Phone secrets”/ Vanity Fair: Jared Kushner’s hacked device revealed negotiations and transfers worth more than $700 million

An investigation published by the American magazine Vanity Fair has shed light on major financial transfers and relations between Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former adviser, and leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

According to the article, the Dutch intelligence service uncovered part of the story after obtaining screenshots from Kushner’s phone. Monitoring showed that he accessed a bank account in the United Arab Emirates into which hundreds of millions of dollars had been deposited through a bank in Azerbaijan.

The magazine writes that in 2017, the leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia discussed with Kushner the creation of a fund for foreign-policy objectives. The initial plan envisaged funding of more than $10 billion, but it was shelved. Later, at least $2 billion was deposited into two accounts linked to him.

One of the accounts, which the investigation calls “Alpha,” was held at First Abu Dhabi Bank. Around $750 million was transferred into it by the Saudis and Emiratis, with the intention that the funds would be used for foreign-policy matters.

Kushner did not own the “Alpha” account, but he was authorized to conduct transactions on it. The account belonged to a government-funded charitable foundation in the United Arab Emirates.

Sources cited by the magazine claim that the foundation also served as a cover for transferring money that supported the UAE’s covert military and intelligence operations abroad. According to them, the organization’s charitable status made it less likely that international transfers would attract attention and scrutiny.

The investigation also raises questions about the legal basis for Kushner’s authorization. Four former senior Trump administration officials said they knew of no presidential authorization that would have given him access to a foreign government’s bank account.

Kushner’s lawyer has rejected the article’s implications. He stated that his client had not reached agreements or made arrangements with foreign leaders or officials without the approval of the president of the United States, and that his actions were in the interests of the United States.

Vanity Fair article:

At the end of spring 2020, a source whom I considered reliable called me and told me a story. The Dutch government, the source said, had hacked Jared Kushner’s phone and followed him as he accessed a bank account in Dubai. What made the matter unusual was that hundreds of millions of dollars had arrived in that account from a bank in Azerbaijan. But, according to the source, the more important point was that Kushner appeared to have sent large sums from the Dubai account to other people, including a warlord, a mercenary and a former contract killer.

I told the source that the story sounded absurd to me. Nevertheless…

Six months later, I was speaking with someone else about the United Arab Emirates’ government and its use of mercenaries in conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. In passing, I asked whether the person had heard about Kushner and bank transfers from an account in the UAE. The interlocutor fell silent for a few moments, then said: “Yes.”

Over the next four years, I learned that, at the end of 2017, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) had made a stunning discovery. A dark-web hacker specializing in stolen banking data and an operative of Russia’s Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces (GRU) was traveling to the United Kingdom for a spying mission.

The Dutch approached the British government for permission to arrest him upon arrival, and the British agreed. When the Russian arrived in England, the Dutch offered him two options: cooperate against the GRU or be arrested by the British. If convicted, he could spend years in a British prison. He decided to switch sides.

Later that year, the Russian agent gave Dutch spies access to one of the GRU’s most sensitive sources. In Rostov, Russia, GRU hackers and cyber specialists were operating a remote server where some of the stolen data was stored. While examining the secret files, the Dutch found something extraordinary: screenshots from Jared Kushner’s iPhone.

In The Hague, the MIVD’s hacking team tried to reconstruct how the Russians had gained access to Kushner’s phone. He had the newest model at the time, the iPhone X, released in November 2017 and equipped with Face ID, the security system that Apple had widely promoted during its presentation.

As they searched for a way to bypass the device’s defenses, the Dutch realized that the Russians might not have used the main entry point, but had found an unprotected window.

The suspicion was confirmed. At the beginning of 2018, the MIVD discovered a vulnerability in the iPhone that allowed access. However, exploiting it was not perfect. Some malicious software can use a victim’s phone as a microphone and camera, turn it on or off, and receive or add files. The Dutch tool did not enable such access; it allowed them to see the screen whenever Kushner used the phone.

Almost immediately after the breach, the intelligence service began recording every image displayed on the phone’s screen while Kushner was using it and storing the images on internal servers.

The surveillance revealed that Kushner used the phone to access a bank account in the United Arab Emirates. When Dutch spies observed the device’s activity, the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan.

Initially, it was assessed that the account was linked to the Azerbaijani government. For MIVD hackers, it became an intelligence puzzle that needed to be solved. Almost everything they dealt with appeared to have a connection to Russian conspiracies.

A little more than a year after Trump’s first presidency began, the MIVD, like the FBI agents and federal prosecutors in Washington working on Robert Mueller’s investigation, had uncovered only part of the story.

Kushner, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed (MBZ), and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) came together at a decisive moment.

MBS sought to become crown prince. MBZ wanted to overturn Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, while Kushner hoped the two would help him pressure the Palestinians into an agreement acceptable to Israel.

Although he was perceived as wealthy, Kushner was not financially independent from his parents. The family company, Kushner Companies, had to repay a $1 billion loan for its best-known building: the office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

At the outset of the first Trump administration, MBZ and MBS proposed financing a special fund to help the new administration achieve foreign-policy goals. One example mentioned was funding the wall Trump had promised on the border between Mexico and the United States, with the aim of securing a second presidential term.

Initially, the two Arab leaders and Kushner considered investing more than $10 billion in the initiative.

But within a few months, as MBZ pressured the Trump administration to support MBS’s bid to become crown prince and later king of Saudi Arabia, the idea of a broader foreign-policy fund was abandoned.

Instead, MBZ and MBS, first together and later MBZ alone, deposited at least $2 billion into at least two bank accounts linked to Kushner.

The exact way in which the two Arab leaders organized the joint $2 billion payments is unknown, but in practice they shared the cost. To understand the arrangement, one must examine the location of each account and the people who controlled it.

The “Alpha” account was held at First Abu Dhabi Bank, the UAE’s largest bank. It was overseen by MBZ’s brother, Tahnoon bin Zayed, the bank’s board chairman.

Since 2017, the Saudis and Emiratis had transferred around $750 million into the Alpha account, which was intended to serve as a foreign-policy fund. Kushner and MBZ would oversee and administer part of the money. In their effort to reach a broad agreement that would end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they believed the region’s map needed to be redrawn.

“Jared was looking for shortcuts in his diplomacy,” said a source with knowledge of the arrangement between the UAE and Kushner.

“Jared promised MBZ that he would advance their agenda with Trump if they contributed to a fund. He wanted normalization of relations with Israel, so that business could flourish,” the source said.

This person explained that a secret fund—meaning a pool of money for diplomatic objectives outside official channels—was a common form of corruption in the Arab governments of the Gulf.

“The Emiratis and Saudis do this once a year. One or two billion dollars is nothing to them, and if it gets them what they want, then it is money well spent,” he said.

At first glance, the Alpha account looked like a source of funding for an Emirati government program through which MBZ paid, for example, officials or supported state schools. But the way the money entered the account and the people through whom it passed indicated that the arrangement was intended to be kept secret.

Essentially, it was a secretive and questionable scheme administered in part by a senior adviser to the president of the United States.

The Dutch monitoring the Alpha account noticed that all the funds arrived in U.S. dollars, transferred from a bank in Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan has a special role in money laundering. Its central bank holds large reserves in U.S. dollars, but the banking system does not apply the highest standards of transparency.

As a result, Azerbaijani banks have developed established but unofficial practices for serving as intermediaries in large transfers. In these transactions, a foreign currency is exchanged for an equivalent value in U.S. dollars.

For a fee of around 6–7 percent of the transaction, some banks in Azerbaijan accept money from clients who want to move hundreds of millions of dollars into Saudi riyals or UAE dirhams.

The client from Saudi Arabia or the UAE sends the money to the Azerbaijani bank. The bank then uses another internal account to send the corresponding amount in U.S. dollars to the country requested by the client.

For auditors, this hidden trade is difficult to detect. A superficial observation, such as the one the Dutch could make by monitoring Kushner’s iPhone, showed only an account that appeared to be linked to the Azerbaijani government and that had transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to an account in Dubai.

However, the Alpha account had another feature that the Dutch could not see or understand. It helped reveal the true purpose of the money.

Kushner did not own the account at First Abu Dhabi Bank. He had the right to conduct transactions on an account owned and managed by an Emirati charitable foundation.

When MBZ and MBS began contributing to the Alpha account in 2017, the Watani Al Emarat foundation, a government-funded Emirati charity, was headed by Dherar Belhoul Al Falasi.

Al Falasi was a technocrat, a member of the Federal National Council and a friend of one of MBZ’s closest advisers.

But the Watani foundation had another function as well. Sources cited in the investigation say the organization was used as a cover to send money supporting the UAE’s covert military and intelligence operations abroad.

A confidential source with direct knowledge of the foundation’s weapons-proliferation program said Al Falasi had helped facilitate the UAE’s secret weapons-purchasing programs.

According to the source, the Emiratis believed that the foundation’s charitable status would make its international transactions subject to less scrutiny. Thus, the organization provided a useful cover for financing the covert wars of MBZ and his brother.

MBZ and Tahnoon authorized Kushner to act on the Alpha account belonging to the Watani foundation. As an authorized person, he could access the account and, in theory, conduct transfers, even though it was not officially his. His role in the account could be compared to that of the CIA director.

If Kushner had been running a government institution administering covert programs abroad, such an account could have been part of his duties, provided that the activity was approved by the president and reported to Congress. But he was not the CIA director. That position requires Senate approval, while operations are overseen by Congress.

Instead, Kushner’s only supervisor was his father-in-law, Donald Trump. Four senior Trump administration officials—two national security advisers, a White House chief of staff and a former CIA director—said they knew of no presidential authorization granting him access to a foreign government’s bank account.

Kushner’s lawyer, however, said that his client had not made agreements or arrangements with foreign leaders and officials without the approval of the president of the United States, and that every action had been taken in the best interests of the United States.