Protocols of Zion: Protocol II – Economic Wars

PROTOCOLS OF THE MEETINGS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION

PROTOCOLS OF THE MEETINGS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION

Protocol No. 2 – Economic Wars

1. It is indispensable for our purpose that wars, so far as possible, should not result in territorial gains: war will thus be brought on to the economic ground, where the nations will not fail to perceive in the assistance we give the strength of our predominance, and this state of things will put both sides at the mercy of our international AGENTUR; which possesses millions of eyes ever on the watch and unhampered by any limitations whatsoever. Our international rights will then wipe out national rights, in the proper sense of right, and will rule the nations precisely as the civil law of States rules the relations of their subjects among themselves.

2. The administrators, whom we shall choose from among the public, with strict regard to their capacities for servile obedience, will not be persons trained in the arts of government, and will therefore easily become pawns in our game in the hands of men of learning and genius who will be their advisers, specialists bred and reared from early childhood to rule the affairs of the whole world. As is well known to you, these specialists of ours have been drawing to fit them for rule the information they need from our political plans from the lessons of history, from observations made of the events of every moment as it passes. The GOYIM are not guided by practical use of unprejudiced historical observation, but by theoretical routine without any critical regard for consequent results. We need not, therefore, take any account of them – let them amuse themselves until the hour strikes, or live on hopes of new forms of enterprising pastime, or on the memories of all they have enjoyed. For them let that play the principal part which we have persuaded them to accept as the dictates of science (theory). It is with this object in view that we are constantly, by means of our press, arousing a blind confidence in these theories. The intellectuals of the GOYIM will puff themselves up with their knowledge and without any logical verification of them will put into effect all the information available from science, which our AGENTUR specialists have cunningly pieced together for the purpose of educating their minds in the direction we want.

DESTRUCTIVE EDUCATION

3. Do not suppose for a moment that these statements are empty words: think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzsche-ism. To us jews, at any rate, it should be plain to see what a disintegrating importance these directives have had upon the minds of the GOYIM.

4. It is indispensable for us to take account of the thoughts, characters, tendencies of the nations in order to avoid making slips in the political and in the direction of administrative affairs. The triumph of our system of which the component parts of the machinery may be variously disposed according to the temperament of the peoples met on our way, will fail of success if the practical application of it be not based upon a summing up of the lessons of the past in the light of the present.

5. In the hands of the States of to-day there is a great force that creates the movement of thought in the people, and that is the Press. The part played by the Press is to keep pointing out our requirements that are supposed to be indispensable, to give voice to the complaints of the people, to express and to create discontent. It is in the Press that the triumph of freedom of speech finds its incarnation. But the GOYIM States have not known how to make use of this force; and it has fallen into our hands. Through the Press we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade; thanks to the Press we have got the GOLD in our hands, notwithstanding that we have had to gather it out of the oceans of blood and tears. But it has paid us, though we have sacrificed many of our people. Each victim on our side is worth in the sight of God a thousand GOYIM.

http://www.renegadetribune.com/protocols-of-zion-protocol-ii-economic-wars/

In the shadow of war: Ukraine as the great reset laboratory of the global tech elite . . .

While a very real conflict is raging in Ukraine, spotlights aren’t shining on the struggles of digital distribution. Yet the advocates of radical world restructuring and total surveillance recognized long ago the potential of this Eastern European country. With the vigorous participation from President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine would be a Mecca for US bio-weapons laboratories and pave the way for digital networking, the Metaverse, and a transparent citizenry. The linchpin is the digital ID app known as “Diia,” an acronym for “The Government and me.”

Zelensky’s Social Credit System The journey started in 2019 after Zelensky had only been in office for just a few months. The “Ministry for Digital Transformation” was founded, with the main task of creating a government platform for smartphones. The Diia app was launched in February 2020. Since then, progress has been accelerating. With more than 50 applications, online identification, and official governmental channels available via the app which include: Driver’s license, Covid vaccination passport, student ID card, the ability to set up a business, apply for insurance, and receive social benefits. A French tech portal wrote the following about it: “A model we previously only knew from China with its social credit system.” By the way, “ID Austria” is also supposed to go in this direction in its final expansion.

As a social credit system, it must also be implemented quite literally. Last year, Zelensky promised rewards of 1,000 Hryvnia (about 30 euros) – about one-tenth of a typical monthly salary – to any citizen who provided proof of a full vaccination record in Diia. Authorities are no longer permitted to insist on paper documents – and observers believe that the dual option is only a temporary solution. The timing is hardly a coincidence. Two weeks before it went live, Zelensky was named “Guest of Honour” for the first time at the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit hosted by the “Great Reset” architect Klaus Schwab.

“Investment Mecca” for Tech Companies Zelenski’s speech at the World Economic Forum included the buzzword of a “new normal.” He claimed that current global institutions do not function efficiently and that international security must be rethought. He presented a vision in which Ukraine would take a leading position in Central and Eastern Europe. In doing so, he openly gave his country’s opportunity for investment, recalling that many “big tech” companies started in garages. He presented his dream of a kind of Eastern European Silicon Valley that would turn his country into an “investment mecca.” Or, as Zelenski put it: “Ukraine is the place where miracles come true […] there is a substantial opportunity to expand new economic sectors”.

Schwab was enthused by the idea and pleased about the “reforms” in the country, many of which had been initiated by the WEF itself through WEF subordinate think tanks in Ukraine. However, the WEF isn’t alone in the interest of Ukraine. The globalist Atlantic Council, for example, recognized the potential for “innovation” shortly after Zelensky’s inauguration and mentioned an app that can operate door intercom systems by cell phone, as well as the blockchain company Bitfury. The Atlantic Council praised the developments as positive and mentioned a number of other IT companies in Ukraine. At a networking meeting, Schwab’s “young world leaders,” Justin Trudeau and Zelenski, discussed how to deepen such “innovations further.” Davos also has its own “Ukraine House,” which is regularly available for “networking” during WEF meetings.

Deals with Apple & Microsoft: Digital Census After the WEF appeal, things moved quickly. A deal was quickly struck with Apple to jointly conduct a digital census in 2023. Once again, using the Diia app and the U.S. company assisting to improve it. In particular, Apple will identify “priority projects that will promote Ukraine’s transition to paperless mode.” Once again, the collaboration is running under the “Ministry of Digital Transformation” – and is not an isolated case.

As recently as 2020, the Ministry finalized a similar deal with Microsoft, which was expected to add $500 million in value. The collaboration is said to be far-reaching, creating a “highly secure cloud platform ecosystem.” This is expected to impact “various industries and promote energy transition, digital transformation of agriculture and sustainability.” In addition, the employees of the Ukrainian government and public authorities are to receive a fully networked environment.

Incidentally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is creating the Metaverse, a kind of virtual reality that will connect more and more areas of life, was photographed with Zelenski. Activist Naomi Klein already had concerns that Corona would allow “Silicon Valley” to create a digital substructure for a global dictatorship. It is quite conceivable that the war in Ukraine will be another springboard for such goals.

Ukrainians are being bought off for a virtual life – 5 times more salary To attract further investment to the so-called “Diia City,” it was announced in 2020. This is a digital model for an economic zone with tax benefits for tech corporations. Among the few taxes required by the “Diia City” is a military tax to support the Ukrainian military. High wages are promised about five times higher than the average salary. The goal is to create 450,000 relevant jobs. The aim was to be an “economic model for simplified economic rules” that would form “the basis for the economic transformation of the entire country.” Zelensky fully backed the project. He repeated what he said in Davos: “We want to make Ukraine a global IT hub, a leader in innovation and technology.”

The goal was to attract Ukrainian and international IT companies, high-tech firms, investment funds, startups, and educational groups. The fields to be plowed ranged from agricultural technology to artificial intelligence, drone construction, aircraft and space technology, financial technology, medical neural networks and biotechnology, the advertising industry, trading platforms, the Internet of Things, publishing, blockchain companies, digital outsourcing, the graphics industry, and e-sports companies. In other words, a huge tax-privileged technology park for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” in which man and machine merge. The ultimate goal, of course, is the “Internet of the Bodies,” in which, according to WEF’s plan, the collection of “bodily data via a range of devices that can be implanted, swallowed or worn.”

Beginning of the end of cash based on the China model? The plans are obvious: Ukraine was meant as a Beta Test for the fully networked Great Reset world. The renowned Forbes magazine, for instance, also attested the country to be leading the “digital currency revolution.” This is a double-edged sword: A system that starts as a decentralized attempt to regain financial freedom can quickly become a cashless nightmare. Recall China, for example, where free cryptocurrencies are banned – but the country began working on the digital yuan simultaneously. Currently, Chinese state employees already receive part of their salary as state digital money. In China, people are now even begging for alms with QR codes. Similar plans have long been underway in Europe, as Wochenblick previously reported.

Ukraine being proposed as a hub for the digital market is nothing new either. One lever for this is so-called “non-fungible tokens.” These are digital goods that have a certain equivalent value as unique items. Examples include digital art, music, or unique items in PC games. In theory, however, NFTs can take any popular form as long as it is represented in the blockchain. So in a particularly dystopian future, people could theoretically have to speculate with cryptocurrency for a loaf of bread. Recently, an NFT of a Ukraine flag was sold for $6.75 million to pump that amount of money into the country.

From the digital nightclub to real virtual hell Digital applications in the Metaverse can take any form – and again, Ukraine is a playground for these ideas. Kyiv-based startup MultiNFT launched its own token-based cryptocurrency a few days ago. So far, the company operates digital nightclubs in the Metaverse, for example. Such venues and events could also be used to support the country in the current conflict and beyond.

What seems like an environment of solidarity now could become an illusory world horror of coexisting interconnected Metaverses in the future. The WEF is already hoping to correct the “system error” of the uncontrolled Internet. Imagine if we all have to enter virtual reality as cyborgs or holograms for important bureaucratic purposes. There would be no easier way to eliminate any dissidents – quite literally. Considering that future possibility, the WEF praise for the “climate goals of the Ukrainian central bank” no longer sounds like a harmless part of the radical transformation…

https://www.wochenblick.at/great-reset/im-schatten-des-krieges-ukraine-als-great-reset-labor-der-globalen-tech-eliten/

Sozialkredit und Metaversum-Hölle

Im Schatten des Krieges: Ukraine als Great-Reset-Labor der globalen Tech-Eliten

Symbolbilder (2): Pixabay; Collage: Wochenblick

Inhalt

Während in der Ukraine ein ganz realer Konflikt tobt, fällt naturgemäß kein Schweinwerfer-Licht auf die digitalen Verteilungskämpfe. Dabei erkannten die Verfechter des radikalen Welt-Umbaus und der totalen Überwachung längst das Potenzial des osteuropäischen Landes. Unter kräftigem Mitwirken von Präsident Wolodymyr Selenski sollte die Ukraine nicht nur Mekka für US-amerikanische Bio-Waffen-Labore sein, sondern auch den Weg zur digitalen Vernetzung, zum Metaversum und zum gläsernen Bürger bereiten. Dreh- und Angelpunkt ist die digitale ID-App “DiiA”, eine Abkürzung für “Der Staat und ich”.

Selenskis Sozialkredit-System

Die Reise führt uns zurück ins Jahr 2019. Selenski war erst wenige Monate im Amt und gründete ein “Ministerium für digitale Transformation”. Dessen wichtigste Aufgabe war die Schaffung einer Plattform für den “Staat auf einem Smartphone”, die App DiiA startete schließlich im Februar 2020. Seitdem geht alles schnell: Mehr als 50 Anwendungen, Nachweise und Behördenwege laufen mittlerweile über die App: Führerschein, Covid-Impfpass, Studentenausweis, Unternehmensgründung, Versicherungen, Sozialleistungen. Ein französisches Tech-Portal schreibt: “Ein Modell, das wir bislang nur aus China mit seinem Sozialkredit-System kannten.” Übrigens: auch “ID Austria” soll im Endausbau in diese Richtung gehen.

Das mit dem Sozialkredit-System ist auch durchaus wörtlich zu nehmen: Im Vorjahr versprach Selenski jedem Bürger, der in DiiA einen vollen Impfpass nachweist, eine Belohnung von 1.000 Griwna (etwa 30 Euro) – etwa ein Zehntel eines typischen Monatslohns. Behörden dürfen nicht mehr auf die Papierform von Dokumenten bestehen – und Beobachter gehen davon aus, dass die duale Variante nur eine Übergangslösung ist. Der Zeitpunkt ist wohl kaum ein Zufall: Zwei Wochen vor der Freischaltung war Selenski erstmals Ehrengast beim Gipfel des Weltwirtschaftsforums (WEF) um “Great Reset”-Architekt Klaus Schwab.

“Investment-Mekka” für Tech-Firmen

In Selenskis WEF-Rede fiel dabei bereits das Schlagwort einer “neuen Normalität”. Die aktuellen weltweiten Institutionen würden nicht effizient funktionieren, man müsse die internationale Sicherheit neu denken. Seine Vision damals: Ukraine soll dabei eine führende Position in Zentral- und Osteuropa einnehmen. Dabei unterbreitete er offen die Gelegenheit seines Landes für Investments und erinnerte an den Beginn mancher “Big Tech”-Unternehmen in Garagen. Sein vorgegebener Traum war es, eine Art osteuropäisches Silicon Valley zu eröffnen und sein Land zum “Investment-Mekka” umzukrempeln. Oder wie es Selenski ausdrückte: “Ukraine ist der Ort, wo Wunder wahr werden […] es gibt eine wesentliche Gelegenheit, neue Wirtschaftszweige zu erweitern”.

Pixabay

Schwab zeigte sich angetan und freute sich über die “Reformen” im Land. Einige davon hatte das WEF mit seinen untergeordneten Denkfabriken für die Ukraine selbst angestoßen. Nicht, dass es nicht davor schon derlei Überlegungen gab. So erkannte das globalistische “Atlantic Council” schon kurz nach Selenskis Amtseinführung das Potenzial für “Innovation”. Dabei erwähnte es eine App, in der man seine Türsprechanlage über sein Handy bedienen kann. Auch das Blockchain-Unternehmen Bitfury erwähnte es als positiv, sowie eine Reihe weiterer IT-Firmen in der Ukraine. Bei einem Vernetzungstreffen besprachen Schwabs “junge Weltführer” Justin Trudeau und Selenski, wie man solche “Innovationen” weiter vertiefen könnte. Auch in Davos gibt es ein eigenes “Ukraine House”, das regelmäßig im Rahmen der WEF-Treffen für “Vernetzungsarbeit” zur Verfügung steht.

Deals mit Apple & Microsoft: Digitale Volkszählung

Nach dem WEF-Appell ging es schnell. Rasch kam es zum Deal mit Apple, im Jahr 2023 gemeinsam eine digitale Volkszählung durchzuführen. Auch diese soll wieder über die DiiA-App laufen, der US-Konzern soll dabei mithelfen sie zu verbessern. Insbesondere soll er “prioritäre Projekte identifizieren, die den Umstieg der Ukraine auf den papierlosen Modus” befördern. Die Zusammenarbeit läuft einmal mehr mit dem “Ministerium für digitale Transformation” – und sie ist kein Einzelfall.

Denn ebenfalls noch 2020 schloss das Ressort einen ähnlichen Deal mit Microsoft ab, von dem man sich eine Wertschöpfung von 500 Millionen US-Dollar erhoffte. Die Zusammenarbeit soll weitreichend sein: Es geht um die Schaffung eines “hochgradig sicheren Cloud-Plattform-Ökosystems”. Diese sollen sich auf “verschiedene Branchen auswirken und die Energiewende, die digitale Transformation der Landwirtschaft und der Nachhaltigkeit befördern.” Zudem sollen die Arbeitsplätze des ukrainischen Regierungs- und Behördenapparats eine vollständig vernetzte Umgebung erhalten.

Übrigens: Auch Facebook-Chef Mark Zuckerberg, der am Metaverse, einer Art virtuellen Realität, die immer mehr Lebensbereiche vernetzt, arbeitet, ließ sich bereits mit Selenski ablichten. Die Aktivistin Naomi Klein befürchtete schon bei Corona, dass das “Silicon Valley” am digitalen Unterbau für eine globale Diktatur arbeitete. Gut denkbar, dass auch der Ukraine-Krieg ein weiteres Sprungbrett für solche Ziele sein soll.

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Ukrainer werden für virtuelles Leben gekauft: 5 Mal so viel Gehalt

Um weitere Investitionen anzulocken, wurde ebenfalls noch 2020 die sogenannte “DiiA City” angekündigt. Dabei handelt es sich um ein digitales Modell für eine Wirtschaftszone mit steuerlichen Begünstigungen für Tech-Konzerne. Unter den wenigen Steuern in “DiiA City” gehört auch eine Wehrabgabe, um das ukrainische Militär zu unterstützen. Dort sollte es zudem hohe Löhne geben – etwa das Fünffache des Durchschnittsgehalts. Geschaffen werden sollten damit 450.000 einschlägige Arbeitsplätze. Es sollte ein “wirtschaftliches Modell für vereinfachte Wirtschaftsregeln sein”, welche “die Basis für die ökonomische Transformation des gesamten Landes” bilden soll. Selenski stellte sich völlig hinter das Projekt. Er wiederholte, was er in Davos sagte: “Wir wollen die Ukraine zum globalen IT-Hub machen, zu einem führenden Land bei Innovation und Technologie.”

Pixabay

Angelockt werden sollten ukrainische und internationale IT-Firmen, hochtechnologisierte Firmen, Investmetfonds, Startups und Bildungskonzerne. Die Felder, die man so beackern wollte reichten von Agrar-Technologie über künstliche Intelligenz, Drohnenbau, Flugzeug- und Weltraumtechnologie, Finanztechnologie, medizinische neuronale Netze und Biotechnologie, die Werbebranche, Handelsplattformen, das Internet der Dinge, das Verlagswesen, Blockchain-Firmen, digitales Outsourcing, die Grafikbranche sowie E-Sports-Firmen. Sprich: Ein riesiger steuerbegünstigter Technologiepark für die “Vierte Industrielle Revolution”, in dem Mensch und Maschine verschmelzen. An deren Ende steht freilich das “Internet der Körper”, in dem wir nach WEF-Plan “Körperdaten über eine Reihe von Geräten, die implantiert, verschluckt oder getragen werden können” sammeln.

Anfang vom Ende des Bargelds nach China-Vorbild?

Die Pläne sind recht offensichtlich: Die Ukraine soll der Probelauf für die vollkommen vernetzte Great Reset Welt werden. Das renommierte Forbes-Magazin attestierte dem Land etwa auch, ein Anführer der “digitalen Währungsrevolution” zu sein. Das ist ein zweischneidiges Schwert: Was als dezentraler Versuch beginnt, wieder finanzielle Freiheit zu erlangen, kann schnell zum bargeldlosen Albtraum werden. Man erinnere sich etwa an China, wo freie Kryptowährungen verboten sind – das Land aber gleichzeitig begann, am digitalen Yuan zu arbeiten. Derzeit erhalten chinesische Staatsbedienstete einen Teil ihres Gehaltes bereits als staatliches Digitalgeld. In China wird mittlerweile sogar mit QR-Codes um Almosen gebettelt. Ähnliche Pläne laufen längst auch in Europa – Wochenblick berichtete.

Der Ukraine als Umschlagplatz für den digitalen Markt: Das ist ebenfalls nichts neues. Ein Hebel dafür sind sogenannte “Non Fungible Tokens”. Dabei handelt es sich um digitale Güter, die als Unikate einen bestimmten Gegenwert besitzen. Beispiele sind bislang digitale Kunst, Musik oder einmalige Gegenstände in PC-Spielen. In der Theorie können NFTs aber jede beliebte Form annehmen, solange er in der Blockchain repräsentiert ist. In einer besonders dystopischen Zukunft könnten die Menschen also theoretisch mit Kryptowährung um einen Laib Brot spekulieren müssen. Erst kürzlich wurde jedenfalls ein NFT einer Ukraine-Flagge um 6,75 Mio. US-Dollar verkauft, um diese Summe ins Land zu pumpen.

Vom Digital-Nachtclub in die reale virtuelle Hölle

Digitale Anwendungen im Metaversum können jede Form annehmen – und wieder ist die Ukraine ein Spielplatz dieser Ideen. Das aus Kiew stammende Startup MultiNFT brachte vor wenigen Tagen seine eigene Token-basierte Kryptowährung heraus. Bislang betreibt das Unternehmen etwa digitale Nachtclubs im Metaversum. Auch solche Veranstaltungsorte und Veranstaltungen könnten natürlich dafür benutzt werden, das Land im aktuellen Konflikt und darüber hinaus zu unterstützen.

Pixabay

Was sich aktuell als solidarische Umgebung anhört, könnte in der Zukunft zu einer Horror-Scheinwelt nebeneinander existierender, aber miteinander vernetzter Metaversen werden. Schon jetzt erhofft sich das WEF, den “Systemfehler” des unkontrollierten Internets zu korrigieren. Wenn wir alle als Cyborgs oder Hologramme für alle wichtigen Wege in die virtuelle Realität müssen, ist es nämlich umso leichter, allfällige Dissidenten auszuschalten – und das ist dann durchaus wörtlich zu sehen. Unter solchen Umständen hört sich das WEF-Lob für die “Klimaziele der ukrainischen Zentralbank” noch fast wie der harmloserer Teil des Radikal-Umbaus an…

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New York Times Magazine . . . https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel-spyware.html

The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon

A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.

By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti

In June 2019, three Israeli computer engineers arrived at a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. They unpacked dozens of computer servers, arranging them on tall racks in an isolated room. As they set up the equipment, the engineers made a series of calls to their bosses in Herzliya, a Tel Aviv suburb, at the headquarters for NSO Group, the world’s most notorious maker of spyware. Then, with their equipment in place, they began testing.

The F.B.I. had bought a version of Pegasus, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.

Read Highlights from This Investigation . . .

F.B.I. Secretly Bought Israeli Spyware and Explored Hacking U.S. Phones

Jan. 28, 2022

Since NSO had introduced Pegasus to the global market in 2011, it had helped Mexican authorities capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo. European investigators have quietly used Pegasus to thwart terrorist plots, fight organized crime and, in one case, take down a global child-abuse ring, identifying dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries. In a broader sense, NSO’s products seemed to solve one of the biggest problems facing law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in the 21st century: that criminals and terrorists had better technology for encrypting their communications than investigators had to decrypt them. The criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going global.

But by the time the company’s engineers walked through the door of the New Jersey facility in 2019, the many abuses of Pegasus had also been well documented. Mexico deployed the software not just against gangsters but also against journalists and political dissidents. The United Arab Emirates used the software to hack the phone of a civil rights activist whom the government threw in jail. Saudi Arabia used it against women’s rights activists and, according to a lawsuit filed by a Saudi dissident, to spy on communications with Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, whom Saudi operatives killed and dismembered in Istanbul in 2018.

None of this prevented new customers from approaching NSO, including the United States. The details of the F.B.I.’s purchase and testing of Pegasus have never before been made public. Additionally, the same year that Khashoggi was killed, the Central Intelligence Agency arranged and paid for the government of Djibouti to acquire Pegasus to assist the American ally in combating terrorism, despite longstanding concerns about human rights abuses there, including the persecution of journalists and the torture of government opponents. The D.E.A., the Secret Service and the U.S. military’s Africa Command had all held discussions with NSO. The F.B.I. was now taking the next step.

As part of their training, F.B.I. employees bought new smartphones at local stores and set them up with dummy accounts, using SIM cards from other countries — Pegasus was designed to be unable to hack into American numbers. Then the Pegasus engineers, as they had in previous demonstrations around the world, opened their interface, entered the number of the phone and began an attack.

This version of Pegasus was “zero click” — unlike more common hacking software, it did not require users to click on a malicious attachment or link — so the Americans monitoring the phones could see no evidence of an ongoing breach. They couldn’t see the Pegasus computers connecting to a network of servers around the world, hacking the phone, then connecting back to the equipment at the New Jersey facility. What they could see, minutes later, was every piece of data stored on the phone as it unspooled onto the large monitors of the Pegasus computers: every email, every photo, every text thread, every personal contact. They could also see the phone’s location and even take control of its camera and microphone. F.B.I. agents using Pegasus could, in theory, almost instantly transform phones around the world into powerful surveillance tools — everywhere except in the United States.

Ever since the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, about U.S. government surveillance of American citizens, few debates in this country have been more fraught than those over the proper scope of domestic spying. Questions about the balance between privacy and security took on new urgency with the parallel development of smartphones and spyware that could be used to scoop up the terabytes of information those phones generate every day. Israel, wary of angering Americans by abetting the efforts of other countries to spy on the United States, had required NSO to program Pegasus so it was incapable of targeting U.S. numbers. This prevented its foreign clients from spying on Americans. But it also prevented Americans from spying on Americans.

NSO had recently offered the F.B.I. a workaround. During a presentation to officials in Washington, the company demonstrated a new system, called Phantom, that could hack any number in the United States that the F.B.I. decided to target. Israel had granted a special license to NSO, one that permitted its Phantom system to attack U.S. numbers. The license allowed for only one type of client: U.S. government agencies. A slick brochure put together for potential customers by NSO’s U.S. subsidiary, first published by Vice, says that Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to get intelligence “by extracting and monitoring crucial data from mobile devices.” It is an “independent solution” that requires no cooperation from AT&T, Verizon, Apple or Google. The system, it says, will “turn your target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”

The Phantom presentation triggered a discussion among government lawyers at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. that lasted two years, across two presidential administrations, centering on a basic question: Could deploying Phantom inside the United States run afoul of long-established wiretapping laws? As the lawyers debated, the F.B.I. renewed the contract for the Pegasus system and ran up fees to NSO of approximately $5 million. During this time, NSO engineers were in frequent contact with F.B.I. employees, asking about the various technological details that could change the legal implications of an attack.

The discussions at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. continued until last summer, when the F.B.I. finally decided not to deploy the NSO weapons. It was around this time that a consortium of news organizations called Forbidden Stories brought forward new revelations about NSO cyberweapons and their use against journalists and political dissidents. The Pegasus system currently lies dormant at the facility in New Jersey.

An F.B.I. spokeswoman said that the bureau examines new technologies “not just to explore a potential legal use but also to combat crime and to protect both the American people and our civil liberties. That means we routinely identify, evaluate and test technical solutions and services for a variety of reasons, including possible operational and security concerns they might pose in the wrong hands.” The C.I.A., the D.E.A., the Secret Service and Africa Command declined to comment. A spokesman for the government of Djibouti said the country had never acquired or used Pegasus.

In November, the United States announced what appeared — at least to those who knew about its previous dealings — to be a complete about-face on NSO. The Commerce Department was adding the Israeli firm to its “entity list” for activities “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” The list, originally designed to prevent U.S. companies from selling to nations or other entities that might be in the business of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, had in recent years come to include several cyberweapons companies. NSO could no longer buy critical supplies from American firms.

It was a very public rebuke of a company that had in many ways become the crown jewel of the Israeli defense industry. Now, without access to the American technology it needed to run its operations — including Dell computers and Amazon cloud servers — it risked being unable to function. The United States delivered the news to Israel’s Ministry of Defense less than an hour before it was made public. Israeli officials were furious. Many of the headlines focused on the specter of an out-of-control private company, one based in Israel but largely funded offshore. But authorities in Israel reacted as if the ban were an attack on the state itself. “The people aiming their arrows against NSO,” said Yigal Unna, director general of the Israel National Cyber Directorate until Jan. 5, “are actually aiming at the blue and white flag hanging behind it.”

The Israelis’ anger was, in part, about U.S. hypocrisy: The American ban came after years of secretly testing NSO’s products at home and putting them in the hands of at least one country, Djibouti, with a record of human rights abuses. But Israel also had its own interests to protect. To an extent not previously understood, Israel, through its internal export-licensing process, has ultimate say over who NSO can sell its spyware to. This has allowed Israel to make NSO a central component of its national-security strategy for years, using it and similar firms to advance the country’s interests around the world.

A yearlong Times investigation, including dozens of interviews with government officials, leaders of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, cyberweapons experts, business executives and privacy activists in a dozen countries, shows how Israel’s ability to approve or deny access to NSO’s cyberweapons has become entangled with its diplomacy. Countries like Mexico and Panama have shifted their positions toward Israel in key votes at the United Nations after winning access to Pegasus. Times reporting also reveals how sales of Pegasus played an unseen but critical role in securing the support of Arab nations in Israel’s campaign against Iran and even in negotiating the Abraham Accords, the 2020 diplomatic agreements that normalized relations between Israel and some of its longtime Arab adversaries.

The combination of Israel’s search for influence and NSO’s drive for profits has also led to the powerful spying tool’s ending up in the hands of a new generation of nationalist leaders worldwide. Though the Israeli government’s oversight was meant to prevent the powerful spyware from being used in repressive ways, Pegasus has been sold to Poland, Hungary and India, despite those countries’ questionable records on human rights.

The United States has made a series of calculations in response to these developments — secretly acquiring, testing and deploying the company’s technology, even as it has denounced the company in public and sought to limit its access to vital American suppliers. The current showdown between the United States and Israel over NSO demonstrates how governments increasingly view powerful cyberweapons the same way they have long viewed military hardware like fighter jets and centrifuges: not only as pivotal to national defense but also as a currency with which to buy influence around the world.

Selling weapons for diplomatic ends has long been a tool of statecraft. Foreign-service officers posted in American Embassies abroad have served for years as pitchmen for defense firms hoping to sell arms to their client states, as the thousands of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010 showed; when American defense secretaries meet with their counterparts in allied capitals, the end result is often the announcement of an arms deal that pads the profits of Lockheed Martin or Raytheon.

Cyberweapons have changed international relations more profoundly than any advance since the advent of the atomic bomb. In some ways, they are even more profoundly destabilizing — they are comparatively cheap, easily distributed and can be deployed without consequences to the attacker. Dealing with their proliferation is radically changing the nature of state relations, as Israel long ago discovered and the rest of the world is now also beginning to understand.

For Israel, the weapons trade has always been central to the country’s sense of national survival. It was a major driver of economic growth, which in turn funded further military research and development. But it also played an important role in forging new alliances in a dangerous world. In the 1950s, when the nation was still young and essentially powerless, its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, established covert links with countries and organizations that lay just outside the ring of hostile Arab states that surround Israel. He called this approach “the periphery doctrine,” and his foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, began weaving a network of secret contacts inside countries throughout the Middle East, Asia and Africa, including many that publicly sided with Arabs. Offering advanced weapons was a key to making those connections.

By the mid-1980s, Israel had firmly established itself as one of the world’s top arms exporters, with an estimated one in 10 of the nation’s workers employed by the industry in some way. All of this bought good will for Israel from select foreign leaders, who saw the military aid as essential to preserving their own power. In turn, those countries often voted in Israel’s favor at the United Nations General Assembly, the Security Council and other international forums. They also allowed the Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces to use their countries as bases to launch operations against Arab nations.

As cyberweapons began to eclipse fighter jets in the schemes of military planners, a different kind of weapons industry emerged in Israel. Veterans of Unit 8200 — Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency — poured into secretive start-ups in the private sector, giving rise to a multibillion-dollar cybersecurity industry. As with purveyors of conventional weapons, cyberweapons makers are required to obtain export licenses from Israel’s Ministry of Defense to sell their tools abroad, providing a crucial lever for the government to influence the firms and, in some cases, the countries that buy from them.

‘This issue is not about Israel’s security. It’s about something that got out of control.’

None of these firms have been as wildly successful, or as strategically useful to the Israeli government, as NSO. The firm has its roots in a former chicken coop in Bnai Zion, an agricultural cooperative just outside Tel Aviv. In the mid 2000s, the building’s owner, realizing that coders might deliver a better profit than chickens, gave the space a light makeover and began renting it to technology start-ups looking for cheap office space. Among the start-up founders there, Shalev Hulio stood out from the veteran programmers around him: He was charismatic and easy to spend time with, but he also gave the impression — at least initially — of being somewhat naïve. He and his partner, Omri Lavie, an old friend from school, had each done their mandatory military service in combat units, rather than intelligence or technology, and for years they struggled to find a product that would connect. They developed a video marketing product, which briefly took off but then crashed with the 2008 global recession. They then started another company, called CommuniTake, that offered cellphone tech-support workers the ability to take control of their customers’ devices — with permission.

That idea met with little enthusiasm, so the two friends pivoted to a very different kind of customer. “A European intelligence agency found out about our innovation and contacted me,” Hulio recalled in an interview. What quickly emerged was that their product could solve a much bigger problem than customer service.

For years, law-enforcement and intelligence agencies had been able to intercept and understand communications in transit, but as powerful encryption became widely available, that was no longer the case. They could intercept a communication, but they could no longer understand what it said. If they could control the device itself, though, they could collect the data before it was encrypted. CommuniTake had already figured out how to control the devices. All the partners needed was a way to do so without permission.

And so NSO was born. Hulio and Lavie, lacking the contacts they would need to scale their product, brought in a third partner, Niv Karmi, who had served both in military intelligence and in the Mossad. They took the company name from their first initials (Niv, Shalev and Omri) — that it sounded a little like “N.S.A.” was a happy coincidence — and began hiring. Recruitment was the essential ingredient of their business plan. The company would eventually employ more than 700 people in offices around the world and a sprawling headquarters in Herzliya, where individual labs for Apple and Android operating systems are filled with racks of smartphones undergoing constant testing by the firm’s hackers as they seek and exploit new vulnerabilities.

Nearly every member of NSO’s research team is a veteran of the intelligence services; most of them served with AMAN, the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, the largest agency in the Israeli espionage community — and many of them in AMAN’s Unit 8200. The company’s most valuable employees are all graduates of elite training courses, including a secretive and prestigious Unit 8200 program called ARAM that accepts only a handful of the most brilliant recruits and trains them in the most advanced methods of cyberweapons programming. There are very few people with this kind of training anywhere in the world, and soon enough, few places would have a higher concentration of them than NSO’s headquarters in Herzliya — where there were not just a few top specialists but hundreds. This would provide NSO with an incredible competitive advantage: All of those engineers would work daily to find “zero days,” i.e., new vulnerabilities in phone software that could be exploited to install Pegasus. Unlike rival firms, which generally struggled to find even a single zero day and therefore could be shut down if it were made public, NSO would be able to discover and bank multitudes of them. If someone locked one back door, the company could quickly open another.

In 2011, NSO engineers finished coding the first iteration of Pegasus. With its powerful new tool, NSO hoped to quickly build a stable of clients in the West. But many countries, especially those in Europe, were initially wary of buying foreign intelligence products. There was a particular concern about Israeli companies that were staffed by former top intelligence officials; potential customers feared that their spyware might be contaminated with even deeper spyware, allowing the Mossad access to their internal systems.

Reputation mattered, both for sales and for holding onto the well-trained coders who had made Pegasus a reality. Hulio appointed Maj. Gen. Avigdor Ben-Gal, a Holocaust survivor and a highly respected combat officer, as NSO’s chairman, and established what he said would be the company’s four main pillars: NSO would not operate the system itself. It would sell only to governments, not to individuals or companies. It would be selective about which governments it allowed to use the software. And it would cooperate with Israel’s Defense Export Controls Agency, or DECA, to license every sale.

The decisions NSO made early on about its relationship with regulators ensured that it would function as a close ally, if not an arm, of Israeli foreign policy. Ben-Gal saw that this oversight was crucial to NSO’s growth — it might restrict which countries the company could sell to, but it would also protect the company from public blowback about what its clients did. When he informed the Defense Ministry that NSO would voluntarily be subject to oversight, the authorities also seemed happy with this plan. One former military aide to Benjamin Netanyahu, at the time Israel’s prime minister, explained the advantages quite clearly. “With our Defense Ministry sitting at the controls of how these systems move around,” he said, “we will be able to exploit them and reap diplomatic profits.”

The company quickly got its first major break. Mexico, in its ongoing battle against drug cartels, was looking for ways to hack the encrypted BlackBerry messaging service favored by cartel operatives. The N.S.A. had found a way in, but the American agency offered Mexico only sporadic access. Hulio and Ben-Gal arranged a meeting with Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, and arrived with an aggressive sales pitch. Pegasus could do what the N.S.A. could do, and it could do so entirely at the command of Mexican authorities. Calderón was interested.

Israel’s Ministry of Defense informed NSO that there was no issue with selling Pegasus to Mexico, and a deal was finalized. Soon after, investigators at an office of the Center for Investigation and National Security, or CISEN — now called the Center for National Investigation — went to work with one of the Pegasus machines. They fed the mobile phone number of a person connected to Joaquín Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel into the system, and the BlackBerry was successfully attacked. Investigators could see the content of the messages, as well as the locations of different BlackBerry devices. “Suddenly we started to see and hear anew,” says a former CISEN leader. “It was like magic.” In his view, the new system had revitalized their entire operation — “Everyone felt like maybe for the first time we could win.” It was also a win for Israel. Mexico is a dominant power in Latin America, a region where Israel for years has waged a kind of diplomatic trench warfare against anti-Israeli groups supported by the country’s adversaries in the Middle East. There is no direct evidence that Mexico’s contracts with NSO brought about a change in the country’s foreign policy toward Israel, but there is at least a recognizable pattern of correlation. After a long tradition of voting against Israel at United Nations conferences, Mexico slowly began to shift “no” votes to abstentions. Then, in 2016, Enrique Peña Nieto, who succeeded Calderón in 2012, went to Israel, which had not seen an official visit from a Mexican president since 2000. Netanyahu visited Mexico City the following year, the first visit ever by an Israeli prime minister. Shortly after, Mexico announced that it would abstain from voting on several pro-Palestinian resolutions that were being considered by the United Nations.

In a statement, Netanyahu’s spokesman said that the former prime minister never sought a quid pro quo when other countries wanted to buy Pegasus. “The claim that Prime Minister Netanyahu spoke to foreign leaders and offered them such systems in exchange for political or other measures is a complete and utter lie. All sales of this system or similar products of Israeli companies to foreign countries are conducted with the approval and supervision of the Ministry of Defense, as outlined in Israeli law.”

The Mexico example revealed both the promise and the perils of working with NSO. In 2017, researchers at Citizen Lab, a watchdog group based at the University of Toronto, reported that authorities in Mexico had used Pegasus to hack the accounts of advocates for a soda tax, as part of a broader campaign aimed at human rights activists, political opposition movements and journalists. More disturbing, it appeared that someone in the government had used Pegasus to spy on lawyers working to untangle the massacre of 43 students in Iguala in 2014. Tomás Zerón de Lucio, the chief of the Mexican equivalent to the F.B.I., was a main author of the federal government’s version of the event, which concluded that the students were killed by a local gang. But in 2016 he became the subject of an investigation himself, on suspicion that he had covered up federal involvement in the events there. Now it appeared that he might have used Pegasus in that effort — one of his official duties was to sign off on the procurement of cyberweapons and other equipment. In March 2019, soon after Andrés Manuel López Obrador replaced Peña Nieto after a landslide election, investigators charged that Zerón had engaged in torture, abduction and tampering with evidence in relation to the Iguala massacre. Zerón fled to Canada and then to Israel, where he entered the country as a tourist, and where — despite an extradition request from Mexico, which is now seeking him on additional charges of embezzlement — he remains today.

The American reluctance to share intelligence was creating other opportunities for NSO, and for Israel. In August 2009, Panama’s new president, Ricardo Martinelli, fresh off a presidential campaign grounded on promises of “eliminating political corruption,” tried to persuade U.S. diplomats in the country to give him surveillance equipment to spy on “security threats as well as political opponents,” according to a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks. The United States “will not be party to any effort to expand wiretaps to domestic political targets,” the deputy chief of mission replied.

Martinelli tried a different approach. In early 2010, Panama was one of only six countries at the U.N. General Assembly to back Israel against a resolution to keep the Goldstone Commission report on war crimes committed during the 2008-9 Israeli assault on Gaza on the international agenda. A week after the vote, Martinelli landed in Tel Aviv on one of his first trips outside Latin America. Panama will always stand with Israel, he told the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, in appreciation of “its guardianship of the capital of the world — Jerusalem.” He said he and his entourage of ministers, businesspeople and Jewish community leaders had come to Israel to learn. “We came a great distance, but we are very close because of the Jewish heart of Panama,” he said.

Behind closed doors, Martinelli used his trip to go on a surveillance shopping spree. In a private meeting with Netanyahu, the two men discussed the military and intelligence equipment that Martinelli wanted to buy from Israeli vendors. According to one person who attended the meeting, Martinelli was particularly interested in the ability to hack into BlackBerry’s BBM text service, which was very popular in Panama at that time.

Within two years, Israel was able to offer him one of the most sophisticated tools yet made. After the installation of NSO systems in Panama City in 2012, Martinelli’s government voted in Israel’s favor on numerous occasions, including to oppose the United Nations decision to upgrade the status of the Palestinian delegation — 138 countries voted in favor of the resolution, with just Israel, Panama and seven other countries opposing it.

According to a later legal affidavit from Ismael Pitti, an analyst for Panama’s National Security Council, the equipment was used in a widespread campaign to “violate the privacy of Panamanians and non-Panamanians” — political opponents, magistrates, union leaders, business competitors — all “without following the legal procedure.” Prosecutors later said Martinelli even ordered the team operating Pegasus to hack the phone of his mistress. It all came to an end in 2014, when Martinelli was replaced by his vice president, Juan Carlos Varela, who himself claims to have been a target of Martinelli’s spying. Martinelli’s subordinates dismantled the espionage system, and the former president fled the country. (In November, he was acquitted by Panamanian courts of wiretapping charges.)

NSO was doubling its sales every year — $15 million, $30 million, $60 million. That growth attracted the attention of investors. In 2014, Francisco Partners, a U.S.-based global investment firm, paid $130 million for 70 percent of NSO’s shares, then merged another Israeli cyberweapons firm, called Circles, into their new acquisition. Founded by a former senior AMAN officer, Circles offered clients access to a vulnerability that allowed them to detect the location of any mobile phone in the world — a vulnerability discovered by Israeli intelligence 10 years earlier. The combined company could offer more services to more clients than ever.

Through a series of new deals, Pegasus was helping to knit together a rising generation of right-wing leaders worldwide. On Nov. 21, 2016, Sara and Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed Prime Minister Beata Szydlo of Poland and her foreign minister, Witold Waszczykowski, for dinner at their home. Shortly after, Poland signed an agreement with NSO to purchase a Pegasus system for its Central Anti-Corruption Bureau. Citizen Lab reported in December 2021 that the phones of at least three members of the Polish opposition were attacked by this spy machine. Netanyahu did not order the Pegasus system to be cut off — even when the Polish government enacted laws that many in the Jewish world and in Israel saw as Holocaust denial, and even when Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, at a conference attended by Netanyahu himself, listed “Jewish perpetrators” among those responsible for the Holocaust.

In July 2017, Narendra Modi, who won office on a platform of Hindu nationalism, became the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel. For decades, India had maintained a policy of what it called “commitment to the Palestinian cause,” and relations with Israel were frosty. The Modi visit, however, was notably cordial, complete with a carefully staged moment of him and Prime Minister Netanyahu walking together barefoot on a local beach. They had reason for the warm feelings. Their countries had agreed on the sale of a package of sophisticated weapons and intelligence gear worth roughly $2 billion — with Pegasus and a missile system as the centerpieces. Months later, Netanyahu made a rare state visit to India. And in June 2019, India voted in support of Israel at the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council to deny observer status to a Palestinian human rights organization, a first for the nation.

The Israeli Defense Ministry also licensed the sale of Pegasus to Hungary, despite Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s campaign of persecution against his political opponents. Orban deployed the hacking tools on opposition figures, social activists, journalists who conducted investigations against him and families of former business partners who had become bitter enemies. But Orban has been Israel’s devoted supporter in the European Union. In 2020, Hungary was one of the few countries that did not publicly speak out against Israel’s plan at the time to unilaterally annex swaths of the West Bank. In May of that year, European Union foreign ministers tried to reach unanimity when calling for a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinian Islamic group Hamas, as well as for increased humanitarian aid for Gaza. Hungary declined to join the other 26 countries.

Arguably the most fruitful alliances made with Pegasus’s help have been those between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Israel first authorized the sale of the system to the U.A.E. as something of an olive branch, after Mossad agents poisoned a senior Hamas operative in a Dubai hotel room in 2010. It was not the assassination itself that infuriated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto Emirati leader, so much as it was that the Israelis had carried it out on Emirati soil. The prince, widely known as M.B.Z., ordered that security ties between Israel and the U.A.E. be severed. In 2013, by way of a truce, M.B.Z. was offered the opportunity to buy Pegasus. He readily agreed.

The Emirates did not hesitate to deploy Pegasus against its domestic enemies. Ahmed Mansoor, an outspoken critic of the government, went public after Citizen Lab determined that Pegasus had been used to hack his phone. When the vulnerability was made public, Apple immediately pushed out an update to block the vulnerability. But for Mansoor, the damage had already been done. His car was stolen, his email account was hacked, his location was monitored, his passport was taken from him, $140,000 was stolen from his bank account, he was fired from his job and strangers beat him on the street several times. “You start to believe your every move is watched,” he said at the time. “Your family starts to panic. I have to live with that.” (In 2018, Mansoor was sentenced to 10 years in prison for posts he made on Facebook and Twitter.)

The messy outcome of the Dubai assassination aside, Israel and the U.A.E. had, in fact, been growing closer together for years. The calcified animosities between Israel and the Arab world that for years drove Middle East politics had given way to a new uneasy alliance in the region: Israel and the Sunni states in the Persian Gulf lining up against their archenemy, Iran, a Shia nation. Such an alliance would have been unheard-of decades ago, when Arab kings proclaimed themselves to be the protectors of the Palestinians and their struggle for independence from Israel. The Palestinian cause has less of a hold on some of the next generation of Arab leaders, who have shaped much of their foreign policy to address the sectarian battle between Sunni and Shia, and they have found common cause with Israel as an important ally against Iran.

No leader represents this dynamic more than Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the son of the ailing king and the kingdom’s de facto ruler. In 2017, Israeli authorities decided to approve the sale of Pegasus to the kingdom, and in particular to a Saudi security agency under the supervision of Prince Mohammed. From this point on, a small group of senior members of the Israeli defense establishment, reporting directly to Netanyahu, took a lead role in the exchanges with the Saudis, all “while taking extreme measures of secrecy,” according to one of the Israelis involved in the affair. One Israeli official said that the hope was to gain Prince Mohammed’s commitment and gratitude. The contract, for an initial installation fee of $55 million, was signed in 2017.

Years prior, NSO had formed an ethics committee, made up of a bipartisan cast of former U.S. foreign-policy officials who would advise on potential customers. After the Khashoggi killing in 2018, its members requested an urgent meeting to address the stories circulating about NSO involvement. Hulio flatly denied that Pegasus had been used to spy on the Washington Post columnist. Pegasus systems log every attack in case there is a complaint, and — with the client’s permission — NSO can perform an after-the-fact forensic analysis. Hulio said his staff had done just that with the Saudi logs and found no use of any NSO product or technology against Khashoggi. The committee nonetheless urged NSO to shut off the Pegasus system in Saudi Arabia, and it did. The committee also advised NSO to reject a subsequent request by the Israeli government to reconnect the hacking system in Saudi Arabia, and it stayed off.

Then, the following year, the company reversed course. Novalpina, a British private-equity firm, acting in cooperation with Hulio, purchased Francisco Partners’ shares of NSO, with a valuation of $1 billion — more than five times more than it was when the American fund acquired it in 2014. In early 2019, NSO agreed to turn the Pegasus system in Saudi Arabia back on.

Keeping the Saudis happy was important for Netanyahu, who was in the middle of a secret diplomatic initiative he believed would cement his legacy as a statesman — an official rapprochement between Israel and several Arab states. In September 2020, Netanyahu, Donald Trump and the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, and all the signatories heralded it as a new era of peace for the region.

But behind the scenes of the peace deal was a Middle East weapons bazaar. The Trump administration had quietly agreed to overturn past American policy and sell F-35 joint strike fighters and armed Reaper drones to the U.A.E., and had spent weeks assuaging Israel’s concerns that it would no longer be the only country in the region with the sophisticated F-35. Pompeo would later describe the aircraft deals in an interview as “critical” to obtaining M.B.Z.’s consent to the historic move. And by the time the Abraham Accords were announced, Israel had provided licenses to sell Pegasus to nearly all the signatories.

Things hit a snag a month later, when the Saudi export license expired. Now it was up to the Israeli Defense Ministry to decide whether or not to renew it. Citing Saudi Arabia’s abuse of Pegasus, it declined to do so. Without the license, NSO could not provide routine maintenance on the software, and the systems were crashing. Numerous calls among Prince Mohammed’s aides, NSO executives, the Mossad and the Israeli Defense Ministry had failed to resolve the issue. So the crown prince placed an urgent telephone call to Netanyahu, according to people familiar with the call. He wanted the Saudi license for Pegasus renewed.

Prince Mohammed had a significant amount of leverage. His ailing father, King Salman, had not officially signed on to the Abraham Accords, but he offered the other signatories his tacit blessing. He also allowed for a crucial part of the agreement to move forward: the use of Saudi air space, for the first time ever, by Israeli planes flying eastward on their way to the Persian Gulf. If the Saudis were to change their mind about the use of their airspace, an important public component of the accords might collapse.

Netanyahu apparently had not been updated on the brewing crisis, but after the conversation with Prince Mohammed his office immediately ordered the Defense Ministry to have the problem fixed. That night, a ministry official called NSO’s operations room to have the Saudi systems switched back on, but the NSO compliance officer on duty rebuffed the request without a signed license. Told that the orders came directly from Netanyahu, the NSO employee agreed to accept an email from the Defense Ministry. Shortly afterward, Pegasus in Saudi Arabia was once again up and running.

The next morning, a courier from the Defense Ministry arrived at NSO headquarters delivering a stamped and sealed permit.

In December 2021, just weeks after NSO landed on the American blacklist, the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, arrived in Israel for meetings with Israeli officials about one of the Biden administration’s top foreign-policy priorities: getting a new nuclear pact with Iran three years after President Trump scuttled the original deal.

The visit carried historical weight. In 2012, Sullivan was one of the first American officials to talk with Iranian officials about a possible nuclear deal — meetings that President Obama chose to keep secret from the Israelis out of fear they might try to blow up the negotiations — and Israeli officials were furious when they found out. Now, years later, Sullivan arrived in Jerusalem to make his case for a united front in the next round of Iran diplomacy.

But there was another matter that Israeli officials — including the prime minister, the minister of defense and the foreign minister — wanted to discuss: the future of NSO. The Israelis pressed Sullivan about the reasons behind the blacklist decision. They also warned that if NSO went bankrupt, Russia and China might fill the vacuum and expand their own influence, by selling their own hacking tools to nations that could no longer buy from Israel.

Unna, the former head of the Israel National Cyber Directorate, says he believes the move against the Israeli firms, which was followed by Facebook’s blacklisting of more Israeli cyberweapons and intelligence companies, is part of something bigger, a plan to neuter Israel’s advantage in cyberweapons. “We have to prepare for a battle to defend the good name that we earned honestly,” he says.

Biden administration officials dismiss this talk of a deep conspiracy, saying the decision about NSO has everything to do with reining in a dangerous company and nothing to do with America’s relationship with Israel. There is far more at stake in the decades-old alliance, they say, than the fate of a hacking firm. Martin Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, agrees. “NSO was providing the means for states to spy on their own people,” he says. “From my point of view it’s straightforward. This issue is not about Israel’s security. It’s about something that got out of control.”

Under the ban, NSO’s future is in doubt, not just because of its reliance on American technology but also because its presence on an American blacklist will probably scare away prospective clients — and employees. One Israeli industry veteran says that the “sharks in the water smell blood,” and Israeli officials and industry executives say there are currently a handful of American companies, some with close ties to intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, interested in buying the company. Were that to happen, the new owner could potentially bring the company in line with U.S. regulations and start selling its products to the C.I.A., the F.B.I. and other American agencies eager to pay for the power its weapons offer.

Israeli officials now fear a strategic takeover of NSO, in which some other company — or country — would take command over how and where the weapon is used. “The State of Israel cannot allow itself to lose control of these types of companies,” a senior Israeli official said, explaining why such a deal was unlikely. “Their manpower, the knowledge they’ve gathered.” Foreign ownership was fine, but Israel had to maintain control; a sale was possible “only under conditions that preserve Israel’s interests and freedom of action.”

But the days of Israel’s near monopoly are over — or soon will be. The intense desire inside the United States government for offensive hacking tools has not gone unnoticed by the company’s potential American competitors. In January 2021, a cyberweapons firm called Boldend made a pitch to Raytheon, the defense-industry giant. According to a presentation obtained by The Times, the company had developed for various American government agencies its own arsenal of weapons for attacking cellphones and other devices.

One slide in particular underscored the convoluted nature of the cyberweapons business. The slide claimed that Boldend had found a way to hack WhatsApp, the popular messaging service owned by Facebook, but then lost the capability after a WhatsApp update. This claim is especially remarkable because, according to one of the slides, a major Boldend investor is Founders Fund — a company run by Peter Thiel, the billionaire who was one of Facebook’s first investors and remains on its board. The capability to hack WhatsApp, according to the presentation, “doesn’t currently exist” in the United States government, and the intelligence community was interested in acquiring that capability.

In October 2019, WhatsApp sued NSO, arguing that NSO tools had exploited a vulnerability in its service to attack approximately 1,400 phones around the world. Beyond the question of who controls the weapons, at stake in that lawsuit is who is responsible for the damage they do. NSO’s defense has always been that the company only sells the technology to foreign governments; it has no role in — or responsibility for — targeting specific individuals. This has long been the standard P.R. line of weapons manufacturers, whether Raytheon or Remington.

Facebook is out to prove that this defense, at least in NSO’s case, is a lie. In its lawsuit, the tech giant argues that NSO was an active participant in some of the hacks, pointing to evidence that it leased some of the computer servers used to attack WhatsApp accounts. Facebook’s argument is essentially that without NSO’s constant involvement, many of its clients would not be able to aim the gun.

When they first presented their case against NSO, Facebook’s lawyers thought they had evidence to disprove one of the Israeli company’s longtime claims — that the Israeli government strictly prohibits the firm from hacking any phone numbers in the United States. In court documents, Facebook asserted it had evidence that at least one number with a Washington area code had been attacked. Clearly someone was using NSO spyware to monitor an American phone number.

But the tech giant didn’t have the entire picture. What Facebook didn’t appear to know was that the attack on a U.S. phone number, far from being an assault by a foreign power, was part of the NSO demonstrations to the F.B.I. of Phantom — the system NSO designed for American law-enforcement agencies to turn the nation’s smartphones into an “intelligence gold mine.”

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Ronen Bergman is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, based in Tel Aviv. His latest book is “Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations,” published by Random House. More about Ronen Bergman

Mark Mazzetti is a Washington investigative correspondent, and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. He is the author of "The Way of the Knife: the C.I.A, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth."  More about Mark Mazzetti