<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
<div class="container font-size5 content-width3">
<div> <font size="-2"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/private-mossad-for-hire">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/18/private-mossad-for-hire</a></font><br>
<h1 class="ArticleHeader__hed___GPB7e">Private Mossad for Hire</h1>
</div>
<div class="content">
<div class="moz-reader-content line-height4 reader-show-element">
<div id="readability-page-1" class="page">
<div>
<section>
<article>
<header>
<div>
<div>
<h2>Inside an effort to influence American
elections, starting with one small-town race.</h2>
<p>By Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow - February 18
& 25, 2019<br>
</p>
</div>
</div>
</header>
<div>
<div>
<div id="articleBody" data-template="two-column">
<div>
<div>
<div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Psy-Group’s talks with Benzeevi, after
the 2016 election, spurred the company
to draw up<span data-page="page_2"></span>
a 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 <em>PAC</em>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.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>The modern market for private
intelligence dates back to the
nineteen-seventies, when a former
prosecutor named <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/the-secret-keeper">Jules
Kroll</a> 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.</p>
<p>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.’ ”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.’ ”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/03/the-vegetarian">Meir
Dagan</a>, who had just stepped down
as the director of Mossad, how he could
draw on the expertise of former
intelligence officers to look into<span
data-page="page_3"></span> the
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war">information
warfare</a> 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.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.)<span data-page="page_4"></span></p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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 <em>P.M.</em>, 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 <em>FIFA</em>
17.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>IOCO</em>, which
controlled Psy-Group. (Zamel’s lawyers
and Burstien declined to say how much of
an ownership stake Zamel held in <em>IOCO</em>,
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.</p>
<p>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 whom<span
data-page="page_5"></span> offered to
guide her through the process of
becoming a Muslim.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>After her conversion, Madison began to
come into contact with Facebook members
who espoused more radical beliefs. One
of her new friends was an <em>ISIS</em>
fighter in Raqqa, Syria, who encouraged
her to become an <em>ISIS</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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, which<span
data-page="page_6"></span> is ‘What
we’re doing is completely legal,’ ” a
former colleague said.</p>
<p>Benzeevi had already received a draft
of Psy-Group’s battle plan, contained in
an e-mail that was password-protected
and marked “<em>PRIVILEGED &
CONFIDENTIAL</em>.” The proposal
assured Benzeevi that Psy-Group’s
activities would be “fully disconnected”
from him and his hospital-management
company.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Times</em>, last
October, <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/politics/rick-gates-psy-group-trump.html"
target="_blank">Psy-Group used code
names for the candidates</a>: 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.)</p>
<p>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.”)</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>Burstien said that his talks with the
Trump campaign went nowhere; a
representative<span data-page="page_7"></span>
for 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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 <em>AIDS</em>
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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?”</p>
<p>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,<span data-page="page_8"></span>
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.”</p>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://www.politico.com/tipsheets/politico-influence/2017/03/trump-connected-lobbyists-sign-more-clients-219017"
target="_blank">offices in London,
Hong Kong and Cyprus</a>.” There was
no mention of Israel; Burstien thought
it would be better for business to play
down the Israel angle.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Tony Maldonado, a reporter for the <em>Valley
Voice</em>, 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.”</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <em>Valley Voice</em> posted an
article under the headline “<em><a
href="https://www.ourvalleyvoice.com/2017/07/06/tulare-politics-get-fishy-hospital-recall-nears/"
target="_blank">Tulare Politics Get
Fishy as Hospital Recall Nears</a></em>.”
Psy-Group, one of the company’s former
employees later said, was engaged not in
“serious intelligence” but in “monkey
business.”</p>
<p>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!”</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>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, to<span
data-page="page_9"></span> discover
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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.”</p>
</div>
<div>
<p>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 was<span
data-page="page_final"></span> like
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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,
<a
href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies">including
for the producer Harvey Weinstein</a>,
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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.” </p>
<p>______________<br>
</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</article>
</section>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://freedomarchives.org/">https://freedomarchives.org/</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>