“DO NOT try to do too much with your own hands,” T.E. Lawrence advised in an essay from August 1917. “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly.” This is a key tenet of insurgency warfare that the Islamic Republic of Iran has been keen to apply in its relationship with Lebanese Hezbollah—especially as their collaboration has expanded into cyberspace. When it comes to influence strategy, Iranian leaders have long known that, in an era of increasingly vocal nongovernmental players and deregulation of information exchanges, governments can no longer rely solely on their own official communication channels to win the heart and minds of foreign populations. Diffusing ideological content through indigenous networks is likely to have a deeper impact than through national channels. In today’s hypermedia age, working with local friends and allies, with and through local medias, is certainly one of the most crucial and delicate aspects of any credible cyber-influence strategy.

Ever since its establishment in 1982 with Iranian subsidies and with the support of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Lebanese Hezbollah has been a crucial surrogate for allowing Iran to break its diplomatic isolation and extend its footprint throughout the Middle East “by other means.” The Party of God has acted as a platform of influence through which the Islamic Republic projects its ideological doctrine regionally and prolongs its other-than-war strategy. Engaging with this non-governmental actor, often described as a state within a state, and taping into its networks is a way of filling the gaps between official efforts and effectively reaching out to Lebanese and Middle Eastern youth, consumers, politicians, journalists, businesses, and opinionmakers. By relying on the Lebanese Shia movement to amplify the echo of its message in the proverbial Arab street, it is also a matter of compensating for Iran’s weaknesses in the conventional realms while establishing a virtual border with Israel and challenging Saudi Arabia and Gulf Cooperation Council countries in their strategic depth.

Since the early 1980s, Hezbollah has devotedly reproduced the Iranian modus operandi by combining the classic methods of insurrectional warfare with sophisticated propaganda campaigns to carry out a full-spectrum fight against its American, Israeli, and Saudi adversaries. Blending irregular warfare and high-tech psychological methods, Hezbollah is a pioneer in the art of multifaceted influence strategies enabling the promotion of strategic interests while avoiding head-on combat with militarily superior adversaries: “Inspired and refined with the help of Iran,” notes Ben Schaefer, “Hezbollah is shifting its coercive tactics from urban streets and battlefields to the routers of their Western adversaries.” After initially using it as a simple guerrilla auxiliary, Iran helped it grow into a powerful cyber-proxy capable of magnifying the scope of Iranian ideological power. Over the past decade, this maleficent group has developed into one of the main cyber-protagonists of today’s global arena.

IN THE years following the 1979 revolution, the Iranian regime started relying heavily on its standing as a beacon of the Shia world to galvanize support from pockets of Shia populations in a Sunni-dominated Middle East. With 140 million followers forming an almost uninterrupted string of communities stretching from the Mediterranean to the Ganges Valley, the Shia world constitutes a formidable pool of influence that is all the more strategic for Tehran as three-quarters of the region’s oil reserves are concentrated in areas two-thirds populated by Shia denizens. In the Lebanese context, Tehran’s religious outreach policy has included spreading pro-regime messages through a network of mosques and husseiniyyas (religious meeting locales), as well as through medias linked to the Islamic Republic information agency known as Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. One of the spearheads of Tehran’s audiovisual diplomacy with regard to local Arab-Shia populations is the satellite channel Al-Alam (the Arab World) conveying to its Arabic-speaking and Shia audience favorable views on the Islamic Republic. Launched in 2003 during the U.S. invasion of Iraq and having offices in Teheran, Bagdad, and Beirut, the Iranian TV station prides itself on providing an alternative to other satellite networks run by the Gulf monarchies. 

Very quickly, however, those responsible for the Iranian influence strategy came to realize that, to better bridge the famous “last three feet” that stand between Tehran and its target audience, it is essential to relay their message via Hezbollah’s own influence network. Iranian sponsors, therefore, ensured that the substantial aid provided to the Shia militia was not only used to set up an army of several thousand fighters but also served to build a powerful propaganda machine deeply rooted in Lebanese society. Founded in 1991, Al-Manar (The Lighthouse, or The Minaret), the largest and most prominent broadcasting company in Lebanon, rapidly positioned itself at the heart of the influence system co-managed by the Party of God and its Iranian backers. From the get-go, the pro-Iranian TV station plainly displayed its mandate on its website: “Al-Manar is the first Arab organization to stage an effective psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy.” The return on investment has been total for Tehran: Al-Manar acts as a proxy channel for ideological subversion re-broadcasting Iranian messages without its initiatives being directly attributable to the Islamic regime. In other words, a powerful information laundering device.

To support and strengthen this type of subversive partnership, Iran created, in October 2003, the National Passive Defensive Organization (NPDO), an elite cyber-organization in charge of promoting Iran’s interests by systematizing “the use of nonlethal means” including psychological action and the use of mass media conduits. A key cog in the Iranian influence projection program, NPDO has been working closely with the Lebanese Hezbollah to promote “regional resistance doctrine.” It is notably thanks to this form of mechanism that Hezbollah and its satellite channel have succeeded in mastering the art of public diplomacy to galvanize Arab populations against Washington. So much so that, in 2002, several Western observers were already attributing the unprecedented level of anti-American hatred and the failure of U.S. public diplomacy in the Middle East to the virulent anti-Western messages spread through Iran-backed media like Al-Manar. 

ISRAEL AND Hezbollah’s thirty-three-day war in the summer of 2006 marked a turning point in the partnership between Hezbollah and Iran by enabling a symbolic victory over Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)—a victory very largely won on the media front and the cyber battlefield. “How could a few hundred guerrillas force their will on a regional power [like Israel]?” asked Ron Schleifer of Ariel University in the immediate aftermath of the conflict. For him, the standoff between Israel and Hezbollah was a blatant example of asymmetric psychological warfare illustrating the way in which a weaker challenger can level the playfield and seize the initiative at the expense of its conventional opponent. In the Israeli political scientist’s view, the pro-Iranian militia largely prevailed in this “war of images” by focusing on communication techniques and methods of message dissemination, thus securing a key advantage over its powerful adversary despite its initial lack of brute force. 

Short of weapons of mass destruction, Hezbollah relied on weapons of mass persuasion to emerge as the virtual winner of the Second Lebanon War. Firstly, the militia benefited from a powerful psychological warfare system overseen by a psywar unit specifically dedicated to the diffusion of doctrinal and symbolic imagery. As the spokesperson for the Israeli army noted at the time, this special unit enjoyed irrefutable expertise in the art of acting on the morale of key segments of local, regional, and international public opinions. However, it is the Shia cable television channel Al-Manar which, by forming the centerpiece of Hezbollah’s psychological action artillery, proved decisive: It was the first channel to announce the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese border. Following the “ceasefire,” it was Al-Manar that featured Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of Hezbollah, saying: “we are at the brink of a great victory; a strategic and historic one … a great triumph brought about by Hezbollah fighters and its Iranian allies.” In the space of a month and, to large extent, thanks to Al-Manar’s propaganda machine, Hezbollah metamorphosed from a simple armed Islamist group to the leading mouthpiece of the Lebanese resistance against “Zionist imperialism.”

In addition to yielding an indirect victory over the IDF, the Second Lebanon War provided Iran’s IRGC with a testing ground to experiment with the so-called Mosaic Asymmetrical Warfare doctrine adopted in 2005. To a large extent, it is by applying the Iranian ally’s recommendations that the Party of God managed to symbolically win over the Israeli forces. It is no coincidence that only a few weeks after the end of the conflict, Brigadier General Mohammad-Ali Jafari, commander of the IRGC, pointed out that: “As the likely enemy is far more advanced technologically than we are, we have been using what is called ‘asymmetric warfare’ methods … We have gone through the necessary exercises and our forces are now well prepared for this.” In many regards, the 2006 war proved a pivotal moment: it is at this point that specialists such as F.G. Hoffman date the emergence of what they coined “hybrid conflicts”—ones involving coordinated use of military and non-military means to achieve gains in the psychological dimensions of conflicts.

THE THIRTY-three-day Second Lebanon War also marked the beginning of Iran and Hezbollah’s intense collaboration in cyberspace and, in particular, the latter’s discovery of the strategic advantages offered by cyber-influence—an aspect that went largely unnoticed at the time. During this conflict, the Shia militia started launching relatively advanced cyber-attacks against Israeli and U.S. websites. However, what immediately distinguished these cyber-sabotage acts is that they were systematically exploited as public relations operations aimed at promoting the cause, image, and ideological doctrine of the Lebanese militia. As Ben Schaefer notes, in addition to compromising legitimate websites, these attacks “focused on spreading Hezbollah’s propaganda.” The Party of God largely contributed to setting a new hybrid trend since the Iranian Cyber-Army only got into the habit of advertising its actions for the purpose of psychological and political gains in the early 2010s.

However, it was not until 2011 that Hezbollah began to really develop a cyber-army comparable to that of its Iranian patron. In 2010, Stuxnet, which allowed the United States to temporarily neutralize the Iranian nuclear program, acted as an accelerator pushing the IRGC to invest massively in the training and recruitment of cyber-experts. A report by the British Technology firm Small Media indicates that, between 2013 and 2015, the Islamic regime increased its spending on cybersecurity by 1,200 percent. The new priority given by Iran to the expansion of cybernetic weapons and the notable surge in investments in this area directly translated into a synchronous development of Hezbollah’s electronic action units which, almost simultaneously, increased its research and development efforts “for its own cyber abilities.” For example, it is in 2015 that the Israeli-based cyber-threat intelligence firm Check Point Software Technologies located the birth of the so-called Hezbollah Cyber-Army (HCA) and the launch of its Volatile Cedar campaign designed to compromise hundreds of Israeli or Western public-facing servers—a campaign whose degree of sophistication leaves little doubt regarding the close ties uniting the HCA and IRGC’s Cyber-Army. 

In the second half of the 2010s, Hezbollah leaders realized that while pursuing “classic” cyber-espionage and cyber-sabotage activities, the militia can also leverage social media to develop and pursue cyber-influence operations. The blossoming of companies such as Facebook, YouTube, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, and Twitter provided the HCA with the ability to gather, sort, process, transfer, and display information to an audience of unprecedented scale in order to brand itself as one of the leaders of the so-called anti-Israeli, anti-Saudi, and anti-Western “Resistance Front.” Since major social networks did not allow it to have an official presence, Hezbollah quickly got into the habit of using proxy accounts like Al-Manar’s Twitter feed which, at the end of the decade, was already followed by half a million people. The militia’s use of these networks is characteristically similar to that of the Iranian Big Brother: while the latter’s cyber-message, Schaefer assessed, is riddled with references to the theological doctrine of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, “the YouTube channel posts videos of speeches by Hassan Nasrullah, the Secretary-General of Hezbollah, while the other platforms allow Hezbollah to carry out diplomacy and intimidation through live broadcasts and online posts.” Quickly, HCA’s methodology diversifies by habitually disseminating its message through a myriad of foreign cells that, although dormant from an operational point of view, are particularly active and vocal in cyberspace. The days of leaflets, posters, and good old radio propaganda seem over.

IMPORTED FROM Iran and fine-tuned over two decades, Hezbollah’s cyber-influence potential has reached a level of maturation that makes it a cyberspace heavyweight. To a large extent, the IRGC’s Cyber-Army continues to provide the HCA with massive material and financial support, some of which has come in the form of technical expertise, which prompted Maj. Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror, a former Israeli national security adviser, to characterize Hezbollah as Iran’s cyber “sub-contractor.” This function was illustrated when, in October 2022, all HCA-affiliated social networks echoed Nasrallah’s words describing Mahsa Amini’s death as a “vague incident” and downplaying the extent of popular protest in Iran. This, however, does not prevent experts from agreeing that HCA has become “self-sufficient” enough to operate autonomously in cyberspace. Its self-sufficiency is particularly illustrated in the information warfare field where the Shia militia now imposes itself as a leading agent of radicalization thanks to its growing capacities for disinformation, manipulation, and cyber-recruitment. In addition to its television and radio stations, Hezbollah runs more than twenty websites in seven languages (Arabic, Azeri, English, French, Hebrew, Persian, and Spanish) as well as a quite complex social media network consisting of a multitude of proxy units through which it can punch well above its weight and disseminate anti-Israeli and anti-Western propaganda regionally and internationally.

In addition to projecting Hezbollah’s soft power towards neutral public opinions, HCA’s media armada has proved to be a formidable mobilization and recruitment apparatus. Formerly subject to rather lengthy and thorough screening by the Jihad Assembly, recruitment has spread beyond the boundaries of Lebanon and is now done via proxy units operating through social media and encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram. This is how the Shia militia enlists fighters as well as cyber-warriors from Arab, European, and North American countries eager to join the virtual jihad against Israel, the United States, and their allies. 

HCA’s recruitment efforts are doubled by particular care given to the instruction of future propagandists: to this end, HCA runs conferences and boot camps in Lebanon during which foreign trainees are educated in the fundamental tenets of disinformation and cyber-influence. The Telegraph reported in August 2020 that: “…Hizbollah has been flying individuals into Lebanon for courses teaching participants how to digitally manipulate photographs, manage large numbers of fake social media accounts, make videos, avoid Facebook’s censorship, and effectively spread disinformation online.” Beyond the training of individual cyber-warriors, the objective is to build up “troll farms” and “electronic armies” likely to join the ranks of the digital coalition fighting alongside Hezbollah and Iran. Once trained, activists are then sent onto other neighboring countries to transmit their skills to local cyber-armies. Among the main beneficiaries of this know-how transfer are the Houthis in Yemen and Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq, which now runs its own “online façade” group. Composed, according to U.S. intelligence, by 400 operatives, Kata’ib Hezbollah’s digital propaganda unit is now fully operational and actively “flooding Facebook with fake accounts and promoting fake news.”

Not content with propagating cyber-armies across the Middle East, HCA is increasingly collaborating with the IRGC’s Cyber-Army on an international scale and, in particular, with an aim to discrediting and destabilizing adversaries such as the United States and European countries. Resorting to disinformation by proxy and “influence laundering” techniques, the two Shia allies are jointly conducting cyber-campaigns designed to sow discord within Western countries by playing on polarizing themes while actively undermining public faith in democratic institutions by, among other things, manipulating the outcomes of electoral processes. According to the U.S. intelligence community, “…Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s re-election prospects…,” while “…a range of additional foreign actors—including Lebanese Hizballah, Cuba, and Venezuela—took some steps to influence the election.” In a more discreet but no less ambitious way, Iran and its Lebanese proxy are also suspected of conducting information operations in several West African countries: these initiatives targeting populations of Lebanese descent living in Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Guinea, Benin, and Mauritania pose a real threat and show the extent of the cyber-influence reach acquired by the Party of God. 

IN THE decentralized and deregulated battlefield of today’s cyberspace, persuasion by stealth and mobilization of external partners have become essential dimensions of the modern cyber-diplomacy game. When information is plentiful, the scarce resources are attention and credibility. States pursuing influence strategy must imperatively shift away from wholly government-sponsored structures and cultivate alliances with third parties entrusted with carrying their ideological message abroad. The rationale is that these allies provide credibility, additional reach, pervasive presence in overseas countries, and a capacity to create exuberantly receptive audiences. In addition to the strategic relay that Hezbollah provides to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the Near East, their partnership has been based on the search for this type of mutual benefits. For forty years now, Tehran has provided the Party of God with financial support and technological expertise, while the latter has been bringing in its local legitimacy, its knowledge of the field and its valuable networks of influence to better spread the Islamic regime’s radical pan-Shia and anti-Western message.

Smuggled from Iran and perfected over four decades, Hezbollah’s information-enabled capabilities have come to represent a growing “Quiet Force” which increasingly weighs in the international balance of soft power. As cyber threat analyst Emilio Iasiello notes, “The culmination of [recent] events reveals how a nonstate group, backed by a nation state’s financial and material resources, can quickly develop a mature capability that leverages the full scope of operations in the larger information environment.” Emulating the Iranian propaganda model and absorbing the lessons provided by the IRGC’s Cyber-Army, adopting best practices from both adversaries and allies, learning from disinformation campaigns targeting the United States and Europe, HCA is increasingly establishing itself as an autonomous actor in cyberspace capable of taking the initiative and conducting significant influence operations both in the Middle East and in other regions of the world. Its ability to work in synergy with friendly states and to spawn other cyber-armies capable of mimicking its subversive methods of influence is not simply troubling but alarming.

Pierre Pahlavi is a full professor at the Royal Military College of Canada in the Department of Defence Studies, co-located with the Canadian Forces College, Canada’s Staff and War College. His latest book on the Iranian revolution, Le Marécage des Ayatollahs, was prized by the Académie Française. He has a Ph.D. in political science from McGill University, Montreal, Canada.

Image: Reuters.