After Israeli athletes were kidnapped and murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics, a phone was tampered with to assassinate one of those responsible. Mahmoud Hamshari, of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September, was killed by his ornate marble base desk phone in Paris packed with explosives that detonated when he answered a call.
Twenty two years later in 1996 Yahya Ayyash, of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, was killed by his Motorola Alpha cell phone, packed with just 50g of explosives that detonated when he answered a call (from his father). Notably Ayyash himself had become infamous as a bomb maker.
At this point you might have an impression there’s a particular theme, even a signature move, to explain exploding phones.
However, to be fair in September 2016 a Samsung Note 7 exploded on Southwest Airlines flight 994 in Louisville, Kentucky, causing an emergency evacuation. And then in October 2016 reports surfaced of a Samsung Note 7 catching fire and destroying Nathan Dornacher’s Jeep in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Fast forward to today, and Lebanon is reporting nearly 3,000 Hezbollah pagers have just simultaneously exploded this afternoon, killing nine people so far according to the FT.
Pagers belonging to Hizbollah members exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday, killing at least nine people and injuring more than 2,700 in an apparent sabotage of the low-tech systems the militant group uses to evade Israeli surveillance and assassination attempts.
The blasts took place in several areas of Lebanon including the capital Beirut, the southern city of Tyre and the western area of Hermel, as well as in parts of Syria. Images circulated on social media of explosions and of people with bloodied pocket areas, ears or faces being taken to hospital.
The damage in the Lebanese reports suggests to me this was a supply chain attack. Pagers were recently deployed, perhaps with some sense of new urgency for new devices. These could have been intercepted and sabotaged. They may have all be the same, but also could have been different models.
The IRA, for example, knew some cars had been bugged by British intelligence. What they didn’t know was that the supply chain was compromised such that every single car entering Ireland allegedly was bugged by the British so any of them could be triggered.
The pagers deployed widely today in Lebanon are popular because one-way, a receive only device. This leads people to believe without a transmit function they are hidden, with no target surface, while still being available for calls to action. Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah, had warned members against cellphones. In reality, it’s possible to triangulate a one-way pager based on tower signal strength and direction. But news of exploding and easily tracked cellphones generated a great fear of using them.
And yet, if everyone in a particular target group is receiving the same signal at 1530, and they have just “upgraded” to a new pager device with a tell-tale vulnerability… the implications of membership are clear.
Unlike phones, pagers generally have very limited internal space, a few centimeters at most. A small explosive charge, even under 20 grams, would still cause significant damage, particularly when combined into a lithium battery known for volatility. Allegedly the GApollo AP-900 was the pager in this case, however, which uses an AAA battery.
I mean why would such a small charge be detonated to cause mass suffering across Lebanon, given a history of explosive methods in phones used for assassinating terrorist leaders?
My guess is that someone, either intentionally or unintentionally, just exposed how pervasively Hezbollah has been operating in Lebanon, and how they are being organized. Nearly 3,000 casualties, having no other indicators than a newly distributed pager, is the strongest angle in this story. Emergency response has little choice but to put those being targeted on a map.
The method of using everyday communication devices for remote explosions has historical precedent. Similarly, massive supply-chain compromise is quite old and far more common than most realize. This incident is most interesting because it seems to indicate a strategic shift, by loudly messaging that Hezbollah’s operational reach — even among civilians and diplomats — is no secret and is vulnerabile to large scale intelligence failures.
Update:
A second wave of exploding Hezbollah communication devices involved handheld radios. The manufacturer says these radios are counterfeits.
A sales executive at the U.S. subsidiary of Japanese walkie-talkie maker Icom told The Associated Press that the exploded radio devices in Lebanon appear to be a knockoff product and not made by Icom. “I can guarantee you they were not our products,” said Ray Novak, a senior sales manager for Icom America’s amateur radio division, in an interview Wednesday at a trade show in Providence, Rhode Island. Novak said Icom introduced the V82 two-way radio model more than two decades ago and it has long since been discontinued.
The pager manufacturer CEO also has said today that the explosive devices were not made by his company, although he referred to it as a licensing deal with a Hungarian distributor.
This suggests the supply chain attack was not interception of newly made goods, and instead a targeted insertion of counterfeits or sabotaged old models into the Lebanese electronics market; remote control bombs were made to look like popular communication technology brands.