During Trumpʼs first term, US policy in the Middle East was run by two sheikhs, a mercenary king and a pedophile, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner profited from it. We retell the book by investigator Matthew Cole

1. Mercenary King, Business Partner, and Pedophile

In the 2016 US presidential election, the Emiratis supported both candidates.

They initially believed that Democrat Hillary Clinton would win and channeled $3.5 million through American intermediaries to support her campaign. Foreign governments are prohibited from funding US elections, so the money was given out as donations from American donors.

According to the US Department of Justice, the political committees that received these contributions were unaware of their true origin.

When Republican Trump began to gain popularity, the Emiratis decided to play it safe and, together with the Saudis, offered to finance a network of fake accounts that were supposed to promote Trump and criticize Clinton.

The Emiratis maintained contact with Trump’s entourage through several people. Among them were the former head of the world’s largest private military company “Blackwater” Erik Prince, Trump’s longtime business partner Tom Barrack (both were close friends with Jeffrey Epstein), and political consultant George Nader.

Prince donated $250 000 to Trump’s campaign because he saw an opportunity to make money from his promises. Trump promised to withdraw American troops from the Middle East, and Prince expected that after their departure, the demand for mercenaries in the region would increase. For him, the head of a private military company, this meant the opportunity to get new contracts.

After Trump’s victory, Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos headed the Department of Education. Barrack also wanted to make money — to attract more money from the Emirates to his investment company. The UAE offered him business deals, but in return they expected him to use his friendship with Trump to influence his decisions in favor of the Emirates.

George Nader (a Lebanese Christian) lived in the United States for decades, where he became a journalist and Middle East expert. He negotiated with terrorist groups and Israeli officials and had a reputation as a man through whom governments could negotiate without revealing their contacts and secrets.

In addition, Nader is a pedophile. In 1984-1990, American law enforcement officers caught him three times for possessing and importing pornography featuring underage boys. When it came to trial in 1990, the Administration of President George H.W. Bush defended Nader. Nader had helped free American hostages held by the Lebanese group Hezbollah, so the White House asked the court to be lenient. In 1991, Nader received probation and a fine of $2 000.

His role as a negotiator and sexual crimes did not end there. In the late 1990s, Nader participated in negotiations with Syria about the Golan Heights, a Syrian territory occupied by Israel.

At the same time, he began traveling to the Czech Republic, where he sought out underage boys who were engaged in prostitution. He brought one of the Czech teenagers to the United States and raped him for several weeks.

In 2003-2004, Nader served a year in a Czech prison — the court found him guilty of ten counts of sexual abuse of minors. In 2007, Nader traveled to the Jordanian capital, Amman, on cases related to Iraq and “Blackwater”, and stayed at an elite hotel.

According to Cole, security guards heard screams from his room and found Nader raping the underage boy. This time, he was helped by “Blackwater” chief Eric Prince — after his intervention, Nader was released.

2. Meeting with Kushner

In December 2016, a month before Donald Trump was first sworn in as president, Jared Kushner arrived at the most expensive hotel room in the United States — the presidential suite at the “Four Seasons” Hotel in Manhattan.

There, waiting for him was Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan (MBZ), then the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto leader of the United Arab Emirates. Tom Barrack had already planted the idea in Kushner’s mind that MBZ and his Saudi “protege” — crown prince and defense minister Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) — would be Trump’s trusted partners.

At a secret meeting, Kushner reported that his father-in-law would make the Middle East a foreign policy priority, and that Kushner himself would try to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Kushnerʼs family was Orthodox Jewish and had close ties to Israel. His father Charles had donated generously to Israeli organizations, including those supporting Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was a longtime family friend. Once, while visiting the Kushners, he even slept in Jaredʼs bed, while Jared went to sleep in the basement. Kushner intended to pursue a pro-Israeli policy and wanted the support of the Gulf monarchies to force the Palestinians to make a deal with Israel.

Trump, Kushner and Netanyahu in Jerusalem during Trumpʼs first foreign trip as president, May 22, 2017. He arrived in Israel after Saudi Arabia.

Getty Images / «Babel'»

Trump with Western Wall rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz at the Wall, May 22, 2017. Jared Kushner stands far left.

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In return, the Emiratis and Saudis wanted the US to pursue a tough policy towards Iran. MBZ was a sharp critic of Barack Obamaʼs Middle East strategy. In his opinion, Obama betrayed US allies by supporting the 2011 Arab Spring — a wave of protests against the regionʼs authoritarian rulers. He was also outraged by the nuclear deal with Iran — the Emiratesʼ main enemy. Tehran limited its nuclear program, and international sanctions against it were eased.

The Emirati leader called Qatar his second main enemy. He accused Qatar of supporting the Islamist movement "Muslim Brotherhood" and inciting hatred in the region through the state-owned television company Al Jazeera.

At the same time, the UAE prince wanted to establish official diplomatic relations with Israel, with which he had long maintained secret contacts — in his opinion, the Emirates and Israel could create an alliance against Iran.

Back in 2015, he suggested to the Americans that the UAE and Saudi Arabia recognize Israel and establish relations with it. However, the nuclear deal with Iran finally undermined the Arab princesʼ trust in Obama. They decided to negotiate an agreement that was supposed to change the Middle East with the next American president, using their greatest resource — money.

3. Meeting in the Seychelles

9 days before Trump’s inauguration, on January 11, 2017, the UAE prince convened a military council at a private villa at the “Four Seasons” resort in the Seychelles.

The council was joined by Eric Prince, who had already worked for the Emirates — 7 years earlier, he had assembled dozens of former Colombian and white South African military units that helped the UAE fight Somali pirates.

Prince was later expelled from the Emirates. Cole writes that his secret military projects became public, and he himself had embezzled Emirati government money. By 2017, these claims had been forgotten — Prince had become a useful connection to the Trump family.

MBZ and Prince looked at maps of Libya, Somalia, and Yemen — countries where the UAE had been waging military campaigns. Prince proposed a new business project — to form a brigade of ground troops and a small air force from mercenaries.

They would be financed by the Emirates and supported by the American government. This would give the ruler of the UAE his own mercenary forces and air force, which he could send to the Middle East, Africa, or South Asia — wherever he saw fit to fight.

The Emirati leader also wanted to help the new American administration improve relations with Russia. One reason was the war in Syria — the UAE and the US supported the rebels fighting against Bashar Assad, while Russia and Iran helped him stay in power.

The Emiratis sought to end the war on terms that were favorable to them and wanted Moscow to end its military support for Assad and reduce aid to Iran. MBZ hoped that if it could show Trump the benefits of cooperation with Russia, it might convince him to lift sanctions on it.

Therefore, through the mediation of George Nader, MBZ invited the head of the Russian sovereign wealth fund Kirill Dmitriev to the Seychelles. The Emirates had already invested several billion dollars in this fund.

Prince met with Dmitriev and told him about his plan to create mercenary troops. The first country he wanted to send them to was Libya. There, with the support of the UAE and Russia, Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar was fighting against the countryʼs internationally recognized government.

Later, mercenaries from the PMC “Wagner” joined Haftar in supporting him, whose salaries the UAE agreed to pay. Prince hinted to Dmitriev that he could coordinate the actions of his fighters with the Kremlin in advance so that they and Russian forces would not fire on each other.

However, the meeting did not yield any results. Dmitriev was disappointed, because he was counting on an interlocutor with more influence in the future Trump administration.

Khalifa Haftarʼs military in 2015. Since the start of the Libyan civil war in 2011, Haftar has controlled the east of the country, including the largest city, Benghazi. The west, including the capital, Tripoli, is controlled by the internationally recognized Government of National Accord.

Getty Images / «Babel'»

Khalifa Haftar in Moscow in 2018. To his right is the Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Behind him stands the head of the PMC "Wagner" Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Скриншот / You Tube / مكتب الاعلام - القيادة العامة للقوات المسلحة الليبية

In the 1970s, Haftar became the Chief of the General Staff of Libya. However, in 1987, during the war with Chad, he was captured, and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi disowned his general. Haftar briefly became an agent for the CIA, which saw him as a possible replacement for Gaddafi, and returned to his homeland after the 2011 revolution.

Getty Images / «Babel'»

4. Blockade of Qatar

On January 20, 2017, Trump became president, and Kushner quickly eclipsed all other senior officials in foreign policy.

Although, he needed a lot of money — for both business and diplomatic initiatives. As a senior adviser to the president, he did not have his own office with a budget and a staff of diplomats who could implement his plans.

Cole writes that the princes of the UAE and Saudi Arabia offered to give Kushner a bank account from which he could finance the projects of the Trump administration. Among the ideas was even to pay for the construction of the wall on the border with Mexico, which Trump had promised to voters. Arab leaders agreed to deposit $ 10-12 billion into the account.

On May 20, 2017, Trump arrived on his first foreign visit to Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. The visit was prepared by Kushner and George Nader, and the most important conversation took place in the evening, without cameras.

At a closed meeting, MBZ and MBS convinced Kushner and the Trump team that it was time to force Qatar to change its policy. They accused it of cooperating with Iran and supporting Islamist organizations, including the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestinian Hamas.

The princes presented a step-by-step plan for how to put pressure on the Qatari government. They wanted to force it to stop supporting organizations they considered extremist, reduce ties with Iran, and close Al Jazeera.

The plan was for the blockade to be gradually tightened, and eventually Saudi Arabia would invade and overthrow the government in Qatar. Kushner did not object, even though Qatar was a US ally — the country has hosted the forward headquarters of the US Central Command since 2002, and Al-Udeid Air Base is the largest US military base in the region.

According to Cole, the Saudi foreign minister later said that Kushner had said: “We will turn a blind eye.”

On June 5, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, and Yemen severed ties with Qatar. They cut off trade, expelled Qatari citizens, and banned Qatari aircraft from their airspace. Saudi Arabia also closed Qatar’s only land border, cutting it off from supplies that way. The move caught then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis off guard.

They were unaware that Kushner had already convinced Trump to support Saudi Arabia and the Emirates in their standoff with Qatar. As the Saudis began massing troops on the Qatari border, Tillerson and British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson called the Saudi prince and persuaded him to abandon the idea of an invasion.

5. "Black Box"

The blockade of Qatar dragged on, but the idea of "black money" developed.

Arab princes described to Kushner the future Middle East. Israel would be recognized first by the monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, and then by other Arab states, the Palestinians would agree to a peace agreement with Israel, Islamist extremism would be overcome, and Iran would become less aggressive.

However, according to the princes, for this to happen, the Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, would first have to be removed from power.

In the summer of 2017, instead of a large fund for Trump’s foreign policy projects, the princes decided to create a smaller fund under Kushner’s personal control, which would attract less attention.

Cole claims that by the end of the summer, both Arab leaders had already transferred the money to him. Kushner had unrestricted access to his father-in-law, an opportunity that other officials did not have.

After each official meeting about the blockade of Qatar, Trump spoke with his son-in-law alone, and later presented new arguments why the United States should support the leaders of the UAE and Saudi Arabia.

However, Kushner never convinced his father-in-law to fully support the blockade or at least not to interfere with it, so the confrontation with Qatar reached a dead end.

6. Opening in the Netherlands

At the end of 2017, the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) made an important discovery.

Its employees learned that a hacker for the Russian military intelligence GRU, who specialized in stealing bank data, was traveling to the UK. The Dutch asked the British to allow him to be detained, and they agreed.

The Russian was offered a choice — to work for Dutch intelligence against the GRU or to go to a British prison. He chose the first option and gave the Dutch access to the GRU server in Rostov-on-Don. Among the files on it were screenshots of Jared Kushner’s iPhone. The Dutch decided not to rush to inform American allies that the Russians had hacked the president’s son-in-law’s phone.

The MIVD specialists decided to gain access to Kushnerʼs phone themselves. They found a vulnerability that allowed them to see his screen. The spies were looking for Kushnerʼs connections to the Russians, but instead they noticed that he often accessed a bank account in the UAE, which had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan.

In total, the Emirates and Saudis transferred at least $2 billion to Kushner’s accounts through accounts in two banks. The first account — “Alpha” — was opened at the UAE’s largest bank “First Abu Dhabi Bank”.

Starting in 2017, approximately $750 million, laundered in Azerbaijan, was transferred to “Alpha”. This money was supposed to finance the foreign policy projects of Kushner and MBZ, who jointly managed the account. Both believed that a major peace deal that would end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict required a change in relations between countries throughout the Middle East.

By July 2018, Dutch intelligence officers could already see transfers from “Alpha”. Within a few months, $60 million had been transferred from this account to Erik Prins’ account.

The second account — “Beta” — was in Israel. By the spring of 2018, MBZ had transferred about $1 billion to it via Azerbaijan. According to Cole’s source, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu advised Kushner to place this money in the Central Bank of Israel so that it would look like a government account.

How exactly Kushner disposed of the funds is unknown, but the same source claims that Kushner spent the money on himself.

At the same time, Kushner helped negotiate a third, separate account to pay for possible Israeli military aid to the Emirates. Israel pledged to defend the UAE if Iran attacked it, and the Emirates would cover the cost of the aid. To do this, the Emirati government transferred money to the central bank of Israel, creating a defense reserve there for a rainy day.

7. The End of George Nader

On January 17, 2018, George Nader flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

The US president was hosting a party to celebrate his first anniversary in office, and Nader was expected to be among the guests. His presence was no coincidence — in the first 8 months of Trump’s presidency, Nader had visited the White House 13 times.

However, FBI agents from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US election were already waiting for Nader at Dulles Airport near Washington. They stopped him and questioned him.

The Washington Post had previously reported that Nader had arranged for Prince and Dmitriev to meet in the Seychelles, but he had not expected to be arrested specifically in connection with the election interference case. Over the next two months, Nader volunteered to testify about the election and the transition period between Trump’s victory and inauguration.

Meanwhile, videos of sexual abuse of boys between the ages of two and 14 were found on Nader’s seized phones. Some of the recordings showed them being forced to perform bestiality. Mueller was investigating only Russian interference in the election, and his team turned over evidence of other, unrelated crimes to other prosecutors.

Nader initially decided not to travel to the United States again. However, when the Mueller report was released in 2019 and he was not charged in the Russian meddling case, he decided that the danger had passed.

In June, Nader flew from Dubai to New York, where he was detained by the FBI — this time in a child sexual abuse case. He was later accused of bringing a minor boy from the Czech Republic to the United States almost two decades ago and raping him.

In June 2020, Nader was sentenced to ten years in prison, but the sentence was later reduced to five years because Nader helped Mueller with the investigation. In February 2025, he was released and immediately flew to the UAE, where he remains today.

8. Eric Prince in Ukraine and Belarus

In March 2020, Erik Prince returned to Libya. The UAE wanted him to create a PMC like “Blackwater”, capable of competing with Russia’s “Wagner”. Meanwhile, Kushner was pressuring Trump to withdraw American troops from Africa.

A month earlier, Prince had arrived in Ukraine on a UAE diplomatic passport and met with aides to President Volodymyr Zelensky. On behalf of the Emirates, he proposed investing in the Ukrainian defense industry. Prince wanted to hire veterans of the ATO and JFO for his military operations, acquire stocks of Soviet weapons, the aircraft engine manufacturer Motor Sich, and a rocket engine manufacturing enterprise.

Ukrainian companies were to develop and supply heavy weapons and aircraft for foreign operations with the participation of his mercenaries. Prince suggested to Ukrainian intelligence that he conclude a deal with the private military company Lancaster 6, registered in the Emirates. He also enlisted the support of pro-Russian MP Andriy Derkach, a graduate of the KGB Academy in Moscow. According to a senior Ukrainian national security official, the plan was rejected due to Princeʼs ties to Derkach and the UAE government.

In April 2020, the Turkish-backed government forces in Tripoli launched a counteroffensive and pushed Haftar’s forces out of the capital. The Emirati attempt to bring him to power across Libya failed, but Prince was looking for new opportunities for his military business. In the summer, he traveled to Belarus, where he wanted to buy Soviet fighter jets and 50 million rounds of ammunition. In a letter to Alexander Lukashenko, Prince asked to be allowed to create a joint venture with the Belarusian military to supply weapons to different regions of the world. While Belarusians were protesting against the rigged elections, he wrote to the dictator that there were many forms of government in the world, and his leadership had brought prosperity to the country. Lukashenko did not respond to the letter.

9. Peace plan

On January 28, 2020, Trump presented a plan at the White House to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that his son-in-law had been preparing for three years. Netanyahu stood next to him, and there were no representatives of the Palestinian Authority in the room. In 2017, the United States recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The Palestinian Authority condemned the decision, and the following year the White House cut hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the UN agency that takes care of Palestinian refugees. Then it closed the only Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington. Kushnerʼs plan gave Netanyahu everything he could have hoped for: the United States was to recognize Israeli occupation settlements in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley as part of Israel. In return, the Palestinians were offered a state of disparate territories connected by roads and tunnels, with Israel retaining control over security. The plan also called for the United States to attract $50 billion in investment in the Palestinian territories and neighboring countries. Thanks to this, Washington could present the Palestiniansʼ refusal as a rejection of a wonderful economic opportunity, and the Gulf monarchies would have an excuse to improve relations with Israel without Palestine.

The Palestinians rejected the plan, and on August 13, 2020, Trump announced in the Oval Office that the UAE and Israel had established diplomatic relations. At that time, among the Arab states, only Egypt and Jordan maintained such relations with Israel. That same year, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan normalized relations with Israel. A resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was not among the conditions: Arab states could get closer to Israel against Iran without waiting for it to end. According to Cole, Kushnerʼs peace proposal was not intended to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but to allow it to be ignored.

10. Murder of a Poet

For the sake of relations with Israel, an Emirati prince killed one of the countryʼs leading artists. Habib al-Sayyeg was a poet, journalist, secretary general of the International Union of Arab Writers, and one of the editors-in-chief of the Emirati newspaper Al Khaleej. He was not a dissident — he often visited the court of the MBZ and actively criticized Qatar.

At the same time, al-Sayeg openly criticized Israel and opposed normalizing relations with it, although the Emirati authorities warned him to stop this rhetoric. In a column dated August 11, 2019, al-Sayeg described Israel as a violent entity that was forcibly imposed on the Arab world. A few days later, security agents kidnapped the poet from his home at night, tortured him for several days, and then killed him.

On August 20, MBZ tweeted about the loss of the prominent figure of literature and culture, and the funeral prayer was read over the body by the cousin of the crown prince. A few days after the funeral, special forces dug up the poetʼs body and buried it in an unknown location. A few years later, a former Emirati intelligence officer was asked what he knew about the money that the UAE government had transferred to Kushner. He refused to talk because he did not want to be "habibed."

11. Between Trumpʼs terms

On November 7, 2020, Trump lost the election to Joe Biden. Kushner and MBS’s plans to reshape the Middle East failed. In the final weeks of the administration, Kushner’s father-in-law negotiated to lift the blockade on Qatar, which Saudi Arabia lifted on January 5, 2021. However, the Saudis refused to recognize Israel — Prince bin Salman could not do so while his father, a representative of the older generation that could not recognize Israel and disregarded the idea of a Palestinian state, remained on the throne.

A day or two after Joe Bidenʼs inauguration, the UAE cut off Kushnerʼs access to the Alpha account. It is not known whether Israel retained his access to Beta. Kushner later founded the investment fund Affinity Partners and raised $2 billion from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund and another $2 billion from the sovereign funds of the UAE and Qatar.

A few days after Biden’s inauguration, Emirati special forces detained Eric Prince. They wanted to know where he had put the money from the “black box”. For more than two weeks, in a remote villa in Abu Dhabi, he was forced to explain transactions worth millions of dollars. Prince assured that they were authorized by Kushner, and Kushner confirmed his words. Prince was then released from the country, but the Emirati government emptied several of his bank accounts.