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US/Saudi Covert Ops in Chechnya Ricin, Diamonds, Stingers … and Adnan Khashoggi

Alex Constantine - May 1, 2013

Also see: "The CIA and ‘Chechen Terror, A Closer Look to Chechnya Today"

OIL AND THE BATTLE FOR CHECHNYA

"CIA Helped Blood Diamond Dictator Escape Prison"

April 30, 2013

Adnan Khashoggi

As the Cold War between the USSR and the USA drew down in the early 1990's, organizations/institutions used to fund proxy wars-and destabilization efforts--between the two Empires became exposed. With the Cold War ostensibly over, the corrupt and illegal actions of such groups could no longer be ignored, or covered up, as the larger purpose of them was to fund the fight against the Red Menace of Communism.

One of the most notable instances of the demise of a Cold War machine was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Founded in 1972 it would survive under various guises until roughly 2002. BCCI was designed to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Direct involvement with BCCI's illegal activities-including covering them up--would ultimately besmirch the names of members/advisors of every US presidential administration from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton: Clark Clifford, Richard Helms, George Bush I, James Baker, William Casey, Bert Lance, and Marc Rich among them. BCCI clients included the intelligence agencies form the US and Saudi Arabia, the Medellin Cartel and Saddam Hussein.

Bank accounts were opened at BCCI by US intelligence agencies in order to fund the Mujahideen not only in Afghanistan but in the Caucasian Region to include Chechnya and Dagestan. Once BCCI was shut down a new means of off-the-books funding was needed. It was then that the US and Saudi intelligence organizations figured out that diamonds from the African Continent would be a worthy convertible cash vehicle. Diamonds would make their way from Angola to Belgium. Once converted to cash, US and Saudi intelligence agencies could clandestinely purchase weapons, like Stinger Missiles, and bribe the appropriate personnel to get the nasty little weapons where they needed to be. In this case the anti-aircraft Stingers would land in the hands of Chechen rebels fighting against the Russian military. A transit and training point was (and remains) NATO and Israeli friendly Georgia.

According to the Russian research group Civil Research, "After signing the Khasavyurt Accord in Dagestan in 1996 ending the first Chechen War--and after the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria's de facto independence"--it became absolutely clear that Chechnya became a key element in the process of controlled destabilization of the Caucasian Region. Hence well-known intelligence managers of such destabilization processes moved to solve Chechen problems. The creators and instigators of shadow money and arms flows began to appear."

What's the Story?

BCCI "worked in the interests of American and Saudi elites and was a means of organization and financing of controlled crises in different regions from South America to Middle Asia...BCCI took an active part in arms smuggling, financing of terrorist groupings, and drug money laundering." According to Civil Research, BCCI accounts were surreptitiously used to fund the creation of nuclear weapons in Pakistan. The Board of directors of BCCI included two chiefs of the US Central Intelligence Agency--William Casey and Richard Helms; the head of the General secret service of Saudi Arabia from 1997-2001, Turki al-Feisal al-Saud; Camal Adkham -a former chief of the Saudi Arabia Secret service before; and Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi multimillionaire, arms dealer, official representative of Saudi Bin Laden Group in the USA, and a key player in the Iran-Contra Affair under President Ronald Reagan.

"In 1997 Khashoggi introduced Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev (Chechen Mafia leader and opponent of Radical Islam and the USA) to former US Secretary of State James Baker who headed the election campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George Bush I. Baker would also be called in to mediate the 2000 Election debacle in Florida. Baker was Khashoggi's partner in BCCI and the Carlyle Group."

Civil Research believes that it is likely that during meetings between the two, "the decision to create a structure to control the process of destabilization in the Caucasian Region--some kind of Regional BCCI or Caucasian Common Market--was made. In April of 1997 Nukhaev registered the Caucasian-American Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Washington.

"We are inclined to think that Nukhaev's structures were managed by American and Saudi Special Services and were financed by Khashoggi through BCCI," said Civil Research.

"The funds were used to purchase and deliver the modern means of Terrorist War to Chechnya: high accuracy weapons like anti-aircraft Stingers, satellite communication gear, intelligence tactics, sabotage devices, and well trained instructors mainly from the General Secret Service of Saudi Arabia... There are serious reasons to think that a batch of 70 Stingers came to Chechnya from Saudi Arabia."

Once BCCI's operations were exposed by the US Congress and an international assortment of regulators a new means of funding arms sales to anti-Russian, radicalized followers of Islam had to be found by NATO, US and Saudi intelligence agencies. Anti-Russian operations had also been conducted by then-active duty US Special Forces operating in Chechnya and Bosnia. These former American soldiers would find work, post-911, with companies like the former Blackwater (XE) and Triple Canopy.

Diamond Dogs

US, NATO and Saudi intelligence agencies turned to the diamond market to fund operations to destabilize Russia. According to Civil Research, in 1993 Aziz Ben Said Ben Ali al-Gamdi (a regular officer of General Secret Service of Saudi Arabia) went to Angola. "Later he would become known as Abu al Valid. During a business trip to Angola Abu al-Valid made contacts with the representatives both of UNITA and the legal government who were engaged in export of Angolan diamonds to Antwerp in Belgium. At the time Angola was filled with enterprising fragments of Soviet Special Services like Viktor Bute who not without success supported black and gray exports of Angolan diamonds to Belgium."

The Angolan conflict didn't interest the US, NATO or Saudi Special Services as much as did the acquisition and use of diamonds to create a considerable flow of cash for clandestine operations to further destabilize Russia by igniting Chechen radicalization.

By 1995 the Saudi Arabian Special Services had successfully created diamond flows from Luanda, Angola to Antwerp, Belgium to be used to fund radicalization and terror. Abu al-Valid showed up in Chechnya now as a Saudi Arabian resident and also as a representative of radical Islam grouping known as Brothers-Muslims. The first business contact of Abu al-Valid in Chechnya was with Nukhaev. A few months later Nukhaev was introduced to Khashoggi. Thus the construction of Caucasian Common Market" began. In 1997 Nukhaev, as an emissary of Caucasian Common Market, visited Belgium. By that time Antwerp was given the nickname Belgian Caliphate by the European press.

Meanwhile in Georgia

Lorenzo Vidino in How Chechnya Became a Breeding Ground for Terror (Middle East Quarterly Summer 2005) indicated that in 2002 a cadre of Islamic fundamentalists made camp in Pankisi Gorge in Georgia to plan and train.

"According to Georgian officials, in early 2002, some sixty Arab computer, communications, and financial specialists, military trainers, chemists, and bomb-makers settled in the gorge. The group used sophisticated satellite and encrypted communications to support both operations in Chechnya and terrorists planning attacks against Western targets. The Pankisi Arabs later tried to buy explosives for what Georgian security officials believe was to have been a major attack on U.S. or other Western installations in Russia."

Vidino also claimed that in 2003 there was an effort by the Pankisi Arabs to use Ricin to kill.

"A 2003 plot involving ricin, a virulent and deadly toxin, demonstrated the Islamist co-option of the Chechen nationalist conflict and its transformation into a global jihadist training ground. According to U.S. intelligence sources cited in an Italian indictment, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi (the Jordanian terrorist alleged to mastermind much of the Iraqi insurgency) dispatched Adnan Muhammad Sadiq (Abu Atiya), a former Al-Qaeda instructor at a Herat, Afghanistan training camp, to Pankisi [Georgia]. In the gorge, Abu Atiya, a Palestinian who had lost a leg during the Chechen War, trained terrorists in the use of toxic gases. He also was behind a 2002 scheme to stage biological and chemical attacks against Russian or American interests in Turkey."

John Stanton is a Virginia based writer specializing in national security. His latest book is The Raptor's Eye. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com

Oil And The Battle For Chechnya
www.nlpwessex.org/docs/ukraine-caspian.htm
A Caucasian Republic In An Oil And Gas Transit Corridor
Between The Caspian And Black Seas

"At least 11 of the 9/11 al-Qaeda hijackers travelled to Chechnya between 1996 and 2000." Chechen rebels were feared for suicidal courage and cruelty
London Times, 20 April 2013, Print Edition, P 9.

"Delivering one of his most scathing attacks on the US, Mr Gorbachev told The Daily Telegraph that a US military build-up was under way to contain a resurgent Russia. From Nato's expansion plans in the former Soviet Union to Washington's proposals for a bigger defence budget and a missile shield in central Europe, the US was deliberately quashing hopes for permanent peace with Russia, Mr Gorbachev said. 'We had 10 years after the Cold War to build a new world order and yet we squandered them,' he said..... 'I sometimes have a feeling that the United States is going to wage war against the entire world.'... Relations have further deteriorated after Nato promised eventual membership to Georgia and Ukraine, a move interpreted by Mr Gorbachev as an attempt to extend America's sphere of influence into Russia's backyard.  ‘The Americans promised that Nato wouldn't move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half of central and eastern Europe are members, so what happened to their promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.’ ....Gorbachev ..... quoting a Russian documentary on state television, suggested that Margaret Thatcher had supplied weapons to Chechen terrorists."
Gorbachev: US could start new Cold War
Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2008

"I don’t think that the Trump administration is thinking in the same terms as the slogans during the campaign, that Iran is the number one terrorist state; we don’t have a single fact to substantiate this claim. At least when we were facing a huge terrorist threat, when we were under terrorist attack in the 1990s in the northern Caucasus, we detected and discovered dozens and hundreds of foreign terrorist fighters from very close neighborship to Iran, but not from Iran at all. And we know that the political circles in quite a number of countries were really encouraging these terrorist groups to go into the northern Caucasus."
Sergei Lavrov, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation - Interview
The National Interest, 29 March 2017

Above, A Devastated Grozny In Chechnya During The Civil War That Followed The Fall Of The Berlin Wall And The End Of The Soviet Union
In April 2013 a young man of Chechen origin was arrested following the explosion of two bombs near the finish line of the Boston marathon in the United States, killing three people and wounding nearly 180.  For the first time the incident caused the American public to become strongly aware of Chechnya as source of international Islamist based terrorism.

What most Americans remained unaware of, however, was the long term secret support by NATO member states for Chechen terrorists ('rebels'), as part of the west's struggle with Russia for control of pipeline corridors transporting oil and gas out of the Caspian sea region following the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991.

The type of terror that occurred in Boston on 15 April 2013 has been, at various times during their civil war, a near daily experience for those who live in Chechnya. It is an experience whose delivery has been assisted by the hidden hand of NATO, the most lethal and hypocritical military alliance of modern times.

nlpwessex.org

"Oil is never far from the surface of the war in Chechnya.... oil financed the Chechen struggle for independence 10 years ago
and the Caspian Sea oilfields and control of pipelines through the Caucasus were a major factor behind Moscow's use of force against the [Chechen] rebels."
Back garden 'oil barons' spring up in Chechnya
Daily Telegraph, 7 June 2002

"It is time to consider the extent to which American secret agencies have developed a symbiotic relationship with the forces they are supposed to be fighting – and have even on occasion intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots..... Consider the FBI’s instruction in 1993 to the Canadian RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] to release the al-Qaeda organizer Mohamed Ali, who then proceeded to Nairobi in the same year to begin planning the U.S. Embassy bombing of 1998.... the best insider's book about the FBI and Ali Mohamed, [is] The Black Banners, by former FBI agent Ali Soufan (a book that was itself heavily and inexcusably censored by the CIA, after being cleared for publication by the FBI)....  by 1996 bin Laden was 'supporting Islamists in Lebanon, Bosnia, Kashmir, Tajikistan, and Chechnya.' 72 And in step with bin Laden, the al-Kifah Center [in New York] was also supporting jihad after 1992 'in Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Philippines, Egypt, Algeria, Kashmir, Palestine, and elsewhere.' 73 But bin Laden and Al-Kifah were not acting on their own, they were supporting projects, especially in Tajikistan (1993-95) and then Chechnya (after 1995), where their principal ally, Ibn al-Khattab (Thamir Saleh Abdullah Al-Suwailem) also enjoyed high-level support in Saudi Arabia.74 'Khattab enjoyed a certain amount of logistical and financial support from Saudi Arabia. Saudi sheikhs declared the Chechen resistance a legitimate jihad, and private Saudi donors sent money to Khattab and his Chechen colleagues. As late as 1996, mujahidin wounded in Chechnya were sent to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, a practice paid for by charities and tolerated by the state.' 75 Ali Soufan adds that America also supported this jihad: by 1996, 'the United States had been on the side of Muslims in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.' 76 By protecting the Al-Kifah Center [in New York] and its associates (including Mohamed) and not prosecuting them for their crimes (including murder), the U.S. Government was in effect keeping open a channel whereby those in America who wished to wage jihad were helped to wage jihad in other countries, not here."

Peter Dale Scott - US Government Protection of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi Black Hole
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 29, No. 1, July 29, 2013

"Russian President Vladimir Putin says he hopes the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings will bring Russia and the United States closer together in combating terrorism.... U.S. and Russian authorities are investigating why deceased bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen, visited Russia last year.... Putin accused the West of providing 'informational, financial, and political' support to militants in the North Caucasus that Russia considers terrorists. 'Russia itself has been a victim of international terrorism, one of the first such victims,' he said. 'And I have always been annoyed when our Western partners and your colleagues from the Western media called our terrorists -- who committed brutal, bloody, sickening crimes on the territory of our country -- called them insurgents and almost never called them terrorists,' Putin said."
Putin Talks About Boston Bombings, Navalny, Berezovsky In Q&A Session
Radio Free Europe, 27 April 2013

"In this second episode of the new BFP Roundtable series Pearse Redmond, Sibel Edmonds and Tom Secker discuss the recent 'revelation' from Putin regarding Gladio B operations in Chechnya. They start with the basic facts that Putin has laid out: intercepts obtained by the FSB show that US officials in Azerbaijan were supporting and backing Chechen rebels during the early 2000’s."
Who is Putin & Why has he let his nation become encircled by NATO
BFP Video, 14 May 2015

NATO's Decades Long Islamic Jihad
Bombings at a marathon sporting event in Boston, Massachusetts, in the spring of 2013 suddenly drew much public focus onto the role of Chechnya as a centre for Islamist terrorism. This is a subject to which very little public attention had previously been drawn despite the fact that at least eleven of the 9/11 al-Qaeda hijackers travelled to Chechnya between 1996 and 2000. However, militant Islamists in Chechnya have not been acting alone.

During the 1990s NATO countries had been working behind the scenes to try and destabilise Chechnya by secretly backing militant jihadists seeking independence from Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Chechnya falls within the key geopolitical strategic corridor known as 'the Caucasus' linking the oil and gas fields of the Caspian Sea region with Western Europe. NATO believes that if Chechnya can be split off from Russia, western control of the corridor will be greatly enhanced.

NATO's secret alliance with jihadist Islam in Chechnya is an extension of that launched in 1979 in Afghanistan by US President Jimmy Carter, and later extended under the Reagan Administration. Running to billions of dollars it was NATO's largest ever covert operation ('Operation Cyclone') and it propelled the rise Osama Bin Laden.

This covert policy of backing militant Islamists in pursuit of 'regime change' was also continued by NATO member states in the Balkans and in Libya in the 1990s, and against Libya, Syria and Iran after 9/11.

Those post 9/11 activities have been in total contradiction to the so-called 'war on terror' proclaimed by the Bush II administration, albeit a proclamation long since understood as a 'smokescreen' for the pursuit of other geopolitical objectives (see 'This War On Terrorism Is Bogus', Guardian 6 September 2003), not least of which was 'regime change' in Iraq in 2003, the planning for which began just 10 days into the Bush administration in January 2001.

With the principal exception of actions against the Shia-Islam-based religious regime in Iran, all these covert operations have involved NATO member states deploying fundamentalist Islamists to try and overthrow secular governments (Najibulla in Afghanistan; Milosevic in Yugoslavia; Putin in Chechnya; Gaddafi in Libya; and Assad in Syria). The aim of the Islamists in all these cases is not to establish democracy, but rather rule by Islamic Sharia law, as was achieved by the Taleban in Afghanistan after NATO's covert destabilisation of that country in the 1980s.

In the case of Iran the United States has been secretly backing the MEK (or 'People's Mujahadeen of Iran', a Marxist Islamist group), some of whom were covertly trained by the US government in America's Nevada desert between 2005 and 2007. This matter was exposed in 2012 by the veteran Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, the man who had also previously exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war, and the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal following the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The Bush administration's covert training of the MEK, as uncovered by Hersh, took place even though the organisation was officially designated a terrorist group at the time by the US State Department.

The Obama administration has since delisted the MEK as a terrorist group in order to more easily further its efforts to destabilise Iran, as happened with the Bin Laden-allied KLA in Yugoslavia under the Clinton administration in the 1990s. Put simply, such people are designated 'terrorists' when attacking NATO member states, but 'rebels' or 'freedom fighters' when attacking NATO's enemies, for which they are deployed on a vastly larger scale.

In the eyes of western strategists, it is that latter imbalance which makes the overall net effect of the exercise geopolticially 'worthwhile', despite occasional 'blow back' causalities on the soil of NATO member states.

This is part of a cynical calculation of the type infamously outlined by former US National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in an interview given with the diplomatic journal Le Nouvel Observateur as far back as 1998, when he described the creation of what he called "Some stirred-up Muslims" as a price worth paying for conducting covert operations against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s (though  Brzezinski's post 9/11 opposition to the arming of Islamists in Syria suggests a more recent tacit acknowledgement of the dangerous consequences of such actions).

The ultimate targets in these covert wars are Russia (the world's largest combined producer of oil and gas) and China (the world's largest consumer of energy), including their strategic interests abroad. Neither being any longer communist in economic terms, these two countries are now major capitalist competitors to NATO member states.

NATO's 'Islamic Jihad' conducted against them is not about 'values', but about money and the natural resources which underpin it.

In the process millions of innocent people continue to have their lives devastated by being killed, maimed, orphaned, or made homeless and destitute.

nlpwessex.org

'Pipeline-Istan'

"We're trying to move these newly independent countries toward the west. We would like to see them reliant on western commercial and political interests rather than going another way. We've made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it's very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right."
Bill Richardson 1998, Bill Clinton's US energy secretary, on US policy on the extraction and transport of Caspian oil
'A discreet deal in the pipeline - Nato mocked those who claimed there was a plan for Caspian oil'
Guardian, 15 February 2001

The West's Secret Alliance With Islamic Jihadists In The Balkans And The Caucasus

"The Clinton administration followed up by providing strong support to the KLA, even though it was known that the KLA supported the Muslim mujahadeen. Despite that knowledge, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had the KLA removed from the State Department list of terrorists. This action paved the way for the United States to provide the KLA with needed logistical support. At the same time, the KLA also received support from Iran and Usama bin Laden, along with 'Islamic holy warriors' who were jihad veterans from Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. Swiss journalist Richard Labeviere, in his book, 'Dollars for Terror,' said that the international Islamic networks linked to bin Laden received help from U.S. intelligence community. Indeed, Chechen sources claim that U.S. intelligence also aided them in their opposition to Russia. Given that U.S. policy in the post-Cold War period has not only been anti-Russian but anti-Iranian, the United States worked closely with Pakistan's predominantly Sunni Inter-Services Intelligence organization. Through ISI, the United States recruited Sunni mujahadeen by staging them in Chechnya to fight in Bosnia and later in Kosovo."
Michael Maloof, Post 9/11 Pentagon Counterterrorism Adviser
Iran subversion in Balkans
G2 Bulletin, 25 September 2006