Front Burner - Israel’s historic, deadly cyber attack in Lebanon

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

This week in Lebanon, a series of attacks targeted personal communications devices — like pagers and walkie talkies — belonging to members of the political and paramilitary organization Hezbollah. At least 37 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured, according to the Lebanese health ministry. Among the dead are at least two children.Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, referred to the attack as an ‘act of war’ and a ‘major terrorist operation.’ Israeli officials have said the country has entered a ‘new phase of the war.’ For a better picture on the ground in Beirut, as well as a sense of how the Israeli intelligence service managed to sabotage thousands of devices in Lebanon we’re joined by two journalists. Edmund Bower is in Beirut and has reported for The Guardian, The Times of London and the Atlantic. And Yossi Melman is the co-author of Spies Against Armageddon as well as numerous other books on Israeli intelligence. He’s also an analyst for the newspaper Haaretz.In this episode, we refer to a previous episode of Front Burner, which you can find below:What is Hezbollah? For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcriptsTranscripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem, brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Ali Janes, in for Jamie Poisson. So what you're hearing is the leader of the political and paramilitary organization Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, speaking in Lebanon on Thursday. It was his first public speech following a series of historic attacks in the country earlier this week,

reportedly by Israel. With this operation, the enemy crossed all rules, laws and red lines. It didn't care about anything at all, not morally, not humanely, not legally. Between Tuesday and Wednesday, hundreds or possibly thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices exploded. At least 37 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured. While the attacks targeted Hezbollah, the victims also included civilians. At least two children were killed.

Hezbollah's leader called the attacks an act of war and a major terrorist operation. As he spoke on Thursday, Israeli warplanes flew low in the Lebanese capital, Beirut. The Israeli airplane overhead. Israeli airplane. Okay, Eleni, there's an Israeli fighter jet dropping flares. As of Thursday evening when I'm recording this, the Israeli government has not directly commented on the attacks. But on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant said that Israel has entered a new phase of the war aimed at the north, widely interpreted to mean Lebanon. The center of gravity is moving north. The meaning is that we are diverting forces, resources, energy towards the north.

A little later on, I'm going to speak to an Israeli intelligence expert about what we know about how this would have been carried out and why. But first, we want to get a picture from the ground in Lebanon. For that, I'm joined by Edmund Bauer. He's a journalist based in Beirut who has reported for The Guardian, The Times of London, The Atlantic, and others. Edmund, hi. Thank you so much for speaking to us. Hi. hundreds, possibly thousands of pagers reportedly belonging to members of Hezbollah in different parts of Lebanon and even some in Syria, all exploded basically simultaneously. And can you just give me a sense of the scale and the impact of these attacks? Like what kind of scenes were unfolding across the country on Tuesday? Very similar scenes across the whole country. And within a short space of time, I think seconds or minutes,

after 3.30pm in the afternoon local time, you had thousands of small explosions. Thousands of people were injured. There was about a dozen people killed on the first day. And quite quickly, every hospital in Lebanon, I was told, received cases. I'm in Beirut and within about an hour I think of first receiving a message suggesting that pages have started blowing up in South Beirut there were lines of ambulances on the streets so pretty quickly the health ministry put out a statement asking people to stay off the roads to make way for ambulances.

I went down to a large hospital near me and I watched as ambulances came up speeding, going through the gates, dropping off people who'd been injured, speeding back off again to other parts of the city to pick people up. At the entrance to the intensive care unit, devastated families still in shock. This man has just undergone facial surgery. This patient was admitted yesterday with extremely severe eye injuries. He lost both of his eyes and consequently his sight. Other patients had injuries to their faces and hands.

So not only were we faced with this new reality, this idea that such an attack exists, but it all happened within such a short space of time. You know, of course, a lot of these people who had these pages were in public when their devices exploded, right? So, you know, many of the injured, as far as we know, were just civilians going about their days working or shopping or whatever it might be, right? Right. Yeah. Well, we've seen videos of pages going off in grocery stores and other public places. grocery stores and other public places. Exactly who the victims were or who the casualties are, it's unclear. Cameras haven't been allowed to go into hospitals. Hezbollah have been keeping it quite secret who exactly has been hit. They've released names of the dead, but the people who

are wounded, they're much more cagey about. I did speak to the chief medical director at the American University of Beirut who people are, what their affiliations are, it's hard to say. We're also not exactly clear, even amongst the Hezbollah members, who was actively a fighter or a different member of the organization. This is a large and sprawling organization. It's not just a military group.

Yeah, I mean, just for our listeners, and sprawling organization. It's not just a military group. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, just for our listeners, we actually did a FrontBurner episode last fall explaining who Hezbollah is, which we can link to in the show notes. And, you know, as you were saying, it's important to understand that this isn't just like a little fringe militant group.

Like, this is a huge organization that's very embedded in Lebanese society and government. They've got ministers in the Lebanese government. This brings us to Wednesday because, you know, as I mentioned, you know, people are still processing what happened on Tuesday. There are funerals going on for some of the people killed the day before. And then there is this other set of explosions and so tell me about this second wave of explosions that happened on Wednesday well Wednesday was I mean just speaking personally when these walkie-talkies were detonated at the same time so 3 30 p.m on Wednesday whereas the pages were detonated the same time the previous day. It was surreal. I was with somebody who just turned to me and said, it's happening again.

There were people attending a funeral of somebody who died on Tuesday. There were many journalists there who, as the funeral was taking place, could hear explosions outside. Chaos erupting at this funeral in Lebanon as walkie talkies began exploding. ABC's Marcus Moore just feet away. Roll. We just heard a loud explosion. And I saw a man whose hands were gone.

I've even heard reports, I should say that I wasn't there myself, but I've heard reports from colleagues that people were taking out their mobile phones and throwing them on the floor and stamping on them. I think for many people, it was a terrifying prospect that you could be carrying a bomb in your pocket. You know, there were also reports of solar power systems having been targeted on Wednesday as well. I mean, I'm just imagining that some of our listeners may be wondering, why would Hezbollah be using these, you know, kind of archaic kinds of technology, pagers and walkie talkies in the first place? This is something that Hezbollah has spoken about a lot.

And it's something that their leader, Hassan Nasrallah, has ordered members of the group to do for safety reasons. Spyware is now so prominent and is so sophisticated. Even, you mentioned the side panels, even TVs, even other electronic devices can be used to listen in on conversations, access GPS coordinates. So the idea of moving towards pages and moving towards walkie-talkies and scaling back this level of technology was to move away from something that could end up compromising its owner. And Israel, incidentally, is one of the leaders in producing spyware that

hacks mobile phones. If you remember the Pegasus program that was produced in Israel and was used to hack various phones as part of an investigation that broke a couple of years ago. Flicious practices that threaten cyber security. That is how the United States described the Pegasus spyware software. Pegasus is at the heart of several scandals. In the summer, 17 major newspapers showed how clients of the Israeli firm had used the program against journalists, activists and politicians. So I think Hezbollah were very aware of that and wanted to mitigate any risk that they could. I'm wondering about the kind of psychological impact that this seems to be having on people in Lebanon as this continues to unfold. I mean, you described people on Wednesday throwing down their cell phones.

How are people kind of processing that? I've been out all day today in Beirut speaking to people and in different areas of the city, including areas with a large Hezbollah presence, including areas which the group has next to no presence. The most common thing that I've heard people say is, no, we're not scared. We're not going to change what we do. We're not going to avoid using particular devices because of what happened. All that said, and I'm not questioning how anybody else describes how they're feeling about this,

but me personally being here, I find it difficult to imagine that this won't make an impact. I think the image of seeing somebody carrying a bomb in their pocket and not knowing, and the image of that bomb going off in a crowded place and seeing the reactions from other people that you can see in real time as they realize what's happened. And the fact that it happened two days in a row as well. So it's already not a one-off. I can't see how that image isn't going to stay with people. Okay. Thank you so much, Edmund, for speaking to me. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Edmund, for speaking to me. Thank you. All right, now I'm going to speak to a journalist who's been reporting on Israeli intelligence and security for years. Yossi Melman is the co-author of Spies Against Armageddon, as well as numerous other books on Israeli intelligence. And he's also an analyst for the newspaper Haaretz. And he's also an analyst for the newspaper Haaretz. So it may be years before we fully know what happened with these pager and walkie-talkie attacks that were reportedly carried out by Israel.

But can you break down what we know at this point about how they would have actually done this? Like, how would they have pulled this off? What we know is mostly from Lebanese sources who were at the receiving end of the operation and from leaks either from Israel or from other countries like the United States. countries like the United States, we understood that was a Mossad operation and that Mossad itself created. They bought 3,000 devices and sent them to Beirut, to Hezbollah. The last shipment was like two weeks before the incident. So the picture is quite clear. And I know also from my sources that such an operation requires very long preparations and to invest a lot of money to create these companies, these front companies that no one would know that Mossad is behind them? And the aim of the operation was to activate them when Hezbollah would respond to and still are to respond heavily with thousands of rockets, long-range rockets, to be launched against the entire country. by Hezbollah to communicate between the combatants,

between the headquarters and command and control centers and the combatants in the fields, those who were waiting for the order to launch the rockets and the missiles. Unfortunately, I would add that someone who decided to activate them did it prematurely, whether deliberately or he had no choice, because they were wasted. These tools were wasted because it wasn't followed up by a massive, by a massive, massive Israeli airstrikes or land invasion. shell companies so that the whole time the people that they were ordering them from were, like, in essence, was the Mossad? Is that what your understanding is?

Not necessarily. The shipments were intercepted. Once the Israeli intelligence, military intelligence, and the Mossad realized that Hezbollah is using beepers, and it's interesting to understand why they were switching to beepers. Once the Mossad knew about it, he

found out who is the producer, the manufacturer, and with the realization that Hezbollah is purchasing them, some dummy front stroke companies were created. Behind them was the Mossad. is who, I imagine, approached those who were purchasing the devices for Hezbollah. Right. And sorry, just to clarify, so this is, I mean, the Shell company, would this be the company in Hungary?

The pages carried the branding of Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo. It issued a statement saying it had licensed a Hungarian-based company to make the devices in question, bearing its logo. Today, the Hungarian government denied the pages had ever been on its soil, that the firm in question had no manufacturing capacity, even as an opposition MP demanded an investigation into whether it was a front for Israeli intelligence. Well, I assume that it's only one company. There is a web of companies that were involved in such an operation. And such an operation takes years to prepare. And you need very skillful engineers, scientists, purchasing agents, or Mossad agent who poses purchasing agents.

It's a very elaborated operation, and it takes a lot of time. In the intelligence parlance, such an operation is called infrastructure intelligence because it involves infrastructure sites and infrastructure equipment. Because usually when you talk about intelligence, you think, okay, you recruit a guy and he provides you information. That's only a small part of intelligence operations. Most of these intelligence operations are through such companies. Most of these intelligence operations are through such companies, opposing intelligence agents. The Mossad didn't invent the wheel, didn't invent this kind of modus operandi.

Many, many security services, intelligence organizations are doing it, the CIA, the MI6, British MI6, because it's part of and parcel of their understanding how is the best way to penetrate the other side, to infiltrate into the other side and to gain either information or to bug, listen to its communication lines, or even to sabotage. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections.

Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo, 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples,

I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cups. On Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant said that Israel was opening a new phase in the war. He didn't mention the Pager attacks, but he did say, quote, the center of gravity is moving north. We are diverting forces, resources and energy toward the north, which has widely been read as meaning towards Lebanon and Hezbollah. And for Israel, what do you think the strategic value of the Pager bomb operation would have been right now? Like, why would they have done this? Why would they have done it right now? Well, it's an excellent question because from what I learned and from

what I know, these devices were supposed to be used as a complementary element to an all-out war with Hezbollah, which would begin with land invasion and heavy, heavy, massive airstrikes. So you mean that that was something that Israel was eventually planning to do, was to have an all-out ground invasion of Lebanon? That was in this scenario. You know, war plans, you plan all eventualities. You prepare for the worst case analysis. So these devices, these tools were supposed to be used together with the launching a massive attack, all out war.

I don't know why it was decided. I have my guess. Why now? Why no one waited for the real war if it happens in the future but here is the reality and by doing so you also waste a very important intelligence tool no one knew about such a innovative imaginative plan and now the other side and the rest of the world know that it is possible. So anyone

would draw lessons. Either Hezbollah would draw its own lessons which would mean that they would try to improve their security and to have safer communication gear and

the world can copy that mode of operation. Given the timing of it and, you know, mixed with Gallant saying this thing about, you know, that they're sort of moving resources toward the north, presumably meaning toward Lebanon, toward Hezbollah. I mean, how are those things to be read together? Like, is it fair to read those as a kind of provocation? Well, yes.

Maybe one explanation is that Israel knew that by activating the devices, Hezbollah would not sit idle and would have to respond, heavily respond, because Hezbollah has been bombing Israel. Missiles and rockets are being fired and launched from Lebanon to the northern part of Israel, to the upper Galilee. So maybe that's one explanation, to provoke the other side explanation to provoke the other side to tempt the other side to launch a massive war which would give Israel an excuse

for invading Lebanon there is another possibility that maybe maybe Hezbollah although I doubt it very much maybe Hezbollah suspected that these are suspicious devices and Israel got hold of that knowledge and decided they're going to expose us.

Well, let's at least save our investment by activating these devices. And still, it has a blow to Hezbollah. Hezbollah is in trauma. It was a shocking incident for them. It shows how the Israeli intelligence has the upper hand. And there is a third possibility, which maybe the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave that order because he, for political reasons, domestic reasons, he wanted to improve his standing rating in the polls. He's not very popular in Israel in the last two years.

Do you think that what we saw this week was different from the way that Mossad has operated in the past? Or is this sort of like a continuity from historical operations? The name of the operations change. The targets are different sometimes. The technology used is different. But since we are now with very modern technology, because of that, what happened was very impressive. But in the past, you know, when people used landlines and not smart telephones, the Mossad and other security services were trying to do the same, to listen, to bug, and even if possible, to send bombs via these machines to the other side, to the enemy. So in that sense, I don't think that it's new. If you put it in perspective, the Mossad has been doing similar operations and even more

spectacular in the past. I'm curious to get your perspective on something. You know, many people inside Lebanon are describing this as an act of terror, particularly because this happened in so many random civilian areas with major civilian collateral damage and, you know, has sort of created reportedly a sort of feeling, you know, in the general psyche of, of where might this happen next. And we've seen some scholars outside Lebanon call it a terror attack as well. And what do you make of that argument? I disagree because Hezbollah is a terrorist organization with a political wing. It's not the other way around that it it's a political organization with the military. It's a terrorist organization.

They kill Israelis. They bomb civilians. They don't target soldiers, although sometimes they do. But most of their rocket attacks are against innocent Israeli farmers and city dwellers, which were forced to leave their homes. Secondly, it's a war. And in a war, unfortunately, innocent people are killed on both sides. As I said from the outset, Hezbollah combatants, Hezbollah helpers, and Hezbollah associates. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was wounded,

and the Iranian ambassador would be on the communication system and lines with Hezbollah. So it was for a very precise purpose to use them as a weapon, as a tool in the war against Israel. Yes, some innocent people were killed, but I don't see it as an act of terrorism. Both sides are targeting also civilians. I mean, you know, definitions of terrorism are a function of one man, one person terrorist is someone else's freedom fighter.

All right, that is all for today. FrontBurner was produced this week by Joyta Shingupta, Matt Mews, Matthew Amha, and me. Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron, Marco Luciano, and Sam McNulty. Music is by Joseph Chabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. Hosting this week was by Jamie Poisson and by me, Allie Janes. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you next week. to FrontBurner and we'll talk to you next week.