1407: Paging Hezbollah | Out of the Loop

How do you get your enemy to buy its own bomb? Paging Hezbollah https://paginghezbollah.com/ filmmaker Justin Folk brings us in from Out of the Loop here! Welcome to what we’re calling our “Out of the Loop” episodes, where we dig a little deeper into fascinating current events that may only register as a blip on the media’s news cycle and have conversations with the people who find themselves immersed in them. Filmmaker Justin Folk, whose documentary Paging Hezbollah https://paginghezbollah.com/ reconstructs Israel’s exploding-pager operation, is here to help us understand how Mossad got Hezbollah to buy, distribute, and carry its own booby-trapped pagers, how everything from the alert tone to the sales pitch was engineered to work, and how the operation weakened Hezbollah and Iran’s wider network. Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/1407 https://jordanharbinger.com/1407 What We Discuss with Justin Folk on This Episode of Out of the Loop: How Israel got Hezbollah to buy, distribute, and willingly carry the very weapon used against it, and why Hezbollah’s own fear of Israeli cellphone surveillance created the vulnerability Mossad exploited. Why Mossad reportedly reduced the explosive charge to maim rather than kill — reasoning that dead fighters become martyrs, while thousands of visibly injured ones become walking warnings and a lasting drain on medical resources. What Mossad learned by having its own people carry test pagers and filming how they reacted, which led to a louder, more irritating alert and firmware requiring two buttons pressed at once to read the message. How Mossad licensed Taiwan’s Gold Apollo brand, hired the sales manager Hezbollah already trusted, and built a fake company convincing enough to survive due diligence by an organization that assumed Israel was trying to penetrate everything it did. Why even the most sophisticated technology still depends on understanding people — a familiar salesperson, a desirable product, and habits nobody thinks about. Notice which of your own routines run on autopilot, and you’ll make wiser choices about whom and what you trust. And much more! Connect with Jordan on Twitter https://twitter.com/JordanHarbinger, on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/jordanharbinger, and on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/THEJORDANHARBINGERSHOW. If you have something you'd like us to tackle here on an Out of the Loop episode, drop Jordan a line at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] and let him know! And if you're still game to support us, please leave a review here https://itunes.apple.com/podcast/id1344999619?mt=2&ls=1 — even one sentence helps! Sign up for Six-Minute Networking https://jordanharbinger.com/course — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course https://jordanharbinger.com/course! Subscribe to our once-a-week Wee Bit Wiser https://www.jordanharbinger.com/news/ newsletter today and start filling your Wednesdays with wisdom! Do you even Reddit, bro? Join us at r/JordanHarbinger https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanHarbinger/! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. Our mission is to help you become a better-informed, more critical thinker through long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers, even the occasional former jihadi, arms dealer, neuroscientist, or journalist-turned-poker-champion. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, and I always appreciate it when you do that, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of some of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology and geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com/start

• 1:48Speaker 01

  or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, how do you get your enemy to buy the weapon you'll use against them? And thank you for the customer service. Today filmmaker Justin Folk, whose documentary, "Pageing Hezbollah", reconstructs Israel's exploding pager operation. He joins us to unpack the sales pitch, the behavioral engineering, and the last-minute scare that nearly unraveled the whole thing. This one is controversial, so if you're going to be upset about this, please just skip to another one and save us both the hassle. Here we go with Justin Folk. Man, I gotta say, I love the film. I wasn't expecting some, like, rinky-dink production. But often documentaries, I mean, they're not usually shot super well. Often, you can't get the interviews that you want. And then it's like, here's the head of the Mossad,

• 2:31Speaker 01

  here's footage from the actual attack, and the body cams, and then here's propaganda footage, and then here's the footage of this funeral from Lebanon. And it's like, oh, you guys must have done some serious digging to get all this stuff. Like, real digging.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, our team really, I think we're fortunate in a lot of ways. We reached out and we were able to kind of get the inside access to this story. I have a great production team. You know, people think of documentaries a certain way. They think of a kind of low-budget interviews, talking heads. We really, from the very beginning, we knew this was like a spy story, a really incredible spy thriller. And so, we wanted to shoot it like that. We wanted to give it all the cinematic appeal that you could do in a spy thriller. And so, from the very beginning, this thing was always kind of part documentary, part recreation narrative of the events that actually happened. And so, we had a great production team, got to link up with a really quality team in Israel, a lot of a quality crew people over

• 3:29Speaker 02

  there to work with. And so, but I think you mentioned, I think the biggest thing that we had going for us was the access itself, the people that we got to interview, the people that were directly involved in the story. And that was just a matter of a little bit of luck, relationship building. We really had to get them to sort of trust us to tell their story, which just took some relationship building over time. But ultimately, they're very cooperative. And the cool thing is, they never really told us how to tell the story. They just told us the facts. They just told us the events and, you know, essentially what happened.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  I mean, the whole story is crazy. I'm sure almost everybody in the world heard about it. But usually, if you want to attack an enemy organization, you've got to penetrate its defenses, right? And here, Israel got Hezbollah to buy the weapon, distribute it freely throughout its own organization, specifically to the top guys first, carry it around all day, 24/7, essentially willingly. What was the hardest part of making that possible?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  So, there's a technological side of this. There's also the marketing side of it, which is, I actually think is actually even more impressive.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Same.

• 4:30Speaker 02

  The technological side of getting a bomb planted in a pager, you know, that's a complicated thing to get the right amount of explosive in a tiny device and then be able to activate it whenever they wanted to activate it. That's next-level stuff. But the real trick was to get them to not just trust these devices, but like, rely on them. Mossad needed to sell something to Hezbollah. They needed to get it into their hands. And they needed the product itself to do what it was supposed to do very, very well, so that Hezbollah essentially were happy customers. And so, there's sort of a customer service angle here, too, which is really fascinating, that Mossad was involved in.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  I've got questions about that. It's almost comical. It's like, oh, don't worry, we'll ship you. Oh, if these don't work to your liking, let us ship you some more. You can keep those and distribute them to less important members of your organization. Like, okay, great. Thanks.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, on top of being an intelligence organization that's tasked with protecting the lives of Israelis, Mossad also had to become a marketing operation. It had to become a producer, you know, a manufacturer of pagers. And it had to be a customer service organization, too. So, they had to kind of do all of this in order for Hezbollah, this terrorist organization, to trust these devices, carry it with them wherever they went, because they are always very suspicious of their devices. Israelis have been, Mossad had been tapping their phones for years. And so, they had to really trust these devices. And so, for Mossad to be able to convince them that they could trust these devices was nothing short of a miracle.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, look, if you've seen Munich, which I'm sure you have, they've been blowing up phones since, was that the 70s, the 80s? And I guess that was the 80s, right? And they might have been doing that even before that, right? There's that detail, that little story in the movie Munich. When you first heard this story, which detail sounded too ridiculous to be true? Because when I read that the pagers exploded, I was like, oh, that's cool. They got someone with a pager. That's really creative. And then it was like, how many people? I mean, the scale of it was crazy. But I'm curious where your mind went when you thought, because you learned really every detail about this. Which one sounded like, oh, gosh, that's going to be such a strange sell. People are going to think we're making it up?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of all of it. I think that's a question that a lot of people ask, is like, how could they possibly get devices into the pockets and into the hands of their enemy and have them all go off at once? So, there's the part of it of them having the pagers in the first place. Like, how did Mossad, you know, have their hand in that? And then, of course, how did they activate it all at the same time? And I don't know if there's any one particular thing. When I first heard the story, it was as improbable as it was incredible, I think, for me. And I think for anybody that heard the story, and the question was, that I had, which I think most people had, was, how did they do that?

• 7:15Speaker 01

  And we'll talk about all of those details. Yeah, there were a couple of moments where the entire operation nearly fell apart. And I'm going to get to those as well, because it's, this is one of those that, like, you have to just know, was one New York minute away from failure at pretty much any time. And there's all these failsafes that you know had to be involved in this, that you didn't even get to in the movie, that they probably didn't even want to discuss. Like, something I was thinking about last night was, what happens when one of these Hezbollah guys takes his family to Paris on a shopping trip? Because those guys, the higher-ups are millionaires, right? They don't care about these smaller, low-riding troops. These guys are living large. What happens when one of those guys goes to Paris with his family, but he's got his pager on him and it blows up in a café

• 7:56Speaker 01

  and kills a French kid? That's a big problem. So, you know, they had to be like, when they activated, they had to be like, where is it? We only want this happening in these particular countries. We got to make sure they didn't give it to, like, their kid to run around with for the day for some reason. We are going to make sure their daughter doesn't have it in the car by mistake. Like, they have to make sure of all these things, because if it blows up in a café in France or New York or something like that, or anywhere that's not Lebanon, or Syria, or Iran, you've got a major, major international incident where, instead of making intelligence history, you're repairing diplomatic damage for the next 20 years, if you can even do that. So, there's little things like that, where, you

• 8:38Speaker 01

  know, I just thought of last night, that whoever put this attack together had to think of everything like this, everything, and then make sure that it actually worked. All right. So, before we rewind here, what were the planners ultimately trying to accomplish? Were they trying to kill fighters, incapacitate fighters, collapse the command network of Hezbollah, deter it from attacking Israel, or create an opening for a larger military campaign? You know, what was the point of this?

• 9:05Speaker 02

  You just listed them. All of the above. They needed something different that they could fight with. Up until this point, and if you learn about the history of Hezbollah and how they'd been building up on the border of Israel over years and years, funded and supplied by Iran, they became one of the most powerful militaries in the world. I don't know if everybody realizes that, but Hezbollah was stacked. And it was ready. And they had plans to invade Israel. And so, Israel, just like Hamas did on October 7th, Hezbollah had those same plans. They were burrowing tunnels underground. They were preparing for invasion. They wanted to cut off communities in the north. And they basically wanted to take over all of Galilee, which is the northern part of Israel. These plans were out there. They didn't even hide it. They announced it. And so, Israel knew they

• 9:50Speaker 02

  needed an element of surprise. They needed something that they could turn the table, so to speak. And, but what you just listed is all true. They wanted to take out some of their top people. They wanted to disrupt their communication system and ultimately they wanted to follow this operation up with a offensive that would ultimately remove their capabilities, remove Hezbollah's capabilities in southern Lebanon, which was threatening the northern cities of Israel. And so it was an audacious plan that was going to be sort of the first domino in a domino effect that would come later. And so the interesting thing about it is not everybody thought it was going to work. The Mossad was confident in it because they, I think they knew that like this element of surprise and

• 10:33Speaker 02

  the sort of the, the panic that would unfold in the aftermath would be a great advantage to them and would be very disruptive for the Hezbollah high command. So I think Mossad knew this, but not everybody in the Israeli military was on board. They actually referred to it as a toy, the pages as a toy, a tactical toy.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Right, right. The tactical toy and like this is, it's going to be something where it surprises them and does that, you know, pretty much nothing. And there were generals that were kind of like, whatever, you know, I got tanks. Right? So one thing that I found quite shocking, like you said, was I knew that Iran was going over land through Assad controlled Syria. I didn't realize they had literally tens of thousands of rockets and they can hit all, you said they're going to take over northern Israel, correct, but they can hit all of Israel. So they were going to rain, like, imagine tens of thousands of rockets hitting every city in Israel, all the way from the north to the south, while Hamas goes back in, while Hezbollah goes back in. That's what the idea was, right? October 7th Hamas was, if you remember those, the news

• 11:36Speaker 01

  back then, it was, you know, they were calling on Hezbollah, all right, we did our thing. Now we really need you guys to do your thing. And then we'll all get in there and then we'll kill everybody. And that was kind of the idea. So they were planning to go in and take over Galilee, but they were just going to do what they did in southern Lebanon, which is take over that part and then use it as a staging ground to take over the rest of Israel, which is what they did in Lebanon, right? They moved into south Lebanon and immediately started launching rockets to Galilee. I mean, they're not, the idea that they're just trying to take over Lebanon and keep it from Israel is complete nonsense. Like Hezbollah wants to take over the entire Middle East and the rest of the world. And they've said this, it's not some crap I'm making up from a YouTube video for people who think that.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  People need to understand, when you say Hezbollah, yes, Hezbollah is the largest crime organization in the world.

• 12:19Speaker 01

  Yes, thank you.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  They deal in drugs, they deal in weapons, illegal weapons tradings, and they have operatives all around the world. They're not just in southern Lebanon. And when you think of Hezbollah, you have to realize you're talking about Iran. This is Iran's proxy.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  They are connected at the hip. They don't do anything without each other's permission. It is the long arm of Iran. So everybody has to kind of realize Hezbollah is Iran. It is the long arm of Iran in southern Lebanon, but also around the world. And so you're exactly right. They had been stacking that region with weapons. It's actually the most dense collection of munitions in the world, ballistic missiles, rockets, you name it, drones, everything. And you're exactly right. The plan was to come in and invade. Iran wanted to destroy Israel a number of different ways. And they knew that if Hezbollah was super powerful, that Israel could not attack them. They knew that Hezbollah would be a buffer for Iran to develop its ballistic missiles, its nuclear weapons.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  And ultimately, Israel and the rest of the world could do nothing about it because Iran had these proxies set up that would attack whenever they were asked to. So this was a long game that Iran had been playing for quite some time, investing billions and billions of dollars of their money into this thing. And that's what makes this story, the pager operation, even more intriguing because it basically just, it was the thing that dismantled all of that. It was the first thing that basically led to dismantling all of that firepower that Iran had built up over the years.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really incredible when you see the scale in the movie, again, paging Hezbollah, great title. So for somebody who recognizes these names and is like, cool, yeah, this is going to be a great story. But what exactly is Hezbollah again? How did he run, create this? Is that the same as Hamas? I know people are saying that right now to themselves. And I totally understand why, because unless you've nerded out on this stuff like you and I have for the last, I don't know, 10 years, it all kind of blurs together.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Exactly right. The movie itself, we try to simplify this for people too. Cause

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  I know how a lot of Americans look at everything going on over there. They can't tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys half the time. They don't really understand what's happening over there. All they hear about is violence and it's related to religious things. And, you know, you got the Jews, you got the, you got Islam, you got all the stuff, right?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  You did a great job simplifying it in the movie. One thing that I found comical, I guess dark comedy, because that's how we Jews do it. Dark comedy was, I remember like 15 years ago, 10 years ago, if you ask people what Israelis were, they were brown, right? And because they were in the Middle East. But after October 7th, they were all white people, even though 40 plus 50% of Israel is actually Arabs or Sephardic, right? So it went from, those are a bunch of brown people who cares to, they're a bunch of white people, get them, you know? It was just like overnight. And I was like, how did that happen?

• 15:05Speaker 02

  They're like a bunch of white people with like country club memberships or something all of a sudden, you know, it was like, they're colonizers.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  It was like before, when you didn't care about anything over there, everybody was brown, you didn't give a shit. Now, half of them are white and the other ones, it's like, make up your mind, folks. What's going on here?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  They're as white as Karl Rove, basically.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Listen, I mean, I think Hezbollah, right? So simplifying the story down for people. Our story, this spy thriller story, we have a supervillain. We have Hezbollah, we have the leader of Hezbollah, this guy named Hassan Nasrallah. And he is every bit the supervillain that you would have in any superhero movie. Like this guy is like

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Except fatter, much fatter.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Fatter, yeah, a little fatter. Very well fed by, you know, all that good Iranian, you know, Middle Eastern food.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  But we had the ultimate supervillain in this story. And Hezbollah as a group, part of the thing that we try to get across in the movie, we want to remind Americans, like their origin story, their villain origin story is killing Americans.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Hezbollah got their start in the 1980s, killing Americans. And a lot of Americans forget this, but like, the very first targets were Americans and the West, not necessarily Israel. And so in 1983, you had the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut, which killed scores of people. And then you had the bombing of the United States Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 243 Marines. It was the largest loss of life of military personnel since World War II in one day. So we have to remember what Hezbollah's start was. And it was killing Americans. And America really didn't respond properly. They didn't really do anything to prevent them. And so I

• 16:44Speaker 02

  think what it did was convinced Hezbollah, hey, this is good business. Let's keep this up. Later, they hijacked a airliner in 1985, TWA 847, which was full of Americans. It was a flight from Athens to Rome. And they kidnapped all these Americans, they fly them to Beirut, they torture a bunch of people, they kill an American serviceman and they dump his body on the tarmac.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  And he was like a kid, wasn't he?

• 17:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was a Navy serviceman. I think he was 20 years old or 21 years old or something like that.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  He looks, when you see the photo of him, you're like, wait, that's the most recent photo? This man is, this is a child with a sailor uniform on.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. His name is Robert Steatham. Robert Steatham was a US Navy serviceman. And they beat him with an arm rest from a chair and then they shot him and they threw his body on the tarmac. And I think it was to send the message to the rest of the world, hey, we're coming for you. We are relentless in our pursuit of not just the Middle East, but the rest of the world. And that's how Hezbollah got their start. And ultimately, they've been operating in that area of the world and around the world for decades.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  I want to pause you right here because this is an important point. People love to say, look, PLO, Hamas, all the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, they're because Israel's taking over the land. Okay. Well, Hezbollah is not. Hezbollah is, we're taking over the entire Middle East and then we're going to go take over France. We're murdering all of you. We're forced converting you, whatever it needs to be. We don't care. So explain that. If it's just about Israel, why does Hezbollah exist? Why did they get their start? It was not push the Jews out of our land. This was take over everything. So they tip their hand a little bit when they do this stuff. And if you refuse to look at history, you can pretend that Hezbollah is just protecting Lebanon from the Jews, but that is just total nonsense. That's revisionist history.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  That's how they motivate their people as well. It's a big lie that they need to resist Israel and Lebanon. Israel left Lebanon. There's no Jews in Lebanon. They left decades ago. There were Jews at one time, but they basically realized it wasn't a safe place for them. So they, they left.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  The Christians also left because Hezbollah basically kicked off a civil war, along with Palestinians in Lebanon. And who wants to stick around for that?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  There's still some Christians left, but it used to be a Christian majority country.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Lebanon was created by France back in the 1920s. And it was meant to be a Christian majority nation in the Middle East. Since then, many of the Christians have left, all of the Jews have left. And it's been this fight between the Sunni Muslims and the Shiite Muslims. And the Shiite Muslims are the ones that are funded by Iran. And that's Hezbollah. And they've been trying to basically dominate that region and the entire area ever since then. So what you have here is a country that was beautiful at one time. Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East. It was, it was a cosmopolitan, very, very progressive society founded by France. It was a beautiful place. And if you look at the geography, it's incredible. It's like coastline, it's basically, it's basically Southern California.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Mossad had to become a manufacturer, a marketing agency, and a customer service department. Apparently, the secret to international espionage is a suspiciously well-run small business. And speaking of people trying to earn your business, how about our sponsors? We'll be right back.

• 19:58Speaker 00

  At Lowe's, this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic Milo's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus, 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/TERMS. Subject to change.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  We don't earn a commission from sales when you buy from our sponsors, but companies do see you responding to the ads and they're more likely to continue their partnerships with us. So if you sign up or buy anything, please use our code. It is usually Jordan. Of course, they're all listed on the deals page. It's a double win. You get a great deal and you help keep the show going strong. Thank you for your support. Now, back to Justin Folk. Have you been to Lebanon? It's beautiful. I've been to southern Lebanon until the military tells you to get out of here because you're, you know, walking into Lebanon. But there's those grottos and the beaches. There's like all the, and you just, you can just imagine in the 60s, there was like a yacht club down there and a beach club. And you, when you see old footage from the 60s, it looks like Iran in the 60s and the 70s, right? Many skirts and people having fun and coed beaches and it looks very westernized and

• 21:12Speaker 01

  every, you know, this sort of Europe in the Middle East with, Europe with better weather, right? And some nice, beautiful people. And now it looks like, you know, it's back in the Middle Ages because of all the regression and the conservatism, the conservative Islamist movements. And I know people are going to be like, that's called what, ethnocentric or whatever. Yeah, I don't know, whatever. I don't care. You can go backwards. We have been doing that. I don't think that's controversial. And if people think that's rude, this is the wrong show for them.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  I think people in the West need to wake up to culture and there are some cultures that promote bad ideas.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  And if you look at Lebanon, it's the perfect example. It's a tragic tale, really. I mean, it's a beautiful place. It was an experiment. It, could these different groups coexist together? Could you have Christians and Muslims and Druze and all these different groups, Bedouin, all these people kind of living in the same area? And it was off to a pretty decent start until the PLO, the Yasser Arafat and the PLO showed up.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  This is the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Yeah.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. Palestinian Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat. And they immediately just started to attack everybody. And that's what led to the civil war in Lebanon and it all fell apart. So it really is a tragic tale of the clash of cultures and the cultures with the bad ideas. In this case, the Islamists that want to take the region back to the Middle Ages, they sort of got their way in that area and it really destroyed Lebanon. It's really a sad state of affairs because Lebanon, frankly, would be a great place to go visit.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  I've planned two vacations to Lebanon to the point where we were either purchasing or pricing airline tickets. And one time was, I believe in 2000 and the Second Entefata started, so bad timing. And the other time was in 2006. And I remember I was going to the internet cafe, because you still needed to do that, in London where I was at the time, to use the internet. And I turn on CNN while I'm putting my underwear on and it's like, Israel's invading. And I was like, maybe I will not buy airline tickets to Lebanon for next week. So I just texted my friend, my college roommates are Armenians and they're from Lebanon. And I was like, are you ever going to go back? And they're like, yeah, now's not the best time for that, but yeah, I'll call you. Cause I'm like, I want to go. He's like, I want to go, you know, my family's there. I haven't seen him for a decade and

• 23:23Speaker 01

  a half or whatever it's been. So it looks like an amazing place. And I'm from Michigan, man. I'm from near Dearborn. We have the largest Lebanese community outside the Middle East. Tons of Lebanese friends growing up. Lebanese food was always kind of my favorite cuisine and probably still is.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  The best food.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when I say Nasrallah's fat, I'm mostly just jealous that he got to eat so much Lebanese food because that stuff is absolute drugs. I will take that any day over pretty much any other cuisine. And if you haven't had it, you haven't lived. But the idea that Lebanon would have been an amazing place now is not lost on people who know the history. And that's what's extra sad about it. And you have some people in the documentary who are like, who are from there. And they basically just say like, I miss the place, right? I mean, it used to be such a great place and now who knows what's going to happen? I mean, you just don't know. What's interesting is you got the Shiite Hezbollah, party of God is what that means, by the way, and Hamas is Sunni. Maybe some people know that Shiites and Sunnis don't always get along. I mean, Iran is Shia. They

• 24:21Speaker 01

  fight the Iraqis all the time because they're Sunni. What overrides the religious divide? Is it just, well, the Jews are worse? You know, is that what we're dealing with?

• 24:27Speaker 02

  I think that's the basic math. Yeah. Now, listen, the Sunnis and Shiites, they don't like each other at all. They fight constantly. It all goes back to this ancient dispute over who's the direct descendant of Muhammad. And there was one guy that killed another one. And then from then on, it was just not good. So you have the Sunni and the Shia. And the Shia have always looked at themselves as the oppressed. They always claimed that they're the ones that are oppressed by the Sunnis and the rest of the world, especially the West. And that's who Hezbollah is, is the Shia. They brand themselves as the oppressed. Now, you pointed out Nasrallah being fat. It kind of betrays the whole motivation of what he's trying to teach everybody about, we're oppressed here in Lebanon, but we eat

• 25:07Speaker 02

  so well. But the Shia has always been known, they always think of themselves as the oppressed. Iran fuels that, of course. And that's why they call themselves the Resistance. Well, resistance to what exactly? But Israel left Lebanon years ago, decades ago, you know, they don't plan on coming back, but they do care about rockets flying into their northern cities. And that's why we're in the situation that we're in now.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  There's this whole sort of nonsense Tucker Carlson style bullshit that's like, Greater Israel, they want to take over the whole Middle East. And if you know anything about the Middle East, it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all. It's like, who's going to live in those places? In case you missed the news in the last century or so, there's not enough Jews anymore, and there never were frankly, to fill that space. Also, I don't know about you, man, but if somebody's like, this all could be yours. And they show me like downtown Detroit in Cleveland. I'm like, I'm good. I don't think so. I don't want to govern this area. I mean, and you look at places like, and this is a little bit dark, but like you look at places like Syria, you can ask countries like Egypt and they're like, we don't want anything to do with that. Like you could, the UN is like,

• 26:15Speaker 01

  go in there and keep the peace? Do we have to? It's just not a place where you're like, oh, we want all of this. And it's like, great. So you want a bunch of sand with a bunch of people that are constantly killing each other? No, thanks. That's a nightmare. That's like asking if you want a tiger as a pet in your house with your kids. No, thanks. The idea fails immediately as soon as it's brought up to anybody who's not just like a Nazi on Twitter.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  Right. The whole narrative that Israel, this Greater Israel project is to take over the Middle East is total nonsense. You have to not know your history.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  All throughout history, Israel's done nothing but give back land. They had the whole Sinai. They gave that back to Egypt. They gave Gaza to the Palestinians essentially. They pulled all their people out of Gaza. And by the way, that was not easy to do. There was people that lived there and there was back in 2000 when this happened.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to be fair. They gave Gaza back to the Palestinians. The Palestinians were there before. It wasn't a gift from Israel. I gotta be fair on this, right? You know?

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. My point is there was Israelis that were living in Gaza and they pulled them out of there. They pulled them out of their homes in some cases. They dragged them out. And they said, we're out of here. Back to you Palestinians. Do what you will with it. We'll leave you infrastructure. We'll leave you water, desalinization plants and everything you guys need to survive. And so they pulled out of there. So there isn't an example. They pulled out of Lebanon when they had a security zone up there. So case after case, Israel would be in an area to try to protect themselves and they'll pull out. And what do they get rewarded for that? Well, they get rewarded with their enemy right on their border and invading and attacking and coming after them. So you have to not know your history to suggest that Israel's plan is to just keep getting more and more territory in the Middle East. What they do want to do is have a place that they can

• 27:57Speaker 02

  live and not be attacked.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  And that was the whole purpose in 1948 when the nation was created, after World War II.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  One thing I think we should clarify is Lebanon, the government of Lebanon and the general population of Lebanon also does not want Hezbollah there. I think, can you speak to that a little bit? Cause I think people think like, oh, Hezbollah is just a Lebanese army. No, they're a random Iranian army that happens to be in Lebanon as a social organization, terrorist organization and political party and a militia. But no, there's a Lebanese army that's just not strong enough to push them out. And that's been the case for decades.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. Hezbollah is many things and this is how they're pretty clever. They're a political organization, like you said. They're a military organization. They're a terrorist organization. They also provide for social services. They're basically a welfare state for the Shiite people. And so they've gained the trust for a certain population of the Lebanese society. As a result too, they've really kind of forced their will on the rest of Lebanon, which is like we mentioned, the Christian portion, the Sunni portion. And Hezbollah as a political organization has really thrown their weight around. Now, of course, they do this through assassinations and violence and other ways like that. And so Lebanon does have an actual military that's separate from Hezbollah, but they're feckless.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  They can't do anything. And they're very much afraid that if they do try to do something, Hezbollah, who's funded by billions of dollars from Iran, will have their way. I heard one stat that just is fascinating, Jordan. I don't know if you've heard this or not, but I heard the weekly pay for a Lebanese military person versus a Hezbollah military person. And the pay for somebody in Hezbollah is about 10 times more money than if you work for the Lebanese military. And so it's really no contest. They have the money. They have the resources. They use violence and they can push people around. And that's how they've been able to have the amount of influence and authority in Lebanon. And the Lebanese government can kind of Not do anything about it.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you for clarifying that because I think a lot of people are like, well, they're allowed to have their own army. No, it's not their own army. It's, it's, it would be like if Louisiana was like, hey, we got a bunch of contractors here from, I don't know, China, and they're armed, and they're gonna do whatever they want. We can't really stop them. And by the way, they're probably gonna attack a bunch of people in the other states and I don't know, you can't do anything about it. I mean, that's the situation that they're in, right? It's no good. The connection to Syria is interesting here, too. Iran's, they're supplying, for years and years and years, they're running missiles across here, probably for decades. And Assad, during the civil war, Assad, a murderous dictator, right, who killed, he's gassing his own people and, you know, just absolutely one of the worst dictators of

• 30:40Speaker 01

  modern history. He was allowing them to do this because he was probably getting paid, you know, he's running organized crime with Hezbollah in Iran. But also, during the civil war, he needed Hezbollah soldiers to essentially back him because his army was getting hammered by militias and ISIS and other, the US and, you know, Russia's in the mix, right? So Assad's like, hey, I'm on the, on the back foot here, send more guys over. And it's interesting to see these articles where even Hezbollah commanders are like, why are we fighting for this piece of crap who's killing a bunch of other Muslims again? And the answer is kind of like, shut up and do your job. We need this guy. It's above your pay grade. And you can read about all these grumblings of these guys that are like, we're getting

• 31:22Speaker 01

  killed all the time over here to support this guy who's just clearly a piece of shit dictator that's murdering tons of Muslims, doesn't care at all, doesn't share our ideals. And it's quite interesting what happens when Hezbollah ends up getting paged because once they can't support Assad, well, where's Assad now? In a hotel in Moscow for the rest of his life? I mean, that play, that was overnight that changed. So it shows you what Hezbollah was doing for one of the most murderous regimes in the world. They were propping them up, and they were doing it essentially for cash and weapons.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, you're pointing out one of the more interesting nuances of this whole thing. And, you know, listen, Assad was a puppet. He was a puppet for Iran. He basically was very weak. The Syrian military was not very strong. You know, Iran always wanted to be in Syria and Lebanon, and they just found this unique arrangement with the Assad regime where basically Assad would do whatever Iran wanted. And the trade off there was, Iran would keep him in power. So whenever these rebel groups would try to overthrow Assad, Iran would step in with Hezbollah and different groups to basically back up Assad. And to your point, you're exactly right. The leaders of Hezbollah didn't necessarily love that. But what were they gonna say about it when they're getting all of their money and resources from Iran? I mean, it was like, basically like, Iran's like, no, you need

• 32:40Speaker 02

  to do this. It did create this Shia axis through Syria into southern Lebanon where they could basically transport and do whatever they wanted. And so Assad would essentially just look the other way for whatever Iran wanted to do. But the arrangement there was that they would keep him in power. But the problem is, when the pager operation happened, and then the subsequent operations in southern Lebanon that really, really weakened Hezbollah, they took out their commanders with airstrikes, they took out a lot of their weapons, Hezbollah didn't have the ability to go in there and defend Assad in Syria. And so within weeks, it happened faster than I think people thought it would.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  It always does, right? These guys seem completely bulletproof, and then some weird domino comes out of left field and hits the rest of them, and you go, oh, he fell out a window? And that's it? That's kind of what happened, right, in Syria, was, wait, the, the rebels are, they're totally, almost totally done. They're pushed back everywhere. Hezbollah's in there, they're entrenched, that's not happening. Boom, you take out 3,000 of them, right? There's 5,000 testicles floating around Lebanon and Syria now on the floor, and eyeballs. And then suddenly, oh, wait a minute, the rebels are making another push. Oh, and all these positions are empty. Or they're manned by guys with one leg, and the rest of them are in the hospital, right? And it's, oh, I guess Assad is boarding his plane. And I remember within, like you said, weeks slash a couple of days,

• 33:59Speaker 01

  you have these intercepted communications from the Syrian army that's like, wait, Assad left us? That bastard. We're sitting, and then they just basically get killed because there's no supplies. They're, they're putting on civilian clothes from people they've murdered so that they can walk around and go, oh, I don't know, I just, I was caught in this mess, right? They're totally screwed. It really does happen kind of overnight, which shows you how much of a role Hezbollah slash Iran was playing in Syria as well, even though they, of course, denied that. And dummies in TikTok are gonna deny that.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, there was one of those revolutions where there was barely a shot fired, and people just put down their weapons and walked away.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Well, at the end.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  At the end, yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Syrian civil war was unbelievably brutal.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I'm talking about when it actually did finally happen. Yeah, it's been a horrible, bloody civil war. And of course, Assad had the backing of Iran and Hezbollah and Russia.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  And it was, anybody that's watched that Aleppo movie knows how bad it was. But when finally, when Hezbollah was taken out with the pager operation and the operations afterwards, it all happened very quickly. Once those rebels realized that Hezbollah would not be there to come to the rescue, they started in Aleppo, and they just marched right down into Damascus. And there was very little resistance whatsoever. So it all happened very fast. And you can just see clearly how much Iran was responsible for that, for keeping Assad in power, and how much they basically were controlling the Greater Middle East.

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so people get the background. I apologize for those of you out there who are like, I've heard all this before, but now it's, we're on to the pager stuff, I promise. But you have to do this. Otherwise, people are like, okay, so they blew up a bunch of random Lebanese guys with pagers? Cool, I guess, right? Now, it's, you'll see this in the bigger context of things. So take us back to the beginning. Who first realized Hezbollah's communication equipment could become the delivery mechanism for an attack? What problem were they originally trying to solve here?

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think they were looking for that one thing that they could just use as a surprise element. Obviously, Israel had been tapping their devices for a number of years. And the pager operation actually started with an operation before that called the walkie talkie operation. The walkie talkie operation had been in play for about 10 years. And the reason it had gone on that long is ultimately, Israel did not activate the walkie talkies, but they had essentially done the same thing where they knew Hezbollah fighters were using walkie talkies. They carried a gun and a walkie talkie. And so they thought, okay, well, not only can we monitor their communications, which is very helpful in terms of intelligence, but maybe we could do something else with this operation

• 36:29Speaker 02

  as well. Maybe we could change this on the battlefield and be able to detonate an explosion. And so they got into the supply chain for these walkie talkies. These walkie talkies were being supplied to Hezbollah from a company in the far east, and they got into the supply chain. The details of this operation are a little bit more unclear, but they basically were able to plant bombs in these walkie talkies. And there's about 15,000 of these walkie talkies that were given to Hezbollah fighters. Now, the reason Israel decided that this was not going to be effective is because the fighters only carried these walkie talkies at certain times. And it was when they were directly engaged with Israel in

• 37:08Speaker 02

  a fight. And so at any given time, only about 5% of the fighters would be carrying one of these walkie talkies. And so most of these walkie talkies were sitting in storage rooms somewhere. And so I think Israel realized, okay, well, it's a cool idea. It could be a game changer, but it's not gonna work because there's not enough Hezbollah guys that are carrying around these things at any given moment. And so they said, well, okay, well, what will they be carrying? Are they gonna be carrying anything that is electronic? And that's when they found out that they were buying pagers from Taiwan. And so about two years prior to the operation is when the pager operation got started. And they essentially did the same thing. They got into the supply chain, they found the company

• 37:49Speaker 02

  in Taiwan that was selling these pagers to Hezbollah knowingly, by the way. They found the company, it was called Gold Apollo. And they reached out to Gold Apollo. First of all, they set up a shell corporation so that nobody knew it was Mossad that was behind it.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Probably a good idea, yeah.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And they reached out to this company, and they asked, first of all, to buy the company outright. And the company was interested, but they decided they didn't want to sell the company. And so they licensed the pagers, they've licensed the brand to this shell company that Mossad owned. And so that way, Mossad could make this Gold Apollo brand of pagers and manufacture them and sell them. And they also hired away their top saleswoman who was responsible for all of the Middle East. Now, this woman knew that she was selling for Hezbollah for years. She had been selling them all kinds of different devices. And so I think they just made her a better offer. And she became the sales rep for these new devices that they were gonna market to Hezbollah. Now, with the pagers, of course, what was

• 38:50Speaker 02

  different than the walkie talkies, is the Hezbollah fighters carried these pagers with them everywhere at all times. And it was their main form of communication. Because right around the same time, Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, told all the Hezbollah fighters to get off your mobile phones. The Israelis are tracking you on your mobile phones. They're getting intel. The mobile phone is collaborating with the Israelis. It is betraying all of you. So use pagers, use something that can receive messages but cannot transmit them.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Mossad tested ringtones until it found the most annoying one possible. Finally, a product team willing to admit that making you hate the device was always part of the design. We'll be right back.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. Take a moment, support the sponsors. They make the show possible. All of the deals and discounts are searchable and clickable on the deals page at jordanharbinger.com/deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor or find a code, you can email me, [email protected]. We're happy to surface codes for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Justin Folk.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  I gotta say, I caught something kind of funny, and I don't know if you did this deliberately in the film, but they shown Nasrallah giving this speech, and he's like, "Get off the cellphones. The Israelis are tracking it." And immediately, you cut to the crowd, and there's all these dudes filming him on their cellphones. And I was like, "Is that real? Is that... or did he just put that B-roll in there? Because that's hilarious if they're like, "Oh yeah, get off your cellphones, zooming in on... you know, make it wider." I was like, "If that's real footage, that's low-key hilarious." Like, the low IQ in the room is just unbelievable.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Very ironic. Yeah, yeah. They're kind of like, "Oh, yeah, oops." Very, very embarrassing moment.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  "I'll start tomorrow." Yeah, sorry about that.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  So coincidentally, it's right around the time that Nasrallah tells all Hezbollah to stop using your cellphones and start using pager devices is when Mossad was already essentially contracting this with this woman in Taiwan to manufacture these gold Apollo pagers. And then from then on out, it was, uh, they had to come up with the design, they had to get Apollo to sign off on the design, which they did. In fact, the pager company said, "This is one of the best designs we've ever seen."

• 41:03Speaker 01

  That's hilarious.

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Now, of course, they left out the part about the explosives being in the battery.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was not in the schematic, right? The TNT that they included was not in the schematic. I think the reason the sales lady is important is because she was knowingly selling to terrorists for years, and then when they hired her away, Hezbollah had no reason to believe, "Oh, we shouldn't trust her. This is a new..." No, this is the same salesperson you've always dealt with. And, you know, some people were like, "Oh, man, Israel put her life in danger." Eh, I don't know. You put your own life in danger if you're selling to terrorists, and the fact that you got outplayed, I mean, sucks to suck. Maybe don't sell equipment and material to terrorists.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  The supply chain was there. Mossad did not disrupt it. It was this woman selling to this Hezbollah buyer.

• 41:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:44Speaker 02

  They had been doing that for years. They were able to just get right in there in that, between that relationship. But this woman, she knew she was selling to Hezbollah, and she was probably making some pretty good money doing that. I will note that after the operation, and this is information that's not really well-known, Israel basically paid for her to go into retirement. They basically put her in witness protection program, and so she was able to kind of sail off into the sunset, because they knew that her life would be in danger from Hezbollah after this operation. So she's living somewhere quietly with well-apportioned accommodations and living a good life somewhere. And that just kind of shows how, even though they didn't have to do that, I think they did that because

• 42:26Speaker 02

  they realized, "Okay, well, she didn't know who she was working for, so we're gonna, we're gonna put her up somewhere."

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is ironic, though. She knew she was working with Hezbollah, but then she didn't know she was working with Mossad, and now she has to worry about Hezbollah killing her, but the Mossad is the one protecting her. I mean, the irony is there, but it shows you who values human life a little bit, at least in the end, at the end of the day. So if you live in Israel and your neighbors are Taiwanese, and they moved in a couple years ago, I don't know, man, invite them over for dinner.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  To the penthouse suite.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, invite them over for dinner and get the story. I don't think they're gonna tell you, but you can try. All right. So, once somebody says, "Let's put an explosive inside a pager," what are the engineering problems that immediately appear, right? Because this thing still has to be a pager. It can't have like five hours of battery life compared to your 30-day battery life on other pagers. It can't have this giant chunk on the top where the TNT goes. It has to survive shipping, inspection, charging, ordinary use, which could be rugged. These guys are in the desert jumping around and blowing things up. It can't blow up prematurely, because then they're gonna check all of them and throw them all away, and it has to remain dormant until the exact moment Israel chooses, and that could literally be years. So, that's a tall order, man.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  It is. And the biggest challenge that they faced was the size of the device. Over the years, we've seen our phones, we used to, people used to walk around with those big brick phones, you know, the massive things like that. People would not buy that today.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  You know, we have these super slick devices. Well, pagers kind of the same way. Like, the old pagers used to be these big blocks, and now they're kind of like these sleek little designs. And, and so the pagers that Hezbollah had were these kind of like little, kind of sleek little things, and Mossad needed to try to get them to buy a new one. But the problem is, they couldn't fit the explosives into that tiny little device. They had to put it in a battery. They had to hide the explosive, because a lithium battery you cannot break open catches on fire. And so, what Mossad did was they hid the explosives in the battery. And they knew that you couldn't break it apart to inspect it, because that's a bad thing to do. And so they had to put this bigger battery, but making the battery bigger made the whole thing bigger. So then you ended up with this

• 44:29Speaker 02

  big chunky device, that it's like, "Okay, why would anybody want to buy this?" And so, they decided, "Okay, well, this is a marketing problem. This is not a design issue. We need to market this bigger pager. It's like, bigger is better. And we're gonna make this the, sort of the fighter's pager." They called it the rugged pager. And so, you know, it was waterproof, it had a longer battery life, it could be charged from a USB device, which old pagers were always like 9-volt batteries. They'd last like a very short amount of time. And so they came up with this rugged design, and then they branded it like that. They actually made advertisements that showed this pager being dropped in a glass of water. They showed this pager kind of in dirt and dust and being run over and all this stuff like that. And they basically were able to convince the Hezbollah fighters, like, "This

• 45:12Speaker 02

  is the cool fighter pager. If you have one of these, you're a total badass." Like, you want one of these.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  That's right. Are you out there trying to murder Jewish school kids with rockets, and you're sick of not being able to get your email, your texts? We got the solution for you. You don't have a lot of water out there, but you got a lot of dust, and it's dustproof, too. I mean, the ad that they showed was pretty convincing, you know? Yeah, and then they show the guys holding it, like, wow.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  What I love about that ad, Jordan, is like, it's kind of like lo-fi. You know, Mossad, if they wanted to, they could have done like a really super slick ad and had, you know, this beautiful photography or AI or whatever to make it look awesome. But the ad itself is like, fairly like lo-fi.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  It is.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  It's got this cheesy, needle drop music, and it's like, the way it was shot, it was like, almost like, "Okay, this is what a pager company would do."

• 45:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. If you're making 80s tech, we got an 80s commercial for you. Here we go. Get ready. Yeah, or 90s tech, anyway.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Where were they making these? Because in the movie, it looks like they were moving the squat rack and the benches, and they're like, "I guess the gym is now an assembly line for making exploding pagers."

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there was a ton of speculation about where these pages were made, and how did they get the explosives in there. But in our story, you learn that they were actually making them right there at Mossad headquarters. That's where these pages were being manufactured. Now, they were being shipped through Europe and Taiwan and all these places into Lebanon, so they had a, a long way to go before they got to Hezbollah, but they were being made right there in Tel Aviv.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  I'm sure DHL is thrilled to find out that Mossad shipped a bunch of TNT over in the air, right, through Germany and Taiwan or whoever, right? They're probably like, "Wait a minute. FedEx CEO and DHL CEO were like, 'Find out if we are the ones that ship these.'"

• 46:52Speaker 02

  That little question you have to answer, "Does this package contain dangerous goods?" I don't think that checkbox was marked.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's like somewhere, somebody's like, "Oh, please don't let this have been on one of our planes. Please." But they had to think about that, right? Israel had to think, "Okay, we gotta make sure this is not something that is going to explode under pretty much any circumstance, other than the exact ones that we want. Period."

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, think about the stress of that. The engineer, what fell to the engineers of this thing is like, "Okay, this thing cannot just randomly blow up accidentally, for many reasons." What an embarrassing thing to have happen, especially if like it killed a civilian. So, they had to really make sure that their tech was solid. And so, they hired, actually, there was a Mossad engineer. He was a PhD in both physics and mathematics, and he was the one that was responsible for, sort of, young guy that kind of came up with the design and how to get these explosives in there and how to activate it and do all of that. And so, literally the best of the best to come up with this design. I should also mention, um, this is an interesting part of the story, is how much TNT did they put into these things? And that was always a debate that they had to figure out. And

• 47:58Speaker 02

  ultimately, what they did was they lowered them out more and more and more. And they decided that what they wanted to do is not kill the person, but just injure them. You know, listen, they're tired of making martyrs. They're tired of these guys being killed on the battlefield. They have the big funeral. They put them in the ground, and everybody forgets about them, and there's a new crop of terrorists that pop up right behind them. And so they're tired of doing that. What they wanted to do was to injure these guys, take them off the battlefield for sure. Maybe remove a couple fingers so they can't press the button that launches the rockets. If they can't see, they can't target things. And so, they wanted to injure them, but not kill them. They wanted them to be in their medical system.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  You know, they wanted them to be around for years. They wanted to be around in crutches and wheelchairs, so that as deterrent, the young people of Lebanon, the young Shia Muslims would look at these old guys that don't have fingers and maybe are blind or whatever, however they're injured, and be like, "You know, I don't really want to go down this road. I don't really want to be like that."

• 48:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  And so they didn't want to just wipe all these people off the map. They wanted to keep them around. Sure, they wanted to get them off the battlefield, but they didn't want to kill them.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  I think it's a brilliant strategy. I mean, one, it limits collateral damage, right? Because you're not taking out the whole café with this pager. You're taking out the testicles or the eyeballs of the guy and the hands of the guy who's holding it, and that's it. And it's usually just the guy who's supposed to be holding it, the majority, vast majority of cases. And yeah, they're in the medical system, there are a drain on the finances, right? You got 3,000 of your, whatever, 11,000 fighters, and they're all just a pure drain, right? Iran might give them a billion dollars, and 100 million is going to like... Making sure these guys have fresh colostomy bags for next month. You see these parades where they're all in wheelchairs. You have this in the movie. And I remember thinking, that might not be the flex you guys think it is. When you just have rows and rows of dudes in wheelchairs and kids are like, oh, my gosh, how did you get injured?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I was taking a dump in one of the outhouses, doing absolutely nothing. And then this blew up and now I pee out of a plastic tube. It's like, ugh, okay. So you don't have like a cool story about, you know, going into Israel. No, no, I really got injured for no reason. And now my life is crappy and I'm blind. And it's like, maybe I don't want to join the resistance. What are we resisting again? They don't, it doesn't, all the cool videos they post online, they kind of leave this out. And I was thinking, I don't know, man, I might want to hide the dudes in the wheelchairs in that number if I'm trying to show how mighty we are. It's like, no, no, no, you're basically just a commercial for how bad Israelis dunked on you guys. That's all this parade looked like to me.

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that parade video is unbelievable. I remember seeing it when it came out and it has this like heroic music that they're playing and all the guys in the wheelchairs are kind of like thumping their chests like they do in Hezbollah.

• 50:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  And it's like a proud moment where they're all like in crutches and wheelchairs like limping down the street. And it's like, really? This is how you want to present yourself to the rest of the world? And like you said, this is the flex you guys want.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like when you see a World War II veteran and he's in a wheelchair, you're like, he's 94. Wow, look, good for him. When you see a guy who's 34 and he's in a wheelchair because he checked a page, you know, at a cafe, this does not quite have the same effect.

• 51:06Speaker 02

  And to your point, the guy that lost his leg at the Battle of the Bolts, it's a little different story than the guy that was sitting on the toilet.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, saving Private Ryan story is a little different. One of the things I thought was quite interesting, a detail from the movie was when they were paging, they kept giving the test pagers to the Mossad agents and they would be like, all right, oh, look, they're picking it up with one hand and disabling it. Oh, look, they're reaching into their pocket and they can, without looking at it, push the silence button on it and then check it and put it right back really quickly. We don't want that. So they were changing the noises it made to be more annoying and they had the way you silence it has to be two buttons and you can only push each, one hand can only push each of the buttons because of how far apart they are. You couldn't possibly do it with one hand. And you've got to look at the screen, but the screen's a little too big. Let's make it a little smaller so you have to put it closer to your face. And they're testing all this on Mossad agents so that they're like, okay, now the only way

• 51:55Speaker 01

  to silence this thing is you hear this really annoying noise, you quickly pull it out of your pocket because it's grating and then you have to put it close to your face to read it. And then you have to push the two buttons on the sides, one with each hand. And then it was like, now we got you because now you're shoving this thing right up in your face with both hands and boom. And I thought to myself, wow, they really, again, just had to test every single element of this thing over and over again to make sure that it worked and also didn't kill a bunch of random people when it went off.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, this was probably the most focused, tested product in the history of products. I mean, they basically like, they had to get this thing dialed in to do what they wanted to do. I mean, obviously they're taking a great gamble with this stuff. And so they're like, okay, how do we get these guys? They had to test, how long does it take them to take it out of their pocket? They determined that was about seven seconds, that the time it rings to the time that you kind of fumble for it and you've got to move past your keys and your wallet and then you get it out. And about seven seconds was sort of the median of people having that thing up in front of their face. But then they realized, oh, everybody does this. Everybody just takes it up with one hand and looks at it. That's cool, but you know, listen, we'd like to have the other hand involved too. So how do we do that?

• 53:09Speaker 02

  So then they sent a message that says, encrypted message, press both buttons. There's two buttons on the face of this thing. And so it requires you to take both thumbs and press it like this. And it also requires you to put it, if you're holding it with two hands, you're putting it right here in front of your face.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  They also trained the explosion to go basically directly out towards the person.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I think the pattern of the explosion is critical because specifically they did not want to injure anybody standing right next to that person. It could be a civilian, it could be a kid, it could be anything. And so they, they worked on the pattern. Now, of course, they didn't test this on the Mossad agents, but it was definitely part of the design of the explosion only occurring right here. And so all this stuff came through testing and Mossad agents didn't know exactly why they had these pagers, but they had to record how long it took for them to get it out of their hands and what the message said and would they press the buttons and all these different things. And ultimately they finally figured out, okay, seven seconds. And there is also a misconception about the pagers, about how they went off.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  People think that because they pressed the buttons, they went off, but that's not true. That was just kind of a ruse. They were all going to go off after seven seconds, no matter what. It's just that they wanted people like pressing those buttons, like, why can I not turn off this annoying noise?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  They also engineered and they tested the noises, the actual ringtones, and they picked the most annoying one. And it was a different one. So Hezbollah fighters were using these pagers and they had different ringtones. And this was a ringtone that they had never heard before. It only activated the one time that it blew up.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. So they're like, oh, gosh, what's this? It must be really important. I better look at it.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a different sound and it was very annoying. And so they're like, okay, I got to, and it says encrypted message, which it usually never said. And so it was a different ringtone, very annoying. It had the message, press both buttons. And ultimately that was the thing that got most of the fighters to do this. Now, it did go off in some people's pockets, the people that didn't get it out in time. And those are probably the ones with the unfortunate injuries below the belt. But yeah, they definitely tested it and made sure that it would do what they wanted it to do.

• 55:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, people are like, Jordan's awkwardly giddy about a weapon of war. I'm actually, the reason I get so worked up about this in a positive way is because this is a complete piece of behavioral engineering designed to place itself exactly where it would cause the intended injury to people that are very targeted, right? I mean, this is not like, again, you're not blowing up a whole cafe full of people to kill one Russian general or something like that, right? You're taking out an operative who is a terrorist.

• 55:51Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, we maybe we buried the lead here, but I've heard this criticism over and over about the pager operation, about it being just like indiscriminate and just blowing people up all, no. This was the most precise targeted operation probably in history. You have to understand, only the best of the Hezbollah commanders had these pagers. They didn't just give them out to anybody. This is top secret stuff. Their communications at the highest level. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon had one of these pagers. He lost his eye. So what does that tell you? If you, the ambassador to Iran has one of these pagers, they're not giving it out to the guy on the corner, they're not giving it out to the woman that sells flowers. There was about 5,000 pagers out there and it was only the top military commanders.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  Keep in mind, there's hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah fighters.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Oh, there are. I didn't realize it was that many. Wow.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  There's close to 200,000. And so only 5,000 pagers and they only belong to the top guys. Israeli intel says that there was a number of people in the room with Nasrallah when those pagers went off. So imagine what that was like for him. He didn't have one himself, but there was at least five to seven guys in his bunker with him that had pagers that went off in front of Nasrallah.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  Wow. Yeah, that would have been a confusing morning for him. And yeah, and I assume right after that, it was, okay, somebody replace these and take me to another place that it doesn't have windows because I'm next. I mean, they know I don't have a pager, so they're going to use something else to get me. Man, that's one of those like, it's dark, but fly on the wall would have been real interesting to see what the reaction to that type of thing, right? You're in a meeting and seven out of your 12 guys are dead.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, imagine the broken trust. Like you gave these pagers to us. Like imagine looking to your higher up in the military command, like, wait, you gave me this pager and it just blew up in my hand. These walkie talkies, they detonated the walkie talkies the next day.

• 57:43Speaker 01

  Oh, they did? Okay, I wondered about that.

• 57:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the walkie talkie operation, obviously, we talked about how they didn't think it'd be effective, but all of a sudden, when the pagers blow up, everybody grabs their walkie talkies in Hezbollah. They're using that for communication because their communication device just blew up. So now they're all on walkie talkies. So Israel's like, okay, use it or lose it type of situation. 24 hours after the pagers, the walkie talkies blew up. And now at that point, it's like, okay, what can you trust if you're in Hezbollah?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  No, now you're using smoke signals from rooftop to rooftop because.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  Carry your pigeons.

• 58:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, the movie shows a pretty funny dramatization where the guy's ripping out the microwave and throwing it out the window and taking out the TV apart. And his wife is like, what the heck is wrong with this guy? But I would do the same thing, right? If my pager blew up and then my cellphone blew up, I'm sending you mail, snail mail, and I'm using, I'm using a quill to do it. I'm looking for Mossad under every frickin' rock in my backyard at that point. One thing I forgot to mention about the pagers, the first batch had really bad reception, probably because there was a bunch of TNT around the antenna. And they called the sales lady and she's like, yeah, we're aware of the problem. I'm so sorry you got that bad batch. We'll send you some more. And then you cut to the head of Mossad sort of chuckling and he's like, we offered them 500 more, no charge. Like, and he's, you can just tell he's like so proud of himself, right?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Because these are, this is like the legendary operation of his career. And this is like a historic intelligence coup.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Just good customer service, really. They could just be proud.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  It's just good, five star customer service. Exactly.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Good customer service, five star rating on Yelp. And you know, they were able to kind of get the price down. They were still competitive and you know, Hezbollah had to like the product, but they had to play that whole marketing game and keep them happy. And we were just talking about the pagers and when they blew up, they no longer had a way to communicate. They lost their primary form of communication and so they couldn't launch all those rockets. You know, that command was supposed to go out to Hezbollah fighters to launch those rockets. And you know, those pages were, you know, pieces at that point.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  And then after that, Israeli special forces and airstrikes just took out as many of the rockets as they could because they knew where they were. They were just worried they couldn't get them all if they were going to launch them all at the same time. But since they were just sitting there with nobody to activate them, they were sitting ducks. And of course Hezbollah didn't know, Israel knew where most of those things actually were. I was wondering, did you feed the head of Mossad that line? Because you cut, you show him going, it sounds like Hezbollah paid arms and legs to get the best product on the market. And I'm like, that sounds like something either he thought up and sat on for three days or that you gave him.

• 1:00:10Speaker 02

  I don't think you're allowed to feed the head of Mossad anything.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Probably not.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so no, those are lines are entirely his, those are entirely his statements. There's another one from the movie that I love. Comes early on in the movie where he basically is talking about a message to their enemies. And he said, if you're an enemy to Israel, you know, you just know that Mossad is a fist in your face and you will have no idea how we will get to your face.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  And it's like one of the best lines ever. But no, those are his, those are his lines entirely.

• 1:00:41Speaker 01

  For all the technology involved, Justin said this still depended on contacts and relationships. Devastating news for every guy who bought a second monitor so he'd never have to speak to another human. We'll be right back.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. Now for the rest of my conversation with Justin Fulk.

• 1:01:03Speaker 01

  You see like all the information warfare from the other side, from Hamas, from Hezbollah, and you had it from ISIS, you see it from Iran. When you see the movie, you realize Israel's got some zingers too. I mean, there's a clip from Netanyahu saying something that I think the UN and he's like, "Look, we paged Hezbollah and I think they got the message." And it was just like, "Oh, God, man. You just want people to hate you, but okay, I'm chuckling in my seat." Like, I wish they showed the whole, the delegates, because you know there was somebody like covering their mouth and looking down at their paper and just biting their fingers so they don't laugh into the mic. Like, where's my, because it's just like, oh, man, epic troll after this. And once they killed Nasrallah with, I believe it was a, was it a drone strike or rocket strike?

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  They did a flyover of his funeral, just like, "Hey, no, no, no, we're not going to do anything. We just want you to know we're here and you can't do anything about it. We got your guy. We're waiting for you to replace him so we can come back and get the next one."

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  The flying the jets over Nasrallah's funeral for the soccer stadium full of like over 100,000 people, they do a, you know, a maverick buzz the tower over that just to send a message. But I think it's a kind of a foreign concept for us Westerners. We're all such nice people and it just seems like impolite. But one thing you have to realize is strength is all that matters over there in the Middle East. And so when Israel sends a message to its enemies, whether it's what we were just talking about of saying, "We'll be a fist in your face," or whether it's like you mentioned, Netanyahu saying, "We paged Hezbollah, they got the message," or whether it's flying fighter jets over the funeral, it's basically telling their enemy, "Hey, don't mess with us. Stop doing this. Stop trying to fight us."

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  And there's a real detert effect that they're trying to accomplish. You know, that kind of language works in the Middle East. They listen to that. And so that's something that's a little bit of a foreign concept, I think, to us in the West. It seems like it's a bluster. It seems like it's a really kind of inviting trouble. But actually what it's doing is it's telling their enemies to sit down, cut it out, you don't want to mess with us.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  I always lose listeners when I cover stuff like this because people are like, "Oh, you admire this too much." And it's like, "Look, it's sort of a double standard, I'll admit. If the United States did this, I would be like, 'Aren't we better than this?'" But when you look at Israel and the Middle East, you realize, no, this is the language that they understand, right? When you look at Ukraine and Russia, you can't just be like, "I know they're bombing our schools and our cafes and our hospitals, but we really need to try a diplomatic solution here." And it's like, "No, these are invaders. You need to dismember them with drones until they run out of people to throw into the meat grinder." That's the sad truth, the sad reality on the ground over there. And until that reality changes, you're basically the UN sending a strong angrily worded letter to Kim Jong Il about nuclear weapons that he's tearing up and lighting on fire and laughing in your face, right? And it's completely useless.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  It's a completely different culture over there and you have to do that or they're going to go. I mean, when the US didn't respond to the barracks being blown up in the 80s from Hezbollah, we probably thought, "Oh, we're, we're just going to leave and they're going to realize that this, we're doing, we're standing up and we have our values and we value freedom and human life." And they just went, "What idiots. They're not going to do anything about that. They must be so weak. Let's hit it twice as hard now. They're not going to do, they're so much weaker than we thought. We thought we were going to get smacked for this and they didn't do anything. What a bunch of wimps, those Americans." That's exactly what they thought. And you can see that they wrote about that. They talked about that. They were shocked at that. They learned that we were a bunch of wimps and that was the wrong message to send to a bunch of terrorists.

• 1:04:33Speaker 02

  They think of things very differently than the way we think about it. And by not responding, they realize, "Oh, guess what? We can attack Americans, the West with impunity, essentially. We can kind of keep it up." In fact, it's very beneficial. And when Hezbollah did this, they, all they got as a reward was more money, more financing from Iran. Iran's like, "Keep it up. This is awesome." They didn't do anything. And we have this misconception in the West, like, "If we're just nice, if we step back, if we just are very polite to them, they'll stop attacking us." We don't realize that, like, no, this is a different ideology. It has nothing to do with that. They want to conquer the world. And it doesn't matter how nice we are. It doesn't matter, you know, for those of people think that we're responsible for 9/11

• 1:05:16Speaker 02

  in our country because like, we did some things somewhere. It's a total misconception. It's totally false. They're coming for us as Westerners. We just have to realize this ideology is different. They think different. It's a religious fundamental ideology. It's backwards in many ways and what they don't see it the way we do. They look at their existence as fighting for some eternal reward that they're going to get. Until we realize that, we're in trouble.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Yes, I agree. I agree. Well, in the West, we conflate our lovely Muslim neighbors down the street who we love with Islamists or vice versa. And we go, "These people are not that bad. What's wrong with you? You live in a bubble." And I go, "No, no, no, I love my Muslim neighbors. They're awesome. They come to my house all the time." It's the crazy Islamic fundamentalists who want political Islam in all of the Middle East. And by the way, if you're the wrong kind of Islam, we have to kill all of you and enslave you. And if you're Yazidi, we get to kill you and enslave you. And if you're Christian, we get to kill you and enslave you. And if you're Jewish, gosh, God help you, right? At that point, you're not even going to make it that far. I mean, the Druze, right? What's interesting is if you talk to people from the Middle East who are a minority,

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  they are well aware of this, right? There's a reason that Druze people live in places like Israel, because they don't get tortured and killed for no reason, right? They don't get murdered or have their village burned down for absolutely no reason. And you see it happening in Syria right now. They're attacking Druze people and the government, I believe, is trying to stop it from happening, but it's very hard because this sectarian stuff goes back centuries, if not longer. So, I mean, there's so many things we could cover on this show. I have more questions about the pagers, though. So, they must have, surely they scanned these and they're like, "Let's make sure they don't send out any signals because the Israelis could plant something in there. Let's x-ray the thing." And you could see a detonator and a battery, right? I mean, you might be able to find that in there.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  So, they must have used like non-metal parts or made it look like a different thing. I mean, that, surely they did that? And I know that one of the reasons they timed the operation the way they did was they sent some of these things to Iran and they're like, "Look, we can only do so much here. This thing needs to be like disassembled in a vacuum chamber so the battery doesn't catch on fire and then all of the material needs to be, what's it called? Like those spectral analyzers where you can tell what something is molecularly, like a spectrometer? Like, you need something like that to do it. You need NASA or the equivalent to basically look inside this thing." And they just don't have that back in Lebanon. And Netanyahu's in the movie going like, "How long ago did they send these to Iran? And you're telling me right now? We gotta, where's the switch?

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  We gotta hit the switch yesterday." So, surely they must have examined these things.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, the timeline is actually very, very interesting on all of this. And, you know, because on October 7th, I'll just back up just a little bit. October 7th, when October 7th happened, the attack, there was only 500 pagers that were in the hands of Hezbollah at that time. They didn't have enough pagers out there and they had to step up the production of these pagers. But by the time September rolled around, less than a year, there was 5,000 pagers in the hands of Hezbollah. Now, they're still wondering, "When do we trigger these things? When do we decide to go ahead and go forward this operation?" Now, ultimately, they wanted to follow the pager operation up with a strategic military operation, operations into southern Lebanon to take away Hezbollah's capabilities. But all those plans were still in the works.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  And so what happened was, the intel notified Mossad that Hezbollah had become suspicious and they were shipping these pagers to Tehran, to Iran, to have them tested. I guess in Tehran, they had this special machine that could pick up on kind of what you're alluding to there, like analyze this device in a whole nother way. And I think they realized at that point, "Okay, the gig is up. We're going to lose these things. They're going to find something suspicious." And all they have to say is to everybody is, "Get rid of those pagers." And then the whole operation is gone at that point. And so now Mossad found out about this, but they neglected to tell the prime minister for a few days. That's where the prime minister had some consternation because he's like, "What? This is crazy. You're just telling me now." And so that really sprung things into motion.

• 1:09:23Speaker 02

  I think the prime minister knew, "Okay, we have to go right now." Even though those war plans weren't in place, even though they didn't have the follow-up ready to go, I think the prime minister knew and the head of Mossad knew that, "Okay, we're going to lose this advantage if we don't operate it now." And so the very next day is when they actually operated the pagers, the very next day at 3:30 PM, because 3:30 PM is the time when the day shift is still going and the night shift Hezbollah fighters are just waking up and kind of getting going. So, it was like the time when most of them will be carrying the pagers and the pagers wouldn't be in some nightstand or something like that.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. And do you have any idea, were there more deaths than they expected? Were more bystanders harmed? Because I know one of the major criticisms, they were like, "Oh, my gosh, this person got injured from this." And it's like, "I thought you wanted this to be targeted and now it's the most targeted attack in human history and you're complaining that there's like..." And look, any harm done to a civilian is terrible, but like, when you're in a war for survival, when you attack 3,000 people and you hit all of them, I hate saying this, but that's a pretty, I hate that. I want to phrase this differently, but that's a pretty good ratio of collateral damage, right? Again, any collateral damage is terrible, but it's one of those like, you can't get better, no matter what. It's never happened in history.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and again, this is one of the criticisms, but it's just, you know, you have to be ignorant to military and historical context to believe that this was not the most precise targeting of an enemy pretty much of all time. I mean, you think about it, 5,000 pages went off, about 3,000 operatives. And these, again, these are the top guys. There were a handful of civilians, of people that were nearby, or a kid that grabbed the pager to bring it to his dad. But in terms of historical context, I can't think of an example where you, you were able to target and actually eliminate that many operatives at the highest level with such few civilian casualties. Now, the walkie talkies killed more people because there were the amount of explosives in the walkie talkies was higher than the pagers.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  I just told you how they kept bringing down the level of explosives. So, most people that had the pagers go, went off, there were a handful of deaths, but most of them were just injuries. The walkie talkies killed, I think, maybe a dozen or so people, fighters. But yeah, in the context of all human history of warfare, this was like the most specific targeted and very, very few civilian casualties in retrospect to how war usually works.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  I wonder how quickly Hezbollah and Iran understood this was a supply chain attack rather than just some sort of cyber attack. I wonder how they, they must have really had to do a crazy deconstruction of this and realize that they were outclassed. I mean, obviously.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  Well, I feel bad for the guy who was the buyer, right? Like the Hezbollah buyer. I don't know where he's at right now, but yeah, I'm sure they're all looking at him like he's the guy that brought these pagers in. And so, yeah, I'd like to do a follow up and find out where that guy's at right now.

• 1:12:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. He's either hiding dead or at least retired and no longer in his position, I would imagine.

• 1:12:23Speaker 02

  Maybe he's living in Israel now, who knows?

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  Who knows? Who knows? So, what was Hezbollah physically capable of doing before the operation that it could no longer do two days later? You mentioned it couldn't hit the switches on the rockets, but the organization has been significantly degraded. I mean, this is going to take years and years because I don't know if you remember this news or people listening remember this news, but once they killed Nasrallah, they promoted some guy and that guy was dead in like two days. And then they promoted some other guy and he was dead within a day. And then the next guy was dead within hours. And it was like, you could take a nap and wake up to whatever the ayatollahs or whatever they call them later. And you're just like, what happened? I've only been out for three hours. Yeah, no, the leaders changed twice already. We didn't even finish printing the new flyers.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  That was the worst job you could have in Lebanon at that point was next in line to be head of Hezbollah.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think the business cards were printed yet by the time he got taken out. Israel was always kind of walking this walk, this balancing act of how do we eliminate some of Hezbollah's capabilities without instigating a full war with Iran? Because this is Iran's proxy and they knew, they call it the war between the wars, where Hezbollah would take a shot, then Israel would kind of eliminate a couple guys. And then like, everything kind of blow over after that for a little bit, but it wouldn't go into full front war. But I think Israel knew that once they triggered these pagers, it was going to be full front war. So, they had to make sure that Hezbollah couldn't launch all these ballistic missiles and rockets into the northern Israel. Because, you know, listen, we know about the Iron Dome and how effective it is, but it doesn't get all the rockets.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  And there are not enough defensive Iron Dome batteries in place to be able to, to fight off that level of rockets and ammunition and drones and everything else. And so, they knew, you know, once the game was on, Iran, or Israel rather, knew that once the game was on, like they better be ready to go. And so, what is not known very well is that, leading up to the pager operation, the IDF had been undergoing these special ops in southern Lebanon during the night. They would sneak in, they would take out these, some of these weapons facilities with commandos. They would sneak in during the night in these special operations. And they were also starting to kind of take apart their military leadership, piece by piece.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  So, when the operation of the pagers happened, the military brass for Hezbollah was pretty depleted. They'd actually punched a lot of holes in, in the leadership of Hezbollah over the course of several months. And then when they, when the pagers happened and they didn't have a way to communicate and they didn't have, a lot of their commanders couldn't give the command to fire rockets, that's when Israel was able to go into southern Lebanon and really remove these weapons.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  I wonder, and I don't have any information about this, but I'm pretty sure that Syria no longer, after the fall of Assad, no longer allows Iran to drive trucks full of rockets and missiles across their territory to get to Lebanon. And if they destroyed years and years and years, or even decades worth of armaments in southern Lebanon, how are they going to replace that stuff?

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Iran spent billions of dollars on this and what a waste of money. This is kind of a theme of our movie a little bit is you have Israel on one hand, who lives in this dangerous neighborhood, but what they do is they build and they create and they make and they innovate. And, you know, there's no natural resources in Israel. They don't have a bunch of oil.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  Their natural resources, actually their people and their technology that they create. And a lot of this technology, we as Americans use today, like all the apps we use and the technology we use, most of the major tech companies have headquarters in Israel because of how advanced they are in making things and building things. And on the other hand, their enemies, every bit of dollars and resources goes into trying to destroy, trying to figure out a way, hey, how can we take out Israel? How can we burrow tunnels under the ground? It takes one foot a day to burrow these tunnels with drills. So, every bit of resource, every bit of dollars is just going into, how can we make more rockets? How can we build whatever we can to destroy Israel? So, it's kind of a tale of two things.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Israel trying to build, create, Hezbollah and Iran trying to destroy. And ultimately, that desire to build and create that Israel has, it gave them the upper hand because they had advanced in their technology. They put their resources and their thinking into things that matter, things that actually enhance life, you know, technology advances. And ultimately, that's what gave them the upper hand in this fight. I think that's interesting to me because, you know, the two motivations and then the one giving the upper hand.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  I hadn't really thought about that, but it's true. I mean, you look at the amount that's been stolen from the Palestinian people by Hamas to build concrete tunnels that they are not allowed to go in because it's only for Hamas fighters to move weapons and hostages and whatever else around when they're getting bombed and hide from Israeli bombs while civilians get wrecked on the ground. I mean, you look at that and you go, look, I don't know how much it costs to build Dubai in Gaza, but I bet you the few billion dollars they spent on those tunnels could have done a lot more than just build bomb shelters that civilians aren't allowed to use. It's really tragic when you look at that, but it's all just crazy religious nonsense, right? Oh, you'll be rewarded in the afterlife, so it's okay if you get hit by a bomb today. I mean, it's just really disgusting when you look at that and it's a completely different

• 1:17:37Speaker 01

  mindset. After reconstructing this operation, which is painstaking, I would imagine, what do you now understand about intelligence, deception, and the limits of military success that you didn't understand when you started?

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  I think one of the big features of the pager operation is the human intel that they put into it. It wasn't just a technology. Obviously, cyber and technology played a role in this story, but ultimately, the way they were able to carry it out was old school intelligence, like stuff that goes back decades, making contacts, relationships, getting into the supply chains, and really the human side of the intelligence, which is so crucial. One interesting thing is Mossad's intelligence would allow them to carry out this operation in the north, in Lebanon. It was incredible. They had such great intelligence in Lebanon, on the ground. It's actually kind of the opposite of what happened in Gaza and what led to October 7th.

• 1:18:33Speaker 02

  Back when Israel pulled out their people from Gaza back in 2000, they also pulled out a lot of their intelligence assets as well. And so, they were kind of blind down there. So, they're blind in the south, but in the north, they had people all over the place, on the ground, human intelligence. And so, it's really a tale of two stories when it comes to intelligence. Cyber is not enough. You still have to kind of do the old school thing when it comes to this spy game that's going on. And this story kind of reflects that tremendously.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  So, the movie, I watched it on one of those web platforms that resets every 20 minutes and soon you want to throw your computer out the window. That's not how most people are going to watch this movie. So, this comes out in theaters? How, or is it going to be streaming? Like, tell us about this because I actually don't know much about the release itself.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  Paging Hezbollah comes out in US theaters on October 30th. And it'll be nationwide, different, most of the major markets will have the movie. I would say for your viewers, if it's not playing near you, call the local theater, get ahold of the manager, don't get the guy that serves the popcorn, but get ahold of the manager and ask him, are you going to be playing this movie? If not, why not? But we're hoping for a big theatrical release. This is the type of movie, it's not just a regular documentary of talking heads. This is a very cinematic movie. I encourage people to watch it in the theaters. It's very cinematic. It's got the full sound and obviously, there's a lot of explosions in this movie. So, I encourage people to make it out. And in part, it's kind of an action film. So, get to the theaters, watch it October 30th. I think it'll be well worth your time. Later, it'll come out on home entertainment, but we're not even there yet.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  We're focused on the US theater release, October 30th, and we hope people buy tickets and bring their friends. It's going to be a wild ride.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  I told a bunch of people about it, just like my producers and wife and stuff, and they're like, oh my God, I want to see this because I, I thought it was super, super interesting, man. And look, it's right up my alley, of course, but I thought it was just fascinating. And it's well done, told well, again, the sound and the quality is high. Are you not worried that theaters are going to get bomb threats and like, we're going to, you know, whatever, if you play this Israeli propaganda? I mean, that's, surely you've thought that that might happen.

• 1:20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we don't want to give them that veto. I mean, I think that's possible and in a way, they'd be proving the point of the movie.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. Those people are not afraid of proving your point about that movie, right? Like jihadists, they're the only ones not in on the joke and they just don't care.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Don't care. They don't care. So I can't predict how the criticisms or how this is going to be met with protests or whatever, or people acting very stupidly. But, you know, listen, I don't want that to prevent people from understanding the truth and seeing the story. So, you know, I pray that nothing bad happens. And honestly, you know, we're going to take all the precautions we can. And we just hope people will see the movie. And it's a spy thriller. But at the end of the day, you're going to learn a lot about what's going on over there with this conflict. So I encourage people to see it and not let these crazy extremists have that sort of hecklers veto.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Exactly. Well, once it does come out, because this is an international audience. Once it does come out on streaming, let us know, because I want to add that into the show notes as well. Because there's people in Canada, the UK, Germany, there's actually a ton of people listening in Iran. And what I've found so interesting over the past couple of years, is how pro-Israel the Iranian listeners are. Look, it's a sample issue, right? Because they're the ones who speak English well enough to understand my voice and my guests. But Iran is in our top 10 largest, or maybe top 15 largest country audiences, which I find completely shocking. And that's when the internet's on, of course. When the internet's off, the analytics change a little. But I've just gotten so much email from people there who are like, please take out these crazy ayatollahs. I'd like a future from

• 1:22:12Speaker 01

  me and my kids. So those, I think, once you mark this thing for streaming, you're going to see the same thing. You're going to be like, Canada, Germany, all right, UK, Australia, and Iran, holy smokes. Everybody's going to be watching that with the window shades closed. So definitely let us know. And we'll put the link in the show notes.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Appreciate that. Thank you so much, Jordan. Really appreciate it. Go to, people can go to paginghezbollah.com for more information. But we're very excited. And listen, this is one of the most exciting stories I've even heard of. And the fact that I was able to be a part of it is very special. So, but thanks for talking about it with me.

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you got it. Thank you.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  The takeaway for me is how much this operation depended on trust, a familiar salesperson, a product people wanted, and habits they didn't have to think about. Sophisticated technology still depends on understanding human beings. Here, those ordinary relationships and routines became the weapon. Justin's film is Paging Hezbollah. I really enjoyed it. It's a great history of Hezbollah and this operation. Once again, controversial episode. But at my age, well, I guess I just left all my remaining [BLEEP] back in the Clinton administration. Unhinged emails to me, [email protected]. All things Justin folk in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support this show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  who support the show. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well, over at sixminutenetworking.com. This show was created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Tadusidlouskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in covert operations like this, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.