Second Intelligence Carried By Out Ex-CIA Officer Working for Qatar; This Time FIFA Officials Were the Target

Swiss media has report­ed on what is described as a “large-scale and long-stand­ing intel­li­gence oper­a­tion” spon­sored by Qatar and tar­get­ing FIFA offi­cials to pre­vent Qatar from los­ing the World Cup. Accord­ing to the Swiss­in­fo report:

Novem­ber 2, 2022 Qatar orches­trat­ed a large-scale and long-stand­ing intel­li­gence oper­a­tion against FIFA offi­cials with the help of for­mer CIA oper­a­tives. Switzer­land was a key the­atre of oper­a­tions. The high­est ech­e­lons of the Qatari gov­ern­ment were involved. An espi­onage net­work work­ing in secret. Intel­li­gence agents plan­ning on sway­ing world events in a covert oper­a­tion. Hack­ers steal­ing con­tro­ver­sial infor­ma­tion. And an obscure client fund­ing the entire project with hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars. This is the sto­ry of a glob­al secret oper­a­tion. An inves­ti­ga­tion by Swiss media SRF’s inves­tiga­tive team, “SRF Inves­tiga­tiv”, shows the details of how the state of Qatar had offi­cials of world foot­ball spied on. And how crit­ics of the upcom­ing World Cup out­side of FIFA were tar­get­ed as well. The ulti­mate goal of those efforts: to pre­vent Qatar from los­ing the World Cup bid after mas­sive crit­i­cism was raised, when FIFA award­ed the tour­na­ment to the author­i­tar­i­an coun­try in 2010. The scale of the espi­onage activ­i­ties is con­sid­er­able. One sub-oper­a­tion alone involved the planned deploy­ment of at least 66 oper­a­tives over nine years. The bud­get amount­ed to $387 mil­lion. And the activ­i­ties spanned five con­ti­nents. The high­est ech­e­lons of the Qatari gov­ern­ment were involved in the espi­onage activ­i­ties, includ­ing the cur­rent head of state, the Emir of Qatar. The doc­u­ments show that the desert coun­try want­ed to make sure that no change of posi­tion with­in FIFA, no new friend­ship, no poten­tial­ly dan­ger­ous alliance, noth­ing that could jeop­ar­dise Qatar’s hold­ing the 2022 World Cup could slip their atten­tion. The goal was to gain absolute con­trol. Or “world­wide pen­e­tra­tion”, as it is referred to in a doc­u­ment of the espi­onage operation.

The report goes on to iden­ti­fy Glob­al Risk Advi­sors (GRA), found­ed by for­mer CIA offi­cial Kevin Chalk­er as the firm which car­ried out the oper­a­tion, titled “Project Merciless:”