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Build­ing on infor­ma­tion pre­sented in FTR 151, this pro­gram com­pellingly doc­u­ments the involve­ment of the Kosovo Lib­er­a­tion Army, Koso­var orga­nized crime syn­di­cates and the Alban­ian orga­nized crime estab­lish­ment in the drug trade. Much of the KLA’s activ­ity has been funded by the nar­cotics trade, in addi­tion to sup­port drawn from Ger­man and U.S. intel­li­gence. Draw­ing on excel­lent reportage on the sub­ject by San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle reporter Frank Viviano, the pro­gram rein­forces infor­ma­tion pre­sented by Mike Rup­pert in his From the Wilder­ness Newslet­ter. (Mike was the first per­son in the U.S. to report the KLA-drug con­nec­tion.) One of the most impor­tant sec­tions of the pro­gram con­sists of the read­ing of a bril­liant paper on the Balkans war by Pro­fes­sor Michel Chos­su­dovsky of the Uni­ver­sity of Ottawa, spelling out the rela­tion­ship between the KLA, U.S. and Ger­man covert action and the “Balkans route.” The lat­ter is the route trav­eled by much of the heroin reach­ing West­ern Europe and the U.S. Pre­vi­ously dom­i­nated by Turk­ish orga­nized ele­ments, the route is now con­trolled pri­mar­ily by eth­nic Alba­ni­ans. Sig­nif­i­cantly, Viviano, Rup­pert and Chos­su­dovsky point out that, up until shortly before the bomb­ing of Yugoslavia began, sev­eral U.S. offi­cials were pub­licly char­ac­ter­iz­ing the KLA as “ter­ror­ists” and law enforce­ment per­son­nel around the world were decry­ing the KLA and eth­nic Alban­ian par­tic­i­pa­tion in the heroin trade. As noted by Viviano in the Chron­i­cle, Alba­nia itself is dom­i­nated by orga­nized crime. (Europe’s poor­est nation, the coun­try was dev­as­tated by severe con­di­tions imposed by the IMF and has been fur­ther dec­i­mated by mis­man­age­ment and cycli­cal down­turns of the global econ­omy.) With the com­mence­ment of the bomb­ing cam­paign and the Koso­var dias­pora, Alban­ian mafias are edg­ing the Koso­vars out of the “rack­ets,” in addi­tion to cyn­i­cally and bru­tally exploit­ing the refugees’ help­less­ness. Refugees are charged exor­bi­tant fees for basic ser­vices, as they des­per­ately try to rebuild their lives. Devel­op­ing pow­er­ful links with the Sicil­ian Mafia, the Alban­ian syn­di­cates are deeply involved with many other areas of crim­i­nal activ­ity includ­ing: cig­a­rette smug­gling, the tran­sit­ing of refugees to other Euro­pean coun­tries, the arms trade, auto­mo­bile theft, theft of aid from abroad ear­marked for refugees, as well as money laun­der­ing. Pro­gram high­lights include: the Alban­ian mafias’ abduc­tion of young Koso­var women flee­ing the war; the fact that U.S. Army units sta­tioned in Tirana (the Alban­ian cap­i­tal) list “crime” ahead of “Yugoslav forces” as the chief dan­ger to Amer­i­can per­son­nel; the Alban­ian mafias’ sys­tem­atic rob­bery of reporters attempt­ing to cover the war; the prob­a­bil­ity that two-thirds of the auto­mo­biles in the coun­try are stolen; the arrest in Italy of the pres­i­dent of the Alban­ian cen­tral bank for auto theft; the large-scale diver­sion into the black mar­ket of aid intended for Koso­var refugees; the arrest of the Alban­ian “boss of bosses” (wanted for mur­der, among other things) while trav­el­ing with a forged diplo­matic pass­port to par­tic­i­pate in a Euro­pean Par­lia­ment tri­bunal on orga­nized crime; the fact that many parts of Alba­nia have more stolen Kalash­nikovs than peo­ple; the dom­i­na­tion of Alban­ian polit­i­cal life by the crime syn­di­cates; how the influx of large num­bers of refugees involved in crim­i­nal activ­ity serves to strengthen fas­cist polit­i­cal sen­ti­ment in West­ern Euro­pean nations. (Recorded on 5/16/99.)