See also A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11
(I wish to acknowledge the invaluable assistance in the preparation of this essay from N,
a Russian who for the time being prefers to remain anonymous.)
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I. The Meta-Group, the Russian 9/11, and Kosovo
Violence
and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic
In the last three decades, three important
facts have emerged about the international drug traffic. The first is that it
is both huge and growing.
Narcotics are
estimated to be worth between $500 billion and $1 trillion a year, an amount,
according to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in remarks to a United Nations
General Assembly session in June 2003, that is greater than the global oil and
gas industry, and twice as large as the overall automobile industry.[2]
The second is that it is both worldwide and
above all “highly integrated.”[3]
At global drug summits such as the one in Armenia
in 1993, representatives of the Sicilian Mafia, the Brighton Beach
Organizatsiya, and Colombian drug
lords, have worked out a common modus
operandi, with the laundering of dirty money entrusted chiefly to the
lawless Russian banks.[4]
The third important fact, undeniable since
the 1980 U.S. intervention
in Afghanistan,
is that governments with global pretensions will avail themselves, in pursuit
of their own political ends, of the resources, both financial and political, of
the drug traffic. It was striking in the 1980s that the CIA, in its choice of
Afghan mujahedin leaders to back against the Soviet Union,
passed over those with indigenous support in favor of those, notably Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, who dominated the heroin trade. The result was to enhance
Hekmatyar’s power until he became a leading heroin trafficker, not just in Afghanistan
but in the world.[5]
Three more important features of the global
drug traffic have been less noticed; thus although I regard them as facts I
shall refer to them not as facts but as propositions to be tested against
evidence. The first proposition is that the highly integrated drug traffic
industry, in addition to serving the political ends of world powers, has its
own political as well as economic objectives. It requires that in major growing
areas there must be limited state control, a condition most easily reached by
fostering regional rebellion and warfare, often fought by its own private
armies. This is the on-going situation of designed violence in every major
growing area, from Lebanon
to Myanmar, Colombia to Afghanistan.
Once the local power of drug armies was
enough in itself to neutralize the imposition of state authority. But today
there are increasing signs that those at the highest level of the drug traffic
will plot with the leaders of major states to ensure, or even to stage,
violence that serves the power of the state and the industry alike.
Thanks to extensive research in Russia,
we now have initial evidence of a second and even more significant proposition:
There exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the
resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without
being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of
designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power – most
conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin, but allegedly,
according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States.
One piece of evidence for this consists in
a meeting which took place in July 1999 in southern France near Nice, at the villa in
Beaulieu of Adnan Khashoggi, once called “the richest man in the world.” Those at
the meeting included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives
from the meta-group, with passports from Venezuela,
Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Germany. Between them they
allegedly enjoyed excellent relations with:
1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, the acknowledged mastermind
of 9/11 and senior mentor to Osama bin Laden.
2) Soviet military intelligence.
3) the FARC, the Colombian revolutionary
group that has become increasingly involved in the drug traffic.
4) the Kosovo Liberation Army, a similarly
involved group.
5) (according to a well-informed Russian
source) the CIA.
The third important proposition is that a
meta-group of this scale does not just help government agencies make history. I
hope to show that it, and its predecessors, are powerful enough to help make
history themselves. However they do not do so overtly, but as a hidden Force X
whose presence is not normally acknowledged in the polite discourse of academic
political scientists. On the contrary, as we shall see, references to it are
usually suppressed.
A
Digression: Drugs, Meta-Groups and the Compradorial Revolution
The question arises whether this is the
only such meta-group in the international drug milieu. My tentative answer is
that there are indeed other focal nodes for organized international drug
trafficking, often above the reach of the law. (The remnants of the dissident
Hekmatyar drug network in Afghanistan
would be a prime example.) What is special about this meta-group is its global
reach, which makes it of especial interest to the CIA and other pro-American
agencies committed to globalization.
A drug meta-group with such broad
connections is not unprecedented. A clear predecessor was the Bank of Credit
and Commerce International (BCCI), a drug-laundering bank which was of use to
CIA Director William Casey precisely because of its corrupt global reach. As a Washington insider said
to two Time reporters covering BCCI,
They were the
only way we could talk to certain folks, and they were the only vehicle
available for some transactions. Who else could wire something together to Saudi Arabia, China,
Israel, and the U.S.?[6]
It is worthy of note that Khashoggi has
enjoyed intimate connections to both, as well as to western intelligence and
western politicians.
The “wiring together” effected by drugs has
helped give a significant boost to the global banking network, particularly in Russia
and southeast Asia. In these areas it has also fostered trade and investment,
bringing businessmen from previous diverse commercial areas into increasing
contact with each other. From this perspective globalization can be seen as a
compradorial revolution: compradorial classes have moved into positions of
power, and in some cases their international networks have been more than a
match for local state power.[6a]
There are three different ways in which
this compradorial revolution has proceeded, and it could be shown that drugs
have often helped supply a base for all three:
1) In some countries (as in Thailand, South
Korea, Taiwan,
and to some extent Indonesia)
these classes have displaced military regimes. Drug-based fortunes clearly
played a major role in the compradorial revolution of Thailand.
2) In some countries compradorial elements
have succeeding in converting (or, depending on your point of view, corrupting)
the cadres of socialist governments. Drugs have played a significant role in
the compradorial embourgeoisement of China,
Laos, and Cambodia, and may have played an indirect role
in the case of Vietnam.
3) Recently – as in the “color revolutions”
of eastern Europe and central Asia – compradorial
elements have helped to oust the remnants of the former Soviet governing
apparatus. I hope in this essay to give preliminary evidence that the global
drug meta-group I have described has played a role in the “color revolutions”
as well.
As to how many drug meta-groups exist in
the world, I believe there are at least two. A second, which we will not
examine here, oversees the new drug highway from north Myanmar (Burma)
through the entrepreneurial zones of south China,
and manages the international connections necessary to arrange for the smuggling of heroin and people into Australia and the eastern and western United States.
The relation of the west to this second or
eastern meta-group is unknown, and in all probability it is highly complex and
ambiguous. It is probably safe to say however that the global reach of the
second meta-group, overseeing the much smaller flow of drugs east from Myanmar,
is less than the first or western meta-group we shall discuss here, overseeing
the far greater flow of drugs west from Afghanistan. (It has been estimated
that by now Afghanistan
supplies from 80 to 90 percent of the global heroin trade.)[7]
The west, and particularly the United States,
have not concealed their interest in the success of globalization and the
“color revolutions.” Unfortunately those who sing the praises of both neglect the
terrible social costs of the drug traffic, and the Force X which so often is
the underpinning of the compradorial revolution. Because the drug economy is often
not integrated into the legal one, it tends to foster superwealth and income
disparity. The benefits tend not to be enjoyed by a society as a whole, or even
its middle class. This is even more true when the masters of the drug-traffic
are not indigenous but alien (as is conspicuously the case in eastern Myanmar).[8]
There is an undeniable western face to the dominant
meta-group. One member of the meta-group at the 1999 meeting, Anton Surikov,
had spent time at the London Centre for Defence Studies; and in addition
Surikov had had contacts with at least one senior CIA representative.[9]
(Another member of the meta-group, former Lithuanian Defense Minister Audrius
Butkevicius, was with Surikov at the London Centre.) We shall see that a third
member, Ruslan Saidov, is said to have been paid as a CIA contract agent.
One of the alleged purposes of the meeting at
the villa – but not the only one – was to give the Yeltsin “family” what it supposedly
needed: a Russian 9/11.
The
“Russian 9/11” in 1999: Bombings and Plans for War
Russia has been familiar for some time with charges that the bombings in Moscow in 1999, and an accompanying invasion of Russian
Dagestan that rekindled the ongoing war in neighboring Chechnya, were both planned by
representatives of the Islamist element in the Chechen resistance, in collusion
with a representative of the Russian Kremlin.
Read synoptically, these stories indicate
that the well-connected drug-trafficking meta-group, with connections to both the
Kremlin and the CIA, arranged in advance for the bombings and invasion at the
meeting in July 1999, at a French villa owned by the superrich arms merchant
Adnan Khashoggi. The group allegedly operated with support from Saudi Arabia
and organized global drug trafficking, some of it probably through Kosovo.
The group’s business front, Far West, Ltd.,
is said to have CIA-approved contractual dealings with Halliburton for
geopolitical purposes in the Caucasus, as well as dealings in Iraq with
Diligence LLC, a group with connections to Joe Allbaugh (the FEMA chief in
2001) and to the President’s younger brother Neil Bush. The head of Far West recently told a Russian outlet that “a
well-known American corporation… is a co-founder of our agency.”[10]
The evidence for this western face of the
group is laid out in an article by a so-called Yuri Yasenev, which is clearly a
compilation of extracts from intelligence reports, on a Russian website.[11]
The article is cited – very selectively – as authoritative by a reputable Hoover
Institution scholar, John B. Dunlop.[12]
But Dunlop completely ignores, one might say, suppresses, Yasenev’s case as I
have summarized it above. He uses the article instead to document a more
familiar case: that in 1999 the Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin dealt with this
same group to create what might be called the “Russian 9/11.”
When I say that Dunlop suppresses certain details,
I do not mean to suggest that he does so conspiratorially, or even consciously.
My notion of deep politics, which I have developed elsewhere, posits that in
every culture and society there are facts which tend to be suppressed
collectively, because of the social and psychological costs of not doing so.[13]
Like all other observers, I too have involuntarily suppressed facts and even
memories about the drug traffic that were too provocative to be retained with
equanimity.[14]
The drug traffic is often the beneficiary
of this suppression, which leaves it more free to act without interference. In Deep Politics I referred to the
pervasive influence of a U.S.
government-drug collaboration which I called “Operation X,” looking at it from
the perspective of a parapolitical manipulation of the traffic by the
government.[15] I wish
now that I had written of a “Force X,” a force which was no longer under total
government control, and indeed could influence government behavior for its own
ends.[16]
Dunlop’s thesis is in itself an alarming
one. It is that men of influence in the Kremlin, building on the connections
established by the wealthy oligarch Boris Berezovskii, were able to arrange for
staged violence, in order to reinforce support for an unpopular Russian government.
This staged violence took the form of lethal bombings in the capital and an
agreed-upon incursion by Chechens into Russian Dagestan.
This credible thesis is even more alarming
when we consider that both Khashoggi and Berezovskii have purchased significant
political influence in the West as well. In 2003 Khashoggi was negotiating with Richard
Perle, a member of the Cheney-Rumsfeld clique who at the time was still
Chairman of the U.S. Defense Policy Board, to invest considerable Saudi money
in Perle’s company Trireme.[17]
Berezovskii is a shareholder in the software company, Ignite, of President
Bush’s delinquent brother Neil Bush.[18]
More significantly, Khashoggi and his
connections have shown in the past their ability to influence, even distort, U.S.
foreign policy, to the detriment of the latter. An important example was the
ill-fated so-called Ghorbanifar initiative during Iran-Contra, to sell arms to the
mullahs in Iran
in exchange for the release of American hostages:
Ghorbanifar was
not acting alone. Although he led us to believe he was using Iranian money, his
forward purchases and bridge deposits were actually being bankrolled by Adnan
Khashoggi [and BCCI]….Khashoggi had an on-and-off relationship with Israel for
many years and evidently had been in the loop as Ghorbanifar’s backer from the
very beginning.[19]
Ghorbanifar could never have caused such
embarrassment to the Reagan Administration if he had not been backed by deeper,
hidden forces.
By the “Russian 9/11” I mean the bombings
of Russian apartment buildings in 1999,
accompanied by the pre-arranged (and partly
staged) second Russian invasion of Chechnya. For some time the West
has heard versions of the claim that both events were planned at the time by
Russian intelligence. For example Patrick Cockburn reported as follows in the Independent:
Boris
Kagarlitsky, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Comparative Politics, writing in the weekly
Novaya Gazeta, says that the bombings in
Moscow and
elsewhere were arranged by the GRU (the Russian
military intelligence service). He says they used members of a group
controlled by Shirvani Basayev, brother of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, to plant the bombs. These killed 300
people in Buikask, Moscow
and Volgodonsk in September.[20]
Cockburn’s source, Boris Kagarlitskii, also
accused Russian intelligence agents of planting at least one of the bombs.
Boris Kagarlitsky,
a member of the Russian Institute for Comparative Politics, stated: “FSB
officers were caught red-handed while planting the bomb. They were arrested by
the police and they tried to save themselves by showing FSB identity cards.”
The first man to enter the basement, Police Inspector Andrei Chernyshev,
related: “It was about 10 in the evening. There were some strangers who were
seen leaving the basement. We were told about the men who came out from the
basement and left the car with a licence number which was covered with paper. I
went down to the basement. This block of flats had a very deep basement which
was completely covered with water. We could see sacks of sugar and in them some
electronic device, a few wires and a clock. We were shocked. We ran out of the
basement and I stayed on watch by the entrance and my officers went to evacuate the
people.” Despite the arrest of the FSB officers by the police, they were
quietly released when the secret service’s Moscow headquarters intervened. The Observer
reports that the next day, in an attempt to cover-up the discovery, “the FSB in
Moscow
announced that there had never been a bomb, only a training exercise.”[21]
Western scholarly analyses have seen the bombings and war as part of
a stratagem to boost the popularity of the Kremlin, and particularly the
little-known new Prime Minister Putin, for the coming presidential elections in
November 1999. The most thorough study, by John Dunlop of the Hoover
Institution, blames the plotting on three protégés of the Russian oligarch
Boris Berezovskii – Valentin Yumashev, Alexander Voloshin, and Roman Abramovich
– who at this point were members of Yeltsin’s “Family” in the Kremlin.[22]
(As for Berezovskii himself, Dunlop writes that by mid-1999 “all
of his real but beginning-to-dwindle political influence was obtained through
the intercession of D’yachenko [Yeltsin’s daughter] and Yumashev.”)[23]
The
Meeting in Khashoggi’s Villa, July 1999
A crucial piece of evidence for this thesis
of Kremlin-structured violence is the meeting in July 1999, when Alexander
Voloshin met in southern France
with the Chechen warlord Shamil Basaev. In Dunlop’s words,
On the day following the initial
incursion of rebel forces into the Dagestani highlands in early August of 1999,
the investigative weekly Versiya published
a path-breaking report claiming that the head of the Russian Presidential
Administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had met secretly with the most wanted man
in Russia, Shamil’ Basaev, through the good offices of a retired officer in the
GRU, Anton Surikov, at a villa belonging to international arms merchant Adnan
Khashoggi located between Nice and
Monaco.109 A
source in French intelligence was credited by Versiya
with supplying this information. The article stirred major
interest in the Russian media, but at the time documentary confirmation was
lacking.
By July of 2000, Versiya, in
an effort of persistent journalistic digging, had unearthed what it regarded as
the full story of what had occurred, with an acknowledged assist from French
and Israeli intelligence. “The meeting [of Voloshin and Basaev],” the weekly
related, “which supposedly took place at the dacha of the international arms
dealer Adnan Khashoggi in the small town of Beaulieu near Nice, occurred on 4
July 1999.[24]
Sources in the French special services had earlier communicated that information,
in particular a certain professor of political science, a specialist in issues
of Russian defense, security,
and organized crime. He is well known
for his contract work for French government establishments, including French
counter-intelligence.”110….
The investigative weekly then went on
to summarize what it had learned from French and Israeli intelligence, as well
as from its own journalistic digging: “A luxurious villa in the French city of Beaulieu, located between Nice and the principality of Monaco.
This villa, according to the French special services, belongs to the
international arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. He is an Arab from Saudi Arabia, a billionaire with a
complicated reputation. According to the French special services, and also to
the French press, in June of 1999 there took up residence at the villa a
Venezuelan banker named Alfonso Davidovich.111
In the Latin American press, he is said
to be responsible for laundering the funds of the Columbian left insurrection
organization FARC, which carries out an armed struggle with the official
authorities, supported by the narcotics business.”
110 Petr Pryanishnikov, “Voloshin I Basaev na lazurnom beregu:
foto na pamyat’,” Versiya,
4 July 2000. The article, accompanied by a photo, can be found at: http:www.compromat.ru/main/voloshin/basaev.htm111 The article “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya,” compromat.ru, 17
December 2004 reports that Davidovich lives in Munich and enjoys both German and Venezuelan
citizenship. He is also said to be personally acquainted with international
arms dealer Khashoggi.[25]
Dunlop’s massively documented essay is 52 pages long, with 142
footnotes. But having thus provocatively included references to both Khashoggi
and narcotics, Dunlop does not mention either again. The failure to discuss
Khashoggi is particularly surprising. If indeed the meeting took place at his
villa, the proceedings were not only likely to be recorded, one would think
that they were intended to be recorded.
One would also expect the participants to be confident that the
recordings would reach western intelligence, as apparently they promply did. “In
France
and in the ranks of Israeli intelligence, Versiya
wrote, it had been reported that `there exists a video-tape
of the meeting at the villa in Beaulieu.'”[26] One would have expected that
this video-tape might reach, not just the French and Mossad, but Khashoggi’s
long-time associates in U.S.
intelligence as well.[27]
Khashoggi’s Interest in Chechnya
Just as Berezovskii was at one point the
richest man in Russia,
so Khashoggi was once (according to his American biographer) “The Richest Man
in the World.” At one point indeed Khashoggi had an influence in American
politics analogous to Berezovskii’s in Russia. For example, Khashoggi
attended both Nixon inaugurals and contributed money to his electoral
campaigns. He admitted to giving $58,000 in 1968, but allegedly told Pierre
Salinger he gave $1 million in 1972.[28]
He also arranged a fund-raising event for Jimmy Carter’s Center in Plains, Georgia,
an event which probably originated in both men’s connections to the Bank of
Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).[29]
Khashoggi is usually thought of as an arms
salesman. Although he has never been directly linked to the drug traffic, he
was intimately involved in the affairs of the drug-laundering bank BCCI, with
which he arranged an arms shipment as part of Oliver North’s dealings in
Iran-Contra.[30] He also
became notorious for flying into Las
Vegas from abroad and then rapidly losing vast sums of
cash at the casino tables – a traditional form of money-laundering.[31]
His name has surfaced in connection with a number of other scandals, from the
illicit real estate ventures of the Marcos family in New York to a major defrauding of a Thai
bank in 1998, which was followed by the Asian financial crisis of that year.
Khashoggi had had a financial interest in Chechnya, and connections with its
leaders, since 1996, from his participation in a consortium called Caucasian
Common Market AO. This was designed to raise $3 billion in the West and Japan for investment in Chechnya.[32]
A principal organizer was former Chechen First Deputy Premier Khozh-Akhmed
Nukhaev, in conjunction with Lord McAlpine of the Goldsmith family interests in
London, and
also American capital.[33]
But according to the late Paul Klebnikov, Nukhaev had a background in Chechen
organized crime, before developing “a radical ideology in line with the one
espoused by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network.”[34]
Despite this background, Nukhaev found support and financing in Washington for his
Caucasian-American Chamber of Commerce. According to once source, in 1997
Khashoggi introduced Nukhaev to former Secretary of State James Baker.[35]
However Dunlop’s inquiry is focused, not on
Khashoggi, but on Berezovskii and his representative Voloshin in the Kremlin:
In March of 2002 Interfax reported
that, through his long-time business partner Badri Patarkatsishvili,
Berezovskii had “supplied Chechen figures Kazbek Makhashev and Movladi Udugov
with money to purchase the raid against Dagestan.
According to witnesses, Berezovskii contributed 30 million rubles
for the purpose.”120 This payment, amounting to more than $1
million, if it occurred, may have been only one of several intended to
underwrite a “short victorious war” in Dagestan.
120 “Berezovskii Sponsored Dagestan Raid, Top Policeman’s
Abduction — Prosecutors,” Interfax, 5 March 2002. A well-known journalist for RFE-RL, Andrei
Babitskii, who frequently visited Chechnya during this period and was
acquainted with a number of leading separatists, writes that he can confirm
that Berezovskii did indeed speak by telephone with both Basaev and Movladi
Udugov at this juncture. See Andrei Babibitskii, “Na voine,” hro.org, 2 March 2004.
Dunlop is not alone
in suspecting the hand of Berezovskii
behind Voloshin’s meeting with Basaev. So does Cockburn’s source Boris Kagarlitskii
(about whom we shall have more to say).[36]
The Russian observer Lilia Shevtsova reports a rumor at this time that Berezovskii
himself, along with his agent Alexander Voloshin, had met in France with
Bazayev in the summer of 1999, just before the Dagestan
invasion of August 2.[37]
Dunlop’s Redactions of His Source Yasenev
Though he says nothing more about Khashoggi or drugs, Dunlop does
however make one more reference to the alleged drug-money launderer Alfonso Davidovich:
“It soon emerged,” Versiya continued, “that a
very frequent visitor to Davidovich was a certain French businessman of
Israeli-Soviet origin, a native of Sokhumi [Abkhazia], 53-year-old Yakov
Kosman. 112 Soon
Kosman brought with him six persons who arrived via Austria carrying Turkish passports.[38] In one
of the passports the French [authorities] identified a certain Tsveiba, who is
accused by the Tbilisi
authorities of having committed genocide during the Georgia-Abkhaz conflict.”
All of the visitors settled into the villa for a three weeks’ stay.
“Soon,” the account continues, “the
special services succeeded in establishing that
Kosman and Tsveiba went to the Nice
airport, where they met two men who had arrived from Paris. Judging from their documents, one of
those who arrived was Sultan Sosnaliev, who in the years of the Georgian-Abkhaz
war served as the minister of defense of Abkhazia.113
Second there emerged from the airport one more native of
Sokhumi — Anton Surikov. According to rumors, during the years of the war in
Abkhazia, he was subordinated to Sosnaliev and was responsible for questions of
the organization of sabotage and was friendly with field commander Shamil’
Basaev, who at that time headed the Chechen battalion.”
The next arrival came by sea:
“According to the precise information of the French and the Israelis, on 3 July
at the port of Beaulieu a private English yacht
‘Magiya’ [Magic] arrived from Malta.
From it to the shore came two passengers. If one is to believe the passport
information, one of the ‘Englishmen’ was a certain Turk, in the past an advisor
to the Islamicist premier of Turkey, [Necmettin] Erbakan, a rather influential
figure in the Wahhabi circles of Turkey, the Middle East, and the Caucasus.114 From sources in the Russian special
services we learned that Mekhmet is also a close friend of the not unknown
Khattab.”
“The second person,” the account goes on, “to
the surprise of the intelligence officers, was the Chechen field commander
Shamil’ Basaev.
112 Kosman is reported in the same 17 December 2004 issue of compromat.ru, to live in Nice and to possess German and, possibly,
Israeli citizenship.113 On Sosnaliev as Abkhazia’s defense minister, see RFE-RL Newsline, 2
November 1993.114 On Erbakan, see Shireen T. Hunter, Islam in Russia: The Politics of
Identity and Security (Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 2004), p. 365.
Dunlop’s cited source for information about
both Davidovich and Kosman is an article by Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya
revolytsiya” (“An Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”), on a Russian website,
ru.compromat.[39] But
Dunlop has significantly edited, one must even say censored, what Yasenev
wrote.
In footnote 111 Dunlop says
The article “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya
revolytsiya,” compromat.ru, 17 December 2004 reports that Davidovich lives in Munich and enjoys both
German and Venezuelan citizenship. He is also said to be personally acquainted
with international arms dealer Khashoggi.
radically curtailing Yasenev’s description
of Davidovich:
Alfonso
Davidovich – (1948), Venezuelan, lives in Munich.
Has German and Venezuelan citizenship.
Speaks
Spanish, English, French, German, and Russian fluently. In the 1970s went
through special training in the USSR
(Privol’noe, Nikolaevskaya oblast) and East Germany.
Owns companies and banks in Barbados, the Caymans and other
off-shores.
Has friendly relations with Hugo Chavez, and is
acquainted with Fidel Castro, Marcus Wolf and Adnan Khashoggi. Has many
contacts in Colombia,
including FARC. In 1999 Davidovich was alleged to have engaged in arms
trafficking for guerillas in Chiapas,
Mexico and in
money laundering for the Colombian drug mafia. Finances antiglobalization
movement in Europe and Latin
America.”[40]
With respect
to Yakov Kosman, Dunlap says: “Kosman is reported in the same 17 December 2004 issue of
compromat.ru, to live in Nice and to possess German and, possibly, Israeli
citizenship.”
Compare this
with what Yasenev wrote:
Yakov
Abramovich Kosman (b. 1946), resides in Nice,
France. Has
German and, possibly, Israeli citizenship. Involved in real estate operations
and banking. Has contacts with Kosovo Albanian criminal societies in European
countries. In 1997-2000 he served as financial consultant to Hashim Thaçi, the chief
commander of KLA.”[41]
Consider that “In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA –
formally known as the Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, or UCK – as an
international terrorist organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations
with proceeds from the international heroin trade and from loans from known
terrorists like Osama bin Laden.”[42]
The Khashoggi Villa
Meeting, Drugs, and Kosovo
It would appear that Davidovich and Kosman were in Khashoggi’s villa
to talk about more than just Chechnya,
but that Dunlop did not wish to explore this possibility. For example, he
acknowledges the presence of no less than four men of Abkhazian origin and/or
influence at the meeting – Kosman, Tsveiba, Sosnaliev, and Surikov — and yet
offers no explanation whatsoever for their presence. (A glance at a map will
show that Abkhazia is irrelevant to the subsequent events in Dagestan
and Chechnya.)
It seems likely that a drug-route was
discussed involving Abkhazia, which now “has become a key heroin transiting
point.”[43]
Its drug-trafficking importance is noted by none other than Surikov himself:
In general then,
the Chechen [drug-trafficking] group has allotted a very important place to
Abkhazia in its plans. This is due firstly to the strong position of local
field commanders after the end of the Georgian/Abkhazian conflict….Secondly…a
large number of `volunteers’ [notably Basaev] came from Chechnia and other
North Caucasian republics….Amongst these people were a number of criminals
whose presence facilitated later contacts with local undesirables….As a result
of these developments Abkhazia today is one of the most criminalised areas of
the former Soviet Union.[44]
Note that in this passage Surikov makes no
reference to his own Abkhazian origin, his involvement as a GRU officer in the
Russian-backed Abkhazian insurrection, and his friendship there with Basaev
(referred to by Dunlop). Here and elsewhere in his text it would appear that
the “Chechen group” he describes is one overseen by his own meta-group.
Russian observers have pointed out that the meeting(s) in France, which
took place in June and/or July 1999, came shortly after the unexpected entry of
Russian troops into Kosovo.
On June 11, 1999, 200 Russian
troops in SFOR drove from Bosnia
to Prishtina and secured Slatina airport. Gen Wesley Clark then ordered [UK] Gen. Sir
Mike Jackson (who on June 9 had signed technical agreement for withdrawal of
Yugoslav troops from Kosovo) “to seize the airport. Jackson responded, famously, that he would
not start World War Three for him”[45]
Following two days of talks directly
between Clinton and Yeltsin, the crisis was averted.
Instead there followed weeks of “protracted negotiations on Russia’s role
in the Kosovo peacekeeping mission.”[46]
In the end, under circumstances still not fully understood, the United States
and NATO agreed that the Russians could stay.
The Russian troops finally withdrew from the airport in July 2003.[47]
Significantly, a chart of Russian drug-trafficking prepared by one of Surikov’s
partners, Sergei Petrov, indicates that in 2003 Kosovo ceased to be a main
point of export for Russian drugs, its place being taken by the Black Sea oil port
of Novorossiysk.[48]
Within a year of the troops’ arrival, by 2000, according to DEA
statistics, Afghan heroin accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized
in the United States
– nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier. Much of it was now
distributed in America
by Kosovar Albanians.[49]
It is significant therefore that
The `Pristina dash’ by Russian parachutists in 1999
during the Kosovo crisis (the purpose of the `dash’ was to force NATO to
guarantee for Russia a separate sector of responsibility in Kosovo) was
organized by the head of the General Staff, Anatoly Kvashnin, and his deputy,
Leonid Ivashov, without the knowledge of minister of defense Igor Sergeyev and
most likely without Yeltsin’s knowledge.[50]
Yasenev says
nothing about this, but does assert that Kvashnin was the Russian Army
connection of two leading drug traffickers (Vladimir Filin andAlexey Likhvintsev)
in the Saidov-Surikov group.
II. The Meta-Group, Drugs, Salafist Islam, and America
The Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev Versions
As we have seen, Dunlop describes Anton Surikov, the organizer of
the Beaulieu meeting between Voloshin and Basaev, as “a retired officer in the GRU.” He fails to quote from his source Yasenev’s description of Surikov:
Anton
Victorovich Surikov (b. 1961). Presents himself as political scientist.
Responsible for informational and political projects. Actively publishes in
press. Some of his publications resemble ciphered directives to the elements in
Russian special services disloyal
[emphasis added] to President Vladimir Putin. His other articles contain
political messages intended for abroad. Surikov has contacts with F[ritz] Ermarth, former leading CIA analyst of the USSR and Russia, now in the Nixon Foundation….[51]
Surikov
has close relations with Alexander Prokhanov and Alexander Nagorny
[respectively, chief editor and assistant chief editor of newspaper “Zavtra”],
Anatoly Baranov [chief editor of Pravda.info and KPRF.ru], Mikhail Delyagin,[52]
former advisor to Mikhail Kasyanov[53],
Alexei Kondaurov (head of YUKOS security department, former general of KGB and
FSB, State Duma deputy from CPRF), Ilya Ponomarev (former YUKOS CEO, CPRF).
In
2002-03, together with Kondaurov–who represented Mikhail Khodorkovsky and
Leonid Nevzlin–Surikov, with the help of Victor Vidmanov, organized financing
of CPRF by YUKOS shareholders and the individuals associated with OPS [the
organized criminal society] (Yakov Kosman, Nikolai Lugovskoi) to the tune of
$15 million.
Boris Kagarlitskii’s essay and
Yasenev’s memo, taken from intelligence files, talk about Surikov, but from
opposing perspectives. Kagarlitskii, a longtime dissident and foe of Putin, saw
the Beaulieu meeting as the venue for Kremlin-instigated violence, designed to restore
the Kremlin’s popularity before the coming election. Yasenev’s memo sees
Surikov as part of an on-going effort to destabilize Russia, and weaken the Kremlin.
Kagarlitskii (and after him
Dunlop) say almost nothing about Surikov, other than to refer to his past years
with Russian military intelligence, the GRU. To quote Dunlop,
Kagarlitskii also notes: “During
Primakov’s time, Surikov worked on the staff of the government of the Russian Federation.
Despite this fact, he also developed regular work relations with Voloshin’s
people.” It seems therefore quite likely that Surikov and Voloshin were
personally acquainted.[54]
However
Yasenev’s memo in December 2004 links Surikov, not to the government or Kremlin,
but (through Kondaurov) to the sphere of the man who by that time had emerged
as America’s best friend and Putin’s most powerful enemy in Russia, the
oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovskii. (The Kondaurov-Khodorkovskii connection is
abundantly documented: both men freely admit it.)
Forbes magazine, which underwrote
Klebnikov’s damning accounts of both Berezovskii and Nukhaev, wrote on March 18, 2002 that
Khodorkovskii appeared “to be the West’s best friend” in Russia.
According to PBS in 2003, Khodorkovskii’s firm Menatep shared business
interests with the western investment firms Global Asset Management, the
Blackstone Group, the Carlyle Group and AIG Capital Partners. In addition
He frequently travels to the United States.
He reportedly dined with Condoleezza Rice last year and recently was a guest at
Herb Allen’s Idaho
ranch, along with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other luminaries, for an
annual telecommunications executives meeting.[55]
Quoting from an anti-Yeltsin essay of May 1999 by Surikov in Versiya, the American right-wing
Jamestown Foundation agrees with Yasenev (against Kagarlitskii) that “Surikov
is clearly in the camp of Yeltsin’s opponents.”[56]
More recently Surikov has also shown himself to be anti-Putin, criticizing
Putin’s “obvious inability … to struggle against terrorism effectively.”[57]
Furthermore Surikov clearly had western support in his opposition to
government corruption under Yeltsin. We need only look to the following description
of a Surikov book published in London:
Crime in Russia:
the international implications Anton Surikov London Defence Studies.Examines (1) the growth of
organized crime in post-Soviet Russia (2) the extraordinary extent to which the
Colombian cartel has targeted Russia as a conduit for its penetration of the
world market (3) the scale of drug-trafficking in Russia, predominantly by the ‘Chechen
group’ controlled by the Dudayev regime.[58]
The author’s interesting career details are set out on a prelim page. The
monograph is introduced by Jonathan Aves (lecturer in Russian studies at the University of Sussex) ‘Introduction’ pp1-6, 12 refs,
detailing both the scale of the problem and Surikov’s background expertise. This expertise has to be assumed by the reader,
as the monograph contains no literature references of its own.[59]
According to his webpage at the IPROG website, Surikov spent the year
1994 at the Centre for Defence Studies, King’s College, London.[60]
(Audrius Butkevicius is said to have spent the year there as well.)
As for Yasenev’s allegations that “Surikov has contacts with F. Ermarth,”
Surikov when questioned about this admitted it frankly: “I am personally acquainted
with Mr. Ermarth as political scientist since 1996. It’s well known by many people and we never
hid this fact.”[61] In saying this, Surikov was
admitting to a CIA connection: Ermarth, a senior officer who twice served on
the National Security Council, did not retire from the CIA until 1998. The two
men had met in April 1996 at a Global International Security Seminar in Virginia.[62]
Above all, Kagarlitskii is silent about the charge which has since
aroused controversy in the Russian media: Surikov’s supposed involvement with
“a group of renegade Soviet secret service officers who are allegedly involved
in international drug trafficking and have ties with Western and Saudi security
apparatus.”[63]
It would be interesting to learn at what point Kagarlitskii first
met Surikov, and whether Surikov was in fact the source for Kagarlitskii’s
article about the meeting in southern France. Today the two men are
close, and serve together at the Moscow Institute
for the Study of Globalization (IPROG).[64]
Saidov, Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug Trafficking
The most conspicuous clue to Dunlop’s selectivity in his use of the
Yasenev memo is his failure to identify “Mekhmet,” the “certain
Turk, in the past an advisor to the Islamicist premier of Turkey,
[Necmettin] Erbakan.”[65] Yasenev
identifies Mekhmet, linking him not only to Erbakan but also to the CIA, to
Saudi intelligence, and to al-Qaeda:
In 2003
the Turkish citizen Mehmet whose real name is Ruslan Saidov, persuaded the
President of the Chechen
Republic, Ahmed Kadyrov,
that he could be of use with Kadyrov’s policy of “national reconciliation.”
Saidov took part in organizing Kadyrov’s visit to Saudi Arabia. There Kadyrov made an
agreement with the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Naif Ibn Abdel-Aziz, that
the Arab militants under the Lieutenant Colonel Aziz ben Said ben Ali al Hamdi
(alias Abu al Walid al-Hamadi), Prince Naif’s subordinate, would be removed
from Chechnya by May 2004. The agreement stipulated that Kadyrov guaranteed
safe passage to Abu al-Walid. Playing a double game and intending to set up
both parties, Saidov (probably together with Abu al-Walid himself) gave this
information to the CIA. Apparently the CIA was concerned that having left Chechnya the
Arab militants would resurface in Iraq and join the terrorist group
of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that belongs to the al-Qaida network.
Trying
to prevent this, and besides, wanting to discredit Kadyrov in the eyes of
Prince Naif, the CIA gave Saidov an “assignment”. On April 13 in the
Nozhai-Yurt district of Chechnya, Russian troops killed Abu al-Walid (or
alleged having done so). Saidov paid $300,000 to those who carried out this
operation. Their bosses in Moscow
received $500,000. How much the CIA paid Saidov is unknown….
Yasenev describes Saidov as both a
drug trafficker and an arms trafficker, involved with the supply of Russian
arms to the Saudi-backed secessionists from Yemen in Aden. This was at a time when Russia had
officially ceased support to the one-time Marxist country in favor of
supporting Yemeni unity:[66]
In
May-June 1994, Saidov together with Usman Imaev and Khozh-Ahmed Nukhaev and
under an agreement with Pavel Grachev and Dzhohar Dudaev, organized twenty-two
flights to airlift arms and ammunition via the Chechen airport Sheikh Mansur to
the airport Aden
in Yemen.[67]
In the
spring of 1995 Saidov began to cooperate with the organized society, led by
Vladimir Filin and Alexei Likhvintsev [see below] in handling [narcotics] traffic
through the port
of Novorossiysk.
Saidov is described by Yasenev as
having good relations not only with the CIA, but also with both Turkish Islamists
and even with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man often described as both the
“mastermind” behind 9/11 and the senior partner in al Qaeda with the younger bin
Laden:[68]
Since
August 1995 Saidov resides in Turkey.
In
December 1995 he published an extremist book in Turkish The Muslims of the Caucasus in the 19th century: Genocide by Russia. The
leader of the Welfare Party and the future Turkish Prime Minister, Necmettin
Erbakan, gave a good review of this book. In July 1996 Saidov became his
advisor.[69]
In December
1996 Ayman al-Zawahiri was arrested in Dagestan
for illegal entry.[70]
He carried a false Sudanese passport. When he was arrested Saidov went to Makhachkala [the capital
of Dagestan]. There he organized a petition to
the authorities in support of Zawahiri. It was signed by twenty-six Muslim
clergymen and the Russian State Duma deputy, Nadirshakh Khachilaev.[71]
Saidov managed to obtain a court decision, condemning Zawahiri to a six-month
prison term, which had actually expired by that time….
Since
the middle of the nineties, Saidov formed stable relations with the Saudi
businessman Adnan Khashoggi, Prince Turki al-Faisal (then head of the Saudi
intelligence and at present, Saudi Ambassador to Great Britain) and Prince
Naif.[72]
In addition Yasenev made it clear
that Saidov was not pro-Putin, but a Muslim activist who was passionately
anti-Putin and indeed anti-Russian:
In
September 2003, Saidov participated in the congress of the extremist
organization Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami in Jordan. At this congress he announced
that Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami was an organization effectively acting in the
underground throughout Russia,
Central Asia and the Crimea….[73]
On December 8, 2004 Saidov
addressed Muslim youth in Moscow.
In his words, “following Ukraine,
the Orange Revolution is coming to Russia.” “Our liberals say that in
2008 the situation in Moscow
will be like the one in Kiev.”
However, everything will be different, and not in 2008, but earlier.” “Amirs
and mudjahideen will soon make the Kremlin shudder with horror.” In 2005, “they
will throw into hell the servant of Satan,” i.e., President Putin, who is
allegedly “wanted by the International Tribunal at The Hague.”
The same goal of Muslim liberation was attributed by Yasenev to the
organizer of the meeting in France, Anton Surikov:
On
December 13 2004,
in Adygeia, Surikov had a meeting with a group of Sufi believers and said this:
“In the past we were against ahl-ad-dalala (those who gone astray) with
their Arab money. We used to say that
one should not separate from Russia. But now “Russia is on the brink of collapse
and chaos.” So “we’ll be separating
[from Russia]
with all Muslims of the Caucasus.” A new state will be created on our historical
lands from Psou and the Black Sea to Laba and Kuban.”
(The goal of splitting up Russia
attributed here to Surikov is that which, in an earlier text co-authored by
Surikov, is attributed by Russian “radicals” to the United States:
The
radicals believe that the US
actively utilizes Turkish and Muslim elements….From Azerbaijan, radicals foresee a
strategic penetration which would irrevocably split the Federation. US influence
would be distributed to the former Soviet
Central Asian
Republics, to Chechnya and
the other North Caucasus Muslim autonomous republics of T[at]arstan and Bashkortostan.
As a result Russian territorial integrity would be irreparably compromised.)[74]
Yasenev claims also that, in the
summer of 2004, the meta-group
started
a project in the Near-Volgian Federal District to train cadres for Volga-Urals
chapter of the international extremist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned by
the Supreme Court of the Russian
Federation in 2003. The project is financed
by private philanthropic foundations of the Arabic Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
In this context we can further question
Dunlop’s assumption that the 1999 meeting organized by Surikov in southern France was
called to promote the intentions of the Yeltsin “family.” In the light of the
Yasenev essay, it is more likely to have served the purposes of militant Islam
and the drug traffic.
The portraits of Saidov’s and
Surikov’s connections with al-Zawahiri, Erbakan, and Hizb ut-Tahrir confirm the
criticism, by the Indian analyst B. Raman and others, that American studies of
Islamist jihadism err in their
restrictive focus on al-Qaeda.[75]
The full range of Islamic jihadism is far more complex.
In my conclusion I shall return
to the possibility that U.S.
government might share common goals with Hizb ut-Tahrir and the meta-group in Russia, even
while combating the Islamist terrorism of al-Qaeda in the Middle
East and the West.
III. Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West, Ltd
Yasenev
links Saidov, Surikov, and others to their former service in a drug-interception
group in Afghanistan,
under a Leonid Kosyakov who now headed a company called Far West, Ltd.:
Leonid
Leonidovich Kosyakov, b. 1955, Ukrainian citizen. Until 2005 resided in Arab
Emirates and Switzerland. Citizen of Ukraine. Retired from the service in
May 1993. Presently the president of Far
West Ltd. In 1983-85 Kosyakov was in
command of a special group in Shindand (Afghanistan), assigned to intercept
caravans with drugs. In different times under his direct command served Filin,
Lunev, Likhvintsev, Surikov, Petrov, as well as Saidov[76]
Yasenev also presents testimony that this
group developed into what the Russians call an OPS (an Organized Criminal
Society) responsible for massive drug-trafficking:
These
accusations were made by the former officer of the Main Intelligence
Directorate of Ukraine Sergei Petrov (alias Serge Rodin, French citizen).
According to his
testimony:
“The OPS
[organized criminal society] was involved in drug trafficking since the
beginning of 1990s:
-from 1995 the
OPS transports heroin (produced in Afghanistan) from Tajikistan to
European countries via Russia
with the assistance of the Russian Defense Ministry.
– from 2000 the
OPS is involved in smuggling Colombian cocaine to Russia through the seaports
of Novorossiysk and St. Petersburg under the disguise of import shipments from
Latin America.
Among the OPS
contacts in Novorossyisk is Saidov; in St.
Petersburg it used to be Roman Tsepov.
Received profits
are used for personal enrichment of the OPS leaders, the officials at the
Ministry of Defense who provide them with “the roof” [protection], and for
financing extremist activities.”
In November of
2003, Rodin contacted the law enforcement agencies of Germany and France. Their investigation did not result in any
actions against Filin, Likhvintsev, and their partners.
In January 2004,
Rodin was blown up in his car in South Africa.
Yasenev’s charge of a military organized
crime group under Filin had been reported
a year earlier by Russian journalist Nikita Kaledin:
There is a
powerful military organized crime community which from 1992 through to the
present has controlled substantial drug flows from Afghanistan to Russia and
Europe and is also involved in laundering “dirty” money and is actively
involved in Russia’s political life. The community is controlled by former
intelligence officers, Afghan war veterans, and now drugs barons Vova Filin and
Lesha Pribalt. The former lives in Switzerland, the latter in London. Both make quite
frequent trips to Moscow,
Dushanbe,
Nazran, and Khankala….
Filin and Pribalt literally flooded Russia with
heroin. The Kremlin could not tolerate
this abomination any longer and ordered a mighty “Chekist raid” [i.e., ordered
the FSB to shut down the operation] against the narcobarons. However, it is rumored that the raid has
ended up with the agreement that the latter would 1) share their profits; 2) help in the facilitating the peaceful
referendum on the constitution in Chechnya; 3) bring some order to the
drug market by liquidating the leaders of ethnic criminal groups.”[77]
As if in fulfillment of the third point, Surikov in 2001 denounced
the leaders of an influential Tajik heroin cartel, including the mayor of the
Tajik capital, Dushanbe.[78]
(Tajiks until then had been one of the ethnic mafias who most dominated the
trafficking of Afghan heroin through Russia.)
Far West, Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush
The connection to Far West, Ltd, of Filin, Likhvinsky, Surikov, and Saidov (along
with Alfonso Davidovich) has since been stunningly corroborated by a news story
on the Pravda-info website about Far West, Ltd, and Kosyakov’s resignation from
it.
At a meeting of
its stockholders on 2 May in the Hotel Ritz Carlton in Dubai “Far West Ltd.”
accepted the retirement of the president of the Agency Leonid Kosiakov, who
moved to government service in Ukraine.
Vladimir Filin, member of the Editorial Board of “Pravda-info,” was
elected the new president, at the same time retaining his previous position as
executive director. The meeting of stockholders, in accordance with its
charter, selected new members of the board of directors of “Far West Ltd.,”
which will now contain 9 members. Besides Vladimir Filin, Anatolii Baranov and
Anton Surikov, it will include four more members if the Editorial Board of “Pravda-info”:
Audrius Butkevicius, Aleksei Likhvintsev, Natal’ia Roeva, and Ruslan Saidov,
and also Valerii Lunev,[79]
a veteran of the Armed Forces, and
Alfonso Davidovich, a political scientist from Venezuela.
Far West, the story said,
specializes in
consulting work on questions of security in conducting business in regions of
the world with unstable environments and hiring personnel for foreign private
military companies [last three words in English]. Its head office is located in
Switzerland.
In addition, the Agency has a network of representatives in OAE [United Arab Emirates],
Afghanistan,
Colombia,
the autonomous region of Kosovo, the autonomous republic of Crimea,
Georgia,
and the Volga Federal District of the RF [Russian Federation].[80]
Recently Filin gave Pravda.info some
details about Far West’s work, and revealed
that the firm had been co-founded by “a sub-division of a well-known American
corporation.” He said that the company’s new contract is
connected with the secured transport of commercial shipments
from Afghanistan, where we have an office, to ports on the Black Sea. In
Afghanistan there is a well-known U.S. air base in Bagram. It is connected
by an aerial bridge with a number of other US air bases. For example, with
the largest base in Frankfurt-on-Main, that’s in Germany, with an
intermediary landing in Chkalovsk, in the Moscow area. But the most commercially attractive route seems to be that from Bagram to the US air base in Magas, in Kyrgyzstan. By the way, it is quite near the Russian air
base in Kant. A significant flow of shipments passes through Magas,
there is a niche there for commercial shipments too. This is very
profitable. It is much more profitable than routing commercial shipments
from Afghanistan through Tajikistan. Therefore last year we completely
withdrew from all shipping through Tajikistan and closed our office in
that country.Who are your partners?
Who our partners are is a commercial secret. I can say that they are four
private firms from three countries, Turkey, Russia, and the USA,which
engage among other things in shipping. One of these firms is a sub-division
of a well-known American corporation. This firm is a co-founder of our agency.[81]
We can assume that Pravda.info is an inside
source for information about Far West, for the two organizations seem in fact
to be two different manifestations of the same group. Among the directors of Far West on the
masthead of Pravda.info we find first of all Anton Surikov, followed by Anatolii
Baranov, Aleksei Likhvintsev, Ruslan Saidov, Vladimir Filin, Natal’ia Roeva,
and Audrius Butkevicius.[82]
Also on the Pravda.info masthead is Boris Kagarlitskii,
who as we saw at the outset is a main source for the Western accounts of the
meeting in southern France,
by Patrick Cockburn, Nafeez Ahmed, and John Dunlop.[83]
Many of the Far West directors, notably Anton
Surikov, are or have been also associated with Kagarlitskii at the Russian
Institute for Globalization Studies (IPROG).[84]
Although Filin and Pravda.info did not
identify the foreign private military companies with which it worked, another
source did:
Filin and
Likhvintsev do business with foreign private military companies (PMCs):
– «Meteoric
Tactical Solutions» (South
Africa) – in Angola;
– «Kellogg,
Brown &Root» (KBR Halliburton) – in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia,
and Iraq.
– «Diligence
Iraq LLC» (controlled by the Kuwaiti Mohammed as-Sagar) – in Iraq.”
Their
cooperation with these companies began in the end of 1994 in Angola on the
initiative of Victor Bout, who was involved in the shipments of Soviet-made
arms to the antigovernment group UNITA in exchange to raw diamonds.[85] Apparently, Bout became interested in
Likhvintsev’s contacts (L. worked in Angola in 1986-87). Later, in October of 1998, Filin, Likhvintsev’s wife
Liudmila Rozkina (b. 1966) and Anton Surikov (at that time he worked in the
Russian government) established the company Far West Ltd., with the office in
Lausanne, which officially does security consulting for business ventures in
countries with unstable regimes. De
facto, this is a legalized form of recruiting mercenaries for PMCs.[86]
Furthermore Yasenev claims that some of Far West’s work with Halliburton is apparently approved
by the CIA for geopolitical purposes:
In 2003-2004,
Filin and Likhvintsev worked on the Georgian project, financed by KBR
Halliburton, apparently, with the approval of the CIA. The project had the goal of weakening the
competitors of Halliburton in the oil business and, in a broader context, of
facilitating the geopolitical objectives of the United States in the Caucasus. The OPS
man in Georgia
is Audrius Butkevicius, former Lithuanian minister of defense, presently
advisor to Badri Patarkatsishvili.[87]
Some of Yasenev’s information about
Diligence Iraq is corroborated by a Press Release from Diligence itself.[88]
Diligence LLC, a private military company
(PMC), could be described as a CIA spin-off:
Diligence was
founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief
executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations
officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations.
Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[89]
Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME)
is New Bridge Strategies, whose political clout was described by the Financial Times:
New Bridge was
established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the
Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush
administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh,
George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith,
former George H.W. Bush aids.[90]
Joe Allbaugh, the co-chairman of the
company, was also head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), on
the day of the 9/11 attacks, and indeed until March 2003, the month that the U.S. invaded Iraq.
The Financial
Times wrote that the success of New
Bridge in securing
contracts had to do with their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s
brother:
Two businessmen
instrumental in setting up New Bridge Strategies, a well-connected Washington
firm designed to help clients win contracts in Iraq, have previously used an
association with the younger brother of President George W. Bush to seek
business in the Middle East, an FT investigation has found.
John Howland,
the company president, and Jamal Daniel, a principal, have maintained an
important business relationship with Neil Bush stretching back several years.
In Mr Daniel’s case, the relationship spans more than a decade, with his French
office arranging a trip for Mr Bush’s family to Disneyland Paris in 1992, while
his father, George H.W.Bush, was president.
On several
occasions, the two have attempted to exploit their association with the
president’s brother to help win business and investors.
Three people
contacted by the FT have seen letters written by Neil Bush recommending
business ventures promoted by Mr Howland, Mr Daniel and his family in the Middle East. Mr Daniel has also had his photograph taken
with the elder Mr Bush. Such letters and photographs can be valuable props when
doing business in the Middle East.
Mr Daniel’s Houston investment fund,
Crest Investment Corporation, employs Neil Bush as co-chairman. Crest
Investment also helped fund Neil Bush’s Ignite!, an educational software
company. Mr Daniel sometimes introduces himself as a founding backer of Mr Bush’s
company, a Middle-Eastern businessman who has met him said, and has persuaded
the families of prominent leaders in the region to invest.[91]
Until recently, news stories about the
international backers for Neil Bush’s firm ignite have focused on Taiwanese
businessmen, and Middle East billionaires, such as Defense Minister and Crown
Prince of Dubai Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum.[92]
But it was a surprise to learn in September 2005 that “Exiled Russian tycoon
Boris Berezovsky was in Riga
along with Neil Bush, the brother of the U.S. president, to discuss an
educational project with Latvian businessmen.”[93]
In an interview with Interfax, “Berezovsky pointed out that he is one of the
shareholders of Ignite! Inc., an educational software company. U.S. President
George W. Bush’s brother Neil Bush is the company’s chairman and chief
executive.”[94]
The U.S.
Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic
Much remains to be learned about Far West,
Ltd., its personnel, and the American firm which co-founded it. Reportedly it
was founded in 1998; and already had Surikov and Saidov as directors when they
attended the meeting in Khashoggi’s villa in July 1999.
I suspect myself that the meeting did
indeed have to do with destabilizing Russia, as Dunlop claimed. But I
believe also that the group at the meeting was more concerned with facilitating
drug-trafficking than with strengthening the Kremlin. I believe further that they
also discussed the Russian presence in Kosovo, and the imminent increase in the
flow of Afghan drugs through Kosovo.
That this flow is huge has been attested to
by many observers. Russian sources estimate that from 1991 to 2003 the same group
shipped to Western Europe up to 300 tons of
heroin and sold it to wholesale buyers of Kosovo Albanian nationality. In
the same period they sold up to 60 tons of heroin to Azeri and Roma (gypsy)
wholesalers in the Volga and the Urals Federal
Districts of Russia. The group’s total receipts for heroin in 1991-2003 are
estimated to be $5 billion.[95]
The chief narco-baron of the group is said to be Vladimir Filin, who is also the
head of Far West. Here is a relevant interview
Filin afforded to his colleague Alexander Nagorny at Filin’s own alternate
organization, Pravda.info:
There have been reports in mass
media about the involvement of the U.S. military in Afghanistan in
drug trafficking. I asked the well-known
political scientist and specialist on organized crime Vladimir Filin to comment
on this.
-Vladimir Ilyich, is it true that
Americans are involved in drug business?
-Yes, they are in ideal situation
for this. They control the Bagram airfield from where the Air Force transport
planes fly to a U.S.
military base in Germany.
In the last two years this base became the largest transit hub for moving
Afghan heroin to other US
bases and installations in Europe. Much of it
goes to Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia.
From there the Kosovo Albanian mafia moves heroin back to Germany and
other EU countries.
-Why such a complex arrangement?
Drug traffickers enjoy relative
safety in military bases. There is no
serious control there. German police cannot work there. However, outside of military bases German
law-enforcement is in effect. True, any
police can be bought. But the level of corruption in Germany is not as high as, say, in Russia. This is why it is more convenient for
Americans to establish distribution centers in other places. I believe that, in time, such centers will
move to their military installations in Poznan,
Poland, and
also in Romania
and Bulgaria. Poland is already a EU member. Romania and Bulgaria are
expected to be in 2007. Corruption in
these countries is almost as high as in Russia.
-How big is American drug traffic
to Europe and who is behind it?
-About 15-20 tons of heroin a
year. When Poznan become open, I think it could rise to
50, even 70 tons. Behind this business are the CIA and the DIA (Defense
Intelligence Agency). Actually, this is
what they did already in Indochina in the
1960s-70s and in Central America in the 1980s.[96]
Under the circumstances I consider Filin to
be no more reliable than his opposite number, Joseph D. Douglass, the author of
Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the
West. But legitimate questions abound as to why the USA empowered
the KLA to take over Kosovo.
[“Peter Dale Scott has requested the deletion here of three erroneous paragraphs concerning Kosovo, Haiti, and AID. The error arose because his published source had misread and misunderstood an AID document.”]
How the U.S. Restored Narco-Barons to Power in Afghanistan, 2001
It is clear that the Blair and Bush Administrations
did have drugs in mind when in 2001 they developed a strategy for ousting the
Taliban in Afghanistan.
Their plans focused chiefly on Ahmad Shah Massoud, overcoming the long-time
resistance in Washington
to supporting this known drug trafficker.[100]
Massoud of course was also the most
successful guerrilla opponent of the Taliban. A more naked example of a U.S. drug ally
was Haji Zaman in Jalalabad.
When the Taliban
claimed Jalalabad…Zaman had fled Afghanistan for a leisurely life in
Dijon, France. Just a few years at the top
of the heroin trade in Jalalabad had given “Mr. Ten Percent” a ticket to just
about any destination he could have chosen. In late September 2001, British and
American officials, keen to build up an opposition core to take back the
country from the Taliban, met with and persuaded Zaman to return to Afghanistan.[101]
According to Asian sources, Zaman’s
long-time Pakistani drug-trafficking partner, Haji Ayub Afridi, was also
released from a Pakistani jail at this time, “reportedly at the request of the
CIA.”[102]
The informed Indian observer B. Raman was
outspoken about the U.S.
use of narcobarons to oust the Taliban. Citing the subsequent failure to curb
opium production, he wrote:
There are
disturbing reports from reliable sources in Afghanistan that this marked lack
of success in the heroin front is due to the fact that the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) of the USA, which encouraged these heroin barons during the Afghan
war of the 1980s in order to spread heroin-addiction amongst the Soviet troops,
is now using them in its search for bin Laden and other surviving leaders of
the Al Qaeda, by taking advantage of their local knowledge and contacts. These Pakistani heroin barons and their
Afghan lieutenants are reported to have played an important role in
facilitating the induction of Hamid Karzai into the Pashtun areas to counter
the Taliban in November, 2001. It is
alleged that in return for the services rendered by them, the USA has turned
a blind eye to their heroin refineries and reserves.[103]
A third major narcobaron selected by the
CIA, according to Raman, was Haji Abdul Qadeer.
Haji Abdul
Qadeer was the CIA’s choice [in 2001] as the Governor of the Nangarhar province
in which Jalalabad is located. …. During the first Afghan war against the
Soviet troops in the 1980s, he played an active role under the control of the
CIA and the Directorate-General For External Security (DGES), the French
external intelligence agency, in organizing
the heroin trail to the Soviet troops from the heroin refineries of
Pakistan owned by Haji Ayub Afridi, the Pakistani narcotics baron, who was a
prized operative of the CIA in the 1980s.
Abdul Qadeer and Afridi became very close associates in running this
drug trade with the blessings of the CIA. Amongst others who were associated
with this trade were Haji Mohammed Zaman and Hazrat Ali.[104]
If Raman is correct, therefore, the CIA not
only blessed but controlled the flow
of drugs from Afridi, Zaman, and Abdul Qadeer into the hands of Soviet troops
like Vladimir Filin and Aleksei Likhvintsev.[105]
IV. The Meta-Group, the War on Terror, and 9/11
U.S. Geostrategic Goals and Chechnya
In the 1980s CIA Director William Casey
used narcotics to achieve two goals, the immediate goal of weakening the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan,
and the long-term goal of financing Islamist resistance to break up the Soviet Union.[106]
According to the partisan but well-informed observer Yossef Bodansky, Director
of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, the U.S. still
pursues the goal of weakening destabilizing Russia.
As if reliving
the “good ol’ days” of Afghanistan
of the 1980s, Washington
is once again seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western
Islamist forces. The US
crossed the line in mid-December 1999, when US officials participated in a
formal meeting in Azerbaijan
in which specific programs for the training and equipping of mujahedin from the
Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab
world were discussed and agreed upon. This meeting led to Washington’s tacit
encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia)
and US “private security companies” (of the type which did the Clinton
Administration’s dirty job in the Balkans while skirting and violating the
international embargo the US formally supported) to assist the Chechens and
their Islamist allies to surge in the Spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing
jihad for a long time.
Washington’s motivation is oil pipeline politics and the economy. Essentially,
Washington is
determined to deprive Russia
of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism, the
political fallout of media accusations of Russian war crimes. In the
calculations of the Clinton Administration, a US-assisted escalation and
expansion of the war in Chechnya
should deliver the desired debilitation of Russia.
The Clinton
Administration believes that the spiraling violence in the Caucasus
will scare Western investors and oil buyers from making deals with Russia.
Meanwhile, with the sudden US
attempted rapprochement with Iran,
the Clinton Administration is heralding the Azerbaijani southern route (with a little
detour in Iran)
as seemingly feasible. And so, in the Summer of 2000, the Clinton
Administration keeps fanning the flames of the Islamist jihad in the Caucasus through covert assistance, tacit encouragement
of allies to actively support the mujahedin, as well as the orchestrating of an
intense media campaign against Russia
and its conduct in Chechnya.[107]
The Caucasian Common Market project of
Khashoggi, Lord McAlpine, and James Baker, can be seen as contributing to this
goal. While these western investors may have sought profits as the result of
their investment, they were perhaps more anxious to see the reduction of
Russian influence, thus providing a more secure environment for the new
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which western oil companies count on to deliver
oil from the Caspian Basin to the Mediterranean.
As the State Department noted in 2005,
the involvement
of U.S.
firms in the development and export of Azerbaijani oil is key to our objectives
of diversifying world oil supplies, providing a solid base for the regional
economy, and promoting U.S.
energy security.[108]
The Bush Administration committed an
estimated $1.5 billion to the Caspian basin area, including an $11 million
program to train a “pipeline protection battalion” for the special Georgian
unit created to protect the Georgian section of the BTC pipeline.[109]
The Meta-Group’s
Geostrategic Goal: Maintain the War of Terror
The fact that the United States
will use drug traffickers as geostrategic assets does not at all mean that
Washington and the traffickers will necessarily have the same agendas. In
theory at least, the contrary should be true. Although the United States may have
used known traffickers like Zaman and Qadir to regain access to Afghanistan,
its stated ultimate goal, and the one assumed by the mainstream media, was to
reimpose its own kind of order. Whether the country is Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Colombia, or Kosovo, America’s
national interest is said to be to install and then protect pipelines. And
pipelines require peace and security.
The prime geostrategic goal of the drug
traffic in Afghanistan
is precisely to prevent peace and security from happening. It is true that the
international illicit drug industry, like the international oil industry, is
polymorphous and flexible, relying on diversified sources and markets for its
products in order to maintain its global dominance. But for the global drug
traffic to prosper, there must always be key growing areas where there is
ongoing violence, and state order does not prevail.
However, in speaking above of America’s stated
national interest, I do not assume that a U.S. government will always
represent that national interest. Something else has happened in recent
decades, the growth of the drug trade to the point that it now represents a
significant portion of national and international wealth. And it has to be said
that the American free enterprise system, like every other dominant political
system in a current nation with world pretensions, will tend above all to represent
the interests of the wealthy.
Thus Bush Administration policies cannot be
assumed to reflect the national goals of peace and security, as outlined above.
On the contrary, its shocking underfunding of Afghanistan’s recovery, like its
complex and destabilizing interventions in Georgia, suggest that it, as much as
the drug traffic, hopes to utilize instability – as a pretext for maintaining unstable
U.S. bases in countries like Uzbekistan, whose people eventually will more and
more object to them. These policies can be said to favor the interests of the
drug traffic more than the interests of security and orderly development.
A test of the Bush Administration’s true
intentions in the War on Terror came as early as November 2001. The Americans
had learned, correctly, that Osama bin Laden was holed up in the caves of Tora
Bora. While storming the caves was a difficult military challenge, surrounding
and isolating them was well within the capacity of U.S. military strength. However General
Franks, the United States
commander, entrusted the task of capturing bin Laden to two local commanders: Hazrat
Ali and Haji Zaman.
As we have seen, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman
were not only drug lords, they were earlier part of the 1980s heroin trail to
Soviet troops that had been organized “with the blessings of the CIA.” Thus the
U.S.
could hardly plead ignorance as to these men’s activities and interests, which
clearly involved making sure that the writ of Kabul would never extend to their own Nangahar Province. For the drug trade to thrive
in Afghanistan,
it was necessary that the influence of Osama and the Taliban be preserved, not
extinguished.
The folly of using Hazrat Ali and Haji
Zaman was brought to Franks’ attention at the time:
Military and intelligence officials had warned Franks
and others that the two main Afghan commanders, Hazrat Ali and Haji Zaman,
couldn’t be trusted, and they proved to be correct. They were slow to move
their troops into place and didn’t attack until four days after American planes
began bombing – leaving time for al-Qaida leaders to escape and leaving behind
a rear guard of Arab, Chechen and Uzbek fighters.[110]
The failure to use U.S. troops cannot be attributed to the motive of appeasing local sentiments:
Pir Baksh Bardiwal, the intelligence chief for the Eastern Shura, said that he would welcome a massive
influx of U.S.
troops. He believed that the Pentagon
planners were making a grave mistake by not surrounding Tora Bora.[111]
A U.S. journalist
who was there, Philip Smucker, claims that the treachery of the local
commanders went beyond their slowness to surround Tora Bora. He describes
hearing how one lower level commander
whom Ali had assigned to guard the Pakistani border,
had acted as an outright escort for al Qaeda…. “Ilyas Khel just showed the
Arabs the way out of the country into Pakistan”…..That Ali had entrusted [Khel,
who had once served under the military commander of Osama’s friend Younis
Khalis] suggested to us that the escapes were part of a much broader conspiracy
to assist al Qaeda right through to the end.[112]
How high up did this conspiracy go?
Certainly Ali’s failure to capture Osama could have been and was predicted. But
if capturing Osama was indeed the U.S. goal (as announced at the time
by Colin Powell), the real question is why the task was not entrusted to U.S. troops.
In the wake of 9/11, Sibel Edmonds, a
former FBI translator, has claimed to possess information linking the American 9/11,
and much else, to massive drug-trafficking which has corrupted high level U.S. officials.
Among other things, she has claimed that the U.S. has never gone after top-level
drug traffickers, because
this would upset
“certain foreign relations.” But it would also expose certain of our elected
officials, who have significant connections with high-level drugs- and
weapons-smuggling – and thus with the criminal underground, even with the
terrorists themselves…..[113]
After Ms. Edmonds reported improprieties to
her FBI employers, she was fired. She has appealed her firing, but the Bush
administration has invoked the unusual claim of the “state-secrets privilege”
to prevent the lawsuits she has filed from being heard in court. At this point
we know little more than that what concerned her involved arms-dealing,
drug-trafficking, and Turkey.
It is I think a matter of national priority
to learn more about the American links to Far West, Ltd., the group accused of
staging the Russian 9/11. It is a matter of more than purely historic interest
to learn if that group’s Islamist and American connections could have supplied
a meeting-ground for staging the American 9/11 as well.
For at present America faces in Afghanistan,
what Russia faces in Chechnya, a war which is favorable to drug trafficking but
increasingly deleterious to national well-being.[114]
The Bush Administration continues to use 9/11 to sell its Asian adventures to
the American people. Meanwhile elements profiting from the flow of Afghan drugs
continue to grow stronger and more dangerous to the well-being of both
countries.
Concluding
Question: The Meta-Group and the United States Government
It seems clear that the meta-group, with
its influential connections on at least three continents, was powerful enough
to effect changes, through the Russian 9/11, in Russian history. The question
arises whether they could similarly effect changes in American history as well.
As we have seen Russian sources claim that
the U.S. Government has had access to he meta-group, for such especially
sensitive projects as the assassination of Abu al Walid al-Hamadi. They claim the meta-group’s
involvement in a number of U.S.-sponsored regime changes in eastern Europe,
from the overthrow of Ceausescu in Romania to the recent deposition of
Shevardnadze in Georgia.
The Wall Street Journal attributed the latter to
the work of “a raft of non-governmental organizations . . . supported by
American and other Western foundations.”[115]
One of these was the Albert Einstein Institution, funded by both the NED and
the Soros foundations, which helped to create the dissident youth movementKmara in Georgia.Audrius Butkevicius, the meta-group member now
resident in Georgia,
is said to be closely connected with the Albert Einstein Institution.[116]
To this we should possibly add the so-called
tulip revolution in March 2005 that ousted long-time leader Askar Akayev in Kyrgyzstan, (It
was after this event that Far West opened its
office in Kyrgyzstan.)[117]
Nagorny claims that the coup was organized by British intelligence and Chechens
in Istanbul,
with the “technical assistance” of Americans.[118]
Since then the heroin traffic through Kyrgyzstan has allegedly almost
trebled.[119]
Returning to a question raised earlier, it
also seems possible that the U.S.
government might contemplate using Hizb ut-Tahrir and the meta-group for
political changes in Russia
itself, even while combating the Islamism of al-Qaeda elsewhere. This would be
far from the first time that the U.S. Government had used drug-trafficking
proxies as assets, and would do a lot to explain the role of the U.S. in 2001 in
restoring major drug traffickers to power in Afghanistan. Dubious figures like
Nukhaev, Khodorkovskii, and Khashoggi have already shown their interest in such
initiatives; and western business interests have shown their eagerness to work
with these allies of the meta-group.
It is fitting to think of most U.S.
intelligence assets as chess pieces, moved at the whim of their controllers.
That is however not an apt metaphor for the meta-group, which clearly has the
resources to negotiate and to exert its own influence interactively upon the
governments it works with.
Since first hearing about the meta-group’s
role in the Russian 9/11, I have pondered the question whether it could have
played a similar role in the American 9/11 as well. At this point I have to say
that I have found no persuasive evidence that would prove its involvement. The
fact remains that two informed and credible witnesses, Sibell Edmonds and
Indira Singh, have spoken independently of the importance of international drug
trafficking in the background of 9/11.
The Bush Administration has paid Sibell
Edmonds the tribute of silencing her on the grounds of national interest. She
has nonetheless made it clear that what she would talk about concerns that part
of the world where the meta-group has influence:
SE [Sibell
Edmonds]: It’s interesting, in one of my interviews, they say “Turkish
countries,” but I believe they meant Turkic countries – that is, Turkey,
Azerbaijan, and all the ‘Stans, including Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and
[non-Turkic countries like] Afghanistan and Pakistan. All of these countries
play a big part in the sort of things I have been talking about.
CD [Chris
Deliso]: What, you mean drug-smuggling?
SE: Among other
things. Yes, that is a major part of it. It’s amazing that in this whole “war
on terror” thing, no one ever talks about these issues.[120]
Indira Singh, who lost her high-tech job at
J.P. Morgan after telling the FBI about Ptech and 9/11, was even more dramatic
in her public testimony at a Canadian event:
I did a number
of things in my research and when I ran into the drugs I was told that if I
mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.[121]
The False Dilemmas of 9/11 Theories
I said
earlier that by suppressing awareness of the role of drug-trafficking in our
society, we give drug traffickers a de
facto franchise to exert political influence without criticism or
opposition. An example of this is the discussion of 9/11 in America, which
usually fails to consider the meta-group among the list of possible suspects.
I have
tried to suggest in this paper that in fact the meta-group had both motive – to
restore the Afghan opium harvest and increase instability and chaos along the
trade routes through Central Asia – and
opportunity – to utilize its contacts with both al-Zawahiri in al Qaeda and the
CIA in Washington.
It is furthermore the best candidate to explain one of the more difficult
anomalies (or indeed paradoxes) of the clues surrounding 9/11: that many of the
clues lead in the direction of Saudi Arabia, but some lead also in a very
different direction, towards Israel.[122]
Here it is
worth quoting again the well-informed remark of a Washington insider about the meta-group’s
predecessor, BCCI: “Who else could wire something
together to Saudi Arabia,
China,
Israel,
and the U.S.?”[123]
The current meta-group fills the same bill, for it unites supporters of Muslim
Salafism (Saidov) with at least one Israeli citizen (Kosman).
The
meta-group’s involvement in the Russian 9/11 of course does nothing to prove
its involvement in the American one. However awareness of its presence – as an
unrecognized Force X operating in the world – makes previous discussions of
9/11 seem curiously limited. Again and again questions of responsibility have
been unthinkingly limited to false dilemmas in which the possible involvement
of this or any other Force X is excluded.
An early
example is Michael Moore’s naïve question to President Bush in Dude, Where’s My Country: “Who attacked
the United States
on September 11 – a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?”[124]
A far more widespread dilemma is that articulated by David Ray Griffin in his
searching critique of the 9/11 Commission Report:
There are two basic theories about 9/11. Each
of these theories is a “conspiracy theory.” One of these is the official
conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks of 9/11 were planned and
executed solely by al-Qaeda terrorists under the guidance of Osama bin
Laden….Opposing this official theory is the [sic] alternative conspiracy
theory, which holds that the attacks of 9/11 were able to succeed only because
they were facilitated by the Bush administration and its agencies.[125]
Griffin of course is not consciously excluding a third possible theory –
that a Force X was responsible. But his failure to acknowledge this possibility
is an example of the almost universal cultural denial I referred to earlier. In
America
few are likely to conceive of the possibility that a force in contact with the U.S. government
could be not just an asset, but a force exerting influence on that government.
My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is
that they focus on the connections of the meta-group’s firm Far West, Ltd. – in
particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick
Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush.
DIRECTORS OF FAR WEST, LTD.[126]
Leonid Leonidovich Kosyakov, b. 1955,
Ukrainian citizen. Until 2005 resided in Dubai
and Switzerland.
’83-’85 – in command of a special GRU group in Shindand, West. Afghanistan,
assigned to intercept caravans with drugs. In different times under his command
served Filin, Lunev, Likhvintsev, Surikov, Saidov, and Petrov. Ret. in ’93.
Owns big travel company in Dubai.
In the spring of 2005 was appointed to general’s position in Ukrainian military
intelligence (GUR) and stepped down as the official president of Far West Ltd.Vladimir
“Ilyich” Filin, b. 1960, Kiev,
Ukraine.
Ukrainian. Doctor of sciences (1982). In ’83-84 served in a special unit of GRU
in Western Afghanistan, assigned to intercept
caravans with drugs. In 1993 retired from GRU in the rank of Lt.-Colonel. A
British citizen since 2000. In 2004 Filin
was listed as political scientist and expert on “revolutionary and guerilla
movements in the developing world” at IPROG, the Moscow Institute for
Globalization Studies.Anatoly Baranov. Journalist. Under
Masliukov-Primakov cabinet served as public relations executive director,
Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG. In 2002 bought forum.msk.ru. Owner of
Pravda-info. 2003 – Press secretary to the deputy prime minister Alyoshin
(military-industrial complex). “Coordinator of media projects” at
IPROG.Audrius Butkevicius, Lithuanian.
Presently resides in Georgia.
Former Lithuanian minister of defense. Sentenced for bribery. Has close ties
with Albert Einstein Institution. Member of Far West Ltd. board of directors
and the editorial board of Pravda.info. ’94 – visiting scholar at Centre for
Defence Studies at King’s College London (together with Anton Surikov and Igor
Sutyagin, now in prison for espionage).Alfonso Davidovich Ochoa (b. 1948),
Venezuelan, resides in Munich,
Germany. Has
German and Venezuelan citizenship. In the 1970s went through special training
in the USSR
and East Germany.
Was close to the Cuban General Arnaldo Ochoa Sanchez. In the past used
passports in the names of Jose Rodriguez, Captain of the Cuban Army, and Jose
Alva, Colombian citizen. Responsible for FWL office in Bogotá.Alexei Likhvintsev
(“Abdulla,” “Pribalt”), b. 1959, Lviv, Ukraine.
Ukrainian. British citizen (2000), resides in Britain (Scotland?). ’84-85 special GRU unit
based in Shindand, West. Afghanistan).
Nov ’87-Jan ’89 – military advisor in Angola. 90′-’93 – together with
Filin on assignment to sell the property of the Soviet Army in East Germany,
did business with Kosovo Albanian companies. ’93.Valery Nikolaevich Lunev (b. 1960, Belorussia). Belorussian. ’83-84 – special GRU unit based in Shindand, West. Afghanistan. Married to Dzhokhar Dudaev’s relative Fatima (b. 1970). Retired from the military in March of 1995. Lunev is responsible for security and “strong arm operations”. For his operations he hires the former and active duty officers of Russian secret services, including spetsnaz. Resides in the Netherlands, has Dutch citizenship. In 1990-91 Lunev took part in overthrowing the regime of Zviad Gamsahurdia in Georgia. Has extensive contacts in Tajikistan.
Ruslan Shamilievich Saidov (b. 1960,
city of Khasavyurt,
Dagestan). Avar Chechen-Spanish. Has Turkish
passport in the name of Hungar (?) Mehmet and passport of Arab Emirates. ’83-84
– special GRU unit based in Shindand, West. Afghanistan. Later, assignments in Lebanon and Syria. Ret.
Major of GRU ’93. Resides in Turkey
since ’95 and in Dubai.
Advisor to Necmettin Erbakan – ’96. Business partner of the Islamic Bank of Dubai and Habib Bank.
Since mid-90s Saidov formed stable relations with the Saudi businessman Adnan
Hashoggi, Prince Turki al-Faisal and Prince Na’f. Close to Basaev and Khattab.Anton Victorovich Surikov ,
“Mansur” (Ancestral name: Mansur Ali-Hadzhi Natkhoev), b. 1961, Sukhimi, Georgia,
USSR.
Ethnic Adygei. Son of a leading figure in the Soviet military-industrial
establishment. Resides in Moscow.
Has Turkish and, possibly, US
citizenship. Doctor of sciences. ’84-served in a special GRU unit, based in
Shindand, West. Afghanistan).
’90-96 – Institute of USA
and Canada.
’92 – 93 – deputy of the Abkhazian minister of defense, makes friends with
Shamil Basaev, commander of the special battalion trained by GRU. ’94 – visiting scholar at the Center for Defense
Studies, King’s College London. ’96 – ret. Colonel. Also on IPROG staff.Yakov Abramovich
Kosman (b. 1946), resides in Nice,
France. Has
German and, possibly, Israeli citizenship. Involved in real estate operations
and banking. Has contacts with Kosovo Albanian criminal societies in European
countries. In 1997-2000 he served as financial consultant to Hashim Thaçi, the
chief commander of KLA. The new president of Far West, Ltd.
| Peter Dale Scott‘s last book was Drugs, Oil, and War (2003). For the past three years he has been living in Berkeley and Thailand, while writing a book on oil, drugs, and 9/11. His website is www.peterdalescott.net |
Footnotes
[1] Asia Times, 10/27/05, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GJ27Ag02.html.
[2] Nick Kochan, The Washing Machine: How Money Laundering
and Terrorist Financing Soils Us (Mason,
OH: Thomson, 2005), 124.
[3] Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, 2004; quoted in Kochan, The Washing Machine, 124: “The effects
of this worldwide, highly integrated industry have been felt from Colombia to Thailand, from Afghanistan to Sudan, and from
Russia
to the United States.
No country has been impervious.
Transnational drug networks have exploded in response to the new
conditions in the former Soviet Union.
Particularly menacing are the connections that have been identified between
networks in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Soviet successor states.”
[4] Robert I.
Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob
Has Invaded America
(Boston: Little
Brown, 2000), 208-09.
[5] Alfred
W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (Chicago:
Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago
Review Press, 2001); Peter
Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
[6] Jonathan Beaty and
S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride
into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 347.
[6a] A comprador is an agent who acts as intermediary between local and international commerce. The term is used pejoratively in Marxist literature, but I use it neutrally here. Each compradorial revolution must be judged on its own merits
[7] “According to the UN, opium production [in Afghanistan] peaked
in 2004 to near record levels of 4,200 metric tonnes – nearly 90% of the world
market” (BBC News, 4/26/05,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4487433.stm).
[8] The former
dominance of the Burma
drug trade by the Taiwan-based Guomindang (GMD) has now been replaced in press
accounts by the control of the United Wa State Army, an ostensibly indigenous
group. At the heart of the Wa Army, however, control of the traffic by Taiwan intelligence
endures. See Bertil Lintner,
Burma in Revolt: Opium and Insurgency since 1948
(Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1999), 321, 324, 380.
[9] Letter of Anton Surikov to Oleg Grechenevsky, discussed below: “I
am personally acquainted with Mr. Ermarth as political scientist since
1996. It’s well known by many people and
we never hid this fact.” Fritz Ermath did not retire from the CIA until 1998.
Cf. Argumenty i Facty, 9/15/99, http://www.aif.ru/oldsite/986/art010.html.
That the two men met in 1996 was indeed public knowledge. The Russian journal Commersant published a photo of the two
men and others at the International Seminar on Global Security in Virginia, April, 1996.
[10] Interview, http://www.pravda.info/region/3601.html,
discussed below. Cf. Letter of Anton
Surikov to Oleg Grechenevsky, discussed below:
“We cooperate with the American side in the sphere of commercial
transportation not on the basis of direct commercial contracts between our
agency [Far West, Ltd.] and the U. S. government, but through the intermediary
company co-founded by the agency and a private U.S. company, which in its turn
also interacts with the U.S. government.”
[11] Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“An
Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”),
http://www.compromat.ru/main/surikov/saidov.htm.
[12]John B.
Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow”: A Plan of the Yeltsin “Family” to
Destabilize Russia
The Hoover Institution, October 8, 2004, http://www.sais-jhu.edu/programs/res/papers/Dunlop%20paper.pdf.
[13] Peter
Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death
of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 6-15.
[14]
See the anecdote in the latest edition of Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of
Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Traffic (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago Review
Press, 2003), xii; discussed also in Peter Dale Scott, “The Sleep of Reason: Denial,
Memory-Work, and the Reconstruction of Social Order,” Literary Responses to Mass Violence (Waltham, MA:
Brandeis University, 2004).
[15] Scott, Deep Politics,
164-81.
[16] This distinction between a government operation ad a
socio-political force reflects the distinction I make between parapolitics and
deep politics (Scott, Deep Politics,
6-12).
[17] Seymour Hersh, New Yorker,
3/17/03, http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact.
Soon after the exposure of Perle’s contact with Khashoggi, which, Hersh argued,
violated a federal Code of Conduct for government employees, Perle resigned his
influential position as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
[18] Interfax, 9/21/05.
See below.
[19] Richard
Secord, with Jay Wurts, Honored and
Betrayed: Irangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret War in Laos (New
York: John Wiley, 1992), 283-84; cf. Robert Parry, Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq (Arlington, VA: Media Consortium, 2004), 136, 139.
[20] Patrick Cockburn, “Russia
‘planned Chechen war before bombings,'” Independent,
1/29/00, http://www.naqshbandi.net/haqqani/features/caucasus/news/stepashin_confession.htm.
[21] Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed, “The Smashing of Chechnya: An International
Irrelevance.
A Case Study of the Role of Human Rights in Western Foreign Policy”
http://mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq5.html.
[22] John B.
Dunlop, “`Storm in Moscow’:
A Plan of the Yeltsin “Family” to Destabilize Russia
The Hoover
Institution, October 8, 2004,
15-17
[23] Dunlop,
“`Storm in Moscow,'”
18.
[24] Although Dunlop
does not mention it, Khashoggi “himself, in a letter addressed to Versiya, denied the allegation that the
meeting occurred specifically at his estate” (Versiya, 2/3/00).
The book Blowing Up Russia goes further, arguing that “no such meeting took
place, and someone deliberately misinformed the Russian media.” The logic
advanced for this conclusion is that the bombings were not needed “by the
insurgents in Chechnya
to encourage the legal recognition of their independent republic” (Yuri Felshtinsky and Alexander
Litvinenko, Blowing Up Russia [New
York: S.P.I. Books, 2002], 105, 108). However this
“logic” ignores the more likely motive of Basaev: to weaken the influence of
the moderate Chechen leader Maskhadov, and create future political space for
action by Salafi Muslim jihadists. See Shireen T. Hunter, Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity
and Security (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), 152-55.
[25] John B.
Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow”: A Plan of the Yeltsin “Family” to
Destabilize Russia
The Hoover
Institution, October 8, 2004.
[26] Dunlop,
“Storm in Moscow,”
41: “At the end of June [2000] there arrived at the editorial board of Versiya a large postal envelope without
a return address. In it was a photograph in which were depicted three men….
After a time, there was a telephone call to the editorial offices, and the man
who called, who did not introduce himself, said: ‘That is the photograph of the
meeting of Voloshin with Basaev. It is easy to recognize Voloshin, but Basaev
is the bearded man to the extreme right. That is what you wrote about [in the 3 August 1999 issue] and
what you need.’ The unidentified man explained that the photograph was from a
still of footage shot with a video-camera…” (The third man in the photograph, Versiya asserted, was former GRU
operative Anton Surikov.) Versiya
published the photograph of the three men at the head of the article.”
[27] Khashoggi’s
connections to U.S.
intelligence date back to his involvement in Lockheed payoffs to Saudi
politicians in the 1960s. These tended to overlap with CIA patterns of
corruption; and the USAF actually ran a similar program with Lockheed,
“code-named ‘Operation Buttercup’ that operated out of Norton Air Force
Base in California from 1965 to 1972″ (San
Francisco Chronicle, 10/24/73, 22).” For the pattern of Lockheed
payoffs tracking the CIA’s, see Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar (New York: Viking, 1977), 134, 227-8, 238.
[28] Anthony Summers with Robbyn Swann, The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon (New York: Viking, 2000),
283.
[29] Peter Truell and
Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside
Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1992), 84.
[30] Robert Parry, Secrecy
& Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq (Arlington,
VA: Media Consortium, 2004), 136,
139. A Portuguese newspaper article alleged that Khashoggi was a
director of BCCI, and this claim has often been repeated. The best sources
confirm only Khashoggi’s profitable arms deals with the bank as co-investor,
and his cousin Yassin’s participation in a BCCI affiliate, Hong Kong Deposit
and Guaranty (Truell and Gurwin, False
Profits, 108-09, 129, 135-38).
[31] Ron Kessler, The Richest Man
in the World , 181-83.
[32] “Separatism,
Islam and Oil,” http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2000/02/game/344.htm.
Cf. “The tendencies of interregional and international integration in North Caucasia,” Caucasian Knot,
eng.kavkaz.memo.ru/reginfotext/ engreginfo/id/560578.html: “One of the projects
of Caucasian integration is called “Caucasian Common Market”. It was
offered in 1997 by Chechen politicians with the support of the western states –
USA
and Great Britain.
This project is on the stage of implementation: in Georgia a branch of Caucasian
Common Market is established, a company for insurance of foreign investments is
established, an industrial construction consortium “Caucasus”
is organised that apart from renovation of the port Poti plans to construct
motorways and railways in Chechnya.
The executive bodies of Caucasian Common Market are also represented in Baku. Caucasian-American
chamber of commerce and as part of it Caucasian investment fund were organised
in the USA.
These organisations are going to collect 3 billion USD as the initial capital
for the projects of Caucasian Common Market.”
[33] Jamestown
Foundation, Monitor, Vol. 3, Issue
206, 11/4/97.
Another interested party before his tragic death with Princess Diana was Dodi
al-Fayad, the owner of Harrod’s and Khashoggi’s nephew.
[34] AFP, “From criminal to Islamist: US journalist traces the life of a
Chechen rebel,” JRL 7252, 7/16/03,
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7252-17.cfm#top.
Nukhaev’s criminal background was known in the West before his dealings with
Lord McAlpine and (allegedly) James Baker. See A. Zhilin, ” The Shadow of
Chechen Crime over Moscow,”
Jamestown Foundation, 3/22/96,
http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?search=1&volume_id=3&issue_id=128&article_id=15.27;
Paul Klebnikov, Razgovor S Varvarom Besedy S Chechenskim Polevym Komandirom
Khozhakhmedom Nukhaevym O Banditizme I Islame (Talks with a Barbarian). .
This background did not deter Margaret Thatcher from posing in a photograph
with Nukhaev.
[35] “Caucasian diamond traffic” (Moscow,
2005), http://www.civilresearch.org/pdf/7.pdf:
“In spring 1997 Adnan Khashoggi introduced Hozh-Ahmed Nukhaev to James
Baker.”
[36] Boris Kagarlitskii, “S terroristami ne razgovarivaem. No pomogaem?”
Novaya gazeta, 24
January 2000; Boris Kagarlitskii, trans. Olga Kryazheva, “We Don’t
Talk To Terrorists. But We Help Them? A version of apartment explosions in Russia,” Novaya Gazeta, 1/24/00, http://geocities.com/chechenistan/conspiracy.html).
[37] See Lilia Shevtsova, translated by Antonina Bouis, Putin’s Russia (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, 2003), 279, fn 15; citing Profil’, 11/27/00,
18-20.
[38] For the complex story of Turkish involvement in the Chechen War,
see e.g. “Turkey
and the Chechens,” BBC News, 3/16/01,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1223398.stm;.
Hunter, Islam in Russia,
362-71.
[39] Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“An
Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”), http://www.compromat.ru/main/surikov/saidov.htm.
[40] Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“An
Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”), ru.compromat. This and
other discrepancies between Dunlop and his source Yasenev were first pointed
out by the Russian research group burtsev.ru at http://left.ru/2005/10/burtsev127.html
.
[41] Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“An
Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”), ru.compromat..
[42] “KLA Funding Tied To Heroin Profits,” Washington Times, 5/3/99.
[43] SIDA/Cornell Caspian Consulting, “The South Caucasus: A
Regional Overview,” 2002, http://www.cornellcaspian.com/sida/sida-cfl-2.html.
[44] Anton Surikov, Crime in Russia,
38-39.
[45] Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002),
279, 284-85.
[46] Toronto
Sun, 6/27/99.
[47] Pravda.ru, 7/3/03,
http://english.pravda.ru/world/20/91/365/10389_peacekeepers.html.
[48] The map was allegedly shown by Surikov’s partner Sergei Petrov to a
Russian businessman in Geneva
while discussing a drug deal (http://www.compromat.ru/main/surikov/a.htm).
[49] Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2000/01/heroin.html;
Peter Dale Scott, “Deep Politics: Drugs,
Oil, Covert Operations and Terrorism,” http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/911Background.htm.
[50] Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia,
285, fn. 11.
[51] Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“An
Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”), ru.compromat. Cf. Robert
I. Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian
Mob Has Invaded America
(Boston: Little
Brown, 2000), 265: “Astonishingly, both
the [George H.W.] Bush and the Clinton
administrations have unwittingly helped foster the Russian mob and the
untrammeled corruption of post-Soviet Union Russia. When the CIA was asked in
1992 by Kroll and Associates, working on behalf of the Russian government, to
help locate $20 billion that was hidden offshore by the KGB and the mob, the
Bush national security team declined to cooperate. The Bush group rationalized,
according to Fritz Ermarth, a top CIA policy analyst writing in The National Interest, `that capital
flight is capital flight. It doesn’t matter who has the money or how it was
acquired even if by theft; so long as it is private, it will return to do good
things if there was a market.'”
[52] Founder and Chair of IPROG Board and the Institute’s director until
April 2002 when he was replaced by Boris Kagarlitskii.
[53] Member of Yeltsin “family;” Deputy Minister of Finance and then Prime Minister for four years until fired by Putin 2/24/04.
[54] Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 44-45.
[55] PBS, Frontline, October 2003, http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/moscow/khodorkovsky.html.
Cf. Menatep Press Release of 4/30/02, http://www.groupmenatep.com/pressroom/pressroom_april_30_02.cfm:
“30.04.2002: Group MENATEP Invests US $25 Million in Blackstone Capital
Partners IV: Group MENATEP’s GM Investment & Co Ltd has agreed to invest up
to US $25 million in Blackstone Capital Partners IV, a private equity
investment fund managed by The Blackstone Group, an investment bank with
offices in New York and London. Primary investment targets will include major
industrial, service and communications-related companies in the United States
and Europe. In the last six months, Group
MENATEP has made commitments to invest in excess of US $150 million with a
number of investment firms, including AIG Capital Partners, Global Asset
Management, The Carlyle Group, and now The Blackstone Group (Source: PR
Newswire).”
[56]“Former Primakov
Official Attacks High-Level Corruption and Yeltsin’s Plans in 2000,” Jamestown Foundation Monitor, 5/25/99, JRL 3306,
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/3306.html##9.
[57] Chechen Press, 5/28/05, http://www.chechenpress.co.uk/english/news/2005/05/28/08.shtml.
[58] As will be
apparent in a moment, it makes sense that Surikov would have been opposed not
only to Yeltsin but to the relatively secular, anti-Islamist Chechen leader Dzhokar
Dudaev. For Dudaev see Shireen T. Hunter, Islam
in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security (Armonk, NY:
M.E. Sharpe, 2004), 150-51.
[59] Military Policy Research, Archive Search Results, http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:Vt5emTAcJJEJ:www.mpr.co.uk/scripts/sweb.dll/li_archive_item%3Fmethod%3DGET%26object%3DLDS_1995_25_MAR+%22Crime+in+Russia:+the+international+implications+&hl=en.
The full citation for the book is Anton Surikov, Crime in Russia: the International Implications (London: Brassey’s
for the Centre for Defence Studies, University of London, 1995). The database
WorldCat lists it in three U.S.
libraries: Columbia,
Cornell, and the U.S. Army War College.
[61] Letter of 9/17/05
to Oleg Grechenevsky, /msg01967.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg01967.html.
According to one 1999 article in Russia, Ermarth introduced Surikov to Steve
Forbes who offered to help him participate in the project –together with Ermarth
and UK Ambassador Sir Rodric Braithwaite –to reveal the ties between the Yeltsin
Administration and Russian corruption. But
this claim needs to be treated with extreme caution, given the false stories at
the time linking Ermarth, Braithwaite, and Surikov to an imaginary joint
campaign against Russian corruption. See The Electronic Telegraph (UK), 9/11/99, JRI #3493, http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/3493.html.
[62] Commersant (n.d). In an alleged transcript of a drug-related dialogue beween Sergei [Petrov] and a businessman, the latter says, “You’ve said Surikov was also a CIA man.” See transcript of audio recorded conversation between businessman Gennady Nikolaevich (GN) with Sergei (S), which took place on September 29, 2003 in the Hotel Noga Hilton in Geneva, http://www.compromat.ru/main/surikov/narko.htm.
[63] Left Front Press
Conference, , http://left.ru/2005/11/preskonf_eng.html.
Kagarlitskii was defended at the press conference by the former Yukos official
Ilya Ponomarev.
[64] Another IPROG member is Ilya Ponomarev (see preceding footnote).
[65]Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,”
42. Dunlop’s important and truncated description of Mekhmet has a strange and
irrelevant citation: “On
Erbakan, see Shireen T. Hunter, Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity
and Security (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), p. 365.”But there is no
need to identify Erbakan, and Hunter is silent about Mekhmet.
[66] See e.g. Mohamed H. Heikal, Daily
Yomiuri, 8/8/94.
[67] Surikov’s book, Crime in
Russia, p. 33, confirms that “Chechen transport of armaments to Aden airport was even
carried on during the civil war in Yemen in 1994.”
[68] Independent (London), 8/5/05.
[69] Milli Görüş, the chief organization of Turks in Germany, is
said to have as it goals the “abolition of the laicist government system in
Turkey and the establishment of an Islamic state and social system ….Former
Turkish prime minister Nehmettin Erbakan, whose Refah Party was banned by the
Turkish Constitutional Court in January of 1998 for `activities against the
country’s secular regime,’ is still Milli Görüş’ undisputed leader, even
if his nephew Mehmet Sabri Erbakan is its president” (Lorenzo Vidino, “The
Muslim Brotherhood’s Conquest of Europe,” Middle
East Quarterly, Winter 2005, http://www.meforum.org/article/687.
[70] Cf. Independent (London), 8/5/05.
[71] On 1/20/02,
“Dagestani authorities announced that they had detained Nadirshakh Khachilaev,
the leader of Dagestan’s Laks minority groups
and a former State Duma deputy, on suspicion of having organized the bombing of
the Interior Ministry troop truck in Makhachkala.
Khachilaev, who once headed the Union of Muslims of Russia and has also been
described as one of Dagestan’s most powerful mafia bosses, was detained along
with another eight or so suspects over the weekend” ( Jamestown Foundation, Monitor, 1/21/02, http://jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=25&issue_id=2179&article_id=19084).
Cf. Hunter, Islam in Russia,
264-65.
[72] Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“An
Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”), ru.compromat.
[73] “Russia
is also concerned about the HT [Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami], for it fears that
the movement will spread to Muslim regions of Russia. Russian intelligence is now
collaborating closely with the Central Asian states to combat the HT” (Ahmed
Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam
in Central Asia [New Haven:
Yale UP, 2002], 132). Cf. Surikov statement to Sufis below.
[74] Graeme Herd with Ene Rôngelep and Anton Surikov, Crisis for Estonia? Russia, Estonia and a Post-Chechen Cold War.
London Defence Studies, 29 (London: Brassey’s for the Centre for Defence
Studies, 1994), 33.
The enemy within,” Asia Times, 11/22/03, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EK22Ak01.html.
In this essay Raman shows the direct links between Turkish terrorists (former
disciples of Erbakan) and groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba sponsored by Pakistan’s ISI.
[76] Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“An
Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”), ru.compromat.
[77] “Geroinovyi tur.” By Nikita
Kaledin. Stringer-news, November
4, 2003: http://www.stringer-news.ru/Publication.mhtml?PubID=2448&Part=39;
partially translated in “Afghan Drug Scene: The Poppy Power,” News Central
Asia, http://www.newscentralasia.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=406.
[78] Pravda.ru, 7/30/01,
http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/30/11317.html.
Surikov’s accusation was noted by Maureen Orth in the March 2002 issue of Vanity Fair: “To find out, I track down
in Moscow the
only Russian official who has spoken on the record about this issue. Dr. Anton
V. Surikov is chief staff of the Committee of Industry, Construction, and High
Technology in the Russian parliament. Last spring he told the Moscow News that the mayor of Dushanbe was a major drug
dealer. That interview precipitated not only a denial from the mayor but also,
according to Surikov, a demand that the Tajik journalist the mayor
erroneously believed was Surikov’s
source be arrested.” In the same interview, Surikov also noted that, “as early
as the mid-90s, the Russians were`buying heroin and transporting it from the
northern part of Afghanistan
to Russian military bases in Tajikistan
by truck and helicopter.'”
[79] According to Yasenev, “Lunev is responsible for security and
`strong arm operations’. For his
operations he hires the former and active duty officers of Russian secret
services, including spetsnaz. In 1990-91 Lunev took part in overthrowing the
regime of Zviad Gamsahurdia in Georgia.”
Lunev thus helped install Shevardnadze, who in 1991 supported Yeltsin against
Gorbachev.
[80] http://www.pravda.info/news/2695.html,
Анатолий
Баранов и
Антон
Суриков
вошли в состав
руководства
агентства «FarWestLtd» – 2005.05.03.
[81] http://www.pravda.info/region/3601.html.
[82] http://pravda.info/aboutus/.
[83] Kagarlitskii, Director of IPROG, has also published many books in
English, as well as in The Nation, Zmag, Counterpunch, and other journals.
[84] Those in both organizations are Anton Surikov, Vladimir Filin,
Ruslan Saidov, Anatolii Baranov, Audrius Butkevicius, and Natalia Roeva. This
list differs from the paravda.info list only in the omission of Likhvintsev.
.
[85]For Bout’s
involvement with blood diamonds, and the US failure to deal with this problem,
see Douglas Farah, Blood from Stones: The
Secret Financial Network of Terror (New
York: Broadway Books, 2004), especially 44:
“Intelligence officials say Bout [following 9/11] flew U.S.
clandestine operatives into Afghanistan
and badly needed ammunition and other supplies to the Northern
Alliance. In exchange, they said, his past activities would be
ignored.” For more on Bout see Nick Kochan, The
Washing Machine: How Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing Soils Us (Mason, OH:
Thomson, 2005), 36-61.
Cf. Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York:
Crown, 2003), 15: “In the early 1990s,
Osama bin Laden’s main supply sergeant was Victor Bout, a former Russian
military officer who had served in Angola, where he got involved in arms
trafficking and oil. …Bout had a reputation for delivering anything, anywhere,
including the nasty stuff.”
[86] Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya.”
[87] Georgian tycoon, close associate of Boris Berezovskii. Cf.
Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin,
262: “Often Berezovskii acted in Chechnya through Badri
Patarkatsishvili, the Logovaz partner who, according to the Russian security
services, had long served as the company’s primary intermediary with organized
crime groups.” Klebnikov reports (161, cf. 331) that Moscow police heard in early 1995 from a
gangster that “he had been approached by Berezovsky’s aide, Badri, with a
contract for Listyev’s assassination.” (In February 1995 Listyev, the director
of Russia’s most important TV network ORT, was shot dead in his apartment
building.)
[88] Diligence, LLC Press Release 12/8/03, http://www.diligencellc.com/DME_announce.html.
[89] David Isenberg, “Myths and mystery,” Asia Times, 5/20/04.
[90]Financial Times, 12/11/03.
Cf. Asia Times, 5/20/04.
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=9375.
“Mr Daniel’s Houston
investment fund, Crest Investment Corporation, employs Neil Bush as co-chairman.”
Ed Rogers, Diligence’s vice chairman, was one of George H.W. Bush’s top
assistants when he was US
president. On resigning from the White House, he negotiated a lucrative
contract to act as lobbyist for the former Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI
front man Kamal Adham, at a time when American and British prosecutors were
preparing criminal cases against him. Rogers
used Khashoggi as a go-between to secure the contract, which was canceled after
White House criticism of it (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 362-64).
[91] Ibid.
[92] Wayne Madsen,
[93] The Baltic Times, 9/23/05, http://www.baltictimes.com/hot1.php?art_id=13659.
[94] Interfax, 9/21/05,
http://www.interfax.ru/e/B/politics/28.html?id_issue=11386915.
Cf. http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/09/22/berezovskyriga.shtml:
“Berezovsky is meeting Neil Bush on business, as the U.S. president’s brother is a
stockholder of Berezovsky’s educational company Ignite, the spokesperson said.”
[95] www.compromat.ru/main/zuganov/surikov2.htm.
[96] Alexander Nagorny “Narcobarons from the CIA and MI-6”
Pravda-info 2004.09.13 http://www.pravda.info/kompromat/1203.html.
59 Anthony Fenton, “Kosovo Liberation
Army helps establish `Protectorate’ in Haiti,” citing Flashpoints
interview, 11/19/04,
www.flashpoints.net). Cf. Anthony Fenton, “Canada in Haiti:
Humanitarian Extermination,” CMAQ.net, 12/8/04; http://www.cmaq.net/fr/node.php?id=19240.
[98] San Francisco
Chronicle, 5/5/99.
[99] New York
Times, 6/2/04.
[100] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The
Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan,
and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 536:
“Massoud was a drug trafficker.” Cf. 345, 430, 458, 516, 519.
[101] Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s
Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail (Washington: Brassey’s,
2004), 9. Ironically, this decision by British and American officials (the
latter almost certainly CIA) may have contributed to bin Laden’s escape from
Tora Bora in December 2001. Cf. CNN, 12/29/01: “Abdullah Tawheedi, a deputy head of
intelligence in Afghanistan,
says he has received `reliable information’ that the terrorist leader paid a
`large amount’ of money to buy his way out of Afghanistan. Tawheedi named Haji
Zaman — a well-known independent military commander — as the man responsible
for taking bin Laden across the border to Pakistan. Ironically, Haji Zaman
had recently been fighting against bin Laden and his al Qaeda organization. But
Tawheedi says he believes Haji Zaman was apparently persuaded — by money — to
help the terrorist leader.”
[102] B. Raman,
“Assassination of Haji Abdul Qadeer in Kabul,”
South Asia Analysis Group, Paper No. 489, www.saag.org/papers5/paper489.html:
“11.With an Afghan passport, Afridi, a Pakistani
national belonging to the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA),
voluntarily traveled to Dubai , where he allegedly negotiated with American
authorities the terms of his voluntary surrender and from there he boarded a
cargo flight to the US in December 1995 to hand himself over to the US drug
control authorities. He was sentenced to
three and a half year’s imprisonment.
After serving his sentence, he returned to Pakistan in August,1999. He was arrested by the Pakistani drug control
authorities and prosecuted in a drug smuggling case pending against him. The court sentenced him to seven years
imprisonment in the middle of 2001.
Hardly had he started his sentence in a Karachi jail, when he was got
released by the ISI, reportedly at the request of the CIA, after the war
against the Taliban and the Al Qaeda had started on October 7, 2001, and
allowed to proceed to his home in the Khyber Agency.” Cf. Asia Times Online, 12/4/01;
Peter Dale Scott, “Pre-1990 Drug Networks Being Restored Under New Coalition?” http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/qf5.html.
[103] B. Raman, “Assassination of Haji Abdul Qadeer in Kabul, South Asia Analysis Group, Paper No.
489.
[104] Raman, op. cit., emphasis added.
[105] A possible explanation for the release and recruitment of major
traffickers in 2001 would be the desire to combat the influence in the traffic
of narco-barons who supported the Taliban, such as Bashir Noorzai and Juma
Khan. The fact remains that the Taliban had effectively suppressed the planting
of opium, a major event in drug suppression that has now been completely
reversed by the U.S.
invasion.
[106] Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 49-50.
[107] Yossef Bodansky, “The Great Game for OIL,” Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, June-July 2000, pp.
4-10, http://news.suc.org/bydate/2000/Sep_28/11.html.
Kagarlitsky’s article itself can be seen as
an important part of this campaign.
[108] U.S. Department of State, Congressional Budget Justification:
Foreign Operations, Fiscal Year 2005, 363; quoted in Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s
Growing Petroleum Dependency (New York: Metropolitan
Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 137.
[109] Klare, Blood and Oil, 136, 137.
[110] Knight-Ridder, 10/31/04.
[111] Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great
Escape, 88.
[112] Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great
Escape, 110-11. Some of those whose escape from Tora Bora was assisted
later led terrorist attacks in Saudi
Arabia and Morocco.
[113] Christopher
Deliso, “The Stakes Are Too High for Us to Stop Fighting Now,” interview with Sibel
Edmonds, http://antiwar.com/deliso/.
For a survey of the Sibel Edmonds story, see David Rose, “An Inconvenient
Patriot,” Vanity Fair, September 2005:
“Much of what Edmonds
reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity.
There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of
large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the
highest bidder.”
[114] The Iraq War is also beneficial to the drug traffic. See the
following story from the Balochistan
Post, quoting the London Independent:
“”BAGHDAD:
The city, which had never seen heroin, a deadly addictive drug, until March
2003, is now flooded with narcotics including heroin. According to a report
published by London’s
The Independent newspaper, the
citizens of Baghdad
complained that the drugs like heroin and cocaine were being peddled on the
streets of the Iraqi metropolis. Some reports suggest that the drug and arms
trafficking is patronized by the CIA to finance its covert operations
worldwide.”
[115] Wall Street Journal, 11/24/03.
[116] “In June 1992, independent
Lithuanian Minister of Defense, Audrius Butkevicius, hosted a symposium to thank
the Albert Einstein Institution’s key role during the independence process of
the Baltic countries” (Thierry Meyssan,” The Albert Einstein Institution:
non-violence according to the CIA,” http://www.voltairenet.org/article30032.html). Cf. Paul Labarique : «Les dessous
du coup d’État en Géorgie», text in French, Voltaire, January 7, 2004.
[117] Saidov, in his own words, was in Andijan at the time of the
subsequent turmoil in the Uzbek Fergana Valley, which straddles the drug route
through the Kyrgyz town of Osh: “`In May 11-18 I was in Uzbekistan, in the
Fergana Valley, where I witnessed the suppression of the people’s uprising in
Andijan by the dictatorial regime of Islam Karimov,’ – says the Dagestani historian Ruslan Saidov”
(http://www.muslimuzbekistan.com/rus/rusnews/2005/05/rusnews30052005_5.html).
[118] http://www.apn.ru/?chapter_name=impres&data_id=430&do=view_single.
[119] Из Оша в
Андижан(“From Osh to Andijan”), http//www.polit.ru/analytics/2005/06/06/andij_print.html.
[120] Christopher
Deliso, “The Stakes Are Too High for Us to Stop Fighting Now,” interview with
Sibel Edmonds, 8/15/05,
http://antiwar.com/deliso/.
[121] Indira Singh
testimony, 9/11 Citizen’s Commission, 130,
http://justicefor911.org/September-Hearings.doc.
[122] Khashoggi is perhaps the most famous example of a Saudi-Israel
connection. One of the few in the United States who has dared to discuss the 9/11
clues pointing towards Israel is Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at
the End of the Age of Oil (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2004), 259-68, 578-79.
[123] Jonathan Beaty and
S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride
into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 347.
[124] Michael Moore, Dude, Where’s
My Country (New York:
Warner Books, 2003), 15. The same superficial analysis is a blemish of his film
Fahrenheit 911.
[125] David Ray Griffin,
The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (Northampton, MA:
Olive Branch Press/Interlink, 2004), 5.
[126] Commenting on the list published by Pravda.info on May 3, 2005,
http://www.pravda.info/news/2695.html.