Chapter VIII: Al Qaeda and the U.S. Establishment=

The then leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherho= od, Sayed Kuttub, a man Faisal sponsored to undermine Nasser, openly admitted t= hat during this period [the 1960s] “America made Islam.”[1]

“The government…were not prepared to= set up their own organization. They preferred to use the oil companies, at a discreet distance, as the instruments of national security and foreign policy.”U.S. government.[3] In one way or another, Americans in the 1990s cooperated with al Qaeda terrori= sts in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan= and Kosovo. In other countries, notably Uzb= ekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Georgi= a, al Qaeda terrorists have provided pretexts or opportunities for a U.S. military commitment and even troops to follow.

This has been most obvious in the years since the end = of the Afghan War in 1989. Deprived of Soviet troops to support it, the Soviet-bac= ked Najibullah regime in Kabul finally fell in April 1992. What should have been a glorious victory for th= e mujahedin proved instead to be a t= ime of troubles for them, as Tajiks behind Massoud and Pashtuns behind Hekmatyar b= egan instead to fight each other.

The situation was particularly difficult for the Arab Afghans, who now found themselves no longer welcome. Under pressure from America, E= gypt, and Saudi Arabia, the = new interim president of Afghanistan, Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, announced that the Arab Afghans should leave. In January 1993 Pakista= n followed suit, closed the offices of all mujahedin in its country, and ordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.[4] Shortly afterwards Pakistan extradited a number of Egyptian jih= adis to Egypt, some of whom had already been tried and convicted in absentia.[5] O= ther radical Islamists went to Afghanistan, but without the foreign support they had enjoyed before.

Fleeing the hostilities in Afghanistan, some Uzbek and Tajik mujahedin = and refugees started fleeing or returning north across the Amu Darya.U.S. backing.[7] B= oth Hekmatyar and Massoud actively supported the Tajik rebels, including in the years up to 1992 when both continued to receive aid and assistance from the= United States.[8] T= he Pakistani observer Ahmed Rashid documents further support for the Tajik reb= els from both Saudi Arab= ia and the Pakistani intelligence directorate ISI.[9]

These raids into Tajik= istan and later Uzbekistan contributed materially to the destabilization of the Muslim Republics in the Soviet Union (and after 1992 of its successor, the Commonwealth of Independent States). This destabilization was an explicit goal of U.S. policy in the Reagan era, and did not change with the end of the Afghan War= . On the contrary, the United States was concerned to hasten the break-up of the Soviet Union, and increasingly = to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin, which at that time were still estimated to be “the largest known rese= rves of unexploited fuel in the planet.”[10]<= /p>

The collapse of the Soviet Unio= n had a disastrous impact on the economies of its Islamic Republics. Already = in 1991 the leaders of Central Asia “began to hold talks with Western oil companies, on the back of ongoing negotiations between Kazakhstan and the = US company Chevron.”[11] = The first Bush Administration actively supported the plans of U.S. oil companies to contract for exploit= ing the resources of the Caspian region, and also for a pipeline not controlled= by Moscow that could = bring the oil and gas production out to the west. The same goals were enunciated = even more clearly as matters of national security by Clinton and his administration.[12]<= /p>

Eventually the threat presented by Islamist rebels per= suaded the governments of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan to allow U.S. as well as Russian bases= on their soil. The result was to preserve artificially a situation throughout = the region where small elites grow increasingly wealthy and corrupt, while most citizens suffer from a sharp drop in living standards.[13] =

The gap between the Bush Administration’s profes= sed ideals and its real objectives is well illustrated by its position towards = the regime of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. America quickly sent D= onald Rumsfeld to deal with the new regime in Kyrgyzstan installed in March= 2005 after the popular “Tulip Revolution” and overthrow there of Ask= ar Akayev.[14] = But Karimov’s violent repression of a similar uprising in Uzbekistan at this time did not diminish <= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">U.S. support for the dictator, as long as = he allowed U.S. troops to be based in his oil- and gas-rich country.[15]<= /p>

U.S. Operativ= es, Oil Companies and Al Qaeda in Azerbaijan

In one former Soviet Republic, Azerbaijan, Arab Afghan jihadis clearly ass= isted the effort of U.S. oil companies to penetrate the region. In 1991, Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans of U.S. operations in Laos, and later of Oliver North’s operations with the Contras, turned up in Baku under the cov= er of an American company, MEGA Oil.[16] = This was at a time when the first Bush administration had expressed its support = for an oil pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan<= /st1:country-region> across the Caucasus to Turkey.[17] = MEGA never found oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of Azerbaijan= from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.

Secord, Aderholt, and Dearborn were all career U.S. Air Force officers, not CIA. However Secord explains in his memoir how Ader= holt and he were occasionally seconded to the CIA as CIA detailees. Secord descr= ibes his own service as a CIA detailee with Air = America in first Vietnam and t= hen Laos, in cooperation with the CIA Station Chief Theodore Shackley.[18] Secord later worked with Oliver North to supply arms and materiel to the Contras in Honduras, a= nd also developed a small air force for them, using many former Air America pilots.[19] Because of this experience in air operations, CIA Director Casey and Oliver North had selected Secord to trouble-shoot the deliveries of weapons to Iran in the Iran-Contra operation.[20] (Aderholt and Dearborn also served in the Laotian CIA operation, and later = in supporting the Contras.)

As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and their men engaged in military training, passed “brown b= ags filled with cash” to members of the government, and above all set up = an airline on the model of Air America, which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahedin mercenaries in Afghanistan.[21] (Secord and Aderholt claim to have left Azerbaijan before the mujahedin arrived.) Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was “obse= rved recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against = Armenia and its Russian allies.”Afghanist= an through Baku into Chechnya, Russia, and even North America.[23] = It is difficult to believe that MEGA’s airline (so much like Air America) did not become involved.[24]<= /p>

The operation was not a small one.

Over the course of the next two years, [MEGA Oil] procured thousands of dollars worth of weapons and recruited at least two thousand Afghan mercenaries for Azerbaijan - the first mujahedin to fight on the territory of the former Communist Bloc.”[25]<= o:p>

<= /span>

In 1993 the mujahedin also contributed to the = ouster of Azerbaijan’s elected president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by an ex-Communist Brezhnev-era leader, Heidar Aliyev.

At stake was an $8= billion oil contract with a consortium of western oil companies headed by BP. Part = of the contract would be a pipeline that would, for the first time, not pass through Russian-controlled territory when exporting oil from the Caspian ba= sin to Turkey. Thus the contract was bitterly opposed by R= ussia, and required an Azeri leader willing to stand up to the former Soviet Union.

The Arab Afghans helped supply that muscle. Their own eyes were set on fighting Russia in the disputed Armenian-Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and in liberating neighboring Muslim areas of Russia: Chechnya and Dagestan.Baku, which became a base for terrorism elsewhere.London= arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America.”Moscow alone last = year. ''Every one of them was run by Azeris, who use the proceeds to buy arms for= Azerbaijan's war against Armenia in Nagorno- Karabakh,= '' [Russian economist Alexandre] Datskevitch said.[29]<= br style=3D'mso-special-character:line-break'>

This foreign Islamist presence in Baku was also supported by bin Laden= 217;s financial network.[30] = With bin Laden’s guidance and Saudi support, Baku soon became a base for jihadi operations against Dagestan and Chechnya in Russia.[31]A= nd an informed article argued in 1999 that Pak= istan’s ISI, facing its own disposal problem with the militant Arab-Afghan veterans, trained and armed them in Afghanistan to fight in Chechnya= . ISI also encouraged the flow of Afghan drugs westward to support the Chechen militants, thus diminishing the flow into Pakistan itself.[32]<= span style=3D'font-family:Optimum'>

As Michael Griffin has observed, the regional conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and other disputed areas, Abkhazia, Turkish Kurdistan and Chechnya

each represented a distinct, tactical move, crucial at the t= ime, in discerning which power would ultimately become master of the pipelines which, some time in this century, will transport the oil and gas from the Caspian basin to an energy-avid world.U.= S. oil companies and their Saudi allies. U.S.<= /st1:country-region> oil companies have been accused of spending millions of dollars in Azerbaijan= , not just to bribe the government but also to install it. According to a Tur= kish intelligence source who was an alleged eyewitness, major oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil, were “behind the coup d’état” which in 1993 replaced the elected President, Abulfaz Elchibey, with his successor, Heydar Aliyev. The source claimed to = have been at meetings in Baku with “senior members of BP, Exxon, Amoco, Mobil and the Turkish Petro= leum Company. The topic was always oil rights and, on the insistence of the Azer= is, supply and arms to A= zerbaijan.” Turkish secret service documents allege middlemen paid off key officials of= the democratically elected government of the oil-rich nation just before its president was overthrown.[34]<= /p>

The true facts and backers of the Aliyev coup may neve= r be fully disclosed. But before the coup, the efforts of Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, Ed Dearborn and Hekmatyar’s mujahedin helped contest Russian influence and prepare for Baku’s shift away to the west.[35] Three years later, in August 1996, Amoco’s president met with Clinton and arranged for Aliyev to be invited to Washington.[36] = In 1997 Clinton said that

In a world of growing energy demand…our nation cannot afford to rely on a single region for our en= ergy supplies. By working closely with Azerbaija= n to tap the Caspian’s resources, we not only help Azerbaijan to prosper, we als= o help diversify our energy supply and strengthen our energy’s security.[37]<= /p>

But the interest in Azerbaijan was bipartisan. Ja= mes Baker, George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, was and is a member of = the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. So was Dick Cheney. During the 1990s t= he council’s co-chairman was Richard Armitage, later one of the so-called Vulcans or neocons in George W. Bush’s State Department, who in this period visited Aliyev in Azerbaijan on behalf of Texaco.[38]<= /p>

Unocal, the T= aliban, and bin Laden in Afg= hanistan

The accusations against Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil in Azerbaijan parallel those from European so= urces against Unocal in Afghanistan, which has been accused of helping, along with Delta Oil, to finance the Taliban’s seizure of Kab= ul in 1996. (This was at a time when the Taliban was also receiving funds from= Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden.)

The respected French observer Olivier Roy has charged that "When the Taleban took power in Afghanistan (1996), it was la= rgely orchestrated by the Pakistani secret service [ISI] and the oil company Unoc= al, with its Saudi ally Delta.”= Unocal executive John Maresca then testified in 1998 to the House Committee on International Relations on the benefits of a proposed oil pipeline through Afghanistan to the coast of Paki= stan.[40]= A second natural gas pipeline (Centgas) was also contemplated by Unocal.=

For Unocal to advance its own funds for the Taliban conquest w= ould have been in violation of U.S. law, which is why such companies customarily resort to middlemen. No such l= egal restraints would have inhibited Unocal's Saudi partner in its Centgas consortium, Delta Oil; but Delta Oil asserts emphatically that it took no p= art in orchestrating or financing the Taliban's assumption of power in Afghanistan.=

(Delta was already an investor with Unocal in the oilfields of= Azerbaijan, and may have been a factor in = the October 1995 decision of Turkmenistan’s president to sign, in New Yor= k, a new pipeline contract with Unocal/Delta.[41])

As I wrote a decade ago, citing the case of a U.= S. oil company in Tunisia, "it is normal, not unusual, for the entry of major U.S. firms into Thi= rd World countries to be facilitated and sustained, indeed made possible, by corruption."Som= e have speculated that Enron also had a potential interest in the Unocal gas pipel= ine project through Afgh= anistan. By 1997 Enron was negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Nefteg= as of Uzbekistan, to develop Uzbekistan's natural gas. This was a huge project backed by a $400 million commitment fr= om the U.S. Government through OPIC. Uzbekistan also signed a Memo= of Agreement to participate in the Centgas gas pipeline. But the Enron Uzbek negotiations collapsed in 1998.Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Europe<= /st1:place>. However it has been claimed that Enron hoped eventually to supply, via the Centgas pipeline, its failing energy plant in Dabhol, India. (Without a cheap gas supply, the cost of electricity from Dabhol was so gre= at that Indians refused to buy it.)[44]

In the first half of 2001 = the Bush Administration attempted to revive negotiations with the Taliban for the pipeline, as a quid pro quo for agreeing to a national unity government with Massoud’s Northern Alliance, and extraditing Osama bin Laden.[45] As Chalmers Johnson has commented, “Support for this enterprise [the = dual oil and gas pipelines] appears to have been a major consideration in the Bu= sh administration’s decision to attack Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.”In = my book Drugs, Oil, and War, I quo= te again from Olivier Roy: "It is the Americans who have made inroads in = Central Asia, primarily because of the oil and gas interests. Chevron and Unocal are political actors who talk as equals with = the States (that is, with the presidents).”[48] =

Al Qaeda, the= KLA in Kosovo, and the Trans-Balkan Pipeline

The U.S., Al Qaeda and oil company interests converged again in Kosovo. Though the origins of the Kosovo tragedy were rooted in local enmities, oil became a prominent aspect of the outcome. There the al Qaeda-backed UCK or “Ko= sovo Liberation Army” (KLA) was directly supported and politically empower= ed by NATO, beginning in 1998.[49] = But according to a source of Tim Judah, KLA representatives had already met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly “several years earlier.”[50] = This would presumably have been back when Arab Afghan members of the KLA, like Abdul-Wahid al-Qahtani, were fighting in Bosnia.[51]<= /p>

Mainstream accounts of the Kosovo War are silent about= the role of al Qaeda in training and financing the UCK/KLA, yet this fact has b= een recognized by experts and to my knowledge never contested by them.[52] = For example, James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, said “Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan…. Milosevic is right. There is no question of their [al Qaeda’s] participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented."= ;[53] = In March 2002, Michael Steiner, the United Nations administrator in Kosovo, wa= rned of "importing the Afghan danger to Europe" because several cells trained and financed by al Qaeda remained in the regi= on.[54]<= /p>

As late as 1997 the UCK/KLA had been recognized by the= U.S. as a terrorist group supported in part by the heroin traffic.[55] = The Washington Times reported in 1999 = that

The Kosovo Liberation Army,= which the Clinton administration has embraced and some members of Congress want t= o arm as part of the NATO bombing campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war effort with profits from the sale of heroin.[56]<= /p>

Alfred McCoy supplies a detailed and footnoted corroboration:

Albanian exiles used drug p= rofits to ship Czech and Swiss arms back to Kosovo for the separatist guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). In 1997-98, these Kosovar drug syndicates armed the KLA for a revolt against Belgrade’s army….Even after the 1999 Kumanovo agreement settled the Kosovo confl= ict, the UN administration of the province…allowed a thriving heroin traff= ic along this northern route from Turkey. The former commanders of the KLA, both local clans and aspiring national leaders, continued to dominate the transit traffic through the Balkans.[57]<= /p>

Yet once again, as in Azerbaijan, these drug-financ= ed Islamist jihadis received Ameri= can assistance, this time from the U.S. Government.[58] = At the time critics charged that US oil interests were interested in building a trans-Balkan pipeline with US Army protection; although initially ridiculed, these critics were eventually proven correct.[59]<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> BBC News announced in December 200= 4 that a $1.2 billion pipeline, south of a huge new U.S. army base in Kosovo, has been given a go-ahead by the governments of Albania, B= ulgaria, and Macedonia.[60] =

Much of the financing came from the U.S. government= 217;s Overseas Private Investment Corporation and private American firms, as originally proposed in 1996, when the corridor involved had been laid out as part of the Clinton administration’s South Balkan Development Initiat= ive.[61]<= /p>

The closeness of the UCK/KLA to al Qaeda was acknowled= ged again in the western press, after Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded= in 2001 to conduct guerrilla warfare in Macedonia. Press accounts inc= luded an Interpol report containing the allegation that one of bin Laden´s senior lieutenants was the commander of an elite UCK/KLA unit operating in Kosovo in 1999.Clinton’s actions in Kosovo, has transmitted reports “that the KLA's head of el= ite forces, Muhammed al-Zawahiri, was the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military commander for bin Laden's Al Qaeda.”[63] Meanwhile Marcia Kurop in the Wall = Street Journal has written that “The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of = mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throug= hout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, = Turkey and Bosnia.”[64]<= /p>

According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,

Bin Laden’s Arab `Afghans’ also have assumed a dominant role in training the Kosovo Liberation Army… [By mid-March 1999 the UCK included] many elements controlled and/or sponsored by the U.S., German, British, and Cr= oatian intelligence services.[65]<= /p>

Ramush Haradinaj, described by the London Observer as a drug-trafficker and "the key US military and intelligence asset in Kosovo during the civil war," is today awaiting trial as a war criminal before the Hague War Crimes Tribunal.

Meanwhile 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 is now distributed by Kosovar Albanians.[66]<= /p>

Al Qaeda and the Petroleum-Military Complex

It is important to understand that the conspicuous inf= luence of petroleum money in the administration of two Bush presidents was also prominent under Clinton. A former CIA officer complained about the oil lobby’s influence with Sheila Heslin of Clinton’s National Security Council staff:

Heslin’s sole job, it= seemed, was to carry water for an exclusive club known as the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in = the Caspian. . . . Another thing I learned was that Heslin wasn’t soloing. Her boss, Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, headed the inter-agency committee on Caspian oil policy, which made him in effect the government’s ambassador to the cartel, and Berger wasn’t a disinterested player. He held $90,000 worth of stock in Amoco, probably the most influential member of the cartel. . . . The deeper I got, the more Cas= pian oil money I found sloshing around Washington.[67]<= /p>

The oil companies’ meeting with Sheila Heslin in= the summer of 1995 was followed shortly by the creation of an interagency governmental committee to formulate U.S. policy toward the Caspia= n.

The Clinton Administration listened to the oil compani= es, and in 1998 began committing U.S. troops to joint training exercises in Uzbekistan.[68] = This made neighboring countries like Kazakhstan<= /st1:country-region> and Turkmenistan, wary= of Russia, more eager to grant exploration and pipeline rights to American companies.[69]<= /p>

But Clinton did not y= ield to Unocal’s strenuous lobbying in 1996 for U.S. recognition of the Taliban, as a condition for building the pipeline from <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">Turkmenistan. Clinton declined in the end to do so, responding instead to the strongly voiced political opposition, especially from women’s groups over the Taliban’s treatment of women.[70]<= /p>

The three way symbiosis of Al Qaeda, oil companies, an= d the Pentagon is still visible in the case of Azerbaijan, for example. Now = the Pentagon is protecting the Aliyev regime (where a younger Aliyev, in a dubi= ous election, succeeded his father).

The Department of Defense a= t first proposed that Azerbaijan also receive an IMET [International Military Educa= tion and Training] grant of $750,000 and an FMF [Foreign Military Financing] gra= nt of $3 million in 2003 as part of the war on terrorism but later admitted th= at the funds were actually intended to protect U.S. access to oil in and around the Caspian Sea.al Qaeda, U.S. bases have sprung up close to oilfields and pipelines in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, and Kosovo. And as Michael Klare has noted,

Already [U.S= .] troops from the Southern Command (Southcom) are helping to defend Colombia’s Ca&= ntilde;o Limón pipeline….Likewise, soldiers from the European Command (Eurcom) are training local forces to protect the newly constructed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in Georgia….Finally, the ships and plane= s of the U.S. Pacific Command (Pacom) are patrolling vital tanker routes in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and the western Pacific….Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.U.S. history since World War Two suggests that the United States power state has consistently used the resources of drug-trafficking terrorists, and more recently those of al Qaeda, to further its own ends, particularly with resp= ect to oil, at the expense of the public order and well-being of the American public state.United States public order underlies the conspiracy that made 9/11 possible. But we must also look at = how the military-petroleum complex came to project long-term military budgets, = in the order of a trillion dollars, that its advocates acknowledged that the American public state could not be persuaded easily to support…..

In the absence, that is, of “some catastrophic a= nd catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”[74]<= /p>

[1] Saïd K. Aburish, The Rise, Corruption and Coming Fall of the House of Saud (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), 130-31.

[2]<= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> Anthony Sampson, The Seven Sisters: The Gre= at Oil Companies and the World They Shaped (New York: Bantam Books: 1976), 74.=

[3]<= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> Western governments and media apply the term “al Qaeda” to the whole “network of co-opted groups” who have at some point accepted leadership, training and financing from bin Laden (Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical = Islam [London: I.B. Tauris, 2004], 7-8). From a Muslim perceptive, the term “Al Qaeda” is clumsy, and has led to the targeting of a number of Islamist groups opposed to bin Laden’s tactics. See Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Lāden’s Right-Hand Man [London: Pluto Press, 2004], 100, etc.). I am reminded of certain right-wing hypostatizations of the Vietnam anti-war “Movement” in which I took part, and which saw foreign-funded conspiracy where I could only see chaos. For this reason I w= ill where possible try to use instead the clumsy but widely-accepted term (or misnomer) “Arab Afghans.”

[4]<= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> Guardian, 1/7/93; Evan F. Kohlmann= , Al-Qaida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, 2004), 16. Despite this public stance, ISI elements “privately” continued to support Arab Afghans who were willing = to join Pakistan’s = new covert operations in Kashmir.=

[5]<= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> Montasser al-Zayyat, The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Lāden’s Right-Hand Man (= London: Pluto Press, 2004), 55.

[6] Barn= ett Rubin, New York Times, 12/28/92.

[7] Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), 143-44. Former CIA officer Ro= bert Baer, who in 1993 was posted to Tajikistan<= /st1:country-region>, describes a raid at that time in which “a Tajik Islamic rebel group…from Afg= hanistan…managed to overrun a Russian border post and cut off all the guards’ heads.” According to Baer, the local Russian intelligence chief was convinced that “the rebels were under the command of Rasool Sayyaf’s Ittehad-e-Islami, bin Laden’s Afghani protector,” who in turn was backed by Saudi Arabia and the IIRO. More commonly it is claimed that Hekmatyar’s terrorist drug network was supporting the Ta= jik resistance (Independent, 2/17/93, San Francisco Chronicle, 10/4/01). For Casey’s encouragement of these ISI-backed raids in 1985, see Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of t= he CIA, Afghanistan, and = Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 104.

[8]<= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (London: Pluto Press, 2001), 150 (Tajik rebels); Coll, Ghost Wars, 225 (U.S. aid).

[9]<= span style=3D'font-size:10.0pt;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> = Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in C= entral Asia (New Haven= : Yale UP, 2002), 140-44.

[10] Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind, 115. Explor= ation in the 1990s has considerably downgraded these estimates.

[11]= = Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 145.

[12] Pet= er Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War= (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 30-31.

[13] Mar= tha Brill Olcott, “The Caspian’s False Promise,” Foreign Policy, Summer 1998, 96; q= uoted in Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil:= The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Dependency on Imported Petrol= eum (New York: Metropolitan/ Henry Hol= t, 2004), 129. Cf. Scott, Drugs, Oil, = and War, 8, 64-66.

[14] Reuters, 4/24/05.

[15] Mar= tha Brill Olcott, Washington Post, 5/22/05. In July 2005 Uzbekistan, moving back into the Russian o= rbit, ordered U.S. troops to leave the country.

[16] Tho= mas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sh= arpe, 1999), 272-75. Cf. Mark Irkali, Tengiz Kodrarian and Cali Ruchala, “G= od Save the Shah,” Sobaka Magazi= ne, 5/22/03, http://www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/shah2.html. A fourth operati= ve in MEGA Oil, Gary Best, was also a veteran of North’s Contra support effort. For more on General Secord’s and Major Aderholt’s role = as part of Ted Shackley’s team of off-loaded CIA assets and capabilities, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in t= he Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 26-30, 36-42, 197-98.

[17] It = was also a time when Congress, under pressure from Armenian voters, had banned = all military aid to Azer= baijan (under Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act). This ban, reminiscent of the Congressional ban on aid to the Contras in the 1980s, ended after 9/11. “In the interest of national security, and to help in `enhancing glob= al energy security’ during this War on Terror, Congress granted President Bush the right to waive Section 907 in the aftermath of September 11th. It = was necessary, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress, to `enable Azerbaijan= to counter terrorist organizations’" (Irkali, Kodrarian and Ruch= ala, “God Save the Shah,” So= baka Magazine, 5/22/03).

[18] Richard Secord, with Jay Wurts, Honored a= nd Betrayed: Irangate, Covert Affairs, and the Secret War in Laos (New York: John Wiley, 1992), 53-57.

[19] Sec= ord, Honored and Betrayed, 211-16.

[20] Sec= ord, Honored and Betrayed, 233-35.

[21]= Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary, 272-75; Peter Dale Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War (Lanha= m, MD: Rowman & Littlefiel= d, 2003), 7. As part of the airline operation, Azeri pilots were trained in Texas. Dearborn had previously helped Secord a= dvise and train the fledgling Contra air force (Marshall, Scott, and Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection, 197). = These important developments were barely noticed in the U.S. press, but a Washington Post ar= ticle did belatedly note that a group of American men who wore "big cowboy h= ats and big cowboy boots" had arrived in A= zerbaijan as military trainers for its army, followed in 1993 by “more than 1,0= 00 guerrilla fighters from Afghanistan's radical prime minister, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.” (Washington Post, 4/21/94) Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms, with the assistance of Isra= eli agent David Kimche, another Iran-Contra associate of Oliver North. See Scot= t, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20. Whe= ther the Americans were aware of it or not, the al Qaeda presence in Baku soon expanded to include assistance for moving jihadis onwards into Dagestan and Chechnya.

[22] Coo= ley, Unholy Wars, 180; Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7.

[23] Coo= ley, Unholy Wars, 176.

[24] As = the 9/11Commission Report notes (58), = the bin Laden organization established an NGO in Baku, which became a base for terrorism elsewhere. It also became a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to the Ch= echen mafia, whose branches “extended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America (Cooley, Unhol= y Wars, 176).

[25]= Mark Irk= ali, Tengiz Kodrarian and Cali Ruchala , “God Save the Shah: American Guns, Spies and Oil in Aze= rbaijan,” 5/22/03, http:/= /www.diacritica.com/sobaka/2003/shah.html. As we have just seen, they were not the first.

[26] One of Bin Laden’s associates claimed that Bin Laden himself led the Arab Afghans in at least two battles= in Nagorno Karabakh. (Associated Press 11/14/99).

[27] Ibrahim Eidarous, later arrested i= n Europe by the FBI for his role in the 1998 embassy bombings, headed the Baku base of Al Qa= eda between 1995 and 1997 (Strategic Po= licy 10/99). An Islamist in Baku claimed= that they did not attack the U.S. Embassy there so as "not to spoil their g= ood relations in Azerbaijan" (Bill of Indictment in U.S.A. vs. Bin Laden et. al. = 4/01; Washington Post 5/3/01).

[28] Coo= ley, Unholy Wars, 176.

[29] Fra= nk Viviano, San Francisco Chronicle, 12/18/92.

[30] 9/11 Report, 58.

[31] USA vs. Osama bin Laden, Transcript, Testimony of Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, February 6, 2= 001, http://c= ns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/pdfs/binladen/060201.pdf, 300-03.