AL QAEDA, U.S. OIL COMPANIES, AND CENTRAL ASIA

What is slowly emerging  from Al Qaeda activities in Central Asia in the 1990s is the extent to which they involved both American oil companies and the U.S. government.^[1][1] By now we know that the U.S.-protected movements of al Qaeda terrorists into regions like Afghanistan , Azerbaijan and Kosovo have served the interests of U.S. oil companies. In many cases they have also provided pretexts or opportunities for a U.S. military commitment and even troops to follow.

This has been most obvious in the years since the Afghan War with the Soviet Union ended in 1989. Deprived of Soviet troops to support it, the Soviet-backed Najibullah regime in Kabul finally fell in April 1992. What should have been a glorious victory for the mujahedin proved instead to be a time of troubles for them, as Tajiks behind Massoud and Pashtuns behind Hekmatyar began instead to fight each other.

The situation was particularly difficult for the Arab Afghans, who now found themselves no longer welcome. Under pressure from America , Egypt , and Saudi Arabia , the new interim president of Afghanistan , Mojaddedi, announced that the Arab Afghans should leave. In January 1993 Pakistan followed suit, closed the offices of all mujahedin in its country, and ordered the deportation of all Arab Afghans.^[2][2] Shortly afterwards Pakistan extradited a number of Egyptian jihadis to Egypt , some of whom had already been tried and convicted in absentia.^[3][3]

Fleeing the hostilities in Afghanistan , some Uzbek and Tajik mujahedin and refugees started fleeing or returning north across the Amu Darya .^[4][4] In this confusion, with or without continued U.S. backing, cross-border raids, of the kind originally encouraged by CIA Director Casey back in the mid-1980s, continued.^[5][5] Both Hekmatyar and Massoud actively supported the Tajik rebels, including in the years up to 1992 when both continued to receive aid and assistance from the United States .^[6][6] The Pakistani observer Ahmed Rashid documents further support for the Tajik rebels from both Saudi Arabia and the Pakistani intelligence directorate ISI.^[7][7]

These raids into Tajikistan and later Uzbekistan contributed materially to the destabilization of the Muslim Republics in the Soviet Union (and after 1992 of its successor, the Conference of Independent States). This destabilization was an explicit goal of U.S. policy in the Reagan era, and did not change with the end of the Afghan War. On the contrary, the United States was concerned to hasten the break-up of the Soviet Union, and increasingly to gain access to the petroleum reserves of the Caspian Basin , which at that time were still estimated to be “the largest known reserves of unexploited fuel in the planet.”^[8][8]

The collapse of the Soviet Union had a disastrous impact on the economies of its Islamic Republics. Already in 1991 the leaders of Central Asia “began to hold talks with Western oil companies, on the back of ongoing negotiations  between Kazakhstan and the US company Chevron.”^[9][9] The first Bush Administration actively supported the plans of U.S. oil companies to contract for exploiting the resources of the Caspian region, and also for a pipeline not controlled by Moscow that could bring the oil and gas production out to the west. The same goals were enunciated even more clearly as matters of national security by Clinton and his administration.^[10][10]

Eventually the threat presented by Islamist rebels persuaded the governments of Uzbekistan , Tajikistan , and Kyrgyzstan to allow U.S. as well as Russian bases on their soil. The result is to preserve artificially a situation throughout the region where small elites grow increasingly wealthy and corrupt, while most citizens suffer from a sharp drop in living standards.^[11][11]

The tension between the Bush Administration’s professed ideals and its real objectives is well illustrated by its ambivalent position towards the regime of Karimov in Uzbekistan . America quickly sent Donald Rumsfeld to deal with the new regime in Kyrgyzstan installed in March 2005 after the popular “Tulip Revolution” and overthrow there of Askar Akayev.^[12][12] But Islam Karimov’s violent repression of a similar uprising in Uzbekistan saw no wavering of U.S. support for a dictator who has allowed U.S. troops to be based in his oil- and gas-rich country.^[13][13]

U.S. Operatives, Oil Companies and Al Qaeda in Azerbaijan

In one former Soviet Republic , Azerbaijan , Arab Afghan jihadis clearly assisted this effort of U.S. oil companies to penetrate the region. In 1991, Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, and Ed Dearborn, three veterans of U.S. operations in Laos , and later of Oliver North’s operations with the Contras, turned up in Baku under the cover of an oil company, MEGA Oil.^[14][14] This was at a time when the first Bush administration had expressed its support for an oil pipeline stretching from Azerbaijan across the Caucasus to Turkey .^[15][15] MEGA never did find oil, but did contribute materially to the removal of Azerbaijan from the sphere of post-Soviet Russian influence.

Secord, Aderholt, and Dearborn were all career U.S. Air Force officers, not CIA. However Secord explains in his memoir how Aderholt and himself were occasionally seconded to the CIA as CIA detailees. Secord describes his own service as a CIA detailee with Air America in first Vietnam and then Laos , in cooperation with the CIA Station Chief Theodore Shackley.^[16][16] Secord later worked with Oliver North to supply arms and materiel to the Contras in Honduras , and also developed a small air force for them, using many former Air America pilots.^[17][17] Because of this experience in air operations, CIA Director Casey and Oliver North had selected Secord to trouble-shoot the deliveries of weapons to Iran in the Iran-Contra operation.^[18][18] (Aderholt and Dearborn also served in the Laotian CIA operation, and later in supporting the Contras.)

As MEGA operatives in Azerbaijan, Secord, Aderholt, Dearborn, and their men engaged in military training, passed “brown bags filled with cash” to members of the government, and above all set up an airline on the model of Air America which soon was picking up hundreds of mujahedin mercenaries in Afghanistan.^[19][19] (Secord and Aderholt claim to have left Azerbaijan before the mujahedin arrived.) Meanwhile, Hekmatyar, who at the time was still allied with bin Laden, was “observed recruiting Afghan mercenaries [i.e. Arab Afghans] to fight in Azerbaijan against Armenia and its Russian allies.”^[20][20] At this time, heroin flooded from Afghanistan through Baku into Chechnya , Russia , and even North America .^[21][21] It is difficult to believe that MEGA’s airline (so much like Air America ) did not become involved.^[22][22]

The operation was not a small one.

Over the course of the next two years, [MEGA Oil] procured thousands of dollars worth of weapons and recruited at least two thousand Afghan mercenaries for Azerbaijan - the first mujahedin to fight on the territory of the former Communist Bloc.”^[23][23]

In 1993 the mujahedin also contributed to the ouster of Azerbaijan ’s elected president, Abulfaz Elchibey, and his replacement by an ex-Communist Brezhnev-era leader, Heidar Aliyev.

At stake was an $8 billion oil contract with a consortium of western oil companies headed by BP. Part of the contract would be a pipeline which would, for the first time, not pass through Russian-controlled territory when exporting oil from the Caspian basin to Turkey . Thus the contract was bitterly opposed by Russia , and required an Azeri leader willing to stand up to the former Soviet Union .

The Arab Afghans helped supply that muscle. Their own eyes were set on fighting Russia in the disputed Armenian-Azeri region of Nagorno-Karabakh, and in liberating neighboring Muslim areas of Russia : Chechnya and Dagestan .^[24][24] To this end, as the 9/11 Report notes (58), the bin Laden organization established an NGO in Baku , which became a base for terrorism elsewhere.^[25][25] It also became a transshipment point for Afghan heroin to the Chechen mafia, whose branches “extended not only to the London arms market, but also throughout continental Europe and North America .”^[26][26]

The Arab Afghans’Azeri operations were financed in part with Afghan heroin.

According to police sources in the Russian capital, 184 heroin processing labs were discovered in Moscow alone last year. ''Every one of them was run by Azeris, who use the proceeds to buy arms for Azerbaijan 's war against Armenia in Nagorno- Karabakh,'' [Russian economist Alexandre] Datskevitch said.^[27][27]

This foreign Islamist presence in Baku was also supported by bin Laden’s financial network.^[28][28] With bin Laden’s guidance and Saudi support, Baku soon became a base for jihadi operations against Dagestan and Chechnya in Russia .^[29][29]And an informed article argued in 1999 that Pakistan ’s ISI, facing its own disposal problem with the militant Arab-Afghan veterans, trained and armed them in Afghanistan to fight in Chechnya . ISI also encouraged the flow of Afghan drugs westward to support the Chechen militants, thus diminishing the flow into Pakistan itself.^[30][30]

As Michael Griffin has observed, the regional conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh and other disputed areas, Abkhazia, Turkish Kurdistan and Chechnya

each represented a distinct, tactical move, crucial at the time, in discerning which power would ultimately become master of the pipelines which, some time in this century, will transport the oil and gas from the Caspian basin to an energy-avid world.^[31][31]

The wealthy Saudi families of al-Alamoudi (as Delta Oil) and bin Mahfouz (as Nimir Oil) participated in the western oil consortium as partners with the American firm Unocal. In October 2001, the U. S. Treasury Department named among charities allegedly providing funds to al Qaeda the Saudi charity Muwafaq (Blessed Relief), to which the al-Alamoudis and bin Mahfouz families were named as major contributors.^[32][32] One cannot discern whether religion or oil was their primary charitable motive.

It is unclear whether MEGA Oil was a front for the U.S. Government or for U.S. oil companies and their Saudi allies. U.S. oil companies have been accused of spending millions of dollars in Azerbaijan, not just to bribe the government but also to install it. According to a Turkish intelligence source who was an alleged eyewitness, major oil companies, including Exxon and Mobil, were “behind the coup d’état” which in 1993 replaced the elected President, Abulfaz Elchibey, with his successor, Heydar Aliyev. The source claimed to have been at meetings in Baku with “senior members of BP, Exxon, Amoco, Mobil and the Turkish Petroleum Company. The topic was always oil rights and, on the insistence of the Azeris, supply and arms to Azerbaijan .” Turkish secret service documents allege middlemen paid off key officials of the democratically elected government of the oil-rich nation just before its president was overthrown.^[33][33]

The true facts and backers of the Aliyev coup may never be fully disclosed. But unquestionably, before the coup, the efforts of Richard Secord, Heinie Aderholt, Ed Dearborn and Hekmatyar’s mujahedin helped contest Russian influence and prepare for Baku ’s shift away to the west.^[34][34] Three years later, in August 1996, Amoco’s president met with Clinton and arranged for Aliyev to be invited to Washington .^[35][35] In 1997 Clinton said that

In a world of growing energy demand…our nation cannot afford to rely on a single region for our energy supplies. By working closely with Azerbaijan to tap the Caspian’s resources, we not only help Azerbaijan to prosper, we also help diversify our energy supply and strengthen our energy’s security.^[36][36]

Unocal, the Taliban, and bin Laden in Afghanistan

The accusations against Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil in Azerbaijan parallel those from European sources against Unocal in Afghanistan, which has been accused of helping, along with Delta Oil, to finance the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul in 1996. (This was at a time when the Taliban was also receiving funds from Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden.)

The respected French observer Olivier Roy has charged that "When the Taleban took power in Afghanistan (1996), it was largely orchestrated by the Pakistani secret service [ISI] and the oil company Unocal, with its Saudi ally Delta.”^[37][37] Unocal executive John Maresca then testified in 1998 to the House Committee on International Relations on the benefits of a proposed oil pipeline through Afghanistan to the coat of Pakistan .^[38][38] A second natural gas pipeline (Centgas) was also contemplated by Unocal.

For Unocal to advance its own funds for the Taliban conquest would have been in violation of U.S. law, which is why such companies customarily resort to middlemen. No such restraints would have inhibited Unocal's Saudi partner in its Centgas consortium, Delta Oil. Delta Oil certainly had the assets; it was “owned by a Jeddah-based group of 50 prominent investors close to the [Saudi] royal family.”^[39][39] Delta was already an investor with Unocal in the oilfields of Azerbaijan , and may have been a factor in the October 1995 decision of Turkmenistan to sign a new pipeline contract with Unocal.^[40][40]

As I wrote a decade ago, citing the case of a U.S. oil company in Tunisia , "it is normal, not unusual, for the entry of major U.S. firms into Third World countries to be facilitated and sustained, indeed made possible, by corruption."^[41][41] This has long been the case, but in the Reagan 1980s it was escalated by a new generation of aggressively risk-taking, law-bending, “cowboy” entrepreneurs. The pace was set by new corporations like Enron, a high-debt merger that was in part guided by the junk-bond impresario Michael Milken.

Some have speculated that Enron also had a potential interest in the Unocal gas pipeline project through Afghanistan . By 1997 Enron was negotiating a $2 billion joint venture with Neftegas of Uzbekistan , to develop Uzbekistan 's natural gas. This was a huge project backed by a $400 million commitment from the U.S. Government through OPIC. Uzbekistan also signed a Memo of Agreement to participate in the Centgas gas pipeline. But the Enron Uzbek negotiations collapsed in 1998.^[42][42]

Enron’s  short-term plans had been to export Uzbek gas west to Kazakhstan , Turkey , and Europe . However it has been claimed that Enron hoped eventually to supply, via the Centgas pipeline, its failing energy plant in Dabhol , India . (Without a cheap gas supply, the cost of electricity from Dabhol was so great that Indians refused to buy it.)^[43][43]

In my book Drugs, Oil, and War, I quote again from Olivier Roy: "It is the Americans who have made inroads in Central Asia , primarily because of the oil and gas interests. Chevron and Unocal are political actors who talk as equals with the States (that is, with the presidents).”^[44][44]

It is clear they talk as equals in the current Bush Administration. Both the President and Vice-President are former oilmen, as were some of their oldest friends and political backers, like Kenneth Lay of Enron.^[45][45] Twice in his early years George W. Bush’s oil investment Arbusto (later merged into Harkin Energy) was advanced by Saudi investors (Salim bin Laden, Osama’s father, and Khalid bin Mahfouz of Delta-Nimir), some of whom have been allied with the U.S. oil giants in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan.^[46][46]

Al Qaeda, the KLA in Kosovo, and the Trans-Balkan Pipeline

The U.S. , Al Qaeda and oil company interests converged again in Kosovo. Though the origins of the Kosovo tragedy were rooted in local enmities, oil became a prominent aspect of the outcome. There the al Qaeda-backed UCK or “Kosovo Liberation Army” (KLA) was directly supported and politically empowered by NATO, beginning in 1998.^[47][47] But according to a source of Tim Judah, KLA representatives had already met with American, British, and Swiss intelligence agencies in 1996, and possibly “several years earlier.”^[48][48] This would presumably have been back when Arab Afghan members of the KLA, like Abdul-Wahid al-Qahtani, were fighting in Bosnia .^[49][49]

Mainstream accounts of the Kosovo War are silent about the role of al Qaeda in training and financing the UCK/KLA, yet this fact has been recognized by experts and to my knowledge never contested by them. For example, James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia , said “Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan …. Milosevic is right. There is no question of their [al Qaeda’s] participation in conflicts in the Balkans. It is very well documented."^[50][50] In March 2002, Michael Steiner, the United Nations administrator in Kosovo, warned of "importing the Afghan danger to Europe " because several cells trained and financed by al-Qaeda remained in the region.^[51][51]

As late as 1997 the UCK/KLA had been recognized by the U.S. as a terrorist group supported in part by the heroin traffic.^[52][52] The Washington Times reported in 1999 that

The Kosovo Liberation Army, which the Clinton administration has embraced and some members of Congress want to arm as part of the NATO bombing campaign, is a terrorist organization that has financed much of its war effort with profits from the sale of heroin.^[53][53]

Yet once again, as in Azerbaijan , these drug-financed Islamist jihadis received American assistance, this time from the U.S. Government.^[54][54] At the time critics charged that US oil interests were interested in building a trans-Balkan pipeline with US Army protection; although initially ridiculed, these critics were eventually proven correct.^[55][55]  BBC News announced in December 2004 that a $1.2 billion pipeline, south of a huge new U.S. army base in Kosovo, has been given a go-ahead by the governments of Albania , Bulgaria , and Macedonia .^[56][56] Meanwhile by 2000, according to DEA statistics, Afghan heroin accounted for almost 20 percent of the heroin seized in the United States -- nearly double the percentage taken four years earlier. Much of it is now distributed by Kosovar Albanians.^[57][57]

The closeness of the UCK/KLA to al-Qaeda was acknowledged again in the western press, after Afghan-connected KLA guerrillas proceeded in 2001 to conduct guerrilla warfare in Macedonia . Press accounts included an Interpol report containing the allegation that one of bin Laden´s senior lieutenants was the commander of an elite UCK/KLA unit operating in Kosovo in 1999.^[58][58] This was probably Mohammed al-Zawahiri. The American right wing, which opposed Clinton ’s actions in Kosovo, has transmitted reports “that the KLA's head of elite forces, Muhammed al-Zawahiri, was the brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the military commander for bin Laden's Al Qaeda.”^[59][59] Meanwhile Marcia Kurop in the Wall Street Journal has written that “The Egyptian surgeon turned terrorist leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri has operated terrorist training camps, weapons of mass destruction factories and money-laundering and drug-trading networks throughout Albania , Kosovo , Macedonia , Bulgaria , Turkey and Bosnia .”^[60][60]

According to Yossef Bodansky, director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,

Bin Laden’s Arab `Afghans’ also have assumed a dominant role in training the Kosovo Liberation Army…[by mid-March 1999 the UCK included] many elements controlled and/or sponsored by the U.S. , German, British, and Croatian intelligence services.^[61][61]

The most flagrant and revealing evidence that as late as 2004 some U.S. bureaucratic sectors were still working with veterans of al Qaeda networks came in respect to Haiti :

In 2004 a USAID Report confirmed that "Training and management specialists of the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civilian response unit consisting primarily of former Kosovo Liberation Army members, have been brought to Haiti "^[62][62]

Why would AID bring veterans of the Kosovo Liberation Army, “a major force in international organized crime, moving staggering amounts of narcotics,”^[63][63] to train and manage the Haitian Army, an organization traditionally “corrupted by Colombian cocaine kingpins”?^[64][64] Whatever the answer, it is hard to imagine that AID did not have drugs somehow in mind.

Al Qaeda and the Petroleum-Military Complex

It is important to understand that the conspicuous influence of petroleum money in the administration of two Bush presidents was also prominent under Clinton . A former CIA officer complained about the oil lobby’s influence with Sheila Heslin of Clinton ’s National Security Council staff:

Heslin’s sole job, it seemed, was to carry water for an exclusive club known as the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. . . . Another thing I learned was that Heslin wasn’t soloing. Her boss, Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, headed the inter-agency committee on Caspian oil policy, which made him in effect the government’s ambassador to the cartel, and Berger wasn’t a disinterested player. He held $90,000 worth of stock in Amoco, probably the most influential member of the cartel. . . . The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington .^[65][65]

The oil companies’ meeting with Sheila Heslin in the summer of 1995 was followed shortly by the creation of an interagency governmental committee to formulate U.S. policy toward the Caspian.

The Clinton Administration listened to the oil companies, and in 1998 began committing U.S. troops to joint training exercises in Uzbekistan .^[66][66] This made neighboring countries like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan , wary of Russia , more eager to grant exploration and pipeline rights to American companies.^[67][67]

But Clinton did not yield to Unocal’s strenuous lobbying in 1996 for U.S. recognition of the Taliban, as a condition for building the pipeline from Turkmenistan . Clinton declined in the end to do so, responding instead to the strongly voiced political opposition, especially from women’s groups over the Taliban’s treatment of women.^[68][68]

The three way symbiosis of Al Qaeda, oil companies, and the Pentagon is still visible in the case of Azerbaijan , for example. Now the Pentagon is protecting the Aliyev regime (where a younger Aliyev, in a dubious election, succeeded his father).

The Department of Defense at first proposed that Azerbaijan also receive an IMET [International Military Education and Training] grant of $750,000 and an FMF [Foreign Military Financing] grant of $3 million in 2003 as part of the war on terrorism but later admitted that the funds were actually intended to protect U.S. access to oil in and around the Caspian Sea.^[69][69]

We have seen that, thanks to al Qaeda , U.S. bases have sprung up close to oilfields and pipelines in Uzbekistan , Tajikistan , Georgia , and Kosovo. And as Michael Klare has noted,

Already [U.S.] troops from the Southern Command (Southcom) are helping to defend Colombia’s Cano Limón pipeline….Likewise, soldiers from the European Command (Eurcom) are training local forces to protect the newly constructed Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in Georgia….Finally, the ships and planes of the U.S. Pacific Command (Pacom) are patrolling vital tanker routes in the Indian Ocean, South China Sea, and the western Pacific….Slowly but surely, the U.S. military is being converted into a global oil-protection service.^[70][70]

A survey of U.S. history since World War Two suggests that the United States power state has consistently used the resources of the global drug traffic to further its own ends, particularly with respect to oil, at the expense of the public order and well-being of the American public state.^[71][71] For at least two decades, from Brzezinski’s backing of Hekmatyar in 1979 to Bush’s backing of the Afghan Northern Alliance in 2001, the United States has continued to draw on the resources of drug-trafficking Islamic jihadists who are or were associated at some point with Al Qaeda.

In the next chapter I shall argue that this alliance with al Qaeda terrorists against the United States public order underlies the conspiracy that made 9/11 possible. But we must also look at how the military-petroleum complex came to project long-term military budgets, in the order of a trillion dollars, that its advocates acknowledged that the American public state could not be persuaded easily to support…..

In the absence, that is, of “some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor .”^[72][72]

Peter Dale Scott                     (6,368 words)                          Revised, July 30, 2005