Recently Yahoo News on-line picked up the following:
Exclusive-How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah (2/2)
Wed, October 16, 2024 at 6:39 p.m. GMT+8·8 min read
Reuters - By Maya Gebeily, James Pearson and David
Gauthier-Villars
(continue)
THE WEAK LINK
From the outside, the pager’s power source looked like a
standard lithium-ion battery pack used in thousands of consumer electronics
goods.
And yet, the battery, labelled LI-BT783, had a problem: Like the pager, it did not exist on the market.
So Israel's agents created a backstory from scratch.
Hezbollah has serious procurement procedures to check what they buy, a former Israeli intelligence officer, who was not involved in the pager operation, told Reuters.
"You want to make sure that if they look, they find something," the former spy said, requesting not to be named. "Not finding anything is not good.”
Creating backstories, or “legends”, for undercover agents has long been a core skill of spy agencies. What made the pager plot unusual is that those skills appear to have been applied to ubiquitous consumer electronics products.
Gold Apollo’s chairman, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters a day after the pager attack that he was approached about three years ago by a former employee, Teresa Wu, and her “big boss, called Tom” to discuss a licence agreement.
Hsu said he had scant information about Wu’s superior, but he granted them the right to design their own products and market them under the widely distributed Gold Apollo brand.
Reuters could not establish the identity of the manager, nor whether the person or Wu knowingly worked with Israeli intelligence.
The chairman said he was not impressed by the AR-924 when he saw it, but still added photos and a description of the product to his company’s website, helping give it both visibility and credibility. There was no way to directly buy the AR-924 from his website.
Hsu said he knew nothing about the pagers’ lethal capabilities or the broader operation to attack Hezbollah. He described his company as a victim of the plot.
Gold Apollo declined to provide further comment. Calls and messages sent to Wu went unanswered. She has not given a statement to the media since the attacks.
"I KNOW THIS PRODUCT"
In September 2023, webpages and images featuring the AR-924 and its battery were added to apollosystemshk.com, a website that said it had a licence to distribute Gold Apollo products, as well as the rugged pager and its bulky power source, according to a Reuters review of internet records and metadata.
The website gave an address in Hong Kong for a company called Apollo Systems HK. No company by that name exists at the address or in Hong Kong Corporate records.
A section of the apollosystemshk.com site devoted to the LI-BT783 put emphasis on the battery’s outstanding performance. Unlike the disposable batteries that powered older generation pagers, it boasted 85 days of autonomy and could be recharged via a USB cable, according to the website and a 90-second promotional video on YouTube.
Reuters could not establish the identity of Mikevog.
The website, the online stores, and the forum discussions bear the hallmark of a deception effort, the former Israeli intelligence officer and two Western security officers told Reuters. The websites have been scrubbed from the web since the pager bombs wreaked havoc in Lebanon, but archived and cached copies are still viewable.
Ruing the day they bought the pagers, Hezbollah leaders said they had launched internal investigations to understand how the security breach could happen and identify possible moles.
The group had shifted to pagers at the start of the year after realising that cellphone communications were compromised by Israeli eavesdropping, Reuters previously reported.
Hezbollah's investigations have helped uncover how Israeli agents used an aggressive sales tactic to make sure Hezbollah’s procurement manager chose the AR-924, one of the people familiar with the matter said.
The salesperson who conveyed the offer made a very inexpensive proposition for the pagers, “and kept bringing the price down until he was pulled in,” the person said.
Lebanese authorities have condemned the attacks as a serious violation of Lebanon's sovereignty. On Sept. 19, in his last public speech before he was killed by Israel, Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the device blasts could amount to a "declaration of war" and vowed to punish Israel.
Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging fire since Oct. 8, 2023, when the militant group began launching rockets at Israeli military positions in solidarity with its Palestinian ally Hamas.
In the wake of the device attacks, Israel has launched a full-on war on Hezbollah, including a ground invasion of southern Lebanon and airstrikes that have killed most of its top leadership.
Hezbollah's internal investigation into the pager attack, still underway, suffered a setback on Sept. 28: Eleven days after the devices exploded, the senior Hezbollah official tasked with leading the procurement probe, Nabil Kaouk, was himself killed by an Israeli airstrike.
Translation
獨家-以色列笨重的傳呼機如何愚弄真主黨
(2/2)
（繼續）
弱點
從外部看，傳呼機的電源看起來就像數千種消費性電子產品中使用的標準鋰離子電池組。
然而，標示為 LI-BT783 的電池存在一個問題：與傳呼機一樣，市場上它們是不存在的。
因此，以色列特工從零開始編造了一個背景故事。
一名未參與傳呼機行動的前以色列情報官員告訴路透社，真主黨有嚴格的採購程序來檢查他們購買了的物品。
這位要求匿名的前間諜說:「你要確保他們在尋找時能找到一些東西」;「什麼都沒找到就不好的」。
為臥底特工創造背景故事或「傳說」長期以來一直是間諜機構的核心技能。傳呼機陰謀的不同尋常之處在於，這些技能似乎已應用於無處不在的消費性電子產品。
對於傳呼機，特工透過銷售客定製型號 AR-924 來欺騙真主黨，該型號是屬於現有的著名台灣品牌 Gold Apollo。
Gold Apollo 的董事長Hsu Ching-kuang 在傳呼機襲擊事件發生的第二天告訴記者，大約三年前，一名前僱員 Teresa Wu 和她的 “叫亜Tom的大老闆” 找他討論一個牌照協議。
Hsu說，他對Wu的上司所知甚少，但他授予他們設計自己產品的權利，並以廣泛流通的 Gold Apollo 品牌進行銷售。
路透社無法確定該經理人的身份，也無法確定該人或Wu是否在知情的情況下與以色列情報機構合作。
董事長表示，當他看到 AR-924 時，並沒有留下深刻的印象，但仍在公司網站上添加了該產品的照片和描述，有助於提高該產品的知名度和可信度。沒有提供直接從他的網站購買AR-924的辦法。
Hsu說，他對傳呼機的殺傷力或更廣泛的攻擊真主黨的行動一無所知。他稱他的公司是該陰謀的受害者。
Gold Apollo 拒絕提供進一步評論。給Wu的電話和簡訊均無人接聽。自從襲擊事件發生以來，她尚未向媒體發表聲明。
“我知道這個產品”
據Reuters對網路記錄和元資料的檢視，2023
年 9 月，apollosystemshk.com
上添加了 顯示AR-924
及其電池的網頁和圖片，該網站稱其擁有分銷
Gold Apollo 產品以及堅固型傳呼機及其龐大電源的許可證。
該網站提供了一家名為 Apollo Systems HK 的公司在香港的地址。在該地址或香港公司名册中沒有這公司。
然而，台灣Wu姓女商人今年稍早在台北註冊了一家名為Apollo
Systems 的公司時，在她的
Facebook 頁面以及公開公司註冊記錄中列出了該網站。
在apollosystemshk.com
網站上專門介紹
LI-BT783 的部分裡, 它強調了電池的出色性能。根據該網站和 YouTube 上一段 90 秒的宣傳短片，與為老一代傳呼機供電的一次性電池不同，它擁有
85 天的續航時間，並且可以通過
USB 線充電。
路透社發現，2023
年末，兩家電池線上商店，在目錄中列出了
LI-BT783。在兩個專門討論電池的線上論壇中，參與者討論了這種電源，儘管它缺乏商業上的買賣：「我知道這個產品」; 一位名為Mikevog
的用戶在2023
年4 月寫道。「它有很棒的數據表和出色的性能」。
路透社無法確定Mikevog的身份。
前以色列情報官員和兩名西方安全官員告訴路透社，該網站、線上商店和論壇討論帶有欺騙行為的特徵帶。自從傳呼機炸彈在黎巴嫩造成嚴重破壞以來，這些網站已從網路上刪除，但從存檔和快取副本仍可以查看到。
真主黨領導人後悔那天購買了傳呼機，他們表示已啟動內部調查，以了解安全漏洞如何發生並找出可能的內奸。
根據路透社先前報道，在意識到手機通訊受到以色列竊聽的影響後，該組織於今年年初轉向傳呼機。
一位知情人士表示，真主黨的調查幫助揭露了以色列特工如何使用進取的銷售策略來確保真主黨的採購經理選擇 AR-924。
該人士表示，傳送報價的推銷員為傳呼機提出了非常便宜的建議，「並不斷降低價格，直到他被拉進來」。
黎巴嫩當局譴責這起攻擊事件嚴重侵害黎巴嫩主權。 9月19日，真主黨領袖哈桑·納斯魯拉在他被殺前的最後一次公開演講表示，這次裝置爆炸可能相當於 “宣戰” ，並誓言要懲罰以色列。
自 2023 年 10 月 8 日以來，真主黨和以色列一直在交火，當時武裝組織開始向以色列軍事陣地發射火箭，以聲援巴勒斯坦盟友哈馬斯。
裝備襲擊事件發生後，以色列對真主黨發動了全面戰爭，包括對黎巴嫩南部的地面入侵以及導致其大部分高層領導死亡的空襲。
真主黨對傳呼機襲擊事件的內部調查仍在進行中，但在9
月28 日遭遇挫折：裝備爆炸11
天後，負責領導調查採購的真主黨高級官員Nabil
Kaouk在以色列空襲中身亡。
So, the batteries inside the weaponized
pagers that arrived in Lebanon at the start of the year was part of an Israeli
plot to decimate Hezbollah had powerfully deceptive features and an Achilles'
heel. The agents who built the pagers designed a battery that concealed a small
but potent charge of plastic explosive and a novel detonator that was invisible
to X-ray. To overcome the weakness of this plot, that would be the absence of a
plausible backstory for this bulky new product, the agents created fake online
stores, pages and posts that could deceive Hezbollah due diligence. I think
from the espionage point of view, it is a successful operation.
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