The illegal drug trade
Is a global black market, dedicated to cultivation, manufacturing, distribution, and sale of drugs, which are subject to drug prohibition laws. Most jurisdictions prohibit trade, except under license, of many types of drugs bydrug prohibition laws.
Drug traffickingA UN report said "the global drug trade generated an estimated US$321.6 billion in 2003." With a world GDP of US$36 trillion in the same year, the illegal drug trade may be estimated as slightly less than 1% (0.893%) of total global commerce. Consumption of illegal drugs is widespread globally. HERE
IntroductionDrug trafficking is a global illicit trade involving the cultivation, manufacture, distribution and sale of substances which are subject to drug prohibition laws. UNODC is continuously monitoring and researching global illicit drug markets in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their dynamics. Drug trafficking is a key part of this research. Further information can be found in the yearly | World Drug Report.
At current levels, world heroin consumption (340 tons) and seizures represent an annual flow of 430-450 tons of heroin into the global heroin market. Of that total, opium from Myanmar and the Lao People's Democratic Republic yields some 50 tons, while the rest, some 380 tons of heroin and morphine, is produced exclusively from Afghan opium. While approximately 5 tons are consumed and seized in Afghanistan, the remaining bulk of 375 tons is trafficked worldwide via routes flowing into and through the countries neighbouring Afghanistan.
The Balkan and northern routes are the main heroin trafficking corridors linking Afghanistan to the huge markets of the Russian Federation and Western Europe. The Balkan route traverses the Islamic Republic of Iran (often via Pakistan), Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria across South-East Europe to the Western European market, with an annual market value of some $20 billion. The northern route runs mainly through Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan (or Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan) to Kazakhstan and the Russian Federation. The size of that market is estimated to total $13 billion per year.
- Global heroin flows from Asian points of origin
- Source: UNODC World Drug Report 2010
In 2008, global heroin seizures reached a record level of 73.7 metric tons. Most of the heroin was seized in the Near and Middle East and South-West Asia (39 per cent of the global total), South-East Europe (24 per cent) and Western and Central Europe (10 per cent). The global increase in heroin seizures over the period 2006-2008 was driven mainly by continued burgeoning seizures in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Turkey. In 2008, those two countries accounted for more than half of global heroin seizures and registered, for the third consecutive year, the highest and second highest seizures worldwide, respectively.
In 2007 and 2008, cocaine was used by some 16 to 17 million people worldwide, similar to the number of global opiate users. North America accounted for more than 40 per cent of global cocaine consumption (the total was estimated at around 470 tons), while the 27 European Union and four European Free Trade Association countries accounted for more than a quarter of total consumption. These two regions account for more than 80 per cent of the total value of the global cocaine market, which was estimated at $88 billion in 2008.
For the North American market, cocaine is typically transported from Colombia to Mexico or Central America by sea and then onwards by land to the United States and Canada. Cocaine is trafficked to Europe mostly by sea, often in container shipments. Colombia remains the main source of the cocaine found in Europe, but direct shipments from Peru and the Plurinational State of Bolivia are far more common than in the United States market.Main global cocaine flows, 2008
- Source: UNODC World Drug Report 2010
Following a significant increase over the period 2002-2005, global cocaine seizure totals have recently followed a stable trend, amounting to 712 tons in 2007 and 711 tons in 2008. Seizures continued to be concentrated in the Americas and Europe. However, the transition from 2007 to 2008 brought about a geographical shift in seizures towards the source countries for cocaine. Seizures in South America accounted for 59 per cent of the global total for 2008, compared with 45 per cent in 2007. | HERE
A Meta-Group Managing Drugs, Violence, and the State
History and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic
Peter Dale Scott -Part I
In this serie I wish to explore three important propositions concerning the global drug traffic. The first is that the highly integrated drug traffic industry, in addition to serving the political ends of world powers, has its own political as well as economic needs. It requires that in major growing areas there must be limited state control, a condition most easily reached by fostering regional rebellion and warfare, often fought by its own private armies. This is the on-going situation of designed violence in every major growing area, from Lebanon to Myanmar, Colombia to Afghanistan.
Once drug armies themselves were powerful enough to neutralize the imposition of state authority. But today there are increasing signs that those at the highest level of the drug traffic will plot with the leaders of major states to ensure, or even to stage, violence that serves the power of the state and the industry alike.
Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, explores the underlying factors that have engendered a U.S. strategy of indirect intervention in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies.
Thanks to extensive research in Russia, we now have initial evidence of a second proposition: There exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power – most conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin, but allegedly, according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States.
Evidence for this consists in a meeting which took place in July 1999 near Nice, at the villa in Beaulieu of Adnan Khashoggi, once called “The richest man in the world.” Those at the meeting included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives from the meta-group, with passports from Venezuela, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Germany.
The representatives are mostly veterans of Russian military intelligence (GRU) in Afghanistan. Between them they allegedly enjoyed excellent relations with:1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, the acknowledged mastermind of 9/11 and mentor to Osama bin Laden.
2) Soviet and Cuban military intelligence.
3) FARC, the Colombian revolutionary group increasingly involved in drug trafficking.
4) the Kosovo Liberation Army, a similarly involved group.
5) a Turkish backer of the drug-trafficking IMU in Uzbekistan
6) (according to a Russian source) Saudi intelligence and the CIA.
The third proposition is that a meta-group of this scale does not just help government agencies make history. I hope to show that it, like its predecessors, has the power to manage both violence and state behavior, and thus make history to its own agenda.
As an example of drug-motivated history-making, I shall discuss the sudden occupation in 1999 of Pristina Airport in Kosovo, by the Russian Army. This appears to have consolidated a drug route through Uzbekistan and Chechnya, three countries to which the meta-group was connected.
Footnotes
1: For corroborations that the Russian military has been trafficking Afghan heroin since the early 1990s, see Igor Khokhlov.
A Meta-Group Managing Drugs, Violence, and the State
The Meta-Group, West, and East
Part II
Peter Dale Scott -
What is special about this meta-group is its global reach, which makes it of especial interest to the CIA and other pro-American agencies committed to globalization. It also has its own business front, Far West Ltd., which claims to have interfaced with prominent American firms.
There is an undeniable western face to the dominant meta-group. One member of the Far West meta-group at the 1999 meeting, Anton Surikov (aka Mansour Natkhoev), had spent time at the London Centre for Defence Studies, together with another member of Far West, former Lithuanian Defense Minister Audrius Butkevicius1. We shall see that a third member, Ruslan Saidov (aka Hungar Mehmet), is said to have been paid as a CIA contract agent.
But there are also functional links between the meta-group and corporations close to the White House of Pres. George W. Bush. The group’s business front, Far West Ltd., is said to have had CIA-approved contractual dealings with Halliburton for geopolitical purposes in the Caucasus, as well as dealings in Iraq with Diligence LLC, a group with connections to Joe Allbaugh (the FEMA chief in 2001) and to the President’s younger brother Neil Bush. The head of Far West, Vladimir Filin, recently told a Russian outlet that “a well-known American corporation… is a co-founder of our agency.” 2
Despite these connections, Far West has allegedly sold arms to both Venezuela and Iran, and has recently adopted a militantly anti-West posture.
As recently as [2005] Filin wrote in glowing terms about their visit to the United States in July 2005, where, according to Pravda-info, he and two other co-founders of Far West, Ltd., Anton Surikov, and Alexei Likhvintsev, met with representatives of the Bush Administration. However, lately he cites fear for criminal persecution by US law-enforcement agencies as the reason for his and his partners' hasty relocation from Europe to Brazil and Dubai, …. According to Filin, … he and his partners were warned by a high-ranking [US] official that they would be brought to justice for their alleged role in the illegal sale of Soviet-made cruise missiles X-55 to Iran in 2001. 3
Filin has since attended the inauguration of President Evo Morales in Bolivia, where he denounced the CIA as “absolute and universal evil.” 4
Footnotes1: In addition Surikov had had contacts with at least one senior CIA representative. See the Letter of Anton Surikov to Oleg Grechenevsky, discussed below: “I am personally acquainted with Mr. Ermarth as political scientist since 1996. It's well known by many people and we never hid this fact.” Fritz Ermath did not retire from the CIA until 1998. Cf. Argumenty i Facty, 9/15/99, that the two men met in 1996 was indeed public knowledge. The Russian journal Commersant published a photo of the two men and others at the International Seminar on Global Security in Virginia, April, 1996.2: Interview, discussed below. Cf. Letter of Anton Surikov to Oleg Grechenevsky, discussed below: “We cooperate with the American side in the sphere of commercial transportation not on the basis of direct commercial contracts between our agency [Far West, Ltd.] and the U. S. government, but through the intermediary company co-founded by the agency and a private U.S. company, which in its turn also interacts with the U.S. government.”3: Editorial staff of burtsev.ru; citing Vladimir Filin, Pravda-info, 7/29/05, Cf. Financial Times, 3/18/05.The relocation followed Filin’s admission he had paid bribes paid to Ukrainian officials in connections with the X-55 missile sales. In discussions of the scandal, the claim that Far West worked with KBR/Halliburton, made initially by Yuri Yasenev (see below), was reiterated by Valery Lysenko, deputy director of Ukrspetsexport, who handled the deals. See Left.ru, 2/18/06.Cf, Boston Globe, 2/12/06, A
A Meta-Group Managing Drugs, Violence, and the State
The Meta-Group, BCCI, and Adnan Khashoggi
Part III
Peter Dale Scott –
A drug meta-group with such broad connections is not unprecedented. As I argue in my other paper to this conference, I see a historical succession of meta-groups influencing US governmental relations to the international drug traffic. This succession reaches back, through the CIA-sponsored activities of BCCI, to what I call the first post-war meta-group -- the overlapping global operations of William Donovan, E. Howard Hunt, Paul Helliwell, and Meyer Lansky. (1) If there is a historical pattern of evolution in this succession, it is that successive meta-groups have become more powerful, more highly organized, and more independent of their government (as opposed to business) connections.
Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, explores the underlying factors that have engendered a U.S. strategy of indirect intervention in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies.
A clear predecessor for the Far West meta-group was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a drug-laundering bank which was of use to CIA Director William Casey precisely because of its corrupt global reach, which included the USSR. (2) As a Washington insider said to two Time reporters covering BCCI,
They were the only way we could talk to certain folks, and they were the only vehicle available for some transactions. Who else could wire something together to Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, and the U.S.? (3)
BCCI inherited its ability to broker Arab-Israeli-China arms deals, as well its contacts to western intelligence and politicians, from Adnan Khashoggi, whom it partly displaced as an agent of influence in the Middle East, after the United States, in 1977, outlawed direct payments by U.S. corporations to foreign officials. (4)
Khashoggi was listed in the 1992 Senate BCCI Report as one of the “principal foreign agents of the U.S.” (5) He had long-term relations with former CIA officers and also undercover assets, such as BCCI and the banker Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya (who inter alia financed a botched kidnapping in Mexico, defrauded an Arabian bank, and allegedly oversaw arms-for-drugs deals). (6) Khashoggi himself became notorious for flying into Las Vegas from abroad and then rapidly losing vast sums of cash at the casino tables – a traditional form of money-laundering. (7
Khashoggi’s name has surfaced in connection with a number of other scandals, from Imelda Marcos’ illicit real estate ventures in New York to major securities fraud in Thailand. (8) He was also involved in murky Savings and Loan deals in Texas along with his sometime partner Mario Renda, “a Long Island man whose office was staffed by …a muscular gunman from - police said - the Lucchese Mafia family.” (9)
Some of Khashoggi’s American operations, like Hernandez-Cartaya’s, involved associates of the Bush family. (10)
Khashoggi had had a financial interest in Chechnya, and connections with its leaders, since 1996, from his participation in a consortium called Caucasian Common Market AO. (11) A principal organizer was former Chechen First Deputy Premier Khozh-Akhmed Nukhaev, in conjunction with Lord McAlpine of the Goldsmith family interests in London. (12) According to the late Paul Klebnikov, Nukhaev had a background in Chechen organized crime, before developing "a radical ideology in line with the one espoused by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.” (13)
Despite this background, Nukhaev found support and financing in Washington for his Caucasian-American Chamber of Commerce. According to one source, in 1997 Khashoggi introduced Nukhaev to former US Secretary of State James Baker. (14)
When I first wrote about the Beaulieu, I passed over Khashoggi’s other links to drug-traffickers. But a 1991 DIA report, obtained by the National Security Archives, lists numerous Colombian traffickers and their associates, and includes: “69. Adnan ((Khashoggi)) -- An international arms trafficker who allegedly has sold arms to the Colombian drug traffickers, especially to the Medellin Cartel.” (15)
This gibes neatly with reports that Davidovich, who at the time of the Beaulieu meeting was residing in Khashoggi’s villa, had dealings in Colombia with both the FARC and the Ochoa brothers of the Medellin cartel. (16)
BCCI and an Israeli intelligence agent were also involved in Medellin arms sales, via a “melon farm” in Antigua partly financed by William Casey’s friend Bruce Rappaport. (17)
Khashoggi’s ally Hernandez-Cartaya was also accused of financing arms deals through Cuba with Colombian revolutionaries. (18)
Footnotes:
1: Peter Dale Scott, “Drugs, Parapolitics, and Mexico: The DFS and the First Post-War Meta-Group,” 14.2. Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 250.3: Beaty and. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank, 347.4: Ronald Kessler, The Richest Man in the World (New York: Warner Books, 1986), 162, 300; Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), 54, 80, 263-64.4: U.S. Congress. Senate, 102nd Cong., 2nd Sess. The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from Senator John Kerry, Chairman, and from Senator Hank Brown, Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, 299. Henceforth Kerry-Brown Report.5: Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: The CIA, Drugs, and Armies in Central America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 31-32; Pete Brewton, The Mafia, CIA, and George Bush (New York: S.P.I. Books, 1992), 184-85; Penny Lernoux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), 146-53.6: Ron Kessler, The Richest Man in the World , 181-83.7: New York Times, 6/28/90 (Marcos); Wall Street Journal, 5/7/99 (Thailand)8: Brewton, Mafia, 53-59, 189 (S&L); Jonathan Kwitny, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 9/12/90 (Mafia).9: Brewton, Mafia, 58-59, 185.10: "Separatism, Islam and Oil," Cf. "The tendencies of interregional and international integration in North Caucasia," Caucasian Knot, eng.kavkaz.memo.ru/reginfotext/ engreginfo/id/560578.html.11: Jamestown Foundation, Monitor, Vol. 3, Issue 206, 11/4/97. Another interested party before his tragic death with Princess Diana was Dodi al-Fayad, the owner of Harrod's and Khashoggi's nephew.12: AFP, "From criminal to Islamist: US journalist traces the life of a Chechen rebel," JRL 7252, 7/16/03, Paul Klebnikov, Razgovor S Varvarom Besedy S Chechenskim Polevym Komandirom Khozhakhmedom Nukhaevym O Banditizme I Islame (Talks with a Barbarian).13: "Caucasian diamond traffic" (Moscow, 2005), "In spring 1997 Adnan Khashoggi introduced Hozh-Ahmed Nukhaev to James Baker."14: DIA Report of 9/23/91, “Subj: (U) IIR [DELETED]/Narcotics – Colombian Narco-Trafficker Profiles,”. Cf. New York Times, 8/2/04.15: Personal communication.16: Kerry-Brown Report, 69.17: Lernoux, Banks, 149.
Dunlop’s Account of the Beaulieu Meeting’s Purpose: The
“Russian 9/11” in 1999
Part IV
According to Russian sources, one of the alleged purposes of the meeting at the villa – but not the only one – was to give the threatened Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin what it supposedly needed in 1999: a Russian 9/11. Russia has been familiar for some time with charges that the bombings in Moscow in 1999, and an accompanying invasion of Russian Dagestan that rekindled the ongoing war in neighboring Chechnya, were both planned by Chechen Islamists, in collusion with a Kremin representative.
It is claimed that the well-connected drug-trafficking meta-group, with connections to both the Kremlin and the CIA, arranged in advance for the bombings and invasion at the meeting, in July 1999, at a French villa owned by Adnan Khashoggi. The group allegedly operated with support from Saudi Arabia and organized global drug trafficking, some of it probably through Kosovo.
The evidence for this western face of the group is laid out in an article by a so-called Yuri Yasenev, on a Russian website. The article is cited – very selectively – as authoritative by a reputable Hoover Institution scholar, John B. Dunlop. But Dunlop completely ignores, indeed suppresses, Yasenev’s case as I have summarized it above. He uses the article instead to document a more familiar case: that in 1999 the Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin dealt with this same group to create what might be called the “Russian 9/11.”
When I say that Dunlop suppresses certain details, I do not mean to suggest that he does so conspiratorially, or even consciously. My notion of deep politics, which I have developed elsewhere, posits that in every culture and society there are facts which tend to be suppressed collectively, because of the social and psychological costs of not doing so. Like all other observers, I too have involuntarily suppressed facts and even memories about the drug traffic that were too disturbing to be retained with equanimity.
Dunlop’s thesis (taken from his two main Russian sources)
Is that men of influence in Yeltsin’s Kremlin, building on connections established by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, arranged for staged violence in order to reinforce support for an unpopular Russian government. This violence took the form of lethal bombings in Moscow, and an agreed-upon (and partly staged) Islamist incursion by Chechens into Russian Dagestan.
Western versions of the story, such as one in the Independent, have stressed that these events were arranged by Russian intelligence:
Boris Kagarlitsky … writing in the weekly Novaya Gazeta, says that the bombings in Moscow and elsewhere were arranged by the GRU (the Russian military intelligence service). He says they used members of a group controlled by Shirvani Basayev, brother of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, to plant the bombs. These killed 300 people in Buikask, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September.
The bombings and war were allegedly a stratagem to boost the popularity of the Kremlin, and particularly the little-known new Prime Minister Putin, for the coming elections in November 1999.
Dunlop blames the plotting on three protégés of the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky – Valentin Yumashev, Alexander Voloshin, and Roman Abramovich – who at this point were members of Yeltsin’s “Family” in the Kremlin.
Dunlop’s thesis of Kremlin-structured violence follows the Russian journal Vestiya’s account of the Beaulieu meeting on July 4, 1999. In Dunlop’s words,
On the day following the initial incursion of rebel forces into the Dagestani highlands in early August of 1999, the investigative weekly Versiya published a path-breaking report claiming that the head of the Russian Presidential Administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had met secretly with the most wanted man in Russia, Shamil’ Basaev, through the good offices of a retired officer in the GRU, Anton Surikov, at a villa belonging to international arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi located [in Beaulieu] between Nice and Monaco.
Since October 2005, when I first wrote about the meta-group and the Beaulieu, the Versiya/Dunlop claim that Basaev was there has been challenged, because on
July 3, 1999, only one day earlier, Basaev met with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov in Grozny, Chechnya. But Basaev’s presence or absence is not of major concern to me, because of my belief that the primary purpose of the meeting was not managed violence in Russia, but arrangements for a narcotics route through Kosovo.
If Dunlop is right about the meeting, it would be another example of the meta-group’s ability to manage both violence and the state. But in the course of this article two things should become clear. The first is that Surikov and other plotters at Beaulieu were not pro-Putin, but anti-Putin, indeed anti-Russian. The second is that Kagarlitsky, one of Dunlop’s two main sources for his story, was by 2002 close to Surikov.
We shall see that if politics were discussed at Beaulieu, it was more likely to have been the use of narcotics proceeds to finance anti-Russian Islamist activity, in a broad swathe of countries ranging from Macedonia to Russia itself. Dunlop himself corroborates a drug link to the meeting:
In June of 1999 there took up residence at the villa a Venezuelan banker named Alfonso Davidovich. In the Latin American press, he is said to be responsible for laundering the funds of the Columbian left insurrection organization FARC, which carries out an armed struggle with the official authorities, supported by the narcotics business.But Dunlop has no explanation for his presence.
A Meta-Group Managing Drugs, Violence, and the State
Dunlop’s Redactions of His Source Yasenev / Part V
Peter Dale Scott -
Dunlop’s essay is 52 pages long, with 142 footnotes. But having thus provocatively included references to both Khashoggi and narcotics, Dunlop does not mention either again. Dunlop does however make one more reference to Davidovich: “`It soon emerged,’ Versiya continued, `that a very frequent visitor to Davidovich was a certain French businessman of Israeli-Soviet origin, a native of Sokhumi [Abkhazia], 53-year-old Yakov Kosman.’”
Dunlop’s cited source for information about both Davidovich and Kosman is the website article by Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“Russia Awaits an Orange Revolution”). But Dunlop recurrently abridges what Yasenev wrote:
The article “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya,” … reports that Davidovich lives in Munich and enjoys both German and Venezuelan citizenship. He is also said to be personally acquainted with international arms dealer Khashoggi.
curtailing Yasenev’s description:
Alfonso Davidovich – (1948), Venezuelan, lives in Munich. Has German and Venezuelan citizenship.
Speaks Spanish, English, French, German, and Russian fluently. In the 1970s went through special training in the USSR (Privol’noe, Nikolaevskaya oblast) and East Germany.
Owns companies and banks in Barbados, the Caymans and other off-shores.
Has friendly relations with Hugo Chavez, and is acquainted with Fidel Castro, Marcus Wolf and Adnan Khashoggi. Has many contacts in Colombia, including FARC. In 1999 Davidovich was alleged to have engaged in arms trafficking for guerillas in Chiapas, Mexico and in money laundering for the Colombian drug mafia. Finances antiglobalization movement in Europe and Latin America.”
With respect to Kosman, Dunlop’s version is: “Kosman is reported in the same 17 December 2004 issue of compromat.ru, to live in Nice and to possess German and, possibly, Israeli citizenship.”
Yasenev wrote:Yakov Abramovich Kosman (b. 1946), resides in Nice, France. Has German and, possibly, Israeli citizenship. Involved in real estate operations and banking. Has contacts with Kosovo Albanian criminal societies in European countries. In 1997-2000 he served as financial consultant to Hashim Thaçi, the chief commander of KLA.”
Consider that “In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA – formally known as the Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosoves, or UCK – as an international terrorist organization, saying it had bankrolled its operations with proceeds from the international heroin trade and from loans from known terrorists like Osama bin Laden.” According to Loretta Napoleoni, “It was thanks to the mediation of Chechen criminal groups that the KLA and the Albanian mafia managed to gain control of the transit of heroin in the Balkans,”
The Khashoggi Villa Meeting, Kosovo, and the “Pristina Dash”
Part VI
Peter Dale Scott –
Dunlop ignores the implications of the drug backgrounds of Davidovich and Kosman. For example, he acknowledges the presence of four Abkhazians at the meeting – Kosman, “a certain Tsveiba,” Sultan Sosnaliev, and Surikov -- and yet offers no explanation for their presence. (A map will show that Abkhazia is irrelevant to the subsequent events in Dagestan and Chechnya.)
It seems likely that a drug-route was discussed involving Abkhazia, which now “has become a key heroin transiting point.”
(1) Its drug-trafficking importance is noted by none other than Surikov himself: “In general then, the Chechen [drug-trafficking] group has allotted a very important place to Abkhazia in its plans….Abkhazia today is one of the most criminalised areas of the former Soviet Union.”
(2) The London paper Al-Sharq Al-Awsat has written that Basaev controlled the “Abkhaz heroin road,” used by the Taliban as a transit route to Europe. (3) And (whether or not Basaev was at the Beaulieu meeting) it is certain that Basaev and Surikov were both leaders in the Russian-backed Abkhazian revolt from Georgia in 1991.The Beaulieu meeting allegedly took place on July 4, 1999, or shortly after the unexpected entry of Russian troops into Kosovo. On June 11, 200 Russian troops drove unexpectedly from Bosnia to Pristina and secured Slatina airport. Gen Wesley Clark then ordered British Gen. Sir Mike Jackson (who was at the scene) “to seize the airport. Jackson responded, famously, that he would not start World War Three for him” (4)
Instead there followed weeks of “protracted negotiations on Russia’s role in the Kosovo peacekeeping mission.” (5) In the end, under circumstances still not fully understood, the United States and NATO agreed that the Russians could stay.
The Russian troops finally withdrew from the airport in July 2003. (6) Significantly, a chart of Russian drug-trafficking prepared by one of Surikov’s partners, Sergei Petrov, indicates that in 2003 Kosovo ceased to be a main point of export for Russian drugs, its place being taken by the Black Sea oil port of Novorossiysk. (7)
Within a year of the troops’ arrival, 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 was now distributed in America by Kosovar Albanians. (8)
It is significant therefore that, according to Lilia Shevtsova,
The `Pristina dash’ by Russian parachutists in 1999 during the Kosovo crisis (the purpose of the `dash’ was to force NATO to guarantee for Russia a separate sector of responsibility in Kosovo) was organized by the head of the General Staff, Anatoly Kvashnin, and his deputy, Leonid Ivashov, without the knowledge of minister of defense Igor Sergeyev and most likely without Yeltsin’s knowledge. (9)
Yasenev says nothing about this, but does assert that Kvashnin was the Russian Army connection of the two leading drug traffickers (Vladimir Ilyich Filin and Alexey Likhvintsev) in the Saidov-Surikov group, Far West.
In February 2006 Anton Surikov himself confirmed that the Pristina dash had been prepared for by his meta-group colleague Filin:
When V. I. Filin, who was at that time in Belgrade, learned about the advance of [Russian] peace keepers towards Pristina, he, together with Colonel V. S. Kovalchuk, went to Kosovo on their own risk, unarmed and without bodyguards. They arrived there several hours before our paratroopers. They used this time to get in touch with the field commanders of KLA and received personal guarantees from Hashim Thaci and Ramush Haradinaj that there would be no provocations against the Russian peacekeepers on the part of Albanians. (10)
This was possible because Hashim Thaçi, as we have seen, was advised by Filin’s meta-group partner Yakov Kosman.
Ramush Haradinaj became known as a leading KLA terrorist, war criminal, and drug trafficker. Nevertheless, according to the London Observer, he was also “the key US military and intelligence asset in Kosovo during the civil war.” The Observer also reported UN investigators’ charges that American officials in Kosovo were interfering with an investigation into his war crimes. (11)
Today Haradinaj is an indicted war criminal awaiting trial at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal. (12)
It may be relevant that Rusham Haradinaj’s brother Daut, another alleged drug trafficker, is said to have been placed by their KLA faction
in charge of coordinating operations with the Islamic terrorist organization Al Qaeda. In that capacity, he organized a meeting with Muhamed Al Zawahiri, brother of the ideological leader of the aforementioned organization Dr. Ayman Al Zawahiri, in Sofia in October 2001. (13)
The meeting probably concerned the KLA offshoot fighting in Macedonia, the NLA, which was led by Muhamed al-Zawahiri and overseen by former KLA leader Agim Ceku, another U.S. ally and indicted war criminal, (14) later chief of the KLA’s successor, the KPC (where Daut Haradinaj was his deputy). In 2001 the Washington Times reported, "Osama bin Laden is the biggest financial supporter of the National Liberation Army (NLA) in Macedonia." (15)
Other sources claimed that the American company Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), which had trained Ceku in first Croatia and then Bosnia, provided the 17 American instructors which (according to the Hamburger Abendblatt) were training and assisting the NLA in Macedonia. (16)
Daut and Ramush Haradinaj are accused of using their smuggling activities to finance the flow of arms to the NLA in Macedonia, and Daut of participating personally in NLA attacks. (17)
Though they profit from other smuggled commodities, notably cigarettes, it would appear that the Pristina Dash may have helped provide narco-financing for Islamist insurrection in Macedonia.
This possibility is reinforced by the Yasenev version of the meta-group’s politics, which he portrays as Islamist and anti-Russian, rather than pro-Putin.
Footnotes:1: SIDA/Cornell Caspian Consulting, “The South Caucasus: A Regional Overview,” 2002.2: Anton Surikov, Crime in Russia, 38-39.3: Paul Murphy, The Wolves of Islam: Russia and the Faces of Chechen Terror (Washington: Brassey’s Inc., 2004), 136.4: Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale UP, 2002), 279, 284-85.5: Toronto Sun, 6/27/99.6: Pravda.ru, 7/3/03.7: The map was allegedly shown by Surikov’s partner Sergei Petrov to a Russian businessman in Geneva while discussing a drug deal8: Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February 2000, Peter Dale Scott, “Deep Politics: Drugs, Oil, Covert Operations and Terrorism,”9: Shevtsova, Putin’s Russia, 285, fn. 11. That Yeltsin was ignorant has been disputed. But a Sky journalist heard in Kosovo, from “a man who `freelances’ as a go-between for Moscow,” that “the army took the decision to move without consulting the politicians” (Tim Marshall, Shadowplay [Beograd : Samizdat B92, 2003], 153)10: Anton Surikov, Pravda-info, 2/8/06,11:Nick Wood, “US 'covered up' for Kosovo ally,” Observer, 9/10/00,: Cf. Agence France Presse - English, 10/25/00.12: Baltimore Sun, 5/10/06.13: “Daut Haradinaj,” in “Kosovo's 156 lawless: Biographies of the men in the Albanian-dominated Serbian province of Kosovo,” Serbianna.. Daut Haradinaj was blacklisted by President Bush as an Albanian terrorist in an Executive Order of July 1, 2001. See “The US Black List of Albanian Terrorists,”14: Halifax Herald, 9/10/01.15: Washington Times, 7/22/01.16: Christopher Deliso, “US Betrayed Us In Macedonia,” Antiwar.com, 6/26/02. Cf. London Times, 9/3/01. In Croatia, Agim Ceku and other MPRI trainees were accused of ethnic cleansing in the forced Serbian evacuation of the Krajina.17: “Ramush Haradinaj,” in “Kosovo's 156 lawless: Biographies of the men in the Albanian-dominated Serbian province of Kosovo,” Serbianna..
The Role of Anton Surikov: The Dunlop and Yasenev Versions
Part VII
Peter Dale Scott -
As we have seen, Dunlop describes Anton Surikov, the organizer of the Beaulieu meeting, as “a retired officer in the GRU.” He fails to quote from his source Yasenev’s description of Surikov:Anton Victorovich Surikov (b. 1961). Presents himself as political scientist. Responsible for informational and political projects. Actively publishes in press. Some of his publications resemble ciphered directives to the elements in Russian special services disloyal to President Vladimir Putin. His other articles contain political messages intended for abroad. Surikov has contacts with F[ritz] Ermarth, former leading CIA analyst of the USSR and Russia, now in the Nixon Foundation…. (1)
Both Boris Kagarlitsky’s essay and Yasenev’s memo, taken from intelligence files, talk about Surikov, but from opposing perspectives. Kagarlitsky, a longtime dissident and foe of Putin, presented Surikov’s presence at the Beaulieu meeting as a venue for Kremlin-instigated violence, designed to restore the Kremlin’s popularity before the coming election. Yasenev’s memo sees Surikov as part of an on-going effort to destabilize Russia, and weaken the Kremlin.
Kagarlitsky (and after him Dunlop) say almost nothing about Surikov, other than to refer to his past years with Russian military intelligence, the GRU. (2) However Yasenev’s memo in December 2004 links Surikov, not to the government or Kremlin, but (through Alexei Kondaurov) to the sphere of the man who by that time had emerged as America’s best friend and Putin’s most powerful enemy in Russia, the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Yukos Oil. (The Kondaurov-Khodorkovsky connection is abundantly documented: both men freely admit it.)
Forbes magazine, which underwrote Klebnikov’s damning account of Berezovsky, wrote on March 18, 2002 that Khodorkovsky appeared “to be the West’s best friend” in Russia. According to PBS in 2003, Khodorkovsky’s firm Menatep shared business interests with the western investment firms Global Asset Management, the Blackstone Group, the Carlyle Group and AIG Capital Partners. In addition
He frequently travels to the United States. He reportedly dined with Condoleezza Rice last year and recently was a guest at Herb Allen’s Idaho ranch, along with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other luminaries, for an annual telecommunications executives meeting. (3)
Quoting from an anti-Yeltsin essay of May 1999 by Surikov in Versiya, the American right-wing Jamestown Foundation agreed with Yasenev (against Kagarlitsky and Dunlop) that “Surikov is clearly in the camp of Yeltsin’s opponents.” (4)
More recently Surikov has also shown himself to be anti-Putin, criticizing Putin’s “obvious inability … to struggle against terrorism effectively.” (5)
Furthermore Surikov had western support in his opposition to government corruption under Yeltsin. The Centre for Defence Studies, a British think-tank at King’s College, London, published two small books by Surikov, including one entitled Crime in Russia: the international implications. (6) According to his webpage at Kagarlitsky’s IPROG website, Surikov spent the year 1994 at the Centre for Defence Studies. (7) Audrius Butkevicius of Far West is said to have spent the year there with him.
As for Yasenev’s allegations that “Surikov has contacts with F. Ermarth,” Surikov when questioned about this admitted it frankly: “I am personally acquainted with Mr. Ermarth as political scientist since 1996. It’s well known by many people and we never hid this fact.” (8) In saying this, Surikov was admitting to a CIA connection, however casual: Ermarth, a senior officer who twice served on the National Security Council, did not retire from the CIA until 1998. (9)
Above all, Kagarlitsky is silent about the charge which has since aroused controversy in the Russian media: Surikov’s supposed involvement with “a group of renegade Soviet secret service officers who are allegedly involved in international drug trafficking and have ties with Western and Saudi security apparatus.” (10)
It would be interesting to learn at what point Kagarlitsky first met Surikov, and whether Surikov was in fact the source for Kagarlitsky’s article about the meeting in southern France. Today the two men are close, and serve together at the Moscow Institute for the Study of Globalization (IPROG).
Footnotes1: Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet,” emphasis added.2: To quote Dunlop, “Kagarlitskii also notes: `During Primakov’s time, Surikov worked on the staff of the government of the Russian Federation. Despite this fact, he also developed regular work relations with Voloshin’s people. It seems therefore quite likely that Surikov and Voloshin were personally acquainted’” (Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 44-45).3: PBS, Frontline, October 2003,. Cf. Menatep Press Release of 4/30/02.4: “Former Primakov Official Attacks High-Level Corruption and Yeltsin’s Plans in 2000,” Jamestown Foundation Monitor, 5/25/99, JRL 3306.5: Chechen Press, 5/28/056: Anton Surikov, Crime in Russia: the International Implications (London: Brassey's for the Centre for Defence Studies, University of London, 1995).7: www.iprog.ru/cast/?id=8.8: Letter of 9/17/05 to Oleg Grechenevsky. According to one 1999 article in Russia, Ermarth introduced Surikov to Steve Forbes who offered to help him participate in the project –together with Ermarth and UK Ambassador Sir Rodric Braithwaite –to reveal the ties between the Yeltsin Administration and Russian corruption. But this claim needs to be treated with extreme caution, given the false stories at the time linking Ermarth, Braithwaite, and Surikov to an imaginary joint campaign against Russian corruption. See The Electronic Telegraph (UK), 9/11/99, JRI #3493.9: The two men had met in April 1996 at a Global International Security Seminar in Virginia Commersant (n.d). In an alleged transcript of a drug-related dialogue beween Sergei [Petrov] and a businessman, the latter says, “You’ve said Surikov was also a CIA man” See transcript of audio recorded conversation between businessman Gennady Nikolaevich (GN) with Sergei (S), which took place on September 29, 2003 in the Hotel Noga Hilton in Geneva.10: Left Front Press Conference. Kagarlitsky was defended at the press conference by the former Yukos official Ilya Ponomarev, another IPROG member.
Saidov, Surikov, Muslim Insurrectionism, and Drug
Trafficking
Part VIII
Peter Dale Scott -
Another example of Dunlop’s curtailment of Yasenev is his abridged description of “Mekhmet,” another attendee at the Beaulieu meeting, as a “certain Turk, in the past an advisor to the Islamicist premier of Turkey, [Necmettin] Erbakan.” (1) In the same year 1999, Erbakan reportedly arranged for both cash and arms to be sent to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a drug-trafficking group whose heroin reached Europe through Chechnya. (2) The IMU was backed not only by Turks but also by Pakistan’s ISI, who had also trained Shamil Basayev for the Chechnyan insurgency. For strategic reasons, ISI oversaw the spread of mujahedin and their narcotics from Afghanistan to Chechnya, a spread which as we have seen continued on into Kosovo.
In addition Yasenev links Mekhmet (“whose real name is Ruslan Saidov”) not only to Erbakan but also to the CIA, to Saudi intelligence, and to al-Qaeda:
In 2003 the Turkish citizen Mehmet whose real name is Ruslan Saidov, persuaded the President of the Chechen Republic, Ahmed Kadyrov, that he could be of use with Kadyrov’s policy of “national reconciliation.” Saidov took part in organizing Kadyrov’s visit to Saudi Arabia. There Kadyrov made an agreement with the head of Saudi intelligence, Prince Naif Ibn Abdel-Aziz, that the Arab militants under the Lieutenant Colonel Aziz ben Said ben Ali al Hamdi (alias Abu al Walid al-Hamadi), Prince Naif’s subordinate, would be removed from Chechnya by May 2004. The agreement stipulated that Kadyrov guaranteed safe passage to Abu al-Walid. Playing a double game and intending to set up both parties, Saidov (probably together with Abu al-Walid himself) gave this information to the CIA. Apparently the CIA was concerned that having left Chechnya the Arab militants would resurface in Iraq and join the terrorist group of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that belongs to the al-Qaida network.
Trying to prevent this, and besides, wanting to discredit Kadyrov in the eyes of Prince Naif, the CIA gave Saidov an “assignment”. On April 13 in the Nozhai-Yurt district of Chechnya, Russian troops killed Abu al-Walid (or alleged having done so). Saidov paid $300,000 to those who carried out this operation. Their bosses in Moscow received $500,000. How much the CIA paid Saidov is unknown….
Yasenev describes Saidov as both a drug trafficker and an arms trafficker, involved with the supply of Russian arms to Yemen. He adds that, since the mid-1990s, “Saidov formed stable relations with the Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi, Prince Turki al-Faisal [then head of Saudi intelligence, now Saudi Ambassador in Washington] and Prince Naif [Saudi Interior Minister].”
Furthermore:In the spring of 1995 Saidov began to cooperate with the organized society, led by Vladimir Filin and Alexei Likhvintsev in handling [narcotics] traffic through the port of Novorossiysk.Saidov is described by Yasenev as having good relations not only with the CIA and Saudi intelligence, but also with both Turkish Islamists and even with Ayman al-Zawahiri, the man often described as both the “mastermind” behind 9/11 and the senior partner in al Qaeda active in the Balkans. (3)In addition Yasenev described Saidov as not pro-Putin, but a Muslim activist who was passionately anti-Putin and indeed anti-Russian:In September 2003, Saidov participated in the congress of the extremist organization Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami in Jordan. At this congress he announced that Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami was an organization effectively acting in the underground throughout Russia, Central Asia and the Crimea…. (4)On December 8, 2004 Saidov addressed Muslim youth in Moscow. In his words, “following Ukraine, the Orange Revolution is coming to Russia.” “Our liberals say that in 2008 the situation in Moscow will be like the one in Kiev.” However, everything will be different, and not in 2008, but earlier.” “Amirs and mudjahideen will soon make the Kremlin shudder with horror.” In 2005, “they will throw into hell the servant of Satan,” i.e., President Putin, who is allegedly “wanted by the International Tribunal at The Hague.” (5)The same goal of Muslim liberation was attributed by Yasenev to the organizer of the Beaulieu meeting, Anton Surikov:On December 13 2004, in Adygeia, Surikov had a meeting with a group of Sufi believers and said this: “In the past we were against ahl-ad-dalala (those who gone astray) with their Arab money. We used to say that one should not separate from Russia. But now “Russia is on the brink of collapse and chaos.” So “we’ll be separating [from Russia] with all Muslims of the Caucasus.” A new state will be created on our historical lands from Psou and the Black Sea to Laba and Kuban.” (6)The portraits of Saidov’s and Surikov’s connections with al-Zawahiri, Erbakan, and Hizb ut-Tahrir reinforce the thesis that the “Pristina dash” aimed at facilitating drug flows to strengthen Islamism in the Balkans. They also confirm the criticism, by the Indian analyst B. Raman and others, that American studies of Islamism and jihadism err in their restrictive focus on al-Qaeda. (7) The full range of Islamic jihadism is far more complex.It appears that Russia and America, believing that they can use Islamist traffickers as assets, are also in fact being used by them.
Footnotes:
1: Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow,” 42. Dunlop’s important and truncated description of Mekhmet has a strange and irrelevant citation: “On Erbakan, see Shireen T. Hunter, Islam in Russia: The Politics of Identity and Security (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2004), p. 365.” But there is no need to identify Erbakan, and Hunter is silent about Mekhmet.2: Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated, 91: “It was partly thanks to [IMU leader] Namangiani’s contacts in Chechnya that heroin reached Europe. According to Interpol, about 60 percent of exported Afghan narcotics in 2002 passed through Central Asia. The IMU controlled 70 percent of the opium that moved through this area.”3: “For the past 10 years…Ayman al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training … and drug-trading networks throughout Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey and Bosnia” (Wall Street Journal, 11/1/01). Cf. Independent (London), 8/5/05.4: “Russia is also concerned about the HT [Hizb ut-Tahrir al-Islami], for it fears that the movement will spread to Muslim regions of Russia. Russian intelligence is now collaborating closely with the Central Asian states to combat the HT” (Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia [New Haven: Yale UP, 2002], 132). Cf. Surikov statement to Sufis below. Rashid regards the Hizb ut-Tahrir as essentially non-violent, but others have seen it as a target for terrorist recruitment by Osama bin Laden. Cf. Bakhram Tursunov, “Extremism in Uzbekistan,” Conflict Studies Research Centre, 12, “It should also be noted that bin Laden’s scheme, under which the unification of all extremist forces and movements in the cause of establishing a caliphate was supposed to occur, also envisaged sponsoring activities inside the Islamic underground in states selected by him as appropriate subjects for his efforts. The religious and political movement Hizb-ut-Takhrir, widespread in the countries of Central Asia and among Muslim minorities in China, can quite justifiably be regarded as one of the underground movements.”5: The goal of splitting up Russia, attributed here to Surikov, is that which, in an earlier text co-authored by Surikov, is attributed by Russian “radicals” to the United States (Graeme Herd with Ene Rôngelep and Anton Surikov, Crisis for Estonia? Russia, Estonia and a Post-Chechen Cold War [London: Brassey’s for the Centre for Defence Studies, 1994], 33).6: Surikov, like Saidov, may not be Russian. A recent article refers to “Ret. Colonel Anton Surikov (Turkish citizen Mansur Natkhoev) and Ret. Major Ruslan Saidov (Turkish citizen Ugur Mehmed)” (Andrei Petrov and Valentin Zorin, Academician Anton Surikov Confirms Professor Peter Dale Scott's "Prishtina Dash".7: Cf. B. Raman, “Istanbul: The enemy within,” Asia Times, 11/22/03, In this essay Raman shows the direct links between Turkish terrorists (former disciples of Erbakan) and groups like Lashkar-e-Toiba sponsored by Pakistan’s ISI.
Allegations of Drug-Trafficking and Far West Ltd.
Part IX
Peter Dale Scott -
Yasenev links Saidov, Surikov, and others to their former service in a drug-interception group in Afghanistan, under a Leonid Kosyakov who in 2004 headed Far West Ltd.:
Leonid Leonidovich Kosyakov, b. 1955, Ukrainian citizen. Until 2005 resided in Arab Emirates and Switzerland. Citizen of Ukraine. Retired from the service in May 1993. Presently the president of Far West Ltd. In 1983-85 Kosyakov was in command of a special group in Shindand (Afghanistan), assigned to intercept caravans with drugs. In different times under his direct command served Filin, Lunev, Likhvintsev, Surikov, Petrov, as well as Saidov. (1)Yasenev also presents testimony that this group developed into what the Russians call an OPS (an Organized Criminal Society) responsible for massive drug-trafficking:These accusations were made by the former officer of the Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine Sergei Petrov (alias Serge Rodin, French citizen).
According to his testimony:“The OPS [organized criminal society] was involved in drug trafficking since the beginning of 1990s:-from 1995 the OPS transports heroin (produced in Afghanistan) from Tajikistan to European countries via Russia with the assistance of the Russian Defense Ministry.- from 2000 the OPS is involved in smuggling Colombian cocaine to Russia through the seaports of Novorossiysk and St. Petersburg under the disguise of import shipments from Latin America. …”In November of 2003, Rodin contacted the law enforcement agencies of Germany and France. Their investigation did not result in any actions against Filin, Likhvintsev, and their partners.In January 2004, Rodin was blown up in his car in South Africa. (2)Yasenev’s charge of a military organized crime group under Filin had been reported a year earlier by Russian journalist Nikita Kaledin:
There is a powerful military organized crime community which from 1992 through to the present has controlled substantial drug flows from Afghanistan to Russia and Europe and is also involved in laundering “dirty” money and is actively involved in Russia’s political life. The community is controlled by former intelligence officers, Afghan war veterans, and now drug barons Vova Filin and Lesha Pribalt. The former lives in Switzerland, the latter in London. Both make quite frequent trips to Moscow, Dushanbe, Nazran, and Khankala….
Filin and Pribalt literally flooded Russia with heroin. The Kremlin could not tolerate this abomination any longer and ordered a mighty “Chekist raid” [i.e., ordered the FSB to shut down the operation] against the narcobarons. However, it is rumored that the raid has ended up with the agreement that the latter would1) share their profits; 2) help in the facilitating the peaceful referendum on the constitution in Chechnya; 3) bring some order to the drug market by liquidating the leaders of ethnic criminal groups.” (3)As if in fulfillment of the third point, Surikov in 2001 denounced the leaders of an influential Tajik heroin cartel, including the mayor of the Tajik capital, Dushanbe. (4) (Tajiks until then had been one of the ethnic mafias who most dominated the trafficking of Afghan heroin through Russia.)
Footnotes1: Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet.”2: Cf. Petrov conversation3: “Geroinovyi tur.” By Nikita Kaledin. Stringer-news, November 4, 2003: partially translated in “Afghan Drug Scene: The Poppy Power,” News Central Asia.4: Pravda.ru, 7/30/01. Surikov’s accusation was noted by Maureen Orth in the March 2002 issue of Vanity Fair: “To find out, I track down in Moscow the only Russian official who has spoken on the record about this issue. Dr. Anton V. Surikov is chief staff of the Committee of Industry, Construction, and High Technology in the Russian parliament. Last spring he told the Moscow News that the mayor of Dushanbe was a major drug dealer. That interview precipitated not only a denial from the mayor but also, according to Surikov, a demand that the Tajik journalist the mayorerroneously believed was Surikov's source be arrested.” In the same interview, Surikov also noted that, “as early as the mid-90s, the Russians were buying heroin and transporting it from the northern part of Afghanistan to Russian military bases in Tajikistan by truck and helicopter.’"
Far West Ltd, Halliburton,
Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush.
Part X
Peter Dale Scott -
The connection to Far West of Filin, Likhvinsky, Surikov, and Saidov (along with Alfonso Davidovich) has since been corroborated by a news story on the Pravda-info website about Far West Ltd, and Kosyakov’s resignation from it.
At a meeting of its stockholders on 2 May in the Hotel Ritz Carlton in Dubai “Far West Ltd.” accepted the retirement of the president of the Agency Leonid Kosyakov, who moved to government service in Ukraine. Vladimir Filin, member of the Editorial Board of “Pravda-info,” was elected the new president, at the same time retaining his previous position as executive director. The meeting of stockholders, in accordance with its charter, selected new members of the board of directors of “Far West Ltd.,” which will now contain 9 members. Besides Vladimir Filin, Anatolii Baranov and Anton Surikov, it will include four more members of the Editorial Board of “Pravda-info”: Audrius Butkevicius, Aleksei Likhvintsev, Natal’ia Roeva, and Ruslan Saidov, and also Valerii Lunev, a veteran of the Armed Forces, and Alfonso Davidovich, a political scientist from Venezuela.
Far West, the story said,specializes in consulting work on questions of security in conducting business in regions of the world with unstable environments and hiring personnel for foreign private military companies [last three words in English]. Its head office is located in Switzerland. In addition, the Agency has a network of representatives in OAE [United Arab Emirates], Afghanistan, Colombia, the autonomous region of Kosovo, the autonomous republic of Crimea, Georgia, and the Volga Federal District of the RF [Russian Federation].
Recently Filin gave Pravda.info some details about Far West’s work, and stated that the firm had been co-founded by “a sub-division of a well-known American corporation.” He said that the company’s new contract is
connected with the secured transport of commercial shipments from Afghanistan, where we have an office, to ports on the Black Sea. …But the most commercially attractive route seems to be that from Bagram to the US air base in Magas, in Kyrgyzstan. By the way, it is quite near the Russian air base in Kant. A significant flow of shipments passes through Magas, there is a niche there for commercial shipments too. This is very profitable. It is much more profitable than routing commercial shipments from Afghanistan through Tajikistan. Therefore last year we completely withdrew from all shipping through Tajikistan and closed our office in that country.
Who are your partners?Who our partners are is a commercial secret. I can say that they are four private firms from three countries, Turkey, Russia, and the USA, which engage among other things in shipping. One of these firms is a sub-division of a well-known American corporation. This firm is a co-founder of our agency.
Pravda.info is an inside source for information about Far West, for the two organizations are in fact two different manifestations of the same group. Among the directors of Far West on the masthead of Pravda.info we find first of all Anton Surikov, followed by Anatolii Baranov, Aleksei Likhvintsev, Ruslan Saidov, Vladimir Filin, Natal’ia Roeva, and Audrius Butkevicius.
Also on the Pravda.info masthead is Boris Kagarlitsky, a major source for Western accounts of the meeting in southern France, including Dunlop’s. Many of the Far West directors, notably Anton Surikov, are or have been also associated with Kagarlitsky at the Russian Institute for Globalization Studies (IPROG).Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, explores the underlying factors that have engendered a U.S. strategy of indirect intervention in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies.
Although Filin and Pravda.info did not identify the foreign private military companies with which it worked, Yasenev did:
Filin and Likhvintsev do business with foreign private military companies (PMCs):
- «Meteoric Tactical Solutions» (South Africa) – in Angola;
- «Kellogg, Brown &Root» (KBR Halliburton) – in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia, and Iraq.
- «Diligence Iraq LLC» (controlled by the Kuwaiti Mohammed as-Sagar) – in Iraq.”
Furthermore Yasenev claims that some of Far West’s work with Halliburton is apparently approved by the CIA for geopolitical purposes:
In 2003-2004, Filin and Likhvintsev worked on the Georgian project, financed by KBR Halliburton, apparently, with the approval of the CIA. The project had the goal of weakening the competitors of Halliburton in the oil business and, in a broader context, of facilitating the geopolitical objectives of the United States in the Caucasus. The OPS man in Georgia is Audrius Butkevicius, former Lithuanian minister of defense, presently advisor to Badri Patarkatsishvili.
2003 and 2004 were the years of the two Georgian “Rose Revolutions,” in which Mikheil Saakashvili displaced Eduard Shevardnadze. A role was played by western foundations such as the Albert Einstein Institute, with which Butkevicius was allegedly associated.
Some of Yasenev’s information about Diligence Iraq is corroborated by a Press Release from Diligence itself.
Diligence LLC, a private military company (PMC), could be described as a CIA spin-off:
Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.
Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose political clout was described by the Financial Times:
- New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.
- Joe Allbaugh, the co-chairman of the company, was head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), on the day of the 9/11 attacks, and indeed until March 2003, the month that the U.S. invaded Iraq.
- The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother. (A major investor in Neil Bush’s educational company Ignite! is Boris Berezovsky.)
Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California,Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher.sfux - 28. Aug, 08:02 Article There Are No Sunglasses | American Resistance To Empire
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