of Papadopoulos’s interactions in Tel Aviv—cryptic in their totality, but evidently involving the Saudis and Israeli intelligence technology—occur in the days leading up to MBS’s investment in Blackstone and Blackstone’s investment in NSO. A fact that may or may not be related to this is that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani is in Israel for reasons he says have to do with his interest in “cybersecurity” at the same time Papadopoulos and Tawil are interacting in Tel Aviv on that very subject and Papadopoulos is receiving a request to join Netanyahu at a conference in Greece.111 Giuliani had previously been named an “unofficial adviser on cybersecurity” to President-elect Trump during the transition period, in which role he met face-to-face with Netanyahu in Israel in January 2017 and “delivered a personal message from Trump to the prime minister”; according to the Times of Israel, Giuliani and Netanyahu “have been friends for 25 years.”112
That Israeli businessman Joel Zamel’s digital marketing and intelligence-gathering business is based in Cyprus, and that Zamel has done extensive work with the Emiratis on anti-Iran social media campaigns; that Israeli businessman Charles Tawil’s business is also based in Cyprus, and that Tawil has also had extensive contact with the Emiratis and is, like Zamel, focused on new social media campaigns in the Middle East; and that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sometime in the months prior to Trump’s January 2017 inauguration been in secret talks in Cyprus with the Emiratis over plans to counter Iran all suggest another possibility behind Netanyahu’s strange invitation of Papadopoulos to a meeting involving the presidents of Greece and Cyprus: that the Israelis, Emiratis, Trump administration, or all three are trying to use Trump’s onetime Israel expert as a go-between in a post-election plot to target Iran with a digital psy-ops campaign. Certainly, the shifting stories (or silence) from all those involved in Papadopoulos’s mid-2017 meetings in Israel and Greece—Papadopoulos, Tawil, Arbel, the Arab businessmen and former Israeli intelligence officers who meet with Papadopoulos in a Tel Aviv hotel room, and even Netanyahu himself—suggest geopolitical intrigue well beyond what Papadopoulos has thus far revealed to federal law enforcement.
Just days after his email to Tawil about the “tremendous opportunity” offered to him and Tawil by the Trump-Saudi arms deal, Papadopoulos is arrested by the FBI at Dulles International Airport, in part due to suspicions that he has been acting, in both Israel and Greece, as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government.113 According to a summary of June 2018 remarks to the press by Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, “Special Counsel Robert Mueller last summer [summer 2017] threatened to charge George … with acting as an unregistered agent of Israel.”114 Per Mangiante, whatever the special counsel’s office thought of Papadopoulos’s meetings in Israel and Greece in June and July of 2017—and of what he said in each meeting and to whom—it believed, strikingly, that following its review of the evidence and relevant counterintelligence data, it had sufficient basis to charge Papadopoulos as an Israeli agent based exclusively on his actions “while he was serving as an energy consultant before he joined the Trump campaign [in March 2016].”115
Subsequent media reports on Papadopoulos’s connections to Israel will reveal a new piece of information that explains much of the special counsel’s and Papadopoulos’s own actions: as of the day in mid-2017 that Papadopoulos was asked by the Israeli prime minister’s office to come immediately to Thessaloniki, Greece, Papadopoulos had, for at least two years, been in semi-regular contact with Eli Groner, “a top aide to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”; this suggests that Papadopoulos’s appearance “alongside” Groner at the Hadera Energy Conference in Tel Aviv in April 2016—while he was a Trump adviser and, moreover, on a Trump campaign-approved trip—may not have been mere coincidence.116
That Papadopoulos, one of the most active members of the Trump campaign’s twelve-man national security advisory committee, had direct access to the Israeli prime minister’s office for the entirety of his employment by Trump—March 2016 to January 2017, though he had first approached the campaign about a job in mid-2015, when he first met Netanyahu’s aide Groner, itself a troubling concurrence—casts a new light on the efforts of at least one Israeli business intelligence firm, Psy-Group, to try to assist Trump’s team through a social media manipulation campaign in the final three months of the 2016 presidential election. That Psy-Group was introduced to the Trump campaign by George Birnbaum, a man who, like Groner, was a Netanyahu aide; that Papadopoulos’s June 2017 meeting in