Weinstein Was Playing The Intel Game A Lot

It makes sense:

Harvey Weinstein’s original contract with an Israeli intelligence firm, published exclusively here, reveals that the disgraced movie executive agreed to pay the company as much as $1.3 million to spy on his perceived enemies – including numerous actresses, fashion designer Kenneth Cole and a prominent AIDS charity.

Black Cube was first hired to ‘identify the entities behind the negative campaign against [Weinstein]’ and ‘support [Weinstein’s] efforts to put a stop to it,’ according to the initial contract.

The investigation targeted actresses who accused Weinstein of sexual assault, but it also extended to Weinstein’s supposed friends and allies.

A source familiar with the operation said Black Cube was asked to investigate Weinstein’s long-time friend Kenneth Cole and the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR), a charity where Weinstein was a donor. Cole is amfAR’s chairman.

Black Cube was also asked to look into Thomas Ajamie, a financial fraud attorney who had been hired by amfAR to examine a suspicious financial transaction involving Weinstein.

Another target was Commentary magazine editor John Podhoretz, who had posted a comment on Twitter in 2015 about Weinstein’s rumored assault victims.

Actresses Sophie Dix and Katherine Kendall were also subjects of interest, according to the source.

Ajamie told DailyMail.com that he was not surprised he was on Black Cube’s list and believed he was targeted because he had been hired by the amfAR board to investigate an unusual financial deal Weinstein had with the charity in 2015.

The transaction, which is currently under investigation by the Department of Justice, involved transferring profits from an amfAR auction to a theater project that Weinstein had invested in…

During ‘Operation Parachute,’ Black Cube operatives managed to obtain several meetings with targeted journalists and actresses.

One undercover female operative working for Black Cube met with actress Rose McGowan and her agent in May 2017 in Los Angeles, according to the New Yorker.

DailyMail.com learned the operative is a blonde woman in her 30s from Jaffa, Israel, who previously worked for the Israel Defense Forces.

I don’t know if she always looks like this, but the girl operative’s face is obviously untrustworthy in the photo. Everything over the lower eyelid, especially the upper eyelids, is not smiling, and even cold and calculating, while everything below the lower eyelid is a strangely empty smile. Everything above her eye could be paralyzed when I isolate it in my mind. Here is a counter-example:

What is interesting is my perception of her eyes is an instant feel when I first look at them. Stare at it too long and too intently after that, trying to increase the feel, and that feeling abates, until I go away and come back, and am instantly hit again by the coldness and lack of emotion.

I think the mouth and nasolabial area is good for spotting defects, because most defects are stress and emotional-pain-mediated and stress and emotional pain manifest there. But eyes are a measure of whether the real emotion matches the expected, as most people who fake emotion seem to do it with the mouth and sometimes even the crow’s feet in the corners of the eyes, but not the rest of the minor muscles surrounding the eyes. Indeed, their eyes may even freeze, and acquire a glassy quality, as if to try to hide the natural stress from faking emotions and trying to trick people. Picture lively, smiling eyes that are excited about something vs cold, dead eyes. It would be interesting to know if the masculinized big nose and chin are related to a high-T state that also plays a role in trustworthiness.

There should be a law barring foreigners from posing as a cover identity, just like you can’t walk into a federal building and represent yourself as a delivery man, even if you commit no other crime and do no enter any non-public space. We have enough spooking without foreign intel entities operating freely in this country.

Some part of me wonders if Weinstein beginning to launch aggressive intel ops, with a foreign company, on US news operations, was making him come to be seen as a problem that needed to be dealt with by the machine. Part of the reason is, I cannot imagine Black Cube was launching infiltrations, without at least technical penetrations of their target’s lives, if not in-person observations.

Infiltrations are not a seat-of-the-pants endeavor. Infiltrations require immense effort expended in arranging events. Knowing where your target will be, knowing what their personal preferences are, knowing their interests so you can hold their attention and be who you need to be to appeal to the them and gain a foothold in their lives, and not just be another person they meet and dismiss. What is something your target would want, that you can provide to establish trust. How do you make them happy to see you again. How do you make them want to see you again.

And then you need to get your infiltrator where they need to be in the world, so the infiltration seems like a natural occurrence. It needs to seem as if it was not planned, not unusual, and totally innocent, just like everyone else the target has met – just this person happens to have all the same interests and passions, and a psychology that seems unusually nice and likable by the standards of the target. A professional operation usually wouldn’t just send one operator in cold, and tell them to meet a target they know nothing about without any support, even with the internet today.

In this case, Black Cube identified McGowan’s literary agent as the best secondary contact to use for the introduction, and formed a relationship with her ahead of time. Then they identified a party where both the agent and McGowan would be and arranged to attend, so their operator could be introduced to McGowan by the agent. That began the relationship with some of the trust and social proof McGowan afforded her agent, so any subsequent instance of suspicion by McGowan would probably be dismissed based on how natural their initial meeting seemed, and the fact they only met because the infiltrator knew her agent. What are the chances this person was both, a friend of a friend, and had an invitation to a party nobody knew I was going to be at? The chances are infinitesimal, so they must be legitimate.

Low-level PI stuff targeting gay studio heads who were exploiting teenaged boys, to advance Miramax deals, might be one thing. Putting heavy coverage on the reporters for the New Yorker and NY Times might be an entirely different beast in the eyes of the machine. A part of me wonders if he approached his usual US PI’s, and they knew better and declined the jobs for fear of stepping on toes, which was why he was forced to ask Ehud Barak if there was an Israeli firm he could hire.

Imagine how fast your star would rise in Hollywood though, which is basically scumbag central, if you simply went out and gathered blackmail material. Get photos of Kevin Spacey with his hand down some 14 year old’s pants, and every studio with money in a project he was in would bend over backward to accommodate you. Tape Harvey Weinstein groping some unwilling naïve young waif in a hotel hallway, and Miramax would put you in whatever movie you wanted. In no time, doors which others could never open in a million years using skill and merit would open effortlessly for you. You can see how Weinstein, after a while, would think he could do anything.

I wish they taught you this stuff in school. How many brilliant minds are wasted trying to produce quality and value, only to languish in failure as the Weinsteins of the world fly up the ladder. Give everyone the ability, and you would almost be guaranteed that these institutions would become more moral.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because sometimes nothing is what is seems