Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps ordered all its members to stop using any communication devices following last week’s alleged Israeli attack that detonated thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, officials said.
The order comes as the IRGC is conducting a mass inspection of all devices issued to its agents, two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters.
One official said the sweep will include all electronics, not just communication equipment, with most of the devices either being homemade or imported from China and Russia.
The officials claimed a thorough investigation of the IRGC’s own mid and high-ranking members has already begun as Tehran grows concerned over possible infiltration by Israeli agents.
“This includes scrutiny of their bank accounts both in Iran and abroad, as well as their travel history and that of their families,” one security official said of the ongoing probe.
It remains unclear how the nearly 200,000 IRGC operatives are currently communicating with each other after receiving the order to ditch their devices.
“For now, we are using end-to-end encryption in messaging systems,” one of the officials added, declining to elaborate.
Along with its own internal probe, the IRGC is also helping Hezbollah investigate the cause of last week’s deadly explosions, which killed 39 people and injured more than 3,000 others.
Reports following the attacks suggested Israel intercepted a shipment of pagers and walkie-talkies bound for Hezbollah months ago and planted explosive materials inside them.
While Iran stopped using pagers more than two decades ago, the sources said the military still uses walkie-talkies, along with other encrypted communication devices.
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Among Tehran’s top concerns is that Israel could use similar tactics to target its secret nuclear and missile facilities, a third Iranian official told Reuters.
“There has never, ever been such tight security and extreme measures in place as there are now,” the official said following the pager attack.
Israel has been previously accused of complex operations in Tehran that killed several of the Islamic Republic’s top nuclear scientists, including the program’s founder who was gunned down by a machine gun controlled by AI.
In order to keep its systems hidden, as well as circumvent Western sanctions, Tehran has developed its own military-grade radio transmissions.
Tehran has, however, imported communication devices from China, Russia, and even Japan.
The IRGC has vowed to join Hezbollah’s counterattack on Israel after Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was injured in the pager attack.
“Such terrorist acts are undoubtedly the result of the Zionist regime’s (Israel) despair and successive failures,” IRGC commander Hossein Salami told Hezbollah, according to Iranian state media.
“This will soon be met with a crushing response from the axis of resistance and we will witness the destruction of this bloodthirsty and criminal regime,” Salami added.
With Post wires —
