SPY GAMES

Ex-CIA Officer Used a Honeypot, Fake Journo to Help Qatar Spy on Soccer Officials, Report Says

Kevin Chalker is said to have kept frighteningly close tabs on not only rival bid teams and officials in charge of picking the World Cup host country, but also critics of Qatar.

A former CIA officer embarked on a ruthless years-long spying operation targeting soccer officials to help Qatar secure and keep the rights to host the 2022 World Cup, the Associated Press reports. Citing hundreds of internal documents and interviews with former associates, the AP reports that Kevin Chalker, a former CIA officer who now works as a private contractor, kept frighteningly close tabs on not only rival bid teams and officials in charge of picking the host country, but also critics of Qatar inside FIFA. He reportedly went so far as to employ a honeypot to monitor a target on Facebook, and used someone posing as a photojournalist to conduct surveillance work on targets connected to a rival nation’s FIFA bid.

“The time for half-measures is over and serious consideration needs to be given to how important the 2022 World Cup is to Qatar,” a project document for his company Global Risk Advisors declared in 2014, according to the AP. The company is said to have promised “unique, non-traditional capabilities against a wide-ranging set of targets.” Chalker has claimed some of the documents cited in the AP report were forgeries and said in a statement that he and his companies would not “ever engage in illegal surveillance.”