Device detonations reveal ‘incredible’ intelligence abilities: ex-NSA chief

NASHVILLE, Tennessee—The detonation of several thousand Hezbollah devices displayed a stunning capability for intelligence-gathering, likely Israel's — and underscored potential vulnerabilities in global supply chains, a former NSA chief said Wednesday.

The perpetrators “had incredible ability to do targeting intelligence and to be able to actually know the numbers, know who’s got them, [and] know the periodicity upon which they’re using them,” said Paul Nakasone, the former director of the National Security Agency and four-star commander of U.S. Cyber Command.

Thousands of pagers remotely detonated in Lebanon at 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, killing at least 12 people, including two children, and injuring roughly 2,800 others. On Wednesday, a second wave of explosions—this time, of walkie-talkies—killed at least 20 people and injured some 450.

The covert attack on the Iran-backed militant group demonstrated a thorough understanding of their operatives, and that the targets were known “pretty intimately,” said Nakasone, who added that he had no advance knowledge of the operation.

In recent months, Hezbollah has adopted a more basic tech strategy to try to evade Israeli intelligence, which has infiltrated the group’s landlines and mobile phones. But the move seemingly backfired after someone—widely believed to be Israeli intelligence operatives—appeared to have orchestrated a series of covert supply-chain compromises that turned the devices into deadly weapons.

A major concern now is how those types of hijacks could end up inside U.S. consumer products or devices, Nakasone said.

“One is, if this was a supply-chain [attack], I think about our own supply chains and what we need to be able to do to ensure their integrity,” he said. “The second piece is, if it wasn’t a supply-chain attack, how was this conducted?”

In recent weeks, and following Israeli airstrikes against his commanders, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has advised his militant operatives to take a low-tech approach while fighting Israel. In February, he ordered a cellphone blackout in an effort to thwart Israel’s intelligence gathering.

Israel has a long history of rigging and exploding communications devices on their targets. In 1996, Israel’s Shin Bet tricked notorious Hamas bombmaker Yahya Ayyash into using a cell phone rigged with explosives, killing him instantly.

Nakasone, who retired from his post in February, was speaking to reporters at a news conference leading up to the launch of Vanderbilt University’s National Security Institute, where he is slated to head the program meant to steer younger talent into national security roles.