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Blowback chronicles
Giles Foden on the murky deals that fuelled international terrorism
Special report: Afghanistan
Special report: Terrorism in the US
Giles Foden
Saturday September 15, 2001
The Guardian
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, US officials passed
billions in funding and training to the mojahedin. The CIA, in
particular while under the direction of William Casey - head of the
agency during the Reagan administration - was the main manager of
these operations. With the Russian withdrawal in 1989, the CIA
"celebrated its victory with champagne". So says Unholy Wars:
Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism (Pluto Press,
£12.99), the definitive account by ABC journalist John Cooley.
The celebrations, under the presidency of George Bush senior (himself
a former CIA director), were premature. The sophisticated methods
taught to the mojahedin, and the thousands of tonnes of arms supplied
to them by the US - and Britain - are now tormenting the west in the
phenomenon known as "blowback", whereby a policy strategy rebounds on
its own devisers. The sins of the father, it might well be said, are
being heaped on the head of
the son.
Self-laceration may seem the last thing the US needs right now. But the lesson of
these books is th
at only by facing up to its dark past will a beleaguered country be able to create a
future in whic
h terrorist attacks on
this scale can be avoided. The whole issue of American "creation" of bin Laden in the
Frankenstein'
s laboratory of Afghanistan during the 1980s is generally avoided by government
sources. Cooley poi
nts out that while the
State Department released a fact sheet on bin Laden in 1997 (the year prior to the
bombing of the E
ast African embassies), the document "omits the background facts which help to explain
how early an
d close were his connec
tions in the United States - making it easier for the Reagan-Casey jihad team to
enlist his talen
ts and his fortune".
The British military establishment colluded with the US in supporting the mojahedin,
with SAS and G
reen Berets going into Afghanistan itself. As ex-SAS soldier Tom Carew explains in his
Andy McNab-l
ike Jihad: The Secret W
ar in Afghanistan (Mainstream, £7.99), they were inevitably drawn into actual combat.
"We came to a
small hamlet and were stopped by a couple of mojahedin. They asked us, surprisingly
politely, whet
her we would mind helpi
ng them, as their commander had decided he was going to make some kind of stand
against the Russian
s."
As Cooley points out, in this country, "it was only Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's
British gove
rnment which supported the jihad with full enthusiasm". Hindered by Congressional
interference, the
CIA covertly sought Mr
s Thatcher's help - in one incident, during the Falklands war, they curried favour by
handing over
an illegal supply of Stinger missiles to British officials in a Washington car park.
Much of the help given to the mojahedin was coordinated by an MI6 field officer in
Islamabad. It wa
s surely only a matter of time before some of this aid would find its way to the likes
of bin Laden
. Like the covert Briti
sh and American teams, many of which received dollar-for-dollar funding from the Saudi
royal family
, he arrived in Afghanistan directly after the Soviet invasion in 1979. Everyone was
getting along
famously, according to
Cooley. "Delighted by his impeccable Saudi credentials, the CIA gave Osama free rein
in Afghanistan
, as did Pakistan's intelligence generals."
In Ken Connor's Ghost Force: The Secret History of the SAS (Orion, £7.99), it is
claimed that the e
lite regiment actually trained Afghan fighters in remote locations in Scotland. In
Afghanistan itse
lf, the services of K
eenie-Meenie Services were used. This was an offshoot of British security firm Control
Risks, mainl
y comprising ex-SAS members and former members of Rhodesian and South African special
forces. It to
ok its name from the Sw
ahili word for the movement of a snake through grass. KMS later played a role in the
Oliver North,
Iran-Contra affair of 1987.
On American soil, the CIA used Muslim charities and mosque communities as fronts for
recruitment of
fighters in their secret war against the USSR in the Hindu Kush. As Cooley writes in
Unholy Wars
: "One was [in] New Yor
k's Arab district, in Brooklyn along Atlantic Avenue... Another was a private rifle
club in an affl
uent community of Connecticut."
Bin Laden and a man named Mustafa Chalaby, who ran a jihad refugee centre in Brooklyn,
were both pr
otégés of Abdullah Azzam. A formative influence on bin Laden, the charismatic Azzam
was killed in a
car-bomb in 1987: acco
rding to some rumours he was killed by the CIA. Others claim he was himself a CIA
agent.
Cooley says that those directly recruited by the US went to Camp Peary - "the Farm",
as the CIA's s
py training centre in Virginia is known in the intelligence community - in scenes, as
he tells them
, reminiscent of the pr
eparations for the killing of JFK recounted in Don DeLillo's Libra. At the Farm and
other secret c
amps, young Afghans and Arab nationals from countries such as Egypt and Jordan learned
strategic sa
botage skills. Passed d
own to the younger jihad generation which filled the ranks of the bin Laden
organisation, these ski
lls would come back to haunt the US. Simon Reeve's The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef,
Osama bin Laden a
nd the Future of Terror
ism (Deutsch, £17.99) looks at how they were applied at the time of the 1993 attack on
the World Tr
ade Centre and the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam.
In the financial world, too, there is a blowback scenario, given that for years global
banking has
gained considerable benefits from lack of transparency and regulation. BCCI, the
British-Pakistani
bank that was closed do
wn in 1991 after a massive fraud, was a regular route for mojahedin funding, including
that provide
d by Saudi intelligence.
Financing for Pentagon and CIA "black budget" operations - particularly in the era of
William Casey
- also passed through BCCI, as did drug money. Some analysts claim black-budget US
and British ope
ratives flew out opium
on the planes with which they brought in arms. Later, jihad funding came from the
construction-indu
stry coffers of Osama bin Laden and other Muslim "philanthropists". Bin Laden
established his own b
ank, the Al-Shamal Isla
mic, in Khartoum.
In Unholy Wars, Cooley provides convincing evidence that Arab businessman and arms
merchant Adnan
Kashoggi had dealings with bin Laden's father, receiving a $50,000 cheque from him.
Oil broker Roy
Furmark, Cooley says, p
rovided a link between his CIA friend Casey and Kashoggi, introducing the latter to
Manuchehr Ghorb
anifar, "the Iranian middleman who became a central figure in the arms for hostages
and funds for C
ontras deals with Iran,
in which Kashoggi got involved".
Oil itself has long been a factor in the "great game" of Asian geopolitics, one which
brings the ot
her big player in the blowback scenario, Russia, into the picture. As Afghan expert
Michael Griffin
puts it in Reaping the
Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan (Pluto, £19.95): "A trans-Afghan
pipeline would und
ermine Russia's control of energy prices from Central Asia".
Griffin argues that the US under Clinton trimmed its opposition to the Taliban to
gain an advanta
ge in oil politics. By that time, in this high-stakes game of snakes and ladders,
Clinton's success
or was effectively alre
ady in the picture, as the son of a man with close ties to the oil company Unocal,
which wanted to
put a pipeline across Afghanistan. Among their partners in the venture were BP and the
Saudi royal
family. The future was
beginning to cast as heavy a shadow as the past.
Griffin's introduction was penned seven months ago, but what he has to say still makes
sobering rea
ding.
"The accession in the US of President George W Bush... may shed yet fresh light on at
least two cen
tral mysteries of the Taliban ... The first is the extent to which the administration
of Bill Clint
on actively encouraged
its former cold war allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to assemble
and finance a tribal military force to end the misrule of the
mojahedin in the post-Soviet years. The second - of greater
sensitivity - is to provide a coherent explanation for the studied
incompetence of the FBI, CIA and other American intelligence agencies
in addressing the alleged threats posed to the US by Osama bin Laden
and his network. Bush's links with the US energy industry, most
notably Unocal, are, regrettably, more likely to restrict the current
state of knowledge about US policy in Afghanistan in the late 1990s,
than to enlarge it."
Appalling as they are, this week's events may yet begin to force some
dark secrets out into the light.
• Zanzibar, Giles Foden's novel about the US embassy bombings in East
Africa, is published by Faber next year.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001
End<{{{
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