WITH a lot less exposure in the world’s press than it got for its recent Dubai operation, Israel has quietly suffered a string of setbacks in Lebanon, a front-line state with which it has often been at war. Lebanon’s security service says that since November 2008 it has broken up no fewer than 25 Israeli spy rings. The reported arrest this month of a colonel in Lebanese army intelligence, identified solely by the initials GS, brings the number of those charged to 70-plus; 40 of them are in Lebanese police custody.
For a force better known for its failure to manage traffic, let alone resolve Lebanon’s sorry catalogue of political murders, the counter-intelligence sweep is an unprecedented coup. The arrests are said to have exposed a series of agents for Israel, ranging from a retired Lebanese army general who ran a housecleaning service to a garage owner who specialised in supplying Hizbullah, Lebanon’s Shia party-cum-militia, with vehicles that he secretly fitted with tracking devices.
Some are said to have worked for the Israelis since the 1980s, whereas others were recruited after Israel’s war against Hizbullah in 2006. Earlier this month a Lebanese court sentenced two such agents to death for blowing up a Palestinian Islamist leader and his brother in a car in 2006. One is charged separately with killing two top Hizbullah men, as well as the son of Ahmad Jibril, past head of a Palestinian guerrilla group.
Aside from the alleged spies, the Lebanese say they netted fancy surveillance and communications gear disguised, among other innocuous things, as Thermos flasks, canisters of motor oil and battery chargers. The gadgetry may be what gave the game away. Security sources hint that France or perhaps Russia helped the Lebanese by supplying sophisticated systems to monitor and analyse the telecoms data. The Lebanese then homed in on suspicious signals.
Another clue may have pointed to the importance of the signals trail. Last summer, as the spies were being rounded up, a senior man in Unit 8200, the section of Israeli military intelligence tasked with eavesdropping on Israel’s enemies, shot himself in his office. Colleagues blamed “unrequited love”.
