Mossad’s Exploding Pager Attacks and 9/11
Over the last year or two, Hezbollah had become increasingly concerned that the cell phones used by its members were giving away their locations and allowing the Israelis to target them with airstrikes or missiles, so its leadership finally decided to shift most of its communications network to the use of old-fashioned pagers, which only receive signals rather than also emitting them.
Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor
September 25, 2024
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For the last half-dozen years, Israeli-born Ronan Bergman has served as a reporter with the New York Times, and I’ve regularly heard him described as the best-connected American journalist in Israel, with especially close ties to that country’s powerful security services such as the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200.
Much of that reputation goes back to the 2018 publication of his book Rise and Kill First, a widely praised and highly authoritative history of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, as well as its sister agencies. As I wrote in early 2020:
The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel’s long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.
That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman’s volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as “hands down” the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.
If Bergman ever considers bringing out an updated, revised edition of that volume, I think that this newer text might devote an entire chapter to the very serious blow that Mossad recently struck against Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization though the use of booby-trapped exploding pagers, an operation at least as daring and successful as anything covered in his very thick 2018 volume.
Although the Israeli government has not officially claimed credit for the attacks, no one doubts that Mossad was responsible and a dozen of their current and former defense and intelligence officials provided all the details to the New York Times.
Over the last year or two, Hezbollah had become increasingly concerned that the cell phones used by its members were giving away their locations and allowing the Israelis to target them with airstrikes or missiles, so its leadership finally decided to shift most of its communications network to the use of old-fashioned pagers, which only receive signals rather than also emitting them.
However, according to news reports by Bergman and others, the Israelis had cleverly anticipated that possibility, and several years ago they had established a front-company based in Hungary that produced pagers and other electronic devices under license from a Taiwanese manufacturer. Its initial products were entirely legitimate but Mossad was prepared for any sabotage opportunities that might eventually come along. So when Hezbollah placed its order for some 5,000 such pagers, the company provided them, but each device also contained a deadly load of high explosives and ball-bearing shrapnel. Then, at 3:30pm on Tuesday, September 17th all the pagers beeped for an incoming message, prompting their owners to pick them up, and exploded a few seconds later.
The result was thousands of such simultaneous pager explosions across Lebanon and elsewhere, with reports of some 2,700 casualties, hundreds of whom were maimed or severely injured, together with about a dozen deaths. The following day, walkie-talkies that had been similarly booby-trapped also detonated as did as some solar panels, and although those numbers were much lower, another couple of dozen deaths were reported, probably because those larger devices concealed heavier explosive charges. All of this produced widespread terror across Lebanon, with everyone suddenly fearful of electronic devices, including reports that terrified mothers were unplugging baby-monitors from their cribs.
Over the years, Hezbollah had become quite proud of its security, and the leadership freely admitted that this was the worst breach they had ever suffered, resulting in very serious losses. I haven’t seen reports that any of the organization’s senior leaders had been killed or wounded in the blasts, but given the huge number of casualties, I’m sure that at least some had been caught in the attack. Then, just a couple of days later, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a Beirut building, killing a high-ranking Hezbollah military leader and a number of his colleagues as they were meeting together, perhaps to plan a retaliatory strike against Israel. It’s obvious that Hezbollah has suffered a very bloody nose, and a major setback in its ongoing military conflict against Israel.
Mossad certainly achieved a brilliant tactical victory, one that its members and pro-Israel partisans surely intend to boast about for years. But many aspects of the attack seemed very puzzling to me, and experienced military analysts wondered whether any long-term gains had been achieved.
After Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas raid last October, Hezbollah and its Israeli enemies soon began trading cross-border fire, bombarding each other with missiles, rockets, drones, and artillery shells, and those exchanges have now continued for nearly a year. As a result, some 160,000 civilians on both sides of the border have fled their homes, with perhaps 60,000 of these being Israelis.
With so many tens of thousands of Israelis having become internal refugees, displaced from their communities in the north of the country and spending the last year living in temporary accommodations, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under enormous political pressure to attack and invade Lebanon in order to drive the Hezbollah forces away from the border, thereby allowing those Israelis to return home. In addition, the most extreme religious elements among his supporters regard portions of southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s God-given lands and wish to see them conquered and annexed, with their local Lebanese residents expelled and replaced by Jewish settlers.
However, the last time the Israelis launched a ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006, their forces suffered a severe defeat at Hezbollah’s hands, and during the last eighteen years that organization has become far more powerful, with many of its troops having gained a great deal of military experience during their successful intervention in the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, a year of fighting against Hamas in Gaza has left the IDF exhausted, so despite Israel’s command of the air, it’s not at all clear how well such a ground assault would go. Moreover, Hezbollah has reportedly amassed an enormous arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles, and these could be used to inflict devastating damage upon most of Israel’s cities and towns if it chose to do so.
The combination of these two conflicting factors has led to repeated indecision on Israel’s part. For months, media leaks have reported that Israel had made the decision to invade Lebanon and that the attack was imminent. But nothing has ever happened, presumably because the military risks of such an operation were considered too great.
Those booby-trapped pagers and other devices might have played an absolutely crucial role in an Israeli ground invasion. If they had all been detonated at the beginning of such an attack, Hezbollah’s forces would have been left dazed and confused, with their entire communications network knocked out, thereby preventing them from mounting an effective defense or retaliatory measures. This would probably have allowed the IDF to win a major initial victory on the ground.
But instead those explosions occurred alone, with no invasion taking place. So Hezbollah has merely licked its wounds and is surely now putting in place a replacement communications network, presumably based upon a large shipment of carefully vetted pagers received from Iran or China or Russia. Israel thus lost the element of surprise, with little to show for it except wounding a large number of Hezbollah members. Thus, the exploding pagers merely produced a tactical victory instead of a potentially strategic one.
This raises the obvious question of why the Israelis chose to shoot their bolt when they did instead of waiting until the pagers could be detonated in conjunction with a major invasion.
According to media reports, the Israelis may have suspected that some Hezbollah members had discovered that the pagers contained explosives, and were thus faced with a use-it-or-lose-it dilemma, choosing to immediately detonate all the devices before they were discarded and the entire long Mossad effort was totally wasted. This is certainly possible, but given the extreme difficulty the Israelis had previously had in penetrating Hezbollah’s organization, I really wonder how they could have learned that a couple of Hezbollah operatives had discovered the explosives during the short time interval before the latter notified their top commanders and a quick order came down to junk all the pagers.
My own guess is quite different. I think that the explosions indicate that despite media leaks to the contrary, the Netanyahu government had taken a firm decision to abandon plans for any ground invasion of Lebanon in the foreseeable future as just too risky. If any such invasion were now off the table, the pagers had lost their strategic value, so they were instead detonated for essentially political reasons. Netanyahu hoped that the serious damage and humiliation the attacks inflicted upon Hezbollah would provide his government with an immediate boost in popularity, helping to deflect the continuing anger over its lack of success in returning its displaced civilians to their homes in the north. Thus, under this interpretation, the pager explosions suggest that no ground invasion of Lebanon will take place.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s military effectiveness hardly seems to have been crippled. Early Sunday morning, its forces fired off some 150 rockets, cruise missiles, and drones into Israel, bombarding areas far south of those they had previously targeted. The very tight Israeli censorship makes it difficult to estimate damage, but it sounds like Israel’s Iron Dome defenses failed to stop many of the projectiles, which inflicted numerous injuries and started large fires, while Hezbollah could probably keep these attacks at this level every day for the next several years, completely saturating and overwhelming Israel’s defenses. Thus, pager explosions or not, Hezbollah’s huge arsenal could easily level most of Israel’s cities while the Israelis still seem reluctant to tangle with its very formidable ground forces. So perhaps just as observers had suggested, the Mossad operation was merely a tactical Israeli victory with great propaganda value but little if any strategic significance.
However, my own view is somewhat different. I think that the longer term strategic consequences of that exploding pager operation may be very negative for Israel.
Although America’s fiercely pro-Israel mainstream media would never treat it as such, the sudden simultaneous detonation of those thousands of pagers all across Lebanon and some nearby areas obviously amounted to a gigantic terrorist attack, and was certainly seen as such by nearly the entire world. Indeed, some Lebanese have described it as their own 9/11.
Hezbollah is one of Lebanon’s largest political organizations, and many of those pagers had apparently been distributed to its affiliated civilian members, who were obviously not legitimate targets of deadly attacks, especially in a country not at war. Non-military members of Hezbollah would have the same relationship to its fighters that ordinary Israeli civilians do to the IDF, and using explosives-filled pagers to attack the former is really no different than detonating a large car-bomb on a crowded Israeli street where soldiers gathered. If thousands of booby-trapped electronic devices had suddenly exploded all across Israel—or across the United States—the Western media would certainly have regarded such an attack as the most blatant possible example of massive, illegal terrorism.
The Internet is filled with videos showing explosions in crowded Lebanese markets, and some of the dead victims were children. Pagers were used by the medical staff in Lebanese hospitals, and this was also true of the exploding walkie-talkies. Given the thousands of those sudden explosions and the enormous numbers of victims, many of whom were civilians, including women, children, and medical workers, I’ve seen this described as the world’s worst terrorist attack since 9/11, and that hardly seems an unreasonable appraisal.
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Over the decades and especially during the last twelve months of the attack on Gaza, the Jewish State has become absolutely notorious for its endless, flagrant violations of international law and the rules of warfare, and this latest pager attack is merely a particularly egregious example of this. As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported:
A global treaty, which has been signed by more than 100 countries including Israel, bans “the use booby traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”.
Most of the legal experts quoted by NPR took the same position, so it seems clear that the Israelis have further compounded their long record of flagrant war-crimes.
Moreover, nothing like this had ever previously been attempted, and Israel’s Mossad operation may have dangerous consequences for the entire world. Now that this line has been crossed and everyone has witnessed the huge potential impact of this sort of deadly attack, others may decide to do the same given that the technology involved is easily available to every major country as well as many non-state actors. Apparently the high-explosive compound employed was very difficult to detect by scanning or any other means, so what would stop explosive-filled laptops or other large electronic devices from being used to bring down civilian planes in flight? The societies of America and the West are very soft targets, unused to the regular attacks that Israel has inflicted upon its Middle Eastern neighbors, so the deployment of booby-trapped electronic devices would have a hugely negative impact upon our way of life.
The possible damage to the market reputation of Taiwan’s consumer electronics industry and that of other manufacturers aligned with the West may also be quite substantial. With Mossad having so easily taken deadly advantage of the security gaps of the contract manufacturers in those supply chains, what rational country in the Middle East would not factor that risk into its future orders? Huawei and other Chinese companies provide the full range of such products, with their quality at least as good and their prices generally much lower, while their devices would be almost totally immune to such sabotage. Over the last year, Israeli representatives have expressed ferocious public hostility towards almost all of the nations of the world, denouncing them for joining together in the series of near-unanimous UN votes condemning the ongoing genocidal rampage in Gaza. Many of these countries and organizations may begin to wonder if they might eventually be targeted in political retaliation, and therefore chose to be safe rather than sorry by switching their purchases of consumer electronics to Chinese vendors.
For generations, the nations of the world have signed international protocols and treaties prohibiting exactly these sorts of terrorist attacks for exactly these sorts of reasons, so Israel’s endless violations of such standards may inflict a great deal of damage upon the peace and security of the rest of the world, eventually provoking huge international hostility. Israel has obviously now become almost universally recognized as a rogue, terrorist state, the worst sort of international criminal regime. Eventually the rest of the world may conclude that its continued existence poses too much of a risk to global peace and take concerted action to eliminate that threat, together with the entire population deemed responsible. Indeed, if not for the totally slavish subservience of America’s bought-and-paid-for political leadership, I think that such steps would have already been taken long ago.
But although these negative strategic consequences for Israel’s long-term situation are obviously quite serious, I think they are actually far overshadowed by certain other implications of this extremely successful Mossad operation, which may have a more immediate and historic impact. This project certainly ranked as one of the most brilliant and effective covert strikes in the history of the world, with few other comparable examples coming to mind. Yet I think that exactly those characteristics may lead to Israel’s total destruction, perhaps even in the relatively near future.
In many respects, this use of thousands of weaponized pagers to target the members of an opposing organization almost seemed much more like something produced by a Hollywood scriptwriter than anything carried out in real life. In many respects it straddled the line between representing a massive wave of simultaneous, targeted assassinations and a huge terrorist attack against the cities of a hostile country. Although neither Mossad nor any other intelligence service had ever tried any similar operation in the past, Bergman’s authoritative history does provide a very long list of past Mossad assassinations, as well as similar actions by the various Zionist groups prior to Israel’s creation. I think it is worth reviewing some of that material to get a better sense of the likely mindset of those involved in formulating this recent operation. Back in early 2020, I summarized some of Bergman’s important information:
The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book…
Israeli operatives sometimes even contemplated the elimination of their own top-ranking leaders whose policies they viewed as sufficiently counter-productive. For decades, Gen. Ariel Sharon had been one of Israel’s greatest military heroes and someone of extreme right-wing sentiments. As Defense Minister in 1982, he orchestrated the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which soon turned into a major political debacle, seriously damaging Israel’s international standing by inflicting great destruction upon that neighboring country and its capital city of Beirut. As Sharon stubbornly continued his military strategy and the problems grew more severe, a group of disgruntled officers decided that the best means of cutting Israel’s losses was to assassinate Sharon, though that proposal was never carried out.
An even more striking example occurred a decade later. For many years, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had been the leading object of Israeli antipathy, so much so that at one point Israel made plans to shoot down an international civilian jetliner in order to assassinate him. But after the end of the Cold War, pressure from America and Europe led Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to sign the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords with his Palestinian foe. Although the Israeli leader received worldwide praise and shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his peacemaking efforts, powerful segments of the Israeli public and its political class regarded the act as a betrayal, with some extreme nationalists and religious zealots demanding that he be killed for his treason. A couple of years later, he was indeed shot dead by a lone gunman from those ideological circles, becoming the first Middle Eastern leader in decades to suffer that fate. Although his killer was mentally unbalanced and stubbornly insisted that he acted alone, he had had a long history of intelligence associations, and Bergman delicately notes that the gunman slipped past Rabin’s numerous bodyguards “with astonishing ease” in order to fire his three fatal shots at close range.
Many observers drew parallels between Rabin’s assassination and that of our own president in Dallas three decades earlier, and the latter’s heir and namesake, John F. Kennedy, Jr., developed a strong personal interest in the tragic event. In March 1997, his glossy political magazine George published an article by the Israeli assassin’s mother, implicating her own country’s security services in the crime, a theory also promoted by the late Israeli-Canadian writer Barry Chamish. These accusations sparked a furious international debate, but after Kennedy himself died in an unusual plane crash a couple of years later and his magazine quickly folded, the controversy soon subsided. The George archives are not online nor easily available, so I cannot effectively judge the credibility of the charges.
Having himself narrowly avoided assassination by Israeli operatives, Sharon gradually regained his political influence, and did so without compromising his hard-line views, even boastfully describing himself as a “Judeo-Nazi” to an appalled journalist. A few years after Rabin’s death, he provoked major Palestinian protests, then used the resulting violence to win election as Prime Minister, and once in office, his very harsh methods led to a widespread uprising in Occupied Palestine. But Sharon merely redoubled his repression, and after world attention was diverted by 9/11 attacks and the American invasion of Iraq, he began assassinating numerous top Palestinian political and religious leaders in attacks that sometimes inflicted heavy civilian casualties.
The central object of Sharon’s anger was Palestine President Yasir Arafat, who suddenly took ill and died, thereby joining his erstwhile negotiating partner Rabin in permanent repose. Arafat’s wife claimed that he had been poisoned and produced some medical evidence to support this charge, while longtime Israeli political figure Uri Avnery published numerous articles substantiating those accusations. Bergman simply reports the categorical Israeli denials while noting that “the timing of Arafat’s death was quite peculiar,” then emphasizes that even if he knew the truth, he couldn’t publish it since his entire book was written under strict Israeli censorship…
Having thus acquired serious doubts about the completeness of Bergman’s seemingly comprehensive narrative history, I noted a curious fact. I have no specialized expertise in intelligence operations in general nor those of Mossad in particular, so I found it quite remarkable that the overwhelming majority of all the higher-profile incidents recounted by Bergman were already familiar to me merely from the decades I had spent closely reading the New York Times every morning. Is it really plausible that six years of exhaustive research and so many personal interviews would have uncovered so few major operations that had not already been known and reported in the international media? Bergman obviously provided a wealth of detail previously limited to insiders, along with numerous unreported assassinations of relatively minor individuals, but it seems strange that he came up with so few major new revelations.
Indeed, some important gaps in his coverage are quite apparent to anyone who has even somewhat investigated the topic, and these begin in the early chapters of his volume, which present the Zionist prehistory in Palestine prior to the establishment of the Jewish state.
Bergman would have severely damaged his credibility if he had failed to include the infamous 1940s Zionist assassinations of Britain’s Lord Moyne or U.N. Peace Negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte. But he unaccountably forgot to mention that in 1937 the more right-wing Zionist faction whose political heirs have dominated Israel in recent decades assassinated Chaim Arlosoroff, the highest-ranking Zionist figure in Palestine. Moreover, he omitted a number of similar incidents, including some of those targeting top Western leaders. As I wrote last year:
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.
As far as I know, the early Zionists had a record of political terrorism almost unmatched in world history, and in 1974 Prime Minister Menachem Begin once even boasted to a television interviewer of having been the founding father of terrorism across the world.
Indeed, I also recounted the remarkable history of Zionist and Israeli terrorism, some of which was covered by Bergman:
Although somewhat related, political assassinations and terrorist attacks are distinct topics, and Bergman’s comprehensive volume explicitly focuses on the former, so we cannot fault him for providing only slight coverage of the latter. But the historical pattern of Israeli activity, especially with regard to false-flag attacks, is really quite remarkable, as I noted in a 2018 article:
One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.
The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
Of these famous incidents, Bergman only includes mention of the King David Hotel bombing. But much later in his narrative, he describes the huge wave of false-flag terrorist attacks unleashed in 1981 by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who recruited a former high-ranking Mossad official to manage the project.
Under Israeli direction, large car bombs began exploding in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities, killing or injuring enormous numbers of civilians. A single attack in October inflicted nearly 400 casualties, and by December, there were eighteen bombings per month, with their effectiveness greatly enhanced by the use of innovative new Israeli drone technology. Official responsibility for all the attacks was claimed by a previously unknown Lebanese organization, but the intent was to provoke the PLO into military retaliation against Israel, thereby justifying Sharon’s planned invasion of the neighboring country.
Since the PLO stubbornly refused to take the bait, plans were put into motion for the huge bombing of an entire Beirut sports stadium using tons of explosives during a January 1st political ceremony, with the death and destruction expected to be “of unprecedented proportions, even in terms of Lebanon.” But Sharon’s political enemies learned of the plot and emphasized that many foreign diplomats including the Soviet ambassador were expected to be present and probably would be killed, so after a bitter debate, Prime Minister Begin ordered the attack aborted. A future Mossad chief mentions the major headaches they then faced in removing the large quantity of explosives that they had already planted within the structure.
Bergman’s weighty book constituted an extremely comprehensive if fully authorized history of Mossad’s assassination operations, and it also provided considerable coverage of its terrorist attacks. But as an important supplement to the latter, I would strongly recommend State of Terror published in 2016 by Thomas Suarez. Although it focuses primarily upon the Zionist terrorism that played such a central role in the creation of the State of Israel, it also provides some incidents from later years as well. Most importantly, it massively documents the complete ideological support for that technique found across all of the early Zionist leaders, who then continued governing that country during the decades that followed, even into the 1990s. Although the work is long out of print and used copies available on Amazon start at an outrageous $4,291, it may also be found at Archive.org.
As I mentioned earlier, the sudden, simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers all across Lebanon’s streets and cities was regarded as a gigantic terrorist attack by most of the world, probably the worst since 9/11. I very much doubt that any intelligence service other than Israel’s Mossad would have possessed the combination of skills, daring, and imagination necessary to successfully carry out such an operation.
Indeed, the only terrorist attack in world history that seems even bolder, more complex, and more successful would be the 9/11 attacks themselves, whose 23rd anniversary just passed a couple of weeks ago. That brilliantly conceived and implemented terrorist operation inflicted enormous damage to America’s financial and military centers while easily circumventing our usual air defenses on that fateful day, and dramatically changing the course of world history.
Yet oddly enough, while most of us freely admit that only an organization with Mossad’s superb resources, brilliance, and training could have carried out the exploding pager attacks, according to the official story, the even greater 9/11 terrorist attacks were merely the work of a rag-tag band of poorly-trained Arabs directed by an eccentric with severe health problems dwelling in an Afghanistan cave. The contrast between the supposed actors behind those two operations is so extreme as to defy rationality, and the recent events in Lebanon must surely raise 9/11 doubts even among the most credulous and gullible.
For more than two decades, large numbers of highly-credible journalists, academics, and former government officials have expressed enormous skepticism about the official 9/11 story. As far back as 2006, former high-ranking CIA official William Christison characterized it as “almost certainly a monstrous series of lies.” Over the years, a substantial fraction of the entire American population has come to very similar conclusions, much like those long expressed by most of the rest of the world.
But if the successful 9/11 terrorist attacks were not the work of Osama bin Laden and his small band of Arabs, then who was responsible? If the Israeli Mossad recently carried out what was arguably the second boldest, most successful terrorist attack in the history of the world, does that not suggest an obvious suspect?
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI quickly rounded up and arrested some 200 Mossad agents, many of whom had been found in the exact vicinity of the destruction, with five of them caught red-handed, celebrating the successful attack on the WTC towers. Over the years, I have discussed all of this at considerable length, including in an article published around the twentieth anniversary of the attacks:
American Pravda: Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 7, 2021 • 7,800 Words
For those who wish to place all of this in the broader context of past Mossad operations, many of which were carefully excluded from Bergman’s lengthy but highly-selective account, I would recommend my extremely long article from early 2020, which is conveniently divided into a series of major sections:
American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words
From the Peace of Westphalia to the Law of the Jungle
“Rise and Kill First”
“Who Killed Zia?”
“By Way of Deception”
“The Other Side of Deception”
“Final Judgment” on the JFK Assassination
The Strange Death of James Forrestal and Other Fatalities
The 9/11 Attacks – What Happened?
The 9/11 Attacks – Who Did It?
Important Historical Realities, Long Hidden in Plain Sight
The Past Perspective of American Military Intelligence
We also recently published a long article documenting the extremely strong evidence linking the Israeli Mossad and its American collaborators to the 9/11 Attacks. Although the style is somewhat breathless and there are a few minor inaccuracies, the volume of material presented seems absolutely overwhelming, and I would urge people to read it.
Israel Did 9/11
Wyatt Peterson • The Unz Review • September 12, 2024 • 13,300 Words
Given the gigantic mass of very strong evidence implicating Israel and its Mossad in the worst attacks ever launched against the United States, the consequences when and if this becomes widely known are likely to be terminal both for the Jewish State and the bulk of its population.
For a variety of different reasons, large portions of America’s political, financial, and media elites, both Jewish and Gentile, have bound themselves very tightly to support for that foreign nation. So unless they take strong steps to sever that connection in the loudest and most emphatic manner, they would probably share its fate.
https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/09/mossads-exploding-pager-attacks-and-9-11/Mossad’s Exploding Pager Attacks and 9/11
Over the last year or two, Hezbollah had become increasingly concerned that the cell phones used by its members were giving away their locations and allowing the Israelis to target them with airstrikes or missiles, so its leadership finally decided to shift most of its communications network to the use of old-fashioned pagers, which only receive signals rather than also emitting them.
Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor
September 25, 2024
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For the last half-dozen years, Israeli-born Ronan Bergman has served as a reporter with the New York Times, and I’ve regularly heard him described as the best-connected American journalist in Israel, with especially close ties to that country’s powerful security services such as the Mossad, Shin Bet, and Unit 8200.
Much of that reputation goes back to the 2018 publication of his book Rise and Kill First, a widely praised and highly authoritative history of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, as well as its sister agencies. As I wrote in early 2020:
The author devoted six years of research to the project, which was based upon a thousand personal interviews and access to an enormous number of official documents previously unavailable. As suggested by the title, his primary focus was Israel’s long history of assassinations, and across his 750 pages and thousand-odd source references he recounts the details of an enormous number of such incidents.
That sort of topic is obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman’s volume carried glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the official cooperation he received is indicated by similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who himself had once led assassination squads. Over the last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in this same field, and he praised the book as “hands down” the best he had ever read on intelligence, Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our elite media were equally laudatory.
If Bergman ever considers bringing out an updated, revised edition of that volume, I think that this newer text might devote an entire chapter to the very serious blow that Mossad recently struck against Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization though the use of booby-trapped exploding pagers, an operation at least as daring and successful as anything covered in his very thick 2018 volume.
Although the Israeli government has not officially claimed credit for the attacks, no one doubts that Mossad was responsible and a dozen of their current and former defense and intelligence officials provided all the details to the New York Times.
Over the last year or two, Hezbollah had become increasingly concerned that the cell phones used by its members were giving away their locations and allowing the Israelis to target them with airstrikes or missiles, so its leadership finally decided to shift most of its communications network to the use of old-fashioned pagers, which only receive signals rather than also emitting them.
However, according to news reports by Bergman and others, the Israelis had cleverly anticipated that possibility, and several years ago they had established a front-company based in Hungary that produced pagers and other electronic devices under license from a Taiwanese manufacturer. Its initial products were entirely legitimate but Mossad was prepared for any sabotage opportunities that might eventually come along. So when Hezbollah placed its order for some 5,000 such pagers, the company provided them, but each device also contained a deadly load of high explosives and ball-bearing shrapnel. Then, at 3:30pm on Tuesday, September 17th all the pagers beeped for an incoming message, prompting their owners to pick them up, and exploded a few seconds later.
The result was thousands of such simultaneous pager explosions across Lebanon and elsewhere, with reports of some 2,700 casualties, hundreds of whom were maimed or severely injured, together with about a dozen deaths. The following day, walkie-talkies that had been similarly booby-trapped also detonated as did as some solar panels, and although those numbers were much lower, another couple of dozen deaths were reported, probably because those larger devices concealed heavier explosive charges. All of this produced widespread terror across Lebanon, with everyone suddenly fearful of electronic devices, including reports that terrified mothers were unplugging baby-monitors from their cribs.
Over the years, Hezbollah had become quite proud of its security, and the leadership freely admitted that this was the worst breach they had ever suffered, resulting in very serious losses. I haven’t seen reports that any of the organization’s senior leaders had been killed or wounded in the blasts, but given the huge number of casualties, I’m sure that at least some had been caught in the attack. Then, just a couple of days later, an Israeli airstrike destroyed a Beirut building, killing a high-ranking Hezbollah military leader and a number of his colleagues as they were meeting together, perhaps to plan a retaliatory strike against Israel. It’s obvious that Hezbollah has suffered a very bloody nose, and a major setback in its ongoing military conflict against Israel.
Mossad certainly achieved a brilliant tactical victory, one that its members and pro-Israel partisans surely intend to boast about for years. But many aspects of the attack seemed very puzzling to me, and experienced military analysts wondered whether any long-term gains had been achieved.
After Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas raid last October, Hezbollah and its Israeli enemies soon began trading cross-border fire, bombarding each other with missiles, rockets, drones, and artillery shells, and those exchanges have now continued for nearly a year. As a result, some 160,000 civilians on both sides of the border have fled their homes, with perhaps 60,000 of these being Israelis.
With so many tens of thousands of Israelis having become internal refugees, displaced from their communities in the north of the country and spending the last year living in temporary accommodations, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under enormous political pressure to attack and invade Lebanon in order to drive the Hezbollah forces away from the border, thereby allowing those Israelis to return home. In addition, the most extreme religious elements among his supporters regard portions of southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s God-given lands and wish to see them conquered and annexed, with their local Lebanese residents expelled and replaced by Jewish settlers.
However, the last time the Israelis launched a ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006, their forces suffered a severe defeat at Hezbollah’s hands, and during the last eighteen years that organization has become far more powerful, with many of its troops having gained a great deal of military experience during their successful intervention in the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, a year of fighting against Hamas in Gaza has left the IDF exhausted, so despite Israel’s command of the air, it’s not at all clear how well such a ground assault would go. Moreover, Hezbollah has reportedly amassed an enormous arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles, and these could be used to inflict devastating damage upon most of Israel’s cities and towns if it chose to do so.
The combination of these two conflicting factors has led to repeated indecision on Israel’s part. For months, media leaks have reported that Israel had made the decision to invade Lebanon and that the attack was imminent. But nothing has ever happened, presumably because the military risks of such an operation were considered too great.
Those booby-trapped pagers and other devices might have played an absolutely crucial role in an Israeli ground invasion. If they had all been detonated at the beginning of such an attack, Hezbollah’s forces would have been left dazed and confused, with their entire communications network knocked out, thereby preventing them from mounting an effective defense or retaliatory measures. This would probably have allowed the IDF to win a major initial victory on the ground.
But instead those explosions occurred alone, with no invasion taking place. So Hezbollah has merely licked its wounds and is surely now putting in place a replacement communications network, presumably based upon a large shipment of carefully vetted pagers received from Iran or China or Russia. Israel thus lost the element of surprise, with little to show for it except wounding a large number of Hezbollah members. Thus, the exploding pagers merely produced a tactical victory instead of a potentially strategic one.
This raises the obvious question of why the Israelis chose to shoot their bolt when they did instead of waiting until the pagers could be detonated in conjunction with a major invasion.
According to media reports, the Israelis may have suspected that some Hezbollah members had discovered that the pagers contained explosives, and were thus faced with a use-it-or-lose-it dilemma, choosing to immediately detonate all the devices before they were discarded and the entire long Mossad effort was totally wasted. This is certainly possible, but given the extreme difficulty the Israelis had previously had in penetrating Hezbollah’s organization, I really wonder how they could have learned that a couple of Hezbollah operatives had discovered the explosives during the short time interval before the latter notified their top commanders and a quick order came down to junk all the pagers.
My own guess is quite different. I think that the explosions indicate that despite media leaks to the contrary, the Netanyahu government had taken a firm decision to abandon plans for any ground invasion of Lebanon in the foreseeable future as just too risky. If any such invasion were now off the table, the pagers had lost their strategic value, so they were instead detonated for essentially political reasons. Netanyahu hoped that the serious damage and humiliation the attacks inflicted upon Hezbollah would provide his government with an immediate boost in popularity, helping to deflect the continuing anger over its lack of success in returning its displaced civilians to their homes in the north. Thus, under this interpretation, the pager explosions suggest that no ground invasion of Lebanon will take place.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s military effectiveness hardly seems to have been crippled. Early Sunday morning, its forces fired off some 150 rockets, cruise missiles, and drones into Israel, bombarding areas far south of those they had previously targeted. The very tight Israeli censorship makes it difficult to estimate damage, but it sounds like Israel’s Iron Dome defenses failed to stop many of the projectiles, which inflicted numerous injuries and started large fires, while Hezbollah could probably keep these attacks at this level every day for the next several years, completely saturating and overwhelming Israel’s defenses. Thus, pager explosions or not, Hezbollah’s huge arsenal could easily level most of Israel’s cities while the Israelis still seem reluctant to tangle with its very formidable ground forces. So perhaps just as observers had suggested, the Mossad operation was merely a tactical Israeli victory with great propaganda value but little if any strategic significance.
However, my own view is somewhat different. I think that the longer term strategic consequences of that exploding pager operation may be very negative for Israel.
Although America’s fiercely pro-Israel mainstream media would never treat it as such, the sudden simultaneous detonation of those thousands of pagers all across Lebanon and some nearby areas obviously amounted to a gigantic terrorist attack, and was certainly seen as such by nearly the entire world. Indeed, some Lebanese have described it as their own 9/11.
Hezbollah is one of Lebanon’s largest political organizations, and many of those pagers had apparently been distributed to its affiliated civilian members, who were obviously not legitimate targets of deadly attacks, especially in a country not at war. Non-military members of Hezbollah would have the same relationship to its fighters that ordinary Israeli civilians do to the IDF, and using explosives-filled pagers to attack the former is really no different than detonating a large car-bomb on a crowded Israeli street where soldiers gathered. If thousands of booby-trapped electronic devices had suddenly exploded all across Israel—or across the United States—the Western media would certainly have regarded such an attack as the most blatant possible example of massive, illegal terrorism.
The Internet is filled with videos showing explosions in crowded Lebanese markets, and some of the dead victims were children. Pagers were used by the medical staff in Lebanese hospitals, and this was also true of the exploding walkie-talkies. Given the thousands of those sudden explosions and the enormous numbers of victims, many of whom were civilians, including women, children, and medical workers, I’ve seen this described as the world’s worst terrorist attack since 9/11, and that hardly seems an unreasonable appraisal.
Video Link
Over the decades and especially during the last twelve months of the attack on Gaza, the Jewish State has become absolutely notorious for its endless, flagrant violations of international law and the rules of warfare, and this latest pager attack is merely a particularly egregious example of this. As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported:
A global treaty, which has been signed by more than 100 countries including Israel, bans “the use booby traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”.
Most of the legal experts quoted by NPR took the same position, so it seems clear that the Israelis have further compounded their long record of flagrant war-crimes.
Moreover, nothing like this had ever previously been attempted, and Israel’s Mossad operation may have dangerous consequences for the entire world. Now that this line has been crossed and everyone has witnessed the huge potential impact of this sort of deadly attack, others may decide to do the same given that the technology involved is easily available to every major country as well as many non-state actors. Apparently the high-explosive compound employed was very difficult to detect by scanning or any other means, so what would stop explosive-filled laptops or other large electronic devices from being used to bring down civilian planes in flight? The societies of America and the West are very soft targets, unused to the regular attacks that Israel has inflicted upon its Middle Eastern neighbors, so the deployment of booby-trapped electronic devices would have a hugely negative impact upon our way of life.
The possible damage to the market reputation of Taiwan’s consumer electronics industry and that of other manufacturers aligned with the West may also be quite substantial. With Mossad having so easily taken deadly advantage of the security gaps of the contract manufacturers in those supply chains, what rational country in the Middle East would not factor that risk into its future orders? Huawei and other Chinese companies provide the full range of such products, with their quality at least as good and their prices generally much lower, while their devices would be almost totally immune to such sabotage. Over the last year, Israeli representatives have expressed ferocious public hostility towards almost all of the nations of the world, denouncing them for joining together in the series of near-unanimous UN votes condemning the ongoing genocidal rampage in Gaza. Many of these countries and organizations may begin to wonder if they might eventually be targeted in political retaliation, and therefore chose to be safe rather than sorry by switching their purchases of consumer electronics to Chinese vendors.
For generations, the nations of the world have signed international protocols and treaties prohibiting exactly these sorts of terrorist attacks for exactly these sorts of reasons, so Israel’s endless violations of such standards may inflict a great deal of damage upon the peace and security of the rest of the world, eventually provoking huge international hostility. Israel has obviously now become almost universally recognized as a rogue, terrorist state, the worst sort of international criminal regime. Eventually the rest of the world may conclude that its continued existence poses too much of a risk to global peace and take concerted action to eliminate that threat, together with the entire population deemed responsible. Indeed, if not for the totally slavish subservience of America’s bought-and-paid-for political leadership, I think that such steps would have already been taken long ago.
But although these negative strategic consequences for Israel’s long-term situation are obviously quite serious, I think they are actually far overshadowed by certain other implications of this extremely successful Mossad operation, which may have a more immediate and historic impact. This project certainly ranked as one of the most brilliant and effective covert strikes in the history of the world, with few other comparable examples coming to mind. Yet I think that exactly those characteristics may lead to Israel’s total destruction, perhaps even in the relatively near future.
In many respects, this use of thousands of weaponized pagers to target the members of an opposing organization almost seemed much more like something produced by a Hollywood scriptwriter than anything carried out in real life. In many respects it straddled the line between representing a massive wave of simultaneous, targeted assassinations and a huge terrorist attack against the cities of a hostile country. Although neither Mossad nor any other intelligence service had ever tried any similar operation in the past, Bergman’s authoritative history does provide a very long list of past Mossad assassinations, as well as similar actions by the various Zionist groups prior to Israel’s creation. I think it is worth reviewing some of that material to get a better sense of the likely mindset of those involved in formulating this recent operation. Back in early 2020, I summarized some of Bergman’s important information:
The sheer quantity of such foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable, with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York Times suggesting that the Israeli total over the last half-century or so seemed far greater than that of any other nation. I might even go farther: if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be surprised if Israel’s body-count greatly exceeded the combined total for that of all other major countries in the world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s extremely long book…
Israeli operatives sometimes even contemplated the elimination of their own top-ranking leaders whose policies they viewed as sufficiently counter-productive. For decades, Gen. Ariel Sharon had been one of Israel’s greatest military heroes and someone of extreme right-wing sentiments. As Defense Minister in 1982, he orchestrated the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which soon turned into a major political debacle, seriously damaging Israel’s international standing by inflicting great destruction upon that neighboring country and its capital city of Beirut. As Sharon stubbornly continued his military strategy and the problems grew more severe, a group of disgruntled officers decided that the best means of cutting Israel’s losses was to assassinate Sharon, though that proposal was never carried out.
An even more striking example occurred a decade later. For many years, Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat had been the leading object of Israeli antipathy, so much so that at one point Israel made plans to shoot down an international civilian jetliner in order to assassinate him. But after the end of the Cold War, pressure from America and Europe led Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to sign the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords with his Palestinian foe. Although the Israeli leader received worldwide praise and shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his peacemaking efforts, powerful segments of the Israeli public and its political class regarded the act as a betrayal, with some extreme nationalists and religious zealots demanding that he be killed for his treason. A couple of years later, he was indeed shot dead by a lone gunman from those ideological circles, becoming the first Middle Eastern leader in decades to suffer that fate. Although his killer was mentally unbalanced and stubbornly insisted that he acted alone, he had had a long history of intelligence associations, and Bergman delicately notes that the gunman slipped past Rabin’s numerous bodyguards “with astonishing ease” in order to fire his three fatal shots at close range.
Many observers drew parallels between Rabin’s assassination and that of our own president in Dallas three decades earlier, and the latter’s heir and namesake, John F. Kennedy, Jr., developed a strong personal interest in the tragic event. In March 1997, his glossy political magazine George published an article by the Israeli assassin’s mother, implicating her own country’s security services in the crime, a theory also promoted by the late Israeli-Canadian writer Barry Chamish. These accusations sparked a furious international debate, but after Kennedy himself died in an unusual plane crash a couple of years later and his magazine quickly folded, the controversy soon subsided. The George archives are not online nor easily available, so I cannot effectively judge the credibility of the charges.
Having himself narrowly avoided assassination by Israeli operatives, Sharon gradually regained his political influence, and did so without compromising his hard-line views, even boastfully describing himself as a “Judeo-Nazi” to an appalled journalist. A few years after Rabin’s death, he provoked major Palestinian protests, then used the resulting violence to win election as Prime Minister, and once in office, his very harsh methods led to a widespread uprising in Occupied Palestine. But Sharon merely redoubled his repression, and after world attention was diverted by 9/11 attacks and the American invasion of Iraq, he began assassinating numerous top Palestinian political and religious leaders in attacks that sometimes inflicted heavy civilian casualties.
The central object of Sharon’s anger was Palestine President Yasir Arafat, who suddenly took ill and died, thereby joining his erstwhile negotiating partner Rabin in permanent repose. Arafat’s wife claimed that he had been poisoned and produced some medical evidence to support this charge, while longtime Israeli political figure Uri Avnery published numerous articles substantiating those accusations. Bergman simply reports the categorical Israeli denials while noting that “the timing of Arafat’s death was quite peculiar,” then emphasizes that even if he knew the truth, he couldn’t publish it since his entire book was written under strict Israeli censorship…
Having thus acquired serious doubts about the completeness of Bergman’s seemingly comprehensive narrative history, I noted a curious fact. I have no specialized expertise in intelligence operations in general nor those of Mossad in particular, so I found it quite remarkable that the overwhelming majority of all the higher-profile incidents recounted by Bergman were already familiar to me merely from the decades I had spent closely reading the New York Times every morning. Is it really plausible that six years of exhaustive research and so many personal interviews would have uncovered so few major operations that had not already been known and reported in the international media? Bergman obviously provided a wealth of detail previously limited to insiders, along with numerous unreported assassinations of relatively minor individuals, but it seems strange that he came up with so few major new revelations.
Indeed, some important gaps in his coverage are quite apparent to anyone who has even somewhat investigated the topic, and these begin in the early chapters of his volume, which present the Zionist prehistory in Palestine prior to the establishment of the Jewish state.
Bergman would have severely damaged his credibility if he had failed to include the infamous 1940s Zionist assassinations of Britain’s Lord Moyne or U.N. Peace Negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte. But he unaccountably forgot to mention that in 1937 the more right-wing Zionist faction whose political heirs have dominated Israel in recent decades assassinated Chaim Arlosoroff, the highest-ranking Zionist figure in Palestine. Moreover, he omitted a number of similar incidents, including some of those targeting top Western leaders. As I wrote last year:
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.
As far as I know, the early Zionists had a record of political terrorism almost unmatched in world history, and in 1974 Prime Minister Menachem Begin once even boasted to a television interviewer of having been the founding father of terrorism across the world.
Indeed, I also recounted the remarkable history of Zionist and Israeli terrorism, some of which was covered by Bergman:
Although somewhat related, political assassinations and terrorist attacks are distinct topics, and Bergman’s comprehensive volume explicitly focuses on the former, so we cannot fault him for providing only slight coverage of the latter. But the historical pattern of Israeli activity, especially with regard to false-flag attacks, is really quite remarkable, as I noted in a 2018 article:
One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew.
The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
Of these famous incidents, Bergman only includes mention of the King David Hotel bombing. But much later in his narrative, he describes the huge wave of false-flag terrorist attacks unleashed in 1981 by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who recruited a former high-ranking Mossad official to manage the project.
Under Israeli direction, large car bombs began exploding in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities, killing or injuring enormous numbers of civilians. A single attack in October inflicted nearly 400 casualties, and by December, there were eighteen bombings per month, with their effectiveness greatly enhanced by the use of innovative new Israeli drone technology. Official responsibility for all the attacks was claimed by a previously unknown Lebanese organization, but the intent was to provoke the PLO into military retaliation against Israel, thereby justifying Sharon’s planned invasion of the neighboring country.
Since the PLO stubbornly refused to take the bait, plans were put into motion for the huge bombing of an entire Beirut sports stadium using tons of explosives during a January 1st political ceremony, with the death and destruction expected to be “of unprecedented proportions, even in terms of Lebanon.” But Sharon’s political enemies learned of the plot and emphasized that many foreign diplomats including the Soviet ambassador were expected to be present and probably would be killed, so after a bitter debate, Prime Minister Begin ordered the attack aborted. A future Mossad chief mentions the major headaches they then faced in removing the large quantity of explosives that they had already planted within the structure.
Bergman’s weighty book constituted an extremely comprehensive if fully authorized history of Mossad’s assassination operations, and it also provided considerable coverage of its terrorist attacks. But as an important supplement to the latter, I would strongly recommend State of Terror published in 2016 by Thomas Suarez. Although it focuses primarily upon the Zionist terrorism that played such a central role in the creation of the State of Israel, it also provides some incidents from later years as well. Most importantly, it massively documents the complete ideological support for that technique found across all of the early Zionist leaders, who then continued governing that country during the decades that followed, even into the 1990s. Although the work is long out of print and used copies available on Amazon start at an outrageous $4,291, it may also be found at Archive.org.
As I mentioned earlier, the sudden, simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers all across Lebanon’s streets and cities was regarded as a gigantic terrorist attack by most of the world, probably the worst since 9/11. I very much doubt that any intelligence service other than Israel’s Mossad would have possessed the combination of skills, daring, and imagination necessary to successfully carry out such an operation.
Indeed, the only terrorist attack in world history that seems even bolder, more complex, and more successful would be the 9/11 attacks themselves, whose 23rd anniversary just passed a couple of weeks ago. That brilliantly conceived and implemented terrorist operation inflicted enormous damage to America’s financial and military centers while easily circumventing our usual air defenses on that fateful day, and dramatically changing the course of world history.
Yet oddly enough, while most of us freely admit that only an organization with Mossad’s superb resources, brilliance, and training could have carried out the exploding pager attacks, according to the official story, the even greater 9/11 terrorist attacks were merely the work of a rag-tag band of poorly-trained Arabs directed by an eccentric with severe health problems dwelling in an Afghanistan cave. The contrast between the supposed actors behind those two operations is so extreme as to defy rationality, and the recent events in Lebanon must surely raise 9/11 doubts even among the most credulous and gullible.
For more than two decades, large numbers of highly-credible journalists, academics, and former government officials have expressed enormous skepticism about the official 9/11 story. As far back as 2006, former high-ranking CIA official William Christison characterized it as “almost certainly a monstrous series of lies.” Over the years, a substantial fraction of the entire American population has come to very similar conclusions, much like those long expressed by most of the rest of the world.
But if the successful 9/11 terrorist attacks were not the work of Osama bin Laden and his small band of Arabs, then who was responsible? If the Israeli Mossad recently carried out what was arguably the second boldest, most successful terrorist attack in the history of the world, does that not suggest an obvious suspect?
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI quickly rounded up and arrested some 200 Mossad agents, many of whom had been found in the exact vicinity of the destruction, with five of them caught red-handed, celebrating the successful attack on the WTC towers. Over the years, I have discussed all of this at considerable length, including in an article published around the twentieth anniversary of the attacks:
American Pravda: Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 7, 2021 • 7,800 Words
For those who wish to place all of this in the broader context of past Mossad operations, many of which were carefully excluded from Bergman’s lengthy but highly-selective account, I would recommend my extremely long article from early 2020, which is conveniently divided into a series of major sections:
American Pravda: Mossad Assassinations
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 27, 2020 • 27,300 Words
From the Peace of Westphalia to the Law of the Jungle
“Rise and Kill First”
“Who Killed Zia?”
“By Way of Deception”
“The Other Side of Deception”
“Final Judgment” on the JFK Assassination
The Strange Death of James Forrestal and Other Fatalities
The 9/11 Attacks – What Happened?
The 9/11 Attacks – Who Did It?
Important Historical Realities, Long Hidden in Plain Sight
The Past Perspective of American Military Intelligence
We also recently published a long article documenting the extremely strong evidence linking the Israeli Mossad and its American collaborators to the 9/11 Attacks. Although the style is somewhat breathless and there are a few minor inaccuracies, the volume of material presented seems absolutely overwhelming, and I would urge people to read it.
Israel Did 9/11
Wyatt Peterson • The Unz Review • September 12, 2024 • 13,300 Words
Given the gigantic mass of very strong evidence implicating Israel and its Mossad in the worst attacks ever launched against the United States, the consequences when and if this becomes widely known are likely to be terminal both for the Jewish State and the bulk of its population.
For a variety of different reasons, large portions of America’s political, financial, and media elites, both Jewish and Gentile, have bound themselves very tightly to support for that foreign nation. So unless they take strong steps to sever that connection in the loudest and most emphatic manner, they would probably share its fate.
https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/2024/09/mossads-exploding-pager-attacks-and-9-11/
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