I Couldn’t Not Write About This

By now I’m sure you have all seen headlines or read something about this on a newsfeed, but I’ll paste in here the first paragraph of the story that was in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday afternoon, Sept 17.

BEIRUT—Pagers carried by thousands of Hezbollah operatives exploded at about the same time Tuesday afternoon in what appeared to be an unprecedented attack that authorities said injured more than 2,700 and killed eight across Lebanon.

Pagers. Exploding pagers, and not a few of them, more than 2,700 of them, exploding simultaneously. This is James Bond stuff, no, it’s not really, Ian Fleming would not have tried to sell such an outrageous idea as plausible, and even in the 007 movies, this would be a stretch. It’s more like Maxwell Smart stuff, except that in Smart’s case the pagers wouldn’t explode and the remote control that was supposed to detonate them all would blow up in Smart’s face, and 99 would have to rescue poor Max from his own folly.

How the hell does one pull this off? How does one get exploding pagers into the hands – or, I suppose, onto the belts – of 2800 of your enemies and then set them off? And, if eight people were killed by these things, they are not just devices that go bang, they are potentially lethal.

Hezbollah immediately blamed Israel, and of course they would, because 1) Israel and Hezbollah are long-time enemies, and 2) there is no other organization or state on the planet who anyone  could imagine being capable of pulling this off. The CIA, MI6, Canada’s CSIS – not a chance, especially that last one, and the CIA repeatedly failed to assassinate just one Caribbean dictator.  Supposedly with an exploding cigar, as I recall. Russia’s FSB might be good at basic murder, poison umbrella tips to kill one man, but not something as complex and audacious as this. I don’t know much about China’s Ministry of State Security, I suspect no one does, and while they may have the technical chops for this, you still have to put your money on Mossad.

Later, like the next day, radios and walkie-talkies started blowing up, even more lethally. One can easily imagine Hezbollah operatives having the fridges and washing machines removed from their homes.

Sorry, I have nothing intelligent or insightful to say about this other than – you really don’t want Israel as an enemy.