Intelligence liaison under scrutiny, Part II: Qatar and cryptodiplomacy.

Intelligence is often regarded as encompassing four main disciplines; collection, analysis, counterintelligence and covert action. Liaison relationships can encompass all of these.

Last week’s piece on criticism of Britain’s sigint relationship with Israel largely focused on collection. In Israel itself, however, it is intelligence liaison as covert action that has come under scrutiny in recent days, as the New York Times reported on 10 December.

Just weeks before Hamas launched the deadly Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, the head of Mossad arrived in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting with Qatari officials.

For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them.¹

Anything that governments can do overtly, they can do covertly, and diplomacy is often a prime candidate, particularly when governments want to speak to official enemies, or to states with whom they do not have official relations, as Israel and Qatar do not.

In this case, the veneer of secrecy has not been thick enough to protect the Netanyahu government from criticism in the wake of the attacks. Yet even as the Qatari relationship comes under scrutiny, it has emerged as the key channel for ceasefire and hostage negotiations.

A number of intelligence chiefs have been among the main participants. Alongside Mossad chief David Barnea, they include the US Director of Central Intelligence, Bill Burns and the head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service (EGIS), Abbas Kamel.²

Burns is something of a unique figure: as the only career State Department official to head the CIA, he has made the role of intelligence diplomat his own.

Yet mixing diplomacy with intelligence has its complications. In October, the New York Times reported that Abbas Kamel had several meetings with US Senator Robert Menendez, who briefed him about his colleagues’ concerns on human rights in Egypt. Menendez was subsequently indicted for acting as an agent of the Egyptian Government.³

Kamel is nevertheless a key interlocutor on Gaza, reviving a role played by his predecessors. In 2006, then EGIS chief Omar Suleiman attempted to mediate a ceasefire between Palestinian factions in the conflict that erupted after Israeli withdrawal from the Strip. That effort failed to prevent the civil war in which Hamas wrested control from Egypt’s allies in the Palestinian Authority.⁴

Owen Sirrs’ history of Egyptian intelligence draws some conclusions from this episode which seem apposite today.

The role of General Intelligence as a would-be peacemaker in Gaza highlights the limitations of cryptodiplomacy in resolving highly complex, seemingly intractable political problems like the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. While EGIS officers could mediate local crises and defuse some flare-ups, they lacked the political, economic and security clout to impose durable, long-term solutions. As the events of 2006 in Gaza demonstrated, EGIS’s efforts to create a PA security force capable of policing Hamas were no more than a house of cards.⁵

Cryptodiplomacy can lead to bigger things - the Northern Ireland peace process is one example, but For the Netanyahu government at least, the Doha channel seems to be little more than an exercise in crisis management.

Other players may be more ambitious, but many of the political formulas in play are reminiscent of those of Suleiman’s day, and it is not clear that the political will behind them is any greater now, even as the conflict itself has deepened.

1. Mark Mazzetti and Ronen Bergman, ‘Buying Quiet’: Inside the Israeli Plan That Propped Up Hamas, New York Times, 10 December 2023.

2. Julian E. Barnes and Edward Wong, C.I.A. Director Arrives in Qatar for Talks on Hostage Releases, New York Times, 28 November 2023.

3. Mark Mazzetti and Vivian Yee, Behind a Senator’s Indictments, a Foreign Spy Service Works Washington, New York Times, 13 October 2023.

4. Owen L. Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service: A history of the mukhabarat, 1910–2009, Routledge, 2010, p.185.

5. Owen L. Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service: A history of the mukhabarat, 1910–2009, Routledge, 2010, p.185.