An American General, an Israeli Defense Minister, and Qatari Handlers Make a Deal

But for what?

Retired Marine General and former head of the Brookings Institution John R. Allen

The following article comes from Tablet senior writer and frequent Scroll contributor Armin Rosen. Follow Armin @ArminRosen.

A powerful retired American military officer turned think tank president secretly lobbying for a cash-glutted Gulf sheikdom ranks among the least-surprising possible news stories at the moment. Per an FBI affidavit accidentally posted to a federal court database last week, John Allen, a four-star Marine general, former commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, former Obama counter-ISIS envoy, and a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, served as an unregistered foreign agent of Qatar throughout 2017 and possibly beyond. Around that time, he became head of the Brookings Institution, the leading warehouse for members of the Washington, D.C., policy establishment. Allen successfully urged senior members of then president Donald Trump’s foreign policy team to take a more even-handed approach to that year’s Gulf crisis, during which Qatar’s neighbors sought to blockade the tiny, gas-rich emirate until it dropped its support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups. On Sunday, amid the ongoing federal investigation into his lobbying activities, Allen resigned as the head of Brookings.

Whether Allen’s actions were criminal remains to be seen, but the notion that American elites, particularly in the realm of national security, are self-interested mediocrities who preside over hollowed-out institutions and will sell themselves to the first desert sheikhdom willing to shovel money at them comes as no particular shock by now.

The really juicy bit of the document, a detailed report on the alleged lobbying conspiracy that an FBI agent submitted in support of a search warrant into Allen and his partners, comes nearly 50 pages in. Allen had been introduced to leading Qatari officials, including the country’s intelligence and defense ministers, by Imaad Zuberi, a businessman and political strategist currently serving a 12-year federal prison sentence on unrelated obstruction of justice charges. Zuberi paid Allen a $20,000 fee for a weekend-long trip to the emirate in 2017, a high-level junket that kicked off the retired general’s effective campaign to persuade members of Trump’s inner circle of the Qatari government’s position in the Gulf dispute. Qatar wasn’t Allen’s only client, though. From at least November 2016, the retired general had received a $10,000-a-month retainer from an Israeli software company called Fifth Dimension (5D), along with a 1.5% commission on any business he generated for the company. Between 2015 and the company’s bankruptcy in 2018, the chairman of Fifth Dimension was Israeli politician Benny Gantz, a centrist former chief of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) general staff, the longtime Washington, D.C., establishment favorite to succeed Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, and Israel’s current defense minister.

From an FBI affidavit submitted in a search warrant request

According to the FBI document, “the Qataris”—which in context means the Qataris who were handling Zuberi, who had in turn hired Allen—“had asked Allen to endorse 5D’s product to Qatar’s head of intelligence and minister of defense—two of the Qatari government officials with whom Allen later met in Doha in June 2017. Allen opined that his endorsement would ‘likely complete their decision making and result in Qatar deciding to buy the 5D product.’” To break that down: A firm headed by Benny Gantz paid John Allen to help broker a sale of its software to Qatar, a government that Israel accuses of supporting Hamas and that has also been suspected of aiding the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and various Sunni jihadist groups. The FBI document notes that the agency “has not determined whether the Government of Qatar agreed to the 5D proposal.” The deal would have been worth some $70 million, netting Allen a $1 million commission.

What’s going on here? As The Times of Israel once put it, 5D sought to produce “artificial intelligence solutions for law enforcement agencies.” At one point, it attempted to get itself acquired by NSO Group, maker of the infamous Pegasus cyber-weapon, a deal that was scuttled when the U.S. government stepped in to stop it. 

It is unclear if Gantz knew the company he helped lead was attempting to sell potentially sensitive technology to a country that has pursued a range of policies hostile to Israel. It is unclear if this was in fact a part of a deliberate Israeli-Qatari back channel—if the sale of such technology was a quid pro quo for a shift in Qatari behavior or maybe an entrée to closer or more formalized relations with a government that has built up regional clout through its ties to Palestinian Islamists while investing extensively across the Palestinian Territories and even inside Israel itself. It is also unclear if there are others in the Jerusalem or Washington diplomatic or national security apparatus who also knew about something as potentially momentous, not to mention geopolitically notable, as a software company headed by an ex-IDF chief of staff making a $70 million deal with Qatar.

The truest explanation might turn out to be the simplest one, though: Two former military chiefs saw nothing more or less than a sweet business opportunity. Maybe no higher idealism was at play, but also no special nefariousness either—perhaps this was merely the kind of payday that senior former officials are constantly on the prowl for in a time when a big career in government can be so easily monetized and when the civic and moral guardrails against public-sector-adjacent self-enrichment have become almost laughably brittle. Though maybe the Allen case will prove to be a turning point, given his lofty résumé and Brookings’ centrality to the Washington ecosystem: The general has been placed on leave from the think tank until the investigation ends.