YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Hubbard

lines on the record: 79
first: 2020-03-23
most recent: 2020-03-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You wouldn't, anyway, you know, it reminds me of a saying I say all the time, he's so poor, all he has is money. I don't think he's going to build it. And I think it's going to be difficult. You're right in getting technology people to go there and do this. Although, you know, everybody has a price, as they say. Anyway, I really recommend this book. It's a really important book to understand a critical figure who is not going away, as you say, Ben, and who is going to influence all kinds of things in the world economy, including in tech and elsewhere. MBS, the rise to power of Mohammed bin Salman by Ben Hubbard of the New York Times. I urge you to read it. Thank you, Ben, for coming on the show.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Move to Saudi Arabia and live in this weird place out in the middle of the desert and try to build this sort of Saudi Arabian Xanadu. So I don't know. We'll see where it goes. Maybe he'll surprise us, and in 20 years, we'll say, oh my God, it's Neom, it's amazing.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“about MBS really wanted to have a beach with glow in the dark sand. And sort of got all these scientists together to figure out, wow, is there a safe way to make glow in the dark sand? And I don't know if we can really do it. You know, he wanted to have a fake moon that would rise over Neome at night that would be hoisted into the air by drones. And if Saudi wants this thing to be run by robots and wants to have solar energy, I mean, Saudi Arabia is the world's largest oil producer. They don't really have any history with solar energy. Sure, they can buy these things from Broad, but they don't have any history with this stuff. Robots? I mean, I would be surprised if one of the major Saudi universities even has a robotics program, but they're not known for producing robots. So they're going to have to buy all this stuff. So, you know, will it turn out? But again, like if he had not done all this crazy stuff that made people sort of hesitate to be associated with him and with Saudi Arabia, Neom would have been a lot easier. Now it's going to be really hard. It's going to be really hard to convince the people who do have those skills and who own those technologies to”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. We're going to have to wait and see. I mean, just to give a sense for what this thing is, I mean, you know, Muhammad bin Salman announced this in late 2017 surprises everybody at this investment conference and says, we are going to build, this thing is going to be, you know, we're going to spend $500 billion that we're going to have business people write the regulations in order to encourage investment, to encourage growth, and to encourage innovation. We're going to be, you know, I mean, some of the language in the documents is incredible. He basically said, we're going to create a new way for humanity to live. Like this is not just a development project, you know, like a new housing development or something like that. No, no, no. This is supposed to be like a new model for humanity. That's the way that they're thinking about it. Then there was the Wall Street Journal got some amazing internal documents about this that really, you know, at the beginning, a lot of us were like, okay, well, we'll see, you know, good luck with that. The Wall Street Journal got some amazing documents where, you know, they're talking.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unlikely. And then again, since you mentioned the last thing, this neome project, is it just a fan, like a mirage, I hate to use a desert metaphor, but is it just a mirage or is there real technology behind this?”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of the future is supposed to cost $500 billion. It's going to be sort of staffed by robots and fueled by solar power. And it's kind of his pie in the sky project for the future. I think that what all these companies have now is they have a risk premium that they have to take into account that they didn't have before. And everybody who thinks about it, they say, oh, wow, Saudi Arabia, there's a lot of money there. We could really make a lot of money, but do we really want it on our website that we're like in business with these guys? You know, is Human Rights Watch going to come after us or other human activists going to kind of criticize us? Is that going to hurt our business model in other parts of the world? And, you know, that for me is the interesting question. I mean, they're not just going to say, we don't like Saudi Arabia, but we're not going to do business there. But for me, the more interesting question is how that affects their calculus when they're trying to decide whether it's worth getting on a plane, flying to Saudi Arabia, opening an office, putting some money into a business or not. I just think that all of these things that he's done have”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It will be surprising the first time we see, say, let's say that we have a Democratic president, will this person be as willing as Donald Trump to invite Mohammed bin Salmana to the Oval Office for a photo op? I don't know. MBS, will he feel comfortable coming to Pennsylvania Avenue when you might have protesters show upside holding saws and pictures of Jamal Khashoggi? He might decide to pass. He might decide that that's not worth the news coverage. So I think in that way, we're definitely in a new era in terms of the way that sort of, I'd say, the broader US government sees Saudi Arabia. And that could very well be reflected in a new administration if there is one.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“State Department. He's done things that have angered people in both houses of Congress and in both parties. Congress people have come together to try to pass legislation to stop the armed sales to Yemen. We're not talking to, this is for once not a bipartisan issue. You've had Republican, you know, Lindsey Graham has become a huge critic of MBS. So this is not a partisan issue. And in the Democratic before the Democratic field really thinned down, you had basically nobody who was going to say anything nice about MBS. You know, nobody was really going to stand up and say, yes, these people are important for us and we look forward to selling arms. And I could be wrong, you know. I mean, the US at the same time, we've been dealing with dictators for a very long time. And, you know, it's part of the way that we do business, but it is.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I don't want to make it sound like the Obama administration. I mean, the Obama administration, they still sold tens of billions of dollars in arms to Saudi Arabia while the Yemen war was going on. So I don't want to make it sound like Obama was, you know, really tough on MBS all the time. But, you know, when you look at the kind of cover that Trump gave him after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, it would have been very, it's difficult to imagine Obama doing the same thing. I don't want to speculate too much about future administrations, but I think what it's because we don't know, you know, we don't know who it's going to be. But I think it's fair to say that his relationship with Trump is quite exceptional and that the anger at MBS is vast inside of the US government and probably bigger than we've seen maybe since, I don't know. I mean, I think it surpasses 9-11 because that was a different thing. Maybe it goes back to the 1970s and the oil embargo. I wasn't really around then. And so I don't know how much anger there was. But he's done things that have angered the CIA. He's done things that have angered a lot of people at the...”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think this is definitely unusual. Kind of, you know, if MBS had done some of these things under a Barack Obama administration, I don't think that he would have received as much cover as he did from the Trump administration.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would that change in another administration, or will it be like, look, we need these guys for now as long as we need their oil and their money and we want to sell them things like weapon systems? Do you imagine it changing in any administration or is this unusual?”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Being a wiser sort of more seasoned monarch. And there's also a possibility that it's just going to be a wild, wild ride from here on out, that like every year or two there's just going to be like a new crazy thing that he does that tanks the world oil price or locks up more people for this or that or hacks somebody else's some other famous person's cell phone. And we just don't really know. But that's really the question is, you know, is he learning from these things or is he not”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is he learning from his mistakes? You know, does he sort of look at the Yemen war and all of the civilian deaths and all of the money wasted and the lack of anything kind of approaching victory and say, huh, yeah, maybe we could have done that better. Does he look at the Jamaica Shogi thing and say like, wow, we really screwed that up and we really like ruined my international reputation? Like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't have, maybe we should have just let the guy write his newspaper columns. Like, what's the big deal? Does he look at sort of the lockup at the writs? Does he look up at the kidnapping out of Hariri and say, wow, you know, this really made people who were thinking about doing business in Saudi Arabia scratch their heads and say, wow, do I want to deal with this? Like, do I want to take on this amount of risk if I'm going to take my business to Saudi Arabia? And, I mean, I don't know the answer, but I think the big question is, is he learning? And does he consider these mistakes? He is now 34 years old, which is incredibly young. You know, there's a possibility that he will learn from them and that he will grow into.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, if people were expecting that the murder of Jamau Khashoggi was going to cause King Salman to remove MBS and send him back to, you know, send them out to the ranch and say, okay, I'm going to try somebody else. That obviously didn't happen. And so if that didn't do it and all these other things didn't do it, I don't think there's any reason to believe that, you know, the king is suddenly going to change his mind and do it. And I think from the best information we have from the situation in Saudi Arabia, I think that there's no reason to believe that when his father dies, he's not going to become king and that he could be king for many, many decades. I mean, if he lives to be as old as his father, is he'll be king into the 2060s. So this guy is going to remain there for a very long time. And I think the conversations you're talking about that the Silicon Valley people are having, you're hearing all over the place. I mean, I hear it from people in the US government, people in the UK government, people around the Middle East and various governments here who are watching this guy and wondering. And I think the big question everybody is asking is really.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, own goal thing. He's doing this all the time. All kinds of stories I hear about him talk about someone who's super twitchy, loves video games, doesn't have an attention span of a gnat, essentially. The people who've met with him in Silicon Valley. Nonetheless, they continue to accept his money, because why not? True, including the Vision Fund, which is money all over. What happens? Is there any repercussions for this? Or I don't see it in Silicon Valley. I don't see them. Among some startups, for example, there's some like, I don't want that Saudi money anymore. Do you imagine that he'll get it right at some point, although he doesn't certainly deserve it, given his behavior so far. But a lot of people I know who've met with him are quite worried about his demeanor and all kinds of, you know, talk about the way he behaves, the way he's, again, his attention span, his ability to understand things, the kind of people that he has around him that are weak, obviously weak and sort of yes men.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And here we are. So, what happens from here from him? He's made so many errors. I mean, these errors are really quite massive, a war, a murder, you know, bollocking all kinds of advantages, like you said. What's it called one in the goal or one in your own goal or something? Oh, the only...”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, they were agreeing on production cuts or production levels just to try to keep the price up. And it was working. And then, you know, MBS just basically decides we need to take more steps to get the price up. He starts making outreach to the Russians. What are we going to do? Production cuts. We got to do this, do that. The Russians demure. I don't know. We're going to think about it. Let's see. They talk to them again. Well, I don't know. Let's see. And then finally, the Russians say, no, we're not interested. And so MBS basically does exactly the opposite thing. He says, okay, well, then we're going to boost production and output. And we're going to crash the price. And that's exactly what happened.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well I mean, oil is the lifeblood of Saudi Arabia. I mean, the place really has nothing without oil. I mean, the whole reason the place still exists as it exists is because they discovered oil. Other than that, it would have been, it's hard to know what it would have become, but it would have been a country that probably didn't interest the rest of the world much at all. And the oil price has been a difficult thing for MBS. Sort of he comes in in 2015 when the prices declining and will remain safely below $100 a barrel for a long time. This poses big problems because it crunches the state budget. It gives him less money to do a lot of the reforms and things that he wants to do inside the country. And anyway, so he more recently wants to start talking to Russia about how are we going to keep the price up. Let's come to some kind of agreement. And this had worked for a while.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, a lot of people said, well, terrible things happen everywhere, but business has to go on. And I think that for the Saudis, 2020 was going to be this year where like we're going to stand on the world stage. We're going to show people that we're a serious player. I believe that the summit is sometime this fall, you know, we're going to be host to the world. All these heads of state are going to be coming to Riyadh and we're going to throw this great thing. So I think a lot of us expected this was going to be the year that they try to sort of put some of these scandals behind them. And then, boom, oil war and like price crashes and serious blow to the world economy. And then you sort of wonder, really? Like, was that necessary?”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, again, you know, we have sort of MBS wanting to have this international legitimacy, wanting to be respected by the West. And, you know, Jama Khashoggi happens. The Saudis try to sort of act like they feel bad about it. We're going to put some people on trial. We're going to ask for the death penalty, whatever. And then there's this kind of sense that, okay, maybe they can move past it 2020. Saudi took, you know, now Saudi has just taken the presidency of the G20 for the first time in Saudi history. And so if you're Muhammad bin Salman, this is a huge deal. You know, you were just not very long ago sort of seen as an international pariah. And now your country's the head of the G20. So 2020 was, you know, I think a lot of people expected that this was going to be a year. Congress came back.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's going on below the surface? But from where I sit and from all the people I've talked to, I find it very hard to believe that there's any significant sort of group of people or network inside of Saudi Arabia that can organize effective opposition to what he wants to do.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't see much reason to think, I don't see any, what's the best way to say this? I think MBS has been very successful at pulling all of the various levers of power in Saudi society into his hands. So if you look at the royal family, the royal family used to be kind of a diffuse body. You had a number of princes who were senior and had large portfolios and they had perhaps one in charge of the National Guard, somebody in charge of the military, somebody in charge of foreign affairs. And they kind of had their own little purviews. And MBS has kind of gotten rid of all that. Everybody answers to him. He's brought in a bunch of new younger princes who answer to him and, you know, he's the top guy. He consolidated his power over the military. He's consolidated his control over the National Guard, the intelligence services, the secret police. Everything comes back to him now. And so I find it, you know, Saudi society, you know, the only caveat is that it is a pretty murky place. It's a difficult place to really see.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of your elder cousins, you're kind of worried that he's going to come back at you. I mean, this is a guy who used to run the secret police. This is a guy who, you know, sort of used to be the one who was in charge of cracking down. Yeah, definitely. Right. So, you know, so MBS, you know, puts him in his palace and puts him under a virtual house arrest. And, you know, he'll sort of show up at family functions now and then, but he's really kind of out of his network and everything. And so it looks like what happened is basically Muhammad bin Nayeyeff and Prince Ahmed got together and they were complaining about MBS and saying, yeah, man, you know, my finances are either confiscated or frozen. I don't know what this guy is doing, you know, various things. The world gets back to MBS. And so he locks him up.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be a good choice. This is a guy who's popular, he knows the West, good track record, interesting way to move from that first generation of princes to that next generation of princes. Like, okay, but it becomes kind of clear over time that MBS is gunning for his job. MBS becomes number two. He's this deputy crown prince, so second in line to the throne, and various ways he kind of starts taking pieces of Muhammad bin Naeif's portfolio away, starts kind of undermining him in various ways, tries to get a foothold in the counterterrorism world, tries to get a foothold in security, things like that. And he eventually in mid-2017 shoves him out of the way quite unceremoniously and becomes the crown prince. Since then, Mohamed bin Nayev, despite sort of his prominence in Saudi Arabia and his many friends in the West, was largely under house arrest. I mean, they basically put him in his palace. They took away a lot of his finances. And they basically just kept an eye on him. And I think, you know, if you're Muhammad bin Salman and you've just done this to...”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because he could have been a direct threat to MBS, whereas I don't know if Ahmed could have. Muhammad bin Nayef was the Interior Ministry of Saudi Arabia for many years, and he was the counterterrorism czar. This guy is good friends with John Brennan. He's good friends with people in MI6, other people in the CIA, many people who have been through the National Security Council. This guy was seen as like the main contact for the United States on counterterrorism and incredibly popular in Saudi Arabia in the mid-2000s, al-Qaeda declared war on Saudi Arabia and started blowing up compounds and carrying out really nasty attacks. Muhammad Binayif is the guy who is credited with shutting that down with launching the war that sort of got dismantled the al-Qaeda network inside of the kingdom. And so he was very popular, very popular in the West, good friends in the UK, good friends in the United States. And anyway, when MBS shows up in 2015, his father names Mohammed bin Nay if Crown Prince and everybody says, wow, that's really, that seems to be.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So the princes, let's just talk about who they were first. I mean, there were four who were arrested. There were sort of only two that are sort of big names that we should really know about. One is Prince Ahmed, who is actually a full brother of MBS's father. So he's MBS's direct uncle. So you would assume that they were quite close. There have been photos of Ahmed and Sanman meeting at various family occasions. They seem to be getting along very well. It is known that when MBS was named Crown Prince, they have this council called Allegiance Council of senior princes who sort of vote to approve whatever the next lineup is going to be. Ahmed was one of the no votes for MBS. And it's been known that he's sort of been grumbling in private circles. We hear it here and there that Ahmed is not happy about the way things are going and he thinks MBS is rash and this and that. And he's mostly spending his time at London. So anyway, that's who Prince Ahmed is. The other one is Prince Mohammed bin Nayev. And this guy in a way is more interesting because...”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I don't know, maybe we should break these out and talk about them separately. Do you want to talk about the princes? Do you want to talk about the oil?”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't want to sort of, you know, try to, you know, play armchair psychologist or whatever, but I mean, I do think that we have seen a pattern with MBS of just believing that he can do things, believing that he can get away with things and that he should be able to get away with things that other leaders do. We didn't really see a whole lot of sort of regret after Jamal Khashoggi. It took him quite a long time to come out and say, I bear some responsibility to this because it happened on my watch. You know, there were weeks and weeks of Saudi denials, Saudi misinformation, various things after it happened. And one theory would be that that's the way it is if you're an absolute monarch and you've been, you know, you're the son of a king. I mean, you know, how many times in Muhammad bin Salman's life has somebody told him, you know what? No, like you can't do that. You know, whereas if you're me or if you're somebody else, you know, like, yeah, sometimes you fail a test or sometimes you want to do something and you don't get accepted to that university. You know, it's like what we all go through, but I don't know if you're Muhammad been.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there was also, for a while, the Saudis were courting Amazon. They wanted them to open up a data center inside Saudi Arabia. And I don't exactly know when the talks for that fell apart, whether that was before after Jamal. But for whatever reason, I mean, but there's no reason to think that when that text was sent, MBS was, I think he was still trying to court Jeff Bezos. I mean, this was before the big break between them. I just think he thought he could get away with it.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is it related to because Jamal Khashoggi worked for the Washington Post and Jeff Bezos has been very critical of Saudi Arabia more recently, especially around all kinds of things, including the hacking of photos of him and texts. And he linked those to Saudi Arabia in some way. So there's a beginnings of a face-off between Bezos and Saudi Arabia.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because after he met Muhammad bin Salman, they exchanged phone numbers, they used to keep in touch on WhatsApp. One day out of the blue, Jeff Bezos receives this encrypted video that has something to do with Sweden, I forget, but it's a very bizarre video. And then they examine his phone and they find that after he receives this video, his phone starts leaking tremendous amounts of data. It's basically uploading lots of data from his phone to the internet. And so his investigators conclude that it was that video that hacked his phone and that it was MBS who did it.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I can't get inside the heads of the hackers and know why they did it. I mean, MBS had a quite complicated relationship with Jeff Bezos. And, you know, if we sort of go back to, you know, when I said you can kind of graph his trajectory, that it sort of goes up and up and up, the high point is March 2018. And then I think, you know, Jamal Khashoggi sends it on this like drastic sort of roller coaster down that sort of gets him considered an international parai, at least for a while. So Jeff Bezos, I mean, when he took this story trip to the United States in March 2018, he met with Jeff Bezos. You know, you can go online, Google Jeff Bezos, Mohammed bin Salman. You'll find a photo of them sitting, I think, probably in a fancy hotel suite somewhere. And they're sort of laughing and smiling and talking to each other. And that was only three months, three, let's say, March, two months before he gets this text on his phone. So anyway, Jeff Bezos, you know, from what his representatives have said, he...”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this is, you know, the Saudis have tried to say, oh, this group was sent to quote unquote negotiate with Jamal. They were trying to persuade him to come back to the kingdom. But, you know, I don't think anybody really believes that, to be honest.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The cameras, they're prepared and ready to go. I mean, like this wasn't something that they just came up with last minute. You have another guy who's brought along because he's built like Jamal and they use him as a body double to go wander around Istanbul to try to convince the world that Jamal is still alive. I mean, it's like Keystone Cops, he sort of level of intelligence work.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think Donald Trump is right about this one. He keeps saying there is no smoking gun. But what pretty much everybody else will tell you is, okay, we don't have, nobody has an email or an intercept or anything of MBS saying, go get me this guy. Nobody has that. And I don't think the CIA has it. And if they do, they've kept it very well hidden. But the assessments by the CIA and by pretty much everybody else, by many, many other intelligence agencies is that the way that this guy ran the kingdom, he's in charge of everything. He does not delegate. This is not a country where people are big on personal initiative, where you as sort of a mid-level government intelligence official or whatever just going to decide, oh, I'm going to, you know, take this very risky, you know, operation in a foreign country and just organize it myself. It's just not the way that it happens in Saudi Arabia. So it's incredibly complex operation. We just have 15 agents who fly in a group of them on private jets. They come in, they check into hotels, they outfit the consulate.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we'll try to tell the story quickly, but Jamal is in Washington trying to figure out what's going on. He eventually meets a young Turkish woman that he wants to marry. He proposes to her. She says yes. In order to get married in Turkey, he needs to prove that he's divorced from his previous marriage, which he has to go to the Saudi consulate. So he goes to the Saudi consulate. They say, oh, you know, we're very happy to see you. Why don't you come back in a few days? We'll have your document ready. And he goes back on, well, in early November 2018, walks into the consulate, never comes out. And then, you know, over the next few weeks, obviously, the details come out. The Turks, you know, leak out the details of what happened inside. And we find that there was a team of 15 Saudi agents who flew in that morning before he got there to intercept him. And they killed him. They murdered him and dismembered him and made his body disappear. And to this day, we don't know where it is.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, where people really will go to the mat and say nasty things about political figures or whatever, they're not that bad, but in the Saudi context to be directly”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The relationship between the Trump administration. You know, if you're sort of used to American journalism or British journalism, it's not critical.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Packs his bags and gets on an airplane and ends up going back to flying to the United States where he moves into an apartment he had bought many years before in Tyson's Corner in Virginia and he sets up camp.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business people, they're interested in the bottom line. They don't really know anything about the Middle East. They don't really know anything about Saudi Arabia. The only thing that they do know about the Middle East is Israel, and that's kind of the only thing that they care about. And so the Saudis kind of craft their approach to Donald Trump based on that. And Jamal is not with the program. Jamal sort of says, you know what? This guy, he said a lot of really nasty things about Muslims. And he wrote a column at the time that said, you know, we shouldn't be afraid of Trump, but we should prepare for him. And basically said, we need to take a cautious approach to this guy because we don't know what he's going to do. This is when he gets the phone call from the royal court that basically says, you're done. We're shutting you off. No more Twitter, no more media appearances, no more articles. And he goes dark for a bit less than a year, I believe. And Jamal is just gone. And during that time, he sort of gets, you know, indications that if you stick around, you could get arrested. You could get travel banned. You may not be able to leave Saudi Arabia. And then so he eventually...”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because Jamal was one of the few Saudis win Donald Trump won the election who came out and said, this guy might be a problem for us. And, you know, you had this sort of very interesting, you know, the Saudis, I think, very much like, you know, most other, I think pretty much everybody else expected that Hillary Clinton was going to win and they were quite shocked when Donald Trump won. Donald Trump obviously had a quite storied history of saying some not very nice things about Muslims and not very nice things about the Saudis themselves. I mean, even during the campaign, he would rail on the Saudis and he would use it as a weapon against Hillary Clinton, you know, in some of the debates. The Saudis basically realized if this guy won, we have to do everything to build a relationship with him. And so they very quickly put together a delegation. They send them to the East Coast. They meet with Trump business associates. They meet with political associates. They meet with Jared Kushner. They come back and they write this report that basically says, here's who these guys are, this new administration, they're not politicians. These guys are deal makers.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Him an enemy and actually considered him an asset. This is somebody that you wanted on your side because he's an ambassador. He talks to the Western media. He writes, he goes on TV. He speaks in English. He speaks in Arabic. But anyway, that relationship begins to sour over the next few years. Jamal becomes very critical of a lot of the authoritarian things that MBS is doing at home, the crackdowns on freedom of speech. Then one of MBS's aides calls Jamal and basically says, you're done. No more talking on social media. No more talking on the media, no more publications. And this ironically is because of Donald Trump.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Asset, I think to people like me who were covering Saudi Arabia, but also to the kingdom because they didn't have a lot of people like him who understood the kingdom but who also understood the Western media and could engage with them and try to explain what was going on. And that's the way that he was. I mean, the guy is a household name in Saudi Arabia before his murder and before he became a dissident. Everybody knew who Jamal Khashoggi was. And when MBS comes in, I write about this in my book. MBS actually saw him as an asset. You know, MBS releases his grand vision for the future of Saudi Arabia, which is called Vision 2030, and it's this sort of sprawling document that it's about the economy. We're going to diversify the economy, but it's also about what we want to do with social life, what we want to do with entertainment. We want Saudis to exercise more. All of these different things. And the day that he releases it, he hosts kind of a reception for a number of prominent people in Saudi society. And one of them is Jamachogji, like MBS at that point didn't consider.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for the vast majority of Jamaq Ashogi's life, he was part of the establishment in Saudi Arabia. He was a journalist who was seen as very close to the state. He was close to the royals. He sometimes traveled with the king. And he had lived in the United States. He studied, did his university in Indiana. And so for people like me and for many, many other people who worked on Saudi Arabia before me, when you had to write about Saudi Arabia, one of the first things you would do is track down Jamaica Shogji's phone number and call him up. Because, you know, when something somewhat murky would happen in the kingdom, you know, let's say that there's somebody else gets named to a new position. You don't know who this person is, or Saudi Arabia does something in foreign affairs that appears to be a bit baffling. You call up Jamal and A, he was one of the few Saudis who would reliably answer his phone. And B, he would tell you what's going on. And he would say, oh, well, I think, you know, the king is really thinking about it this way. Or I think what's going on is this. Or, you know, what the Saudis are really interested in this case is why. So this was, you know, he was this incredible sort of...”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And there's a reason for that. So let's get to what really sort of blew this open, which was the murder and this memberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which every single intelligence agency has linked directly to MBS and his team, the team that he sent out to deal with him. Give us the background of Jamal Khashoggi, for those who don't know. He was a columnist and he was actually somewhat close to the royal family for a long time.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saudi activists that were targeted and actually hacked, and I received an attempt on my phone that I did not click on, and so we don't have any reason to believe that they actually got into my phone. And right before that, you had obviously the famous reported attempt on Jeff Bezos, which it takes really a lot of gall to think that it's a good idea to hack the phone of one of the richest men in the world.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On Twitter, you could end up in jail And then the second package is the hacking. I have a piece in The New York Times today actually about MBS's chief hacker. This gentleman's named Surkhatani, who would become quite well known later thanks to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And this was a guy who kind of brought up through the royal court, was brought in quite early, worked under King Abdullah. And when MBS comes in in 2015, deputizes him with finding the best tools that they can find to use technology to their advantage. And so he gets in touch with hacking team, which was an Italian spyware company that was selling hacking tools and things to governments. And he basically starts experimenting with how we can use these things. And the entire picture is not clear because of the covert nature of these technologies. But looking back, we've seen quite a lot now. I mean, over May, June 2018, we now have five confirmed cases of Saudi attempts, one of them on me that we're all confirmed by Citizen Lab, which is a group of researchers at the University of Toronto.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can actually shape the way that people understand reality. And I don't think I'm overstating the case because they spend so much time on that platform to get their news and their information. And so you start seeing these sort of armies of bots, armies of what I don't think are bots, I think, are probably paid accounts or people who are sort of in the service of him. They basically realized that even if you have a conversation happening on Twitter that has thousands or tens of thousands of participants with not very many directed tweets, you can change the conversation. Either you can report it as offensive and get Twitter to take it down, and then it goes through whatever review process they do at Twitter. But then by then the wave has passed. Or you can get on there and you can sort of muddy the waters. People are complaining about something. You can get on and put up other information that might be true, that might be not true, that's deliberately false, and it can just kind of change the whole tenor of the conversation. On top of that, you just have the arrests of many prominent people on Twitter, which sort of sent the message to everybody else that you better watch what you see.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we see this kind of in two ways. There's, I think, the first kind of batch of technologies have to do with social media monitoring and manipulation, where he basically realizes that Twitter is incredibly important for Saudis and how they understand the world. I mean, much more than in the United States. Saudis live on Twitter. Everybody has a Twitter account. Some people have two or three Twitter accounts. Saudis are on Twitter all the time. And I think he and his deputies realize that if we can shape the conversation,”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very well. And so there's a lot. So, anyway, so then we have sort of the general crackdown at home. We have to get back to this tech stuff. We have a lot of sort of crazy text stuff that happens. I mean, MBS realizes very early on that he can marshal new technologies to the service of his authoritarian.”
2020-03-23 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Ben Hubbard · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT