MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Exploding pagers, what do we know what really happened

To maximize the damage, Mossad reportedly sent a message alert to the pagers less than a minute before the actual “explode” command

By Gwynne Dyer

The exploding pagers that killed at least 12 people and injured 2 800 others in Lebanon and adjacent places on Tuesday were mostly just a new wrinkle on the exploding cell-phones that Israel has used to assassinate its opponents in the past, but there was one major innovation.

You expect competence and ingenuity from Israel’s Mossad spy agency, so it’s no surprise that it knew Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based Islamist organisation, was planning to replace the cell phones of its planners and commanders with old-fashioned pagers.

(One-way pagers cannot transmit, so do not reveal the holder’s location.) More impressively, Mossad found the information early enough to use it.

Its operatives quickly turned to an obscure Hungarian firm called BAC Consulting that manufactures pagers under licence from a Taiwan company called Gold Apollo. Gold Apollo’s founder, Hsu Ching-kuang, denies it made the pagers used by Hezbollah.

Now come the speculative bits. Was BAC Consulting a front organization set up in Budapest by Mossad? That seems likely, because sabotaging 5 000 pagers is an industrial-scale operation, not easily hidden. It is not something that can be done by three spooks in a garage.

And how did Mossad persuade some senior Hezbollah officials to order 5 000 Gold Apollo Model AR-924 pagers from a dubious Hungarian company?

Hezbollah will be tearing itself to shreds today as it hunts for the traitors, and some of its senior officials will be facing ruthless interrogations and probably even torture.

The rigged pagers were all delivered to Hezbollah a couple of months ago and were in daily use ever since. The obvious question is: what was it all for? The answer to that lies in another question: why so many?

Normal Mossad assassinations target one or two key figures in militant Arab organizations.

There seems little point in targeting thousands of mid- and low-level officials, all of whom will automatically be replaced by their immediate subordinates. Unless, of course, you want to take out as many as possible on a single day.

The technical brilliance of the Mossad operation was not in how the pagers were manufactured nor in the way the explosive was disguised.

It was in the fact that all 5 000 pagers, widely dispersed across Lebanon and nearby countries, could be detonated simultaneously by a single coded signal.

That is exactly what the Israeli government would want to do on the day it finally launched its long-threatened invasion of Lebanon to “destroy’ Hezbollah.

True, such an operation is unlikely ever to succeed. After 11 months of fighting, the Israel Defence Force (IDF) has not even managed to destroy Hamas, a far weaker foe.

But for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, which cannot think of anything else to do, attacking Hezbollah is an almost irresistible displacement activity.

If he decides to go down that road, then thousands of pagers exploding and killing or maiming thousands of Hezbollah’s key cadres on the first day of the attack would make good sense.

So why have the Israelis jumped the gun? According to their own leaked explanation, it was because they thought Hezbollah was about to discover that its pagers had been sabotaged.

Use them or lose them, even if using them without an accompanying invasion is a far less effective action resulting only in a few thousand shredded hands, faces and groins.

To maximize the damage, Mossad reportedly sent a message alert to the pagers less than a minute before the actual “explode” command to ensure that as many Hezbollah commanders as possible would be looking at their pagers at just the right time.

However, the pagers that stayed in trouser pockets did almost as much damage to stomachs and genitalia.

The whole thing is just a footnote in history, really, although a fascinating one. Most of the victims were actual combatants, for once, and the only message it sends is that Israel is not yet ready to invade Lebanon.

Whether it ever will be ready remains to be seen, but doing so without crippling Hezbollah’s communications first would be a very big mistake.