Israeli agency told to find incriminating material on Obama diplomats who negotiated deal with Tehran
By Julian Borger
May 07, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.
People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.
The extraordinary revelations come days before Trump’s 12 May deadline to either scrap or continue to abide by the international deal limiting Iran’s nuclear programme.
Jack Straw, who as foreign secretary was involved in earlier efforts to restrict Iranian weapons, said: “These are extraordinary and appalling allegations but which also illustrate a high level of desperation by Trump and [the Israeli prime minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, not so much to discredit the deal but to undermine those around it.”
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One former high-ranking British diplomat with wide experience of negotiating international peace agreements, requesting anonymity, said: “It’s bloody outrageous to do this. The whole point of negotiations is to not play dirty tricks like this.”
Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president. Trump promised Netanyahu that Iran would never have nuclear weapons and suggested that the Iranians thought they could “do what they want” since negotiating the nuclear deal in 2015. A source with details of the “dirty tricks campaign” said: “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it.”
According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.
Investigators were also apparently told to contact prominent Iranian Americans as well as pro-deal journalists – from the New York Times, MSNBC television, the Atlantic, Vox website and Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper among others – who had frequent contact with Rhodes and Kahl in an attempt to establish whether they had violated any protocols by sharing sensitive intelligence. They are believed to have looked at comments made by Rhodes in a 2016 New York Times profile in which he admitted relying on inexperienced reporters to create an “echo chamber” that helped sway public opinion to secure the deal. It is also understood that the smear campaign wanted to establish if Rhodes was among those who backed a request by Susan Rice, Obama’s final national security adviser, to unmask the identities of Trump transition officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.
Although sources have confirmed that contact and an initial plan of attack was provided to private investigators by representatives of Trump, it is not clear how much work was actually undertaken, for how long or what became of any material unearthed.
Neither is it known if the black ops constituted only a strand of a wider Trump-Netanyahu collaboration to undermine the deal or if investigators targeted other individuals such as John Kerry, the lead American signatory to the deal. Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them. Rhodes said: “I was not aware, though sadly am not surprised. I would say that digging up dirt on someone for carrying out their professional responsibilities in their positions as White House officials is a chillingly authoritarian thing to do.”
A spokesman for the White House’s national security council offered “no comment” when approached. However, the revelations are not the first time that claims of “dirty tricks” have been aimed at the Trump camp. Special counsel Robert Mueller is leading an investigation into apparent attempts by Trump’s inner-circle to dig up damaging information on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign.
Of particular interest is a meeting involving the US president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, his brother-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort and a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who had promised damaging information about Clinton.
Trump has repeatedly signalled his intention to scrap the Iran deal, denouncing it as “the worst deal ever.” In a January speech the US president accused his predecessor of having “curried favour with the Iranian regime in order to push through the disastrously flawed Iran nuclear deal.”
Last Monday, Netanyahu, accused Iran of continuing to hide and expand its nuclear weapons know-how after the 2015 deal, presenting what he claimed was “new and conclusive proof” of violations.
However, European powers including Britain responded by saying the Israeli prime minister’s claims reinforced the need to keep the deal.
On Thursday the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres urged Trump not to walk away from the deal, warning that there was a real risk of war if the 2015 agreement was not preserved. The following day details emerged of some unusual shadow diplomacy by Kerry, meeting a top-ranking Iranian official in New York to discuss how to preserve the deal.
It was the second time in around two months that Kerry had met foreign minister Javad Zarif to apparently strategise over rescuing a pact they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration. On Sunday Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, will arrive in Washington, hoping to persuade Trump to keep the deal, known as the joint comprehensive plan of action (JCPOA).
Straw, who was foreign secretary between 2001 and 2006, said: “The campaign against the JCPOA has been characterised by abuse and misinformation. It is the best chance of ensuring Iran never develops a nuclear weapons programme, and it is insane to suggest abandoning the deal could do anything but endanger international security.”
This article was originally published by "The Guardian" -
Trump Circles Hired Israeli Spy Company 'Black Cube' To Dig Up Dirt on Iran Deal Negotiators
By Moon Of Alabama
Updated below
Someone tipped off the Observer, the Guardian's Sunday edition, about an attempt of Donald Trump flunkies to find dirt about the people who negotiated the nuclear deal (JCPOA) with Iran. An Israeli spy company was hired to set up traps. One of the victims describes how that happened. The modus operandi seems similar to one described in another dirty story which surfaced about a year ago. The company, not named by the Observer, in question is Black Cube.
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The Observer: Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for ‘dirty ops’ on Iran arms deal
Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a “dirty ops” campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to “get dirt” on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.
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Sources said that officials linked to Trump’s team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president.
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According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.
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Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them.
The last sentence no longer holds. Colin Kahl now remembers that something fishy was going on:
Colin Kahl @ColinKahl - 5:33 UTC - 6 May 2018According to this story, in May of last year, Team Trump asked an Israeli intel firm to dig up dirt on me as part of an effort to discredit the Iran deal. Tonight, as my wife read this story, that date triggered a very creepy memory. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/05/ …
Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK.
This "UK person" said "she" was flying to DC soon and wanted to have coffee with my wife to discuss the possibility of including my daughter's school in their educational fund network.
This was not a generic "Nigerian prince" scam. This person had all sorts of specific information on my wife's volunteer duties at an obscure DC elementary school.
There was a website for the firm (which no longer exists, by the way), but it had no depth to it, and there was no detailed information about the "UK person" who reached out to my wife.
My wife shared the email with me and a few people we know in both the finance and education fields. All agreed that the entire scenario seemed implausible and seemed like an approach by a foreign intelligence entity.
To test the implausibility, my wife kept trying to encourage the "UK person" over email to meet with other school fundraising officers & leadership while "she" was in DC, providing relevant contact info. But the "UK person" kept insisting that "she" had to meet with my wife.
At that point, my wife stopped corresponding. This all happened in late May and early June of last year.
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The way the operation was run against Colin Kahl sounds familiar. I remembered reading about a similar attempt a while ago and, after some searching, dug up this New Yorker story from last November:
In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” according to its literature.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. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan.
In both cases we see a 'private' Israeli spy company, with deep government connections and operating from London, which uses false identities and meets its targets under false pretense. I bet a cup of coffee that Black Cube is the company behind the attempts to spy on the JCPOA negotiators. The company is notorious for such dirty work.
Compare this from Colin Kahl above:
One day, out of the blue, [my wife] received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. This "UK person" said "she" was flying to DC soon and wanted to have coffee with my wife to discuss the possibility of including my daughter's school in their educational fund network.
With this from the Weinstein case as described in the New Yorker:
In May, 2017, McGowan received an e-mail from a literary agency introducing her to a woman who identified herself as Diana Filip, the deputy head of sustainable and responsible investments at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Filip told McGowan that she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace ...
The same pattern is used: A surprise contact from London pretending to have money from some rich fund to disperse for a good cause the targeted person is known to support. The false person is persistently asking for a personal meeting. There are multiple additional details about the spies approach in both cases that look quite similar.
Black Cube claims to deliver "Creative Intelligence". But to use the same method and false story over and over is not creative at all. The company has had some press lately. The Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Whyle alleges that Black Cube was hired to hack the personal data of Nigerian President Buhari prior to his election to get access to his medical records and private emails. Cambridge Analytica also worked for the Trump campaign.
One wonders why the Observer did not name the Israeli spy company. One also wonders why the story is coming up now. Who leaked it? And is it true?
One of the Guardian/Observer authors of the story is Julian Borger who was long notorious for writing manipulating stories about Iran's nuclear program. Borger is pretty much in the anti-Trump camp and his 'official' sources are sometimes shady. His additional frame piece to the story above reveals nothing new. Who gave him the story? The British government which wants to keep the JCPOA alive?
Could someone have made up the whole story, modeled after the Weinstein case, in an attempt to discredit Trump and his planned termination of the JCPOA deal?
Then again - hiring 'former' spies to dig up dirt about people was actually a specialty of the Clinton campaign. It paid the 'former' British spy Christopher Steele to make up the "Dirty Dossier" about Trump.
It would be hypocritical to now condemn the Trump circles for doing similar stuff.
Update (May 7 12:30pm est):
An hour ago the New Yorker author who wrote the original Black Cube/Weinstein piece confirmed that Black Cube was indeed the company which targeted the Obama administration officials Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes. Mr. Kahl points to several news-pieces in mid 2017 in which Trump administration officials blamed him and Mr. Rhodes for the Iran deal. It is unclear though how deep the current White House was involved in hiring the spy company. From the new New Yorker piece:
The Observer reported that aides of President Trump had hired Black Cube to run the operation in order to undermine the Iran deal, allegations that Black Cube denies. “The idea was that people acting for Trump would discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to pull out of it,” a source told the Observer. One of the sources familiar with the effort told me that it was, in fact, part of Black Cube’s work for a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran. (A Trump Administration spokesperson declined to comment to the Observer on the allegations.)
It could of course be both. The Trump administration officials Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon pushed against the Iran deal and went to news outlets complaining about Kahl and Rhodes. The company denies that the White House hired it. While some private company, (uber-Zionist and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson?), may have paid Black Cube these efforts were likely coordinated. Another target was the pro-Iran deal lobbyist Trita Parsi. The Black Cube spies, and the Trump administration flunkies, insinuated that the Obama people pursued the Iran deal in exchange for personal financial gains. I do not believe that to be the case. But it is interesting that the Trump people can not think of other reasons for making such a strategic deal.
This is the kind of scandal the media will love to dig into. We can thus expect to hear much more about the case. Was a crime committed? I do not see such an angle yet but a good prosecutor may make the case.
Unlike the whole anti-Russia/anti-Trump campaign and investigation, which has no merit at all, this one would be on target. It was and is Israel that is the most influential foreign country in Washington DC and within the Trump administration. Any dirt coming up now will help to make that point more visible to the general public.
This article was originally published by "Moon Of Alabama" -
==See Also==
Israeli private intel firm denies being hired to dig up dirt on ex-Obama officials
Giuliani: Trump Supports Regime Change in Tehran; Hints of Withdrawal From Nuclear Deal
Iran warns of regret ‘like never before’ if U.S. leaves nuke deal
Iran says could remain in nuclear deal if its interests guaranteed: TV
Germany, France vow to stick to Iran deal if US pulls out
Iran nuclear deal: Johnson courts Trump on Fox & Friends
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