The batteries inside weaponized pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the beginning of the year, part of an Israeli plot to destroy Hezbollah, had powerful deceptive features and an Achilles’ heel.
According to a Lebanese source with direct knowledge of the pager, the agents creating the pager had designed a battery that concealed a small but powerful charge of plastic explosive and a new detonator that was invisible to X-rays. Battery pack seen by Reuters.
To overcome the weakness – the absence of a credible backstory for the massive new product – they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah’s due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows. .
The secret design of the pager bomb and the battery’s carefully constructed cover story are both described here for the first time, shedding light on the execution of the years-long operation that struck an unprecedented blow against Israel’s Iran-backed Lebanese enemy and the Middle East. Pushed. The former is close to a regional war.
According to the Lebanese source and photographs, a thin, square sheet filled with six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was squeezed between two rectangular battery cells.
The remaining space between the battery cells cannot be seen in the photographs, but is occupied by a strip of highly flammable material, which acts as a detonator, the source said.
The photos showed that this three-layer sandwich was inserted into a black plastic sleeve, and encased in a metal casing about the size of a matchbox.
The source and two bomb experts said the assembly was unusual because it did not rely on a standard miniature detonator, usually a metal cylinder. All three spoke on condition of anonymity.
Without any metal components, the material used to trigger the explosion had an edge: like plastic explosives, it was not detected by X-rays.
Upon receiving the pager in February, Hezbollah looked for the presence of explosives, putting them through airport security scanners to see if they triggered an alarm, said two people familiar with the matter. Nothing suspicious was reported.
The two bomb experts, who were shown the pager-bomb design by Reuters, said the devices were probably set up to generate a spark within the battery pack, which would ignite the explosive material and detonate the sheet of PETN. It was enough.
Two battery experts said that since the explosive and wrapping take up about a third the volume, the battery pack has a fraction of the power commensurate with its 35 gram weight.
“There’s a huge amount of unaccounted mass out there,” said Paul Christensen, an expert on lithium batteries at Newcastle University in Britain.
The Lebanese source said that at some point, Hezbollah noticed that the batteries were draining faster than expected. However, the issue did not appear to raise major security concerns – the group was still handing out pagers to its members just hours before the attack.
On 17 September, thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Beirut’s southern suburbs and other Hezbollah strongholds, in most cases followed by a beeping of the devices, indicating an incoming message.
Reuters witnesses noted that many of the victims rushed to hospital had injuries to their eyes, missing fingers or had holes in their stomachs, indicating proximity to the devices at the time of the explosion. Overall, the pager attack and a second attack the next day activating weaponized walkie-talkies killed 39 people and injured more than 3,400.
Two Western security sources said the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad led the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.
Reuters could not establish where the devices were manufactured. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has authority over the Mossad, did not respond to a request for comment.
Lebanon’s information ministry and Hezbollah spokesmen declined to comment for this article.
Israel has neither denied nor confirmed any role. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant praised the Mossad’s “very impressive” results in comments the day after the attacks, which were widely interpreted as tacit approval of the agency’s involvement in Israel.
US officials have said that they were not informed in advance about the operation.
weak link
From the outside, the pager’s power source looked like a standard lithium-ion battery pack used in thousands of consumer electronics goods.
And yet, the battery labeled LI-BT783 had one problem: like the pager, it did not exist on the market.
So Israel’s agents created a backstory from the beginning.
A former Israeli intelligence officer who was not involved in the pager operation told Reuters that Hezbollah has serious procurement procedures to check what they buy.
“You want to make sure that if they look, they find something,” said the former detective, requesting anonymity. “It’s no good getting nothing.”
Creating backstories, or “legends”, for undercover agents has long been a core skill of spy agencies. What makes the Pager story unusual is that those skills have been applied to ubiquitous consumer electronics products.
As for the pagers, agents deceived Hezbollah by selling a custom-made model, the AR-924, under an existing, well-known Taiwanese brand, Gold Apollo.
Gold Apollo Chairman Su Ching-kuang told reporters a day after the pager attack that about three years ago a former employee, Teresa Wu, and her “big boss named Tom” had contacted him to discuss a licensing agreement.
Hsu said he knew little about Wu’s superiors, but that he gave him the authority to design his own products and market them under the widely distributed Gold Apollo brand.
Reuters could not establish the identity of the manager, nor ascertain whether that person or Wu had knowingly worked with Israeli intelligence.
The chairman said he was not impressed with the AR-924 when he saw it, but still added photos and descriptions of the product to his company’s website, which helped give it both visibility and credibility. There was no way to purchase the AR-924 directly from their website.
Hsu said he knew nothing about the lethal capabilities of the pagers or the broader operation to attack Hezbollah. He described his company as a victim of a conspiracy.
Gold Apollo declined to provide any further comment. Calls and messages to Wu remained unanswered. He has not given any statement to the media since the attacks.
“I know this product”
In September 2023, webpages and images featuring the AR-924 and its battery were added to apollosystemshk.com, a website that said it had a license to distribute Gold Apollo products, as well as the rugged pager and its heavy power source. Reuters review of Internet records and metadata.
The website gave the address of a company called Apollo Systems HK as being in Hong Kong. No company with this name exists at this address or in Hong Kong corporate records.
However, the website was also listed by Taiwanese businesswoman Wu on her Facebook page as well as in public incorporation records when she registered a company called Apollo Systems in Taipei earlier this year.
The excellent performance of the battery is emphasized in a section of the apollosystemshk.com site dedicated to the LI-BT783. Unlike the disposable batteries that powered older generation pagers, it had an autonomy of 85 days and could be recharged via USB cable, according to a 90-second promotional video on the website and YouTube.
Reuters found that in late 2023, two battery stores came online with LI-BT783 listed in their catalogs. And in two online forums dedicated to batteries, participants discussed the power source, despite the lack of commercial availability: “I know this product,” a user with the handle MikeVogue wrote in April 2023. “It has a great datasheet and great performance.” ,
Reuters could not establish the identity of MikeVogue.
A former Israeli intelligence officer and two Western security officials told Reuters that the website, online store and forum discussions reflected the deception attempt. The websites have been removed from the web since pager bombs devastated Lebanon, but archived and cached copies can still be viewed.
Reframing the day they purchased the pagers, Hezbollah leaders said they had launched an internal investigation to understand how the security breach could have occurred and identify possible tampering.
Reuters previously reported that the group had shifted to pagers earlier this year after realizing that cellphone communications were exposing Israeli eavesdroppers.
Hezbollah’s investigation has helped uncover how Israeli agents used aggressive sales tactics to ensure that Hezbollah’s procurement manager chose the AR-924, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
“The salesman who pitched the offer made a very cheap offer for pagers,” the person said, “and kept lowering the price until it was taken in.”
Lebanese officials condemned the attacks as a serious violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty. On 19 September, in his last public speech before being killed by Israel, Hezbollah leader Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah said the device explosions could amount to a “declaration of war” and vowed to punish Israel.
Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging fire since October 8, 2023, when the operator group began launching rockets at Israeli military targets in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas.
In the wake of the device attacks, Israel has launched a full-scale war on Hezbollah, including ground invasions and airstrikes on southern Lebanon, killing most of its top leadership.
Hezbollah’s internal investigation into the pager attack, still ongoing, suffered a setback on 28 September: eleven days after the detonation of the devices, the senior Hezbollah official leading the procurement investigation, Nabil Kouk, was himself killed in an Israeli airstrike. They went.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)