By Maya Gebeily, James Pearson and David Gauthier-Villars
BEIRUT (Reuters) – The batteries in the armed pagers that arrived in Lebanon early this year, part of an Israeli plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerful deceptive features and an Achilles heel.
The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that hid a small but powerful charge of plastic explosives, and a new detonator that was invisible to X-rays, according to a Lebanese source with firsthand knowledge of the pagers, and disassembly photos of the pagers. battery pack seen by Reuters.
To overcome the weakness – the lack of a plausible backstory for the massive new product – they created fake online stores, pages and messages that could mislead Hezbollah's due diligence, a Reuters review of web archives shows.
The covert design of the pager bomb and the carefully constructed cover story of the battery, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation that dealt unprecedented blows to Israel's Iran-backed Lebanese enemy and pushed the Middle East . East closer to regional war.
According to the Lebanese source and photos, a thin, square sheet containing six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was pressed between two rectangular battery cells.
The remaining space between the battery cells was not visible in the photos, but was occupied by a strip of highly flammable material that acted as a detonator, the source said.
This three-layer sandwich was placed in a black plastic sleeve and encased in a metal casing about the size of a matchbox, the photos showed.
The assembly was unusual in that it did not rely on a standard miniaturized detonator, usually a metal cylinder, the source and two bomb experts said. All three spoke on condition of anonymity.
With no metal components, the material used to trigger the blast had an advantage: like the plastic explosives, it was not detected by X-rays.
After receiving the pagers in February, Hezbollah looked for the presence of explosives, two people familiar with the matter said, running them through airport security scanners to see if they triggered an alarm. Nothing suspicious was reported.
The devices were likely positioned to generate a spark in the battery pack, enough to ignite the detonating material and detonate the PETN sheet, said the two bomb experts, to whom Reuters showed the pager bomb design.
With explosives and packaging taking up about a third of the volume, the battery pack carried a fraction of the power, equivalent to its 35 gram weight, two battery experts said.
“There is a significant amount of missing mass,” said Paul Christensen, a lithium battery expert at Britain's University of Newcastle.
At one point, Hezbollah noticed that the battery was draining faster than expected, the Lebanese source said. However, the issue did not appear to raise any major safety concerns; the group handed over the pagers to its members hours before the attack.
On September 17, thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in the southern suburbs of Beirut and other Hezbollah strongholds, in most cases after the devices beeped, indicating an incoming message.
Among the victims rushed to hospital, many had eye injuries, missing fingers or gaping holes in their abdomens, indicating they were near the devices at the time of the blast, Reuters witnesses saw. In total, the pager attack, and a second attack the next day in which armed walkie-talkies were activated, killed 39 people and injured more than 3,400.
Two Western security sources said Israel's Mossad intelligence agency spearheaded the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.
Reuters was unable to determine where the devices were manufactured. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office, which has authority over the Mossad, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Lebanese Ministry of Information and a Hezbollah spokesperson declined to comment for this article.
Israel has neither denied nor confirmed a role. The day after the attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised the Mossad's “very impressive” results in comments that were widely interpreted in Israel as a tacit acknowledgment of the organization's participation.
U.S. officials have said they were not given advance notice of the operation.
THE WEAK CONNECTION
From the outside, the pager's power source looked like a standard lithium-ion battery pack used in thousands of consumer electronics.
And yet the battery, labeled LI-BT783, had a problem: like the pager, it didn't exist on the market.
So the Israeli agents created a backstory from scratch.
Hezbollah has serious tender procedures to control what they buy, a former Israeli intelligence officer, who was not involved in the pager operation, told Reuters.
“You want to make sure that when they search, they find something,” the former spy said, asking not to be named. “Finding nothing is not good.”
Creating backstories, or “legends,” for undercover agents has long been a core skill of spy agencies. What made the pager plot unusual is that these skills appear to have been applied to ubiquitous consumer electronics products.
As for the pagers, the operatives tricked Hezbollah into selling the custom-made model AR-924 under an existing, reputable Taiwanese brand, Gold Apollo.
Gold Apollo chairman Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters a day after the pager attack that he was approached about three years ago by a former employee, Teresa Wu, and her “big boss, named Tom” to sign a licensing deal. to discuss.
Hsu said he had little information about Wu's superior, but he gave them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely distributed Gold Apollo brand.
Reuters was unable to determine the identity of the manager or whether the person or Wu knowingly cooperated with Israeli intelligence.
The chairman said he was not impressed with the AR-924 when he saw it, but still added photos and a description of the product to his company's website, giving it both visibility and credibility. There was no way to purchase the AR-924 directly from its website.
Hsu said he knew nothing about the pagers' lethal capabilities or the broader operation to attack Hezbollah. He described his company as a victim of the plot.
Gold Apollo declined to comment further. Calls and messages to Wu went unanswered. She has not given a statement to the media since the attacks.
“I KNOW THIS PRODUCT”
In September 2023, web pages and images showing the AR-924 and its battery were added to apollosystemshk.com, a website that said it was licensed to distribute Gold Apollo products, as well as the rugged pager and its sizable power source, according to a Reuters overview of internet records and metadata.
The website listed an address in Hong Kong for a company called Apollo Systems HK. No company with that name exists at its address or in Hong Kong corporate documents.
However, the website was mentioned by Wu, the Taiwanese businesswoman, on her Facebook page and in public articles of incorporation when she registered a company called Apollo Systems in Taipei earlier this year.
A section of the apollosystemshk.com site dedicated to the LI-BT783 highlighted the battery's excellent performance. Unlike the disposable batteries that powered the older generation of pagers, it had an autonomy of 85 days and could be charged via a USB cable, according to the website and a 90-second promotional video on YouTube.
In late 2023, two battery stores came online with the LI-BT783 in their catalogs, Reuters discovered. And on two online forums dedicated to batteries, participants discussed the power source, despite the lack of commercial availability: “I know this product,” wrote a user with the handle Mikevog in April 2023. “It has a great datasheet and great performance.”
Reuters was unable to determine Mikevog's identity.
The website, online stores and forum discussions bear the hallmarks of an attempt at deception, the former Israeli intelligence officer and two Western security officials told Reuters. The websites have been removed from the Internet since the pager bombs wreaked havoc in Lebanon, but archived and cached copies are still visible.
On the day they bought the pagers, Hezbollah leaders said they had launched internal investigations to understand how the security breach happened and to identify possible moles.
The group had switched to pagers early this year after realizing that mobile phone communications were being compromised by Israeli eavesdropping, Reuters previously reported.
Hezbollah's investigation helped reveal how Israeli agents used an aggressive sales tactic to get Hezbollah's purchasing manager to choose the AR-924, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
The salesperson who conveyed the offer made a very cheap offer for the pagers, “and kept lowering the price until it was won,” the person said.
Lebanese authorities have condemned the attacks as a serious violation of Lebanon's sovereignty. On September 19, in his last public speech before being assassinated by Israel, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the device's 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 militant group began launching rockets at Israeli military positions in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas.
In the wake of the device attacks, Israel launched a full-scale war against Hezbollah, including a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and airstrikes that killed most of its top leaders.
Hezbollah's internal investigation into the pager attack, which was still ongoing, suffered a setback on September 28: eleven days after the devices exploded, the senior Hezbollah official in charge of leading the tender investigation, Nabil Kaouk, was himself killed by an Israeli airstrike.
(Additional reporting: Laila Bassam in Beirut, Anthony Deutsch in Amsterdam, Ben Blanchard in Taipei, James Mackenzie in Jerusalem. Editing by Frank Jack Daniel)
