Harvey Weinstein Was Playing The Intel Game

Not at all surprising – I would bet it is how he rose to such prominence in the first place:

In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world’s largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies…

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women’s-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan. The same operative, using a different false identity and implying that she had an allegation against Weinstein, met twice with a journalist to find out which women were talking to the press…

The explicit goal of the investigations, laid out in one contract with Black Cube, signed in July, was to stop the publication of the abuse allegations against Weinstein that eventually emerged in the New York Times and The New Yorker. Over the course of a year, Weinstein had the agencies “target,” or collect information on, dozens of individuals, and compile psychological profiles that sometimes focussed on their personal or sexual histories…

In May, 2017, McGowan received an e-mail from a literary agency introducing her to a woman who identified herself as Diana Filip, the deputy head of sustainable and responsible investments at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Filip told McGowan that she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace, and asked McGowan, a vocal women’s-rights advocate, to speak at a gala kickoff event later that year. Filip offered McGowan a fee of sixty thousand dollars. “I understand that we have a lot in common,” Filip wrote to McGowan before their first meeting, in May, at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. Filip had a U.K. cell-phone number, and she spoke with what McGowan took to be a German accent. Over the following months, the two women met at least three more times at hotel bars in Los Angeles and New York and other locations. “I took her to the Venice boardwalk and we had ice cream while we strolled,” McGowan told me, adding that Filip was “very kind.” The two talked at length about issues relating to women’s empowerment. Filip also repeatedly told McGowan that she wanted to make a significant investment in McGowan’s production company.

Filip was persistent. In one e-mail, she suggested meeting in Los Angeles and then, when McGowan said she would be in New York, Filip said she could meet there just as easily. She also began pressing McGowan for information. In a conversation in July, McGowan revealed to Filip that she had spoken to me as part of my reporting on Weinstein. A week later, I received an e-mail from Filip asking for a meeting and suggesting that I join her campaign to end professional discrimination against women. “I am very impressed with your work as a male advocate for gender equality, and believe that you would make an invaluable addition to our activities,” she wrote, using her wealth-management firm’s e-mail address. Unsure of who she was, I did not respond.

Filip continued to meet with McGowan. In one meeting in September, Filip was joined by another Black Cube operative, who used the name Paul and claimed to be a colleague at Reuben Capital Partners. The goal, according to two sources with knowledge of the effort, was to pass McGowan to another operative to extract more information. On October 10th, the day The New Yorker published my story about Weinstein, Filip reached out to McGowan in an e-mail. “Hi Love,” she wrote. “How are you feeling? . . . Just wanted to tell you how brave I think you are.” She signed off with an “xx.” Filip e-mailed McGowan as recently as October 23rd.

In fact, “Diana Filip” was an alias for a former officer in the Israeli Defense Forces who originally hailed from Eastern Europe and was working for Black Cube, according to three individuals with knowledge of the situation. When I sent McGowan photos of the Black Cube agent, she recognized her instantly. “Oh my God,” she wrote back. “Reuben Capital. Diana Filip. No fucking way…”

Last fall, Weinstein began mentioning Black Cube by name in conversations with his associates and attorneys… Two sources familiar with the agency defended its decision to work for Weinstein, saying that they originally believed that the assignment focused on his business rivals.

We’re just two burned spies who’re here to help your operation! Tell us everything about it, and we’ll make it work so much better.

Click over and read the whole thing. I have no idea of his politics, but Ronan Farrow is one sharp operator for such a young guy. He never even bit.

Though I find it hard to believe he broke through Anna’s cover and uncovered Weinstein’s operator’s real identity, at his age, all by himself, unless he was backed by big bucks somewhere. Also strange is Weinstein’s lawyer Boies talking about all this openly. That feels like bigger players are involved, and feeding Ronan intel and offering him some sort of operational support along the way. Perhaps Harvey’s brother, or someone even higher up in the machine was behind the scenes playing an even bigger game on Harvey, as Harvey occupied himself playing the women he assaulted, clueless that he himself was a target. That Ronan not only hit Weinstein once, but now follows on with a second hit on Weinstein’s intel ops, seems an unusually well planned kill shot.

In the hall of mirrors the predator can easily end up being the prey.

Still think the alt-right can just cruise to victory in supporting Trump’s online publicity and meme-ology, and never suffer any detriment, when this could be moved against it on a moment’s notice? It’ll have the fucking Mossad getting up it’s ass – literally. Or at least former Mossad, using professional Eastern-European operatives no less. And even then, agencies like the Mossad itself might not be far behind one day.

Think about this. Harvey was moving ex-Mossad on this scale, to protect a net worth probably consisting of scores of millions. The Democratic National Committee and all of it’s corporate and banking supporters are fighting to protect control over a revenue stream of trillions of dollars in US government funds dispersed each year, as well as probably trillions of other dollars companies get from manipulating laws to protect monopolies in various industries and control opportunities, domestically and overseas – to say nothing of how many of these leftist pricks would be thrown in prison if the reality of their corruption was ever honestly brought to light. And on the other side, a GOP elite which is just as corrupt. Think they will all just endure the meme-ologists of reddit and the new online right stoically?

And notice the amygdala-techniques. A $60,000 speaking fee and funding for a production house to shut off amygdala and threat recognition, while establishing trust. “I mean what hostile intel operation would give me a $60,000 speaking fee?” Handing the target off to other operators to carry the operation on, using social proof and pre-established trust to shut amygdala off. I’ll bet all along the way, they used delicious food, distracting environments, and pleasurable stimuli in the environments where they met to further shut off amygdalae as they sought to deceive. To say nothing of how deeply I will bet McGowan’s world was intruded upon in other ways. I’ll bet they knew everything going on with her every moment of every day.

However this highlights something more important.

Notice what a defective Harvey was. Notice how many detriments he suffered, as a businessman, as a moral and decent person, and as an intelligent, logical human being. And yet he went from sticking flyers for no-name bands playing in skeevy bars under windshield wipers, to a top movie producer in Hollywood, catapulting ahead of probably hundreds, if not thousands of superior movie-makers.

Most people would think that to be a successful producer you’d need to produce great movies. But those who win will think, I need to be able to blackmail everyone in power, so they will have to do what I say:

For years, Weinstein had used private security agencies to investigate reporters. In the early aughts, as the journalist David Carr, who died in 2015, worked on a report on Weinstein for New York, Weinstein assigned Kroll to dig up unflattering information about him, according to a source close to the matter. Carr’s widow, Jill Rooney Carr, told me that her husband believed that he was being surveilled, though he didn’t know by whom. “He thought he was being followed,” she recalled.

Doubtless he was not alone. As in so many places in our society, making great movies has nothing to do with being successful at making movies. The social success is the game, not the process of being good.

In times of r, there is no meritocracy, because the measure of success is not success/survival, it is dopamine and feeling high. If you are a K who wants to be successful at something, and you focus on doing it well, in r-selection you will be beaten ten times over by the people who focus on their social networks, their intel-superiority, and their narcissistic self-promotion, all to the exclusion of their actual skill and product.

It appears Harvey was a case study in that. Learn the rules, because we are beginning to see these rules being employed ever more aggressively as the Apocalypse closes in.

Until the streets are filled with the bodies of the starving and K-selection returns, these are the rules.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because knowing the rules is everything