The extraordinary attacks on Hezbollah this week, in which thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies exploded over two days, was a stunning coup for Israel’s spy agency and a humiliating setback for the Lebanese militants and their Iranian patrons, Western officials and former intelligence officers say.
But the attacks, which Lebanese authorities said killed more than 30 people over two days while wounding thousands, are only the latest in a decadeslong history of audacious covert operations in which Israel has hunted down its enemies through a combination of high-tech tools and old-fashioned spycraft.
Using letter bombs, poison, booby traps, armed drones and an artificial intelligence-assisted robotic machine gun, Israel’s security services have pursued their adversaries with relentless determination. Even before the country’s founding in 1948, the Zionist underground movement assassinated British military officers and police, seeing them as obstacles to creating a Jewish state.
Over the years, Israel has viewed “targeted killings” as a way to deter attacks on the county, fuel fear among its enemies and exact revenge. But the operations have created ethical dilemmas for Israeli governments, and they have often produced only temporary successes without lasting effects, experts and former intelligence officers say.
“The impact is short-lived. Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranians are quick to select successors to those assassinated,” said Bruce Riedel, a former career CIA officer who served in the Middle East. Iran’s nuclear program is closer to building a bomb than ever, even after several nuclear scientists were killed, he said.
Letter bombs
One of Israeli intelligence’s early manhunts focused on a mastermind of the Holocaust, the Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann, who sent millions of Jews to death camps. In 1960, Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency tracked him down in Argentina, captured him, sedated him and then dressed him in an Israeli flight crew uniform before it smuggled him past Argentine police onto a plane bound for Israel. Eichmann was put on trial with dozens of Holocaust victims testifying. He was found guilty and hanged.
In the early 1960s, Israel was alarmed at a rocket program in Egypt that enlisted the technical expertise of German scientists with Nazi pasts. In Operation Damocles, Mossad went after the German scientists with letter bombs and threatened their families.
Egypt dropped the rocket program in 1963. But the Mossad operation dismayed Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who demanded the resignation of the spy service’s chief.
After Palestinian militants kidnapped and murdered 11 Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel launched a covert campaign — dubbed Operation Wrath of God — to hunt down all those responsible.
The campaign included a nighttime commando raid into Beirut to go after three Palestine Liberation Organization figures, with teams arriving on the beach by boat. Ehud Barak, who would go on to become prime minister, led the raid, disguised as a woman with a brunette wig.
Some of Israel’s assassination operations have failed miserably or resulted in tragic mistakes.
In 1973, Israeli assassins believed they were targeting one of the key figures behind the Munich Olympics hostage-taking and killings. But they mistook a Moroccan waiter, Ahmed Bouchikhi, for Ali Hassan Salameh, a security aide to PLO leader Yasser Arafat. They killed Bouchikhi in the Norwegian ski resort of Lillehammer. Norwegian authorities soon learned Israel was behind the killing, and Israel’s spy network across Europe was exposed.
Almost four decades later, Israel killed a major Hamas official, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, in a Dubai hotel in a complex plot involving more than two dozen Mossad operatives. But afterward, using hours of security camera footage, local police were able to reconstruct the movements of team members from the time they entered the country with false passports until they left. Their passport photos were plastered across global media, showing that in 2010, it would be hard for a hit squad to trail a target in an Eichmann-style operation without leaving electronic traces.
Exploding cellphone
In a 1988 operation designed to kill Ahmed Jibril, a Palestinian militant working with Hezbollah, an Israeli military team used a trained dog loaded with explosives as part of an effort to track down its target in a warren of caves on Lebanon’s coast. The explosives would be detonated remotely. But the operation was plagued by a series of failures, according to an account in the book “Rise and Kill First,” by journalist Ronen Bergman. The trained dog was scared off by shooting and ran away. Hezbollah later found the dog. It turned out that Jibril had not even been in the location at the time of the raid.
In an echo of this week’s attacks in Lebanon, Israel killed a Hamas bombmaker, Yahya Ayyash, in 1996 with a cellphone outfitted with explosives. When he answered the phone and spoke to his father, the Israelis were listening, and a voice recognition expert verified it was Ayyash. The explosives were detonated remotely, killing Ayyash.
Drones and motorcycles
The advent of armed drones, which Israel pioneered in the 1990s, dramatically expanded the scope of assassination operations, without having to risk the lives of Israeli troops or spies.
As Iran’s nuclear program advanced in the early 2000s, Israel’s Mossad focused its efforts on targeting the scientists overseeing the effort, according to former U.S. and Israeli officials.
Multiple scientists were killed by motorcyclists who attached magnetized bombs to cars. Then, in September 2021, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was considered the most important figure in Iran’s now-suspended nuclear weapons program, was killed when his car was hit by bullets in the town of Absad, east of Tehran. It later emerged that Fakhrizadeh was killed by a remote-controlled, AI-assisted machine gun, according to Iranian media reports and a New York Times account.
Since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, Israel has cranked up its covert operations, killing senior Hamas and Hezbollah figures, as well as Iranian generals visiting Syria, with drone strikes. Iran was stunned in April when Hamas’ political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in a bombing where he was staying in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Mossad’s chief, David Barnea, has vowed to take out all those involved in the Oct. 7 assault on Israel “directly or indirectly,” including “planners and envoys.”
“It’ll take time, as it took time after the Munich massacre, but we will put our hands on them wherever they are,” Barnea said.
