Learning From Mossad: What Exploding Pagers Can Teach Us About Getting a Job

Tactical Mastery: How Mossad's Ingenious Pagers Dismantled Hezbollah In this episode, the hosts delve into the meticulous and strategic operations of Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, that led to a significant strike on Hezbollah. They explore the sophisticated tactics used, including the installation of explosive devices in pager batteries and walkie-talkies, which effectively maimed Hezbollah operatives and disrupted their communication network. Through an in-depth analysis of these events, the conversation sheds light on the precision and ingenuity behind Mossad's actions, while intentionally setting aside the moral debates to focus purely on their tactical execution. Additionally, the hosts draw parallels between these intelligence strategies and modern marketing techniques, discussing relevance in business and non-profit advocacy. The conversation is rounded off with broader reflections on conflict resolution strategies and the responsibilities of leadership in making tough decisions.

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Malcolm Collins: Hello simone today. We are going to be talking about an interesting topic, which actually Is transformed the way that we personally think about things like looking for jobs, attracting press and attracting donors, which was how Mossad, that's Israel's intelligence agency, pulled off the major strike on the On Hezbollah and a lot more information has come out about this over time.

So I'm going to try to paint a full picture, including a lot of things that I'm pretty sure that even you didn't know, Simone, here's, for example, an interesting one. I didn't know. Did you know about the security feature? A thing on this where to decode a message with the pager that they had sold to Hezbollah.

You needed to have both hands on the device.

Simone Collins: Oh, interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Wow. The way it worked is they built a security feature where you could only decode it encoded [00:01:00] Hezbollah message. If you had both of your hands on the device, like holding it in different locations, which ensured. When they send out the initial thing to make the devices explode it only exploded when people were answering this specific coded message.

So they had to have both of their hands on the device when it exploded, which ensured that bunch of their

Simone Collins: proximity, like someone didn't have a pager sitting on their nightstand and so

Malcolm Collins: there were two different instances of the explosion. The first instance was they sent out a coded message. And then anybody who hadn't answered that message, their pagers then later exploded like the next day or something all at once.

But the important thing about the message is it removed these people from fighter capabilities. If you don't have your two hands, whatever other injuries you have, you can't shoot a gun. And so the goal there was to remove them from fighter capabilities. There's all sorts of cool stuff like that, that you will learn.

And I just like to As we go [00:02:00] into this, I am not going to give my standard Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah rant this time. So just I'm sort of leaving morality at the door. What

Simone Collins: we're talking about here is the tactical that went into Mossad's actions, which for those who have been living in a cave. They managed to get that is to say, Mossad, Israel's intelligence apparatus, managed to get a hostile entity, Mossad to purchase a bunch of pagers that it had created that were, that had embedded bombs that were used for monitoring and this was done for years.

And then recently, this year, they detonated them, maiming quite a few people. Basically a huge devastating attack, not just in terms of one sort of violent strike that took place on one day, but also sort of dismantling their communication infrastructure. So this was