Frei

Daily Stormer

January 7, 2020

As the Weinstein case goes to trial, it’s worth recalling an interesting detail from Ronan Farrow’s book about his investigation into Weinstein, which ultimately led to the mogul’s downfall. Weinstein put the Israeli company Black Cube (“a private Mossad”) onto some of the women making complaints against him. Their operatives successfully established relationships, under a variety of pretexts, with Weinstein’s enemies and accusers, and mined them for information. Daft Rose McGowan, whose life would have been much enhanced if she had adopted Alt Right precepts instead of denouncing them, was one of those targeted. A Black Cube infiltrator called Stella Penn Pechanac built up such a close relationship with her that at one point McGowan told her “You’re the only one I can trust.”

Ronan Farrow, the gay Jew whose investigation into Weinstein was suppressed by other Jews at NBC, forcing him to use the New Yorker as an alternative outlet for his stories, was also targeted by Black Cube. At some point, he became aware he was being monitored and managed to turn one of the people subcontracted to follow him, named Ostrovskiy. In the extract below, it emerges that one of the techniques these Israeli black ops firms used was to secretly record conversations in which they would try and entrap goyim into making anti-Semitic statements.

From “Catch and Kill” by Ronan Farrow:

Through the remainder of 2018, I continued my reporting on the world of Israeli private intelligence, keeping at Black Cube in the process. Eido Minkovsky, the genial freelancer who handled the spy agency’s public relations, was a regular contact. “Ronan, baby,” he’d say, when I called. “Don’t divorce me,” he’d write, responding evasively to my latest reporting inquiry. In January 2019, he agreed to have a drink during one of his regular stops in New York.

Several hours before that meeting, Ostrovskiy called. Black Cube had ordered Roman Khaykin and InfoTactic to find a pen capable of secretly recording audio. Ostrovskiy sent a picture of the spy pen they’d found. It was piano-black, with a silver clip: nothing you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it, but it had features you could track, like a little ring of chrome at a specific height on its barrel.

Minkovsky and I had agreed to meet at a wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen. I arrived to find him lounging in a corner with a Cheshire cat grin. Minkovsky ordered a cocktail, led with his usual flattery offensive. Then he announced that he was going to take notes on my reporting questions. He produced, from his jacket pocket, a black pen with a silver clip.

“Funny, I have the same one,” I said.

His grin faltered. “It’s a special pen,” he said. “From Minkovsky Industries.”

I asked Minkovsky if he was recording. He looked injured. He informed Zorella, the Black Cube founder, of any meetings, of course. He had to—he was polygraphed periodically. But: “Ronan, I would never, ever record.”

Later, Minkovsky would maintain that the pen he’d taken out was perfectly innocent, and that he wasn’t aware of any other. But on my way out of the meeting that night, I texted Ostrovskiy, “Do you know who that pen was delivered to?”—and he replied with a string of pictures, all showing Minkovsky, just before we met, standing on a corner, accepting delivery of the spy pen.

A few days later the spy pen appeared to resurface in Black Cube’s latest operation. A middle-aged man with a neat white beard, who identified himself as Michael Lambert, sat down for lunch with John Scott-Railton, a researcher for the watchdog group Citizen Lab. Lambert had said he worked for the Paris-based agricultural technology firm CPW-Consulting, and asked to meet about Scott-Railton’s doctoral research on using kite-mounted cameras to create maps, which is a thing, apparently.

But as food arrived, Lambert’s interests strayed. Citizen Lab, which tracks state-backed efforts to hack and surveil journalists, had recently reported that NSO Group’s Pegasus software compromised an iPhone belonging to a friend of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, not long before Saudi operatives cut Khashoggi to pieces with a bone saw. The investigation had prompted sharp criticism of NSO Group, which denied that its software was used to target Khashoggi but also refused to answer questions about whether the software had been sold to the Saudi government. Lambert wanted to know about Citizen Lab’s work on NSO Group. He asked whether there was any “racist element” to the focus on an Israeli group. He pressed Scott-Railton about his views on the Holocaust. As they spoke, Lambert took out a black pen with a silver clip and a chrome ring on its barrel. He laid it just so on a legal pad in front of him, tip pointed at Scott-Railton.

The script was familiar. In the operations in which Stella Penn Pechanac had been involved, targeting employees of West Face Capital and critics of AmTrust Financial Services, Black Cube agents had also solicited anti-Semitic statements. But this time, the mark was wise to it: suspecting subterfuge, Scott-Railton had decked himself out with recording devices. He’d been taping the whole time.

It was a spy vs. spy confrontation of sorts—and each had brought his own tail as backup. Raphael Satter, an Associated Press journalist with whom Scott-Railton had been working, arrived with a camera and started questioning the man who was not named Michael Lambert after all. The Black Cube agent’s cover had been blown. From a table nearby, Ostrovskiy had been watching and photographing the meeting, too. Khaykin, who had been there earlier and then departed, started calling, apoplectic. “Our guy got burned!” he said. “Get to the lobby immediately! He needs to get out.”

The Black Cube agent ducked out of a service entrance. Ostrovskiy picked up the agent and his luggage, then drove around, trying to shake potential tails. As they drove, the agent placed frantic calls, trying to book the first possible flight out of New York. On his luggage was a tag bearing the name “ALMOG” and a home address in Israel. This name was real: the agent was Aharon Almog-Assouline, a retired Israeli security official later reported to have been involved in a string of Black Cube operations.

Black Cube and NSO Group would later deny any connection to the operation against Citizen Lab. But in many of the meetings Ostrovskiy had described to me over the preceding months, Almog-Assouline had been there, appearing to target figures who criticized NSO Group and argued that its software was being used to hunt journalists.