RUTHFULLY YOURS

Major hat tip to Michael Doran of the Hudson Institute for coming up with “Operation Grim Beeper” for Hezbollah’s exploding devices, while pointing out that this is a modern version of a very old story:

This is one of the most astonishing intelligence operations in history. It is a reworking of the story of the Trojan Horse for the digital age, and it deserves to become nearly as legendary as its iconic predecessor.

It’s going to be a while—maybe years, if ever—before we learn the complete story. The Telegraph offers some thoughts on how it went down that may turn out to be correct, and this part in particular stands out:

“Everything starts with identifying an opportunity,” says one former officer in Unit 81, the secret Israeli weapons division.

“Here, that was Hezbollah’s request to purchase pagers because they wanted to avoid using cellular mobiles because they can all be hacked and traced. But the pager is a device that we can easily control – basically you know how to get into the network and transmit whatever you want to transmit. So when we saw the order for the pagers, they said: ‘OK, we now have an opportunity to put something that we want inside those pagers.’

“Operation-wise you need to think about how to control the whole process. And we know that those pagers came out of a factory in Hungary, but it might be that those pagers left the factory in their original condition. But then maybe the customs diverted it, a delay for a couple of days because of customs issues, and then the [operations team] took care of [inserting the boobytrapped devices]. It might be that the European company is an innocent company. . .

Here we should pause for a moment to note that this story says the pagers came from “a factory in Hungary.” I hope this is true, as it will further infuriate all the right people who hate Hungary, in part for their deliberate exclusion of “migrants” from hostile nations. But other stories I’ve seen claim the pagers came from Taiwan, and that Israeli intelligence intercepted them there. Stay tuned. Maybe the Hungary mention here is a deliberate false trail.

To continue:

In such scenarios, says the former officer, if it proves too difficult to gain access to the “original device” due to be delivered to the intended target of the assassination, “you just copy it, make new ones, and replace the originals, one by one. We must make sure that it is our new beepers that get delivered. And that is possible because we can know everything down to the serial numbers, the packaging, everything. With a few thousand units you can swap one shipping pallet for another. Who looks after those pallets? You think there was a Hezbollah guy escorting it the whole way? No.”

I can imagine a great secondary market for ex-Hezbollah pagers, in any condition.

By the way, for an ideology that is rooted in a desire to return to the 8th century, hasn’t Israel helped them take one big step there by causing Hezbollah to abandon electronics?