A Brief History of Booby-Trapping Electronics to Blow Up

Two large-scale, coordinated attacks this week rocked Lebanon — the latest iteration in a historical pattern of booby-trapping electronics.

On Tuesday, one attack caused pagers to explode across Lebanon and Syria, injuring thousands of people and killing at least 12, including a 9-year-old girl and an 11-year-old boy. A second wave of bombings unfolded on Wednesday, when explosives detonated inside a slew of hand-held radios across the country, leaving nine dead and 300 wounded, according to reports.

Israel, which is widely assumed to be behind both attacks, reportedly booby-trapped pagers used by Hezbollah members, carrying out a similar feat with the hand-held radios. The bombings appear to be supply-chain attacks — meaning the gadgets were tampered with or outright replaced with rigged devices containing explosives and a detonator at some point prior to arriving in the hands of the targets. Hezbollah, which also attributes the exploding electronics to Israel, had reportedly recently switched en masse to using pagers for communications to evade Israeli surveillance.

The scale of the coordinated attacks was shocking, but the tactic of turning an electronic gadget into an explosive device is not unprecedented. In fact, it dates back at least half a century, according to U.S. military documents.

Field Manual 5-31, titled simply “Boobytraps” and first published by the U.S. Department of the Army in 1965, describes the titular objects as explosive charges “cunningly contrived to be fired by an unsuspecting person who disturbs an apparently harmless object or performs a presumably safe act.” The 130-page manual provides an array of intricate wiring diagrams and cross-sectional schematics for booby-trapping various devices ranging from office equipment like desks and telephone list finders (early phone directories) to kitchenware like pots and kettles, as well as items like televisions and beds.

The manual also describes a World War II-era booby-trapped communications headset “containing an electric detonator connected to the terminals on the back. The connection of the headset into the live communication line initiated detonation.”

An earlier edition of the “Boobytraps” field manual from the same year includes a diagram of a desk phone rigged with an explosive charge in its base. It states that “a phony telephone can be manufactured that will detonate when an attempt is made to use the instrument.” This diagram was omitted from the later version of the manual.

Another Army manual from 1966, TM 31-200-1, covering “Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques,” further elaborates that while the “test history” of the booby-trapped headset is not known, the concept nonetheless “appears to be workable” and that “even a small charge of explosives detonated near the ear will cause serious injury.”

Some 30 years later, in 1996, the Israeli Security Agency, also known as Shin Bet, is said to used a similar technique to detonate a small charge of explosives near the ear of Hamas bomb-maker Yahya Ayyash. Knowing that Ayyash used the phones of his friends, orchestrators of the assassination managed to deliver a rigged phone to a relative of one of Ayyash’s childhood pals. When Ayyash answered a booby-trapped phone, reports suggest his communications were intercepted by aerial surveillance and Shin Bet remotely detonated the booby-trapped device, killing him.

Communications devices are not the only electronics that have been turned into explosives. An issue of Inspire from 2010, a magazine published by Al Qaeda, contains an article by Ikrimah Al-Muhajir of the “Explosives Department,” elaborating at length how a printer was booby-trapped to include explosives in the ink cartridge. According to the article, bomb-makers used a circuit from a Nokia cellphone to allow the device to pass through airport security undetected.

Al-Muhajir claimed that the molecular number of the printer’s toner was close to the molecular number of the explosive compound used, while the cellphone’s circuitry helped it blend in with the internal circuits of the printer. Two devices were discovered owing to intelligence about the plot, having already made their way successfully onto numerous planes.

More recently, Ecuadorian journalists in 2023 were sent booby-trapped USB sticks, which, when plugged into their computers, exploded and injured a television presenter. The USB sticks are said to have used the same type of explosive compound, RDX, used in the assassination of Ayyash.

In the aftermath of the coordinated attacks in Lebanon and Syria, more details might emerge on how the devices were manipulated to explode. But the takeaway for now is that electronic communications tools aren’t merely susceptible to surveillance — they can, in fact, be turned into weapons themselves.

Update: September 18, 2024, 1:48 p.m. ET
The story has been updated with new information regarding the two children who were killed in the pager attack on Tuesday as well as a similar coordinated attack on Wednesday in Lebanon that targeted hand-held radios.