Jeff Bezos: the hacking of a billionaire
For 25 years after he founded Amazon, Jeff Bezos managed to keep a remarkably low profile, said The Washington Post. That changed in January 2019 when, days after the billionaire revealed that he was divorcing his wife, the National Enquirer ran an 11-page spread about his secret affair with a former TV presenter, Lauren Sánchez. There followed a feverish hunt to find out the source of the tabloid’s scoop. Its publisher, AMI, insists it got the story from Sánchez’s Trumpsupporting brother. But at the time, Bezos suggested Saudi Arabia might be involved; and last week, his investigators pointed the finger at Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) himself. According to their report, Bezos’s phone started to “leak” vast amounts of data in May 2018, after he’d opened a WhatsApp message from MbS (the pair having exchanged numbers in April, when they met at a party in Los Angeles). In November that year, MbS sent Bezos a photo of a woman loosely resembling his lover, with a cryptic message hinting at divorce negotiations.
The Saudis have dismissed as “absurd” the idea that MbS hacked Bezos’s phone – but the report has been given credence by the UN, said The Times. Its investigators have suggested that MbS targeted Bezos in an effort to influence critical reporting in The Washington Post, which he owns. It was eight months after The Post started employing the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi as a columnist that bin Salman is alleged to have targeted Bezos; and weeks after Khashoggi was murdered at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, that MbS sent him the message hinting at knowledge of his affair.
On the face of it, the idea that MbS would personally deliver spyware to Bezos’s phone is outlandish. The risk of exposure, for a man posing as a liberal reformer, was surely too great. But MbS is not a rational actor, said Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy. He is a “loose cannon: reckless, paranoid and a bit of a fool”. He allegedly ordered the murder of Khashoggi – though the journalist posed no threat to his rule. “He launched a war in Yemen that has been a humanitarian disaster and a military failure.” He endures because Saudi has lots of oil, and Donald Trump has proved an unswerving ally. But his “enablers” in the West must be wondering who else’s phone he may have infiltrated – and whether he’d be reckless enough to turn on them, said David Wearing in The Guardian. Meanwhile, “wiser heads in Washington and London” will be growing ever more dismayed at the prospect of having to deal with this “dangerous” figure for years to come.