Did Hezbollah Emulate Avon Barksdale?
And did the Mossad emulate Kima Greggs, Lester Freamon, and Jimmy McNulty?
Serious question: did higher-ups in Hezbollah get their idea of using pagers for secure communications from Avon Barksdale’s drug gang on HBO’s 2002-2008 series, The Wire? And if so, did they fail to learn from the series that pagers are also vulnerable to breaches?
It appears that Hezbollah had determined that cellphones were too vulnerable to surveillance by Israel’s Mossad and other outsiders, so they adopted a strategy of using pagers. Someone (presumably the Mossad) managed months ago to sabotage thousands of pager devices going through a Taiwan-to-Hungary-to-Hezbollah supply chain—managing somehow to get vast numbers of the devices into the pockets of Hezbollah terrorists and almost no one else. And yesterday, whoever planned the operation simultaneously detonated the devices all over Lebanon, injuring thousands of Hezbollah personnel and killing perhaps a dozen.
I’ve never read of any intelligence effort—factual or fictional—that seemed as unlikely or unbelievable as this one. Upon reading the story, my mind raced immediately to the role that pagers played in The Wire—with a serious question as to whether some fans of the show held high-ranking positions within Hezbollah’s operation and within Israel’s counterterrorism community.
In the fourth episode of The Wire (“Old Cases”), Baltimore police detectives are on the trail of the elusive Barksdale and his dealers. Detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) notes that the gang carries pagers and suggests that the police undertake a surveillance operation on the devices. Detective Herc Hauk (Domenick Lombardozzi), expresses surprise that the gang uses the primitive pager technology in an era of cellphones. Detectives Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), along with Lieutenant Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) join in. In the following video, the relevant scene begins at 4:35:
GREGGS: We can continue with the buys. But I don't think that's gonna get us too far off the street. On the other hand, the people we pulled in last week had pagers. So did D'Angelo Barksdale when McNulty jacked him up. We could try to clone a couple of pagers and see where that takes us.
HAUK: Clone what?
McNULTY: They’re pagers. They get beeped, we get beeped. We see who's calling. From what number.
HAUK: If these guys are all that, why they still using pagers? Why not un-ass a few dollars for cell phones?
FREAMON: It's a discipline. You can't bug a pager.
DANIELS: But you can't make a call with a pager, either.
It’s then explained that Barksdale’s higher-ups send street-level dealers brief messages via pager, after which the dealers call the higher-ups from payphones for further instructions. In later episodes, when the gang finds that payphones are not secure, they turn to coded pager messages and face-to-face follow-ups. For many episodes, pager cat-and-mouse is a recurring theme.
Given this, it would be fascinating to know whether this plot device from The Wire played any role in Hezbollah’s decision to use pagers in lieu of cellphones. It would be equally fascinating to know whether any members of the Mossad are also fans of the series. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that in the long run, pagers were not a successful strategy for the Barksdale gang, though for less dramatic reasons than Hezbollah’s recent experience with the devices.
The Middle East has plenty of fans of prestige TV series—and a number of top-flight series have been produced in that part of the world. Premiere among them has been Fauda—a nail-biting Israeli series concerning an Israeli deep-cover counterterrorism unit operating in Gaza. The cast and writers include both Jews and Arabs and, surprisingly, the show became a huge hit among both Israelis and Palestinians. (By the way, Before the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Fauda’s writers had suggested an episode in which Hamas terrorists breach the Gaza border and take control over an Israeli kibbutz. The show’s producers thought such a plot would not be believable.)
WAY DOWN IN THE HOLE
The Wire featured one of the all-time great TV theme songs, “Way Down in the Hole,” written by Tom Waits and first recorded by him in 1987. From Wikipedia:
The song was used as the theme for HBO's The Wire. A different recording was used each season. Versions, in series order, were recorded by The Blind Boys of Alabama, Tom Waits, The Neville Brothers, DoMaJe, and Steve Earle. Season four's version, performed by the Baltimore teenagers Ivan Ashford, Markel Steele, Cameron Brown, Tariq Al-Sabir, and Avery Bargasse, was arranged and recorded specifically for the show. An extended version of the Blind Boys of Alabama recording was played over a montage in the series finale.
All five versions are available on YouTube at this URL.
Robert F. Graboyes is president of RFG Counterpoint, LLC in Alexandria, Virginia. An economist, journalist, and musician, he holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. An award-winning professor, in 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. He publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack-based journal of economics, science, and culture. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.
The “game” played by Hezbollah was how to keep Israel from following our communications. So we can kill more Jews. The game played by Israel was how do we disable Hezbollah. So they can’t kill Israelis. By not considering the implausible creates a reality where the intellectual creates the physical. The same happened on the other side on October 7. Even though lower level Israeli’s warned their higher-ups that something was going to happen they were ignored because intellectual laziness and hubris.
Some management consultant sold the pager notion, charging H a fat fee. What can be said, besides, if you are getting your ideas from Hollywood scriptwriters, disaster is barreling toward you, smirking.