Blood and Oil, page 18
With the White House seemingly supporting their desire to escalate the conflict, there seemed little risk for the Saudi and Emirati princes in trying to bring Qatar to heel.
An hour before the boycott was announced, the Saudis gave Jared Kushner a heads-up. He asked if they could delay. “It’s too late,” a Saudi emissary told him. “It’s in motion.”
The boycott announcement terrified many Qataris, who referred to it with the more charged term “blockade.” Some of the nation’s wealthiest families began amassing personal armories in their villas and palaces in anticipation of an invasion. Rex Tillerson, who hadn’t been in on discussions about the Qatar boycott with Mohammed bin Salman, tried to stop things from getting out of hand. Tillerson had history with the Al Thani ruling family from when he was an executive at ExxonMobil, helping Tamim’s father develop its natural gas operations.
Speaking to the White House, Tillerson emphasized that the US Al Udeid military base would be at risk if three of the world’s biggest buyers of arms suddenly started pointing them at each other. The idea that Saudi Arabia would use American tanks, American fighter planes, and American missiles against Qatar, and vice versa, was unacceptable.
Tillerson had little luck in getting the president to help calm the situation in the early days. In a White House meeting with Trump and Kushner, the frustrated secretary of state tried to emphasize that the situation was a potential crisis that would upend life for Qataris. “They’re not going to be able to take their exams,” Tillerson said. “There’s not going to be any milk in the grocery store.”
“I don’t give a fuck about milk,” Trump responded. He didn’t see the blockade as necessarily a bad thing. “If you’ve got them fighting over who funds terrorism less, this is going in the right direction,” he told Kushner. Let the Saudis figure it out.
Trump tweeted on June 6, the first day of the boycott, “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar—look!”
While Saudi Arabia and the UAE claimed they had no role in the hacking of Qatar News Agency, foreign intelligence sources told the New York Times and Washington Post that the culprits were Russian freelance hackers working for foreign governments. As the impasse hardened, Mohammed bin Salman’s aides floated an idea to dig a canal along the forty-mile Saudi border with Qatar to turn the peninsular nation into an island. It wasn’t clear if it was a real possibility or a false story to intimidate the Qataris.
While Saudi Arabia and the UAE were responding to Qatar’s escalations, including Tamim’s faked statements, the plan to isolate and neutralize Qatar had been in the works for months. The guile and intrigue would later lead pundits to refer to it as a “Game of Thobes.”
On March 22, 2017, Abdulaziz Alotaibi, a Saudi strategist at the consultancy KPMG working with the Saudi embassy and the public relations firm Qorvis Communications, headed by veteran communications guru Michael Petruzzello, created a special PowerPoint laying out a media plan of attack starting for three months in June—just after Trump’s scheduled visit to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia had long been one of Qorvis’s best clients. Also looped into the plans was The Harbour Group, a public relations firm working with both the Emiratis and the Saudis. At the same time Mohammed bin Zayed was seeking to help his younger neighbor take a bigger role in the region, Saudi Arabia hired Harbour’s managing director Richard Mintz in early 2017 to help get Mohammed bin Salman’s brother Khalid ready for his new role as ambassador to the United States. The men would venture out for frequent two-hour meals to discuss everything about American politics and foreign policy from the ground up.
Khalid is Mohammed’s full brother, younger by about three years, and among his most trusted confidants. The two had a similar background. Khalid had stayed home to study in Saudi Arabia like his brother, and they were close growing up, playing computer games, learning to scuba dive together from an instructor they brought with them on King Salman’s annual one-month vacations, and venturing into towns in Spain and France to see what real life looked like up close. But unlike his brother, Khalid learned to speak English well when he was relatively young and grew to understand American culture while spending long stretches of time in the United States for air force training at Columbus Air Force Base in Mississippi and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where he’d venture out after hours with fellow servicemen to explore the area’s nightlife. When his brother declared war on the Houthi militia in Yemen in 2015, Khalid took part in sorties in an F15 fighter jet, returning home with a back injury that left him with chronic pain. After a stint in the Ministry of Defense, he was appointed ambassador in April 2017.
Mintz started working with the UAE after one of his colleagues at the public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, Simon Pearce, took a full-time job working for the Abu Dhabi government. Pearce, an Australian, went on to become a key advisor to Khaldoon Al Mubarak, one of Mohammed bin Zayed’s closest advisors, on buying the football team Manchester City and other high-profile Abu Dhabi deals and strategic endeavors, such as countering the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.
Qorvis’s plan had a week-by-week strategy to “increase public perception of Qatar as a supporter of terrorism,” creating fact sheets to distribute about Qatar’s alleged bribes related to the 2020 World Cup and even creating digital ads showing Qatar as a destabilizing force in the Middle East.
The same document laid out a similar strategy for finding “third-party validation” for Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan, including a nine-by-nine matrix of journalists ranked as friendly, neutral, or hostile and their influence as low, medium, or high created by KPMG. The top, most influential journalists they could count on were Tom Friedman, a New York Times columnist who’d been praising Mohammed bin Salman as a reformer; David Ignatius at the Washington Post; Bret Baier at Fox News; and Norah O’Donnell at CBS News. Fareed Zakaria at CNN was the most hostile journalist with a high influence ranking, the matrix showed.
The cold war with Qatar was years in the making, but the country started drifting rapidly away from its neighbors when Tamim’s father, Hamad bin Khalifa, known as HBK, overthrew his own father, Khalifa bin Hamad, in a bloodless coup d’état in 1995.
Hamad was born in Qatar’s sleepier early days, when the country was hardly known outside the Persian Gulf—and even in the region wasn’t known for much other than its pearl divers. Before the coup, Emir Khalifa had operated Qatar as a semi-independent country, running its own domestic affairs since independence in 1971 but sheltered under Saudi Arabia’s security umbrella. The Saudi king, not the Qatari emir, dictated foreign policy and defense affairs. Qatar was a tiny fingernail compared to Saudi Arabia in terms of power, influence, size, and even self-identity.
But Hamad had grown up in a more cosmopolitan world. Thanks to the country’s modest wealth at the time and historical ties to the United Kingdom, he attended the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, before returning to Doha to become a military officer and eventually minister of defense and crown prince. He grew restless under his father’s incrementalist approach to development and his unwillingness to forge Qatar’s own path in global affairs.
Hamad, then in his mid-forties, had already alarmed Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd and UAE president Zayed Al Nahyan with his efforts to develop unilateral relations with Iraq and Iran, then ruled by Saddam Hussein and Akbar Rafsanjani. He hatched a plan to seize control with the approval of key members of the family. Then, while his father was in Geneva on vacation, he took over. His father fled to Abu Dhabi with his advisors in a convoy of jetliners, where he lived for years before decamping to France and finally back to Doha in 2004 for the last twelve years of his life.
As emir, Hamad injected energy into the Qatar government and an independent ethos, even forging a trade relationship with Israel. He developed the country’s gas fields, a big bet since natural gas was not yet the profitable raw material in global industrial production that it is today. The bet paid off tremendously, making Qatar fabulously rich. Armed with wealth and gumption, Hamad set out to create a foreign policy focused on the role of Qatar in the rest of the world and not just on his monarchical neighbors. One of the biggest factors was the creation of Al Jazeera. The news channel spent lavishly recruiting international journalists. It covered the Middle East most intently, depicting Qatar as a neutral power mediating conflicts. There was virtually no coverage of societal issues or controversies within Qatar itself.
Qatar’s neighbors considered Al Jazeera anything but neutral, and they found the country’s foreign policy to be almost diametrically opposed to theirs. The Arab Spring brought those differences into relief. When Egyptian youth protested against longtime president Hosni Mubarak, Qatar backed the street, while Saudi Arabia and the UAE tried to bolster Mubarak. And after Mubarak fell, Qatar propped up Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi. The Emiratis and Saudis subsequently backed a military general to overthrow Morsi and quash the Brotherhood.
Saudi Arabia had been a force for stasis in the region. It paid billions of dollars to protect leaders like Mubarak and Jordan’s King Hussein from unrest and used its most powerful tool of all, religious influence, to sway the global Muslim population to its conservative, fusty interpretation of what it meant to live a good Islamic life. Wahhabi imams would regularly admonish during their sermons that good Muslims should never oppose their leaders, no matter how grave their errors or ethical violations, because doing so would divide the Muslim population, a concept known as fitna.
The Muslim Brotherhood disagreed with the Wahhabists and long opposed the Gulf monarchies, portraying them as indulging in extravagant, unholy lives, while regular Arabs struggled to make ends meet. Emirati and Saudi officials genuinely wondered what game Qatar was playing in backing them—Qatari royals weren’t strangers to wild spending and partying. Yet here was the tiny country hosting Islamic leaders who regularly decried royals and questioned their faith; maintaining ties with groups like Hezbollah, seen by much of the world as terrorists masquerading as freedom fighters; and hosting a television channel that used its Western-style investigations to undermine every regional dynasty except the Al Thanis. One Emirati official remarked, “I guess they plan to have their throats slit last.”
Qataris, more adept than the Saudis at lobbying and communicating their worldview, liken themselves to a Middle Eastern Switzerland that maintains contact with every group to better facilitate negotiations and bring peace to the region. There are incidents that don’t fit with that image, as in the case of Khalifa al-Subaiy, a Qatari financier who the United States says long provided financial support to senior al-Qaeda leadership, including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Subaiy was tried and convicted in absentia in 2008 in Bahrain on charges of financing and facilitating terrorism, then was arrested in Qatar and imprisoned for six months. But after his release, Subaiy allegedly reconnected with al-Qaeda agents and resumed organizing funds in support of the group, as well as linking up with operatives in Iran in 2009, 2011, and throughout 2012 and sending cash to senior al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan through 2013. He continues to live freely in Qatar as of 2020.
Qatar weathered criticism of its foreign policy for years, but tensions reached a new high after disagreements over Egypt. For two years, the Qataris had propped up Morsi, a high-ranking member of the Muslim Brotherhood with a tense relationship with the Gulf. The Gulf monarchies long believed the Brotherhood planned to come for them if it ever amassed enough power. At one point, the Brotherhood-led government suggested to Saudi Arabia it would not send Hosni Mubarak to prison in exchange for $10 billion, according to a leaked Ministry of Foreign Affairs document from Saudi. To reverse Egypt’s 2011 revolution, the Saudis and Emiratis secretly supported a military general, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in his bid to take power in a coup d’état accompanied by a bloody crackdown on Islamists in Cairo in which hundreds were killed. Not long after, el-Sisi replaced his general’s uniform with a suit and ran for president, winning with an overwhelming majority, but Qatar had stubbornly refused to join the other Gulf states in supporting him.
With disagreements raging, in 2013 Qatar’s emir, Hamad bin Khalifa, abdicated to calm the situation, passing the throne to his then-thirty-three-year-old son Tamim. The Saudis, Emiratis, and Bahrainis didn’t buy it, and in 2014 they withdrew their ambassadors from Qatar to protest what they saw as its refusal to stop interfering in the politics of other countries in the region. They also believed Tamim was a figurehead taking orders from his father behind the scenes.
Within weeks all the countries had settled the issues with a secret document called the Riyadh Agreement, which included Qatar dialing down its interventionist foreign policy.
Another factor had been building up resentment for years: Qatar had a habit of outshining its bigger neighbors. Using its immense wealth, the country’s sovereign wealth funds bought high-profile stakes in Western companies such as Volkswagen Group and Royal Dutch Shell. It became a player in iconic real estate, including developing Heathrow Airport and the Canary Wharf business district, and built the Shard, the United Kingdom’s tallest tower. It won the rights to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament, the most illustrious international sports competition after the Olympics.
And for the wealthy Gulf set, especially their wives and children, the purchase of Harrods, the iconic department store on Old Brompton Road in London, for 1.5 billion pounds in 2010 was especially momentous. Arabic sometimes feels like the store’s second language because of all the rich shoppers on holiday from Dubai, Riyadh, and Kuwait City.
Few Qataris better exemplify the absurdly rich lifestyle of the Al Thanis than Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani, Tamim’s first cousin, who has the jaunty look of a 1920s robber baron. After a life spent frolicking in museums while living on French estates and in high-class hotels, Hamad forged an existence that could only be compared to the one depicted in the television series Downton Abbey. After buying an old city mansion in London, he refurbished it to its early-twentieth-century grandeur, with seventeen bedrooms and a staff of domestic servants who changed into white ties and coattails at 6 p.m. promptly. Queen Elizabeth II, the United Kingdom’s reigning monarch, visited for supper on several occasions. Hamad liked to exhibit pieces from his collection of Indian jewelry once belonging to maharajas and other notables. And that was just his London home.
Only two years before the boycott, a few months after his father was anointed king, Mohammed bin Salman traveled to Doha to meet Tamim, the thirty-five-year-old emir. During a dinner held in his honor, Mohammed seemed particularly interested in how Qatar had so successfully worked with international media to enhance its standing in the world. Foreign policy wasn’t high on the agenda.
He asked about whether obtaining positive reporting required him to buy international newspapers or simply pay them for the coverage. Whether he was showing naivete about the Western system or simply cynicism about journalism, no one could tell for certain. Also on hand was Saud al-Qahtani, who was the main person to call Qatar whenever the kingdom was upset about a particular article or news program about Saudi Arabia.
During falconry expeditions afterward, Mohammed bin Zayed and Mohammed bin Salman discussed how Qatar was a mortal danger to stability in the region and their families’ ability to remain in power for years to come. Maintaining a delicate balance with the poorer and more combustible Arab nations like Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan, and to a lesser extent the countries of North Africa, was important to prevent movements antagonistic to their regimes—fueled by unemployed, poor youth in the hundreds of millions—from sweeping across the Middle East.
By 2017, the Emirati leadership felt certain Qatar had been flouting its obligations because of arrogance. Qatar had the Al Udeid base, the slick global communications operation, and more spending power than the rest. They were haughty and domineering. So the wily sheikhs of Abu Dhabi, together with allies, had long been looking for an excuse to cut Qatar off, alienate it, and make life so unpleasant it would finally agree to their demands. It was the most aggressive foreign policy move in the region’s short history. It backfired spectacularly.
Instead of falling in line, Qatar dug in. Its vast wealth helped. While it couldn’t import milk via Saudi Arabia anymore, it could fly in cows by the hundreds to create a self-sustaining dairy farm. The entire supply chain supporting its population was redesigned. Tamim struck closer relationships with Iran, the longtime Gulf adversary, and Turkey, ruled by the descendants of Ottoman rulers who governed the Middle East until the early twentieth century. Turkey built its first military base in the Middle East since those times in Qatar. A boycott intended to break Qatar away from rivals Iran and Turkey had driven the tiny country closer to them.
One major issue was a failure of planning: Saudi Arabia and UAE enacted the boycott without telling Qatar what it wanted from them. Bannon told Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE national security advisor, that for the action to look credible abroad, the Saudis and Emiratis would have to tell Qatar what they wanted from the country. “You’ve got to lay out something. What are your demands?” Bannon asked him.
Tillerson eventually called publicly for a list of demands. While Trump seemed to support the boycott and publicly accused Qatar of funding terrorism, the secretary of state and other high-ranking US officials were trying to defuse the situation. It became a public mess; after meeting with Tillerson, Adel al-Jubeir, then the Saudi foreign minister, denied there was a boycott and said the kingdom had just cut off Qatar from using its airspace.
