WTH is Going On with Exploding Pagers in Lebanon? Marc Polymeropoulos Explains
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 23 September 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
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Summary
With one page, Israel was able to take thousands of Hezbollah operatives off the battlefield. When Hezbollah feared its modern communications network had been compromised, the Lebanese terrorist organization decided to dole out old-school pagers and two-way radios, hoping they would be more secure. In an operation more reminiscent of James Bond than reality, Israeli intelligence managed to infiltrate Hezbollah’s supply line and implant explosives throughout Hezbollah’s new “secure” communications network. The result? A crippled adversary, boosted Israeli morale, and all with historically low civilian casualties.
Marc Polymeropoulos is a nonresident senior fellow in the Forward Defense practice of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Polymeropoulos worked for twenty-six years at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) before retiring in July 2019 at the Senior Intelligence Service level. He was one of the CIA’s most highly decorated operations officers. He is the author of Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA (HarperCollins, 2021).
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell he's talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name knows what it's all about. |
| 0:28.9 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. |
| 0:30.7 | And I'm Mark Tiesin. |
| 0:32.0 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:33.9 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:36.5 | Mark, tick, boom. |
| 0:42.2 | What the hell is going on is Israel and Kamala Harris have finally found an issue on which they agree 100%. |
| 0:48.9 | They both support government-funded gender reassignment surgery. |
| 0:55.0 | Mark, you've been holding on to that baby for a while. |
| 0:58.9 | I have. |
| 1:00.4 | The Israelis have carried out the most exquisite, the most discreet, the most effective |
| 1:07.5 | counterterrorism operation, possibly ever. This thing is amazing. They somehow inserted |
| 1:16.3 | themselves into the supply chain and sold Hezbollah thousands of pagers that they had rigged |
| 1:24.4 | with explosives and then set them off simultaneously, thousands of them going |
| 1:29.3 | off, blowing up Hezbollah operatives all across Lebanon in a single moment. |
| 1:34.9 | We've all seen the videos of some of these guys writhing on the floor, and it just makes my |
| 1:41.6 | heart sing. |
| 1:43.9 | And I will tell you, and I'm sorry, maybe that's a little bit gruesome, but I |
| 1:47.3 | will tell you, Israel has been attacked over and over, and I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez |
| 1:53.1 | condemning this, you know, and I was like, you know, what exactly do you want Israel to do? |
... |
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