by Ronan Farrow
They promised to send documents from within the operation that would dispel any claims that Black Cube had followed accusers or reporters. “I will send you the documents today,” the lower voice said. “We’ll use a onetime email or one of our servers, we’ll see.”
Thirty minutes after we hung up, a message arrived from the encrypted email service ProtonMail, with documents attached. Another message followed a few hours later, from a different email service, Zmail, with more documents. Smart to disperse them across multiple accounts, I thought. “Hello mutual friend,” read the first email. “Attached you’ll find new information concerning the HW&BC affair. Best, cryptoadmin.”
The ProtonMail account it came from bore the name “Sleeper1973.”
CHAPTER 47:
RUNNING
Attached to that email was a complete record of Black Cube’s work for Weinstein. There was the first contract, signed October 28, 2016, and several others that followed, including a July 11, 2017, revision after the squabble over invoices. That last arrangement promised services through November:
The primary objectives of the project are:
a) Provide intelligence which will help the Client’s efforts to completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading NY newspaper (hereinafter “the Article”);
b) Obtain additional content of a book which currently being written and includes harmful negative information on and about the Client (hereinafter “the Book”).
Black Cube promised “a dedicated team of expert intelligence officers that will operate in the USA and any other necessary country,” including a project manager, intelligence analysts, linguists, and “Avatar Operators” specifically hired to create fake identities on social media, as well as “operations experts with extensive experience in social engineering.” The agency agreed to hire “an investigative journalist, as per the Client request,” who would be required to conduct ten interviews a month for four months and be paid $40,000. The agency would “promptly report to the Client the results of such interviews by the Journalist.”
Black Cube also promised to provide “a full time agent by the name of ‘Anna’ (hereinafter ‘the Agent’), who will be based in New York and Los Angeles as per the Client’s instructions and who will be available full time to assist the Client and his attorneys for the next four months.”
The invoices attached were eye-popping: fees that might have totaled up to $1.3 million. The contracts were signed by Dr. Avi Yanus, the Black Cube director, and by Boies Schiller. This was an astonishment. Boies’s law firm represented the New York Times. But here was the esteemed lawyer’s signature, in genteel blue-inked cursive, on a contract to kill the paper’s reporting and obtain McGowan’s book.
Black Cube stressed that its tactics were vetted by attorneys around the world and that it kept to the letter of the law. But I was soon hearing from sources in the private intelligence world that the agency had a reputation for flouting rules. In 2016, two Black Cube operatives were jailed in Romania for intimidating a prosecutor and hacking her emails. They were later convicted, receiving suspended sentences. “Privacy laws, data laws,” one person directly involved with Black Cube’s operations told me. “It’s impossible to do what they do without breaking the law.” The head of a competing Israeli private intelligence firm who’d had dealings with Black Cube told me, “More than fifty percent of what they do is illegal.” I asked him what to do if I suspected I was being followed, and he said, “Just start running.”
As our conversations with the Israelis grew tense, I spent a few nights at my borrowed desks at The New Yorker rather than move around on the streets after dark.
Within hours of the contracts coming in, I was on the phone with David Boies, the beginning of what would sprawl into days of conversation. At first, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go on the record. He said he was busy with his pro bono work, including negotiating to get a young American out of jail in Venezuela. And he was concerned that he might be misinterpreted. “As the bad guy says in one of the Mission Impossible films, it’s complicated,” he wrote in one email. I puzzled over the choice of quotes. It was from a scene in the third film in that series. Billy Crudup, thus far made out to be a good guy, sits down in front of a bloodied Tom Cruise, tied to a chair in the way heroes have to be at this point in the third act, and gives a similarly obligatory speech about how he was working for the bad guy. “It’s complicated,” says Crudup. He’s concerned about being found out. “Did anyone else see it?” he asks of evidence tying him to the villain, chewing scenery like he’s read the script and knows it’s his last scene.
Boies eventually went on the record. “We should not have been contracting with and paying investigators that we did not select and direct,” he told me. “At the time, it seemed a reasonable accommodation for a client, but it was not thought through, and that was my mistake. It was a mistake at the time.” Boies conceded that efforts to profile and undermine reporters were problematic. “In general, I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to pressure reporters,” he said. “If that did happen here, it would not have been appropriate.” And he edged toward something like personal regret. “In retrospect, I knew enough in 2015 that I believe I should have been on notice of a problem, and done something about it,” he added, referring to the time frame when Nestor’s and Gutierrez’s allegations surfaced. “I don’t know what, if anything, happened after 2015, but to the extent it did, I think I have some responsibility. I also think that if people had taken action earlier it would have been better for Mr. Weinstein.”
It is to Boies’s credit that he unhesitatingly copped to everything, including the agent the contract called Anna and the reporter-for-hire, whom he identified as Freedman, the former Guardian writer. When I sent him the signed contracts with Black Cube, he wrote back simply, “Both are my signatures.” The best characters know when it’s time for a confessional speech.
In Rohde’s office the next morning, we were back on the phone with the two men close to the Black Cube operation. I thanked them for sending the documents. They sounded cheerful, confident that what they’d sent would exonerate them of any claims that they’d relied on intrusive human surveillance on Weinstein’s behalf. “We did not approach any of these women undercover,” the deeper of the two voices said again. “We did not approach any of these journalists undercover.”
When I began asking questions about the contract that alluded to those very tactics, they sounded confused. “We never drafted. I can one hundred percent tell you that we never drafted,” the higher voice chimed in.
Rohde and I exchanged a puzzled glance. “I’m looking at it. It’s on Black Cube’s stationery, it’s signed by Avi,” I said. “ I’m referring to a document you guys sent me.”
“When you say ‘we guys,’ what do you mean by ‘we guys?’” said the deeper voice, cautious, worried.
“This was in the binder of documents that you sent to me yesterday. Not the second dump from Zmail, but the very first one, from the Sleeper email,” I said.
A pin-drop silence.
“We did not send you any burner email yesterday,” the deeper voice replied. “The only thing we sent you yesterday was from Zmail.”
Realization prickled my skin. The men had promised a Black Cube document dump from a discreet account. What was the likelihood that another source would intercede with a conflicting and more devastating leak at the exact same time? But two distinct leaks seemed the only possibility. I’d stumbled into a civil war among spies.
I got off the subject of the source of the documents in a hurry, told them that we’d already authenticated them with Boies and others. “They are genuine,” I said. There was a flash of panic in the deeper voice. “I… I don’t know who sent that, but we will definitely investigate.” Then, collecting himself, he added: “We should do this friendly, I would say.” I wondered what the alternative looked like.
I fired off an email to the mystery address quickly. “Can you g
ive any information that would help authenticate these documents? Some parties involved are denying several pieces of this.” A response, immediately: “I’m not surprised they denied it, but it is all true. they were trying to get Rose’s book, via a girl named ‘Ana’… a HUMINT agent.”
Another set of files was attached: a wide-ranging history of correspondence and ancillary documents underpinning and surrounding the contracts. Over time, these would check out, too.
I leaned back, rubbed a palm over my mouth, thinking.
Who are you, Sleeper?
CHAPTER 48:
GASLIGHT
“We need to find out who he is,” Rohde, and just about everyone else at The New Yorker, pressed. We turned over the question. “Sleeper1973 is possibly a Woody Allen reference,” I wrote, referring to the film of the same name released that year. “Which is certainly cheeky.” Someone with a sense of humor, then.
But Sleeper rebuffed my every plea for identifying information, to get on an encrypted call, to meet in person. “I can understand your editors’ concern although I’m afraid to reveal my identity. Every online method can be monitored these days… its hard for me to trust it wont come back at me,” Sleeper wrote. “I’m sure you know NSO so I’m not interested in taking unnecessary risks.” NSO Group was an Israeli cyber intelligence firm, famed for its Pegasus software, which could take control of a cell phone and strip-mine it for data. It had been used to target dissidents and journalists around the world.
But Sleeper kept sending information from the encrypted email address, and it always checked out. After McGowan told me she’d spent time with only a few trusted contacts in recent months and couldn’t recall anyone who might have been Anna, the undercover operative, I asked Sleeper for leads. Another lightning-quick response: “Regarding Anna, her genuine name is Stella Pen. I’ve attached pictures as well. She allegedly got 125 pages of Rose’s book (as appears on BC’s agreement with Boies), and discussed the findings with HW himself.”
Attached were three photos of a statuesque blonde with a prominent nose and high cheekbones.
I was in a taxi, the West Side Highway slipping by outside. I texted the photos to McGowan and Ben Wallace.
“Oh my God,” McGowan wrote back. “Reuben Capital. Diana Filip. No fucking way.”
Wallace remembered her immediately too. “Yes,” he wrote back. “Who is she?”
Black Cube’s work was designed never to be discovered. But, once in a while, an operative would leave too many prints. In the spring of 2017—as the Trump administration and its supporters worked to dismantle the 2015 Iran nuclear deal—a string of peculiar inquiries reached prominent defenders of the deal. A woman identifying herself as Adriana Gavrilo, of Reuben Capital Partners, emailed Rebecca Kahl, a former program officer at the National Democratic Institute and the wife of Obama administration foreign policy advisor Colin Kahl. Gavrilo told Kahl that she was launching an initiative on education and repeatedly asked to meet to discuss the school that Kahl’s daughter attended. Worried that she was “strangely a target of some sort,” Kahl stopped responding.
A few weeks later, a woman named Eva Novak, of a London-based film company called Shell Productions, emailed Ann Norris, a former State Department official and the wife of Ben Rhodes, another Obama foreign policy advisor. Novak wanted Norris to consult on a movie that she described as “All the President’s Men meets The West Wing,” telling the stories of government officials during times of geopolitical crisis, including “nuclear negotiations with a hostile nation.” Finding Novak’s request “bizarre,” Norris decided not to write back at all.
Later, Freedman would leak again, helping me assemble the documents underlying the operation: Black Cube profiles of the Obama administration officials, ferreting out damaging information, detailing bogus claims that they worked with Iran lobbyists, or were getting kickbacks, and a rumor that one of them had an affair.
There were other examples. During the summer of 2017, a woman who identified herself as Diana Ilic, a London-based consultant to a European software mogul, began calling and meeting with critics of AmTrust Financial Services Inc., pressing them to make statements about their work that could be used against them. Not long after, Maja Lazarov of Caesar & Co., a London-based recruitment agency, began doing the same with employees of West Face Capital, a Canadian asset management firm.
Social media accounts tied to these names, and photos taken during the meetings, showed a familiar face, with high cheekbones framed by long blond hair.
The marks were left with the same question:
Anna, Adriana, Eva, Diana, Maja.
Who are you?
Stella Penn Pechanac was born between two worlds and belonged to none. “I was a Bosnian Muslim, and my husband was a Serbian Orthodox,” her mother later said. “And what was our little Steliza?” In childhood photos, the girl was not yet blond but dark: dark hair, dark eyes. She was raised in the faded sprawl of Sarajevo, amid beat-up cars and dilapidated tower blocks. That was before things got bad.
Pechanac watched it all turn to ash and blood. War began, Serbian Orthodox against Bosnian Muslim. Sarajevo was roadblocked and cordoned according to sect. At best, during the war, there was the grind of poverty and near starvation. When nothing else could be found, her mother made grass soup. Pechanac was smart, but there were few opportunities for education. At worst, it was a childhood like Guernica. Sharpshooters on rooftops made the streets a death trap. For half a year, the family moved into a bare, closet-sized basement room. When the first bombs fell, Pechanac’s parents gathered up what wounded they could, and shared the room and the thin mattress in it. “One woman died on it,” Pechanac would later recall with a shrug. After the bombing, the entryway of their rundown building flooded with blood. “There were water hoses we used to clean with, and they simply washed all the blood out the door. I remember, seven years old.”
About a decade before the Weinstein affair, when Pechanac was in her early twenties, she and her mother had gone back to Sarajevo to appear in a documentary about the war and their family’s flight from it. Her mother wept openly, walking the streets and recalling the bloodshed. Pechanac seemed a reluctant participant. She hovered at the margin of shots, chewing gum or smoking, casting petulant glances at the camera.
Eventually, one of the filmmakers cornered the impassive young woman at the entrance to a crumbling building and asked what it was like to relive such painful memories. Another shrug. “It makes me mad that she had to go through this,” she said, referring to her mother. “But personally, I haven’t felt anything for a long time.”
During World War II, Pechanac’s grandmother had hidden and protected Jews. The State of Israel bestowed upon her the Righteous Among the Nations honorific, a novelty for a Muslim woman. As Sarajevo burned, a Jewish family returned the favor and helped to exfiltrate the Pechanacs. They settled in Jerusalem and converted from their Muslim faith to Judaism. Young Stella Pechanac adapted to a new identity and cultural context. “She doesn’t feel inside patriotic like the people born in Israel,” said one person who knew her well. “Always in one level, she feel like a stranger.”
At eighteen, Pechanac enlisted in the Israeli Air Force. After that, she enrolled at Nissan Nativ acting school. She dreamed of Hollywood. But she found only a few fleeting acting opportunities in plays and music videos. “At all the auditions,” Pechanac later observed, “they all noticed my accent, they all noticed I was different.”
The job at Black Cube presented an ideal compromise. Its operatives were trained in psyops—psychological operations designed to manipulate targets. Like the best actors, they were students of body language, of the gentle tics that expose lying and vulnerability. They knew how to read them in others and how to deploy them convincingly themselves. They wore costumes and used technology straight out of spy thrillers: watch-cameras; recording pens. “She went to work in Black Cube,” said the person who knew her well, “’cause she needs to be a character.”
&
nbsp; As I presented them with the evidence from Sleeper, the men close to the Black Cube operation dropped their denials. They confirmed, like Boies, that Freedman was the journalist in the contract, describing him as an informal adjunct to the team. They described, in detail, Pechanac’s efforts to insinuate herself into McGowan’s life. McGowan had been an easy mark. “She was trusting,” the deeper voice explained. “They became very good friends. I’m sure she’s a bit shocked.” McGowan had told Pechanac that it seemed like everyone in her life was turning out to be secretly connected to Weinstein. She even suspected her lawyers. But, “she, of course, didn’t suspect us.”
When I finally told McGowan what I’d learned, she reeled. “It was like the movie Gaslight,” she told me. “Everyone lied to me all the time.” For the past year, she said, “I’ve lived inside a mirrored fun house.”
CHAPTER 49:
VACUUM
It wasn’t just Black Cube. The calls led to more calls, and soon a dam was fracturing and the shadowy underworld of private intelligence spilling its secrets. There were the conscientious objectors feeding me information about their intelligence agencies. And there were the leaders at those firms, frantically leaking about their competitors in a bid to broaden the focus of my reporting beyond their own activities.
