MBS ‘taunted Bezos about secret affair after phone hack’
Jeff Bezos received a message taunting him about his collapsing marriage from the personal phone of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia long before his extramarital affair became public knowledge, the United Nations has confirmed.
A photograph of a woman loosely resembling the Amazon billionaire’s secret girlfriend was sent to Bezos from a WhatsApp account belonging to the prince, known as MBS, ‘‘along with a sardonic caption’’, according to Agnes Callamard and David Kaye, two UN special rapporteurs.
The message arrived just over a month after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident who had written a column for The Washington Post, which Bezos owns. It was apparently intended to silence the paper’s critical reporting of Saudi Arabia.
The newspaper had been publishing ‘‘ever-expanding revelations about the role of the Saudi government and of the crown prince personally’’ in the killing and a consequent backlash against Bezos, Amazon and itself on social media in Saudi Arabia, the UN said.
Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, a crime that MBS has claimed was carried out without his knowledge by rogue operatives.
Yesterday the two UN officials, who have seen a report on the Khashoggi murder investigation, declared that they were ‘‘gravely concerned’’ and called for an ‘‘immediate investigation by US and other relevant authorities’’.
According to a report commissioned by Bezos’s head of security last year, several months before Khashoggi’s murder a malicious video file sent from the prince’s WhatsApp account is believed to have compromised the billionaire’s phone and made possible the theft of a tranche of personal data.
Callamard, a rapporteur on summary executions and extrajudicial killings who has been investigating the Khashoggi case, and Kaye, who examines violations of press freedom, have reviewed the evidence in the report and found it credible.
Phones belonging to a Saudi human rights activist and a Saudi political activist, both of whom were in frequent contact with Khashoggi, were also infected with malware in the weeks after Bezos’s phone was corrupted.
The evidence ‘‘suggests the possible involvement of the crown prince in surveillance of Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia,’’ they wrote. The circumstances and timing of the surveillance also ‘‘strengthen support’’ for a deeper look into claims that ‘‘the crown prince ordered, incited, or at a minimum, was aware of planning for but failed to stop the mission that fatally targeted Khashoggi.’’
Bezos once enjoyed warm relations with Saudi Arabia and in April 2018 he swapped numbers with MBS at a dinner in Los Angeles, providing the two of them with the contacts to set up a WhatsApp exchange. At the time Bezos, 56, was pursuing a US$1 billion contract to build three data centres in Saudi Arabia for Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing business that powers Amazon’s corporate empire.
However, a much smaller part of his portfolio, The Washington Post, was already becoming what the billionaire has since called ‘‘a complexifier’’ in his dealings with Riyadh. Its editors had hired Khashoggi, a dissident in selfimposed exile, as an opinion writer. His first column, stating that Saudi Arabia was ‘‘repressive’’ and ‘‘unbearable’’ was published in September 2017.
On November 8, Bezos received the text with the picture of a woman who looked slightly like Lauren Sanchez, 50, a pilot and former TV host with whom he was having a then clandestine affair. It was sent ‘‘precisely during the period Bezos and his wife were exploring divorce’’, according to the report compiled for the billionaire by Anthony Ferrante, a former FBI and White House cybersecurity chief.
The accompanying message read: ‘‘Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software License agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree.’’
Two months later, in January last year, an expose of the affair was published in the National Enquirer, a tabloid with links to President Donald Trump – who has been a critic of Bezos, Amazon and The Washington Post.
In February Bezos hinted that Saudi Arabia was involved in a plot by American Media, owner of the Enquirer, to blackmail him. Later that month Gavin de Becker, Bezos’s security adviser, hired Ferrante to examine the breach of the iPhone. In March de Becker wrote that ‘‘investigators and experts concluded with high confidence’’ that the Saudis had taken private information from the phone.
Prince Faisal bin Farhan AlSaud, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, dismissed the allegations as ‘‘absurd’’ yesterday on Wednesday. Speaking in Davos he said: ‘‘The idea that the crown prince would hack Jeff Bezos’s phone is absolutely silly.’’