations the walkie talkie and the pages are going to be exposed just to make sure that this is ready in case there's war with Hespana. Now my only real knowledge of all this is just watching it play out in real time. One aspect of the use of this capability that was striking among others was how targeted it was that you would literally see images from CCTV footage of, you know, Hezbollah operative at a supermarket at a grocery store with his family and the page would go off and it would blow him up. But virtually no one around him, no civilian around him was hurt.

I mean, there were cases, I'm sure, where a civilian here, they were hit, but by and large, it was the quintessence of a super, super granular microscopic targeted capability at the actual target with minimal collateral damage. Was that part of the plan? Was the idea in part, how do we take a lot of Hezbollah combatants, fighters, terrorists off the battlefield without a lot of collateral damage among civilians around them. The advantage of the walkie-talkie was that they were big, relatively. They could contain more explosives and they were going to be used only in the

battlefield. But this was also the disadvantage because if there's no battlefield, they are in the storage. They are not going to kill anyone. So Israeli intelligence was looking for something that will be with Hezbollah operative every day. But if it's in every day, it's not in the battlefield, there will be civilians around. And they were doing many, many different experiments with different kinds of different amounts and qualities of explosives to see that it's only, or trying that it's only the operative that is carrying. Now, this is also the reason that the number, we're talking about something like 3,300 people

from terrorists injured and around 15 people dead. The ratio is because the amount of the explosive was very small relatively. In most cases, the vast majority did not cause death. And I don't know if Mossad was thinking about that, but of course, it minimized significantly the collateral damage. There were a few children, regretfully,

where the collateral damage here, and each one of them is a huge tragedy. But the fact that these people were not killed but injured, I would say, they will carry on them the scars of humiliation to Hezbollah from this defeat. Iranian Revolutionary Guards wanted to do a good PR for themselves and they show the video of the senior commanders of Hezbollah that were brought for medical treatment in Tehran and then were taken to some shrine. And I think it was the worst publicity possible because you see people with no eyes, with

no fingers, coming to the sacred Muslim Shiia place and crying of misery. And you really see it, you know, as much as I think that much of the horrible, horrible views, visions that we have from October 7 will be carried out by all of us since then, but also as a humiliation for the earth. I think these pictures from the pages from that day in Beirut, they will be carried as a deep humiliation by Shizbana forever and ever. And, you know, the New York Times, my colleague Farnas Fasihie, had sources inside the Iranian leadership or the Iranian operational infrastructure that saw people, they described this was like a zombie movie. One person is collapsing, the other one is collapsing, it's like a nightmare. People all around, people around the srah like collapsed.

And nobody knew what's next and who can stop that. The feeling of intimidation, infiltration, horror, the fear is filled by these actions. He cannot be exaggerated There was a moment according to your reporting that someone within Hezbollah was on to this capability They were suspicious of these devices Which of course when the Israelis realized this they this was the tripwire This is what accelerated there had been no decision to use this capability And then suddenly they thought if we don't use it we're gonna lose it

There had been no decision to use this capability and then suddenly they thought if we don't use it, we're gonna lose it So just briefly explain what happened there So as I said that unit in 8200 is Monitoring his bala all the time and the rain is to see that nobody suspect anything in late 23 when major shipments of the pages are coming There is one technician in his bala that suspect that is wrong and israel kills that person in early twenty four they think they are over that the threat is over meaning israel kills that technician because they know the technician is onto them is auto something is wrong with the battery i did the pages of the walkie talkie but he's suspecting that something's wrong with the battery, the battery that contains the explosives.

Then there were more and more hints from Hezbollah that something is maybe, someone is looping around. But then in September, there were people in Hezbollah that were thinking of sending three pages to be inspected in Tehran. They have better equipment, they can x-ray better, and they were suspecting that something is wrong with the pages. And then we're just about to send them over.

And this is when 8200 alerted Mossad and the chiefs of the intelligence community. This is the dire threat of being exposed. This is when the chief of Mossad, David Barnea, went to see Prime Minister Netanyahu and said, use it or lose it. And it set, I would say it accelerated the process that was happening in any case where the military coming to realize that there will not be a hostage deal soon. And Mossad was pushing to the center way, the Ministry of Defense was pushing it, Gallag was pushing on this anyway, but it accelerated the process of shifting the whole attention

of Israeli defense establishment from Gaza to the north. And it dictated a fast dial on these ten clicks on the seven eight because. So now let's talk about the assassination of. Nasser ala which came soon after the activation of the pager and walkie talkie attacks why was taking out nasrallah at this time. Open for debate within is Israel's security apparatus. Now we look at retrospect and it seems, yeah, sure, they took out Hezbollah. You know, a few days ago, I called someone who was like one of the best experts on Hezbollah in Israeli intelligence, the brigadier general of the intelligence.

And I said, how are you, Shimon And he said, you know, I'm still grieving or losing my son. And for a minute, I like, I thought, what is he talking about? Did I miss anything? And then, then I realized he's talking about Nasrallah. Now, not that he was in agony for Nasrallah dead, but because he devoted his life. And he's not the only one to understanding that person, the person that was seen like a part of the view of the Middle East that was there and will be there forever. The decision to take him out was following two other strikes. So there was the pages, the walkie-talkie.

Then there was bombing the bunker where Ibrahim Akil, the head of operations, was with many of the Radwan forces. And then there was a massive, massive raid of taking out many, many of these secret locations. You remember we spoke about where the rent they paid for a missile or a rent they paid for two missiles in the garage. The idea was going hard on all of these locations. Each one with its success contributed more and more to the confidence of the Israeli leadership that they can continue to the next plane. But what happened is that the other side,

so the red side, Nasrallah, he thought that he's able to contain Israel forever, that Israel will not go to all in war. He thought with his hubris that there's no way that Israel will launch a full-scale war against him. And so until the day he died, he did not call the Hezbollah forces on full alert. They were commanders of his military. One of them, he ordered him to fire at Nahariya, Nahariya in the north of Israel.

That commander fired on Haifa. And Nasrallah, he exploded on him. He said, why did you fire on Haifa? Now the Israelis will fire on Beirut and we will go to war. I don't want war. By the way, that commander was killed as well. And all these steps that Israel took, they led Nasrallah to one decision. And his decision, which he put in the last speech he gave alive after the explosion of

the walkie talkie and the pages, he said, if the Israelis believe that with these attacks, I will stop firing at them before they sign a ceasefire in the South, they are wrong. And that speech contributed to the basic read of Nasrallah that people in Israeli intelligence held. One of them is Brigadier General Yossi Sariel, the commander of the Israeli NSA, and their read of Nasrallah is that he will not be able to negotiate with, he will not stop firing at Israel, hence he will not agree

to a ceasefire, they will not be able to bring back the 100,000 people evacuated from the north to live in peace back to where they live. That Nasrallah needs to be taken out because Nasrallah alive will be an obstacle in any kind of resolution. And then after taking the head of operation Ibrahim Ail and the Radwan force, came another warning intelligence. And that is Nasrallah might be going to a different location where it will be much harder to be killed. Benjamin Netanyahu travels to one of the headquarters of A-200, where he meets with Brigadier General Sariel and other Israeli commanders and they explain to him the risk that Nasrallah will become sort of immune from Israeli attack

and that he should be taken out, if there's a decision to take him out, in that specific bunker. And there is Tuesday, that's the meeting, and then Wednesday and Thursday there are more meetings. But Benjamin Netanyahu, he leaves at night to the General Assembly, flies overnight to New York City, and he ends the discussion with no vote. And he says, we will discuss this when I'm back. It's Friday morning, and the aides to Nasrallah urge him to take more extreme

precautions to defend himself. Nasrallah pushed back. He said, there's no way, don't worry, I know the Israelis. There's no way the Israelis are going to hurt me. They understand the impact of that decision. They understand what will happen to them if they go to all-out war with Hezbollah. And people from the military and the Ministry of Defense are calling Prime Minister Netanyahu, and at the end, though he wanted to be back in Israel after that weekend, but at the end they convince him to approve killing Nasrallah, maybe the most important step of the war, of all the wars since October 7, maybe the most important moment in the history of the last decades.

It's a turning point. So when he, Prime Minister Netanyahu, when he takes the podium at the UN, he knows that the bombers, that the F-15 carrying 84 tons of explosives, 84 tons of explosives to be dropped on one bunker. They are on their way. He adds two sentences about basically warning Iran not to interfere. He has the advantage because he knows what's going to happen. And shortly afterwards, they dropped these massive bombs.

Nasrallah is in a bunker, something like 15 meters deep, highly fortified. He is not killed of the blast. He is not killed of the ruins. He is killed from lack of oxygen, from suffocation. And they found him the day after in embrace with Villeforshain, the Iranian general that Iran sent to Beirut to warn Asrallah from the threat of all-out war with the Zionists. They embraced, I think, as a gesture of understanding that it's their last moment on earth. Ronan, before we wrap here, how long, I know this is incredibly speculative but how long do you think it takes for has to rebuild after experiencing this near annihilation massive massive massive setback is that something is really military intelligence leaders are thinking about worried about. Yeah i sure they're thinking about talking about something around at least a decade but.

Sure. They are thinking about that talking about something around at least a decade, but it depends on the question. And the answer is also dependent on massively dependent on Syria. One of the leaders of Israeli intelligence, when they started the ceasefire agreement with Lebanon, which is basically with Hezbollah, he said, the critical role, the critical question of whether this agreement will continue to exist or not is not Lebanon and not Hezbollah. It's about Syria. Whether then still the president Assad will allow the flow of weapons. There was a secret plan to try and recruit with the help of Russia and the US. with the help of Russia and the US to recruit President Assad, use the vulnerability of Hezbollah and the weakness of Iran to convince him to move to the Western side.

It turned out that it's very good that they didn't do business with him because he turned out to be a hollow entity that does not have any power and collapse. I think Hezbollah will yet to define its own role, whether they are going to go to be just a terrorist organization, smaller, and be able to function as this, or they want to keep their political entity and then maybe leave the military wing. Iran will need to determine what's now after the whole of the Eastern flank of its foreign policy, the vision of Soleimani about the ring of fire against Israel, it's all collapsed. It's nothing. It's vaporized. So I would say if all the bricks of the front will be in place, Iran will continue to the flow of weapon. It will, I think, take at least a decade.

But maybe, maybe I'm just a wishful thinking, but maybe inshallah we'll see a different future and different opponents. That is where we will leave it because we always try Ronen to end these conversations if we can on an upbeat note. And you know, inshallah It's so is where we'll leave it run in. Thanks for being here terrific powerful reporting and I'm sure there'll be more to come. So thanks for being here run in. Thank you for the by done pleasure as always. Thank you That's our show for today call me back is produced and edited by Alain Benatar. Our

media manager is Rebecca Strom. Additional editing by Martin D'Huergo. Research by Gabe Silverstein. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Cnore.