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Dope Inc
The Global Drug Meta-Group:
Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11
By Peter Dale Scott (18,734 words) 10/29/05
(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.)
Tajik authorities have claimed repeatedly that neither the US nor NATO
exerts any pressure on the drug warlords inside Afghanistan. "There's
absolutely no threat to the labs inside Afghanistan," said Avaz Yuldashov of
the Tajikistan Drug Control Agency. "Our intelligence shows there are 400
labs making heroin there, and 80 of them are situated right along our border
... Drug trafficking from Afghanistan is the main source of support for
international terrorism now," Yuldashov pointed out last year.[1]
1. The Meta-Group, the Russian 9/11, and Kosovo
Violence and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic
A
Digression: Drugs, Meta-Groups and the Compradorial Revolution
The "Russian
9/11" in 1999: Bombings and Plans for War
The Meeting in
Khashoggi's Villa, July 1999
Khashoggi's Interest in Chechnya
Dunlop's Redactions of His
Source Yasenev
The Khashoggi Villa
Meeting, Drugs, and Kosovo
2. The Meta-Group, Drugs, Salafist Islam, and America
The
Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev Versions
Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug Trafficking
3. Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West, Ltd
Far West, Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush
The U.S.
Contribution to the Afghan-Kosovo Drug Traffic
How the U.S. Restored Narco-Barons to Power in Afghanistan, 2001
4. The Meta-Group, the War on Terror, and 9/11
U.S. Geostrategic Goals
and Chechnya
The
Meta-Group's Geostrategic Goal: Maintain the War of Terror
Concluding Question: The Meta-Group and the United States Government
The False Dilemmas of 9/11
Theories
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.htm
111 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.
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.
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]
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 naďve 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.
[60]
www.iprog.ru/cast/?id=8.
[61] Letter of 9/17/05 to Oleg Grechenevsky,
http://www.mail-archive.com/cia-drugs@yahoogroups.com/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.
[75] Cf. B. Raman, "Istanbul: 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 [for Belokon
Holding] 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.
http://lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/global-drug.htm