In less than two days, Lebanon was the scene of an unprecedented event: thousands of beepers and walkie-talkies exploded simultaneously across the country, leaving around thirty dead and around 3,000 injured, according to local authorities.
The mobile devices were used by members of the armed group Hezbollah to communicate with each other. Although no one has claimed responsibility for what happened, the Beirut government and the Islamist organization immediately pointed the finger at Israel and in particular at its intelligence agency, the Mossad.
A thesis that has also been echoed by officials from Western governments.
The American newspaper The New York Times ensures that The operation would have been orchestrated by the Israeli governmentwhose spies are said to have tapped into the devices commissioned by Hezbollah and managed to smuggle explosives into them before they arrived in the country.
Meanwhile, Israel remains silent.
But why is all eyes on the Mossad? Why is this agency so feared?
BBC Mundo answers these and other questions below.
Born with the State
“The Mossad is Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, broadly speaking. It is the equivalent of the CIA in the United States or the MI6 in the United Kingdom.“but with a much broader mandate,” explained Frank Gardner, BBC Security Correspondent.
The Mossad, whose official name is Institute of Intelligence and Special Operationswas established in 1949, just months after the creation of the State of Israel itself by David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first ruler.
The mission of the organization is “gather intelligence, thwart threats and ensure the security of the State of Israel and the Jewish people“, reads its website.
And it was established that, to achieve this objective, “it will rely on the best of all levels of society, who must lead secret activity abroad with courage, wisdom and cunning.”
The secrecy surrounding the agency was such that until the 1990s the names of its top officials were not made public until their terms were over, recalled Danny Yatom, who was the first director of the agency whose identity was revealed while he was in office.
Although the Mossad is today Israel’s most internationally known intelligence agency, it is not the only one. The country also has the Shin Bet, the internal security service, and the Military Intelligence Directorate (AMAN, in Hebrew).
Unlike the CIA and MI6, the agency plays a key role in Israeli diplomacy and in particular in the normalisation of relations with Muslim-majority countries.
“The improvement of relations with Morocco and other North African countries (…) was led by the Mossad”Yatom confirmed in an interview with the publication The Grand Continent.
Garibaldi and other coups
With an annual budget of about $3 billion and a staff of about 7,000 employees, security and intelligence specialists consider the Mossad to be the second largest spy agency in the West after the CIA.
However, in the 1960s the agency had only about 80 staff on its payroll, according to its website.
This did not prevent him from carrying out a risky mission that made the Mossad known internationally and that has been brought to film and television: eThe kidnapping of former Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.
Eichmann, one of the architects of the so-called “Final Solution,” managed to escape from Germany at the end of World War II and settled in Argentina in the 1950s under the false identity of Ricardo Klement.
However, in 1957 a concentration camp survivor who also emigrated to the South American country recognized him and reported him to the Israeli authorities, who began to follow him and set in motion the Operation Garibaldiin honor of the street where the former Nazi leader lived in a suburb of Buenos Aires, reads the Yad Vashem museum website.
The objective of the mission was to capture him alive and bring him to Israel for trial.. All this without warning the authorities of the southern country to prevent Eichmann from escaping, is added to the portal of the museum set up to remember the victims of the Holocaust.
On May 23, 1960, Ben-Gurion announced that Israeli agents had apprehended Eichmann and that he would be prosecuted for crimes against the Jewish people and humanity.
In 1961 the former German officer was found guilty and sentenced to death.
The Mossad’s reputation was reinforced years later by the hunt it launched against the leaders of the Palestinian organization Black September, who were responsible for the kidnapping of the Israeli delegation that participated in the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich (Germany).
After an attempt to rescue the athletes and their coaches failed and 11 of them were killed, then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir ordered the Institute – as it is known in the country – to identify, track down and kill those responsible for the attack, BBC journalist Fergal Keane said in a podcast about the Israeli agency published in 2014.
Between 1972 and 1973, at least seven members of the Palestinian organization were murdered in different European countries.However, some authors believe that the operation continued for decades.
Years later, the Mossad carried out an operation to rescue Jews who were suffering persecution in Africa. Between 1984 and 1985, one of its teams smuggled hundreds of Jewish-Ethiopian refugees out of Sudan, using a fake diving center.
“Those who join the Mossad do so because they are very patriotic”a former agent who agreed to be interviewed for a documentary broadcast in 2010 told the BBC.
Targeting the neighbors
The Eichmann case placed the Mossad among the main spy agencies, but the hunt for Nazi criminals was never the agency’s priority, but rather neutralize the threats posed by Israel’s Arab neighbors.
Thus, over the last few decades the agency has carried out various actions against neighbouring countries that are considered “enemies”.
The assassination of leaders of organizations that Israel calls “terrorist,” acts of sabotage against scientific and military facilities, and even the establishment of relations with ethnic or political groups opposed to the authorities in power are some of the measures adopted by the Mossad in the region.
“We had to find friends wherever we could”Eliah Safriya, a former Mossad agent who was sent undercover to support the Kurds in their fight for independence from Saddam Hussein-ruled Iraq in the 1970s, told the BBC in 2010.
Regarding assassinations and sabotage, in 2021 former Mossad director Yossi Cohen admitted that the agency was behind the theft of thousands of documents on Iran’s nuclear program in 2018.
He also hinted that his agents were involved in the cyberattack on the Natanz nuclear plant in central Iran and the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the country’s top nuclear scientist, in November 2020.
Most recently The Iranian government has accused the agency of being behind the death of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyawhich occurred on July 31 north of the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Although Israel has not claimed responsibility for the attack, it has admitted that it was behind the attack that killed Fouad Shukur, a senior Hezbollah commander, in Beirut, Lebanon.
These events explain why all eyes have turned to the Mossad as the alleged perpetrator of the explosions of thousands of beepers and walkie-talkies that have shaken Lebanon.
Unlimited
The Mossad’s actions are controversial and have caused problems for Israel on more than one occasion.
For example, the capture of Eichmann in Argentina led to a serious diplomatic conflict with the South American country.
Operation Wrath of God, in which an innkeeper was killed in Norway after being mistaken for a member of Black September, also strained relations with Western allies.
However, the Mossad’s actions reveal that its mantra appears to be “the end justifies the means”.
“The sky is the limit” for the Mossad, Israeli journalist Yossi Melman told the BBC.
“Even if we provoked friendly nations, committed crimes on their territory or violated international or national law, we felt that We had to do it to ensure our safety.“added the author of the book “Spies of the Holocaust.”
“And we knew we would get away with it because of the sympathies that the Holocaust still generated and because we were a small country,” he concluded.
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