Alwaght- Earlier this year, Lebanese villagers captured an eagle flying over the southern Lebanese town of Bin Jbeil. The men who caught it thought the vulture was on an Israeli reconnaissance mission, spying on Hezbollah fighters. After further inspection, it appeared that the bird, which was attached to a device, had been tagged by Israeli conservationists.
This is not to say that the Israelis have not experimented with disguised eagles before. In fact, south Lebanon residents are wary of Israeli spy drones and devices as they have come cross many espionage strategies throughout the years.
Now the means may vary but the end is standardized: to attack the country by gathering top government information and spying on the Lebanese resistance group, Hezbollah. Evidently, the Israelis have been keeping an eagle eye on Lebanon.
Internet Scandal
After Lebanon’s Telecommunications minister Boutros Harb announced in a televised speech that the recently discovered illegal internet networks east of Beirut was linked to Israeli intelligence, he vowed to hunt down unauthorized internet providers.
Harb made clear that the crime constitutes a violation of the country’s sovereignty and national security alike. But this is not the first breach of its kind. In 2009, Lebanese security forces found a small internet sever in the town of al-Barouk in the Chouf district which was believed to be an Israeli transmission since it was wired to antennas aimed in the direction of the occupied territories.
Harb contacted the Turkish and Cypriot embassies demanding that these countries “stop aggressing Lebanon” as they were selling bandwidth to these stations.
Sovereignty at Stake
While sovereignty can be defined as a country’s independent authority and the right to defend itself, it is not restricted to a state’s borders. Land, sea, air and even information are protected by a country’s sovereignty. Yet, for the Israelis, who established a regime on occupied Palestinian land in 1948, sovereignty means next to nothing before their interests. On an almost daily basis, Israeli warplanes violate Lebanon’s air space, there are still towns in south Lebanon that are still occupied, and there are attempts to illegally extract gas from the country’s fields. These are a few examples of Israeli violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty but they are certainly not the end of it.
In March, the Lebanese army found a spying device in a black box planted near the Blue Line east of the southern town of Markaba. According to the report, the device was discovered not far from a Lebanese army post and airstrip, a blatant violation of the country’s sovereignty.
But this is just one case of many surveillance gear that are usually disguised as gadgets. With such activities constantly infringing upon Lebanon’s sovereignty, its national security is also at stake.
Intelligence War
Whether through an eagle in the sky or a box along the border fence, however, Israeli attempts to outmanoeuvre the resistance have thus far failed to bring about the desired results. While, in some cases, Israeli intelligence managed to form spy rings in Lebanon, they have been —more often than not— detected.
The Asia Times has published a report summarizing the content of US military expert Anthony Cordesman’s account of the 2006 July war. The "Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War" was studied by planners for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and passed among military experts in Washington.
Part 1 of “How Hezbollah Defeated Israel” focused on the intelligence war. The article mentioned the arrest of at least 16 Israeli spies by Lebanon intelligence officials. It further read that during two years from 2004 until the eve of the war, Hezbollah had successfully “turned” a number of Lebanese civilian assets reporting on the location of major Hezbollah military caches in southern Lebanon to Israeli intelligence officers.
In some small number of crucially important cases, Hezbollah senior intelligence officials were able to "feed back" false information on their militia's most important emplacements to Israel - with the result that Israel target folders identified key emplacements that did not, in fact, exist.
Furthermore, Hezbollah developed the skill of intercepting and decoding Israeli messages, an ability that proved to be pivotal during the July war in 2006.
“Hezbollah intelligence officials had perfected their signals-intelligence capability to such an extent that they could intercept Israeli ground communications between Israeli military commanders,” the report stated.
It became clear to the Israelis that they had underestimated the capabilities of Hezbollah as an organized military body, which, against all odds, mastered what is referred to as counter-signals technology. Counting on the element of surprise, therefore, was denied its superordinate privilege by counter-intelligence as a form of resistance.
“It now is clear that the Israeli political establishment was shocked by the failure of its forces to accomplish its first military goals in the war - including the degradation of a significant number of Hezbollah arsenals and the destruction of Hezbollah's command capabilities,” it concluded.
Nonetheless, extending beyond the aerial, maritime and terrestrial borders of Lebanon, Israeli intelligence continues to violate Lebanon’s virtual sovereignty—even during what is known as a ceasefire.
In an age where communication has taken on new meaning with the rise of technology, the internet has revolutionized the espionage industry, a subset of intelligence gathering. Privacy, government secrets, and a country’s sovereignty have become subject to spying through a tool as common and as widespread as the internet. In Lebanon’s case, this marks the most recently uncovered side—part and parcel—of its conflict with the Israeli regime.
