2 weeks Ago By By Ed Adamczyk
It comes from the 1964 film “A Shot in the Dark,” in which actor Peter Sellers, as the vainglorious buffoon Inspector Clouseau, steps out of a car, falls into a fountain, is advised by a passerby to get out of those wet clothes lest he catch a cold, and replies, “It’s all part of life’s rich pageant.” Yes, the quote goes back further than that in English literature but there you are. Hezbollah, the military and political power currently residing in Lebanon, is a group with not only its own television station but a designation as a terrorist organization by the United States and others.
Suffice to say, they are at odds with their neighbor, Israel. Hezbollah handed out pagers to some of its members since surveillance is more difficult on these things than on cellphones, despite most of the world obsoleting the devices years ago. This week they exploded simultaneously, killing at least 11 and injuring at least 2,700 all over Lebanon.
If yours was one of the 3,000 or so distributed and in the “on” position, well, it went off. The Israeli military was blamed and they’re not exactly denying it. They make movies about this sort of thing: all the planning involved, how every step in the process of preparation is achieved, the tension as to whether or not it will work, then someone pushes a button and 3,000 pairs of pants explode all over the country.
I have watched enough “Ocean’s Eleven” films and their derivatives, and innumerable other “heist” movies. Studying this incident in Lebanon reminds me of those. Okay, the pagers were made by a Taiwanese company, and presumably paid for by Iran’s generosity before arriving in Lebanon, so somewhere along the way they were intercepted, filled with explosive material inserted next to the battery with a switch, and then distributed to Hezbollah members.
A message was sent, purporting to be from group headquarters. The pagers all beeped several times and then blammo. In a world in which militaries get the best equipment – planes, computers and the like – this stunt seems sophisticated, yet so simple and homebrewed that Buster Keaton may have conceived it.
I envision intercepts of boxes of pagers on the high seas or at some Middle Eastern wharf, explosive powder carefully or perhaps sloppily poured in, then loading the boxes onto trucks – slap the side of the vehicle twice – and it’s on to Lebanon, where at 3 p.m. on Tuesday, explosions were heard and felt.
I know, deaths and injuries are nothing about which to laugh, but I am not exactly pro-Hezbollah; I remain fascinated by how this was pulled off. I’ll leave the jokes to Kimmel and Colbert, but the next major shipment of goods to Lebanon will likely be pants. They’ll need more pants over there.
A Hezbollah operative thinks he is fighting the good fight. He trains, he believes his superior officers, he knows how to fire rocket-propelled grenades and looks out for aerial assaults. And the pager in his pocket explodes.
Clever stuff, and no one on the Israeli side fired a shot. The retribution is no doubt coming. The big loophole in all of this is the cell phones.
The Hezbollah leader Mr. Nasrallah limited their use because of the relative ease of intercepting signals. So they went to pagers.
Beep beep boom. If no one knows the names of Lebanon’s current and active Hezbollah members, they will now because hospital admission records are full of them. Thus presumably ends an incident in a long and unending conflict.
This episode is adequately complex to require plenty of thinking, organization and battleground planning, yet simple enough that I understand it, and marvel at it. It also suggests that some lone wolf saboteur could pull off something similar, something that could injure people, rock Wall Street and generally cause panic accelerated by politicians eager to place blame. In any event, I’m ready for the movie.
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