Dangers of the private spy payroll

Last week, Weinstein was convicted of rape and other sexual offences, the guilty verdict generating news headlines that gripped America and went round the world.

During the long legal battle towards the court’s guilty verdict there has been no shortage of startling headlines and insights to emerge from the trial.

One of the most significant of these, however, relates to that email and reveals how the wealthy Weinstein hired Israeli private intelligence agencies to try to obtain information on accusers that would help suppress or silence their allegations against him. This remarkable revelation, first exposed in depth during the trial by The New Yorker magazine, has shone a long overdue light on the whole shadowy world of private intelligence agencies, whose activities often operate close to the legal line in pursuit of their clients’ interests.

The journalist who first wrote the story for the magazine is Ronan Farrow, who himself comes from a family background comprising of Hollywood’s elite.

The son of actress Mia Farrow and filmmaker Woody Allen, it was Farrow who as far back as November 2017 in a comprehensive investigative article entitled “Harvey Weinstein’s Army of Spies”, drew attention to the role of private intelligence agencies in the saga of the beleaguered movie producer’s predatory sexual activities.

Farrow revealed how the Israeli firms called Kroll and Black Cube working on Weinstein’s payroll deployed a number of investigators using false identities to befriend women accusing him of sexual misconduct and extract information from them that might aid his defence. “Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies ‘target’ or collect information on dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focused on their personal or sexual histories,” wrote Farrow in The New Yorker, adding that Weinstein monitored the progress of the investigations personally.

So just who exactly are the likes of Kroll and Black Cube? How have these and other private intelligence agencies emerged and what kind of wider work do they undertake on their clients’ behalf?

In order to understand the evolution of such firms, say analysts, it is important to realise how outsourcing dramatically increased after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001 and subsequent so-called “war on terror”.

In the wake of 9/11, spying and intelligence became one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States and elsewhere.

More and more intelligence work – covert, overt and analysis activity – was delegated to contractors who generally perform surveillance, interrogation, analysis or rendition activities.

Indeed, as far back as 2007, a little more than five years after the 9/11 attacks, the US Defence Intelligence Agency was spending 70% of its classified budget on private contractors performing the agency’s work.

Privatisation has also spread into the realm of human intelligence, according to Tim Shorrock, investigative reporter and author of the 2008 book Spies For Hire: The Secret World Of Intelligence Outsourcing.

He tells of how, just a few years after 9/11, the CIA was employing contractors to help staff overseas stations and provide disguises used by agents working undercover. In the intervening years, meanwhile, the privatisation of secret intelligence has become a worldwide phenomenon.

“Just as the job of army-to guard, shoot, and kill is turned over to mercenaries, now known in corporate-speak as private military contractors, so the work of intelligence agencies – to investigate, influence, and infiltrate – is turned over to spooks for hire, known as private intelligence companies,” says veteran Washington journalist Jefferson Morley, editor of the news blog The Deep State.

But far and away it is Israeli firms that increasingly dominate the private spy market. According to Morley and other experts who monitor such companies’ activities there is one simple reason for this.

“The Israeli intelligence services – Mossad (foreign), Shin Bet (domestic) and Amal (military) – generate more trained intelligence operatives than any other country in the world,” he explained in a recent article.

Gadi Aviran, formerly the head of an Israeli military intelligence research team, was one of the first to recognise this “talent pool” and one of the pioneers of the private Israeli intelligence industry.

“There was this huge pipeline of talent coming out of the military every year,” he told The New Yorker last year in an article examining the role Israeli private intelligence companies played in trying to influence the 2016 US presidential elections. All a company like mine had to do was stand at the gate and say ‘You look interesting,’” explained Aviran, who helped set up the intelligence firm Terrogence back in 2004.

Since then, other Israeli intelligence officers have joined this lucrative market using their expertise to open their own intelligence and surveillance firms. Among those companies are the now-defunct Psy-Group, whose slogan was “Shape Reality” and whose techniques included the use of elaborate false identities to manipulate its targets.

Among its many operations, was one code-named Project Butterfly, which the company pitched to its wealthy Jewish-American donors. The operation targeted what Psy-Group described as “anti-Israel” activists on American college campuses that supported the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Supporters of BDS see the movement as a way to use nonviolent protest to pressure Israel about its treatment of the Palestinians. However, detractors claim it unfairly singles out Israel.

The key to Project Butterfly was deception, making sure Psy-Group’s actions could not be traced to the firm, while it sought to “destabilise and disrupt” the BDS movement from within. But Psy-Group was far from the only Israeli company in the private spook marketplace. There are other companies like NSO that develop and sell cyber-attack tools designed to gather intelligence from mobile phones and other devices.

Then there is Fifth Dimension which according to Calcalist, the Israeli daily business newspaper and website, develops artificial intelligence systems designed to detect unusual behaviours and spot suspicious criminal or terrorist activity. Last but not least, of course, there is Black Cube.

Observers say that what ties these private spy companies and seems common to them all is how they invariably advertise, stressing that their founders were former members of Israeli intelligence. These mainly include Mossad agents as in the case of Black Cube or Psy-Group, or members of Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals-intelligence corps.

Content on the website of Black Cube, the spy firm central to the Weinstein case, demonstrates the extent to which its credentials are deeply connected to the mainstream Israeli intelligence community.

Not only does the company boast of having access to hundreds of financial, commercial, regulatory, technical and legal databases based upon its clients needs, it has at its disposal language specialists and an operational capacity in more than 70 countries. In its website mission statement Black Cube describes itself as specialising in “creative intelligence” whereby “tailor-made solutions based on high-quality intelligence, cutting-edge technology, unique expertise and out-of-the-box thinking” are produced.

This might seem just corporate speak, but even a glance at the list of those who serve or have served on Black Cube’s directorial and advisory board is enough to make the curious think again of its role and purpose. For that list of those at the top in Black Cube reads like a veritable Who’s Who of the elite in Israel’s intelligence services.

Also on the Black Cube board is another former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, a man known as a hardheaded pragmatist who has a distinguished intelligence service record.

Given the involvement of such figures it’s hardly surprising that Black Cube has been described as an “almost privatised wing” of the Mossad. Among its more controversial activities before the Weinstein case, Black Cube was reported to have targeted senior White House officials to gather compromising information that could be used in President Donald Trump’s decision to exit the 2015 international nuclear accord with Iran, which was negotiated under his predecessor Barack Obama.

Then 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.

Meanwhile, after the Weinstein scandal, the company was at the centre of controversy again in early 2018, when Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower who accused Facebook of a massive data breach, alleged that Black Cube was hired to spy on the Nigerian president in 2015. Wylie later went back on the allegations.

It was in 2016, with an office in New York, that Black Cube was introduced to Harvey Weinstein by the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and won a $1.6 million contract to investigate 91 women alleging sexual assault, harassment and even rape against the movie producer.

According to the Byline Times, this even came complete with complete “success fees” for stopping harmful stories coming to print.

“I don’t feel guilty about anything I did for Back Cube,” insisted Seth Freedman who the company had deployed to gather useful information to help Weinstein’s case.

Among others Freedman tricked into giving long interviews by pretending to work for The Guardian where he was once employed was actress Rose McGowan, who alleged Weinstein raped her.

After a year of concerted effort, however, Weinstein’s campaign to track and gag his accusers failed. But there is little doubt that speaking out was made all the more difficult for those women he targeted using Black Cube. For this and other reasons many argue the time is overdue for a re-examination of the activities of some private intelligence companies, who they criticise for playing fast and loose with the law.

While Israeli companies like Black Cube have been in the headlines, industry observers say the playing field includes firms from across the world.

“The world of spies used to be cloistered. People who joined it never spoke about it and often served until retirement,” observed the British security specialist Edward Lucas last year in a Foreign Policy magazine article entitled The Spycraft Revolution.

“That has changed,” Lucas continued. A stint at the CIA or MI6 has become a paragraph on a resume, not a career. Britain and the United States have caught up with Israel, where the private sector has long prized a spell in a senior position in intelligence or defence.”

And so it seems the old rule that you are “either in or out” of the service is out of date. It’s a shift that has increasingly allowed some ex-spies to get extremely rich. And therein lies perhaps the biggest fear of all, whereby a blurring between the privateers and government intelligence agencies is created.

There is real concern now that such a scenario might only embolden the unscrupulous in certain quarters to use private intelligence firms for activities and actions deemed unacceptable. In one fell swoop the capacity to distance themselves from certain activities and claim plausible deniability presents itself for those willing to put private spies on their payroll.

The Harvey Weinstein case and his conviction have opened the eyes of many as to what some powerful, wealthy individuals and institutions believe they can get away with. It has also opened many eyes to the potentially pernicious nature of some private intelligence work – and few would argue against it being a lesson well worth heeding.