New in SpyWeek: Beyond Deadly Pagers

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Would be Trump assassin Asif Merchant

UPDATED: Hezbollah confirmed early Saturday that its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah had died in an Israeli airstrike on his underground headquarters in Beirut. Also noteworthy: the strike also killed a senior Iranian commander of the Quds Forces, Brig. Gen. Abbas Nilforoushan, who headed its operations for Lebanon and Syria.

Israel’s diabolically imaginative op to put exploding pagers and walkie-talkies into the hands of Iran-backed Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon two weeks ago generated unsurprising “wow” headlines—swiftly followed by worries that our adversaries could be inspired to mount copycat ops using U.S. electronics supply chains.  While privately expressing some concern about supply chair infiltration this week (more on this in coming days), SpyTalk’s knowledgeable intelligence sources said their far greater worry is the crescending tsunami of real and potential sabotage and elections-oriented infowar ops via “the internet of things” by foreign adversaries Russia, China, North Korea and Iran. Case in point: a DOJ-led grand jury’s indictment Friday of three Iranian hackers.

In the instant case, the Iranians were accused of targeting a wide array of U.S. officials with email phishing and other tricks over the past four years, but had recently managed to steal sensitive Trump campaign documents and offer them via cutouts to the Biden-Harris camp and journalists, reminiscent of Russia’s theft of internal DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign emails in 2016 that were circulated to an all-too-eager press corp by Wikileaks. 

This time, the recipients  of the stolen goods—save one, former Intercept reporter and current Substacker Ken Klippenstein—didn’t bite. He published a dossier on JD Vance, for which MAGA cheerleader Elon Musk’s X suspended him.