Dan Sabbagh
The Guardian / September 19, 2024
Reports that sabotaged pagers and walkie-talkies were made by Israeli front company with links to Europe.
A meticulous manufacturing operation, probably controlled by an Israeli front company, is emerging as the most likely way thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies containing hidden explosives ended up in the hands of Hezbollah operatives.
Experts said the sabotaged devices appeared to use small amounts of military grade plastic explosives that could be carefully assembled only over a period of time, amid reports that they were manufactured by an Israeli front company with links to Europe.
“It looks like what was used was a high grade plastic military explosive,” said Trevor Lawrence, the head of Cranfield University’s Ordnance Test and Evaluation Centre, which tests bombs on Salisbury Plain. “You only need around 5g, but it is a complex job to insert them into the pagers and ensure they still worked.’
Military plastic explosives are not commercially available, but are able to kill and cause significant injuries if they are close to a person, particularly their head and torso, Lawrence said. This tallies with the injuries caused in Lebanon this week. “Causing injury with explosives is all about proximity,” he added.
A report in The New York Times, based on intelligence briefing, said the exploding pagers were manufactured by an Israeli front company, which even went to the trouble of shipping normal pagers to other clients.
Israel has not claimed responsibility for the sophisticated deadly double attack, widely considered to be the work of the Mossad intelligence agency, which killed 37 and wounded hundreds this week.
Casualties included Hezbollah fighters and operatives but also civilians, with explosions going off in supermarkets and hospitals, while a walkie-talkie exploded on Wednesday during a funeral for three members of the militant group. A child was killed when pagers blew up the day before.
The pagers bleeped with a fake message from a Hezbollah commander, then went silent before exploding, by which time many users had lifted the devices to read. Mohamad Jawad Khalifeh, a surgeon at the American University of Beirut, told the pro-Hezbollah newspaper Al-Akhbar that more than 90% of the injuries they were treating were double injuries to the eye and fingertips.
There are examples of intelligence agencies taking control of companies, such as the CIA and West German intelligence’s secret ownership of Crypto, which secured diplomatic communications for as much as 40% of the world’s embassies during the cold war and in the two decades that followed.
But controlling a company to manufacture covert weapons in quantity is something different – and has raised questions about whether the remotely exploding devices are legal under international law.
Prof Janina Dill, an international law specialist at Oxford University, said: “The attacking party would have struggled to verify whether the individuals using the pagers were legitimate targets of attack due to a fighting role in Hezbollah.” They would have “had little information about the circumstances in which the pagers detonated”.
A deliberately confusing web of front companies, some based in Europe, appear to be behind the delivery of the devices.
Bulgarian intelligence said it was examining reports that a firm, Norta Global, was behind the shipment of the pagers, which in turn was using a Hungarian firm, BAC Consulting, as a front.
The Bulgarian security service, DANS, said that it could find “no customs operations have been carried out with the goods in question”, though its searches were continuing.
No company called Norta Global crops up on the social media networking site LinkedIn or web searches, though there is a deleted website with a reverse name Global Norta. Internet archives reveal only the most basic website, shorn of identifying information.
A day earlier, Hungarian authorities said they had no evidence that BAC Consulting had manufactured the pagers in the country, though it held a licence from their original Taiwanese manufacturer, Go Apollo. BAC’s chief executive, Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono, said it was just an intermediary.
Plastic explosives are also difficult to detect, particularly in small quantities, and normally require the adding of a taggant, a special chemical marker, to ensure their origin can be known. Given the apparent goal to target Hezbollah fighters and leaders, it is unlikely that this will have taken place.
Lawrence said more explosive was likely to have been used in the walkie-talkies, which would account for the higher number of fatalities on Wednesday in fewer attacks. The death toll was 25, compared with 12 killed by the exploding pagers.
The Japanese walkie-talkie manufacturer, Icom, whose name and logo appears on the IC-V82 devices that exploded on Wednesday, said it had not made the handset since 2014. The batteries had also been discontinued, it added, though counterfeits circulate widely in the Middle East.
The fact that Israel was apparently able to ascertain that Hezbollah wanted 5,000 pagers and made use of walkie-talkies as an alternative to the mobile phones its leader had banned this year – and successfully supply them about five months ago – suggests a high degree of intelligence.
Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel, said there would be “100 steps in an operation like this, all of which have to be perfect”, adding that such is the ambition of the attack on Hezbollah this week it would make sense only as part of the beginnings of a military escalation.
“This has exposed what appears to be a remarkable strategic capability,” Freilich said, though he questioned if the Israeli military was ready for a major war in the north given it had been fighting in Gaza for nearly a year.
Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said the attacks on Tuesday and Wednesday “could be considered war crimes or a declaration or war”.
Dan Sabbagh is The Guardian’s defence and security editor
