Warriors of God (52 page)

Syria also was the chief supplier of Hezbollah's most advanced antitank missiles after 2000, acquiring from Russia and transferring to its Shia ally the AT-13 Metis-M, which has a tandem warhead and a range of just under a mile, and the third generation AT-14 Kornet-E, which has a laser-beam-riding guidance system and a range of more than three miles. The AT-14, one of the most advanced missiles in the world, can be fitted with antiarmor or bunker-busting thermobaric warheads and includes thermal-imaging capability for use at night. Hezbollah's acquisition of the AT-14 significantly raised the level of threat to Israel's fleet of tanks and armored vehicles.

Hezbollah was thought to have acquired a handful of 240 mm artillery rockets in the late 1990s, although the largest-caliber Katyusha ever fired into Israel before the IDF withdrawal was the standard 122 mm with a range of twelve miles. But from 2000 on, in addition to the Syrian rockets, Hezbollah received the Iranian Fajr family of rockets, with ranges from twenty-five to fifty miles, and the Falaq system of large-caliber but short-range rockets. Around 2002, Iran began delivering 610 mm Zelzal-1 and Zelzal-2 sub-ballistic rockets, which can carry an eleven-hundred-pound payload and travel up to 75 miles and 126 miles respectively.

In 2003, Israeli military intelligence learned that Hezbollah might have acquired a weapons system previously unseen in the south Lebanon theater: a shore-to-ship cruise missile. A warning was passed on to the Israeli navy, but when nothing more was heard, the initial reports were no longer taken seriously—an oversight that would have deadly consequences three years later during the July 2006 war. As was subsequently learned, Hezbollah had received a consignment of Iranian Noor antiship missiles, a reverse-engineered version of the Chinese C-802, a fifteen-hundred-pound radar-guided cruise missile with a range of seventy-two miles.

The acquisition of new longer-range rocket systems did not go unnoticed by the Israelis. Even before the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, Israeli
officials, military and civilian, regularly fed the media with assessments of Hezbollah's arms buildup. The number of rockets in Hezbollah's arsenal was estimated at eight thousand in 2000, a figure that two years later had risen to ten thousand. In May 2006, Major General Amos Gilad, a senior defense ministry official, claimed that Hezbollah had acquired thirteen to fourteen thousand rockets.

Typically, Hezbollah would deflect repeated inquiries about its rocket arsenal, maintaining its preference for ambiguity. But Hezbollah's leaders often alluded in speeches to the existence of long-range rockets, teasing the Israelis with vague hints rather than hard facts. “We have the power to destroy important and sensitive targets in northern occupied Palestine,” Nasrallah said in a May 2006 speech marking the sixth anniversary of the Israeli troop withdrawal from south Lebanon. “The resistance now has over thirteen thousand rockets. All of north occupied Palestine is within our firing range. This is the minimum range. As for the range beyond the north … it is best to be silent.”

The same level of creativity that went into the bunker networks could also be found in the construction and deployment of Hezbollah's fixed firing platforms for its arsenal of 122 mm Katyusha rockets. The rocket posts were placed in dense undergrowth on reverse (north-facing) slopes of valleys to make them more difficult targets for Israeli artillery guns firing from the south. The 122 mm rockets, standard and upgraded, which between them have ranges of twelve to thirty miles, covered a belt adjacent to Israel to a depth of about six miles from the border. Some positions were simple shelters of cinder block walls and concrete roof open at opposite ends, protected by sandbags and rock-filled Hesco blast protection barriers and disguised by camouflage netting and foliage. Thermal blankets were thrown over the launchers immediately after firing to mask the heat signature from patrolling Israeli aircraft overhead. One typical position I found was a firing pit about four meters deep, the walls lined with concrete. The top of the
southern wall was angled 45 degrees to facilitate the launching of the rocket. At the back of the pit was a short tunnel that doglegged into a small chamber where the rockets were kept. In the one I explored, a house-proud Hezbollah militant had decorated the walls of the chamber with panels from the wooden crates in which the rockets were packed.

Some rocket launchers were fixed to platforms that could be raised or lowered electronically from holes in the ground. Abu Mahdi, a veteran Hezbollah fighter, told me after the 2006 war that a comrade of his was taken to a mountaintop and told that that he was in charge of a Katyusha rocket launcher. “My friend looked around him and asked, ‘Where is it?' The other man pressed a button and the launcher rose out of the ground next to him,” he said.

Residents of a village in south Lebanon, about thirteen miles north of the border, remember on July 28, 2006, midway through the war, a group of Hezbollah men arriving in the village carrying laptop computers. The men entered an orchard and began tapping at a keyboard. A launcher emerged from the ground among the trees and a single large-caliber rocket was fired. The rocket, carrying a 220-pound warhead, hit the Israeli town of Afula in what was then the deepest strike into Israel of the war.

Perhaps the most ingenious rocket launcher was a homemade contraption consisting of ten 122 mm Katyusha launching tubes arrayed in two rows of five encased in a block of cement. The cement blocks, hinged at one end, were laid horizontally into shallow pits prealigned in the direction of the targeted town or kibbutz. The blocks were then covered by a steel plate and camouflaged by a roll of turf. To launch them, the Hezbollah team would roll back the turf, remove the steel plate, and electronically raise the concrete block to a predesignated firing angle. Once the rockets were fired, the block was lowered back into its pit, the steel plate replaced, and the turf unfurled, and the militants would take cover in a nearby cave or bunker long before Israeli artillery initiated a counterbombardment.

Beyond a belt extending roughly six miles north of the border, Hezbollah built emplacements for its stock of larger-caliber rockets,
some of them fired from multibarreled launchers on the back of Mercedes-Benz trucks. The trucks were hidden in ground-floor garages of buildings and houses, generally lying on the outskirts of towns or villages. In a time of war, the trucks would emerge from the buildings, unleash a salvo of rockets, and then return to cover inside.

Due to their longer range and larger size—which makes them more difficult to conceal—the Zelzal rockets were positioned farther north. According to Western intelligence sources, the Zelzals are launched from specially adapted shipping containers carried on trucks. The roof of the shipping container is hinged and flips open at the touch of a button, allowing the rocket to be elevated on a launch rail and fired.

Arguably the most significant improvement to the capabilities of the Islamic Resistance from 2000 on was the introduction of a new and more advanced communications and signals intelligence (SIGINT) infrastructure.

Originally, in the late 1980s, Hezbollah communicated by walkie-talkie and hand-cranked cable-linked military field telephones that connected the secret bases in the Jabal Safi Mountains on the western edge of the Jezzine enclave. The field telephones were apparently introduced after Israel was able to intercept Hezbollah's radio chatter and track and target the fighters. Even Nasrallah is rumored never to have used a cell phone, for that same reason.

In the 1990s, Hezbollah installed an internal telephone network using copper lines that initially linked command nodes and senior officials and officers. The network was expanded during that decade until it connected Hezbollah's main operational areas in southern Beirut, the south, and the southern Bekaa Valley. The cables were buried alongside government communications lines, allowing Hezbollah to take advantage of existing infrastructure and affording a level of security for its network. After 2000, the lines were extended into the border district, and some of the copper lines were replaced with fiber optic cables. In
2003, UNIFIL peacekeepers often saw Hezbollah engineers laying the inch-thick black fiber optic cables in trenches alongside roads in the south. Not only does a fiber optic cable transmit substantially more information than a traditional copper line (one fiber optic cable can carry about the same amount of data as a thousand copper lines), it provides greater security and is less prone to interception and tapping. In addition to voice communications, the network allowed Hezbollah to send images and to communicate by instant messaging and emails.

Hezbollah knew that in the event of war, the Israeli military would seek to impose a “jamming blanket” in southern Lebanon to block radio and cell phone signals. Each electronic jammer covers a relatively small geographic area, making it impossible for the Israelis to cover south Lebanon in its entirety. But Hezbollah anticipated that the frontline areas would be affected, requiring combat units to use the fiber optic network, which cannot be jammed electronically, to communicate with command posts farther north. Indeed, during the 2006 war, cell phones continued to operate in Tyre even when Israeli troops advanced to within eight miles of the town. But in Bint Jbeil, scene of one of the fiercest confrontations, neither cell phones nor satellite phones used by reporters worked due to Israeli jamming.

Still, Hezbollah had another trick up its sleeve to allow it to continue using radios even in jammed combat zones. Communications personnel carried military-grade portable spectrum analyzers, the size of a laptop computer, to discover which frequencies were being blocked. That allowed the fighters to switch to clear frequencies to maintain radio communications with one another even while operating in a jammed environment.

For wireless communications, Hezbollah fighters carry Icom V8, V82, and V85 handheld radios. The range of the radio signals are boosted by hundred-watt transmitter antennae, enabling conversations by walkie-talkie as far apart as Beirut to Tyre, a distance of forty-three miles.

Although the radio sets are not encrypted, secure communications are ensured through a regularly updated vocal code system using letters and numbers. “We have codes for everything, references to martyrs, casualties,
locations, fighters, weapons, radio frequencies, tactics,” explains one Hezbollah fighter. “We change them regularly, at least once a month, sometimes every day.”

Hezbollah's communications unit devises the codes, which are printed on laminated cards and distributed to unit commanders, who then pass them on to the fighters. Other than a universal code for the organization, separate codes are issued for different
qita'at
, or sectors, all the way down to a subsector of two or three villages. At the subsector level, fighters will augment the official coding system with an ad hoc code based on their intimate knowledge of the local terrain and of each other. Two veteran Hezbollah fighters in the southern village of Srifa gave a demonstration of how the code worked during the 2006 war. Hajj Rabieh, a schoolteacher in normal times, pulled from his pocket a small laminated card listing Hezbollah's code numbers for positions in the area and for each fighter. “I am 103 and Abu Mohammed is 121,” he said, referring to his comrade squatting nearby. Abu Mohammed said, “Hajj Rabieh once loved a woman in the village. I could call him [on the walkie-talkie] and say ‘let's meet at the house of the woman who melted your heart.' How can the Israeli enemy understand that?”

During the 2006 war, each Hezbollah fighter went by the generic name Fallah but was identified by a following code number. In demonstrating how it worked, Hajj Rabieh picked up his walkie-talkie and spoke into it: “Fallah 47, 47, 47.” When a voice answered, he said in greeting, “God give you strength,” then “Go, go, go.” He tapped at the walkie-talkie, switching to a preselected frequency to continue the conversation.

“What did you have for lunch?” Hajj Rabieh asked.

“Rice and potatoes,” came the tinny answer.

Since the mid-1990s, Hezbollah had used scanners to record conversations on Israeli cell phones for translation by the party's Hebrew speakers. This technique allowed Hezbollah to glean valuable intelligence from garrulous soldiers deployed in south Lebanon or in positions along the border.

From 2000 on, technicians from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps–Quds Force instructed a special Hezbollah intelligence-gathering
unit in the use of the latest Iranian electronic interception devices and jamming equipment to monitor and block Israeli military communications. The high-tech Iranian equipment even overcame the complex frequency-hopping techniques used by the Israelis to avoid jamming and interception, according to U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials as well as Hezbollah sources. Hezbollah's SIGINT personnel were required to be fluent Hebrew speakers, and many were conversant in two or three more languages. Surveillance centers were established in apartments and houses in villages near the border, often within view of the security fence and adjacent Israeli army compounds. Here, the SIGINT personnel carefully monitored and recorded Israeli communications traffic, sending the data via fiber optic links to Beirut, where it was translated into Arabic. Even the individual cell phones of Israeli military commanders were tapped by the SIGINT specialists, thanks to Hezbollah's network of spies in northern Israel passing on lists of the phone numbers. The buried fiber optic network also ensured that in a time of war critical data collected by the SIGINT unit could be translated immediately by the intelligence operators and distributed directly to commanders in the field.

Hezbollah's SIGINT capabilities also benefited from the military partnership between Iran and Syria. In November 2005, Iran and Syria signed and ratified a joint strategic defense cooperation agreement that in part called for the establishment of four SIGINT stations covering Syria's border regions. The highly secret and compartmentalized listening stations are staffed by Syrian and Iranian intelligence officers, technicians, and electronic warfare experts as well as Hebrew-, English-, and Turkish-speaking translators. Two of the four stations were reportedly up and running by the outbreak of war in July 2006. One of the two was located on the Golan Heights and reportedly passed on intelligence data to Hezbollah commanders in Lebanon via dedicated fiber optic links, which were impervious to Israeli electronic countermeasures.
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