هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
When the conversation turns to the influence of foreign governments inside Washington’s decision-making centers, Israel’s name invariably jumps to the forefront, while the UAE rarely receives the same level of attention. Yet a Wall Street Journal investigation published July 19 under the headline “The Intelligence Officer Who Spied on the UAE and Helped It Win the AI Race” opens eyes to the scale and nature of Emirati influence.
Abu Dhabi’s clout has moved beyond the traditional concept of lobbying, based on public relations firms and direct political money, to a deeper model: investing in officials’ career trajectories.The Wall Street Journal” published on July 19 under the headline “The Intelligence Officer Who Spied on the UAE and Helped It Win the AI Race,” opens eyes to the scale and nature of Emirati influence.
Abu Dhabi’s clout has moved beyond the traditional concept of lobbying, based on public relations firms and direct political money, to a deeper model: investing in officials’ career trajectories.
The core of this strategy — which we examine in this report — is that the UAE does not merely buy loyalty at retirement. It provides the American official with a financial and professional safety net during periods out of office, ensuring itself a domestic intermediary within the U.S. system upon that official’s return to power. In other words, Abu Dhabi is not betting on the retired official, but on the “revolving-door” official who moves between the public and private sectors, taking him in during the in-between period so it can reap the benefits when he returns.
Our report breaks down this strategy across five axes: from defense to intelligence, from linguistic manipulation in the Sudan file to the engineering of intellectual incubators and think tanks, all the way to crossing red lines and the U.S. legislative response.
Mattis, who dubbed the UAE “Little Sparta”
The contours of this strategy become clear in a series of cases accumulated over the years, most notably that of Gen. James Mattis, who in June 2015 submitted a formal request to the Marine Corps and the State Department for permission to work as a private, secret military adviser to Mohammed bin Zayed on the operational, tactical, informational, and ethical aspects of the Yemen war, according to documents revealed by a Washington Post investigation in February 2024.The Washington Post” in February 2024.
What is striking is that Mattis returned to the Pentagon as defense secretary in January 2017 without publicly disclosing his previous advisory work for Abu Dhabi’s ruler, and senior officials and diplomats in the region told the newspaper they had been unaware of it.
Thus, Mattis’ interim period between retiring from the military and returning to government became a bridge that cemented Abu Dhabi’s strategic relationship with the U.S. military establishment. He was the one who dubbed the UAE “Little Sparta” when he was commander of U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, from 2010 to 2013. He said the description reflected his deep admiration for Abu Dhabi and its active regional role, which exceeds its geographic size.
Documents obtained by The Washington Post showed Mattis opposed mentioning this role in his financial disclosures when he took office as defense secretary, in addition to receiving financial compensation for his services, as part of a broader phenomenon of the UAE recruiting retired American military officers.
The same pattern is repeated with Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism coordinator, who chaired the board of governors of the Middle East Institute and founded the consulting firm Good Harbor in Abu Dhabi. According to reports by Reuters and Al Jazeera, Clarke’s work helped build the UAE’s cyber surveillance capabilities.
As for the leaked emails of UAE Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba (published by “The Intercept” in its investigation titled “A Gulf Government Gave a Secret $20 Million Gift to a Think Tank in Washington”), they reveal that Clarke secured about $20 million for the Middle East Institute through compensatory transfers that moved from Tawazun Holding to the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, which is linked to the State Security apparatus in Abu Dhabi, and then to the institute.
As institute President Wendy Chamberlin wrote to an Emirati official named Saif Al Hajeri, “Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba kindly informed our chairman Richard Clarke of the grant from the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies.” According to those documents, the institute became a documented Emirati influence tool. In the same context, the name Richard Murphy also stands out the veteran diplomat and a member of the institute’s board of governors.
But the most telling case is that of intelligence officer Jonathan “Jonny Gannon,” revealed in the Wall Street Journal investigation cited at the beginning of the report. Gannon was a prominent field officer who spent more than 26 years at the CIA and headed multiple intelligence stations abroad before CIA Director William Burns sent him to Abu Dhabi in 2023 under diplomatic cover at the U.S. Embassy to assess G42 and evaluate its chairman, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed — who also serves as the UAE’s national security adviser — because of the company’s ties to China and Huawei, before allowing it access to advanced AI chips.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Gannon’s role gradually evolved from gathering information to serving as a channel of communication: For more than six months, he relayed advice to Tahnoon on what the company needed to do to win Washington’s approval, and even quietly hinted at the problems uncovered by espionage.
Those problems soon began to disappear. G42 gave a presentation saying it had removed $150 million worth of Huawei equipment from its systems, and Gannon flew to Washington to brief senior officials, including Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Brett McGurk, on his conclusions — an unusual role for a station chief. The investigation stated verbatim that he “ended up going from spying on G42 to helping the Emiratis clean up the troubling problems he found.”
After retiring from the agency in the summer of 2025, Gannon shifted from security assessor to promoter and deal facilitator. According to the investigation, he began traveling frequently to the UAE to arrange meetings between American executives and Emirati security officials, helping security companies win consulting contracts, while courting G42 as a potential client.
More than 30 current and former officials in diplomacy, national security, the White House and the intelligence community criticized him, with some saying he had “identified with the other side,” arguing that he “was paving the way for America to give up its edge in the decisive geopolitical competition of this century.”
Gannon now holds the title of “Distinguished Intelligence Fellow” at the Middle East Institute, meaning he has moved from the heart of the world’s most famous intelligence agency to a think tank that presents itself as an Emirati influence tool the fullest embodiment of the cycle of investment in career trajectories in addition to serving as a member and adviser to the U.S.-UAE Business Council.
Brett McGurk and Sudan: Linguistic manipulation as a tool of exoneration
Brett McGurk, the Biden administration’s Middle East adviser, is the clearest example of what might be called exoneration through linguistic manipulation. In December 2024, McGurk sent a letter to Sen. Chris Van Hollen in response to congressional pressure to halt arms deals with the UAE until it stopped arming the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan. The pivotal line in the letter read: “Despite reporting we have received to the contrary thus far, the UAE has informed the administration that it is not currently transferring any weapons to the RSF and will not do so in the future.”
When this wording is unpacked, three precise linguistic maneuvers emerge. First, the phrase “the UAE has informed” attributes the claim to Abu Dhabi itself, not to independent U.S. verification, turning Washington from an investigator into a faithful transmitter of the Emirati narrative. Second, the phrase “is not currently transferring” implicitly acknowledges the past — namely previous transfers — without addressing or holding anyone accountable for them. Third, the phrase “in the future” grants Abu Dhabi a “blank slate” beginning from the moment of the letter.
In this way, what was supposed to be an oversight letter becomes an exculpatory document wrapped in diplomatic language. In the same letter, McGurk promised to provide an assessment of “the credibility and reliability of these assurances” by Jan. 17, 2025 — three days before Biden handed power to Trump. It is worth noting that U.N. experts tasked with monitoring the arms embargo on Darfur had described allegations that the UAE was funneling weapons to the RSF through Chad as “credible.”
More troubling still, McGurk later appeared alongside Tahnoon bin Zayed just a few months after effectively exonerating Abu Dhabi. Brett McGurk moved into the private sector as a partner at the investment firm Lux Capital at the start of 2025 (the firm announced his appointment on Jan. 31, 2025). He also became a senior adviser to Cisco on Middle East affairs, where Cisco’s CEO praised his decisive role in the company’s joining the “Stargate UAE” project with G42.
According to the San Francisco Standard, in February 2025 McGurk took Lux Capital partner Josh Wolfe to Saudi Arabia and the UAE to strike multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence deals with regional leaders. A Wall Street Journal investigation — on July 19 of this year (regarding intelligence officer Jonny Gannon) — also pointed to McGurk’s appearance with Tahnoon in the context of a Lux Capital delegation. In other words, the official who exonerated Abu Dhabi over its support for RSF massacres became a business partner profiting from the very relationship he had cultivated from his official post.
The UAE’s deep diplomacy
Data from the Quincy Institute, in its report “Big Ideas and Big Money: Think Tank Funding in America,” shows that the UAE is the single largest foreign government funder of American think tanks, having poured in $16.7 million during the 2019-2023 period. It was followed by Britain ($15.5 million) and Qatar ($9.1 million). The biggest beneficiaries were the Atlantic Council ($20.8 million from all foreign funders combined), Brookings ($17.1 million), and the German Marshall Fund ($16.1 million).
According to the same tracking, the UAE provided about $3.1 million in 2024 alone. Other prominent beneficiaries included the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Middle East Institute.
In an incident documented through Yousef Al Otaiba’s leaked emails and The Intercept, Abu Dhabi paid $250,000 to the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). The outlet revealed an invoice dated July 12, 2016, sent to the Emirati Embassy in exchange for a research paper on the legal regime governing the export of military drones (within the framework of the Missile Technology Control Regime, or MTCR). The invoice was signed by Michèle Flournoy, the center’s co-founder and CEO.
In addition to think tanks, the UAE operates through joint business councils (the U.S.-UAE Business Council) and private consulting firms (Good Harbor, the Cohen Group, Lux Capital).
We can see that Abu Dhabi’s strategy has been to capture U.S. officials during transition periods between Republican and Democratic administrations in order to preserve their partisan and political readiness. Mattis is a Republican, McGurk served under four successive administrations, and Clark’s career spanned both parties. This diversification in investing in the careers of U.S. officials ensures that Abu Dhabi has intermediaries in any future administration, regardless of its political color.
Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba is the mastermind behind this network. The leaked emails previously referenced revealed his role in directing funding to the Middle East Institute and the Center for a New American Security, coordinating against Iran, and spending about $2.7 million to polish the image of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.
In a notable development, The Washington Post revealed in November 2022 that a secret report prepared by the National Intelligence Council accused the UAE of carrying out systematic operations involving donations, political pressure, and espionage to penetrate the U.S. political system and shape its foreign policy.
The report explained how the UAE exploited legal loopholes, such as reliance on campaign contributions and weak enforcement of disclosure laws across multiple administrations, and employed former U.S. officials to serve its regional interests. Al Otaiba responded publicly that he was “proud of the UAE’s influence and strong standing in the United States … a standing earned through effort and merit.”
Cybersecurity
Two prominent cases provide forensic and historical evidence of the depth of the penetration and the boldness of the tools used. The first is “Project Raven,” which Reuters exposed in January 2019. The Emirati company DarkMatter hired former National Security Agency operatives to spy on activists, journalists, political opponents, and even Americans using the “Karma” exploit, which could hack iPhones without a single click from the victim.
In September 2021, three of them — Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke — signed a deferred prosecution agreement under which they paid fines of $750,000, $600,000, and $335,000, respectively, for a total of $1.685 million, along with a permanent ban on arms export licenses and the surrender of their security clearances, without any prison sentence.
The second case, meanwhile, is The Tom Barrack case, involving the chairman of Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, who was accused of acting as an unregistered agent for the UAE — serving as its eyes, ears and voice inside the U.S. administration. But a Brooklyn jury acquitted him of all charges on Nov. 4, 2022, after three days of deliberations.
The pivotal point here is that both cases ended without any meaningful deterrent punishment: the first with financial fines that were symbolic relative to the scale of the violation, and the second with a full acquittal. That has only emboldened Abu Dhabi and encouraged it to exploit loopholes, since the legal cost of penetration remains low while the strategic return is high.
The American response
The revelation by The Wall Street Journal in early 2026 that Aryam Investment, linked to Tahnoon bin Zayed — whom the newspaper described as the “spy sheikh” — had purchased a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company tied to the Trump family, for $500 million just days before the inauguration, while paying $187 million upfront to Trump family entities, triggered a firestorm of anger in Congress.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren introduced resolution S.Res.598 in February 2026, together with Sens. Chris Van Hollen, Andy Kim and Elissa Slotkin, condemning and calling for the reversal of the decision to export chips to the UAE. She described the deal as “corruption, plain and simple,” adding that Steve Witkoff, David Sacks and Howard Lutnick should testify before Congress.
Yet on July 10, 2026, the U.S. Commerce Department moved the UAE into export group A:5, allowing advanced Nvidia chips to flow without individual licenses, with a large share allocated to G42 and the Stargate UAE project.
As for the direct repercussions of Gannon’s investigation, they appear limited so far. Neither the CIA nor the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has issued a specific public statement in response to the investigation, even though its publication came amid a broader oversight storm over the chip deal and the conflict of interest tied to the Trump family’s cryptocurrency.
An analysis of the available countermeasures reveals a structural shortcoming. The Closing the Revolving Door Act, introduced last year by Sen. Michael Bennet and Rep. Joe Neguse, would impose a lifetime ban on former members of Congress becoming lobbyists, a six-year ban on senior staff, and create a public database of lobbyists.
But its chances of passage are slim. More importantly, it is designed for the legislative revolving door and does not directly address the loophole embodied by the Gannon case: the movement of an intelligence officer into a commercial entity linked to a foreign state.
This was compounded by a decline in enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). In a memo issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi on Feb. 5, 2025, criminal prosecutions under the law were limited to “conduct similar to traditional espionage by foreign government actors.” She also dissolved the Foreign Influence Task Force and shifted the focus toward civil enforcement.
That came after a series of judicial setbacks, most notably the ruling in Steve Wynn’s case in 2024, which rejected efforts to compel him to register as a foreign agent. In practice, this retreat expands the gray zone in which Abu Dhabi and its intermediaries operate.
How did the capital of American decision-making become so vulnerable to penetration?
The answer is that the UAE did not so much break the law as invest in its loopholes. It cultivated officials during periods of transition and downtime between administrations, whether from Republican to Democratic rule or the reverse. It also funded the think tanks that shape policy discourse and spread its influence across both parties, becoming a structural partner in the influence ecosystem rather than an outsider to it.
This strategy has had a direct impact on the conflicts in which the UAE intervenes through proxies. In Sudan, it backs the Rapid Support Forces militia. In Libya, it supports retired Gen. Khalifa Haftar and uses his bases as an air bridge to funnel weapons to the RSF, according to U.N. expert reports. In Somalia, it built a military base in a separatist region and trained security units as part of its expansion in the Horn of Africa, while DP World operates the Port of Berbera under a 30-year concession. In Yemen, it backed the Southern Transitional Council against the internationally recognized government.
At the end of the Biden era, the UAE escaped scrutiny through the aforementioned McGurk letter, while congressional efforts to restrict arms deals failed. Sen. Chris Van Hollen and Rep. Sara Jacobs introduced joint resolutions of disapproval in November 2024 to halt the sale of $1.2 billion worth of munitions, including GMLRS and ATACMS, but they failed to secure passage of the ban.
There is also suspicion that, in Biden’s final days, the UAE succeeded in pushing the accusation that the Sudanese army used chemical weapons in the war, tarnishing its image and counterbalancing the genocide determination against its proxy, the RSF, thereby placing the two sides on equal footing.
The Trump administration formally adopted this line. In April 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio determined under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act that Sudan’s government had used chemical weapons in 2024. The sanctions were then notified to Congress on May 22, 2025, and took effect in June 2025. In July 2026, U.S. adviser Massad Boulos and the U.S. delegation to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, headed by Ambassador Nicole Shampaine, equated the “genocide of the RSF militia” with the “Sudanese army’s use of chemical weapons.”
That parallel drew criticism from prominent analysts, most notably Lauren Ploch Blanchard, a specialist in African affairs at the Congressional Research Service. The substance of her objection, backed by independent evidence, is that the number of civilians killed by the RSF runs into the tens of thousands, while it remains unclear to this day whether anyone was actually killed in the alleged chemical attacks during this war. She noted that a France 24 investigation appeared to support the accusation, but documented injuries rather than confirmed deaths.
By contrast, according to Blanchard, the U.N. fact-finding mission established that the RSF massacres in El Fasher bore the “hallmarks of genocide,” with thousands killed. The United Nations documented the deaths of about 6,000 people in the first days alone, in addition to 10,000 to 15,000 killed in El Geneina and more than 1,000 in the Zamzam camp for displaced people. The analyst concluded that both sides are credibly implicated in war crimes, but that equating alleged chemical use, with no proven fatalities, to documented genocide is misleading, in her words.
The narrative embraced by Trump adviser Massad Boulos objectively serves Abu Dhabi’s preferred framing, which seeks to cast the Sudanese army and the RSF as two equal parties to the conflict. Abu Dhabi knows full well that the militia it supports cannot be exonerated, nor can its horrific crimes even be downplayed. It is worth noting that many observers and Sudanese local sources have identified a convergence, to the point of near identity, between the rhetoric of Massad Boulos and that of Abu Dhabi on Sudan.
Finally, despite all the investigations, reports and leaks, Abu Dhabi has so far succeeded in protecting its core interests in Washington at virtually no cost. It won on the artificial intelligence file, secured Nvidia chips, and was elevated to the highest export category. Its proxies also escaped meaningful accountability, at least for now. This means the UAE’s investment in career trajectories has proved more effective than traditional lobbying: It carries lower legal costs, penetrates more deeply, and is harder to prove in court.
What The Wall Street Journal investigation reveals is not the story of a single officer who “identified with the other side,” as analysts in the intelligence community described him, but rather a structural flaw in the American system of governance: a revolving-door system that allows national expertise and official relationships to be turned into a commodity later sold to whoever can afford it, amid legislative and regulatory retreat that opens the way for wealthy allied states to turn influence into a permanent structure.
Unless this loophole, embodied in the Gannon case and the movement of intelligence officers into commercial entities linked to foreign states, is closed, Abu Dhabi’s strategy will remain a model that others can replicate, and Washington will remain an environment open to internal penetration through tools that appear legitimate on the surface.
