Narratology: Jared the Spy

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters via The Times (UK).

I realize there's an awful lot to think about at the moment, but this week-old piece by the estimable Vicky Ward (author of the 2019 Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump), really shouldn't be allowed to wash away in the flood.

It offers a very plausible account, based on Ward's own sources, of exactly what the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund was paying for with their $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner's new investment firm, in the context of a power struggle that had been going on in the kingdom since early 2015, when King Salman, who had been king for just three months, appointed his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef (MbN) as crown prince, and his own son, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) as deputy crown prince; namely, alleging that Kushner conspired with MbS to get him named crown prince and MbN thrown in prison in 2017, including by passing him classified material to which he had access thanks to the security clearance Trump insisted on giving him.

Which would make him guilty of more than just a Foreign Agents Registration Act violation, if true (Kushner has denied passing classified material to anybody)—like espionage, or the "espionage lite" of Section 951, in which

defendants typically engage in “espionage-like or clandestine behavior or an otherwise provable connection to an intelligence service, or information gathering or procurement-type activity on behalf of a foreign government” (emphasis added)

That's more than Ward is willing to say, but it's the case I'm seeing between the lines, buttressed by some facts she doesn't mention and some of my own narratology, which would lay out the story in a more direct chronology, starting with that moment in 2015.

MbN was a particularly good candidate from the international standpoint, because he had particularly god relationships with the Americans as interior minister, as Dexter Filkins/The New Yorker reported:

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he had presided over a vicious fight with Al Qaeda, in which his security forces tortured and killed suspected insurgents. In 2009, the group retaliated by sending a suicide bomber to kill bin Nayef, who suffered damage to one hand and lasting pain from his injuries. Bin Nayef forged close relationships with American officials. “He was the go-to person on counterterrorism,” a senior counterterrorism official in the Obama Administration told me.

While MbS, the king's favorite, was noted above all for unrestrained greed:

As M.B.S. grew into adulthood, he brazenly used his status to enrich himself. In his teens, according to people who know him, he visited a series of wealthy businessmen and asked them to put money into his personal investment fund. In a matter of weeks, he raised thirty million dollars. “He’s the son of Salman,” M.B.S.’s friend told me. “It’s not like anyone was going to say no.” According to a story that circulates in Riyadh, M.B.S. demanded that a Saudi land-registry official help him appropriate a property. After the official refused, he received an envelope with a single bullet inside. The episode earned M.B.S. the street name Abu Rasasa, or “father of the bullet.” 

He was also the principle architect of the new king's signature foreign policy initiative, the ill-conceived and remarkably cruel war against the Houthi militias in Yemen, thought to be  proxies for Iran, a war carried out chiefly by the relentless bombing of civilians and accomplishing pretty much nothing (seven years later, it's still going on, crueler and more indecisive than ever). While MbN was thought to have opposed the war, endearing him still further to the Obama administration, which had grave (and justified) doubts about it.

The story in Riyadh was that MbN was only intended as an acceptable placeholder, while MbS was being,  groomed to be Salman's actual successor, but MbS was impatient:

As the war increased M.B.S.’s influence in Saudi Arabia, he began pushing more aggressively to become crown prince. In the summer of 2015, Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, was dispatched to Nantucket to see Secretary of State Kerry, who was vacationing at his house there. Jubeir wanted to know whether Kerry would support M.B.S. if he pushed bin Nayef aside, according to a former Obama Administration official who was briefed on the meeting. “M.B.S. was trying to play Kerry,” the official told [Filkins]. “He wanted us on his side.” Kerry said that the Administration wasn’t going to take sides. At about the same time, the official told me, bin Nayef was reaching out to John Brennan, who was then the head of the C.I.A., to seek support against M.B.S.

After his failure with the Obama administration, MbS began reaching out to the Trump campaign, which meant through Kushner (coordinating Trump's interactions with foreign leaders was Kushner's portfolio), and just a week before the 2016 election, met with Trump at Trump Tower; and after the election, sent a delegation to meet with Kushner and others. The delegates' report concluded 

that Trump’s “inner circle is predominantly deal makers who lack familiarity with political customs and deep institutions, and they support Jared Kushner [and identified] Mr. Kushner as a crucial focal point in the courtship of the new administration,” according to the New York Times. “He brought to the job scant knowledge about the region, a transactional mind-set and an intense focus on reaching a deal with the Palestinians that met Israel’s demands, the delegation noted.”

By the time Trump was finally ensconced in the White House, Kushner and the prince were in regular, private communications, so frequent and so private as to cause some concern among senior Trump officials:

“The private exchanges could make him susceptible to Saudi manipulation, said three former senior American officials,” according to the Times. “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him,” one former White House official said. Intelligence briefers told Kelly that virtually all of the conversations that U.S. officials had with the Saudis on sensitive policy matter had been between Kushner and MBS, according to the Washington Post. “Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster expressed early concern that Kushner was freelancing U.S. foreign policy. … McMaster was concerned there were no official records kept of what was said on the calls,” the Post reported.

All this time, MbN was becoming concerned—this is some of Ward's new information—

that Kushner and MBS had formed an “alliance” of some sort that involved getting rid of him. MBN reportedly felt he needed to act preemptively and wanted to make sure he retained top U.S. government support in the event he staged a coup d’état to usurp both King Salman, whom he believed was mentally incompetent, and MBS, whom he thought was dangerous....

MBN knew he had the backing of the U.S. intelligence community, who loved him. In [February] 2017, then-CIA director Mike Pompeo had even awarded him a medal for saving American lives. But MBN also believed that Kushner and MBS were working against him. He even told people that he figured there was some sort of financial arrangement between Kushner and MBS that would eventually be revealed, if their plan was to work. 

Meanwhile, in April, the Kushner family, which had bought out Jared's interest in the financially troubled building at 666 Fifth Avenue, was negotiating with the Gulf emirate of Qatar over the possibility of a rescue. Charles Kushner, Jared's father, later told the press he had turned down the Qatari offer out of concern that he might be causing a conflict of interest for his son, but this was apparently a lie; rather the Qataris turned his billion-dollar proposal down because they didn't think it made any business sense. 

In late May, Trump made his first international visit as president to Saudi Arabia, instead of the normal Canada or Mexico or other close traditional ally, happily danced the sword dance with the locals and touched the mysterious orb with King Salman and President Sisi, and attended the summit;

During the trip, Kushner and Bannon meet for a private dinner with top leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who lay out their plan to impose a blockade on Qatar. Secretary Rex Tillerson is neither present for the meeting, nor informed of the meeting. He never learns of the meeting during his time in office (he departed in March 2018).

On 5 June, Saudi Arabia and UAE, with Egypt and Bahrain, suddenly broke off diplomatic relationships with Qatar and decreed a blockade by air, sea, and land of the peninsula, to the surprise of Secretary of State Tillerson and Secretary of Defense Mattis, but Trump seemed not surprised at all, tweeting his support for the thing the very next day. 

During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar – look!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

(He later took it back.) Qataris immediately suspected Jared Kushner of plotting this in some kind of retaliation for their rejection of the Kushner bailout plan for 666 Fifth, reinforced by Trump's tweets. And finally, on 21 June, MbN was sacked as crown prince and MbS installed in his place, where he remains today, after making some gestures towards female emancipation (allowing women to drive cars), briefly imprisoning a large number of family members in the Ritz Carlton Hotel and shaking them down for huge amounts of cash, having the Washington Post columnist Jamal Kashoggi brutally murdered in Istanbul, continuing to mismanage the Yemen war, and finally, in March 2020, having MbN arrested and imprisoned, probably tortured, nobody knows where. 

(And of course somebody connected to Qatar managed to negotiate a bailout for 666 Fifth Avenue, in August 2018, though it took another two and a half years, to 5 January 2021, the day before the Capitol coup attempt in Washington, for the Gulf Cooperation Council to lift the blockade, so I have my doubts that's related.) 

So what exactly did Kushner do to earn his two billion bucks? Ward's sources don't quite come all the way out to tell her, but what they do say is that MbN was ready in May 2017 to launch what you might call a legal coup d'état in Saudi Arabia, with a vote in the Council of Ministers to depose the senile King Salman and his son the deputy prime minister, and support from the US security establishment, with the pro-Trump lobbying firm of Robert Stryk supplying public relations and media support, and the plan suddenly fell apart; and that Kushner's activities were what caused him to lose his security clearance:

it was Kushner and his allies in the White House who got word to MBS of bin Nayef’s plans, and the plot was abruptly stopped. (As I’ve mentioned before, a spokesperson for Kushner has denied passing on intelligence to the Saudis).

But, according to three sources with knowledge, it was this meddling in Saudi royal affairs that caused U.S. intelligence officials to go “apoplectic” and prevent Kushner from getting a top-level security clearance.

And we happen to know from this 2018 report in The Intercept what kind of classified material he was likely to have been using:

UNTIL HE WAS stripped of his top-secret security clearance in February, presidential adviser Jared Kushner was known around the White House as one of the most voracious readers of the President’s Daily Brief, a highly classified rundown of the latest intelligence intended only for the president and his closest advisers.

Kushner, who had been tasked with bringing about a deal between Israel and Palestine, was particularly engaged by information about the Middle East, according to a former White House official and a former U.S. intelligence professional.

I've idly wondered for years how an idiot like Kushner could have managed the tradecraft involved in acquiring secret information about given subjects, and the answer turns out to be obvious: Trump, who didn't (or couldn't) read the things himself, dropped it in his lap. DCI Pompeo, following up on DCI Brennan, another MbN fan, carefully laid out the details of the plan, which MbN had no doubt coordinated with CIA, for the PDB, and Kushner just sent them to his friend, no doubt via WhatsApp.

One of the people MBS told about the discussion with Kushner was UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, according to a source who talks frequently to confidants of the Saudi and Emirati rulers. MBS bragged to the Emirati crown prince and others that Kushner was “in his pocket,” the source told The Intercept.

Along with other services, certainly, like getting Trump to tweet nice things about his pal, like this, after the Ritz-Carlton shakedown in which MbS had Maj. Gen. Ali al Qahtani tortured to death—

During months of captivity, many were subject to coercion and physical abuse, witnesses said. In the early days of the crackdown, at least 17 detainees were hospitalized for physical abuse and one later died in custody with a neck that appeared twisted, a badly swollen body and other signs of abuse, according to a person who saw the body. (The New York Times)

I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2017

....Some of those they are harshly treating have been “milking” their country for years!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2017

Trump and Kushner, Kushner and Trump cheerfully working to undermine the work of their own intelligence community and promote the interests of the "father of the bullet". More important than Russia, because Russia never gave them any money. Jared's a billionaire now, and 666 is free and clear, and KSA and Emirates helped keep the old Pennsylvania Avenue hotel afloat for a pretty long time.