Mattis secretly advised Arab monarch on Yemen war, records show

Soon after his country began bombing Yemen in 2015, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates confidentially reached out to an old friend: retired Marine Gen. Jim Mattis.

Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, who also served as the deputy supreme commander of the Emirati military, needed help. The UAE was part of a coalition of Arab countries that had intervened in Yemen’s civil war to fight Iran-backed Houthi rebels. But the coalition’s bombing campaign was killing large numbers of civilians and doing little to deter the Houthis.

With the conflict threatening to turn into a regional quagmire, Mohamed asked Mattis, who retired from the Marines in 2013 after years of fighting wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, to work for him as a military adviser.

In keeping with federal law, Mattis applied in June 2015 for permission from the Marines and the State Department to advise Mohamed and the UAE on “the operational, tactical, informational and ethical aspects” of the war in Yemen, according to previously undisclosed documents obtained by The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

His request was highly unusual: a legendary four-star Marine asking to work for a foreign head of state as a personal consultant about an ongoing war.

Complicating matters, the U.S. military had become entangled in the conflict. Soon after the bombing started, the Obama administration agreed to support the Arab coalition’s air forces, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with aerial refueling and intelligence. But U.S. officials were growing alarmed by the number of innocent Yemenis dying in coalition airstrikes.

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.

Throughout his career, Mattis, now 73, has praised the UAE as a valued ally to Washington. Between 2010 and 2013, when he was a Marine general in charge of all U.S. forces in the Middle East, he referred to the small Persian Gulf nation as “Little Sparta” because of its outsized military prowess.

But Mattis, one of the most prominent American military leaders since 9/11, has maintained a steadfast public silence about his stint as a military adviser to the Emirates. He has never disclosed the exact scope or duration of his work. He declined multiple requests from The Post for an interview or to answer written questions about his duties for Mohamed.

There are conflicting accounts about whether he was paid for his foreign service. The documents obtained by The Post state that the UAE would compensate Mattis for his advice on the war in Yemen, as well as award him a $100,000 honorarium for giving one speech after he left the Trump administration. But a spokesman for the retired general said he worked for free.

Over the past decade, it has become a common, if secretive, practice for retired U.S. military personnel to work as consultants and contractors for foreign governments. Hundreds of veterans have cashed in on their experience gained during two decades of war in the Middle East and Afghanistan by training foreign armies.

A Post investigation in 2022 found that the oil-rich UAE, despite its small size, hired more U.S. veterans than any other country in the world, often for salaries that dwarfed what they earned while wearing American uniforms. Mattis’s service to the UAE was cited in that investigation, which was based on the FOIA lawsuit filed by The Post.

The litigation compelled the armed forces and State Department to disclose records about retired U.S. military service members employed by foreign governments. Under an anti-corruption clause in the Constitution, retired U.S. military personnel must obtain federal approval before they can accept jobs, gifts or anything of value from foreign powers.

At the time, however, federal officials shielded many documents regarding Mattis, releasing only fragments of information about his unspecified role as a military adviser. They also redacted records regarding his compensation.

The Post continued to press its case in court, arguing that details of his work on behalf of a foreign power should be made public to shed light on whether it may have posed a conflict of interest when he returned to the U.S. government to run the Pentagon.

In response to a judge’s order, federal agencies last fall released additional records which reveal for the first time that Mattis was personally hired by Mohamed to advise him on the war in Yemen, as well as other details about his ties to the UAE.

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