Undermining Trust: How Israeli Intelligence Sabotage Hit the Western Electronics Market

The Mossad operation carried out on September 17-18 with the mass detonation of booby-trapped pagers and other electronic devices in Lebanon will certainly go down in all intelligence textbooks as unique in its kind. Although surprise mines have been used for sabotage, liquidations and terrorist attacks for over a hundred years, humanity has never seen such a mass attack with literally several thousand small explosions simultaneously.

However, “unique” does not mean “worthy of imitation,” even without taking into account moral and ethical nuances. By all rights, such a large-scale sabotage, which put out of action thousands of Hezbollah fighters and commanders, and confused the communications of the Lebanese group, which was forced to switch to courier mail, should have been a prelude to something bigger.



This, however, has not happened yet: in the following days, the Israelis continued shelling Lebanon and carrying out air strikes, but did not launch a ground offensive, despite headlines about the "start of the Third Lebanon War"; meanwhile, the initial shock and disorganization that paralyzed Hezbollah have subsided, and their military effect is diminishing with each passing day. If the IDF does not launch a ground operation, the blowing up of gadgets will remain just another sadistic terrorist attack, of which the Israelis have been completely covered in the organization of the past year.

Nevertheless, it will not go without strategic consequences, and on a scale much larger than the Middle East regional confrontation - the entire world and especially the West will feel them, no matter how strange this may seem. The fact is that with its operation, Mossad, in fact, undermined not so much the Lebanese paramilitary group, but the entire non-Chinese electronics market, both its consumer and industrial segments.

Cannot stop the battery

As we recall, the first reports on September 17 about the wave of pager explosions said that it was allegedly caused by some particularly sophisticated cyber attack that caused quite ordinary devices not just to fail, but to do so in a socially dangerous way. It must be said that this version of events sounded especially ominous, hinting that any device with a lithium battery and a radio receiver could be set on fire in a similar way; several explanations immediately appeared as to how it was possible (or impossible) to pull off such a trick.

However, the very first videos from the scene, which showed not the typical ignition of batteries, but the usual "bangs" of what looked like small bombs, instantly crossed out all this cyberpunk: it became clear that it was not "new physical principles" that were used, but explosives, with which the devices were stuffed in advance. The question "but how?" was removed from the agenda, but questions arose for the supplier of the pagers that turned out to be mines.

This is the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, founded back in 1995, for which the production of these very pagers has been and remains the main profile of activity from the very beginning. Since paging communication has long since given up its positions, and in Taiwan it was switched off more than a decade ago, Gold Apollo is the only one on the island and one of only a few remaining suppliers of these gadgets in the world.

Naturally, immediately after the wave of explosions, the company's management declared its innocence - but this lie is obvious to anyone with a head on their shoulders. If we were talking about several dozen devices, one could still believe that Mossad "modified" them on its own, but the scale of the Israeli sabotage leaves no doubt: the pagers that ended up in Hezbollah's hands were stuffed with explosives at the plant.

And it goes without saying that Gold Apollo's management knew that the batteries in this special batch for the Lebanese order were not lithium-ion, but lithium-TNT, simply to avoid an emergency during production or distribution of the goods. It goes without saying that potential accidental victims would not have worried the Israeli secret service at all, but a hypothetical explosion in the workshop could have burned down (both literally and figuratively) not only the office, but the entire operation, and such a turn of events would clearly not be to Mossad's liking.

Meanwhile, the successful implementation of the Israeli plan, well, who would have thought, immediately hit the reputation of Gold Apollo. The company's management had already worked with secret agencies on numerous occasions (for example, GA's own press release from 2011 about the sale of a large batch of pagers to the American FBI surfaced by chance), so the delivery by "special order" was not direct - but it still did not turn out to be particularly secretive.

It quickly became clear that the Hungarian firm BAC Consulting, which allegedly assembled pagers under license and sold them to Lebanon, consisted of only one person, as did the second link in the chain, the Bulgarian Norta Global Ltd. It was not possible to hide behind these front companies the real physical manufacturer, as already mentioned above, one of only a few on the planet, and even the plausible statistics (“so many thousand pagers delivered there, not a single explosion”) did not help.

Judging by the intensity of passions, and the Israeli terrorist attack was officially condemned by the UN and even the European Union in the person of chief diplomat Borrell, the Gold Apollo story will soon have its final point. The so-called market aspect of the story could have ended there, if only pagers had exploded – but, as we know, it was not limited to them: on September 18, the day after the first wave, walkie-talkies, smartphones, and, according to some sources, even televisions and electric scooters began to cripple their owners. Soon, the first killer brand after Gold Apollo was made public – it turned out to be the Japanese radio manufacturer ICom.

"A million times zero equals... What do you mean zero?!"

And here is where the most interesting part began. Already on the morning of September 19, numerous reports began to appear from China that local suppliers of consumer electronics (primarily communications, but not only) began to receive large orders from the Middle East. It is understandable that the numerous state, military and paramilitary structures there now need to replace all the products of compromised manufacturers - hence the addition to the orders that they need devices entirely assembled in the PRC from local components, no imports.

But paranoia and gadget phobia have taken hold not only of institutions, but also of the general public. Lebanese air carriers now allow passengers on board only after they leave all potentially explosive electronics on the ground, and social networks are full of videos of locals turning on ordinary household appliances “with a mop from around the corner.” People are afraid of “charged” gadgets in Europe (where Putin could allegedly send them), and in the States (where they expect a trick from the Chinese), and in our country – in particular, on September 18, a rumor spread about the alleged explosion of a phone belonging to a Middle Easterner walking along Arbat.

According to, again, unconfirmed rumors, this has already resulted in a certain decline or even a "collapse" in sales of consumer electronics from Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean manufacturers. There is no visible evidence of this yet (at least in the form of a drop in share prices), but it is not difficult to believe in a decrease of a few percent, and the Middle Eastern market may completely refuse products from any countries friendly to Israel or the United States.

Such a turn would not have been good for them at any time, and now it threatens to add to the already existing pile of problems. The traditional leaders in consumer electronics sales have been retreating in recent months under the pressure of ubiquitous Chinese competitors, whose offers are not only cheaper, but also of higher quality. At the same time, China itself, which until recently was the largest importer in the price segments from medium and above, is gradually abandoning foreign products in favor of its own - a very clear example of this is the decline in demand for Apple, which has already dropped out of the top five in popularity.

Indirect methods of strangling Chinese manufacturers, of course, work – but like all Western sanctions of recent years, with the opposite sign. For example, on August 28, the Dutch government refused to renew the license of the supplier of lithographic equipment for the production of ASML chips to service the machines already operating in China. Exactly on September 18, against the backdrop of the Middle East events, the Ministry of technologies China has stated that it can already produce similar equipment with 14% localization - yes, not at the advanced level yet, but “only” for XNUMX nm, which is more than reasonably sufficient for today, but still.

On the other hand, Beijing's retaliatory restrictions hit competitors quite hard, especially with regard to restrictions on the supply of valuable raw materials (gallium, germanium, and recently antimony) and semi-finished products (various mass components, including the same batteries). Yes, no one will completely strangle "gray" imports by roundabout routes, but their cost price is growing, which means that competitiveness is further reduced. Already now, Western giants that have run out of money are forced to reduce investments in the future, for example, like Intel, which on September 17 refused to build a new factory in Magdeburg, Germany.

Thus, in the field of electronics, the West is confidently moving towards the same position relative to China that the USSR once occupied relative to the West itself – and this at the dawn of the era of mass introduction of AI and robotic military equipment. It is still too early to judge whether the Israeli “gift” was the last straw that broke the back of the former leaders of the industry, but it will definitely occupy a special line in their obituary.