The Israeli Private Intelligence Industry and the 2016 Trump Campaign

30 min readOct 17, 2023

This story describes the interactions between the Trump campaign and the Israeli private intelligence industry. It further explores the links between the Trump campaign and the Israeli right. Lastly, it describes how a failed coup in Montenegro, which occurred less than a month for the 2016 U.S. election, brought together all of these elements with Russian military intelligence.

It is part one of the series, “Convergence of Shadows: Israel, the Gulf States, and Erik Prince in the 2016 Election.”

This article is an excerpt from my book, While We Slept: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and the Corruption of American Democracy, available .

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —On August 3rd, 2016, Donald Trump, Jr. met in Trump Tower with George Nader, an emissary representing the Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Joel Zamel, the head of the Israeli private intelligence firm Psy Group.The meeting had been arranged and was attended by Erik Prince, America’s most infamous private military and intelligence contractor and an ardent supporter of Donald Trump.The content of the meeting consisted of an offer to assist Trump’s candidacy through a sophisticated online and social media influence campaign.The genesis of the meeting began months earlier.

George Birnbaum and the Israeli Right’s Connection to the 2016 Trump Campaign

On March 29th, 2016, the conservative political consultant George Birnbaum met with Trump campaign Deputy Chairman and longtime Paul Manafort employee Rick Gates at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Washington, DC.

Gates and Birnbaum were .Sager, a former CNN producer turned press relations expert, had assisted Manafort and Gates in disseminating negative press about the client Viktor Yanukovych’s chief domestic .Yanukovych had served as the kleptocratic and pro-Kremlin President of Ukraine prior to being deposed in the Maidan Revolution.

Read my article on Manafort’s efforts before joining the Trump campaign to launder Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s reputation here.

Sager also listed the government of Azerbaijan among his clients, and according to the OCCRP received over $2.6 million dollars from a shell company that sat at the heart of a $2.5 billion money laundering operation .

Nor was Sager the only link connecting Birnbaum to Manafort and Gates’ work in Ukraine.

2016 Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort (left) and Deputy Chairman Rick Gates (left)

Birnbaum works for Mercury Public Affairs, the same political strategy and consulting firm enlisted by Manafort .Birnbaum lists the former Chancellor of Austria . Gusenbauer was a key figure in the Hapsburg Group, a collection for former EU leaders organized by Manafort .Years after the Yanukovych government fell in Ukraine, Birbaum pitched his political consulting services to Yulia Tymoshenko, proposing to burnish her image in the US media, exactly the opposite of .Gates and Birnbaum’s meeting took place during a time in which the Trump campaign was worried the Never Trump Republicans might try to steal the nomination from him through a delegate revolt at the convention. Gates brought up “the challenge of the delegates,” with Birnbaum, and asked if there was “any Israel[i] technology that could help us with some of these goals?”Gates wanted help with identifying which delegates were pro-Trump, which were anti-Trump and which hadn’t made up their minds yet.Regarding the latter category, Gates wanted to know whether they could potentially use social media to influence their decision and get them to support Trump.Gates was also interested in using publicly available information to gather opposition research on Clinton and “up to ten of her closest circle.”Birnbaum had deep connections to Israel.In 1996, he worked beneath the Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein in support of the right-wing Likud Party challenger Benjamin Netanyahu’s successful run to become the Israeli Prime Minister.Birnbaum later served as Netanyahu’s chief of staff.

Political Consultant George Birnbaum with his client, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s use of American political consultants provided an important lesson to future campaigns around the world.

“It’s not so easy to replicate America to any country, let alone Israel, a multiparty parliamentary system with so many dividing lines,” Birnbaum later told The Jerusalem Post. “But the 1996 race changed the dynamics of elections. No one thought Netanyahu would win, .”

Birnbaum’s close association with Netanyahu makes it unsurprising that he supported Trump. For years, Netanyahu’s relationship with Barack Obama had been deteriorating.

According to Adam Entous of The New Yorker, the Israeli Prime Minister believed that Obama had “.

Obama, having won a majority of American Jewish voters, resented the charge.Unable to reconcile their opposing views regarding the two-state solution, Obama and Netanyahu’s relationship further soured when the latter all but officially endorsed his old friend Mitt Romney, Obama’s 2012 Republican challenger.Despite Netanyahu’s denials, the Obama team was convinced the Israeli leader .

US President Barack Obama with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Relations reached a nadir after Obama signed a nuclear treaty with Iran, which Netanyahu vehemently opposed.Republicans in the U.S. Congress invited Netanyahu to address the chamber, and he .Netanyahu also had ties to the Trump clan.

Benjamin Netanyahu with Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner

He was close friends with Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner. The Kushner’s had for years donated Israeli causes, including to the yeshiva at the Beit El settlement, located in the West Bank.Netanyahu was close enough to the Kushner’s that he often visited their home in New Jersey, sometimes staying over for the night and sleeping in Jared’s bedroom, while the younger Kushner found lodging in the basement.Netanyahu and his party Likud were closely connected to the Republican Party. His campaign manager in 1996, and George Birnbaum’s mentor, was Arthur Finkelstein.The late Finkelstein, who died of lung cancer in 2017, was legendary among political strategists despite the fact that he was notoriously private and camera shy.

Republican political consultant Arthur Finkelstein (left) with his client Benjamin Netanyahu

While at Columbia, he .In the 1970s, Finkelstein was one of the first to understand the implications of a Supreme Court decision that allowed independent political committees to spend money on candidates and causes.He helped develop advanced demographic analyses of primary voters, the use of exit polling, and applying the marketing strategy .Finkelstein worked for numerous Republicans ranging from Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan.In an echo of Roy Cohn, Finkelstein was gay and later married his long term partner, all the while supporting opponents to gay rights.Finkelstein was famous for .In the 1970s, he developed the “Six-Party Theory,” which divided the electorate into ideological and racial groupings and predicted that Republicans could win elections if they peeled off support from Conservative Democrats.As early as 1996, Finkelstein encouraged Republican candidates to go negative and “.”At its core, Finkelstein’s strategy relied on demoralizing his opponents’ supporters to keep them from voting.This strategy was embraced by the Trump campaign, as well as the Russian election interference and social media disinformation campaigns contemporaneously targeting the United States.In a of Finkelstein dating back to a 2011 presentation made in Prague, he presages not only the rise of right wing populism, but also the candidacy of Donald Trump, who at that time was propagating the lie that Barack Obama was born outside of the United States.

Arthur Finkelstein speaking at the CEVRO Institut forum in Prague in 2011

The economic crisis that shook the world after 2008, according to Finkelstein, “appears, at least from my travels around, to be much worse than it feels to most of us. There is real anger.”He continued, “the anger is at the Mexicans. Not even all Hispanics — the Mexicans.”In such an environment, Finkelstein predicted that “from nowhere politicians” could rise to the fore. He suggested that “we’re looking at business people to become leaders.”Finkelstein then brought up Trump. “I don’t know if anybody here is watching Donald Trump in the US, but it’s mind-boggling. .”Finkelstein didn’t just predict the rise of right wing populists, he helped make it happen. He and George Birnbaum had been working on political campaigns across Eastern Europe since 2003.In 2008, after an introduction provided by Netanyahu, Finkelstein and Birnbaum worked to help re-elect Viktor Orbán to power in Hungary.According to Steve Bannon, Orbán’s populist political rhetoric made him “.”Orbán had once been a pro-democracy critic of Russia and Putinism. However, after 2009, the Hungarian leader notably changed his tune and became a right-wing populist and arguably the number one Putin cheerleader within the EU.

Russian President Vladimir Putin with Hungarian President Viktor Orbán

According to the Russian publication The Insider, this may have had something to do with the fact that the powerful and Russian intelligence connected Eurasian crime lord Semyon Mogilevich, who for years used the Hungarian capital Budapest as the base of his operations, reportedly possessed kompromat in the form of a video of Orbán accepting a suitcase full of cash as a bribe .

Read my description of Semyon Mogilevich, his connections to Russian intelligence, and his sophisticated financial crimes, here.

After Orbán’s initial victory, Finkelstein landed on a key insight that he would use to devastating effect in Orbán’s future campaigns: he needed to invent an enemy for Orbán to run against that personified the collective fears of the electorate.According to George Birnbaum, , the man Finkelstein settled on to fill this role was the Hungarian-born Jewish financier, Holocaust-survivor and liberal philantropist George Soros, founder of the Open Societies Foundation.

Billionaire financier and philantropist George Soros.

Soros’ financial support of liberal causes had already made him a despised figure on the American right, just as his support of civil society and liberal democracy initiatives in Eastern Europe also made him an enemy of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin.By the time the Trump campaign got into gear, Finkelstein had not only laid the intellectual foundations for the electoral strategy it pursued, but sat at the nexus of many key figures backing Trump’s improbable run.Finkelstein had reportedly done work for the Trump Organization, though what exactly and when is not clear.Finkelstein got the job working for Netanyahu after being recommended by Ronald Lauder, a close personal friend .Roger Stone, Trump’s oldest political advisor, and Tony Fabrizio, the Trump campaign pollster brought on by Paul Manafort whose data was shared with alleged Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik, were both part of a group of Republic consultants known as “Arthur’s kids,” meaning they had learned the tricks of the trade .

Peter Geoghegan of openDemocracy wrote that Finkelstein, who had done campaign work himself in Ukraine, had introduced Manafort to a number of “.”

Court documents later accused Paul Manafort of coordinating with a “senior Israeli official” in 2012 to spread a story accusing Yulia Tymoshenko of semitism during the course of his work supporting Viktor Yanukovych.The day after this news broke, both and speculated that the official in question was the Soviet-born, Israeli official Avigdor Lieberman.

Read my description of the suspicious connections between Lieberman and Russia, as well as Eurasian organized crime, here.

According to The Times of Israel, Finkelstein, while being assisted by George Birnbaum, “masterminded” the October 2012 alliance .

Psy Group, iVote Israel, and Ronald Lauder

A day after Birnbaum met with Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates, he reached out to Eitan Charnoff, a project manager at an Israeli private intelligence firm called Psy Group.Birnbaum was connected to Charnoff by Kory Bardash, the head of the group Republicans in Israel.In addition to his role at Psy Group, Charnoff was also the director of iVote Israel, an ostensibly nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaign .Founded in 2012 during the lead up to the Obama-Romney race, iVote Israel was initially run by Elie Pieprz, a former member of the Republican Jewish Coalition who later immigrated to Israel and joined the group Republicans Abroad Israel.iVote Israel’s first campaign strategist, Aron Shaviv, .

In 2016, Shaviv worked as a consultant for the Democratic Front, a pro-Russian political opposition party in Montenegro that was later involved in .Montenegrin prosecutors at one point believed that Shaviv was one of the conspirators in the planned .The failed coup involved Russian military intelligence, the GRU, and was funded by Oleg Deripaska, who .We shall return to the events in Montenegro, but first a bit more about iVote israel and its reputed patrons.Despite being a 501(c)4 so-called “dark money” nonprofit, which is not required to list its donors, iVote Israel has been linked to the American billionaire heir Ronald Lauder.According to the Sunlight Foundation, the nonprofit behind iVote Israel shares the .Lauder, a staunch supporter of Netanyahu, has been personally connected to Donald Trump for decades, .Lauder’s mother, the cosmetics magnate Estée Lauder, socialized and was friends with .

In The Art of the Deal, Trump claimed that he first met the Soviet Ambassador to the United States, Yuri Dubinin, at a luncheon held by Ronald’s brother, Leonard Lauder.

As Trump tells it, the surreptitious meeting led to a series of events that culminated in Trump’s first visit to Moscow.Ronald Lauder later became a major donor to the 2016 Trump campaign and .Lauder became politically involved during the Reagan years and in 1986 was made the US Ambassador to Austria.Three years later, he unsuccessfully ran to be the Mayor of New York City against Rudy Giuliani. Lauder’s campaign was managed by Arthur Finkelstein and the later .In addition to funding Netanyahu’s first run for Israeli Prime Minister in 1996, Ronald Lauder introduced him to Finkelstein, who subsequently joined his campaign and .In the late 1990s, Lauder also negotiated with Syria on behalf of Israel and during this time of shuttle diplomacy between Jerusalem and Damascus was accompanied by George Nader, the convicted pedophile representing the interests of the UAE and Saudi Arabia who would later accompany Erik and Prince and Joel Zamel in their meeting with Donald Trump Jr.Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Lauder used connections he gained as an Ambassador in Vienna to pursue business opportunities in Eastern Europe, some of which brought him into contact with individuals with ties to Eurasian organized crime.In 1995, he established Central European Media Enterprises (CME), which purchased dozens of commercial television stations across Eastern Europe.That same year, in the course of attempting to purchase a television station in Ukraine, Lauder met with an advisor to Ukraine’s famously corrupt President Leonid Kuchma named Oleksandr Volkov, who was later .

Read my description of Kuchma, Volkov, and the seizure of post-independent Ukraine by Kremlin-backed Eurasian organized crime here.

Oleksandr Volkov, a close aide of Kuchma’s, was a , owned by the Russian Boris Birshtein.

Alleged organized criminal and Russian intelligence asset Boris Birshstein

Birshtein has been linked to organized crime by the FBI and according to a former KGB officer , and the book by Karen Dawisha, , Birshtein was one of the businessmen cultivated by the KGB to launder Communist Party funds out of Russia and to develop international business interests.

Read my article about the KBG’s efforts to launder Communist Party money out of the Soviet Union, and Birshtein’s involvement in the process, here.

Birshtein’s (now former) son-in-law, Alexander Shnaider, invested in the .

Alexander Shnaider, Boris Birshtein’s former son-in-law shaking hands with Donald Trump at an event for the opening of Trump Tower Toronto

Read my article about Shnaider’s involvement in Trump Tower Toronto and corruption in other Trump Org real estate developments here.

On Volkov’s suggestion, Lauder’s CME purchased a stake in Studio 1 + 1, then co-owned by the .According to the FBI, Boris Fuchsmann, was a gold smuggler and embezzler with links to organized crime.Vadim Rabinovich is a Ukrainian ex-convict and alleged organized crime boss who worked as the Ukrainian representative of Nordex, a commodities firm established by Grigori Luchansky (AKA Loutchansky) that is allegedly associated with .

In 1994 Rabinovich attended a meeting in Tel Aviv with Semyon Mogilevich, Solntsevskaya criminal syndicate head Sergei Mikhailov and other major Eurasian organized crime figures including Viktor Averin, Boris Birshtein and Arnold Tamm, .

Read my article where I describe this meeting, and place it in the wider context of Eurasian organized crime in Israel and around the world, here.

CME was later investigated for offering up to $1 million in bribes to Ukrainian officials, though no charges ever appear to have been filed.Though Rabinovich sold his stake in the television station, he remained closely connected to its investors.In 2007, the Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi purchased 3% of the company. Kolomoyskyi, who has been accused by the Department of Justice of involvement in a , co-founded the .When later attempting to explain how they could have gone into business with Rabinovich, CME executives claimed to have been impressed by a picture he had on his wall showing him with then-President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore .The man who brought Rabinovich to the event, Bennet S. LeBow traveled to Moscow with Donald Trump in 1996 to investigate potentially investing in a Trump Tower Moscow.

Donald Trump and Bennett LeBow in Moscow in 1996

Read my description of Trump and LeBow’s 1996 visit to Moscow here.

Nor was the Rabinovich-LeBow axis the only link Lauder has had with corrupt figures from the former Soviet Union who have had interactions with Trump.In his capacity as the President of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), Lauder has had multiple interactions with Alexander Mashkevich, the Israeli-Kazakh billionaire who served as the President of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress until 2011, .

Mashkevich once worked for the suspected KGB money laundering outfit Seabeco, underneath the alleged KGB-linked organized criminal Boris Birshstein, whose former son-in-law .Mashkevich himself was .

Read my in-depth article on the Trump Tower Soho project, including the involvement of Felix Sater and reportedly Alexander Mashkevich, here.

Returning to iVote Israel, when it’s former campaign strategist Aron Shaviv worked on behalf of the pro-Kremlin Democratic Front (DF) opposition party in Montenegro, a number of disparate threads relating to the Russian interference in the 2016 US election and figures within the Trump campaign appear to have come together.

While certain details of the October 2016 alleged coup attempt remain controversial, international investigators from Bellingcat have confirmed that the GRU officers Eduard Shishmakov and Vladimir Popov (aka Vladimir Nikolaevich Moiseev) .

The plot was , who had major business interests in the country.

Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska with Vladimir Putin

Another Russian oligarch involved was Konstantin Malofeev, who also played a key role in the Kremlin’s efforts to influence events in Ukraine, particularly in .Paul Manafort, who had worked on behalf of Oleg Deripaska’s interests in Montenegro as far back as 2005, was also in contact with figures in the DF in the Fall of 2016, immediately after he had .

Read my article about Manafort and Deripaska’s involvement in Montenegro in 2005 here.

According to the US Treasury Department, Victor Boyarkin, the former GRU officer who later worked on behalf of Deripaska and chased down Manafort over his debts to the oligarch during the 2016 election, was also .In addition to accusing Aron Shaviv of assisting the ultimately failed coup, on October 16th Montenegrin authorities arrested the alleged conspirators prior to the plot being enacted, prosecutors also allege that an ex-CIA officer named Joseph Assad was tasked with .

Psy Group and the Trump Campaign

As mentioned, after speaking with Trump campaign deputy chairman Rick Gates, George Birnbaum was connected to Eitan Charnoff, who was a project manager at the Israeli private intelligence firm Psy Group, as well as the director of iVote Israel, by Kory Bardash, the head of the group Republicans in Israel.

“I have spoken to both of you about the other,” Kory Bardash wrote to Birnbaum and Charnoff. “Hopefully you can .”In connecting with Psy Group via Charnoff, Birnbaum was reaching out to the world of Israeli private intelligence firms. In his later testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Birnbaum indicated that he well knew who he was getting involved with.“These guys came out of the military intelligence army unit, and it’s like coming out with a triple Ph.D. from MIT,” Birnbaum testified.“The amount of knowledge these guys have in terms of cybersecurity, cyber-intelligence… they come out of a unit in which their minds in terms of understanding cybersecurity-the algorithms that they can create — it’s just so beyond what you could get [with] a normal education that it’s just unique … there are hundreds and hundreds of Israeli start-up companies that the founders are guys .”The Israeli private intelligence industry emerged in the 2000s. Organizations such as Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force’s Unit 8200, an elite signals intelligence unit, had been tracking and conducting influence operations on terrorists and perceived enemies of Israel for years.From this firmament emerged multiple successful technology startups, as well as a number of private intelligence firms.The first of these, Terrogence, was established in 2004 by Gadi Aviran, the former .Four years later in 2008, Israeli’s Shalev Hulio and Omrie Lavie established NSO Group, which gained infamy for providing the Saudi government with software that allowed it to track dissidents including Jamal Khashoggi, who was .2011 saw the founding of Black Cube by ex-Israeli intelligence officers Dan Zorella and Avi Yanus, known for its aggressive clandestine operations .Black Cube, which features two former heads of Mossad on its board, provided services to the .The interweaving nature of these organizations, with Israeli state backed intelligence organizations sitting at the nexus of them all, raises the question of just how independent these groups are from the Israeli government and intelligence establishment.Operating under the motto “Shape Reality,” Psy Group was founded in Israel on December 22nd, 2014. The private intelligence firm specialized in the collection and analysis of information, particularly online and on social media, and offered services related to online reputation management as well as sophisticated, targeted influence campaigns.Psy Group was founded by Joel Zamel, an Israeli born in Australia in 1986. Zamel’s co-founders included Daniel Green and Elad Schaffer. Psy Group’s CEO, Royi Burstein, was a lieutenant colonel in Israeli military intelligence.According to the Psy Group’s promotional literature, the company specialized capabilities include Financial intelligence, Cyber intelligence, Targeting & Monitoring, Online reputation management, Offline/Online campaigns and “Honey Traps.”After detailed descriptions of these capabilities, the company described itself as being “managed by an elite group of high-ranking officers from one of the .”Psy Group was not Zamel’s first foray into the world of private intelligence.In 2010, he co-founded a “crowdsourced” geostrategic consulting firm called Wikistrat. Despite being based in Washington, DC, Wikistrat is essentially Israeli. Elad Schaffer, who later founded Psy Group alongside Zamel, served as Wikistrat’s COO.

Screen shot of an old Wikistrat bio of Joel Zamel

The majority of Wikistrat’s clients were foreign governments, yet it was extraordinarily well-connected to senior officials .Members of its board included former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden, former national security advisor James L. Jones, former deputy director of the National Security Council Elliott Abrams and the former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) David Shedd.Shedd .In 2015, Wikistrat ran simulations exploring what would happen if a foreign government attempted to interfere in the American political process and compiled a report on the subject.

The report discussed the possibility, which later became a reality, that Russian trolls might target the United States.

“At the time we were discussing the subject of cyber-interference in democratic processes, it seemed and felt like just another idle intellectual exercise and scenario planning project for political scientists,” a Wikistrat analyst who worked on the report told The Daily Beast.

“But retrospectively, it feels .”Wikistrat’s 2015 report contained prescient analysis at a time when the Internet Research Agency (IRA) was already targeting the US.The report refers to the “Internet Research Group,” almost certainly a reference to the IRA.“[T]hese ‘cyber-trolls’ are trained controversialists: they openly engage in public controversy…People are drawn to the excitement of controversy and these cyber-trolls are experts in sensationalizing a political issue. The objective of cyber-trolls is not to convince explicitly, but rather subconsciously, by inserting a seed of doubt that leads to confusion and encourages fact-skepticism.“They are not afraid to use provocative and confrontational language, as it is to their advantage if it leads to an emotional rise in the reader because the reader is then more likely to engage in debate, which in-turn, creates more buzz and attracts a greater audience, increasing the potential number of people exposed to this misinformation campaign.”

Psy Group’s Opaque Corporate Structure, and its Links to Russia and Walter Soriano

According to Zamel, Psy Group was composed of a Cyprus-registered parent company, IOCO Ltd., and a subsidiary company based in Israel called Invop Ltd.Zamel described himself as the majority shareholder for IOCO Ltd, which was responsible for business development, contracting and marketing. Invop was .Zamel gave no explanation as to why the company was structured this way, nor did he explain several other oddities, most of which seemed to point to a remarkable number of connections to Russia.IOCO ltd was managed by a Cyprus-based holding company administered by two Cypriot directors named Ria Chistofides and Giannakis Ermogenous, who also served as the official affiliates of the Russian state-owned Vozrozhdenie Bank and Promsvyazbank and the privately held Avtovazbank.Through an analysis of incorporation documents, author and investigative reporter Scott Stedman found that Christofides and Ermogenous “have the power to decide over the activities and conduct of the company. They are involved in all of the decisions concerning the company and have to fulfill certain duties .”From its inception in 2014 until July of 2016, IOCO Ltd was owned by a rotating cast of shell companies. Two of these companies were registered in the British Virgin Islands, Prime Nominees Ltd and Sea Holdings Ltd.Both of these companies were under the control of a Swiss lawyer named Judith Hamburger. Hamburger worked for two UK-based companies which from 2010–2016 listed their ultimate beneficiary as the Russian national Alina Zolotova, wife of the Russian banker Georgy Bedzhamov, who fled to Monaco in December of 2015 after being accused of embezzling $3.4 billion from Vneshprombank.

Alina Zolotova and Georgy Bedzhamov (source )

In July of 2016, ownership over IOCO Ltd was transferred to a British Virgin Islands-based shell company called Protexer Ltd.Protexer’s subsidiaries contain multiple links to Russia.Protexer-owned MGMT Financial Services Limited is controlled by a multi-billion dollar Russian consortium called the Metropole Group.Based out of Moscow, Metropole Group is controlled by a Russian billionaire and former member of the state Duma for Vladimir Putin’s party United Russia named Mikhail Slipenchuk.

Protexer Ltd itself is a subsidiary of the Cyprus-based Trident Trust, which provides corporate, trust and fund services. Protexer is just one of sixteen subsidiaries owned by Trident.Of those, five were owned by Slipenchuk, three feature Directors that are affiliated with numerous Russian banks and one used the same Cyprus-.According to documents seen by , the anonymously owned Protexer is associated with Gazprombank and Gazprom Media, the largest media holding company in Russia and a subsidiary of Gazprom.The connection is through yet another sister company to Psy Group, the Protexer-owned Benton Solutions Ltm.Registered in Cyprus, Benton’s shareholder was listed as Ecofran Marketing, Consulting and Communication Services Company Limited, itself a subsidiary of Gazprom Media, which is owned by Gazprombank.Russian corporate documents show that Ecofran provided millions of dollars in loans to a .Psy Group’s clients also reveal multiple links to Russia.In or around 2015, Psy Group was hired by Oleg Deripaska to conduct an intelligence operation codenamed “Project Starbuck” that involved a business dispute Deripaska was having with a large Austrian company possibly involving real estate.Deripaska enlisted Psy Group to dig up derogatory information on the Austrian company, though Psy Group CEO Royi Burstein, who may have met with Deripsaska in Switzerland to discuss the project.

Burstein told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Psy Group was unable to dig up any negative information on the company. The publicly available details of Psy Group’s work for Deripaska remain scant.Another Russian oligarch that hired Psy Group was Dmitry Rybolovlev. As previously covered, Rybolovlev purchased a Florida mansion from Donald Trump in 2008 for $95 million, approximately $50 million more than Trump had .

Read my article about Rybolovlev’s purchase of the Trump property here.

Rybolovlev engaged Psy Group to perform an intelligence project involving a dispute the billionaire Russian oligarch was having with the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier. Psy Group was paid $150,000 to collect derogatory information on Bouvier.Oleg Deripaska was put in touch with Psy Group by a mysterious British-Israeli citizen named Walter Tvzi Soriano, who had worked in the past for Deripaska and was also .

Former Israeli intelligence officer Walter Tvzi Soriano ()

Soriano is an Argentinian-born, former Israeli intelligence officer who operates a .While very little information appears about him online, due to his scrupulous attempts to avoid being photographed or attract attention to himself, Soriano enjoys elite connections to both the Israeli government and powerful Russian oligarchs.Soriano is a close friend and associate of Benjamin Netanyahu’s. He produced a documentary about the Prime Minister’s brother, who died while leading .After losing to Ehud Barak in 1999, Netanyahu briefly left politics and entered the private sector with Soriano, where they invested in a number of US based technology ventures.In 2002, Soriano arranged for Netanyahu to deliver lectures at a Mexico City-based charity, the Lev Malka Organization, for which he was paid $180,000. Soriano had described his and Netanyahu’s relationship as being based on “.”In an explosive allegation that both Soriano and Netanyahu deny, Israeli press has reported that the Israeli police believed that Netanyahu hired Soriano to surveil police officers who were .Prior to establishing USG Group, in 2002 Soriano founded the similarly named Universe Security Group, an international security based out of London he owned with Israeli’s Guy Nagar and Yitzhak Molcho.Molcho served in a longtime capacity as Benjamin Netanyahu’s private attorney, and is a close , Netanyahu’s cousin and attorney who later became caught up in one of several corruption cases swirling around the Prime Minister which included .The company’s board of directors included Nahum Admoni, the director-general of Mossad from 1982–1989, Uri Sager, the former head of Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate and Albert Raes, Director of the Belgian State Security Service from 1977–1990.United Security Group appears to have done contracting work with the CIA through its connection with Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, at one point the third highest ranking member of the CIA.The company was liquidated in 2009 after one of its clients, Graff Diamonds in London, .Soriano subsequently established USG Security.Soriano’s relationships with Russian oligarchs are extensive.According to the journalist Raviv Drucker, who Soriano unsuccessfully sued for defamation, Oleg Deripaska hired Soriano while he was involved in a legal dispute with Mikhail Chernoy in British court.

Read my description of Mikhail Chernoy, his connections to the Izmaylovskaya criminal syndicate, and his business relationship with Oleg Deripaska, here.

It has been publicly alleged (and disputed) that in 2014, USG Security was hired by a Deripaska-linked company to provide security at Sochi Airport during the 2014 Winter Olympics.

[NOTE: The original source for the above claim was an article written by the reporter Scott Stedman. Stedman was sued for defamation by Soriano in the United Kingdom. Fifteen press freedom organizations the suit as a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) law suit. As part of a settlement with Soriano, the article was taken down. It is the opinion of the author, who cannot independently establish the validity of the Sochi/Deripaska claim, that Soriano utilizes expensive and time consuming litigation for the purposes of intimidation.]

According to , Soriano was also involved in Oleg Deripaska’s attempts to silence Nastya Rybka while she was imprisoned in Thailand.

Belorussian escort Nastya Rybka riding on a yacht with Oleg Deripaska.

Read my description of Deripaska’s involvement the Nastya Rybka affair here.

In addition to working for Oleg Deripaska and Dmitry Rybolovlev, Psy Group has also done work for an as yet unknown client attempting to discredit Ukrainian anti-corruption activists, which would have been in the interests of the Kremlin and/or it’s supporting oligarchs in Ukraine.In the Summer of 2017, Psy Group was allegedly behind a disinformation campaign targeting the Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC) run by a .AntAC was a key proponent of establishing the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), a law enforcement body .Kaleniuk is also an , the Ukrainian lawmaker and investigative journalist who helped publicize the “Black Ledger” of illicit payments made by the Yanukovych regime that led to Paul Manafort’s .

Ukrainian anti-corruption activists Daria Kaleniuk (second from the left) and Serhii Leschchenko (center)

Read my description of the story behind the “Black Ledger” and Paul Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign here.

Project Rome: Psy Group Devises a Plan for the Trump Campaign

Following his meeting with Rick Gates, George Birnbaum contacted Psy Group project manager Eitan Charnoff.On March 30th, Charnoff emailed his Psy Group colleagues Royi Burstein and Arnon Epstein, among others, to alert them to the new opportunity to work for an American presidential campaign.Charnoff said that he and Epstein had been in touch with “a major American campaign consultant who [had] been tasked by the [T]rump campaign.”He further explained that “[t]hey want us to [use] social platform analytical tools as well as our Rublik department capabilities to identify who is truly with [T]rump and who isn’t and then run an influence campaign to impact their decision using avatars and creating third party assets and outreach.”Charnoff ended by saying “[b]y the end of today they want a rough estimate of what it will cost,” as well a timeline and more exact cost estimate within three days.Charnoff divided the potential work for the Trump campaign into two distinct projects. The first involved gathering opposition research on “the female opposing candidate,” meaning Hillary Clinton, by means of “dig[ing] up dirt as well as active [information] gathering on associates.”The second project would consist of looking into state delegates who would be voting at the Republican National Convention to determine which delegates were “pro [T]rump, against and unknown.”The delegates who fit into the latter two categories would then be targeted by a social media influence campaign specially designed to get them “to support [T]rump and not change the convention rules.”On April 1st, Arnon Epstein sent an email with the subject line “Project D-Day” in which he suggested that Psy Group had been authorized to “move to the planning phase of the activity,” following “several conversations last night with George [Birnbaum]”Epstein included a screenshot of Birnbaum’s communications suggesting that the Trump Campaign was not “intimidated” by the budget numbers being discussed and was anxious to receive proposals from Psy Group within days. Epstein also elaborated on the oppo research against Clinton.“As for the intel on the lady and her team, he’s talking about up to 10 people in her inner-inner circle,” Epstein wrote.“We told him an estimate of 10 people and her would be around $250Kf or passive work + very light active. We explained we suggest not to go heavy active at the moment because of the issues we discussed. We spun it a bit and said we are not concerned for us, but wish to prevent any blow back or flags raising pointing to him at this point.”In another email sent April 1st, Birnbaum offered guidance to Charnoff and Epstein on how to draft the proposal for the Trump team, suggested that they “run intensive influence campaigns on the unknown delegates themselves and on the influencers of the delegates,” and “[f]or the Clinton Proposal… run an intensive, deep open source opposition research campaign on Hillary and her 10 closest associates (names to be supplied by [the] campaign). Depending on information found, apply a second layer of info gathering to make sure no stone was left unturned. Anything else you might want to add as well.”“Project D-Day” initially envisioned up to 53 Psy Group employees being involved in the effort, divided into four teams: Team Black, Team Rubik, Team Blue and Team Red. Four days later, on April 5th, Epstein reached out to Birnbaum with an updated plan, now being referred to as “Project Rome.”According to the renamed proposal, Psy Group would conduct “influence services” on behalf of the Trump campaign targeting Republican convention delegates.The proposal also called for conducting “opposition intelligence research” on the Clinton camp.The cost estimate for the “influence services” targeting the Republican delegates was $3.1 million, plus $100k for media expenses, while the opposition research was priced at $400k.In addition to these proposals, Epstein’s email to Birnbaum included a “sample report” on an actual California Republican delegate named Felicia Michelle Tweedy.Psy Group’s “sample report” included biographical data related to Tweedy including her place of residence, employment status, marital status, political and religious beliefs and personal interests.According to the report, while Tweedy was “a strong supporter of Donald Trump, and therefore no active influence is required at this point,” it recommended “infrequent monitoring (monthly) to check whether any changes in opinions or sentiments towards Trump.”It was explained that the information contained in the sample report had been gathered through “available OSINT (Open Source Intelligence),” and promised that “[i]n the event that additional information is required, Psy Group can carry out various active intelligence activities to extract additional information .”According to documents , Psy Group promised that “veteran intelligence officers” would look through social media accounts and other publicly available information to produce similar dossiers on the psychology of every persuadable Republican delegate.It further promised upwards of 40 Psy Group employees would then target up to 2,500 individuals with tailored messages to sway them towards Trump.The messages would also target Trump’s chief rival for the Republican nomination, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.Targeted messages appearing to come from former Cruz supporters or influential people within the Republican Party would highlight Cruz’s “ulterior motives or hidden plans.”The influence campaign would consist of both “online and offline approaches,” and even potentially involve telephone calls. Psy Group further promised that it could gather “unique intel” through both “covert sources” and “tailored avatars.”George Birnbaum informed Rick Gates that he had received proposals from Psy Group. Gates then told Birnbaum to send the proposals to an individual named Scott Wilkerson. Though Birnbaum wasn’t familiar with Wilkerson, he sent the information to him anyway.Conversations regarding the project continued with Psy Group.In a May 8th email chain under the subject “campaign work,” Psy Group employees discussed developing “psyop campaigns” against Trump’s “opposition,” which would consist of “[h]undreds of avatars driving negative messaging,” and “.”Despite these discussions, the initial communications between Psy Group and the Trump campaign do not appear to have led to the two moving forward with “Project Rome.”Birnbaum later claimed to have never heard back from Gates or the Trump campaign and subsequently canceled his meetings with Psy Group.Joel Zamel and Psy Group, however, continued their efforts to offer their services to the Trump campaign.In May of 2016, Zamel emailed the former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who had only just endorsed Trump for President that month, suggesting that he could offer the Trump campaign powerful tools that could utilize social media to help it in the election. Zamel suggested that they meet to discuss the issue.Gingrich forwarded Zamel’s email to Jared Kushner, who ran the idea by Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital director. Parscale reportedly .Despite this seeming failure, Zamel would ultimately secure a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. in Trump Tower. The story of how he achieved such a coup will be the subject the next article in this series.