Leaked documents have implicated Qatari Ambassador Meshal bin Hamad al-Thani — currently his country’s representative to the U.S. and formerly its ambassador to France — in alleged efforts to bribe a French minister and spy on U.S. lawmakers.
Al-Thani’s name came up in documents exposed by Project Raven, itself an international scandal that involved more than a dozen former U.S. intelligence operatives going to work for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as electronic surveillance specialists.
Project Raven began during the Obama administration with a certain degree of officially approved cooperation between the U.S. and UAE intelligence services, which led to Qatar aggressively hiring U.S. intelligence veterans with advanced electronic surveillance skills. The project was seen by U.S. officials as a useful tool against international terrorist groups — such as al-Qaeda — in its early days.
The UAE began using its American hires to collect intelligence on a growing constellation of security threats, including Qatar, which has often been at odds with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). These tensions led to a GCC boycott and a partial blockade of Qatar between 2017 and 2021.
When Reuters exposed Project Raven in a series of 2019 reports, some of the American intelligence officers the UAE hired said they felt the program started going off the rails around 2016, with surveillance extending to human rights activists, journalists, political dissidents, and Western targets, including Americans.
In 2016, the UAE told its cyberintelligence contractors they could either begin working for an Emirati firm called DarkMatter or quit the program and go home. Soon afterward, the UAE cyberwar unit began hacking into the smartphones of targets that included numerous Qatari officials, all the way up to the Emir of Qatar himself.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported in November that some of the Qatari documents exposed by Project Raven implicated al-Thani, who was then assigned to France, in a 2016 effort to bribe French Secretary of State for Relations with Parliament Jena-Marie Le Guen.
One of the documents was a letter from al-Thani to the Qatari Foreign Ministry authorizing a payment of 160,000 euros (a little under $175,000) to Le Guen for “future services to the state of Qatar.”
The Qataris took no action against French media outlets that ran the Le Guen story in late 2021, which MEMRI took as a tacit admission the leaked documents were genuine. The revelations contributed to a rolling scandal in France and the European Union that some observers labeled “Qatargate,” involving hundreds of efforts by Qatar to manipulate EU politics. The scandal took down several EU lawmakers, including former European Parliament Vice President Eva Kaili.
MEMRI reported on Monday that, in addition to the Le Guen bribery allegations, al-Thani was allegedly involved in a Qatari intelligence initiative called “Project ENDGAME,” which involved hiring a company called Global Research Associates (GRA), headed by a former CIA official named Kevin Chalker, to spy on U.S. lawmakers.
Targets of Project ENDGAME included Sens. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Tom Cotton (R-AR), plus Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and former Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), who was chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs from 2013 to 2019.
MEMRI posted an alleged executive summary of Project ENDGAME, prepared for the Qatari government by GRA in March 2017, that described former President Donald Trump and the targeted Republican lawmakers as “enemies with dark motives” who were “dedicated to harming Qatar.”
The executive summary sneered that “Trump’s supporters can’t find Qatar on a map,” so they would attack the Qataris indirectly by going after their allies with the help of the “Israel lobby.”
“Qatar’s support for Hamas is a vulnerability your enemies will aim to exploit,” GRA wrote. “An attack on Hamas is an attack on Qatar.”
The executive summary urged the Qatari government to “unmask” its enemies by running surveillance and influence campaigns in the United States, using al-Thani — code-named “ENDGAME” and described as “the most powerful Ambassador in the U.S.” — as a key intelligence asset.
“ENDGAME has built a powerful influence infrastructure with allies and assets in think tanks and thought leaders. He has even co-opted Qatar’s own allies and assets,” the summary boasted, describing the ambassador as well-positioned to “capture total information control” in the United States.
Project ENDGAME targeted Cruz because he was trying to get the Muslim Brotherhood designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Diaz-Balart co-sponsored the 2017 bill to sanction the Muslim Brotherhood.
Cruz told Fox News Digital on Saturday that Qatar “spends uncountable billions of dollars promoting and even funding the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and other terrorist groups.”
“They have either bought or intimidated huge parts of Washington, D.C., into silence. It’s not at all surprising they would consider the few remaining outspoken opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood in Congress to be Qatar’s enemies,” he said.
“It is long past time for the U.S. to reevaluate the U.S.-Qatari relationship,” Cruz advised.
“The revelation that the Qatari government not only targeted my office but two sitting U.S. senators is not surprising and only validates my longstanding concerns with the Qatari government,” Diaz-Balart told Fox News Digital.
Cotton and Royce declined to comment on the story to Fox News. The Biden State Department referred inquiries to the FBI, which would neither “confirm nor deny conducting specific investigations.” A lawyer representing Chalker said that he and his company are not facing any “pending indictments.”
