86. Mossad Pager Attack: The Long War with Hezbollah (Ep 1)

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You have a tapping device in your pocket and in the pockets of your son, daughter and wife.

You have it with you at home, at work and in the car.

Through this cell phone, they can hear what you say.

They download everything you have on your cell phone, the conversations, the messages, and the images, and they can pinpoint your location.

They can tell in which room you are and if you are in your car.

They can tell you if you are in the front or the back, left or right.

Do the Israelis need anything else?

We are providing all of this for them.

Therefore, we have asked, and I am asking now again, that the fighters and their families should refrain from using cell phones.

Disable it, bury it, lock it in a metal box, keep it there for a week, two weeks, a month.

God knows how long this will last.

Do this in order to protect the people's security, lives, and honour.

These are the collaborators.

You're asking where the collaborators are.

The cell phones you, your wife, and your children hold are the collaborators.

The cell phone is a lethal collaborator.

Welcome to the Rest is Classified.

I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McCloskey.

And that was now deceased Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in a speech posted online in February 2024.

Now, that was amid Hezbollah's increasingly violent conflict with Israel in the months after the 7th of October attacks and the war in Gaza.

And he there is warning Hezbollah members and their families of the dangers of cell phones, mobile phones, part of what was to become a fateful choice by the group to shift away from high-tech communications and towards what I would call pages, David, but which you might call bleepers.

Well, I would use beepers or pagers sort of interchangeably.

Is that not the case in the UK?

I think pages.

Pages is our lingo.

Okay, well, we can fight about this over the next few episodes.

And that's right, Gordon, because this little two-parter we're going to do here on the rest of this classified is going to focus on an extremely creative, audacious, and violent operation conducted by Israel's Mossad, their foreign intelligence agency, to seed Hezbollah's supply chain with explosive-laden pagers.

Now, this is, I think,

one of the most maybe audacious supply chain operations ever conducted in the intelligence business.

I mean, there have been operations to, you know, attempt to seed Iran's sort of nuclear supply chain with contaminated material.

We talked about Stuxnet on the podcast and sort of trying to mess with the production process.

But I think what is so unique about this operation, and we'll get sort of under the hood of how the Israelis actually did it, is they didn't just infect the supply chain, they became the supply chain and actually took over part of the production and distribution process themselves and created a product a unique product that they then essentially infected hezbollah's supply chain with and what's amazing and we heard that from that speech from hassan nasrallo at the start is they are playing on people's fear of technology so people know that you know mobile phones cell phones as hassan nasrallo was saying can be used to spy on them and he's talking about them as the collaborator so it's it's a fascinating operation because they're also using the psychology of people's fear of surveillance to get them to turn to something else, which then Israel and Mossad are going to control and use against them.

So it kind of mixes technology, espionage, even a degree of psychology.

And I guess it's also a covert campaign, which is going to have a significant strategic effect on this battle between Israel and Hezbollah, which we're going to be looking at.

I think you could make the case that this pager operation was a really instrumental part of actually changing the trajectory of the kind of post-October 7th Middle East, right?

I mean, it is essentially the opening salvo of what will become a 12- or so-day campaign by the Israelis that ends up decimating Hezbollah and really bringing the organization to its knees in a way that I think many analysts thought was not possible.

So the Pager operation is a critical piece of the Israelis really weakening a key member of this so-called axis of resistance in the Middle East, right?

And I think to the point around this kind of push-pull between technology and espionage, I think this story says something important about the dynamics of this kind of ubiquitous technical surveillance and cyber world that intelligence officers and spy agencies are living in.

Because we see some of the dynamics here where, as you read up front, Hassan Nasrallah understands the incredible risks that cell phones pose and how the Israelis have been able to penetrate Hezbollah through those phones.

And yet, as he goes sort of more analog in a way, he goes back in time to try to get something that is less digitally connected, the Israelis still find a way to penetrate his organization and create immense problems for him through this dumber technology.

So, you see this kind of back and forth between adversaries in the spy game.

It's not static, right?

There's a push and a pull here and creative adversaries can still find a way to defeat you.

And I also think, as kind of a broader point, this really shows the incredible

vulnerabilities that modern supply chains have.

And that's true if you're the American military and it's true if you're Hezbollah.

These supply chains are so stretched out, so global, that in many cases it has become a real pressure point.

Yeah, whether you're Hezbollah or whether you're the Pentagon or whether you're a company buying a service or some kind of piece of hardware, do you know what you're buying and what's buried within it, either in kind of physical terms, as we'll see in this story or in cyber terms?

I mean, certainly I think in recent years, this is one of the most remarkable.

kind of covert operations that we've seen.

I mean, when it came out, people almost found it hard to believe that this was possible or understand or grapple with it.

And I think what's so interesting is we can really now, with a bit of hindsight, pull apart how this operation was put together and how it was executed and the impact that it had.

But should we go back and just kind of lay the groundwork a bit in terms of Israel and Hezbollah in this very long-standing conflict between this pretty large, powerful organization and the Israeli state?

Yeah, so I think the place to start this is to go back to the early 80s, to go back to 1982, when Israel invades Lebanon.

Now, Lebanon at that point is in the middle of a brutal civil war.

And one of the parties in that civil war is the Palestine Liberation Organization, which has essentially been using Lebanon as kind of a staging ground for attacks against Israel and as kind of a safe haven for PLO members who had been kicked out of Jordan years before.

So the Israelis invade in 1982.

The goal is to defeat the PLO and to install a friendly government in Beirut, which seem like very ambitious goals for the Israelis.

And it is in the swirl of this invasion that Hezbollah is formed with Iranian help.

And the goal of this organization, the sort of raison d'être, is to fight the Israelis.

Now, we should note that Hezbollah is a Shia.

group, which would put it sort of from a sectarian standpoint in relative alignment with the Iranians.

There's a large Shia population in Lebanon.

There had been Shia resistance to the Israelis prior to the invasion, right?

But in the swirl of this invasion, it really is kind of the point at which Hezbollah becomes the thing that we know of today.

And from the early 80s up until 2000, Hezbollah gets more and more support from the Iranians, becomes a more mature organization.

And there's really this kind of mix of sometimes there's direct conflict with the Israelis, there's irregular warfare, there's kidnappings, there's terrorist violence.

And it's not just against Israeli targets in Lebanon.

I mean, most famously, Hezbollah was responsible for the 1983 U.S.

embassy bombing, which killed 63.

They bombed the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon.

There's actually a Marine contingent that Reagan had sent to Lebanon.

241 Americans die in that.

It's the deadliest day for the Marine Corps since the Battle of Ibojima in the Second World War.

So Hezbollah, by the time you get to 2000, has a tremendous amount of Israeli and American blood on its hands, and also some Saudi blood on its hands and terrorist attacks it's conducted.

Through this whole time, the Israelis are occupying peace of southern Lebanon.

And I should just note here that we talked about this all the way back, Gordon.

Actually, some of our earliest episodes.

That's right.

Episodes six and seven of The Rest is Classified.

If you want to go check it out, we talked about sort of the Assad regime and its intelligence services and kind of set it up like the Godfather.

And it is is after 1989 that the Syrians, as we discuss in these episodes, really occupy and kind of legitimate their occupation of Lebanon.

So you actually have the Israelis occupying a section of Lebanon in the south.

The Syrians are occupying the rest of the country, including having an occupation force, tens of thousands of soldiers and intelligence officers in Beirut.

And part of the agreement to end that civil war is that all militias have to disarm.

But there's sort of an unwritten exception for Hezbollah to legitimate its fight against Israel down in the south.

And this is permitted because the Syrians want to use Hezbollah as kind of leverage and a pressure point against the Israelis.

Because the Israelis occupy a piece of Syrian territory that the Syrians want back, and they want to use Hezbollah as sort of a card to play or a point of leverage in that negotiation.

At least that's how it starts.

So complicated dynamic in Lebanon.

A lot of different parties involved.

Major point here is that Hezbollah throughout the 90s gets stronger and stronger, sort of under Syrian tutelage, Iranian patronage, and it is legitimated as this sort of anti-Israeli fighting force in the south of Lebanon.

Led by Hassan Nasrallah.

Who is this clerical-looking figure?

Quite portly, I would say.

Quite portly, quite portly.

But as with all of Hezbollah, he's a kind of politician, leader of a resistance group or a terrorist group, as well as a kind of big player in Lebanese politics and a figurehead.

People look up to him within that Shia community enormously.

So a kind of complicated figure, which I guess matches the complicated role that Hezbollah have in Lebanon.

Yeah, he's always struck me as a bit professorial looking for the head of an international terrorist organization, but it's kind of what he looks like.

He's got the glasses.

He's very thoughtful, I think, in his public remarks and speeches.

He takes over the organization in 1992 after his predecessor is killed by the Israelis.

And he really is, I think, the architect of this dance that Hezbollah begins to sort of dance in the 1990s, where the Israelis withdraw from Lebanon in the year 2000.

Nasrallah's sort of stock in the Arab world rises tremendously, and even inside Lebanon, because he sort of can lay claim to this idea that he,

unlike the Arab armies of 1967 and 1973, and 1948 and all these other wars, that he has actually liberated Arab land.

The Israelis have withdrawn from Lebanon.

Now, the Israelis continue to occupy some small pieces of Lebanese territory in the south and southeast of Lebanon.

And

because of that, and because of the Syrian occupation, Nasrallah essentially uses this as a justification to keep Hezbollah armed and to keep fighting the Israelis, even after they've left most of Lebanon.

And Hezbollah in the early 2000s starts to become really a central player in what we now call the Axis of Resistance, which is this kind of block of anti-Israel actors in the Middle East.

It includes Iran.

It included Syria when Syria was ruled by the Assad family.

It's kind of really challenge Israeli and Western power in the region.

By the time of 7th of October and the sort of war in Gaza afterward, Hamas is part of this group too.

It's not really an alliance per se, but it's kind kind of this network of players that are all aligned by shared opposition to Israel, right?

And critically, under Syrian occupation, the Israelis gone.

Hezbollah really entrenches, right?

It builds up its arsenal.

It builds what Kim Gaddis, the author of a wonderful book on recent Middle Eastern history, called Black Wave, what Kim calls its resistance society.

So it builds up a kind of state within a state.

So if your mental model of Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, like you're only looking at it from one angle.

It's much more complicated than that.

My one experience, direct experience of Hezbollah is around this time.

In 2002, I was in Beirut for the BBC for an Arab summit, and we actually...

organized to do an interview with Hezbollah.

And it was fascinating because it was the classic thing.

Meet someone on the street corner.

We had hoods put over us and they were then driven into the Shia suburbs of Beirut, which are fascinating.

And you can immediately feel the difference for some of the more western international suburbs of Beirut.

But then you just entered a big office block, which was basically the Hezbollah kind of media office, sit down, do an interview like with anyone else.

And you kind of go, it was the kind of weird sense that this was an internationally designated terrorist organization.

And yet a big chunk of Beirut was just theirs.

They were openly there and running the place.

And I guess that is...

the kind of unusual nature of this organization.

It's very different from some of the others we've heard about.

And over this period, it's going to grow in strength, isn't it?

And it's going to build up its political influence and its military strength to the point where Israel is going to be quite worried about that growing strength.

I think with good reason, because, I mean, Hezbollah really conducts through the early 2000s a massive military buildup.

The group constructs a network of bunkers and steel-lined tunnels and camouflaged firing positions all throughout the south.

They acquire increasing quantities of advanced weaponry from the Iranians, from the Syrians, including some really advanced pieces of weaponry from even even the Russians, not directly, but via Iran or Syria, right?

And throughout the early 2000s, sort of Israeli estimates, which, you know, could be a little bit inflated, but I think are directionally correct of Hezbollah's arsenal.

The Israelis estimated in the year 2000 that Hezbollah had 8,000 rockets.

By 2002, that's 10,000 rockets.

By 2006, that's 13,000 to 14,000 rockets.

They've constructed firing platforms throughout the south, some of which are vehicle-based.

There's others that are hidden in bunkers or in the ground floor of garages of buildings or homes.

They have a SIGINT, signals intelligence capability, right?

Including Hebrew speakers for translation.

They field sniper teams, anti-tank and anti-armor, what they call hunter-killer units to go after Israeli tanks should they cross the border again.

They have an amphibious warfare unit, maritime surveillance.

So it's a very sophisticated group that at the same time to this kind of resistance society or state within a state point, They have seats in the Lebanese parliament, right?

They have cabinet positions.

Starting in 2005, they run hospitals, schools, provide subsidies for widows.

So Hezbollah is effectively a government.

It is truly a state within a state.

And even though it conducts terrorist attacks and has these sort of paramilitary groups inside it to do those kinds of things, it's not al-Qaeda.

And then in 2006, the tension with Israel is going to actually escalate into a pretty much full-on conflict between the two sides, which is going to be a pretty brutal battle and which each side is going to show what they can do, if you like.

Yeah.

In late June of 2006, Hezbollah kidnaps two Israeli soldiers and then take them across the border back into Lebanon.

And the Israeli hot pursuit into Lebanon leads to more casualties.

And so you start going down this kind of escalatory spiral.

Israel launches an aerial offensive in the south that they hope will sort of cow Hezbollah into suing for a ceasefire, restore deterrence, but that spreads into a larger bombing campaign that eventually goes after Hezbollah strongholds in the sort of southern suburbs of Beirut and eventually an Israeli ground invasion.

And this fight goes on for 34 days.

As a side note, this was my first summer as an intern at the Central Intelligence Agency.

It was the first PDB article

that the young McCloskey ever wrote as a CIA intern.

Interns are writing briefs for the president.

In this case, yes.

Now, obviously, I was highly supervised, right?

I mean, I had someone kind of staring over my shoulder.

I wasn't just writing whatever the heck I wanted to.

But yes, I was the principal author on an article that went into the president's daily brief and was read, I'm sure, with great interest by George W.

Bush in July of 2006.

That is not what most interns do, I think, at that point.

But back to the conflict.

I mean, what's interesting is the Israeli military, for all its

and technology, struggles, doesn't it, to deal with Hezbollah?

And I mean, it effectively gets a bit of a bloody nose, I think, from Hezbollah, it's fair to say.

You know, the Israeli ground forces are going to get stuck in southern Lebanon.

They're going to be doing airstrikes against Hezbollah's infrastructure.

But Hezbollah have got, you know, these tunnels and networks that they built, which allow them to kind of hide and continue to fire.

And all the time, the international pressure is growing on Israel because of the perception that they're bombing this country and, you know, there are civilian casualties.

This conflict does not go well for the Israelis.

Hezbollah throughout is able to actually steadily increase the rate of rocket fire into Israel.

So they start with about 150 to 180 per day.

The beginning of the conflict, sometimes they get up to 350 per day.

On the very last day of the war, Hezbollah fires 217 rockets into Israel that kill 33 Israeli soldiers.

which is a quarter of the IDFs, the Israel Defense Forces, fatalities.

Hezbollah does that in the final two days of the conflict.

And what I think is really critical, and it's absolutely critical for the Pagers

operation, is that throughout the conflict, Hezbollah's command and control structure remains intact.

Its leadership is in bunkers and largely untouched by the Israelis.

And throughout the conflict, Hezbollah retains pretty high morale.

And Hassan Nasrallah and the other leaders of the organization, particularly on the military side, are able to communicate with their soldiers in the field consistently throughout the 34-day conflict.

So the Israelis never, never

breach kind of Hezbollah Command and Control Central, right?

And at the end of this 34-day war, 1,200 Lebanese are dead.

There's several billion dollars of damage to the country's infrastructure.

125,000 homes and apartments are destroyed.

And even though it is a disaster for Lebanon and the Lebanese, Hezbollah can kind of come out and say, we've won because we didn't lose.

And this idea that they are the image of resistance as being the group that stood up to Israel and kind of went toe-to-toe and wasn't defeated.

I mean, that is important, isn't it?

It is.

And I think 2006 is really important to sort of set the table for the Pagers or Beepers operation because 2006 sets three expectations for what the next war between Israel and Hezbollah will look like.

And I think one of those is that there's unfinished business between both sides.

And I think you could actually say that a little bit differently.

Like, I think both sides see another conflict, another round as inevitable.

It's just a matter of when.

So that's one.

Two is that Israel, they're not fighting a terrorist group, or at least they're not only fighting a terrorist group.

It is fighting something that is actually between kind of a guerrilla warfare organization and a conventional military.

Hezbollah is more like fighting a conventional military than it is just a straight-up guerrilla group.

And three

is that the next war is going to be longer, more violent, and reach much deeper into Israel because Hezbollah was essentially able to bring northern Israel, the economy, the society to a screeching halt during 2006 because of its rocket fire.

And I think the real fear and expectation on the part of Israeli planners is that next time, this is just going to go deeper.

It's going to go further south.

into Israel and affect more of the country.

Yeah, and that's 2006.

And then Hezbollah effectively has the chance to rebuild and grow its capacity.

And what's interesting is you do get this sense of, I think, for the Israelis that this force is growing to their north with more and more military capacity.

And that at some point, as you said, this is going to resume.

And when it does resume, it's going to be bad.

That's right.

And, you know, on the 6th of October 2023, so the day before October 7th, Hezbollah is probably the most heavily armed non-state actor in the world.

There's a bit of a range here, but maybe they have 120,000 to 200,000 missiles and rockets.

That's largely short-range, but they do have some medium-range capabilities there.

And they possess, in particular, medium-range missiles of Iranian and Syrian manufacture, because over the course of the years since 2006, there's essentially been a pipeline created, an arms production and shipment pipeline between Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah, where these three players are sharing essentially what they have in their arsenals with each other.

Hezbollah has Scud missiles.

Yeah, those are the tactical ballistic missiles, which I think were originally developed by the Soviet Union or the Russians, but then famously the Iraqis have them and Saddam Hussein fires them and now Hezbollah's got them as well.

Yeah, Hezbollah has anti-ship cruise missiles, including one manufactured by the Russians, the Akant, which is one of the most advanced anti-ship missiles on the planet.

Hezbollah has 2,000 drones, many of domestic manufacture, and they're actually attempting to sell some of those drones.

So you think about Hezbollah as an arms exporter.

And the Israelis estimate that in a kind of all-out conflict, Hezbollah would be able to launch 2,000 to 4,000 rockets and missiles per day, which would saturate Israel's air defenses.

And, you know, when you read the books written by, you know, some Israelis prior to the 7th of October about just how bad an Israel-Hezbollah war could get, you see estimates of Israeli casualties in the tens of thousands, billions of dollars of economic damage, and the total disruption of sort of of basic infrastructure, power, water, sewage, transportation, things like that.

And so we've sort of set the table with all of this because

inside the minds of Mossad, the question is, well,

how do you create an environment?

How do you get the intelligence that would allow you to change the trajectory?

of what this next conflict would look like, right?

How do you completely set it onto a different pathway that allows you to actually win and to disrupt Hezbollah's command and control so that they can do none of these things and this sort of worst case scenario never happens?

So, David, with October the 7th looming ahead and with this heavily armed group to the north of Israel and the potential for a really violent conflict there, let's stop and we come back.

We'll see how the pages play into what happens next when that conflict really does erupt.

Hi, David McCloskey here from The The Rest is Classified with an exciting announcement for U.S.

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Do be sure to stick around to the end of this episode because I'll be reading an excerpt from the Persian.

Welcome back.

We're looking at the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, which is going to result in this remarkable operation using pages against them.

And we've arrived at the moment, I guess, of the 7th of October 2023.

This day when, out of the blue, Israel is going to get attacked, not by Hezbollah, but by Hamas.

The 7th of October, 2023, 846 Israeli civilians are killed, 278 soldiers.

Hamas takes 251 hostages.

It's the deadliest day in Israel's history.

And this takes Hassan Nasrallah and the Hezbollah leadership, I think, by surprise.

But as we discussed earlier in this episode, even though Hezbollah and Hamas, they fought actually on opposite sides of the Syrian civil war, both of these organizations are part of this axis of resistance.

They're both dedicated to this fight against Israel.

They're both partnered partnered with the Iranians.

Nasrallah is, I think, wary of a broader conflict with the Israelis because even though he quote unquote won in 2006, he won at tremendous cost in Lebanon, right?

And he's not, I think, at this moment, keen for a broader conflict with the Israelis.

But

because Hezbollah is sort of carrying this banner as the preeminent resistance organization to the Israelis, all of a sudden, I think with the Israelis then starting to effectively pound Gaza and Hamas, Nasrallah doesn't think that Hezbollah can just sit this out.

For Hezbollah's status across the Middle East as one of the leading resistance organizations, you get the feeling what he's trying to do is to show that they are supporting Hamas and the people of Gaza, but without necessarily quite getting into a full-scale war with Israel.

So they start launching missiles and drones, don't they, you know, against the Israelis, but it's fairly limited in terms of what they're doing and where they're doing it.

It is.

I think it is limited relative to what Hezbollah might have been able to do.

But of course, it's still massively disruptive in Israel and it's deadly.

I mean, there are 150,000 civilians that get displaced on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border in the first month after the 7th of October.

And I think Hezbollah and the Israelis kind of settle into this back-and-forth, almost kind of staring contest/slash war of attrition in which

it's not quite a full conflict, but at any point in time, you get the sense that a miscalculation from one side or this sort of conflict spiral could happen where you end up back in a conflict like the 2006 war, this kind of full-scale conflict between both sides.

And amid this broader war of attrition, in November of 2023, so just a couple months after the the 7th of October, the Israelis began targeting and killing senior Hezbollah commanders, including members of an elite Hezbollah group called the Radwan Force, which is Hezbollah's premier special operations unit.

They start to kill these commanders.

It happens kind of throughout the winter.

It happens again in January when there's another Radwan commander and actually a top Hamas official in Beirut are both killed in kind of an Israeli targeted killing.

And these targeted killings in the first few months of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah convinces Hassan Nizrallah that he's got some problems.

And he's thinking, you know, are my commanders and my fighters being tracked by their cell phones?

As you read at the beginning, which was the opening statement where he goes, the cell phone is the collaborator.

This is leading them to know where we are.

They can pinpoint your location.

Clearly, that is what's in their mind, that the Israelis are in the telecoms, in the cell phone network, which I'm sure they probably were, and are therefore able to track and pinpoint specific commanders.

So obviously they've been doing what they can to protect their operational security, but they've still got that fear, haven't they, that they're going to get hit through the cell phones or at least located through them.

We should also note that, I mean, Hezbollah has a private fiber optic fixed-line telecom network, which at this point in 2023 is maybe 20 years old.

It runs from those Hezbollah strongholds in the south of Beirut down to southern Lebanon and east into the Bakat Valley.

The Iranians had helped them set it up, and it's a bit unclear from the publicly available reporting, but it seems that Hezbollah believes that even this had been breached by the Israelis probably prior to the 7th of October.

I thought banks and trading companies were the only people who had private fiber optic fixed line telecoms networks, but clearly Hezbollah as well.

But anyway, there you go.

Yeah, it turns out if you're running an extremely paranoid, paramilitary/slash-terrorist organization in a constant state of war with the state of Israel, you probably want the best possible telecommunications infrastructure.

Oh, and by the way, the Israelis are also going to find a way into it.

So as the Gaza war kind of unfolds, Hezbollah's telecom specialists are starting to actually break that overall fiber optic network down into a cluster of smaller networks to limit the damage if it's breached again.

So you get the sense of this organization that is

feeling squeezed by Mossad, by the Israelis.

And on the 28th of December, 2023, Hezbollah sends a telegram message out to residents of southern Lebanon, basically telling them to disconnect security cameras from the internet because Hezbollah is concerned that the Israelis have access to these security cameras throughout the south, which would allow them to use that to create targeting packages for the Israeli Air Force.

So everyone's being told to get rid of their phones, basically.

Phones, security cameras, everything, because they know the Israelis are in them.

That's right.

And by early February, so around the time of Nasrallah's speech, which you read, there's another directive that goes out, which is that Hezbollah fighters cannot have their cell phones anywhere near the battlefield.

And there's a Lebanese source that's quoted in this period and and said, quote, today, if anyone is found with their phone on the front, he is kicked out of Hezbollah.

And so soldiers, Hezbollah soldiers, begin leaving their phones behind when they carry out operations.

And Hezbollah actually has administrative officers who are carrying out snap checks to make sure no one's got phones.

So I guess the question is: if you can't use your phone, what do you do?

And if you have suspicions about your fiber optic landline network, what do you do?

Well, Gordon, how about pagers, right?

What about a pager?

A pager would be an interesting way to solve some of these problems, wouldn't it?

When this happened, and I did a news report about it, lots of people said to me, what is a pager?

Young people out there, young people out there do not know what a pager is.

So I think we should maybe just do a brief explainer about what a pager is, because I had the pager when I started work as a journalist, actually.

It was late 90s.

I'm dating myself.

Sorry, David, you are probably...

still at school, but within that, I have mobile phones.

So we were given pages.

And it's a one-way communication device.

So it can receive broadcast text messages from someone.

You can send from one place to many and you know you can receive a message which normally said on the pager, please call the news desk.

So it's a kind of simple way of communicating with a lot of people.

But the idea is because it's a one-way broadcast out to the pages, it's not tracking where the pager is.

And the pager itself is not sending data back to the other side in the way a mobile phone is or through cell phone towers or other things.

Simply the message goes out and the pager picks it up.

So that, I guess, is why if you're worried about being tracked, you would think a pager is a more secure communications device.

And you would be right, wouldn't you?

I mean, despite the tremendous disaster that will befall Hezbollah here, you would be correct in that.

I mean, it's not connected to the internet and it's not going to give away your location or even your identity.

And it would still allow you to communicate.

And which from the perspective of an organization like Hezbollah makes a ton of sense.

So the concept for this operation inside Mossad probably originates in 2021 or 2022, so more than a year before the 7th of October.

The broader concept of rigging communications devices with explosives inside the Mossad goes back even further.

There's some reporting from the Washington Post, maybe this is like 2015, where the Israelis had successfully embedded explosives in thousands of walkie-talkies that Hezbollah was using.

But the issue with the walkie-talkies is that they're only used in battle.

Large numbers of them would sit idle in kind of storehouses and they wouldn't be kept on a person.

So it's not the most effective tool for really dealing a blow to Hezbollah's command and control structure.

And so those walkie-talkies are sitting idle on the 7th of October, even though they do have some rigged.

Now, the Israelis have tremendous insight into Hezbollah's decision-making, both from a SIGINT signals intelligence standpoint and a

human intelligence standpoint, right?

And the Israelis know that Hezbollah has been looking for sort of hack-proof electronic networks for relaying messages.

And by at least by 2022, the Israelis see that Hezbollah is interested in pagers.

And so, the idea inside Masad becomes: how do we

sort of infect Hezbollah's supply chain with pagers of our manufacture?

And it's a simple concept, but essentially taking over part of your adversary's supply chain is

really not an easy intelligence operation to pull off.

It's very complicated.

And we should note here, Gordon, because we're going to go into the nuts and bolts as we understand it today of how the Israelis did this.

We should say, fair warning for listeners, it is complicated.

The way that the Israelis set this up,

it is designed to be very difficult for anybody, whether it be Hezbollah or journalists, investigative journalists, to understand what you're looking at when you look at the web of organizations and people and the actual creation of these products.

So we're going to do this justice, but just be warned that there's a lot going on here, right?

Because what do you need to really infect your adversary supply chain?

Well, overall, you need a seemingly legitimate operation that is fed by clean cash that has zero connection to the state of Israel.

And there's a real balance here because to do that, you need to appropriate legitimate legal and organizational structures, but you also need enough flexibility so that you can essentially below the waterline produce a product that has explosives in it, right?

So that balance is very hard to strike.

Yeah, because of course what you can't do is just suddenly create a made-up pager company or brand because that would immediately look suspicious.

And yet you still need to be able to control this enough to do what you're going to do in terms of, as we'll see, explosives and things inside pages and to have enough control of it.

So that's the tension, isn't it?

Between legitimacy and control, effectively, in the cover story you develop.

If you're going to purchase a product, and especially if you're running procurement for a large organization, you don't want to buy from some no-name brand that has no established track record, right?

So, the first thing you want is a big brand that you, the Mossad, can sort of work under or appropriate.

Because, again, if you're the Hezbollah procurement guy, it's going to be hard for you to justify buying something from some unknown company that's got no sort of digital trail, no reviews, right?

So what the Israelis do is that in, again, probably 2021, 2022, the CEO of a Taiwanese-based pager manufacturer known as Gold Apollo, it's a big name in pagers,

and he is approached by a former employee of his, a woman named Teresa Wu, and she is working with someone named Tom.

Now, we don't know Tom's last name.

I think there's good reason to believe that Tom is either an officer under non-official cover for the Mossad or a witting asset of the Mossad.

We don't know, we should say.

Now, Tom is Taiwan-based.

He's Austrian.

He is apparently the big boss of this operation.

And he and Teresa Wu ink a licensing agreement with Gold Apollo, which will allow them to distribute pagers under the Gold Apollo brand.

And of course, Gold Apollo, the big Gold Apollo in Taiwan, they're not going going to manufacture the pagers, right?

Mossad needs to do that.

And so they need a few more layers to obscure everything from the eventual buyers in Hezbollah.

And now a few different organizations enter the picture here.

And again, this is confusing by design.

Also, note that

all the people that we're going to discuss here have since vanished

from public view after the pager attacks, right?

They're nowhere to be found.

The first organization is a group called BAC Consulting.

It is based in Hungary.

It's founded by a woman named Dr.

Christiana Barsoni.

BAC Consulting is a strange corporation.

It looks from the outside like a company that's got a lot of different kind of ideas that maybe don't necessarily connect.

When you look at Christiana Barsoni, her online profile, it's a little bit more like she's an influencer rather than the CEO of a company that's actually, you know, a real, real-going concern.

But she has a PhD in particle physics.

She does from UCL.

Yeah.

And that's true.

She does have a very prestigious university, I should add, in London, UCL.

Very serious.

That's right.

And alma mater of our intrepid producer, Becky.

Now, pretty much everybody in this story has a hyphenated nationality.

So Dr.

Christiana is a Hungarian-Italian dual citizen who has her PhD in particle physics from UCL.

She has done some very interesting fabrication on her CV, even though she does actually legitimately have the PhD.

She says she has degrees from SOAS

and the London School of Economics.

What does SOAS stand for, by the way,

School of Oriental and African Studies?

African Studies.

So she spent a lot of time in London, by the look of this.

I mean, those are three London universities, UCL, SOAS, and LSE.

Yeah.

Now, she doesn't actually have the degrees from SOAS and LSE.

That's not true.

She also says she's a board member at the Earth Child Institute, which is not true, and claims she was a project manager at the IAEA when, in fact, she was just an intern for eight months.

She is also trying to dabble in more mushroom trading from Patagonia.

So she's kind of all over the place, right?

Yeah, that's an unusual mix.

It is.

Mushrooms and particle physics.

Mushrooms and particle physics.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We should note here, there is a team at Reuters that has done absolutely stellar work to break this story.

And we will actually, for our club members, be having a conversation with one of the members of that team, James Pearson, at the end of this series.

On how he did it.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah, and exactly like how they broke this story.

But we should say immense credit to that team here because we basically wouldn't be able to tell the story without the exceptional work done by Reuters.

So we've got BAC Consulting in Hungary, Dr.

Cristiana Barsoni.

And interestingly enough, Gordon, in sort of 2023, Dr.

Cristiana mentions to friends that BAC Consulting has just recently gotten an investor, Paris-based investor.

Reuters, again, uncovers that Dr.

Barsoni actually went from borrowing cash from friends to lending it after she gets this mysterious investor who sort of pumps BAC Consulting with some cash.

I think there's potentially reason to speculate that it is our mysterious guy, Tom, who's maybe the investor or someone connected to him.

And BAC Consulting, it is a subsidiary of a group called Frontier Group Entity, which

is

what does that mean?

Sounds like something that I don't know.

Universal import-export.

It's in that.

Exactly.

If I was like, give me a name for my cover business, I think ChatGPT would come up with something like that.

And I think this is probably how the Israelis pumped BAC with cash so that BAC essentially becomes a front for the Israelis to acquire the stuff to build the pagers, right?

So BAC pays a firm in Hong Kong for logistical services.

They pay a firm to make the display module for the beepers, and they sort of purchase additional parts for the beepers, like metal chains and crystal display panels, things like that.

And crucially, BAC Consulting acquires the license to distribute beepers under the Gold Apollo brand.

So, when Tom and Teresa Wu are going to, you know, sort of big Gold Apollo in Taipei, they are actually acquiring the license from Gold Apollo and buying it on behalf of BAC Consulting.

Now, BAC is going to pay about three-quarters of a million euros to Gold Apollo to acquire that license.

Apparently, BAC, which is based in Hungary, is going to use Middle Eastern intermediary banks that cause all manner of headaches for the Gold Apollo accountants in Taiwan.

And that licensing relationship goes back to like 2021 and 2022.

And this takes us back to the money because again, remember, you need clean cash to

set up your front organizations here, but where's the money coming from?

Because BAC Consulting, remember, prior to this investor, had not really been in the black, right?

I mean, it had been kind of Dr.

Christiana dabbling in mushrooms and a lot of different things that kind of weren't actually generating cash flow.

So here we have another strange company, which enters the picture.

It's called Norta Global.

And pay attention to this, Gordon.

I'm actually going to read it directly to make sure I don't get any of these countries wrong.

a it is a bulgarian company that is established by a man named rinson jose who is a norwegian indian man who lives in oslo and he has set up the company via the bulgarian embassy in oslo wow okay

so

again purposely confusing here and we should note here like basically everyone else in this story, Rinson Jose, who's the head of I was going to say, where is Rinson Jose now?

He's vanished.

Oh, no, you surprised me.

Yes, yes.

He's disappeared magically.

And we'll talk more with James Pearson, the Reuters journalist, in our club interview about this, but Reuters got Rince and Jose on the phone after the pager attacks happened.

And as soon as one of the journalists mentions Norta Global, Jose hangs up and he's never heard from again.

So anyway, while Rince and Jose is running Norta, the company sends 2.6 million euros to BAC Consulting in transactions that are marked in the Norta Global books as services, right?

Now, that's probably the money used to finance the fabrication of the pagers.

And interestingly, just as, you know, sort of dig into who Rinson Jose is, he had a profile on an Israeli website, which connects entrepreneurs with Israeli investors.

He had also tweeted once at Malala, the activist Malala, sort of defending Israel back in May of 2021.

So, again, it's not proof of anything, but he maybe looks like the sort of guy who, you know, if he's tapped on the shoulder by the Mossad,

might be happy to help.

And so I don't think we know precisely what he was.

He's probably not an actual Mossad officer, but he's somebody who would have, you know, sort of looked favorably on a request for help from the Israelis, most likely.

Now, where did the 2.6 million Euro come from?

The sort of digging that's been done since, like, if Hezbollah starts to dig, you want this to be really challenging for them.

And you don't want them to end up with like, oh, it came from a bank in Tel Aviv, right?

So the money came from two Hong Kong-based companies that handle remittances.

They're run by an Italian and a Swiss national, both of whom don't actually exist, right?

And one of those Hong Kong-based companies, Ellenberg Trading, This is where you actually do get a connection back to Israel, paid Norta from a bank in Israel.

So there's another layer here.

It is money laundering, isn't it?

It's a bit like when we've done stuff on criminal money laundering, we famously did the the kind of billion-dollar heist with the North Koreans stealing money.

I'm half expecting someone to turn up in a casino in Macau here with suitcases of money in order to kind of launder it and hide the origin.

But we can see that they fairly effectively moved the money to build it and, you know, create this cover story, which is pretty well distance from Israel to do it.

But the next question is, you've got to actually build these pages, haven't you?

You have to make them.

And that is a little bit more mysterious, isn't it?

Where exactly they were made.

That is still one of of the unanswered questions about this whole operation.

And Reuters looked at promotional videos of the pagers because, by the way, the Israelis created videos that are available on YouTube that show the product, right?

And

there's a USB stick in the video that's made by a German company.

There's a wood desk in the video where you're kind of showing the pager.

And in that video, there's this kind of short segment of silence.

And when when you amplify it you get a a hum that's at 50 hertz that is consistent with a power frequency in europe or in israel but not in taiwan where the hum would have happened at 60 hertz right and so we can assume that these were not actually manufactured by gold apollo in taiwan because of that given what we know and i don't think we're giving too much away to say that there's going to be something very nasty inside these pages something explosive if you were mossad would you risk making them in a third country, like in a kind of, I don't know, in Hungary or Europe or somewhere?

I'd have thought you'd do it in Israel to kind of, if you've got to kind of get that much explosives and material into it, because we're talking about a lot of stuff and to keep control of it and to avoid any kind of thing going bang by mistake.

So as you said, we don't know.

My guess is they do it in country, but.

I wouldn't do it in Israel.

You wouldn't?

No, I don't think so.

I mean, where would you do it, David?

Where would you build some exploding pages?

I would do it in Hungary.

I would do all of the design and testing in Israel.

I'd have your prototype built there.

You'd figure out exactly how you put it together.

You'd test it a bunch.

And then once you've got sort of your blueprints for it, I would do it in Hungary because I would source everything from Europe and I would not have any of the pagers that are being sent to Hezbollah ever on Israeli soil, period.

But anyway, it's a fascinating trail which has led us to this point

where all of these front companies have been set up, which clearly has the Israeli hand hidden merkily in the background.

But with that, let's stop because next time we'll understand how they come into the hands of Hezbollah and crucially, what's inside them and what's going to happen when they get triggered.

But Gordon, members of the Declassified Club, and we would encourage all of you to join, will not only get access or have access to the second episode and conclusion of this thrilling series right now, but they will also get access to a raft of bonus content, including our interview with James Pearson, the Reuters investigative journalist who was so critical to breaking the story.

So we hope you join.

We'll see you next time.

See you next time.

Hey, this is David from the Rest is Classified again.

Here's that short excerpt from my upcoming novel, The Persian, which will be available on September 30th in the U.S., wherever books are sold.

And even though I'm reading right now, the audiobook is wonderfully narrated by Fajr al-Qaisi.

I hope you enjoy.

Where am I, General?

Camron as Fahani loads his questions with a tone of slavish deference because, though the man resembles a kindly Persian grandfather, he is, in the main, a psychopath.

The general is looking hard at Cam.

He plucks a sugar cube from the bowl on the table, tucks it between his teeth, and sips his tea.

Cam typically would not ask such questions, but during the three years spent in his care, hustled constantly between makeshift prisons, he has never once sat across from the general, clothed properly with a steaming cup of tea at his fingertips, a spoon on the table, and a window at his back.

Something flashes through the general's eyes, and it tells Cam that he will deeply regret asking the question again.

It has been over a year since the general last beat him or strung him up in what his captors call the chicken kebab, but the memories are fresh each morning.

Cam can still see the glint of the pipe brought down on his leg, can still remember how the pain bent time into an arc that stretched into eternity, and how that glimpse into the void filled him with a despair so powerful that it surely has no name, at least not in Persian, Swedish, or English, the three languages he speaks.

And he's got more than the memories, of course.

He's got blurry vision in his left eye and a permanent hitch in his stride.

What is the spoon doing here?

A spoon?

2,721 consecutive meals have been served, without utensils, on rubber discs, so Cam can't help but blink suspiciously at the spoon.

A mirage, an eyeball scooper, a test?

Perhaps the general plans to skin the fingers that pick it up.

The general calms his fears with a nod, a genuine one, which Cam knows looks quite different from the version he uses for trickery, for lulling him into thinking there will be no physical harm.

Cam puts a lump of sugar into his tea and slowly picks up the spoon.

He stirs, savoring the cold metal on his fingertips.

He sets it down on the table and waits, listening to the soft metallic wobble as the bowl of the spoon comes to rest.

You will write it down again, the general says.

He is rubbing the gray bristle on his neck, and Cam follows his eye contact as it settles on the portraits of the two Ayatollahs looking down from the wall above.

When Cam was a child, the sight of the Ayatollah's frightened him.

It still does.

He looks away.

You will write it again, and you will leave nothing out.

It will be comprehensive and final.

Final?

Cam considers another question.

The general's silent gaze screams, do not.

The first drafts, right after his capture three years ago, were utter shit, like all first drafts.

To call them stories would be like calling the raw ingredients spread across your counter a meal.

No,

they were just a bunch of facts, information wrung from his tortured lips and committed to bloodstained sheets of A4 paper.

But Cam knows he's being too hard on himself.

As a dentist, his writing had been limited to office memorandums and patient notes.

As a spy, his cables adopted similarly clinical tones.

Just the facts, Glitzman, his handler, the man who'd recruited him to work for Massad liked to say, leave the story to someone else.

Masad had preferred he write in English, not Swedish.

The general, of course, demands that he write in Persian, and it is in Persian that Cam has found his voice.

Now the cell becomes Cam's scriptorium.

In his dragging, tedious Persian script, he writes the Quranic inscription, In the name of God, honesty will save you, across the top of the cover page.

Cam knows that the general appreciates this self-talk reminder right up front.

Beneath it, Cam titles this as the first part of his sworn confession and then signs his name.

Someone will fill in the date later, because though he does not know the date today, he also knows not to ask.

The general's men will fill in the location for their own files.

He writes the number one in the top left corner.

But which story should he tell?

The general said it was to be his masterpiece.

Perhaps the best of each, he thinks.

He would also like to write something the general will let him finish.

He would like to reach the end.

Across hundreds of drafts, no matter the type of story, Cam has only managed to write one version of the end.

It is the part he fears the most.

Someday, he has told himself, someday he will write a new beginning to the bleakness of the end.

Will he find it here on this last attempt?

A prisoner can dream, he thinks.

As always, Cam completes a final ritual before he starts this draft.

He imagines writing down his last remaining secret in crayon on one of these A4 sheets right in front of him.

One secret.

Three years in captivity, Cam has held on to only one.

Then he pictures a wooden cigar box.

He slides the paper with the secret inside.

In the early days of his captivity, he locked the real secret written on imaginary paper in the imaginary cigar box into an imaginary safe.

But the general's men broke into every physical safe in his apartment, and Cam thought he should also improve his mental defenses.

He now pictures the cigar box with his secret secret incinerated on a monstrous pyre, the lights and heat so fierce that every dark corner of his brain burns bright as day.

This way Cam's not lying when the general asks him if he's been truthful, if the story is complete.

He's written it all down, has he not?

The prisoner cannot be held responsible for how management handles the papers.

Cam presses the crayon to the paper and begins.