The cellphone of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is said to have been hacked in 2018 – after receiving an encrypted WhatsApp message from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The British “Guardian” reports. Accordingly, the message from the number assigned to Bin Salman contained a file with alleged spyware that Bezos’ smartphone was “very likely” to spy on. This emerges from the results of a forensic investigation, the newspaper writes.
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The “Guardian” refers in its article to anonymous sources, which state, among other things, that Bezos and Bin Salman should have maintained a friendly exchange via the messenger before the alleged spyware was sent. A large amount of data was then pulled from Bezos’ smartphone, the newspaper writes.
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After the alleged hack, Jeff Bezos’ private life fell into disrepute. Nine months later, in January 2019, the US tabloid “National Enquirer” published intimate details from Bezos’ private life: among other things, he had an affair, the paper headlined at the time. Bezos launched a private investigation to find out how the “National Enquirer” got hold of the sensitive data. The brother of his new partner was suspected for a long time, but was considered a pawn sacrifice.
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The role of David Pecker
Bezos’ chief of security, Gavin de Becker, wrote in the Daily Beast magazine last March, among other things, about “the close relationship” between the Saudi Crown Prince and the CEO of American Media INC (AMI), David Pecker. The media company also owns the “National Enquirer”. According to the Guardian, both Saudi Arabia and the “National Enquirer” deny that Saudi Arabia has anything to do with the revelations about Bezos’ private life. Saudi Arabia had always denied that it was targeting the Bezos phone.
Pecker came under criticism after holding the affairs of his friend, today’s US President Donald Trump, out of the headlines in the 2016 US election campaign, even though the “National Enquirer” had bought the exclusive rights to the story. In the USA, such behavior by a media company is called “catch and kill”. Bezos claims to have been blackmailed by the magazine with nude photos. Bezos is considered a major opponent of Trump.
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The Guardian’s revelations also shed new light on the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He had spent the last years of his life in the United States and wrote for the Washington Post, bought by Bezos in 2013. Just five months after Bezos’ smartphone was said to have been hacked, Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul in October 2018. The Crown Prince is considered a possible client for the murder.
Khashoggi regularly wrote critically about the Saudi kingdom in his column in the Washington Post. Saudi Arabia shifted to the line of defense that the Khashoggi murder was the result of a “rogue operation”. In December, a Saudi Arabian court sentenced eight people for participating in the murder after a secret trial criticized by human rights experts.
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After Khashoggi’s death, the Washington Post set up a team to investigate the circumstances surrounding his murder. Bezos also appeared publicly with Khashoggi’s wife Hatice Cengiz.
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