How Israel’s ‘Operation Grim Beeper’ rattled global spy chiefs

A group of Israeli executives was in a euphoric mood earlier this year after witnessing how explosive pagers sent by the Mossad had killed or maimed thousands of Hezbollah militants and civilians in Lebanon.

Then they meet a former European spymaster. Instead of high-fiving executives about Israeli sabotage, the former intelligence chief inflated their high spirits with an unapologetic assessment.

Operations must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legally permissible in this country, the former spy chief told a business conference. That count exploded pager “did not meet my test”.

The synchronized detonation of thousands of Hezbollah electronic pagers on September 17 shocked security officials around the world at the audacity of the operation and mystified the elaborate front companies Israel had set up to supply the booby-trap devices.

Yet the attack, a Trojan horse reimagined for the digital age, has sparked a wide-ranging debate among Western security chiefs grappling with two fundamental questions about their modern spycraft.

Are their own communication systems similarly vulnerable to disruption? And would they ever approve a comparable operation – given that the Pager attack killed at least four civilians, 37 of them including two children, and injured nearly 3,000 others?

Interviews range from four to more than a dozen current and former senior security officials IsraelIts most important Western allies, all acknowledged that the Pager attack was a remarkable feat of espionage. But only three said they would approve similar legislation.

One said it set a dangerous precedent that could be exploited by non-state actors, such as terrorists or criminals. Another concern was how explosive-laden pagers were smuggled across Europe and the Middle East, posing a threat to roadside property and human life.

Former CIA chief Leon Panetta even described the Pager attack as a “form of terrorism” in a television interview. Other officers took a similar view in an operation that, with dark humor, some have nicknamed “Operation Grim Beeper”.

“This was the kind of operation the Russians would do,” said one former intelligence chief. “I don’t think any other Western intelligence agency would consider this kind of operation, maiming thousands of people.”

“I like the boldness, but on balance I would not have approved the operation as it was not completely targeted,” said a senior defense official. “There was a chance that the pagers could, say, kill a child that caught it.”

“It was an extraordinary operation – even if many Western states might consider it an assassination,” said another former senior intelligence official. “Defense ministries around the world will now ask themselves: How do we protect ourselves from similar sabotage?”

People familiar with the operation say it was caused by a small but powerful plastic explosive hidden in a pager battery and a detonator invisible to X-rays triggered remotely.

Israel initially denied involvement in the attack, but weeks after it happened, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Le Monde that he had personally authorized the operation.

It is a part, along with other operations, of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency. In 1972, Israeli activists A phone exploded They planted explosives, which were used by representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Paris. The man, Mahmud Hamshari, lost a leg and later died. In 1996, they repeated the trick with Yahya Ayash, a master bomb maker for Hamas.

An important difference with the 2024 Pager attack was its scale. Also, another series of explosions the next day — this time booby-trap walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operators — killed another 20 people and wounded 450, according to Lebanese authorities.

Outside the region, the operation raised urgent concerns about the risk of copycat sabotage operations.

Sir Alex Younger, the former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, warned that the attack was a “valuable wake-up call” about the vulnerability of Western supply chains.

“Because supply chains are invisible, we don’t pay them any attention,” he said. “But the West has to value the risks inherent in supply chains – whether it’s Russian energy, Chinese electronics or whatever – and put them alongside other risks like AI, drones and cyber warfare.”

This has the potential to intercept supply chains by terrorists, a point addressed by Ken McCallum, head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5.

Asked about Operation Pager at a rare press conference in October, McCallum replied that a key aspect of MI5’s work was to “stay ahead of where terrorism can reach”.

Supply chain sabotage and assassinations are as old as spycraft. Medieval armies used spies to act as merchants to discover what their opponents were buying. According to espionage historian Calder Walton, they would also poison the water supply.

More recently, during the Cold War, the CIA smuggled faulty computer chips into the supply chain that the Soviet Union used to steal Western technology through commercial front companies.

The most successful example of a CIA campaign was some faulty software that blew up a gas pipeline in 1982 with a three-kiloton explosion. No one was killed, and repairs cost the Kremlin millions of rubles it could not afford.

At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of US officials worried that if Israel could snare mundane electronic gadgets such as pagers, the full range of China’s civilian technology – such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, just about anything. — can also be weaponized.

“The new digital world allows for previously unimaginable means of sabotage,” Walton said.

Not all of the officers interviewed believed that the operation was either disproportionate or unnecessary. As one clearly said: “War is about violence”.

Younger said he did not judge the attack as an indiscriminate use of violence because the pagers were used by Hezbollah operatives and Israel is at war with the militant group. However, he cautioned that “decapitation operations are most effective in the context of a larger strategy – they are not ends in themselves”.

A senior Western security official called it a “very nice operation”. . . I’m jealous.” Western countries may frown on Israel’s apparent disregard for civilian casualties from the attacks, the official said, but that pales in comparison to the brutality with which the Israeli military attacked Gaza and Lebanon.

“They are [the Israelis] They have their own method of assessment – and a different threshold,” the official added.

What seems clear is that targeted killings are at the heart of Israel’s security operations in a way that they are not among its Western allies, where civilian casualties during war are widely seen as unacceptable.

According to Ronen Bergman, author of a history of Israeli assassinations, in the first 17 years of this century alone, Israel conducted more than 2,000 targeted killing operations. During the same period, the United States approved less than a fifth of that amount.

“Israel’s security calculus is different from that of the West,” said John Rein, senior adviser at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They live in a rough neighborhood and are brutalized by it. The saving grace is that Israel is aware of this. The concern is that it seems to care less and less.”

Such considerations raise the question of whether a Western intelligence agency would approve its own version of Operation Grim Beep.

One official commented: “If our state faces the same existential threat as Israel, what will we do? The answer is that it all depends on conditions that we can’t expect until we get there.”

Illustrated by Bob Haslett