This reminds me of a story I read once. It was a long time ago and I
forget the title of the anthology it was in, but I remember that the
entire story took up one page and there was a lot of white space left
over. The title of the story was, The Shortest Horror Story Ever
Written. It was so short that I can still quote the entire story after
the many years that have passed since I read it. It reads like this. The
last human being alive sat in a room. There was a knock on the door.
On 5/10/2018 12:39 AM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
"It's a Small, Small World"...full of sick, sick people.
The frail old man sat facing the wall, staring at a fly spec, drooling
and giggling quietly to himself, as if he held the most secret of all
funny stories. The door behind him opened. The old man turned and
sadly shook his head. "I have told you over and over," he admonished,
in a stern voice, "I will come to you when the time has arrived".
"But Doctor," came a small whisper of a sound, "There is no one left.
All are gone or dead. You must release me."
"Not today. No! It's a lie. They are just away for lunch. They'll
all be back. Go to your room and wait."
As if it were a dark shadow, the form slip across the room and bony
fingers reached out and twisted themselves around the Turkey neck of
the Doctor. "I shall be free! I shall be free!"
And as the dead body of the Doctor fell to the floor, the last living
human turned and slowly went back to his room.
Carl Jarvis
On 5/9/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Israeli Operatives Who Aided Harvey Weinstein Collected Information on
Former Obama Administration Officials
By
Ronan Farrow
|May 6, 2018 11:05 PM
The private-intelligence firm Black Cube compiled profiles on Colin Kahl
(pictured) and Ben Rhodes, Obama Administration advisers who were
proponents
of the Iran nuclear deal.
The private-intelligence firm Black Cube compiled profiles on Colin Kahl
(pictured) and Ben Rhodes, Obama Administration advisers who were
proponents
of the Iran nuclear deal.
Photograph by Chip Somodevilla / Getty
In June, 2017, Ann Norris, a former State Department official, received an
e-mail containing an unusual proposal. Norris is married to Ben Rhodes, a
former foreign-policy adviser to President Barack Obama and a prominent
advocate of the Iran nuclear deal. In the e-mail, a woman who introduced
herself as Eva Novak and claimed to work for a London-based film company
called Shell Productions asked Norris to consult on a movie that she
described as “ ‘All the President’s Men’ meets ‘The West Wing’ ”: it would
follow the personal lives of “government officials in the positions that
determine war and Peace” during times of geopolitical crisis, including
“nuclear negotiations with a hostile nation.” Recalling the exchange, Ann
Norris said that she found Eva Novak’s request “bizarre,” and that she
“never responded.”
The e-mail appears to be part of an undercover campaign by an Israeli
private-intelligence firm to discredit Obama officials who had been leading
proponents of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. The campaign was first reported,
on Saturday, by the British newspaper the Observer. However, sources
familiar with the effort and pages of documents obtained by The New Yorker
reveal that there is more to understand. Two of those sources told me on
Sunday that the operation was carried out by Black Cube—a firm that was
also
employed by Harvey Weinstein and that offers its clients access to
operatives from “Israel’s élite military and governmental intelligence
units,” including the Mossad.
A month before Norris received her e-mail, Rebecca Kahl, a former program
officer at the National Democratic Institute and the wife of the former
Obama Administration foreign-policy adviser Colin Kahl, had also received a
puzzling e-mail. A woman named Adriana Gavrilo claimed to be the head of
corporate social responsibility at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based
wealth-management firm. Gavrilo told Kahl that her firm was launching an
initiative on education and that she wanted to meet to discuss the school
that Kahl’s daughter attended, at which Kahl volunteered. Kahl referred
Gavrilo to school staff members, but Gavrilo repeatedly refused to speak to
anyone but her. Gavrilo’s firm would “not be able to make the necessary due
diligence” on the school employees, she wrote. Rebecca Kahl, who said she
“worried I’m strangely a target of some sort,” eventually stopped
responding
to Gavrilo.
Adriana Gavrilo and Eva Novak appear to be aliases. LinkedIn pages for both
Gavrilo and Novak at one point showed a slim blond woman advertised as
fluent in Serbian. Shortly after The New Yorker contacted Black Cube about
this story, Novak’s LinkedIn page was deleted. The e-mail addresses listed
by both women do not work. Calls to the phone number Novak listed went
unanswered. The Web sites for Reuben Capital Partners and Shell Productions
have been taken down, but both were bare-bones pages constructed through
the
free site-building tool Wix. The addresses for both companies led to shared
office spaces; there is no evidence that Shell Productions or Reuben
Capital
Partners had ever operated there.
The documents show that Black Cube compiled detailed background profiles of
several individuals, including Rhodes and Kahl, that featured their
addresses, information on their family members, and even the makes of their
cars. Black Cube agents were instructed to try to find damaging information
about them, including unsubstantiated claims that Rhodes and Kahl had
worked
closely with Iran lobbyists and were personally enriched through their
policy work on Iran (they denied those claims); rumors that Rhodes was one
of the Obama staffers responsible for “unmasking” Trump transition
officials
who were named in intelligence documents (Rhodes denied the claim); and an
allegation that one of the individuals targeted by the campaign had an
affair.
The campaign is strikingly similar to an operation that Black Cube ran on
behalf of Harvey Weinstein, which was reported in The New Yorker last fall.
One of Weinstein’s attorneys, David Boies, hired Black Cube to halt the
publication of sexual-misconduct allegations against Weinstein. Black Cube
operatives used false identities to track women with allegations, and also
reporters seeking to expose the story. In May, 2017, a former Israel
Defense
Forces officer, who had emigrated to Israel from the former Yugoslavia, was
working as an undercover agent for Black Cube. The woman contacted the
actress Rose McGowan, claiming to work for Reuben Capital Partners but
using
the identity of a Diana Filip. Filip’s e-mails to McGowan displayed the
same
tactics as those in the e-mails sent to Norris and Kahl, and in some cases
used almost identical language. (Filip also wrote to me from Reuben Capital
Partners, and again used similar language.)
In a statement, Black Cube said, “It is Black Cube’s policy to never
discuss
its clients with any third party, and to never confirm or deny any
speculation made with regard to the company’s work.” The statement also
read, “Black Cube has no relation whatsoever to the Trump administration,
to
Trump aides, to anyone close to the administration, or to the Iran Nuclear
deal.” The firm also said that it “always operates in full compliance of
the
law in every jurisdiction in which it conducts its work, following legal
advice from the world’s leading law firms.”
In the Iran operation, as in its operation for Weinstein, Black Cube
focussed much of its work on reporters and other media figures, sometimes
using agents who posed as journalists. The company compiled a list of more
than thirty reporters who it believed were in touch with Obama
Administration officials, annotated with instructions about how to seek
negative information. Transcripts produced by Black Cube reveal that the
firm secretly recorded a conversation between one of its agents and Trita
Parsi, a Swedish-Iranian author. The conversation, which began as a general
discussion of Iran policy, quickly devolved into questions about Rhodes,
Kahl, and whether they had personally profited off of the Iran policy.
“I’ve
had the first part of the conversation five hundred times,” Parsi recalled,
of his conversation with the agent, who claimed to be a reporter. “But then
he started asking about personal financial interests, and that was more
unusual. He was pushing very, very hard.”
The Observer reported that aides of President Trump had hired Black Cube to
run the operation in order to undermine the Iran deal, allegations that
Black Cube denies. “The idea was that people acting for Trump would
discredit those who were pivotal in selling the deal, making it easier to
pull out of it,” a source told the Observer. One of the sources familiar
with the effort told me that it was, in fact, part of Black Cube’s work for
a private-sector client pursuing commercial interests related to sanctions
on Iran. (A Trump Administration spokesperson declined to comment to the
Observer on the allegations.)
Kahl, who worked as an adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden, said that he
believed Trump associates may have been involved because of unsubstantiated
reports in conservative media outlets accusing Rhodes and Kahl of damaging
leaks about the Trump Administration. “Why Ben and I? Why conjoin Ben and
me?” Kahl asked. “Of all the other senior people in the White House, I’m
least senior.”
Black Cube is known for its close ties to current and former power players
in Israeli politics and intelligence. The late Meir Dagan, a former Mossad
director, once served as the company’s president. Ehud Barak, the former
Israeli Prime Minister, has publicly acknowledged that he introduced
Weinstein to Black Cube’s leadership. (Barak said he did not know the
nature
of Weinstein’s concerns at the time.) The Observer reported that officials
linked to Trump’s team had made contact with Black Cube days after Trump
visited Tel Aviv in May, 2017, during his first foreign tour as President.
Standing next to Netanyahu during that trip, Trump promised, “Iran will
never have nuclear weapons, that I can tell you.”
Rhodes said that the campaign represented a troubling situation in which
public servants were being targeted for their work in government. “This
just
eviscerates any norm of how governments should operate or treat their
predecessors and their families,” he said. “It crosses a dangerous line.”
