As Hezbollah threat loomed, Israel built up its spy agencies

Washington: In the immediate days after the deadly October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Israeli intelligence officials feared a preemptive strike was imminent from another longtime enemy, Hezbollah. They frantically prepared to stop it with plans to strike and kill Hassan Nasrallah, the powerful Hezbollah leader who the Israelis knew would be in a bunker in Beirut.

But when Israel informed the White House of its plans, alarmed administration officials discounted the imminent Hezbollah strike. President Joe Biden called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told him that killing Nasrallah would set off a regional war and asked him to hold his fire, current and former senior American and Israeli officials said.

On Saturday, Israel announced that it had killed Nasrallah after warplanes dropped more than 80 bombs on four apartment buildings in Lebanon, where the Hezbollah leader of more than three decades had gone to meet his top lieutenants. Biden was not informed ahead of time, aggravating the White House.

But the more salient outcome for Israel and the United States was how successfully Israeli intelligence had pinpointed Nasrallah’s location and penetrated Hezbollah’s inner circle. In a matter of weeks, Israel has decimated the senior and midlevel ranks of Hezbollah and left the group reeling.

That success is a direct result of Israel’s decision to devote far more intelligence resources in targeting Hezbollah after its 2006 war with the Iran-backed terrorist group. It was a defining moment for Israeli intelligence. The Israeli army and the intelligence agencies failed to score a decisive victory in that 34-day conflict, which ended with a U.N.-brokered cease-fire and allowed Hezbollah, despite heavy losses, to regroup and prepare for the next war with Israel.

Israel has spent the years since bolstering what was already considered one of the world’s best intelligence-gathering operations. Much of the effort has been invested in the Mossad and Israeli military intelligence, which were frustrated after the 2006 war by their shortcomings in collecting vital information about Hezbollah’s leadership and strategy.

As a result, Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, built cutting-edge cyber tools to better intercept Hezbollah’s cellphones and other communications, and created new teams within the combat ranks to ensure valuable information was quickly passed on to soldiers and the air force.

Israel also began flying more drones and its most advanced satellite over Lebanon to continuously photograph Hezbollah strongholds and document even the smallest changes to buildings that might, for example, reveal a weapons depot — work that one former Israeli intelligence official called “Sisyphean.” In the past week, Israel’s air force has pounded many of these targets.

In addition, Unit 8200 and its American counterpart, the National Security Agency, have forged stronger ties, which expanded the Israeli government’s information about mutual adversaries such as Iran and Hezbollah.

Israel has used Lebanon’s proximity to its advantage — Jerusalem is less than 150 miles from the Lebanese border — to insert undercover commandos deep into the country to conduct sensitive intelligence missions.

Most important, former US and Israeli officials say that Israel’s audacity to carry out such operations set it apart from traditional intelligence agencies with less of an appetite for risk and legal hurdles.

“They understand this has been and will be a protracted conflict,” said Chip Usher, a former top CIA Middle East analyst who has worked extensively with Israeli intelligence. “They are putting in capabilities to serve their needs for the long term.”

Israel’s aggressiveness has resulted in a recent string of humiliating defeats for Hezbollah, even as Hezbollah has worked closely with Iran to improve its ability to ferret out Israeli spies and detect electronic intrusions.

Nasrallah admitted as much in a recent televised speech before his death. He said his group had suffered a “strong blow” after Israel detonated explosive-laden pagers and hand-held radios in Lebanon.

Israel’s investment in greater intelligence gathering after the failure in Lebanon first paid off in 2008, American and Israeli officials said. The Mossad, Israel’s external spy agency, worked with the CIA to kill a top Hezbollah operative, Imad Mugniyah, in Syria.

Unit 8200’s heightened focus on Hezbollah continued to pay off in January 2020. Israeli intelligence watched as Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the powerful commander heading Iran’s Quds Force, flew into Damascus and drove in a convoy to Beirut to meet Nasrallah. Israel decided not to attempt to kill Nasrallah at the time for fear of starting a war, but passed the information to the United States, which killed Soleimani in a drone strike at Baghdad International Airport.

This July Israel used a missile strike to kill Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah commander, while he was visiting his mistress in Beirut. Shukr, a close confidant of Nasrallah’s, was also wanted by the U.S. for his role in a 1983 bombing attack that killed roughly 300 American and French soldiers in Beirut.

More recently the fight has extended to Syria, where Unit 8200 provided information for Israel’s raid on Hezbollah and Iran’s secret missile factory in early September.

Israel had so penetrated Hezbollah’s cellphones that the group made the decision to transition to pagers and hand-held radios for communication. In response, Mossad began devising a plan to turn the pagers and radios into miniature bombs.

The Mossad appears to have created a shell company in Budapest and made the pagers under license from a company in Taiwan. Before the pagers arrived in Lebanon, Israeli operatives installed explosives inside them. The operation was scaled to produce thousands of pagers, requiring sophisticated manufacturing.

Israel detonated the pagers earlier this month. When Hezbollah figured out the hand-held radios were also compromised, Israeli officials rushed to detonate them too. The explosions also killed civilians, including children, and caused widespread panic in Lebanon.

Days later the Israelis killed Ibrahim Akil, a top Hezbollah military commander, by bombing a Beirut apartment building where he was meeting with other senior commanders. They had tracked Akil as he moved back and forth from Beirut to southern Lebanon, where he oversaw Hezbollah’s group’s fighters and inspected tunnels he hoped to use to invade Israel.

As Akilwalked into an apartment building in Beirut and took the stairs to a war room, Israel bombed the building, killing him and other senior Hezbollah commanders.

“Akil has the blood of many Americans, Israelis and soldiers from the coalition countries in Iraq on his hands,” said Zohar Palti, a former top Mossad official and expert on Hezbollah.

But there was no greater target than Nasrallah. Netanyahu authorized the strike while he was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where he spoke Friday.

“The secrets of their success come down to a couple of factors,” said Usher, the former CIA analyst who worked with Israeli intelligence. “They have a fairly defined target deck. That makes it easier for them to bring a tremendous amount of focus to what they do. They’re in a shadow war with Hezbollah and Iran.”

“And they’re extraordinarily patient,” he added.