Mayfair on a crisp, clear morning. The demure woman I am meeting in the bar of an opulent hotel is dressed elegantly and entirely in black. Her nail polish is black, too. A flash of a gold bracelet when we shake hands hints at money.
To the waiter delivering her glass of still water, my companion might be a high-flying banker or even a minor European royal. Age? She could be 25 or 45. Appearances can be deceptive, and this woman knows all about deception.
For more than ten years she spied for Mossad, conducting undercover operations in more than 20 countries for Israel’s respected external intelligence service. These days, she runs Shibumi Strategy, a Tel Aviv-based agency she set up seven years ago to provide espionage services to businesses and high-net-worth individuals.
She says all of her field operatives are ex-Mossad and so far they have conducted more than a dozen operations on British soil. At least six of her clients have appeared in The Sunday Times Rich List, including one in its top tier, she adds.
“London is a good place for spies,” she says coolly, citing relatively relaxed surveillance laws and a bountiful supply of well-heeled clients prepared to stump up the $100,000 a month starting fee for her agency’s services. “That’s why we’re coming here.”
Later this summer Shibumi — a Japanese word for elegant efficiency as well as the title of a cult 1970s spy novel — plans to open a UK office not far where we’re sitting.
It won’t be the only corporate intelligence agency in town. Some of the work that her 50 staff undertake is hardly surprising: digging up evidence for commercial litigation, due diligence on deals and industrial espionage.
“Often a person or business will bring us in because they have a leak and we find other things that are even more valuable to them,” she says.
How? “Essentially we talk to people, we investigate. We don’t hack computers or phones. Everything we do is to the very letter of the law. When we need to we recruit local private detectives who have the necessary permits to do what our clients need us to get done.
“This is a world where not everyone is reputable, responsible and discreet. We are.”
But as our conversation unfolds, it’s not long before some of her past cases drift into murkier, more morally ambiguous territories. “There have been times where we have two directors fighting for control of a business,” she explains. “We have been recruited by one to look at the other. Is the other director having an affair? Is there something else that could be used as leverage? We find skeletons in closets, you could say.”
A brochure I am given later states that “uncovering negative campaigns” is one of Shibumi’s skills. But the agency doesn’t just root these out, it would seem.
The financier Lars Windhorst hired Shibumi to run a clandestine campaign to oust a football club president, according to court papers
The financier Lars Windhorst hired Shibumi to run a clandestine campaign to oust a football club president, according to court papers
TOM STOCKILL FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Court documents filed in Tel Aviv two years ago revealed that the financier, Lars Windhorst, hired Shibumi to run a clandestine campaign to oust Werner Gegenbauer, the president of German football club Hertha Berlin. Windhorst, who appeared in the 2011 Sunday Times Rich List, was the club’s majority shareholder at the time.
Shibumi, the legal papers said, had 20 people working on the project at one point, using subterfuge to approach Gegenbauer’s relatives, colleagues and friends. They also created a social media campaign portraying Gegenbauer as a cigar-puffing plutocrat, the grim reaper and even the devil.
The claim against Windhorst alleged he had reneged on an agreement to pay Shibumi a monthly fee of €125,000 — plus €4 million if Gegenbauer left the club, which he did in May 2022.
To what extent the president’s exit was due to the agency’s handiwork was contested by the two parties. Windhorst has dismissed as “nonsense” a newspaper report based on court documents, which were withdrawn soon after they were filed and are the only occasion Shibumi’s activities have found their way into the mainstream media.
“I cannot discuss that matter in any way,” the agency’s boss tells me when I bring up the case, possibly an indication that the two parties reached a financial settlement, complete with a non-disclosure agreement.
She is more willing to discuss anonymised cases of where the super rich have brought in Shibumi to spy on their own families. We talk about a father whose son had dropped out of university, became depressed and seemingly developed issues with drugs.
“On our first call, the father was in tears — he wanted his son back,” she recalls. “At one point we had ten people on that operation. We recruited another student to penetrate his network [of friends] at university to find out what was going on.”
A 15-year-old was hired to ensure that the Snapchat messages Shibumi’s operatives sent to the targets seemed plausible. “The young man was taking drugs — we were able to show photographs of him on a bench with the dealer and even some of the substances.”
“It was a good result,” she adds. “The son had a problem, went to rehab and later restarted his studies.”
What did the student say when he found out that his father had hired Mossad’s alumni to spy on him? “He never knew. That was vital — it would have destroyed their relationship. Most of our targets are never aware that they are under surveillance. Discretion is vital in what we do.”
Those “targets” include the spouses of the super-rich. A wealthy husband approached Shibumi after he became concerned that his wife had fallen under the spell of a group of Reiki practitioners who, he believed, were persuading her to leave their marriage.
“We were hired to find out what was going on,” she recalls. “Was she being manipulated? Was she looking for a divorce settlement? If so, how much was she after? In fact, their relationship was in better shape than he thought and they are now a lot closer.”
Although much of her life is now spent managing her staff and running Shibumi with her business partner, she still conducts a few operations herself.
That may not have been possible if she had stayed in Mossad, as she is now a mother of four. “Once you have children, as a woman, Mossad tend to keep you away from undercover work and you find yourself doing office-based work. That wasn’t as interesting to me.”
Launching Shibumi has clearly allowed her to build her own fortune and to conduct a few operations in, what she calls, “special circumstances”. For these cases she retains an armoury of “avatars”, including more than 50 LinkedIn profiles and five bogus websites to provide ballast to her various cover stories.
Each of Shibumi’s field operatives are felt to be particularly good at connecting to a certain type of target. What’s hers? “Women, I suppose,” she says.
She outlines a recent operation where she flew repeatedly from Tel Aviv to London to attend a yoga class so she could bump into and build a rapport with a woman with financial information of interest to her client. “It can take two to three meetings to build trust. Often with women it’s about presenting a mirror. You mention you’re having problems with your husband and then perhaps the target follows suit and opens up about theirs.”
Talk of tradecraft does not end there. Applying a company logo familiar to the target to a pen has been used as a conversation starter. Trawling through posts on the Strava fitness app has allowed agents to engineer “chance” encounters. In one case, Shibumi even created a bogus London restaurant as part of a ruse to extract commercially sensitive information from a target. It succeeded, she says.
Sometimes the old ways are the best. “They do say when the alcohol goes in, the truth comes out,” she adds, raising an eyebrow and sipping her water.
Yet the day-to-day life of intelligence work can be tedious, frustrating and at times frightening. “Often we get a call from someone who says they are sending a helicopter or a car to pick us up, but won’t say who they are,” she says. “Once we were in a car sent, apparently, by a wealthy sheikh. We got into this car and had been driven for some time when we started to think that we’d been kidnapped. They were Arab and we are Israeli. It was a possibility — but we were wrong.”
Wealthy men hiring spooks to spy on their wives and children, estranged business partners hunting for kompromat on one another, the running of a pretty vicious campaign … how can she and her Shibumi colleagues ever be certain that they’re working for the “good guys”, or even that their means are justified by their clients’ ends?
“We have very clear ethical boundaries about what we will do and what we won’t. We are part of a wider Israeli intelligence community, and if we are found to be doing something wrong that reflects badly not just on us but on our government. That’s not a risk we can afford to take.”
That defence will not wash with every reader, of course. Then again, it’s not just corporate spooks who find themselves working for rogues. How many lawyers, accountants or other professionals for hire have found themselves drawn into doing nefarious things for nefarious types?
Two hours have ticked by and there is a meeting in her diary at a nearby law firm, just the sort of outfit that may pass work her way. As we part, she proffers a business card. “Shibumi,” it reads. “Your personal intelligence agency.” On the reverse is her name, the title, chief operating officer and a QR code. No contact details. Can I just have an email address or a phone number?
“You get that by scanning the code with your phone,” she replies. “That way I get your data.”
After a pause her face erupts with a smile. She is joking. Perhaps.