Technology and Society, War Commentary

A Master Stroke

50 Comments

I wonder what the next shoe to fall will be?

[Update a while later]

So weird that the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon had a Hezbollah pager. As I write this, I’m thinking that Ben Rhodes, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan are throwing their pagers in the Potomac.

[Update a few minutes later]

[Update a few more minutes later]

A thread:

[Update a few minutes later]

I suspect that Mossad just got a treasure trove of intel from this, by seeing where everyone was and who they were with when it happened. It will help them map the entire network (if they hadn’t already) in preparation for what’s coming next.

[Wednesday-morning update]

More at Instapundit.

[Bumped]

[Update a few minutes later]

The second wave: exploding walkie talkies:

Ignoring all the carnage, Israel has made it impossible for them to communicate. They’d be sitting ducks if the IDF decides to attack.

[Mid-afternoon update]

Thoughts from Blake Powers.

[Tuesday-morning update]

[Bumped]

50 thoughts on “A Master Stroke”

      1. The person who should be worried is the guy who thought he was getting a good deal on a pallet of pagers “that fell off the back of a truck” that he then distributed to all their operatives.

          1. Those were supposed to be “burner” pagers, but it seems someone took that requirement a bit too literally.

      2. Smart phones are basically all battery under the skin. Pagers are only as large as they are because they need to be manipulated by human hands.

        There’s a lot more room in a pager for extras.

      1. On second thought. Given that the cashier appears unhurt, I’d say more likely the Claymoor One Time Pager with CallerIDET (CallerID with En-crypt-ion Technology).

        Beware those pagers with old old Li-ion batteries…
        Rumor has it they were being sold on the street by some fellow named ‘Q’.

  3. I too wondered what this was, and then found related headlines. I guess if Hamas keeps getting off the hook with progressives for using terrorist tactics, then it only incentives Israel to do the same, and at least this is still targeting militants while minimizing collateral damage.

    Bonus, it may cause disruption in the terror cells…

  4. So did Mosad manage to sell/give Hezbollah pagers with embedded explosives or did they hack into untampered with pagers and cause their batteries to explode?

      1. Apparently it was both. They tampered with the batteries making them more susceptible to a “fast cook-off” which was then initiated by a software exploit.

        1. Most likely explanation seen on the Internets was pagers that had their batteries enhanced with a few grams of crystallized pentaerythritol tetranitrate to give that little extra energy boost needed to support all that power hungry secure technology.

          No word on whether they were still under warranty.

  6. So they got one with a walkie-talkie at a funeral of one they got yesterday with a pager. I really don’t see how you could possibly top that, though I’d love to be pleasantly surprised.

    I’m not currently in the mood, but I suspect there’d be plenty of entertainment in perusing the 750+ comments on the piece at ArseTech. I suspect it’d be tough finding a better display of collective nut-hurt.

  7. Not sure what the tactical strategy is here. Normally this would be the kind of thing you’d do prior to a major offensive operation while the enemy is on their heels. Don’t see anything like that in the works, so not sure what the point of exposing one’s hand is at this time. I find the timing of it all very curious.

    1. Read a comment but haven’t seen the claim referenced elsewhere that it was in response to the attempted assassination of a former Israeli government official. Most people are just talking about what happened, not why it happened, so its a lot of stuff to sift through.

    2. assuming it’s ever not a good day to take out 3,00 of you sworn enemies, I read the Israelis were concerned the secret might be compromised.

    3. From what I’ve heard, Israel bought a license from a Taiwanese electronics firm to manufacture their Apollo Gold pager, then set up a factory in Budapest to manufacture them. As for the two-way radios, syndicated talk radio host Chris Plante in his original exposition speculated that they were originally Motorola products, converted to “Martyrola” radios (they weren’t – they were a Japanese product).

      Evidently, the Israelis began this op six years ago, and embedded everything into Hezbollah hands over a long period of time. They set it off when their intelligence confirmed that a massive Iranian-backed attack was about to occur.

      A more primitive variation of this is the planting of sleeper cells in target countries. We’ve had tens of millions of people admitted to the U.S. under Biden, and many known terrorists have been intercepted at the border. How many have we missed?

  8. Decades ago when I was in the Army, I bought a couple Special Forces field manuals. One of them was on incendiary devices, including recipes to make your own accelerants. The other one was what I called Special Forces Dirty Tricks. It was full of covert ways to take out people. One memorable one was putting a small amount of C4 into headphone earpieces. These manuals were probably written about 60 years ago, but they were full of ways to make you paranoid. I still have them.

    1. Well, that’s a bit removed from the old shoe-polish on the phone receiver trick…

      Reminds me of the Anarchist’s Cookbook. One of the longest chapters was on how to make large batches of concentrated Nitric Acid. A precursor chemical to making a lot of explosives and in and of itself highly corrosive but not extremely dangerous if handled properly. The point was using it to go through the extra synthesis steps needed to make high explosives without drawing undue attention to oneself through mail order. (Now on-line ordering).

      Since making Nitric Acid doesn’t involve using chemicals that would put one on the “suspicious character” map. Synthesizing some of the more exotic super-explosives (see above) does run some risk of detection unless one is very adept at chemical synthesis, very patient and very, very careful.

      However, the most famous super-explosive, nitro-glycerin doesn’t require any “suspicious” exotics at all. OTOH, did I mention very, very careful? White vapor, ok, orange-ish vapor get away quickly, reddish vapor, see if you can reach your ass quick enough to kiss it goodbye.

      Of course there are other even easier ways of making explosives via your local gardening center and gas station. But I’m not going there…

      I’m at that stage of life where I’m a zealous adherent to Derek Lowe’s philosophy of “…things that I won’t work with”. With obligatory H/T to A.G. Streng.

      1. A couple coworkers of mine are retired Army intel specialists. Several years ago, they took some special training on how to make improvised explosives. They then detonated the explosives in old cars and other things. The goal was to give them the tools to examine the aftermath of explosions to determine the source of the chemicals. They told me that a brief shopping excursion at Walmart could provide them with enough materials to blow up just about anything they wanted.

  9. “In October 1995, Kamil Hamad met with Shin Bet operatives, demanding money and Israeli identity cards for himself and his wives. After they threatened to inform on him, he agreed to cooperate. Shin Bet agents gave him a cell phone and told him it was bugged so they could listen in on his conversations.[19] They did not tell him that it also contained 15 grams of RDX explosive.[5] Hamad gave the phone to his nephew Osama, knowing that Ayyash regularly used Osama’s phones.[20]

    At 08:00 on 5 January 1996, Ayyash’s father called him and Ayyash answered. Overhead, an Israeli plane picked up their conversation and relayed it to an Israeli command post. When it was confirmed that it was Ayyash on the phone, Shin Bet remotely detonated it, killing him instantly.[5] He was in Beit Lahia at the time.[21]”

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash#Veneration_in_Palestinian_society

  10. Just to be clear (I’m seeing a lot of misunderstanding in the news media) pagers, except for the 2-way type, don’t transmit, so can’t be tracked the way cell phones and other 2-way gear can.

    I used one for years, until a few years ago. It was a way for clients to get ahold of me. I never used cell phones for that, because I’ve never been okay with receiving voice calls all the time, such as at business meetings, when with other clients, or even just out shopping (Rather useless to take a client call when I don’t have my reference materials at hand).

    So, I preferred the pager. Unfortunately, pager coverage areas have shrunk a lot, so in my state they’re basically in just the urban and semi-urban areas now (My area is no longer covered, so a few years ago, I had to give up using a pager). I miss my pager.

    However, I’d like to thank the Mossad for making me miss my pager just a little bit less, plus congratulate them on a superb opp!

    1. Unidirectional pagers can’t be tracked, but emergency calls for aid to those whose pagers exploded probably can be tracked.

    2. Unidirectional pagers can be spotted at the very least. Any radio receiver using superheterodyne circuitry (i.e. all of them) has a “local oscillator” in it, which generates an RF signal near the frequency being received. The point is to mix the incoming signal with the local oscillator signal to produce a beat frequency mush lower than either incoming or local, and much easier to amplify. The high frequency is filtered out, and the low frequency beat signal amplified. That local oscillator signal is radiated, and is detectable.

      This is how the Nazis located radio receivers used by European resistance forces, how the U.S. figured out which frequencies the Soviet embassy in DC was using in its covert communications, and how the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia find out if you have a police speed radar detector (illegal in only those two places in the United States).

      It would be trivial to use a local oscillator frequency for only a specific set of pagers, those bought by Hezbollah. It would transmit the only identifying information required, by virtue of its frequency. But it wouldn’t be much more difficult to add another frequency, carrying more information, especially for someone who could also secret a PETN charge and detonator circuit in the pager.

      The telemetric tire pressure valves the government forces us to buy on new cars transmit a lot more information about the state of your tire pressure, including detailed vehicle registration information. And it can be received from way further away than you might imagine.

      Just sayin’…

      1. You sir are a Tempest junkie. Keep those radios in a grounded metal case or in WWI I a cigar box lined with wire mesh that is connected to an external Earth ground. Or use a grounded metal box enclosure for a regenerative receiver you never drive into oscillation.

        1. Or do what the guys in the foxholes did in WWII – build a “crystal” set using a razor blade and pencil lead for the diode, so the Germans couldn’t zero in on their local oscillator.

          1. Crystal sets are touchy beasts. Of course in WW2 you could pick up the BBC with damp string. I remember having a one earpiece version of one that weakly pulled in the 50kW clear channel WLS back in the AM rock days. But back in the war days, nothing quite beat listening to improvised poetry hour…

            The sparrow skims the treetops at dawn.
            Seeking that which is always hidden.
            Stay low those in fields of fallow,
            Shall not thy brow be burdened.

          2. You should visit the Cold War Museum at Vint Hill Farm in Northern Virginia. It’s a little two-story house, crammed with memorabilia from WWII and the Cold War. It is there because it was the original site of the NSA.

            An Army Colonel set moved into a nearby home prior to WWII, and one day paid a visit to the farmer who owned Vint Hill. The farmer was also a ham radio fanatic, and happened to mention that he could pick up taxi cab dispatches…from Berlin.

            Turns out that a geological formation underlying the farm makes it a natural antenna capable of attracting signals from all over the world. The government set up a huge antenna array, and it became the SIGINT center for WWII. All of the U.S. code breaking personnel located there, as well.

            Among the items in the museum is one of the first secure telephones, a SIGSALY, which encoded voice calls by adding white noise recorded from a radio receiver. Two phonograph records were made with the white noise of the day, and one was sent to London, the other to the Pentagon, and the master destroyed. That’s how the US and Britain coordinated securely during the war.

            There’s a lot more there of interest. My wife and I were just blown away by all of it.

            And, yes, I am a Tempest junkie.

          3. a SIGSALY, which encoded voice calls by adding white noise recorded from a radio receiver. Two phonograph records were made with the white noise of the day, …

            An audio variant of the One Time Pad. I presume the records were sent out daily? Perhaps more than one, with prearranged sequencing.

            Must have been early versions of the 33 1/3 LP which didn’t come out commercially until 1948.

            Otherwise your secure phone conversations either were <3 minutes in length (at 78 rpm) Or paused while the records were re-queued. If so, so much for the OTP.

            If you tried to slow play the record for a longer conversation you risk a shift of the audio bandpass that could lead to cheap trick high pass filtering to scuttle your “encryption”.

          4. OK should have done a little Wikipeding first.
            A PCM system (one of the first). No simple mixing. Used modulo math. Two records of 12 minutes each played on separate turntables for up to 24 minutes.

        2. The radiation is via the antenna which, perforce, must be out of the Faraday Cage. It’s pretty weak, so detecting it over any distance would be challenging.

          Pager messages were transmitted here on broadcast FM sideband by the broadcast station. That would make differentiating a pager from any other FM receiver probably impossible. Using existing transmitters and very low bandwidth is what made them so cheap, 100 KW and more transmitters is what made them so reliable.

          The word now is that the Israelis built them themselves rather than modifying a commercial product (probably a trademark violation). So they could have included a beacon of some sort although still pretty low power. The last pager I had would last for weeks with an AA battery.

  11. The Israelis had a front company (I think in Switzerland) selling these pagers. Pretty good intel to know the bulk purchase was coming up (I think after a smaller scale ‘job’ with smart phones?).Perhaps the salespeople offered a discount Hezbollah couldn’t refuse because of sympathy for the cause…

    Anyway, apparently triggering the pagers now was forced by a couple of Hezcreeps noticing that their units were getting _very_ hot.

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