[News] Private Mossad for Hire - Inside an effort to influence American elections, starting with one small-town race

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/private-mossad-for-hire


  Private Mossad for Hire


    Inside an effort to influence American elections, starting with one
    small-town race.

By Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow - February 18 & 25, 2019

One evening in 2016, a twenty-five-year-old community-college student 
named Alex Gutiérrez was waiting tables at La Piazza Ristorante 
Italiano, an upscale restaurant in Tulare, in California’s San Joaquin 
Valley. Gutiérrez spotted Yorai Benzeevi, a physician who ran the local 
hospital, sitting at a table with Parmod Kumar, a member of the hospital 
board. They seemed to be in a celebratory mood, drinking expensive 
bottles of wine and laughing. This irritated Gutiérrez. The kingpins, he 
thought with disgust.

Gutiérrez had recently joined a Tulare organization called Citizens for 
Hospital Accountability. The group had accused Benzeevi of enriching 
himself at the expense of the cash-strapped hospital, which subsequently 
declared bankruptcy. (Benzeevi’s lawyers said that all his actions were 
authorized by his company’s contract with the facility.) According to 
court documents, the contract was extremely lucrative for Benzeevi; in a 
2014 e-mail to his accountant, he estimated that his hospital business 
could generate nine million dollars in annual revenue, on top of his 
management fee of two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month. 
(In Tulare, the median household income was about forty-five thousand 
dollars a year.) The citizens’ group had drawn up an ambitious plan to 
get rid of Benzeevi by rooting out his allies on the hospital board. As 
2016 came to a close, the group was pushing for a special election to 
unseat Kumar; if he were voted out, a majority of the board could 
rescind Benzeevi’s contract.

Gutiérrez, a political-science major, was a leader of the Young 
Democrats Club at the College of the Sequoias, and during the 2016 
Presidential campaign he attended a rally for Bernie Sanders. Gutiérrez 
grew up watching his father, a dairyman, work twelve-hour shifts, six 
days a week, and Sanders’s message about corporate greed, income 
inequality, and the ills of America’s for-profit health-care system 
resonated with him. Seeing Benzeevi and Kumar enjoying themselves at La 
Piazza inflamed Gutiérrez’s sense of injustice. He spent the week 
between Christmas and New Year’s knocking on doors and asking neighbors 
to sign a petition for a recall vote, which ultimately garnered more 
than eleven hundred signatures. Gutiérrez later asked his mother, 
Senovia, if she would run for Kumar’s seat; the citizens’ group thought 
that Senovia, an immigrant and a social worker, would be an appealing 
candidate in a community that is around sixty per cent Hispanic.

The recall was a clear threat to Benzeevi’s hospital-management 
business, and he consulted a law firm in Washington, D.C., about 
mounting a campaign to save Kumar’s seat. An adviser there referred him 
to Psy-Group, an Israeli private intelligence company. Psy-Group’s 
slogan was “Shape Reality,” and its techniques included the use of 
elaborate false identities to manipulate its targets. Psy-Group was part 
of a new wave of private intelligence firms that recruited from the 
ranks of Israel’s secret services—self-described “private Mossads.” The 
most aggressive of these firms seemed willing to do just about anything 
for their clients.

Psy-Group stood out from many of its rivals because it didn’t just 
gather intelligence; it specialized in covertly spreading messages to 
influence what people believed and how they behaved. Its operatives took 
advantage of technological innovations and lax governmental oversight. 
“Social media allows you to reach virtually anyone and to play with 
their minds,” Uzi Shaya, a former senior Israeli intelligence officer, 
said. “You can do whatever you want. You can be whoever you want. It’s a 
place where wars are fought, elections are won, and terror is promoted. 
There are no regulations. It is a no man’s land.”

In recent years, Psy-Group has conceived of a variety of elaborate 
covert operations. In Amsterdam, the firm prepared a report on a 
religious sect called the Brunstad Christian Church, whose Norwegian 
leader, Psy-Group noted, claimed to have written “a more important book 
than the New Testament.” In Gabon, Psy-Group pitched “Operation 
Bentley”—an effort to “preserve” President Ali Bongo Ondimba’s hold on 
power by collecting and disseminating intelligence about his main 
political rival. (It’s unclear whether or not the operations in 
Amsterdam and Gabon were carried out. A spokesperson for Brunstad said 
that it was “plainly ridiculous” that the church considered “any book” 
to be more important than the Bible. Ondimba’s representatives could not 
be reached for comment.) In another project, targeting the South African 
billionaire heirs of an apartheid-era skin-lightening company, Psy-Group 
secretly recorded family members of the heirs describing them as greedy 
and, in one case, as a “piece of shit.” In New York, Psy-Group mounted a 
campaign on behalf of wealthy Jewish-American donors to embarrass and 
intimidate activists on American college campuses who support a movement 
to put economic pressure on Israel because of its treatment of the 
Palestinians.

Psy-Group’s larger ambition was to break into the U.S. election market. 
During the 2016 Presidential race, the company pitched members of Donald 
Trump’s campaign team on its ability to influence the results. 
Psy-Group’s owner, Joel Zamel, even asked Newt Gingrich, the former 
House Speaker, to offer Zamel’s services to Jared Kushner, Trump’s 
son-in-law. The effort to drum up business included brash claims about 
the company’s skills in online deception. The posturing was intended to 
attract clients—but it also attracted the attention of the F.B.I. Robert 
Mueller, the special counsel, has been examining the firm’s activities 
as part of his investigation into Russian election interference and 
other matters.

Psy-Group’s talks with Benzeevi, after the 2016 election, spurred the 
company to draw upa plan for developing more business at the state and 
local levels. No election was too small. One company document reported 
that Psy-Group’s influence services cost, on average, just three hundred 
and fifty thousand dollars—as little as two hundred and seventy-five 
dollars an hour. The new strategy called for pitching more than fifty 
individuals and groups, including the Republican National Committee, the 
Democratic National Committee, and major super /PAC/s. The firm 
published a provocative brochure featuring an image of a goldfish with a 
shark fin tied to its back, below the tagline “Reality is a matter of 
perception.” Another brochure showed a cat that cast a lion’s shadow and 
listed “honey traps” among the firm’s services. (In the espionage world, 
a honey trap often involves deploying a sexually attractive operative to 
induce a target to provide information.)

Psy-Group put together a proposal for Benzeevi, promising “a coordinated 
intelligence operation and influence campaign” in Tulare to preserve 
Kumar’s seat on the hospital board. Operatives would use fake identities 
to “uncover and deliver actionable intelligence” on members of the 
community who appeared to be leading the recall effort, and would use 
unattributed Web sites to mount a “negative campaign” targeting “the 
opposition candidate.” All these activities, the proposal assured, would 
appear to be part of a “grass roots” movement in Tulare. The operation 
was code-named Project Mockingjay, a reference to a fictional bird in 
the “Hunger Games” novels, known for its ability to mimic human sounds.

The modern market for private intelligence dates back to the 
nineteen-seventies, when a former prosecutor named Jules Kroll 
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/the-secret-keeper> began 
hiring police detectives, F.B.I. and Treasury agents, and forensic 
accountants to conduct detective work on behalf of corporations, law and 
accounting firms, and other clients. The company, which became known as 
Kroll, Inc., also recruited a small number of former C.I.A. officers, 
but rarely advertised these hires—Kroll knew that associating too 
closely with the C.I.A. could endanger employees in countries where the 
spy agency was viewed with contempt.

In the two-thousands, Israeli versions of Kroll entered the market. 
These companies had a unique advantage: few countries produce more 
highly trained and war-tested intelligence professionals, as a 
proportion of the population, than Israel. Conscription in Israel is 
mandatory for most citizens, and top intelligence units often identify 
talented recruits while they are in high school. These soldiers undergo 
intensive training in a range of language and technical skills. After a 
few years of government service, most are discharged, at which point 
many finish their educations and enter the civilian job market. Gadi 
Aviran was one of the pioneers of the private Israeli intelligence 
industry. “There was this huge pipeline of talent coming out of the 
military every year,” Aviran, who founded the intelligence firm 
Terrogence, said. “All a company like mine had to do was stand at the 
gate and say, ‘You look interesting.’ ”

Aviran was formerly the head of an Israeli military intelligence 
research team, where he supervised analysts who, looking for terrorist 
threats, reviewed data vacuumed up from telephone communications and 
from the Internet. The process, Aviran said, was like “looking at a 
flowing river and trying to see if there was anything interesting 
passing by.” The system was generally effective at analyzing attacks 
after they occurred, but wasn’t as good at providing advance warning.

Aviran began to think about a more targeted approach. Spies, private 
investigators, criminals, and even some journalists have long used false 
identities to trick people into providing information, a practice known 
as pretexting. The Internet made pretexting easier. Aviran thought that 
fake online personae, known as avatars, could be used to spy on 
terrorist groups and to head off planned attacks. In 2004, he started 
Terrogence, which became the first major Israeli company to demonstrate 
the effectiveness of avatars in counterterrorism work.

When Terrogence launched, many suspected jihadi groups communicated 
through members-only online forums run by designated administrators. To 
get past these gatekeepers, Terrogence’s operatives gave their avatars 
legends, or backstories—often as Arab students at European universities. 
As the avatars proliferated, their operators joked that the most 
valuable online chat rooms were now entirely populated by avatars, who 
were, inadvertently, collecting information from one another.

Aviran tried to keep Terrogence focussed on its core 
mission—counterterrorism—but some government clients offered the company 
substantial contracts to move in other directions. “It’s a slippery 
slope,” Aviran said, insisting that it was a path he resisted. “You 
start with one thing and suddenly you think, Wait, wait, I can do this. 
Then somebody asks if you can do something else. And you say, ‘Well, 
it’s risky but the money is good, so let’s give it a try.’ ”

Terrogence’s success spawned imitators, and other former intelligence 
officers began to open their own firms, many of them less risk-averse 
than Terrogence. One of the boldest, Black Cube, openly advertised its 
ties to Israeli spy agencies, including Mossad and Unit 8200, the 
military’s signals-intelligence corps. Black Cube got its start with the 
help of Vincent Tchenguiz, an Iranian-born English real-estate tycoon 
who had invested in Terrogence. In March, 2011, Tchenguiz was arrested 
by a British anti-fraud unit investigating his business dealings. (The 
office later dropped the investigation and paid him a settlement.) He 
asked Meir Dagan 
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/03/the-vegetarian>, who had 
just stepped down as the director of Mossad, how he could draw on the 
expertise of former intelligence officers to look intothe business 
rivals he believed had alerted authorities. Dagan’s message to 
Tchenguiz, a former colleague of Dagan’s said, was: I can find a 
personal Mossad for you. (Dagan died in 2016.) Tchenguiz became Black 
Cube’s first significant client.

In some respects, Psy-Group emerged more directly from Terrogence. In 
2008, Aviran hired an Israel Defense Forces intelligence officer named 
Royi Burstien to be the vice-president of business development. Social 
networks such as Facebook—whose profiles featured photographs and other 
personal information—were becoming popular, and Terrogence’s avatars had 
become more sophisticated to avoid detection. Burstien urged Aviran to 
consider using the avatars in more aggressive ways, and on behalf of a 
wider range of commercial clients. Aviran was wary. After less than a 
year at Terrogence, Burstien returned to Israel’s military intelligence, 
and joined an élite unit that specialized in PsyOps, or psychological 
operations.

In the following years, some of Burstien’s ambitions were being 
fulfilled elsewhere. Russia’s intelligence services had begun using a 
variety of tools—including hacking, cyber weapons, online aliases, and 
Web sites that spread fake news—to conduct information warfare 
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war> 
and to sow discord in neighboring countries. In the late two-thousands, 
the Russians targeted Estonia and Georgia. In 2014, they hit Ukraine. 
Later that year, Burstien founded Psy-Group, which, like Black Cube, 
used avatars to conduct intelligence-collection operations. But Burstien 
also offered his avatars for another purpose: influence campaigns, 
similar to those mounted by Russia. Burstien boasted that Psy-Group’s 
so-called “deep” avatars were so convincing that they were capable of 
planting the seeds of ideas in people’s heads.

Tulare seemed an unlikely target for an influence campaign. The town 
took its name from a lake that, in 1773, was christened by a Spanish 
commandant as Los Tules, for the tule reeds that grew along the shore. 
The town was later memorialized in a song, “Ghost of Bardsley Road,” 
about a headless spectre who rode a white Honda motorcycle.

Today, the city is home to just over sixty thousand people. The county 
leads the nation in dairy production. In the summer months, dry winds 
churn up so much dust that many residents suffer from what’s known as 
valley fever, a fungal infection that causes flulike symptoms. Not long 
ago, when wildfires were raging across California, winds pushed the 
smoke into Tulare, leaving an acrid smell in the air.

Citizens for Hospital Accountability began as a simple Facebook page. At 
first, the group’s leaders hoped that Alex Gutiérrez would run for 
Kumar’s seat, but he was planning to stand for a position on the city 
council. Senovia was the backup choice. She had grown up as the youngest 
of twelve children, in the central Mexican state of Aguascalientes. Her 
parents were impoverished farmers who cultivated corn and beans until a 
drought forced them to abandon their land. She started working full time 
when she was sixteen; when she was twenty-four, she crossed the border 
at Tijuana to join her boyfriend, Miguel Gutiérrez, who was living in 
Los Angeles. They married and, two years later, moved to Tulare, where 
Senovia raised five boys and supplemented the family’s income by working 
part time as a housekeeper. When she was thirty-five, she got her 
high-school diploma, then attended community college and went on to earn 
a B.A. at California State University, Fresno. In 2015, she became an 
American citizen and completed a master’s degree in social work.

Alex doubted whether his mother would agree to enter the race. She had 
never shown much interest in politics. “Growing up as immigrants, 
parents know what’s happening, but, aside from voting, they don’t really 
want to get involved,” he said. Over family dinners in Senovia’s 
three-bedroom home, Alex told her stories about the “corruption and 
mismanagement” that he said was hurting the hospital. “I will happily do 
it because you’re so involved,” Senovia told him.

Hospital-board races are usually small-time affairs. One former member 
of the Tulare board said that her campaign had cost just a hundred and 
fifty dollars, which she used to buy signs and cards that she handed out 
door-to-door. In the recall, which had been set for July 11, 2017, voter 
turnout was expected to be fewer than fifteen hundred people. Still, 
Alex decided to take a break from college and serve as his mother’s 
campaign manager. He suspected that the race would be bitterly 
contested, and expensive. He calculated that ten thousand dollars should 
cover the costs. To help, Citizens for Hospital Accountability hosted a 
fund-raiser on Cinco de Mayo. The invitation featured a photograph of 
Senovia in a pink dress, surrounded by her husband and five children, 
standing in front of a mural depicting the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas.

Senovia was nervous about her first big campaign event, which was held 
in an orchard, where guests ate handmade tacos. Tulare County is largely 
Republican; Trump won it with fifty-three per cent of the vote in 2016, 
and the district’s representative in the House, Devin Nunes, has 
spearheaded efforts to counter the Russia investigation. But the 
hospital board was a crossover issue. One of Senovia’s supporters, a 
dairyman of Portuguese descent, pulled Alex aside at the fund-raiser to 
tell him that Senovia’s “classy” appearance and her foreign accent 
somehow reminded him of Melania Trump, whose husband he had supported in 
the 2016 election. (Alex, a Bernie Sanders fan, laughed and suggested 
that this might not be an apt comparison.)

After giving a speech, Senovia told Alex that she was pleased that the 
event had been held on Cinco de Mayo, which commemorates the Mexican 
Army’s victory over France in the Battle of Puebla. “The French could 
not believe they were defeated by Mexico,” Senovia told her son. “I am 
going to beat Kumar, and he won’t be able to believe that a Mexican 
woman defeated him.”

But Benzeevi wasn’t going to let his opponents win without putting up a 
fight. While Alex and Senovia were soliciting small donations from 
neighbors, Benzeevi got on a plane to Israel to meet with Psy-Group.

Psy-Group operated out of a nondescript building in a commercial area 
about twenty minutes outside Tel Aviv. Its offices were on the fourth 
floor, behind an unmarked door. Employees used key cards to enter, and 
yet, for a private intelligence firm, security was comically lax, 
particularly between noon and 2 /P.M./, when men carrying motorcycle 
helmets raced in and out, delivering lunch. Clients were escorted 
through a communal room, which had a big-screen TV facing a large, 
listing couch, where twentysomethings in faded jeans and T-shirts spent 
their breaks playing Mortal Kombat and /FIFA/ 17.

Burstien tried to position Psy-Group as a more responsible alternative 
to Black Cube, which was known for a willingness to break the rules. 
“I’m not saying we’re good guys or bad guys,” Burstien said in one 
meeting. “It’s not black or white. The gray has so many shades.” In 
2016, Romanian police arrested two Black Cube operatives for illegal 
hacking and harassment of the country’s leading anticorruption officer. 
(The pair pleaded guilty and received probation.) Psy-Group tried to 
capitalize on Black Cube’s legal troubles. Burstien reassured 
prospective clients that lawyers vetted everything the company’s 
operatives did. Former company officials said that Psy-Group didn’t hack 
or appropriate the identities of real people for its avatars. It 
clandestinely recorded conversations, but never in jurisdictions that 
required “two-party” consent, which would have made the practice illegal.

The company’s claims of legal legitimacy, however, skirted the fact that 
regulations haven’t kept pace with advances in technology. “What are the 
regulations? What’s the law?” Tamir Pardo, who was the director of 
Mossad from 2011 to 2016, said. “There are no laws. There are no 
regulations. That’s the main problem. You can do almost whatever you want.”

Psy-Group went to great lengths to disguise its activities. Employees 
were occasionally instructed to go to libraries or Internet cafés, where 
they could use so-called “white” computers, which could not be traced 
back to the firm. They created dummy Gmail accounts, often employed for 
one assignment and then discarded. For particularly sensitive 
operations, Psy-Group created fake front companies and avatars who 
purported to work there, and then hired real outside contractors who 
weren’t told that they were doing the bidding of Psy-Group’s clients. 
Psy-Group operatives sometimes paid the local contractors in cash.

In one meeting, Burstien said that, before a parliamentary election in a 
European country, his operatives had created a sham think tank. Using 
avatars, the operatives hired local analysts to work for the think tank, 
which then disseminated reports to bolster the political campaign of the 
company’s client and to undermine the reputations of his rivals. In 
another meeting, Psy-Group officials said that they had created an 
avatar to help a corporate client win regulatory approval in Europe. 
Over time, the avatar became so well established in the industry that he 
was quoted in mainstream press reports and even by European 
parliamentarians. “It’s got to look legit,” a former Psy-Group employee 
said, of Burstien’s strategy.

Most Psy-Group employees knew little or nothing about the company’s 
owner, Joel Zamel. According to corporate documents filed in Cyprus, he 
was born in Australia in 1986. Zamel later moved to Israel, where he 
earned a master’s degree in government, diplomacy, and strategy, with a 
specialization in counterterrorism and homeland security. Zamel’s father 
had made a fortune in the mining business, and Zamel was a skilled 
networker. He cultivated relationships with high-profile Republicans in 
the U.S., including Newt Gingrich and Elliott Abrams, who served in 
foreign-policy positions under Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and 
whom Psy-Group listed as a member of its advisory board. (The Trump 
Administration recently named Abrams its special envoy to oversee U.S. 
policy toward Venezuela.) Documents show that Zamel was a director of a 
Cyprus-based company called /IOCO/, which controlled Psy-Group. (Zamel’s 
lawyers and Burstien declined to say how much of an ownership stake 
Zamel held in /IOCO/, or to identify who else provided funding for the 
venture.) Using Cyprus as a front made it easier for Psy-Group to sell 
its services in Arab states that don’t work overtly with Israeli companies.

Initially, Psy-Group hoped to make money by investigating jihadi 
networks, much as Terrogence did. In an early test of concept, a 
Psy-Group operative created a Facebook account for an avatar named 
Madison. Burstien’s idea was to use Madison as a virtual honey trap. The 
avatar’s Facebook page depicted Madison as an average American teen-ager 
from a Christian family in Chicago. She was a fan of Justin Bieber, and 
after graduating from high school she took a job at a souvenir shop. She 
posted Facebook messages about religion and expressed interest in 
learning more about Islam. Eventually, a Facebook member from Casablanca 
introduced Madison online to two imams at Moroccan mosques, one of 
whomoffered to guide her through the process of becoming a Muslim.

Madison’s conversion was conducted through Skype. The call required a 
female Psy-Group employee to bring Madison to life briefly and chant the 
Shahada, a profession of faith, from a desk in the company’s offices. 
“Finally! I’m a Muslim,” Madison wrote on Facebook. “I feel at home.” 
She added a smiley-face emoticon.

After her conversion, Madison began to come into contact with Facebook 
members who espoused more radical beliefs. One of her new friends was an 
/ISIS/ fighter in Raqqa, Syria, who encouraged her to become an /ISIS/ 
bride. At that point, Burstien decided to end the operation, which, he 
felt, had demonstrated the company’s ability to create convincing “deep” 
avatars. Not long afterward, he sent representatives to pitch State 
Department officials on an influence campaign, “modeled on the 
successful ‘Madison’ engagement,” that would “interrupt the 
radicalization and recruitment chain.” The State Department never acted 
on the proposal.

Psy-Group had more success pitching an operation, code-named Project 
Butterfly, to wealthy Jewish-American donors. The operation targeted 
what Psy-Group described as “anti-Israel” activists on American college 
campuses who supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, 
known as B.D.S. Supporters of B.D.S. see the movement as a way to use 
nonviolent protest to pressure Israel about its treatment of the 
Palestinians; detractors say that B.D.S. wrongly singles out Israel as a 
human-rights offender. B.D.S. is anathema to many ardent supporters of 
the Israeli government.

In early meetings with donors, in New York, Burstien said that the key 
to mounting an effective anti-B.D.S. campaign was to make it look as 
though Israel, and the Jewish-American community, had nothing to do with 
the effort. The goal of Butterfly, according to a 2017 company document, 
was to “destabilize and disrupt anti-Israel movements from within.” 
Psy-Group operatives scoured the Internet, social-media accounts, and 
the “deep” Web—areas of the Internet not indexed by search engines like 
Google—for derogatory information about B.D.S. activists. If a student 
claimed to be a pious Muslim, for example, Psy-Group operatives would 
look for photographs of him engaging in behavior unacceptable to many 
pious Muslims, such as drinking alcohol or having an affair. Psy-Group 
would then release the information online using avatars and Web sites 
that couldn’t be traced back to the company or its donors.

Project Butterfly launched in February, 2016, and Psy-Group asked donors 
for $2.5 million for operations in 2017. Supporters were told that they 
were “investing in Israel’s future.” In some cases, a former company 
employee said, donors asked Psy-Group to target B.D.S. activists at 
universities where their sons and daughters studied.

The project would focus on as many as ten college campuses. According to 
an update sent to donors in May, 2017, Psy-Group conducted two “tours of 
the main theatre of action,” and met with the campaign’s outside 
“partners,” which it did not name. Psy-Group employees had recently 
travelled to Washington to visit officials at a think tank called the 
Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which had shared some of its 
research on the B.D.S. movement. In a follow-up meeting, which was 
attended by Burstien, Psy-Group provided F.D.D. with a confidential memo 
describing how it had compiled dossiers on nine activists, including a 
lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. In the memo, 
Psy-Group asked the foundation for guidance on identifying future 
targets. According to an F.D.D. official, the foundation “did not end up 
contracting with them, and their research did little to advance our own.”

Burstien recruited Ram Ben-Barak, a former deputy director of Mossad, to 
help with the project. As the director general of Israel’s Ministry of 
Strategic Affairs, from 2014 to 2016, Ben-Barak had drawn up a plan for 
the state to combat the B.D.S. movement, but it was never implemented. 
Ben-Barak was enthusiastic about Butterfly. He said that the fight 
against B.D.S. was like “a war.” In the case of B.D.S. activists, he 
said, “you don’t kill them but you do have to deal with them in other ways.”

Yaakov Amidror, a former national-security adviser to Prime Minister 
Benjamin Netanyahu, also became an adviser to Psy-Group on Butterfly. 
Before accepting the position, Amidror said recently, he spoke to Daniel 
Reisner, Psy-Group’s outside counsel, who had advised five Israeli Prime 
Ministers, including Netanyahu. “Danny, is it legal?” Amidror recalled 
asking. Reisner responded that it was. While active Israeli intelligence 
operatives aren’t supposed to spy on the United States, Amidror said, he 
saw nothing improper about former Israeli intelligence officers 
conducting operations against American college students. “If it’s legal, 
I don’t see any problem,” Amidror said with a shrug. “If people are 
ready to finance it, it is O.K. with me.”

On April 22, 2017, Benzeevi arrived in Tel Aviv. He checked into the Dan 
Hotel, across from the city’s seafront promenade. At the start of his 
first full day in Israel, he was greeted by a “Welcome home!” e-mail 
from Scott Mortman, a former lawyer who managed Psy-Group’s American 
clients. The e-mail described their schedule for the day. At lunch, 
Mortman would give Benzeevi a briefing on Psy-Group’s offerings. Then 
Benzeevi would meet with Burstien, who would walk him through the 
company’s proposed campaign to keep Kumar on the hospital board. 
Burstien and Mortman were a well-practiced tag team. “Royi would give 
his ‘cloak and dagger’ spiel and then Scott would come on and give his 
‘Boy Scout’ spiel, whichis ‘What we’re doing is completely legal,’ ” a 
former colleague said.

Benzeevi had already received a draft of Psy-Group’s battle plan, 
contained in an e-mail that was password-protected and marked 
“/PRIVILEGED & CONFIDENTIAL/.” The proposal assured Benzeevi that 
Psy-Group’s activities would be “fully disconnected” from him and his 
hospital-management company.

To close the deal, Burstien called in Ram Ben-Barak, one of his biggest 
hired guns. Lanky and charismatic, Ben-Barak looked like someone from 
Mossad central casting. A former company employee said that Benzeevi 
“appeared to like the idea that someone from Mossad would be on his 
side.” Before Benzeevi flew back to California, he was given the number 
of a bank account where he could wire Psy-Group the fee for the Tulare 
campaign—two hundred and thirty thousand dollars. On May 8th, just days 
after Senovia’s Cinco de Mayo party, Benzeevi’s company sent the first 
of three payments, which was routed to a bank in Zurich. The project was 
set in motion, and its code name was changed from Mockingjay to Katniss, 
a reference to Katniss Everdeen, the protagonist in the “Hunger Games” 
novels.

A hospital-board election in central California wasn’t exactly what 
Burstien had in mind when he set out to establish Psy-Group in the U.S. 
election market. In early 2016, as the Presidential race was heating up, 
he and Zamel both tried to pitch much bigger players. Being hired by one 
of the main campaigns initially seemed like a long shot for an obscure 
new company whose services sounded risky, if not illegal. Lawyers at 
firms in New York and Washington expressed curiosity about Psy-Group, 
but most were too cautious to sign contracts with the company.

The Trump campaign, however, presented an opportunity. Early in 2016, a 
Republican consultant with ties to the Israeli government put Psy-Group 
in touch with Rick Gates, a senior Trump campaign official. Eager to 
secure a potentially lucrative project, Burstien drew up plans for an 
intelligence and influence campaign to promote Trump and undermine his 
rivals, first in the Republican primary and then in the general 
election. In the proposal, dubbed Project Rome, which was first reported 
on by the /Times/, last October, Psy-Group used code names for the 
candidates 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/rick-gates-psy-group-trump.html>: 
Trump was Lion, and Hillary Clinton was Forest. Psy-Group also hired the 
Washington law firm Covington & Burling to conduct a legal review of its 
work. Former Psy-Group officials said that the resulting memo gave a 
green light to begin offering the company’s services in the U.S. (A 
spokesperson for Covington & Burling said that the firm could not 
discuss its advice to clients.)

Zamel often operated independently of Burstien, and it’s unclear how 
closely the two coördinated, but both saw the Trump campaign as a 
potential client. Trump’s vocal support for Israel and his hard-line 
views on Iran appealed to Zamel, and he reached out to Trump’s inner 
circle. In early May, 2016, Zamel sent an e-mail to Gingrich, saying 
that he could provide the Trump campaign with powerful tools that would 
use social media to advance Trump’s chances. Zamel suggested a meeting 
in Washington to discuss the matter further. Gingrich forwarded the 
e-mail to Jared Kushner and asked if the campaign would be interested. 
Kushner checked with others on the campaign, including Brad Parscale, 
who ran Web operations. According to a person familiar with the 
exchange, Parscale told Kushner that they didn’t need Zamel’s help. (A 
2016 campaign official said, “We didn’t use their services.”)

Also that spring, Zamel was introduced to George Nader, a 
Lebanese-American with ties to the Emirati leader Mohammed bin Zayed and 
other powerful figures in the Gulf. Born in 1959, Nader was almost twice 
Zamel’s age. Both men preferred to operate behind the scenes, but were 
consummate networkers who touted their connections to high-level 
political figures. Some viewed Nader as an influence peddler; others 
said that he had been intimately involved in high-stakes negotiations in 
the Middle East for decades. Martin Indyk, an adviser to Presidents 
Clinton and Obama on Middle Eastern affairs and now a distinguished 
fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “We used to joke that 
George was in the pay of at least three intelligence services—the 
Syrian, the Israeli, and the Iranian.”

In June, 2016, Nader was attending an international economic forum in 
St. Petersburg, Russia, when Zamel approached him and requested a 
meeting. According to a representative for Nader, Zamel told Nader that 
he was trying to raise money for a social-media campaign in support of 
Trump; he thought that Nader’s Gulf contacts might be interested in 
contributing financially. Nader listened to Zamel’s pitch but didn’t 
make any commitments, according to the Nader representative. (Zamel’s 
representatives denied that he spoke to Nader in St. Petersburg about 
trying to help Trump.)

Zamel had another opportunity to pitch his services in early August, 
2016, when Erik Prince, the founder of the Blackwater security firm, 
helped arrange a meeting at Trump Tower among Zamel, Nader, and Donald 
Trump, Jr. (Prince, whose sister Betsy DeVos became Trump’s Education 
Secretary, was a major Trump donor and had access to members of his 
team.) In the meeting, Zamel told Trump, Jr., that he supported his 
father’s campaign, and talked about Psy-Group’s influence operations. 
(Zamel’s lawyer, Marc Mukasey, played down the encounter, insisting that 
Zamel made no formal proposals during the meeting.)

Burstien said that his talks with the Trump campaign went nowhere; a 
representativefor Zamel denied that his client engaged in any activity 
having to do with the election. But, according to the Nader 
representative, shortly after the election Zamel bragged to Nader that 
he had conducted a secret campaign that had been influential in Trump’s 
victory. Zamel agreed to brief Nader on how the operation had worked. 
During that conversation, Zamel showed Nader several analytical reports, 
including one that described the role of avatars, bots, fake news, and 
unattributed Web sites in assisting Trump. Zamel told Nader, “Here’s the 
work that we did to help get Trump elected,” according to the Nader 
representative. Nader paid Zamel more than two million dollars, but 
never received copies of the reports, that person said.

A representative for Zamel denied that he told Nader that he or any of 
his operatives had intervened to help Trump during the 2016 election. If 
Nader came away with that impression, the representative said, he was 
mistaken. “Nader may have paid Zamel not knowing when, how, or why the 
report was created, but he wanted to use it to gain access and new 
business,” the representative said. “In fact, it used publicly available 
material to show how social media—in general—was used in connection with 
the campaign.”

Information warfare is as old as warfare itself. In “The Art of War,” 
Sun Tzu declared that “all warfare is based on deception.” In modern 
times, both Soviet intelligence and its American counterpart used 
disinformation as a tool of persuasion and a weapon to destabilize the 
other side. Long before the advent of social media, Moscow concocted 
fantastical rumors that the /AIDS/ virus had been manufactured by 
American government scientists as a biological weapon. The C.I.A. 
supported the publication of underground books in the Soviet Union by 
such authors as Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a ploy that 
the agency knew would enrage the Kremlin leadership and deepen 
anti-Soviet sentiment among dissident circles inside the country.

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. government convinced 
itself that it was now free of many of the challenges it faced during 
the Cold War, and its interest in information warfare faded. The 
military’s special forces stepped into the information-warfare void. “We 
knew we needed to operate in this space,” Austin Branch, who specialized 
in PsyOps, said. “It was the information age. We didn’t have a road 
map.” Branch became one of the military’s first “information operations” 
officers, in the early nineties. He and other specialists created 
experimental Web sites aimed at readers in Central Europe and North 
Africa. The sites were designed to look like independent news sources; 
the U.S. military’s role was revealed only to readers who clicked 
deeper. “We didn’t hide who it was from, but we didn’t make it easy to 
find,” a former military official who specialized in psychological 
operations said.

U.S. leaders were generally skeptical about the effectiveness of these 
kinds of operations. They also worried that the open flow of information 
on the Internet would make it difficult, if not impossible, to insure 
that misinformation disseminated by the United States wouldn’t 
inadvertently “blow back” and reach Americans, in violation of U.S. law. 
The result, according to retired Army Colonel Mike Lwin, who served as 
the top military adviser to Pentagon leaders on information operations 
from 2014 to 2018, was that a cautious approach to information warfare 
prevailed in Washington.

Russian military and intelligence agencies, on the other hand, didn’t 
see information warfare as a sideshow. They invested in cyber weapons 
capable of paralyzing critical infrastructure, from utilities to banks, 
and refined the use of fake personae and fake news to fuel political and 
ethnic discord abroad. “We underestimated how significant it was,” Lwin 
said, of these online influence operations. “We didn’t appreciate 
it—until it was in our face.”

The 2016 election changed the calculus. In the U.S., investigators 
pieced together how Russian operatives had carried out a scheme to 
promote their preferred candidate and to stoke divisions within U.S. 
society. Senior Israeli officials, like their American counterparts, had 
been dubious about the effectiveness of influence campaigns. Russia’s 
operation in the U.S. convinced Tamir Pardo, the former Mossad director, 
and others in Israel that they, too, had misjudged the threat. “It was 
the biggest Russian win ever. Without shooting one bullet, American 
society was torn apart,” Pardo said. “This is a weapon. We should find a 
way to control it, because it’s a ticking bomb. Otherwise, democracy is 
in trouble.”

Some of Pardo’s former colleagues took a more mercenary approach. Russia 
had shown the world that information warfare worked, and they saw a 
business opportunity. In early 2017, as Trump took office, interest in 
Psy-Group’s services seemed to increase. Law firms, one former employee 
said, asked Psy-Group to “come back in and tell us again what you are 
doing, because we see this ability to affect decisions that we weren’t 
fully aware of.” Another former Psy-Group employee put it more bluntly: 
“The Trump campaign won this way. If the fucking President is doing it, 
why not us?”

To capitalize on this newfound interest, Burstien started making the 
rounds in Washington with a new PowerPoint presentation, which some 
Psy-Group employees called the “If we had done it” slide deck, and which 
appeared similar to the one that Nader saw. Titled “Donald Trump’s 2016 
Presidential Campaign—Analysis,” the presentation outlined the role of 
Web sites, avatars,and bots in influencing the outcome of the election. 
In one case highlighted in the slide deck, pro-Trump avatars joined a 
Facebook page for Bernie Sanders supporters and then flooded it with 
links to anti-Hillary Clinton articles from Web sites that posted fake 
news, creating a hostile environment for real members of the group. 
“Bernie supporters had left our page in droves, depressed and disgusted 
by the venom,” the group’s administrator was quoted as saying. As part 
of the presentation, Burstien pointed out that Russian operatives had 
been caught meddling in the U.S.; Psy-Group, he told clients, was “more 
careful.”

Psy-Group’s post-election push into the U.S. market included a cocktail 
reception on March 1, 2017, at the Old Ebbitt Grill, near the White 
House, “in celebration of our new D.C. office.” The next day, an article 
in Politico briefly mentioned the gathering and described Psy-Group as a 
multinational company with “offices in London, Hong Kong and Cyprus 
<https://www.politico.com/tipsheets/politico-influence/2017/03/trump-connected-lobbyists-sign-more-clients-219017>.” 
There was no mention of Israel; Burstien thought it would be better for 
business to play down the Israel angle.

In fact, the reception was part of Psy-Group’s campaign to shape 
perceptions about itself. The image it projected was mostly bluster; the 
company’s “new D.C. office” consisted of a desk at a WeWork on the 
eighth floor of a building across the street from the White House.

In June of 2017, strange things began happening in Tulare. A series of 
ominous Web sites appeared: Tularespeaks.com, Tulareleaks.com, and 
Draintulareswamp.com. The sites directed visitors to articles that 
smeared Senovia Gutiérrez and her allies in the hospital-board fight.

Tony Maldonado, a reporter for the /Valley Voice/, the local newspaper, 
saw the sites and thought, What the fuck? He knew that residents were 
fired up about the hospital-board election, but these shadowy tactics, 
he said, were “completely out of left field.”

“I guess you might see that in a big city or on a national level,” 
Maldonado said. “But to see it in a small town, about a hospital board 
in Tulare, is just insane.” The domain names appeared to be playing off 
themes from the 2016 Presidential campaign. Trump liked to use the 
phrase “drain the swamp” to rally his anti-Washington base. The address 
Tulareleaks.com was similar to DCleaks.com, a site allegedly set up by 
Russian intelligence officers to publish hacked e-mails with the aim of 
influencing the 2016 race. Along with the Web sites, online personae, 
who claimed to be local residents but whom nobody in town recognized, 
began posting comments on social media. Some of the messages suggested 
that Senovia took bribes. Others pointed to her Mexican background and 
her accent and questioned whether she was an American citizen.

Psy-Group also conducted “off-line” operations, as the company sometimes 
termed clandestine on-the-ground activities, according to a former 
company employee. Early on the evening of June 9th, a woman with short 
blond hair knocked on Senovia’s front door, and told Senovia’s adult son 
Richard, who answered, that she was a supporter of his mother’s 
campaign. The woman handed Richard an envelope that read “To: Mrs. 
Sanovia,” misspelling her name. Richard noticed that a man was standing 
across the street, next to a Yukon Denali S.U.V., taking photographs 
with a telephoto lens. Later that night, the S.U.V. returned to 
Senovia’s street, and the man took more photographs.

Some of the photographs soon appeared on Draintulareswamp.com, under the 
title “Who Is Pulling Senovia’s Strings?” The accompanying article said, 
“This post is addressed to one member of our community in particular. 
The public should be watching Martha Senovia closely. This past week a 
very expensive black car was seen parked in front of the home of Mrs. 
Senovia in addition to several other unidentified cars.” The Web site 
used Senovia’s nickname, Martha. The photographs seemed designed to make 
it appear as if Senovia had taken a bribe. (The envelope contained a 
thirty-dollar Tommy Hilfiger gift certificate.) Later, the /Valley 
Voice/ posted an article under the headline “/Tulare Politics Get Fishy 
as Hospital Recall Nears 
<https://www.ourvalleyvoice.com/2017/07/06/tulare-politics-get-fishy-hospital-recall-nears/>/.” 
Psy-Group, one of the company’s former employees later said, was engaged 
not in “serious intelligence” but in “monkey business.”

Other articles on Draintulareswamp.com questioned whether Senovia was 
fit to manage finances, and published records showing that she had filed 
for bankruptcy in 2003. (The bankruptcy records were authentic.) “It was 
horrible—they put out stuff that we couldn’t believe, and they were 
turning it out so fast,” Deanne Martin-Soares, one of the founders of 
Citizens for Hospital Accountability, said. “We couldn’t trace anything. 
We didn’t know where it was coming from.” On Facebook, Alex Gutiérrez 
responded to the smear tactics, writing, “The gall of their campaign to 
fabricate and move forward with such trash speaks volumes of their 
desperation and fear!”

On June 15th, campaign flyers ridiculing Senovia for having “zero 
experience,” and directing residents who “want proof” to visit 
Tularespeaks.com, appeared on door handles around town. The small 
businessman who printed and distributed the flyers said that he had been 
paid in cash by a stranger who used the name Francesco Manoletti, which 
appears to be a made-up persona. (In another Psy-Group operation, a 
similar-sounding name—Francesco Gianelli—was used to hire contractors.)

Parmod Kumar had hired his own political consultant, a California 
campaign veteran named Michael McKinney, to fight the recall. When 
rumors started to spread that Kumar or Benzeevi was behind the attacks 
on Senovia, McKinney tried, unsuccessfully, todiscover who had created 
the Web sites. “Recall elections are about voter anger,” McKinney said. 
“To win a recall, you have to keep the electorate angry enough to vote. 
To stop a recall, you have to diminish the voters’ anger.” The attacks, 
McKinney felt, had the opposite of the intended effect: they motivated 
Senovia’s supporters to turn out on election day. When McKinney asked 
Kumar about the Web sites, Kumar said that he didn’t know where they had 
come from. McKinney said that he also confronted Benzeevi, urging him to 
tell whoever was orchestrating the campaign to “knock it off.” Benzeevi 
stopped returning McKinney’s calls after that. “It didn’t really hurt 
Senovia,” McKinney said. “It made it look like she was being harassed. 
It hurt Kumar. It backfired.”

On the eve of the election, Alex’s house burned down and he lost almost 
everything, including his final batch of campaign flyers. He suspected 
that the blaze could have been election-related, but local 
fire-department officials said that they saw no evidence of foul play. A 
former Psy-Group official told me, “I never initiated any physical fire 
on any project whatsoever.”

Burstien hoped that Psy-Group’s work in Tulare would help the company 
land other small campaigns, but that proved overly optimistic. He told 
colleagues that he was close to finalizing several deals, but the new 
clients fell through, and, in February, 2018, Burstien found that he 
couldn’t make payroll.

Psy-Group’s financial woes coincided with sudden scrutiny from the 
F.B.I. The Bureau had taken an interest in George Nader for helping to 
organize a secretive meeting in the Seychelles ahead of Trump’s 
Inauguration, with the aim of creating an unofficial channel with 
Vladimir Putin. In January, 2018, F.B.I. agents stopped Nader, an 
American citizen, at Dulles International Airport and served him with a 
grand-jury subpoena. Nader agreed to coöperate, and told F.B.I. agents 
about his various dealings related to the Trump campaign, including his 
discussions with Zamel. (Nader has been granted immunity in exchange for 
testifying truthfully, according to one of his representatives. “Someone 
who has this kind of immunity has no incentive to lie,” the 
representative said.)

The following month, F.B.I. agents served Zamel with a grand-jury 
subpoena. Agents also tracked down Burstien in the San Francisco area, 
where he was on a business trip. Burstien returned to his hotel room and 
found a note under his door informing him that the Bureau wanted him to 
come in for questioning. Burstien told friends that he was “in shock.” 
The F.B.I. also visited Psy-Group’s so-called D.C. office, at the 
WeWork, and seized a laptop computer that had been hidden in a desk 
drawer, where it had been running continuously.

The F.B.I. questioned some of Burstien’s employees about Psy-Group’s 
activities. In the interviews, agents acted as if “there’s no smoke 
without fire,” a former company official said. “There was a lot of 
smoke,” the official acknowledged. “We had to show them, it’s smoke, 
it’s smoke, it’s smoke, and not fire.” Psy-Group officials referred the 
F.B.I. to the letters they had received from law firms, attesting to the 
legality of their activities and telling the company that it didn’t need 
to register as a foreign agent. “The F.B.I. seemed genuinely surprised 
that this shit wasn’t illegal,” a former Psy-Group employee said.

In an interview, Burstien said that he was comfortable with how 
Psy-Group had operated but believed that changes were needed to protect 
average citizens. “I’m coming from the side of the influencer, who 
really understands how we can make use of online platforms,” he said. 
“There needs to be more regulation, and it’s up to our legislators, in 
each and every country. What have U.S. legislators done since they 
learned, more than two years ago, about the potential of these new 
capabilities? They have the power to move the needle from A to B. 
Nothing substantial has been done, as far as I know.”

Ram Ben-Barak, who helped woo Benzeevi on behalf of Psy-Group, said that 
he decided to leave the company after he learned about the extent of its 
operations in Tulare, which he objected to. Ben-Barak said that he 
regrets his decision to work with the firm. “When you leave the 
government and you leave Mossad, you don’t know how the real world 
works,” he said. “I made a mistake.” Ben-Barak, who is now running for a 
seat in Israel’s parliament, said that he believes new regulations are 
needed to stem the proliferation of avatars and misinformation. “This is 
the challenge of our time,” he said. “Everything is fake. It’s 
unbelievable.”

Gadi Aviran, the Terrogence founder, said that he “never dreamed” that 
the business of fake personae, which he helped establish, would become 
so powerful. “In order to understand where we are, we have to understand 
where we started,” he said. “What started as a noble cause ended up as 
fake news. What you have today is a flooded market, with people that 
will, basically, do anything.”

In Tulare, the test of Psy-Group’s strategy came on the night of July 
11, 2017. The hospital-board election resulted in a landslide—but not 
for Psy-Group’s client. There were more than a thousand ballots cast, 
and only a hundred and ninety-five people voted for Kumar to keep his 
seat. Senovia Gutiérrez won with seventy-five per cent of the vote. In 
the end, the Web sites attacking Senovia attracted scant attention in 
the community. “It waslike they organized a concert and nobody showed 
up,” a computer-security expert said after reviewing trace data from the 
sites, which were taken down after the election.

After Senovia’s victory, Benzeevi’s contract was rescinded. Larry Blitz, 
a hospital-turnaround specialist, stepped in as the interim C.E.O., and 
discovered that the hospital’s financial records were completely 
disorganized, with “entries that indicated artificial means of balancing 
the books.” Eventually, Blitz said, his team realized that the accounts 
contained a “hole as big as the Grand Canyon.” The hospital was more 
than thirty-six million dollars in debt, and had to close for nearly a 
year. (It reopened in October, 2018.) One morning, Blitz’s chief 
financial officer found police carting away computers and telephones. 
The local district attorney has issued more than forty search warrants 
as part of a fraud investigation, one of the largest such investigations 
in Tulare County history. Benzeevi and his legal team refused to respond 
to questions about Psy-Group. At first, Kumar said that he wasn’t aware 
of the covert campaign and that he wanted to help with this story. Then 
he stopped returning calls.

According to a former company official, Zamel decided to shut down 
Psy-Group in February, 2018, just as Mueller’s team began questioning 
employees. But its demise hasn’t suppressed the appetite for many of the 
services it provided. Some of Psy-Group’s former employees have met with 
Black Cube to discuss job opportunities. Black Cube has been criticized 
for some of its recent work, including for the producer Harvey Weinstein 
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies>, 
but there’s no sign that the notoriety has hurt business; one person 
familiar with the company’s operations bragged that there was booming 
interest from a variety of corporations. Recently, Efraim Halevy, who 
served as the director of Mossad from 1998 to 2002, joined Black Cube’s 
advisory board. Uzi Arad, a Mossad veteran and a former 
national-security adviser for Netanyahu, said that he was ashamed to see 
some of his former colleagues become “mercenaries for hire,” adding, 
“It’s highly immoral, and they should know it.”

Last year, Black Cube moved to one of Tel Aviv’s most expensive 
neighborhoods, where it now occupies a sleek, full-floor office in the 
Bank Discount Tower. The entrance is unmarked, and painted black; doors 
are controlled by fingerprint readers. One area of the office is 
decorated with spy memorabilia, including an old encryption machine.

Some Psy-Group veterans expressed regret that the firm had closed. “Had 
the company still been open, all this so-called negative press would 
have brought us lots of clients,” one said. Despite embarrassing 
missteps, which have exposed some Psy-Group and Black Cube operations to 
public scrutiny, a former senior Israeli intelligence official said that 
global demand for “private Mossads” is growing, and that the market for 
influence operations is expanding into new commercial areas. In 
particular, the former official cites the potentially huge market for 
using avatars to influence real-estate prices—by creating the illusion 
that bidders are offering more money for a property, for example, or by 
spreading rumors about the presence of toxic chemicals to scare off 
competition. “From a free-market point of view, it’s scary,” a former 
Psy-Group official said, adding that the list of possible applications 
for avatars was “endless.” Another veteran of Israeli private 
intelligence warned, “We are looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms 
of where this can go.”

______________

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