Ahead of Qatar World Cup, a Gulf dispute plays out in the shadows

The pitch landed in an email inbox at the offices of Qatar’s World Cup bid at a crucial time in the summer of 2010, only months before FIFA would meet to pick the host of its quadrennial soccer championship.

The sender was Cornerstone Global Associates, a little-known consulting firm based in London, and in the email the company’s president laid out a plan to assist Qatar — tiny, dusty, hot and, to many observers, ill-suited to host sports’ most-watched event — with its mounting public relations problems.

The Qataris declined the offer, one of several that had arrived unsolicited that summer, and Cornerstone’s president moved on as well: For the next few years, he continued to offer support for the emirate and its World Cup on his active social media accounts.

But the criticism of Qatar did not go away: Year after year, news reports assailed the emirate over whether it was suitable as a host for the World Cup, over the way it had won the vote and over its treatment of migrant workers. In October 2017, the tone of the coverage turned ominous when the BBC led reports on its website and news channel by warning darkly that there was “an increasing political risk that Qatar may not host the World Cup in 2022.”

The article created a ripple of similar pieces in the British and international news media, all of them referring to the same report: “Qatar in Focus: Is the FIFA World Cup 2022 in Danger?” The report asserted that “Western diplomats have privately stated they do not know whether or not the tournament will take place as planned.”

What was most intriguing, though, was not the report’s conclusions but its author: Cornerstone Global Associates. The 2022 World Cup will be the first one played in the Arab world, and it has been a hot-button issue in soccer since the moment Qatar won the hosting rights. But in the 19 months since Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations began a punishing boycott of neighbouring Qatar, the tournament has become something else: a proxy in the broader geopolitical dispute transfixing the Gulf. In that smaller sporting fight, the goal appears to be to scuttle the tournament or, failing that, to humble Qatar by forcing it to share the event with its political enemies.

The dispute has added a new dimension to a specialised industry in which consultants and other insiders can earn millions of dollars for their efforts to shift public opinion in favour of the nations that finance them, or against those countries’ rivals. At times, that hidden work — exploiting the dark arts of leaked documents, whispered secrets and shifting allegiances — has drawn journalists, government officials and even President Trump into the fight. The intricacies of the campaigns are sometimes revealed only after information from one side or the other is leaked.

When a trove of the emails of the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to Washington was stolen and released in 2017, for example, it revealed a broad influence campaign financed by the UAE that hoped to use American journalists and think tanks to reposition Qatar and its World Cup in a negative light. A year later, an article in Britain’s Sunday Times suggested that Qatar was just as adept at those kinds of shadow campaigns: The Times’s reporting showed that Qatar had hired an American public relations firm to disparage its 2022 rivals during its campaign to win the World Cup.

The New York Times itself received several batches of documents from an anonymous source last year. Over a period of several months, the source, claiming to be someone close to Cornerstone who had become disillusioned with how soccer was being politicised, answered questions related to the disclosure over encrypted email. The Times was able to independently confirm some of the meetings and conversations described in the documents, which appear to fit the pattern of the Gulf’s continuing tit-for-tat information war. Viewed through that prism, Cornerstone’s about-face on Qatar in 2017, then, was hardly a surprise. The timing was important, though; Cornerstone’s anti-Qatar report, publicised by the BBC, was published only months after the start of the Saudi- and UAE-led blockade of Qatar. The blockade is the result of a long-running political dispute between Qatar and several of its neighbours, who accuse it of financing terrorism and working too closely with Iran. But the breadth and specifics of the campaign to hamstring Qatar’s World Cup are laid out in documents that reveal close ties between Cornerstone Global Associates and individuals and companies in the UAE.

One Cornerstone document outlines a plan to produce a report linking Qatar to the Muslim Brotherhood, and several others discuss efforts to place articles in the British news media that would damage Qatar’s reputation. Cornerstone’s success in providing some source material for the BBC report, for example, involved first cultivating a relationship with a long-term critic of the UAE’s human rights record before asking him to write the sceptical report about Qatar’s World Cup. The critic, the journalist and activist Rori Donaghy, denied that Cornerstone had had any role in influencing or altering his conclusions, saying that the report was “solely by me.”

©2019 The New York Times News Service