Exploding pagers: what was the point?

The exploding pagers that killed at least 12 people and injured 2,800 others in Lebanon and some adjacent places last Tuesday were mostly just a new wrinkle on the exploding cellphones 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 mobile 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, claiming that BAC Consulting had bought the rights to manufacture its pagers in Europe.

“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Hsu said. “We are a responsible company.

This is very embarrassing.” Indeed. Now come the speculative bits.

Was BAC Consulting a front organisation 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 working in a garage. And how on Earth did Mossad persuade som.