Israeli Black Cube
Someone tipped off the Observer, the Guardian's Sunday edition, about an attempt of Donald Trump flunkies to find dirt about the people who negotiated the nuclear deal (JCPOA) with Iran. An Israeli spy company was hired to set up traps. One of the victims describes how that happened. The modus operandi seems similar to one described in another dirty story which surfaced about a year ago. The company, not named by the Observer, in question is Black Cube.

The Observer: Revealed: Trump team hired spy firm for 'dirty ops' on Iran arms deal
Aides to Donald Trump, the US president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a "dirty ops" campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal.

People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to "get dirt" on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama's top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal.
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Sources said that officials linked to Trump's team contacted investigators days after Trump visited Tel Aviv a year ago, his first foreign tour as US president.
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According to incendiary documents seen by the Observer, investigators contracted by the private intelligence agency were told to dig into the personal lives and political careers of Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, and Kahl, a national security adviser to the former vice-president Joe Biden. Among other things they were looking at personal relationships, any involvement with Iran-friendly lobbyists, and if they had benefited personally or politically from the peace deal.
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Both Rhodes and Kahl said they had no idea of the campaign against them.
The last sentence no longer holds. Colin Kahl now remembers something fishy:
Colin Kahl @ColinKahl - 5:33 UTC - 6 May 2018

According to this story, in May of last year, Team Trump asked an Israeli intel firm to dig up dirt on me as part of an effort to discredit the Iran deal. Tonight, as my wife read this story, that date triggered a very creepy memory. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/05/ ...

Last year, my wife was serving on the fundraising committee of my daughter's public charter school in DC. One day, out of the blue, she received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK.

This "UK person" said "she" was flying to DC soon and wanted to have coffee with my wife to discuss the possibility of including my daughter's school in their educational fund network.

This was not a generic "Nigerian prince" scam. This person had all sorts of specific information on my wife's volunteer duties at an obscure DC elementary school.

There was a website for the firm (which no longer exists, by the way), but it had no depth to it, and there was no detailed information about the "UK person" who reached out to my wife.

My wife shared the email with me and a few people we know in both the finance and education fields. All agreed that the entire scenario seemed implausible and seemed like an approach by a foreign intelligence entity.

To test the implausibility, my wife kept trying to encourage the "UK person" over email to meet with other school fundraising officers & leadership while "she" was in DC, providing relevant contact info. But the "UK person" kept insisting that "she" had to meet with my wife.

At that point, my wife stopped corresponding. This all happened in late May and early June of last year.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that this obvious scam targeting my family had all the hallmarks of an intel op and coincided with Team Trump's reported efforts to "dig up dirt" on me.

But the fact that I even have to think about the possibility that my family was targeted by people working for the President is yet another sign of the fundamental degradation of our country that Trump has produced.
The way the operation was run against Colin Kahl sounds familiar. I remembered reading about a similar attempt a while ago and, after a while, dug up this New Yorker story from last November:
In the fall of 2016, Harvey Weinstein set out to suppress allegations that he had sexually harassed or assaulted numerous women. He began to hire private security agencies to collect information on the women and the journalists trying to expose the allegations. According to dozens of pages of documents, and seven people directly involved in the effort, the firms that Weinstein hired included Kroll, which is one of the world's largest corporate-intelligence companies, and Black Cube, an enterprise run largely by former officers of Mossad and other Israeli intelligence agencies. Black Cube, which has branches in Tel Aviv, London, and Paris, offers its clients the skills of operatives "highly experienced and trained in Israel's elite military and governmental intelligence units," according to its literature.

Two private investigators from Black Cube, using false identities, met with the actress Rose McGowan, who eventually publicly accused Weinstein of rape, to extract information from her. One of the investigators pretended to be a women's-rights advocate and secretly recorded at least four meetings with McGowan.
In both cases we see a 'private' Israeli spy company with government connections operating from London which uses false identities and meets its targets under false pretense. I bet a cup of coffee that Black Cube is the company behind the attempts to spy on the JCPOA negotiators. The company is notorious for such dirty work.

Compare this from Colin Kahl above:
One day, out of the blue, [my wife] received an email from someone claiming to represent a socially responsible private equity firm in the UK. This "UK person" said "she" was flying to DC soon and wanted to have coffee with my wife to discuss the possibility of including my daughter's school in their educational fund network.
With this from the Weinstein case as described in the New Yorker:
In May, 2017, McGowan received an e-mail from a literary agency introducing her to a woman who identified herself as Diana Filip, the deputy head of sustainable and responsible investments at Reuben Capital Partners, a London-based wealth-management firm. Filip told McGowan that she was launching an initiative to combat discrimination against women in the workplace ...
The absolutely same pattern is used: A surprise contact from London pretending to have money from some rich fund to disperse for a good cause the targeted person is known to support. The false person is persistently asking for personal meetings. There are multiple additional details about the spies approach in both cases that look quite similar.

Black Cube claims to deliver "Creative Intelligence". But to use the same method and false story over and over is not creative at all.

One wonders why the Observer did not name the Israeli spy company. One also wonders why the story is coming up now. Who leaked it? And is it true?

One of the Guardian/Observer authors of the story is Julian Borger who was long notorious for writing manipulating stories about Iran's nuclear program. Borger is pretty much in the anti-Trump camp and his 'official' sources are sometimes shady. His additional frame piece to the story above reveals nothing new. Who gave him the story? The British government which wants to keep the JCPOA alive?

Could someone have made up the whole story, modeled after the Weinstein case, in an attempt to discredit Trump and his planned termination of the JCPOA deal?

Then again - hiring 'former' spies to dig up dirt about people was actually a specialty of the Clinton campaign. It paid the 'former' British spy Christopher Steele to make up the "Dirty Dossier" about Trump.

It would be hypocritical to now condemn the Trump circles for doing similar stuff.