‘Your smart phone is their agent’, Hezbollah leader had warned in Feb

The coordinated terrorist attacks in Lebanon this week has left the militant Hezbollah group reeling, Western media reported on Thursday. While Israel has not publicly commented on the attacks, the overwhelming consensus is that the attacks bear the mark of Israel’s counter-insurgency and spy agency Mossad. The trail has so far led to a nondescript company in Taipei, and an equally unknown intermediary in Budapest, Hungary.

The carefully planned terror operation indicates that the attackers knew who was supplying the pagers to Hezbollah and when. They would also have had the resources to intercept the entire consignment and place the booby-traps. The Guardian spoke to cyber security experts who said a small quantity of explosive material, one to three grams, appears to have been placed on a board with a switch. This was detonated by sending a coded message that triggered the explosion.

The pagers, three-four thousand of them, exploded at exactly 3.30 pm, in residential buildings, on the streets, in hospitals and in offices and markets.

What was even more sinister was that eyewitness accounts revealed that there was first a beep and then a pause for several seconds before the explosions occurred. This explains the high number of injuries to eyes and arms of victims, who would have instinctively drawn the devices closer to their eyes.

The New York Times quoted news portals to report that Israel’s defence minister called US defence secretary Lloyd Austin to alert him that an operation was about to begin. The Israeli Defence Forces have moved troops to the northern border with Lebanon, which has officially accused Israel of staging the coordinated attacks. Israeli intelligence is also quoted as stating that they planned to be two steps ahead of the terrorists and have the capability to make terrorists "think twice before even eating".

As more chilling details of the attacks surface, reports say pagers and walkie-talkies which exploded this week in Lebanon's capital Beirut and its suburbs were ordered earlier this year and supplied around five months ago. This was done to avoid location tracking and surveillance through smart phones after Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah warned in February, “your phone is their agent”.

The Financial Times reported that the Taiwan-based company Gold Apollo founded in 1995 continues to manufacture pagers, a communication device which was popular in the 1980s before the appearance of smart phones.

The pagers are today used mostly by coffee shops to alert customers that their drink is ready, have a limited range and are operational within short distances. They are used to receive and send messages between handlers but cannot be used to make calls, and are fitted with low-end communication chips, receivers and basic motherboards.

The FT report held that the Taiwanese company operates from a ‘shabby suburb’ and has just 40 employees. The company issued a statement saying the particular batch of pagers which exploded in Lebanon was not manufactured in Taiwan. The company named a Hungarian entity in Budapest, BAC Consulting, which turned out to be yet another nondescript outfit with no sign of activity.

The Budapest company, promoted by a 49-year-old woman physicist of Italian descent with links to London, claimed to be just an intermediary and denied manufacturing the pagers. The Hungarian government has also officially stated that the pagers were not manufactured in Hungary, nor did the consignment pass through Hungary. It further added to the mystery by revealing that BAC Consulting appeared to be just a shell operation.

Western media reports also quoted from the promoter’s posts on LinkedIn to suggest that they showed pronounced pro-Russian and anti-Ukrainian leanings.

With India’s dependence on global supply chains, communication devices and equipment, and its growing imports from both Taiwan and China, it is also vulnerable to such attacks. Experts warn that the trading with the grey market needs to be tightened and steps taken to ensure that devices are not physically tampered with.