Solomon acknowledged “serious mistakes in managing my source relationship with Azima” but he said he had been the target of an “incredibly effective” information operation.
A former Wall Street Journal reporter has accused a major US law firm of having used mercenary hackers from India to oust him from his job and ruin his reputation.
In a lawsuit filed late on Friday, Jay Solomon, the Journal’s former chief foreign correspondent, said Philadelphia-based Dechert LLP worked with Indian hackers to steal emails between him and one of his key sources, Iranian American aviation executive Farhad Azima.
Solomon said the messages, which showed Azima floating the idea of the two of them going into business together, were put into a dossier and circulated in a successful effort to get him fired.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, said the law firm Dechert “wrongfully disclosed this dossier first to Mr. Solomon’s employer, the Wall Street Journal, at its Washington DC bureau, and then to other media outlets in an attempt to malign and discredit him."
It said the campaign “effectively caused Mr. Solomon to be blackballed by the journalistic and publishing community.”
Dechert said in an email that it disputed the claim and would fight it in court. Azima — who filed his own lawsuit against Dechert on Thursday in New York — had no immediate comment.
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Cyberespionage campaign
Solomon’s suit is the latest in a series of legal actions about hired hackers operating out of India.
In June, several hack-for-hire shops, including Delhi area-companies BellTroX and CyberRoot, were involved in a decade-long series of espionage campaigns targeting thousands of people, including more than 1,000 lawyers at 108 different law firms.
At the time, people who had become hacking targets while involved in at least seven different lawsuits had each launched their own inquiries into the cyberespionage campaign. That number has since grown.
Azima's lawyers, like Solomon’s, allege that Dechert worked with BellTroX, CyberRoot and a slew of private investigators to steal his emails and publish them to the web.
BellTroX and CyberRoot are not parties to the suit and could not immediately be reached. Executives at both firms have previously denied wrongdoing.
Solomon and Azima allege that Dechert undertook the hack-and-leak operation on behalf of Ras Al Khaimah's investment agency (RAKIA).
Lawyers for RAKIA used the emails to help win a fraud lawsuit filed against Azima in London in 2016.
Azima, who denies RAKIA’s fraud allegations, is trying to have the judgment thrown out.
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Relationship with a source
The leaked emails also made their way to The Associated Press, which published two articles about Azima in June of 2017, including one that revealed the airline mogul had offered reporter Solomon a minority stake in a company he was setting up.
The Journal fired Solomon shortly before the AP’s story was published, citing ethical violations. But Solomon says he never took Azima up on his proposal or benefited financially from their relationship.
In a first-person account of the scandal published in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2018, the ex-journalist said he never pushed back on Azima’s talk of business opportunities because he was trying to humour a man who had been crucial to his reporting on the Middle East.
Solomon acknowledged “serious mistakes in managing my source relationship with Azima” including accepting stays on the businessman's yacht. But he said he had been the target of an “incredibly effective” information operation.
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