The secret Uganda deal that has brought NSO to the brink of collapse

Enlarge / A man walks by the building entrance of Israeli cyber company NSO Group at one of its branches in the Arava Desert on November 11, 2021, in Sapir, Israel. (credit: Amir Levy | Getty Images)

In February 2019, an Israeli woman sat across from the son of Uganda's president and made an audacious pitch-would he want to secretly hack any phone in the world?

Lt. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, in charge of his father's security and a long-whispered successor to Yoweri Museveni, was keen, said two people familiar with the sales pitch.

After all, the woman, who had ties to Israeli intelligence, was pitching him Pegasus, a piece of spyware so powerful that Middle East dictators and autocratic regimes had been paying tens of millions for it for years.

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