From Espionage to Electoral Fraud: Black Cube, the Israeli Firm Hired for Regime Change in Colombia

Following Colombia’s 2026 presidential election—in which the far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella was allegedly declared the winner—President Gustavo Petro condemned the existence of an “algorithmic fraud” operated from abroad by private intelligence companies. Among them, he highlighted Black Cube, a firm from the Israeli settler colony that, he stated, “supplied flawed algorithms and other support for the Bautista brothers.”

Fernando and Camilo Bautista are the entrepreneurs and majority shareholders of Thomas Greg & Sons, the company tasked with providing the scrutiny software used during the elections in Colombia.

For its part, Black Cube—often dubbed the “Private Mossad” of wealthy businessmen and politicians—is a corporation founded in 2010. With bases in Tel Aviv, London, and Madrid, the firm is dedicated to corporate espionage and was created by former Israeli intelligence officials Dan Zorella and Avi Yanus. Composed mainly of veterans from Israel’s elite intelligence and security units, including former members of the Mossad, its international advisory board has also featured senior figures of the Israeli establishment, such as the late former Mossad director Meir Dagan.

According to Petro, the alleged manipulation of the results was carried out from a server located in Los Angeles, California, utilizing algorithms designed to replace the records of citizens who did not show up to vote with irregularly issued ballots; this in theory allowed some individuals to cast multiple votes.

This firm—singled out by Gustavo Petro for supplying the algorithms used during the scrutiny phase to artificially favor the far-right candidate—has been repeatedly implicated in political interference during electoral processes in various countries, employing a diverse array of covert operations.

A global trail of electoral interference

The most recent case of this nature, in addition to Colombia, occurred in Slovenia during the elections in March of this year, when Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon condemned the Israeli intelligence company for electoral intervention. The firm was accused of conducting covert operations and recording videos to damage the government of Europeanist Robert Golob before the election, directly benefiting the conservative opposition.

Slovenian intelligence (SOVA) confirmed, weeks earlier, that opposition candidate Janez Janša met with three members of Black Cube. Among them was former Israeli national security adviser Giora Eiland—an executive at the firm—and the company’s founder and chief executive, Dan Zorella, a former military intelligence officer of the Israeli Zionist entity.

Both operatives, according to SOVA, visited the capital of the former Yugoslav nation, Ljubljana, on three occasions and remained “for a prolonged period” at the headquarters of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS). Janša, who belongs to the party, subsequently acknowledged his closeness to Giora Eiland.

The way the company operated—as it always does when hired—involves the use of false identities and covert recordings. Its modus operandi is based on tactical deception to extract information and distort it in favor of its paymasters.

Weeks before the Slovenian elections, recorded conversations of personalities close to the Golob government began circulating on social media, allegedly revealing practices of patronage and corruption. According to those targeted by the leaks, these recordings were made during meetings with actors posing as foreign investors, and the content was heavily manipulated and decontextualized to project the illusion of illegal activity.

The result of the Israeli operation was that former Prime Minister Robert Golob and his liberal party, Freedom Movement (Gibanje Svoboda), won the parliamentary elections by a razor-thin margin but were ultimately unable to form a governing coalition, forcing them to cede power and allowing the conservative Janez Janša to assume office as Prime Minister on May 22 of this year.

A similar episode occurred in Hungary, where the spying firm operated under a comparable scheme during the 2018 legislative elections. Black Cube agents used false identities to infiltrate and covertly record leaders of civil society organizations and opponents of the Fidesz-Civic Union government, led by Viktor Orbán—a far-right political ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Subsequently, the obtained material was disseminated across government-aligned media and weaponized by Orbán as part of a political strategy to discredit civil society and promote the so-called “Stop Soros Law”—a legislative package that criminalizes and punishes with up to one year in prison any individual or organization providing aid to undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers.

During the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary elections, Black Cube interfered once again through a more elaborate campaign of defamation and disinformation. The firm created a network of fake LinkedIn profiles offering fictitious job opportunities to serve as bait. The goal of this social engineering tactic was to trick journalists and activists into scheduling video interviews and recording their conversations, which were later used to discredit non-governmental organizations prior to the election.

Afterward, heavily edited fragments of these recordings were strategically leaked to smear NGOs and the independent press. The material was later cited directly by key political figures in Orbán’s government. In this case, the results of the electoral contest tacitly favored the ruling establishment, despite the victory at the polls of the center-right candidate Péter Magyar—an ally of Trump who left Fidesz to found his own center-right movement, tired, according to him, of institutionalized corruption.

Tactical espionage across Cyprus, the US, and Mexico

In Cyprus, in April 2026, the company itself confirmed it had carried out a covert operation on the island. Black Cube deployed classic spying tactics to secretly record senior officials and advisers to President Nikos Christodoulides, allegedly seeking to “expose corruption.” This prompted the resignation of several presidential advisers and triggered a severe political crisis over foreign interference.

In the US empire, during the fallout of the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, Black Cube was hired by political actors allegedly linked to the Trump administration to discredit former Barack Obama officials (such as Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl) who were involved in negotiating the agreement. Agents used false identities to gather compromising information and undermine the pact.

Mexico must be alert: Black Cube is already operating in the country

While Black Cube’s headquarters are located in Tel Aviv, London, and Madrid, the company enjoys global reach, offering covert operations, evidence collection, and counterintelligence for corporations and wealthy individuals embroiled in high-stakes legal disputes. In Mexico, according to a report published by El Universal in 2019, the firm has been actively operating since at least 2018.

According to a series of interviews published by El Universal with an anonymous source close to the company, the firm planned to open a fourth international office in 2019, noting that “for Black Cube, the Mexican market is highly interesting because it is a large economy with a strong presence of multinational companies.”

While that office has yet to officially materialize, the company has already been implicated in several espionage cases targeting high-profile figures, fueling some of the most controversial corporate litigations in recent Mexican history.

One of the most resounding cases occurred during the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, when Black Cube was hired amidst the bitter conflict involving the oil company Oro Negro, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), and a group of international investment funds.

At the time, Oro Negro hired the Israeli firm’s services, and its agents posed as United Arab Emirates (UAE) investors interested in bailing out the struggling oil company. Under false identities, they held clandestine meetings with high-ranking Pemex executives—including José Carlos Pacheco Ledesma, former executive coordinator of Pemex Perforación y Servicios; Carlos Morales Gil, former director of Pemex Exploration and Production; Mario Beauregard Álvarez; Gustavo Escobar Carré; and Arturo Henríquez Autrey—to extract information that would bolster Oro Negro’s legal strategy.

During those meetings—details of which were later filed in a civil lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and a complaint before the NAFTA arbitration commission against Pemex and the Mexican government—Pacheco Ledesma described a pervasive corruption scheme within Pemex. He alleged that Carlos Morales Gil had raised over two billion pesos from private contractors to finance Enrique Peña Nieto’s presidential campaign.

He further stated that to secure contracts with the state oil giant, it was necessary to pay substantial bribes to various officials. The resulting recordings were incorporated by Oro Negro into its litigation against the Mexican state and its creditors, turning Black Cube into one of the most influential and controversial actors in the dispute.

Furthermore, the billionaire businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego—one of the most vocal right-wing figures speculated to run in the 2030 presidential election—hired Black Cube’s services last year after falling victim to a massive scam, hoping to gain leverage in a fraud lawsuit in London.

In that dispute, Salinas Pliego, the founder and president of Grupo Salinas, had agreed to hand over $416.3 million in Elektra Group shares to an alleged heir of the Astor family—one of the oldest and wealthiest dynasties in Anglo-American history. What the Mexican tycoon did not know was that the entity presenting itself as “Astor Asset Management” had no connection to the multi-billion dollar family. It was actually a fraudulent firm set up by a Ukrainian national named Vladimir Sklarov, who successfully deceived Salinas Pliego with the promise of a $113.8 million loan that never materialized.

This is where Black Cube entered the picture. Salinas Pliego and his legal team hired the Israeli firm, which, according to reports published in El Universal, commands fees of up to $50 million per operation for its elite commercial intelligence services.

An undercover Black Cube agent managed to coax the opposing lawyer into revealing information protected by attorney-client privilege during a dinner where the lawyer became heavily intoxicated. However, the presiding judge in London ruled that this tactic offended the integrity of the justice system, promptly throwing out the gathered evidence and issuing a stinging rebuke of the Mexican tycoon’s legal strategy.

While the mastermind behind the scam, Sklarov, was eventually arrested within the US entity, Salinas Pliego continues his legal battle in London courts to recover his assets.

However, Black Cube’s footprint in Mexico stretches back even further, with its name appearing in various cases since 2014. For instance, when the casino company E-Games sued the Mexican state for illegally canceling its permits and shuttering its venues, it hired the Israeli firm to deploy undercover agents and record government officials to prove the closure was arbitrary. Black Cube’s shadowy presence has also been rumored in other high-stakes Mexican scandals, from the tracking of ghost companies tied to former governor Javier Duarte to the controversial acquisitions of Fertinal and Agronitrogenados, and even elements of the infamous “Master Scam” (Estafa Maestra).

Clearly, Black Cube intimately understands the intricate fabric of Mexican politics and the inner workings of corporate corruption. It serves as a go-between for high-ranking officials and powerful oligarchs eager to shape the political landscape.

Yet, the situation in Colombia marks a dangerous escalation: it is the first time Black Cube has been accused of directly intervening in a Latin American election through what is suspected to be a highly coordinated algorithmic fraud.

Protecting democracy: Legal defenses against foreign algorithms

The Mexican government and the broader left-wing movement must prepare themselves against the very real threat of this type of hybrid interference, shielding not only the Fourth Transformation (Cuarta Transformación) but also grassroots social organizations and independent leftist media.

Taking a proactive step, Ricardo Monreal Ávila, the coordinator of Morena in the Chamber of Deputies, recently presented a legislative proposal. The initiative seeks to annul elections if any form of foreign intervention is detected in favor of a specific candidate or political party, drawing lessons from recent international scandals.

Intended to be in effect for the upcoming 2027 mid-term elections, the reform focuses heavily on preventing meddling by foreign individuals, organizations, media outlets, and governments. It aims to block operations reminiscent of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the British data-mining firm harvested the personal information of approximately 87 million Facebook users to build psychographic profiles for targeted political manipulation.

Using a seemingly harmless personality quiz app, “This Is Your Digital Life,” Cambridge Analytica harvested data from users and their friends to build predictive models of voter behavior, weaponizing personalized social media advertisements to sway electoral outcomes.

To counter these modern threats, the Morena congressional bench proposes amending Article 41, Section VI of the Mexican Constitution. The amendment would explicitly prohibit foreign interference via social networks and digital platforms, empowering the Electoral Tribunal of the Federal Judiciary (TEPJF) to annul elections when such foreign meddling is verified.

According to the draft bill, such illicit intervention can manifest through several vectors, including “foreign financing, cyberattacks, coordinated disinformation campaigns, or targeted diplomatic pressures.”