Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [122]
The contract with Levick called for TDI and its stable of former spies and diplomats to receive $25,000 per month, after an initial start-up payment of $40,000. According to the filings of one of the firms involved, team members in Dubai were working on something they code-named “Project Voss.” The work involved building a document sharing system and a Web site that would serve as a public relations vehicle for the firm’s client in Dubai.
The entire effort—lawyers, Web masters, and spies—was designed to fend off a class-action lawsuit against Sheikh Mo in south Florida. The suit was filed on September 7, 2006. In it, a group of parents alleged that their sons had been kidnapped and forced to work in the United Arab Emirates, as jockeys in camel races.
Camel racing has been popular in the bedouin desert regions of Arabia for hundreds of years. The oil produced in the region in the twentieth century provided wealth for this sport, which grew ever more competitive and deployed ever more resources, as sheikhs battled for prize money and glory. The sheikhs realized that small boys—who weigh very little—made the best jockeys for these races. That fact, plus the oil money, quickly created a market for children to work in the growing camel-racing industry. Boys from as young as three up through adolescence worked in the racing circuit.
But there may have been a dark underside: the lawsuit alleged that the boys riding the camels were not paid athletes but slaves:
This Complaint seeks redress against individuals who abducted and trafficked thousands of small boys from South Asia and Africa to the United Arab Emirates and other Arab states and enslaved them to work as camel jockeys, camel trainers and camel tenders in the desolation and heat of the Arabian Peninsula. Boys as young as two years old were stolen from their parents, trafficked to foreign lands, and put under the watch of brutal overseers in camel camps throughout the region.
This had the potential to embarrass Sheikh Mo. It also looked as though it might get expensive, even for a billionaire: the lawsuit didn’t specify an amount of money sought by the plaintiffs, but it asked for compensatory damages, punitive damages, and the cost of the lawsuit itself. And it listed as plaintiffs “Minors John Does 1–10,000, Mother Does 1–10,000, Father Does 1–10,000, along with Mother Roes 1–1,000 and Father Roes, Individually and as Survivors of Deceased Children.”
That meant potentially tens of thousands of impoverished third-world parents suing one of the richest men on the planet and invoking the images of their enslaved, and in some cases dead, sons. Whatever the merits, it would be a tough case to defend. Sheikh Mo’s phalanx of Americans went to work to mitigate the damage.
It’s possible that TDI became involved because executives there saw Sheikh Mo’s troubles as an opportunity for profit—that’s how the competitive intelligence industry works. There is also a possible hint of something more: for the United States, the lawsuit was extraordinarily sensitive. The United Arab Emirates is a crucial ally of the United States against Al Qaeda, and it borders the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic point separating the Persian Gulf from the Gulf of Oman. The twenty-one-mile-wide strait is the sole transit point for as much as 40 percent of the world’s oil, which is transported by tanker to the Indian Ocean and the rest of the world beyond. Across the strait is a hostile nation, Iran. The United States military has used the United Arab Emirates as a launching point for operations in Iraq and the Horn of Africa, where two volatile nations—Ethiopia and Somalia—are situated.
For the American government, and by extension the CIA, Sheikh Mo isn’t just a billionaire