Below an section - from the article "KLA and Drugs: The `New Colombia of Europe' Grows in Balkans by Umberto Pascali (appeared in the June 22, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.) You can find the whole article on the page: WWW.LAROUCHEPUB.COM Bin Laden, Bush, Afghanistan, and Texas Reportedly, Osama's halfbrother, Sheikh Salem M. bin Laden, was in Texas at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, in charge of his family's business. The family is one of Saudi Arabia's richest and most powerful, and owns one the biggest construction companies in the Middle East. Was Salem involved in the most crucial part of the bin Laden Afghan operation, namely, the logistics and supplies? According to a PBS Frontline report, "There was also a political aspect to Salem bin Laden's financial activities.... Salem bin Laden played a role in the U.S. operations in the Middle East and Central America during the '80s." In fact, Salem was gravitating to the highest political, financial, and economic circles in Texas, where he had arrived in 1973. He also started his own air company, Bin Laden Aviation, which was incorporated in Austin. In 1976, he nominated another expert in air transportation, James Bath, as his trustee. As Pete Brewton, Texas' most informed investigative journalist, put it: "[In 1976] Bath got a huge break. He was named as a trustee for Sheikh Salem bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, a member of the family that owns the largest construction company in the Middle East. Bath's job was to handle all of bin Laden's North America investments and operations." Bath was an aircraft broker in Houston, a businessman involved in several private air cargo companies. Apparently, the relation with Salem bin Laden coincided with an escalation of his activities. He bought several planes from Air America, the company reputed to be an intelligence front, and in 1979, became the partner of George W. Bush. Bush's father, the future President, had only recently completed a brief stint in 197677, as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1979, Bath became George W. Bush's partner in an oil company called Arbusto (Spanish for "bush"). As the Progressive Review explained in 1992, "In 1979, George W. Bush begins operations of his oil firm, Arbusto Energy. He assembles several dozen investors in a limited partnership including Dorothy Bush, Lewis Lehrman, William Draper, and James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker who bought several planes from Air America, a CIA front. Bath's firm appears to be owned by Saudi investors. He also was a partowner of a Houston's Main Bank, along with a couple of BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International, later prosecuted and shut down as a moneylaundering bank] figures." Also interesting is another Texas account of this story by Jerry Urban in the Houston Chronicle, June 4, 1992. "The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network—known as FinCEN—and the FBI are reviewing accusations that entrepreneur James R. Bath guided money to Houston from Saudi investors who wanted to influence U.S. policy under the Reagan and Bush Administrations, sources close to the investigations say.... "According to [Bath's former real estate business associate Bill] White, Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role with Saudi Arabia since 1976. Bath has previously denied having worked for the CIA.... Bath received a 5% interest in the companies that own and operate Houston Gulf Airport after purchasing it on behalf of bin Laden in 1977." Salem bin Laden died in a 1988 plane crash. Bin Laden Aviation was immediately dissolved. The PBS Frontline web page, in its report entitled "Origins of the bin Laden Family," said that "Salem bin Laden's accidental death revived some speculation that he might have been 'eliminated' as an 'embarrassing witness.' " Opium War on Russia and West Europe In the years of Salem bin Laden's business activities in Texas and Osama bin Laden's guerrilla activities in Afghanistan, the Afghan "operation" was not seen as embarrassing in the official world of Washington or London. Contrary to the dirty connection of the U.S. National Security Council's Lt. Col. Oliver North with the Nicaraguan Contras, the support for the Afghan "freedom fighters" was official, including substantial funds approved by the U.S. Senate. Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the surrounding area paid a high price for this policy. The country was destroyed not only physically, but also culturally; now, also in the grip of a terrible threeyear drought, it is comparable to Pol Pot's Cambodia. An integral part of the policy was the increase in opium production. The drug addiction statistics available for Pakistan, explain the terrible crime committed there. Pakistan has the highest number of heroin addicts per capita in the world. In 1980, before the start of the Afghan operation, there was virtually no consumption of heroin in Pakistan. In 1988, when the Soviet troops withdrew, Afghanistan and bordering areas in Pakistan were producing about 955 tons of opium per year, onethird of the world's production. A tremendous financial resource was placed in the hands of the Taliban. The opium, refined mostly in Turkey, was smuggled into Europe by the Turkish mafia, which dominated the socalled Balkan Route, previously given the misleading name of the "Bulgarian Connection." Heroin was coming into Europe through Yugoslavia, and part of it was consistently shipped into Italy from Albania and Montenegro. But suddenly, a new organizedcrime cartel emerged, the Albanian mafia, or better, the Kosovo mafia. In 1996, the DEA, in a report prepared for the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee, stressed: "Drugtrafficking organizations composed of ethnic Albanians from Serbia's Kosovo Province were considered to be second only to Turkish groups as the predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan Route. These groups were particularly active in Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Serbia. Kosovan traffickers were noted for their use of violence and for their involvement in international weapons trafficking. There is increasing evidence that ethnic criminals from the Balkans are engaged in criminal activities in the United States and some of that activity involves theft of licit pharmaceutical products for illicit street distribution." In the section on Southwest Asia, the report noted: "Despite the country's political shift to Islamic fundamentalism, Afghanistan maintained its position as the second largest producer of opium in the world." The report pointed out that Afghanistan's opium production went through "six straight years of increases during which the crop more than tripled." It also admitted, that "according to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), total opium production is much higher [than the DEA's figures]. Relying on an incountry survey of Afghan opium poppy farmers, the UNDCP estimates a potential opium yield of 2,336 metric tons from 56,824 hectares of opium poppies." In a euphemistic passage, the DEA's report noticed with disappointment that "despite early pronouncements on their aversion to drug cultivation and production, the Taliban appears to have reached an accommodation with opium poppy farmers." It was much more than an "accommodation," of course. From then on, the Taliban's opium invasion of Europe increased, and with it, the power and the criminal machine of the Kosovo mafia and the KLA skyrocketted as well. Several intelligence reports have stated that bin Laden and his organization, alQaeda, have both trained and financially supported the KLA. Bin Laden has been connected to one of the most prominent "staging areas" for the KLA, before the terrorist organization took over Kosovo with the help of 78 days of air bombing and war by NATO in 1999. The "staging area" is the Albanian town of Tropoje. KLA: From Hoxha to Albright Though the KLA emerged in the international media only at the end of the 1990s, the organization goes back at least to 1982, when the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha—who controlled Albania with an iron fist and a cultlike radicalism from World War II to the early 1980s—was pushing with every means the Greater Albania project. The first modern sponsor of Greater Albania was Hoxha, who called for the union of all Albanians—including Albania, Kosovo, the southern part of Serbia, the northwestern part of Macedonia, the northern part of Greece—especially after the death of Yugoslavia's President Josip Broz Tito in 1980. The Kosovo radical hardcore created international centers in Switzerland, Germany, and other European cities, in addition to Hoxha's Albania. The KLA's original core went through a large number of elaborated MarxistLeninist party names, mixing up the idea of Greater Albania with radical Hoxha thought. They were kept in a state of political suspended animation, with minor spurts of activity, until Bosnia's Dayton Peace Agreement in 1995. Then they were activated to take advantage of the wave of resentment which spread through the Kosovars for having been "left out" of the Dayton agreement (the province had lost its autonomy in 1989, in a Serbian decision pushed through by then emerging leader Slobodan Milosevic). Of course, there were a lot of political activities in Kosovo itself among the ethnic Albanians, but these had nothing to do with the KLA. The Kosovars formed a sort of selfdeclared autonomy under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova and his Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK); Rugova advocates nonviolence and was known as the "Gandhi of the Balkans." Still now in Kosovo, despite the KLA terror regime, Rugova has the support of the ethnic Albanians. However, the KLA usurped Rugova's leadership thanks to two elements: first, the unconditional support of U.S. and British leaders, in particular thenU.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (a protégé of George Soros and Zbigniew Brzezinski) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair; and second, the support of the Kosovo mafia. At the 1999 negotiations supposedly to peacefully settle the turmoil between Serbia and Kosovo, in Rambouillet, France, Albright imposed the young KLA political leader, Hashim Thaci, rumored to be the scion of an important family at the center of organized crime in Kosovo, as the top representative of the ethnic Albanians. Rugova was pushed brutally aside. In fact, the KLA had been engaged for a long time in a "manhunt" against Rugova and his leading officials, using intimidation, violence, even murder. The KLA had dedicated more time and resources to attacking ethnic Albanians around Rugova, than it did to opposing the Serbian regime. As we shall see, the same tactics are being repeated right now in Macedonia. Rugova himself had expressed some perplexity when the KLA began escalating its terror activities, expressing his suspicion that the guerrillas could just be provocateurs, sponsored by Yugoslav President Milosevic, to provide the pretext to bring Kosovo again under control. At the moment of the socalled peace negotiations in Rambouillet, a NATO assault on Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo had already been decided. The use of the KLA gangs inside Kosovo, especially to "triangulate" and guide the air bombings from the ground, had also been decided. The training of the KLA had been going on for a long time. The Colombia of Europe The NATO air campaign increased the power of the Kosovo mafia dramatically, in terms of its criminal activities and its control over the population, by eliminating every obstacle, even the vestige of a narcotics police. The bombing campaign also fed the KLA's predisposition to broaden its area of control, starting with Serbia and Macedonia. One year after the bombing, when many thinktanks made their first thorough analysis, the situation looked appalling. NATO's 78 days of bombings had included the use more than 1,000 aircraft to fly more than 38,000 "sorties" at a cost estimated in the tens of billions dollars. About 40,000 men had been deployed in Kosovo, while reconstruction had not taken place at all. But the KLA, under the NATO umbrella, became the absolute master of Kosovo, and the Kosovo mafia became one of the leading criminal organizations in the world. Another year later, at the beginning of 2001, the KLA was ready to launch its wellorganized expansionist assault on two sovereign countries, Macedonia and Yugoslavia, using NATOadministered Kosovo as its base. Under the ceasefire agreement of June 1999, the KLA was supposed to disarm and disband. The 5,000 KLA guerrillas were to join the unarmed, civil protection Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) under the leadership of the KLA military commander, Agim Cequ. Cequ is a former general in the Croatian army, reportedly trained by Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), a U.S. firm based in Alexandria, Virginia. MPRI includes on its board some of the highestlevel retired U.S. military officers and is specialized in "privately" arming, training, and "advising" foreign governments and foreign groups, including the KLA (see box). The KLA is better armed than ever, according to observers, and based on the findings of secret weapons caches in Kosovo, Serbia, and Macedonia. Evidence is also piling up that the structure of the KLAKPC coincides with that of the Kosovo mafia. The Albrightsponsored Thaci continues to be the political leader of Kosovo, despite the fact that his political adversary, Ibrahim Rugova, can still count on the large majority of the KosovoAlbanian votes. "Kosovo is set to become the cancer center of Europe, as Western Europe will soon discover," stated Marko Nikovic, vicepresident of the New Yorkbased International Narcotic Enforcement Officers Association, speaking to the London Guardian March 13, 2000, one year after the NATO bombing campaign had officially installed the KLA in power in Kosovo. "It is the hardest narcotics ring to crack, because it is all run by families," said Nikovic, who estimated that as of March 2000, the Kosovo mafia was handling between four and a half and five tons of heroin a month, and growing fast, compared with two tons per month before NATO and the KLA took over the province. "It's coming through easier and cheaper, and there is much more of it. The price is going down, and if this goes on, we are predicting a heroin boom in Western Europe, as there was in the early '80s"—i.e., the boom due to the increase in opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Afghanistan war. Sources in the Balkans have confirmed that the Kosovo mafia bosses, divided into four major families, are concentrating even more on Western European and U.S. markets. A highlevel informant admitted, "There is nobody to stop them." "Kosovo is the Colombia of Europe," Nikovic explained. "When Serb police [during the ruthless retaliation for the KLA assassination of Yugoslav police officers, which led to the NATO intervention] were burning houses in Kosovo, they were finding heroin stuffed in the roof. As far as I know there has not been a single report in the last year of KFOR seizing heroin. You have an entire country without a police force that knows what is going on. Everything is worked out on the basis of the family or clan structure—their diaspora have been in Turkey and Germany since Tito's purges, so the whole route is set up. Now they have found the one country between Asia and Europe that is not a member of Interpol." NATO Troops Do Not Police Under the NATO protectorate, Kosovo organizedcrime activities have been left officially undisturbed for a long time. "Generals do not want to turn their troops into cops.... They don't want their troops to get shot pursuing black marketeers," a top NATO official in the Brussels headquarters told a reporter. "The KLA is indebted to Balkan drug organizations that helped funnel both cash and arms to the guerrillas before and after the conflict," according to a report published by the U.S.based Stratfor Global Intelligence on March 3, 2000, entitled "Kosovo: One Year Later." "Kosovo is the heart of a heroin trafficking route that runs from Afghanistan through Turkey and the Balkans and into Western Europe.... The KLA must now pay back the organized crime elements. This would in turn create a surge in heroin traffic in the coming months, just as it did following the NATO occupation of Bosnia in the mid1990s.... The route connecting the Talibanrun opium fields of Afghanistan to Western Europe's heroin market is dominated by the Kosovo Albanians; this 'Balkan Route' supplied 80% of Europe's heroin. The U.S. government has been—and likely continues to be—well aware of the heroin trade coming through Kosovo, as well as the KLA connection.... For the KLA, the Balkan route is not only a way to ship heroin to Europe, but it has also acted as a conduit for weapons filtering into the wartorn Balkans." According to a NATO report which surfaced in June 1999, after the end of the bombings, "the smugglers" either trade drugs directly for weapons or buy weapons with drug earnings in Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Cyprus, Italy, Montenegro, Switzerland, or Turkey. The arsenal of weapons smuggled into Kosovo has included: antiaircraft missiles, assault rifles, sniper rifles, mortars, grenade launchers, antipersonnel mines, and infrared night vision gear. More Powerful Than a State On Feb. 1, 1995, the British Jane's Intelligence Review, considered very close to intelligence circles, wrote an analysis called "The Balkan Medellín," which described a scenario in which Macedonia would became the target of "Albanian narcoterrorism," especially using the "Albaniandominated region of western Macedonia," an area dominated by drug trafficking that makes it much "richer" than the rest of Macedonia. In fact, the Jane's report was pointing to the wellknown fact that the border area between Kosovo, Albania, Serbia proper, and Macedonia has been, at least since the 1970s, an important center for illegal activities. Of course, until the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s there was no border between Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia proper. Albania was a rigidly isolated country; however there were still many relations and exchanges between Albania and the Albanian community in Kosovo. This situation was exploited fully by the Albanian mafia, and Kosovo became an area of choice, because of the ease of running traffic through this province. It was in this crossborder area—including southern Serbia, western Macedonia, and northern Albania, with Kosovo at its center—where the illegal smuggling had established a wellorganized logistical apparatus, that the KLA emerged. This transborder area is also the region that is supposed to constitute "Greater Albania." "The Albaniandominated region of Western Macedonia accounts for a disproportionate share of Macedonia's shrinking GDP," reads the 1995 Jane's report. "This situation has strengthened Albanophobic sentiments among the ethnic Macedonian majority, especially as a great deal of revenue is thought to derive from Albanian narcoterrorism as well as associated gunrunning and crossborder smuggling to and from Albania, Bulgaria and the Kosovo province of Serbia. This rising Albanian economic power is helping to turn the Balkans into a hub of criminality.... [The Albanian mafia is] closely associated to the powerful Sicilian mafia. If left unchecked, this growing Albanian narcoterrorism could lead to a Colombian syndrome in the Southern Balkans, or the emergence of a situation in which the Albanian mafia becomes powerful enough to control one or more states in the region. In practical terms this will involve Albania or Macedonia or both. Politically, this is been done by channeling growing foreignexchange profits from narcoterrorism into local governments and political parties." In other words, the 1995 British report was presenting the scenario that was later on actually implemented by the KLA. As of this writing, in June 2001, what is at stake in the ongoing KLA assault on Macedonia is whether the KLA mafia has become powerful enough to "break away" from its highlevel sponsors, and whether it is ready to take control of Macedonia, after having taken over large part of Albania and the totality of Kosovo. Concerning the Sicilian mafia. It is important to note that a whole new mafia branch has developed with a dramatic accumulation of power, as a direct consequence of the Albanian mafia escalation. It is the mafia based in Apulia, just across the Otranto Canal from Albania. It calls itself Sacra Corona Unità (Holy United Crown). Confirming the existence of an integrated organizedcrime network across the YugoslaviaAlbania borders, later used to develop the KLA structure, was a June 1994 report by The Geopolitical Drug Dispatch. The Dispatch, a French center for research and analysis on drug traffic that advises governments, in a report titled "Guns and Ammo for 'Greater Albania,' " pointed out: "Heroin shipment and marketing networks are taking root among ethnic Albanian communities in Albania, Macedonia and the Kosovo province of Serbia, in order to finance large purchases of weapons destined not only for the current conflict in Bosnia, but also for the brewing war in Kosovo. Hence on May 18, as part of a tenmonthold operation codenamed 'Macedonia,' the Italian police dismantled a major ItalianMacedonian network and seized 40 kilograms of heroin produced in Turkey and shipped to Italy via the Balkans. "In recent months," the report continues, "significant quantities of heroin have been seized in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Greece, from traffickers who usually hail from Pristina (the Kosovo capital), Skopje (capital of Macedonia) or Skorda (a large town in Northern Albania)." Target: Macedonia Nikola Dimitrov, the National Security adviser of Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski, told the March 21, 2001 Newsweek that "Kosovo has become the combined Afghanistan and Colombia of the Balkans. There is no rule of law, no ethnic tolerance, no human rights. Not even an economy, except foreign aid and organized crime." His interviewer, not a Macedonian sympathizer, concluded: "A year ago, that sweeping denunciation would have been easy to dismiss as Slav rhetoric. Now it has begun to sound plausible." The first KLA invasion of Macedonia from Kosovo at the beginning of 2001, had produced a political shock in the country's leadership, especially when their strong protest to NATO was met with evasive statements by the Secretary General, Lord George Robertson, and the other military leaders responsible for Kosovo. Confronted with the dramatic emergency appeals of the Macedonians, the NATO officials repeatedly replied that, first, they were trying to seal the borders, but they really did not see any invasion; second, that Macedonia should react in a peaceful way and try to negotiate with the aggressors; and third, the invasion looked like an internal uprising against the government, and had little to do with outside factors. The attitude of Lord Robertson and his cothinkers was even more insulting because it was known in many quarters, that Tanusevci, the Macedonian village just across the Kosovo border, which the KLA had been occupying for weeks, was one of the "secret" weapons depots that the KLA had already built up at the time of the NATO bombing of Kosovo. Reportedly the Macedonian authorities had been asked to close one or both eyes, because this operation concerned the war against the Serbs and those weapons were never to be used against Macedonia. To illustrate how the military and the criminal sides of the operation are connected, it is enough to point out that the same, very high mountain village of Tanusevci had been for many years one of the smuggling centers to and from Kosovo. In other words, it had been one of the bases of operation for the Kosovo mafia. According to observers, the Kosovo mafia's territorial and logistical structures correspond almost identically to the KLA logistical structure on the ground. Furthermore, the Macedonian authorities knew precisely who the man in charge was for the Tanusevci operation: Xhavit Hasani, an ethnic Albanian born in Tanusevci, who is a KLA member wanted in Macedonia for shooting a policeman. He was also arrested in Kosovo by the KFOR troops following the murder of Serb civilians. On March 18, Prime Minister Georgievski broke the spell that had paralyzed the country after the Tanusevci invasion and made his dramatic denunciation of Western support for the "Taliban of Europe." In that televised appeal to the nation, the Prime Minister said also: "It is not a secret for us that this aggression has been prepared, organized, and conducted with logistics support of parties and structures from Macedonia's northern neighbor. We refer to the political structure from Kosovo. We cannot agree with some assessments that developments in Macedonia are not a result of a spillover of the Kosovo crisis, an aggression from Kosovo against Macedonia. The reason [for this assessment] is very simple: if the international community admits that there is an aggression from Kosovo, then its Kosovo policy for the last two years has been wrong." On March 23, at the summit of the European Union heads of state in Stockholm, Russia President Vladimir Putin gave his support to his Macedonian counterpart, Boris Trajkovski. The KLA attack must be faced "in a robust manner," said Putin, comparing the Macedonian situation to Chechnya. When, in 1996, Russia withdrew its troops from Chechnya, the rebels attacked Dagestan. "Had we not taken adequate measures of reaction, we would have faced much wider problems these days," he said. If unchecked, the KLA terrorism "will create the conditions for shaking Europe in its very heart." More recently, on May 24, Macedonia began to react to the second KLA "shock," the invasion of a group of villages just north of Skopje in the region of Kumanovo. The terrorists used several thousand civilians as "human shields." And what is Kumanovo? One of the main centers for the Kosovo mafia; an area where the mob traditionally enjoys a high level of social control. Reportedly the area has hosted one of the most modern heroinprocessing facilities. The IMF and the Mafia To conclude this overview, it is necessary to emphasize one point: Though the KLA operation had been prepared for many years, and, as we see, its connections are international, the trigger element was represented by the financial, political, and social collapse of Albania in 1997, following the explosion of the infamous financial pyramid scheme. Many Albanians who were told to invest all they had in these cancerous speculation schemes—presented as the epitome of the "free market"—had lost everything in a matter of days. It was a gigantic looting operation of the poorest country in Europe. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had provided the coup de graçe when it demanded that the Albanian government and Parliament not pass an already finalized bill, requiring a "safety" deposit, before engaging in "pyramid" speculation. The crash was mercilessly destructive. Reportedly, the loot ended up in the safe of some very prestigious Western banks. The consequence was an explosive rebellion, the collapse of the state, and the criminalization of a high percentage of the population. Many Albanians became, from one day to the next, refugees, black marketeers, cannon fodder for the mafia clans, ready to do everything to survive. The organizedcrime groups (with close links with the Italian Mafia) rapidly took over the pieces and fed on the misery and destruction of a whole country. Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/