As Hezbollah Threat Loomed, Israel Built Up Its Spy Agencies
After the 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israel invested heavily to intercept the group’s communications and track its commanders in a shadowy war that ultimately led to the killing of the group’s leader.
Adam GoldmanRonen BergmanJulian E. Barnes and Aaron Boxerman
Reporting from Washington, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem
In the immediate days after the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, Israeli intelligence officials feared a pre-emptive 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 Biden called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told him that killing Mr. 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 Mr. 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. Mr. Biden was not informed ahead of time, aggravating the White House.
But the more salient outcome for both Israel and the United States was how successfully Israeli intelligence had pinpointed Mr. 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 the country’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 that 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 last 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 like 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 U.S. 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 C.I.A. 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.
Mr. 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.
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 C.I.A. 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. Qassim Suleimani, the powerful commander heading Iran’s Quds Force, flew into Damascus and drove in a convoy to Beirut to meet Mr. Nasrallah. Israel decided not to attempt to kill Mr. Nasrallah at the time for fear of starting a war, but passed the information to the United States, which killed Mr. Suleimani 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. Mr. Shukr, a close confidant of Mr. 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 Aqeel, a top Hezbollah military commander, by bombing a Beirut apartment building where he was meeting with other senior commanders They had tracked Mr. Aqeel 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 he walked 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.
“Aqeel 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 Mr. Nasrallah. Mr. Netanyahu authorized the strike while he was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where he spoke on Friday.
“The secrets of their success come down to a couple of factors,” said Mr. Usher, the former C.I.A. 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.
Julie Tate and Gabby Sobelman contributed reporting.
Adam Goldman writes about the F.B.I. and national security. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Adam Goldman
Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades. More about Julian E. Barnes
Aaron Boxerman is a Times reporting fellow with a focus on international news. More about Aaron Boxerman
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