Leaked data shows extent of UAE's meddling in France

AnAn Israeli unit codenamed 'Team Jorge', which sold hacking services and access to a vast army of fake social media profiles, became notorious recently when its activities were exposed by revelations from the non-profit network 'Forbidden Stories'. But they are not the only players in the disinformation sector.

An investigation by Mediapart, based on leaked documents and first-hand accounts, has revealed a network of influence operating in France on behalf of a foreign power whose importance in Paris continues to grow: the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The network's activities are coordinated by an economic intelligence company based in Switzerland, Alp Services, which has carried out private intelligence gathering for their Gulf state client. The company works with researchers, one of whom claims to have direct access to Emmanuel Macron, and sends information to an Emirati intelligence agent, whom Mediapart has been able to identify.

Using fake identities on the internet this network has also spread information with the aim of damaging opponents of the Emirates. But they also appear to be behind the publication of English and Arabic versions of the book 'Qatar Papers' by French journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. This work revealed how Muslim associations have been funded across Europe by Qatar, the UAE's neighbour and sworn enemy.

Mediapart's revelations come against a backdrop of poor relations between the two Gulf states. This enmity reached its peak between 2017 and 2021 when a coalition led by the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt blockaded Qatar.

The UAE and Qatar are two of the biggest buyers of French armaments and invest huge sums in property, sport (leading football club PSG is owned the Qataris) and culture (the Louvre Abu Dhabi is a partnership between France and the UAE). They have also spent fortunes on public relations consultancies and backroom agencies specialising in private intelligence gathering and disinformation, in order to influence both political leaders and public opinion in Western countries.

Some of the methods have involved lobbying, the publication of false articles in the press and even hacking. The Emirates carried out Operation Raven to hack the Qataris with the help of former American cyber-spies, while Qatar is suspected of having spied on opponents with the help of hackers from India.

The dirty tricks employed by Qatar in France and other parts of Europe, which are at the centre of the recent corruption scandal at the European Parliament, have been widely documented. The UAE has been criticised for its aggressive lobbying in the United States – in particular after the hacking of their ambassador's email account – but little has been known about their activities on this side of the Atlantic. Until now.

The Swiss detective and the Emirati agent

For the first time, Mediapart can reveal the behind-the-scenes activities of an operation to gain influence in France, one that is directly overseen by the Emirati secret services. Spies from Abu Dhabi used the intelligence and influencer company Alp Services. This was founded in Geneva in 1989 by Mario Brero, aged 76, an industry veteran and someone who uses controversial methods.

He was convicted in France for having illegally procured in 2011 summaries of telephone calls made by the husband of Anne Lauvergeon, who was then chair of the French nuclear energy group Areva. She later described Brero as a “spook”.

A previous leak of information from Alp Services, revealed in 2021 by Heidi News, shows that Mario Brero reportedly generated press articles designed to criticise a Geneva prosecutor at the request of the mistress of the former Spanish King Juan Carlos. In an audio recording he is heard considering the possibility of selling research carried out on behalf of his client, the art dealer Yves Bouvier, to the latter's main adversary, the Russian billionaire Dimity Rybolovlev, on the grounds that Bouvier had not paid Alp Services.

These revelations, which are particularly disagreeable for a person who likes to stay in the shadows, have made Mario Brero very suspicious towards his staff. A number of people have left the firm in recent years, and sources speak of a management style that is sometimes brutal. In 2021 he was convicted for having forced a female employee who was leaving to sign a document. According to the court judgement, the victim stated that a “spy software apparently existed at all the employees' work stations”.

Contacted on several occasions, Mario Brero did not respond to Mediapart's questions. His lawyers, Christian Lüscher and Yoann Lambert, explained that Alp Services “is covered by strict professional confidentiality, in all its forms … relating to its clients and the information which it handles on behalf of the latter”.

“In view of the information featured in your email, it seems that you have been given data covered by such secrets and obtained in an unlawful manner,” the lawyers added. They formally asked us to “destroy all the data” relating to their client and to “abandon any publication of information obtained by the commission of unlawful acts”.

Other people have accused Mediapart of attacking the Emirates to help out Qatar. We have reminded them that Mediapart was responsible for revealing several cases, in particular corruption affairs, that have pointed the finger at senior figures from that very same Qatar. According to the British newspaper The Sunday Times and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, those revelations even led to Qatar targeting Mediapart as part of a global hacking operation.

Avisa Partners and lobbyist Sihem Souid in the firing line

Fresh internal documents from Alp Services obtained by Mediapart show that Mario Brero acted imprudently in relation to an industrial tribunal hearing. In a file for a routine case he included documents and photos which revealed information about Alp's business facilitators and clients, including the most sensitive one of all: an Emirati secret agent.

This man, whom we have identified and whom we will call 'Mohammed' (see Black Box below) is a senior officer in the intelligence services in Abu Dhabi. He has used Mario Brero's services for at least four years.

In November 2018 the boss of Alp Services crowed in a text message that he was “dining one-on-one with Mohammed” who had just entrusted him with “3 important commissions for a total of … 1 million euros”. Another contract was signed later with fees totalling 1.2 million Swiss francs (the same value as euros) every six months.

The mission was so sensitive that all communications took place solely via two anonymous email addresses, each with six numbers, opened on the encrypted email service Protonmail. The first was for Alp, the other for their Emirati agent contact, an address we shall call 842943@protonmail.com. Mario Brero and his staff also discreetly met in Switzerland and Abu Dhabi with Mohammed and his boss in the UAE intelligence services, who was nicknamed “his excellency the boxer”.

According to documents seen by Mediapart, one of the contracts required Alp to carry out in-depth investigations into the “network of influence” and the “lobbyists, influencers and journalists” used by Qatar within the European Union.

In a commercial proposal made to its UAE client, the Swiss company itself suggested targeting Sihem Souid, a former police officer and socialist ministerial advisor who works in public relations and as a lobbyist for Qatar in France. The idea was to investigate her, “her husband and their company” in order to find “negative information”.

Alp also planned to investigate the agency Avisa Partners who, as Mediapart has already reported, have worked for Qatar. Alp's objective was “clear” according to the document. This was to “counter Qatar's lobbying activities at European Union level” by “revealing and attacking … the shadowy infrastructure” that had been set up by “aggressive agents such as Avisa and Sihem Souid”.

There was added spice caused by the fact that Avisa Partners had recently lined itself up as a potential buyer of Alp Services, according to Mediapart's information. When contacted Avisa, which says it has not worked for Qatar “for years”, declined to make any comment as, too, did Alp Services.

In its proposal to the UAE, Mario Brero's Swiss agency also proposed “counter lobbying” against Qatar, including the passing of anti-Qatari information to “friendly politicians” and the preparation of files with a view to bringing legal action.

Objective: a hundred propaganda articles a year

The aim was also to influence the press and publish fake articles attacking Qatar and movements linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, which was supported both in the media and financially by Qatar. This organisation, which was set up in Egypt and is now present in many countries, advocates a political Islam, anti-Western ideology and a rigorous moral code.

The Brotherhood has been at the heart of tensions in the Gulf since the start of the 2000s when Qatar strengthened its relations with the group, while the UAE and Saudi Arabia moved in the opposite direction. The conflict became worse in 2010 at the time of the Arab Spring when members of the Brotherhood come to power in Tunisia and Egypt, leading dictators in the Gulf to fear they might face similar movements. Since then Saudi Arabia and the UAE have lobbied hard to get the Muslim Brotherhood regarded as a terrorist organisation.

According to Mediapart's documents, Alp Services' aim was to publish or influence a hundred articles a year on behalf of the UAE. Some were published via fake accounts, in particular in Mediapart Club, our participative blog space, under the pseudonym 'Tanya Klein'. Between 2018 and 2020 this fictitious blogger published 15 blogs, all against the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar.

These blogs were deemed sufficiently suspicious for them to be flagged - before this current investigation began - by Mediapart's moderation team, who then removed them and suspended 'Tanya Klein's' right to publish on the site (see Black Box below). The same tactics, of trying to infiltrate this site's participative space on behalf of wealthy clients, were used in the past by other agencies such as Avisa Partners and Majorelle, the latter a company run by the former communications chief of ex-foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

Though it had been deleted, a 'Tanya Klein' blog is quoted in an article that is still online and which was published on November 12th 2020 by the far-right weekly publication 'Valeurs Actuelles'. Written by journalist Nicolas Clément, the article describes the Council of European Muslims as the “parent company of the Islamist octopus … established on French soil” which it said was “spared by the French government's riposte” launched after the murder of teacher Samuel Paty a month earlier.

The journalist twice refers to comments by 'Tanya Klein' who had written two months earlier on Mediapart Club that the Muslim Brotherhood had a “well-known strategy” consisting of “changing the name of their organisations when they have become too controversial and attract too much attention”.

When approached, Tugdual Denis, deputy editor of Valeurs Actuelles, insisted that its journalist had himself come across the 'Tanya Klein' blog. “I assure you that this is in no way a planted article and that the journalist carried out his investigations with different sources, some of them open [sources],” he said. “And to be clear, we had no contact with Alp Services.”

However, the day after it was published the Alp team claimed paternity of the article in an email sent to the 842943@protonmail.com email address used by the UAE agent Mohammed. “Excellent news, we finally have our major article in France which has just been published in the magazine 'Valeurs Actuelles'... It's devastating for the Muslim Brotherhood's French networks and embarrassing for the authorities, who have forgotten to focus on the Council of European Muslims,” they wrote.

The Swiss agency then added that “the article is in the process of being shared and commented on hundreds of times on social media” and announced that it was now going to “work to put extra pressure on other media and discreetly lobby to get the Council of European Muslims banned in France or at least get them investigated”.

In another email addressed to 842943@protonmail.com, Alp boasted that it had got an article about claims of murder and torture involving a member of the Qatar royal family published on the Belgian site Histoireroyales.fr, which specialises in royal news. “Dear friend, here's the article that we've just got published on the Emir's brother,” Alp wrote to their Emirati contact. “It's not a sponsored publication,” insisted Nicolas Fontaine, editor-in-chief of Histoireroyales.fr. He said the article was “based entirely on three sources”, newspaper articles in English.

Analyzing Muslim Brotherhood networks in Europe

Alp Services' task also involved carrying out advanced research in 2020 into the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, and in France, Belgium and Norway in particular. The Swiss agents wrote reports on the personalities and organisations belonging to, or seen as close to, the brotherhood. But they also produced large country by country infographics, linking dozens of names – public figures but also unknown people – who were supposedly moving in Muslim Brotherhood circles.

These documents were presented by the Swiss firm's teams to the UAE intelligence agent Mohammed during working meetings in Abu Dhabi, as shown by the photo below. What use was made of these lists? Contacted via its embassy in Paris the UAE government did not respond.

As part of its work Alp Services also used the services of academic researchers. One was the Italian-American lecturer Lorenzo Vidino, director of the programme on extremism at George Washington University. In January 2018 Lorenzo Vidino, who writes a great deal about the Muslim Brotherhood, signed a consultancy contract with the Swiss company for several thousand euros.

“I often consult with entities such as law firms, consulting companies, PR firms, private companies, so this is not unusual for me (as many other scholars),” said Lorenzo Vidino, who said he did not know the identity of the ultimate client. “My relationship was with Alp and I have no idea what they did with my research,” he said. As far as he was concerned, the money that the private intelligence firm paid him did not compromise his “independence”.

'Expert' Roland Jacquard boasts to the Emiratis about his access to President Macron

Another consultant emerges at the heart of the relationship between Alp Services and the Emirati secret services, this one French: Roland Jacquard. This former journalist has long done the rounds of the television studios as an 'expert' on Islamist radicalism, thanks to his position as president of the Observatoire International du Terrorisme. In fact, according to Le Monde, behind this grandiose name lies an empty shell “with no publications, no website, no postal address and no legal status”, and whose sole member is apparently Roland Jacquard himself.

A man who enjoys stunts, in July 2010 Roland Jacquard produced in the studios of TV programme 'C à vous' what was supposedly a manual on how Al Qaeda protected itself from intelligence services on the internet. The following day the website Arrêt Sur Images revealed that this document was in fact simply a computer programming manual, one that could readily be downloaded.

During the same period a former official at France's external intelligence agency, the DGSE, wrote on his blog on Le Monde's website that Jacquard was a “national specialist in mouldy scoops”. In 2001 Roland Jacquard had revealed the number of a satellite phone which he said could be used to contact Al Qaeda's military leadership. This DGSE agent, who was still in post at the time, said that he had checked in the intelligence service's database and that in reality this was a number for a portable Inmarsat phone used by the Red Cross in the Pakistan-Afghan border zone.

Despite these setbacks, the consultant has a significant network of politicians, military personnel and diplomats. According to Mediapart's information, it was also he who brought in the Emirate secret services as a client to Alp Services, as well as other potential clients connected with Angola and Monaco.

As part of the contract with Alp Services Roland Jacquard himself wrote directly to the 842943@protonmail.com email address used by the Emirati agent Mohammed. In these emails he claimed to be supplying information that came from the security services and the Élysée, and even President Macron himself.

On October 30th 2020, he wrote that “EM” - Emmanuel Macron – had a telephone conversation with German chancellor Angela Merkel “yesterday, about Turkey”. At the time Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had launched a verbal assault on his French counterpart, going so far as to question his mental health. “The [non public] conversation was very tense,” claimed Roland Jacquard, who then explained that “Merkel decided to negotiate directly with Erdoğan and put pressure on many European countries to wait until December before imposing economic sanctions against Turkey”.

In another email, dated September 10th 2020, Jacquard told his Emirati contact that the previous week he had had a “private” meeting with advisors to President Macron, prime minister Jean Castex, interior minister Gérald Darmanin and justice minister Éric Dupond-Moretti in order to prepare “with them” a law against radical Islam. This was the law “against separatism” that was passed the following year.

Roland Jacquard told the Emirati agent that the French government was going to introduce the monitoring of associations that were potentially linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. President Macron publicly spoke about the preparations for this law a month later on October 2nd 2020 during a speech at Les Mureaux in the north-west suburbs of Paris. In his email Jacquard insisted that he had been invited to discuss this issue in early October, this time with President Macron in person.

In an email to the 842943@protonmail.com address on October 27th 2020, the consultant also claimed that he had “supplied” reports to the “minister of the interior” about a non-governmental organisation (NGO) targeted by prosecutors for its supposed links to the Islamist movement. “After a search, the NGO didn't want to give the computer codes,” he wrote. “They're now in prison and the French secret services are trying to obtain the codes.” What Roland Jacquard did not say was that this information had been published a week earlier in Le Parisien newspaper.

On October 31st 2020 Roland Jacquard told his Emirati contact that the following Monday, November 2nd, he had to go and work in the 'crisis centre' at the Élysée, though there is no evidence at all to corroborate this.

When asked about the consultant's claims, the Élysée said that it had “no knowledge of the events described”. Gérald Darmanin's and Éric Dupond-Moretti's ministerial offices went further: both ministries said they had had no contact with Roland Jacquard.

After several telephone conversations, Roland Jacquard ultimately decided he did not want to respond to Mediapart and threatened us with legal action. “I note that your information comes from a dedicated @protonmail.com address” which “has clearly been hacked, which constitutes a criminal offence” said his lawyer, Patrick Maisonneuve.

Alp Services, Alexandre Benalla and the UAE embassy

Another French figure, whose closeness to Emmanuel Macron is in his case undeniable, also crops up in the Alp Services firmament. Now based in Switzerland, Alexandre Benalla – who was President Macron's bodyguard and security consultant before being fired for assaulting demonstrators - has taken part in several events organised by Mario Brero's agency. According to Mediapart's information, the two men started to work together from 2018, after Benalla was dismissed from the Élysée.

President Macron's former security consultant does not stint in his praise for Mario Brero. “He's very charming, charismatic, professional. There aren't many firms who keep raising the bar in the area of economic intelligence. He remains the leader, the reference point, in continental Europe,” said Benalla.

Now working in private consultancy and the security sector, in particular in Africa, Alexandre Benalla acknowledges that “for complex requests that I couldn't handle or subcontract to others” he has “referred people to Mario Brero”. These were “businessmen or company bosses” whose names he declined to give. Alexandre Benalla said that he has never been paid by Alp. “I've done it out of friendship, and in the context of reciprocal professional exchanges of services,” he said. He said he did not know that the Swiss agency worked for the UAE.

However, the former member of Emmanuel Macron's presidential office has already been involved in another contract with the Emirates. As Mediapart has revealed, in the summer of 2021 he was involved in the setting up of a security team for the new Emirati ambassador in Paris, Hend al-Otaiba. Images showed Benalla standing in the background in a scooter helmet, supervising operations.

Benalla told us that he had “never been paid” nor did he have any “operational” role as part of that deal. He had simply been happy to recommend people who could work on this project to a “friend” - the person who had the Emirati contract. He then carried out an audit into the implementation of the security measures before “letting them stand on their own two feet”.

An intelligence memo on François Fillon

Another person who wrote to the 842943@protonmail.com address used by the Emirati spy Mohammed was the French journalist of Algerian origins Atmane Tazaghart, who is close to Roland Jacquard.

The former editor-in-chief of the Arabic section of the public broadcaster FRANCE 24, Tazaghart was dismissed in 2016 for troubling remarks he had made three years earlier on a pro-Iranian Lebanese television station. There he had described Western military intervention in Libya as a “war financed by the Zionists”. He later said he was the victim of a cabal orchestrated by a FRANCE 24 journalist close to the Muslim Brotherhood and won his subsequent case at an industrial tribunal.

Atmane Tazaghart later wrote articles for Marianne magazine and worked with the CEMO, a Parisian “research centre” that is today dormant, but which at the time published articles critical of the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar. It was run by Abdelrahim Ali, an Egyptian Member of Parliament close to that country's dictator Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. This ally of the UAE has ruled his country since the 2013 coup d'état which overthrew the Islamist president Mohamed Morsi, who was affiliated with the Brotherhood.

On December 18th 2019 Atmane Tazaghart sent an email headed “Fillon” to the 842943@protonmail.com address. It contained a memo about Nicolas Sarkozy's former prime minister François Fillon who was a candidate at the 2017 presidential election and whose political career ended after a 'fake jobs' affair involving his wife Penelope. In the message Atmane Tazaghart claimed he had “succeeded in gathering” information on supposed financial links between François Fillon and Qatar, without producing the slightest supporting evidence. He made the same accusations regarding a French diplomat, once again with no tangible evidence.

His Emirati contact was clearly very interested, and asked the journalist for additional information about the diplomat in question. Atmane Tazaghart replied to him on May 14th 2020: “My friend, I've already spoken to you about him in the report below on the subject of François Fillon. I'm going to send you a more detailed report tomorrow, god willing.”

Contacted by Mediapart, the former FRANCE 24 journalist was outraged that we had got hold of emails which he said came from computer hacking of which he had been the victim, and which he blamed on an individual close to the Muslim Brotherhood. “The emails that you mention come from my hacked data, obtained in an illegal manner, without my consent … The possession, transmission or divulging of this stolen data comes under the heading of receiving stolen goods and will be the object of legal proceedings.”

Atmane Tazaghart told us in writing that he “didn't want to comment on any detail or any information that comes from this hacking”, but he nonetheless agreed to do so on certain points.

The journalist said that he did not know the Emirati agent whom Mediapart has established uses the 842943@protonmail.com email address. He insisted this email address belonged to an Emirati research centre, TRENDS Research and Advisory, with whom he has done paid work since 2019.

TRENDS is run by Mohammed Abdullah Al-Ali, a “researcher and author” with close links to the Abu Dhabi authorities for whom he devised a “sophisticated system to monitor, evaluate, analyze and report on all UAE news published on both international and local journalism, in order to support decision-makers in the UAE”. Unsurprisingly, TRENDS devotes a significant number of its publications to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Atmane Tazaghart stated that his email about François Fillon was not intelligence work but simply a “summary note” that the Emirati research centre had asked him for “ahead of a forum”, in order to decide whether it was right to “invite or not” the former French prime minister. “It wasn't an investigation, there was nothing confidential or new in that thing … All the information had already been published” in the media, he said. This is despite the fact that there is no press article that mentions Qatari financing of François Fillon.

Atmane Tazaghart also said that he never sent a report on the diplomat mentioned earlier, contrary to what he had said he would do to his correspondent in May 2020.

The journalist's explanations raise questions. Nowhere does his name appear on the web page where TRENDS records the long list of foreign experts who work with the centre. That list features Lorenzo Vidino – the Italian-American lecturer paid by Alp Services – and also several French scholars, including the geopolitical expert Pascal Boniface, director of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs (IRIS).

When questioned by Mediapart, Pascal Boniface confirmed that he wrote an article for TRENDS, but said that he never wrote to his contacts at the centre on an anonymous Proton email address. “I spoke with them via their professional email addresses in their names,” he said.

Atmane Tazaghart replied that he goes into TRENDS' offices in Abu Dhabi “every two or three months”, in particular to contribute, along with other experts, to the 'Encyclopaedia of the Muslim Brotherhood' that the centre publishes.

He said that TRENDS uses an anonymous Proton email address and does not mention the names of the encyclopaedia's authors on its website for reasons of “discretion” and “security”, given the “threats that the researchers who work on problematic issues linked to Islam are exposed to”, and who are victims of “electronic attacks and smear campaigns”.

Does TRENDS really use this email address? Or, on top of its research activities, does this academic centre operate as a cover for Emirati secret service operations? Approached by Mediapart, TRENDS did not reply.

Was UAE behind the translation of a book by Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot?

The name of Atmane Tazaghart arises in another potentially troubling episode, linked to the French journalists Christian Chesnot (from public radio station France Inter) and Georges Malbrunot (of Le Figaro newspaper), the authors of several books on Qatar.

Their latest book 'Qatar Papers', published in April 2019 by publishers Michel Lafon, was based on a leak of documents from an NGO called Qatar Charity. This data had been stored on a USB drive and posted to Georges Malbrunot at Le Figaro, as the journalist himself stated at the book's publication. The documents show in minute detail Qatar's funding of 140 projects involving mosques, Islamic centres and schools across Europe, mostly initiated by organisations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Shortly after the book's publication Atmane Tazaghart contacted Michel Lafon and in June 2019 agreed a contract with the publisher to buy foreign language rights to the book with a view to publishing Arabic and English versions. The journalist did not pay the money himself: he signed on behalf of the United Kingdom-based company Countries Reports Publishing Ltd.

However, it turns out that Countries Reports Publishing Ltd (CRP) is a front company whose headquarters is the address of a company registration service provider based at a house in the northern suburbs of London. CRP has no offices, no website, no telephone number and employs just one person. The true beneficiary of this company hides behind a figurehead, Thomas Ashman, who administers dozens of other companies.

Where does the money that CRP paid to buy the foreign rights to 'Qatar Papers' come from? “You'd have to ask Atmane, but I imagine it's people from Dubai or Abu Dhabi,” Georges Malbrunot told Mediapart. Christian Chesnot added: “Georges and I weren't really fooled because in fact we knew that it was probably money from the Emirates, even Saudi Arabia.” The two journalists, and their publisher Michel Lafon, said however that they had not looked into the company CRP and the origin of its money.

Christian Chesnot said he only knew Atmane Tazaghart “a little” and added: “[He is] very anti-Muslim Brotherhood … I knew that he was close to the Saudis, to the Emiratis.” His colleague from Le Figaro added: “Of course we understood that Atmane probably, very certainly, had links with the Emirates.”

However, the two journalists still gave the go-ahead for the sale of the foreign language rights on the basis that they had written the book “in a completely independent way”. Georges Malbrunot said: “The fact that information that is not favourable to Qatar is used by the Emirates, that's fair game, and it's the same in the other direction. We're not naïve, we've covered this region for 35 years, information hostile to one country is exploited by their enemy.” He added: “That didn't pose a problem for us provided the translations were faithful and that there was no distortion of the information.”

The fact remains that as authors of a book critical of Qatar the two journalists personally received some of the money paid by CRP, even though they suspected that the money came from the UAE. Did this pose an ethical problem? The journalists did not respond to questions on this.

Atmane Tazaghart refused to tell Mediapart who is hidden behind the UK-based front company. Contacted via the company registration firm that hosts it, Countries Reports Publishing Ltd and the frontman who administers it did not reply.

The mysterious Countries Reports Publishing Ltd also funded Atmane Tazaghart's professional activities. In July 2019 he launched a website, Global Watch Analysis, which in addition publishes a magazine called 'Écran de Veille' ('Screensaver'). These publications, which describe themselves as dedicated to “geostrategic forsight (sic), security monitoring, counter-terrorism” and “resistance to extremism”, devote a large number of their articles to criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Moreover, between July and November 2019 the company that published Global Watch Analysis was the front company Countries Reports Publishing Ltd. This was later replaced by a French company called Global Watch Analysis (GWA) which belongs to Atmane Tazaghart and his wife. But according to the website La Lettre A the mysterious UK-based company CRP pays GWA 46,000 euros a year.

Mediapart has not been able to verify this information because GWA files its accounts with a confidentiality declaration which means they are not publicly accessible. According to Atmane Tazaghart this is done not to be “opaque” but in order to “protect” the company from “multiple threats” from Islamists.

On top of taking over responsibility for the website with the same name, the French company Global Watch Analysis is also a publishing house. It was ultimately GWA, in agreement with the front company CRP, which published some of the English and Arabic editions of the book by Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot. The publication of the English version was promoted at a press conference in January 2020 in an hotel not far from the Champs-Élysées in Paris, with the authors and Atmane Tazaghart present.

By coincidence, GWA also published the French version of the latest work on the Muslim Brotherhood by Lorenzo Vidino, the academic who has been paid by the private intelligence agency Alp Services.

In April 2022 Global Watch Analysis published 'La Menace mondiale des Frères musulmans' ('The Global Threat of the Muslim Brotherhood'). This was a translation of a report by the United States Congress on the issue, accompanied by analysis from several experts such as Roland Jacquard, who is linked with Alp Services and who, like Atmane Tazaghart, corresponded with the 842943@protonmail.com email address.

When questioned, Atmane Tazaghart said he had no link with Alp Services and that he had simply chosen to get commentary on the report from “people who are the best on the subject in France” including Roland Jacquard, whom he has known for a long time and whose work he likes.

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• The original French version of this investigation can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter

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