The title of the document sent to the secret services of the United Arab Emirates was “A continental Mafia-like network”, and below it was an infographic listing of the names of hundreds of individuals across Europe, linked with arrows, who supposedly constituted a network of radical Islamists.
The alarming document was the work of private Swiss intelligence firm Alp Services, some of whose dirty tricks operations on behalf of Abu Dhabi have already been exposed by Mediapart and The New Yorker magazine. But more shocking revelations were to follow, as revealed by “Abu Dhabi Secrets”, a series of investigations based on confidential documents hacked from Alp Services. Mediapart obtained access to the hacked files, which it shared with its media partners in the journalistic consortium European Investigative Collaborations (EIC).
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The documents passed to Mediapart show that between 2017 and 2020, Alp Services gave the intelligence services of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) the names of more than 1,000 individuals and more than 400 organisations supposedly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in 18 European countries. These included 120 organisations and more than 200 individuals in France.
The list was drawn up outside of any legal framework, and many of those named have no connection with radical Islamism. Among these in France is Benoît Hamon, a former minister who stood as the Socialist Party’s candidate in presidential elections in 2017; Samia Ghali, a former senator and now deputy mayor of Marseille, and Rokhaya Diallo, an author, filmmaker and anti-racist activist. Also named is France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, a prestigious and public body; the radical-left party La France Insoumise, and the online journal Le Bondy Blog, which centres on reporting on issues in working-class suburban districts.
Also on the list is a Mediapart journalist. On discovering this, Mediapart announced it would file a formal, criminal law complaint, and other victims indicated that they also intended to file complaints.
In the Alps Services documents, some individuals are placed at the same level as convicted terrorists linked to Al Qaeda. Phone numbers and personal details are included for some of those named.
All are described as close to, or supporters of, the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organisation regarded as a terrorist organisation by the UAE, a dictatorship that suppresses any opposition, far from the image of modernity that surrounds Dubai, one of the seven emirates that make up the Gulf state.
Mario Brero, an old hand in nefarious investigations
Upon learning that their names feature on the Alp Services list, the reaction of the victims ranged between astonishment, anger, and fear. “It’s dismaying,” commented Benoît Hamon. “I’m not going to let myself be had,” said Samia Ghali. “The French justice system and the authorities must investigate and give us an explanation.”
“I’ll ask myself questions before going to the Emirates,” said a targeted academic researcher with the CNRS, who requested his name was withheld.
The man behind the listing is Mario Brero, 77, a veteran private investigator and head of Geneva-based firm Alp Services, which he created more than 30 years ago.
Contacted by Mediapart, he refused to answer questions on the details of the operation. His lawyers in Geneva, Christian Lüscher and Yoann Lambert, said the documents obtained by Mediapart “are in part falsified” and that “most of the points that constitute the premises of [Mediapart’s] questions are based on erroneous suppositions and/or implausible wild imaginings”. The lawyers reproached the use of “stolen data” and threatened to bring legal proceedings against Mediapart in Switzerland.
On August 7th 2017, Mario Brero and one of his collaborators were in a plush Abu Dhabi hotel as the hosts of an Emirati secret services agent whose first name is Matar. “Dear Matar,” wrote Brero, “we are in Abu Dhabi, in the magnificent suites of the Fairmont. Thank you for your hospitality. We are at your total disposition.”
For a man whose profession requires secrecy, Brero showed little caution. As well as photos of himself sipping a drink beside a swimming pool, he took pictures of his contact agent, a man, who appears to be in his forties, with a carefully trimmed beard and wearing a kandura, the traditional white robe worn in the Gulf region.
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That evening, during dinner at the hotel’s restaurant, Brero presented Matar with a project prepared by his agency two weeks earlier. The proposal was a vast operation “to map” and then “to discredit” the UAE’s enemies, “by disseminating compromising information in a discreet and massive manner”.
Detectives from the Swiss firm made several trips to Abu Dhabi in 2017, when Matar led them to meet his boss, Ali Saeed Al-Neyadi, who was in charge of the operations. Neyadi was the head of an Emirati administration for managing natural disasters and crises, but in reality the body, which works under the umbrella of the UAE’s Supreme Council for National Security, is also an arm for special operations.
Meanwhile, Brero told the Emiratis that Alp Services worked for “wealthy people, governments, heads of state, multinationals and legal firms”, while promising to put to work his network of journalists, consultants and investigators.
He was clearly convincing, since the first contract between the two parties was signed in 2017. According to the documents obtained by Mediapart, between 2017 and 2020, Alp Services received at least 5.7 million euros from an Emirati research centre called Al Ariaf, which serves as a cover for the UAE’s secret services.
Reports, cartographic documents and code names
The operations were given the codenames Arnica and Crocus, in a reference to flowers that grow on Swiss mountains, and their targets were Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood – two obsessions for Abu Dhabi. Brero knew how to exploit the sentiments of his clients, proposing missions, in simplistic terms, to “expose” and “destroy” the networks of the Muslim Brotherhood by “influencing the public and politicians”.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by schoolteacher and imam Hassan al-Banna, partly in reaction to Britain’s colonisation of the country. It preached a political Islam, with anti-Western views, and promoted traditional Muslim mores, notably on the place of women in society and the wearing of the veil.
The UAE authorities are not opposed to the Brotherhood for reasons of ideology. Rather, the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 which led to the elections, in Tunisia and Egypt, of presidents who were members of the Brotherhood, made some emirs in the Gulf region afraid that their own regimes would in turn be overthrown. Qatar’s support for the Brotherhood accentuated the conflict, which reached its height over the period between mid-2017 and early 2021 when the UAE and Saudi Arabia led a coalition that severed diplomatic relations with Qatar and mounted a land, sea and air blockade against it.
It was within this geopolitical context that hundreds of Europeans became victims of Abu Dhabi’s schemes and the practices of Alp Services.
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The Swiss firm produced dozens of reports about individuals, along with country-by-country mapping illustrations. Their presentations reflected the taste of the firm’s clients, with blood-like splashes of red, a map of Europe coloured with the Muslim Brotherhood’s logo, and references to the “mafia”.
Abu Dhabi could subsequently place further orders for attacks against chosen targets, which would be charged between 20,000 euros and 50,000 euros per person chosen. The methods used included press campaigns, the modification of Wikipedia pages, opinion articles published under false profiles and manoeuvres to lead banks to close down a client’s accounts. That was what happened to Hazim Nada, an American based in Switzerland from where he ran a commodities-trading business, and whose company went bankrupt thanks to an operation by Alp Services.
One of the countries where Alp Services was most active is France. Among the reports it produced was a cartographic document entitled “MB in France, December 2020” which listed 191 individuals and 125 organisations.
But a close study reveals that in reality the contents are a jumble of names artificially linked to public personalities.
In the document, religious personalities and activists from denominational associations are associated with anti-racist militants who include Rokhaya Diallo, but also three officials from an association called Coexister which is dedicated to encouraging young people to engage in inter-religious dialogue and to adopt tolerance. In 2016 it won the Secularity Prize of the French Republic (prix de la Laïcité de la République française), a yearly award presented in the presence of the French prime minister.
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Also on the list is former socialist senator Samia Ghali, now deputy mayor of Marseille, and journalist Taha Bouhafs, a militant of radical-left party, La France Insoumise, along with Hakim El Karoui, a contributing advisor on Islamic affairs for the Institut Montaigne, a right-leaning think-tank, and Mennel Ibtissem, a former contestant on the French version of reality TV singing competition The Voice.
A very diverse list of targets
Names of academics in France include two researchers with France’s prestigious School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS,) and three researchers from the equally prestigious National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). The CNRS itself, as an organisation, is also named.
Meanwhile, supposed members of a nebulous Islamist network among the media include a reporter from Mediapart, and also, as organisations, the online magazines Bondy Blog and Orient XXI, which specialises in reporting on the Arab world. The founder of XXI, Alain Gresh, a former editor of Le Monde diplomatique, is among named individuals. “The Emirates are one of the worst dictatorships and it’s not astonishing that they be clients for a conspiracy-theory vision of an Islam that had penetrated everything, including the media,” said Gresh. “It is the Je suis partout of modern times,” he added, referring to the far-right, anti-Semitic journal published during the Nazi occupation of France.
Supposed French “political supporters” of the Muslim Brotherhood include Benoît Hamon, a former minister who was the Socialist Party’s candidate in presidential elections in 2017. He is joined in the “mafia-like” web by La France Insoumise party.
Concerning Belgium, the Alp Services report names climate, environment and sustainable development minister Zakia Khattabi as being part the Brotherhood’s network. Informed of the document, her party, Ecolo, described it as “scandalous”, adding that “the results are manifestly so absurd that they deserve neither comment nor attention”.
In its document focussing on Brotherhood supporters in Britain, Alp Services names the former leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, while another concerning Norway lists Swedish and Danish individuals.
As to the question of how Alp Services could have been engaged in work of such poor quality, one former employee of the firm said: “Mario Brero sold the client dreams. The information was presented as being very secret, whereas 80% of it came from public sources.”
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Alp Services clearly selected names on the basis of simple rumours or controversies. What those who Mediapart contacted all had in common was the fact that they were targeted in the mainstream media, and on social media, for their supposed connivance with radical Islam.
During the French Socialist Party’s primaries to select its 2017 presidential election candidate, Benoît Hamon was criticised by his rival, former prime minister Manuel Valls, over the issue. “Since my candidature for the presidentials, I cannot publish a single message on social media without being attacked with fantasies and absurd accusations of connivance with Islamism,” said Hamon.
Samia Ghali expressed outraged surprise upon learning that she had been associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. “It [the Muslim Brotherhood] is the contrary of all that I am and my commitments,” she commented. After further thought, she remembered having been targeted by criticism from a former Marseille secondary school headmaster over her participation in the inauguration of a private Muslim school in the city, the lycée Ibn-Khaldoun.
“It perhaps comes from that, but it’s nonsense,” said Ghali. “The establishment is under contract with the state [editor’s note, meaning it follows the same curriculum as state schools]. I was brought up by the nuns and my daughters are in the Catholic private-sector [schools]. I don’t see why I, as an elected representative, would not go to the inauguration of an establishment which is recognised by the national education system.”
Singer Mennel Ibtissem, who was identified by the Swiss firm as a figure of Muslim Brotherhood ideology, was included in one of its reports because of a controversy over her appearance on the French version of The Voice in 2018 when she sang wearing a turban – which she no longer wears. She was forced to step down from the programme after the publication of Tweets she once posted which included conspiracy-theory comments about the murderous Islamist terrorist attacks in Nice and Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray in July 2016. “I love France,” she said later, adding that she condemns violence. She said she wrote the posts on Twitter in a state of “anger” to criticise “the lumping together of terrorism and religion”.
Contacted by Mediapart, Ibtissem was indignant at having been associated with the Muslim Brotherhood in a document addressed to a foreign power. “It’s nonsense, I never said nor did anything that could lead to believe that I have a political or religious commitment,” she said.
Bondy Blog, an online citizens’ journal reporting on issues in working-class suburban districts whose inhabitants are largely from immigrant backgrounds, believes the Alp Services accusation originated from criticism voiced by Gilles Kepel, a French academic and political scientist, specialised in the contemporary Arab world. “Gilles Kepel had accused us in 2016, in a totally unjust and unfounded manner, of being in the hands of a “Brotherhood fringe”, after we invited him to an evening debating event,” said Sarah Ichou, editorial director of the website.
That same year, in an interview with news magazine l’Obs, Kepel, director of the Middle East and Mediterranean chair at the elite École normale supérieure, launched a scathing attack against what he called “Islamo-leftists”.
French political scientist and sociologist Vincent Geisser, who is a researcher with the CNRS, also figures on the Alp Services cartographic document handed to the UAE. Geisser is notably the author of a book entitled La Nouvelle Islamophobie (The new Islamophobia) and was publicly criticised by the polemicists Caroline Fourest and Mohamed Sifaoui, who champion a “combatant secularity”. Sifaoui is today caught up in the scandal over payments made by a government-funded body to counter “hate and separatist speech”.
“That an authoritarian country stoops to this game of files and surveillance, it’s not surprising,” said Geisser. “On the other hand, that their security services find relays in Europe and Switzerland for their operations, that is the real scandal.”
Other reports by the Swiss firm on individuals and organisations are more thorough and pertinent. But whether it be serious or fantasist, the work of Alp Services appears to be out of bounds from a legal standpoint.
Under French law, performing “intelligence with a foreign power” and recording information for that purpose is a criminal offence. In Switzerland, where Alp Services is based, any activity carried out on behalf of a foreign state must be declared to the foreign affairs ministry. Questioned about the activities of Alp Services, the ministry said it had received “no declaration whereby a foreign state was the demander or final addressee”.
Some victims alerted by Mediapart to the fact that their names appeared in the Swiss firm’s cartographic documents asked for their names not to be published. “It’s too risky,” said one. “Even if your article underlines the absurdity of the process, some will continue to say that there’s no smoke without fire.”
That was also the wish of the Mediapart journalist accused in the documents sent to the UAE of acting as a communicator for the Muslim Brotherhood. “As a victim, via one of its journalists, of the creation of [personal] files, as illegal as absurd, made by a shadowy agency working for the United Arab Emirates, Mediapart will obviously lodge a formal complaint,” said Mediapart’s publishing editor, Edwy Plenel. “In the current French political and media context, marked by the rise of far-right intolerances in both speech and acts, to give such a defamatory label to a journalist does not only harm his reputation but also places his safety in jeopardy.”
Several of those on the Alp Services list told Mediapart that they will file formal complaints. “I’m going to call my lawyer, and question the government which is supposed to protect its nationals,” said Samia Ghali, who was still a senator when she was targeted by the Swiss agency. “Things won’t stop here.”
“I won’t let myself be messed around,” said Taha Bouhafs. “If one doesn’t take legal action every time one is insulted it ends up on Wikipedia pages. These attacks sully our reputations and cause us professional harm.”
Others, meanwhile, fear what action the UAE authorities might eventually take against them after being listed as close to what the Gulf state considers to be a terrorist organisation. What use the UAE has made of the information remains unknown, as also what might befall the individuals named in the Alp services documents if they travelled to Dubai.
Contacted for comment about those and other issues, no reply was received from the UAE government, nor agent Matar, nor his superior Ali Saeed Al-Neyadi.
In the United Arab Emirates, those with opinions which are deemed to be critical of the authorities are punished with prison terms. Demonstrations are prohibited. At least 41 political opponents continue to be held in detention despite having served their prison sentences , on the grounds that they have adopted “extremist thoughts”. In 2021, an investigation by the NGO Forbidden Stories revealed how the UAE targeted political opponents using the Pegasus surveillance spyware which, among other things, can hack into mobile phones to steal data and listen into conversations.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse