CLASS 11: IT'S NOT JUST RUSSIA!

HOW MOROCCO AND QATAR BOUGHT THE EUROPEAN UNION (ALLEGEDLY)

I know I said last class that I would be posting a third class on Russian influence operations aimed at US elections. And I will. Just not today. I thought we’d take a little break from Russia (and from Trump!) and start looking at examples of malign influence operations involving some other countries. I think it’s important to do so in order to keep our eyes on the big picture. Despite my focus on Russia, that country is hardly the only perpetrator of these types of operations, and certainly not the only country we need to be wary of. So today, we’re going to dig into the wrongly named scandal Qatargate, which actually began with actions from the very top of Morocco’s foreign intelligence service, the DGED.

MOROCCO

Located on the grounds of the Royal Palace in Rabat, Morocco, the Royal College has specialized in educating young princes and princesses of the Alawite Dynasty since the 1940s. The school opens a class for each senior member of the royal family, and in 1973, the school welcomed a young Mohammed VI, the eldest son and heir apparent of Morocco’s King Hassan II.

One of Mohammed’s (very few) classmates was Yassine Mansouri, the son of a religious professor and preacher. Mansouri and the future monarch were chummy, by all accounts. Of course, the small class size and exclusivity were meant to help forge such bonds.

When Mohammed VI ascended the throne after his father’s death, in 1999, Mansouri was serving in the Ministry of Information. He moved then to the Ministry of Interior and in 2005 was named the head of the General Directorate for Studies and Documentation, the somewhat Orwellian name for Morocco’s external intelligence service, known as the DGED for its initials in French. The DGED answers directly to the king.

Fast forward to, well, we don’t know exactly when, but Belgian security officials received a tip off from an allied intelligence service warning that a criminal organization in Brussels was using a group of European parliamentarians to help push pro-Morocco policies in Europe. By April 2022, Belgium’s security services believed the criminal group posed a "serious threat to the country’s domestic security and to the continuity of the democratic and constitutional order."

So much so, in fact, that they sought permission to use highly intrusive surveillance techniques, allowing them to listen to individuals in their own homes.

One of those individuals was Pier Antonio Panzeri, an Italian politician and former member of the European parliament. (It’s a testament to just how grave investigators thought the threat was that they were allowed to surveil a former member of parliament.)

One day, while Panzeri was out, investigators went into his house, where they found 380,000 euros in a suitcase under his bed and an additional 320,000 euros in a safe.

Totally normal to have 700,000 euros just, like, lost in the couch cushions, right?

To understand how Panzeri got to this point—with Belgian agents secretly sniffing through his stuff—we need to meet Mohamed Belahrech, codename: M118. Belahrech is an intelligence officer with the DGED, working under the king’s friend Mansouri. He’s rather known in intelligence circles in Europe. I know that sounds weird, since intelligence officers are supposed to be undercover, but Belahrech had actually worked with some European intelligence services, while at the same time also being investigated by some of them. Ah, the murky world of intelligence.