Juan Villoro
In 2023, at a highway intersection between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, a building housed an unusual business: controlling lies with global impact. Two Israeli journalists, Gur Megiddo and Omer Benjakob, and a French journalist, Frédéric Métézeau, managed to enter the austere-looking office. The only luxury was a wall covered with screens. “We don’t exist,” said the host as he welcomed them.
For six months, the journalists had pretended to work for an African country where elections were to be held. They suspected that this company, which went by the strange name of “Team Jorge,” had replaced Cambridge Analytica in manipulating political campaigns. Four or five people were there, but there was no doubt who the main “Jorge” was: a businessman in his 50s, with an austere appearance and an ostentatious watch. In the tone of someone who knows that insinuation is better than saying, he commented: “When the conventional is insufficient, we make the difference.” He explained that his company had been involved in 33 elections, winning 27 of them. The fee for altering the will of the people ranged from $6 million to $15 million.
With the internet came the golden age of disinformation. Cambridge Analytica amassed a fortune by spreading fake news in favor of candidates such as Donald Trump and Mauricio Macri, and was even hired not to operate. According to the New York Times, in 2017, the Peña Nieto administration paid the company more than $7 million in exchange for not collaborating with candidates outside the PRI.
Since the Normandy landings, which defined the outcome of World War II, the decisive date has been called “D-Day.” Thanks to digital mercenaries, the expression has changed: “D-Day” now refers to the disinformation that decides a campaign. In 2018, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had illegally used data from 50 million Facebook users. That scandal signed its death warrant. But the market for lies is quickly renewing itself: “Team Jorge” offered new days of disinformation.
The Israeli company has operated in Indonesia, Nigeria, Bosnia, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, and other countries (including Mexico). In a meeting with journalists posing as clients, “Jorge” explained that he had a multinational army of 30,000 digital avatars, devices for hacking Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Facebook, Telegram, Gmail, Instagram, and YouTube accounts, countless phones registered in Indonesia, and credit cards with which his avatars paid for accounts on Amazon and Airbnb. He had built a vast network of unreality, of diffuse technology, impossible to trace.
The operation depended on anonymity, but it was in the hands of someone who liked to show off. To impress his clients, “Jorge” gave a real-time demonstration. He logged into the accounts of a Nigerian politician and a businessman from the same country. Under the cover of other people’s identities, he could form alliances or engage in intrigues. In this case, he limited himself to sending a seemingly harmless message: the number 11. Satisfied with the invasion of accounts, he made a mistake: he deleted the message from his phone but not from the recipient’s, allowing journalists to speak with the Nigerian businessman who had received it and trace the identity of “Jorge.”
The seller of hope was Tal Hanan, a former member of the Israeli army, an explosives expert with strong contacts in the U.S. Sixth Fleet, a former collaborator with Cambridge Analytica, and the owner of Demoman International, a security company recommended on an Israeli Ministry of Defense website. In 2015, he had been arrested in Bern on espionage charges and released shortly thereafter. At the 2023 meeting, he reported that he had only exempted two countries from his manipulations: Israel and the United States.
Rarely has investigative journalism been so productive. Megiddo, Benjakob, and Métézeau secretly recorded Hanan and contributed to the collective report published by Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and other media outlets. Starting in 2023, “Team Jorge” disappeared from the map. He may have become a customer of the Eliminalia platform, dedicated to erasing records, whose slogan is: “We erase your past.”
Disinformation and oblivion are coveted digital products.
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