INVESTIGATION: Israel’s maneuvers to conceal its state secrets linked to cyberespionage

New documents reveal how Israel suppressed information related to the private cyber-surveillance company NSO, which developed the Pegasus spyware. Forbidden Stories reveals this with the investigation unit of Radio France.

It is late July 2020, and NSO’s headquarters in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, are the scene of unusual activity: agents from the Israeli Ministry of Justice are bustling about in the blue-glass building, lined with palm trees, near the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, at the request of the Israeli government, a Tel Aviv court ordered, on July 19, 2020, the seizure of documents and computers installed in the company’s offices.

Why such a procedure? Nine months earlier, Facebook (since renamed Meta), owner of the WhatsApp messaging platform, filed a complaint against NSO in a federal court in California. WhatsApp accuses the cyber surveillance company of having used its messaging platform to hack the phones of 1,400 users. In this context, NSO could be forced to share documents during the so-called “pre-investigation” phase. Customary in American procedures, this procedure requires the various parties to share internal information and documents that can then be considered as evidence. But Israel fears that the use of such documents in the American procedure could lead to the revelation of state secrets, linked to the cyber surveillance company.

According to our information, this seizure of NSO’s offices was accompanied by a court order prohibiting publication in the Israeli media. For the Israeli government, this ban is intended to protect the country’s “national security” and its “foreign relations”. This is why the Israeli media, including the partners of Forbidden Stories and the investigative unit of Radio France in this investigation, are not allowed to report on it.

To conduct our investigation, we gained access to a data leak containing internal emails and documents from the Israeli Ministry of Justice. These files were obtained by the non-profit organization DDoSecrets and shared with Forbidden Stories and its partners. Our investigation is corroborated by multiple sources, an official Israeli document, and a technical analysis conducted by Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

Thanks to these files, we learn in particular that powerful American law firms were recruited in this case. Among the lawyers from the King & Spalding firm employed by NSO Group, there is even Rod Rosenstein, former deputy attorney general of the United States under Donald Trump (2017-2019). The Israeli Ministry of Justice, for its part, sought advice from the Arnold & Porter firm, as evidenced by an invoice that we were able to consult: 108.5 hours of work at an hourly rate of up to $913 (842 euros), or more than $88,000 (nearly 82,000 euros) paid by the Israeli Ministry of Justice.

For Scott Horton, a law professor at Columbia University, this case is not “not surprising in the least. This reveals relations between the government [israélien] and NSO, a private entity”. According to him, “NSO Group is an integral part of the Israeli defense system”what the Hebrew State “tries to conceal from the legal proceedings.”

Other documents suggest that the Israeli Justice Ministry pressured NSO to change the wording of court documents that suggested that Israel was indeed a client of NSO and a user of the Pegasus spyware. For example, a March 2020 document produced by NSO’s lawyers to request that WhatsApp’s complaint be dismissed was edited by NSO to remove references to Israel’s use of the Pegasus spyware.

In July 2021, Forbidden Stories and Radio France’s investigation unit were behind the “Pegasus Project” on this massive cell phone spying tool. We discovered that relatives of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist assassinated on October 2, 2018 by the Saudi secret services in Istanbul, had been targeted by the software. However, in a 2020 document – to which senior officials of the Israeli Ministry of Justice appear to have had access – NSO’s legal counsel expresses concern that confidential information will be revealed during the pre-investigation by the American justice system in the WhatsApp/NSO case. And precisely, he cites on this subject “Khashoggi’s murder”.

The Israeli government therefore probably knew a year before our revelations that Pegasus could be linked to the murder of Khashoggi. At that time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was mobilized to normalize relations between his country and Saudi Arabia. Certainly, the revelation of such suspicions would have been detrimental to both countries as well as to Israel’s image. Forbidden Stories and its partners, including the investigation unit of Radio France, contacted NSO. According to its vice-president in charge of communication, “NSO, as a law-abiding company, cannot comment on [nos] questions.” Also contacted, the Israeli Ministry of Justice responded that it “rejects the claims that he acted in any way with the aim of harming or obstructing the judicial proceedings referred to in [nos] questions.”