Beep Beep Bang
this exploding pager lark is weird.
It just doesn’t add up. Or if it does add up it does so in a very strange way.
The plausible assumption is that the Israelis are behind it. Who else? So they come up with this wizard idea of putting explosives in pagers. But pagers are very small so these “special” pagers are going to be significantly larger than normal. So far so good, but how are they going to get those pagers to their intended targets. Do they pack them in crates and send them over the border addressed to Hezbollah? “Dear Hezbollah member. Please accept this kind gift from your friends in Israel”.
So maybe they manage to send the crates using some way of obfuscating their origin. Maybe they used Amazon? And how did Israel know that only Hezbollah members would pick them up? I know Israel is quite happy to slaughter quite a few innocent men women and children to get one Hezbollah member but it does seem very random.
And were Hezbollah not surprised when this batch of pagers suddenly appeared out of the blue? Unless they ordered them? From Israel?
No one apparently opened a pager to see why it was a bit bigger? We all know that man thing? Something new appears so any man worth his salt is going to take it to bits to see how it works? It’s hard coded into the male genome.
so they all just sat around with their new pagers.
Until of course the Israelis sent that fatal heavily encoded plain text message to all pagers.
“Fuck you, Ragheads”
Let’s make the wild assumption that this was the work of Israel – that’s only a 99.999% certainty I’ll admit, but we’ll accept that.
You’ve got to admire the creativity, ingenuity and execution, first to identify pagers as a potential vehicle, then somehow to interrupt the supply-chain invisibly to introduce an amount of explosives plus the firmware for its operation, then allowing these devices to be circulated amongst its target group.
Not only that but, to avoid futile explosions in cupboards, drawers or bags, ensuring that the explosive is only triggered when a button is pressed by the user, thus ensuring closest proximity and maximum damage to the targets. Brilliant.
Whatever we think of the morals or politics of it, you’ve got to acknowledge the clever background planning, design and execution work to enable this project to succeed.
It only needs enough explosive to rupture the lithium battery which then makes its own contribution to the spectacle.
I had a pager in the 1980s. My pager was about as small as you’d want it to be and still have a screen to display a short message. I’m sure 40 years of development have improved and shrunk the electronics but the case would still need to be about the same size. Plenty of room for a small explosive charge. The same applies to the walkie talkies that went bang.
Apparently Hezbollah had finally discovered that their agents were being tracked when they used mobile phones, computers or any other modern tech, so they were told to dump it all and go back to pagers. We all know that modern computers are distinctly Orwellian devices. It was reported a while back after raids against the Mafia that their computers had been modified to remove their microphones and cameras.
Somehow, Israeli security then intercepted the order. It may be as simple as the pager order going either to or through an Israeli agent? An order for a large number of essentially obsolete devices like pagers from Lebanon would stand out like the proverbial sore thumb.