Did Israel intercept pagers bought by Hezbollah? Did they hack into them remotely, using their technological supremacy?
Nope. Turns out that Israel went into the pager business — anticipating Hezbollah’s change in comms strategy by perhaps as much as two years.
The New York Times offers an overview of the operation that took thousands of Hezbollah operatives out of commission and rendered their communications entirely kaput. Rather than tamper with pagers manufactured by others, the Israelis decided to create cut-rate pagers to lure Hezbollah into a sale, and succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
It’s a tale of creative genius, and of strategic idiocy:
By all appearances, B.A.C. Consulting was a Hungary-based company that was under contract to produce the devices on behalf of a Taiwanese company, Gold Apollo. In fact, it was part of an Israeli front, according to three…
