Israeli bug raid led to laptop ban on planes

MIDDLE EAST: A ban on laptops being carried in passenger plane cabins was the result of a secret Israeli operation, according to a report.

Two helicopters flew commandos from Israel’s elite Sayeret Matkal force and a team of Mossad technical operatives into the desert near the Syrian city of Raqqa.

The commandos fanned out while the Mossad team, driving jeeps in the colours of the Assad regime army, placed a listening device in or near a room in which an Islamic State team was talking about bomb-making.

The bug picked up the team discussing a technique, thought to be the work of Ibrahim al-asiri, al Qaeda’s master bomb-maker, by which a device big enough to destroy an airliner could be fitted into a laptop.

The revelation, passed on by Mossad to Western intelligence, led Britain and the United States to ban laptops from the cabins of several airlines travelling from Middle Eastern cities. The US has since introduced new screening and lifted the ban, but Britain has kept it for some flights.

The Mossad operation also became the focus of a row between the United States and Israel, after US President Donald Trump revealed part of it to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, and Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to Washington. Israel’s intelligence service was said to be furious that by revealing an outline of the operation, Trump had endangered the Israeli agent who was presumed to have provided the tipoff about the Isis safe house.

According to Vanity Fair, whose reporter was briefed by two experts on Israeli intelligence operations, the raid took place in February, about a month after Trump’s inauguration.

John Kelly, the US homeland security secretary, subsequently admitted he had been sceptical about the ability of such a small bomb to bring down a plane. However, his staff had developed and tested their own such device on a plane on the ground. ‘‘To say the least, it destroyed the airplane,’’ he said. – The Times