MBS AND THE SAUDI STATE AID TRUMP IN HIS WAR ON THE WASHINGTON POST AND JEFF BEZOS

U.N. officials press Saudi Arabia on hack of Jeff Bezos's phone

WASHINGTON — United Nations officials have asked the government of Saudi Arabia to explain the apparent hack of a cellphone belonging to Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, a source familiar with the matter told Yahoo News.

On Wednesday, special rapporteurs, investigators working for the U.N., will release a statement announcing the findings of a forensic investigation conducted by an outside firm that concludes the hack of Bezos’s phone was likely the result of a Saudi scheme. Naked photos sent by Bezos to a woman with whom he was having an extramarital affair were likely obtained in the hack. While the findings of the investigation aren’t conclusive, the U.N. officials are concerned that the attack on privacy is part of a broader campaign to intimidate critics of Saudi Arabia.

Shortly after the October 2018 killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Bezos skipped a planned appearance at an investment conference that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (also referred to as “MBS”) was hosting in Saudi Arabia. A few months later, Bezos announced that the National Enquirer had obtained naked pictures of him. While news reports at the time suggested that Michael Sanchez, the brother of the woman with whom Bezos was having an affair, may have been responsible, last March Bezos’s longtime security consultant, Gavin de Becker, announced he believed the Saudis were responsible for the hack.

U.N. Special Rapporteurs Agnes Callamard and David Kaye have sent an “allegation letter” to the Saudi ambassador in Geneva, the source said, asking questions about the Bezos hack, which U.N. officials believe to be significant in part because “it connects to both the killing [of Khashoggi] and the use of spyware in general,” the source added.

Spyware similar to the type that is believed to have been used to infect Bezos’s phone was previously deployed by the Saudis to hack into the phone of Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, who is suing NSO Group, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware. Abdulaziz has alleged that the Saudis hacked into his phone using Pegasus weeks before Khashoggi was killed. Abdulaziz had been working with Khashoggi on sensitive projects targeting Saudi disinformation campaigns in the months before the killing.

The Saudi government denies the allegations.

“Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos’ phone are absurd,” the Saudi Embassy in Washington said in a Tuesday tweet. “We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out.”

The forensic investigation of the Bezos hack was conducted by FTI Consulting’s Anthony Ferrante, who declined to comment for this article. But the source familiar with the matter said bin Salman and Bezos had dinner in Los Angeles and “exchanged numbers” during the crown prince’s tour of the U.S. in March 2018. A video clip was sent to Bezos’s phone by a WhatsApp number linked to bin Salman, the source said, adding that Ferrante determined with a “medium to high degree of confidence” that the Saudis are behind the Bezos hack. It is unclear who paid Ferrante to investigate.
 
Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (Photo: Mandel Ngan/Pool/AFP)

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, is suing NSO for having “violated both U.S. and California laws as well as the WhatsApp Terms of Service, which prohibit this type of abuse,” according to a statement from WhatsApp. Last May, WhatsApp discovered a security flaw that allowed hackers to infect victims’ phones with Pegasus spyware even when they didn’t click on a link.

The Facebook allegations bolster the claim that the Saudis are behind the hack of Bezos’s phone, the source said. “The allegation is that a video file was sent from an account controlled by, at least partially controlled by, MBS and was received by the intended recipient, Bezos,” the source said. “If you line it up with what Facebook alleged in October and November of this past year there was an exploit that didn’t require ... the target to actually click on the link if it was sent by WhatsApp.”



Analysis Said to Tie Hacking of Bezos’ Phone to Saudi Leader’s Account

Karen Weise, Matthew Rosenberg and Sheera Frenkel 
 
© Francis Mascarenhas/Reuters Jeff Bezos with Lauren 
Sanchez at an Amazon event this month in Mumbai, India.

SEATTLE — A forensic analysis of Jeff Bezos’ cellphone found with “medium to high confidence” that the Amazon chief’s device was hacked after he received a video from a WhatsApp account reportedly belonging to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, according to people familiar with the Bezos-ordered investigation.

After Mr. Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, got the video over the WhatsApp messaging platform in 2018, his phone began sending unusually large volumes of data, said one of the people, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The person said the investigators believed Prince Mohammed was used as a conduit because the message would not raise suspicions if it came from him.

The findings of the forensics investigation, completed on behalf of Mr. Bezos by Anthony Ferrante at the business advisory firm FTI Consulting, could not be independently verified by The New York Times.

After the findings were reported by The Guardian and The Financial Times, the Saudi Embassy denied that the Saudi government was involved.

“Recent media reports that suggest the Kingdom is behind a hacking of Mr. Jeff Bezos’ phone are absurd,” the Saudi Embassy said on Twitter. “We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out.”

Mr. Bezos’ security consultant, Gavin de Becker, had previously accused the Saudi government of hacking Mr. Bezos’ phone, saying Saudi authorities targeted him because he owned The Washington Post. The Post has aggressively reported on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, one of its columnists, who was a critic of the Saudi government. The Central Intelligence Agency has concluded that Prince Mohammed ordered the killing.

Two United Nations experts plan to release a public statement Wednesday morning “addressing serious allegations” that Mr. Bezos was hacked by receiving a WhatsApp message “reportedly from an account belonging to the crown prince of Saudi Arabia,” one of the experts, Agnes Callamard, said in an email.

Ms. Callamard, a specialist in extrajudicial killings, has been investigating Mr. Khashoggi’s murder, and David Kaye, an expert in human rights law, has been gathering information about violations of freedom of the press.

In its statement, the United Nations plans to say that it is raising concerns over the hacking of Mr. Bezos’s phone directly with the Saudi government, said a person familiar with the statement. The United Nations did not conduct its own investigation into the hack and is basing its statement on the FTI report, the person said.

The United Nations began looking into the situation in June 2019 when someone close to Mr. Bezos shared the forensic analysis with them, the person added.

Amazon and Mr. de Becker declined to comment. William Isaacson, Mr. Bezos’ lawyer at Boies Schiller Flexner, declined to comment beyond saying that Mr. Bezos was cooperating with continuing investigations. Mr. Ferrante declined to comment through a FTI spokesman.

“All FTI Consulting client work is confidential,” Matt Bashalany, a spokesman for FTI, said in a statement. “We do not comment on, confirm or deny client engagements or potential engagements.”

The questions about who has had access to Mr. Bezos’ phone erupted a year ago, after The National Enquirer reported that the tech executive was romantically involved with Lauren Sanchez, a former TV anchor. At the time, The Enquirer published photos of the couple together, as well as intimate text messages.

Mr. Bezos later published emails from American Media, the parent company of The National Enquirer, which he said amounted to “extortion and blackmail.” He suggested that the leaks of photos and details of his private life could have been politically motivated to harm him because of his ownership of The Post.

In March, Mr. de Becker accused the Saudi government of hacking Mr. Bezos’s phone. In an opinion article in The Daily Beast, Mr. de Becker wrote that his “investigators and several experts concluded with high confidence” that the Saudis got private information from Mr. Bezos’ phone and that he turned the evidence they had uncovered over to law enforcement authorities.

Mr. de Becker did not detail specific evidence they uncovered, nor did he detail whether the leaked information was published by The Enquirer. American Media denied any Saudi involvement, saying Ms. Sanchez’s brother was the tabloid’s sole source.

Karen Weise reported from Seattle, Matthew Rosenberg from Washington and Sheera Frenkel from San Francisco. Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.