Peter Dale Scott (10,909
words) Sept. 1, 2005 (revised)
Chapter 9: "Al Qaeda, U.S. Oil Companies, and Central Asia" (July 19, 2005, revised 9/1/05; excerpt from forthcoming book, The Road to 9/11)
The
then leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Sayed
Kuttub, a man Faisal sponsored to undermine Nasser,
openly admitted that during this period [the 1960s] “America made Islam.”
What is slowly emerging from Al Qaeda
activities in Central Asia in the 1990s is the extent to
which they involved both American oil companies and the U.S.
government.
By now we know that the U.S.-protected movements of al Qaeda
terrorists into regions like Afghanistan,
Azerbaijan and Kosovo have served the interests of U.S.
oil companies. In many cases they have also 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 Afghan War
with the Soviet Union ended in 1989. Deprived of Soviet
troops to support it, the Soviet-backed Najibullah
regime in Kabul finally fell in
April 1992. What should have been a glorious victory for the mujahedin proved instead to be a time of troubles for them,
as Tajiks behind Massoud
and Pashtuns behind Hekmatyar
began 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,
Egypt, and Saudi
Arabia, the new interim president of Afghanistan,
Mojaddedi, announced that the Arab Afghans should
leave. In January 1993 Pakistan
followed suit, closed the offices of all mujahedin in
its country, and ordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.
Shortly afterwards Pakistan
extradited a number of Egyptian jihadis to Egypt,
some of whom had already been tried and convicted in absentia.
Other 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.
In this confusion, with or without continued U.S.
backing, cross-border raids, of the kind originally encouraged by CIA Director Casey
back in the mid-1980s, continued.
Both 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.
The Pakistani observer Ahmed Rashid documents further
support for the Tajik rebels from both Saudi
Arabia and the Pakistani intelligence
directorate ISI.
These raids into Tajikistan
and later Uzbekistan
contributed materially to the destabilization of the Muslim
Republics in the Soviet
Union (and after 1992 of its successor, the Conference 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 reserves of unexploited fuel in the
planet.”
The collapse of the Soviet Union 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.”
The first Bush Administration actively supported the plans of U.S.
oil companies to contract for exploiting 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.
Eventually the threat presented by Islamist
rebels persuaded the governments of Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, and
Kyrgyzstan
to allow U.S. as
well as Russian bases on their soil. The result is 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.
The gap between the Bush Administration’s professed ideals
and its real objectives is well illustrated by its position towards the regime
of Karimov in Uzbekistan.
America quickly
sent Donald Rumsfeld to deal with the new regime in Kyrgyzstan installed in
March 2005 after the popular “Tulip Revolution” and overthrow there of Askar Akayev.
But Islam Karimov’s violent repression of a similar
uprising in Uzbekistan
saw no wavering of U.S.
support for a dictator who has allowed U.S.
troops to be based in his oil- and gas-rich country.
U.S. Operatives, Oil
Companies and Al Qaeda in Azerbaijan
In one former Soviet
Republic, Azerbaijan,
Arab Afghan jihadis clearly assisted this 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 cover of an oil
company, MEGA Oil.
This was at a time when the first Bush administration had expressed its support
for an oil pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan
across the Caucasus to Turkey.
MEGA never did find 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 Aderholt and himself
were occasionally seconded to the CIA as CIA detailees.
Secord describes his own service as a CIA detailee with Air America
in first Vietnam
and then Laos,
in cooperation with the CIA Station Chief Theodore Shackley.
Secord later worked with Oliver North to supply arms
and materiel to the Contras in Honduras,
and also developed a small air force for them, using many former Air America
pilots.
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.
(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 bags 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.
(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 “observed recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan
against Armenia
and its Russian allies.”
At this time, heroin flooded from Afghanistan
through Baku
into Chechnya, Russia,
and even North America.
It is difficult to believe that MEGA’s airline (so
much like Air America)
did not become involved.
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.”
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 which would, for the first time, not pass
through Russian-controlled territory when exporting oil from the Caspian basin
to Turkey. Thus the contract was bitterly opposed by Russia, 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. To this end, as the 9/11 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 Chechen mafia, whose branches “extended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America.”
The Arab Afghans’Azeri operations were financed in part with Afghan
heroin.
According to police sources in the
Russian capital, 184 heroin processing labs were discovered in 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.
This foreign Islamist presence in Baku was also supported by bin Laden’s financial network.
With bin Laden’s guidance and Saudi support, Baku soon became a base for jihadi operations against Dagestan and Chechnya
in Russia.And
an informed article argued in 1999 that Pakistan’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.
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
time, 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.
The wealthy Saudi families of al-Alamoudi (as Delta Oil) and bin Mahfouz
(as Nimir Oil) participated in the western oil
consortium along with the American firm Unocal. In October 2001, the U. S.
Treasury Department named among charities allegedly supporting terrorism the
Saudi charity Muwafaq (Blessed Relief), to which the
al-Alamoudis and bin Mahfouz
families had been identified as major contributors. (It should be noted that the
entire bin Mahfouz family has emphatically condemned
terrorism in all of its manifestations.)
It is unclear whether MEGA Oil was a front for the U.S.
Government or for U.S.
oil companies and their Saudi allies. U.S.
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 Turkish
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 Petroleum Company. The topic was always oil
rights and, on the insistence of the Azeris, supply
and arms to Azerbaijan.”
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.
The true facts and backers of the Aliyev
coup may never be fully disclosed. But unquestionably, 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.
Three years later, in August 1996, Amoco’s president met with Clinton
and arranged for Aliyev to be invited to Washington.
In 1997 Clinton said that
In a world of growing energy
demand…our nation cannot afford to rely on a single region for our energy
supplies. By working closely with Azerbaijan
to tap the Caspian’s resources, we not only help Azerbaijan
to prosper, we also help diversify our energy supply and strengthen our
energy’s security.
Unocal, the Taliban, and bin Laden in Afghanistan
The accusations against Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil in Azerbaijan
parallel those from European sources against Unocal in Afghanistan,
which has been accused of helping, along with Delta Oil, to finance the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul
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 largely orchestrated by the Pakistani secret service [ISI] and the oil
company Unocal, 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 coat
of Pakistan. A second natural
gas pipeline (Centgas) was also contemplated by
Unocal.
For
Unocal to advance its own funds for the Taliban conquest
would have been in violation of U.S. law, which is
why such companies customarily resort to middlemen. No such restraints would
have inhibited Unocal's Saudi partner in its Centgas consortium,
Delta Oil. Delta Oil certainly had the assets; it was “owned by a Jeddah-based
group of 50 prominent investors close to the [Saudi] royal family.” 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 to sign a new
pipeline contract with Unocal.
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 Third World
countries to be facilitated and sustained, indeed made possible, by
corruption." This has long
been the case, but in the Reagan 1980s it was escalated by a new generation of
aggressively risk-taking, law-bending, “cowboy” entrepreneurs. The pace was set
by new corporations like Enron, a high-debt merger that was in part guided by
the junk-bond impresario Michael Milken.
Some
have speculated that Enron also had a potential interest in the Unocal gas
pipeline project through Afghanistan. By 1997 Enron
was negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Neftegas
of Uzbekistan, to develop Uzbekistan's
natural gas. This was a huge project backed by a $400 million commitment from 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.
Enron’s short-term plans had been to export
Uzbek gas west to Kazakhstan,
Turkey, and Europe.
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 great that Indians refused to buy it.)
In my
book Drugs, Oil, and War, I quote 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).”
It is clear they talk as equals in the current Bush
Administration. Both the President and Vice-President are former oilmen, as were
some of their oldest friends and political backers, like Kenneth Lay of Enron.
Many observers have noted, from as early as 1992, that George W. Bush’s first oil venture, Arbusto, received a $50,000 investment from a Texan, James
Bath, “who made his fortune by investing money for [Khalid
bin] Mahfouz and another BCCI-connected Saudi, Sheikh
[Salim] bin-Laden [Osama’s
brother].”
Such little investments purchased political influence. According
to Kevin Phillips,
James Bath, who invested fifty thousand dollars in the 1979 and 1980 Arbusto partnerships, probably did so as U.S. business representative for rich Saudi
investors Salem bin Laden and Khalid
bin Mahfouz …. Both men were involved with the Bank
of Credit and Commerce International…indeed, bin Mahfouz
owned twenty percent of its stock….A decade later, Harken
Energy, the company willing to handsomely buy out George W.’s
crumbling oil and gas business, had its own CIA connections….17.6 percent of Harken’s stock was owned by Abdullah Baksh,
another Saudi magnate reported by some to be representing Khalid
bin Mahfouz.
(Khalid bin Mahfouz has however categorically
denied being an investor in either Arbusto or Harken Energy.)
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 “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) was directly
supported and politically empowered by NATO, beginning in 1998. 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.” This would presumably have been back when
Arab Afghan members of the KLA, like Abdul-Wahid al-Qahtani, were fighting in Bosnia.
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 been recognized by experts and to my knowledge never contested by them. 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." In March 2002, Michael Steiner, the United
Nations administrator in Kosovo, warned of
"importing the Afghan danger to Europe"
because several cells trained and financed by al-Qaeda
remained in the region.
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. The Washington Times reported in 1999
that
The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton
administration has embraced and some members of Congress want to 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.
Alfred McCoy supplies
a detailed and footnoted corroboration:
Albanian exiles used drug profits 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
conflict, the UN administration of the province…allowed a
thriving heroin traffic 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.
Yet once again, as
in Azerbaijan, these drug-financed Islamist
jihadis received American assistance, this time from
the U.S. Government. 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.
BBC News announced in December 2004 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, Bulgaria, and Macedonia.
The closeness of the
UCK/KLA to al-Qaeda was acknowledged again in the
western press, after Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded in 2001 to
conduct guerrilla warfare in Macedonia. Press accounts included 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.
This was probably
Mohammed al-Zawahiri. The American right wing, which
opposed Clinton’s actions in Kosovo,
has transmitted reports “that the KLA's head
of elite forces, Muhammed al-Zawahiri,
was the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri,
the military commander for bin Laden's Al Qaeda.”
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
throughout Albania,
Kosovo, Macedonia,
Bulgaria, Turkey
and Bosnia.”
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 Croatian intelligence services.
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.
Al Qaeda and the Petroleum-Military Complex
It is important to understand that the conspicuous influence
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
Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington.
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 Caspian.
The Clinton Administration listened to the oil companies,
and in 1998 began committing U.S.
troops to joint training exercises in Uzbekistan.
This made neighboring countries like Kazakhstan
and Turkmenistan,
wary of Russia,
more eager to grant exploration and pipeline rights to American companies.
But Clinton did
not yield to Unocal’s strenuous lobbying in 1996 for U.S.
recognition of the Taliban, as a condition for
building the pipeline from 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.
The three way symbiosis of Al Qaeda,
oil companies, and 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 dubious
election, succeeded his father).
The Department of Defense at first
proposed that Azerbaijan also receive an IMET [International Military Education
and Training] grant of $750,000 and an FMF [Foreign Military Financing] grant
of $3 million in 2003 as part of the war on terrorism but later admitted that
the funds were actually intended to protect U.S. access to oil in and around
the Caspian Sea.
A survey of U.S.
history since World War Two suggests that the United
States power state has consistently used the
resources of the global drug traffic to further its own ends, particularly with
respect to oil, at the expense of the public order and well-being of the
American public state.
For at least two decades, from Brzezinski’s backing
of Hekmatyar in 1979 to Bush’s backing of the Afghan
Northern Alliance in 2001, the United States has continued to draw on the
resources of drug-trafficking Islamic jihadists who
are or were associated at some point with Al Qaeda.
In the next chapter I shall argue that this alliance with al
Qaeda terrorists against the 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 and
catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”