The Global Intelligence Files logo
The Global Intelligence Files logo (Wikileaks)

Stratfor, the intelligence firm at the centre of the latest WikiLeaks/Anonymous tie-up, attempted to set up an investment fund with a Goldman Sachs director to trade on the intelligence collected by Stratfor.

In 2009, the then managing director of the investment bank, Shea Morenz, planned to utilise the intelligence from the insider network "to start up a captive strategic investment fund".

"What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like," reads an email by Stratfor's CEO George Friedman.

The emails show that Morenz in 2011 invested more than $4 million and joined Stratfor's board of directors.

During 2011, a formally independent offshore share structure was built up with the name of StratCap. But Friedman himself told his Stratfor staff that StratCap intelligence fund was secretly integrated to the intelligence firm.

"Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral," he wrote. "It will be useful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as another aspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor... we are already working on mock portfolios and trades"

The emails published by Wikileaks also reveal that Guardian journalist David Leigh allegedly teamed up with Israeli journalist Yossi Melman, dubbed as "an information mule", to move WikiLeaks US diplomatic cables to Israel "in violation of Wikileaks' contract with the Guardian".

Wikileaks started publishing on Monday more than five million emails hacked by Anonymous from the servers of Stratfor, a US intelligence gathering company.

WikiLeaks said it released 167 emails in partnership with 25 media organisations around the world, including Rolling Stone, The Hindu and Russia Reporter.

Anonymous announced the attack on Stratfor 26 December via a post on the Pastebin website. In its statement the collective claimed to have successfully bypassed Stratfor's online security stealing roughly 50,000 credit card numbers, 87,000 email addresses and 44,000 encrypted passwords.

As well as stealing the date, Anonymous' statement went on to claim that the group had already used the stolen credit information to donate $500,000 to a number of unnamed charities.

The Wikileaks GiFiles: Stratfor Monitored Bhopal Activists Yes Men