Mattis Secretly Advised the UAE on the War on Yemen

Mattis was apparently a paid adviser to the crown prince of Abu Dhabi during the first years of the war on Yemen.

The Post reports on Jim Mattis’ work advising Mohamed bin Zayed in the UAE after he retired from the military:

Nonetheless, U.S. officials swiftly approved Mattis’s request. Then they fought to conceal his advisory role in the war in Yemen and his work for Mohamed. After The Post sued in 2021 for records of retired U.S. military personnel employed by foreign governments, federal agencies took 2½ years to release the ones about Mattis.

Mattis did not publicly reveal his consulting job for the UAE when he returned to the Pentagon in January 2017 to become secretary of defense in the Trump administration. He omitted it from his public work history and financial disclosure forms that he filed with the Office of Government Ethics. Though he reported it confidentially to the Senate Armed Services Committee, multiple senators said they were not informed. He also did not mention it in his 2019 memoir.

There was earlier reporting in 2017 about Mattis’ “informal” advisory role in the UAE after he left the military, but that was supposedly an unpaid role. The new report shows that he was much more deeply involved in advising the crown prince on the war itself than he or anyone else in the government let on publicly, and it seems that he was being paid for it.