Israel's Diabolical Caper in Lebanon

Turning Hezbollah's pagers and walkie-talkies into booby traps was a significant blow to its leaders but sacrificed an intelligence opportunity and left thousands of others injured

Gold Apollo’s pager. It denies it made the devices that blew up in Lebanon

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THE LINE BETWEEN SPY THRILLERS AND REAL LIFE gets blurrier by the day. The diabolically brilliant caper that Israel pulled off with exploding pagers and walkie-talkies in Lebanon could’ve been invented by any number of former CIA officers-turned fiction writers, like the late Jason Matthews, whose Palace Of Treason climaxed with his hero Nate Nash teaming with the sultry Russian double agent Dominika Egorova to sabotage Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. Only bad guys die.

In real life, innocent people get killed and maimed. The ops’ brilliance quickly dissipates under a dark cloud of humanitarian condemnation.

Details emerging from the two-day Lebanon sabotage operation suggest that Israeli intelligence learned about Hezbollah’s purchase of pagers from Gold Apollo, a Taiwan firm, then created a front company, seemingly in Hungary, to receive the order, substitute or alter the pagers with explosives and then forward them on to Beirut.