An investigation by Radio France’s investigative unit with the Forbidden Stories consortium reveals that BFMTV broadcast information sourced from an Israeli disinformation agency run by former army and intelligence officials.
An editorial team in shock. For a month, BFMTV journalists were stunned. They wonder how their colleague, the veteran Rachid M’Barki, came to be spreading biased and biased information on the air. Russian oligarchs, Qatar, Sudan, Cameroon, the “Moroccan” Sahara, these short messages (a text about forty seconds long against a background of illustrative images), provided turnkey on behalf of foreign clients, went on the air without confirmation from the publisher -boss and despite BFMTV’s editorial line.
Questioned by his management, who launched an internal investigation, Rachid M’Barki, 54, who has been on the air since BFMTV’s inception in 2005, acknowledged “entryism” operations and admitted a possible “journalistic error of judgment that would have led him to “do a friend a favor”. He was suspended by the channel’s director, Marc-Olivier Fogiel, on January 11, 2023. The latter then explained to the staff that he had to make this decision after being made aware of the existence of potentially biased information.
The person who alerted him was a journalist, Frédéric Métézeau, then working for Radio France’s investigative unit as part of a major investigation called “Story Killers” coordinated by the Forbidden Stories consortium. For more than six months, it brought together one hundred journalists working for 30 international media outlets. As before any publication, Frédéric Métézeau informs Marc-Olivier Fogiel of our discoveries in order to get his reaction. The latter then summons Rachid M’Barki. “He explains to me that briefings are being offered to him by an intermediary and that this is his editorial free will,” says the station’s director. It is problematic enough for us to initiate an internal audit to understand how these briefings come about antenna, how they are presented and the manner in which the hierarchy has been circumvented.”
A shadow society
However, the starting point of this affair is not France, but Israel. There, for several months, Frédéric Métézeau, along with Gur Megiddo (investigative journalist at the Israeli newspaper The Marker) and Omer Benjakob (investigative journalist at the Israeli newspaper Haaretz), infiltrated a structure that specializes in influence manipulation, election rigging and misinformation.
This company has no legal existence. To find it you need to go to the Modiin business district between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Its offices are functional but discreet. “Are you looking at the door? There is nothing. We are nothing,” jokes the one who greets us. However, there is a team working there that we will call “Team Jorge”. Because “Jorge” is the nickname of his main manager. On the ground it is impossible to interview anyone given the distrust of the press and the sensitivity of the activities there. The employees present themselves as former officers of the Israeli army or secret services, as experts in financial information, military affairs, psychological warfare or social media. Therefore, in order to understand what they are really doing, we had no choice but to present ourselves as “independent consultants” hired by an African client who wanted to influence an election vote.
“Most of the time, customers don’t want us to show up,” explains an executive at the company. We like to be behind the scenes. That makes us strong,” says Jorge. His company claims to be active on all continents: “We intervened in 33 presidential election campaigns.” “Two-thirds of them were in English and French-speaking Africa. 27 were a success,” claims one of his colleagues. Only in three areas do they not intervene: in American national politics, in Russia and in Israel.
Thousands of fake profiles
The focus of her work: online disinformation. Team Jorge has been developing a digital platform of impressive efficiency for six years called Aims for “Advanced Impact Media Solutions”. An acronym that also means “goals to be achieved” in English. With this software you can create fake profiles and activate them on the biggest social networks. Our interlocutors claim to have sold Aims to several state intelligence agencies.
Screenshot of the Aims software developed by Team Jorge, which is used to create fake profiles to influence opinion on social networks. (DR)
This software produces avatars: people who don’t exist but have a real appearance and credible areas of interest on the Internet. These fake profiles post their so-called opinions in hopes of influencing as many “Twittos” as possible. At the beginning of January 2023, the system exploited 39,213 different fake profiles, which can be viewed in a kind of catalogue. There are avatars of all ethnicities and nationalities, all genders, single or in pairs… Their faces are portraits of real people from the internet and their surnames are the combination of thousands of first and last names stored in a database.
Screenshot of fake profiles created by Israeli company Team Jorge’s Aims software. (DR)
To give these avatars credibility, Aims can open accounts for them on Amazon or even Airbnb and leave comments on YouTube videos. These subscriptions are then authenticated and validated via email (common with Gmail) or SMS. Car Aims also generates virtual phone numbers to receive or send text messages.
To convince us, Jorge creates an avatar in front of our eyes with all his characteristics as if he were ordering a la carte pizza with different ingredients: “UK… Woman… Isla Sawyer? I don’t like that name.. “Sophia Wilde… I prefer that name! He sounds British. What city is this lady from? Leeds? No,London. Now she has an email, a date of birth. She even has a fingerprint set of photos. And all his accounts are verified via SMS because I generated his UK phone number.”
Screenshot of Sophia Wilde’s fake Twitter profile still active in early 2023. (DR)
The “fake” death of an emu
Having a gigantic base of fake profiles is not enough to be credible. You still have to animate them. Aims therefore makes them interact regularly on social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) and in telegram loops. These interactions can be controlled automatically by the platform. And to show us what it’s capable of, Team Jorge will spread false information: the death of an emus named “Emmanuel” in the United States, very popular on Twitter. On July 29 and July 3, 2022, Aims tweeted the hashtag #RIP_Emmanuel (“rest in peace”, “rest in peace”) on Twitter and Facebook, referencing a July 27 video of the bird.
Within hours, the activation of hundreds of accounts managed by Aims broke the news of the animal’s death. Other accounts are reinforcing the operation by posting comments. The result is stunning. #RIP_Emmanuel, completely false information, appears in “Twitter trends” in certain countries such as Slovakia, forcing the bouquet’s owner to deny the claim to his more than 810,000 subscribers. “I woke up to find someone had started a rumor that Emmanuel was DEAD, she wrote. I literally ran to the barn to see if it was true. He was waiting for me at the door, alive and ready for hugs. EMMANUEL IS NOT DEAD!!”
Screenshot of emu owner Emmanuel’s tweet responding to the rumor of his pet’s death on July 22, 2022. (DR)
As part of the Story Killers project, Le Monde referenced the Twitter accounts used to popularize #RIP_Emmanuel. And he discovered they had been activated during a series of other disinformation operations far more serious than faking the death of an emu. “We were very surprised and impressed by the level of technical sophistication of this platform and in particular by the precautions taken to evade Facebook’s detection measures,” testifies Damien Leloup, our colleague at Le Monde. Aims is able to generate technical elements that really allow him to pass as a human.”
Six million euros for postponing an election
In a video addressed to their clients summarizing their know-how, the members of Team Jorge boast that they also took part in the sabotage of several elections, notably the first referendum on Catalonia’s independence, organized on November 9, 2014 It sometimes happens that Team Jorge strengthens its automatic system by recruiting editors (students who know how to write and speak foreign languages) in the countries where it is considering an operation. In exchange for a local minimum wage, they become the “handles” of future digital campaigns.
Team Jorge tells us that to get an election postponed in an African country, he charged six million euros for his service. “The first thing we did was a very thorough research and analysis of the country,” says one of the operators. Then we needed to know if the election result would have an impact in other countries, for example in the United States or in Europe, to assess what we can do there to serve the interests of our clients.” The company then activates its aims -Platform. It’s flooding social networks. But the campaign is also being carried out using SMS, which relay political messages. Up to two million text messages in one week: “The aim is to create an atmosphere locally and internationally that makes postponing the elections the best solution.”
intercept targets
Another part of the operation: sowing discord within the clans that control the levers of power. “We have to be very clever to cause clashes between the generals and their families. Between each tribal leader.” Hence the need to benefit from the assistance – not to say complicity – of local phone company personnel to intercept targets, we are told, in order to “find out who are in charge of the enemy camp”. The wiretapping will be billed at 50,000 euros each, it is said.
Finally, we organize targeted lobbying. “The last thing people want is instability, we are told. In Europe they tell themselves: ‘If there is instability, there will be waves of migrants’ and that worries you. In the United States, people are more likely to be afraid that these events will drive up energy prices…” And to get those messages across, Team Jorge says it relies on well-known figures like Israeli Ilan Mizrahi, a former Mossad deputy director and former national security adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or even Roger Noriega, a former diplomat in the Bush Jr. and Reagan administrations. Ilan Mizrahi told us that he knows Jorge but has no business relationship with him. Roger Noriega claims not to remember his name.
BFMTV undercover
Whatever the case, and with supporting evidence, Team Jorge claims it can also “recruit” journalists from major foreign media outlets. According to our information, the client can be billed 20,000 euros for a publication in this case, of which 3,000 would be paid in cash to the journalist at the end of the chain. During one of our discussions, the executives of the Israeli company showed us a video dated September 19, 2022, in which we see how Rachid M’Barki, the BFMTV journalist, shares, with supporting images, the difficulties that the yachting industry in Monaco is facing after the imposition sanctions against Russian oligarchs. After airing, this excerpt was quarantined and widely shared by the Aims platform on Twitter to make it viral. Clearly, then, the purpose of this intervention is to discredit the sanctions imposed on Russia. However, we have identified other information of the same nature, some of which is disseminated by an equally obscure French-language site “News365”. Its editor is an avatar himself. And on this page writes another key figure in this affair, Jean-Pierre Duthion, whom Rachid M’Barki described as the one who provided him with the texts and images that would go on the air.
Screenshot of Jean Pierre Duthion’s Twitter profile. (DR)
Jean-Pierre Duthion is no stranger to the media world. A foreign entrepreneur in Syria from 2007 to 2014, he covered daily life in Damascus, where he also acted as an intermediary for many foreign reporters dispatched there, before becoming a “bulldozer” of disinformation, according to a good industry expert. When asked by Forbidden Stories, the man posing as a “lobbyist” and a “mercenary” admitted to being the origin of the dissemination of the disputed information on BFMTV, but put the facts into perspective. “BFMTV has become the sacrificial lamb,” he told us. But he denies paying the journalist and claims to know nothing about the sponsor. “I get orders without knowing the end customer,” he explains. It’s very small. I don’t ask myself any questions. I do what I’m told. The less I know, the better I carry myself.”
Other biased information was shared by Rachid M’Barki, such as Portsec’s management of the port of Douala in Cameroon, which in turn was picked up by News365. According to another BFMTV journalist, the practice is not isolated. He claims to have been contacted by Jean-Pierre Duthion back in 2020. A year later, the lobbyist reportedly told him, “I’m in charge of paying journalists to pass on information… I know your salaries. I know who might need them.” he would have told him, thanks to me they can afford a vacation because I know the end of the month can be difficult. According to him, Jean-Pierre Duthion called him back in January 2023, shortly after Rachid M’Barki’s suspension, but he says he didn’t help. For his part, Jean Pierre Duthion replied: “I never have and will never pay a journalist. No evidence, no element allows us to assert the opposite.”
Jorge: a former Israeli soldier
Finally we were able to find out who was behind the mysterious Jorge, the mastermind behind these operations. He is also called “Michael”, “Joyce Gamble” or “Coral Jaime”. He has multiple email addresses and phone numbers in different countries. But his real name is Tal Hanan. He is the head of two companies involved in security and intelligence: Sol Energy and Denoman. On its website, he is described as an explosives specialist who served in the Israel Defense Forces’ special forces and as a former liaison officer for the Tsahal, the Israel Defense Forces, with command of the United States Sixth Fleet Specials. According to his biography, he also “commanded operations to protect high-risk executives in Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela and conducted counter-terrorism training programs … for the US government.” He has a degree in International Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is considered “a highly sought-after speaker having given presentations to the United States Congress, numerous foreign governments and international corporations.” We find him interviewed in several online media outlets and in major newspapers such as the Washington Post in 2006.
As Jorge approaches Cambridge Analytica
Thanks to our Guardian colleagues, we had access to emails showing that between 2015 and 2017, Tal Hanan attempted to work for Cambridge Analytica, a shadow company that worked for Donald Trump’s campaign and embroiled his name in a Facebook was data theft scandal In one of these 2016 emails, Jorge Cambridge Analytica offers to provide him with videos to fool American voters that Donald Trump is addressing them personally. It’s also about a video about “Clinton”, presumably Hillary Clinton, then in the running for the presidency of the United States. He also boasts of being able to create between 3,000 and 5,000 fake profiles per week on social networks. He still suggests “helping in Kenya” where presidential elections are soon to be held.
In 2017, he told Cambridge Analytica’s great boss, Alexander Nix, that his services are so effective that one of his clients was “very happy” to pay €1 million to deal with a crisis situation. Alexander Nix will reject his proposals. “We already have our own media production company,” he replies politely, “and none of our clients will be willing to pay anywhere from $400,000 to $600,000 a month for crisis management.”
Reconstruction of an email from Alexander Nix to Jorge, in which he rejected his proposal to collaborate. (THE GUARDIAN / FORBIDDEN TALES)
Asked by Forbidden Stories, Tal Hanan didn’t answer our questions. It’s hard to break the culture of secrecy when working behind the scenes. However, this secret has been revealed. According to Anat Ben David, Associate Professor of Communications at the Open University of Israel, the revelations of the “Story Killers” project not only lift the veil from behind the scenes of disinformation and its new actors, but they also highlight the flaws in social networks: “We all felt that something was wrong. We analyzed the profiles without being able to do more. But with this investigation we can finally see in real time how things are going.” And how these networks, in the absence of regulation but also because they are exploited by malicious entities, make it possible to manipulate public opinion.
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