Israel’s detonation of thousands of pagers held by Hezbollah fighters and loyalists in mid-September will be remembered as one of the most ingenious plots in the history of spycraft. It is also a reminder that the most powerful weapon in war is not a fighter jet, a drone or even artificial intelligence, but rather something much older: impersonation.
Central to the Israeli operation was the human infiltration of supply chains. Three years ago, Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, developed a custom pager containing plastic explosives. It then sent agents to trick the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo into marketing the device to the right buyers. Thus, Israel’s biggest blow to Hezbollah in 40 years hinged on the simple dynamic of one human persuading another that he was someone else.
Impersonation — or “identity mimicry” as we call it in a recent book on the topic — is a widely used weapon of war. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the first Russian convoy headed for Kyiv was disguised as a Ukrainian unit to avoid detection. Male jihadists have dressed as women to pull off suicide bombings so often that several Muslim countries now ban face veils on security grounds. And it is not just Islamists who use this ploy. Earlier this year, Israeli soldiers entered a West Bank hospital dressed as Palestinian women and doctors to kill three suspected militants.
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