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SAUDI
ARABIA PLANNED TO INVADE QATAR LAST SUMMER. REX TILLERSON’S EFFORTS
TO STOP IT MAY HAVE COST HIM HIS JOB.
Alex
Emmons
1 August, 2018
THIRTEEN
HOURS BEFORE Secretary of State Rex Tillerson learned from the
presidential Twitter feed that he was being fired, he did something
that President Donald Trump had been unwilling to do. Following a
phone call with his British counterpart, Tillerson condemned a
deadly nerve agent attack in the U.K., saying that he had “full
confidence in the U.K.’s investigation and its assessment that
Russia was likely responsible.”
White
House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had called
the attack “reckless,
indiscriminate, and irresponsible,” but stopped short of blaming
Russia, leading numerous
media outlets to
speculate that Tillerson was fired for criticizing Russia.
But
in the months that followed his departure, press
reports strongly
suggested that the countries lobbying hardest for Tillerson’s
removal were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which
were frustrated by Tillerson’s attempts to mediate and end their
blockade of Qatar. One report in the New
York Times even
suggested that the UAE ambassador to Washington knew that Tillerson
would be forced out three months before he was fired in March.
The
Intercept has learned of a previously unreported episode that stoked
the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s anger at Tillerson and that may have
played a key role in his removal. In the summer of 2017, several
months before the Gulf allies started pushing for his ouster,
Tillerson intervened to stop a secret Saudi-led, UAE-backed plan to
invade and essentially conquer Qatar, according to one current member
of the U.S. intelligence community and two former State Department
officials, all of whom declined to be named, citing the sensitivity
of the matter.
In
the days and weeks after Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain
cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and closed down their land, sea, and
air borders with the country, Tillerson made a series of phone calls
urging Saudi officials not to take military action against the
country. The flurry of calls in June 2017 has
been reported,
but State Department and press accounts at the time described them as
part of a broad-strokes effort to resolve tensions in the Gulf, not
as an attempt by Tillerson to avert a Saudi-led military operation.
Tillerson made a series of phone calls urging Saudi officials not to take military action against Qatar.
In
the calls, Tillerson, who dealt
extensively with the Qatari government as
the CEO of Exxon Mobil, urged Saudi King Salman, then-Deputy Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir not
to attack Qatar or otherwise escalate hostilities, the sources told
The Intercept. Tillerson also encouraged Defense Secretary Jim Mattis
to call his counterparts in Saudi Arabia to explain the dangers of
such an invasion. Al Udeid Air Base near Doha, Qatar’s capital
city, is the forward headquarters of U.S. Central Command and home to
some 10,000 American troops.
Pressure
from Tillerson caused Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the
country, to back down, concerned that the invasion would damage Saudi
Arabia’s long-term relationship with the U.S. But Tillerson’s
intervention enraged Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu
Dhabi and effective ruler of that country, according to the U.S.
intelligence official and a source close to the Emirati royal family,
who declined to be identified, citing concerns about his safety.
Later
that June, Mohammed bin Salman would be named crown prince,
leapfrogging over his cousin to become next in line for the throne
after his elderly father. His ascension signaled his growing
influence over the kingdom’s affairs.
Qatari
intelligence agents working inside Saudi Arabia discovered the plan
in the early summer of 2017, according to the U.S. intelligence
official. Tillerson acted after the Qatari government notified him
and the U.S. embassy in Doha. Several months later, intelligence
reporting by the U.S. and U.K. confirmed the existence of the plan.
The
plan, which was largely devised by the Saudi and UAE crown princes
and was likely some weeks away from being implemented, involved Saudi
ground troops crossing the land border into Qatar, and, with military
support from the UAE, advancing roughly 70 miles toward Doha.
Circumventing the U.S. air base, Saudi forces would then seize the
capital.
On
June 20, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert told
reportersthat
Tillerson had “more than 20 calls and meetings with Gulf and other
regional and intermediate actors,” including three phone calls and
two meetings with Jubeir. “The more time goes by, the more doubt is
raised about the actions taken by Saudi Arabia and the UAE,” she
said.
A
spokesperson for the State Department told The Intercept last week
that “throughout the dispute, all parties have explicitly committed
to not resort to violence or military action.” Tillerson, reached
through a personal assistant, did not respond to interview requests.
Pentagon
spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Rebecca Rebarich told The Intercept that
although Mattis meets regularly with the secretary of state, the
“details and frequency of those meetings are confidential.”
“The
Department of Defense has made clear that the persistent Gulf rift
puts at risk mutual regional security priorities and has encouraged
all parties seek resolution,” Rebarich said. “It is critical that
the [Gulf Cooperation Council] recovers its cohesion as the proud
Gulf nations return to mutual support through a peaceful resolution
that provides for enhanced regional stability and prosperity.”
Spokespeople
for the Saudi and UAE embassies did not respond to multiple requests
for comment. A spokesperson for the Qatari embassy in D.C. also did
not respond to interview requests from The Intercept. None of the
information in this story was provided by Qatari government officials
or the country’s paid public relations consultants.
THE
INVASION PLAN raises questions about interventionist
tendencies on the part of two of the U.S.’s closest allies and
largest weapons clients. In recent years, both countries have
demonstrated a willingness to use military force to reshape politics
in the Gulf, intervening in Bahrain to suppress an Arab Spring
uprising in 2011 and waging a three-year, U.S.-backed war that has
devastated Yemen.
Robert
Malley, president and CEO of Crisis Group and a former top Middle
East adviser to President Barack Obama, said that since the summer of
2017, Qatari officials have consistently told him that their country
had been threatened with invasion.
“There
is little doubt that senior Qatari officials with whom I spoke were
convinced — or at least acted as if they were convinced — that
Saudi Arabia and the UAE had been planning a military attack on their
country that was halted as a result of U.S. intervention,” Malley
told The Intercept.
Tillerson’s
attempts to de-escalate the conflict in the Gulf diverged from the
signals sent by the White House. Trump offered a full-throated public
endorsement of the blockade, tweeting that
“perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of
terrorism.” As Tillerson called on the Gulf countries to lift their
embargo, Trump told
reporters that
“the nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder
of terrorism at a very high level.”
According
to one news
report,
Tillerson was frustrated with the White House for undercutting him,
and his aides suspected that the line in Trump’s prepared Rose
Garden remarks had been written by UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba, a
powerful D.C. player who maintained “almost constant phone and
email contact” with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, according
to Politico.
“Senior Qatari officials with whom I spoke were convinced — or at least acted as if they were convinced — that Saudi Arabia and the UAE had been planning a military attack on their country.”
At
the time, Kushner was personally handling much of the
administration’s diplomacy with the Gulf states, and the leaders of
Saudi Arabia and the UAE were choosing to go through him instead of
the U.S. defense or intelligence establishments. Kushner communicated
directly with the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE using
the encrypted messaging service WhatsApp.
Some Gulf watchers speculate that the incentive for the planned invasion may have been partly financial. Saudi Arabia’s “cradle to grave” welfare system relies on high oil prices, which plummeted in 2014 and have not fully recovered. Since the current king came to power in 2015, the country has spent more than a third of its $737 billion in reserves, and last year, the Saudi economy entered a painful recession. In response, the government has looked for ways to raise money, including by selling shares in the state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco.
“It’s unsustainable,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and 30-year CIA officer, in a lecture last November. “In the three years since [King Salman] ascended to the throne, one third of Saudi Arabia’s reserves have already been spent. You don’t need to have an MBA from the Wharton school to figure out what that means six years from now.”
If
the Saudis had succeeded in seizing Doha, they would potentially have
been able to gain access to the country’s $320
billion sovereign wealthfund.
In November of last year, months after the plan collapsed, the Saudi
crown prince rounded
up and detained dozens
of his relatives in the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, forcing them to sign
over billions in privately held assets. The government justified the
detentions as a corruption crackdown, but it allowed the state to
recoup billions in assets for government use.
Beginning
in the fall of 2017, the crown princes in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi began
lobbying the White House for Tillerson’s removal, according to the
source close to the Emirati royal family and another source who is
close to the Saudi royal family.
None
of the current or former officials interviewed by The Intercept had
direct insight into why Trump decided to fire Tillerson. But one
source told The Intercept that the timing — a week before the Saudi
crown prince arrived for a much-publicized visit to Washington —
was significant. During that visit, MBS, as the crown prince is
known, was set to discuss
the Qatar crisis and
future arms sales with the administration.
Four
of the sources interviewed by The Intercept also pointed to an
ongoing campaign by the UAE to try to provoke Qatar into escalating
the crisis. Qatar has continued to complain about violations of its
airspace by UAE aircraft, detailing its accusations in a letter
to the U.N.
earlier this year.
The
UAE’s harassment of Qatar also includes crude public insults lodged
by UAE leadership against the Qatari royal family. The jibes
frequently emanate from the verified
Twitter account of
Hamad al Mazrouei, a high-level Emirati intelligence official and
righthand man to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. Mazrouei’s
account frequently tweets sexually
suggestive content directed
at Mozah bint Nasser, the mother of the emir of Qatar. Just last
week, Mazrouei tweeted a
video of a man and woman – with Mazrouei and Sheikha Mozah’s
faces photoshopped onto their bodies – doing a raunchy
bump-and-grind.
The
content and audacity of Mazrouei’s tweets have led to speculation
in Qatari
media that
the account is actually controlled by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi
himself.
