On the second of October 2018 Jamal Khashoggi walked into the Saudi Arabian Consulate alive and looking forward to his coming wedding. On the nineteenth of October Saudi Arabia admitted to the world that the Washington Post columnist and American resident alien had been strangled to death upon entering the consulate. Eventually his body was chopped into pieces and disposed of.
This is all known now and would be a sadly unremarkable footnote in these steadily troubled times except for the fact that Jamal Khashoggi worked for the Bezos’ owned Washington Post , and the Post decided to investigate the murder with all the resources available to it. As of this moment, we are still in the land of “Normal” or at least what passes for normal anymore.
I’m afraid the rest of this is going to raise many more questions than answers.
AMI, aka the National Enquirer, is owned by David Pecker, a Trump loyalist with very close ties to Saudi Arabia. Doing what the National Enquirer does best, they splashed Mr. Bezos’ photos and private texts all over their pages during his divorce last year. Just earning a buck, as it were, in what’s always been normal for them.
Then something changed, something major happened and everything went weird. Mr. Bezos, a man who has more dollars than anyone else in the whole, wide world got angry and decided to put his money to use. He wanted to know how his phone was gotten into and by whom. He hired one Gavin de Becker to look into it and gave him an unlimited budget.
When the richest man in the world tells you to Take Whatever You Need to get to the bottom of this, but Get To The Bottom Of THIS! – that’s pretty darn unlimited.
Now we leave weird behind. Mr. Bezos reports that Pecker was “Apoplectic” over the fact that the source of those text messages was being aggressively sought by a man with, literally, unlimited funds and investigative resources and, it seems, he lost his cool.
Having decided to use the National Enquirer’s business model on Mr. Bezos, why panic when he decides to find out who does their data collection? Known for catching private information on people who might speak out about Donald Trump, AMI has admitted to using money and their influence to kill those stories before they could get out. Mr. Bezos can’t be the first person with means and power they’ve angered. At the most they’d face a lawsuit with damages- some embarrassment, maybe.
So, why get scared now? Why go ballistic? Once you’ve made the stupid decision to attack a person with more money than some nations, an organization with more ink than you’ll ever have and better investigators- why go nuts because the guy you outed decides to go to the mattresses and expose your 400 pound hacker where you have him stuck in his mom’s basement.
And what the HELL does any of this have to do with Mr. Khashoggi?
Maybe it was Karma? I think Karma is why they went ballistic.
It seems that in 2009 The United Arab Emirates didn’t have any real cyber defense abilities, so America decided to give these them some. Project Raven was created with Americans being stationed in the UAE, teaching the Emiratis how to do it- supposedly without showing them how we do it. That was the goal. It apparently wasn’t met.
Former American intelligence personnel, many of them from the N.S.A. were recruited by a Maryland company named CyberPoint to work in Abu Dhabi. The money was good, figures between two and four hundred thousand dollars a year have been spoken of and the former analysts were assured not only that the job was supported by the U.S. but that American persons- citizens, resident aliens and companies, would never be targeted. Americans were to be in all the management positions.
Before Project Raven, the Emiratis had to rely on an operative actually breaking into the home or business of a target and placing software on that person’s various machines. After Project Raven and despite the hired expertise supposedly not giving American surveillance technology or classified know how to the Emiratis, they developed Karma.
Where a target once had to accept an email or text message to be hacked, Karma could get into I-Phones world wide without that being necessary.
Using an inherent platform vulnerability, it had the ability to pull pictures and texts from the phone without the owner of the device doing anything at all.
In 2016, the UAE, apparently growing concerned with foreigners in the very heart of their counterintelligence operation, dropped the services of CyberPoint and brought in DarkMatter, an Emirati owned company to take their place.
Those Americans working in the one time mansion could either take a job with DarkMatter or go home. According to Reuters interviewee Lori Stroud, ex NSA employee and Raven operative, in 2015 she began seeing more and more target files classified as “Emirate-eyes only”- after the switch to DarkMatter and upon doing some digging, she says she started finding American names being targeted for hacks.
Those names were in a new target category, one she’d never seen, the “white category”, the one for Americans. She tells us that the occupations of the targets were listed: journalist.
“I was sick to my stomach,” she said. “It kind of hit me at that macro level realizing there was a whole category for U.S. persons on this program.”
After repeatedly raising the issue with her, now Emirati, managers, we’re told she was fired and relieved of her phone and passport. Two months later she was finally allowed to go home where she promptly contacted the F.B.I.
I have to mention here that the United Arab Emirates are staunch allies with the Kingdom of Saud.
Now that we know this is going on in the background, let’s go back to the Washington Post for a moment and try to complete the circle. The Post has promised an ad campaign and more investigation into Mr. Kashoggi’s death. They do not appear to be backing down and have stated they’d follow this for as long as it takes. They are stirring powerful, well connected enemies with their determination.
What was it that AMI wanted from Mr. Bezos to keep them from publishing his private pictures and mails? What would make a supermarket tabloid send the email they sent to Mr. Bezos? They wanted a public statement made. Here are Mr. Bezos’ own words on their demand.
“ In the AMI letters I’m making public, you will see the precise details of their extortionate proposal: They will publish the personal photos unless Gavin de Becker and I make the specific false public statement to the press that we “have no knowledge or basis for suggesting that AMI’s coverage was politically motivated or influenced by political forces.” ”
Why in the world would this worry anyone at a tabloid rag unless they were the instrument and not the instigator. In relaying this to the public, Mr. Bezos also makes this point.
” Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is “apoplectic” about our investigation. For reasons still to be better understood, the Saudi angle seems to hit a particularly sensitive nerve.
Didn’t I tell you this would open up more questions than it answered. Who told AMI to blackmail Jeff Bezos and why? Who has a record of wanting to silence journalists and hide inconvenient truths. How far does this go? Is the UAE sharing information it stole using American technology and methods with the Saudis? Do the Saudis then share them with Trump or anyone else and heck- does Russia have anything to do with this? What was that Russo/Saudi high five about anyway?
Aside from the question of should Americans be doing this sort of work for foreigners is the question of control. One of the perks of working for the UAE according to Ms. Stroud was the lack of laws that hindered them in their work. They got a target, they could do their job and hack him or her without worrying about the legality of it. We know the UAE used Raven against dissidents and even a British Journalist- the folks who left DarkMatter are talking. Maybe we’ll begin to see why those pesky laws are so invaluable.
But there is a cover story over the cover story for the real story and none of this is going to come out without a fight. That’s what these people do- they keep the shadows under shade. But uncover it we must.
What I wonder about is this. Why go to the trouble and risk of setting up a domestic citizen surveillance program- risking people leaking the fact of it’s existence and having all these pesky dang laws and courts in the way when you can just teach a willing ally how to do it for you?
Does it matter if the NSA obtained those texts or if an Emirati agent trained by a former NSA agent did it? The deed was done and I’m not saying either of those scenarios are true. I’m saying they need to be questioned. What the hell else are they getting? Trump refuses to use a secure phone! Maybe it wouldn’t matter if he did?
The ramifications of all of this have my head spinning, how about yours.
I know it was a convoluted path, but that’s where it takes me. Here’s hoping that Mr. Kashoggi’s senseless death will lead to Karma indeed!
Kell
Cross posted from Kell's World