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Al Akhbar, combed through the intelligence emails about Jared Cohen. The people at Stratfor, who saw themselves as a kind of private CIA, were jealous that anyone wanted to enter their sector. Google was on their radar. In a series of colorful emails, they discussed the structure Cohen was building under the auspices of Google Ideas, and speculated about where it was really heading.

Cohen's office sought to move beyond public relations and "corporate responsibility" to active corporate intervention in international affairs, at a level normally acceptable to governments. Jared Cohen became known jokingly as the "Director of Regime Change."

According to the information in the letters, he tried to have list of lebanon cell phone numbers his hand in all the major historical events in the modern Middle East. He was in Egypt during the revolution, meeting with Wael Ghonim, a Google employee whose arrest made him a media hero and a symbol of the uprising in the Western press, and who was captured a few hours after the meeting [Wikipedia reference: Wael Ghonim is an Internet activist and computer engineer. Since January 2010, he has been Google's marketing director for the Middle East and North Africa. In 2011, he gained worldwide fame as an activist in the Egyptian revolution].

Meetings were also planned in Turkey and Palestine, but both were canceled by Google management as too dangerous. Just a few months before meeting me, Cohen was planning a trip to the Iran-Azerbaijan border to engage Iranian communities near the border, as part of a Google Ideas project on “repressed communities.” Unfortunately, there are no footnotes in the text, so it’s not entirely clear what the project was.

In an internal email, Stratford's vice president for intelligence, Fred Burton (a former State Department security official), wrote: "Google gives the White House both support and air cover. In reality, they do things that the CIA can't do... [Cohen] will be kidnapped or killed someday.