In the weeks before Slovenia’s March 2026 parliamentary election, secretly recorded videos alleging corruption among figures linked to the governing coalition were released online with calculated timing. Slovenia’s Intelligence and Security Agency (SOVA) subsequently confirmed foreign influence operations around the vote and presented evidence of concrete activities by a foreign para-intelligence agency, including documented contacts with Slovenian entities.

Official statements noted visits by representatives of Black Cube, an Israeli-origin private intelligence firm, on multiple occasions, with material evidence tying three named individuals to locations including the street where the main opposition party maintains its headquarters. The opposition leader acknowledged contacts with one Black Cube adviser but denied any wrongdoing connected to the election.

The firm itself stated that its services are provided exclusively to business clients in litigation, arbitration and white-collar matters.

Whatever the precise chain of commissioning, the episode revealed something larger than a single scandal. The infrastructure of covert electoral pressure is now commercially available, operationally modular and capable of functioning inside consolidated European democracies.

This is not classic state propaganda, which carries an attributable signature and serves overt strategic objectives. Nor is it reducible to cybersecurity incidents or platform manipulation in the narrow technical sense. It is the emergence of a gray-zone market in which former intelligence professionals, including veterans of Israel’s intelligence and security milieu, specialized private companies, political clients, digital influence networks and local intermediaries transact services that combine human intelligence, cyber tools, fabricated identities and narrative amplification.

The product on offer is the deliberate shaping or degradation of the cognitive and institutional environment surrounding elections. Journalists, civil society actors, campaign staff and public trust itself become operational surfaces. The objective is to erode the shared factual and institutional ground on which democratic contestation depends.

Black Cube

The Hungarian case, confirmed by LinkedIn in late 2023, illustrates one vector. Beginning in 2020 and running into the April 2022 parliamentary campaign, Black Cube constructed a network of fabricated professional personas on the platform. These accounts used bogus job postings to initiate contact with at least 12 journalists and activists critical of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Targets who accepted video calls were recorded. Selected clips later circulated in pro-government media as part of a sustained effort to discredit independent NGOs and civil society voices.

LinkedIn attributed the operation to Black Cube, removed the network of fake accounts and deleted the firm’s company page for violating its terms of service. Black Cube maintained that its work is confined to litigation support and does not extend to cyber operations. The episode demonstrated how private actors can convert ordinary professional networking infrastructure into a pipeline for compromising material, aimed at the credibility of those who scrutinize power.

Slovenia represents a sharper crystallization of the sovereignty problem. Here the reported activity crossed from information operations into direct engagement with domestic political structures in the immediate pre-election period. SOVA’s confirmation of foreign para-intelligence activity, amid allegations involving an Israeli-origin contractor, marked an explicit recognition that private intelligence capabilities had become a vector for influencing the internal political process of an EU member state. The recordings themselves, high-production, precisely timed and focused on corruption allegations, exhibited the hallmarks of professional orchestration rather than spontaneous leaks.

Whether or not any single client can be definitively tied to every element, the presence of a commercial actor with a documented track record in similar methods turned an electoral contest into a theatre of covert pressure. This is the core distinction from traditional foreign interference. The service is deniable, transactional and available to whoever can pay or provide access.

BlackCore, Team Jorge

A different Israeli-linked firm, BlackCore, has drawn scrutiny from French authorities for a distinct but related set of techniques. Taken together with the Black Cube controversies, the BlackCore case suggests that Israel-linked influence contractors have become recurrent actors in the expanding market for electoral disruption.

In June 2026, France’s Viginum service publicly detailed technical findings linking BlackCore to online smear campaigns during the March local elections. The suspected operations involved deceptive websites and social media accounts alleging criminal conduct against candidates from the La France Insoumise party in several cities, accompanied by coordinated negative amplification.

Viginum indicated that comparable methods appeared in other contexts, including elections in Scotland and New York as well as operations in Angola and Togo. French officials stated they had sought assistance from Israel in identifying the sponsors, while emphasizing that the clients remained unidentified.

BlackCore has described itself as an influence and technology company offering strategies for narrative shaping. The French investigation treats these activities as suspected foreign digital interference. The significance lies in the geography. Advanced Western democracies are not treated as off-limits terrain.

The 2023 reporting by Forbidden Stories and the Guardian on Team Jorge supplied an earlier, more comprehensive portrait of the broader Israeli-linked private influence ecosystem. Led by Tal Hanan, the group presented itself to undercover reporters as a full-spectrum provider capable of hacking political communications, deploying automated disinformation networks and conducting sabotage operations. Demonstrations included live access to email and messaging accounts of political aides in the Kenyan context. Leaked materials referenced earlier work alongside other contractors in Nigeria. Team Jorge claimed experience across dozens of electoral environments. Hanan has rejected allegations of improper conduct, framing the activity as commercial service provision.

The exposure was valuable less for any single verified electoral outcome than for mapping the menu of capabilities now on the private market. Human sources, technical intrusion, synthetic amplification, and narrative laundering, all combinable and all deniable.

Real target is public trust

These operations’ cumulative effect is to render the informational and associational space around elections unstable. Civil society organizations that document abuse become targets of entrapment or smear campaigns. Journalists who pursue stories encounter fabricated professional approaches designed to generate compromising footage. Political actors receive signals that external resources can be mobilized against rivals or inconvenient investigators. The resulting distrust serves the client’s longer-term interest by weakening the domestic coalitions most likely to resist external influence. Because the providers operate commercially and across borders, the traditional diplomatic and intelligence channels used to manage state-on-state interference are less effective. Attribution is harder, retaliation is legally and politically awkward, and the services remain available to the next bidder.

Western democracies have been slow to internalize the implication. The recurring appearance of Israeli-origin firms in these cases points to a distinctive export of intelligence tradecraft into the global market for political influence. Election security policy remains heavily weighted toward the physical and cyber integrity of the vote itself. That focus is necessary but insufficient.

The more durable vulnerability lies in the surrounding environment of trust, scrutiny and institutional legitimacy. When private contractors can be retained to degrade that environment inside France, Scotland or New York as well as in Hungary or Slovenia, the problem ceases to be one of “foreign interference in fragile states” and becomes a structural exposure of open societies.

Several practical adjustments follow. Election security frameworks must encompass transparency obligations for foreign political consultancy, private intelligence engagements and influence contracting during electoral periods. Platforms should face enforceable requirements to detect and disclose coordinated inauthentic behavior, with heightened standards in the months before votes. Governments require legal instruments to investigate suspected private interference without converting those instruments into instruments of domestic political control or content regulation. Internationally, the category of democratic sovereignty threats should explicitly include commercially provided covert operations that target the cognitive and institutional preconditions of free elections.

The bigger risk is that citizens will be habituated to doubt the very conditions under which elections occur, who is speaking, what is recorded and which institutions can be trusted to arbitrate fact. Once that doubt becomes ambient, the formal ritual of voting continues, but the democratic substance has already been placed on the market.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance, values or position of Daily Sabah. The newspaper provides space for diverse perspectives as part of its commitment to open and informed public discussion.

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