Pagers used in Hezbollah attacks: who still uses them and why?

Members of Hezbollah, a militant organization operating in Lebanon, used old-school pagers to avoid being tracked down and targeted by Israeli intelligence. Who else uses pagers and why?

In an audacious and highly technical operation, Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, reportedly managed to sabotage encrypted – programmed with unique keys – pagers intended for Hezbollah.

All of them were detonated at the same time on Tuesday, killing 12 people and injuring 2,800. The next day, Hezbollah’s walkie-talkies were targeted in another wave of explosions, killing at least 20 people across Lebanon.

The attacks have served as a reminder that these gadgets, largely forgotten by the public, still exist and are used for very specific purposes by different organizations and industries.

Supply chain infiltration

Hezbollah, designated as a terrorist group fully by the United States and partly by the European Union, bought and used the pagers to avoid Israel’s highly sophisticated surveillance.

After Hezbollah began launching rockets into Israel’s territory last year, Israel retaliated by picking off senior Hezbollah commandos with targeted assassinations.

The group’s leadership immediately ordered their fighters to ditch traceable cell phones and purchased thousands of pagers. In other words, if Israel was going high-tech, Hezbollah would go low.

Already in February, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah admitted that Israel was using cellphone networks to pinpoint the locations of his operatives and told his followers in a televised address: “You ask me where the agent is. I tell you that the phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent.”

“Bury it,” Mr. Nasrallah said. “Put it in an iron box and lock it.”

He had been pushing for years for Hezbollah to invest in pagers, devices capable of receiving data without giving away a user’s information. Better yet, encrypted pagers are also sold, further protecting their users.

However, Mossad successfully infiltrated the supply chain of Hezbollah's new pagers over the summer, injecting a lethal compound known as Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN) into the lithium batteries.

Once the devices were in Hezbollah’s hands, the Israelis chose Tuesday to remotely trigger the overheating and detonation of the lithium batteries. The operation to intercept the pagers seems to have been a complex one and involved establishing a shell company posing as an international pager producer.

What are pagers?

Pagers, also known as beepers, have a long history. These devices, used to receive an alert or message, were patented in 1949 by Al Groos, an inventor who was also behind the walkie-talkie and the cordless telephone.

However, the new device wasn’t exactly popular at first. Pagers only soared in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s – right before the advent and mass production of mobile phones.

The Washington Post said in 1984 that pagers were used by around three million Americans. A decade later, there were already 61 million beepers in use – unsurprisingly, they also entered pop culture in movies and music videos.

Of course, the public soon found a new lover – cell phones. As they became cheaper, Motorola, once the world’s biggest pager manufacturer, said it was discontinuing the product in 2001.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise – why run to a phone booth after getting paged when you can directly exchange messages or call someone on your own mobile phone that you carry in your pocket or purse? With modern games, you also get music, videos, games, and much more, of course.

Today, it’s not even entirely clear how many people around the world still use pagers. And yet, some companies are still making them, meaning that the demand, as scarce as it is, is still out there.

One of the world’s biggest producers of pagers is the Taiwan-based firm Gold Apollo. On behalf of this company, B.A.C. Consulting, a company in Hungary that was in fact an Israeli front, sold the cheap gadgets to Hezbollah.

Gold Apollo was founded in 1995, the golden age for pagers, and has so far exported 41,000 pagers this year. Another company, Spok, sells the devices in the US and Australia.

Who still uses pagers?

Apart from organizations such as Hezbollah that need pagers for safer communication, the devices are quite widely used in hospitals in many countries – they’re faster and more reliable if, say, the WiFi or phone network fails.

Spok’s pagers “penetrate signals through concrete and steel when a smartphone signal may not,” and are “powered by batteries that can be replaced during a power outage and don’t rely on WiFi or cellular networks,” the company says.

As recently as in 2019, the government of the United Kingdom said the country’s National Health Service (NHS) used around 130,000 pagers. Now, however, the NHS doesn’t use beepers in non-emergency situations and is phasing them out altogether.

Pagers have also been used by first respondents and in mines and chemical plans in Australia where sparks or radio emissions could be dangerous.

Finally, some people are concerned about the ability of companies and governments to collect data on modern devices that they also choose to use pagers. Then again, they have to be encrypted to be truly safe.

In 2019, privacy researcher Sarah Jamie Lewis alerted Vancouver Coastal Health, a Canadian regional health authority, to the fact that alphanumeric pagers were consistently exposing patients’ protected health information.