House,” including to Vice President Pence.296 Because the plan calls for secretary of state Mike Pompeo to oversee the operations of the two units on Trump’s behalf, the fact that “Pompeo has embraced the plan and lobbied the White House to approve the contract” suggests that Trump has been apprised of the plan as well—as he is the only person above Pompeo in the proposed units’ chain of command, and therefore the only official Pompeo would need to successfully lobby to get the plan approved.297
In seeking the plan’s approval, Prince and North are assisted by John R. Maguire, a Trump transition official now working for intelligence contractor Amyntor Group.298 Maguire is also a consultant for Prince’s Frontier Services Group, though he is most well-known in intelligence circles for having “helped plan the 2003 invasion of Iraq.”299 More recently, Maguire has been propagating the conspiracy theory, in intelligence circles, that “National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, in coordination with a top official at the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of Steven [sic] Bannon and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.”300 Maguire has also, according to The Intercept, been spreading the false and anti-Semitic rumor that McMaster is “us[ing] a burner phone to send information gathered through the surveillance [of the Trumps and Bannon] to a facility in Cyprus owned by George Soros.”301 Perhaps most troubling, Maguire is also known for taking potential donors to the Prince-North plan to the “Tinfoil Room”—a suite at the Trump Hotel in Washington set up to send and receive “secure communications.” In the Tinfoil Room, The Intercept reports, Maguire tries to convince donors that a cabal of “deep state” plotters is planning a coup of the Trump administration, a treasonous attack that Maguire tells prospective donors throughout 2017 will be executed by the end of 2018.302
According to Maguire, his job—and Prince’s and North’s—is to “protect[] the president” by various means, including sending clandestine “intelligence reports” to Mike Pompeo.303 Both Prince and Maguire, writes The Intercept, have also been involved in the planning of unauthorized “snatch operation[s]”—in which private citizens illegally kidnap a foreign national suspected of crimes for extraordinary rendition to the United States. Some of those Prince and Maguire recruit for such operations have previously been involved in a “post-9/11 era CIA assassination program targeting Al Qaeda operatives.”304 According to an associate of Prince’s, the men Prince and Maguire are dealing with are “very dark individuals” who are already operating in “Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, [and] all across North Africa.”305 It is unclear if this is the same outfit capable of conducting “kinetics” that Prince and Nader discuss with Saudi intelligence chief (and suspect in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi) Ahmed al-Assiri when the men meet with him in 2017.
Prince has denied all of the preceding allegations—which, according to a “longtime Prince associate” spoken to by The Intercept, is “his exact modus operandi,” as he “consistently attempts to ensure plausible deniability of his role in U.S. and foreign government contracts.”306 The associate says that Prince has an international network of “deniable assets” (that is, covert operators) that “has never gone away.” “The NOC [“no official cover” operator] network is already there,” the associate tells the digital media outlet. “It already exists [and has] for the better part of 15 years now.”307
The Intercept notes that Prince “revealed part of his strategy in a July 2016 radio interview with Steve Bannon, when he proposed recreating the CIA’s Phoenix Program, an assassination ring used in the Vietnam War, to battle the Islamic State.”308 The proposed assassinations would go well beyond ISIS fighters, however: “Prince said in the interview that the program would be used to kill or capture ‘the funders of Islamic terror, the wealthy radical Islamist billionaires funding it from the Middle East’”—in other words, anyone MBS or MBZ happens to identify as an enemy of their new anti-Iran alliance.309 Just Security, a media outlet run by national security experts, calls Prince’s proposals “alarming” and “dangerous” and a possible prelude to a “private, domestic counterintelligence squad” whose opaque domestic intelligence-gathering functions would make it an outfit the likes of which America has never seen before.310
ANNOTATIONS
MBS did not overpay for the painting by $350 million—Christie’s had estimated it might sell for $100 million—merely due to bad luck. Rather, he was bidding against an unusually insistent anonymous party whose aggressive bids raised the painting’s price to historic heights.
Oddly, the figure $350 million will recur in the Trump-Russia saga, with former Trump