Saudi Arabia planned to invade Qatar last summer - Rex Tillerson’s efforts to stop it may have cost him his job
Thirteen
hours before Secretary of State Rex Tillerson learned from the
presidential Twitter feed that he was being fired, he did something
that President Donald Trump had been unwilling to do. Following a
phone call with his British counterpart, Tillerson condemned a deadly
nerve agent attack in the U.K., saying that he had “full confidence
in the U.K.’s investigation and its assessment that Russia was
likely responsible.”
White
House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders had called the attack “reckless,
indiscriminate, and irresponsible,” but stopped short of blaming
Russia, leading numerous media outlets to speculate that Tillerson
was fired for criticizing Russia.
But in
the months that followed his departure, press reports strongly
suggested that the countries lobbying hardest for Tillerson’s
removal were Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, both of which
were frustrated by Tillerson’s attempts to mediate and end their
blockade of Qatar. One report in the New York Times even suggested
that the UAE ambassador to Washington knew that Tillerson would be
forced out three months before he was fired in March.
The
Intercept has learned of a previously unreported episode that stoked
the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s anger at Tillerson and that may have
played a key role in his removal. In the summer of 2017, several
months before the Gulf allies started pushing for his ouster,
Tillerson intervened to stop a secret Saudi-led, UAE-backed plan to
invade and essentially conquer Qatar, according to one current member
of the U.S. intelligence community and two former State Department
officials, all of whom declined to be named, citing the sensitivity
of the matter.
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