Information suggests alleged targeting of Amazon chief was part of a wider campaign to pick off individuals close to Khashoggi

'Click I agree': the UN rapporteur says prince tried to intimidate Bezos with message

'Click I agree': the UN rapporteur says prince tried to intimidate Bezos with message

The message, it seems, could not have been clearer.

On 8 November 2018, just one month after the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man, received an unsolicited text from Mohammed bin Salman’s WhatsApp account.

According to the UN, the message from the crown prince of Saudi Arabia contained a single photograph that bore a striking similarity to the woman with whom the married billionaire was having a secret affair. It also contained what appeared to be a sardonic message.

It read: “Arguing with a woman is like reading the Software Licence Agreement. In the end you have to ignore everything and click I agree.”

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For Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur who is investigating the murder of Khashoggi, it seemed the message was evidence of an attempt by the future king, also known as MBS, to “intimidate” Bezos.

She told the Guardian it appeared intended to make him feel vulnerable, even as his own newspaper, the Washington Post, continued to publish hard-hitting stories about the murder of one of its own journalists.

The new UN revelations, which follow the Guardian’s report that Bezos’s phone was allegedly hacked by Saudi Arabia in the months before the Khashoggi killing, point to an orchestrated cyber campaign to target Bezos, and the close circle of individuals around Khashoggi.

Callamard said: “This shows that during this period, there is a concerted effort to hack into the system of people who are considered as a threat somehow to MBS or to the government system of Saudi Arabia. That does not mean it is aimed at picking up particular information. It is done to use that information in the future.”

Play Video 3:12 Jeff Bezos, the Saudi crown prince, and the alleged phone-hacking plot – video explainer

According to a timeline provided by the UN, the story began on 21 March 2018, when Bezos was invited to a small dinner party in honour of the crown prince.

A fortnight later – on 4 April – the two men exchanged phone numbers at a dinner whose guest list included former basketball player Kobe Bryant and the Disney chief executive, Bob Iger.

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And a month after that, on 1 May, Bezos received “a message from the crown prince account … through WhatsApp,” the UN explained.

“The message is an encrypted video file. It is later established, with reasonable certainty, that the video’s downloader infects Mr Bezos’ phone with malicious code.”

This rapidly infected his phone – and a huge exfiltration of data began.

That was the conclusion of a report undertaken for Bezos by FTI Consulting, an advisory firm, whose findings were passed to Callamard, and another UN special rapporteur, David Kaye.

The Guardian has seen this report.

If the analysis is correct, the crown prince’s close circle had obtained the contents of the mobile phone of one of the world’s most powerful businesspeople.

Bezos – like hundreds of other victims – would have had no reason to know he had been hacked.

In the days and weeks that followed, Bezos – who was married at the time – sent private text messages to his girlfriend, describing his romantic feelings.

Those texts would later be published in the National Enquirer, although the exact circumstances around their publication have yet to be determined.

What is known is that the crown prince had twice met with the owner of the National Enquirer, David Pecker, who was known in Hollywood and Washington as a man who had ties to Donald Trump, and had a history of solving problems for the US president, including “killing” negative stories about Trump and his extramarital affairs.

New information published by Callamard and Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, suggest that the alleged targeting of Bezos was just the beginning of a broader campaign to pick off individuals who were close to Khashoggi and in frequent contact with the journalist.

The timeline published by the investigators on Wednesday refers to four other prominent Saudi critics who were targeted with malware in the weeks that followed: Yahya Assiri and Omar Abdulaziz, who were in frequent contact with Khashoggi, the London-based satirist Ghanem al-Dosari, and an Amnesty International official who was working in Saudi Arabia.

On 2 October, Khashoggi entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul and was killed. US intelligence agencies and Callamard’s own report would later allege that Bin Salman bore responsibility for the killing.

Shortly thereafter, the investigators said there had been a “massive online campaign” against Bezos and Amazon in Saudi Arabia, principally targeting him as the owner of the Washington Post.

Then, in January last year, the National Enquirer published an exposé of Bezos’s extramarital affair, including text messages that were sent after the billionaire’s phone was allegedly hacked by the Saudis.

American Media Inc, owner of the National Enquirer, has denied that any “third party” was involved in it obtaining information about Bezos, and has insisted that it received its tip-off from the estranged brother of Bezos’s girlfriend. But the brother, Michael Sanchez, publicly stated last year that the Enquirer was already aware of the illicit relationship when he was first contacted by the tabloid in July 2018 and had already “seen” text messages between the couple.

While experts contend that Bin Salman may have been seeking to silence Bezos, the Amazon CEO publicly accused AMI of trying to “extort and blackmail” him, after the company suggested that it would agree to not publish compromising photographs of the billionaire if he agreed to shutdown his investigation into the leaked texts. Bezos flatly denied the apparent deal.

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The FTI Consulting report says that Bezos obtained a detailed briefing about the extent of the Saudi campaign against him on 14 February. It was provided over two separate phone calls.

Yet two days later, according to the FTI report, the crown prince sent another message to Bezos, claiming “what you hear or told it’s not true and it’s matter of time tell [sic] you know the truth”.

UN investigators say the online campaign against Bezos ended on 1 April.

At about that time, the Guardian reported that Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, had privately urged the crown prince to cut his ties to a close adviser, Saud al-Qahtani, who had been known as a key architect of Saudi Arabia’s cyber warfare and Twitter campaigns.

The Saudi embassy in Washington declined to respond to the Guardian’s questions. But in a tweet, the Saudi government called allegations that the crown prince was involved in the hacking of Bezos “absurd”.

“We call for an investigation on these claims so that we can have all the facts out,” it said.

AMI said it had no further comment.

Saudi Arabia has insisted the crown prince had nothing to do with the murder of Khashoggi. It has also denied using surveillance technology against critics of the kingdom.

But, on Wednesday night, as the story continued to grow, Bezos remembered the journalist in a tweet.