Saudi crown prince tried to ‘intimidate’ Amazon chief
Mohammed bin Salman hinted he knew of Bezos affair in Whatsapp message, claim UN investigators
MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN personally attempted to “intimidate” Jeff Bezos with a Whatsapp message implying he had incriminating information about the Amazon chief’s extramarital affair in the weeks after Jamal Khashoggi’s murder, UN investigators have told
The Daily Telegraph.
Officials from the United Nations said the Saudi crown prince appeared to have sent a suggestive message to Mr Bezos’s personal iphone in November 2018 to make The Washington Post owner tone down his paper’s critical coverage of the Saudi journalist’s death several weeks earlier. When the message was sent, Mr Bezos’s affair had yet to be exposed.
The allegation suggests that the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia was using private messages not only to hack the world’s richest man but also intimidate him as part of an attempt to cover up the truth of Khashoggi’s murder.
“The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the crown prince in surveillance of Mr Bezos, in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia,” said UN officials Agnes Callamard and David Kaye.
Saudi Arabia adamantly denied the claims. “The idea that the crown prince would hack Jeff Bezos’s phone is absolutely silly,” said Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, the Saudi foreign minister. Mr Bezos made no public statement but simply tweeted a photograph of himself at a memorial service for Khashoggi, with the caption “Jamal”.
Meanwhile, it emerged Boris Johnson may have been vulnerable to a similar hack as several former government figures told The Telegraph that he had communicated with Prince Mohammed using Whatsapp. A former Foreign Office source said they were “99 per cent sure” the Prime Minister had done so, adding: “He certainly had his number and would ping him the occasional message.” No10 declined to comment.
Other Western officials who could have been vulnerable because of Whatsapp conversations with the prince included Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, and Simon Collis, British ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
Mr Bezos and Prince Mohammed exchanged numbers on April 4 2018, while the prince was on a tour of the US. The Amazon founder soon joined the ranks of global figures who kept in touch with him via Whatsapp.
On May 1, the prince sent Mr Bezos a seemingly innocuous video about internet costs in Saudi Arabia that allegedly contained spyware designed to infiltrate his iphone and pilfer his private data, including texts and photographs of his affair with Lauren Sánchez, a US television news anchor.
Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct 2, allegedly on Prince Mohammed’s orders.
The Washington Post, where the journalist wrote a column critical of the prince, began intensive coverage of the case. Saudi Arabia has always denied the prince was involved in the killing.
On Nov 8, the prince contacted Mr Bezos on Whatsapp with an unusual internet picture “meme” of a woman resembling Ms Sánchez. “Arguing with a woman is like reading the software
licence agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree,” the caption read. Ms Callamard said the message, and the fact it came so soon after Khashoggi’s death, indicated it
was meant to unnerve Mr Bezos. “I would say it was designed to unsettle, to intimidate… to convey or imply they had access to personal, private or confidential information,” she said.
Mr Kaye added: “It points toward an interest of the Saudi government or the crown prince in influencing the kind of control that Jeff Bezos would have over
The Washington Post.”
But the efforts appear to have failed. Suspicious his phone had been hacked, he hired a team of experts who concluded with “medium to high confidence” that Prince Mohammed was personally involved in sending the spyware. The findings formed the basis of the UN statement yesterday.
The Wall Street Journal last night reported that Saudi officials close to the prince were aware of the attempt to hack Mr Bezos but not of a plan to blackmail him.
‘I would say it was designed to unsettle, to intimidate… to imply they had access to confidential information’
MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN could be forgiven for thinking there was no one who could touch him.
It was May 1 2018, and the world was beating a path to the gilded doors of the 32-year-old’s palace in Riyadh.
A year earlier his father had abruptly promoted him to Crown Prince and heir to the throne. He had just returned from a much-heralded trip to America where he was feted by Hollywood stars, US politicians, and Silicon Valley leaders. His Vision 2030, imagining an economically dynamic Saudi Arabia guided by a tolerant form of Islam, was being praised as a blueprint for a new Middle East.
It was in this spirit of confidence that Prince Mohammed pressed “send” on Whatsapp, delivering a video on Saudi internet usage, allegedly encrypted with spyware, to the personal iphone X of Jeff Bezos, the world’s wealthiest person.
But the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia would soon learn he had met his match in a man whose corporate empire stretches to almost every corner of the planet and is prepared to use his unimaginable fortune to stand up to even the most powerful of rulers.
Nearly two years later, Prince Mohammed’s global reputation is in tatters, thanks largely to Mr Bezos’s forces, which have been marshalled against him.
Dogged news coverage from The Washington Post, which Mr Bezos bought in 2013, helped expose the Saudi state’s role in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, at the country’s consulate in Istanbul, and amplified the chorus of voices accusing Prince Mohammed of personally ordering the killing.
A team of digital forensic experts hired by Mr Bezos claimed last year that Saudi Arabia appeared to have hacked the Amazon founder’s phone and ransacked it, apparently for evidence he was having an extramarital affair.
This week the United Nations investigators, working on evidence gathered by Mr Bezos’s team of cyber experts, made an even more explosive allegation likely to tear at the last shreds of Prince Mohammed’s international credibility.
They assessed that the prince was not only directly involved in the hacking of Mr Bezos’s phone, but that he appeared to have personally attempted a clumsy effort to threaten the billionaire.
On Nov 8 2018 – a month after Saudi agents cut Mr Khashoggi’s body to pieces with a bone saw and sent Riyadh into a spasm of false denials – Prince Mohammed sent Mr Bezos a picture of a woman via Whatsapp.
The picture was in the format of an online meme and the woman in it closely resembled Lauren Sánchez, the US TV news anchor with whom Mr Bezos was having an affair.
The message arrived as the Amazon executive was secretly discussing a divorce with his wife, Mackenzie, and how they would split his $100billion (£76billion) fortune.
The meme’s caption used a joke long shared on the internet that, in this context, seemed to contain a coded threat. “Arguing with a woman is like reading the software licence agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree,” it read.
Both the private experts and the UN investigators interpreted the 23 words in the same way: that Prince Mohammed was signalling he knew about Mr Bezos’s affair and divorce and perhaps intimating he would make this knowledge public if The Washington Post did not tone down its criticism over the death of Mr Khashoggi.
“The information we have received suggests the possible involvement of the Crown Prince in surveillance of Mr Bezos in an effort to influence, if not silence, The Washington Post’s reporting on Saudi Arabia,” the UN experts Agnes Callamard and David Kaye said.
Saudi Arabia strongly denied that Prince Mohammed played any role. “The idea that the Crown Prince would hack Jeff Bezos’s phone is absolutely silly,” said Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, the Saudi foreign minister.
For Prince Mohammed to allow himself to be personally implicated in the hacking would indeed seem to be an act of unfathomable recklessness.
But it is also in character for a prince known for impetuosity, aggression and a willingness to take risks.
When a Saudi official tried to stop a young Prince Mohammed from appropriating a property, the prince reportedly sent him a bullet in an envelope, earning himself the nickname “Father of the Bullet”.
On a whim, he paid $550 million (£419million) for a yacht that he liked the look of after spotting it off the coast of southern France in 2015. Such behaviour might seem like the typical extravagance of a young royal raised in vast wealth but Prince Mohammed has brought the same style to his decision-making as Saudi’s de facto ruler, often with calamitous results.
In 2015 he ordered his military into neighbouring Yemen to put down an insurrection by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Five years later, they remain bogged down, unable to defeat the Houthis or withdraw. More than 100,000 people have died in the fighting and ensuing famine, including 8,000 civilians killed by Saudi Arabia and its allies, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project.
The technology used to hack Mr Bezos’ phone is nearly as complicated as the Saudi motivations for doing so.
Mr Bezos and Prince Mohammed first met at a small dinner in Los Angeles on March 21 2018, but did not exchange numbers until a second meeting on April 4, according to the UN. “Hello MBS,” Mr Bezos wrote in his first Whatsapp message. “Hello, I saved the number,” the prince replied.
The two men stayed in touch, primarily about a proposal for Amazon to build three data centres in Saudi Arabia, a project that would help fulfil Prince Mohammed’s desire to attract international investment to his country.
On May 1, Prince Mohammed sent Mr Bezos what appeared to be an innocuous video promoting the low cost of internet data in Saudi Arabia. But hidden inside the file appears to have been spyware code that quickly spread through the iphone.
A report by FTI Consulting alleged that within hours of Mr Bezos receiving the video “a massive and unauthorised exfiltration of data from Bezos’s phone began, continuing and escalating for months”. He would not even have needed to click the file for the spyware to gain access to his private information.
Data began pouring out of the mobile to an unknown location without Mr Bezos realising. At one stage, the data output from the phone was 106,032,045 per cent higher than usual.
Among the files that were allegedly sucked from the phone on to Saudi-controlled data servers were naked selfies that Mr Bezos had sent to his lover, Ms Sánchez. Those photographs later found their way into the hands of the National Enquirer.
The US tabloid insists that it acquired the photographs from Ms Sánchez’s brother, a conservative and Donald Trump supporter who shares the president’s hostility towards the liberal Washington Post.
Mr Trump regularly rages against the paper on Twitter and denounces it as “the Amazon Washington Post”. But Mr Bezos and his team have always suspected that the lurid pictures were given to the tabloid by Saudi intelligence officers in the hope that it would weaponise them against The Washington Post and its owner.
A critical question remains outstanding: which of the constellation of spyware firms provided the technology used for the hack?
The UN said yesterday that the technology used to extract Mr Bezos’s data appeared similar to the Pegasus-3 spyware, but stopped short of explicitly accusing NSO, the company behind the technology.
NSO, a Tel Aviv firm founded by Israeli military and intelligence veterans that has provided tens of millions of dollars in services to Riyadh in recent years, “unequivocally” denied that its technology was used in the hack.
Ms Callamard, one of the UN officials, said that the Bezos case only underscored the need for a moratorium on the export of spyware technology until the international community
could come up with an effective system of regulation. She told The Daily Telegraph: “It is totally uncontrollable and very difficult to trace.
“The international community must come together to think of a moratorium on the production and export of surveillance and hacking technology.”
Mohammed bin Salman has spent the past few weeks holed up in his palaces in Saudi Arabia, making almost no public appearances. The days when he would be welcomed by American technology executives or celebrities must seem like a distant dream to a man now widely seen as a global pariah and accused of having Mr Khashoggi’s blood on his hands.
Mr Bezos has also maintained a relatively low-profile, issuing no lengthy statement. Instead he tweeted a photograph of himself at a memorial service for Mr Khashoggi, writing simply “#Jamal”.
Last Friday a dip in Amazon shares meant he briefly slipped from his position as the richest person on earth and saw the title go to Bernard Arnault, a luxury goods mogul.
But this week his shares shot back up again, restoring his net worth to $116 billion – $3bn more than Mr Arnault. Mr Bezos, in many ways, is once again on top of the world.