Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon is a largely unknown figure, and greatly feared because of his role in charge of the UAE’s national security. We asked Jack Shenker what it was like to report on him.
When did you first come across Sheikh Tahnoon?
I’ve been fascinated by the UAE for years, ever since I lived in Cairo and covered Egypt for the Guardian. I was keen to learn more about who and what was driving the UAE’s rapidly growing ambitions on the global stage. And I was particularly struck by the gap between the Emirates as it exists in the popular imagination – the soaring skyscrapers and gilded luxury of Dubai, the international sporting assets such as Manchester City – and some of these darker phenomena that were helping to reshape the Middle East: the military operations, the mercenary armies, the massacres.
In the course of my reporting I ended up becoming sucked into the utterly weird and wild world of Sheikh Tahnoon: elite chess player, jiujitsu black belt, royal fixer, financial leviathan, reclusive spymaster, AI leader and the most powerful man that most people had never heard of. I realised that if I wanted to explore what is really going on behind the scenes in the UAE , my story had to be centred on him.
Can you tell us a bit about how difficult it is to report on him?
What’s most striking about Sheikh Tahnoon is the disconnect between his influence, which is vast, and his public profile, which is relatively nonexistent. He is rapidly buying up huge chunks of the infrastructure on which AI technology depends. And yet very few people outside the UAE even know his name.
I’ve spent most of my career reporting on immensely powerful forces, both within the Middle East and elsewhere. In that time, I’ve never encountered a subject wrapped in as many layers of mystery, misdirection and secrecy as Tahnoon. He doesn’t give sit-down interviews to journalists. Most of the people he’s ever worked with, even tangentially, are made to sign non-disclosure agreements. And beyond all of that, there’s a general unease about Tahnoon as a subject matter. Time and again while researching this article, I came up against a wall of reticence whenever his name was mentioned: previously friendly PR people suddenly clammed up; sources grew nervous about their names being featured; discussions over interviews came abruptly to a halt.
Given that the UAE is one of the global powerhouses behind cyber espionage activities, I also had to be really mindful of my own digital security, and how I could protect my sources. Just to give one tiny example, one of the individuals I mention in the piece is Ahmed Mansoor, an Emirati dissident and human rights activist who was targeted by Tahnoon’s security agencies and is held in solitary confinement in al-Sadr, the UAE’s most notorious prison. Mansoor knew that the authorities were after him and took steps to prevent any infiltration of his laptop and his phone. What he didn’t reckon with was the possibility that Tahnoon’s intelligence apparatus might hack his baby monitor, and turn it into a device that tracked everything he and his family were saying. Well, during the reporting for this story, I had a baby – and I’ve spent many long hours in the middle of the night after a 2am nappy change, wondering if someone in Abu Dhabi might be listening in …
You did a huge amount of reporting for the piece. I’m curious if there are any elements that you weren’t able to fit into the story that you want to mention here.
Too many to mention! I did a really deep dive into one of Tahnoon’s passions: Brazilian jiujitsu, and mixed martial arts. It’s a subject area I knew very little about beforehand, but it turned out to be a remarkable window on to both Tahnoon’s character and some of the ideologies that are shaping Silicon Valley and the AI industry. There is some fascinating detail that didn’t make it into the final edit for space reasons, such as what the Californian martial arts scene looked like at that time, when leading politicians were seeking to get the newly formed Ultimate Fighting Championship banned, and fights were taking place in secret in Native American reservations.
I also got really interested in how some of jiujitsu’s principles and philosophies can dovetail with a certain brand of tech-bro libertarianism that simultaneously views its proponents as gutsy insurgents and mighty leviathans: too big and too important to be bound by the petty-minded rules that inhibit the rest of us. It’s no coincidence that business titans such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have trained in jiujitsu, or that big companies such as Google now employ in-house instructors.
Lastly, you’re also making a podcast about Tahnoon for our colleagues on Today in Focus. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
I originally reported this story with audio in mind as well as print. I managed to gather a lot of material with my microphone as well as my notebook – and I’m so glad listeners will be able to hear some of that. There are interviews with people who understand what makes Tahnoon tick, and can help explain why he has risen to such a position of power and influence. As the Emirati sociologist Mira Al Hussein told me: “Tahnoon understands the language of global capitalism today, and he’s exactly where he needs to be, at exactly the right time. He’s the broker who sold authoritarian stability and surveillance capitalism to the rest of the world, and he’s sold it very well, which is why the rest of the world is buying it.”
Composite: Guardian Design/AP/Getty Images/Photoshot/PA/AFP/EPA/Alamy
