How Many Whistleblowers, Shortsellers, or Billionaires are Fronts for Foreign Intelligence?
The curious case of Hindenburg research, Carl Icahn, and the fight over genomic sequencing
A friend of mine and I were going for a walk today and the subject of whistleblowing and shortselling came up.
For what it’s worth I favor short selling and think its role in forcing companies like Wirecard to behave themselves to stop criming was critically important. I think you should read the great book, Money Men by Dan McCrum.
I’m also a fan of the federal whistleblower programs that are being used by people like Will Wilkerson, the Truth Social whistleblower who is now working at Starbucks. Lots of luck to Will and may his courage inspire others. It certainly inspires me.
I myself am something of a whistleblower in the Clearview.AI lawsuit I filed earlier last month. You’ll note rather interestingly that Clearview.AI is represented by Rudy Giuliani’s handler, Ron Giller. This is after Clearview.AI has lost representation by other firms.
So I’m pro-whistleblower and I do think it’s net beneficial for whistleblowers to be compensated in some form. Public sympathy or gratitude is not accepted at the bank or for your mortgage.
Some of us are just programmed to tell the truth even if it costs us everything. It is what it is. If I were a normal man this isn’t how I’d roll but I am not a normal man and so les jeux son fait. I recite the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling to myself as I brush my teeth and hope for the best. I can see from Carl Icahn’s HBO film, Icahn: The Restless Billionaire, that he’s also a fan of “If.” Well fancy that.
Still, the question remains. How many whistleblowers or shortsellers are fronts for foreign intelligence?
Imagine you were a country that had a rather robust intelligence apparatus and you had national priorities you were trying to achieve but not necessarily the cash you needed through taxation.
You could, of course, defame people or spread false information about your targets. That sometimes works. It nearly worked on me. That is, until it didn’t. Until I filed suit and started standing up for myself.
When that smearing didn't work you you could be more aggressive. You could use your intelligence agency to make money to finance your operations by shorting the stock of targeted companies or entities. Maybe you could even cause the events that would make the short selling possible. Whose to say that industrial accident was an accident — and not sabotage? Who would know? And if you compromised the investigators who would find out?
If you were such an operation you’d naturally want to target companies that are operating against your nation state’s interests or which you hoped to subvert. Sometimes the companies would know it. Sometimes they wouldn’t.
I suspect that such a thing is happening with Hindenburg Research, which I think acts a front for Likud and the Chisraelis. Can I prove it? Well, I don’t know.
Let’s look up this guy Nathan Anderson about which there is precious little on the Internet. That’s weird. But okay.
Anderson worked as an ambulance driver in Israel — which is where a lot of the intelligence services get their training. Careful readers of this Substack will note that I’ve talked about Likud gal Sheryl Sandberg donating money to ambulances in Israel.
This is a common tactic as when you’re an emergency medical technician you are exposed to a lot of high stress situations. (Mr. Anderson, as we shall see, makes that very argument on his LinkedIn.)
When we peruse Mr. Anderson’s (public) LinkedIn page we see this curious detail.
When we look closer at Ambassador Dore Gold we see that he ran the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs which was itself funded by none other than Sheldon Adelson, the late casino oligarch and major backer of Likud.
Let’s go to Wikipedia and see what’s up.
From 2000 to the present, Gold has been the president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. Gold has much experience in US–Israel policy. His articles and books cover a wide variety of Israeli diplomacy such as: Jerusalem, the United Nations and its implications for Israel, nuclear Iran, and the United States' relationship with Israel. One of the projects Gold has led at the JCPA is the concept of Defensible Borders for Israel.
We could go harder here if we wanted to but suffice it to say that that’s quite the relationship for two boys from Connecticut. (Dore was born in Hartford, Connecticut and Anderson is said to hail from the Constitution State too though where we don’t really know. It’s weird. I know.)
Now it’s quite possible that Anderson was rightly identifying frauds and his track record would suggest as much though how much this is him and how much this is people tipping him off I couldn’t say.
I also enjoy the name of his firm — Hindenburg Research — and confess to spending way more time than is healthy pondering whether or not the Hindenburg disaster was a sabotage or not. I’d like to think it isn’t but it is awfully romantic to believe that fear of German engineering was destroyed by anti-Nazi German resistance. Surely Anderson would be aware of the various conspiracy theories about the Hindenburg. For all I know he has his own. As you know I’m into this stuff.
When we are dealing in the realm of espionage we are dealing in the realm of conspiracies. Why even have intelligence services if they can’t listen in on the most powerful people’s phone calls?
And yet, when we look at some of Anderson’s collaborators the story gets weirder and weirder. There’s the pesky detail about how collaborators of his worked with the Likud firm Black Cube though what precisely happened there is hard to tell. And there’s the curious thing about how “An Alleged Fraud Uncovered by a Short Seller Ends in Gunfire” to quote a Wall Street Journal headline. What was really going on there? Who knows!
Still it’s impressive how Anderson busted Nikola — the fake electric car company — and I’ve enjoyed seeing him expose the Adani network which is little more than a front for Modi himself. (Of course I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that Nikola was a competitor to Tesla which was sourcing its electric batteries from areas in the Democratic Republic of Congo controlled by an Israeli named Dan Gertler and supported by Yossi Cohen, former director of Mossad, or that Adani had just bought the port in Haifa.)
And yes, it seems clear to anyone who has eyes that some very weird stuff has been going on at Block aka Square — and that was before Bob Lee, co founder of the Cash App and recreational drug user, was murdered. I mean are we not going to talk about how Bob Lee’s alleged assailant was an immigrant from Iran? There was this choice quote from the alleged assailant’s attorney: "There's a lot of drugs in Bob Lee‘s system…I mean Bob Lee's system is like the Walgreens of recreational drugs."
I think, though, that Anderson screwed up when he went after Carl Icahn.
For one Icahn and his son own about 85% of their firm so it’s hard to see how you could really short them.
I suspect that the attack on Icahn was really about Icahn’s proxy fight over Illumina, the genomic sequencing company. The proxy fight is scheduled for May 25 and so far, Icahn is seemingly racking up victories by documenting the problems at the company.
We’ve written at length about the problems facing Illumina and how we support Lina Khan’s efforts to rein in monopoly excesses. No, it isn’t muh money printer that’s causing inflation but the consolidation of power in industry after industry which are increasingly colluding to raise prices. In my assessment, the tell that the American middle class was about to be screwed was Secretary Elaine Chao joining the board of Kroger.
I won’t restate those criticisms here but there is this interesting tidbit I found worthy of mentioning once we accept the frame of Hindenburg as a Likud front: “DNA sequencing giant Illumina to establish Center of Excellence in Israel”
Illumina, the world's leading DNA sequencing company, worth an estimated $51 billion, has announced that it will be establishing an Excellence Center in Israel for the advancement and development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to provide scalable and highly accurate streamlined solutions that dramatically shorten interpretation time in genome analysis. The center currently employs 30 people and is run by Einat Metzer.
Illumina’s presence in Tel Aviv will focus on AI-driven interpretation technology, supporting researchers and clinicians. Providing faster and meaningful insights can transform the diagnosis and lives of rare disease patients – of which 50% are children under the age of five.
This sort of thing is an intelligence bonanza and it’s going to be increasingly important that this sort of work is done within the U.S., preferably with secured databases.
In my honest assessment, Icahn made a strategic error. He refused to pick a side in the coming conflict between China, Israel, and America with respect to genetics.
He’d be wise to listen to those reaching out to help him in his endeavor.
We really do want to see genetics made great again and if Icahn can help to do that with the takeover of Illumina so much the better.
That is a legacy worth having. Pick up the phone Mr. Icahn. We need you. It’s your country calling.
