The security video shows a market full of fruits and vegetables. A man in a cap with a black bag slung over his shoulder appears to be checking out some limes when suddenly a loud bang echoes through the market. A plume of smoke escapes from under the man’s bag, and small bits of paper fly into the air. He hits the ground with a thud as workers and other shoppers scatter away from the explosion that has pierced what had been a normal afternoon. Rumors quickly spread that the Mossad might be involved in the incident.
What is Mossad exactly?
This was a scene that played out across Lebanon on September 17 as members of the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah had their pagers and flip phones explode that afternoon. Terrorists across the country experienced a similar fate as the man in the market, flooding hospitals with members of the terrorist group suffering from bleeding abdomens, mangled hands, injuries to faces and eyes, and more. Some didn’t even survive the blasts.
Just three months earlier, Hezbollah publicized that the group was switching its communications to older technology in an effort to thwart Israel from hacking the systems and tracking their movements. That apparently didn’t work out, and more explosions followed a day after the initial beeper attacks, this time with walkie-talkies and other electronic devices blowing up.
The operation injured more than 3,000 suspected terrorists and killed 12. As Israel deals with increased security demands since the Hamas attacks of October 7, these types of special operations and the work of Mossad, the country’s famed intelligence and covert operations unit, have drawn plenty of headlines. While Israel hasn’t officially claimed responsibility for the electronics explosions, a top Israeli general told the Wall Street Journal: “We have many capabilities that we haven’t yet activated.”
Defending Israeli Interests
Officially known as the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, Mossad was founded in 1949. Just a little over a year after Israel was founded, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion formed the group to become a central body coordinating existing intelligence groups.
Facts about the intelligence service are sketchy as the group works in the shadows and answers directly to the Israeli prime minister. However, the group is believed to have around 7,000 employees and an annual budget of almost $3 billion.
Through the years, Mossad has worked diligently to protect the interests of Israel and eliminate enemies. That is believed to have included assassinations, sabotage, computer hacking, covert operations, and numerous other activities deemed necessary to protect the Middle East’s sole democracy. And as Hezbollah discovered, that also apparently now includes causing pagers and vintage cell phones to explode.
“It is a story of espionage, sabotage, assassinations, and secret diplomacy every bit as exciting as such television thrillers as Homeland, Fauda, and The Black List,” authors Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar write in the new book Target Tehran.
Mossad Response
After last year’s terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, Mossad has been heavily involved in the war footing taken by Israel in response – both in dealing with Hamas and also in response to stepped-up rocket attacks from Hezbollah in the north.
One of the country’s biggest successes came in June when a commando unit known as “mista’arvim” (a Hebrew word for people knowledgeable about Arab culture) entered Gaza disguised as locals before engaging in a firefight that rescued four hostages.
“There was a thin line between being a huge success and a huge failure,” an Israeli military official noted of these types of missions.
The squad’s work has been featured in the popular Netflix series Fauda. Mossad and Israeli Defense Forces have also shown a knack for infiltrating seemingly impossible locations. For example, Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in the Iranian capital Tehran on July 31. What made this assassination more amazing was that the Israelis were actually able to get a bomb inside his guest house that was guarded by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard.
Haniyeh had traveled to the city to attend the inauguration of Iran’s new president, and Israeli intelligence was able to infiltrate the Revolutionary Guard’s defenses to complete the mission – something one might see in a spy movie.
“They were able to kill him from a relatively close distance,” Foundation for Defense of Democracies chief executive Mark Dubowitz told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s got to show Khamenei the extent to which Mossad has deeply penetrated their system.”
Killing an Enemy of America
A similar level of intimate knowledge of enemies’ movements and communications played out again in July when the Israelis killed a terrorist that had been on U.S. radar for years as well. Fuad Shukr was a Lebanese Hezbollah leader who was a key figure in helping secure guidance systems for the terrorist group’s long-range missiles, according to intelligence reports.
Shukr was also believed to be a key organizer of a barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983 that killed 241 American servicemen and 58 members of the French military. The U.S. had designated Shukr as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2013, but he remained elusive – but not for Mossad and the Israelis.
Despite commanding many Hezbollah forces, Shukr was known to keep a low profile –meeting only with trusted cohorts and small gatherings. Shukr lived and worked in the same multi-story building in Beirut, with his office five floors below his apartment. A call that evening asked the terrorist leader to return to his apartment, and an Israeli airstrike later targeted the building and killed Shukr in the process.
Hezbollah officials believed Israel was able to infiltrate the group’s internal communications systems to lure Shukr to his apartment for the airstrike. Israel has now stepped up responses to Hezbollah rockets in an attempt to return 60,000 residents to the northern part of the country.
“Since the strike in Beirut, threats are sounding from all directions,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu noted after the attack that successfully killed Shukr. “We are prepared for any scenario.”
Other Successful Missions
These missions are just a sampling of the work Mossad has done over the years. Here’s a look at a few of the intelligence group’s other successes.
● Operation Wrath of God – A covert operation in response to the 1972 Summer Olympics massacre in Munich in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 11 Israeli athletes. Mossad agents spent years tracking down those involved with one member of the terrorist group, even assassinated via explosives in his telephone.
● Capturing Adolf Eichmann – In 1960, Mossad tracked down Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, who helped organize the Holocaust for Hitler. An eight-man team was dispatched to Argentina, where Eichmann lived under a different identity near Buenos Aires. He was put on trial in Jerusalem, convicted of crimes against humanity, and executed in 1962.
● Stuxnet Cyber Attack—This 2009 attack on Iranian computer systems involved with enriching uranium caused significant damage to the country’s nuclear program. As Wired reported, “Stuxnet, as it came to be known, was unlike any other virus or worm that came before. Rather than simply hijacking targeted computers or stealing information from them, it escaped the digital realm to wreak physical destruction on equipment the computers controlled.”
