The New York Times itself received several batches of documents from an anonymous source last year. Over a period of several months, the source, claiming to be someone close to Cornerstone who had become disillusioned with how soccer was being politicized, answered questions related to the disclosure over encrypted email. The Times was able to independently confirm some of the meetings and conversations described in the documents, which appear to fit the pattern of the Gulf’s continuing tit-for-tat information war.

Viewed through that prism, Cornerstone’s about-face on Qatar in 2017, then, was hardly a surprise. The timing was important, though; Cornerstone’s anti-Qatar report, publicized by the BBC, was published only months after the start of the Saudi- and U.A.E.-led blockade of Qatar. The blockade is the result of a long-running political dispute between Qatar and several of its neighbors, who accuse it of financing terrorism and working too closely with Iran. But the breadth and specifics of the campaign to hamstring Qatar’s World Cup are laid out in documents that reveal close ties between Cornerstone Global Associates and individuals and companies in the U.A.E.

One Cornerstone document outlines a plan to produce a report linking Qatar to the Muslim Brotherhood, and several others discuss efforts to place articles in the British news media that would damage Qatar’s reputation. Cornerstone’s success in providing some source material for the BBC report, for example, involved first cultivating a relationship with a long-term critic of the U.A.E.’s human rights record before asking him to write the skeptical report about Qatar’s World Cup. The critic, the journalist and activist Rori Donaghy, denied that Cornerstone had had any role in influencing or altering his conclusions, saying that the report was “solely by me, independent of anyone else.”

But after the initial flurry of negative headlines, and after Cornerstone’s impartiality was called into question, the BBC changed the online version of the report to soften some of the allegations made by Cornerstone. A BBC spokesman said that it was standard practice to update articles throughout the day and that “there were no corrections to note.”

Insider Help

Cornerstone’s president, Ghanem Nuseibeh, was hardly a neutral party in the Gulf dispute. Although he offered his help in burnishing Qatar’s reputation in 2010, Nuseibeh has close links to the U.A.E. elite: He is a relative of both the U.A.E.’s minister of state and the country’s ambassador to the United Nations.

A keen social media user who had been generally supportive of Qatar’s efforts to bring the World Cup to the Middle East in the years that followed his initial pitch to the bid committee, by 2017 he had become a frequent Qatari critic and a backer of the blockade and the countries leading it.