Jeff Bezos’s phone was ransacked for evidence A year earlier his father had abruptly promoted him to crown prince and heir to the throne. He had just returned from a much-heralded trip to America where he was fêted by Hollywood stars, US politicians, and Silicon Valley leaders.
His
Vision
, imagining an economically dynamic Saudi Arabia guided by a tolerant form of Islam, was being praised as a blueprint for a new Middle East.
ut the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia would soon find he had met his match in a man whose corporate empire stretches to almost every corner of the planet and is prepared to use his unimaginable fortune to stand up to even the most powerful of rulers.
This week the United Nations investigators, working on evidence gathered by Mr Bezos’ team of cyber experts, made an even more explosive allegation likely to tear at the last shreds of Prince Mohammed’s international credibility.
They assessed that the prince was not only directly involved in hacking Mr Bezos’ phone, but that he appeared to have personally attempted a clumsy effort to threaten the billionaire.
n November 8, 2020 – a month after Saudi agents cut Khashoggi’s body to pieces with a bone saw and sent Riyadh into a spasm of false denials – Prince Mohammed texted Mr Bezos a picture of a woman on WhatsApp.
he message arrived as the Amazon executive was secretly discussing a divorce with his wife, MacKenzie , and how they would split his $ (billion) 90 billion) fortune.
he picture caption was cryptic but seemed to contain a coded threat. “Arguing with a woman is like reading the software license agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree, ”it read.
For Prince Mohammed to allow himself to be personally implicated in the hacking would indeed seem to be an act of unfathomable recklessness. But it is also in character for a young prince known for impetuosity, aggression, and a willingness to take risks.
Such behavior might seem like the typical extravagance of a young royal raised in vast wealth, but Prince Mohammed has brought the same style to his decision-making as Saudi’s de facto ruler, often with calamitous results.
Five years later, they remain bogged down in the country, unable to defeat the Houthis or withdraw. More than , people have died in the fighting and ensuing famine, including 8, civilians killed by Saudi Arabia and its allies, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project.
The technology used to hack Mr Bezos’ phone is nearly as complicated as the Saudi motivations for doing so.
he two men stayed in touch primarily about a proposal for Amazon to build three data centers in Saudi Arabia, a project that would help fulfill Prince Mohammed’s desire to attract international investment to his country.
n May 1, Prince Mohammed sent Mr Bezos what appeared to be an innocuous video promoting the low cost of internet data in Saudi Arabia. But hidden inside the file appears to have been spyware code that quickly spread through the iPhone.
Among the files that were allegedly sucked from the phone onto Saudi-controlled data servers were naked selfies that Mr Bezos had sent to his lover , Ms Sanchez. Those photographs later found their way into the hands of the National Enquirer, a US tabloid.
he National Enquirer insists that it got the photographs from Ms Sanchez’s brother, a conservative Donald Trump supporter who shares the President’s hostility towards the liberal Washington Post. Mr Trump regularly rages against the paper on Twitter and denounces it as “the Amazon Washington Post”.
ut Mr Bezos and his team have always suspected that the lurid pictures were given to the tabloid by Saudi intelligence officers in the hope that they would weaponise them against the Washington Post and its owner.
he UN said Wednesday that the technology used to extract Mr Bezos’ data appeared similar to Pegasus-3 but stopped short of explicitly accusing NSO, the company behind the technology. NSO, a Tel Aviv firm founded by Israeli military and intelligence veterans that has provided tens of millions of dollars in services to Riyadh in recent years, “unequivocally” denied that its technology was used in the hack.
Mohammed bin Salman has spent the last few weeks holed up in his palaces in Saudi Arabia and making almost no public appearances. The days when he would be welcomed by American tech executives or celebrities must seem like a distant dream to a man now widely seen as a global pariah and accused of having Khashoggi’s blood on his hands.
r Bezos has also maintained a relatively low-profile, issuing no lengthy statement. Instead he tweeted a photograph of himself at a memorial service for Mr Khashoggi, writing simply “#Jamal”.
Last Friday a dip in Amazon shares meant he briefly slipped from his position as the richest person on earth and saw the title go to Bernard Arnault, a luxury goods mogul. But this week his shares shot back up again, restoring his net worth to $ billion – $ 3 billion more than Mr Arnault. Mr Bezos, in many ways, was once again on top of the world.
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