The Original Chechnya Bombers - The CIA, The Saudis And Bin Laden
What if Putin is Telling The Truth?
On
April 26 Russia’s main national TV station, Rossiya 1, featured
President Vladimir Putin in a documentary to the Russian people on the
events of the recent period including the annexation of Crimea, the US
coup d’etat in Ukraine, and the general state of relations with the
United States and the EU. His words were frank. And in the middle of his
remarks the Russian former KGB chief dropped a political bombshell that
was known by Russian intelligence two decades ago.
Putin
stated bluntly that in his view the West would only be content in
having a Russia weak, suffering and begging from the West, something
clearly the Russian character is not disposed to. Then a short way into
his remarks, the Russian President stated for the first time publicly
something that Russian intelligence has known for almost two decades but
kept silent until now, most probably in hopes of an era of better
normalized Russia-US relations.
Putin
stated that the terror in Chechnya and in the Russian Caucasus in the
early 1990’s was actively backed by the CIA and western Intelligence
services to deliberately weaken Russia. He noted that the Russian FSB foreign intelligence had documentation of the US covert role without giving details.
What
Putin, an intelligence professional of the highest order, only hinted
at in his remarks, I have documented in detail from non-Russian sources. The
report has enormous implications to reveal to the world the
long-standing hidden agenda of influential circles in Washington to
destroy Russia as a functioning sovereign state, an agenda
which includes the neo-nazi coup d’etat in Ukraine and severe financial
sanction warfare against Moscow. The following is drawn on my book, “The
Lost Hegemon” to be published soon…
CIA’s Chechen Wars
Not
long after the CIA and Saudi Intelligence-financed Mujahideen had
devastated Afghanistan at the end of the 1980’s, forcing the exit of the
Soviet Army in 1989, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself
some months later, the CIA began to look at possible places in the
collapsing Soviet Union where their trained “Afghan Arabs” could be
redeployed to further destabilize Russian influence over the post-Soviet
Eurasian space.
They
were called Afghan Arabs because they had been recruited from
ultraconservative Wahhabite Sunni Muslims from Saudi Arabia, the Arab
Emirates, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Arab world where the ultra-strict
Wahhabite Islam was practiced. They were brought to Afghanistan in the
early 1980’s by a Saudi CIA recruit who had been sent to Afghanistan
named Osama bin Laden.
With
the former Soviet Union in total chaos and disarray, George H.W. Bush’s
Administration decided to “kick ‘em when they’re down,” a sad error.
Washington redeployed their Afghan veteran terrorists to bring chaos and
destabilize all of Central Asia, even into the Russian Federation
itself, then in a deep and traumatic crisis during the economic collapse
of the Yeltsin era.
In
the early 1990s, Dick Cheney’s company, Halliburton, had surveyed the
offshore oil potentials of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and the entire
Caspian Sea Basin. They estimated the region to be “another Saudi
Arabia” worth several trillion dollars on today’s market. The US and UK
were determined to keep that oil bonanza from Russian control by all
means. The first target of Washington was to stage a coup in Azerbaijan
against elected president Abulfaz Elchibey to install a President more
friendly to a US-controlled Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, “the
world’s most political pipeline,” bringing Baku oil from Azerbaijan
through Georgia to Turkey and the Mediterranean.
At
that time, the only existing oil pipeline from Baku was a Soviet era
Russian pipeline that ran through the Chechen capital, Grozny, taking
Baku oil north via Russia’s Dagestan province, and across Chechenya to
the Black Sea Russian port of Novorossiysk. The pipeline was the only
competition and major obstacle to the very costly alternative route of
Washington and the British and US oil majors.
President
Bush Sr. gave his old friends at CIA the mandate to destroy that
Russian Chechen pipeline and create such chaos in the Caucasus that no
Western or Russian company would consider using the Grozny Russian oil
pipeline.
Graham
E. Fuller, an old colleague of Bush and former Deputy Director of the
CIA National Council on Intelligence had been a key architect of the CIA
Mujahideen strategy. Fuller described the CIA strategy in the Caucasus
in the early 1990s: “The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of
helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in
Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used
to destabilize what remains of Russian power.”6
The
CIA used a dirty tricks veteran, General Richard Secord, for the
operation. Secord created a CIA front company, MEGA Oil. Secord had been
convicted in the 1980s for his central role in the CIA’s Iran-Contra
illegal arms and drugs operations.
In
1991 Secord, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, landed in
Baku and set up the CIA front company, MEGA Oil. He was a veteran of the
CIA covert opium operations in Laos during the Vietnam War. In
Azerbaijan, he setup an airline to secretly fly hundreds of bin Laden’s
al-Qaeda Mujahideen from Afghanistan into Azerbaijan. By 1993, MEGA Oil
had recruited and armed 2,000 Mujahideen, converting Baku into a base
for Caucasus-wide Mujahideen terrorist operations.
General
Secord’s covert Mujahideen operation in the Caucasus initiated the
military coup that toppled elected president Abulfaz Elchibey that year
and installed Heydar Aliyev, a more pliable US puppet. A secret Turkish
intelligence report leaked to the Sunday
Times of London confirmed that “two petrol giants, BP and Amoco,
British and American respectively, which together form the AIOC
(Azerbaijan International Oil Consortium), are behind the coup d’état.”
Saudi
Intelligence head, Turki al-Faisal, arranged that his agent, Osama bin
Laden, whom he had sent to Afghanistan at the start of the Afghan war in
the early 1980s, would use his Afghan organization Maktab al-Khidamat
(MAK) to recruit “Afghan Arabs” for what was rapidly becoming a global
Jihad. Bin Laden’s mercenaries were used as shock troops by the Pentagon
and CIA to coordinate and support Muslim offensives not only Azerbaijan
but also in Chechnya and, later, Bosnia.
Bin
Laden brought in another Saudi, Ibn al-Khattab, to become Commander, or
Emir of Jihadist Mujahideen in Chechnya (sic!) together with Chechen
warlord Shamil Basayev. No matter that Ibn al-Khattab was a Saudi Arab
who spoke barely a word of Chechen, let alone, Russian. He knew what
Russian soldiers looked like and how to kill them.
Chechnya
then was traditionally a predominantly Sufi society, a mild apolitical
branch of Islam. Yet the increasing infiltration of the well-financed
and well-trained US-sponsored Mujahideen terrorists preaching Jihad or
Holy War against Russians transformed the initially reformist Chechen
resistance movement. They spread al-Qaeda’s hardline Islamist ideology
across the Caucasus. Under Secord’s guidance, Mujahideen terrorist
operations had also quickly extended into neighboring Dagestan and
Chechnya, turning Baku into a shipping point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia.
From
the mid-1990s, bin Laden paid Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev
and Omar ibn al-Khattab the handsome sum of several million dollars per
month, a King’s fortune in economically desolate Chechnya in the 1990s,
enabling them to sideline the moderate Chechen majority.21 US
intelligence remained deeply involved in the Chechen conflict until the
end of the 1990s. According to Yossef Bodansky, then Director of the US
Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,
Washington was actively involved in “yet another anti-Russian jihad,
seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist
forces.”
Bodansky
revealed the entire CIA Caucasus strategy in detail in his report,
stating that US Government officials participated in,
“a formal meeting in Azerbaijan in December 1999 in which specific programs for the training and equipping of Mujahideen from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon, culminating in Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US ‘private security companies’. . . to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing Jihad for a long time…Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism.”
The
most intense phase of the Chechen wars wound down in 2000 only after
heavy Russian military action defeated the Islamists. It was a pyrrhic
victory, costing a massive toll in human life and destruction of entire
cities. The exact death toll from the CIA-instigated Chechen conflict is
unknown. Unofficial estimates ranged from 25,000 to 50,000 dead or
missing, mostly civilians. Russian casualties were near 11,000 according
to the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers.
The
Anglo-American oil majors and the CIA’s operatives were happy. They had
what they wanted: their Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan oil pipeline, bypassing
Russia’s Grozny pipeline.
The
Chechen Jihadists, under the Islamic command of Shamil Basayev,
continued guerrilla attacks in and outside Chechnya. The CIA had
refocused into the Caucasus.
Basayev’s Saudi Connection
Basayev was a key part of the CIA’s Global Jihad. In 1992, he met Saudi terrorist Ibn al-Khattag in Azerbaijan. From
Azerbaijan, Ibn al-Khattab brought Basayev to Afghanistan to meet
al-Khattab’s ally, fellow-Saudi Osama bin Laden. Ibn al-Khattab’s role
was to recruit Chechen Muslims willing to wage Jihad against Russian
forces in Chechnya on behalf of the covert CIA strategy of destabilizing
post-Soviet Russia and securing British-US control over Caspian energy.
Once
back in Chechnya, Basayev and al-Khattab created the International
Islamic Brigade (IIB) with Saudi Intelligence money, approved by the CIA
and coordinated through the liaison of Saudi Washington Ambassador and
Bush family intimate Prince Bandar bin Sultan. Bandar, Saudi Washington
Ambassador for more than two decades, was so intimate with the Bush
family that George W. Bush referred to the playboy Saudi Ambassador as
“Bandar Bush,” a kind of honorary family member.
Basayev
and al-Khattab imported fighters from the Saudi fanatical Wahhabite
strain of Sunni Islam into Chechnya. Ibn al-Khattab commanded what were
called the “Arab Mujahideen in Chechnya,” his own private army of Arabs,
Turks, and other foreign fighters. He was also commissioned to set up
paramilitary training camps in the Caucasus Mountains of Chechnya that
trained Chechens and Muslims from the North Caucasian Russian republics
and from Central Asia.
The
Saudi and CIA-financed Islamic International Brigade was responsible
not only for terror in Chechnya. They carried out the October 2002
Moscow Dubrovka Theatre hostage seizure and the gruesome September 2004
Beslan school massacre. In 2010, the UN Security Council published the
following report on al-Khattab and Basayev’s International Islamic
Brigade:
Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was listed on 4 March 2003. . . as being associated with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban for “participating in the financing, planning, facilitating, preparing or perpetrating of acts or activities by, in conjunction with, under the name of, on behalf or in support of” Al-Qaida. . . The Islamic International Brigade (IIB) was founded and led by Shamil Salmanovich Basayev (deceased) and is linked to the Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs (RSRSBCM). . . and the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment (SPIR). . .On the evening of 23 October 2002, members of IIB, RSRSBCM and SPIR operated jointly to seize over 800 hostages at Moscow’s Podshipnikov Zavod (Dubrovka) Theater.In October 1999, emissaries of Basayev and Al-Khattab traveled to Usama bin Laden’s home base in the Afghan province of Kandahar, where Bin Laden agreed to provide substantial military assistance and financial aid, including by making arrangements to send to Chechnya several hundred fighters to fight against Russian troops and perpetrate acts of terrorism. Later that year, Bin Laden sent substantial amounts of money to Basayev, Movsar Barayev (leader of SPIR) and Al-Khattab, which was to be used exclusively for training gunmen, recruiting mercenaries and buying ammunition.
The
Afghan-Caucasus Al Qaeda “terrorist railway,” financed by Saudi
intelligence, had two goals. One was a Saudi goal to spread fanatical
Wahhabite Jihad into the Central Asian region of the former Soviet
Union. The second was the CIA’s agenda of destabilizing a
then-collapsing post-Soviet Russian Federation.
Beslan
On
September 1, 2004, armed terrorists from Basayev and al-Khattab’s IIB
took more than 1,100 people as hostages in a siege that included 777
children, and forced them into School Number One (SNO) in Beslan in
North Ossetia, 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, at least 334 hostages were killed, including 186 children, with
a significant number of people injured and reported missing. It became
clear afterward that the Russian forces had handled the intervention
poorly.
The
Washington propaganda machine, from Radio Free Europe to The New York
Times and CNN, wasted no time demonizing Putin and Russia for their bad
handling of the Beslan crisis rather than focus on the links of Basayev
to Al Qaeda and Saudi intelligence. That would have brought the world’s
attention to the intimate relations between the family of then US
President George W. Bush and the Saudi billionaire bin Laden family.
On
September 1, 2001, just ten days before the day of the World Trade
Center and Pentagon attacks, Saudi Intelligence head US-educated Prince
Turki bin Faisal Al Saud, who had directed Saudi Intelligence since
1977, including through the entire Osama bin Laden Mujahideen operation
in Afghanistan and into the Caucasus, abruptly and inexplicably
resigned, just days after having accepted a new term as intelligence
head from his King. He gave no explanation. He was quickly reposted to
London, away from Washington.
The
record of the bin Laden-Bush family intimate ties was buried, in fact
entirely deleted on “national security” (sic!) grounds in the official
US Commission Report on 911. The Saudi background of fourteen of the
nineteen alleged 911 terrorists in New York and Washington was also
deleted from the US Government’s final 911 Commission report, released
only in July 2004 by the Bush Administration, almost three years after
the events.
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 and the Pentagon an enormous
strategic dagger in the southern underbelly of the Russian Federation.
By
late 2004, in the aftermath of the tragic Beslan drama, President
Vladimir Putin reportedly ordered a secret search and destroy mission by
Russian intelligence to hunt and kill key leaders of the Caucasus
Mujahideen of Basayev. Al-Khattab had been killed in 2002. The Russian
security forces soon discovered that most of the Chechen Afghan Arab
terrorists had fled. They had gotten safe haven in Turkey, a NATO
member; in Azerbaijan, by then almost a NATO Member; or in Germany, a
NATO Member; or in Dubai–one of the closest US Allies in the Arab
States, and Qatar-another very close US ally. In other words, the
Chechen terrorists were given NATO safe haven.
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