A covert UAE campaign run by a Swiss company

April 9, 2023 10:20 AM

The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign. "Rumors destroyed his company. Then hackers handed him terabytes of files exposing a covert campaign against him—and the culprit wasn’t a rival but an entire country." A long article in the New Yorker describing a covert UAE campaign against Hazim Nada, the 34-year-old American-born owner of a shipping company, which turned out to be part of a larger UAE campaign against Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood: Nada himself was apolitical, but his father Youssef was a leader with the Muslim Brotherhood.

An example of "active measures" or "covert action," where the sponsor's identity is hidden or deniable.

When Nada first learned of the hack, “the guys” played coy about who had hired Alp to attack him. They made Nada guess. He named competitors in the oil trade. Wrong, they said. The true client was Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates.

... The U.A.E. had hired Brero as part of a long-running feud with its neighbor Qatar. ... Both states were Western-backed, petroleum-rich monarchies; both had checkered human-rights records; both were close partners with the Pentagon. But the ruling families of Qatar and the U.A.E. embraced different, if equally cynical, strategies for bolstering their power. Qatar performed a balancing act: it hosted a major American airbase but also cultivated a tactical alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, both to gain grassroots influence in the Arab region and to counterbalance its larger Persian Gulf neighbors. Qatar welcomed exiled Muslim Brothers in Doha and handed them microphones on the government-owned Al Jazeera network (as long as they never discussed Qatari politics). During the Arab Spring, Qatar had used its money and its media to amplify demands for democracy (although never at home), in an ill-fated bet that its Brotherhood allies would assume power around the region.

M.B.Z., meanwhile, staked a claim to regional leadership on the notion that the U.A.E. was a modernizing force in a dangerously backward region. He regarded the Brotherhood—founded on the premise that an Islamic revival and Islamic governance could restore the Arab world’s greatness—as an embodiment of that backwardness.

The UAE hired a Swiss company, Alp, founded by Mario Brero.

The files revealed that he had done intelligence operations for many foreign governments, or for individuals close to them. The list included Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Congo, Nigeria, Gabon, Monaco, Angola, Uzbekistan, and Saudi Arabia. He appeared to have done work on behalf of the Hollywood filmmaker Bryan Singer, the director of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” who has been accused several times of sexual assault. (A lawyer for Singer, who has denied the assault allegations, said that Singer was not available for comment.) Other revelations: Brero had done investigations for the French fashion tycoon Bernard Arnault, for the Israeli mining baron Beny Steinmetz, and for a roster of billionaires from Eastern Europe, including Bulat Utemuratov, of Kazakhstan, and Oleg Deripaska, Dmitry Rybolovlev, and Vladimir Smirnov, of Russia.

It was Brero who decided to go after Hazim Nada.

In Brero’s first official report to the Emiratis, dated October 6, 2017, he wrote, “Why Hazim Nada?” His answer, which ran for forty-eight pages, was predicated on the presumption that the son was an extension of his father: “Youssef Nada is now an 86-year-old millionaire and it is natural that he hands over the family business to the next generation.” After making this leap, Brero constructed a case against Hazim Nada mainly through an analysis of surreptitiously obtained copies of Nada’s call history for June, July, and August of 2017. Nada often called his sister, for example; she lived in Qatar, and her husband was a mechanical engineer who happened to be the son of a prominent Muslim preacher revered by the Brotherhood. Nada called childhood friends, some of whom were the offspring of his father’s old Brotherhood friends. His father’s business partner, also a Brotherhood supporter, had a son, Youssef Himmat, who had worked for Hazim and also led a European network of Muslim youth groups. Nada frequently called an Italian Lord Energy employee and friend whose family had converted to Islam; the friend had even posted messages on social media opposing a 2013 Emirati-backed coup in Egypt that had removed a Muslim Brother as President. And so on—page after page of secondhand associations. In reality, Nada told me, the only person on his call history who might actually have been an Islamist was an Algerian parliamentarian and the operator of a language school in Milan. Nada’s wife was studying Italian there.

Brero pushed his conceit with confidence, though. “Lord Energy SA appears as a highly important—and deeply discreet—entity within the Global Muslim Brotherhood secret terror system,” he wrote to the Emiratis. Nada could hardly believe that the Emiratis were paranoid enough to buy it. “You just put some names of people they hate on a chart and their eyes will start flipping!” he told me.

His experience felt increasingly surreal: he was witnessing his own downfall through the eyes of the man who had caused it.

posted by russilwvong (6 comments total)

This was fascinating and horrifying. I admit to having not a ton of sympathy for Hazim Nada: he made his billions dealing in petrofuels. That said, what Brero has done can be done to anyone: it's terrifying. Nightmare fuel for anyone who thinks about getting into public life in some way.
posted by suelac at 12:05 PM on April 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

It’s also a powerful tool for weakening general social trust. This is dreadful because we need social trust — imagine what anti climate change measures are going to be like when everyone believes everyone is cheating.
posted by clew at 12:32 PM on April 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

ungated
posted by chavenet at 3:57 PM on April 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Oil and Gas Money that is Stranded Assets is sloshing all around the world, and it will kill before it gets written down. There's a lot of money looking to be spent before it disappears, it's not going out without a lot of stupid things happening
posted by eustatic at 9:00 PM on April 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's chilling, this read. I don't think there are many people who can tell a grifter promising clandestine influence from someone properly-connected to a nation-state that seeks to trade influence. And some rich people have the assets of a small nation-state, too, with fragile egos that can be trolled into action.

It seems fair to assume that power without transparent and accountable oversight is corrupt, period. This seems like a fair place to observe "if you've got nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear from transparency."
posted by k3ninho at 2:03 PM on April 10, 2023

Thanks for the post, russilwvong. Reading this made me grateful that I have nothing to go after and no relatives worth harassing. Yikes, what a story.
posted by Bella Donna at 8:52 AM on April 12, 2023