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Ali Alzabarah was panicked. His heart raced as he drove home from Twitter's San Francisco headquarters in the early evening on Dec. 2, 2015. He needed to leave the country — quickly.
Earlier that day, Twitter's management accused the unassuming 32-year-old of accessing thousands of user profiles without authorization to pass their identifying information — including phone numbers and IP addresses — , the head of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's charity and private office. When the conversation concluded, management seized Alzabarah's laptop, put him on administrative leave, and escorted him out of the building.
Arriving home at San Bruno's Acappella Apartments — a complex so close to San Francisco International Airport he could hear planes fly overhead — Alzabarah planned his escape. At 5:17 p.m. he called a handler, identified as Associate-1 in the FBI complaint, who arrived in a white SUV two hours later. Driving around Alzabarah's neighborhood, the two men called "Foreign Official-l" — al-Asaker, according to the Washington Post — at 7:20 p.m., and again at 7:22 p.m. and 7:31 p.m. They then called Dr. Faisal Al Sudairi, the Saudi consul general in Los Angeles, at 8:30 p.m., 8:38 p.m., and 9:26 p.m. Shortly after midnight, the consul general called Alzabarah back and spoke with him for three minutes.
Early the next morning, Alzabarah, his wife, and daughter boarded a plane for Saudi Arabia.
From May 2015 until he was exposed that December, Alzabarah spied for the Saudi Arabian government inside Twitter, from the FBI alleges. (Unless explicitly attributed to other sources, the details and allegations that follow are taken from the FBI's criminal complaint.)
Alzabarah and Ahmad Abouammo, a colleague on Twitter's global media team, regularly accessed and delivered information that could've led Saudi intelligence to identify anonymous dissidents. While news of the allegations against them has been public since November 2019, the extent of their roles and abilities inside the company have never previously been reported. Alzabarah, Abouammo, and al-Asaker did not respond to requests for comment.
Though Azabarah fled, he and Abouammo, who remained in the US, are currently indicted in United States federal court on charges of acting as undeclared agents of the Saudi government. No matter the verdict, the case has exposed tech companies' vulnerability to attempted foreign infiltration. One well-placed employee can potentially do extensive damage.
"The message MBS gets from the world, from powerful countries, from the international community, is that he will get away with whatever he did or will do," Abdullah Alaoudh, a legal scholar at Georgetown University whose father is imprisoned in Saudi Arabia, told BuzzFeed News. "Because he has money, he can control the process of oil. Therefore, everybody will go back to business as usual."
Ali Alzabarah's disappearance didn't cause a stir inside Twitter. "One day the general counsel came to me and said there was this crazy thing that happened. They're out of the company. You can never talk about it," a former Twitter executive told BuzzFeed News. "Inside, it was a total nonthing. No one in the rank and file who had ever heard of it. It was a nonissue."
