Then on 17th September Israel broke out of it by triggering the miniature bombs built into the network of booby-trapped pagers its intelligence services had duped Hezbollah into buying.

That dumb jab refers to an Israeli operation targeting Hezbollah members in Lebanon whose pagers had explosives planted inside them.

BBC Monitoring listened to that Russian output on the day thousands of pagers and radio devices exploded last month.

Here, we’re in a world of phone booths, pagers and bulky computers no one knows how to work, of Walkmans and videotape, which both simplifies and complicates the action.

The recent turmoil in Lebanon started on 17 and 18 September, when waves of pager blasts killed at least 32 and left more than 5,000 injured, both Hezbollah fighters and civilians.