Nothing would surprise you about the BBC because you're operating from a position of hating the organisation - same as the Daily Mail. All kinds of unsavoury people will have numbers for the BBC. It's a news organisation and anyone with a cause wants to be in the news. And if you're a journalist, you need contacts for your stories - and not always with the good guys. I'm absolutely certain that there will be others with contacts inside CNN, Al Jazeera and other big networks. It's only some paranoid 'analyst' that has extrapolated this to being a 'propaganda media network'.
I prefer to judge the BBC by its output and, so far, I don't find myself listening to R4 and thinking 'hmm... these guys are very pro Al Quaeda'