Host to the Muslim Brotherhood—and a U.S. Air Base

The U.S.’s entanglement with the Arab world began in the early 1800s with American naval battles against the Barbary pirates off the coast of North Africa. The Al Thani family, which now rules Qatar, was just a minor tribe over most of the past two centuries, dwarfed by the Al Saud family in modern-day Saudi Arabia, the Al Khalifa clan in today’s Bahrain, and the Al Nahyan family in Abu Dhabi.

As recently as the 1980s, diplomats and businessmen described Doha as a barren place with stifling heat. The economy was fueled largely by pearl farming. The Al Thanis promoted a conservative brand of Islam that left its women covered and the country largely dry of alcohol. From a distance, the only discernible building on Doha’s waterfront promenade was the pyramid-shaped Sheraton hotel.

“I mean, sleepy doesn’t really do it justice,” Sir John Jenkins, a former British diplomat focused on the Middle East, told The Free Press about his visits then. “There was nothing going on.”

Qatar’s economic fortunes soared when American and European energy giants, such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, developed the technology to exploit what turned out to be one of the largest natural gas reserves in the world. Qatar began exporting liquefied natural gas to Asia in 1997. Per-capita gross domestic product is now $121,610, among the highest in the world, compared with $89,110 in the U.S., according to the International Monetary Fund.

Money gave the Al Thanis an opportunity to follow the same playbook long used by Persian Gulf rulers: seeking a foreign patron to guarantee their security. Instead of the Ottoman Empire and Great Britain, Qatar turned toward Washington.

In the early 2000s, Qatar successfully wooed the U.S. away from the air base in Saudi Arabia, where it had been for more than a decade after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. Qatar poured more than $1 billion into the runways, barracks, and hangars of Al Udeid. The facility can house thousands of American troops and is also a regional base for the UK’s Royal Air Force.

Of all of Qatar’s investments in the U.S., Al Udeid is widely agreed to be the shrewdest and most impactful. Steve Witkoff said this March that the Qataris “pay for every dollar of it,” more than $8 billion since 2013. As a result, Qatar has become an indispensable part of the U.S. national security system. Al Udeid is the Pentagon’s primary logistical hub in the Middle East—and the launch point for many U.S. military strikes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

It was a brilliant move for a country looking to shield itself from its far more powerful neighbors. These include Qatar’s Sunni rivals in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and Iran’s revolutionary Shi’ite clerics. Qatar and Iran share a massive offshore gas field, giving Qatar another incentive to align with Washington. And the air base bought Qatar critical protection.

Qatar’s massive subsidies of the air base have also helped win the Al Thanis praise from the Pentagon to Congress to the White House. “You’ve been a great ally, and you’ve helped us with a magnificent military installation and military airport, the likes of which people haven’t seen in a long while,” President Trump told the Emir of Qatar at a dinner at the Treasury Department in 2019.

In 2022, President Biden declared Qatar a “major non-NATO ally” of the U.S., easing the way for more arms sales and greater U.S. military support. Last year, the two countries agreed to extend the lease on Al Udeid for another decade and discussed the possibility of joint-weapons production. “They’ve been an extraordinary partner to us, and Al Udeid Air Base remains a critical juncture for us in the Middle East,” said retired U.S. Army General Joseph Votel, who led the U.S. Central Command in the region from 2016 to 2019.

American diplomats have also expressed gratitude to Qatar for serving as a middleman between the U.S. and adversaries such as Iran, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Tehran’s proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah. That role has proven especially important during negotiations to release Israeli and American hostages seized by Hamas in 2023 and imprisoned in the Gaza Strip. In March, Steve Witkoff described Qatar’s leaders as “people who don’t have the old sensibilities, people who want to do business.”

But the intertwined relationship is also a source of growing concern among some current and former officials in the U.S. and Europe. They worry that, especially through the air base, the Al Thanis have far too much influence over Pentagon military strategy and operations at a time when a U.S. or Israeli conflict with Iran is a growing possibility, including potential strikes on Tehran’s nuclear sites. Indeed, maintaining the air base in Qatar comes with a significant string attached: The Gulf monarchy has said it would oppose military strikes on Iran from its soil.

Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who has studied terrorism and insurgency for almost 50 years, publicly denounced Qatar’s long history of financing Hamas after it massacred 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 250 more on October 7, 2023.

Hoffman told The Free Press that he soon heard from a “former very senior official” at the Defense Department, who offered some feedback from inside the Pentagon. “That comment wasn’t appreciated about Qatar, because we can’t do anything that endangers the air base,” Hoffman said he was told.

“Qatar has it both ways. They play both sides of the fence,” Hoffman said to The Free Press.

“I can’t think of a single dispute or conflict in the Middle East or Afghanistan that the Qataris made better,” said Jenkins, the former British diplomat. He cited the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, despite years of mediation, by Doha’s support of Islamist militias and political parties in Syria, Libya, and Egypt.

Most troubling to Qatar’s critics is its deep, abiding relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, which was born in Egypt in the 1920s and later inspired militant organizations like al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and Hamas. A crackdown in the 1950s led to the migration of many Muslim Brotherhood leaders to the Persian Gulf states, including Qatar.

The Al Thanis welcomed them. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely seen as the Muslim Brotherhood’s most important spiritual and religious leader until his 2022 death, hosted a talk show titled Sharia and Life on the government-owned Al Jazeera broadcasting network. His religious edicts justified suicide bombings, condemned homosexuality, and rallied Muslims to fight occupying U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Martyrdom is a heroic act of choosing to suffer death in the cause of Allah, and that’s why it’s considered by most Muslim scholars as one of the greatest forms of jihad,” Qaradawi declared. In 2017, he was designated a terrorist by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt, but not by Qatar.

That year, the same four countries also imposed a trade and travel embargo on Qatar, demanding that it sever all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. They told Qatar to stop its global television channel, Al Jazeera, from airing content that they saw as a threat to their stability.

The crisis eventually faded, partly through U.S. mediation. But Qatar continues to be an Islamist safe haven and to fund Al Jazeera, which aired in January a documentary titled What Is Hidden Is Greater. The film featured exclusive, embedded footage of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, as he evaded Israeli troops in the Gaza Strip. It also documented top military official Mohammed Deif planning attacks on Israeli targets alongside other Hamas terrorists.

“Why would you welcome into your country these forces that could be potentially destabilizing?” asked Steven Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, about whether the haven Qatar provides to extremists is purely politics or a sign of religious devotion. “That’s where I go back and forth. And I think: ‘Well, maybe they are true believers.’ ”

What’s beyond dispute is that Qatar’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood projects its power across the Muslim world from Jordan to Indonesia. “The Qataris are using Islamism as a form of political leverage,” said Magnus Ranstorp, a longtime expert on Islamic movements and terrorism and a strategic adviser at the Swedish Defense University.

In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Arab states launched a formal economic siege of Qatar, accusing the country of supporting terrorism and extremism and threatening the stability of their regimes. They demanded that Doha end its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera. The Al Thanis saw the siege as an existential threat to their rule, Qatari officials have said.

The operation included attempts to sever Doha’s external sea and air routes, and there were rumblings of a Saudi cross-border ground invasion. Qatari nationals also worried about food shortages, necessitating emergency supplies from Iran at one point. As a result, Qatari royals and leaders flocked to Washington to demand that the first Trump administration intervene and negotiate an end to the conflict.

The Al Thanis also initiated one of the most aggressive lobbying and influence operations ever targeted on Washington. This transformed Qatar from a minor meddler in U.S. politics and public policy into a powerhouse that is both courted and feared.

Every foreign government employs lobbyists in the U.S. What is extraordinary about Qatar is its number of lobbyists, how much they’re paid, and their ability to operate within both political parties and across so much of elite Washington.

The U.S. government found that in 2021 alone, Qatar employed 35 registered lobbyists and public-relations firms at a total cost of more than $51 million. In comparison, the total expenditures for the UAE were $35 million. For Saudi Arabia, they were $25 million. The government hasn’t released newer totals.

To get a more complete picture, The Free Press sifted through every filing it could find since the start of 2017 by lobbyists and public-relations firms that reported being paid by Qatar. The Free Press calculated that Qatar has spent $225 million since then, or an average of more than $25 million a year.

*NOTE: PAYMENTS IN 2025 ARE THROUGH APRIL 10. DATES REFLECT WHEN PAYMENTS WERE REPORTED TO THE GOVERNMENT. (SOURCE: GOVERNMENT FILINGS)

Lawyers who specialize in foreign lobbying told The Free Press that these numbers are just part of the picture. Governments aren’t required to tell the Justice Department how much they spend on things like think tanks or hosting U.S. political and congressional delegations. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Qatar targeted a list of 250 people close to Trump aimed at “getting into his head as much as possible,” in the words of a lobbyist involved in the effort.

One of Qatar’s most loyal allies in the U.S. is former congressman Jim Moran. In his 24 years on Capitol Hill, the Democrat from Virginia played an important role in foreign affairs. He protested against the Sudanese government, opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and stood out for criticizing what he called the corrupting power of the pro-Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

In 2017, Moran was the headliner at a National Press Club event titled “Fighting the Israel Lobby in Congress.” He and a fellow former congressman claimed Israel had the power to block the creation of an independent Palestinian state, undermine Lebanese sovereignty, and run out members of Congress who didn’t bow to Israel’s will. Most provocatively, Moran also said that AIPAC and Jewish Americans were critical players behind the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq.

“If the leaders of the Jewish community—particularly the pro-Israeli community—had a different attitude and were willing to get more engaged against the war, I don’t think we’d have a war,” Moran said.

A few months later, Moran signed on as one of Qatar’s lobbyists in Washington.

In coordination with other Qatari-paid lobbyists aligned with Republicans and Democrats, Moran began to promote a network of nongovernmental organizations and think tanks in support of Qatar’s positions on international affairs. Those institutions were often sharply critical of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel.

Public records show that Qatar also funded prominent, Washington-based think tanks to the tune of at least $9 million from 2019 to 2023. They included the Brookings Institution ($6 million), the Stimson Center ($2.3 million), RAND ($300,000), and the Middle East Institute ($380,000). In comparison, the UAE has spent $16.7 million on think tanks, while Saudi Arabia has spent more than $2.1 million.

After the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, Moran met in person with dozens of Democratic and Republican politicians on Capitol Hill to discuss “Qatar’s role as U.S. ally in the Middle East” and the country’s position “vis-à-vis [the] Middle East Conflict,” his lobbying records show. The big names included Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

A week after meeting with Jeffries, Moran donated $2,000 to a political action committee supporting Jeffries’ reelection campaign, according to a filing by Moran. Moran’s consulting firm and an outside contractor were paid $400,000 by the Embassy of Qatar for six months of work.

A person familiar with Van Hollen’s work in Congress said he has met with numerous countries, from Qatar to Israel, to learn more about their efforts to free the hostages and end the war.

Also in 2023, as the House neared a vote to possibly end the Biden administration’s use of Qatar to move unfrozen Iranian funds, Moran met with Minnesota Rep. Betty McCollum on the same day that he donated $500 to her campaign. (She voted against the bill, but it passed the House anyway.) In 2024, Moran met with McCollum again to discuss “Qatar’s constructive role in the Gaza conflict,” and he donated $1,000 to her campaign three days later.

McCollum told The Free Press that Moran “works with my office on critical defense innovation issues to improve and advance U.S. national security.” “I always put U.S. national security first,” she said. She also called Qatar “an important U.S. ally in the Middle East.”

Moran played a central role in helping Qatar acquire a marquee location for its new embassy in Washington. Qatar wanted to buy the Beaux Arts–inspired Carnegie Institution for Science’s building, over 120 years old and near the White House, but it wasn’t for sale. Moran told Washingtonian magazine that he and other people close to Qatar called Carnegie board members “at night” to encourage a sale.

Carnegie sold for $65 million, nearly triple the building’s assessed value, despite opposition from Carnegie employees who called Qatar an “oppressive, brutal, and misogynistic regime.”

In some of Qatar’s political dealings, its allies or beneficiaries crossed the line.

Retired U.S. Marine Corps General John Allen and former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Richard G. Olson Jr., received gifts and consulting contracts from Qatar. In 2017, both men flew to Doha and back, then spoke with Trump administration officials on behalf of Qatar. Neither disclosed being paid for their work.

Olson eventually pleaded guilty to violating federal lobbying and ethics laws. Allen denied lobbying and was never charged. But he resigned from his position as president of the Brookings Institution in 2022.

Last year, prominent Republican lobbyists Barry Bennett and Douglas Watts admitted to failing to register as lobbyists for Qatar. Prosecutors said Bennett’s firm “covertly operated” an organization called Yemen Crisis Watch to highlight alleged war crimes committed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Yemen. Qatar paid the two men $2.1 million for their first three months of work. Last year, they reached deferred prosecution agreements with the government to resolve the investigation.

Qatar also hired a consultant who hatched an audacious strategy to neutralize Qatar’s perceived political enemies in Washington that included smearing them.

Early in the first Trump administration, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE were competing for influence, and Qatar seemed to be on the defensive as a result of the 2017 siege. Republican members of Congress were seeking to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. That’s when a former CIA operative named Kevin Chalker approached Qatar with a plan.

Chalker and his private intelligence company, Global Risk Advisors, drafted a 12-page proposal titled “Project ENDGAME.” It was addressed to the “Qatar Supreme Committee for Delivery and Legacy” and the “Office of the Secretary General.” A copy of the proposal was reviewed by The Free Press. (You can read it here.)

“Endgame” was a code name for Yousef Al Otaiba, the UAE’s ambassador to the U.S., according to people briefed on the operation. “ENDGAME is the most powerful Ambassador in the U.S. He has allies and assets across Washington, D.C., ready to do his bidding,” the proposal said. “Qatar must act immediately because ENDGAME has infiltrated Trump’s inner circle.”

Chalker’s outfit warned that Qatar’s support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood was being used to undermine the Al Thanis. “An attack on Hamas is an attack on Qatar. An attack on the Muslim Brotherhood is an attack on Qatar,” the proposal said.

The proposal named four targets that might be interested in publishing articles based on Otaiba’s private information: The New York Times, The Intercept, Middle East Eye, and the editor of The Grayzone. “Many news organizations won’t publish ENDGAME content, so Qatar’s media assets must play a critical role,” it said.

Soon, some of the UAE ambassador’s emails began popping up on websites and in embarrassing news coverage. He had obviously been hacked.

“Hacked Emails Show Top UAE Diplomat Coordinating with Pro-Israel Think Tank Against Iran,” blared a headline in The Intercept in 2017. A follow-up article was titled “Diplomatic Underground: The Sordid Double Life of Washington’s Most Powerful Ambassador.”

Otaiba declined to comment to The Free Press. Lawyers for Chalker and Global Risk Advisors denied participating in any illegal activity on behalf of Qatar. The government of Qatar has also denied any role in hacking.

The stolen emails spread panic across Washington. One person who worked at a think tank told The Free Press that his bosses sought all of his emails to or from known hacking targets so that it could hunt for any that might be embarrassing.

“Qatar has never faced a threat this dangerous,” the Project ENDGAME proposal said. Now everyone knew how far Qatar would go to fight back.

Flipping Qatar’s Critics

Lindsey Graham, one of Capitol Hill’s staunchest hawks, told a Doha audience that Qatar is “more the solution than the problem.” (Illustration by The Free Press)

You couldn’t find a louder voice against Qatar in Washington over the past decade than Elliott Broidy. After raising money for Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign and inauguration, Broidy, a Republican political operative, used his connections to try to expose the fossil fuel–rich country’s bloody ties to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other Islamist groups.

He helped pay for conferences at prestigious think tanks such as the Hudson Institute and Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Qatar was denounced in 2017 as a “welcome mat” and a “safe haven” for extremists. He solicited anti-Qatar opinion articles from prominent American diplomats and scholars. He leaned on his personal relationship with Trump to push the White House to back regional rivals Saudi Arabia and the UAE in their diplomatic and economic standoff with Qatar.

Most explosively, Broidy accused Qatar in a lawsuit in 2018 of engineering a computer hack of his devices. This eventually exposed his payoff to a former Playboy model who said he impregnated her, his work as a lobbyist for a Malaysian tycoon ensnared in a giant investment scandal, and his efforts to win a pardon from Trump for a convicted tax cheat.

“Elliott was sort of a one-man show focused on Qatar,” someone who worked with Broidy told The Free Press.

Instead of hiding from those humiliating headlines, Broidy spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers and a team of public-relations and crisis-communications specialists, who doubled down on making Qatar look bad. In 2023, one of the Qatari lobbyists he sued admitted knowing about the hack and handed over incriminating emails. A judge demanded that he provide even more. It looked like Broidy might win his revenge.

Then he went completely quiet.

After secret talks in Qatar and Europe that included Broidy and senior aides to Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family, he agreed last year to a settlement that paid him more than $150 million, according to people intimately familiar with the deal. He also agreed to abandon his legal fight and any funding of efforts aimed at tarnishing Qatar. Representatives for Broidy declined to comment to The Free Press.

And Broidy is far from the only such story.

During his two decades in the Senate, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham has made a name for himself as one of Capitol Hill’s staunchest hawks—a champion of U.S. military interventions in the Middle East, a defender of the American-Israel alliance, and a fierce critic of radical Islam.

So when Graham took to the stage at the Sheraton Grand Doha Resort in December 2023, just two months after Hamas’s invasion of Israel, the audience at the Doha Forum might have expected him to drop the hammer on the Al Thani family.

That day, though, Graham showed nothing but admiration and respect. “I want to thank you for what you’ve done for my country,” Graham said. “You get some criticism. Hamas is here. But I know why they’re here. They’re here so they can be talked to. You do things for the world that sometimes are not so popular. But I just want you to know that I appreciate what you do.”

Graham’s praise for Qatar didn’t happen in a vacuum.

Back in 2018, when Graham was known more for his vigorous support of the Iraq War and friendship with John McCain, the late Arizona senator, Qatar began investing hundreds of millions of dollars into Graham’s home state of South Carolina.

This came mostly through Qatar Airways’ purchase of 40 Boeing aircraft, including 787 Dreamliners made near Charleston that were part of an $11.7 billion order in 2016. Qatari-owned military technology company Barzan Aeronautical then announced plans to build spy drones at a new facility nearby.

Graham and South Carolina governor Henry McMaster also met with leaders of Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund to discuss additional investments in the state. Charleston and Doha became “sister cities,” and Qatar’s embassy donated $100,000 to Charleston for Covid relief aid. (It’s not just South Carolina: Qatar said it has invested more than $21 billion in Texas and $8 billion along the Gulf Coast to build energy plants and export facilities in recent years.)

Qatar never left Graham’s relationship to chance. In 2018, Barzan began paying $75,000 a month to a lobbying firm led by Christopher Ott. Ott and his colleagues met regularly with Graham and his staff to discuss Barzan and the intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities being developed in South Carolina.

On the day of the 2023 Hamas attack, Graham took a phone call from Andrew King, a former deputy chief of staff to the South Carolina senator whose firm earns $50,000 a month as a lobbyist for Qatar’s embassy in Washington. Graham and King talked or met seven more times by the end of December, including the day when Graham stepped onto that hotel stage in Qatar.

Graham and King didn’t respond to questions from The Free Press. The lobbyist said in a government filing that they always talked about “U.S.-Qatar relations.” Graham told the Doha audience that Qatar is “more the solution than the problem.”