Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Israeli Private Intelligence Firm Claimed Recruitment of Khashoggi Prior To Murder
Israeli Private Intelligence Firm Claimed Recruitment of Khashoggi Prior To Murder
Shortly after Khashoggi’s murder, the same Wikistrat senior leader who said
Khashoggi had been “recruited” by the rm weeks earlier explicitly denied the
same when pressed by employees.
Wikistrat
Wikistrat was founded in 2009 by Zamel, Daniel Green, and former Israeli
military intelligence of cer Elad Schaffer. Described as “crowd sourced
consultancy”, Wikistrat hires experts who produce reports for clients, often
government agencies and major corporations. Analysts run simulations, war
game scenarios, and risk-monitoring for a wide variety of international
clientele.
Original incorporation documents for Wikistrat in Israel.
Psy Group achieved some level of notoriety for being investigated by Special
Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller was reportedly probing a plan pitched by the
rm which was designed to assist the Trump 2016 presidential campaign with
social media manipulation. The plan would allegedly be bankrolled by Saudi
and UAE leaders. Zamel and both rms, Wikistrat and Psy Group, have also
been the target of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan investigation
into 2016 election interference.
Khashoggi
Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi Arabian author and outspoken dissident of Saudi
government oppression. In 2017, he relocated to the United States due to
increasing fear for his safety. Khashoggi’s concerns proved prescient, as
shortly after his departure bin Salman’s government began implementing a
severe crackdown on opposition speech and organization. After arriving in the
United States, Khashoggi served as a contributor to the Washington Post,
writing articles about his home country and the negative impact of bin
Salman’s politics.
On October 2, 2018, Khashoggi and his ancé headed to the Saudi consulate in
Istanbul, Turkey, to complete divorce paperwork related to his previous
marriage. Khashoggi had attempted to complete the same paperwork inside
the Saudi embassy in Washington but was told he had to travel to Turkey in
order to obtain the documents.
Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate while his ancé waited outside. He was
never seen again. CCTV footage from outside the consulate captured the
moment the journalist was last publicly seen. Numerous reports from media
outlets later con rmed by Western intelligence agencies indicated Khashoggi
was murdered inside the consulate. After a struggle, Khashoggi was disposed
of in morbid fashion: one Saudi assassin listened to music as he dismembered
Khashoggi’s body. His remains have never been found.
In the days and weeks that followed Khashoggi’s murder, friends and
associates of the journalist claimed he had been working on a secret social
media project to push back against Saudi bots and trolls parroting government
messaging and defending the bin Salman. Khashoggi wired his associate, Omar
Abdulaziz, $5,000 for the project dubbed “electronic bees” in the days before
being lured to Turkey.
12 days before his murder, Khashoggi tweeted public support for the bee
project, saying “what do you know about bees? They love their home country and
defend it with truth and rights.”
“He wrote a lot critically before in newspapers but it was only when we started
to organise the opposition [with the Bee movement] that [the regime] got upset,”
Abdulaziz told the Independent in 2018. Saudi agents imprisoned many
members of Abdulaziz’s family, referring to the bee project as the primary
justi cation for their detention.
Prelude
The senior Wikistrat leader directed the employee to nd top Middle East
experts related to organizations like the ME Institute, the Middle East Eye, or
the Middle East Journal. Each has been critical of bin Salman’s regime.
The senior Wikistrat executive is not being named because one employee
feared retribution if information that could lead to their identity became
public.
The employee told Forensic News that he/she was unable to discern the true
purpose of the project. One senior Wikistrat executive, according to internal
messages, referred to the Saudi Arabia project as simply, “KSA Project”. “KSA” is
an oft-used acronym for “Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
The message did not explain the reason the journalists were being sought. The
resumes of the journalists are inconsistent with the professional backgrounds
of Wikistrat’s other analysts, most of whom are academics, former intelligence
of cials, or foreign relations experts. The murky nature of the project and the
lack of any clear answers regarding its existence became extremely
concerning to the employee.
Fallout
After Khashoggi
was murdered,
other Saudi
experts who
signed on to help
Wikistrat with the
con dential
project said they
never heard from
Wikistrat again,
despite lling out
registration forms
in order to work
with the rm.
Cynthia Farahat, a
Middle East
scholar and
author, was one of
the experts
recruited by
Wikistrat:
“In August 2018, a Wikistrat recruiter contacted me and asked me to become one
of their experts and asked for my resume,” she told Forensic News. “He said that
experts, ‘will participate in Wikistrat’s projects involving Saudi Arabian topics
and the MENA region in general.’ That’s all I ever heard about this project. I sent
Wikistrat my resume and I followed all their instructions, but they never gave
me any registration information or contacted me after that.”
Farahat clicked on a link sent by Wikistrat and lled out a registration form as
part of the onboarding process, but never heard from them again.
“It is indeed bizarre since they were the ones who asked me to become one of
their experts,” she said.
“I never got a task or heard from Wikistrat so I just forgot about it,” she said.
The lack of follow-up action by Wikistrat of cials added fuel to the employee’s
suspicions about the true intentions of the Saudi Arabia project.
“Usually, we give people their login information after they’ve registered with us,”
the employee said. “Typically, we invite people to a [simulation], review their
information if they are interested in participating, sometimes we interview
them through Skype, and give them their login information after they’re
approved. I found it strange that they would approve and register these people
but not give them their login information. That isn’t typical.”
Revelation
When asked for comment on this story, an attorney for Joel Zamel, Marc
Mukasey, did not comment but directed Forensic News to another attorney.
That attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Wikistrat PR team told Forensic News via email that their comments were
off the record; however, Forensic News agreed to no such terms. This,
combined with a legal threat from Wikistrat in the event of the publication of
this article, encouraged us to publish the PR team’s statement in full:
As you know the company came under a wave of media scrutiny and
speculation over the past year – raising to the level of ridiculous
conspiracy theories and absurd allegations. You are already responsible
for publishing some of these stories, with an incredibly high proportion of
false claims connecting totally unrelated dots.
Speci cally, the Saudi community existed within the “Middle East Desk”
for years, and was broken down into country-based communities in 2017
as we continue to specialize and broaden our expert communities per
desk.
No, the company does not have – nor has ever had, a working
relationship with KSA. All our analysts are contracted for providing
opinions, forecasting, open-source reports and collaboratively analyzing
complex issues along with other contributors from around the world.
Our legal counsel will be in touch with you directly in the coming days.
We urge you to avoid publishing anything before then.
Origins
Connections to Trump
During his time working with Hannah in 2010, Nader was also hired by Erik
Prince, the CEO of the private mercenary rm Blackwater, to help it “generate
business deals in Iraq.” Prince, who is the brother of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s
Secretary of Education, also tried to set up a secret back channel between the
Trump campaign and a Russian banker in the Seychelles in January, 2017.
Prince later lied to Congress about his contacts with the Trump campaign and
the Russian banker, but has not yet faced formal perjury charges.
Zamel has separate links to other members of Trump’s orbit. Former National
Security Advisor and now-convicted felon, Lt. General Michael Flynn, was
reportedly approached by Zamel through Flynn’s associate, Bijan Kian, with an
invitation for Flynn to join Wikistrat’s advisory council. Kian himself was
recently convicted on charges of conspiring to hide foreign lobbying work and
illegally acting as a foreign agent, based in part on information uncovered by
Robert Mueller. Flynn later pled guilty to lying to a law enforcement of cer
but avoided charges relating to illegal lobbying he may have done on behalf of
the Turkish government.
Recent reporting also suggests that a Trump phone call with bin Salman,
which took place in the immediate wake of Khashoggi’s murder, was covered
up by White House of cials, similarly to the phone call between Trump and
the President of Ukraine at the heart of the ongoing impeachment inquiry.
Multiple reports indicate that the contents of the call were hidden from
of cials who would typically see it. CNN reports this conversation was kept
‘very secret’ and that of cials took the extraordinary step of not even making a
transcript of the call, a decision considered extremely unusual by White
House experts. While there is no evidence the contents of the call were
related to Wikistrat, the unusual secrecy imposed on the call’s contents raises
alarm bells due to the increasingly interconnected web regarding Khashoggi’s
murder.
2016 Election
Farrow and Entous write: “According to a representative for Nader, Zamel told
Nader that he was trying to raise money for a social-media campaign in
support of Trump; he thought that Nader’s Gulf contacts might be interested
in contributing nancially.“
According to the New York Times report, Nader conveyed to Trump Jr. that
both the UAE and Saudi Arabia “were eager to help his father win election as
President.”
Trump, Jr. is said to have welcomed the operation, according to the New York
Times. Nader eventually paid Zamel $2 million sometime after the election, but
before the inauguration of Trump. There are con icting reports regarding the
reasons for the payment.
At the presentations, “Burstien pointed out that Russian operatives had been
caught meddling in the U.S.,” states the New Yorker piece. “Psy-Group, he told
clients, was ‘more careful.'” The Wall Street Journal in 2018 obtained a copy of
the presentation prepared by Psy Group:
It has also been reported that, while Zamel pitched the Trump Campaign
during that August 2016 meeting, Nader separately offered the campaign a
back channel to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, likely via General Asiri.
Cambridge Analytica
Psy Group also signed a contract with Cambridge Analytica, a company
implicated in the 2018 Facebook data scandal which did heavily scrutinized
data analytics work for the Trump campaign.
While the agreement was signed in December 2016, after Trump’s election, it
was allegedly designed in part to steer lucrative government contracts to the
two rms. There’s no indication the partnership resulted in any deliverables.
However, there are indications that the investigation into the relationship
between Cambridge Analytica, Psy Group and Zamel may still be active.
On the day the Mueller report was released, including its twelve redacted
criminal referrals, Christopher Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower
who was interviewed by Mueller and Congress, tweeted simply, “(redacted)”.
Christopher Wylie
@chrisinsilico
(redacted)
366 11:58 AM - Apr 18, 2019
Both [Nader] and Mr. Zamel believed that Hillary Clinton’s anticipated
victory in the 2016 election meant a continuation of the Iran nuclear deal
signed by President Barack Obama — and little appetite in Washington
for a concerted campaign to cripple the Iranian economy. So, they
decided to pitch the plan to Saudi and Emirati of cials, even submitting a
proposal to General Assiri during a meeting in Belgium.
During these series of meetings, all held in Riyadh and Belgium, Nader and
Zamel also pitched a $2 billion plan to General Asiri, and others, to use
intelligence rms to sabotage the Iranian economy and eliminate threats to
bin Salman’s nascent consolidation of power.
Financial Structure
Though Wikistrat purports to be based out of Washington, DC, one former
employee told the Daily Beast that business operations were handled out of
Tel Aviv. Business records analyzed by Forensic News con rm that the same
Tel Aviv address was listed for each of the three main executives at the
company, Zamel, Schaffer, and Green.
Records led by branches of Wikistrat in Virginia, Texas, and New York City,
show all three executives listed an address that corresponds to a nondescript
building used by many other companies as a registered address.
Corporate Structure
Gary Zamel is a serial entrepreneur, who has amassed millions, mainly in the
sector of coal mining.
Recently, Gary Zamel has done business with Ronald Lauder, one of President
Trump’s longest friends, who, while Trump’s mental tness for of ce was
being hotly debated, issued a statement saying, in part, “[t]he President I have
seen is a man of incredible insight and intelligence.”
Trump even tapped Lauder as somewhat of an unof cial liasion in an attempt
to negotiate peace between the Israelis and Palestinians.
Lauder and Nader have a working relationship as well, dating back to the late
1990s, when they worked together to improve Syrian-Israeli relations.
In 2005, Gary Zamel and his wife purchased a mansion on the coast of
Australia for over $20,000,000 from Lachlan Murdoch, who is now Executive
Chairman and CEO of Fox Corporation.
Financial History
Wikistrat saw a large injection of revenue in 2019 that has been deemed
suspicious by at least one employee along with other nancial experts.
“The real question is,” one Wikistrat analyst remarked to Forensic News, “where
did this money come from? Wikistrat nearly collapsed last year, but they’ve since
rebuilt all of their operations. They’ve got a new website, and their activity has
drastically increased since last year.”
“It was never clear to me how much Joel [Zamel] was actually paying out
of pocket to subsidize the company vs. what was brought in,” another
former employee said. “Clients paid decently but not enough to sustain
the company. So Joel was either substantially funding the company or we
were getting money from somewhere else. That naturally leads you to
focus on non-U.S. sources of income.
Methodology
Forensic News was unable to print the original correspondence between the
Wikistrat executive and the employee because the employee feared for
his/her safety. Like many other Wikistrat employees with whom we spoke,
this source noted the company’s connections to Israeli and Saudi intelligence
and was genuinely fearful of retaliation.
In order to stay consistent with our mission at Forensic News, we have been
permitted to show multiple documents that con rm our inside access to
Wikistrat.
Conclusion
Wikistrat also deleted at least one simulation after Joel Zamel was featured in
a series of news articles in 2018. The simulation was sandwiched in between a
series of Russia-focused simulations, but the simulation itself, titled,
“Evolution and Effect of Emerging Technologies”, did not pertain exclusively to
Russia.
One Wikistrat analyst familiar with that particular simulation, said that it
initially seemed benign, but after Zamel’s name was disseminated in major
media reports about Psy Group, the simulation was deleted. “[I]t seemed
strange that they took the sim off the site when they did,” the analyst said.
Another simulation which was rst reported by the Daily Beast, and can now
be con rmed by Forensic News, is entitled, “The Rise of the Cyber Mercenary.”
Published in Reporting
Privacy Policy
Terms of Service