Penetrating Hezbollah with the "Red Button" Strategy... Did Mossad Manufacture Booby-Trapped Pagers in Israel?

The Washington Post published a report prepared by Greg Miller, Kate Brown, Loveday Morris, Shira Rubin, and John Swain, in which they said that the pager and walkie-talkie bombings in Lebanon last week were the culmination of Mossad’s efforts to infiltrate Hezbollah and establish fake companies in Europe.

The burned-out pieces of the pagers have become part of evidence of a sophisticated decade-long effort by Israel to penetrate the Lebanese militant group, current and former Western and Israeli security officials say.

The marks on the scattered pieces of equipment left a trail that led us, via a factory in Taiwan, to a Hungarian front company that Israeli intelligence is suspected of having set up, or exploited, to hide its alleged role in delivering the deadly devices to Hezbollah.

Security officials in another European capital are also investigating whether a second shell company there was the real seller behind the pager deal.

Mossad and the "Red Button" Strategy

Current and former officials described the latest operation as part of a long and multifaceted effort by Israel, over decades, to develop what Israeli officials called “red button” capabilities, meaning a devastating penetration of an enemy that remains dormant for months, if not years, before being activated.

The reason behind the activation of the button last week remains a mystery, though experts have spoken of Israeli fears that Hezbollah might discover problems with the pagers. Such attacks are often the prelude to a full-scale military offensive, officials say, and by creating chaos, Israel delivers its deadly blow.

The first attack, on Tuesday, killed 12 people, including Hezbollah fighters and civilians, and wounded more than 2,800, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry.

On Wednesday, a walkie-talkie bombing killed 25 people and wounded more than 450 others, while a raid on the southern suburb killed more than 37 people, including Hezbollah leaders and a number of civilians.

A second former Israeli intelligence official said the explosions were the culmination of years of investment in penetrating Hezbollah’s communications, logistics and procurement structures.

The newspaper quoted an Israeli official as saying that the “red button” was “a concept of something you can use when you want or need it.” The official added that detonating the devices this week “was not part of the overall plan” that was envisioned when the operation began, though he stressed that Israeli officials believe it had a significant impact.

“Look at the result,” the former official said, referring to explosions that injured or killed leaders, overwhelmed hospitals, and left party members unable to use or trust basic communications equipment.

Long before the pagers were loaded with explosives, the official added, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, Mossad, and others had developed a comprehensive view of “what Hezbollah needs, what its vulnerabilities are, the front companies it works with, where they are located, and who the contacts are.”

Once you have a picture of these networks, “you need to build an infrastructure of companies that sell to one another, to another,” all of which hide their ties to Israel and move toward Hezbollah’s purchasing agents, who rely on their own front companies, the former official added.

Others defended it, saying it was a blow to Hezbollah’s command and control centers. According to former Israeli Navy Commander Eyal Pinko, the operation has disoriented Hezbollah, and Nasrallah needs a long time to reorganize his leadership.

Thomas Rid, director of the Alperovitch Institute for Cybersecurity Studies at Johns Hopkins University, linked the Israeli operation to U.S. operations against Germany in World War II. U.S. and German intelligence agencies secretly took control of a Swiss-based company, Crypto AG, which sold counterfeit communications equipment to dozens of foreign governments.

Both operations had a consistent intelligence objective of hacking into enemy supply chains, and experts also cited the attack dubbed Stuxnet, in which Israel and the United States collaborated to infect Iranian centrifuges with destructive malware.

The pager case raises new ethical questions, officials and experts said, because its purpose, at least in part, was to kill and maim, as well as sabotage or obtain intelligence.

Ralph Goff, a former senior CIA official who served in the Middle East, said that if the United States had known in advance about the Pehr operation, given its large-scale nature, officials “would have panicked and used every means possible to prevent it.” But a former Israeli official said the attack “hit exactly the people who needed to be targeted.”

If Israel's role in planning and executing the operation is confirmed, it will face questions about why it chose European countries, and perhaps exploited individuals, including front companies, who may not have understood the consequences of their alleged roles to sign contracts to supply pagers to a party.

“There are a lot of shell companies and fake people,” said Gavin Wild, a former White House official and cybersecurity expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “If there are real victims, they will have to live in fear for the rest of their lives because Hezbollah won’t believe it [even if they didn’t know about the plot].”

As the scattered pagers were gathered together, a series of commercial entities began to surface. The back panels of the pagers were marked with brand and model information associated with a Taiwanese manufacturer, Apollo Gold, which remains a major supplier of the devices that were widespread in the 1990s but have since been largely replaced by cellphones.

Hezbollah is said to have resorted to using pagers because it believes their low technological limitations make them less vulnerable to hacking by Israeli intelligence.

Officials at the Taiwanese company, who have faced a deluge of investigations, have said the company did not design or manufacture the devices being traded by Hezbollah, and that they were produced under a licensing agreement with BEC Communications KFT. No one knows the true nature of BEC’s work.

The company was registered in Hungary in 2022.

According to Hungarian documents, it was registered in May 2022 and has 118 business activities, including book publishing, film distribution, and the manufacture of oil, grease and imitation jewelry. The company’s website, which has been down since Tuesday’s attack, promotes a wide range of services, offering consulting advice on everything from social impact investing to waste management solutions.

According to the company’s registry, its director is Cristiana Barsoni Archidiacono, 49, who did not respond to multiple attempts by the newspaper. In a brief response to The Associated Press on Friday, her mother said her daughter was now under the protection of Hungarian security.

But a Hungarian security official confirmed that EPC was a shell company involved in delivering the pager to Hezbollah. The devices “never reached Hungary,” the official said, but that EPC’s identity was used to deceive Hezbollah, though it was not clear whether its director was “involved in, or had deep knowledge” of the operation.

On Wednesday, Taiwan police raided BEC’s office in the capital, Taipei, and uncovered records of a shipment from Apollo Gold to Hungary in 2022. Another commercial contract was uncovered showing the company in the Taiwanese capital receiving $15 for each pager sold to BEC.

Meanwhile, Bulgarian security services have been investigating a second company, Norta Global Ltd., in Sofia, following a media report on Wednesday that the company sold and delivered explosive pagers to Hezbollah. The Hungarian news site Telex attributed the information to anonymous sources.

The Bulgarian National Security Agency issued a statement on Friday saying it had “proven beyond doubt” that “no communications devices that were detonated in Lebanon or Syria were imported, exported or manufactured in Bulgaria.”

However, the statement did not rule out a link between Norta Global and the sale of Pager to Hezbollah, saying only that the company “did not carry out transactions within the legal jurisdiction of Bulgaria.”