of their weight after the Putin lieutenant offers innocuous descriptions of his meeting with Prince that are subsequently contradicted by major-media reporting.49
That Flynn’s connection to the Israeli Zamel—and Zamel’s connection to Kian—extends into Trump’s transition period is confirmed by the fact that Zamel met with Flynn, and possibly Kian, at least once during the presidential transition (see chapter 6).50 Flynn had also, just two months after Ben Carson’s presidential campaign closed down in spring 2016, joined the advisory board of a subsidiary of “hacking firm” NSO Group—“a secretive cyberweapons dealer founded by former Israeli intelligence officials”—and done consulting work for the private equity firm that controls NSO.51 A year later, NSO will sell $55 million worth of cell phone–hacking technology to MBS’s government; it is technology that becomes critical to MBS’s Kushner-assisted crushing of domestic dissent in Saudi Arabia in late 2017 (see chapter 8). Flynn’s involvement with NSO beginning in the midst of the 2016 presidential election—indeed, in the very month that his friend Zamel’s Israeli “business intelligence” operation, Psy-Group, first contacts the Trump campaign seeking to conduct covert intelligence-gathering on its behalf—establishes a high-level connection between Trump’s “shadow” national security team (including Simes, Prince, and Flynn) and Israeli government-associated spying outfits from May 2016 through Election Day and beyond. One of the two companies with which Flynn is most closely linked, NSO, deals in such sensitive technology that it must do so in conjunction with clearances from the Israeli Defense Ministry (see chapter 8).
Another Carson adviser with strong ties to Israel is an obscure Middle East energy analyst by the name of George Papadopoulos, who joins Carson’s campaign in late 2015 as (according to Papadopoulos) the GOP candidate’s “principal foreign policy adviser.”52 Lightly published and still largely unknown in his field, Papadopoulos boasts few international publications prior to joining the Carson campaign, though one is an essay he had written the year before in Arutz Sheva, a Zionist Israeli publication.53 In the essay, entitled “A Southern Strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean,” Papadopoulos argues for America to adopt a Middle East policy identical to the one that the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE will ultimately push Trump to accept; it is a view of America and the Middle East that is virulently anti-Obama, anti-Turkey, anti-Iran, anti–Muslim Brotherhood, and pro-el-Sisi.54 Papadopoulos’s focus is on how to negotiate Russia’s growing influence in the Middle East, with the young analyst noting that “Cyprus, Israel, Syria, and Egypt [are] seeking out greater ties with Russia to safeguard their national interests.… Russia’s last-minute negotiated deal to remove chemical stockpiles from Syria without an attack … has now allowed Russia to achieve its desired objective of becoming essential to all seemingly intractable conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean from Tehran to Cairo.”55 Papadopoulos admiringly speaks of Russia’s “leverage … increas[ing]” in the Middle East, and of the way that “Russia has politically outmaneuvered the U.S.” under Obama.56 He proposes that the United States augment its military partnerships with Cyprus, Israel, and Greece, the last of these an idea Papadopoulos will personally advance by meeting with Greece’s defense minister Panos Kammenos—a known “Putin ally,” according to BuzzFeed News—as a representative of the Trump campaign in May 2016.57 According to one NATO military intelligence officer BuzzFeed News will speak to in spring 2018, the very ministry of defense Papadopoulos was advising Trump to partner with in 2016 “is considered [by NATO] to be compromised by Russian intelligence.”58 The day after Trump is inaugurated, Papadopoulos; Trump’s new chief of staff, Reince Priebus; and one of the heads of the presidential transition, Steve Bannon, will meet with Kammenos at Washington’s Hay-Adams Hotel.59 Kammenos had by then already met with Priebus once in D.C., on the day before Trump’s inauguration.60
Carson’s chief foreign policy adviser on Israeli issues, however, is George Birnbaum, who, according to the Times of Israel, “served as chief of staff for [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu during his first term” and is the business partner of “Arthur Finkelstein, the GOP public relations guru … who also has advised Netanyahu.”61
At some point during his ten-month candidacy for president, Carson and his team receive a “plan for voter manipulation in [general election] swing states” from an Israeli business intelligence company, Inspiration, which is “run by former Israeli Defense Force officers.”62 After Carson exits the presidential race in March 2016, he “personally present[s] Trump with Inspiration’s plan,” and thereafter Inspiration receives “enormous amounts of information” from a pro-Trump super PAC, information it uses to “compose strategies and slogans that