By Maya Gebeily, James Pearson and David Gauthier-Villars

BEIRUT (Reuters) – The batteries of armed pagers that arrived in Lebanon earlier this year, as part of Israel’s plot to decimate Hezbollah, had powerfully misleading characteristics and constituted an Achilles heel.

The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small but powerful charge of plastic explosive and a new detonator invisible to X-rays, according to a Lebanese source with direct knowledge of the pagers and photos of battery disassembly seen by Reuters.

To overcome this weakness – the lack of a plausible story for this bulky new product – they created fake online stores, pages and posts that could fool Hezbollah when it came to due diligence, according to an analysis of Reuters web archives .

The paging bomb’s stealthy design and carefully constructed battery cover, both described here for the first time, shed light on the execution of a years-long operation that dealt unprecedented blows against the Lebanese enemy supported by Iran and pushed the Middle East. The East is getting closer to a regional war.

A thin square sheet containing six grams of white pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) plastic explosive was pressed between two rectangular battery cells, according to the Lebanese source and photos.

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 inserted into a black plastic sleeve and encapsulated in a metal case the size of a matchbox, as shown in the photos.

The assembly was unusual because 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.

Devoid of metallic components, the material used to trigger the detonation had an advantage: like plastic explosives, it was not detected by X-rays.

After receiving the pagers in February, Hezbollah scanned for explosives, two people familiar with the matter said, submitting them to airport security scanners to see if they triggered alarms. Nothing suspicious has been reported.

The devices were likely configured to generate a spark inside the battery, enough to ignite the detonating material and trigger the PETN sheet to explode, said the two bomb experts, who were shown the design by Reuters. the pager bomb.

Because the explosives and packaging took up about a third of the volume, the battery carried a fraction of the power corresponding to its 35-gram weight, two battery experts said.

“There is a significant amount of unexplained mass,” said Paul Christensen, a lithium battery expert at Britain’s Newcastle University.

At one point, Hezbollah noticed the battery was draining faster than expected, the Lebanese source said. However, the issue did not appear to raise any major security concerns: the group was still handing out pagers to its members hours before the attack.

On September 17, thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Beirut’s southern suburbs 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 their proximity to the devices at the time of the detonation, Reuters witnesses found. In total, the pager attack, along with a second the next day that activated armed walkie-talkies, killed 39 people and injured more than 3,400.

Two Western security sources said Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, spearheaded the pager and walkie-talkie attacks.

Reuters could not determine where the devices were manufactured. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, which has authority over Mossad, did not respond to a request for comment.

The Lebanese Information Ministry and a Hezbollah spokesperson declined to comment for this article.

Israel has neither denied nor confirmed its role. The day after the attacks, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant praised Mossad’s “very impressive” results in comments that were widely interpreted in Israel as tacit acknowledgment of the agency’s involvement.

U.S. officials said they were not informed of the operation in advance.

THE WEAK LINK

From the outside, the pager’s power source looked like a standard lithium-ion battery used in thousands of consumer electronics products.

And yet, the battery, labeled LI-BT783, had a problem: like the pager, it did not exist on the market.

So Israeli agents created a story out of nothing.

Hezbollah has serious purchasing procedures to verify what it buys, a former Israeli intelligence officer, who was not involved in the paging operation, told Reuters.

“You want to make sure that if they look, they find something,” the former spy said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Finding nothing is not good.”

Creating stories, or “legends,” for undercover agents has long been a core skill of spy agencies. What makes the pager plot unusual is that these skills appear to have been applied to ubiquitous consumer electronics products.

For the pagers, the agents deceived Hezbollah by selling the custom-created model, the AR-924, under a renowned and existing 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, called Tom” to discuss a licensing agreement.

Hsu said he had little information about Wu’s superior, but he granted them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely distributed Gold Apollo brand.

Reuters could not establish the identity of the official, or whether the person or Wu knowingly worked with Israeli intelligence.

The president said he wasn’t impressed with the AR-924 when he saw it, but he nonetheless added photos and a description of the product to his company’s website, helping to give 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 deadly capabilities of the pagers or the broader operation to attack Hezbollah. He described his company as a victim of the conspiracy.

Gold Apollo declined to provide further comment. Calls and messages sent to Wu went unanswered. She has not made any statements to the media since the attacks.

“I know this product”

In September 2023, web pages and images featuring the AR-924 and its battery were added to apollosystemshk.com, a website that claimed to have a license to distribute Gold Apollo products, as well as the rugged pager and its source bulky feed, according to a Reuters review of Internet records and metadata.

The website gave a Hong Kong address for a company called Apollo Systems HK. No company of this name exists at the Hong Kong address or company records.

However, the website was listed by Wu, the Taiwanese businesswoman, on her Facebook page as well as in public incorporation records when she registered a company called Apollo Systems in Taipei earlier this year.

A section of the apollosystemshk.com website dedicated to the LI-BT783 emphasizes the exceptional performance of the battery. Unlike the disposable batteries that powered older pagers, it had a battery life of 85 days and could be recharged via a USB cable, according to the website and a 90-second promotional video on YouTube.

By the end of 2023, two battery stores went online with the LI-BT783 listed in their catalogs, Reuters found. And in two online forums dedicated to batteries, participants discussed the power source, despite its lack of commercial availability: “I know this product,” wrote a user with the nickname Mikevog in April 2023. “It has excellent technical data sheet and excellent performance. “.

Reuters could not establish Mikevog’s identity.

The website, online stores and forum discussions bear the hallmarks of an effort to deceive, the former Israeli intelligence officer and two Western security agents told Reuters. The websites have been removed from the web since pager bombs wreaked havoc in Lebanon, but archived and cached copies are still viewable.

On the day they purchased the pagers, Hezbollah leaders said they launched internal investigations to understand how the security breach could have happened and to identify possible moles.

The group turned to pagers earlier this year after realizing that cellphone communications were being compromised by Israeli eavesdropping, Reuters previously reported.

Hezbollah’s investigations uncovered how Israeli agents used a hard sales tactic to ensure that Hezbollah’s procurement manager chose the AR-924, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

The seller who passed on the offer made a very cheap offer for the pagers, “and kept lowering the price until it was stopped,” the person said.

Lebanese authorities condemned these attacks as a serious violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty. On September 19, in his last public speech before being killed by Israel, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the device’s explosions could amount to a “declaration of war” and pledged to punish Israel.

Hezbollah and Israel have exchanged fire since October 8, 2023, when the militant group began launching rockets at Israeli military positions in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas.

Following these attacks, Israel launched an all-out war against Hezbollah, including a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and airstrikes that killed most of its senior leaders.

Hezbollah’s internal investigation into the pager attack, still ongoing, suffered a setback on September 28: eleven days after the devices exploded, the senior Hezbollah official responsible for leading the investigation into the supply, Nabil Kaouk himself was 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)