by His name is Tal Hanan and he is a 50-year-old former Israeli special forces agent known by the nickname “Jorge”. He describes himself as an “expert in disinformation” and the unit he leads – codenamed “Team Jorge” – claims to have been called upon to intervene in 33 presidential campaigns over the past 20 years. Approached by three journalists under the guise of wanting to hire him to postpone an election in a volatile African country, he said the services of “Jorge’s Team” cost between 6 and 14 million euros.
“We are currently participating in elections in Africa … We have a team in Greece and one in the Emirates … Follow the tracks,” the businessman said in a series of video calls and a meeting at his unit’s or group’s headquarters, an office unmarked in an industrial park in Modi’in, 30 kilometers from the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, the newspaper reported The guardianone out of 30 average participate in “Disinfo black ops” or covert disinformation operations.
“[Completámos] 33 presidential campaigns, we were successful in 27 of them,” Hanan assured in talks with reporters (from Radio France and Israeli newspapers haaretz is TheMarker). Claiming to have been involved in two “major projects” in the United States, he says he has never directly interfered in American politics. However, Hannan has worked several times with Cambridge Analytica – the disgraced British consulting firm after it was accused of using information from millions of Facebook users to interfere with election campaigns around the world, including the one that won Donald Trump in 2016 .
According to him, the “Jorge” team consists of “civil service graduates” with experience in finance, social networks, campaigns and “psychological warfare” and works from six offices in different countries. In addition to him, there were four people at the meetings with the journalists of the consortium, including Zihar Hanan, his brother, who introduced himself as the executive director of the organization.
Some of the disinformation operations allegedly run by Hanan were carried out by the Israeli company Demoman International, the diaries detail The guardian is the country published this Wednesday. Demoman is registered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense as a defense export promotion company and, according to internal company documents, has a presence in Tel Aviv, Washington and Barcelona.
It was in Barcelona that “Team Jorge” carried out an operation that Hannan touted in July as one of his successes: the three-day attack on websites of the Generalitat (Catalan regional government) during independence referendum 2014 (9-N) which wreaked havoc on emergency medical services and police helplines in Catalonia.
The cyber attack in Catalonia is shown in a presentation ready to offer the unit’s services together with a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack map, which consists of overloading a computer network with information until paralysis – a technique which the Center for Information Security of Catalonia says was used in 9-N, writes El País. Another example presented shows how five Gmail and Telegram accounts of William Ruto, who was elected in Kenya’s presidency in August, were hacked in a disputed election and marked by allegations of fraud.
In the same video, and still in relation to Catalonia, Hanan claims to have passed documents to the media about alleged links between the Catalan independence movement and Daesh terrorists, a link that has never been proven and has caused lots of fake news.
Also, according to the Spanish newspaper, one of the 12 professionals of Demoman International is a former Spanish soldier who participated in operations in Afghanistan and has experience in deactivating ETA explosives.
