Catch and Kill

by Ronan Farrow

  Bertoni and I turned over the dilemma. Working with law enforcement was a fraught decision for any journalistic outlet. There were obvious scenarios in which journalists should go to the cops, including any tip-off about impending physical harm to someone. But there were no easy calls in this case. It wasn’t inconceivable that I’d been a victim of a crime, flowing from the phone tracking or the deceptions designed to elicit reporting material from me. But I wasn’t confident that there was enough danger to myself or others to merit sitting with prosecutors and answering questions that might quickly turn to sources and reporting I’d pledged to keep secret. Protecting those sources, including Ostrovskiy, had to be my priority. And it wasn’t just about me. Bertoni feared that any one conversation with law enforcement would set a dangerous precedent for The New Yorker. Would we as easily be able to decline inquiries about, say, a government whistle-blower, once we’d already said yes on this story?

  CHAPTER 54:

  PEGASUS

  At first, Ostrovskiy wouldn’t give me the name of his boss. But there were more than enough clues. In one of the images he’d shown me, the Nissan’s license plates were even visible. I typed in the name I’d come up with and pulled up a promotional video. “I’m the guy out in the field. The action-taker,” a bald man with a Russian accent said in the video. “My name is Roman Khaykin. And I’m the founder of InfoTactic Group.”

  A jaunty techno beat played. Over footage of buttonhole cameras, title cards promised “the best high-tech surveillance equipment.” Khaykin, doing his best impression of James Bond or Ethan Hunt, darted athletically through crowds. It was beguilingly cheesy. InfoTactic was small-time, just a handful of freelancers, most of them with day jobs. Still, Khaykin, over the course of that past year working for Black Cube, had sought to push the envelope, from the phone tracking to the boasts about his ability to illicitly obtain financial records.

  In the video, Khaykin was deadly serious about his skills. “When I was young and first learned how to read,” he said, “I would fascinate my parents with my ability to memorize the text of my favorite book—Sherlock Holmes.”

  Ostrovskiy kept passing along his insights about InfoTactic’s ongoing operations for Black Cube. Sometimes I’d go to the appointed location, or send colleagues who were less likely to be spotted, to keep watch from afar. The pattern was always the same: undercover Black Cube agents meeting with cybercrime and technology experts in luxe hotels.

  Ostrovskiy and I would meet, too, at hole-in-the-wall restaurants we’d immediately depart in favor of jumpy conversations conducted while walking mazy routes through side streets. Once, we sat in a dim corner of a hotel lobby and spoke for half an hour before he abruptly excused himself, then came back worried, saying we had to move, fast. He suspected two men sitting nearby were following us. They looked like professionals. They’d been watching too closely. We took a cab, and then another cab. He had one taxi stop on the West Side Highway, pull over to the shoulder, and wait for any tails to go by or be exposed for slowing. A year before, I’d have thought the paranoia excessive.

  Through the remainder of 2018, I continued my reporting on the world of Israeli private intelligence, keeping at Black Cube in the process. Eido Minkovsky, the genial freelancer who handled the spy agency’s public relations, was a regular contact. “Ronan, baby,” he’d say, when I called. “Don’t divorce me,” he’d write, responding evasively to my latest reporting inquiry. In January 2019, he agreed to have a drink during one of his regular stops in New York.

  Several hours before that meeting, Ostrovskiy called. Black Cube had ordered Roman Khaykin and InfoTactic to find a pen capable of secretly recording audio. Ostrovskiy sent a picture of the spy pen they’d found. It was piano-black, with a silver clip: nothing you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it, but it had features you could track, like a little ring of chrome at a specific height on its barrel.

  Minkovsky and I had agreed to meet at a wine bar in Hell’s Kitchen. I arrived to find him lounging in a corner with a Cheshire cat grin. Minkovsky ordered a cocktail, led with his usual flattery offensive. Then he announced that he was going to take notes on my reporting questions. He produced, from his jacket pocket, a black pen with a silver clip.

  “Funny, I have the same one,” I said.

  His grin faltered. “It’s a special pen,” he said. “From Minkovsky Industries.”

  I asked Minkovsky if he was recording. He looked injured. He informed Zorella, the Black Cube founder, of any meetings, of course. He had to—he was polygraphed periodically. But: “Ronan, I would never, ever record.”

  Later, Minkovsky would maintain that the pen he’d taken out was perfectly innocent, and that he wasn’t aware of any other. But on my way out of the meeting that night, I texted Ostrovskiy, “Do you know who that pen was delivered to?”—and he replied with a string of pictures, all showing Minkovsky, just before we met, standing on a corner, accepting delivery of the spy pen.

  A few days later the spy pen appeared to resurface in Black Cube’s latest operation. A middle-aged man with a neat white beard, who identified himself as Michel Lambert, sat down for lunch with John Scott-Railton, a researcher for the watchdog group Citizen Lab. Lambert had said he worked for the Paris-based agricultural technology firm CPW-Consulting, and asked to meet about Scott-Railton’s doctoral research on using kite-mounted cameras to create maps, which is a thing, apparently.

  But as food arrived, Lambert’s interests strayed. Citizen Lab, which tracks state-backed efforts to hack and surveil journalists, had recently reported that NSO Group’s Pegasus software compromised an iPhone belonging to a friend of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, not long before Saudi operatives cut Khashoggi to pieces with a bone saw. The investigation had prompted sharp criticism of NSO Group, which denied that its software was used to target Khashoggi but also refused to answer questions about whether the software had been sold to the Saudi government. Lambert wanted to know about Citizen Lab’s work on NSO Group. He asked whether there was any “racist element” to the focus on an Israeli group. He pressed Scott-Railton about his views on the Holocaust. As they spoke, Lambert took out a black pen with a silver clip and a chrome ring on its barrel. He laid it just so on a legal pad in front of him, tip pointed at Scott-Railton.

  The script was familiar. In the operations in which Stella Penn Pechanac had been involved, targeting employees of West Face Capital and critics of AmTrust Financial Services, Black Cube agents had also solicited anti-Semitic statements. But this time, the mark was wise to it: suspecting subterfuge, Scott-Railton had decked himself out with recording devices. He’d been taping the whole time.

  It was a spy vs. spy confrontation of sorts—and each had brought his own tail as backup. Raphael Satter, an Associated Press journalist with whom Scott-Railton had been working, arrived with a camera and started questioning the man who was not named Michel Lambert after all. The Black Cube agent’s cover had been blown. From a table nearby, Ostrovskiy had been watching and photographing the meeting, too. Khaykin, who had been there earlier and then departed, started calling, apoplectic. “Our guy got burned!” he said. “Get to the lobby immediately! He needs to get out.”

  The Black Cube agent ducked out of a service entrance. Ostrovskiy picked up the agent and his luggage, then drove around, trying to shake potential tails. As they drove, the agent placed frantic calls, trying to book the first possible flight out of New York. On his luggage was a tag bearing the name “ALMOG” and a home address in Israel. This name was real: the agent was Aharon Almog-Assouline, a retired Israeli security official later reported to have been involved in a string of Black Cube operations.

  Black Cube and NSO Group would later deny any connection to the operation against Citizen Lab. But in many of the meetings Ostrovskiy had described to me over the preceding months, Almog-Assouline had been there, appearing to target figures who criticized NSO Group and argued that its software was being used to hunt journalists.

  Black Cube w
as furious about the botched operation. The agency ordered that everyone with knowledge of the matter be polygraphed immediately. Ostrovskiy called, worried that it was only a matter of time before he was exposed. He wanted to talk, and not just to a reporter. He had knowledge of espionage operations, by agents closely linked to a foreign government, on American soil. He had already tried the FBI, only to be passed between skeptical agents who finally hung up. He asked if I had a better contact in law enforcement. I called Bertoni. He was still adamant about keeping direct engagement with prosecutors to a minimum. But he agreed that there was nothing wrong with informing a source about how to get to the authorities.

  The last time I discussed the matter with my old classmate was at another restaurant in the Financial District. I stepped messily out of a downpour. He, neatly dry, flashed another perfect smile and ordered drinks.

  “You should think about it,” he said again. On the table, his hand was a hairsbreadth from mine. “You don’t have to deal with all this alone.”

  I turned over how it would feel. Then I withdrew my hand by a few inches. I said I wouldn’t talk, but I had sources who might. I asked for the right contact to give them.

  Soon after, I sent Ostrovskiy a name at the Southern District of New York. Ostrovskiy got a lawyer—John Tye, the same whistle-blower attorney I consulted—and began the process of volunteering to be a witness.

  CHAPTER 55:

  MELTING

  At NBC News, the year after the Weinstein story was fraught. In late November 2017, Savannah Guthrie, wearing a floral-print black dress fit for a morning TV funeral, announced that Matt Lauer had been fired overnight. A “detailed complaint from a colleague about inappropriate sexual behavior in the workplace” had come in less than forty-eight hours before. She said she was “heartbroken,” calling Lauer “my dear, dear friend” and emphasizing that he was “loved by many, many people here.”

  Guthrie read a statement from Andy Lack that suggested management was shocked about Lauer, too. The unnamed colleague had lodged “the first complaint about his behavior in the over twenty years he’s been at NBC News.” The network moved quickly to reinforce that idea in the wider press.

  After the announcement, Oppenheim gathered members of the investigative unit in the conference room on the fourth floor. He said that, while the behavior alleged by the unnamed colleague was “unacceptable,” the breach was of professional, not criminal, standards of conduct. “Some of the behavior took place in the workplace. And Matt Lauer is Matt Lauer,” he said. “So there’s obviously a power differential there.” But, Oppenheim emphasized, the network employees who spoke with the unnamed colleague “did not report her using words like ‘criminal’ or ‘assault.’” Soon, articles to which NBC’s communications team contributed were conveying the same message. When the network collaborated with People magazine on a cover story announcing Hoda Kotb as Lauer’s replacement—“Hoda & Savannah: ‘Our Hearts Were Broken,’” read the headline—this party line would become more explicit. “Multiple sources describe the cause for termination as an affair that violated NBC’s terms of employment,” that article read. “Sources initially told The Post that Lauer had been accused of sexual assault,” Page Six reported, “but later said it was inappropriate sexual behavior.” Outlets in contact with NBC at the time said the network made no attempt to alter the characterizations of the matter as an affair.

  Oppenheim also echoed Lack’s suggestion that the network had been unaware of any complaints about Lauer until two days before, when the unnamed colleague came forward. The statement struck several journalists present as strange. Variety and the New York Times had both been working on articles accusing Lauer of serial sexual misconduct for weeks, calling numerous people at the network in the process. And many in the building had heard of complaints about Lauer long before that. At the meeting with Oppenheim, McHugh spoke up again: “Prior to Monday, a lot of us have heard rumors of stuff about Matt… let’s just say that. Prior to Monday, was NBC aware of any allegations of sexual misconduct against Matt?”

  “No,” Oppenheim said. “We went back and looked, and, as we said in the statement, there has not been an allegation made internally in twenty years” in “any place where there would be a record of such a thing.” The qualifying language was significant: that there would be no formal HR records about a figure of Lauer’s importance was practically an assumption. Weinstein had also been adamant that there were no “formal” records of sexual misconduct allegations in his file, either. So had Bill O’Reilly at Fox News. But that wasn’t the question. McHugh hadn’t asked about formal records—he’d asked whether NBC had been “aware.” And on this, Oppenheim was less clear. “We all read the New York Post and walk past supermarket checkout stands and see the National Enquirer,” he said. “There’s not a lot you can do with that, especially when the parties involved are saying this is National Enquirer nonsense.”

  Oppenheim was right: Lauer, AMI’s employees and internal records would later reveal, had been of great interest to the Enquirer all through 2017 and 2018. One email exchange within the tabloid even contained the résumé of the anonymous colleague whose accusations precipitated the firing.

  Not long after, Greenberg called McHugh into his office for what McHugh suspected was an effort to determine whether he was talking to the press. McHugh said that he was disquieted by what he was learning about NBC’s in-house problems, and the bearing they might have had on our Weinstein coverage. “That’s what people are talking about, they’re all saying that—”

  “That they were covering up Matt Lauer,” Greenberg said.

  “Yeah,” McHugh replied.

  “You really think they were aware of a problem with Matt Lauer?” Greenberg said.

  McHugh looked him in the eye and said, “I do.”

  Over the following months, the message that no one at NBC knew about Lauer became a steady drumbeat. In May 2018, NBCUniversal announced the final results of an internal investigation: “We found no evidence indicating that any NBC News or Today show leadership, News HR or others in positions of authority in the News Division received any complaints about Lauer’s workplace behavior prior to Nov. 27, 2017,” the self-report concluded. The network had resisted calls for an independent investigation, both within the company and in the press. Outside lawyers were enlisted to review the results after the fact, but the research was conducted entirely by Kim Harris’s team, including Stephanie Franco, the company’s senior vice president for employment law. The day the internal report was announced, Oppenheim and Harris called another crisis meeting with the investigative unit. The assembled journalists erupted with skeptical questions. McHugh was again among them. “Has NBC ever paid an employee who presented information on Matt to sign a nondisclosure agreement?” he asked. Harris blinked. “Umm,” she said, “no.”

  Then he asked if there had been any settlements in the last “six or seven years” with any employees related to harassment in general. More hesitation. “Not that I’m aware of,” Harris said finally.

  At one point in the meeting, Harris appeared to grow impatient with the journalists’ calls for an independent review. “It feels like having an outside voice, whether they came to the same conclusions or not, would make it go away quicker,” said one woman in the room. “It’s so frustrating.”

  “Well, if the press would stop covering it, it will go away,” Harris said.

  There was a pause, then still another investigative journalist said, “But we are the press.”

  From the beginning, other outlets were publishing reporting at odds with Oppenheim’s and Harris’s characterizations of what the network knew. Hours after NBC announced Lauer’s termination, Variety asserted that “several women… complained to executives at the network about Lauer’s behavior, which fell on deaf ears given the lucrative advertising surrounding Today.” The publication suggested that the complaints about Lauer were an open secret. He had given one colleague a sex toy, with an explicit note
about how he hoped to use it on her. He’d played “fuck/marry/kill” games on open mics during commercial breaks. Clips of a similar tenor began to surface, including one of Lauer in 2006, seeming to tell Meredith Vieira, “Keep bending over like that. It’s a nice view.” At a 2008 private Friars Club roast of Lauer, Katie Couric had performed a David Letterman–style top ten list that included a reference to a sex act between Lauer and Ann Curry, and Jeff Zucker, then the head of NBCUniversal, did a bit about Lauer’s wife forcing him to sleep on the couch because of his indiscretions. Donald Trump, then the host of The Celebrity Apprentice, had attended. “The whole theme was that he does the show and then he has sex with people, with employees,” Joe Scarborough said on air. “So was this whispered behind closed doors? No. It was shouted from the mountaintops and everybody laughed about it.”

  Several junior Today employees said Lauer had been brazen in pursuing sexual encounters with them in the office. Addie Collins, a former production assistant, told me that Lauer had aggressively, almost obsessively, hit on her in 2000, when she was twenty-four years old. She’d kept many of the notes he’d sent her over work email or in the software used to maintain show rundowns. “NOW YOU’RE KILLING ME… YOU LOOK GREAT TODAY! A BIT TOUGH TO CONCENTRATE,” read a typical one. Because of Lauer’s power in their workplace, Collins told me she’d found it difficult to decline when he started ordering her to his dressing room, or even, on one occasion, to a bathroom stall, for sexual favors. She’d consented, but it had made her feel sick, afraid for her job, afraid of retaliation. Though she couldn’t prove it, she suspected Lauer later contributed to her missing out on professional opportunities.