'A masterstroke by Israelis...': Indian Army chief on using shell company to target Hezbollah

Indian Army chief Gen Upendra Dwivedi on Tuesday said that the shell company which had been created to supply pagers to Hezbollah was a masterstroke by the Israelis. He said such a move requires years and years of preparation and it means the Israelis were prepared for it. 

"The pager that you're talking about, it's a Taiwan company being supplied to a Hungarian company. Hungarian company thereafter giving it to them. The shell company that had been created is something that is a masterstroke by the Israelis. And for that, it requires years and years of preparation. So it means they were prepared for it," the army chief said while speaking at Chanakya Defence Dialogue. 

Dwivedi said the war does not start the way one starts fighting, it starts the day one starts planning. "And this is what is most important," he said when asked how Israel turned pagers into bombs and what India was doing to tackle such issues. "Coming on to our side, supply chain interruption, interception is something we have to be very watchful of. We have to have various levels of inspection whether it is at the technological level as well as manual level to make sure such things do not get repeated in our case," he added. 

Last month, 3,000 of the pagers used by the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah exploded when a coded message was sent to them, killing nine and injuring thousands. Later, it was found out that Israel's spy agency Mossad planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000 Taiwan-made pagers ordered by Hezbollah.  

Reuters reported that the plot appeared to have been many months in the making. Lebanon-based Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 beepers made by Taiwan-based Gold Apollo. The militant group's fighters had been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking. However, the devices had been modified by Mossad "at the production level". 

"The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It's very hard to detect it through any means. Even with any device or scanner," a source told Reuters. Up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone "undetected" by Hezbollah for months.

Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah, who is now dead, had ordered his group to use pagers as he suspected that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives. When Nasrallah decided to expand pager usage, Israel put into motion a plan to establish a shell company that would pose as an international pager producer, according to The New York Times. 

By all appearances, NYT reported, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, the report added, it was part of an Israeli front. At least two other shell companies were created as well to mask the real identities of the people creating the pagers: Israeli intelligence officers.

B.A.C. did take on ordinary clients, for which it produced a range of ordinary pagers. But the only client that really mattered was Hezbollah, and its pagers were far from ordinary, NYT reported. Produced separately, they contained batteries laced with the explosive. On September 17, Israel detonated those explosives in what is now seen as the biggest security breach in Hezbollah's network.