the UAE, adding, “Maybe I’m a monster. Maybe I should be in jail. Maybe I’m a bad guy. But I’m right.”279 BuzzFeed News will call Golan’s program part of a larger trend in contemporary warfare (indeed, one being strongly advocated for by Trump adviser Erik Prince at the time): “War has become increasingly privatized, with many nations outsourcing most military support services to private contractors.”280
Given Prince’s communication with—at a minimum—Trump advisers Flynn and Bannon on national security matters during the 2016 presidential campaign, even more striking in Roston’s reporting for BuzzFeed News is his assessment of whether anyone in America knew about the Emiratis’ targeted assassination program in 2015: “Experts said it is almost inconceivable that the United States would not have known that the UAE—whose military the United States has trained and armed at virtually every level—had hired an American company staffed by American veterans to conduct an assassination program in a war it closely monitors.”281 Roston adds, chillingly, that “a former CIA official who has worked in the UAE initially told BuzzFeed News that there was no way that Americans would be allowed to participate in such a program. But after checking, he called back: ‘There were guys that were basically doing what you said.’ He was astonished, he said, by what he learned.… The mercenaries, he said, were ‘almost like a murder squad.’”282
Golan’s particular squad has been contracted to do its wetwork by Mohammed Dahlan, a former security chief for the Palestinian Authority who by 2015 has been exiled to the United Arab Emirates.283 According to former CIA officials, Golan is “ruthless” and “calculating” and is “the kind of guy you hire” when you need someone to do “crazy shit.”284 As for Dahlan, he lost his senior position in the Palestinian Authority in 2007, when he was accused of secretly conspiring with both Americans and Israelis.285 After fleeing to the UAE, he became a “key adviser” to MBZ and, per a former CIA officer who knows him well, a “pit bull” for the Emiratis.286 In 2013, Dahlan destabilized the Palestinian Authority and delighted Benjamin Netanyahu by suing Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, for “corruption [and] intimidation,” and doing so using an “Israeli law firm”; the same year, he assisted el-Sisi in coming to power in Egypt by orchestrating the delivery of messages and financing from MBZ and MBS to el-Sisi’s collaborators in the Egyptian military.287 In 2014, Dahlan, now cemented as an ally of both MBZ and el-Sisi, entered “talks” with Netanyahu to formally become Abbas’s chief political rival in the Palestinian territories and a prearranged “peace partner” for Netanyahu.288 That same year, he also “act[ed] as a proxy for the United States and Israel” in the Middle East, according to the Middle East Eye, which noted at the time that, on MBZ’s behalf, Dahlan invested in the Serbian arms trade in a way that allowed him to distribute weapons across the Middle East to advance not just Emirati but American and Israeli interests, which were threatened at the time by the prospect of Turkish encroachment into the Balkans.289 Dahlan’s connections in the Israeli government are said to reside in the Israeli intelligence community—precisely where those of Trump national security advisers Prince and Flynn do.290 That Mohammed Dahlan ends up in exile in the UAE in 2015 points toward the long-standing but sub rosa synergy between Israeli and Emirati military interests that will later become public.
Dahlan spends 2015 “raising money in Gulf countries” and lobbying el-Sisi to open the Gaza-Sinai border in preparation for his return to Gazan politics, with his hope, according to reports, being to right the mistakes of Palestinian leaders past—most notably, in Dahlan’s view, Yasser Arafat’s rejection of a 2000 Clinton-backed peace plan that would have given Palestinians “statehood in more than 90 percent of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”291 In 2016, Dahlan is accused of helping to funnel money into Turkey to fund the July 2016 military coup there, another effort of which Netanyahu—who has publicly said he considers Erdogan a dangerous anti-Semite—is likely to have been supportive, and which Egypt and the UAE are, at the time, widely suspected of bankrolling.292 During the fallout from the coup’s failure, Dahlan flees from the UAE to his other safe harbor, Egypt.293 Meanwhile, there is again talk in July 2016 of the UAE, Egypt, and Jordan—the last of these one of the original Red Sea conspirators, but one that leaves the conspiracy well after mid-2016—secretly plotting to install Dahlan in