While Qatar's emir has allowed the U.S. to locate its central command and other strategic facilities in the country, including the largest pre-positioning base in the region, his government was also the only member of the U.N. Security Council to oppose the July 2006 resolution that called on Iran to suspend all nuclear research and development activities. Indeed, Iran and Qatar share the North Field/South Pars natural-gas deposit off the Qatari coast, the very one that includes the Giuliani-advised Ras Laffan project. Similarly, the emir praised the Hezbollah resistance in Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel, calling it "the first Arab victory, something we had longed for," and he visited southern Lebanon after the war, meeting with families and giving away $250 million to rebuild destroyed homes. While Qatar had allowed Israel to open a small trade mission in Doha amid much fanfare in the mid-'90s, it had virtually shut down the office by 2000, and the last of the Israeli envoys left in 2003.
Also, Saddam Hussein's wife, Sajida Khayrallah Tilfa, lives in Qatar, in defiance of an Interpol arrest warrant and her appearance on the Iraqi government's 2006 most-wanted list for allegedly providing financial support to Iraqi insurgents, according to an October 2007 report by the Congressional Research Service. Invited with her daughter to Qatar by the deputy prime minister, she has not returned to Iraq despite an extradition demand issued months before Giuliani's December visit.
Illustration by Wes Duvall
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Special reporting by Samuel Rubenfeld and additional research by Adrienne Gaffney and Danielle Schiffman
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Another potentially uncomfortable Giuliani visit to Doha also stayed under the radar. On January 16, 2006, Giuliani visited the Aspire Academy for Sports Excellence and the Aspire Zone, the largest sports dome in the world, built for the Asian Games as well as future international events (including the Olympic Games, which Qatar hopes to host someday). Giuliani praised the academy, which he called "a fantastic achievement," adding that he was "looking forward to seeing it develop in the coming years." Aspire's communications director says that Giuliani "spent more than an hour and a half" touring its facilities, adding that the former mayor "spoke very eloquently." But even putting his stamp of approval on such apparently benign facilities could come back to bite Giuliani: The academy, a $1.3 billion facility designed to move Qatar into the top ranks of international soccer, has been denounced in unusually blunt terms by Sepp Blatter, the head of world football's governing body, FIFA. Blatter called Qatar's "establishment of recruitment networks"—using 6,000 staff members to assess a half-million young footballers in seven African countries and then moving the best to Qatar—"a good example of exploitation."
The Aspire facilities were part of the Asian Games security preparations that Giuliani told the Business Times his firm had participated in planning, since the dome allowed 10 sports to be staged simultaneously under one roof. But even the notice of Giuliani's January appearance, which was posted on the website of an English newspaper there, made no mention of his consulting work for the government. The ex-FBI source says that Giuliani's secretive security work in Qatar—which also includes vulnerability assessments on port facilities in Doha and pipeline security—would necessarily have involved the interior ministry.
A case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations for nearly 19 years, Robert Baer—who calls Qatar "the center of intrigue in the Gulf"—laid out the KSM escape story in his 2003 book, Sleeping with the Devil. His source was Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani, a close relative of the emir who was once the finance minister and chief of police. (An exile living in Beirut in 1997 when Baer began a relationship with him, Hamad al-Thani has since been captured by Qatar and is serving a life sentence for attempting to overthrow the emir.) Hamad told Baer that Abdallah al-Thani, whom he described as "a fanatic Wahhabi," had taken KSM "under his wing" and that the emir had ordered Hamad to help Abdallah. He gave 20 blank Qatari passports to Abdallah, who he said gave them to KSM. "As soon as the FBI showed up in Doha" in 1996, the emir, according to Hamad, ordered Abdallah to move KSM out of his apartment to his beach estate, and eventually out of the country. "Flew the coop. Sayonara," Hamad concluded.
Baer's account of how KSM got away is the most far-reaching, implicating the emir himself. Since KSM "moved his family to Qatar at the suggestion" of Abdallah al-Thani, according to the 9/11 Commission, and held a job at the Ministry of Electricity and Water, Baer's account is hardly implausible. The commission even found that Abdallah ah-Thani "underwrote a 1995 trip KSM took to join the Bosnia jihad." Bill Gertz, the Washington Times reporter whose ties to the Bush White House are well established, affirmed Baer's version in his 2002 book, Breakdown. Another CIA agent, Melissa Boyle Mahle, who was assigned to the KSM probe in Qatar in 1995, said that she tried to convince the FBI to do a snatch operation rather than taking the diplomatic approach, concerned about "certain Qatari officials known for their sympathies for Islamic extremists." Instead, "Muhammad disappeared immediately after the request to the government was made," making it "obvious to me what had happened." Louis Freeh's book says simply: "We believe he was tipped off; but however he got away, it was a slipup with tragic consequences." Neither Mahle nor Freeh named names.
