Qatar: Govt. paid USD10m to Global Risk Advisors to "neutralize" head of the German soccer federation's criticism of hosting World Cup in Qatar, alleges AP; incl. cos. comments
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"Qatar deploys ex-spies to blunt German’s World Cup criticism", 27 Feb 2022
As head of the German soccer federation, Theo Zwanziger was among his sport’s most prominent critics of the decision to award the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. He publicly attacked the energy-rich Gulf nation’s human rights record...
The Qatari government was so concerned by Zwanziger’s criticism that it took action. It paid more than $10 million to a company staffed by former CIA operatives for a multi-year covert influence operation codenamed “Project Riverbed,” according to internal company documents reviewed by The Associated Press.
The records indicate that the goal of the operation was to use spycraft to silence Zwanziger. It failed.
Documents reviewed by AP provide new details about Qatar’s efforts to win and hold onto the tournament, specifically the country’s work with former CIA officer Kevin Chalker and company, Global Risk Advisors...
Chalker acknowledged in a statement that GRA did work on a Project Riverbed, but said it was only “a media monitoring project...”
The AP’s reporting for this article is based on false information from unidentified sources. While GRA did work on an assignment called Project Riverbed, it bore no resemblance to the account described here. It was a media monitoring project staffed by interns and supervised by one full-time employee, who were responsible for reading and summarizing news articles. Every other assertion the AP shared during reporting for this article is inaccurate as well. We offered several times to review the purported evidence for these claims so we could respond in more detail, but we were repeatedly denied access to even a single document.Kevin Chalker, Founder of Global Risk Advisors
...Chalker’s attorney, Brian Ascher, said Zwanziger was never the subject of a covert influence campaign by GRA.
“The primary objective of Project Riverbed was to neutralize the effectiveness of Theo Zwanziger’s criticism of the 2022 Qatar World Cup and his attempts to compel FIFA to take the World Cup from Qatar,” a GRA document reviewed by the AP said.
The AP reviewed hundreds of pages of documents from Chalker’s companies, including a final report, memos and budget documents. Multiple sources with authorized access provided the documents to the AP. The sources said they were troubled by Chalker’s work for Qatar and requested anonymity because they feared retaliation.