In interviews, current and former intelligence officials marveled at the complexity of the plot, though some questioned its strategic significance. One former U.S. intelligence official said that Israel’s decision to rig the devices with explosives rather than with sophisticated espionage equipment reflected a “cult of the offensive mindset” in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, prioritizing displays of kinetic power that may not achieve Israel’s broader aims in an escalating regional conflict.Maybe this "former intelligence official" supervised the janitors at the NSA, because this is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.
Let's go through what would be necessary to outfit the pagers with "sophisticated espionage equipment ."
The pagers used by Hezbollah were not connected to any public communications infrastructure like the phone system. They were an independent ecosystem, with a server sending one-way instructions to thousands of devices. There was no communication going back.
Israel couldn't piggyback on the existing communications to get information back. It would have to build an entirely new two way network. Maybe, maybe they could put a GPS receiver there and monitor where people were that way; I've seen that claim, but they certainly could not install microphones and transmitters inside what is already a very small device. And they would have to place receivers throughout Lebanon - any such device would have a limited range, as pagers themselves do, of only a few miles. So Israel would also have to build reception equipment and antennas inside an enemy state.
If they did, Hezbollah would have found them quickly. Inside sensitive areas there is no doubt there are devices meant to eavesdrop on all radio frequencies to see if anything is being leaked.
So this unintelligence official is saying Israel should have done something much more difficult and much more expensive with a much higher likelihood of failure.
I hope he or she didn't use that logic on planning their own operations.
This person does not know what Israel's aims were, but he or she knows better how to achieve them than Israel does. Because they know that the people who planned the most sophisticated espionage in world history are not subtle enough to think it through.
