by Heidi Blake
That was four months ahead of the ballot for the 2022 World Cup. Bin Hammam had ushered the right-hand man of one of the crucial voters into negotiations about a major gas deal at the highest levels of the Qatari government. It would benefit Makudi’s country and the company that was paying millions of dollars to his football association. Although the Qatar 2022 bid were not involved, FIFA’s rules expressly forbade its associates from providing benefits to voters: ‘The Member Association and the Bid Committee shall refrain, and shall ensure that each entity and individual associated or affiliated with it shall refrain, providing to FIFA, to any member of the FIFA Executive Committee . . . or any of their respective relatives, companions, guests or nominees . . . any kind of personal advantage that could give even the impression of exerting influence, or conflict of interest, either directly or indirectly, in connection with the Bidding Process, such as at the beginning of a collaboration, whether with private persons, a company or any authorities . . . and . . . any benefit, opportunity, promise, remuneration or service to any such individuals, in connection with the Bidding Process.’
A week later, in early September 2010, Sim and Teo were back in Doha and their bills at the Sheraton were, inevitably, once again being footed by Bin Hammam. Chirakal had also arranged the two men’s visas at the request of Makudi. They had a second appointment at the Navigation Tower, but this time the encounter was on a different floor. They were escorted to a noon meeting with Sheikh Khalid in his palatial offices overlooking the West Bay. In the weeks and months that followed, Sim was to become closer to Bin Hammam, travelling alongside the billionaire on a tour of Cambodia and Myanmar. He returned to Doha a couple of times alongside Makudi – and again both trips were arranged by Chirakal. The new bilateral ‘cooperation’ between the Thai and Qatar FAs that had been under discussion at the meeting with Al-Attiyah received no publicity whatsoever. News of the gas deal also went dark. There were no public announcements from PTT or the Thai government except for an acknowledgement in December that they were still in talks with Qatargas.
However, a few months after the World Cup ballot, the completed Map Ta Phut terminal sprang into action. It was daybreak on a cloudy morning in May and the workers were running through last-minute drills as five blue and white tug boats buzzed around the harbour in readiness. Out at sea, a gargantuan dark steel prow was carving a path through the turquoise waters. The Golar Viking was a vessel the length of three football pitches and there could be no doubt about its cargo: the initials LNG were emblazoned on its side in white letters, ten metres high. It took four hours for the tugs to manoeuvre the unwieldy supertanker into position at the end of the terminal’s brand new jetty when it docked on 31 May 2011. It would remain fixed in this position for eight days disgorging the 60,000-tonne shipment that Qatargas had sold to Thailand at the rock-bottom spot price, exactly as PTT had requested. The tanker began its journey two weeks earlier from the port of Ras Laffan, 50 miles north of Doha – the hub through which Qatar supplied LNG to the world. At full capacity Ras Laffan could berth six supertankers the size of the Golar Viking, making Map Ta Phut’s single terminal puny by comparison. But the shipment from Qatar was a big deal for Thailand. It was the terminal’s first ever consignment of gas.
The man Sim had met to discuss the ‘LNG sale’ a matter of months earlier, Sheikh Khalid, was delighted to have been such assistance to Thailand. It was to be the first of several ‘commissioning cargos’ supplied by his company which would make Map Ta Phut fully operational. Announcing the ‘historic’ event on the Qatargas website, the Sheikh radiated pride: ‘Qatari LNG continues to have a key role to play in helping governments around the world improve the diversity of their energy supplies. We are pleased with this development which will help to meet the growing request for energy in the Kingdom of Thailand.’ He added, with reference to PTT, ‘This delivery will further strengthen the relationship between both companies over the long-term.’
In turn Wichai Pornkeratiwat, an executive vice-president of PTT, was similarly joyous at the new relationship. ‘We are very grateful to have Qatargas deliver the first LNG cargo to Map Ta Phut terminal, Thailand, which can be considered as the first LNG receiving terminal in South-East Asia. The success of commissioning of Map Ta Phut LNG receiving terminal is a significant milestone that will lead us to the successful commencement of terminal operations in July 2011,’ he said.
It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The first shipment was only a taster. It was followed by a further 27 deliveries of LNG to Map Ta Phut over the next three and a half years. Three months after the first consignment arrived, Makudi was made a trade representative on behalf of the Thai government, with a brief that covered the discussions with Qatar over a new long-term deal to supply oil and gas. The deal was extended to cover not one decade but two, and Qatar gave Thailand exactly what it wanted. It set aside the original agreement from 2008 and allowed PTT to buy from its huge stockpiles of gas at the lowest market prices, with all the security of a 20-year guaranteed supply. The exact price that Thailand agreed to pay under the new long-term deal, signed in December 2012, was to remain a closely guarded secret, but it was a saving worth hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars for the Thai government and the FA’s sponsor, PTT. The power of football knew no limit.17
Eleven
Spies, Siberia and the Psychic Octopus
At the zanily colourful headquarters of England’s 2018 bid inside Wembley Stadium, two shiny-suited sports supremos were hunched over a table pushing 24 plastic counters around a makeshift gaming board. It was autumn 2010 and the bid’s squirrelly chief executive, Andy Anson, was spending many hours like this with his chief of staff, Simon Greenberg. The pair were anxiously trying to fathom the way the votes were going to fall in the secret ballot that December.
Anson, the former commercial director of Manchester United, was a no-nonsense Lancastrian businessman who was lost in FIFA’s Machiavellian world, but Greenberg was an operator. The former spin doctor for Chelsea FC spoke fast, with a faint cockney twang and all the loose geniality of an East-End wheeler dealer. He had learned his street smarts working alongside Chelsea’s billionaire owner Roman Abramovich, and he knew how the game was played. He had been brought in to try to haul England’s too-gentlemanly bid through the mucky field of football politics to victory.
The World Cup gaming board he and Anson were poring over was his pride and joy. Sellotaped to the top of each counter was a photograph of a FIFA voter, and the two men slid them into clusters on sections ruled off in marker pen to represent every country in the race to host the World Cup. They played out each of the rounds of the ballot over and over again, imagining all the possible ways the men on the executive committee could shift their votes between bids as the least popular countries tumbled out of the contest one by one. But this was an increasingly forlorn pastime. England’s bid leaders were coming to accept that they were staring down the barrel of serious humiliation.
Anson and Greenberg had just received a devastating report on the bidding race from an elite security firm with close links to Britain’s secret foreign intelligence service, MI6. If the old spooks at Hakluyt & Company were correct – and they almost always were – England was in line to get a maximum of three votes, and probably only two. For the country that invented football, such a total wipe-out in the contest to host the game’s ultimate tournament was a sickening prospect.
They knew their bid was the best by far, on paper. They had done everything they could and they could not understand where it had gone wrong. England’s football infrastructure was unrivalled and there was no country in the world where the public worshiped the game more fervently than they did here. All the stars had come out for the England bid: it had the enthusiastic backing of the heir to the throne, Prince William, and was adorned by the world’s most famous footballer, David Beckham, as its vice-president.
That was before Greenberg had earned his spurs as the bid’s new chief of staff
by pulling off the biggest PR coup of all with the signing Paul the Octopus as an official ambassador for England. The psychic cephalopod had become famous during the South Africa World Cup by correctly predicting the results of all seven of Germany’s matches and calling Spain’s victory in the final by eating mussels out of boxes decorated with the flags of the winning teams. ‘Pulpo Paul’ lived in a German Aquarium, but when Greenberg discovered he had been born at the Sealife Centre in the British seaside town of Weymouth, the shrewd spin doctor was determined to claim the creature for the England bid at any price.
The ‘Octopus Oracle’ had proved an unruly signing – refusing over many attempts to pluck his chosen mussel out of the box marked with England’s flag, despite Greenberg’s spirited attempts to entice him. In the end, it was decided that Paul had ‘retired’ from picking winning teams. The mystic mollusc was unveiled to the world amid fanfare as a ‘proud Englishman’ who was backing his country patriotically – mussel or no mussel – in a promotional video in August 2010. Greenberg had hoped hiring talent like that would transform England’s fortunes. So how had it all gone so badly wrong?
The bid had been spying on its rivals and the voters on the FIFA Exco since the start of the World Cup race, trying to get the measure of the competition and the men who would determine the victors. Intelligence flooded into Wembley from a network of private security firms, former MI6 officers and British embassies around the world, and the Hakluyt report was the latest dispatch to land on Anson’s desk. The operation had been one of Lord Coe’s expert suggestions, in his role as an advisory board member. The London Olympics chief had taken Anson to one side soon after his appointment as chief executive, slapped him heartily on the back and told him he needed to have eyes and ears on all the other bidders from the moment the starting gun was fired. England should establish an extensive intelligence network to build up a database of what Coe called ‘campaigning information’, seen only by a trusted inner sanctum within the bid. It was the only way to stay ahead of the race.
Anson had listened carefully. As a first step, a consortium of sponsors and associates of the England 2018 bid had hired a Mayfair-based agency with close links to the British secret services to conduct surveillance on the eight other bidding nations in 2009. The agency was contracted for two years and filed regular dispatches on what its operatives found. Hakluyt would be brought in later, in mid-2010, to put the competition under its own brand of penetrating scrutiny. In addition, Anson and his senior colleagues were in close contact with the British government, and drew information on the campaigning activities of England’s rivals and the voters they were pursuing from foreign embassies. The team was also gathering its own inside intelligence, collating and triangulating rumours gleaned from within the bidding circuit by its officials, consultants and advisors. The material England gathered was all funnelled into a central database stored in an encrypted file on the bid’s internal server, accessible only to the handful of officials in Anson’s inner circle.18
With each new dispatch, Anson and his men had come to see with increasing clarity that the technical merits of their impressive World Cup offering weren’t worth the glossy paper the bid brochure was printed on. This contest wasn’t about which country had the best stadiums and team training facilities, or which would put on the most joyous jamboree for the fans. In the end, it wasn’t really about choosing the right place to hold the world’s most beloved sporting tournament at all. It all seemed to shake down to which of the bidders could offer the biggest boost to the fortunes of FIFA’s voters. The whole contest was awash with dirty money. There were allegations of direct bribes, astonishing gifts, and even massive state-level trade deals being used to sweeten the men on the Exco. Even if a handful of them voted in good faith, a decisive majority of FIFA’s rulers would cast their ballots on the next two World Cup hosts on the basis of personal, not professional interests. It was, Anson and Greenberg agreed, a ‘Wild West of a bidding process’.
Anson and his team had appreciated early in the campaign that they would have to loosen both their purse strings and their buttoned-up British morals if they wanted to be serious contenders in this grubby process. They weren’t prepared to break any rules, but they knew they would have to find ways to satisfy the greed of certain men on the Exco if they were to have any hope of winning support for their bid.
England’s lobbying efforts had centred in particular on Jack Warner, the Trinidadian president of CONCACAF, who was thought to control the votes of the confederation’s other two Exco members, Chuck Blazer and Rafael Salguero, as well as his own. Anson was no fool. He knew what sort of man Warner was, describing him privately as a ‘rogue and a vagabond’, but CONCACAF’s three voters had backed England’s last World Cup bid, after the FA agreed to fund football development in the Caribbean, and it seemed essential to win this triple-vote bloc again. So when Warner began to blitz England’s bid officials with constant demands for payments, gifts and favours, they struggled to toe the line between keeping him happy and stumbling over FIFA’s rules. While they rebuffed Warner’s most outrageous demands with as much charm as they could muster, England’s officials did agree early in their campaign to foot the bill for a training camp for Trinidad’s Under-20 team in Britain, and helped arrange a part-time job for one of his associates in London.
Warner enjoyed dangling the prospect of his vote in front of the bid’s over-eager executives and then slapping them down when they got above themselves. After giving the impression that he was backing England early on, he had rounded on them publicly in October 2009, accusing Anson and his team of ‘creeping along’ in their campaign when they should be ‘galloping’ and saying: ‘I want to disabuse anybody of the view that CONCACAF is in the FA’s corner.’ He was momentarily pacified when England bestowed a £230 handbag by the luxury British designer Mulberry upon his wife – but events took a turn for the worse when the BBC caught wind of the gift.
The bid had bought 24 of the handbags and intended to hand them out to the wives and girlfriends of all of FIFA’s voters when they visited England during the campaign. Little acts of generosity like this were de rigueur in world football, and the handbags were comfortably within the limits set by FIFA’s rules, but the appearance that England’s bid was offering inducements to World Cup voters caused a storm in the ever-irascible British media. Warner was used to creaming off millions of dollars at a time from his football confederation without hearing a peep out of anyone, and he was furious to have been exposed to such stinging criticism for the sake of a paltry present. The CONCACAF president sent his wife’s handbag back to England’s bid team, ranting in a widely leaked letter to its then chairman Lord Triesman that the gift had become ‘a symbol of derision, betrayal and embarrassment’ for him and his wife. It was a disaster.
England just weren’t cut out for this sort of thing – their attempts to play FIFA at its own game always seemed to backfire. They had scrambled to pacify Warner, paying £35,000 into the CONCACAF accounts he controlled to sponsor a dinner for officials from the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) the following February. The man from Trinidad was initially mollified, saying on the eve of the event: ‘It is costing the FA about thirty-five thousand pounds, but I think that is money well spent as it allows them to speak to all thirty-two countries from the CFU. It also means I will be able to get the collective view of my membership about who they think should host the World Cup when the time comes for me to decide who I should vote for.’ This move would later blow up in England’s face too: when it came to the attention of FIFA’s investigators years later, the bid would come in for harsh criticism for paying a voter to put on a dinner in the Caribbean.
Still, after all their efforts to woo Warner, England had hoped they had CONCACAF’s three votes in the bag. They were counting on the vote of Reynald Temarii, too, after renewing a generous memorandum of understanding to provide football development assistance to his Oceania confederation. Issa Hayatou had promised to vote for Engl
and to pay back a long debt of gratitude for the FA’s support for his presidential campaign back in 2002. And now that they had made Geoff Thompson their chairman after Lord Triesman’s downfall, they hoped they could rely on Britain’s own curmudgeonly Exco member to vote patriotically. So if all went to plan, England had been expecting to snag at least six votes at the outset. It would be enough to propel them comfortably through the first rounds, and then they would be sure to pick up more support as other countries dropped out. It had seemed like a solid strategy. That was until the Hakluyt report had poured icy water on all their aspirations.
England’s intelligence-gathering efforts were largely preoccupied with the bid’s most fearsome rival – Russia 2018 – and Anson’s team believed their own campaign of espionage was being matched with equally Cold War-style tactics by their rivals in Moscow. The officials heard that the Kremlin had installed a special surveillance unit in London to spy on their activities, so they paid private security companies to sweep their Wembley offices regularly for bugs. Their fears were so pronounced that they enlisted the help of MI6 to set up surveillance countermeasures when they met FIFA voters. Government security officials went ahead to sweep the rooms for Russian bugs, and issued the bid’s envoys with lead boxes to protect their phones during meetings. It was known that Moscow had the technology to hack into their phones and turn them into microphones so they could eavesdrop remotely.
The information trickling in about Russia’s campaign had not given Anson and Greenberg cause for serious concern until the spring of 2010. Until then, Russia’s bid had drifted along under the lacklustre leadership of the country’s Exco member Vitaley Mutko, but a few months into the year of the ballot, operatives inside Russia began to raise the alarm that Vladimir Putin had seized control and the operation was being ‘cranked up’. The then Russian prime minister was an ice-hockey nut with no love for football, and he had shown virtually zero interest in his country’s World Cup hopes until this point. But the reports suggested that Putin had suddenly woken up to the prospect of a humiliating defeat on the world stage, and had sprung into action. The operatives in Russia said the prime minister had sworn: ‘I can’t lose the World Cup. I can’t watch it happen. I’ve got to do something about it,’ and had ‘dragged in all sorts of capabilities’ to turn the bid around. Sources said Putin had summoned a select group of oligarchs to the Kremlin and tasked them with doing whatever was necessary to ensure victory for Russia, including striking ‘deniable’ deals with voters. If true, this was terrible news for England.