The long catalogue of intelligence failures that allowed Hamas to stage its brutal surprise attack on October 7 begins at The Venetian, Shel
Key Jewish donors in the United States were secretly approached with a proposal by Psy-Group, an Israeli psychological warfare firm with close connections to Mossad. Code-named “Project Butterfly,” the proposal outlined a clandestine operation within the “theater of action,” as the company referred to the United States. Its purpose was to damage specific Americans and US organizations associated with the [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions] movement. It would develop ways to disrupt their activities, lead them to be falsely investigated by the authorities, and run a hidden media influence campaign against them.
According to its secret internal operations plan, Project Butterfly was aimed at “executing intelligence and influence efforts” against Americans by creating an “infrastructure for narrative warfare— alternative messaging and negative platforms.” In other words, by creating fake news outlets, phony Facebook personas and posts, and other forms of information warfare, Psy Group’s goal was to deliberately deceive the American public about Israel and its actions against the Palestinians...
The importance of the operation and its closeness to Netanyahu can be seen in Project Butterfly’s top officials. Among them was Netanyahu’s former deputy director of Mossad and director general of the Ministry of Intelligence and Strategic Affairs, Ram Ben-Barak, who was the project’s strategic adviser. Comparing the effort against the American boycotters to “a war,” he said, “you don’t kill them but you do have to deal with them in other ways.”
Those “other ways” were outlined in the Project Butterfly operational plan: “The Butterfly initiative uses PSY’s proprietary intelligence-gathering and influence techniques to destabilize and disrupt anti-Israel movements from within,” it said, referring to the United States. In addition to spying on innocent Americans, the group created fake news outlets in an Orwellian effort to brand the nonviolent boycotters and their supporters as “terrorists.” According to Psy-Group’s Project Butterfly operations plan, the covert Israeli organization “achieved high-impact results against targeted individuals” while making sure its own activities are “not connected to Israel.”
The actions included efforts to destroy the reputations of students and faculty, subjecting people to unwarranted investigations, and charges of “persecution,” that is, endless phony accusations of “anti-Semitism,” as well as false and slanderous accounts provided to national cable and broadcast news organizations...
In charge of Netanyahu’s secret war in the United States was Gilad Erdan, then head of the highly secret Ministry of Strategic Affairs and now Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. His deputy was Sima Vaknin-Gil, a reserve brigadier general. In a talk to a group of Israeli-Americans in Washington, Vaknin-Gil outlined another high-tech spying tool Israel was secretly using to target Americans within the US. In her talk, she said that Israel was waging its covert war so that the “narrative in the world won’t be that Israel equals apartheid.” Thus, the ministry needed to quickly silence the growing boycott movement and its messengers, before what happened in apartheid South Africa happened to apartheid Israel.
To those ends, General Vaknin-Gil issued a stark warning. “In order to win,” she said, “we must use tricks and craftiness.” They would include threats, intimidation, harassment, covert influence operations, troll farms, fearmongering, blacklists, and espionage. The key was turning thousands of Americans into clandestine Israeli agents to spy on and carry out the operations against their fellow citizens. Secrecy, emphasized Vaknin-Gil, was therefore critical. “We are a different government working on a foreign soil, and we have to be very, very cautious,” she said.
Then she outlined plans to set up a sophisticated covert intelligence unit to spy on Americans involved in the boycott movement and take action against them. According to Vaknin-Gil: “Ambiguity is part of our guidelines, that’s why I’m not going to say anything too much about each one of the legs. The first one is intel, intelligence, or data, or information. What we’ve done is mapped and analyzed the whole [boycott] phenomena globally. Not just the United States, not just campuses, but…labor unions and churches. We started to establish a project called Israel Cyber Shield. This is actually a civil intelligence unit that collects, analyzes, and acts upon the activists in the BDS movement, of its people, organizations, or events. And we give it everything we collect. We are using the most sophisticated data system, intelligence system in the Israeli market.”...
Around the same time, Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs budgeted another $570,000 to create a computer and smartphone application that would turn thousands of Americans into a robotic army of Israeli trolls. Assigned “missions” from troll headquarters near Tel Aviv, they would hide their links to Israel and launch online attacks against their US targets, including critics of Israel, boycott supporters, and human rights activists...
Despite the enormous extent of Israel’s illegal covert operations within the US targeting innocent and unsuspecting Americans, the clandestine agents involved are granted virtual immunity from arrest by pressure on top politicians from wealthy and powerful pro-Israel groups like AIPAC. It is a situation that greatly frustrates many in the FBI. It means bureau personnel are constantly required to close their eyes when it comes to criminal activity by Israel.
According to I.C. Smith, a former top FBI counterintelligence officer, “Dealing with the Israelis was, for those assigned that area, extremely frustrating. The Israelis were supremely confident that they had the clout, especially on the Hill, to basically get [away] with just about anything.” Another former top intelligence official said, “You catch them red-handed, and they shrug and say, ‘Okay now, anything else?’”
At one point, as angry senior US intelligence officials were testifying about Israeli espionage in secret sessions before the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees, that frustration spilled out in public. “US intelligence officials trooped up to Capitol Hill to tell U.S. lawmakers considering visa waivers for Israelis that Jerusalem’s spying here had ‘crossed redlines,’” wrote Newsweek’s Jeff Stein. The extent of the spying was “quite shocking,” one staffer who was there told Stein, adding that he found the testimony “very sobering…alarming…even terrifying.” Others called it “unrivaled” and “unseemly,” and noted that “it has been extensive for years.” And a former staffer who attended a similar classified briefing exclaimed, “No other country close to the United States continues to cross the line on espionage like the Israelis do.”
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