Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

It's in the news today that members of the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah were targeted in a coordinated attack using exploding pagers. Yes, pagers, the small devices a lot of people clipped to their belts or put in their pockets back in the 1980s and early 90s to display phone numbers or extremely short messages from people who called. As of this evening (US time) it's reported that 9 people died and nearly 3,000 were injured.

When I saw an early version of the story this morning my immediate reaction was to chuckle— in disbelief. The idea of an exploding pager sounded ridiculous... and also a bit quaint. It reminded me of the story that the CIA in the 1960s tried to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar. It's debatable that attack even occurred. I mean, exploding cigars where a joke decades ago.  I remember seeing ads in the back pages of magazines aimed at kids for mail-order novelties such as exploding cigars, joy buzzers, and spicy bubblegum.

But this attack actually happened. And it's not a novelty toy.

It got me thinking right away: whoever is responsible for this— Lebanon and Iran point their fingers squarely at Israel— put a lot of planning into this. They would have had to compromise the supply chain all the way back to manufacturing. I mean, it's not like standard pagers come preloaded with explosives that a simple computer hacker could trigger. When Hezbollah ordered thousands of pagers some months ago, the responsible party would have had to 1) find out about the order, 2) design an exploding mechanism, and 3) infiltrate/take over the manufacture to insert the explosive and trigger, before 4) the thousands of pagers are shipped. Subsequent reporting says that the pagers were manufactured by a European company licensed by a Taiwanese electronics brand.

BTW, why were thousands of Hezbollah members using pagers? It's reported that back in February the terrorist group's leaders urged its members to stop using cell phones for communication as it believe Israeli intelligence could track their phones. That's also part of why Israel is suspected of responsibility for the exploding pager plot.

Among the casualties were a few members of foreign governments, including Iran's ambassador to Lebanon. Speaking of pointing fingers at who's involved in what.... Of course, it's no mystery to anyone who pays attention to Middle East politics that Iran bankrolls Hezbollah terrorism. It's just an example of someone getting caught with their pants down— I mean, pager in hand.

Al Qaeda terrorist leader and 9-11 attack planner Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in a US drone strike at his home in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Sunday. The strike, which was months in planning, was notable for its lack of collateral damage. Zawahiri was killed as he stood on a balcony of the building. No other residents of the building were harmed, the building itself was not collapsed, and nobody in the neighborhood was harmed.

Intelligence experts studied al-Zawahiri's movements, and those of people around him, and pinpointed his habit of spending time on a balcony of his building. He apparently hasn't left that building since moving to it earlier this year. His wife and children do run errands, though, and intelligence operatives found them using sophisticated counter-espionage techniques as they moved about the city. Anyway, the US targeted him with a drone strike as he stood on the balcony and killed him without harming family in the house or anyone in the neighborhood.

Zawahiri had been the leader of al Qaeda since the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Prior to that he was the terrorist organization's second-in-command, having joined it when he merged the group Islamic Jihad into it in the 1980s. Islamic Jihad, BTW, was the group that claimed responsibility for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981.