🔴MUST READ INSIDE STORY ON THE PAGER OPERATION: A summary of the Washington Post exclusive about how the Mossad's pager operation against Hezbollah unfolded. A thread 👇
This operation started in 2022, when the Mossad came up with the idea. At this point, Hezbollah was increasingly worried about its vulnerability to Israeli electronic surveillance and was looking for unconventional means of communication. The group specifically sought a "hack-proof electronic network for relaying messages." This is where the Mossad came in.
The first phase of this plan actually started on a smaller scale in 2015 when the Mossad began clandestinely inserting booby-trapped radios into Lebanon. The article describes them as "two-way radios containing oversized battery packs, a hidden explosive, and a transmission system." This gave Israel full access to Hezbollah's internal communications network for eavesdropping; the explosives were considered a bonus.
Jumping forward to 2023, Hezbollah began searching for pagers and landed on the Taiwanese Apollo pagers. The sales pitch came from a marketing official "trusted by Hezbollah and with links to Apollo." The marketing official was a former Middle East sales representative for the Taiwanese company, which had a completely legitimate company with a license to sell Apollo pagers, amongst other products. Hezbollah ended up settling on the AR924 pager model.
Little did Hezbollah know, but the production of these pagers was outsourced without the sales representative's knowledge, and the pagers were physically assembled in Irsael at a Mossad facility. The Mossad pagers featured a battery pack with a miniscule amount of a tiny yet powerful explosive. The explosive was so well hidden that even if the device were taken apart or x-rayed (which most likely Hezbollah did), it would remain undetectable.
The Mossad had remote access to these pagers, and the explosives could be detonated with an electronic signal. However, Mossad also included a feature that took advantage of the pager's two-step procedure to verify encrypted messages that would ensure the user was holding it in both hands when the explosives detonated.
On September 12, PM Netanyahu informed the Cabinet of the operation, and after a heated debate, the plan was approved. The US was not notified.
On September 17, thousands of the pagers started ringing and vibrating across Levanon and Syria. A short message in Arabic that read "You received an encrypted message" flashed across the screen. Hezbollah operatives started following the instructions for verifying and checking the encrypted messages by pressing two buttons, causing the pagers to detonate. Less than a minute later, the Mossad detonated the remaining pagers remotely. The following day, the radios from 2015 were detonated as well. The rest, as they say, is history.....
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