Iran-Contra Operation
Before embarking on its plan for World War III, the Illuminati would first have to end the Cold War, by subduing the Soviet Union, to render America the remaining Western superpower to be pitted against the Muslim World. Therefore, in a Time magazine cover story, published on Jan. 15, 1979, Brzezinski proclaimed Iran, Afghanistan, and the Indian subcontinent as an “arc of crisis” that posed a grave challenge to the West, though one that could also spell doom for the Soviet empire. Essentially, in the Illuminati agenda, the Arc of Crisis was used as a pretext to ignite a band of Islamic fundamentalism across Central Asia, that could be first be used to bankrupt and destroy the Soviet Union, and then to recruit and engage a wave of Islamic fundamentalists to later be used as the specter of terrorism with which to frighten the Western world.
This strategy was revealed in the 1998 interview which Brzezinski gave to the Le Nouvel Observateur:
Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention... We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
[1]
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
Chief among these Mujahideen dissidents was CIA asset Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who for their sake postured a radical view of Islam and anti-Americanism. Hekmatyar received a diploma in engineering from Kabul University in 1968. At this time, he showed no sign of religious fundamentalism, though in 1970, he joined the or Muslim Youth, a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood. Nevertheless, he was also a member of the quasi-Marxist PDPA, until he was accused in 1972 of the murdering a Maoist student. He was found guilty and sent to jail for a period of two years. During the Daoud coup of 1973, Hekmatyar escaped to Pakistan, and was recruited by Pakistani intelligence. In Pakistan, Hekmatyar then founded the Hezbi Islami, or Party of Islam, even though he had never received a classical Islamic education.
The US’ move was understood as one that would likely lead to direct Soviet intervention, and that is exactly what happened. On December 24th of that same year, after being invited by the Afghani government, the Russian military took up positions to protect government assets from rebel attacks.
The CIA’s backing of the Mujahideen war in Afghanistan would become its largest covert operation in history, funded by an intricate series of clandestine and illegal activities, known as the Iran-Contra Affair, which involved the complicity of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi regime as well. Essentially, the tremendous wealth created in Saudi Arabia through the orchestration of the Oil Crisis, would act as a slush fund to fund the CIA’s covert operations. When Reagan became president, his administration engaged in an expansion of the relationship already set out with Roosevelt, by which Saudi Arabia would build a massive network of naval and air defense facilities that could sustain U.S. forces, under the pretext that they would be needed to protect the region or wage war against an aggressor. The program also involved a new understanding that Saudi Arabia would become a partner in covert operations, but not just in the Middle East. The Saudis agreed to fund anti-communist guerrillas in Afghanistan, Angola, and elsewhere, who were supported by the Reagan administration, including the Contras of Nicaragua.
[2]
Aside from Iran-Contra, when war broke out between Iran and Iraq in 1980, the U.S. secretly backed both sides of the conflict, and also became involved in an operation known as and Iraqgate. The Reagan administration used proceeds from arms sale to Iran to fund the right-wing Contras, in an effort to overturn Nicaragua’s left-wing, but democratically elected, Sandanista government. Both actions were contrary to acts of Congress, which prohibited the funding of the Contras, and the sale of weapons to Iran, which it regarded as a “terrorist state”. In addition, both activities also violated United Nations’ santions.
Throughout this period, until the death of Khomeini in 1989, Iran was the command center of international terrorism, inciting all Muslims, both Sunni and Shiah, to fight the Western countries, which he categorized as “greater and lesser Satans”. At the behest of the Americans, and using the local Shiah communities as intermediaries, Iran had supported and financed a number of “liberation” movements and armed factions, from Palestine to Northern Ireland, to Sudan, and the Ivory Coast.
[3]
Prince Bandar
Initially, in order to side-step Congress, the U.S. approached Prince Bandar to solicit Saudi aid in funding the Contras. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was the grandson of Ibn Saud, and Hassa bint Ahmed al-Sudairi, one of the most honored and respected women in Saudi Arabia, was appointed Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in 1983, at the age of 34, an appointment he served for twenty years. Prince Bandar has had unprecedented access to Presidents and most senior American officials since the Reagan era. He was a close family friend of the Bushes, named affectionately by Barbara as “Bandar Bush”.
After the Hezbollah bombed American facilities in Beirut, and kidnapped CIA station chief William Buckley, it was CIA chief William Casey and Bandar who agreed to assassinate Sheikh Fadlallah, the terrorist group’s leader. Control of the operation was handed to the Saudis, who turned to the services of an operative from Britain’s elite special forces. The plan backfired, however, when the car bomb took down an apartment building near Beirut, killing eighty innocent civilians. Fadlallah escaped unharmed. Nevertheless, to cover their tracks, the Saudis provided Fadlallah with information identifying the operatives they had hired.
[4]
Over time, Saudi aid to the Contras amounted to $32 million. Bandar was also used as an intermediary with Saddam, when he made known his readiness to accept American aid. The U.S. had also been aiding the Iranians, primarily to gain their influence with militant groups that held several American hostages in Lebanon, and who supported bombings in Western European countries. However, the U.S. was also concerned with supporting Saddam, to protect the Saudis and its oil reserves. Though Congress would not have approved, the Reagan administration secretly allowed Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt to transfer U.S. weapons, including howitzers, helicopters, and bombs, to Saddam.
Also, part of the proceeds of the weapons sales to Iran had been channelled to finance the Mujahideen:
The Washington Post reported that profits from the Iran arms sales were deposited in one CIA-managed account into which the U.S. and Saudi Arabia had placed $250 million apiece. That money was disbursed not only to the contras in Central America but to the rebels fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan.
[5]
William Casey
The complexities of the Iran-Contra operation, and the arming of the fundamentalist Islamic Mujahideen in Afghanistan, were orchestrated by William Casey, then director of the CIA. Known as “off-the-shelf”, meaning unaccountable and invisible, Casey’s operations involved arms being traded with the Contras for cocaine, and profits from its sale to Black street gangs of Los Angeles, funds from which were then used for the various covert CIA campaigns.
The U.S. government’s involvement in drug-trafficking for the financing of covert activities dates back at least to the Office of Strategic Service (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. A private agreement was settled between Allen Dulles, then Swiss “Station Chief” for the OSS, and later Director of the CIA, and SS General Karl Wolff, against the direct, written orders of President Roosevelt. The SS were granted freedom from prosecution in return for agreeing to secretly work for American intelligence against the Russians in the cold war. However, since it was impossible for the OSS to fund this secret network, Dulles allowed the Nazis to finance themselves from their vast stocks of Morphine, plundered Jewish gold, and a mass of counterfeit British bank-notes.
[6]
During the Vietnam War, the CIA, with the assistance of the Hmong hill tribes of Vietnam, were smuggling huge amounts of Heroin from the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia. Prior to that, the French had controlled the Opium trade in this part of the world, a ring later became known as the “French Connection”. With the embarrassing defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, in 1954, the French began to withdraw their forces from Indochina, the Americans prevailed over the French, and appropriated the Opium trade, facilitated through the CIA’s Air America network of aircraft.
Richard Armitage
Years after the Vietnam War was over, the CIA remained an important player in the Golden Triangle heroin trade. This fact was corroborated Colonel Bo Gritz, a legend in the Special Forces community, after whom Sylvester Stallone modeled himself in the movie “First Blood”. During 1989, Gritz and two others traveled to the Shanland region of northern Burma, controlled by warlord Khun Sa, who runs the Golden Triangle Opium business. Gritz videotaped a meeting with Khun Sa, in which he revealed that the US government official he dealt with was Richard Armitage, the US Assistant Secretary of Defence. Khun Sa said that Armitage, in turn, used the services of a “traffic manager,” who he named on camera as Santos Trafficante, Florida’s notorious Mafia “Boss”.
[7]
Armitage had been a professional assassin in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam war, and lead teams similar to the Phoenix program that killed and tortured tens of thousands of Asians. He has been accused of links to illicit gambling, drug smuggling and expansion of organized crime in Russia, Central Asia and the Far East.
[8]
As Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, Richard Armitage was in charge of coordinating covert military operations, and was in close liaison with Oliver North. Armitage’s deputy and chief anti-terrorist official, Noel Koch, was part of the team set up by Oliver North, in addition to Richard Secord, George Cave, a former CIA station chief in Tehran, and Colin Powell, military assistant to U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.
It was William Casey, with the collaboration of Richard Armitage in the Pentagon, who ran the Mujahideen covert war. Stinger missiles, mountain caves equipped as operation centers, military training camps for internationally recruited Islamic combatants, as well as training and recruitment inside the United States, were part of what was funded, using profits from the sale of opium and illicit drugs, funneled through the BCCI, at the behest of the Saudi Arabian government, working closely with the American CIA that used a proxy to cover its involvement, the ISI.
BCCI
Aga Hasan Abedi
From the beginning of the Afghan War, the CIA, partnered with Pakistani Intelligence, in organizing the rebel Mujahideen fighters. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, was established in 1948, by Joseph Cawthorn, a British Intelligence agent of MI6, with whom it has continually maintained close ties. The power of the ISI increased for its first twenty years, until the emergence of Pakistan’s first popularly elected leader, the socialist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1971. Bhutto fell out of favor with the British, and was overthrown by General Zia Ul-Haq, who had been appointed Chief of the Army Staff by Bhutto in 1976, at the insistence of Gulam Jilani Khan, the Director General of the ISI.
In his book,
If I Am Assassinated, penned in prison, Bhutto relates how Henry Kissinger threatened him for pushing forward on Pakistan’s nuclear energy program, telling him, “We will make an example of you!”
[9] Bhutto was executed in 1978. A spokesman of the Muslim Brotherhood boasted, “The Brotherhood has taken over in Iran and Pakistan. Bhutto stood for intrusion of the West into Islam. Bhutto was everything that Pakistan was not. That is why we killed him. And we will use his death as a warning to others.”
[10]
Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi
The primary conduit for CIA funds to the Mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan would be the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI. BCCI, the first Third World multinational bank, which was created in 1972 by Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi, was initially funded by Sheik Zayed of Abu Dhabi, in anticipation of the petrodollar bonanza of the oil crisis. In The Outlaw Bank, Beatty and Gwynne describe that, “BCCI had been built from oil, from the enormous wealth that flowed into the Middle East after the huge OPEC oil price increases of the 1970s.”
[11] Of the coincidence, they further note, “though Abedi could not claim full credit for it, the timing of BCCI’s launch was nothing short of miraculous”
[12] , particularly since the American speaker at the 1973 Bilderberg meeting stated that, once oil prices would have increased, “serious problems would be caused by unprecedented foreign exchange accumulations of countries such as Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi.”
[13]
Bruce Rappapport
One of BCCI’s early moves to gain legitimacy was its purchase in 1976 of 85% of the Banque de Commerce et Placements of Geneva, Switzerland. After taking over the bank, BCCI installed Alfred Hartmann as manager. Hartmann then became the chief financial officer for BCC Holding, and thus one of BCCI’s most influential directors. Hartmann maintained connections with the Rothschilds, being president of Rothschild Bank AG of Zurich. Hartmann was also vice-chairman of NY-InterMaritime Bank of Geneva, run by Mossad operative Bruce Rappaport, who was on the board of N.M. Rothschild and Sons in London.
Though BCCI was created by a Pakistani, it was ultimately a British-based and British-controlled bank. BCCI was initially incorporated in Luxembourg, famous for its lax banking restrictions, and soon branches and holding companies sprouted up around the globe: in the Cayman Islands, the Netherlands Antilles, Hong Kong, Abu Dhabi, Washington DC and just about everywhere else. However, by 1980, when the BCCI finally applied for and received a license from the Bank of England, there were already more branches in the UK than in any other nation. In fact, one of BCCI’s primary economics advisors was the former British Prime Minister Lord James Callaghan.
[14]
“Black funds” for the CIA traveled through BCCI for the Contra war, the Iranian-Israeli payoffs, and large covert wars in Afghanistan and Angola. Casey had wanted to establish an offshore entity capable of conducting covert operations that was “stand-alone”, financially independent, and free from congressional oversight. BCCI was the solution. In the early eighties, Casey began meeting regularly with Abedi in Washington D.C.
[15] While he had until then been reticent, some secret deal seems to have been struck with Casey, because Abedi then moved aggressively to establish BCCI in the U.S.
[16]
Manuel Noriega
CIA assistant director Robert Gates once referred to BCCI jokingly as the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals.”
[17] BCCI became the favored bank for Middle Eastern terrorists, and arms and drug runners, South American drug cartels, organized crime lords, and intelligence services such as the ISI, Mossad, MI6 and the CIA. A branch was set up in Panama, for the cash that Manuel Noriega was funneling out of his country. Noriega, who had been a long-standing U.S. intelligence asset, was also an informant for the Mossad. He had undergone military and intelligence training in Israel, and-like Uganda’s dictator Idi Amin, wore his Israeli paratrooper wings on his uniform for years afterward. On one of his visits to Israel, in the 1980s, Noriega bought a seaside villa in the Tel Aviv suburb of Herzliya. Back in Panama, he sent his children to the Jewish community’s prestigious Alberto Einstein day school, and even to an Israeli kibbutz one summer.
[18]
Noriega’s mentor was Michael Harari, a Mossad intelligence agent. When Harari finished directing Mossad death squads against the PLO in the early 1970s, he was transferred to Central and South America. Harari supervised what became known as the Harari Network, set up in 1982 by the Reagan administration and the Israeli government, to run a secret aid program for the Nicaraguan contras. Operating out of Mexico, Panama, and Florida, the network integrated his operations with the emerging cocaine trade, particularly those of Colombia’s Medellin and Cali cocaine cartels, and shipped guns to the Contras and smuggled cocaine from Colombia to the US via Panama.
[19] It was the CIA that had set up the meetings in which various Colombian drug dealers organized into a drug trafficking Medellin cartel in 1981, permitting it to deal with a group rather than many independent drug dealers.
[20]
In his book, Defrauding America: Encyclopedia of Secret Operations by the CIA, DEA and Other Covert Agencies, Rodney Stich reports a conversation recorded by one of his informants, Gene “Chip” Tatum, a helicopter pilot for the US Army and the CIA, where Harari explained:
What we do has nothing to do with preserving a country’s integrity. It’s just business and third world countries see their destiny as defeating borders and expanding. The more of this mentality we can produce, the greater our wealth. We train and we arm: that's our job. And in return we get a product far more valuable than the money for a gun. We’re paid with product and we credit top dollar for product [i.e., drugs]. Look, one gun and 3,000 rounds of ammo is $1,200. A kilo of product [cocaine] is about $1,000. We credit the Contras $1,500 for every kilo. That’s top dollar for a kilo of cocaine. It's equivalent to the American K-Mart special: buy four, get one free. On our side we spend $1,200 for a kilo and sell it for $12,000 to $15,000. Now that's a profit center. And the market is much greater for the product than for weapons. It’s just good business sense. Understand?
[21]
The more conventional departments of BCCI handled such services as laundering money for the drug trade and helping dictators loot their national treasuries. BCCI also operated a clandestine division of the bank called the “black network”, which functioned as a global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad. The black network used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping, prostitution, and even, by some accounts, assassination. The black network operated a lucrative arms-trade business and transported drugs and gold. According to an international arms dealer, who frequently worked with the black network:
B.C.C.I. was a full-service bank. They not only financed arms deals that one government or another wanted to keep secret, they shipped the goods in their own ships, insured them with their own agency and provided manpower and security. They worked with intelligence agencies from all the Western countries and did a lot of business with East bloc countries.
[22]
It is evident the BCCI’s black network is an appendage of an original Illuminati body. To understand how so-called “Islamic terrorists” are deceptively recruited, it is revealing to consider an account reported by Beatty and Gwynne through their source, a Palestinian named Sami Masri, who had defected from the Pakistani branch of the operation:
They recruited me in 1984 when I was going to college in Pittsburgh... They called me on the phone, they knew me from home, they knew a lot about me, and it was easy to relate to them. When they showed up, they were just normal people, very humble, down to earth...
They were young white people, Persians, Armenians out of Jordan, Pakistanis living in the Emirates. They all spoke Arabic, most of them with a Palestinian accent.
It was all very friendly at the beginning. They gave me money, there were parties and women, and then they began to explain the power and connections they had and suggested that I join their organization. They told me I would learn later what the orgnization was really about. They were always there for you and they just sort of took control of everything. They taught me about leadership, gave me books to read books on how to deal with people, on psychology. They talked about not showing your emotions. They were always saying “That’s what a leader does, and you should behave like a leader.
In 1985 I got my first operation: there were six people, and I was in charge; I had instructions, support, cash. We went out of Karachi to Bangladesh and then to India. We had documents, passports, and we flew to England. People were waiting for us there. They picked up the stuff and gave us new passports and travel documents. I got paid $50,000 and the others got $10,000 each. I found out later that this first operation was an easy one; it was meant to go like clockwork to give us confidence. We got into the really heavy things later....
All of a sudden they started talking to us differently; it was almost like boot camp. It wasn’t friendly anymore. We trained with arms, and there was other special training: breaking and entering, setting up bugs, and eavesdrop devices....
We were acting as couriers, delivering documents and gathering military and industrial information... government secrets. I was sent to interrogate people people that were targeted. We would learn everything about them; we would do that ourselves or hire detective agencies. At times when there were people we wanted to recruit, or people who had information that we wanted, we would put hundreds of thousands of dollars in their bank accounts before we talked to them...
It is a very good technique if you can afford it, and we had unlimited money. If you look at your bank account and see that you have a million dollars that you didn’t think you had... it is much harder to return that money then it is to turn it down in the first place. And in some circumstances, you are already compromised just because the money is in your account and you can’t explain it....
[Those targeted were...] People we wanted to work with us. Generals, politicians, government officials, bank officers, it was in all countries...
We trained together [with the Mossad] in Karachi for covert operations. We gathered information for the Mossad, spying on the Gulf States because we were so close to the ruling families there that we were familiar with the foreign policies. The Israelis sold U.S. arms, technology, expertise to Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and BCCI brokered the deals...
[BCCI] gave the Mossad, Israel, the use of their agents in the Emirates. BCCI was friends with everybody...
We did joint operations; BCCI was financing Israeli arms going into Afghanistan. There were Israeli arms, Israeli planes, and CIA pilots.
[23]
Clark Clifford
Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Kamal Adham, director of Saudi intelligence between 1963 and 79, brother-in-law of King Faisal, and the CIA’s key liaison in the Arab world during the 1980’s, secretly acted as BCCI nominees in a hostile take-over of Washington D.C.’s largest bank, Financial General Bankshares, that soon became First American Bankshares. From BCCI’s initial attempts to acquire First American, in 1978, until his forced resignation in 1991, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, from his position as the top official at the bank, was one of the central figures in BCCI’s acquisitions and management of American banks. Clark Clifford, who had been Washington’s preeminent attorney, was referred to by the Financial Times as “the ultimate insider”. According to Gwynne and Beatty, Clifford “was without doubt one of the most remarkable personalities ever to navigate the treacherous currents of national politics.”
[24]
Sheikh Kamal Adham
Clifford became special counsel to the president in 1946, and assisted in the formulation of the Truman Doctrine, which stated that the United States would support “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Clifford was instrumental in persuading Truman to recognize the nation of Israel. Clifford was also co-author of the National Security Act of 1947, which set up both the CIA and NSC, and was important in the creation of the Department of Defense.
In 1950, Clifford left politics and became the first Washington lawyer to earn a million-dollar income. He was John F. Kennedy’s attorney while he was still a senator, and continued to offer his advice during his campaign and presidency. Clifford returned to government in 1968 as Lyndon B. Johnson’ secretary of defense, where he advised the president to end the war in Vietnam. His advice was also sought by Pres. Carter, who consulted Clifford regarding difficulties involving his budget director, Burt Lance.
Burt Lance
It was precisely his reputation and connections that led the Arab front men for BCCI to seek Clifford’s help in acquiring an American bank. The Federal Reserve Board approved the takeover in 1981, reassured by Clifford that there would be no control by BCCI, which he also represented. Ten years later, Robert Morgenthau, the district attorney in New York City, found evidence that the parent company of Clifford’s bank was in fact secretly controlled by BCCI. The D.A. convened a grand jury to determine whether Clifford and his partner, Altman, had deliberately misled federal regulators.
Clifford’s predicament worsened when it was disclosed that he had made about six million dollars in profits from bank stock that he bought with an unsecured loan from BCCI. A New York grand jury handed up indictments, as did the Justice Department. Clifford’s assets in New York, where he kept most of his investments, were frozen. Clifford said the investigation caused him pain and anger. If the regulators had been deceived about any secret ownership by BCCI, he said, he too had been deceived.
Mena, Arkansas
BCCI’s First American was set up in the U.S. with the assistance of Jackson Stephens, of Little Rock, Arkansas, the former operational headquarters of Albert Pike. The Stephens Group, a multibillion-dollar empire of companies, which is operated by Jackson Stephens and his family, dominates the Arkansas economy, where they own a large part of more than a dozen banks, the most exclusive hotel in Little Rock, and the building that houses Bill Clinton’s Arkansas office. Stephens is named in the court records as having brought Saudi billionaire Ghaith Pharaon, of BCCI, together with Stephens’ close friend Bert Lance, who had been a cabinet official under President Jimmy Carter. However, Stephens, and Lance, like Clark Clifford, all maintain they did not know the group of investors headed by Pharaon, were actually fronting for BCCI.
Bill and Hilary Clinton
Clinton’s staff has also refused to comment on the series of connections.
[25]Stephens played a part in the CIA-supervised cocaine smuggling operation based in Mena, Arkansas, during Bill Clinton’s term as governor in the 80s. Mena was a key CIA trans-shipment point for the Iran-Contra operation.
[26]One estimate suggests that Barry Seal, who also worked for the CIA and the Drug Enforcement Administration, ran as much as a hundred million worth of cocaine a month through Mena.
[27] It was Barry Seal’s plane crashing in Nicaragua that exposed the Iran-Contra affair. Nevertheless, CBS News correspondent Bill Plante complained there is a trail of “tens of millions of dollars in cocaine profits [from Mena], and we don’t know where it leads. It is a trail that has been blocked by the National Security Council.”
[28]
Jackson Stephens
One important business in the Arkansas narcotics network was Park-on-Meter, or POM Inc. Commercially, POM was to produce parking meters and machine parts. Covertly, it was manufacturing untraceable custom weapons parts for the Contras, and shipping them to Mena. POM had subcontracted the job from a CIA front, called Iver Johnson’s Firearms, of Jacksonville, Arkansas. Former CIA scientist, Michael Riconosciuto, is one of the original architects of the backdoor to PROMIS, a people-tracking software system sold to intelligence organizations and government drug agencies worldwide, originally part of a U.S. plot to spy on other spy agencies. Riconosciuto has told reporters that he was closely involved in these covert operations, and claims that he supervised high-tech equipment transfers to POM, and had developed software to help launder the Mena drug money.
[29]
Park-On-Meter was the first company to receive a loan from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), created by the Arkansas state legislature at Clinton’s urging in 1985. Its ostensible purpose was to attract capital to the state, for the purpose of economic development, by offering companies long-term loans financed through the sale of tax-exempt bonds. ADFA, however, had no regulator and no legislative oversight. The governor could appoint the board and had the right to approve or disapprove every bond issue.
Webb Hubbell
POM president and co-owner Seth Ward’s brother-in-law, Webster “Webb” Hubbell, who served on POM’s board during the early 80s, co-wrote the documents which created the ADFA in 1985. Later Webb Hubbell would become a partner in the Rose Law Firm, which employed Hillary Clinton, and which eventually was at the center of the Whitewater scandal. Hillary Clinton, representing the Rose Law Firm, had also successfully defended Systematics, a subsidiary of Stephens Inc, during Stephen’s and Adham’s hostile takeover of Financial General. Clinton appointed Hubbell as the Associate Attorney General, the number-three position in the Justice Department, but he later resigned under questions about his role in Whitewater, and a question about the million dollars owned by POM to the Rose firm, not only shielding him from other accusations related to Whitewater, but also serving to get POM out of the headlines.
The names of Hubbell and the Rose law firm appear on the bond issues and loan agreements for the largest contributions to Clinton’s presidential campaign. The banks, which extended several loans of more than three million, were all owned by a company named Stephens Inc., which was also a primary underwriter of ADFA bonds. In 1992, Stephen’s Worthen Bank of Little Rock, Arkansas, made a timely, and much needed, two million dollar loan to the primary campaign of the then future president, Bill Clinton.
[30]
Part of Stephens’ laundering worked through front companies set up by bond broker Dan Lasater, of Lasater & Company, the principle bond underwriter for the ADFA. Lasater had first made his fortune founding Ponderosa, a steakhouse chain that went public in 1971, and then moved to Little Rock. He had close ties with Bill Clinton, through his friendship with Clinton’s mother and half-brother, Roger. In 1982 he was one of the biggest contributors to Clinton’s election campaign, when he won back the governorship after a term out of office. Terry Reed alleges in court documents, and in his recent book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush and the CIA, that Barry Seal made deposits of cash from the Mena drug operation directly to Lasater & Co. Reed also says that Lasater introduced Seal to him once as a client of his, although Lasater’s attorney denies the charge.
The Mujahideen
Lord Nichols Bethell
John Train
Ultimately, the primary purpose of the BCCI, and the reason behind its meteoric rise, was its connection to the ISI, and the Mujahideen fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After Zia replaced Bhutto as Pakistan’s president, he appointed his friend Fazle Haq to be the governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province in 1978. This is the area that borders Afghanistan, through which tons of drugs and weapons were smuggled over the Khyber Pass. Fazle Haq was an important friend and backer of BCCI’s founder Hasan Abedi, and the BCCI was used to launder untold millions of ISI narcotics revenues.
[31]
Under National Security Directive 3, signed by President Reagan in 1982, Vice President George Bush was placed in charge of the entire global covert action program. It was Bush’s Special Situation Group (SSG), and Crisis Pre-Planning Group (CPPG), at the White House, that employed Oliver North, Richard Secord, “Public Diplomacy” head Walter Raymond, and the entire Iran-Contra operators. Throughout the 1980s, the Afghan War was the largest single program under this Bush chain of command.
[32]
As indicated by a series of articles in the
Octover 13, 1995 isse of the Executive Intelligence Review, titled “the Anglo-American support apparatus behind the Afghani mujahideen”, the City of London also played a leading role in promoting the Afghan “Jihad”. Following the Soviet invasion, Lord Nicholas Bethell, a career British Intelligence agent, and close friend of British double agent Kim Philby, formed Radio Free Kabul, as a voice for the Mujahideen. Other members included Winston Churchill III, former Foreign Secretary Baron Chalfont, Lord Morrison of Lambeth, the former head of the Foreign Office, and British Intelligence official Ray Whitney.
In 1981, Lord Bethell accompanied Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on a tour of the U.S. to drum up support for the resistance, leading to the creation of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan (CFA). The CFA’s funding came largely from the neo-conservative Heritage Foundation, which is part of the Tavistock Institute network, directed by British Intelligence.
[33] The list of CFA’s Council of Advisers included Gen. John Singlaub, the former president of World Anti-Communist League, who was deeply involved in various Iran-Contra operations; former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen. Daniel Graham; former Reagan-Bush administration National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen. Other members of its advisory council included Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, whose cousin Alexander de Marenches was then running French intelligence; and two known CIA operatives, Louis Dupree and Thomas Goutierre.
[34]
Another British creation was the Afghan Relief Committee (ARC) was established in 1980 by Wall Street investment banker and spy John Train. From its inception, the ARC worked closely with Freedom House, chaired by Leo Cherne, and whichh was has also included among its board of trustees, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations. Founders of the ARC also included four former U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan: Francis L. Kellogg, a decades-long associate of Train; Train’s cousin. Sen. Claiborne Pell; and again Louis Dupree and Thomas Gouttierre. Neo-conservative Jeane Kirkpatrick, later the Reagan administration ambassador to the U.N., also of Freedom House, was co-chairman of the group. Among the main known financial beneficiaries of the group were Doctors Without Borders.
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Also operative were Leo Cherne’s International Rescue Committee (IRC); the National Endowment for Democracy (NED); and the State Department’s Agency for International Development. CIA director William Casey was on the IRC’s board of directors, and had served as its president at one time. Leo Cherne was then vice-director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), with offices at the White House.
Deeply involved in providing safe haven for the Afghan Mujahideen, and facilitating their dispersal throughout the world, was Ismaili Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the second son of the hereditary Imam of the Ismailis. In the 50s, Prince Sadruddin had become publisher of the Paris Review, an important British intelligence operation at the time, which was active promoting the Children of the Sun, the Dionysian cult, comprised of the children of Britain’s Roundtable elites. John Train, who was then the managing editor of the publication, had been Prince Sadruddin’s roommate at Harvard.
Prince Sadruddin was made coordinator of the U.N. Humanitarian and Economic Assistance Programs for Afghanistan, working with John Train, in what was code-named Operation Salam, which was officially intended to organize the repatriation of Afghan refugees after the Soviet withdrawal. Prince Sadruddin’s program also reportedly was involved in the military training and covert military supply of the Mujahideen, who often operated out of U.N. refugee camps that he administered on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
[35]
Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan
Prince Sadruddin has also been a key figure in Prince Philip’s World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which, according to the EIR, is “the British royal family’s most important intelligence agency”.
[36] Since its creation in 1961, Prince Sadruddin has been one of is primary funders, as has his nephew, the current leader of the Ismailis. Through his London-based Aga Khan Foundation, and the Geneva-based Bellerive Foundation, he has emerged as a top figure in the environmental movement.
In 1983, the WWF successfully persuaded the Pakistani government to create two national parks directly on the Afghan border, renowned for the quality and abundance of its opium poppy, which was assiduously cultivated by the Mujahideen. It was also a primary staging area for smuggling arms into Afghanistan.
Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was channelled to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. According to Alfred McCoy, however, within two years of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, border between Pakistan and Afghanistan became the world’s top heroin producer, supplying sixty percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979, to 1.2 million by 1985, a much steeper rise than in any other nation. CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade, but once the heroin left Pakistan’s laboratories, the Sicilian mafia managed its export to the U.S., which it distributed to street gangs through a chain of pizza parlors, according to the DEA.
[37]
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was leading recipient of CIA funding among the Mujahideen groups, and affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, was at the center of the drug trade laundered through BCCI to fund the Mujahideen campaign. According to journalist Tim Weiner, “[Hekmatyar’s] followers first gained attention by throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil. CIA and State Department officials I have spoken with call him “scary,” “vicious,” “a fascist,” “definite dictatorship material.”
[38] Over time it has emerged that Hekmatyar was not only an ISI asset, who laundered his money through BCCI, but that he also cooperated with the KGB to ensure his status as the most powerful warlord among many rivals. Human rights groups alleged that he was responsible for murdering more Afghans than the Soviet Union killed.
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