How Mossad Infiltrated Hezbollah

By Hugh Fitzgerald | Dec 31, 2024

The latest tales of derring-do from the annals of Mossad and the IDF’s military intelligence,, with particular attention to their infiltration of Hezbollah, can be found here: “Internal espionage: How Israeli spies infiltrated Hezbollah for decades – NYT,” Jerusalem Post, December 29, 2024:

Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s former leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was the culmination of extensive spy infiltration and intelligence gathering from the terror group that spanned decades, the New York Times reported on Sunday.

The NYT investigation, based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former Israeli, American, and European officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified operations, revealed just how extensively Israeli spies had penetrated Hezbollah as part of two decades of methodical intelligence work in preparation for an all-out war that many expected would eventually come.

The Israeli spies recruited people to plant listening devices in Hezbollah bunkers, tracked meetings between one top commander and his four mistresses, and had near-constant visibility into the movements of the terror group’s leaders, per NYT‘s report.

NYT acknowledged there were major breakthroughs, such as in 2012 when Israel’s Unit 8200 stole a trove of information, including the specifics of the leaders’ secret hide-outs and the group’s arsenal of missiles and rockets. NYT also highlighted significant stumbles, such as in late 2023, when a Hezbollah technician got suspicious about the batteries in the pagers, which were later detonated by Israel, crippling thousands of Hezbollah terrorists.

NYT noted that Unit 8200 scrambled to save their efforts in September when they collected intelligence that Hezbollah terrorists were concerned enough about the pagers that they were sending some of them to Iran for inspection.

This led top intelligence officials to persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to give the order to detonate the pagers, setting in motion the campaign that culminated in the assassination of Nasrallah due to concerns that the operation would be exposed, the report claimed.

Israel’s great success

The report further stated that the campaign against Hezbollah defanged one of Israel’s greatest adversaries and dealt a blow to Iran’s regional strategy of arming and funding groups bent on Israel’s destruction, with the weakening of the Iran-led Axis reshaping Middle East dynamics, contributing to the fall of Assad in Syria.

Right up until he was assassinated, Hassan Nasrallah did not believe that Israel would kill him, the report claimed. His aides reportedly urged him to leave his underground fortress to a safer location, which Nasrallah brushed off, given his perception that Israel had no interest in a full-scale war. However, he did not realize that Israeli spy agencies had been tracking his every movement for years, according to NYT.

“Hezbollah can’t continue to get support and funding from Iran without being in a war against Israel. That’s the raison d’être for Hezbollah,” said Brig. Gen. Shimon Shapira, a former military secretary for Mr. Netanyahu and the author of “Hezbollah: Between Iran and Lebanon.  “They will rearm and rebuild,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.”

Building a Network of Sources

Operations during the 2006 Lebanon War, based on Israeli intelligence gathering, formed the foundation for the country’s extensive infiltration into Hezbollah….

It has been 18 years since Israel’s intelligence gathering about Hezbollah began in earnest, with information the IDF acquired during 2006 war from material gathered both from the trove of documents it seized during that war and from Hezbollah operatives taken prisoner.

Thus for nearly 20 years, the Mossad has infiltrated deeply into Hezbollah ranks. It has been able to locate, and target, Hezbollah’s immense arsenal of 150,000 rockets and missiles in their hiding places across southern Lebanon. It has found out exactly where all of the Hezbollah commanders lived and even, in one case, where one commander’s four mistresses lived. Its information steadily expanded from 200 “target portfolios” when the 2006 war ended, to tens of thousands of such likely targets by September 2024, when the IDF began to bomb Hezbollah sites in earnest before starting its ground campaign in southern Lebanon.

The IDF, and Mossad, are hewing to the Talmudic injunction: when someone is coming to kill you, rise up and kill him first.