Below the belt, without remorse - Haaretz

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Thu., August 16, 2007 Elul 2, 5767

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Below the belt, without remorse

By Photo by Yanai Yehiel , By Naama Lanski

"The prime minister is in shock," a government official who had been involved in dealing with the demonstration by angry Holocaust survivors against Ehud Olmert, said this week. "He is trying to make a distinction between the survivors' campaigners and the survivors themselves, and he still doesn't believe that he fell into the hands of those drecks, Motti Morell and Ronen Tzur."

Morell and Tzur had made the decision two years ago that the survivors would remove their false teeth, dress in concentration camp uniforms and wear a yellow Star of David patch. The Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund had then hired their services as media advisers and strategists (financed mostly by the millionaire Noam Lanir), and Morell and Tzur for their part promised to attack and embarrass anyone who would try to prevent an increase in the payments made to the survivors. One of their suggestions was to set up a camp for survivors, surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, opposite the government ministries compound in Jerusalem, and to call on major donors to boycott Israel until the survivors' plight was resolved. As they had hoped, they generated a shift in public opinion by helping to fund and produce a documentary film by Orly Vilnai Federbush and Guy Maroz on the survivors' plight, which was screened on Channel 2.

At the beginning of this week, after the survivors staged their "march of the living" protest in Jerusalem, Morell and Tzur congratulated themselves for being responsible for "reaching an unprecedented peak" in their efforts, during which they outraged many people, including some survivors.

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Anyone who follows the campaigns run by Morell and Tzur was not surprised that they chose to ignore a practical and staid approach to finding a solution for the survivors' demands, and insisted on a much blunter strategy. At the end of last week, Noah Flug, chairman of the umbrella group of survivors' organizations in Israel, reached an agreement with cabinet minister Rafi Eitan, who also brought in the director general of the Prime Minister's Office, Ra'anan Dinur, and representatives of the Finance Ministry. At the end of their meeting they issued a statement to the effect that the talks had gone well and that another meeting, this time with Prime Minister Olmert, was to be held. According to the statement, Olmert had abandoned his original idea of granting each survivor only NIS 83 a month.

"The next day, under the direction of Morell and Tzur, people in the Holocaust Survivors' Welfare Fund asserted that under no circumstances was the government to be believed and that it was not a good idea to sit with the prime minister before holding a big demonstration," says a source in the umbrella organization. Subsequently, Morell and Tzur tried unsuccessfully to formulate a joint statement with Flug and Ze'ev Factor, the chairman of the fund. Despite this, a statement to the press was issued, which included quotations from Flug - without his consent - and an ultimatum to Olmert. Flug immediately issued a denial and was furious at not being allowed to continue on the path of dialogue that was under way.

"It was not the prime minister who created a schism between the different groups in the struggle, but public relations people," a confidant of Flug sums up. "They were campaign managers who released a false statement to the media, and others with vested interests who pulled in the direction of an all-out battle."

Tzur is not ruffled: "People call us aggressive and cynical. Fine. That is our status in the market. We do not embrace that status every day, but it is the reality," he says. "When the decision-makers are pressured, they focus on stopping protest actions instead of on solving the problem. They are the ones who sow dissension and dichotomy among the forces. The members of the fund would have been ready to call off the march if the director general of the Prime Minster's Office had met with them. But timing is important in life. After he declined to meet with them, they quickly demanded to meet only with Olmert. Now, if there had been a meeting with Olmert, the march would not have taken place. And they had four days to organize such a meeting. For two years there have been protest attempts, some noisier than others. We need to conduct a campaign. You tell me: Is there something that could have been done and was not done in order to prevent any damage? And I don't think it is damage. It is a legitimate protest. It's not that we put on gloves straightaway and set out to beat up on people."

Where do you draw the red line in this kind of protest? Is the photograph of a Holocaust survivor weeping in concentration-camp uniform essential to get the survivors' allowances increased?

Tzur: "Is there a red line with respect to the abuse of Holocaust survivors? Let Olmert answer that question and we will talk about our red line. He says that the fact that pajamas were worn in the protest is the gravest act committed in the history of the Jewish People - and I say that the attitude toward the survivors is the gravest act committed in the history of the Jewish People. We were asked for a photograph of a survivor, and we didn't know she would be photographed wearing those striped pajamas. We didn't know. But even if we had known, we would not have prevented it. The survivors are the only ones who have the right to use symbols from their past. The pajamas were not part of our strategy. The march is potent enough by its sheer existence."

Morell: "We are doing our job. We are an agency of spins. The Prime Minister's Office is supposed to run the country and solve problems, but instead, he himself is busy the whole day creating spins. Since the march we have been receiving text messages all the time - congratulations, congratulations, congratulations. From clients, from the public, from family. You can imagine that we did not get compliments regarding [our work for former president Moshe] Katsav. Never before was there anything like what happened this week. It was heart-rending."

Crass 'magician'

Morell, a former adman, has worked mainly as a media consultant and strategist since 1998. His ad agency came up with the slogans "Israel is waiting for Rabin" in the 1992 election campaign, "Netanyahu is good for the Jews" in the 1996 election campaign, and "Shas control - nash control" in 1999. He also ran Moshe Katsav's campaign for president against Shimon Peres. Morell was sometimes dubbed a "magician" and was always considered to be aggressive, negative and crass.

Tzur joined Morell's firm five years ago after working as an adviser for Labor MKs Ra'anan Cohen and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, serving as chairman of Young Labor, and even being an MK for a few minutes. In recent years, Morell and Tzur have worked mainly with commercial firms and have decided, they say, to cut down on their work for political campaigns. One of the firm's most recent efforts was on behalf of Iris Avraham (Labor), who ran for mayor of Givatayim. She was drubbed in the elections - in a city where the Labor candidate is considered a shoo-in.

Confidants of the women who filed complaints of alleged sexual abuse perpetrated by former president Katsav describe what Morell and Tzur did on his behalf, along with people close to Katsav, as a "campaign run from the gutter." The campaign's focus was on A., a former employee of the President's Residence, who was "assaulted unmercifully and picked apart in the brutal sense of the term," say people who accompanied the affair closely. The fact that most of the barbs were aimed at one complainant blurred the fact that there was a long list of women who also filed complaints against Katsav.

A. from the President's Residence helped spur the whole affair by supposedly trying to blackmail the president. Morell and Tzur found that her case was the most deeply engraved in the public memory and was also the most legally complex (in the end, it was not included in the plea bargain between the prosecution and Katsav). Their agency leaked to the press irrelevant details about A.'s case - such as her dispute with neighbors over the establishment of a synagogue near her home, which depicted her in a negative light - and information that was apparently taken out of context, such as regarding a thank-you letter she wrote to the president before leaving, about which it was alleged that the condition for writing it was that she receive a letter of recommendation from the President's Residence. Earlier, Katsav's circle leaked the lie that A. had worked for an escort service in the past. Morell and Tzur also exploited the public's ignorance about the patterns of behavior that characterize victims of sexual assault - female victims often try to renew the contact with the assailant, write him letters and call him - as was also noted recently by the president of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinisch.

From the moment they joined Katsav's team, for a fee of about $100,000, Morell and Tzur were supplied with the defense material. After Attorney General Menachem Mazuz decided to indict Katsav, pending a hearing, the duo received mountains of additional material - a vast treasure, which they tried to use in every possible way to divert public opinion in Katsav's favor.

Journalists note three elements they encountered when dealing with Morell and Tzur in the Katsav affair. The first was receiving pro-Katsav material that was extracted selectively from the evidence - the idea being that each journalist would "get his pound of flesh" and react by supporting Katsav. Second was a demand that journalists demonstrate goodwill in their coverage of the case in return for receiving exclusive information. And finally was the effort to intimidate journalists, in the spirit of comments attributed to Tzur, such as: "Publish the material quickly if you don't want to be upstaged by the competition. This is earthquake stuff. The competition is already a few steps ahead of you, so you have to move fast and publish. There will soon be a big boom here, so join the right side."

Not everyone joined the celebration. On Channel 10, for example, crime correspondent Baruch Kra and political analyst Raviv Drucker, both of whom covered the story, did not hide their non-cooperation with the attempts to vilify the complainants. In response, Morell and Tzur declared that they would give other media outlets preference. At the same time, in response to the request of Channel 10 to interview Gila Katsav, the former president's wife, Morell and Tzur agreed on condition that the interview were to be aired at the same time as the investigative report about Katsav on the "Fact" program was broadcast on Channel 2.

Tzur: "We have a problem with Channel 10, because they adopted an agenda, and they do not deny that. They have good journalists and we are cooperating with them on other matters. But this time they blew it. Some of their people were involved in this affair beyond their journalistic roles. They held talks with police sources in order to guide them in the investigation, and they brought them witnesses. I tried to persuade them that the whole thing would blow up in their face. We wanted to arrive at a format of working with them in which we would show them material and they would start to internalize it and show our material [on the air]. In addition, there is always a suspicion that a journalist is collaborating with the other side and will show them our material. What do you do in this situation? You work with a sense of suspicion, but you do not boycott anyone."

Said Baruch Kra in response: "We definitely have an agenda, which is that we are not deceived by the spins of media consultants and people with vested interests, who do as they wish and very selectively trickle investigative material to the media. What exactly did the media consultants mean by warning us that the whole thing would blow up in our face? Were they referring to Katsav's confession to a series of sexual offenses?

"We, for our part, did not conduct a campaign against Katsav, but against the violent vilification of the complainants and against the attempts by people with vested interests to control the information being made available to the public. The allegation about ties with police sources is not clear to me. It sounds a little like the floating of conspiracy theories. Of course, we did not agree to the working conditions set by Katsav's people - that is, favorable coverage in return for investigative materials. That does not work with us."

People who had to deal with the two advisers relate: "These guys have to prove to their clients that they are doing something, even if they are just punching the wind. Motti Morell is nourished by paranoia. That is what drives him. In meetings he behaves like a complete outsider, and after two minutes of conversation, which is meant to be businesslike, he will start to attack in loud tones: 'You - nothing will come of you, you are to blame for everything.' The kind of statements whose usefulness in the work process is unclear. He has untold depths of contempt and revulsion for the media, with which he is working all the time."

'Biased media'

Motti, do you hate the media?

Morell: "This is the most extreme case of biased media. First they ruin a person's life and then they ask for forgiveness? No, they move on to the next victim. There are decent journalists, but they are afraid to swim against the current."

During the Katsav affair, Morell appeared several times on television, demonstrating burning faith in his client and an uncontrollable urge to hit his adversaries below the belt. On one occasion, he was interviewed on a morning show by journalist Tali Lipkin-Shahak, who claimed that the president, as a married man, had affairs within the framework of his relationship of authority vis-a-vis other women. At that point Morell did not hesitate to retort, at least four times, "Tali, didn't you have relations with a married man?"

Morell: "Amid the sea of lies in this affair, it was rare for anyone to tear off the mask of truth. Is [Lipkin-Shahak] the one to attack a married man who had an affair? Only Katsav is fair game and you are not allowed to say anything about journalists? People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones."

There is a significant aspect here of relationships based on authority.

"We have all become judges. The law distinguishes between affairs in places of work that are conducted willingly and those that are not. I do not know if there was an affair and whether it involved any willingness. I only know there was no rape and no exploitation."

Lipkin-Shahak said in response: "Motti Morell's behavior in the Katsav affair, as in other affairs, is unprofessional, and from a human point of view embarrasses him, and therefore is not worthy of comment. He is a person with a lot of butter on his head, who insists on going out into the sun."

Morell: "When Katsav's people came to hire us, we were like the rest of the public. We didn't want to take what was a lost case. Until Ronen saw the material, had his eyes opened and said it wasn't what it seemed."

Tzur: "We were given three thick file folders that showed a different picture. We reached the conclusion that no manipulation was needed; all we had to do was float the material. Its very existence could be an excellent lever to change public opinion."

Contrary to what journalists claim, and contrary to the natural desire of media people, Tzur insists that when they started to work with Katsav "not one journalist wanted to hear about our material. Most of them found it hard to say, 'Stop, we made a mistake by jumping on the bandwaggon.'"

And then came the press conference, when you wrote Katsav a speech in which he became the victim, the underdog from the wrong ethnic group, who is blameless and helpless in the face of a brainwashed, unfair media.

"We wrote that famous speech because it was the only way to create a crack in the reinforced concrete wall we were up against. In our whole career we had never encountered a situation in which there was not even one minor-league journalist, not even in a kids' magazine, who was willing to listen to us. At that stage, we cursed because there was no one to talk to. The speech we wrote was born out of the distress we all felt. Our assessment was that we would not be able to persuade the journalists. The speech was aimed at the public, and the public was persuaded."

In retrospect, was it a convincing performance? Didn't Katsav come across as neurotic and pathetic?

"The journalists saw it like that, but the speech was not meant to serve them. We saw in the talkbacks and in the responses we received that it worked."

Morell: "I want to take this opportunity to say that we do not engage in talkbacks. That is not how we work."

Tzur: "From that moment, the confidence of many journalists in the finality of Katsav's guilt was undermined, and the process reached a peak in the plea bargain."

As the affair progressed, it was claimed more than once that Morell and Tzur presented to the media a formula by which the president would grant a first exclusive interview in return for the preparation of a favorable investigative report. In the end, no such deal was needed.

Immersed in material

Morell and Tzur relate - and Channel 2 confirms - that the journalist Erez Rotem, from Channel 2, asked to peruse the investigative material and try to understand the disparities between the draft indictment prepared by Mazuz and the plea bargain. It was Rotem who asked to interview Katsav, and it was clear to all sides that the interview would not be impartial.

Channel 2 says: "It is rank hypocrisy to claim that such consent is not ethical, when in many cases understandings are reached with interviewees before an interview is given."

With most of the Channel 2 news staff and most of the president's people compartmentalized, Rotem was allowed to immerse himself in the material, out of which emerged a report that pleased Morell and Tzur. However, in the interview with Katsav, which was also filmed secretly, close to midnight, in the yard of his home in Kiryat Malachi, Katsav stopped the interview midway, before Rotem was able to ask the number of questions that had been agreed on in advance.

Try to be objective: Was that a serious interview?

Morell: "From the outset, people wanted to get him and prove that he is a criminal, so that because of the scale of the hostility, we had to be more in control to make sure our client was not harmed. Just as the press was one-sided, we would be even more one-sided. What's the big deal? When the press will be objective, so will we."

Katsav did not want a probing interview. All he wanted was to say what was in his heart - and then he ran off in the middle.

Tzur: "He did not run off. I stopped the interview after the quota of questions was exceeded. I am not bound by the rules of ethics, but by the rules of loyalty to the client. You also cannot accuse us of selectivity, when the whole situation was selective from the outset."

Katsav insisted that he was innocent until the plea bargain. Do you share his sense of innocence?

Tzur: "Moshe Katsav is not a rapist and not a serial sexual offender. This is a person who is accused of serious matters and the material points to something else. If we had been asked to clear him of acts of the kind he was originally accused of and had really been committed, we would not have worked with him."

No one was surprised at the report that the Morell-Tzur firm was taking over the media handling of the Katsav affair. "No one is more eager to play the part of the neighborhood wild man than Motti Morell," says a colleague. "He shows up for television interviews unshaven, his hair disheveled, and terrible things come out of his mouth."

A former employee: "It is a firm without compassion. With Motti it is clear that what cannot be done with force can be done with more force. He has hate inside. The clients come to him angry, and he converts that anger into hatred and personal assaults."

Morell and Tzur describe their recent campaigns as deriving from a belief in their clients, and as being based on "dissemination of the truth." But it's not always possible to discern those elements in the firm's campaigns. At the height of the second intifada, for example, Morell ran information campaigns for the Foreign Ministry aimed at enhancing Israel's image. One day, a man whom those present describe as "weird" came in and offered to invest half-a-million dollars in a campaign against the government of France, calling for a boycott by Israelis of every French person and product, in reaction to positions this person perceived to be pro-Palestinian. Morell, it is said, agreed to go ahead with the effort, despite the fact that it might have had a negative effect on the Foreign Ministry campaign. The campaign never got off the ground, as the rather dubious client disappeared.

Morell: "A lot of people and ideas pass through here. Most of them we don't accept. I don't remember anything like that being placed on our desk. If it had become concrete, we would have consulted with the Foreign Ministry regarding a possible contradiction."

Six years ago, after Morell asserted that Peres would divide Jerusalem, and after defeating him with Katsav as president, he tried to help make Peres a candidate for prime minister. Because Ehud Barak was running for that post then on behalf of Labor, Peres and Morell tried to make him seem like a candidate of Meretz. The move failed, due to the opposition of Yossi Sarid, who was then the chairman of Meretz.

"[Morell] has no scruples," Sarid says. "Because of my opposition he launched a furious tirade against me in the media and claimed that I had torpedoed the successful idea because Barak agreed to send me to Egypt for talks with [President Hosni] Mubarak. Listen, that was a half-day visit and I cursed having to get up in the dead of night to go there. I have been accused of many things in my life, but never of hedonism. And what am I supposedly bought off with? A measly half-day trip? Morell is a representative of what I do not like: deception, mischief-making, pulling the wool over people's eyes, and readiness to find excuses for wrongdoing. He has worked for everyone, and to me that is like used underwear."

Morell: "I said that Barak bought Yossi Sarid with a ticket to Cairo. That is a joke. Obviously, it's not serious."

Although Morell's public image has been set for some time, his personality is not clear even to those who work closely with him. "He is enigmatic in many ways," a former employee says. "Unlike Ronen, who flows with people and can be flirtatious, Motti is not in an ongoing dialogue with his surroundings. He is quite the alien, introverted, insular, and suddenly capable of exploding, badmouthing, losing patience, hurting his employees." On one occasion in the past, he invited an employee for a talk and explained to her that because she is pretty, she is apparently not bothering to develop intelligence and believes that everything will come easily. If you don't start thinking, he told her, you will be out of here. Employees were stigmatized as "dense" or "airheads," and for a long time few lasted more than a year. It's possible that one of the difficulties, say some who left, is a massive occupation with negative campaigns, provocative and violent. "It's hard when the job dictates collecting shit," one of them says.

Adding to Morell's enigmatic image is his deep immersion in Scientology. He has many books on the subject at home and in his office, takes courses and believes in education in the spirit of Scientology. As a devotee of Scientology, Morell in the past held that psychiatrists established the gas chambers and had imparted the theory of race to Hitler. He is partner to one of the fiercest campaigns of Scientology throughout the world - against the use of Ritalin - and was a member, as a representative of the public, on a Health Ministry committee that addressed the issue. The committee was appointed by Yehoshua Matza, the health minister in the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, whose campaign for prime minister Morell ran.

Scientology was also integrated into the firm's work, when an organizational consultant who draws on the doctrine was hired to work with the staff, and job candidates were given tests based on Scientology. "Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, wrote many courses on advertising, public relations and marketing, and when I read them I saw they matched what I had learned in practice, my beliefs," Morell relates. Tzur finds this the appropriate time to leave the conference room we are sitting in so he can attend to prior commitments.

So it's possible to hold on by your side?

Morell smiles. He is chewing nicotine gum, the seventh piece in two hours, and he replies slowly: "When the firm dealt with politics and crises, clients came for a brief period and that affected the stability here in the office. Today the staff stays for longer. People feel good here. We have gone through a change. The atmosphere here is more pleasant. There was a time when everything really was crisis-ridden. But that was in the past, not today. That does not exist any longer. Maybe I have matured. I have undergone a change. I used to do everything alone. Today there is Ronen. The business and I have become relaxed. I see my role today as making sure the employees feel good." W

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