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Souid told me that she’d never heard of Alp or Brero. But by the end of 2017 she had begun to feel that someone was following her: a car appeared repeatedly outside her apartment. And in 2018 a burglar stole some of her jewelry but also her old cell phone, her computer, and some notebooks. A year later, there was a second break-in, by a burglar who took only a laptop and a mobile phone. Souid said, “It is shocking that a foreign country might apply such thuggish methods outside their own borders.”
One night in Como in May, 2021, Nada told me, he looked up from his laptop and saw a trespasser outside his window. His house sits more than half a mile from the road, behind a tall gate, so nobody had strayed there by accident. Nada grabbed his crossbow and the trespasser disappeared into the trees. Had an Alp operative cased his house?
Brero’s campaign sometimes involved secret retaliation. In a 2018 report, a U.N. panel of human-rights experts concluded that the U.A.E. may have committed war crimes in its military intervention in Yemen. The Emiratis commissioned Brero to investigate the panel’s members, especially its chairman, Kamel Jendoubi, a widely admired French Tunisian human-rights advocate. Jendoubi spent seventeen years in exile in France for opposing Tunisia’s former dictatorship, then in 2011 helped oversee Tunisia’s first free elections. “Today, in both Google French and Google English, the reputation of Kamel Jendoubi is excellent,” Brero noted in a November, 2018, pitch to the Emiratis. “On both first pages, there is not a single critical article.” Within six months, Brero promised, Jendoubi’s image could be “reshaped” with “negative elements.” The cost: a hundred and fifty thousand euros.
Rumors spread through Arab news outlets and European Web publications that Jendoubi was a tool of Qatar, a failed businessman, and tied to extremists. A French-language article posted on Medium suggested that he might be “an opportunist disguised as a human-rights hero.” An article in English asked, “Is UN-expert Kamel Jendoubi too close to Qatar?” Alp created or altered Wikipedia entries about Jendoubi, in various languages, by citing claims from unreliable, reactionary, or pro-government news outlets in Egypt and Tunisia.
Jendoubi told me that he’d been perplexed by the flurry of slander that followed the war-crimes report. “Wikipedia is a monster!” he told me. He had managed to clean up the French entry, but the English-language page still stymied him. He said, “You speak English—can you help?”
Nada first contacted me in May, 2021, shortly after he reported the hack to Swiss authorities. He felt torn by conflicting desires—he wanted revenge and compensation, and also to expose Brero and the Emiratis. He was outraged that one of Washington’s closest Arab allies could spy on and defame Muslim citizens and civic associations in Western democracies. Nada texted me, “What are we, second-class citizens that can be abused like this by some lunatic Muppet in the Gulf?” None of the reports to the Emiratis in the hacked Alp files documented financial transfers or other support being provided to any extremist group or Muslim Brotherhood organization.
Nada initially spoke to me on the condition of confidentiality, without telling the hackers. He didn’t yet know if or how he would gain possession of the files, but he wanted to reach out to other targets, who might join him in a legal action. He had reluctantly told the hackers that he would carry a message from them to the richest and most obvious potential buyer for the files: the rulers of Qatar.
After tapping contacts in the petroleum markets and in the Arab news media, Nada reached a series of senior Qatari officials. He was invited to Doha, put up in a luxury hotel, and told to wait. More than a week later, a car shuttled him to a meeting with Qatari intelligence agents, where he shared a PowerPoint presentation on behalf of the hackers: “Over 1.5 millions of files . . . over 1 Terabyte of emails. . . . Complete backups of the executives’ phones. . . . Millions of files and information of inestimable value.”
Nada received no response. Other Qataris met him at hotels in London. Some, noting that the isolation campaign against Qatar had recently ended, insisted that the feud with the U.A.E. was behind them; others claimed to possess far better intelligence already. A member of the Qatari royal family expressed interest, then backed away. When someone claiming to be a Qatari emissary tried to renew contact, early this year, Nada was too exasperated to engage.
He grew increasingly resentful of the hackers, too. They went silent for weeks at a time, or hinted that they were negotiating with other potential customers. A few leaked Alp documents surfaced in the European media, possibly provided by the hackers. “They are trying to use me, absolutely,” Nada told me. “What is their agenda? I don’t know.”
Last summer, another friend from the oil business gave him the number of a former Emirati security official, Abdul Rehman al-Blouki, who was said to be close to M.B.Z. Hoping for a financial settlement in exchange for staying quiet, Nada spoke with Blouki on the phone. Do not threaten the U.A.E., Blouki warned. (Blouki told me he didn’t remember the call, but said that the U.A.E. “is always a fair country, whose rulers only give and don’t take.”)
I sensed that Nada’s drive for vengeance might be fading. He told me that he is still worth about twenty million dollars. Lord Energy’s collapse had freed him to start the electric-car venture he had dreamed of. In November, his new company, Aehra, unveiled its first model, a sleek S.U.V., and MotorTrend praised its “Milanese flair.” Meanwhile, he accepted a research position in plasma physics, beginning next year, at Imperial College London. He and his wife are preparing to divorce, and he is now involved with a woman from Ukraine; he has travelled with her several times to her home town, near the front line of the war. “I am moving on with my life,” Nada told me.
Nevertheless, his improbable glimpse inside Alp’s campaign haunted him. How many other private citizens had been targeted by such firms—and never even known it? Occasionally, the press learned of another instance in which non-Western governments or billionaires had deployed private intelligence agents: last fall, the New York Times reported that both Iran and China had used undercover agents to hire American private intelligence firms to plot against dissidents in New York and New Jersey. A country’s decision to outsource intelligence operations to a Western company may seem perplexing, but the strategy offers various advantages. A country that is courting Western approval, such as Kazakhstan, might want to avoid getting caught at conventional spying. Others, such as the Persian Gulf monarchies, lack effective in-house intelligence agencies. Western firms, meanwhile, often have connections to local media outlets which make them ideal proxies for conducting “dark P.R.” Pierre Gastineau, the editor of Intelligence Online, noted that few private investigators have faced a penalty for working for a foreign plutocrat or government. “There is no cop in the yard,” he told me.
Ronald Deibert, a political scientist at the University of Toronto and the director of its Citizen Lab research center, has argued that the growing use of private intelligence agencies by authoritarian rulers and their cronies is ushering in “a golden age of subversion.” Last year, in an article for the Journal of Democracy, he wrote that, “even a few decades ago, most authoritarian regimes” lacked the capacity to “mount the types of foreign-influence, espionage, and subversion operations that have become common today.” But digital spying does not require people to be on the ground in a foreign country, and the growing number of private firms—often staffed by former Western intelligence agents—makes it easy for governments or oligarchs to order an espionage or misinformation operation à la carte. “Anyone with enough cash can hire a ‘private Mossad,’ ” he wrote. “Subversion is now big business. As it spreads, so too do the authoritarian practices and the culture of impunity that go with it.”
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