Security experts and chiefs now view supply chain terrorism as a major threat

The detonation of thousands of Hezbollah electronic pagers stunned security officials around the world and left them “mystified over the elaborate front companies that Israel set up to supply the booby-trapped devices” according to an article in the Financial Times.  

In the article, a former head of Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, warns that the attack was a “valuable wake-up call” about the vulnerability of western supply chains. “Because supply chains are invisible, we pay them no attention,” he said. “But the west has got to properly price the risks inherent in supply chains — be that Russian energy, Chinese electronics, or now this — and put them alongside other risks, such as AI, drones and cyber warfare.”  

As the article notes: “that includes the possibility that supply chains could be intercepted by terrorists, a point addressed by Ken McCallum, head of Britain’s domestic intelligence service MI5. Asked about the pager operation at a rare press conference in October, McCallum replied that an important aspect of MI5’s work was to “stay ahead of where terrorism might get to”. 

It should be noted supply chain sabotage and assassinations are hardly new methods of gaining an advantage over an adversary. Going as far back as ancient times, armies used spies to act as merchants to discover what their adversaries were up to or use nefarious tactics to poison water supplies.  

“More recently, during the cold war, the CIA smuggled flawed computer chips into supply chains that the Soviet Union used to steal western technology via commercial front companies”, the FT notes.  

“The most successful example of the CIA’s campaign was some malfunctioning software that blew apart a gas pipeline in a three-kiloton explosion in 1982. No one was killed, and the repairs cost the Kremlin millions of roubles it could ill-afford.”  

The FT article concludes that: “At a recent meeting in Washington, a group of US officials worried that if Israel could booby trap mundane electronic gadgets such as pagers, a whole range of Chinese civilian technologies — such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines, almost anything with a battery — could also be weaponised.”