Iranian general on pager explosion: ‘We warned Hezbollah but they wanted cheaper devices’

A year after Israel’s ‘Operation Grim Beeper’ took 1,500 Hezbollah fighters out of action after thousands of handheld pagers exploded, an Iranian general has warned that Hezbollah was warned against buying the pagers but chose to ignore them.  

Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Naqdi, deputy commander of coordination affairs for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, made a rare public criticism in an interview with Iranian media. He said Iran had explicitly warned Hezbollah against purchasing the mobile devices, which were later used in the mass attack.

“Hezbollah members were warned against purchasing the pagers from a suspicious source, but went ahead anyway. They said the pagers are cheaper than the Iranian ones,” Naqdi was quoted by NZIV, an Israeli open source intelligence source.

The operation, which was designed to kill multiple Hezbollah fighters and injured thousands when they exploded simultaneously, is considered the most astonishing intelligence operation in history.

The four-step operation began by Israelis thoroughly mapping Hezbollah’s supply chain before inventing a special explosive charge small enough to be inserted inside a handheld device. The device was sophisticated enough to be remotely activated, big enough to do real harm, and yet not so prominent, physically or electronically, to call attention to itself. The Israelis turned themselves into a big enough link in Hezbollah’s procurement network, and after the pagers reached the hands of Hezbollah activists, they were activated simultaneously.

Middle East