An ambulance transporting injured individuals to the American University of Beirut Hospital (AUBMC) following the beeper explosion on Sept. 17, 2024. (Credit: Mohammad Yassine/L’Orient-Le Jour)
BEIRUT — The pager attack against Hezbollah members on Sept. 17 rattled global spy chiefs and left them stunned by the operation's audacity, the Financial Times (FT) reported on Saturday.
Six days before the escalation of the war between Hezbollah and Israel, Hezbollah's pager and walkie-talkie devices exploded, killing dozens of people and wounding thousands. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he personally approved the operation several weeks after it happened.
FT said the attack "triggered a broader debate among Western security chiefs that has left them grappling with two fundamental questions over modern spycraft." Mainly, the debate revolved around whether their own communication systems are similarly vulnerable to interception and whether they would ever approve a comparable operation — given that the pager attack killed dozens, including at least four civilians, two of them children.
FT interviewed over a dozen current and former senior security officials from four of Israel’s most important Western allies. Although they all acknowledged that the pager attack was an "extraordinary feat of espionage," only three of the twelve said they would approve a similar act.
Operations must be “necessary and proportionate” to be legally approved in this country, a European former spy chief told Israeli executives during a business conference, adding that the exploding pagers "did not meet [his] test.”
One official said it set a dangerous precedent that non-state actors, such as terrorists or criminals, might use. Another concern was how the explosive-packed pagers were smuggled across Europe and the Middle East, posing a danger to property and human life along the route.
A 'form of terrorism,' what 'the Russians would do'
Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA, even described the pager attack in a television interview as a “form of terrorism.” Some officials even nicknamed the attack “Operation Grim Beeper.”
“It was just the sort of operation the Russians would do,” said a former intelligence chief. “I don’t think any other Western intelligence service would even consider that sort of operation, maiming thousands of people.”
“I like audacity, but on balance would not have approved the operation as it was not fully targeted,” a senior defense official said. “There was a chance the pagers could say, kill a child who happened to be holding it.”
“It was an extraordinary operation — even if many western states might consider it murder,” said another former senior intelligence official. “Defense ministries around the world will now be asking themselves: How do we protect ourselves from similar sabotage?”
Outside the region, the operation has raised urgent concerns about the risk of copycat sabotage operations.
Sir Alex Younger, former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, warned that the attack was a “valuable wake-up call” about the vulnerability of Western supply chains.
“Because supply chains are invisible, we pay them no attention,” he said. “But the West has got to properly price the risks inherent in supply chains — be that Russian energy, Chinese electronics, or now this — and put them alongside other risks, such as AI, drones and cyber warfare.”
At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of U.S. officials worried that if Israel could booby trap mundane electronic gadgets such as pagers, a whole range of Chinese civilian technologies — such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, almost anything with a battery — could also be weaponized.
“The new digital world allows for previously unimaginable means of sabotage,” Calder Walton, a historian of espionage, said.
However, not all of the interviewed officials believed the operation was either disproportionate or unnecessary. As one put it bluntly, “War is about violence.”
Younger said he did not judge the attack to be an indiscriminate use of violence because the pagers were used by Hezbollah operatives, and Israel was at war with the militant group. However, he cautioned that “decapitation operations are most effective in the context of a broader strategy — they are not an end in themselves.”
One senior Western security official went so far as to call it a “very beautiful operation . . . I am jealous.” Western countries might balk at Israel’s apparent disregard for civilian casualties caused by the attack, the official said, but it "paled in comparison to the ferocity with which the Israeli military had attacked Gaza and Lebanon."
