Frontier Partisans

The Adventurers, Rangers and Scouts Who Fought the Battles of Empire

Dirty Tricks

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Pagers belonging to Hezbollah operatives went off all across Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, September 17. And by “went off” we mean exploded.

Associated Press:

BEIRUT (AP) — Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded near simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, killing at least nine people – including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding several thousand, officials said. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for what appeared to be a sophisticated, remote attack.

Among those wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The mysterious explosions came amid rising tensions between Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah, which have exchanged fire across the Israel-Lebanon border since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that sparked the war in Gaza.

The pagers that blew up had apparently been acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members in February to stop using cellphones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence. A Hezbollah official told The Associated Press the pagers were a new brand, but declined to say how long they had been in use.

As is their practice, Israel is neither confirming nor denying involvement. As one wag put it, fingers are pointing at Israeli intelligence — but not Hezbollah fingers.
I think it’s safe to assert that this was one helluva op — really unprecedented, even taking into account the Stuxnet attack on the Iranian nuclear program. The book on this is that the Israelis either hacked the pagers to overheat the lithium batteries, or they infiltrated the manufacturing process and inserted small amounts of high explosives into the devices. The actual physical damage to Hezbollah is significant — that’s a huge number of casualties. But the psy-ops aspect of the attack is even more profound. Hezbollah operatives — and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, too — are going to have a hard time trusting any of their tech. And if the Israelis slid into the manufacturing process, they had to know about the pagers well in advance of an order — which means Hezbollah has a mole or moles. Might be a bad look if you pager didn’t explode. Just sayin’.

This sort of nasty op has a long Frontier Partisan pedigree. In fact, Tier One Frontier Partisan scout Frederick Russell Burnham distributed tampered Martin-Henry rounds where Matabele insurgents might scavenge them during the 1896 Second Matabele War in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The Brits pulled the same dirty trick on the Waziristan frontier in what is now Pakistan in the 1930s.
There was a covert operations program called Project Eldest Son under the auspices of MACV-SOG that did the same thing to North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong fighters during the Vietnam War. Special Operations veteran and historian Maj. John Plaster writes:
During the Vietnam War, the Studies And Observations Group (SOG) created an ingenious top-secret program called Project Eldest Son to wreak general mayhem and cause the Viet Cong and NVA to doubt the safety of their guns and ammunition.
Amid a firefight near the Cambodian border on June 6, 1968, a North Vietnamese Army soldier spotted an American G.I. raising his rifle, and the NVA infantryman pulled his trigger, anticipating a muzzle blast. He got a blast, alright, but not quite what he’d expected.

United States 1st Infantry Division troops later found the enemy soldier, sprawled beside his Chinese Type 56 AK, quite dead – but not from small-arms fire. Peculiarly, they could see, his rifle had exploded, its shattered receiver killing him instantly. It seemed a great mystery that his AK had blown up since nothing was blocking the bore. Bad metallurgy, the G.I.s concluded, or possibly defective ammo. It was neither.

In reality, this actual incident was the calculated handiwork of one the Vietnam War’s most secret and least understood covert operations: Project Eldest Son. So secret was this sabotage effort that few G.I.s in Southeast Asia ever heard of it or the organization behind it, the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group. As the Vietnam War’s top-secret special ops task force, SOG’s operators – Army Special Forces, Air Force Air Commandos and Navy SEALs – worked directly for the Joint Chiefs, executing highly classified, deniable missions in the enemy’s backyard of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam.

The genesis of Eldest Son was the fertile mind of SOG’s commander, 1966-68, Colonel John K. Singlaub, a World War II veteran of covert actions with the Office of Strategic Services.

“I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t airlift the ammunition we were discovering on the [Ho Chi Minh] Trail” in Laos, Singlaub explained. It was not unusual for SOG’s small recon teams – composed of two or three American Green Berets and four to six native soldiers – to find tons of ammunition in enemy base camps and caches along the Laotian highway system. But SOG teams lacked the manpower to secure the sites or carry the ordnance away. Further, it could not be burned up, and demolition would only scatter small-arms ammunition, not destroy it. “Initially I thought of just boobytrapping it so that when they’d pick up a case it would blow up,” Singlaub recalled. Then it hit him – boobytrap the ammunition itself!

Again, the “trust issues” created for everybody have a bigger impact than direct casualties.

Comments

  1. Matthew says

    This was definitely a dirty trick since it killed a child. I am not one of those people who think Israel and Palestine are morally equivalent because Hezbollah attacks civilians far more often, but the child’s death was a shame. The thing about bombs is that they kill bystanders. I’d be more comfortable with say sniping the target, though I imagine there are times when that is not tactically possible.

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  3. patrulje says

    With respect to a child being injured, collateral damage is often an unavoidable aspect of war. Research has shown that in the present conflict the Israeli’s have been even more successful than the US was in Afghanistan in preventing civilian deaths.
    From what little footage I have seen, the lack of flame and residual burning would lead me to believe that an explosive such as RDX was added to the pagers rather than causing the battery to explode.
    Also be aware that the booby-trapped ammo TTP was also used in Afghanistan in the 2000’s.

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  4. Kobus van Coppenhagen says

    The Israeli’s, in all probability, had a whole shipment of these pagers and walkie talkies, distributed to a ‘trusted’ supplier elsewhere, BEFORE they initiated the rumour about possible tracking by Israeli intelligence.

    “The pagers that blew up had apparently been acquired by Hezbollah after the group’s leader ordered members in February to stop using cellphones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence.”

    And now that all the top brass are gone, who would know how the rumour started. Perhaps they should have stuck to Blackberry’s, or has the Mossad infiltrated them to such an extent that it does not matter anyway? …..

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    • JimC says

      Israel seems to have penetrated Hezbollah right down to the core. Impressive as hell. Raises questions about October 7. Why did these ace agencies fail to prevent the Hamas attacks? Seems that it wasn’t so much an intelligence failure per se as an analysis failure. Normalcy bias. They knew Hamas was planning and rehearsing and dismissed it as “aspirational.”

      Reply

      • Kobus van Coppenhagen says

        I think that Israel had a healthy respect for for Hezbolla’s arsenal and actively ‘countered it’, Hamas was probably dismissed out of hand. So it was really a matter of them focusing only on the one party instead of both.

        Reply

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