Time for the Emiratis to Get Serious
Cut these guys loose if you want to play in the big leagues.
Sheikh Tahnoun bin Zayed Al Nahyan is an ambitious man. He’s the head of one of the largest sovereign wealth funds on earth. But the world is not going to take him seriously if he continues to do so much business with the Israelis, including security tech within his own country.
Josh Wolfe
Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital was just there for a visit. A lot of these VC are basically fundraisers, they have no vision, no plan. They just raise, raise, raise. Wolfe is a loser. Working with the Israel lobby’s American businessmen is not going to get you the kind of pull in the U.S. that it did in the past, so the smart move is to cut Wolfe loose. He blocked me, but he’s been retweeting the former SVB guy and obvious Israeli asset Shai Goldman.
Mati Kochavi and Yaacov Apelbaum
Let’s talk about Falcon Eye, the mass surveillance system installed in Abu Dhabi in 2016. It’s Israeli.
The key player in it was Mati Kochavi, the Israeli entrepreneur who was also behind Vocativ. This raises some questions about Ronan Farrow’s reporting about Pegasus and other spyware, because Farrow partnered with Vocativ, the entire concept of which was to combine Israeli data mining with journalism.
Yaacov Apelbaum, the Israeli spy connected to the Hunter Biden matter, worked on Falcon Eye with Kochavi. They are co-inventors on a “knowledge management system” employed there, with names on the patent together, and Apelbaum was CTO of Asia Global Technology. You can read some more about the Falcon Eye project here. Apelbaum was one of the first to inspect the version of the Hunter Biden laptop dropped off at the repair store in Delaware.
Needless to say working with these sorts of people is not going to endear the Emiratis to the U.S. deep state.
There are a number of security risks related to Kochavi’s activities, one of his companies was involved the contract for guarding all the New York City-area airports, including Teterboro. It’s very common for former IDF intel people to go to work for him. An investor in some of Kochavi’s companies is Stephen Ross, the developer and owner of the Miami Dolphins.
Now, Mike Ryan, who gave a briefing to a number of journalists in relation to the Hunter Biden matter, used to work for Bill Bachenberg, who Apelbaum is suing, along with Stephanie Lambert, the Michigan attorney who has been criminally charged in connection with some of the Stop the Steal stuff. Ryan claims Bachenberg and Apelbaum had a relationship prior to the laptop matter.
Another person Apelbaum holds a patent with is Charles Fote, who died in November after a long career at First Data Corporation, which makes payment processing machines. First Data was bought by KKR in 2007. You can read the patent here. A big question is what becomes of this data.
Apelbaum has pointed the finger at Patrick Byrne and Mike Flynn, with whom he seems to have been in touch at one point or another. I am skeptical of some of Apelbaum’s claims on his blog, but again, I don’t necessarily think he’s wrong about everything. He’s clearly a very capable man. His post on 2000 Mules is very worth reading.
One thing that is very interesting is that Regnery withdrew the 2000 Mules book, and the publishing house was bought by Skyhorse a couple of months ago. Like Apelbaum, I too am very skeptical of the whole crew around the 2000 Mules thing.
Dan Gertler?
Dan Gertler, the Israeli diamonds magnate, has been under Magnitsky Act sanctions for some time due to his role in corruption in the DRC, though they were briefly lifted by Trump in yet another example of that president’s troubling solicitousness toward Israeli criminality. You can look at the sanctioned entities here. There is a jet that has been flying around since 10/7 that has been making some interesting stops which may be linked to him. The BSD Group is one of them:
The night of 10/7 it flew to Vienna from Tel Aviv.
It was in Baku right around the time Artsakh was evacuated in an ethnic cleansing of the Armenians there:
Last week it made a trip to Abu Dhabi. What’s all this about?