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Leaked emails from Israeli officials — obtained by the Iran-linked hacking group Handala, uploaded by the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, and reviewed by The Standard — show that years before Palantir’s rise, Israeli officials were jockeying for Thiel’s attention and access to his company.

The cache, which includes correspondence between Barak, Prosor, former Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, and other senior Israeli figures, offers a rare peek behind the curtain of defense-tech diplomacy — a revolving door of sorts in which national security officials, venture capitalists, and other geopolitical titans work to influence one another.

It also shows how Silicon Valley and Israel’s political establishment have been intertwined for far longer and more intimately than many realize.

The hacked emails, which date from the early 2000s to 2018, read like an A-list Silicon Valley Rolodex: Thiel, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, Oracle Executive Vice Chair Safra Catz, and Jeff Bezos all make appearances, mostly on the receiving end of Israeli officials’ entreaties to Silicon Valley. Some of the emails are reported here for the first time.

The emails were posted with metadata or cryptographic signatures that are usually used to verify such hacks, and The Standard has verified details from public sources as well as interviews with former Palantir employees, defense-tech analysts, and corporate watchdogs. Some of the contents have also been confirmed by the Epstein files released by Congress.

In 2014, Epstein was eager to connect his two contacts, urging Barak over email to have dinner with Thiel. Barak eventually agreed to Epstein’s overture, and, according to emails he sent to friends, had dinner with the Palantir cofounder in June 2014.

The day before the dinner, Barak confessed to Gary Fegel, a billionaire who was an executive at commodity trading firm Glencore, that he had crossed paths with Thiel a few years prior at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “He was, I guess, under some drug impact,” he wrote. “Probably he doesn’t even recall it.”

In the emails, no tech company surfaces more often — or draws more interest from Israeli figures — than Palantir.

At the time, Palantir was a Silicon Valley star, valued at $15 billion by the end of 2014 but small compared with Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, whose market caps were $60 billion and $46 billion, respectively. Led then and now by CEO Karp, Palantir was just establishing its Israel team, packing the office with former Israeli intelligence operatives and pitching its software to the country’s government.

Palantir wasn’t the only company to catch Israel’s attention a decade ago. In the same leaked emails, a constellation of names — Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon — appear repeatedly as Israeli political figures sought audiences with the people shaping the world’s digital infrastructure.

The emails showed how Silicon Valley and Israel worked in tandem, helping each other get access to various nexuses of power. For example, in 2015, after Ellison spoke with then-Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Prosor wanted a full debriefing. “How was the conversation with Mario [sic] Rubio,” he wrote. “Did he pass your scrutiny? Did you have a chance to talk about Israel?”