"Explosive Paper" .. How did Hezbollah fall into the pager trap set by Israel?

The booby-trapped pager batteries that arrived in Lebanon earlier this year were part of an Israeli plan to destroy the Lebanese Hezbollah group, through their deceptive features despite one weakness.

According to a Lebanese source with direct knowledge of the pagers and photos of detailed battery analysis seen by Reuters, the operatives who built the devices designed a battery casing that concealed a small but powerful amount of plastic explosives and a new detonator that is undetectable by X-rays.

To overcome the weakness of the lack of information available about the new product, they created fake e-stores and pages and wrote misleading posts online to trick Hezbollah when it tried to check out the devices, according to a Reuters review of archived online pages.

This report reveals for the first time how the design of the booby-trapped pagers and the carefully crafted story of how the battery was manipulated to disguise its characteristics were used in an operation years in the making that dealt unprecedented blows to the Iranian-backed Lebanese group and pushed the Middle East to the brink of regional war.

Explosive paper

According to the Lebanese source and the photos, a thin square sheet containing six grams of white plastic explosive material was planted between two rectangular cells in the battery.

The source added that the remaining space between the battery cells did not appear in the pictures, but was filled with a strip of highly flammable material that acted as a detonator.

The images showed that this three-layer sandwich was inserted into a black plastic wrapper, and planted inside a metal shell about the size of a matchbox.

The attack, along with a second attack the following day that involved the detonation of walkie-talkies, killed 39 people and injured more than 3,400.

Two Western security sources said that the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, was behind the attacks.

Reuters was unable to determine where the devices were manufactured. The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which oversees Mossad, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Lebanese Ministry of Information and the Hezbollah spokesman declined to comment on this report.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it was behind the attacks. A day after they occurred, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant hailed the Mossad’s “absolutely amazing” results in comments widely interpreted in Israel as an implicit admission of the agency’s involvement.

US officials said they were not informed of the operation in advance.

weak link

On the surface, the pager's power source appeared to be a regular lithium-ion battery used in thousands of consumer electronics.

However, the battery, codenamed LI-PT783, had a problem: like the pager, it was not on the market. So Israeli agents fabricated information about the product from scratch.

A former Israeli intelligence officer, who was not involved in the Pager operation, told Reuters that Hezbollah follows strict procedures to verify what it buys.

“You have to make sure that if they search, they find something… not finding anything (about the product) is not good,” said the former officer, who asked not to be named.

Creating cover stories, or “myths,” is a basic skill for secret agents. But what made the pager scheme unusual was that these skills appeared to be used with widely available electronic products.

As for the pagers, the agents tricked Hezbollah into selling a specially designed model, the AR-924, under an existing and popular Taiwanese brand, Gold Apollo.

Gold Apollo CEO Hsu Ching-Kwang told reporters a day after the pager attack that he was contacted about three years ago by Teresa Wu, a former employee, and “her big boss named Tom” to discuss obtaining a license.

Hsu said he had little knowledge of Wu's boss, but he gave them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely used Gold Apollo brand.

Reuters was unable to identify the director, nor whether he or Wu worked with Israeli intelligence.

Hsu said he wasn’t impressed with the AR-924 when he saw it, but he added photos and a description of the product to his company’s website, which helped give him exposure and credibility. There was no way to buy the AR-924 directly from his website.

Hsu added that he knew nothing about the Pager’s lethal capabilities or the broader operation to attack Hezbollah, describing his company as a victim of the plot.

Gold Apollo declined to provide further details. Reuters did not return calls and messages to Wu. She has not made any public comments since the attacks.

"I know this product"

In September 2023, web pages and images showing the AR-924 pagers and their batteries were added to ApolloSystemsHK.com , a website that said it had a license to distribute Gold Apollo products, as well as the pager and its bulky charger, according to a Reuters review of internet records and metadata.

The website listed a Hong Kong address for a company called Apollo Systems HK. There is no company of that name listed at the address or in Hong Kong corporate records.

However, Taiwanese businesswoman Wu listed the site on her Facebook page as well as in incorporation records when she registered a company called Apollo Systems in Taipei earlier this year.

A section of ApolloSystemsHK.com’s website focuses on the battery’s outstanding performance. Unlike the batteries used to power older-generation devices, the company boasts that its battery lasts 85 days and can be recharged via USB, according to the company’s website and a 90-second promotional video on YouTube.

Reuters found that in late 2023, two online battery stores appeared selling the new batteries. In two online forums dedicated to batteries, participants discussed the power source, and while it is not commercially available, a user named Lemikfog wrote in April 2023, “I know this product… It has a great data sheet and great performance.”

Reuters was unable to identify Mickevoj.

The former Israeli intelligence officer and two Western security officers told Reuters that the site, the online stores and the forum discussions bore the hallmarks of a phishing attempt. The sites have been removed from the Internet since the pagers were blown up in Lebanon, but archived versions can still be viewed.

Hezbollah leaders said in the wake of the pager bombing that they had launched internal investigations to understand how the security breach occurred and whether there were spies.

The group had switched to pagers earlier this year after realizing that mobile phone communications were vulnerable to Israeli eavesdropping, Reuters reported earlier.

One person familiar with the matter said that Hezbollah's investigations helped uncover how Israeli operatives used aggressive sales tactics to ensure that Hezbollah's procurement director selected the AR-924s.

The salesperson who relayed the offer offered a very low price for the pagers, "and kept lowering the price until it was accepted," the person said.

Lebanese authorities condemned the attacks, calling them a serious violation of Lebanon's sovereignty. On September 19, in his last public speech before being killed by Israel, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah called the detonation of the devices a "declaration of war" and vowed to punish Israel.

Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging fire since October 8, 2023, when the militant group began firing rockets at Israeli military sites in solidarity with its ally Hamas.

Following the pager attacks, Israel launched a full-scale war on Hezbollah, including a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and air strikes that killed most of the group's top leadership.

Hezbollah's internal investigation into the pager attack, which is still ongoing, suffered a setback on September 28, 11 days after the devices exploded, when the group's senior official in charge of heading the procurement investigation, Nabil Qaouk, was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

Source: Reuters