CAIRO — The United Arab Emirates was shipping weapons to favored belligerents in Libya over the summer in violation of an international arms embargo while simultaneously offering a highly paid job to the United Nations diplomat drafting a peace accord there, leaked Emirati emails show.

The leaked correspondence is threatening to undermine months of Libyan talks by tarring the diplomat with an apparent conflict of interest. The emails also open a new window into the hidden and contradictory machinations of regional players like the United Arab Emirates that have helped inflame the fighting even as their diplomats say they support a peaceful solution.

“The fact of the matter is that the U.A.E. violated the U.N. Security Council Resolution on Libya and continues to do so,” Ahmed al-Qasimi, a senior Emirati diplomat, wrote in an email on Aug. 4 to Lana Nusseibeh, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United Nations.

The emails, disclosed here for the first time, were provided to The New York Times through an intermediary critical of the country’s muscular foreign policy. Representatives of the Emirati government declined to comment on the leaks.

The United Arab Emirates has led a campaign against Islamist movements around the region, backing the military ouster of the Islamist president in Egypt and supporting the anti-Islamist factions in the Libyan civil war. That push has also led the U.A.E. into a proxy battle for influence against its Persian Gulf neighbor, Qatar. Doha has backed Islamist-aligned groups in both Libya and Egypt, where the Qataris say they are opposing a return to old-style authoritarianism.

In the emails, the Emirati diplomats frankly acknowledge their government was shipping arms to its Libyan allies in violation of the United Nations embargo — a policy they say is overseen at the “head of state level” — and they strategize about hiding the shipments from a United Nations monitoring panel.

Answering questions and complying with procedures required by the United Nations resolution “will expose how deeply we are involved in Libya,” Mr. Qasimi wrote, adding, “We should try to provide a cover to lessen the damage.”

Western intelligence services and diplomats have known for some time that the United Arab Emirates and Qatar had provided weapons to rival clients in Libya since the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011, and the proxy war between the two tiny, oil-rich monarchies has helped inflame the fighting. But reports this spring of a rapprochement between the Persian Gulf rivals had suggested they might finally have stopped arming the conflicting sides; both publicly supported United Nations-sponsored peace talks.

The leaked emails, though, suggest that the United Arab Emirates’ arms shipments continued at least through August, even as a United Nations mediator, Bernardino Léon, was completing a proposed agreement between the two sides to form a power-sharing unity government.

Other leaked emails, first reported in The Guardian newspaper and provided to The Times, show that while Mr. Léon was drafting the agreement, the Emiratis were also in the process of hiring Mr. Léon as the $50,000-a-month director general of the Emirates Diplomatic Academy, creating a potential conflict of interest. Mr. Léon received a formal offer in June and negotiated throughout the summer over the details of his $96,000-a-year housing allowance.

“I am flying today for 24 hours to Abu Dhabi,” Mr. Léon wrote to a senior Emirati official, Sultan al-Jaber, in an email dated Sept. 6 and provided to The Times.

“Tomorrow I will work with E.D.A. colleagues and will be as always at your disposal should you need anything from me,” he said.

In another email, dated Aug. 27, and not previously disclosed, Jeffrey Feltman, under secretary general for political affairs and a former American diplomat, wrote to senior Emirati leaders asking them to allow Mr. Léon to stay on as mediator for a few more weeks in the hope of signing an agreement.

“(If needed) I could ask the secretary general to call you to make the request,” Mr. Feltman suggested.

But Mr. Léon’s new job was not announced publicly or disclosed to the Libyan parties to the talks until this month. Some angrily accused Mr. Léon of favoritism and bias, casting new doubts on his proposals.

“It is a real scandal,” said Wolfram Lacher, a researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs who studies Libya. “He had to know that taking up this position would cause damage to the negotiations or, even if an agreement had been signed, this would have caused retrospective damage to the agreement. He obviously didn’t care about that.”

Mr. Léon told reporters at the United Nations last week:

“The optics may not be right. The appearance may not be right.” But he said the Emirati job did not influence his mediation.

Late Thursday night, after The Times’s article on the emails and the purported activities of the Emirates in Libya was published, Mr. Léon issued a statement saying that “in light of this report, I have decided to request a full clarification of the issue, including from the.

United Arab Emirates authorities, as I take time to reflect on the next steps in my professional career.”

Other leaked Emirati emails discuss opposition from Washington over other weapons shipments, hinting at a broader portrait of the United Arab Emirates’ arms business.

An internal email dated Sept. 30 refers to formal diplomatic notes delivered by Ethan A. Goldrich, the deputy chief of the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi. The email says that American officials had been complaining since at least February that the Emiratis had violated international missile control agreements by sending Egypt surveillance drones — the United 40 unmanned aerial vehicle — made by the Abu Dhabi-based Adcom.

Such a transfer “would trigger mandatory sanctions review under U.S. law, which could result in sanctions against U.A.E. entities,” the email says.

The Americans had further warned of possible sanctions because the same Emirati firm was selling drones to other countries outside the missile control agreements, “including Russia,” according to a summary included in the emails.

A separate note protested that an Emirates-based company identified as Morrison Commodities was violating the arms embargo on Libya, possibly in cooperation with a Saudi firm called Saudi International Military Services. The United States urged the U.A.E. to “take immediate measures to halt any such transfers,” according to the summary.

Other emails describe American complaints that another Emirati company, Al Mutlaq Technology, was also violating international sanctions by buying $100 million in weapons from North Korea through a business called Korea Mining Development Trading Corporation, or Komid.

The emails include a formal document protesting that transaction that was presented to the United Arab Emirates ambassador in Washington by American diplomats at the State Department. Marked “secret,” the document reported that the weapons under discussion as part of the North Korean deal included “machine guns, rifles and rockets.” An Emirati intermediary was “seeking a vessel and/or charter aircraft to transport the goods in the immediate future,” the document noted, adding that Mutlaq and the intermediary “have a very long history of dealing with North Korean arms trading firms like Komid.”

In an email dated June 3, Yousef al-Otaiba, the Emirati ambassador to Washington, wrote that he had been summoned to the State Department “once again” over the North Korean deals.

“Needless to say, any dealings with North Korea are taken VERY seriously and this has tremendous negative potential,” he wrote to Maj. Gen. Fares al Mazrouei, an assistant foreign minister for security and military affairs. “I suggest you look into this issue promptly.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/13/world/middleeast/leaked-emirati-emails-could-threaten-peace-talks-in-libya.html?_r=0

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