The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran has reportedly ordered all of its members to stop using communications devices, at least until they can all be inspected.
The order came a few days after pagers and handheld radios used by the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah blew up, killing 39 and injuring over 3,000 more.
Two senior Iranian security officials told Reuters on Monday that the IRGC plans to inspect all of the electronics carried by its operatives. The IRGC gets most of its equipment from China and Russia and, in the wake of the Hezbollah blasts, the IRGC fears its supply lines may not be secure.
The security officials said Iran is also worried about “infiltration by Israeli agents, including Iranians on Israel’s payroll,” so a “thorough investigation” of middle- and high-ranking IRGC officers has begun.
“This includes scrutiny of their bank accounts both in Iran and abroad, as well as their travel history and that of their families,” one of the officials said.
The IRGC has reportedly obtained debris from exploded Hezbollah pagers and radios to study how the attack was pulled off, and the Iranians have asked their Hezbollah clients for “technical assessments” from last week’s explosions.
Iranian officials said they were particularly worried about Israel – widely thought to have engineered the pager blasts, although it has yet to claim responsibility for them – using its heretofore-unsuspected skills at weaponizing personal electronics to surveil or sabotage Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.
Neither of Reuters’ sources was willing to disclose how the IRGC’s roughly 190,000 personnel are communicating with each other at the moment. One of them mentioned that the Iranian military stopped using pagers “over two decades” ago. Another spoke of using “end-to-end encrypted messaging systems,” without discussing what sort of battery-powered device might be considered safe to use on either end of those messages.
Iranian opposition news service Iran International noticed on Monday that “regime insider” and former nuclear negotiator Mohammad Marandi has been cranking out social media posts warning Iranians not to purchase electronic devices from Western, Taiwanese, South Korea, or Japanese manufacturers.
Hezbollah’s exploding pagers were ostensibly manufactured by a Taiwanese firm, while it walkie-talkies came from a Japanese company. Both of those companies have said they had nothing to do with the equipment that exploded, describing them as obsolete models and knockoffs.
It is not yet clear whether the pagers and radios were weaponized at the time of manufacture, or if they were intercepted and sabotaged at some point along their supply chain.