Did Saudi Arabia Hack Jeff Bezos' Phone And Did They Use Israeli Technology?

These are not easy questions as there is no smoking gun.

But unlike Robert Mueller, who would only conclude collusion if he had a contract signed by Putin and Trump, I am quite happy to use my black hole method and look at events and actions surrounding the allegations. If they constitute a reasonable explanatory pattern then the black hole exists.

On that basis, the answer is "very likely" on both counts.

Now if you thought the Khashoggi murder sounded like a spy novel, this one is a techno-thriller with some high-level finance mixed in.

Let me explain.

Mohammed Bin Salman

Mohammed Bin Salman

If you read my take on the Jamal Khashoggi murder and my previous posts about the bleak future of Saudi Arabia, you already know that the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, commonly known as MBS, is a character out of a Shakespearean play.

He is bigger than life, volatile, obsessive and ruthless.

Ever since he pushed aside the previous Crown Prince, MBS has been torturing, detaining and killing scores of people for anything big or small as long as what they did or say displeased him.

Saudi security forces have detained dozens of clerics, intellectuals and activists who were perceived to pose a threat, as well as people who had posted critical or sarcastic comments about the government on Twitter. 

“We’ve never seen it on a scale like this,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. analyst now with the Brookings Institution. 

To achieve his goal to completely control social discourse in the Kingdom, one of the first things MBS did was to form what the American intelligence agencies call the Rapid Intervention Group.

The Rapid Intervention Group was authorized by Prince Mohammed and overseen by Saud al-Qahtani, a top aide whose official job was media czar at the royal court, American officials said. His deputy, Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb, an intelligence officer who has traveled abroad with the crown prince, led the team in the field.

One of Saud al-Qahtani's responsibilities was to bring the Twitter network, Saudi Arabia's primary outlet for political dissent, under MBS' control.

Twitter is huge in Saudi Arabia—the country boasts one of the world’s highest rates of Twitter penetration. Because Saudi Arabia lacks a free press, and bans political parties and NGOs, Saudi citizens took to Twitter as their only outlet to discuss public matters. By 2015, Twitter had become the premier hangout of Saudi intellectuals, a critical public sphere often called “The Parliament of the Arabs.”

He achieved this goal after a violent and sustained campaign.

By the end of 2018, MBS’ conquest of Twitter was complete: Prominent independent tweeters were in jail, in exile, compromised by blackmail, intimidated into silence—or dead. No longer was there such a thing as an independent voice within Saudi Arabia—you had to either stop being independent, stop having a voice, or stop being in Saudi Arabia. 

Saudi Twitter is now presided over by a closely controlled network of pro-government accounts—political messages posted on it represent government-promoted narratives, not independent opinion.

Besides silencing dissent, this total control over social media outlets enables MBS to organize concerted attack on a number of political targets and whip up public outrage whenever it suits him.

In short, MBS weaponized the Saudi Twitter space very effectively.

Twitter Trolls Attacking "Jew" Bezos

When Khashoggi was murdered and the Washington Post started asking for the Crown Prince be held accountable, MBS launched a call to boycott Amazon on 15 October 2018.

(“To the people of the Great Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: The leftist Jeff Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post, the newspaper of evil and betrayal… we have to defend our country and boycott Amazon.”)

By early November, there was a concerted anti-Bezos campaign on Saudi Twitter orchestrated by government controlled accounts. Under "Boycott Amazon" hashtag one tweet read:

“We as Saudis will never accept to be attacked by The Washington Post in the morning, only to buy products from Amazon and Souq.com by night! Strange that all three companies are owned by the same Jew [sic] who attacks us by day, and sells us products by night!”

The anti-semitic attacks continued even though Bezos is not Jewish. This one had "The Jew: Jeff Bezos" as its caption.

There are too many messages calling him "the hateful filth" and other slurs.

Then, according to Daily Beast (or more correctly to this site) after this troll outburst, there was a period of relative tranquility.

It turns out it was the calm before the storm, as MBS was given a potent weapon with which he thought he could destroy Bezos.

Enquiring Minds Want To Know

On 10 September, Michael Sanchez, the brother of Jeff Bezos' paramour Lauren Sanchez, gave the National Enquirer copies of text messages exchanged by the couple. They contained some adolescent love declarations and would have made good tabloid copy.

Michael Sanchez, Lauren Sanchez and Jeff Bezos

Curiously, National Enquirer did not use the material and sat on it for four months risking a scoop by a rival publication. Curiouser still for a publication struggling with a $1.3 billion debt and losing $70 million a year.

It turns out they thought of a way to make more money out of this than to sell a few more copies to bored supermarket checkout customers. It is quite likely that they took the material to MBS for a bigger payday.

Bezos exposes Pecker

You see, David Pecker, the aptly named CEO of National Enquirer's parent company AMI, had a previous arrangement with MBS.

In July 2017, Pecker's agent Ari Emanuel (yes, of Entourage fame and brother of Rahm) introduced Pecker to an MBS intermediary Kacy Grine.

Right after that, Pecker took Grine to the White House to meet Trump and Jared Kushner. In September 2017, Grine got MBS to invite Pecker to Saudi Arabia.

In March 2018, to mark MBS' official visit to the US, "AMI prints and nationally distributes 200,000 copies of “The New Kingdom”—an expensive 97-page glossy containing no ads. Its sole topic is how MBS is changing the world for the better."

Later in March, the day the MBS tour began, Emanuel received a $400 million investment from the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund.

After Michael Sanchez gave National Enquirer his sister's text messages in September, there was a four-month period of complete radio silence. Then early in January the Enquirer published a special mid-week edition with a 12 page insert on Jeff Bezos.

The day before the issue hit the newsstands AMI announced that it had“successfully completed the refinancing of all outstanding debt.” But it did not divulge who put up the money to save the company.

When Jeff Bezos asked security consultant Gavin de Becker to find out who passed on the material to National Enquirer something very strange happened. AMI contacted Bezos and de Becker and informed them that they had pictures of Bezos' penis (apparently taken from his phone) and would publish them unless they signed a contract denying that any hacking of Bezos' cell phone had taken place.

De Becker:

An eight-page contract AMI sent for me and Bezos to sign would have required that I make a public statement, composed by them and then widely disseminated, saying that my investigation had concluded they hadn’t relied upon “any form of electronic eavesdropping or hacking in their news-gathering process.” 

Note here that I’d never publicly said anything about electronic eavesdropping or hacking—and they wanted to be sure I couldn’t.

After a thorough investigation Gavin de Becker concluded that Jeff Bezos' phone was hacked by Saudi agents, in a effort to blackmail and control him.

That investigation is now complete. As has been reported elsewhere, my results have been turned over to federal officials. Since it is now out of my hands, I intend today’s writing to be my last public statement on the matter. Further, to respect officials pursuing this case, I won’t disclose details from our investigation. I am, however, comfortable confirming one key fact:

Our investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence that the Saudis had access to Bezos’ phone, and gained private information. As of today, it is unclear to what degree, if any, AMI was aware of the details.

What is interesting is the fact that AMI asked de Becker and Bezos to publicly deny that there was any foreign involvement and that any hacking had taken place before the De Becker investigation. That preemptive request was backed by the threat of publishing Bezos' penis pictures taken from his phone.

This would only make sense if they were trying to protect the Saudis and were willing to give up the penis pictures to achieve that goal.

They also wanted me to say our investigation had concluded that their Bezos story was not “instigated, dictated or influenced in any manner by external forces, political or otherwise.” External forces? Such a strange phrase. 

One final piece of the financial puzzle: 

Weeks ago, David Pecker’s CFO told reporters at Bloomberg News that AMI has again been saved, this time by “several new investors that came into the fold.” Though he would not name the investors, he added: 

“There is no direct investment in the company’s debt or equity by the Saudis.”

Rarely has the word “direct” caused a statement to be so indirect.

It is clear that David Pecker went after Jeff Bezos in order to help the Crown Prince to silence Washington Post's Khashoggi coverage and AMI was handsomely rewarded for its efforts.

The question then is how did the Saudis manage to hack Bezos' phone. The man is the CEO of Amazon and he is likely to be very security conscious.

Enter NSO Group an Israeli firm that developed a spyware capable of accessing the content of any phone without leaving a trace.

Did NSO Group Help Saudis Hack Bezos' Phone?

In his only op-ed after the investigation, Gavin de Becker did not name NSO Group but linked to a New York Times investigative piece about NSO Group, DarkMatter and Black Cube, companies conducting cyber warfare on behalf of authoritarian regimes.

By 2011, NSO had developed its first prototype, a mobile surveillance tool the company called Pegasus. Like its namesake, the Greek mythological winged horse, NSO’s tool could do something seemingly impossible: collect vast amounts of previously inaccessible data from smartphones in the air without leaving a trace — including phone calls, texts, emails, contacts, location and any data transmitted over apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype. 

“Once these companies invade your phone, they own it. You’re just carrying it around,” Avi Rosen of Kaymera Technologies, an Israeli cyberdefense company, said of NSO and its competitors.

Omri Lavie, left, and Shalev Hulio, founded NSO and have tapped into technology developed by graduates of Intelligence Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency.

NSO was accused by several dissidents of providing MBS access to their cell phones and there are even some reports that the team that murdered Jamal Khashoggi monitored his whereabouts using Pegasus.  The same allegation is made in a recent lawsuit against the company.

While helping Mexico catch drug criminals is within NSO Group's stated mission, the company is at the center of a lawsuit which alleges its technology was used by Saudi Arabia to spy on journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

While Saudi Arabia used NSO's services for some time now, last December the Kingdom applied to buy the technology and Israel's Defense Ministry signed off that the sale on 8 December 2018. A full month before the penis pictures saga.

According to the Post’s David Ignatius, Saudi official Saud al-Qahtani sought Pegasus as part of a surveillance network designed to help the crown prince combat internal enemies as part of his drive for power.

As I mentioned at the outset, Saud al-Qahtani is the head of the Rapid Intervention Group, MBS' operational arm.

NSO Group vociferously denied these allegations and claimed that its technology played no role in the Bezos hacking.

"We can say unequivocally that our technology was not used in this instance. We know this because our software cannot be used on US phone numbers," the spokeswoman said. "Our technology, which is only licensed to prevent or investigate crime and terror, was not used by any of our customers to target Mr. Bezos' phone."

This is an interesting denial, a bit like AMI maintaining no direct Saudi investment. It is a matter of clever parsing.

You see, there is a way around the American numbers limitation.

Bill Marczak, a researcher at Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto group that’s studied NSO for years, said that “describing target limitations in terms of phone numbers makes sense if you imagine targeting phones by using their number, such as by SMS.” 

“But what if you target people using, say, a malicious WiFi hotspot, or network injection, or getting them to visit a compromised website? In that case, [NSO’s spyware] Pegasus might not know the phone number of the person before it infects them.”

Tellingly, the NSO Group had no come back for this loophole.

Without explaining the technical details of how this limitation works, an NSO spokesperson said in an email that NSO's spyware is specifically "designed to ensure it cannot be used in places other than which it is licensed."

To me the whole episode is a bit ironic. The most anti-semitic and least democratic place on earth is using Israeli technology to suppress dissent and kidnap and kill its citizens.

If the same technology was used to go after an American citizen things could get complicated for both MBS and Netanyahu.

As the richest man in the world Jeff Bezos is unlikely to leave this fight. If I were MBS I would worry about the prospect of Bezos coming after me.