Inside the Mysterious Intelligence Firm Now in Mueller's Sights
HUSH HUSH
Inside the Mysterious Intelligence Firm Now in Muellers Sights
Wikistrat bills itself as a crowdsourced analysis agency based in Washington. But interviews with current and former employees and documents tell a very different story.
Ken Klippenstein
06.04.18 7:55 PM ET
In the fall of 2016, Donald Trump Jr. and other key aides to the future president reportedly met in Trump Tower with Joel Zamel, the founder of a company called Wikistrat.
Wikistrat bills itself as a crowdsourced geopolitical analysis firm based in Washington, D.C. But interviews with current and former employees and documents reviewed by The Daily Beast tell a different story: that the vast majority of Wikistrats clients were foreign governments; that Wikistrat is, for all intents and purposes, an Israeli firm; and that the companys work was not just limited to analysis. It also engaged in intelligence collection.
Robert Muellers office is investigating Wikistrat and Zamel, according to The Wall Street Journal, as the special counsels probe expands into Middle Eastern governments attempts to influence American politics.
Publicly, Wikistrat touts its crowdsourcing interface it has described as Wikipedia meets Facebook to develop reports for clients. The documents also highlight Wikistrats heavy reliance on gamificationapplying game design features to encourage user engagementto solicit information from sources. Former Wikistrat employees say its founder viewed himself as the Mark Zuckerberg of the national-security world.
But despite the firms purported commitment to transparent, open-source methodologies, the documents provided to The Daily Beast show something different: that the company exploits in country
informants as sources.
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