Off Leash Does the Holy Land: Nuking Gaza, Arms Sales to Israel, and Other Excellent Adventures in the Middle East Discussed in Erik Prince’s Secret Group Chat

Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater and the Off Leash group chat, and generous donor to right-wing candidates and causes. Photo from his WhatsApp profile.

Of the roughly 400 members of Erik Prince’s Off Leash group chat as of the beginning of this month, about three-quarters were from the US or live here to judge from their mobile phone numbers. Of the three dozen other countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, North America, and the Middle East that were represented in Off Leash’s membership roll, Israel’s bloc of 32 was easily the largest among the overseas contingents.

Prince has deep connections in Israel that date back to at least 2012, when he traveled there and met with Ari Harow, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s foreign policy advisor, and Dorian Barak, a politically-wired businessman with ties to the military-industrial complex, who were co-directors of a venture capital fund called Indigo Strategic Capital. Prince invested in Indigo and through it bought a stake in several Israeli companies, including a private security firm called NowForce, Haaretz reported five years later in an excellent story about Prince’s visit 

Harow subsequently became Netanyahu’s chief of staff, but in 2017 took a plea on fraud charges related to his official duties. Off Leash member Nathan Jacobson, a Canadian Israeli businessman who’s a longtime friend of Netanyahu, paid Harow $140,000 to advance his interests in the country, but when Harow didn’t “deliver the goods,” demanded his money back, according to unconfirmed accounts in the Israeli media. 

As part of Harow’s plea deal, he agreed to turn state's witness against Netanyahu, who has been charged with taking quid pro quo payoffs of his own from two wealthy businessmen. Harow testified at Netanyahu’s trial, which began in 2020 but has been repeatedly delayed and remains in process. 

Barak became Prince’s consigliere for Israel-related business and has served on the board, been an executive, or invested in many of his companies. They include Cyprus-based Unplugged, which markets an allegedly super secure mobile phone, and two firms headquartered in Hong Kong, Frontier Services Group (FSG), a security and logistics company, and Frontier Strategic Capital (FSC), private equity fund that invests in natural resource projects.

Another of Prince’s Israeli business associates is Lital Leshem, an executive with FRG who spent seven years in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), including a stint as an Operations Officer in Gaza. The two reportedly met when Lishem was working for Black Cube, the firm founded by two former Israeli intelligence officers that Harvey Weinstein hired with orders to destroy the reputations of women who’d accused of sexual assault. 

Lishem is also a co-founder of a company called Carbyne, which “brought together a who’s who of power brokers and intelligence figures from multiple regions including Russia, China and the Trump administration itself," the Turkish news outlet TRT World reported. Carbyne’s board members, executives and shareholders have reportedly included Michael Chertoff, former Secretary of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush; Peter Thiel, the billionaire GOP megadonor and founder of intelligence contractor Palantir Technologies; and -- who else -- Jeffrey Epstein, the long-rumored Mossad asset and convicted pedophile who committed suicide at  New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2019.

If you take one part Israel and stir it together with a group of smug, moralizing far rightists, it’s all but inevitable the combined outcome will include a dash of the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, seen here in a 2013 mug shot. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Eran Karpen, a co-founder of Unplugged and currently the company’s chief technology officer, is a veteran of Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency, which “specializes in eavesdropping, codebreaking, and cyber warfare [and is] ,” as James Bamford recently wrote in The Nation. Karpen was previously a senior executive with CommuniTake, a startup that the NSO Group – best known for selling its Pegasus spyware, to authoritarian regimes that used it to spy on dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists – emerged from.

I’ve been able to confirm about half of the 32 Israelis who Prince invited to join Off Leash, and thus far Karpen is the only one of those named above who’s an active participant in the group chat. Several others have ties to Leshem or Barak, however, including Itzhak Ayalon, the former head of FRG’s Agriculture Development department, and Tzvi Lev, Israel’s Economic Affairs Officer in Dubai, who works with the UAE-Israel Business Council, which was created by Barak after diplomatic ties were established between the two countries in 2020 and is involved in managing bilateral political, trade and national security relations.

As noted in my New Republic story last week that exposed Off Leash, Lev – whose WhatsApp profile includes a line attributed to H.L Mencken, "Every man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats" – wrote a post to the group chat that proposed the Palestinian problem could be solved by dropping nuclear weapons on Gaza. That approach was seconded by Yoav Goldhorn, a former intelligence operative, who lamented that no one in the Israeli government had “the balls nor vision” to take the “extreme measures” that were needed.

Apropos of nothing, check out this image of George C. Scott and Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. Phot credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Three Off Leash participants wanted to help Israel in a more practical fashion, and make money while they were at it, by selling the IDF weapons for use in Gaza. They pitched the respective deals to Moti Kahana, an Israeli American businessman whose New Jersey-based firm GDC employed fellow group chat member Stuart Seldowitz, a national security adviser under President Barack Obama’s, until his arrest late last year for serial harassment of an Egyptian street cart vendor in New York City, who he told, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”

Kahana cultivates an image as a humanitarian and philanthropist, but he has a funny habit of operating in places of significant importance to US and Israeli national security, which indicates something more complex than that. One such example is Syria, where he popped up soon after President Trump announced he was withdrawing American troops from that country other than a small force to “secure the oil” in an area controlled by a US-backed militia that Kahana entered into negotiation with for an energy export deal, but the plan blew up when it leaked to the media.

In 2022, Kahana set up shop near Romania’s border with Ukraine and worked with the Israeli embassy and a Jewish charity to feed Ukrainian refugees and troops. Late last year, he claimed to be working with the Biden White House on a plan to send medical supplies and civilian goods into Gaza in exchange for the release of all hostages held by Hamas.  

Kahana’s participation in the group chat also indicates he’s not motivated purely by altruism. In addition to offering to be an intermediary with the Israeli military on the deals proposed by the group chat participants, he disclosed he had an International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) license from the State Department that allows him to export weapons from the US.

The first of the three deals was floated by Richard Solberg Jr., president of a Dallas-area company called Cavalcade Services LLC that has exported military and police services and products to clients in more than 70 countries, according to his LinkedIn profile. Last December 12, Solberg, who uses the handle “Richie” when he posts to the group, and Kahana had the following exchange, which I lightly edited to remove some interjections of their and other Off Leash members that aren’t directly relevant.

What happened afterwards isn’t known because their conversation continued outside of the main group chat, as Kahana had suggested. Two days later, though, a Belgrade-based arms broker messaged Kahana with another proposal. 

The third offer, which was sent to Kahana on January 24, came from Luis Murillo, the international sales manager at the Toronto-area branch of Streit Manufacturing, a firm headquartered in the UAE that has sold riot-suppression vehicles to US police departments. In 2015, Streit's subsidiary in South Carolina was fined $3.5 million for exporting military equipment without proper  licenses to Afghanistan, Iraq, and seven other countries. The company has also been criticized in three United Nations reports for selling armored vehicles to Sudan, Libya, and other war-torn countries.

All arms exports from the US to Israel are technically illegal at the moment because weapons can’t be sold to countries that restrict humanitarian aid, but the Biden administration has been brazenly ignoring that law, so there’s no evident legal problem related to the proposal from Solberg, who apparently had the necessary export licenses. There’s not enough information from the group chat to evaluate the legality of Nikolic’s offer, but there are no obvious red flags based on the little that’s known. 

However, even with only the scant details disclosed in the group chat about the deal for military vehicles Murillo raised with Kahana, the evidence suggests – though I’ll emphasize it isn’t conclusive – it would have required skirting the law at some stages of the transaction. The clue is found in Murillo’s remark that Israel couldn’t “be the end user unless you can get an end user certificate and ship to that country.” 

That’s a tipoff something’s not entirely above board with the sale Murillo put forward, because to export weapons legally requires  obtaining an end user certificate from the government of the country the goods will be shipped from that identifies the name of the true buyer and where they operate. The purpose is to prevent weapons vendors from selling to nations under national or international sanctions – typically imposed due to their allegedly poor human rights records, support for terrorism, or similar matters – by bribing government officials in the exporting country to obtain a bogus end user certificate that shows the goods are being shipped to a legal purchaser, as usually occurs in black market deals. 

To put that in practical terms in the case of the would-be sale of military vehicles to Israel, Murillo clearly seemed to be saying that they’d need to be shipped to the IDF from a country – the UAE and Canada are possibilities, but he might well have found the ones he said were available in another country – that’s banned arms exports to Israel. Furthermore, Murillo appeared to be saying with equal clarity, he didn’t have a legitimate end user certificate for Israel and didn’t believe he’d be able to obtain one, so Kahana would need to. 

Otherwise, and I acknowledge I’m speculating on the basis of imperfect evidence, but that nevertheless points strongly in this direction, Murillo or Kahana would need to obtain a bogus end user that showed the end user of the vehicles was based in a country that could buy them legally. After arriving at the first destination, they’d be exported to Israel after the necessary inducements were dispensed to officials at key agencies, usually at the defense ministry and port and customs departments.

It’s entirely possible that when discussion of the proposed military vehicles sale was moved to DMs, Murillo and Kahana agreed it would be impossible to proceed because it couldn’t be done legally. As I already said, it’s also possible I’m missing something, but several experts I consulted who have practical experience in the arms trade reached the same conclusion I did.

Indeed, there’s no way to know whether that deal or either of the two others that were discussed in the main group chat moved forward. However, one intriguing piece of evidence indicates at least one or another may well have. “Looking for a Compliance officer for defense articles to assist with the ITAR application,” Kahana posted at his LinkedIn page about a month after he and Murillo discussed the  deal. “This project may lead to a full-time job. You can also work as a consultant. Please DM.” 

Three people liked the post, including Yoav Goldhorn, the former Israeli intelligence operative and Off Leash member.