A former member of the action service of the DGSE (General Directorate for External Security) for which he worked from 1983 to 2001, Pierre Martinet explains to 20 Minutes why Israel, like other services in the world, does not claim responsibility for its actions and returns to the spectacular coordinated operations of explosions of pagers and walkie-talkies targeting presumed members of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Why doesn’t Israel claim responsibility for pager explosions targeting suspected Hezbollah members?
No intelligence service in the world claims responsibility for its “homicidal” or “arma” actions in terms of the destruction of equipment or buildings.
What’s the point when everyone suspects and it’s like the elephant in the room?
Well because it is illegal and the secret services of the whole world only do illegal actions. Killing people is illegal. When France does it in Africa, it is the same.
But they are in a war context? What is the need to hide the actions? When Ukraine eliminates Russian commanders, the country claims it, right?
I think you are confusing two things: a special operation and a clandestine operation. A special operation, as was done in the Sahel by eliminating leaders of the Islamist terrorist group, is done by the army. A clandestine operation involves people who do not act with real identities, with their faces uncovered, and therefore we cannot claim responsibility.
Is the interest, in terms of communication, to protect oneself from accusations from the international community? Whereas, conversely, “positive communication” could be made by saying that one is capable of striking anyone anywhere.
Protecting themselves from accusations, yes. Israel is not at war with Lebanon. As a few years ago a member of Hamas was eliminated in a hotel in Dubai: Israel, if it is them – they have never claimed responsibility – is not at war with the United Arab Emirates. It is the same thing. And for the rest, there is no need to communicate. Hezbollah has received a strong and clear message. Currently its members who are in Lebanon must be more than suspicious and are shitting their pants.
Isn’t there a form of hypocrisy? Because everyone sees who the authors are, what state is behind it.
Yes, everyone thinks so, but there is no proof. Who says it is not the CIA. I do not rule out that hypothesis. It is an ally. They work together.
Is this an action that will go down in the annals of the secret services?
Yes. And what is interesting in this story is the information that was collected by the team upstream. Two possibilities: either among the close decision-makers of Hezbollah there are infiltrated agents, let’s say from Mossad, or they turned someone close to them; or when Hezbollah decided to release the phones that were too dangerous, too geolocatable, and they decided to take pagers, this information reached an infiltrated agent.
From there, they said to themselves: we’re going to hit them. How? By trapping the beepers. And how to trap them? In two ways: either the production plant works for the Mossad, or it is infiltrated by agents who have introduced explosives into the beepers – because I think that there were micro-explosives introduced into the beepers and that this explosive was manufactured by a technical service that knows how to produce undetectable and untraceable explosives, which is also the signature of a secret service. Another possibility: they were intercepted during delivery and trapped.
This means a huge organization…
And a lot of people who work directly or indirectly for the secret service in question. Trapping 5,000 pagers involves opening them, closing them, introducing explosives and making it work without leaving any trace, neither on the pagers nor elsewhere. That’s what’s impressive.
It wasn’t just about killing for the sake of killing. You can’t load a pager with explosives to kill 100%, it can injure, maim. But the psychological impact is enormous.
Isn’t this the most successful operation of the last ten or twenty years?
I think it was the largest homicide operation ever. They were able to instantly hit 500 targets at once. That’s huge.
The Mossad has already eliminated several people at once, recently again with the building hit by a missile, a drone, in Lebanon. And they had already killed with a booby-trapped phone a Hamas leader whose entourage had to be infiltrated by a Mossad agent who gave him the phone.
Can we say that Mossad is currently the best secret service in the world?
No. Because the DGSE is as good as the Mossad, because the CIA is as good as the Mossad, because the Russian, English and German secret services are as good as the Mossad. The big difference is that they are in reality permanently and at war since forever.
What is also changing is the political will: Israel has the will to eliminate its enemies. On October 7, which was a huge failure of the secret services, 42 French people were killed. Franco-Israeli, but they are French. I have been in this business since 1982, this is the first time that there have been no reprisals.
Or are we not aware?
We would have been. There would have been leaks and it would have been known without them bragging about it.
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