black cube

---

see ISRAEL 2 gorka

see cambr anal

see ZAMEL WIKISTRAT COLLUSION?

GORKA?

SEE ERIK BLKWATER

---

leaked-emails-shed-light-on-former-israeli-leaders--dealings-with-private-intelligence-companies,110523820-eve

Ehud Barak, secret correspondence (2/2) - Ehud Barak and Benny Gantz discussed cooperation opportunities with Black Cube and with Wikistrat founder Joel Zamel, according to a new trove of emails. [...]

Published on 19/09/2025 at 04:00 GMT Reading time 3 minutes Matt Bernardini

---

4 24 7 WORLD CENTRAL FOOD KITCHEN CHEF ANDRES KIA

4 24 kpfa

israel target low level hamas kill at home ok to kill 15-20, higer value kill 300 with smart munitions 4/5/24 7 am lavendEr, where’s daddy

---

---

https://cpj.org/blog/2018/02/weinstein-blackcube-surveillance-claim-exposes-agg.php

Weinstein-BlackCube surveillance claim exposes aggressive tactics to kill a story

By Avi Asher-Schapiro/CPJ US Correspondent on February 7, 2018

Those with deep pockets can go to great lengths to push back against journalism they find objectionable. Billionaire Peter Thiel deployed a team of lawyers in a move that bankrupted the news site Gawker in 2016--and last month President Donald Trump's lawyers tried to block the publication of an unflattering book. But there's another, much less public, arena where the wealthy can combat unflattering reporting: the world of subterfuge-for-hire, where private investigators work to undermine a story before it's even made public.

In late 2017, the public was privy to a rare glimpse inside this world. Ronan Farrow, in a New Yorker exposé, reported that movie mogul Harvey Weinstein's lawyers at Boies Schiller Flexner had enlisted a team of private investigators to push back against reporting into dozens of sexual assault and rape allegations against their client. One of the private investigation firms, BlackCube--an outfit staffed with former agents of the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad--was ordered in a contract obtained by The New Yorker to "completely stop the publication" of an article critical of Weinstein. BlackCube ultimately failed. But, Farrow's report found, journalists investigating Weinstein at The New Yorker, The New York Times, and New York magazine, and their sources, were approached by undercover agents with fabricated backstories, as part of an elaborate effort to keep Weinstein's alleged sexual misconduct secret.

Weinstein's spokespeople have denied the allegations against him and rejected claims that he tried to "suppress" any journalism. BlackCube has repeatedly insisted that it "applies high moral standards" to all of its work, and in an interview a member of its advisory board expressed regret for its relationship with Weinstein.

While there are no laws against lying to a reporter or their sources, or conducting public surveillance of or pushing embarrassing information about a journalist--as long as that behavior doesn't veer into libel or slander--the Weinstein story raised questions about how far some will go to kill a negative story--and what, if any, ethical and legal guardrails exist to protect journalists

Of course, the use of underhanded tactics to derail a reporter is nothing new. Bethany McLean, a business reporter who broke the Enron story in 2001, recalls receiving multiple phone calls from individuals who said they were potential sources. These calls, she told CPJ, amounted to sloppy sting operations: those on the other line would try to lure her into admitting she wanted to financially benefit from her own reporting--McLean said she assumed she was being taped.

For most reporters, however, pushback usually comes in the form of aggressive public relations firms or, on occasion, threatening letters from their subjects' lawyers. Weathering an undercover operation has not typically been part of a journalists' job description. George Freeman said that in nearly 30 years as a lawyer for The New York Times, he "can barely think of an example" of these tactics. He is now executive director of the independent advisory group the Media Law Resource Center. "Unfortunately, it's becoming less rare in the last couple years," he told CPJ. "And that's what's scary about it"

Subjects of journalistic scrutiny are, of course, entitled to defend themselves. And for those with the resources to do so, there are plenty of techniques that reporters with whom CPJ spoke said they have come to expect, including compiling publicly available information that could reveal a reporter's conflicts of interest, or a dossier of past reporting mistakes.

The Weinstein story revealed a more aggressive toolbox apparently used by private investigators: the impersonation of sources and hiring reporters as agents. Other cases involve deploying aggressive surveillance, and smearing sources or reporters by spreading potentially damaging personal information.

Before Weinstein, another high-profile case alleging attempts to suppress reporting focused on Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News. Ailes' biographer Gabriel Sherman, citing sources inside Fox, alleged that the executive used a portion of Fox's budget to pay for a "Black Room," where PR and surveillances operations against Ailes' perceived enemies--including reporters--were coordinated.

Ailes, who died in May, denied the allegations at the time. On the record, Fox executives insisted to Sherman that they had no knowledge of company money being spent on surveillance or online attacks against reporters.

But, Sherman said, sources inside of Fox told him a different story. "From my own reporting, inside Fox, I know Ailes had hired private investigators to have me surveilled," Sherman told CPJ. "It adds a level of psychological intimidation, if you know your subject has goons out there looking for you." Sherman recalled one particularly chilling incident while he was working on his biography of Ailes: he and his wife noticed a black SUV lurking outside a cabin they were renting--when they tried to approach the car, it peeled out and raced away.

Beyond laws against stalking, assault, and fraud, there's little to prevent the rich and powerful from deploying such tactics to suppress reporting they don't approve of, said Philip Segal, the founder of Charles Griffin Intelligence, a private investigations firm. Segal is an expert on investigative ethics and gives ethics seminars to state bar associations.

He said he believes private investigators should follow strict ethical guidelines and refrain from impersonation tactics. Investigators should not, he said, pay other journalists to gather intelligence for them, unless those reporters are prepared to broadcast that they are not working in their capacity as a reporter.

Getting a clear picture of the scope and breadth of these aggressive private investigations is difficult. "Out of a thousand cases, I'd say one or two involved a reporter," Randy Torgerson, the president of the United States Association of Professional Investigators, an organization with over 600 members, told CPJ.

And, when a reporter is the apparent victim of such an operation, it can be difficult to definitively trace the source. In the BlackCube case, Farrow was able to publish a copy of the firm's contract with Weinstein. But more often than not, obtaining such a document is not possible, leaving reporters with a mixture of circumstantial evidence, suspicion, and the assurances of their own sources.

Lee Fang, an investigative journalist at the Intercept, who has reported for a number of outlets about the sprawling political network funded by the conservative Koch brothers, said he suspects operatives working for the Kochs hacked his private account on the image hosting site Photobucket and circulated an image of him smoking marijuana as a teenager.

The image published by the conservative website the Washington Free Beacon, in a post titled "High Times at The Intercept" that mocked the publication's decision to hire Fang, was taken from a password protected account, Fang said. The Free Beacon was co-founded by Michael Goldfarb, who previously worked as a crisis communications consultant for the Kochs.

Fang told CPJ he can't definitively prove who was behind the hack, but said that his reporting had been flagged by pro-Koch Brothers operatives before, including on a now-defunct website, KochFacts.com, that listed journalists writing critically on the Kochs' political activities.

...

---

AN 119

A consulting firm with ties to Israeli intelligence pitched a plan to the Trump campaign to use social media and foreign assistance to interfere with the 2016 election that turned out to be eerily similar to Russian meddling.

Wikistrat started gaming out a foreign influence campaign just days after Donald Trump entered the race, and an associated firm pitched senior campaign official Rick Gates on the plan in April 2016, reported The Daily Beast.

The pitch by Psy Group, which is reportedly owned by Wikistrat founder Joel Zamel, laid out an election influence campaign that involved creating thousands of fake social media accounts to support Trump, and Zamel himself took part in at least two meetings in Washington in 2016 and 2017.

His staff at Psy Group continued making connections about their social media manipulation scheme with individuals who represented themselves as close to the Trump campaign.

Zamel met with Donald Trump Jr. after his father became the Republican presidential nominee to discuss the plan, which resembled the election interference already underway by Russia and the scenario described by Wikistrat the year before.

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators have already questioned Zamel, who is so low-profile that no public photos of him are known, and Gates has agreed to cooperate as part of a plea agreement.

It’s not clear whether the Psy Group plans were ever implemented, but some former employees said at least parts of them were carried out.

An attorney for Wikistrat pointed out the firm had conducted hundreds of simulations on a variety of scenarios, and many in the cybersecurity world were concerned about foreign election interference when Psy Group conducted the sim.

But one former employee who helped create the 2015 report said the accuracy of their predictions are spooky in retrospect.

“At the time we were discussing the subject of cyber-interference in democratic processes, it seemed and felt like just another idle intellectual exercise and scenario planning project for political scientists,” said Peter Marino, a former Wikistrat analyst. “But retrospectively, it feels a bit too on-the-nose not to be disturbing.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/israeli-firm-pitched-don-jr-on-election-meddling-scenario-in-2016-and-it-sounds-exactly-like-the-russia-scheme/

---

Israel-based private intelligence firm made a Power Point presentation in which it appears to have bragged about the ways in which it used social media dirty tricks to help the Trump campaign, the Wall Street Journalreports.

The presentation was uploaded and featured pages on making fake news sites, using "avatar seeding" to get fake news in front of groups and infiltrating opposition to seed discord, such as using a pro-Bernie Sanders Facebook group to radicalize supporters against Hillary Clinton.

:{:{}:

The nine-page presentation, which the Journal uploaded, was marked with the words "confidential" and "do not circulate."

https://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/PsyGroupPresentation05-25-2018.pdf?mod=article_inline

The report says that Robert Mueller’s investigators have a copy of the presentation about how Donald Trump’s 2016 election was helped by fake news and fake social-media accounts.

As the paper writes, "it is unclear how much of the presentation consists of the firm’s analysis of online activity during the campaign and how much is a hypothetical pitch."

The presentation discusses how “bots” and fake news sitesenergized Trump voters. A slide called 'Trump Campaign Components' shows how 'fake news sites/avatars/content' were created during the early part of the election year and leveraged to spread 'uncertainty' during the heat of the campaig

---

https://www.wsj.com/articles/israeli-intelligence-firms-election-meddling-analysis-comes-under-muellers-scrutiny-1527288767?mod=article_inline

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/israeli-operatives-who-aided-harvey-weinstein-collected-information-on-former-obama-administration-officials

---

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/07/us/politics/iran-deal-benjamin-rhodes-black-cube.html

For years, opponents of the nuclear deal with Iran have accused Benjamin J. Rhodes, a top national security aide to President Barack Obama, of scheming to sell the diplomatic agreement on false pretenses to the American people.

Now, just as President Trump appears likely to announce his decision to withdraw from the deal, evidence has surfaced that the agreement’s opponents engaged in a sophisticated effort to dig up dirt on Mr. Rhodes and his family that continued well after the Obama administration left office.

A detailed report about Mr. Rhodes, compiled by Black Cube, a private investigations firm established by former intelligence analysts from the Israel Defense Forces, contains pictures of his apartment in Washington, telephone numbers and email addresses of members of his family, as well as unsubstantiated allegations of personal and ethical transgressions.

In a separate case in 2017, the same firm was hired to gather dirt on women accusing Harvey Weinstein, the movie mogul, of multiple instances of sexual misconduct.

It is unclear who hired Black Cube to prepare the report on Mr. Rhodes and a similar report on Colin Kahl, the national security adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., which were obtained by The New York Times from a source with knowledge of their provenance.

The Guardian, which first publishedthe existence of the reports on Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Kahl, said aides to Mr. Trump hired the firm, but there is no evidence in the documents that indicate any connection to anyone in Mr. Trump’s administration. A spokesman for the company vehemently denied any connection to the president.

“Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration or to the Iran nuclear deal,” said Ido Minkowski, the company’s spokesman. “Anyone who claims otherwise is misleading their readers and viewers.”

One person with knowledge of the reports suggested that the company had been hired by a commercial client with an interest in opposing the nuclear deal.

The reports appear to be aimed at undermining public support for the agreement by finding ways to discredit Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Kahl, who have been staunch advocates of the deal on social media and in television appearances. In an interview on Monday, Mr. Rhodes said he was surprised that ferocious criticism directed at him continued after he left government.

“I never imagined that upon leaving government, that not only would that information campaign continue, but that it would be supplemented by investigations into me and my family by shadowy international operations, involving foreign entities,” Mr. Rhodes said.

The deal to curtail Iran’s nuclear weapons program was signed by the United States, Iran and several European countries in 2015. Its critics, including Mr. Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, have said it does nothing to curtail the danger posed by Iran and will not curtail Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons. The president said Monday that he will announce on Tuesday whether he will formally withdraw the United States from the deal, as he has repeatedly signaled he would.

While there is no evidence directly linking Trump officials to the preparation of the reports, several current or former members of the Trump White House have repeatedly attacked Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Kahl for their support of the Iran agreement.

Sebastian Gorka, a Trump supporter who served briefly in the White House as an adviser, has repeatedly attacked both men on social media and in conservative news outlets, accusing Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Kahl of working to undermine Mr. Trump and defend the Iran deal from its critics.

Current and former Trump administration officials have also targeted John Kerry, the former secretary of state who negotiated the Iran deal for the United States. Even Mr. Trump himself said in a Twitter post on Monday that recent efforts by Mr. Kerry to save the deal amounted to “possibly illegal Shadow Diplomacy.”

Photo

Unlike Mr. Kerry, Mr. Kahl and Mr. Rhodes were not part of the nuclear deal negotiating team for the United States. But even before he left the White House, Mr. Rhodes was the target of criticism for his efforts to help build support for its approval.

“Why did whoever did this conjoin Ben and me? Why the two of us?” Mr. Kahl said. “Being vocal on Twitter would make me a target. But why would it bring down the Iran deal?”

A New York Times Magazine profile of Mr. Rhodes in May 2016 described a White House “war room” in which he tried to manage news coverage of the Iran nuclear negotiations. In the article, Mr. Rhodes was quoted as saying: “We created an echo chamber. They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Critics of the Iran deal have seized on the article to insist that Mr. Rhodes — and by extension, the entire Obama administration — were secretly manipulating public opinion by misrepresenting the implications of the nuclear deal.

The report on Mr. Rhodes by Black Cube notes that “in the article, he boasts about the creation of an ‘echo chamber’ in which he told journalists what to say and they repeated it back over and over as original thoughts.”

The reports also provide a list of several Washington journalists who have had “extensive contact” with Mr. Rhodes. Among those listed under the heading “contacts to investigate” are Jeffrey Goldberg, now the editor of The Atlantic; Mark Landler, a White House correspondent for The Times who often writes about foreign policy; Andrea Mitchell, now NBC News’s chief foreign affairs correspondent; and Glenn Thrush, a Times reporter who covered the Obama White House for Politico.

On Monday, reporters asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, whether anyone at the White House had knowledge of whether aides to Mr. Trump had hired Black Cube to dig up dirt on former Obama officials.

“I’m not aware of anything on that front,” Ms. Sanders said, adding that “if something comes up, we’ll let you guys know.”

---

PAYWALL

Scroll through edition

Spotlight | Israel

Leaked emails shed light on former Israeli leaders' dealings with private intelligence companies

Published on 19/09/2025 at 04:00 GMT Reading time 3 minutes Matt Bernardini

IFrame Content

black cube

Headlines

Topics

Deep Dives

Spymasters

Spy Way of Life

Search

Archives

Our offers

Subscriber services

FAQ

About us

Contact us

Edition française

Spotlight | Israel

Related topics to this article