Criminals, if you're listening
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Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.
Hezbollah is a mix of different things. On one hand, it's a political party. It's also a social service network. I mean, they have hospitals, they have pharmacies, they have schools.
It's also an ideology. Join me for ABC News Daily. Find us on ABC Listen.
This podcast was produced on the lands of the Awabakal and Gadigal people.
G'day, Matt Bevan here, this is If You're Listening. In last Thursday's episode, we talked about one of the most sophisticated intelligence operations in recent history, when Israel planted bombs in thousands of pages and walkie-talkies used by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Handheld radios used by members of the armed group detonated simultaneously a day after thousands of pages were exploded in a similar fashion, leaving behind destruction and even death.
It was an extraordinary operation, but it wasn't the first time something like this has happened. History is full of examples of people who tried to outsmart spies only to actually play right into their hands, when the tools people trusted to keep them safe turned out to be the real danger. Cara Jensen-McKinnon is the supervising producer of this show, and she doesn't know what I'm about to talk about. Hello, Cara.
Hello. I've been brought in. I'm not under duress, I can confirm.
Okay, before we get to the other examples that I've found of this, just remind us of how these pages ended up in Hezbollah's hands.
Yeah, so they've decided that they need these pages. So they go to Gold Apollo and this saleswoman who they've done this business with before, and she says, you know, I don't have any of those old pages, but I do actually have... a whole shipment of these new special shiny pages and I can give them to you for free. Yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, clearly a great deal for them, but a big mistake. And then as we kind of outlined in the episode, they each contained explosives.
I subsequently figured out that they didn't give all the pages for free. Yes. It was like a sample box. What do you think of these pages? Yeah. And one of the incredible things was, as we talked about in last week's episode, Gold Apollo was a Taiwanese company, but they were not the company that was actually selling the pages to Hezbollah. This woman who had worked for Gold Apollo had then basically been hired by Mossad to be the face of their front company where they were selling these Mossad-made pages. And one of the extraordinary things from that story was other people started contacting the Mossad front company asking, we hear that you're selling or perhaps giving away pages. Boxes of free pages.
And so the Mossad company was like, all of our pages have bombs in them.
Yes.
We don't want to give you the pages, but they couldn't sort of say, well, they're not for sale. So what they started doing was they started quoting outrageous prices. Oh, my gosh. I don't know what the prices were or indeed what a reasonable price to pay for a pager is in 2024. Yeah. I would have thought like $10, but I don't know.
The other thing to me is like as a child who grew up watching The West Wing and ER, I really assumed that pages would be a bigger part of our adult life. And I've never even held a pager in my life as an adult or as a child. I've never even seen one in real life.
Oh, my father had a pager for like a brief period of time in the late 90s and people would, you know, send a message saying,
What was the intelligence operation involving Hezbollah and Israel?
To the pager and basically the message was just call me back. Right. The only message that anybody sent to pagers was just like, I need to talk to you, can you call me back? It was very low tech, which is exactly what Hezbollah wanted. It makes sense. And so that's the story behind this vulnerability that had been basically created by Hezbollah being paranoid of having phones. And I was kind of going, well, why couldn't they just have burner phones, you know?
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