On New Year’s Eve in 2023, on the Danish side of the border with Germany, two children stood near their father’s house watching fireworks. The boy was ten, his sister thirteen. A team of masked men in black stormed the house, beat the father to the ground, and took the two children. One of them pressed a distress button that summoned Danish police, who tracked the group as it moved on foot toward the border. When the children cried out, their captors taped their mouths. After thirty-five minutes they crossed into Germany and drove eight hundred kilometers south, and two days later the mother collected them at her home in Hamburg. The men who did this were not relatives and not street criminals. They were hired professionals, and somewhere there was a price.
The capabilities used that night, the watching, the fabrication of evidence, the seizure of a person and their removal across a frontier, once belonged to states alone. They have moved into private companies that sell them to private buyers, and the firms at the center of this case are Israeli, staffed by veterans of the country’s intelligence services. Reaching that market is not a matter of walking in off the street. It runs through insiders, the retired officers and officials who know which company does what, and in this instance the alleged broker was a former chief of German intelligence and the alleged organizer a former head of an Israeli security service. That is what should trouble a reader who will never meet a spy. The instruments of the state are available for purchase, and the people selling and brokering them are the same people who once wielded them on the public’s behalf.
Christina Block, 52, owns eight percent of the company her father built from a German steakhouse chain, and is worth hundreds of millions of euros. She married Stephan Hensel in 2005 and divorced him in 2014, and a long custody war followed over their two youngest children. German courts first granted custody to the father, then on appeal to Block. Denmark, where Hensel had settled with the children and which is the one European Union country not obliged to recognize another member state’s custody rulings, held its own hearings and decided the children would stay with him. By the account German prosecutors have put before the Hamburg court, the effort to get them back began in 2021 with Block’s partner, the sports journalist Gerhard Delling, and an early attempt to smear the father and his lawyer as pedophiles, which failed.
What the prosecution describes next is an escalation, and the exact wording matters. By spring 2023, prosecutors say, Block allegedly turned to an Israeli company called Cyber Cúpula Operations, which the same reporting describes as previously employed by the family for cyber protection, and asked its staff to “rescue” the children. Der Spiegel’s reporting puts the earlier retainer the same way, hedged, with the firm said to have been engaged by the Block business for information security. Prosecutors also say Block had earlier hired the same firm to smear her ex-husband, and German prosecutors allege a further attempt to frame him by planting a hard drive loaded with child-abuse material. Each of these is an allegation within the prosecution’s case rather than a finding, and every defendant denies involvement.
The man named as leading the abduction cell is David Ram Barkai, a veteran of the Israeli military’s Unit 504, its human-intelligence branch, and by several accounts a former Mossad officer. Over several days of testimony Barkai told the court that Block and her lawyer had paid his team around €220,000 to take the children and deliver them, and that Block had handed him a further €20,000 in cash. He gave that account after German prosecutors had the arrest warrants against him lifted so that he could fly to Germany and confess, a step that incriminated the mother and her lawyer. Prosecutors indicted a second Israeli, Tal Sasson, and sought the arrest of Barkai and of a third operative, Keren Tenenbaum, who left Germany. Sasson, a martial-arts trainer arrested in Cyprus, admitted to leading the operation and conducting surveillance and rehearsals, said he had refused a €10,000 payment, and declined to answer the judge’s central question of who ordered and financed the mission. Block’s own account is different again. She has testified that she did not know about the abduction in advance and that her late mother planned and funded it, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of euros, in the months before she died.
Where August Hanning fits is the part the public record does not fully resolve, and it should be left that way. Prosecutors say the former president of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, helped connect Block with the Israeli firm, and he denies it. If Cyber Cupula was already the family’s information-security contractor, as the same prosecution account holds, the reporting does not spell out what the alleged introduction added. The strongest version of Hanning’s alleged role comes from a separate witness and points at a different company. That inquiry would later turn up something larger: when police searched Hanning’s property in the custody investigation, they found classified BND material, the basis of a separate espionage case against him, and which caused one of the largest German intelligence scandals since WW2.
The different company is CGI Group, a Tel Aviv firm that sells business intelligence, cybersecurity, and strategic consulting, and that has opened offices in Rome and Germany. Its president is Yaakov Peri, a former director of Israel’s Shin Bet who later became a government minister and a member of the Knesset for Yesh Atid before stepping down in 2018, and the company is owned by him. It sells the reassurance such a résumé provides. CGI reviewed security after the 2019 theft from the Green Vault museum in Dresden, and after last year’s Louvre robbery it ran a darknet negotiation to buy back the crown jewels, offering fifteen million euros in cryptocurrency for a handover in Slovakia, a deal it says fell through. The Louvre denied ever contacting an Israeli company. By CGI’s own telling, its clients have included a sitting Israeli prime minister.
The claim that CGI stood behind the Block operation comes from Werner Mauss, a veteran German private investigator, who told the authorities that Hanning approached Peri to assemble the team. Testimony in Hamburg turned on whether Block knew Peri’s name, or knew of seven million euros said to have moved to CGI, and she gave no answer. The denials were immediate. CGI’s chief executive, Zvika Nave, said the company had nothing to do with the affair and could not explain how its name had arisen. Peri and CGI announced a defamation suit in Germany against Mauss and the broadcaster NTV. A separate claim that Hanning had also brought in the former Mossad chief Danny Yatom drew a flat dismissal from Yatom, who called it a waste of time. The court then moved the proceedings behind closed doors, citing security and the delicacy of German-Israeli relations, and so the public lost sight of the evidence at the point it reached former heads of intelligence.
Whatever the Hamburg judges conclude about CGI, the structure around the case is already documented, and it reaches well past one family. The commercial afterlife of Israeli state intelligence has produced a set of firms that sell the state’s methods to private clients. Black Cube, founded in 2010 by two former Israeli military intelligence officers, was hired by Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers to run an army of spies against the women accusing him and the reporters chasing the story, its operatives working under false identities, with a promised success fee of three hundred thousand dollars for stopping the New York Times. The same firm later ran a dirty ops campaign against the Obama officials who negotiated the Iran nuclear agreement, building dossiers on Ben Rhodes and Colin Kahl and approaching their wives under invented cover, an operation Black Cube said it had no relation to. In Romania it was turned against the country’s chief anticorruption prosecutor.
The surveillance end of the same industry is the only part that has drawn sustained official punishment, and it runs disturbingly close to the Block pattern. NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus phone-hacking tool, and the quieter vendor Candiru were placed on the US Commerce Department’s Entity List in 2021 for selling spyware that governments used against journalists and critics. The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, used Pegasus to hack the phones of his ex-wife and her lawyers during a London custody fight over their children, a finding reached by England’s High Court; the same tool had earlier helped recapture one of his daughters after she tried to flee the country. Pegasus is licensed only to governments, so a head of state reached for it where a private buyer could not, and the purpose was the same, a family dispute settled with intelligence-grade power. The Predator spyware sold by the Intellexa consortium, built around the former Israeli officer Tal Dilian, drew US Treasury sanctions in 2024 after it had been turned inward in Greece against a financial journalist and the leader of the opposition. A data-protection inquiry there counted at least eighty-seventargets, a European Parliament committee judged the surveillance illegal, the Greek government had itself granted export licences for Predator to Intellexa, and an Athens court this year found four people guilty of enabling it, Dilian among them.
Each of those penalties was imposed by a government other than Israel’s, and each came after the harm. Israel does regulate part of this business. The 2007 Defense Export Control Law requires firms selling intrusion software abroad to license every deal through the Defense Ministry, and under American pressure after the 2021 blacklist the approved export map reportedly shrank from more than a hundred countries to fewer than forty. No comparable regime governs the human-intelligence firms that sell surveillance, fabricated evidence, and, in the case now before the Hamburg court, the removal of two children across a border. A trade described in one survey as largely unregulated recruits openly from the signals and human-intelligence units and from the Shin Bet and the Mossad, and advertises the pedigree, because the pedigree is the product. The rule that bars Israeli state agencies from operating against certain people does not reach a private company staffed by the same people after they resign.
What keeps the buyers and the methods out of sight is private law. CGI told an Italian newspaper that its agreements with clients carry absolute confidentiality, and it met the Block allegations with a libel writ rather than an account of what it did or did not do. In the Weinstein operation the intelligence product was routed through lawyers so it could travel under attorney-client privilege before it reached the man who paid. Confidentiality seals the contract, a defamation threat discourages the reporting, and a closed courtroom finishes the work, so that a client’s name and a firm’s methods are rarely in daylight together. The German case breached that only by accident, when police looking for evidence of a child abduction walked into the private files of a former spy chief and found something larger. The through-line survives whoever gave the order in Hamburg. The power to watch a person, to build a false case against them, and to carry them off has become a service that can be bought, sold by people who learned it in public service and keep it for private hire, while the state that trained them and licenses their weapons looks past the firms that sell everything a weapon cannot.
Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.
