Who Ordered Black Cube’s Dirty Tricks?
Trita Parsi, NYRB, May 9 2018
Last summer, I received an email from someone who said that he was a journalist, from an outlet I hadn’t heard of before, and that he wanted to ask a few questions about the Iran nuclear deal. I had no reason to be suspicious. I receive dozens of media requests a week, and this one was no different. At the time, my book on the subject, Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy, had just appeared. I had no idea that the man in question was working for Black Cube, a private Israeli intelligence firm now best known for its expertise in intimidating and silencing women who had been sexually abused by Harvey Weinstein, as Ronan Farrow has reported in the New Yorker. But this time, Black Cube, which offers its clients the skills of operatives “highly experienced and trained in Israel’s elite military and governmental intelligence units,” was reportedly working not for Weinstein, but for a group of presidential aides or allies. The operation, as Julian Borger of the Observer, which first broke the story said, was “commissioned by people close to Donald Trump,” and its aim was to find or fabricate incriminating information about former Obama admin boxtops, as well as people and organizations that had a part in securing the Iran nuclear deal. Farrow’s reporting has established that White House foreign policy advisers Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl were targets of Black Cube’s subterfuge. At the time, I didn’t know any of this. I thought that I was giving an interview about the intricacies of the nuclear negotiations. After some initial small talk, we soon started discussing the deal. The interviewer sounded young over the phone, probably no more than twenty-five or twenty-six. He didn’t come across as having a particularly strong grasp of the subject, but he spoke with confidence.
I took the opportunity to steer the conversation toward one of the conventional wisdoms I challenge in my book: the idea that the pressure from sanctions forced Iran to finally show flexibility on the nuclear issue, paving the way for a deal. In the course of my research, I had interviewed almost all of the officials from the Iranian and Pindo sides involved in the secret negotiations. What I learned about those talks was that it was primarily Pindostan’s willingness to accept uranium enrichment on Iranian soil that made Iranian flexible, not the pressure from sanctions. Tehran refused to give up its enrichment technology, so this meant accepting Iran’s bottom line. Then, suddenly, the conversation took an unexpected turn. Instead of asking questions, the Black Cube operative started making assertions and pushing me to give statements affirming them. The real reason Obama had agreed to the nuclear deal, he insisted, was because of the financial interests of certain members of his White House staff. In an attempt to shift the conversation to more factual grounds, I said:
There are desirable side-effects, and even though it isn’t central, a positive side-effect of the deal is that it reduces Pindostan’s dependency on gthe Toads and enables Faschingstein to get tough with Riyadh’s support for Jihad.
He shot back:
So you know there might be other interest then, other than national and security interests.
I had been in close contact with the administration throughout the negotiations as an informal adviser, and I had not seen a shred of evidence that financial and economic interests figured at all in their calculations on Iran. I responded in frustration:
But these are not central objectives, and they certainly are not financial!
My many conversations with Obama officials during this period made it clear that the president saw the Iran nuclear negotiations strictly as an arms control issue, and did not encourage lobbying by private businesses so that congress critturs would not doubt that non-proliferation was the central motive for the deal. The administration actively avoided involving the private sector in the effort to secure a nuclear deal, even though admin boxtops knew that their lobbying power could prove decisive in saving the deal from congressional rejection. But my interviewer would not back down. He kept returning to the idea that secret financial interests had driven the negotiations, and tried to goad me into agreeing with him. Once he realized that I would not meet his conspiracy theory half-way, he abruptly cut the interview short. I didn’t think much of it. I was annoyed but neither surprised nor alarmed. Conspiracy theories about the deal have been common enough. Netanyahu argued that it would pave Iran’s path to a bomb, an absurd claim. And Trump himself loves to repeat the lie that Iran got $150b from Pindostan for agreeing to the deal. The notion that the Obama administration had any financial interest in the nuclear deal was a preposterous conspiracy theory, but not obviously more so than those promoted by the Israeli prime minister and the current Pindo president. I had completely forgotten about the encounter until this past weekend. Then, the New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow contacted me and to my amazement read back portions of my conversation with the fake journalist. Farrow had obtained a copy of Black Cube’s transcript from his sources. What I had thought was a misguided, conspiracy-minded reporter had been one of the firm’s operatives, Farrow explained.
After the initial shock, it started to make sense. Several weeks after the 2016 election, I had received a chilling message from a person in the Pindo intelligence community, via an intermediary. The team around Donald Trump, my contact warned, was going to try to discredit me and my organization, the NIAC, and some of our allies. We had been staunch supporters of the nuclear deal, and we were now considered obstructions that needed to be removed in order to kill it. As a first step, the intermediary advised me, I need to get a much more secure phone, which I did. Now, it appeared, evidence of this targeting had emerged. But this experience was not without precedent; it was the latest phase in a longstanding campaign by pro-war, neocons like Daniel Pipes, Kenneth Timmerman and Michael Rubin to intimidate, defame and silence me and my organization. They favored a military confrontation between Pindostan and Iran, and a prominent Pindo-Iranian group in Faschingstein that pushed back against war and favored a diplomatic solution to the Pindo-Iran standoff, was an obstacle. Despite their efforts, for more than a year Trump was thwarted in delivering on his campaign promise to cancel the nuclear deal by the advice he received from his then-secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and his then-national security adviser, Lt-Gen H R McMaster, both of whom reminded him that Iran was not in violation of the agreement. And it appears that the Black Cube fishing expedition failed to provide any justification for breaking the agreement. But having replaced Tillerson and McMaster with two noted Iran hawks, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, Trump finally made his move this week to cancel the deal. On Tuesday, he gave a speech at the White House that seemed intended to prepare the American public for a far greater confrontation with Iran. The speech was no doubt written with extensive input from Bolton, who has long promoted the idea of using military action against Iran to achieve regime change. It seems clear that whoever hired Black Cube also favored Pindostan’s withdrawal from the Iran deal. But we need to know more: if a foreign private intelligence agency was hired to help change a vital aspect of US foreign policy, with global consequences, it is a matter of urgent public interest to discover who ordered the operation and who paid for it, who else was targeted, and whether any foreign power had a part in it. Congress has a responsibility to investigate not only who commissioned Black Cube, but also whether the operation was tied to the White House. If the Trump administration was involved in a Nixonian campaign to justify its disastrous policy-making, we deserve to know.
Maybe Israel is interfering in our politics over the Iran Deal? Naaah!
Phil Weiss, Donald Johnson, Mondoweiss, May 8 2018
Netanyahu with supposed Iranian drone wreckage, Feb 18 2018
Let’s see how hard it is to connect the dots. For the last three years, Benjamin Netanyahu has been doing everything he can to sink the Iran deal, from speaking in Congress against the deal in 2015 with the support of Demagogs who were defying Obama on his signature foreign policy achievement, to sending his Defense Minister over to try to sink the deal, to cartoon presentations at the UN, and a video lecture in English last week saying, Iran Lies. Netanyahu’s interference was so obtuse that Obama once said that Israel was the only country that was against the deal and it would be an “abrogation of my constitutional duty” if he didn’t push the Iran deal. Then it came out over the weekend that a “creepy” Israeli intelligence outfit that did spying for Harvey Weinstein reportedly tried to dig up personal dirt on two Obama officials who had spearheaded the deal (Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl), in order to discredit the deal. The firm was reportedly hired by a business client that has “commercial interests related to sanctions on Iran,” reports the New Yorker. Now the press is full of speculation that Trump allies hired the firm in an effort to undermine the deal; though Black Cube denies as much. “[I]f Trump’s team had any role at all in using foreign spies against American citizens, it should end his presidency,” Michelle Goldberg writes at the NYT. But what about possible Israeli meddling? Is it possible that the Israeli government had anything to do with this effort? As the New Yorker notes, Black Cube is very close to the Israeli government.
Black Cube is known for its close ties to current and former power players in Israeli politics and intelligence. The late Meir Dagan, a former Mossad director, once served as the company’s president. Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, has publicly acknowledged that he introduced Weinstein to Black Cube’s leadership.
One of the targets of the spying, Colin Kahl, points in a tweet to a possible Israel angle as motivation for the undertaking: Kahl and Rhodes were allegedly hurting Israeli security.
About a month after the Israeli firm was allegedly hired, anonymous White House officials reached out to the Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing tabloid, to smear Ben & me with baseless & false accusations. Notice the Israel angle to this piece. [link to Free Beacon article]
No one is going to connect the dots here. No one will point out that Trump’s biggest financial backer, Sheldon Adelson, wanted Obama to nuke Iran. Or that Trump’s former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, had to resign after it came out that he had lied about his contact with the Russians in order to help Israel. Flynn got in touch with the Russians during the transition in Dec 2016, in a failed attempt to help Israel defeat the UNSCR condemning settlements that Obama was about to abstain on. So Trump and the Israelis were colluding and interfering. But the press preferred to talk about Russian collusion. If only: the Russians are all for the Iran Deal. The press likes the Black Cube story as further evidence of Trump’s corruption. Trump officials were “obsessed” with Colin Kahl and Ben Rhodes, Michelle Goldberg reports. Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker also plays up the Trump-dirty-politics angle:
The Observer [which broke the story] 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.
You’d think the press might turn attention on Israel. It has been interfering in our foreign policy on the Iran Deal for a long time. And it has lots of friends in the U.S. who are only too happy to push Netanyahu’s agenda, beginning with some of Trump’s biggest donors. But no one connects the dots. Israel’s interference is not a story. Update: In response to this story we were contacted by Black Cube asking us to run the following comment:
From : Info Black Cube <Info@blackcube.com>
Date : Thu, 10 May 2018 07:35:17 -0700
Subject : Urgent – ResponseDear sirs, you have just published an article regarding our firm. Please add our full comment ASAP! It causes us damage and it’s defamation without our full denial. Our comment: “It is Black Cube’s policy to never discuss its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any speculation made with regard to the company’s work. Referencing Black Cube has become an international sport during 2018. Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration, to Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear deal. Anyone who claims otherwise is misleading their readers and viewers. Luckily, the Mossad and the CIA are capable to deal with the Iran Nuclear deal and other issues of national security without relying on the expertise of Black Cube. It is important to note that Black Cube always operates in full compliance of the law in every jurisdiction in which it conducts its work, following legal advice from the world’s leading law firms.” Thank you, Black Cube
We reached out to Black Cube to try to confirm that this statement was actually sent by the intelligence firm, but have received no response. However, similar statements have been published by other media outlets which would seem to indicate that it was.
