Day: September 20, 2024

WHEN TOM BOSSERT FIRST HEARD about the Israeli espionage operation that detonated thousands of Hezbollah pagers across Lebanon, he was floored. As president of a leading cyber security firm, Trinity Cyber, and a former top White House homeland security advisor to Donald Trump, Bossert has spent years working on how to defend against cyber intrusions by nation-state actors and terrorist groups. But he had never seen or heard about anything quite as audacious as what the Israelis pulled off this week—apparently setting up a supply chain front company in Hungary and then packing thousands of pagers with tiny but high-powered explosives without Hezbollah leaders having a clue.

“Whatever your views of the violence here, it’s a brilliant set of tradecraft,” he told me in an interview for the SpyTalk podcast. Just how brilliant? “They have introduced fear into every member of Hezbollah, right?” he said. “They [Hezbollah operatives] are looking over their shoulder for years now, thinking that everything they touch might blow up. They’re probably looking at everything they pull out of their pockets and everything that they have in their house and everything that they touch on a daily basis.” It’s the cost of “the internet of things.“

Even Hassan Nasrallah—the Hezbollah leader who in a speech Thursday called the Israeli attack a “massacre” that amounted to an “act of war”—is likely spooked, thinking, “I’m now not trusting people that are in my inner circle because there’s a very good chance” the Israelis have penetrated it, said Bossert. 

“I think that Hezbollah right now is not only suffering disruption to their command and control and communications capability, but suffering a massive internal trust problem. And I think that’s exactly what the Israelis wanted,” he added.

But Bossert is not blind to the possible fall-out. There are, of course, the inevitable questions of collateral damage: When the Hezbollah pagers exploded on Tuesday, and then two-way radios on Wednesday, many of the thousands who suffered the consequences were members of the organization’s military and terrorist wings. But there were also civilian casualties, including two small school children, ages 9 and 11.

Two former senior CIA operations officers expressed similar wonderment Wednesday about the terror spectacular, but cautioned in SpyTalk interviews about the political and strategic downside for Israel from the havoc of Lebanon’s civilian casualties.

It was “an extraordinary intelligence accomplishment and an enormous Hezbollah counterintelligence failure,” as retired former senior CIA operations officer Douglas London put it. “But there are questions that need asking: what was the consideration for civilian casualties, if one of these devices detonated on an aircraft in flight? 

Wider War?

And whatever disruption the operation achieved to Hezbollah command and control communications, the Israelis also risked a serious escalation on their northern front, especially from Iran, whose ambassador to Lebanon lost one eye and suffered damage in another after his pager exploded.  

Subscribe now

More broadly, Bossert says, the Israeli op may have unleashed a “Pandora’s Box,” inspiring others to try to replicate the attack while at the same time injecting worldwide fear about the vulnerabilities of handheld devices that adversaries would likely now seek to exploit.

“What type of fear might this spread unintentionally into the rest of the world?” he asks.  “At some stage, are there people in the United States afraid to pick up their phone for fear that it’ll blow up on them?” 

Bossert, who had been George W. Bush’s deputy homeland security adviser, was recruited to the top spot by Trump and served there for about two years, resigning in April 2018, the day after the president brought aboard John Bolton as his national security adviser. “When a CNBC reporter pointed out that Bossert was seen as one of the most effective people in the Trump administration,” the network reported at the time, “another White House official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, responded: ‘That was likely the problem.’” In 2020, Bossert wrote a major Op-ed piece for the New York Times warning that officials weren’t paying enough attention to Russia’s hacking of the federal government.

You can listen to the full conversation with Bossert, in which he also lays out how the Israelis likely managed to insert explosives in the devices without detection, in this week’s SpyTalk podcast, out Friday on Simplecast, Apple, or anywhere else you like to listen.

Exclusive: Key British-Russian opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza tells Tom Watling that even if he and other oppostition leaders are killed, many more will come in their place to challenge Putin