From The Financial Times: From Taipei to Budapest: the mysterious trail of exploding pagers
Founded three decades ago, Gold Apollo is a nondescript, 40-person company in a shabby Taipei suburb, one of the tens of thousands of Taiwanese companies that manufacture the ubiquitous, cheap electronics of daily life.
Launched in 1995, when mobile phones had yet to supplant pagers, one of its current bestsellers is the vibrating pucks that coffee shops hand out to customers to signal that their drink is ready.
Then, at 3.30pm local time on Tuesday, thousands of Gold Apollo-branded pagers exploded in Beirut, plunging the Lebanese capital into a panic, and sending hundreds of members of the powerful Lebanese militant group, Hizbollah, to overcrowded hospitals with mangled hands, facial injuries and worse.
Lots of grist for this mill. But if Hez has been buying from one company for years and ordered in bulk then they were lazy and complacent along with being generally evil MF’ers.Report
Well, they’re going to call in a handful of Security Consultants and watch a bunch of powerpoints that discuss supply chain management and chain of custody.
I’m still exceptionally interested in where the pagers got adulterated.
At the original factory prior to being put in the packaging?
In a lab between the factory and the shipping container?
When the shipping container was on the boat in dock?
When the shipping container was on the boat in transit?
There are only so many moments where this would be easy to get away with and where they’d be able to take their own sweet time (something that *I* would want to be able to take, were I working with explosives).Report
That was a lot of pagers and walkie talkie. Had to take a while. They must ordered few pizza’s for that project. Wouldnt’ surprise me if it happened at the dock before unloading. Being hated, like Hez , is not great for security.Report
At the dock before unloading means that they would have had to smuggle the explosives into the port as well.
Which isn’t an argument to say that it didn’t happen there… but that’s one hell of a trick that would require effort that other places in the process wouldn’t require.Report
Let me tell you, knowing what the Mossad does to its enemies, if I know how the pagers got turned into bombs, I ain’t talking.Report
These are people who believe that Israel is one more glorious push to collapse despite all evidnece. Of course, they are stupid, lazy, an complacent.Report
I have to admit that I’m somewhat surprised Iran isn’t stamping out thousands of cheap communications widgets for its various proxies.Report
They outsourced their manufacturing to Southeast Asia.Report
One thing that I’m still wondering is the extent to which this avenue is burned.
Like, the Budapest connection? That seems to be gone now. Poof. They blew up the walkie-talkies. There’s going to be a bunch of electronics trashed and then Hezbollah (and Lebanon) will wander back to high tech after going through a bunch of trusted source supply chain seminars.
Right? Because they didn’t figure out how to do this to just, you know, devices with particular battery configurations… right?Report
Oh, of course.
The New York Times reports that *ISRAEL* built the pagers themselves. Ship them to the shell company, the shell company takes over, deliver your pagers to Hezbollah over the course of two years and pick the right day to push the button.Report
1 I hope the shell company people have made a good escape with a lot of money. Cause they would be a target forever even if that would be a big lift for Hez.
2 Hez got f’d by shady Chinese merchants selling “faulty” merch. I wonder if the Nigerian prince scheme has already worked on them.Report
The story touches on that.
The only question that I still have about that is whether the building will be sold to someone else next week and, if so, to whom.Report