Inside the shadowy world of the ‘private Mossad’
I am standing on the 26th floor of a skyscraper in Tel Aviv with views over the city and out to the Mediterranean, clutching a bottle of red wine from a Portuguese vineyard that doesn’t exist.
The wine certainly looks convincing. The bottle has an artful label with an etching of vines stretching across a hillside, a farmhouse in the distance. The vineyard also apparently bottles a sauvignon blanc and an aged ruby port, and reviews of its wine have featured on an established website, Vivino. ‘Another great wine from Alcantara,’ says one. ‘A soft fresh and fruity blend that pairs nicely with dessert. I was happily surprised with the tartness of the cranberries that was nicely balanced with the sweetness of the plum.’
And yet all of it – the wine, the reviews, the vineyard – is a work of fiction. Alcantara Vineyard, supposedly in the heart of the Douro Valley, is a fabrication created by Black Cube, an ominously named private intelligence company whose methods, while never illegal the company insists, are to say the least cunning.
Known as a ‘private Mossad’ – Israel’s national intelligence agency – Black Cube recruits staff from Israel’s various spying agencies and specialises in gathering intelligence for clients engaged in litigation with commercial enemies. In other words, it takes tricks learnt in the field by its agents and deploys them in multimillion-pound legal battles.
Evidence gathered by Black Cube has been used in court cases around the world, including in the High Court in London. Its agents have worked on more than 540 cases in over 75 countries, I’m told. There is no way of independently verifying this, nor its claims to have helped to recover $5.3 billion of assets for its clients and win $14.7 billion through court verdicts or out-of-court settlements.
Black Cube also initially gave support to the Israel-Gaza war effort, but those I speak to won’t detail exactly what it did.
Founded in 2011 by Dan Zorella, 40, who served in an elite military intelligence unit within the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and Dr Avi Yanus, also 40 and a former IDF officer, it now employs roughly 150 people, including between 30 and 40 field agents. Its oldest is a Mossad veteran in his 70s.
Today Zorella heads up its intelligence operations, while Yanus runs the financial and legal side of the business and leads the London office.
Its honorary president was former Mossad director Meir Dagan until his death in 2016. Another Mossad former chief, Efraim Halevy, sits on the advisory board. A number of other staff also previously worked for Mossad, which first came to worldwide attention in 1960 when its agents tracked down Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Argentina, then abducted him and smuggled him back to Israel where he was tried and executed.
For years much of Black Cube’s work remained a secret, but inevitably perhaps – given its line of work – when its name has surfaced, it has led to the most almighty stink. Questions have been raised over errors of judgment, while The Wall Street Journal in a brutal headline described Black Cube as ‘The Bumbling Spies of the “Private Mossad”’.
In 2016 two Black Cube investigators were arrested in Bucharest and later convicted of spying on Romania’s senior prosecutor Laura Kövesi, who headed the anti-corruption agency. To this day the company insists it doesn’t know what went wrong. It thought it had been ordered to spy on her by Romania’s intelligence service and was acting in an official capacity as a branch of that. It’s murky stuff to say the least. According to local reports, Zorella, Yanus and another employee were later given suspended prison sentences in Romania in a deal struck with prosecutors. The trio did not attend the court in Bucharest.
In 2017, Black Cube’s reputation took even more of a battering – and its cover was blown in spectacular fashion – after it was revealed it had acted for Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. His lawyer David Boies had signed a contract with Black Cube, employing them to provide intelligence to help to stop the publication of a New York Times article. The contract included a $300,000 bonus clause if Black Cube was successful. Three months after the contract was signed, the newspaper published its bombshell article, containing allegations of sexual abuse – it would lead to Weinstein’s incarceration and to the MeToo movement.
The existence of the contract was reported by journalist Ronan Farrow in a series of damning articles in The New Yorker. His searing exposé disclosed how Black Cube had deployed investigators using false identities to befriend women who were accusing Weinstein of sexual misconduct. ‘Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her,’ wrote Farrow. ‘One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan.’
Black Cube went on to revamp its operations, introducing a traffic light system to vet prospective clients – rating them red to green depending on the risk level. They have also installed a board to sign these off.
But now, Black Cube has come up with another attempt to restore its reputation. It has agreed to allow the tiniest of glimpses into its shadowy world – and permit a journalist inside the offices for the first time to speak to board member Giora Eiland.
Arriving at its Israel headquarters, there is no sign spelling out Black Cube in the foyer, just a discreet logo. Inside, the fixtures and fittings are all black – including the toilets which are accessed through a secret doorway. There are offices in Madrid and in a skyscraper in the City of London but this is their central ‘intelligence’ factory – a sort of mini MI5 from which managers (intelligence officers in spy lingo) run field agents, whose job is to eke out information useful to clients. The fake wine that I’m being shown, for example, is one of numerous props invented to facilitate these covert operations.
It’s real wine in a real bottle. But an in-house design team invented the label and created a vineyard – this was all used to lure a tycoon from South America to London. The firm won’t say who he was but they had investigated his background (through open-source material, they insist) and discovered his penchant for fine wines. Using this as their ‘in’, field operatives got to work, setting up meetings (in this case in London) as part of a sting operation to elicit information usable by their client in a complex legal dispute.
Staff also show me a gold-plated business card, specially made to convince another target that a fictional Arab-based business wanted to invest millions in a deal. Nothing drips wealth like a 3.5-inch piece of gold with an email address and phone number on it; it was handed out by a fake sheikh during a fake meeting.
In one room, an audio-visual team listens to and watches hours of secret tapes from covertly recorded meetings. The company uses tiny cameras and microphones hidden in shirt buttons, in car key fobs, even in a bottle that you can drink from while still filming. It’s clever, James Bond-style gadgetry. Another team is dedicated to creating false social media accounts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and LinkedIn, among others, to give credible backstories to field agents.
They concoct characters – maybe a tycoon or a wine connoisseur or an influencer – and websites to trick their way into the confidence of a target. ‘This is the room where we make dreams come true,’ explains an operative. Perhaps most intriguing is the office set aside as a studio to host video calls. Backgrounds can change to look like anything from an office in Rio to an apartment in Sweden. There’s a hair and make-up kit on hand and photographs of sets are taken to ensure continuity in follow-up calls.
Presiding over it all today is the company’s advisory board, set up in the wake of the Weinstein fiasco. One of those appointed to it is Eiland, 72, a retired major general in the IDF and former chair of Israel’s National Security Council. Sitting in the boardroom, he agrees to tell me how it all operates.
‘There are four sources of intelligence,’ he explains, fixing me with a battle-hardened stare. ‘There is the human intelligence, which is the very old one; the vision intelligence that can be captured from cameras whether in the street or through satellites; the signal intelligence, which includes the ability to intercept communications; and the fourth source, which is the newest, is open-sourced intelligence which is everything published on the internet. Everybody can see it but very few people know how to get the right information and cross this source with other sources to have the complete picture.’ Black Cube insists it will not do anything illegal, including hacking emails. Eiland also emphasises that Black Cube is not involved in signal intelligence work. ‘They don’t intercept communications, they don’t listen to phone calls of others.’
Eiland says that human intelligence is what Black Cube does best: ‘What we found out in this era is we are returning to the very old days where human intelligence is becoming more and more important. The reason is very simple. The other side, let’s call them the bad guys, know all the secrets of more modern sources of intelligence and know how to avoid revealing their secrets.
Let’s say they have done dirty work, whether it’s corruption, hiding of assets or bribery. The last thing they do is exchange emails or WhatsApp messages about what they have done because they fear those can be intercepted. They speak between themselves, there is no record, no paper trail. Surprisingly, someone [involved in bribery] will talk. Why will they talk? Because this is the weakness of human nature. That is enough for Black Cube to capture it and bring it to litigation.’
One of the first things that investigators do when they start working on a new case is create a ‘map’ of the target and their associates and friends. ‘You learn about their abilities, their hobbies, their habits, their weak points, their strong points, and then you make an operational decision about who you are going to attack,’ says Eiland.
Black Cube often recruits from Israeli intelligence because they ‘know how to look for the weak points’. Many were born outside Israel and ‘don’t have to make much effort’ when assuming false identities. They are, between them, fluent in more than 30 languages.
In recent years Black Cube’s name has cropped up in High Court cases in London. One such case involved Eliezer Fishman, once one of Israel’s most powerful tycoons, who was declared bankrupt in 2017 with debts of an estimated £830 million. The bankruptcy trustee (official receiver) appointed was suspicious he may have stashed vast assets in properties and holding companies but had no proof. Enter Black Cube.
A company, East-West UK, registered to an address in West Yorkshire, was suspected of being linked to Fishman, even though his name did not appear on any documents and he had sworn under oath that he had no interest in it. Its sole owner and director was Mirella Helbet, a Romanian woman living in Spain. Black Cube targeted Markus Rese, Helbet’s Germany-based lawyer. Operatives posing as business associates of a Russian oligarch approached Rese telling him their client was about to be bankrupted and needed to hide his money. They wanted to trick Rese into revealing that Fishman was behind East-West UK and other businesses.
At a meeting in Berlin, Rese showed them a flat owned by Fishman, which he was willing to sell to this fictitious client. Black Cube recorded Rese admitting he worked for Fishman and was trying to buy him a hotel in Germany, amid his apparent bankruptcy. In one recording, a laughing Rese tells the undercover agent: ‘I think he is not… really bankrupt. But this is my client – still.’ A High Court judgment made details of Black Cube’s involvement public in 2021. ‘Lunches appear to have involved Mr Rese consuming a good deal of alcohol,’ the High Court noted. Mr Justice Morgan concluded that Rese had ‘in the past created structures which were designed to hide assets’ and that Rese had ‘been involved with Mr Fishman and his companies and investments for many years’. He ordered Helbet to transfer ‘all her powers, rights and interests in East-West UK’ to the Israeli receiver, effectively giving him control of Fishman’s hidden empire in Germany. Black Cube chalks it up as a notable victory.
In other wins, Black Cube secretly recorded senior officials in Mexico describing widespread bribery and corruption at the state-run oil company Pemex, after being hired by a drilling contractor forced into bankruptcy when its contracts worth $1.5 billion were cancelled. In another case it exposed the allegedly corrupt practices of Panama’s courts by posing as Russian businessmen and luring a senior lawyer from Panama to Spain (where covert filming laws were more lax) on the pretext of a business deal involving sex workers. The lawyer, according to local reporting of the case, told the Black Cube agents of paying judges hundreds of thousands of dollars to sway their decisions.
The wins are all well and good. But in the murky world of corporate espionage, it is still impossible to ignore those high-profile disasters. Reflecting on the Weinstein incident, Black Cube accepts it got its fingers badly burnt. Privately, Zorella and Yanus have recognised that they were, to say the least, naive. Neither was prepared to give an interview to The Telegraph for this article, citing the need for strict client confidentiality.
Black Cube had taken the case on after being introduced to Weinstein by Ehud Barak, Israel’s former prime minister and a decorated soldier. The first meeting between them took place, according to sources familiar with it, on the fringes of a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton. There is no suggestion that Clinton was in any way involved.
Eiland says: ‘They got the recommendation to meet Harvey Weinstein from Ehud Barak. So they can say number one he is a very, very well known producer in Hollywood and number two the person who recommended that we would meet with him is a distinguished prime minister. What could be wrong? But you have to check all the dimensions of a case, not just the name of the person. Sometimes the motivations of even very good people – and I’m not saying Harvey Weinstein was a good person – have problems. Sometimes people do very dangerous things and criminal things.’
Eiland had not joined Black Cube at that point but is familiar with what happened. Weinstein, he says, told Zorella and Yanus ‘a reasonable story’. ‘He said, “I have some business dispute with my brother. There are hundreds of millions of dollars on the table and we are fighting about that and my brother is trying to shame me for these reasons.” [Later] they terminated the agreement but it was too late… And of course they got a bad reputation which they are trying to fix now.’
In the wake of the Weinstein and Romania cases, recognising the need to clean up Black Cube’s image, Zorella approached Eiland, Halevy and ex-Israeli police commissioner Yohanan Danino, asking them to form the advisory board. Eiland told Zorella he had ‘certain conditions’, including ensuring its work was ‘compliant’ and that ‘all the activities… [are] legal activities’, supervised by lawyers.
The second stipulation was that ‘we work with the good guys’. And thirdly that Black Cube stops carrying out work ‘against politicians or government agencies’. The exception, says Eiland, is when companies are in a business dispute with a government or fraud is suspected. Recently, Eiland rejected a world-famous client – he won’t say who – fearing possible ramifications. ‘The last thing I would like to be involved in is some scandal, I have a personal interest. This company is now so successful they don’t have to look for troubles.’
And so, for now, business is booming. ‘The whole world comes to Mossad, then they come to us,’ says one Black Cube operative, confident that its mastery of subterfuge can’t be replicated elsewhere. ‘A company like this could only exist in Israel.’ He’s probably right.
