Media

Ex-NSA staffers helped UAE spy on BBC host, Al Jazeera chairman: report

by Zack Budryk - 04/01/19 1:23 PM ET

Former National Security Agency (NSA) employees helped the United Arab Emirates surveil a BBC host and the chairman of Al Jazeera in 2017 amid tensions between the UAE and Qatar, Reuters reported on Monday.

An initiative by UAE intelligence known as Project Raven targeted dissidents and political opponents, including several unnamed U.S. journalists, and involved at least nine former NSA and U.S. military employees, according to the report. The ultimate goal was to find any evidence that Qatar’s monarchy had influenced Al Jazeera’s news coverage.

{mosads}“Folks with these skill sets should not be able to knowingly or unknowingly undermine U.S. interests or contradict U.S. values,” Dana Shell Smith, former U.S. ambassador to Qatar, told Reuters, adding that former American intelligence personnel should be better supervised after they leave government positions to safeguard against such activity.

The UAE Embassy in Washington, D.C., and the NSA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

After the UAE and allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia accused Qatar of deliberately stoking unrest in the Middle East in June 2017, the countries cut diplomatic ties with Qatar and imposed a land, air and sea blockade, according to Reuters. That same week, operatives for Project Raven reportedly broke into the iPhones of at least 10 journalists and media figures it suspected of Qatari or Muslim Brotherhood ties.

The Reuters investigation is part of a longer series on the UAE’s intelligence operations. The news agency reported in January that Project Raven included former U.S. intelligence staffers; the more recent article details the extent to which the project allegedly targeted journalists.

Other media targets of Project Raven reportedly included Abdullah Al-Athba, chief editor of Al-Arab, Qatar’s oldest newspaper. Al-Athba told Reuters he was targeted due to his support for the Arab Spring and his criticisms of how the UAE’s government handled the wave of uprisings.