In the 19th century, there was an ongoing struggle between Czarist Russia and the British Empire over who would control Afghanistan, a geo-strategically central land straddling Central, Southern, and Southwestern Asia. The stakes were huge. With control of Afghanistan, a major power could control or destabilize all of Central Asia through Afghanistan. It was the Soviet Union’s “soft underbelly”. The struggle between Russia and the West was popularized as “the Great Game”, a geopolitical rivalry for control of the Eurasian landmass by controlling the Afghan space.
During the Cold War, that Great Game underwent a changing cast of players. This time around, the US played the lead role that the British Empire had played a century before.
Rockefeller & Brzezinski
The most influential voice in President Jimmy carter’s Administration was his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. His influence drew largely from the fact that he had the most influential patron in the US at the time, David Rockefeller, then chairman of the family’s Chase Manhattan Bank, the most powerful and influential bank in the world. David Rockefeller had taken Brzezinski under his wing.
In 1973, David had founded an elite, secretive policy group called the Trilateral Commission, or TC. It was created to coordinate political and economic policy between Washington, Western Europe, and, for the first time, Japan. David selected Brzezinski to be the first head of the Trilateral Commission, who was charged with selecting the group’s 300 powerful international members; all of whom were taken from David’s Rolodex! This body was responsible for bringing the major areas of the industrial world under the control of a Rockefeller agenda.
At the next TC meeting in Tokyo, in 1974, David introduced an unknown Georgian peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter, as the next President of the United States! When David Rockefeller put Carter into the White House in 1976, Carter chose Brzezinski as his NSA and main foreign policy advisor. Brzezinski was an ardent anti Soviet cold warrior, and was a disciple of the British founder of Geopolitics, Halford Mackinder, like Henry Kissinger was before him. Brzezinski was trained to look at how most effectively to manipulate the global power nexus to Rockefeller’s (and Washington’s) advantage.
By 1979, Washington’s geopolitical world was in a terrible state. The dollar, a pillar of US domination in global finance, was in steep decline against the strong currencies of Japan, France and West Germany. Very high oil prices in the wake of the Iranian Khomeini revolution were driving the American economy deep into recession. Germany and France were increasingly opposed to what they felt was a unilateral de facto imperial arrogance on the part of Washington in world affairs. In the oil-rich Middle East, Iran had undergone a theocratic revolution that ousted America’s puppet dictator and Rockefeller crony, Shah Reza Pahlevi.
Against this background of global instability, Brzezinski initiated a far-reaching policy decision. He and the CIA manipulated events inside Afghanistan to force a Soviet response – a military occupation. Afghanistan was far too strategic to Russian security and Brzezinski’ actions were a trap to bog the Russians down in an endless war against US-trained and armed Jihadist guerrillas. He was obsessed with giving the Russians their Vietnam, and the anti-communist Muslim Brotherhood “freedom fighters” seemed the perfect way. He was actively stirring up that chaotic “Arc of Crisis” in order to destabilize the Islamic perimeter of the Soviet Union.
The Arc of Crisis
In 1978, Brzezinski’ was already speaking of an “arc of crisis.” That arc went along the southern shores of the Indian Ocean, with fragile social and political structures. He and the CIA were actively stirring up that chaotic Arc of Crisis in order to destabilize the Islamic perimeter of the Soviet Union, and now Russia.
Brzezinski’s “Arc of Crisis:” was adapted from a proposal of British intelligence agent, Bernard Lewis. Lewis is an Oxford University specialist in Muslim affairs and the Middle East, and was stationed at Princeton University in the 1970s. The “Bernard Lewis plan “is the code-name for a top secret Anglo-American strategy for the Middle East. Based on his assessment, the two networks can then decide what type of intervention will be the most effective in shaping Middle East affairs to Anglo-American advantage. Lewis’s plans call for the balkanization and fragmentation of Brzezinski’s “arc of crisis” along defined ethnic, tribal and religious lines. It was, not surprisingly, worked out with the aid of Israeli intelligence. The goal is the break-up of the Middle East into a mosaic of competing mini-states and weakening of the sovereignty of existing republics and kingdoms.
This plan received the official go-ahead at the April 1979 US-European Bilderberg Group (another of David Rockefeller’s babies, formed in 1954) in Baden, Austria. At that point, Washington and the CIA believed they could control Khomeini’s revolution as a weapon against the Soviets. To learn more about this phase in geopolitics, please read the articles, called “The Iran File”, in Volume 1.
Anglo-American strategy in the region made a radical shift based on the plans of Lewis and Brzezinski. Almost no one in Washington really understood the internal dynamics of political Islam. They were like small children playing with an undetonated bomb. The bomb was soon to explode.
Afghanistan: the New Great Game in an “Arc of Crisis
Said Ramadan was the most influential man in the Egyptian MB in the years after the death of his father-in-law, Hassan al-Banna. Ramadan spent the 1960s and 1970s in exile in Geneva. From there, with overt and covert political support from the CIA, he traveled the world, and was very often in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
In 1962, said Ramadan had gone to Mecca to launch what was to become the most important international organization of political Islam, and of the Muslim Brotherhood – the Muslim World League (MWL). The MWL became the de facto world center for spreading the Salafist ideology of the MB. In effect, the Muslim World League represented a marriage of the Egyptian MB’s political Salafism with the ultra-traditional Saudi ideology of conservative Islam. A more deadly political cocktail would have been hard to imagine.
In the 1960s and the 1970s, the CIA seemed content to give Ramadan and the MB a large degree of freedom so long as their focus was anti-communism and against troublesome Arab nationalism.
Afghanistan & the Soviets
In 1973, Afghan Prince Muhammed Daoud ousted his cousin, the Afghan king, with help from the Soviet Union. He then established an Afghan republic. Daoud embarked on a land reform program for poor Afghan peasants. Washington became alarmed. However, Daoud began distancing himself from the Soviet Union and turned to the US, and the Gulf states.
Daoud failed to improve the Afghan economy, and his dictatorial one-man rule alienated most of his allies. When he arrested the leaders of the communist PDPA, communist leaders Mohammed Taraki and Tabizullah Amin staged a coup that ended in the killing of Daoud and the installing of Tariki as the new President.
This PDPA military coup brought major land reform intended to weaken powerful landlords who were closely tied to fundamentalist Sunni Islam. The land reform and the education of women represented a red flag for the MB, and other fundamentalist Muslim organizations in Afghanistan. These Islamic networks, with covert help from the CIA, began inciting riots and protests against the Taraki regime, charging them with violating fundamental precepts of Islam. It was a crudely earlier version of the tactics later perfected in the 2011 “Arab Spring” revolts.
In February 1979, pro-Taraki militants kidnapped and killed CIA station chief and then US Ambassador Adolf “Spike” Dubs, further justifying strong action from Washington.
The man named by Taraki to carry out his land reform. Tabizullah Amin, was suspected by Soviet KGB Chief Yuri Andropov to be a CIA deep cover agent. Amin had launched a brutal campaign of terror against political opponents that turned world opinion against the Tariki government. Andropov believed the CIA had Amin infiltrate the Kabul government with the intent of discrediting the Tariki revolution. It that was so, he did a brilliant job for his Washington sponsors.
Tariki flew to Moscow to consult with Brezhnev on a strategy to get rid of Amin. The day he returned to Kabul, Amin had Tariki executed and immediately seized power for himself. Weeks later, CIA – backed warlords massacred dozens of Afghan government officials in the western city of Heart. The combination of these two events finally convinced a reluctant Brezhnev to send troops into Afghanistan.
The Brzezinski Trap
With Moscow’s friend Tariki murdered, and Amin a suspected CIA agent in control of Kabul, Moscow realized they were in danger of losing the strategic Great Game for control of Afghanistan to the West, a devastating strategic catastrophe were it come to pass. On December 25, 1979, Brezhnev ordered Soviet tanks to roll into Afghanistan across the Panjshir Valley, while KGB agents and Special Forces troops stormed the Royal Palace in Kabul.
The Soviets assassinated Amin and installed Babrak Kamal as the new leader of Afghanistan. The original intent of Moscow was to stabilize the situation and leave within a few months. Instead, they would be caught in an Afghani political and tribal quicksand. As a result of their intervention, the Soviets were directly involved for the first time in what had been a domestic war in Afghanistan.
Brzezinski now had the excuse he had been looking for to begin covertly arming a US-backed counter-revolution in Afghanistan. Moscow had taken the bait.
The Mujaheddin, or Holy warriors
In April 1979, the CIA had begun meeting with Mujaheddin guerrillas. Brzezinski was laying his trap, and the Islamic fighters were his bait.
On 3 July, 1979, Brzezinski sent a top-secret internal memo to President Carter, who signed a national security directive authorizing secret US aid to Afghan warlords to fight the Afghan regime. Brzezinski said that he had convinced Carter that this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. He was right, and everything Washington covertly did was to make sure it happened that way.
Years later, when doing an interview with a French magazine, Brzezinski was asked about the consequences of his actions, and he replied, “What is more important – the downfall of the Soviet Union, or a few stirred-up Muslims?”
The Mujaheddin were a rag-tag assortment of various tribal gangs from inside Pakistan, together with Islamic foreign Jihad volunteers. There were a total of 7 such gangs and groups. The most powerful was Gulbuddin Hekmatyr’s Hezbi Islami.
One such foreign Jihad volunteer to the Mujaheddin was Osama Bin Laden, the 22-year old son of a Saudi construction billionaire. Bin Laden arrived in Peshawar, Pakistan, from Saudi Arabia in 1979 with money and many Arab Jihad volunteers, Bin Laden had been sent to Afghanistan with US approval, by then Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal. Bin Laden became part of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone. He proceeded to set up called the Services Office, together with his teacher and mentor from the university in Jeddah, MB member, Abdullah Yusif Azzam, a Palestinian Sunni Muslim.
In 1984, Bin Laden and Azzam established Maktabab al-Khidmat (MAK), which funneled money, arms and fighters from around the Arab world into Afghanistan. From the MAK, a database was established, called Al Qaeda.
Pakistan’s Zia-ul Haq was the main intermediary for doling out the money from the CIA and Saudi sources, handing out arms and giving military training and financial support to Afghan Jihadi groups.
Washington’s CIA, along with funding from Britain’s MI6 and SAS and significant money from Saudi Arabian intelligence, made it possible for the Pakistani ISI to arm and train over 100,000 mujaheddin between 1978 and 1992. Washington alone spent some $20 billion, which was matched dollar for dollar by the Saudis.
Heroin trafficking, run by the Mujaheddin, as in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, played a major financial role with lots of help from the CIA.
BCCI & the Heroin Fallout
By the mid-1980s, under Vice president Bush and CIA director Bill Casey, Washington’s geopolitical games with Jihad Islam went into high gear in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Bush family was deeply entangled in both Colombian cocaine and Afghan heroin and opium operations. Bush used his post to facilitate the inflow of Colombian cocaine via Florida, where his old CIA Cuban buddies controlled organized crime.
The financial heart of the CIA’s Mujahideen operation was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), founded in 1972 by Agha Hassan Abedi, a Pakistani financier close to Zia-ul Haq. The bank was registered in Luxembourg, with head offices in Karachi and London. It became the bank of choice for laundering profits of Mujaheddin heroin sales, financing CIA black operations, and countless other illegal transactions. BCCI was intimately tied to the CIA.
BCCI, in short, was the financial glue linking Afghan Mujaheddin, Saudi intelligence, the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI. Its owners included Bank of America (a Rothschild entity), Khalid bin Mahfouz who headed the largest bank in Saudi Arabia, the NCB, which handled funds of the Saudi Royal family, and Sheik Zayed al Nayhan of Abu Dhabi, Kamal Adham and Abdul Khalil, the past Saudi intelligence liaisons to the CIA.
BCCI became a “crown jewel” in the British offshore hot money system because of its ties to the City of London.
In 1976, BCCI established a Swiss base of operations by purchasing 85% of BCP in Geneva. The remaining 15% was owned by UBS of Switzerland, a Rothschild bank. BCP was managed by Alfred Hartmann, a former official of UBS. Hartmann eventually became CFO for BCC Holding and was the person most accountable for the “lost $23 billion. While serving as BCCI’s ‘man in Switzerland, Hartmann was always operating on behalf of the Rothschild family. Hartmann was president of Rothschild Bank AG of Switzerland, was vice-chairman of NY-Maritime Bank of Geneva (run by Mossad operative Bruce Rapaport) and was a member of the board of the elite N.M. Rothschild & Sons in London.
During the decade of the Afghan War, BCCI’s assets had grown from an initial capital of $2million to $4billion in 1980, to an astounding $23 billion at the point that the Bank of England (another Rothschild entity) moved to shut it down, in 1991. The bulk of the $23 billion disappeared and to this day is still unaccounted for.
As the Mujaheddin expanded operations in Pakistan across the border into Afghanistan, opium cultivation and refined heroin traffic grew along with it, as did the global operations of the BCCI.
Veteran drug researcher Alfred McCoy described how it functioned during the CIA’s covert Afghan Mujaheddin war:
“When the operation started in 1979, this region grew opium only for regional markets and produced no opium. Within 2 years this region became the world’s top heroin producer. CIA assets controlled this region. Once the heroin left Pakistan’s labs, the Sicilian mafia managed its exports to the US. Most Americans did not see the links between the CIA’s alliance with Afghan drug lords and the heroin on US streets.”
The Afghan conflict from 1979 through the final Soviet pull-out in February 1989 was the bloodiest and costliest conflict of the Cold War. Moe than 13,000 Soviet soldiers lost their lives while the cost to Afghan civilians was 2 million dead.
Pakistan’s ISI had trained 100,000 Islamic jihadists in every art of modern warfare and terror tactics. They worked side by side with the CIA, MI6, the Mossad and Saudi intelligence. Over the next 25 years, each of these “sponsors” would finance and deploy these Afghan Mujaheddin veterans under the guise of one or another Islamic Jihad groups. One of the more infamous came to be named “Al Qaeda, or the Base, which meant a database of all foreign Muslim fighters who came to Afghanistan.
In 1988, with CIA knowledge, Bin Laden created Al Qaeda, a conglomerate of quasi-independent terror cells in 26 countries.
For the Sunni world, the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan was greeted as a victory for Islam. For Washington, it was seen as a major defeat of America’s Cold War adversary. Each player looked at the events through completely different lenses.
From their triumph in Afghanistan, the CIA helped bring key mujaheddin into Chechnya, Bosnia, and other battles in the post-Soviet Central Asian theater. For the Jihadists, that was yet another assist on the road to the Global Caliphate that they were quite happy to accept.
The Breakup of Yugoslavia & the Bosnian War
In November 1989, one of the most dramatic events of the past century took place in Berlin. The Berlin Wall, dividing the Communist part of Germany in the east with the western part of Germany, cracked open. It signaled that the Soviet Union had raised the white flag of surrender in the East-West Cold War. It was not long after their humiliating defeat in Afghanistan.
With the Soviet Union in shambles, Washington faced an entirely new challenge. Suddenly, the rationale for permanent US military and political control over the nations of Europe was under existential threat. Europe was beginning to sense its true independent power in the world as leading circles within the EU contemplated life after NATO, where Europeans would no longer have to bow to countless Washington dictates merely because of a real or imagined threat of the Soviets.
The US saw that to avoid falling into decline similar to that of the Soviet Union, it had to keep pace with potential adversaries of the future. They include Japan and Europe united around German economic power. The US could not accept the idea of a Europe as it is today, a Continent that not only can manage quite happily without America, but one which is economically and technologically more powerful.
At the end of the 1980s European elites privately regarded the US as an empire in terminal collapse. America’s industry was technologically outmoded or obsolete in most vital areas, from steel to cars, to machine tools to aerospace. Its major banks, such as Citibank and Chase were in severe crisis, de facto bankrupt but for covert government and Federal Reserve support.
By the end of the 1980s, Washington had become aware that’s Europe’s leaders were drafting new rules to create the Maastricht Treaty, which would give birth to a European Union, and a European Central Bank, which would then create a new common currency, the Euro. Leading Europeans viewed America as a declining empire, much as Britain had been before 1914. They were determined to fill the ensuing power vacuum with their new European Union. The Maastricht Treaty also called for the creation of a European NATO, with a separate command structure run by the EU countries and not by Washington.
Many of Europe’s leaders hoped and thought that the Cold War was over. Reality was to prove very much otherwise. For its part, Washington was just warming up to launching what would become an unending series of wars, destabilizations, confrontations, and Color Revolutions, all aimed at extending the power of America, the self-proclaimed “Sole Superpower”, after the defeat of the Soviet Union. One of the first targets of the Pentagon was the Republic of Yugoslavia.
At that point, Washington began secretly planning for a new war in the heart of Europe. It was to be a war that would be used to establish permanent US military bases in Europe. More importantly, it would be used to justify not only retaining NATO, but actually expanding NATO into the East European states, which, before 1990, were in the Soviet orbit.
From its very creation, Yugoslavia was an artificial entity. It was then composed of six federated republics: Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Washington’s response was to trigger events in Yugoslavia that would explode in a violent war in Europe. The events in and around Yugoslavia would be used to push the extension of NATO to the very steps of Moscow and beyond.
Washington deployed the IMF to impose impossible economic conditionalities on Yugoslavia. The country would be deliberately brought to financial and economic catastrophe by US intervention. Under IMF demands for privatizations of state companies, the Yugoslavian GDP sank by 50% between 1990 and 1992. The resulting bankruptcy of more than 1,200 companies created a massive unemployment of 30%. The economic pressure on the various regions created an explosive cocktail. Amid growing economic chaos, each region fought for its own economic survival against its neighbors. Various other economic and financial demands by Washington, in a carefully calibrated move, brought about a de facto economic secession well before the formal declaration of secession by Croatia and Slovenia in June 1991.
All that was needed was a well-placed match to light the fire of war in Yugoslavia. A new US law provided, passed in November 1990, provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence from Yugoslavia within 6 months of the act would lose all US financial support. The US law threw the Yugoslav government in Belgrade into crisis. It was unable to pay the enormous interest on its foreign debt or even to arrange the purchase of raw materials for industry. Credit collapsed and recriminations broke out on all sides.
The Bush Administration in Washington had demanded the self-dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation in order to deliberately light the fuse to an explosive new series of Balkan wars. The war in Bosnia was America’s war in every sense of the word. Washington helped start it, kept it going, and prevented its early end.
Reacting to this combination of IMF shock therapy and direct Washington destabilization, the Yugoslav president, Serb nationalist, Slobodan Milosevic, organized a new Communist Party in November 1990 dedicated to prevent the breakup of the Yugoslav Republic.
On May 5, 1991, the precise date of the 6-month deadline imposed by the US Law 101, Croatian separatists staged violent demonstrations and laid siege to a military base. The government, under attack, ordered the army to intervene. The civil war had begun. Slovenia and Croatia had declared independence from the central Yugoslavian state on June 25, 1991.
As the largest nationality and one that opposed the breakup, the Serbs became the target and excuse for western intervention. Also, Serbia was an ally of Russia!
The CIA stepped into this chaotic and highly volatile situation, along with US military Special Operations Forces, to fuel the wars using its battle-hardened veteran Islamic Mujaheddin cadre from the Afghan war to incite further chaos, in Bosnia and, later, in Kosovo, in order to finally finish off the Yugoslav Republic.
Jihad Comes to Bosnia
The success of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone Mujaheddin operation in Afghanistan had created the idea in Washington of actively backing similar Jihads, or Holy Wars, using veterans of the Afghan Mujaheddin as the core terrorists or guerrilla force to further weaken or destroy other regimes where a large Muslim population existed.
By 1992, the internal civil war between the various federal states of Yugoslavia had spread to predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina. The war in Bosnia, which lasted until 1995, gave the missing piece of the puzzle how Washington’s Afghan Mujaheddin transformed into a global Jihad force, later using the name Al Qaeda!
The leader of Bosnia-Herzegovina was a Sunni Muslim, Alia Izetbegovic. Washington had decided to play the radical Islamic strategy once more, and Izetbegovic was to be their man. Izetbegovic advocated a return to the era of the 1800s, when Bosnia was a part of the Ottoman Empire, ruling through strict Sharia law.
With their propaganda machine in Washington effectively demonizing Serbs as Nazis and portraying Bosnian Muslims as the hapless victims of Serb atrocities, real or imagined, the way was clear to blame the Serb forces in Bosnia for every imaginable crime.
Foreign Jihad fighters were brought in by US and other NATO intelligence, largely via Croatia, into Bosnia. Islamic countries sent trainers and volunteers to fight with Muslim forces in Bosnia and established secret training camps there. In addition to Afghanistan, the fighters came from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, and Syria – forming a veritable seed crystal of the emerging Global Jihad.
The US encouraged and covertly facilitated the smuggling of arms to the Muslims via Iran, Turkey and Eastern Europe. Reliable estimates put the number of foreign Islamic fighters who fought alongside and within Izetbegovic’s Bosnian Army against Serbs at somewhere between 5,000 to 20,000. The war formally ended with the signing by all parties of the Dayton Agreement in Paris on December 14, 1995. This opened the long-term NATO occupation of the country. NATO, and not the EU, was in control
Osama bin Laden was also in Bosnia for a short while. He was in exile in Khartoum, Sudan, where the head of the Sudanese Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Turabi, had ensured a safe haven.
The longer the war in Bosnia raged, the better for Washington’s attempt to revive the role of a US-led NATO in the Balkans and Europe. The tentacles of a coordinating network for the Global Jihad were emerging from the Bosnia war, and it was getting its nutrition with the assistance of the CIA and the Pentagon. The CIA and Pentagon moved on to the next Jihad against Serbia – the geopolitically strategic Serbian province of Kosovo, bordering Albania. Using a band of heroin traffickers the CIA would reform the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA.
Jihad in Kosovo
Washington had shifted its attention to Kosovo, whose Albanian ethnic population was predominantly Muslim. The second front was being prepared in NATO’s war against Serbia.
Around this time, Washington had learned about the vast oil and gas reserves In the Caspian Sea and wanted to secure a pipeline through the Balkans to control that oil, and above all, keep it from the Russians. Estimated oil reserves In the Caspian Basin was around 600 billion barrels. The Caucasus was becoming an US strategic “area of interest”.
Washington found it far more important to secure a permanent military base in Kosovo, from where they would be able to control the entire region, including the Middle East and the Caucasus. The Clinton Administration has farmed out the training of the KLA to a American private mercenary group made up of former US special forces and military, called Military Professional Resources Inc, or MPRI.
The KLA was a grouping of mafia clans in Kosovo who had been known drug traffickers well before working for the US. During the peace talks over Kosovo, Washington deliberately froze out Kosovo moderates in favour of Jihadists of the KLA mafia, who were guaranteed not to go for peace. Washington wanted war, and the KLA Muslims were its warriors.
One of the leaders of an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict was Mahomed al-Zawahiri, brother of Ayman al-Zawihiri, Bin Laden’s deputy at that time.
The KLA became one of the most powerful heroin smuggling organizations in the world. This heroin came from Afghanistan, from Hekmatyars group. The CIA was getting multiple payoffs – first from its war in Afghanistan financed by heroin proceeds, secondly by shifting those Mujaheddin fighters to the Balkans to merge with the KLA distribution networks in Europe, and lastly, to destabilize the social fabrics of targeted Eurasian nations.
KLA fighters were ruthless. By 1998, the KLA escalated its attacks on Serb government officials in Kosovo. The US intervention using the KLA turned a small conflict into a major crisis. As a pretext, NATO relied on the crisis it itself had created in order to justify waging a war of aggression against Yugoslavia. By 1999, Washington was ready to push a reluctant NATO to launch a second war against Serbia. Using the pretext of the Serbs committing genocide against the Kosovans, the US went to war.
The US-led bombing strikes lasted from 24 March 1999, to 10 June 1999. Belgrade was devastated. Milosevic withdrew Serbian forces, and the decade-long war in Yugoslavia ended. After an estimated $40 billion of destruction to the economy and infrastructure of Serbia, the Pentagon began the construction of one of the largest military bases in the world, Camp Bondsteel. It was a vast fortress, housing 7,000 soldiers, an airfield, and a state-of-the-art communications center that gave the US a commanding military presence in the strategic Balkans within air reach of the increasingly strategic Caspian Sea.
In June 1999, no sooner was the bombing of Serbia over, than Washington announced it was funding feasibility for an AMBO pipeline by a American company, Albanian Macedonian Bulgarian Oil Corp (AMBO). Washington proposed to run it from the Bulgarian Black Sea port of Burgas via Macedonia to the Albanian Adriatic port of Vlore. The 900 km pipeline was to bypass the Turkish Straits, as well as Russia, in transporting Caspian oil to the West. With Washington providing security and financial guarantees, the AMBO pipeline became a much more attractive proposition.
The former leaders of the KLA, now calling themselves the Government of Kosovo, also thrived in the heroin smuggling business, with the clear support of the CIA and Washington, which had arranged for the KLA leaders to take over political control of a new Kosovo government. The new KLA leader was Hashim Thaci, head of the “Drenica Group”, in charge of heroin and arms smuggling. Thaci was Washington’s man in Kosovo.
The outcome of the war also left the Al Qaeda Jihadists far more strongly entrenched In the Balkans than they ever had been. Saudi Arabia and the US were the first countries to recognize the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo.
The next step in Washington’s new Eurasian strategy was to make certain the oil in the Caspian and Caucasus regions belonged to the Anglo-American oil majors, and not the Russians, as during the Cold War.
With Camp Bond Steel as a firm base in the Balkans, Washington turned their attention to Russia, and the former states of the Soviet Union with predominantly Muslim populations. Chechnya, a Muslim part of Russia through which a vital Russian oil pipeline from Baku ran, became the next target of Washington’s Jihad network as the US moved In to take control of the vast oilfields of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, two former Soviet states.
The Chechen Jihad
During the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, geophysical tests by Halliburton and the major Anglo-American oil companies confirmed vast untapped oil and gas reserves in the Caspian Basin. Less than a decade before, the reserves had all been part of the Soviet Union. No more. Amoco and BP immediately moved in to fill the vacuum. The market value of the oil and gas reserves of the region amounted to $12 trillion (at a price of $40 per barrel)
In 1991, the leaders of Central Asia were approached by major US (Amoco – a Rockefeller co) and British (BP-a Rothschild co) during ongoing negotiations between Kazakhstan and American oil company (a Rockefeller entity). Then US President Bush actively backed the plans of American oil companies to exploit and control the resources of the Caspian region, as well as to build a pipeline not controlled by Moscow that could bring the oil and gas production to the West.
In that same year, 1991, Veterans of US covert intelligence operations in Laos, namely Richard Secord and others, came to Baku under the cover of an oil company named MEGA oil. Washington backed the idea of a project to build a US-controlled oil pipeline stretching from Baku, Azerbaijan across the Caucasus to Turkey.
In September, 1994, a consortium of Anglo-American oil majors signed an oil deal with Azerbaijan for 3 oil fields (the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli), and called it the “deal of the century”. The problem was the pipeline route to carry this oil to market. The only existing pipeline from Baku to a Russian port on the Black Sea went through Chechnya’s capital, Grozny. It was a 100,000 barrel/day pipeline from the Soviet era that took Azeri oil north via Machatschkala, the capital of Russia’s Dagestan province, and across 146 km of Chechen territory to the Black Sea Russian port of Novorossiysk. The pipeline was a major competition and obstacle to the alternative route of the Western oil companies.
The CIA was given the mandate to destroy that Russian Chechen pipeline and create such chaos in the Caucasus that no Western or Russian company would ever consider using the Grozny Russian oil pipeline.
How to solve the problem? Simple. Blow up Chechnya! Barely 3 months later, had the US-controlled Mujaheddin provided the pretext, by killing Russian soldiers. This brought about a predictable response. Russia invaded in December, 1994. It was a brutal fight. Nearly 20,000 poorly-trained and equipped Russia soldiers were beaten by almost 1,000 Chechen guerrillas.
This was to show Moscow that this northern pipeline route was unstable. Thus, an alternative had to be found.
To prepare the political stage for a US-British controlled oil pipeline in the backyard of Russia required some help. The CIA and Pentagon turned to their recent Mujaheddin allies, who had done so well for them in Bosnia. Osama bin Laden began in 1995 turning his attention and his Mujaheddin cadre to a sensitive, largely Muslim part of Russian Federation in the Caucasus – Chechnya.
In 1995, the US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce was created to lobby Washington for a strong American intervention in the Caspian Sea region. The Chamber was no collection of lightweights. It included some of the most influential figures in Washington, and all of them were senior power brokers within the Rockefeller network. They included James Baker the 3rd, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft. They were power brokers no US President could ignore lightly. Soon, Clinton’s focus turned from Yugoslavia and the Balkans to the Caucasus and a new war for control of oil and gas in the Caspian Basin.
Chechnya had been traditionally a predominantly Sufi Muslim society, where religion was private and personal, not political. The infiltration of US-sponsored Mujaheddin operatives linked to Bin Laden transformed the character of the Chechen resistance movement, spreading Al Qaeda’s hard-line Islamic ideology. CIA ties had been established in the early 1990s in Azerbaijan under Richard Secord’s Mega Oil operations. From there, Mujaheddin activities had quickly extended into Dagestan and Chechnya, turning Baku into a shipping point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen Mujaheddin mafia.
Mega Oil never found oil, but its airlifts of Mujaheddin into the Caucasus to create terror and chaos along the route of the Russian oil pipeline in Chechnya and Dagestan helped to bring Azerbaijan and its oil firmly into the US orbit with the construction of the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline from Baku through Georgia to a Turkish port, Ceyhan, on the Mediterranean Sea. The CIA airlifted the Afghan-based Mujaheddin into Georgia, where they were smuggled across the border into Chechnya.
Their first deployment was to support the Azeri army in their bitter fight over the future of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. The Armenians were stopped with help from Washington, preventing Azerbaijan from being split, and its future oil pipeline route being blocked. Richard Secord’s covert operation in the Caucasus also contributed to the military coup that toppled elected president Abulfaz Ekhibey that year and installed a more pliable US puppet, Heydar Aliyev. BP and Amoco were behind that coup.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar recruited Afghan mercenaries to fight against Russia and its Armenian allies in Azerbaijan and Chechnya. Hekmatyar used the new Caucasus link to flood Western countries, and Russia, with his Afghan heroin, all with full US knowledge. The heroin went through Baku into Chechnya, Russia, onto Europe and North America.
Saudi sheiks declared the Chechen resistance a legitimate Jihad, and private Saudi donors sent money to Khattab and his Chechen colleagues. Mujaheddin wounded in Chechnya were sent to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment. The CIA, and Washington had been on the side of the Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya; in fact, they had financed, transported, and armed them.
Osama bin Laden brought in an old Jihad friend, a fellow Saudi, Ibn al-Khattab, to become the Emir of the Mujaheddin in Chechnya, together with Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. Both had fought in Afghanistan. Khattab’s Islamic Brigade in Chechnya consisted of an estimated 2,000 Jihadists recruited from Chechnya, Dagestan, Arabs, Turks, and other foreign Muslims.
At the same time, the CIA set up a propaganda arm in Washington to make the case for Chechen independence from the “brutal” Russian occupation. In short, the peace they advocated was Russian surrender. They launched a highly successful international media campaign to demonise Russia. With a war-weary Russian population increasingly against a new military war in Chechnya after the Afghan debacle, Boris Yeltsin’s government declared a ceasefire with the Chechens in 1996 and signed a peace treaty in 1997.
The most intense phase if the Chechen wars wound down in 2000 only after heavy Russian military action defeated the Jihadists.
It was this war that gave Moscow the impetus to initiate a series of meetings with China and other Central Asian nations that formed the Shanghai 5, and formalized in June 2001, as the Shanghai Coordinating Organization, or the SCO. The formation of the SCO was the trigger for the 9-11 terror attacks that gave Washington a pretext to invade Afghanistan.
Grozny was utterly destroyed, with 100,000 civilian deaths, while Russia suffered some 15,000 of its soldiers killed. The Russian Baku oil pipeline route was off the table, just as Washington wanted. The Anglo-American oil majors and the CIA’s operatives were happy. They had what they wanted: their Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, bypassing Russia’s Grozny pipeline. The way was clear for BP and Exxon to go ahead with their BTC route. Completed in September 2001, it is now pumping 1 million barrels of oil daily, to Ceyhan.
When Putin took over from Yeltsin, in 1999, he used false flag incidents in Moscow, to justify a 2nd Russian invasion of Chechnya. Within 2 years, he removed and killed most of the US-allied Mujaheddin in Chechnya, and installed a pro-Russian Muslim as the new leader of Chechnya. Today, in 2016, that leader’s son, Ramadan Kadyrov, is Putin’s man in charge of Chechnya. So close are Putin and Kadyrov that one finds Chechen Special Forces working alongside Russian troops in Syria! Grozny has been rebuilt from scratch, and Chechnya’s economy is booming.
The Moscow Theatre Attack – October 2002 & The Beslan Tragedy – September 2004
In Chechnya, Shamil Basayev, along with Khattab, created the International Islamic Brigade (IIB) with Saudi Intelligence money, approved by the CIA, and coordinated with Saudi Ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The IIB was successful in creating huge security problems across Russia.
When Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Prince Turki, met with Russian President Putin, in Moscow, in October 2002, to sign a strategic economic deal, whereby Saudi Arabia would invest $50 billion into the Russian economy, Washington was not pleased. The CIA used the IIB to attack a theater in Moscow. Subsequent actions by Russian Special Forces resulted in the killing of most of the Chechen terrorists, and also many hostages.
On September 1, 2004 armed Jihadists from the IIB took more than 1,100 people as hostages in a siege situation, and forced them into School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia, and the autonomous republic in the North Caucasus of the Russian Federation near to the Georgia border.
On the third day of the hostage crisis, as explosions were heard inside the school, FSB and other elite Russian troops stormed the building. In the end, about 350 hostages were killed. It became clear that the Russian forces had handled the intervention badly. Basayev claimed credit for having sent the terrorists to Beslan. His demands had included the complete independence of Chechnya from Russia, something that would have given Washington an enormous strategic dagger in the southern underbelly of Russia.
The Western propaganda machine wasted no time demonizing Putin and Russia for their bad handling of the Beslan crisis rather than to focus on the links of Basayev to Al Qaeda to Saudi intelligence and the CIA.
By late 2004, in the aftermath of the Beslan tragedy, President Putin ordered a secret search and destroy mission by Russian intelligence to hunt and kill key leaders of the Caucasus Mujahideen. Al-Khattab was killed in 2002, and Basayev, in 2005. The Russian security forces soon discovered that most of the Chechen Afghan Arab jihadists had fled. They had gotten safe haven in Turkey, Germany Dubai, and Qatar. In other words, the Chechen Jihadists were given safe havens in NATO territories.
Ukraine & Georgia
After these issues had simmered down, and with Armenia drawing close to Russia after the Nagorno-Karabakh war, the Caucasus Republic of Georgia was chosen for the pipeline route from Baku through to Turkey. That, however, meant the need of a Georgian government absolutely beholden to Washington. The Washington choice was Mikhail Saakashvili, a US-educated Georgian clan boss who Washington correctly calculated would sell his grandmothers gold teeth if the price was right.
In 2003, Washington turned its energies to re-organizing the Rose Revolution in Georgia that brought Saakashvili in as a pro-NATO Georgian President.
Washington then immediately turned its attention to Ukraine and what they decided to name the Orange Revolution to install Victor Yuschenko as their pro-NATO president. They used the same operatives as they had used in Georgia’.
The CIA “Color Revolutions”, to install pro-NATO regimes along Russia’s immediate borders, coupled with the use of Mujaheddin, created a strategic crisis for the chaotic Russia.
Soon after taking office in 1999, Russia’s new President, Vladimir Putin, a nationalist with a long career in intelligence, faced the daunting task of trying to undo the damage that the criminal cronies of Yeltsin and their American business partners had done to Russia as a functioning state and nation. The Washington Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, and the use of Chechen Jihad terrorists to destroy the Russian Grozny pipeline were only one, major, part of a geopolitical Grand Chessboard, as Brzezinski termed it in his 1997 book.
In March 2003, Washington launched a full-scale war to occupy Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, then the location of the world’s second-largest oil reserves, and a close friend of Moscow.
By that time Washington had begun to develop a new strategy in addition to using predominantly Arab Jihadists of Osama bin Laden and the Mujaheddin
An important postscript: When the US initiated the Arab Spring in December 2010, they found that they had a public relations disaster on their hands. How would it be possible to use Al Qaeda in Libya, and Syria, if America’s “public enemy No 1”, Osama bin Laden is still around. A living bin Laden would not have made it possible for Washington to use Al Qaeda in these new theaters of war. So, presto, on March 2011, it was announced that a US Seal team killed Osama bin Laden, in Abbottabad, Pakistan! In reality, bin Laden had died of kidney failure a few years earlier, and was buried in Saudi Arabia! Not long after, this very same Seal team was killed while on a mission in Afghanistan. Dead men tell no tales! You just can’t make this stuff up!
Senior CIA Islam experts began to turn to Turkey, a Sunni Muslim country with one advantage over the Arabs: the Turkish Ottoman Empire had stretched originally as far as China and across Central Asia. Washington began to actively build a Turkish option for waging Jihad across Central Asia and to China in order to control Eurasia. A barely educated, reclusive Turkish Imam named Fethullah Gulen would be their vehicle.
The full, explosive story awaits you in the next and final part of this series on “Weaponising Islam”. Stay tuned, folks!
