Exploding Beepers – A Boss’s Decision Put Islamists in Trouble

As suspected, Israel is behind the coordinated wave of attacks, the New York Times reports, citing 12 former and current intelligence officials in the country.

The plan was in the works for years, and in Israeli security circles the radio receivers were simply called “buttons.” Now they have decided to put pressure on it. Apparently also because of lack of time. According to media reports, some Hezbollah members were hot on the heels of the elaborate plan. The Shiite militia seems to have fallen for the Trojan horse of modernity.

Technological regression as a gateway
The Israeli hackers are absolutely feared by the terrorist group. So much so that terrorists have resorted to analog technologies. For security reasons, Hezbollah boss Hassan Nasrallah began focusing on old radio receivers a few years ago.

“You ask me where the agent is,” Nasrallah told his supporters in a televised public address in February. “I tell you that the phone in your hands, in the hands of your wives, in the hands of your children is the agent.”

The Mossad—Israel’s foreign intelligence service—saw this as a unique opportunity. Even before Nasrallah decided to expand the use of pagers, Israel had initiated a plan to set up a shell company that would pose as an international pager manufacturer. This was the much-cited BAC Consulting, founded in 2022.

Devices are not made in Hungary
Now it seems clear: the company actually had no connections to Hungary or Austria, the State of Israel was hiding behind it; to appear credible, the shell company also took on regular customers, manufactured functioning pagers, and set up at least two other shell companies to hide identities.

Because really only one customer mattered: Taiwan’s Gold Apollo. The company that got a big order from the terrorist group Hezbollah. These radio receivers were individually manufactured and contained batteries of the explosive PETN, three intelligence officials said.

The pagers were delivered to Lebanon in small quantities in the summer of 2022, but production ramped up after Nasrallah phased out mobile phones. Most of the devices that have now exploded arrived this summer.

Hungary denies connections
The completely astonished boss of the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, Hsu Ching-Kuang, also saw himself as a victim. Three years ago, a businesswoman contacted him to close the momentous deal, he told Spiegel. The financial transfers from his business partners seemed ‘strange’ to him, partly because the transfers went through a bank in the Middle East. Now he wants to sue BAC Consulting.

The Hungarian government denied any connection to BAC. Hungarian government spokesman Zoltán Kovács said the company was merely an intermediary. It has no manufacturing or logistics facilities in Hungary. “The devices have never been in Hungary,” he stressed. According to the New York Times, the pagers that exploded on Tuesday were manufactured entirely by Israeli intelligence officials.

And the walkie-talkies?
But Israel’s plan apparently went much deeper. Because on Wednesday, the Islamists’ emergency communications were also blown up. These were apparently walkie-talkies from the Japanese company Icom. But: According to the Japanese manufacturer, the IC-V82 model, which has apparently exploded hundreds of times, has not been produced for ten years. According to Icom, illegal reproduction cannot be ruled out.

The explosions in Lebanon killed 37 people and wounded nearly 3,000 within hours. In addition to terrorists, the victims included children and other civilians who were near a device. Hezbollah leader Nasrallah spoke of a declaration of war in a long-awaited speech on Thursday afternoon, saying Israel had “crossed all the red lines.”