This is the second installment in a three-part series. Read Part I here and Part III here. Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism by subscribing here.

In October of 2016, a writer named Ben Wallace got a call from a number that he didn’t recognize, with a U.K. country code. Wallace had spent the preceding weeks pursuing leads, for New York magazine, about rumors of sexual harassment and assault that were swirling around the movie producer Harvey Weinstein.

When Wallace picked up the call, the voice on the line was that of a woman with a refined European accent. “You can call me Anna,” she said. Wallace had lived in the Czech Republic and Hungary for a few years after graduating from college. He had a good ear for accents, but he couldn’t place this one. He guessed that the woman might be German. Anna said she had heard that Wallace was working on a story about the entertainment industry. “I received your number through a friend,” he recalled her saying. “I might have something that might be of importance for you.” Wallace tried to think of which friend might have made the introduction. Not many people knew about his assignment.

He pressed the woman for more information, but she acted coy. Her story was sensitive, she explained, and she wanted to talk in person. The following Monday, Wallace met the woman at a coffee shop in SoHo. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, with long blond hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a Roman nose. She wore Converse sneakers and gold jewelry. Anna said that she wasn’t comfortable giving her real name yet. She said that she had a story about Weinstein but was grappling with whether to tell it. Not long after, Wallace and Anna met for a second time, at a hotel bar. When Wallace arrived, Anna smiled at him invitingly, almost seductively. She had ordered a glass of wine. “I won’t bite,” she said, patting the seat next to her. “Come sit next to me.” Wallace told her that he had a cold and ordered tea.

Anna was cagey about the details of her experience with Weinstein. She said that she first wanted to learn more about Wallace’s story. Some of her questions seemed strange. Anna asked what had motivated him to take the assignment, how many sources he had, and who they were. As they talked, she leaned in, conspicuously extending her wrist toward him. Wallace began to suspect that he was being recorded. When Anna eventually recounted her story about Weinstein, it was mild and lacked detail. She and Weinstein had an affair that ended poorly, she said, and she wanted revenge. Anna broke down while recounting the story, but her performance had a soap-operatic quality. Wallace told Anna that he sympathized with her, but he considered consensual affairs to be Weinstein’s private business.

More in the Black Cube Chronicles Published on October 7, 2019. Published on October 9, 2019. Around the same time, the actress Rose McGowan was planning to go public with a claim that Weinstein had raped her in the nineteen-nineties. (Weinstein has denied “any allegations of non-consensual sex.”) In October of 2016, McGowan tweeted about her allegation, without naming Weinstein; in February of 2017, she recounted the story to me for an investigation that I was conducting; in the ensuing months, she finished writing a memoir that included the allegation. McGowan told me that she had found support from women’s-rights activists. In April of 2017, Lacy Lynch, a literary agent who was advising McGowan, forwarded her an e-mail from Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm that wanted to enlist McGowan’s help with a charitable project called Women in Focus. The e-mail said that the firm was planning a gala dinner at the end of the year and wanted McGowan to be a keynote speaker. “We have taken a keen interest in the work Ms Rose McGowan does for the advocacy of women’s rights and we believe that the ideals she strives towards align closely with those upheld by our new initiative,” the e-mail said. It was signed by Diana Filip, who identified herself as the deputy head of sustainable and responsible investments. The following month, Filip and McGowan met face to face, at the Belvedere, an airy Mediterranean restaurant at the Peninsula hotel in Beverly Hills. Filip had long blond hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones, and a Roman nose. She had an elegant European accent that McGowan couldn’t place. McGowan was generally skeptical of strangers, but Filip seemed to know everything about her, and seemed to understand what she’d been through. McGowan began to let her guard down.

In October of 2016, shortly before Wallace’s encounter with Anna, Harvey Weinstein sent a cryptic e-mail to his legal team. For years, he had been represented by David Boies, the attorney who argued for marriage equality before the U.S. Supreme Court, and who represented Al Gore in the dispute over the 2000 Presidential election. Weinstein wanted Boies’s advice on a private-intelligence firm that had been recommended to him by Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel. “The Black Cube Group from Israel contacted me through Ehud Barak,” Weinstein wrote. “They r strategists and say your firm have used them. Gmail me when u get a chance.” Run largely by former officers of the Mossad and other Israeli spy agencies, Black Cube has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, and offers its clients operatives who, according to the firm’s promotional literature, are “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units.”

Later that month, Boies’s firm and Black Cube signed a secret contract retaining the spy agency’s services for Weinstein. Boies’s colleagues wired a hundred thousand dollars to Black Cube, as an initial payment. In e-mails and documents related to the arrangement, Black Cube staff tried to hide Weinstein’s identity, referring to him as “the end client” or “Mr. X.” Naming Weinstein, one message warned, “will make him extremely angry.” Black Cube promised Weinstein “a dedicated team of expert intelligence officers that will operate in the USA and any other necessary country.” The team would include a project manager, intelligence analysts, linguists, “Avatar Operators,” who would create fake identities on social media, and “operations experts with extensive experience in social engineering.” The agency also promised to provide “a full time agent by the name of ‘Anna’ (hereinafter ‘the Agent’), who will be based in New York and Los Angeles as per the Client’s instructions and who will be available full time to assist the Client and his attorneys for the next four months.” Eventually, Weinstein and Boies brokered an agreement with the spy agency to obtain a draft of McGowan’s book, so that Weinstein could discredit it, and to assist in blocking the publication of news stories about the allegations.

Over the next year, Black Cube operatives periodically met with Weinstein, in New York and Los Angeles, updating him on the firm’s progress. The agency submitted invoices for hundreds of thousands of dollars and asked for large “bonus fees” if it succeeded in its objectives. (A source close to the Black Cube operation said that the company withdrew from its relationship with Weinstein as it became increasingly clear that the producer wanted the firm to target women with sexual-misconduct allegations against him.)

Black Cube was founded in Tel Aviv, in 2010, by veterans of a secret Israeli intelligence unit. Meir Dagan, the former director of Mossad, sat on the company’s advisory board until his death, in 2016. Dagan once described Black Cube to a prospective client as a personal Mossad. Over time, the agency’s workforce grew to include more than a hundred operatives, with thirty languages between them. It eventually moved its headquarters to a sprawling office space in a high-rise tower in central Tel Aviv, behind an unmarked black door. In the company’s reception area, everything from the plush furnishings to the art on the walls evoked a black cube. Inside, agents managed false identities and front companies; each workspace had a cubby hole containing as many as twenty cell phones, tied to different numbers and fictional personae.

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Black Cube’s work was designed never to be discovered. But its operatives could be sloppy, and, once in a while, one of them would leave behind too many fingerprints. In the spring of 2017—as the Trump Administration and its supporters worked to dismantle the Iran nuclear deal—a number of peculiar e-mails were sent to the spouses of prominent defenders of the deal. Rebecca Kahl, a former program officer at the National Democratic Institute and the wife of the former Obama Administration foreign-policy adviser Colin Kahl, received e-mails from a woman identifying herself as Adriana Gavrilo, of Reuben Capital Partners. Gavrilo claimed that she was launching an initiative on education and asked to meet in order to discuss the school that Kahl’s daughter attended. Kahl, worried that she was “strangely a target of some sort,” stopped responding to the requests. Ann Norris, a former State Department official and the wife of the former Obama foreign-policy adviser Ben Rhodes, also received an unusual e-mail, from a woman named Eva Novak, who said that she worked for a London-based film company called Shell Productions. Novak asked Norris to consult on a movie, which she described as “ ‘All the President’s Men’ meets ‘The West Wing.’ ” The film, she said, would portray government officials during times of geopolitical crisis, including during “nuclear negotiations with a hostile nation.” Norris found Novak’s request “bizarre” and didn’t write back.

There were other examples. During the summer of 2017, a woman who identified herself as Diana Ilic, a London-based consultant working for a European software mogul, began calling and meeting with critics of the insurance company AmTrust Financial Services, Inc., pressing them to make self-incriminating statements. (An AmTrust spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that the company didn’t hire Black Cube to investigate critics, but, according to the paper, she declined to say “whether its lawyers or others in its service had done so.”) Not long after, a woman named Maja Lazarov, who claimed to work for Caesar & Co., a London-based recruitment agency, began approaching employees of West Face Capital, a Canadian asset-management firm, and soliciting damaging statements from them. In photos taken during the meetings, and in profile pictures on social-media accounts tied to the suspicious e-mails, the same face appeared over and over: high cheekbones and dark eyes, framed by long blond hair. Anna, Adriana, Eva, Diana, Maja—they were all the same woman, a Black Cube agent named Stella Penn Pechanac.

Stella Penn Pechanac was born between two worlds and belonged to none. “I was a Bosnian Muslim, and my husband was a Serbian Orthodox,” her mother once told a journalist. “And what was our little Steliza?” In childhood photos, the girl was not yet blond; she had dark hair and dark eyes. She was raised in Sarajevo, amid beat-up cars and dilapidated tower blocks. When she was a child, the Bosnian war broke out, turning Serbian Orthodox Christians against Bosnian Muslims. Sarajevo was cordoned by sect and beset by violence, poverty, and hunger. Pechanac’s mother made grass soup when there was nothing else to eat. Snipers fired on civilians. Mortar rounds landed indiscriminately on city streets. For half a year, the family lived in a bare, closet-size basement room. When shells started landing nearby, Pechanac’s parents took in people who had been wounded and shared the family’s thin mattress. “One woman died on it,” Pechanac would later recall. After the shelling, the entryway of their building was covered in blood. “There were water hoses we used to clean with, and they simply washed all the blood out the door,” she said. “I remember—seven years old.”

About a decade before the Weinstein operation, when Pechanac was in her early twenties, she and her mother appeared in a documentary about the war. Her mother wept openly, walking the streets of Sarajevo and recalling the bloodshed. Pechanac appeared reluctant to participate. She hovered at the margins of the shots, chewing gum or smoking, looking petulant. Eventually, one of the filmmakers cornered her and asked what it was like to relive the painful memories. Pechanac shrugged. “It makes me mad that she had to go through this,” she said, referring to her mother. “But, personally, I haven’t felt anything for a long time.”