Radio silence. Officially, Israel has not commented on the operation that this week caused the almost simultaneous explosion of thousands of pagers and other communication devices used by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon. Unofficially, a mysterious and secret Israeli unit is suspected of being linked to this attack that left at least 37 dead and nearly 3,000 injured: Unit 8200.
In the operation to neutralize the pro-Iranian Shiite party, this unit had the “skills to set up the entire part of triggering the explosions”, judge near from the Parisian Gérôme Billois, cybersecurity expert at Wavestone. First, in the “design of the booby-trapped software”, which would have been placed in each of the transmission devices. Then at the time of “the transmission of the message to trigger the explosions”. “This is the mark of this unit”, assures David Rigoulet-Roze, associate researcher at Iris, to the same daily.
The equivalent of the NSA
This cyberwarfare and intelligence unit of the Israel Defense Forces is part of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate. Unit 8200 (pronounced 8-200, shmone matayim in Hebrew), which emerged from the first decryption and intelligence units formed at the birth of the State of Israel in 1948, is responsible for decoding and analyzing information obtained by the intelligence service. It is the largest military unit in the Israeli Defense Forces. The Cross noted that this service, founded in 1952, has several thousand members – the precise figure is confidential – and two thirds of the staff of Aman, Israeli military intelligence.
Unit 8200 is the equivalent of the US National Security Agency (NSA). “Unit 8200 is probably the best technical intelligence agency in the world and is on a par with the NSA in every way except scale,” reported Peter Roberts, director of military science at the Royal United Services Institute, the UK armed forces think tank, with from the Financial Times in 2015. “They are very focused on what they are looking at and they carry out their operations with a degree of tenacity and passion that you don’t find anywhere else.”
This unit is “responsible for collecting information, listening and spying”, described Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah on August 25, targeting the Glilot base that day, located 110 km from the Lebanese border and 1.5 km from Tel Aviv, where unit 8200 is located.
A tarnished reputation
In 2023, remember ReutersIsrael said the unit used artificial intelligence to help select Hamas targets. In addition to spying on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, Unit 8200 operates in all areas, including combat zones. And in wartime, it is closely integrated with the Combat Command headquarters.
A few days before the pager explosions in Lebanon on September 12, 2024, Brigadier General Yossi Sariel, commander of this elite unit of Israeli military intelligence, announced his resignation, in the wake of his service’s failure to prevent the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Accused of this failure, the Israeli army intelligence service experienced an unprecedented crisis and its commander, General Aaron Haliva, became the first senior officer in the Israeli army to resign, in April 2024.
Last June, Kan public television revealed the existence of a report from Unit 8200 dated September 19, 2023, detailing training by elite Hamas units for raids on military positions and kibbutzim in southern Israel, less than three weeks before the Islamist movement launched its bloody attack. As France Inter reminds usYossi Sariel, obsessed with the potential of artificial intelligence, did not heed this warning. Indeed, the red alert system set up for information of this kind had been abolished by the brigadier general, the latter having imposed a central system managed by super-algorithms. The latter, extremely sophisticated in theory, did not understand anything in practice about the report that was sent to him and… blocked it.
Yossi Sariel was also at the heart of revelations of The Guardianin April 2024, which he could have done without. He did indeed leave his identity exposed online. This embarrassing security breach is linked to the publication of an anonymous book on Amazon, The Human Machine Teamwhere he left a digital trail to a private Google account created in his name. In this book, Yossi Sariel offers a radical vision of how artificial intelligence can transform the relationship between military personnel and machines.
Recruitment from high school onwards
Before his resignation, the experienced Yossi Sariel worked in Unit 8200 with a staff selected from among young people in their twenties. Some were identified from highly competitive high school programs, tasked with finding the best students in mathematics and computer science.
Many of them have gone on to pursue careers in Israel’s high-tech and cybersecurity sectors. GPS company Waze, which was sold to Google in 2013, was founded in the late 2000s by three veterans of Unit 8200. The founders of Israel’s two biggest names in high-tech, Check Point and CyberArk, listed on the Nasdaq in New York, also cut their teeth in the unit.
“When you join this entity under the age of 18, you have not demonstrated anything but you are selected, hand-picked, based on your potential,” explained Inbal Arieli, a former lieutenant of unit 8200, in our columns in 2019. “Not only do you have to be autonomous and know how to work in a team, but you also have to take initiatives and dare to contradict your superiors, even if it means arguing with them. So many points in common with the functioning of a start-up,” she indicated, before specifying that “the abilities” of these people working for unit 8200 “can also be used in finance, health or elsewhere.”
A book and a series
In recent years, tragic events have tarnished the image of this unit. The NSO group, which sold the Pegasus software – capable of spying on all the information present in a smartphone running Android – was created by former members of the intelligence service, and more than a quarter of its employees come from the prestigious unit. Veterans of this intelligence section have designed and sold powerful surveillance technologies normally used in the fight against terrorism to countries wishing to control their population or their opponents. Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident journalist exiled in the United States, murdered and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul (Turkey), was one of the victims.
Furthermore, among the operations in which this unit was allegedly involved was the Stuxnet virus attack from 2005 to 2010 that disabled Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. In 2010, The Diplomatic World reported that Unit 8200 has set up one of the world’s largest listening bases in Urim, in the Negev desert region, capable of intercepting phone calls, emails and other types of communications across the Middle East, Europe, Asia and Africa, as well as locating ships.
This mysterious unity inspires literature and cinema. In 2016, the French-Israeli journalist Dov Alfon published a thriller, Unit 8200 (Liana Levi), describing a thrilling treasure hunt between the French police, the Israeli intelligence service and Chinese criminals. The publication and editorial director of Release was an Israeli intelligence officer in Unit 8200 during his military service and his months in the reserve. A six-episode mini-series of the same name, directed by Dan Sachar and loosely adapted from the book written by Dov Alfon, with actor Patrick Bruel, is also expected in France this year 2024.