The Maxwells, Mossad and a Digital Panopticon
How Israel Won the Digital Surveillance War
This feature is a follow-up to ‘Our Greatest Ally.’
It is often claimed that the nation of Israel maintains the most sophisticated intelligence apparatus in the world. Of course, only the deepest and most knowledgeable of spooks will be able to confirm whether or not this is true or just another popular misconception.
For my part, as a bumbling millennial philistine, I decided to try to wrap my mind around the claim and to better understand the history and capabilities of Israeli intelligence and its relationship with the United States government.
As per a recent article from The Conversation:
Israel is widely recognized as having highly sophisticated intelligence capabilities, both in terms of its ability to collect information about potential threats within its own country and outside of it.
It makes perfect sense that a nation like Israel—nestled in what is most likely the world's most volatile geopolitical location and surrounded on all sides by hostile nations (Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon)—would require robust military and intelligence.
Most people are familiar with the premier Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad.
"Mossad" (Hebrew for Institute) is an abbreviation for ha-Mossad le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim (Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks). It is the State Agency responsible for external intelligence and covert operations. It has been described as the “the world’s most efficient killing machine.”
In addition to Mossad (external intelligence), the Israeli intelligence community includes “Aman” (military intelligence) and “Shabak” or “Shin Bet” (internal security).
In the past, there existed another agency called “Lekem,” or the Israeli Bureau of Scientific Relations, which mostly delt in acquiring scientific and technical intelligence, particularly for Israel's nuclear program.
Lekem became embroiled in a series of controversies, including the smuggling of over 800 krytron switches (a component used in nuclear weapons) to Israel (via billionaire Hollywood producer and Israeli operative Arnon Milchan) without the required US State Department Munitions Export License.
Lekem was disbanded in 1986 following the famous arrest of Jonathan Pollard, “the most damaging spy” for espionage on behalf of Israel. Pollard was a United States Navy intelligence employee in the Naval Antiterrorist Alert Center in Washington, D.C. He was paid by Israel for the deliverance of large amounts of classified documents to Lekem.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who went so far as attempting to extort Bill Clinton in the 90s for the release of Pollard, finally had success at the close of the Obama era, and Pollard returned to Israel after 35 years in 2020.
The Pollard affair took Washington and Tel Aviv by surprise.
Talking head Wolf Blitzer, then Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, in a book published just several weeks before Pollard’s arrest, wrote that there is no real fear in the US government that American Jews are leaking information to the Mossad.
The most consequential but lesser-known division of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is Unit 8200.
Unit 8200 is ostensibly responsible for signals intelligence and code deciphering, but is used for many other irregular missions. Its importance is evident by the fact that it is the largest unit in the IDF.
Peter Roberts, senior research fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, characterized Unit 8200 as
“probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stand[ing] on a par with the NSA in everything except scale.”(#)
A quick Wikipedia search will tell you that Unit 8200 is comprised primarily of 18-21 year olds who are recruited for their ability to learn and adapt to new technology. What Wikipedia doesn’t tell you is that these young spies are then dispersed, flooding the tech world and often creating firms of their own.
As per a highly informative article in Mint Press News:
“[…]‘alumni’ often go on to create tech companies… that frequently maintain their ties to Israeli intelligence and, according to Israeli media reports and former employees, often “blur the line” between their service to Israel’s defense/intelligence apparatus and their commercial activity.”
The Israeli media outlet Calcalist Tech published an article, which noted that
“since 2012, cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that in some cases were built for this exact purpose… in some cases, managers of development projects in the Israeli military and intelligence arms were encouraged to form their own companies, which then took over the project,’ an Israeli venture capitalist familiar with the matter told Calcalist Tech.”
Some of the companies with ties to Unit 8200 include: Adallom, Argus Cyber Security, AudioCodes, Check Point, CloudEndure, CommScope, Cloudinary, CTERA Networks, CyberArk, Cybereason, Forter, GIDEON, Gilat, Leadspace, NICE, NSO Group, Palo Alto Networks, PrimeSense, Radware, Waze and Wix. This list is only a small fraction of the companies with known ties to Unit 8200.
NSO Group and its “Pegasus” software are particularly relevant to our discussion.
While it may seem like these young intelligence assets are just all joining harmless tech firms, the truth is that many of these companies—and the above list is FAR from exhaustive—have access to vast amounts of data, a lot of them dealing with cybersecurity specifically.
Members of Unit 8200 are not permitted to publicly disclose that they are part of the unit, or their role within it, though these ties are not always completely obscure. Many tech companies with their own intelligence gathering arms scout former members of Unit 8200, who are typically in high demand.
The Maxwell Family Legacy
Some of you might recall a man named Jeffrey Epstein, and his esteemed colleague Ghislaine Maxwell. There is no shortage of conspiracy lore surrounding this dynamic duo, but the most consequential aspects of their partnership often miss the limelight, and whether that’s intentional or indicative of the shoddy state of modern journalism is hard to say.
Epstein is known as a sex-criminal, and he certainly fits that description, but as investigative reporter Whitney Webb put it, he’s:
“not just a sex criminal, that's what they want to paint him as exclusively; he was a financial criminal who dabbled in sex crimes.”
And even “financial criminal” doesn’t quite afford the role of Jeffrey Epstein its proper justice.
Epstein was a key executive in an unnamed-but-clearly-massive organization that's usually vaguely referred to by academics as “transnational organized crime,” which could be seen as an integral part of the amorphous “deep state.”
As Webb lays out in her highly informative work One Nation Under Blackmail, the marriage between organized crime and the intelligence community is one of the most critical yet best kept secrets in the West.
One of the oft omitted aspects of Epstein and Maxwell’s association were their alleged ties to Israeli intelligence.
The going, but as of yet unverified story circulating across the web is that Epstein was likely not the main person of interest when it came to the alleged blackmail operation that he and Ghislaine were allegedly running. It is believed that he was financed by foreign entities to gather blackmail material on elected politicians, dignitaries, royalty, Hollywood influencers, Wall Street personnel, the financial elite and other high profile individuals from various consequential industries.
Their role, ostensibly, was to feed an addiction that tends to afflict those in positions of power whose private behavior is more ruled by their bodies than their minds. The more cunning the target, the less manageable; this is likely why we see incompetence everywhere we look in government today.
The most visible connection to Israeli intelligence would be through Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, the media mogul Ian Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, a Czechoslovakia born jew, was most popularly known as being a publishing mogul, having bought British Printing Corporation, Mirror Group Newspapers and Macmillan Publishers, among other publishing companies. He is said to have lead a “flamboyant lifestyle,” was embroiled in a host of controversies and was alleged to have been working with multiple Intelligence agencies in some capacity.
In 1991, Robert Maxwell’s body was found floating in the Atlantic Ocean, having apparently fallen from his Yacht, Lady Ghislaine.
In an unflattering biography titled ROBERT MAXWELL, ISRAEL'S SUPERSPY: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul authors Martin Dillon and Gordon Thomas suggest that he died at the hands of the spy agency he worked for, Israel’s Mossad. The book is not sympathetic towards Maxwell; he is portrayed as a vain, obese man of many excesses who they believe helped the Mossad in stealing intelligence-gathering software from the U.S. before selling it around the world.
Robert Maxwell’s close ties to Israeli intelligence and links to other intelligence agencies have been documented by respected journalists and investigators including Seymour Hersh and Gordon Thomas, among others.
Though Ghislaine Maxwell has received the most media scrutiny, she is one of seven siblings who survive the late Robert Maxwell.
It would seem that espionage was the true Maxwell family legacy.
Christine and Isabel, Ghislaine’s twin sisters, have received minimal to no attention despite their senior positions at the Israeli intelligence front company Inslaw, which facilitated their father's most heinous act of espionage on behalf of Israel—the sale of the compromised PROMIS software to the U.S. national laboratories that house the core of the country's nuclear weapons system.
After the multimillion-dollar sale of this venture to a competitor, Christine and Isabel became associated with successors to the PROMIS software scandal. Ghislaine herself became involved in these affairs as well, as did Jeffrey Epstein, following his first arrest. They were courting some of the biggest names in the U.S. tech scene, which dovetailed with Epstein’s investments in Israeli intelligence-linked tech firms (Carbyne) and his claims of having troves of blackmail on prominent tech company CEOs during this same period. (#,#)
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the PROMIS software scandal, it was considered one of the most brazen and successful operations ever conducted by Israeli intelligence. In a nutshell, it was the sale of a bugged software to governments, corporations, financial and scientific organizations across the globe. The software enabled information analysis and integration of disparate databases on an unprecedented magnitude, funneling all of that data back to Israel.
The acronym PROMIS stands for Prosecutor’s Information Management System. In 1982, Inslaw leased its revolutionary software to the U.S. Justice Department, then headed by arch neocon Edwin Meese III. The software also eventually caught the eye of the legendary spook master Rafi Eitan (IDF, Mossad, Lekem, advisor to MI6).
Eitan was then serving as the head of the aforementioned Israeli Bureau of Scientific Relations, Lekem. He was first introduced to the software from Earl Brian. Brian had previously worked for the CIA in covert operations, but in 1982 was in the process of building a business empire in which then-AG Ed Meese’s wife was a major investor.
It’s a small world after all.
Brian and Eitan came up with the idea of installing a “trapdoor” or “backdoor” into the software. The plan would entail the sale of the software across the globe, providing Israel and allied elements of the U.S. security state with a digital peephole into the affairs of their enemies and allies, will also raking in tremendous profits in the process.
It is worth mentioning that, hypothetically, this software could help those with access to circumvent authorities investigating financial crimes.
The plan did not, at first, go off without a hitch. The story is well documented elsewhere, but suffice to say that the Eitan, Brian, Meese collaboration did not go well, and lead to Inslaw’s bankruptcy. Displeased with Brian and Meese, Eitan approached the man he believed could most effectively promote the software: Robert Maxwell.
Maxwell is widely believed to have been recruited in the 60s, the agencies in question include the Mossad, MI6 and even the KGB. (#,#) His standing with Israeli intelligence would strengthen considerably beginning in the early 1980s, when he purchased a web of Israeli companies, many of which were official “service providers” for the Mossad.
One of these companies, a computer company called Degem Systems, had been used for years to hide Mossad killers who kidnapped and killed people in Africa and Latin America. They marketed PROMIS through Degem and the litany of Maxwell-owned companies based in Israel and abroad.
Unlike Eitan’s first venture, Maxwell’s involvement was so successful that Israeli intelligence soon had access to the innermost workings of countless governments, corporations, banks and intelligence services around the world. They sold it to military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, where it was used to facilitate the mass murder of dissidents.
PROMIS saw everything; the level of tracking and surveillance it facilitated had never been seen before. Israel now had a ceaseless flow of classified information pouring in, but there was specific information it was looking for.
Eitan tasked Maxwell with selling PROMIS to US labs in the Los Alamos complex, including the famed Sandia National Laboratory, which was and is at the core of the US nuclear weapons system, and is also alleged to contain “a base within a base” where classified technology of the highest order is housed.
This was all occurring in 1984, concurrent with Rafi Eitan’s most notable controversy, the handling of Johnathon Pollard, an American who was divulging U.S. nuclear secrets to Israel.
This is only one small part of a much larger story. The story did not end when Maxwell died at sea, as it was carried on by his children.
Following Robert Maxwell's demise, which numerous biographers attribute to an assassination carried out by Israeli intelligence, his children initiated efforts to reestablish their father's empire. Five of his seven offspring assumed distinct responsibilities within their father's extensive portfolio.
His enigmatic web of interconnected foundations, trusts, and corporations with a global presence was largely acquired by Kevin and Ian Maxwell, along with the repercussions that accompanied Robert’s death and tremendous debt.
After establishing herself in New York at her father's urging to support his endeavors to extend his empire and activities into Manhattan, Ghislaine and Jeffrey Epstein seemingly initiated a sexual extortion operation on behalf of Israeli intelligence.
Christine and Isabel, however, would be the true inheritors of their fathers work by cashing in on a new revolutionary technology, the Internet.
The next arc in the story is even more intriguing, but the amount of information required to get the full picture demands more space than a single SubStack can provide.
Maybe I’m just crazy, but it seems as though the small nation of Israel exerts tremendous power over the United States government.
Given the extensive surveillance network outlined above and the fact that Mossad doesn’t seem to shy away from blackmail and even violence, it makes one wonder whether or not Israeli intelligence has leverage over many of those in power.
Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.
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It's a great day when I learn something new. Today is a great day! Thanks for the insight and education. Awesome stack.
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