Peter Jukes on evidence that a former Guardian writer working for the Israeli security company threatened the award-winning Observer journalist.
It was a dark time. Six months earlier, Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr had broken one of the biggest political scandals of our times: the role of Cambridge Analytica in the shock 2016 Brexit referendum result in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US.
Her revelations that the data electioneering company had hacked up to 75 million Facebook users wiped billions off the social media giant’s share value. Numerous criminal investigations were initiated, as were congressional and parliamentary inquiries on both sides of the Atlantic.
But the pressure was still on.
I first got to know Carole a year earlier at the 2017 Byline Festival and, at that point, the threats she was facing were mainly legal. Carole and the Observer were being pursued by Cambridge Analytica’s powerful lawyers, Squire Boggs Patton, who also happened to act for Russian President Vladimir Putin and had hired Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen as a consultant. She joined Byline Festival for a spin-off event in New York that November where she was in talks with the New York Times about a secret Cambridge Analytica whistleblower. She was also due to present a Channel 4 News documentary on the subject.
Soon after, I met the whistleblower, Chris Wylie, in London and everyone was confident that the story would be out by Christmas – so confident that I wrote a fictional BBC radio play that December inspired by what was already in the public domain.
But, as the legal and professional quagmires wore on over that winter, more concerns about security rose.
Wylie appeared to be under surveillance and was sent a photo from an anonymous source of him leaving his lawyer’s office. There were rumours that Cambridge Analytica had employed Black Cube, a shadowy private investigations company staffed by ex-Israeli intelligence officers with headquarters in Tel Aviv and London.
Online, the threats made to Carole were more open and concerted, mostly led by Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU campaign, which had boasted of working with Cambridge Analytica during the EU Referendum. The group posted a doctored version of a sequence from the movie Airplane, with Carole’s face clumsily superimposed on a hysterical woman being slapped and hit, with a queue of people with more lethal weapons lining up to assault her. The accompanying soundtrack was the Russian national anthem. The millionaire who had funded the Leave.EU campaign, Arron Banks, was often reminding Carole that she would be “less lippy in Russia”.
The Russian element was no idle threat.
By June 2018, I had helped Carole reveal that Banks and his team had multiple undisclosed meetings with the Russian Embassy in London during the EU Referendum, discussing lucrative gold and diamond deals and aligning their messaging. Banks said he had reported us to two police forces, falsely alleging that we had hacked his emails. Soon, even the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was involved, now tagging Carole (and Byline) into their tweets. A nuclear state, infamous for its treatment of journalists and targeting of critics in the UK with plutonium and nerve agents, was now focused on one sole investigative journalist.
But then came a threat from closer to home.
The Black Cube Operative
Ever since the Cambridge Analytica story broke in the spring of 2018, Carole had been in conversation with a former Guardian writer who had been introduced to her by another journalist.
The man, who I only knew at that time as “SF3”, had served in the Israeli military and said he had a relative who helped found Black Cube. He claimed that the company had also been “hired by Trump”. Carole was wary and told me that she felt he was prompting her to make anti-Israeli comments. They only met once.
In mid-August 2018, as information emerged that other Israel-based investigations and campaigning firms such Psy Group and Wikistrat worked for the Trump campaign, Carole wondered (in a now-deleted tweet) whether Israeli intelligence had played any part in domestic British politics.
Almost immediately, on 17 August, she received a series of threatening WhatsApp messages from her Black Cube confidante. SF3 said he was “disgusted” to see her “antisemitism” and that he was “no longer with you but very much against you”.
Although Carole agreed that anti-Semitism was horrifying and dangerous and that she didn’t mean to underplay it in any way, the threats mounted. “Gonna gun for you every time you rear your ugly head, you anti-Semitic scum,” the former IDF soldier wrote. “We will out you at every turn,” he continued – without being clear who the “we” was.
“F*ck you and yours,” he concluded, claiming to have secretly recorded their previous phone conversations. “My tapes of our many calls are going to bury you,” he told Carole, signing off with “habibi” (the Arabic for “darling”), accompanied by emoticons of the UAE flag and a unicorn.
Carole forwarded the text messages to me. I could see how alarmed she was. This guy was unpredictable and knew where she lived. After more than a year of online attacks, Carole was in a dark place and this was the last straw. She left social media for a month.
It wasn’t until over a year later, when the American journalist Ronan Farrow published his book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators about the Harvey Weinstein scandal, that it became clear why Carole had every reason to be worried about SF3.
Seth Freedman and Black Cube
Seth Freedman is a Londoner brought up in Golders Green who became a city trader at 18 before joining the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) at the age of 24.
According to the Times of Israel, Freedman spent 15 months in an active service unit stationed on the occupied West Bank and the experience radicalised him. While he didn’t “act immorally” on combat duty, he said he was disillusioned with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
On returning to London in 2006, Freedman became a writer on the Guardian’s Comment is Free (CiF) pages, where he was respected as a former IDF volunteer with liberal sensibilities.
According to Freedman’s own blog, he also began spying for corporate clients while writing for the Guardian and was hired by a shipping tycoon to probe rival ship owners. In 2012, he worked in the energy pricing sector and became a well-known whistleblower over allegations of price-fixing.
Contemporaries at the Guardian describe Freedman as one of the most successful authors on CiF – edgy, funny but also with an explosive temper. He fell out with a fellow CiF writer, Richard Silverstein, over the Israeli incursion into Gaza and his threats to destroy Silverstein’s reputation were so hostile and vituperative that the matter was referred up to the then editor, the late Georgina Henry.
By 2015, Freedman had written more than 300 paid articles for the Guardian and a semi-autobiographical fiction Dead Cat Bounce, in which a character with many similarities to the book’s author is planted at the Guardian by the Israeli spy service, Mossad, using his press credentials to spy on the Palestinian resistance.
A year or so later, Freedman was indeed using his press credentials to spy on alleged victims of Harvey Weinstein, working for Black Cube – described as a “private Mossad” by others and as a “group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units that specialises in tailored solutions to complex business and litigation challenges” by itself.
