THE SPIES THAT POLITICIANS AND OLIGARCHS HIRE TO END YOUR LIFE - "THEY
SENT THEM AFTER ME!"
- Stella Penn Pechanac worked for a Mossad-linked
Israeli intelligence company
- Weinstein hired the firm just months before
sexual allegations ruined his career
- But Stella told the actress she was
executive at London asset management firm
By Adam Luck And Ben Lazarus For The Mail On
Sunday
With her long blonde hair, catwalk figure
and dazzling smile, it's easy to believe that Stella Penn Pechanac could
have been one of the victims of disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey
Weinstein.
Indeed, that's exactly what she told New
York Magazine writer Ben Wallace when she introduced herself as 'Anna'
with another terrible story about the influential producer.
However, with his journalist's instinct,
Wallace smelled a rat.
Stella Penn Pechanac (pictured) was a spy
working for the infamous Mossad-linked Israeli intelligence company
Black Cube
This was 2016, well before the #MeToo
scandal emerged, and even Wallace's colleagues had no idea he was
investigating claims of sexual harassment against Weinstein.
When they met for coffee, 'Anna' confided
she had had an affair with Weinstein that had ended badly.
But there was something about her story that
didn't quite ring true. She seemed far more concerned, in fact, with
asking questions about other Weinstein victims than her own story.
Call it paranoia, but Wallace had a sneaking
suspicion she was recording him.
However, Rose McGowan, the actress who first
accused Weinstein of rape, was rather more easily fooled.
Stella's plausible manner and hard-to-place
European accent convinced the actress that she was Diana Filip, an
executive from London asset management firm Reuben Capital Partners, who
wanted to invite McGowan to speak at a gala dinner.
She befriended actress Rose McGowan (alongside
Harvey Weinstein in 2007) after telling her that she was an executive
from a London asset management firm who wanted to invite her to speak
at a gala dinner
Over the course of several months, 'Diana' inveigled her way into the
Scream star's life. Whether McGowan was in California or New York, Diana
always seemed to be conveniently nearby.
They met for long walks, drinks and girls'
nights out. McGowan even told her 'there was no one else in the world she
could trust'.
But it was all a con. Just like Anna, Diana
was merely a cover dreamed up by Stella, a spy working for the infamous
Mossad-linked Israeli intelligence company Black Cube.
Weinstein had hired the firm in the months
before his career and reputation were ruined by a welter of sexual
allegations.
An extraordinary contract, dated July 11,
2017, between the mogul's lawyers and the British arm of the Israeli firm
show that Weinstein had tasked Black Cube with two primary objectives: to
'provide intelligence which will help the Client's efforts to completely
stop the publication of a new, negative article in a leading NY
newspaper', and to 'obtain additional content of a book which is currently
being written and which includes harmful negative information on and about
the Client'.
To achieve this, Black Cube promised a
dedicated team. As part of the operation, codenamed Parachute, the
organisation introduced Stella to Weinstein.
Her main objective was to befriend McGowan,
obtain a draft of her memoir – and discredit it. And she was tasked with
finding out about and blocking other allegations about Weinstein – just
like the stories Ben Wallace was working on.
Stella, now 36, went undercover to meet a worker
in a bank that had been critical of a Black Cube client but she has
since turned her back on the world of espionage
In late 2017, Weinstein met three Black Cube
operatives in the back room of a New York restaurant. There, one of the
agents told Weinstein 'we got something good for you'.
After a short pause, a woman with long blonde
hair and high cheekbones stepped forward and introduced herself as
Anna.
She read passages from McGowan's upcoming
book. Listening in a state of shock, Weinstein muttered repeatedly: 'Oh my
God.'
Today, Stella Penn Pechanac has left her
lucrative job at Black Cube and claims to have turned her back on the
murky world of espionage.
She is pregnant with her second child and, in
an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, has agreed to lay bare her
extraordinary and disturbing double life as an agent for hire.
It is clear from the first moment that Stella
is ideal spy material. She comes across as open, engaging and honest, with
an unwavering gaze and a seemingly puncture-proof self-confidence.
The first thing she wants to make clear is
that she was never involved in any honeytraps.
'I was never a Bond girl,' she insists.
'I was James.'
So how did she come to be a central figure in
the most explosive scandal ever to grip Hollywood?
'I acted for years, I spoke five languages,
and I travelled a lot,' she says.
'They approached me.'
If that seems unlikely, consider that Black
Cube was set up by former Israeli intelligence officers in 2010 and is
known for – and trades on – its links with the feared Mossad intelligence
service.
Consider also that Stella's fractured
background could have been dreamed up by John le Carré: she was born in
Sarajevo into a mixed Muslim/Orthodox Christian family that had sheltered
Jewish Yugoslavs during the Holocaust. Her grandfather perished in a
concentration camp.
Her family converted to Judaism and escaped
the bloody Balkans civil war in 1994 and Stella volunteered for the
Israeli Defence Force as soon as she turned 18, rising to lieutenant in
the air force.
She graduated from an elite Israeli university
and went to drama school before joining Black Cube. Although there appear
to be puzzling gaps in her CV, she doesn't admit to any previous
intelligence training.
However, she did divulge it was the ex-Israeli
premier Ehud Barak who put Weinstein's lawyers in touch with the firm.
'The company received the project, examined
it, found it legitimate,' Stella says.
'Weinstein was respected, everyone wanted to
work for him, with him. We had this new project, it was like a big deal, a
huge client coming in. He was facing serious allegations, and there were
suspicions there was a negative campaign against him.
'I've worked on cases like this before so it
was just another of those, a commercial negative campaign but on a much
bigger scale because of Weinstein.'
Stella, 36, is eager to stress that Black Cube
field agents usually do not meet the clients, but in this case Weinstein
insisted on seeing her face-to-face. The initial meeting, she says, gave
her a rare insight into the disgraced titan.
'He was 100 per cent sure people were out to
get him,' she says.
'So when I met him, contrary to the huge
reputation he had – how powerful, strong, dominant he had been portrayed –
he was vulnerable.
'He was saying, 'Someone out there is trying
to get me, I need your help and everything they are saying is a bunch of
lies. I have never done anything that is not consensual. Someone is trying
to ruin me, my business, my family and I need to find out who that is.''
Weinstein must have been happy with the
meeting and the material Stella and her team subsequently produced. The
former head of Miramax went on to spend more than £1million with Black
Cube to protect his reputation.
Stella sees her efforts as a professional job
aimed at protecting her client. Some of those at the other end of Black
Cube's techniques, however, describe a sinister and complex web designed
to ensnare and cripple those fighting him.
Key witnesses have had their reputations badly
damaged since the Weinstein allegations first surfaced, while journalists
working on the story have been intimidated.
Ronan Farrow, the writer who broke the
Weinstein story, details in his book Catch And Kill how the 67-year-old
mogul's intimidation tactics left him so frightened that friends advised
him to buy a gun.
He was so certain his calls and emails were
being monitored he took to communicating with an encrypted messaging app
and only connected to the internet through anonymous wi-fi hotspots.
Farrow was so worried that he asked a rival
Israeli spy firm what to do if he was being followed by a Black Cube
operative. The man replied: 'Just start running.'
The campaign certainly seems to have been
successful. Several high-profile cases against Weinstein, including those
by actress Ashley Judd and Hollywood producer Lucia Evans, have been
struck out.
Weinstein's legal team, led by Donna Rotunno,
nicknamed the Bulldog, are confident of getting their client off when his
trial on five counts of sexual assault and rape begins on January 6.
Faced with the prospect of potentially
spending the rest of his life behind bars, it is no surprise Weinstein
turned to Black Cube to save him. But just how does it operate?
Stella explains that every mission begins with
a team brain-storming session, but that the field operative always has the
final say.
'You are involved in the think-tank process.
No one is going to tell you to be a brain surgeon if you cannot hold that
cover,' she adds.
'The team builds the operation and does the
analysis and research, and the psychologists build the psychological
profile of the person you are supposed to meet.
'Then they bring in the agent, present them
with different options and see what works best.'
Recalling her approach to Rose McGowan using
the identity Diana Filip, Stella says: 'At that point it was just another
cover. It has to be really in-depth, you have to know the role really well
and the character really well. Essentially it is all just theatre, right?'
The former agent does not appear to recognise
that her approach may have been immoral.
Indeed, during a two-hour interview, Stella
only betrays her discomfort once and that is when she is asked what she
would think of someone approaching her daughter in the same manner that
she approached McGowan.
After a jarringly long pause, the former field
agent calmly recovers her equilibrium and says: 'You are not meeting them
in order to do anything wrong or harmful to them… in 99 per cent of
projects I reveal the bad guys.'
When asked whether this was true in the
Weinstein case, she confidently replies: 'Me talking to someone is not
harmful. I am just extracting information.'
McGowan, however, was distraught to discover
that a woman she regarded as a friend was actually an agent working for
Weinstein.
'Everyone lied to me all the time,' she said
later.
'I've lived inside a mirrored fun house.' She
is now suing Weinstein and Black Cube over what she describes as an
attempt to smear and defraud her.
So was Stella acting during her 'friendship'
with the actress? 'In a lot of aspects we are very much alike, so the
connections were very real,' she says, seemingly unable to comprehend why
her actions would appear distasteful to most people.
'In a parallel universe, in a different
dimension, in different circumstances, we really could have been friends
because although the circumstances were… a lie… the human aspect was very
authentic.'
Stella claims that her traumatic childhood in
war-torn Sarajevo gave her the ability to have empathy for her targets
like McGowan.
'The only way I can get to people and get into
their heads is by empathy and you cannot fake that. The empathy is real
even if the circumstances are tricky.'
But no matter how many mental blocks she has
put up to rid herself of any feelings of guilt, there is no doubt her
actions with McGowan were truly questionable. And she was not the only one
in the Black Cube cast of actors.
Briton Seth Freedman, a one-time Guardian
journalist and a former equities broker, who spent time in the Israel
Defence Forces, told The Mail on Sunday that he, too, was tasked with
'finding out who was talking to the press'.
Freedman had some success with McGowan. He
used the cover story of being a journalist working on an article about
Hollywood to convince McGowan's literary agent to encourage the star to
speak to him.
There followed a 75-minute call in which she
believed she was talking to a concerned British journalist and revealed
information about her accusations against Weinstein.
Freedman denies he was involved in any black
ops against Weinstein's victims.
'The line that is always used is Black Cube
are hired to investigate, harass and silence victims,' he says. 'I wasn't
hired to do any of these things.'
Just like Stella, Freedman was unmasked by
Farrow and no longer works for Black Cube.
Stella claims she left the firm in June for
personal reasons.
'Being a mother changed my priorities, the
risk assessment, everything,' she says.
'You cannot do the job with small children.
The universe sends you clues and that was mine.'
So what would she say to McGowan today?
'I think she is very brave, very strong, and I
am very supportive of what she was doing,' she says, smiling.
'I am sorry if she ever felt betrayed or hurt
by anything that I had to do. I am sorry that I was another person in her
life that was there under false pretences. My goal was never to hurt her.'
As with everything she says over the course of
the interview, it is impossible to tell whether the trained spy is lying
or not.
Regardless, it is perhaps a little too late
for apologies.
Mr Weinstein's attorneys said in a statement:
'Mr. Weinstein had a right to examine any claims against him to attempt to
prove they were false, as anyone facing false allegations would do.
'The firm is a recognized investigative agency
that was referred by the largest law firm in the world devoted solely to
business litigation and arbitration. In addition, the research that was
done was more comprehensive than so much of the fiction dreamed up for
[Ronan Farrow's] book.'