How Mossad’s masterstrokes helped Israel reshape the Middle East - The Jewish Chronicle

Officially, the Assad regime fell on December 8 when rebel forces seized Damascus in a swift offensive that lasted just over a week. But the countdown to Syria’s collapse – and with it, the erosion of Iran’s influence in the region – began much earlier, on September 17.

On that day and the next, thousands of pagers – hand-held communications devices used by Hezbollah – as well as radio gear exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria. The operation, orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad, was one of the most astonishing feats of intelligence in modern history. It can also be described as the largest targeted killing with minimal collateral damage in the war against terrorism. “It’s a reworking of the Trojan Horse story for the digital age,” wrote Michael Doran of the US-based think tank Hudson Institute.

This unprecedented operation triggered a chain reaction. It paved the way for Hezbollah’s defeat in Lebanon, regime change in Syria, a blow to Iran’s ambitions of Middle Eastern dominance and, ultimately, a reassertion of Israel’s military supremacy by the end of 2024.

“We began planning the operation a decade ago,” a senior Mossad official who was privy to the mission told me. “It was part of a continuum, building on operations that go back half a century.”

Israeli intelligence – Mossad and Aman’s signal intelligence Unit 8200 (akin to the NSA in the US or GCHQ in the UK) – recognised the importance of intercepting enemy communications as far back as 60 years ago.

During the Six-Day War in June 1967, Israel intercepted a phone call between Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser and Jordan’s King Hussein. Later, however, intelligence warnings from planted devices in Egypt about an impending attack were ignored, leading to the surprise assault on Yom Kippur in October 1973.

Twelve years later, Unit 8200 intercepted a phone conversation between PLO leader Yasser Arafat and a leader of a small Palestinian group that hijacked Achille Lauro, a passenger ship in the Mediterranean.

From those lessons, Israel expanded its intelligence capabilities, tapping into undersea communication cables near Arab states in the Mediterranean, including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Libya.

Following the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah – bolstered by Iranian expertise – discovered Israeli bugging and infiltration methods. It learnt that Israel’s Unit 504 of the Military Intelligence (MI) and Mossad had recruited informants within Alfa, Lebanon’s primary mobile network. Dozens of Lebanese were arrested in 2010, including Alfa executive Charbel Qazzi, who worked for Israeli intelligence for 15 years. He gleaned information from his position in the transmission section of Alfa’s network, enabling Israeli troops to locate and kill Hezbollah activists during that war.

To counter such breaches, Hezbollah and Iran established independent, supposedly secure communication networks. But Israel’s intelligence community adapted quickly.

Mossad and Unit 81 of MI – known for its cutting-edge technological innovations – began developing a solution. Agents were sent to Beirut to study Hezbollah’s new communication tools. Others mapped the group’s supply chain. Five years ago, they identified Taiwan-based Gold Apollo as the manufacturer of the AR-924 pagers – devices that receive text messages wirelessly but cannot make calls.

Mossad infiltrated Gold Apollo by gaining its trust, establishing legitimate business relationships, and creating front companies in Hungary, Bulgaria and elsewhere in Europe. These shell companies built a reputation by working with real customers, securing glowing references for their reliability.

Finally, in early 2024, Mossad agents made their move. In cooperation with the IDF’s operations department and Israeli state-owned security manufacturers, they offered discounted equipment to Hezbollah’s procurement network, supplying AR-924 pagers rigged with miniature, undetectable explosives. In September, the devices were remotely detonated in one synchronised strike.

Until that point, Hezbollah had held the upper hand in the war. Following Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 – an event that stunned Israeli intelligence and military leadership – Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, opened a second front in solidarity.

In hindsight, Nasrallah made two critical errors. His first was his decision to attack Israel. His second was to confine his assault to missile and drone strikes instead of also deploying ground forces.

“If Hezbollah had launched a ground invasion alongside Hamas, they could have reached Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee. Israel would have difficulties repelling simultaneous offensives in both the north and south,” a senior IDF officer told me.

Instead, over 11 months, Hezbollah launched 15,000 rockets, missiles and drones targeting Israeli military bases, intelligence hubs, Mossad headquarters north of Tel Aviv, airfields and civilian communities. Seventy thousand Israelis were evacuated, becoming refugees in their own land.

The IDF retaliated with devastating airstrikes, levelling villages in southern Lebanon. More crucially, Israel systematically eliminated hundreds of Hezbollah’s mid and upper-ranking commanders. These precision strikes were enabled by years of painstaking intelligence gathering; from recruited Lebanese agents to intercepted communications.

A few days after the astounding pagers operation, Israeli intelligence had another major success. It discovered the location of Fuad Shukr, Hezbollah’s “chief of staff”, and killed him in his hideout in Beirut with an airstrike.

Then, Israel inflicted an even more devastating blow by using a tip from an agent to assassinate Nasrallah. It was possible because the Israeli intelligence community managed to obtain the engineering and construction drawings and layouts of Nasrallah’s underground command centre.

The charismatic Nasrallah was the undisputed leader of Hezbollah. With financial support and arms supplies from Iran, Nasrallah extended his influence beyond Lebanon. Hezbollah rushed to support Assad in Syria, trained Shiite militias in Iraq and Yemen, and developed personal relations with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

“Hezbollah was like an open book for us,” the senior IDF officer added. “We knew the names, addresses and daily routines of their commanders and leaders.”

Following the decapitation of Hezbollah’s top leaders, the movement’s members were paralysed, confused, disoriented and demoralised. IDF invaded south Lebanon with little resistance. Pounding its troops, command centres and arms stockpiles, including those containing long-range missiles, Hezbollah was forced to compromise and agree on November 17 to a 60-day ceasefire. Nearly 70 per cent of its armaments were destroyed.

The military force of Hezbollah, as well as Hamas in Gaza before, has practically evaporated.

This is part of the new reality emerging in the Middle East. The most important development is the Iranian predicament. It is an Israeli consensus, binding together left and right, that Iran is defined as the “octopus head”. It has sent its arms to all corners of the region, embarked on the path to becoming a threshold nuclear state, and cultivated its proxies in Lebanon, Syria Iraq, and Yemen to encircle Israel with a “ring of fire”.

In April, Iran went the extra mile. In response to an Israeli airstrike in Damascus that killed the Iranian general in charge of Lebanon and Syria, Iran decided, for the first time, to directly confront Israel militarily.

Iran launched more than 300 missiles and drones against Israel. The entire Israeli population found itself in shelters for hours. Yet the Iranian attack turned out to be a colossal failure. For years, IDF generals estimated that Hezbollah and Iranian missile and drone strikes would cause unprecedented damage, killing thousands and inflicting widespread destruction.

They were wrong. Israeli air defences – Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and Arrow – in collaboration with US, UK, Jordanian, Saudi and other Western coalition forces, repelled the Iranian attack. Only four Iranian missiles reached their target, causing minor damage to the Nevatim Airbase in the Negev desert, which houses squadrons of IAF F-35 “stealth” warplanes.

In October, Israel retaliated by mounting a massive attack against Iran, primarily using warplanes firing precision-guided missiles from hundreds of kilometres away.

The strikes destroyed most of Iran’s air defences, including several Russian-made S-300 batteries and one S-400 system, the most advanced in the Iranian arsenal. The IAF also attacked the Parchin military base, where Iran was developing explosives for its nuclear programme.

The Israeli attack proved that Iranian boasting about its advanced technologies was self-deception. Iranian military, political, and religious leaders faced a new reality: they had been penetrated and exposed by Israel’s advanced technology and military supremacy.

The culmination of the defeats of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran was supplemented by the surprising toppling of Assad’s regime. Islamist rebels, supported and armed by Turkey, took Damascus by storm within a week. Assad escaped to Moscow with hundreds of millions of dollars and gold bullion without making a real attempt to fight back. His defeat is evidence that rotten and corrupt regimes are bound to collapse.

Yet, Israeli intelligence was again surprised by the rapid developments. Nevertheless, it quickly rose to the occasion and took advantage of the political, military and strategic vacuum created.

Within three days, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Syria’s warplanes, naval bases, missile depots, air defences and – no less important – residual chemical weapons. Israeli security agencies had precise intelligence, gathered over many years, about the locations and targets of the Syrian army. It was a fast and swift operation. The truth, however, is that Syria’s weapons were rusty, outdated and poorly maintained. Israeli pilots participating in the strikes admitted that “it felt like a military drill. The enemy was not present.”

In that sense, the fate of the Assad regime is a manifestation of a poetic justice that shows that the desire of people to be free and liberated cannot be suppressed for ever. Their will is stronger than dictators who rule over corrupt and dysfunctional regimes, be they in Iran, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan or Syria.

Iran under the ayatollahs may eventually face the same fate. History repeatedly shows that when such regimes crumble, it happens overnight – so suddenly and unexpectedly it often surprises even the most knowledgeable espionage services, such as the CIA, NSA and Mossad.

It is clear that Israel is emerging victorious, while Iran, Hezbollah and Russia have been defeated. Syria was a key link in Iran’s axis of evil, which includes Hezbollah, pro-Shiite militias in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. All of them were supported by Russia, which has destabilised the Middle East.

As a cautionary measure, the IDF took over Mount Hermon on the Syrian side of the border and the 100km-long and 3km-wide buffer zone separating Israel and Syria on the Golan Heights.

Following the dramatic developments in Syria, the intelligence communities of Israel, the United States, and other Western countries are concerned now that Iran may break out – that is, produce enough weapons-grade material for a nuclear weapon and assemble such weapons.

According to the latest International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report, Iran has already accumulated more than 100 kilograms of enriched uranium to a level of 60 per cent. There is no scientific justification for enrichment at such a level to advance a civilian programme, meaning the only explanation is that it is intended to be used for nuclear weapons. In a short time, a matter of a few weeks, Iran can accelerate the rate and enrich the uranium from 60 per cent to 90 per cent, which would provide fissile material sufficient to assemble five bombs.

Intelligence experts believe that the acceleration of the uranium enrichment rate reflects Iran’s concerns about the impending change of the US administration on January 20. It appears that Iran is preparing for the possibility that, upon Donald Trump’s entry into the White House, he will impose even more severe and crippling sanctions, not only to hurt its economy but also to cause the fall of the regime.

To prevent this possibility and to ensure the regime’s survival, Iran is striving to reach a situation in which it can announce within a week or two that it has succeeded in assembling nuclear weapons. Tehran’s assumption is that in such a scenario, the US will be deterred from attacking it.

Indeed, Iran is seriously discussing assembling nuclear weapons this time to serve, like in North Korea, as an insurance policy for the survival and perseverance of the regime.

At the same time, there is growing concern in the West that the Netanyahu-led government will try to take advantage of Tehran’s weakness and regional isolation to order the air force to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Yet, a former senior Mossad official who is familiar with Israeli strategic thinking told me that it is very unlikely that Israel alone will strike Iranian nuclear sites, unless such a move is sanctioned by Trump.

When Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar planned and executed his brutal massacre on October 7, 2023, he hoped to trigger a wider chain reaction that would inflict carnage and overwhelming chaos on Israel and change the face of the Middle East.

Sinwar’s plan worked – except in reverse. Israel and the region are facing a new reality. But in order to fully utilise the new emerging order in the Middle East, the right-wing Netanyahu government must also change its policy. It’s not only a moral duty to release the hostages from Gaza. It is a strategic imperative. The government also has a duty to heal the divisions in the Israeli society, which were among the reasons that led Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to mistakenly believe that Israel has lost its fighting spirit and could be an easy prey.

Yossi Melman is an Israeli intelligence and security writer and co-author of ‘Spies Against Armageddon’