White House veterans helped Gulf monarchy develop secret surveillance unit
In the years after Sept. 11, 2001, former US counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke warned the US Congress that the country needed more expansive spying powers to prevent another catastrophe. Five years after leaving government, he shopped the same idea to an enthusiastic partner: an Arab monarchy with deep pockets.
In 2008, Clarke went to work as a consultant guiding the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as it created a cybersurveillance capability that would utilize top US intelligence contractors to help monitor threats against the tiny nation.
The unit Clarke helped create had an ominous acronym: DREAD, short for Development Research Exploitation and Analysis Department. In the years that followed, the UAE unit expanded its hunt far beyond suspected extremists to include a Saudi women’s rights activist, diplomats at the UN and personnel at FIFA, the world soccer body. By 2012, the program would be known among its US operatives by a codename: Project Raven.
Reports this year revealed how a group of former National Security Agency (NSA) operatives and other elite US intelligence veterans helped the UAE spy on a wide range of targets through the previously undisclosed program — from terrorists to human rights activists, journalists and dissidents.
Now, an examination of the origins of DREAD, reported here for the first time, shows how a pair of former senior White House leaders, working with ex-NSA spies and Beltway contractors, played pivotal roles in building a program whose actions are now under scrutiny by federal authorities.
To chart the mission’s evolution, Reuters examined more than 10,000 DREAD program documents and interviewed more than a dozen contractors, intelligence operatives and former government insiders with direct knowledge of the program. The documents span nearly a decade of the DREAD program, starting in 2008, and include internal memos describing its logistics, operational plans and targets.
Clarke was the first in a string of former White House and US defense executives who arrived in the UAE after Sept. 11, 2001, to build the spying unit. Utilizing his close relationship to the country’s rulers, forged through decades of experience as a senior US decisionmaker, Clarke won numerous security consulting contracts in the UAE. One of them was to help build the secret spying unit in an unused airport facility in Abu Dhabi.
In an interview in Washington, Clarke said that after recommending that the UAE create a cybersurveillance agency, his company, Good Harbor Consulting, was hired to help the country build it.
The idea, Clarke said, was to create a unit capable of tracking terrorists. He said the plan was approved by the US State Department and the NSA, and that Good Harbor followed US law.
“The incentive was to help in the fight against al-Qaeda. The UAE is a very good counterterrorism partner. You need to remember the timing back then, post 9-11,” Clarke said. “The NSA wanted it to happen.”
The NSA did not answer written questions about its knowledge of DREAD or its relationship to any of the contractors. The State Department said it carefully vets foreign defense service agreements for human rights issues. UAE spokespeople at its Washington embassy and Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to requests for comment.
Clarke’s work in creating DREAD launched a decade of deepening involvement in the UAE hacking unit by Beltway insiders and US intelligence veterans. The US helped the UAE broaden the mission from a narrow focus on active extremist threats to a vast surveillance operation targeting thousands of people around the world perceived as foes by the Emirati government.
Gloss