'Dirty Penetration,' How Did the Israeli Jorge Team Manipulate Elections in 30 Countries?

The Jorge scandal is the second huge Israeli global scandal after the Pegasus spy program. During an 8 month international investigation, the journalists penetrated the Israeli structure that is specialized in influencing, electoral manipulation, disinformation, and dissemination of fake news at the global level. The Jorge Team is a private agency that has no legal existence, but its offices are located in the Modi’in settlement, located on the road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

The investigation was initiated and coordinated by the Paris-based organization Forbidden Stories. Journalists from The Guardian, Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Le Monde, International Organization of Investigative Journalists, Radio France, Haaretz, The Maker, and other media active in France have worked in Kenya, “Israel,” the United States, Indonesia, Germany, Tanzania, and Spain to fact-check the claims about the Israeli team’s activities around the world, and shockingly, many of his claims have been confirmed.

 

Dirty Manipulation

A group of eminent journalists, such as Stephanie Kirchgaessner, head of the investigative department at The Guardian newspaper, and her colleague Jason Burke, participated in the investigation, among a group of about a hundred journalists working in 30 international media outlets, including those who contributed to exposing previous scandals such as the prominent British journalist Carole Cadwalladr who participated in 2018 in exposing the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Team Jorge’s offices do not bear any banner or name. However, these offices are open and receive their customers, and they conclude deals on a global level, and the work team bears the name Team Jorge, a name given to its main manager.

The investigation revealed that Jorge’s real name is Tal Hanan, and he is the head of two companies working in the field of security and intelligence, Sol Energy Ltd. and Demoman International, registered on their website as belonging to the Israeli Ministry of Defense to support defense exports.

The journalists pretended to be advisers working on behalf of a troubled African country and wanted help delaying the elections. In a stunning presentation to clients, Jorge revealed the array of tools at his disposal to achieve the ends for which they approached him: cyberattacks, national disinformation campaigns, false documents incriminating political opponents, publishing false reports, and stealing bank documents.

Each of these tools could have been used to break resistance to political moves or simply to eliminate the client’s political, personal, or business competitors (in every immaterial sense). Without restrictions, morals, or discrimination, Jorge’s kit can be placed at the disposal of anyone willing to pay for it, even if using it would put someone’s life in immediate danger.

 

Fake News & Anti-Semitism

The investigation revealed the group’s arsenal, which included creating defamatory articles and using the services of an anti-Semitic influencer on social media platforms, that the US State Department has identified as a long arm of the Kremlin, and the creation of fictitious non-profit organizations.

If you were to stop French Jews in the street and ask them to name five known anti-Semites, it is fair to assume that one of them would be Kemi Seba.

Seba is not only a red flag for Jews. Yet, in November 2022, the US State Department issued a report referring to his ties to the Wagner Group. The business group is owned by the oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Despite this, the report revealed that his name was one of the group’s initial suggestions to rely on his services.

In August 2020, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found itself at the center of a global media storm. The French magazine Valeurs Actuelles alleged that the organization had become a “sponsor” of terrorist organizations that control parts of Burkina Faso, West Africa.

The management of the International Committee of the Red Cross—already concerned about the challenge of protecting its staff in the war-torn country—could never have imagined that a group of Israelis working out of an air-conditioned office in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan were behind this media storm. This was only revealed as part of a series of reports about Jorge’s team.

 

Destabilizing African Countries

Haaretz disclosed that in July 2022,  Mashy Meidan, 63, a well-known figure in corporate intelligence, was approached through an intermediary by a “fake” foreign business consultant.

In a Zoom chat a few days later, the adviser said that he works on behalf of a businessman close to the ruling family in an unnamed francophone African country.

Without introductions, the consultant explained to his interlocutor the reason for the call, saying that there will be elections at the end of September, and according to the client, these elections should not take place.

Meidan immediately deduces that the African country in question is Chad. But he was not intimidated by the scale of the task, and his questions were mainly of a technical nature: Does the adviser have a list of the phone numbers of the commanders in the Chadian army or those who were against the move? The chancellor gave him a promise to look into the matter and return to him with an answer.

At one meeting, Meidan suggested destabilizing Chad as a way to delay the elections. At another, the advisers suggested that an explosion in a market in the capital, N’Djamena, might justify the delay. But that did not deter Jorge, who asked for 6 million euros ($6.4 million) for the campaign.

Zohar Hanan, who was described as the CEO of the group, attempted to present the group’s work. He said that they are involved in elections in Africa, and that they have offices in Greece and the Emirates, and follow opportunities. They completed work on 33 high-level electoral campaigns, of which 27 campaigns were successful.

To impress his clients, he took them on a “tour” through the private conversations of government ministers in Kenya and Mozambique via Gmail and Telegram accounts. Jorge explained that he hacked the correspondence of African dignitaries while offering his services to other clients.

He bragged about launching an attack in 2015 on the phones of members of the opposition party in Nigeria as part of an election campaign in which he worked—as the investigation later revealed—with the famous British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

There are other missions carried out by the agency to sow discord within the clans that control the reins of power. Jorge emphasized that they have to be very clever to cause clashes between generals and their families and between every chief. Hence the need to take advantage of the assistance, not to mention the complicity of the employees of the local telephone companies for the wiretap, which sometimes costs €50,000.

The team also spreads instability, but without leading to waves of immigration to Europe and raising energy prices in the United States, hence it appears, as one of the members of the group explained, that they refrain from interfering in only three areas: American national policy, Russia and “Israel.”