Blood and Oil, page 7
As with many rich men, Turki’s taste for power was growing. Speaking to his advisors, he saw Mohammed as a threat but felt he could put together an alliance to challenge Salman’s son. His plan rested on Saudi Arabia’s peculiar military structure.
As a way to balance power within the family, the kingdom’s armed forces were split between three separate ministries, each commanded by a different son of Ibn Saud. For decades, the once-powerful Prince Sultan and his sons controlled the Ministry of Defense, which oversaw the army and air force. The National Guard was under the auspices of King Abdullah and his clan. Prince Nayef and his sons had long controlled the third branch, the Ministry of Interior. Salman put Mohammed in charge of the Defense Ministry when he took the throne but left the other branches with the families that had long controlled them.
Turki thought the young Mohammed could be kept in check. “He only has the army,” Turki told an advisor. “He isn’t as strong as he thinks.”
But developing a plan to sideline Mohammed was fraught. He had a reputation for sidestepping plots against him and what one confidant calls “an incredible capacity to sense danger.” Abdullah’s sons feared he might be using wiretaps, much as princes years earlier were convinced that Salman was listening in on their private conversations.
Turki tried to quietly feel out the US government about a possible coup, meeting former intelligence agency lawyers in places like Los Angeles to avoid word getting back to Salman and Mohammed. He also avoided meeting with government officials directly, a move bound to get picked up somewhere. “I want to know if the government will support me if there is no choice but to take over,” he told one lawyer, pitching a new government led by the sons of Abdullah and Nayef. Turki painted Mohammed as erratic, a despot in the making.
Mohammed bin Nayef was more deliberate. Like his father who led the ministry before him, the prince known as MBN was wary of doing anything that could upset the family balance. He also had a deep faith in Al Saud family inertia, which for decades prevented any big upheaval among its top ranks. And he’d been closer to US intelligence and security officials than perhaps any other Saudi for almost fifteen years, working as the kingdom’s key contact on antiterrorism initiatives. The importance of the US relationship, MBN figured, should help keep him safe.
By mid-2015, Mohammed’s powers were broader than ever, but he knew that meant little if he couldn’t pull off his reform plans. Sitting around the long table with members of the Security and Political Affairs Council, which he had recently joined, he could see just how difficult those changes would be.
The members included MBN, who seemed to oppose any change at all, even if he didn’t say so outright. With every proposal—women driving, opening up to tourism—he or his advisors would list the potential consequences. There was also Musaad al-Aiban, the official with the longest tenure, who was another force for continuity. Others like Saud bin Faisal Al Saud, the Princeton-educated foreign affairs advisor who was in his last days with Parkinson’s disease and other ailments, seemed to focus on age-old conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Miteb bin Abdullah, the saturnine son of the former king and owner of the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris, could barely conceal his contempt for Mohammed, his small brush of a mustache and double chin framing a seemingly perpetual frown. As Mohammed consolidated power, the council would gradually shed those he believed recalcitrant in the face of change.
Mohammed also understood that to strengthen his position, he needed to burnish his image. Radically remaking the country would require buy-in from Saudi youth, since more than 60 percent of the population was under thirty. They were the least powerful people in the country, many struggling to find jobs and chafing under the kingdom’s difficult climate for entrepreneurialism. But they were the most educated and outnumbered the vested religious ideologues and sulking princes many times over. As the Arab Spring showed, discontented youth could also pose a threat to Al Saud rule. Or they could be co-opted by a reform-minded ruler and become the base from which his power sprang.
This stratagem seemed not to occur to Mohammed’s rivals, who focused their efforts on the traditional means of building power: cultivating the old religious leaders and tribal elders. It would be his rivals’ biggest mistake.
To get the youth on his side, Mohammed needed to connect with them where they spent their time: the internet. In a society that prohibited public interaction between men and women, drinking alcohol, dancing, attending concerts, moviegoing, or even smoking a hookah pipe, young people’s online lives became a crucial outlet and a way to commune.
Perhaps just as importantly, the internet showed Saudi youth exactly what they were missing thanks to their ossified monarchy and its commitment to upholding fundamentalist religious laws to keep favor with the clerics who, for decades, helped keep them in power. Largely barred from mixing or seeking entertainment in public, they lived increasingly virtually, watching videos on YouTube and Netflix and following international celebrity culture through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Mohammed grasped the significance of social media long before the kingdom’s geriatric princes. In a country without polling or elections, Twitter could reveal how the public felt about a policy or a leader and help an ambitious young prince prove to older princes that he had the public’s support—an important consideration for a family living in perpetual fear of a people’s uprising. On the other hand, negative sentiment on Twitter could undermine a ruler. In 2014, near the end of King Abdullah’s reign, Mohammed became concerned about anonymous Twitter users spreading claims that his father had dementia. If it got out of hand, if the rumors became accepted as fact by Saudis and foreigners, Salman’s brothers might feel pressure to elevate one of his rivals, cutting the Salman clan off from its claim to the throne.
So Mohammed had his deputy Bader al-Asaker—the man behind the yacht and château purchases and the head of his MiSK foundation—begin a years-long effort to unmask Twitter critics. The endeavor would eventually use cutting-edge Israeli spy technology but began with a much more conventional strategy: bribery. The account of the effort set out below is based on Justice Department legal filings, which at the time of writing amount to allegations since a court case was still underway in 2020.
Asaker, a kindly looking man with dark, rectangular glasses who wouldn’t be out of place at an IT conference, wasn’t really a government official in 2014. He worked for Mohammed personally. But as an employee of the crown prince’s son, he could gain access pretty much anywhere. On June 13 of that year, Asaker traveled to San Francisco to meet Twitter’s head of Middle East partnerships, an Egyptian American named Ahmad Abouammo.
It was framed as a routine visit by an important figure from an important Twitter market. Abouammo showed Asaker around Twitter headquarters in San Francisco’s South of Market district. Asaker explained that he worked for an important prince who used Twitter extensively. The men exchanged contact information and arranged to follow up in London in the fall. During that meeting, Asaker gave the Twitter employee a gift: a Hublot watch worth at least $20,000.
Then came the ask. Twitter users were making trouble for Mohammed, including one nicknamed Mujtahidd, who had been brazenly criticizing the royal family and publishing rumors about senior members that often had a kernel of truth. It was a political mess, but it wasn’t criminal or terrorist in nature, so Twitter wouldn’t reveal the identity of such users to Saudi law enforcement. Asaker asked if Abouammo could help them find information on the people who registered these accounts.
Abouammo complied, using his access to internal systems to find Mujtahidd’s email address and phone number. It was a potentially reckless move by the Twitter employee, possibly unmasking critics of a government that locked up dissidents.
Such requests continued for months. Over that time Salman became king, Mohammed became crown prince, and Asaker found himself working for one of the most powerful men in Saudi Arabia. Asaker would pay more than $200,000 to Abouammo, deposited in a Lebanese bank account that Abouammo had a relative open for him. “Proactive and reactively we will delete evil, my brother,” Abouammo texted Asaker after one deposit of $9,911.
Abouammo had limited technical skill, and a single mole was hardly a reliable way of ensuring consistent access to Twitter users’ private information. Asaker wanted a better spy. As luck would have it, Twitter had hired a young Saudi named Ali Alzabarah, who was educated in the United States on a Saudi scholarship.
Living in San Francisco, Alzabarah struck his friends as a typical software engineer—a “nerd,” one friend called him admiringly. He didn’t seem interested in things other than software and didn’t speak much until the conversation turned to programming or the future of technology. Away from work, Alzabarah seemed to spend most of his time at home or socializing with a small group of expat Saudis who worked at tech firms in the Bay Area.
In February 2015, Asaker had an intermediary reach out to Alzabarah. It turned out that the engineer felt deeply patriotic toward Saudi Arabia and wanted to help the kingdom however he could. And while Alzabarah’s job entailed maintaining systems to keep Twitter working properly and not accessing user accounts, Twitter allowed him access to private user information. For many users, that included phone numbers and email addresses as well as IP addresses, which can identify the physical location where a person logs in. That meant that in some instances, Alzabarah could not only help unmask an anonymous regime critic but also pinpoint the person’s location.
A few months later, Asaker traveled to the United States as part of an official Saudi delegation and asked Alzabarah to meet him. “I am traveling to Washington at the request of the office of Mohammed bin Salman,” Alzabarah told his wife in a text message.
Soon after that meeting, Alzabarah began using internal Twitter systems to comb through the account information of more than six thousand Twitter users. Mujtahidd, in particular, was an ongoing target. He was tweeting out what he claimed was private information about the royal family, and some of it, like the looming dismissal of King Salman’s brother Muqrin as crown prince in April 2015, turned out to be true. The following month, Mujtahidd posted embarrassing documents from France detailing how the widow of a former crown prince was refusing to pay millions of dollars for luxurious hotel stays.
Days later Alzabarah accessed Mujtahidd’s account and got his phone number and IP address at Asaker’s request. Further requests for other users followed. Alzabarah told Asaker that one user split time between Turkey and Iraq. Another was based in Turkey. A third, a Saudi, was “a professional” who used encryption to conceal his identity, though once he signed in without encryption, and Alzabarah was able to track his IP address.
The Twitter engineer realized he was providing valuable information to Mohammed’s men—some of the accounts he was accessing were, the Royal Court suspected, connected to terrorism, and Saudi officials announced a $1.9 million reward to anyone who helped avert an attack. In his private Apple Notes account, Alzabarah drafted language to ask Asaker about whether he could claim that money.
Alzabarah spoke by phone with Asaker on June 18 and the next day accessed the Twitter account of Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi man who had obtained asylum in Canada after the kingdom cut off his schooling in retribution for public critiques of the government and who would form a strong bond with a Saudi journalist and regime critic named Jamal Khashoggi.
As the surveillance efforts gained momentum and sophistication, Alzabarah took a trip to Riyadh, where he continued accessing user accounts from Saudi Arabia. Now that the onetime “nerd” had become an international man of mystery, he wanted credit from the Saudi government and some reassurances of aid if he got into trouble. “Where am I, and how is this going to affect me?” Alzabarah contemplated in another Apple Notes entry, wondering whether he could get government help for his troubled father or business training from Mohammed’s foundation. With the risks he was taking for senior officials, he wanted a “permanent” job, “something that secures my future and my family’s.”
Alzabarah returned to San Francisco and to Twitter and continued providing information to Asaker about Mujtahidd, the government critic. Soon after, he scored an apparent victory: Mujtahidd’s account was shut down, and Mujtahidd claimed online that Twitter had told him the account was “compromised,” though he was able to recover it days later.
Alzabarah continued his work for Asaker and was promoted to a higher engineering position at Twitter. “As much as I am happy for the position, I am happier with and very proud of my work with you,” he wrote in an apparent draft of a letter to Asaker.
Understanding that human assets like Alzabarah would come and go—that they could get scared, or get caught, or lose their access to valuable information—Mohammed’s men developed other ways of spying under the auspices of another of Mohammed’s confidants, Saud al-Qahtani, a former employee of King Abdullah’s Royal Court who quickly became enamored with Mohammed and later one of his most trusted minions. In June 2015, Saud sent an email to the head of Hacking Team, an Italian company that developed cloak-and-dagger software for governments to spy online. The king’s office, Qahtani wrote, “would like to be in productive cooperation with you and develop a long and strategic partnership.” A trove of internal Hacking Team documents that leaked online shows the Saudi government ended up paying millions of dollars for the spyware.
Qahtani told Mohammed that he could go much further than seeking out individual critics and could harness Twitter to gain support for his reforms and assess how his popularity compared with that of other members of the royal family. It turned out that an obscure group funded by the Ministry of Education was already working on a project that could be turned to those purposes.
Under the auspices of a Saudi computer scientist named Nasir al-Biqami, a group of programmers led by an American who worked for Lockheed was using artificial intelligence to understand how ideas and strategies developed on Twitter. Qahtani brought the group under his auspices in the Royal Court and had the programmers examine Twitter sentiment about Mohammed and some of his key rivals, including some of Abdullah’s sons and the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef.
Saud determined that Mohammed needed a wider presence, a stronger effort to burnish his image and attack those trying to tarnish him. In an office in the Royal Court buildings in Riyadh’s Diplomatic District, Saud assembled a group of specialists who created thousands of fake Twitter accounts with photos and names that appeared to belong to regular young Saudis. They tweeted praise of Mohammed and his plans and criticism of rivals.
Remarkably, Turki bin Abdullah’s team had also hit on the importance of social media, which they were viewing more as a weapon. They hired a consultant in Switzerland who flooded Twitter and Instagram with propaganda against Mohammed bin Salman.
Qahtani struck back with even more aggressive and better-funded efforts, using accounts that appeared to belong to foreigners tweeting support for Mohammed. Some accounts were fake. Others, like those of Americans, including a deceased meteorologist, a TV financial commentator, and an Olympic skier, were real accounts taken control of by the Saudis, a British professor based in Qatar found. Qahtani also started keeping track of people who criticized the prince, sometimes attacking them with armies of Twitter bots. He earned the nickname “Mr. Hashtag” for his aggressive Twitter presence, and his army became known as the “flies” among young Saudis.
Qahtani’s efforts came to overshadow Asaker’s alleged Twitter infiltration just as Asaker’s well was drying up. His mole, Alzabarah, turned out to be less careful than one might expect a worried tech expert to be. He spoke with Asaker on an open phone line and communicated via email. US intelligence agents picked up on it.
It was a sensitive situation. Intelligence agencies don’t work with the goal of developing criminal cases in US courts. They’re focused on things happening outside the United States, and using the vast amounts of data they gather to mount court cases opens up all sorts of potential problems, including revealing who’s being listened to abroad.
But sometimes they come across things that clearly deserve an examination by prosecutors. A US company’s employees taking cash from a foreign government to access user information is one example. So intelligence officials passed the information on to the Justice Department, where it found its way to the San Francisco FBI office.
Late in 2015, an FBI agent walked downhill from San Francisco’s Kennedy-era federal building in the squalid Tenderloin, down a block littered with syringes, to Market Street, where Twitter has its headquarters. The agent sat down with company lawyers and broke the news: Twitter had a mole.
By that time Abouammo had left the company, but Alzabarah was still active. The situation was sensitive, the agent explained, and the investigation was at an early stage. The agent asked that the company not tell Alzabarah what was going on—it could imperil the case if he got wind of the investigation.
But Twitter’s lawyers were skeptical of the feds. Like many in the tech community, they resented law enforcement’s presumption that it could get whatever private information it wanted. User data was sacrosanct as far as the Twitter lawyers were concerned. Even if the US government was requesting the data in an effort to bust someone who was giving it to a foreign government, Twitter was reluctant to cooperate. So rather than follow the FBI’s request to keep things quiet to assist the case, Twitter lawyers brought Alzabarah in the following afternoon, accused him of improperly accessing user accounts, and told him he was temporarily suspended.
Alzabarah went home and called a friend, a Saudi-born venture capitalist he’d met in the Bay Area tech community. His friend picked him up a couple hours later, and Alzabarah told him he had a problem. He’d been “curious,” started looking into some user accounts, and got busted. Now he was suspended from Twitter and figured he had to head back to the kingdom.
