DOUBT AS A WEAPON

Hezbollah is incapable of penetrating and exploiting the Israeli army's tactical radio systems as it claimed it did during the recent fighting in Lebanon, say senior U.S. electronics industry officials.

Even so, the militant Islamic organization is parlaying the results of a relatively common signals intelligence capability for analyzing communications traffic and intercepting cell-phone calls into a major psychological warfare victory, say U.S. officials. The success has been so complete that both Israel Defense Force (IDF) and U.S. Army users of advanced encrypted, frequency-hopping radios have raised doubts about the security of their communications.

"What they're really doing is a very good psychological operation," says a senior information operations specialist and industry executive. "One of the things you want to do is instill doubt. Hezbollah makes the pronouncement that they can read encrypted radios. They wanted the IDF troops to believe they weren't as invulnerable as they thought. It ran like wildfire through the U.S. troops as well. What you're witnessing is unsophisticated technology exploited by sophisticated information operations. They scored big time in the psychological warfare department. The enemy is figuring out ways to use the information age against us."

The uncertainty created by stories and rumors about the capabilities of a joint Hezbollah/Iranian intercept facility operated in Syria during the Lebanon fighting reached high levels in both U.S. and Israeli military organizations.

In fact, the U.S. Army's senior program official for the single-channel ground and airborne radio system (Sincgars), James Bowden, was contacted by U.S. service members expressing fear that Hezbollah or Iran was sharing with extremists in Iraq the advanced technology they used to crack Israeli communications.

"We are concerned, because these [reports] lead people to think that Sincgars is vulnerable, and that this technology is available to bad guys," Bowden says. He says the U.S. radio's unique frequency-hopping algorithm, as well as communication and transmission security devices, protects the radio.

Bowden makes two other points. The Israelis don't use Sincgars, and following proper communications procedures ensures that the U.S. radio can't be exploited. That explanation does leave open the widespread concern that frequency-hopping radios are not invulnerable and that being careless can also present a savvy foe with opportunities.

The info ops specialist explained what the Iranians and Hezbollah were able to do. Sorting out the facts has been complicated because of the IDF's predictable silence except for the admission that cell and satellite phones in the hands of its troops were vulnerable to intercept. Also, the stories of what happened are jumbled because reports often confused cell-phone and frequency-hopping radio technology.

"It's not the hopping but the encryption that's very difficult, if not impossible, to break," the specialist says. "What they did is use direction finding [DF] to locate frequency hoppers. In fact, they're easier to DF than conventional signals because you have more shots at it. With a commercially available system, you can probably find at least one of the frequencies."