Israeli-trained Kaplan poaches Labour’s staff
Ex-Labour staffers keep joining a firm run by a former Israeli military intelligence officer as the party chooses its next prime minister.
In 2014, 43 reservists from Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence branch, signed a public letter describing what the job actually involved: the “pervasive” monitoring of Palestinian civilians, files built on medical conditions and sexual orientation, blackmail material passed up the chain. One reservist’s phrase became notorious. There was “blood on the headset.”
That is the trade Assaf Kaplan learned in five years as a Unit 8200 analyst and officer. In January 2021 the Labour Party hired him, giving him a desk in Keir Starmer’s own operation with the job title “Social Listening and Organising Manager” and a brief that included monitoring party members’ social media. He left the party in October 2024. Since then he has run a private firm staffed increasingly by former Labour employees, recruiting from Westminster while the party chooses who succeeds Starmer as prime minister.
Labour staffers, an Israeli-linked firm, and a leadership contest
Nominations for Starmer’s successor opened on 9 July, with Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham the frontrunner to become Britain’s seventh prime minister in ten years. While that contest runs, the firm Kaplan built out of Labour’s own election machine is still pulling staff from the party apparatus that will pick him.
The firm is 411 Communications Ltd, incorporated on 11 September 2024 and registered at Companies House under number 15949736, its registered office a serviced address on Silex Street in south London. Its founders describe themselves as “the team behind the historic 2024 general election victory.” The number 411 is the seat count Labour won that year.
Companies House lists a single officer: Niky William Rutherford, a British director appointed on the day the firm was incorporated. Kaplan does not appear on the company’s public record. He is, however, presented in the firm’s own material and in reporting on it as the person who runs 411 day to day. That gap between the legal filing and the public presentation is itself worth noting: a firm built almost entirely on the reputational capital of a Labour landslide has kept the man steering it off its own Companies House page.
The revolving door
Four recent moves show the pattern. Oketa Zogi Shala, a former Labour intern who says she personally shadowed Starmer and David Lammy, joined 411 in February 2026; her own description of the work is “shaping narratives, amplifying voices, and powering campaigns for MPs, Labour-affiliated groups, political parties, and causes that matter.” Jonah Gregory left a parliamentary assistant post with Mike Tapp, a Labour MP and vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel, for a 411 internship in August 2025 and was promoted to Junior Executive by February 2026. Ellie Banks, communications officer to Labour MP Keir Mather for roughly a year, became a 411 Senior Executive in August 2025. Molly Bibby, digital content and communications officer to Labour MP Josh Simons, announced her move to 411 in February 2026. Declassified UK has identified five further 411 staffers who currently or recently worked for the party, on top of these four.
None of these staffers is accused of wrongdoing, and none should be. They are early-career communications workers taking the jobs on offer. The story is not that a 24-year-old intern did anything improper. It is that the machine offering those jobs is run by a man who spent five years profiling a population under occupation, and that Labour’s own digital operation has become its recruiting ground.
The journalist Labour’s own think tank dossiered
Josh Simons, whose former aide now works at 411, ran the Labour Together think tank before entering Parliament. Labour Together paid PR firm APCO Worldwide £36,000 for a report profiling journalists investigating the think tank’s undeclared donations. Declassified UK’s chief reporter, John McEvoy, was named in it as a “significant person of interest.” Simons resigned as a Cabinet Office minister on 1 March 2026 and stood down from Parliament on 14 May, clearing the Kingswood seat for Burnham to fight the resulting by-election.
The same office that commissioned a dossier on the journalists reporting on Labour’s donors sent a staffer straight to the firm run by the man who used to monitor Labour members’ own social media for the party leadership. It is one office, one machine, moving in one direction.
Not the only Unit 8200 connection in the parliamentary party
Kaplan is not an isolated case. Damien Egan, the Labour MP for Kingswood elected in February 2024, is married to Yossi Felberbaum, a former Israeli soldier who, according to a Birthright Israel Excel posting, was responsible for recruiting soldiers into Unit 8200. Neither fact makes either man a current intelligence asset, and neither should be reported as one; there is no public evidence Kaplan reports to any Israeli agency today, six years after he left the IDF, and none that his firm operates on Tel Aviv’s instruction. What is documented is narrower and still significant: a surveillance skillset built on watching an occupied population has moved, via a named individual, into the operational centre of a governing British party, and is now being monetised and staffed from that party’s own payroll.
411 has separately been reported paying journalists and influencers, under non-disclosure agreements, to post pro-Labour and anti-Reform content, in a project called Amplifiers. The firm has declined to say who funds it and denies any formal link to the Labour Party. Both denials can be true and the pattern above can still stand: formal contracts are not the only route by which a party’s culture and its personnel end up serving one firm.
What “social listening” was for
Labour’s own account of Kaplan’s role in Starmer’s office was that it involved monitoring the party’s own members, a purge era in which the Labour left, particularly left-wing Jewish members, found themselves disciplined and expelled. The same watching, cataloguing craft that Unit 8200 trains for use against Palestinians was applied, at a smaller scale, to Labour’s own membership. It now sits inside a private company recruiting the staff who will help pick Britain’s next prime minister.
