Recounting exploding Hezbollah pagers, Mossad agents say Nasrallah saw people collapse beside him

Two recently retired Mossad agents are interviewed anonymously by CBS News’ 60 Minutes and recount the operation that resulted in the detonation of thousands of handheld communications devices used by Lebanon’s Hezbollah terror group, injuring and maiming thousands of its operatives.

“The aim, it wasn’t killing Hezbollah terrorists,” says one of the agents, referred to as Gabriel (not his real name) in the interview, wearing a mask and speaking in broken English with his voice altered. “If he just dead, so he’s dead. But if he’s wounded, you have to take him to the hospital, take care of him. You need to invest money and efforts. And those people without hands and eyes are living proof, walking in Lebanon, of ‘don’t mess with us.’ They are walking proof of our superiority all around the Middle East.”

On September 17 — almost a year after Hezbollah, unprovoked, started launching daily attacks on Israel — numerous pagers bought in the past year blew up in the hands of Hezbollah members throughout Lebanon. The following day, thousands of walkie-talkies bought a decade earlier similarly exploded.

Both sets of devices were made and supplied to Hezbollah by the Israeli spy agency.

“So Israel sold this device to Hezbollah. Hezbollah paid for the — this weapon that was to be used against them,” says host Lesley Stahl.

“They got a good price,” replies the second agent, referred to as Michael.

“We have an incredible array of possibilities of creating foreign companies that have no way being traced back to Israel,” Michael boasts. “Shell companies over shell companies to affect the supply chain to our favor. We create a pretend world. We are a global production company. We write the screenplay, we’re the directors, we’re the producers, we’re the main actors, and the world is our stage.”

Gabriel describes meticulous tests of the pagers to make sure only the person holding them would be hurt, not people beside them.

He says he convinced his director that the bulky pagers would be marketable, offering added features such as a long battery life and water resistance, and that Mossad put up online ads to catch Hezbollah’s eye, while hitting other interested would-be buyers with high price quotes to avoid selling to them.

Gabriel says: “When [Hezbollah] are buying from us, they have zero clue that they are buying from the Mossad. We make like ‘Truman Show,’ everything is controlled by us behind the scene. In their experience, everything is normal. Everything was 100% kosher including businessmen, marketing, engineers, showroom, everything,” he says.

Gabriel goes on to say the operation was a watershed moment in the conflict with Hezbollah, and that the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah saw people next to him get hit by the pager blasts.

“Nasrallah, when we operate the beeper operation, just next to him in the bunker, several people had a beeper receiving the message. And in his in own eyes, he saw them collapsing,” he says.

When the terrorist leader gave a speech two days later, “If you look at his eyes, he was defeated,” Gabriel asserts. “He already lose the war. And his soldier look at him during that speech. And they saw a broken leader. And this was the tipping point of the war.”

Michael talks about the psychological side of the unprecedented operation, and indicates more is in stock for the future.

“The day after the pagers exploded, people were afraid to turn on the air conditioners in Lebanon because they were afraid that they would explode. So there was — there is real fear,” he says.

“We want them to feel vulnerable, which they are. We can’t use the pagers again because we already did that. We’ve already moved on to the next thing. And they’ll have to keep on trying to guess what the next thing is.”