Since early October, Chris Coleman, an anonymous profile, and the Moroccan authorities play cat and mouse in social networks. The first hanging, especially in Dropbox, a free online storage service, confidential documents and emails that advertise through Twitter; the seconds request that these files get deleted and have even managed to close the account from which they much incordian. He opens another.
Whoever is hidden behind Chris Coleman is not a pro-style Julian Assange and Wikileaks team. It’s probably a hacker, with sympathy for the Saharawi independence movement, judging by some of the profiles that he follows on Twitter. If he was more adept and had more resources would have opened a website on a remote server on which he could hang the stolen material.
The “papers” released by Chris Coleman expose the work of Morocco’s foreign intelligence service, the Directorate General for Research and Documentation (DGED) led by Yassin Mansouri, to get think tanks and journalists from the United States and France – there is also a case in the United Kingdom to defend the “Moroccanness” of Western Sahara and in the process, to lash out against Algeria and the Polisario Front.
The key man appears to be Ahmed Charai , editor of the weekly L’Observateur du Maroc, ordering transfers or makes cash payments and gives an account of it to Mansouri or his chief of staff. By carrying large amounts of cash and not declaring them he was arrested in September 2011 at the Dulles Airport (Washington). He has admitted that his email has been hacked since 2010, but ensures that documents posted were manipulated. He does not explain in what has consisted the alteration.
Charai exchanged emails with French journalists who charge 6,000 per article or asking him an advance of 38,000 euros in hand on the pretext that they had to move house. In return he was told that they would leave in their information, for example, that the Al Qaeda terrorists who had kidnapped two Frenchmen in Mali came from the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf or that the Autonomous Movement of Kabylia, in Algeria, is gaining weight.
If he was smarter he wouldn’t have mixed keen documents with other private and intimate and also irrelevant, as the wedding photos and letters from the vice Minister Foreign Affairs of Morocco, creating some confusion. It costs a little to separate the chaff from the wheat.
In his emails none of the Spanish journalist or think-tank are mentioned though, through the public company Chérifien Office des Phosphates (OCP), Rabat funds programs in at least two of them. The plot, however, was a Spanish side that Charai who published in his newspaper, in September 2008, the canard that attributed to former President José María Aznar paternity of the daughter of Rachid Dati. The Provincial Court sentenced him in 2011 to compensate Aznar paid him 90,000 euros.
Only the Algerian press and some online publications related to the Polisario, as the blog of Professor Carlos Ruiz Miguel, have echoed these revelations. Moroccan mainstream press has ignored them. A handful of the other digital media has been collected them, but to emphasize, usually in financial documents or the recommendations of the Foreign Minister, Salaheddin Mezzouar, so his daughter can get a good job.
In The Moroccan Parliament there has not been question about how espionage spends public money on seducing journalists -that’s a secret subject- but on a McKinsey report, commissioned by the Royal Palace and delivered in September on the strategy to continue to develop the country. Chirs Coleman put it in Dropbox. Nobody has expressed any concern in Rabat because of their secret service emails come out to light.
If the lack of debate in Morocco is not too surprising; the absence of reactions in France is striking. The journalists whose names appear in the papers of Chris Coleman are not strangers. Three are renowned experts in the Maghreb-a fourth plays a key position in the television with more audience-and the revelations of Chris Coleman throw suspicion on everything that had been written in recent years gatherings.
France is the European country in which the media devotes more attention to the Maghreb, but the dirty laundry uncoverd by anonymous of Twitter has not been published, as of today, not a single line. Maybe in France as well, dog doesn´t eat another dog.
Non official translation of Salamu Haddi