ISRAELI SPY ACTIVITY SURGES IN CRISIS-STRICKEN LEBANON
▶ Recent assassinations recall civil war-era Mossad plots, say counter-espionage experts
Lebanon’s security agencies have struggled to cope with Israel’s technological superiority, official sources say
Many alleged that Abu Rish, a well-known homeless man who lived in western Beirut in the early 1980s, was an Israeli spy.
At the time, the cosmopolitan western half of Lebanon’s capital was controlled by left-wing and pro-Palestinian factions. Beyond occasionally buying him a coffee or sharing a greeting, residents – including political activists and militia leaders – paid no attention to Abu Rish.
All the while, he sat and listened to their conversations.
Abu Rish disappeared for some time after Israel invaded Lebanon and besieged Beirut in 1982. It is said that when he returned, he was wearing an Israeli officer’s uniform.
Lebanon’s history – particularly the 1975-1990 civil war – is filled with such tales of espionage, retired general Hisham Jaber told The National.
“But it didn’t end when the war ended,” said Mr Jaber, a counter-intelligence specialist who now leads the Middle East Studies Centre in Beirut. “They’re always here – both undercover Israeli operatives and local agents who collaborate with them.
“Their numbers increase in times of war. Historically, Lebanon has always been exposed to foreign, and especially Israeli, espionage.”
Since October 8, when the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia began exchanging cross-border fire with the Israeli army, Israel has carried out several assassinations of members of the group and its allies.
The assassination this month of money exchanger Mohammad Srour – who was placed under sanctions by the US in 2019 for his ties to Hezbollah and for providing financial support to Hamas – was a reminder of Lebanon’s vulnerability to espionage.
An investigation into Mr Srour’s killing revealed evidence of sophisticated planning and surveillance, Lebanon’s Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi said last week.
“Lebanese security agencies have suspicion or accusations that Mossad was behind this operation,” he said.
These suspicions were shared by a Lebanese security official who spoke to The National.
Mr Srour was lured to the town of Beit Meri under the pretext of delivering money to a woman. However, he was joined by his nephew, and his would-be assassins called off the operation, the official said.
The nephew later told security agencies the woman had a Baalbeki accent, which suggested the operation involved local agents collaborating with Israeli operatives.
When called to make a second delivery to the same woman, though, Mr Srour went alone. He was abducted and taken to a secondary location. His body, handcuffed and bearing signs of torture, was eventually found in a villa.
“They shot him multiple times in the shoulders and legs,” Mr Jaber said. “A clear sign that they wanted information.”
The villa had been rented out for a year in advance. The pistols and tools used to kill Mr Srour had been cleaned of fingerprints and left behind. Thousands of dollars in cash were scattered around his body, indicating there was no financial motive for his death.
“It was most likely an Israeli operative who conducted the torture,” Mr Jaber said. “It takes training and precision to do what they did and then clean it up without leaving a trace. Even if Israel recruited local collaborators to help with this operation, they wouldn’t have been the ones to torture him.”
The conclusions of the investigation raise a question: given that Lebanese law prohibits Israeli citizens from entering the country, how would Mossad agents enter?
“All it takes is someone with a foreign passport,” another security official told The National. “This is how someone in the Mossad can enter through the airport.”
This was the case with Erika Chambers, a British-Israeli Mossad agent who took part in the 1979 assassination of Ali Salameh, a high-ranking official in the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
Mr Salameh was a founding member of Black September, the militant group that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
Ms Chambers entered Lebanon posing as a British charity worker. She lived in an apartment overlooking a car park used by Mr Salameh. On January 22, 1979, as Mr Salameh pulled out of the car park, Ms Chambers reportedly detonated a bomb that had been planted on his car by another agent.
She disappeared without a trace soon afterwards.
With a war between Israel and Hezbollah appearing more likely than ever, the security official told The National that Israel had probably increased the number of undercover operatives in Lebanon.
Mr Jaber said Israel had taken advantage of Lebanon’s economic crisis to recruit local agents.
“All of Lebanon is under surveillance by Mossad and the Israeli army’s intelligence. And they know how to pick people who have the potential to be collaborators,” he said.
“Every human has a weak point. Money. Sex. Political affiliation or resentment. These are the main three things that Israel uses to recruit people.”
Lebanon’s security agencies have also struggled to cope with Israel’s technological superiority.
“Israel’s movement is now easier and faster thanks to technology,” the security official said.
“For example, they use social media to recruit for jobs online. The person applying doesn’t know an Israeli intelligence agency is behind the screen. The Israelis start small – maybe they ask the recruit to take tourism photos for money.
“Then the requests get more intense, like maybe they want the recruit to gather information on a specific person, or to map roads.
“Before the person knows it they’ve become intelligence assets to the Israelis.”
When the border clashes began, the Israeli army intercepted phone calls, hacked into CCTV, and used satellites and surveillance drones to locate Hezbollah fighters.
Mr Jaber said Hezbollah and its allies were initially careless about using phones.
“Not using their phones on missions might have been an obvious lesson to learn given what we know of Israel’s abilities, but hindsight is 20/20,” he said.
In January, when an Israeli drone strike killed Hamas deputy leader Saleh Al Arouri at an office in Beirut, he and six other members of the group had their phones with them, connected to a Wi-Fi network.
Lebanese officials believe Israel used local agents to survey the office and its surroundings two weeks before the strike.
In December, two people were arrested on suspicion of providing information to Israel. They were allegedly recruited by a digital tourism company, which the security official said was probably a front for Israeli intelligence.
After the assassination, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned against the use of mobile phones, calling them “spy devices that can be controlled”.
On a warm April day in western Beirut, writer Ziad Kaj and bookshop owner Sleiman Bakhti traded spy stories.
Mr Kaj said he often saw Abu Rish in Beirut in the years before Israel invaded.
“Abu Rish became a lesson,” he said. “It reminded us that spies are everywhere.”
Mr Bakhti told a civil war-era joke about the pervasiveness of foreign spies in Lebanon.
“One day, a guest rang the fourth floor intercom of an agent’s house in western Beirut. The guest spoke a code into the speaker: ‘The clouds are over the hills.’
“The person on the other end of the line answered: ‘You have the wrong number. You want the spy on the third floor, not the fourth.’”
Lebanon wants to raise money, including debt, to develop its energy sector but funds are hard to come by as financial institutions choose to remain on the sidelines and the domestic financial system suffers from a lack of reforms, the country’s energy minister has said.
It is “almost impossible” to secure access to significant investment from institutions such as the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which are typically involved in big infrastructure projects, Walid Fayad, Lebanon’s caretaker Minister of Energy and Water said told The National.
“It’s not only a lack of financing in the oil and gas space, but also a lack of funding in the renewable energy space with major international institutions not yet unlocking the financial instruments,” he said on the sidelines of the World Energy Congress in Rotterdam.
Lebanon, which generates about 25 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy, requires an additional few thousand megawatts of solar capacity to complete its energy transition, which could cost a “couple of billion dollars”, he said.
“I want to say the total bill for the next 10 years would be something less than $1 billion.”
The country is grappling with what the World Bank has called one of the worst global financial crises since the 19th century.
It has yet to enforce critical structural and financial reforms required to obtain $3 billion of assistance from the International Monetary Fund, as well as billions in aid from other international donors, due to a lack of consensus among the political ruling class.
The country has been without a president since the end of October 2022, when the six-year term of Michel Aoun ended. It is being run by a caretaker cabinet led by Prime Minister Najib Mikati, with limited powers.
“You almost feel like you need the geopolitical stability in addition to other considerations of a political nature to unlock this financing,” Mr Fayad said.
“At the same time, inside Lebanon, the financial system has not undergone the needed reforms in order to allow the rebirth of the banking system and the access to the funding from the local banks,” he said.
In the past couple of years, Lebanon’s government has pinned its hopes on possible oil and gas reserves as a source of much-needed revenue for the debt-ridden country. Exploratory drilling for hydrocarbons in the country’s offshore Block 9 began last year after a US-mediated agreement that demarcated Lebanon’s maritime border with Israel.
French oil company TotalEnergies is leading the consortium that is doing the drilling, alongside Italian company Eni and state-owned QatarEnergy.
“In Lebanon, over a 20-year period, we have only dug two exploration wells and so statistically speaking, we just need to do more,” the minister said.
“We need to see better engagement from our international partners … in the exploration activities to produce commercial results. With two exploration wells, it is not sufficient to be able to get those results.”
At the World Energy Congress, executives and experts spoke about the need to lower carbon emissions without compromising the supply of oil and gas.
“People are really diverting from the real issue. We need to find solutions. We don’t need to eliminate a source of energy that is building economies [and] that is feeding all the globe,” Sharif Al Olama, undersecretary for Energy and Petroleum Affairs at the UAE Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, told a panel.
“I am a firm believer that gas is not going to go anywhere in the next few decades. Gas is going to be a transitional fuel and it will be needed.”
Mr Al Olama’s comments come as emerging economies in Asia aim to increase the share of natural gas to reduce dependence on highly polluting coal, amid an expected surge in power demand.
Amrita Sen, founder and director of research at Energy Aspects, called for higher investment in refining – a process of converting crude oil into petroleum and diesel – with the US shutting down ageing plants.
National oil companies from the Middle East are the only organisations in the industry investing in the downstream sector, Ms Sen said. “We do foresee a shortage in the downstream capacity in the medium term by 2030 because other than the Middle East, nobody else is investing.”
Ms Sen noted that Kuwait’s Al Zour refinery, the Middle East’s biggest, was the last major plant to be built in the region.
The UAE has made “continued investments” not just in refining but also in making the process greener, while Saudi Aramco has consistently invested in refining in the East, including in China and India.
Financing from Middle East national oil companies is “critical” as banks are generally unwilling to sponsor or finance projects related to downstream energy activities, Ms Sen said.
Sara Akbar, a Kuwaiti oil industry veteran and chief executive of Oilserv Kuwait, criticised the West’s backing of Israel and said the “billions” being given to the country in military aid by the US could be used for investing in renewable energy. “The West is supporting Israel today. You are creating your own enemy, believe me, because you have given them carte blanche and to hit anyone they like at any time with funding [in the] billions from the US,” Ms Akbar said.
“This money that goes into buying weapons could go into cleaning the world [or] renewables … instead of this huge destruction,” she said.
Last week, the US House of Representatives approved $86 billion in aid for Ukraine and Israel.
The bill includes $4 billion for Israel’s missile defences after this month’s drone and missile attacks by Iran.
It also provides $9 billion in global humanitarian aid, including for use in Gaza.
More than 34,200 people have been killed and another 77,229 wounded in Israeli bombardments in the Palestinian enclave since the deadly October 7 attacks by Hamas on southern Israel.
You need the geopolitical stability in addition to other considerations of a political nature to unlock this financing
WALID FAYAD
Minister of Energy and Water