Lis­ten to #498:
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RealAu­dio

Lis­ten to #499:
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Intro­duc­tion: Both FTRs #489 and #499 deal in con­sid­er­able mea­sure with SICO—the European-based hold­ing com­pany for many of the Bin Laden family’s assets. One of the com­pli­cat­ing fac­tors in the 9/11 inves­ti­ga­tions is the fact that there are many dif­fer­ent (and seem­ingly dis­parate) ele­ments involved. Exam­i­na­tion of the event yields infor­ma­tion run­ning in the direc­tion of some of the Iran-Contra drug-smuggling net­works, evi­den­tiary trib­u­taries involv­ing white suprema­cist and neo-Nazi par­tic­i­pants in the events, as well as Saudi and Islamist ele­ments of Al Qaeda. It is Mr. Emory’s con­sid­ered opin­ion that SICO may well hold the key to plac­ing these par­tic­i­pa­tory ele­ments in their proper order and perspective.

Mem­bers of the board of direc­tors of SICO par­tic­i­pated in some of the Iran-Contra-connected drug smug­gling oper­a­tions of the 1980’s. Charles Rochat and Bau­doin Dunand—two SICO directors—liquidated some finan­cial enti­ties in early 2001 (formed in part­ner­ship with Willard Zucker, one of Oliver North’s cronies in the Iran-Contra machinations).

SICO trained pilots for its avi­a­tion sub­sidiary at tiny Huff­man Avi­a­tion in Venice Florida. (Huff­man was the school through which Mohamed Atta and sev­eral of the 9/11 hijack­ers infil­trated the United States.) There are also numer­ous links between the milieu of Huff­man Avi­a­tion and the Iran-Contra-connected drug networks.

SICO direc­tor Bau­doin Dunand set up numer­ous off­shore enti­ties in the 1980’s, which were used for covert oper­a­tions involv­ing Afghan Mujahideen weapons acqui­si­tions, as well as some of the Iran-Contra gam­bits. Dunand is also linked to the milieu of the Bank Al Taqwa, which itself brings together Islamists, “Old Guard” Nazi vet­er­ans of the Third Reich and Ger­man neo-Nazis. Al Taqwa direc­tor Ahmed Huber also main­tains links with Amer­i­can white suprema­cist and neo-Nazi elements.

One of the cen­tral points of the pro­gram con­cerns 16 unpub­lished Clearstream accounts that SICO opened in the spring of 2001. Is there a rela­tion­ship between the open­ing of these accounts and the clos­ing of other finan­cial enti­ties by Rochat and Dunand? Is there a rela­tion­ship between these maneu­vers and the events of 9/11? Rudi Dekkers and com­pany sud­denly came into pos­ses­sion of a con­sid­er­able amount of cash shortly before 9/11. Is there any con­nec­tion between Dekkers’ sud­den largesse and the Clearstream accounts? “Fol­low the Money” was what Water­gate infor­mant Deep Throat told Wash­ing­ton Post reporters Wood­ward and Bern­stein. That advice holds well for the 9/11 investigation.

The pro­gram high­lights Michael Chertoff—the new head of the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity. Chertoff headed up Oper­a­tion Green Quest, the task force charged with inter­dict­ing the flow of ter­ror­ist money world­wide. Chertoff him­self had rep­re­sented and pro­tected Dr. Magdy El-Amir, an appar­ent financier of Al Qaeda.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Details about Rudi Dekkers’ con­tin­u­ing infil­tra­tion of the United States; Chertoff’s role in atten­u­at­ing the very Oper­a­tion Green Quest task force he super­vised; review of the FBI and CIA’s harass­ment of the inves­ti­ga­tors behind the 3/20/2002 Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids; review of Bau­doin Dunand’s rela­tion­ship to Nazi financier Fran­cois Genoud; Genoud’s con­nec­tions to Bank Al Taqwa—a major finan­cial vehi­cle for Al Qaeda; Al Taqwa direc­tor Achmed Huber’s links to Ger­man and Amer­i­can neo-Nazis; Amer­i­can neo-Nazi leader William Pierce’s 1998 fore­shad­ow­ing of the 9/11 attacks; Saudi Arabia’s long­stand­ing rela­tion­ship to Nazis of var­i­ous sorts.

1. One of the main ele­ments of dis­cus­sion in both FTR#498 and FTR#499 is the 9/11 money trail. In that regard, it is worth not­ing that the new head of the Depart­ment of Home­land Security—Michael Chertoff—was in charge of the Oper­a­tion Green Quest task force. Later on in this descrip­tion, we will review Chertoff’s role in atten­u­at­ing the Green Quest inves­ti­ga­tion. The pro­gram reviewed and under­scored a rather pro­nounced con­flict of inter­est. Chertoff’s role as head of Oper­a­tion Green Quest was severely com­pro­mised by his close asso­ci­a­tion with Dr. Magdy El-Amir, accused of help­ing to finance Osama bin Laden. (For more about Chertoff’s rela­tion­ship to Dr. Magdy El-Amir, see FTR#’s 495, 500.)

“Fed­eral Appeals Court Judge Michael Chertoff’s ties to the financiers of the Sept. 11 attacks may pre­vent his con­fir­ma­tion as Home­land Secu­rity Chief. Accord­ing to a June 20, 2000 arti­cle in The Record of Bergen County, New Jer­sey, Chertoff defended accused ter­ror­ist financier Dr. Magdy El-Amir. El-Amir’s HMO was sued by the State of New Jer­sey to recoup $16.7 mil­lion in losses. At least $5.7 mil­lion went ‘to unknown par­ties. . . . by means of wire trans­fers to bank accounts where the ben­e­fi­cial owner of the account is unknown,’ accord­ing to the article.”

(“Secu­rity Risk?” by Melissa John­son and Sander Hicks; Uni­ver­sity Star; 1/20/2005; p. 1.)

2. “For­eign intel­li­gence reports given to then chair­man of the House Inter­na­tional Rela­tions Com­mit­tee Ben Gilman, R-New York, in 1998 accused Magdy El-Amir of hav­ing ‘had finan­cial ties with Osama bin Laden for years,’ accord­ing to an Aug. 2, 2002 ‘Date­line NBC’ broad­cast. In 1999, Magdy El-Amir and brother Mohamed were named sus­pects in Oper­a­tion Dia­mond­back, an FBI/ATF under­cover infil­tra­tion of Pak­istani arms mer­chants who sought to arm Osama bin Laden with con­ven­tional and nuclear weapons, accord­ing to inde­pen­dent researcher and for­mer New Jer­sey police offi­cer Allan Dun­can and taped tran­scripts with FBI infor­mant Randy Glass.”

(Idem.)

3. “Mohamed El-Amir tried to pur­chase ‘small arms and ammu­ni­tion’ in a recorded tele­phone con­ver­sa­tion with Glass, accord­ing to ‘Date­line.’ ‘Date­line’ con­firmed that El-Amir and his cor­po­ra­tions had paid at least $5,000 to Egypt­ian arms dealer Diaa Mohsen, who El-Amir referred to on cam­era as a fam­ily friend. Mohsen was sen­tenced to 30 months for his involve­ment in Oper­a­tion Dia­mond­back. How­ever, El-Amir was never con­victed. Dun­can, who was hired by fam­ily mem­bers of the Sept. 11 vic­tims to research gov­ern­ment ties to the attacks, said the rea­son Magdy El-Amir was never con­victed was because he was never charged with a crime.”

(Idem.)

4. “ ‘By the time Oper­a­tion Dia­mond­back cul­mi­nated in arrests in the sum­mer of 2001, Michael Chertoff was the Assis­tant Attor­ney Gen­eral in charge of the crim­i­nal divi­sion and Oper­a­tion Dia­mond­back would have fallen under his per­vue since it was a crim­i­nal case and not a coun­tert­er­ror­ism case,’ Dun­can said. From 1990 to 1994, Chertoff was U.S. Attor­ney for the Dis­trict of New Jer­sey, dur­ing the period when the first attack on the World Trade Cen­ter took place.”

(Idem.)

5. “Omar Abdel-Rahman preached at the Al Salam mosque and was later arrested for his role in the 1993 World Trade Cen­ter bomb­ing, accord­ing to ‘Date­line.’ Magdy El-Amir was one of the Al Salam mosques finan­cial sup­port­ers. ‘The Jer­sey City area and par­tic­u­larly the Al Salam mosque were allowed to con­tinue to be one of the major hubs of ter­ror­ist activ­ity in the United States,’ Dun­can said.”

(Idem.)

6. Chertoff’s stew­ard­ship of Oper­a­tion Green Quest is high­lighted in this paragraph:

“In Octo­ber 2001, Chertoff was appointed head of Oper­a­tion Green Quest, a multi-agency ini­tia­tive to tar­get sources of fund­ing for ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, accord­ing to a U.S. Cus­toms Ser­vice press release. Chertoff told the Asso­ci­ated Press on Oct. 25, 2001 that, ‘The lifeblood of ter­ror­ism is money, and if we cut the money we cut the blood sup­ply.’ Chertoff served in the capac­ity of Assis­tant Attor­ney Gen­eral of the crim­i­nal divi­sion at the Depart­ment of Jus­tice from 2001 to 2003. . . .”

(Idem.)

7. Green Quest inves­ti­ga­tors from the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity charge that the FBI delib­er­ately sab­o­taged their inves­ti­ga­tions. Michael Chertoff was appar­ently an archi­tect of this, as well. (The text excerpt here is from FTR#462.)

“The FBI-Justice move, pushed by DOJ crim­i­nal Divi­sion chief Michael Chertoff and Deputy Attor­ney Gen­eral Larry Thomp­son, has enraged Home­land Secu­rity offi­cials, how­ever. They accuse the bureau of sab­o­tag­ing Green Quest investigations—by fail­ing to turn over crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion to their agents—and try­ing to obscure a decades long record of lethargy in which FBI offices failed to aggres­sively pur­sue terror-finance cases.”

(“Whose War on Ter­ror?”; Newsweek; 12/10/2003; p. 1 .)

8. With Chertoff in charge of the DHS, it seems prob­a­ble that the inves­ti­ga­tion into Oper­a­tion Green Quest will be sidetracked.

“ ‘They [The FBI] won’t share any­thing with us,’ said a Home­land Secu­rity offi­cial. ‘Then they go to the White House and they accuse us of not shar­ing . . . If they can’t take it over, they want to kill it.’ If noth­ing else, the bat­tle over Green Quest illus­trates the bureau­cratic ten­sions that still plague the war on ter­ror. The cre­ation of the Home­land Secu­rity Depart­ment was sup­posed to put an end to such turf fights. The new depart­ment took over a diverse assort­ment of fed­eral agen­cies that had var­i­ous respon­si­bil­i­ties for com­bat­ing ter­ror­ism, includ­ing the Cus­toms Ser­vice, the Immi­gra­tion and Nat­u­ral­iza­tion Ser­vice and the U.S. Bor­der Patrol.”

(Ibid.; pp. 1–2.)

9. Chertoff’s rela­tion­ship with Magdy El-Amir and his appar­ent role in frus­trat­ing Oper­a­tion Green Quest cast a new light on the harass­ment that Ritz Katz and other Green Quest inves­ti­ga­tors received fol­low­ing the 3/20/2002 Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids. As noted, the milieu of the 3/20/2002-targeted SAAR net­work sig­nif­i­cantly over­laps the GOP’s eth­nic out­reach orga­ni­za­tion and the Bush admin­is­tra­tion. That fact may well explain the FBI’s and CIA’s hos­tile inter­est in the inves­ti­ga­tors of Oper­a­tion Green Quest. The inves­ti­ga­tors who were so harassed included Rita Katz, A.K.A. “Anony­mous.” Again, recall Michael Chertoff’s cen­tral role in this operation.

“The CIA was inves­ti­gat­ing me and the SAAR inves­ti­ga­tors from Green Quest and Cus­toms. The CIA and the FBI inves­ti­gated every­one who had any­thing to do with the SAAR inves­ti­ga­tion. White vans and SUV’s with dark win­dows appeared near all the homes of the SAAR inves­ti­ga­tors. All agents, some of whom were very expe­ri­enced with sur­veil­lance, knew they were being fol­lowed. So was I. I felt that I was being fol­lowed every­where and watched at home, in the super­mar­ket, on the way to work . . . and for what? . . .”

(Ter­ror­ist Hunter by “Anony­mous” [Rita Katz]; CCC [imprint of Harper Collins]; Copy­right 2003 by Harper Collins [HC]; ISBN 0–06-052819–2; p. 328.)

10. Chertoff’s stew­ard­ship of Oper­a­tion Green Quest also casts an inter­est­ing light on the treat­ment accorded Rita Katz and other inves­ti­ga­tors who helped launch the 3/20/2002 Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids:

“ . . . The Cus­toms agents were ques­tioned. So were their super­vi­sors. So was the U.S. attor­ney on the SAAR case. One of the ques­tions they were all asked was whether they’d leaked mate­r­ial to me. They all kept say­ing that this was the most pre­pos­ter­ous idea; they all said that before I came, none of them had the slight­est clue about SAAR and 555. They said that there was noth­ing of value they could give me that I didn’t have already. That it was I who gave them the mate­r­ial, not the other way around. None of the inves­ti­gated par­ties has the slight­est clue as to the real rea­son they were being investigated.”

(Ibid.; p. 329.)

11. “Risk­ing crit­i­cism for being unfound­edly para­noid, I must con­vey my the­ory about the inves­ti­ga­tion and CIA’s involve­ment in it, I don’t know for cer­tain what’s the deal with the CIA inves­ti­gat­ing the SAAR inves­ti­ga­tors, but it sure feels as if some­one up in that agency doesn’t like the idea that the Saudi Ara­bian boat is rocked. The raids on 555 had taken place already—the CIA couldn’t change that—but inves­ti­gat­ing and giv­ing the peo­ple behind the raids a hard time is a most effi­cient way of mak­ing sure the SAAR inves­ti­ga­tion stops there. Which, come to think of it, may be the rea­son the gov­ern­ment looks so unfa­vor­ably on the law­suit filed by 9–11 vic­tims’ fam­i­lies against sev­eral Saudi enti­ties and indi­vid­u­als, accus­ing them of fund­ing ter­ror­ism and seek­ing damages.”

(Idem.)

12. In FTR#498, we exam­ined another block­buster arti­cle from Daniel Hop­sicker. Rudi Dekkers con­tin­ues to suc­cess­fully infil­trate the United States. Recall that Dekkers was the oper­a­tor whose flight school was one of the vehi­cles for the infil­tra­tion of some of the 9/11 hijack­ers into the United States. In par­tic­u­lar, note that the milieu of Dekkers, Atta and com­pany in Florida sig­nif­i­cantly over­lapped some of the Iran-Contra-connected drug routes.

“Rudi Dekkers has been reg­u­larly enter­ing the US ille­gally through the Bahamas, the Mad­Cow­Morn­ingNews has learned. In an effort to evade U.S. Cus­toms scrutiny, the infa­mous Dutch national run­ning the Venice FL. Flight school which both ter­ror­ist pilots who crashed into the World Trade Cen­ter used as ‘cover’ is slip­ping into the U.S. from the Bahamas after exchang­ing clothes with one of the pilots on the char­ter flight which flew to pick him up. Then, wear­ing the char­ter pilot’s uni­form, mul­ti­ple sources con­firm, Dekkers walks through U.S. Customs.”

(“Dekkers ‘Reg­u­larly’ Slips into U.S. Ille­gally from the Bahamas” by Daniel Hop­sicker; Mad Cow Morn­ing News; 1/31/2005; p. 1.)

13. “ ‘Rudi looked like the co-pilot when they landed in the U.S.,’ stated one source. ‘His bags were car­ried through Cus­toms by a female who appeared to be the co-pilot, Christina Hewitt, who flew in with pilot Mar­cus Huber to pick him up, and who then posed as the cus­tomer for the char­ter flight when they went through Cus­toms.’ Huber is a Swiss national; Hewitt is report­edly from Louisiana, and found employ­ment at the Naples Air­port with Dekkers sev­eral years ago ‘clean­ing out the planes, which is quite obvi­ously a job you wouldn’t want just ANYONE doing.’”

(Idem.)

14. “Despite his rep­u­ta­tion as an inter­na­tional oper­a­tor, Dekkers was any­thing but a cool cus­tomer. ‘He had beads of sweat pop­ping out on his fore­head,’ a pilot who picked him up in Nas­sau laugh­ingly related to a friend. ‘He looked so guilty that we were all afraid we were going to get caught.’ Dekkers’ efforts to elude inspec­tion may be partly the result of his noto­ri­ety after the 9/11 attacks. Offi­cials looked on uneasily while his inter­na­tional jaunts con­tin­ued with­out let-up, to des­ti­na­tions which include at least sev­eral recent trips to that narco-traffickers des­ti­na­tion of choice, Colombia.”

(Ibid.; pp. 1–2.)

15. “At least sev­eral of the char­ter flights were report­edly oper­ated by Rex Air, located at the Naples Air­port, and owned by Rex Gasteiger, a Ger­man national who pur­chased a flight school there named Wolf Aero in the late 90’s from Wolf­gang Bohringer, another Ger­man national, and a close friend of Mohamed Atta, accord­ing to Atta’s one-time Amer­i­can girl­friend, Amanda Keller. . . .”

(Ibid.; pp. 1–2.)

16. Next, the dis­cus­sion turns to SICO, the European-based hold­ing com­pany for many of the wealthy Bin Laden family’s assets. A fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant detail con­cern­ing the hijack­ers is the fact that Yeslam bin Laden’s SICO sub­sidiary trained its pilots at Rudi Dekkers’ Huff­man Avi­a­tion in Venice, Florida!! Huff­man is the school at which Atta and com­pany were “trained.” Although he denies it, there are pro­found indi­ca­tions that Yeslam and SICO are involved with the activ­i­ties of Al Qaeda. This sub­ject will be dealt with at greater length below. Note that there are numer­ous con­nec­tions between the milieu of Huff­man Avi­a­tion and the Iran-Contra-connected drug smug­gling routes. Recall that SICO per­son­nel were involved with some of these Iran-Contra drug routes.

“ . . . Swiss police ques­tioned Yeslam [bin Laden] because one of his com­pa­nies, Avcon Air Char­ter, had offered flight train­ing to clients at the Venice flight school attended by some of the hijack­ers. As a result of what Le Monde called ‘a still unex­plained coin­ci­dence,’ the pilots of Yeslam bin Laden’s com­pany trained at Huff­man Avi­a­tion in Florida, the paper stated. ‘I didn’t chose that flight school,’ Yeslam protested. ‘I don’t have con­tact with my half-brother since over 20 years ago.’”

(Wel­come to Ter­ror­land: Mohamed Atta & the 9–11 Cover-Up in Florida by Daniel Hop­sicker; Mad­cow Press [HC]; Copy­right 2004 by Daniel Hop­sicker; ISBN 0–9706591-6–4;. p. 178. Be sure to visit Daniel’s web­site for order­ing infor­ma­tion about this book.)

17. “Swiss mag­a­zine L’Hebdo reported that Swiss fed­eral inspec­tors were seek­ing infor­ma­tion on the activ­i­ties of sev­eral bin Laden fam­ily com­pa­nies, includ­ing Geneva-based Saudi Invest­ment Com­pany, a finan­cial clear­ing­house for the family’s inter­na­tional invest­ments, and Avcon Busi­ness Jets SA, which owned a fleet of pri­vate jets which it leased to clients. . . .”

(Idem.)

18. The pro­gram high­lights the con­tin­u­ing probe into the oper­a­tions of Osama’s half-brother Yeslam bin Laden and Yeslam’s SICO firm. Dis­claimers to the con­trary notwith­stand­ing, there are a num­ber of indi­ca­tions that SICO has been involved in Al Qaeda’s activities.

“A French judge has widened a probe into the finan­cial net­work sur­round­ing the fam­ily of Osama bin Laden after ques­tion­ing his half-brother and learn­ing of a 241 mil­lion euro trans­fer to Pak­istan, Le Monde daily said. Inves­ti­gat­ing mag­is­trate Renaud Van Ruym­beke received court autho­riza­tion to extend his inves­ti­ga­tion after Yeslam bin Laden was ques­tioned on Sept. 27 over alle­ga­tions of links with the orga­niz­ers of attacks in 2001 in the United States, the paper said in its Sat­ur­day edition.”

(“French Mag­is­trate Widens Bin Laden Finance Probe” [Reuters]; 12/25/2004; p. 1.)

19. “As a result, Van Ruym­beke was adding ‘other instances of money laun­der­ing’ to the probe already under way, Le Monde said. The court was unreach­able for com­ment on Sat­ur­day. On Dec. 5, 2001, French author­i­ties opened an inves­ti­ga­tion into finan­cial trans­fers car­ried out through Paris between firms grouped within the Saudi Invest­ment Com­pany (SICO) run by Yeslam bin Laden, who also man­ages some assets of the family’s Saudi Bin­ladin Group (SBG). Yeslam bin Laden was ques­tioned by the French judge in 2002, and has handed over a copy of doc­u­ments detail­ing the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the bin Laden fam­ily wealth to 54 broth­ers and sis­ters after the death of their father in 1967, the paper said.”

(Idem.)

20. It appears that, his dis­claimer to the con­trary notwith­stand­ing, Yeslam has had con­tact with Osama in the past 20 years.

“Although he denied hav­ing had any con­tact with his half-brother for the past 20 years, the paper said, doc­u­ments held by Swiss bank­ing author­i­ties sug­gest that Yeslam and Osama bin Laden held a joint account in Switzer­land between 1990 and 1997, accord­ing to Jean-Charles Brisard—a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor hired by fam­i­lies of the vic­tims of the Sept. 11 attacks. Yeslam told French inves­ti­ga­tors in Sep­tem­ber that he had omit­ted to men­tion the exis­tence of that account, while still insist­ing he had not had mixed with his half-brother, Le Monde said. Yeslam bin Laden’s Swiss-based lawyer, Pierre de Preux, could not imme­di­ately be reached by Reuters for comment. . . .”

(Idem.)

21. “ . . . The French author­i­ties, how­ever, say the facts require fur­ther check­ing. Bris­ard noti­fied Van Ruym­beke on Sept. 6 this year of sev­eral sus­pi­cious funds trans­fers, Le Monde said. The inves­ti­ga­tor noted a 241 mil­lion euro trans­fer made to Pak­istan in 2000 from an account belong­ing to a com­pany called Cam­bridge, a SBG sub­sidiary that was opened at Deutsche Bank in Geneva, the paper added. U.S. author­i­ties are aware of the exis­tence of those funds, which they believe were trans­ferred into an account belong­ing jointly to Osama bin Laden and some­one of Pak­istani nation­al­ity, it said. The French author­i­ties say the pres­ence of SICO within the Saudi Bin­ladin Group’s orbit in Geneva jus­ti­fies its probe, Le Monde added.”

(Idem.)

22. Sus­pi­cions con­cern­ing SICO and Yeslam bin Laden’s involve­ment with the activ­i­ties of Al Qaeda were artic­u­lated in the book Dol­lars for Terror.

“ . . . Very lit­tle infor­ma­tion is pub­licly avail­able on the activ­i­ties of the bin Laden Orga­ni­za­tion. Except for a lux­u­ri­ous brochure that gives an annual report. A Lebanese banker, very anx­ious to pre­serve his anonymity, indi­cated to us that the group does not pub­lish an annual report. He also indi­cated to us that the group has a large sub­sidiary com­pany, Saudi Invest­ment Co. (SICO), whose head office is in Geneva, but which has branches in the other Euro­pean coun­tries, the United States, the Arab coun­tries, and in sev­eral tax havens, includ­ing the Bahamas.”

(Dol­lars for Ter­ror: The United States and Islam; by Richard Labeviere; Copy­right 2000 [SC]; Algora Pub­lish­ing; ISBN 1–892941-06–6; p. 110; visit the Algora Pub­lish­ing website.)

23. Of par­tic­u­lar note is the fact that SICO estab­lished a num­ber of sub­sidiaries in off-shore tax havens. Note that these were cre­ated by Bau­doin Dunand, a mem­ber of the SICO board of direc­tors and, as we will see below, an inti­mate of Nazi oper­a­tive Fran­cois Genoud. Many of these off-shore SICO enti­ties appear to have been used to fund the Afghan Muja­hadeen, as well as fig­ur­ing in some of the Iran-Contra drug-smuggling activ­i­ties. (In AFA#38, we exam­ined the Shakarchi A.G. case—one of the many drug-smuggling oper­a­tions con­nected to the covert oper­a­tions being under­taken by the Rea­gan and Bush admin­is­tra­tions in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.)

“Cre­ated in May 1980 in Switzer­land, SICO (whose stated activ­i­ties are ‘wealth man­age­ment and invest­ment ser­vices’) is directed by Yeslam bin Laden, brother of Bakr bin Laden, the patri­arch of the fam­ily. Its board of direc­tors includes in par­tic­u­lar a Swiss busi­ness lawyer, Bau­doin Dunand, Esq., who also worked for the big Lebanese group William Kazan. A memo from a Euro­pean intel­li­gence agency spec­i­fies that since 1984 this lawyer has cre­ated for SICO numer­ous off-shore com­pa­nies in tax havens. Frank War­ren also sits on the board. He is pres­i­dent of an Amer­i­can sport­ing goods com­pany and a ship­ping com­pany, Pro­teus; [and serves] along with a Swede Kjell Carls­son and two Swiss, Bruny Wyss and Beat­rice Dufour—ex-sister-in-law of Yeslam bin Laden, who divorced Car­men Dufour in May 1997.”

(Ibid.; pp. 110–111.)

24. “Two other branches of the bin Laden Empire devel­oped as hold­ing com­pa­nies. The first, Falken Ltd, is based in the Cay­man Islands, and the sec­ond, also bap­tized SICO, is reg­is­tered in Cura­cao. Falken Ltd. Con­trols SICO-London, which was founded in 1984 and is directed by Beat­rice Dufour, and SICO-Great Britain, cre­ated in 1985, under the direc­tion of Bau­doin Dunand, Esq., SICO-Curacao, whose direc­tor is Yeslam bin Laden, is a player on the real estate mar­ket world­wide. The board also com­prises Saleh bin Laden, Beat­rice Dufour and an Amer­i­can real estate devel­oper, Charles Tickle.” (Ibid.; p. 111.)

25. “The bin Laden empire invested in a pri­vate air­line that offered ser­vices between Great Britain, Switzer­land and Saudi Ara­bia. It employed 175 pilots and had about fifty pieces of equip­ment between 1995 and 1997. At that time, its two prin­ci­pal share­hold­ers were a Swiss busi­ness­man and Yeslam bin Laden, the pres­i­dent of SICO.”

(Idem.)

26. It appears that the off-shore sub­sidiaries may have been involved with the financ­ing of Al Qaeda, after the end of the Soviet occu­pa­tion of Afghanistan.

“While there is noth­ing crim­i­nal in such an orga­ni­za­tional chart, in itself, this is still an exem­plary out­line of the com­plex­ity of the ensem­bles of shell com­pa­nies that can be used to dis­guise what the experts call the ‘legal financ­ing’ of ter­ror­ism, a sort of ‘reverse laun­der­ing’ that takes full advan­tage of all the bank­ing industry’s secrecy. Here, clean money becomes crim­i­nal as it flows through legal com­pa­nies and ‘invest­ments,’ leav­ing no hint to sug­gest that it might later be diverted. It is hard, then, to iden­tify the chinks whereby this money might, nev­er­the­less, leak out to become crim­i­nal. For exam­ple, the Thai intel­li­gence agency affirms that bin Laden’s brother-in-law, Mohamed Jamel Khal­ife, regional man­ager of the Inter­na­tional Islamic Relief Orga­ni­za­tion (IIRO), is used as a screen for the financ­ing of sev­eral Philip­pine Islamist orga­ni­za­tions. Activists from these groups show up in the train­ing camps in Pak­istan and in Afghanistan, and at the Islamic Inter­na­tional Uni­ver­sity of Islam­abad (which is known to be used as a cover for stu­dents eager to acquire a para­mil­i­tary education).”

(Idem.)

27. “The zones of poros­ity are hard to iden­tify pre­cisely. With­out leav­ing a paper trail, the funds are trans­ferred directly into liq­uidi­ties, and the actors are sel­dom caught with their hands in the bag. ‘That is the trou­ble with money,’ explains George Kar­douche, the pres­i­dent of the Asso­ci­a­tion of Arab Bankers in Lon­don. ‘If an hon­or­able com­pany decides to invest in another com­pany, which gives funds to such and such human­i­tar­ian orga­ni­za­tion or char­i­ta­ble asso­ci­a­tion, which itself may trans­fer the funds to extrem­ist groups, there is noth­ing you can do about it. Money is like water, it seeks level ground, there­fore it runs wher­ever it can. . .’”

(Ibid.; pp. 111–112.)

28. The dis­cus­sion high­lights spec­u­la­tion that Osama and Yeslam bin Laden may have been involved in the death of their brother Salem bin Laden.

“The same view­point can be heard in the Geneva busi­ness dis­trict, where the bin Laden Orga­ni­za­tion enjoys a solid bank­ing rep­u­ta­tion, just like SICO, an hon­or­able and above-board orga­ni­za­tion installed in a patri­cian house in the cen­ter of the city of Calvin. While he does not spend most of his time among the financiers and busi­ness lawyers of Geneva, its boss, Yeslam bin Laden, fuels conversations—not only because he con­tin­ues to main­tain con­tact with his famous brother. But espe­cially because of the war that raged at the top of the bin Laden empire.”

(Ibid.; p. 112.)

29. Salem’s death per­mit­ted to Yeslam to accede to the head of SICO, at a time when the off-shore sub­sidiaries were being used to send weapons to Afghanistan.

“ ‘In con­cert with Osama,’ relates a busi­ness­man who hails from one of the Gulf states, ‘Yeslam bin Laden is sus­pected by his own fam­ily of insti­gat­ing the death of his elder brother Salem Mohamed bin Laden. The lat­ter per­ished in a mys­te­ri­ous explo­sion of his pri­vate jet dur­ing take­off at the air­port of Riyadh in 1988. The cause of the explo­sion was never explained, and the Saudi police force abruptly marked the case as clas­si­fied. In Riyadh, it is con­sid­ered that this attack made it pos­si­ble for Yeslam to be pro­pelled to the head of SICO, at the very moment when it was build­ing off­shore com­pa­nies spe­cial­ized in the traf­fic of weapons bound for Afghanistan.’”

(Idem.)

30. “Other sources con­firm this account and the fre­quent meet­ings between Osama and sev­eral of his broth­ers, in Khar­toum and Yemen, start­ing in 1990. It is indeed, by track­ing the par­al­lel traf­fic in arms and drugs that one inevitably finds traces of the ‘Banker of the Jihad.’”

(Idem.)

31. Fol­low­ing analy­sis of SICO’s off-shore sub­sidiaries and their appar­ent role in covert oper­a­tions and the (pos­si­ble) financ­ing of ter­ror­ism, the pro­gram turns to some finan­cial maneu­vers con­ducted by mem­bers of the SICO board of direc­tors in early 2001. Note the pres­ence of the afore­men­tioned Shakarchi broth­ers on the board of SICO. The fol­low­ing pas­sage makes a ref­er­ence to the Shakarchi A.G. case, though not by name.

“The French Swiss Lucien Rouiller was until 2001 not only an advi­sor to the DMI in Coin­trin but he was also an advi­sor to Faisal Finance SA and the Faisal Islamic Bank. At the same time Rouiller was linked to the Geneva-registered MKS Finance SA owned by the Shakarchi broth­ers. In the 1980s Shakarchi Trad­ing sent $25 mil­lion of CIA money to Afghanistan and also was involved in drug money for the Turk­ish mafia. For a time a mem­ber of the fam­ily was rep­re­sented on the advi­sory board of Russell-Wood in Lon­don as well. And this com­pli­cated and many-branched busi­ness was the British branch of the Geneva-registered Saudi Invest­ment Com­pany (SICO). SICO was founded in May 1980 as the Swiss invest­ment cen­ter for the bin Laden fam­ily under the name Cygnet SA and later renamed SICO. It belongs to the Swiss-based Yeslam bin Laden, one of Osama’s many half broth­ers. Yeslam has been zeal­ous in pro­mot­ing the idea that the bin Laden fam­ily has noth­ing to do with Osama. Yet Osama’s [step] mother in the begin­ning of 2001 vis­ited Afghanistan for an expen­sive mar­riage cer­e­mony of her grand­son (which was broad­cast over al-Jazeera) and she speaks reg­u­larly on the phone to Osama. Another half brother of Osama’s, Sheik Ahmad, told CNN how much he admires Osama’s deep piety as well as his deter­mi­na­tion to achieve a goal. And more and more French and Amer­i­can experts are sus­pect­ing finan­cial sup­port from his fam­ily that has eco­nomic con­se­quences. After 9/11 mem­bers of the Caryle Group (which includes George Bush Sr.) asked the bin Laden group to with­draw its invest­ments. Also an invest­ment of at least $20 mil­lion by the bin Laden group in a sis­ter soci­ety of the Deutsche Bank in Lon­don was sud­denly not welcomed.”

(“Report on Islamists, The Far Right, and Al Taqwa” by Kevin Coogan; p. 4.)

32. “The idea that there remained close ties between bin Laden and his fam­ily was most put forth about Yeslam bin Laden who has spent the past 20 years in Switzer­land. It is the Swiss author Richard Labeviere in his 1999 book Dol­lars for Ter­ror that chal­lenged the offi­cial ver­sion that there was a clean break between Osama and the rest of the fam­ily in 1994. Labeviere says that SICO has played a key role in money laun­der­ing but Yeslam bin Laden refuses to respond to the charges and said that it would be a great mis­take to respond, as it would only serve as fur­ther adver­tise­ment for the book. Yet after 9/11 a French report came out with the same infor­ma­tion accus­ing SICO of ties to bin Laden. It essen­tially notes that SICO has so many off­shore struc­tures that it can elude finan­cial super­vi­sion. Five months after inves­ti­ga­tors of the French toll unit Tracfin assem­bled evi­dence regard­ing illicit trans­ac­tions. The direc­tor of the inves­ti­ga­tion, Renaud van Ruym­beke, dis­cussed sus­pi­cious trans­ac­tions between France, Eng­land and the British Vir­gin Islands. Almost on the exact day of this announce­ment two months later the homes and apart­ments as well as Yeslam bin Laden’s com­pany were searched.”

(Idem.)

33. Among the mys­te­ri­ous goings-on in the SICO orbit were a series of short trips Yeslam bin Laden made to Milan:

“Yeslam bin Laden knows his life is now under the micro­scope. Why did he fly, for exam­ple, nine times to Milan? Each stop was so short, reports a mem­ber of the main­te­nance team at the pri­vate For­lanini air­port that it couldn’t be for shop­ping. Six times bin Laden came to Milan from his domi­cile in Cannes and because of EU reg­u­la­tions these flights were con­sid­ered domes­tic and no list of pas­sen­gers was required to be filed. But three times he flew in from Zurich and Ital­ian bor­der police have copies of the pas­sen­ger list. Here there is a puz­zle as one name is “Car­los Rochat” but there is no Car­los Rochat known to inves­ti­ga­tors. How­ever there is a Charles Rochat who is on the SICO advi­sory board. Is this a typo or is there some­one else using a false pass­port? They can’t get an answer from Yeslam bin Laden who is silent on this matter.”

(Ibid.; pp. 4–5.)

34. Fur­ther explor­ing the mys­te­ri­ous hap­pen­ings in and around SICO, the dis­cus­sion high­lights the liq­ui­da­tion of sev­eral finan­cial enti­ties by SICO direc­tors Charles Rochat and Bau­doin Dunand in early 2001. One of the peo­ple with whom Rochat and Dunand were oper­at­ing was Willard Zucker, one of the play­ers in Oliver North’s Iran-Contra machinations.

“It is equally pos­si­ble that bin Laden’s silence about Rochat is meant to avoid other prob­lems that might arise. Such as why Charles Rochat and Bau­doin Dunand, two mem­bers of the SICO advi­sory board who are attor­neys, on May 21, 2001 liq­ui­dated the busi­ness Tyn­dall Trust that had first been reg­is­tered in Villars-sur-Glane near Fri­bourg in Jan­u­ary 1986. They ful­filled the same func­tion for a sis­ter soci­ety of the Tyn­dall Trust that shared the same name and that was opened up in 1990 in Geneva and liq­ui­dated in Jan­u­ary 2001. One of the top man­agers of the Tyn­dall Trust since its found­ing was the Amer­i­can tax attor­ney Willard Zucker who lives in Geneva. Zucker also con­trols the Lake Geneva-registered Com­pag­nie de Ser­vice Fidu­ci­aires (CSF). And CFS had, along with par­tic­i­pa­tion from Tyn­dall Trust, assumed finan­cial man­age­ment for a cor­po­rate group named Enterprise.”

(Ibid.; p. 5.)

35. “Enter­prise, how­ever, had noth­ing to do with the suc­ces­sor com­pany to the 1983-founded suc­ces­sor to the Albert Hakim and U.S. Gen­eral Richard Secord-founded Stan­ford Tech­nolo­gies Trad­ing Group Inter­na­tional (STTGI), which later changed its name to Enter­prise and admin­is­tered secret and ille­gal weapons ship­ments with Iran and the Con­tras. The same Willard Zucker arranged pay­ments from the Enter­prise account for Oliver North. In 1986 the Syr­ian Monzer al-Kassar was paid from an Enter­prise account for a weapons deal with the Con­tras. But al-Kassar was not only one of the world’s great weapons deal­ers. He also had close ties with Islamic fun­da­men­tal­ist and ter­ror­ist groups in the Mid East. Al-Kassar also worked with an inter­na­tional group inter­ested in send­ing toxic and atomic waste mate­ri­als by ship to Mozam­bique.
As for Zucker, he has con­stantly denied that any of his activ­ity on behalf of the Enter­prise group from Amer­ica infringed on Swiss or U.S. law.”

(Idem.)

36. Next, the broad­cast reviews the Clearstream finan­cial net­work. The con­nect­ing links between Clearstream, Al Taqwa, the Banco del Got­tardo and Bin Laden were fur­ther described by one of Clearstream’s founders, Ernest Backes. Note the open­ing of 16 unreg­is­tered accounts by SICO in the spring of 2001. Is there a rela­tion­ship between the liq­ui­da­tion of the finan­cial enti­ties in early 2001 by Rochat, Dunand and Zucker and the open­ing of the Clearstream accounts at approx­i­mately the same time?

Do the 16 unreg­is­tered SICO accounts with Clearstream have any­thing to do with the large amounts of cash that the seem­ingly per­pet­u­ally cash-strapped Rudi Dekkers man­aged to obtain shortly before 9/11?

“In Novem­ber, U.S. author­i­ties named some banks that had bin Laden accounts, and it put them on a black­list. One was Al Taqwa, ‘Fear of God,’ reg­is­tered in the Bahamas with offices in Lugano, Switzer­land. Al Taqwa had access to the Clearstream sys­tem through its cor­re­spon­dent account with the Banca del Got­tardo in Lugano, which has a pub­lished Clearstream account (No. 74381). But Bin Laden may have other access to the unpub­lished sys­tem. In what he calls a ‘spec­tac­u­lar dis­cov­ery,’ Ernest Backes reports that in the weeks before CEO Andre Lussi was forced to leave Clearstream last May, a series of 16 unpub­lished accounts were opened under the name of the Saudi Invest­ment Com­pany, or SICO, the Geneva hold­ing com­pany of the Saudi Bin­laden Group, which is run by Osama’s brother Yeslam Bin­laden (some fam­ily mem­bers spell the name dif­fer­ently.) Yeslam Bin­laden insists that he has noth­ing to do with his brother, but evi­dence sug­gests SICO is tied into Osama’s finan­cial net­work. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] SICO is asso­ci­ated with Dar Al-Maal-Al-Islami (DMI), an Islamic finan­cial insti­tu­tion also based in Geneva and presided over by Prince Muhammed Al Faisal Al Saoud, a cousin of Saudi King Fahd, that directs mil­lions a year to fun­da­men­tal­ist move­ments. DMI holds a share of the Al Shamal Islamic Bank of Sudan, which was set up in 1991 and partly financed by $50 mil­lion from Osama bin Laden. Fur­ther­more, one of SICO’s admin­is­tra­tors, Geneva attor­ney Bau­doin Dunand, is a part­ner in a law firm, Magnin Dunand & Part­ners, that set up the Swiss finan­cial ser­vices com­pany SBA, a sub­sidiary of the SBA Bank in Paris, which is con­trolled by the bin Mah­fouz family.”

(“Bank­ing with Bin Laden” by Lucy Komisar [side­bar to “Explo­sive Rev­e­la­tion$”]; In These Times; 3/15/2002.)

37. Again—is there a rela­tion­ship between Rochat and Dunand’s liq­ui­da­tion of finan­cial enti­ties in early 2001, the open­ing of 16 unreg­is­tered Clearstream accounts by SICO at about the same time and Rudi Dekkers’ sud­den acqui­si­tion of large amounts of cash?

“Because national reporters appar­ently had no clue about his shady local rep­u­ta­tion, and his inabil­ity for six months straight to pay his rent on time, no one ques­tioned how Dekkers had come to be so flush with cash just three weeks before the attack.”

(Wel­come to Ter­ror­land by Daniel Hop­sicker; p. 207.)

38. “But it did strike some peo­ple as strange, like Bill Warner, a pri­vate inves­ti­ga­tor in Sara­sota who made it his busi­ness to delve into Rudi Dekkers’ finan­cial affairs to explain his sud­den pre-9/11 change in liquidity.”

(Idem.)

39. “ ‘Rudi Dekkers some­how came up with $10,000 in late Octo­ber (2001),’ he told us, ‘to finally pay off the woman’s (Nicole Antini) sex­ual harass­ment suit. He also came up with $56,000 in early Novem­ber to pay off another law suit with FH1100 Man­u­fac­tur­ing Corp.’”

(Idem.)

40. “ ‘But he had filed a UCC with M&I Bank North­east for all inven­tory of Huff­man Avi­a­tion way back in March of 2000. So he appears to have had no source of addi­tional financ­ing for this $65,000 cash out­lay in late Octo­ber and early Novem­ber 2001.’”

(Idem.)

41. “ ‘There are enough judg­ments in his name and his com­pa­nies name to paper his office walls,’ said Warner. ‘How do you obtain that much cash under such severe conditions?’”

(Idem.)

42. As noted in the intro­duc­tion to this descrip­tion, SICO’s Bau­doin Dunand was a close friend of and attor­ney for Fran­cois Genoud. Genoud was one of the Third Reich’s most impor­tant under­ground oper­a­tors before, dur­ing and after World War II. (For more about Genoud, see—among other pro­grams—FTR#’s 453, 456.)

“What is even more sur­pris­ing than find­ing out the links between Rochat and Dunand with a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Iran-Contra affair like Zucker is find­ing a con­nec­tion point between Islamic ter­ror­ism and the far right. For it turns out that Bau­doin Dunand was not only the attor­ney for Fran­cois Genoud, the Swiss old Nazi who died in 1996, but also his close friend.”

(“Report on Islamists, The Far Right, and Al Taqwa” by Kevin Coogan; p. 5.)

43. Author Kevin Coogan rumi­nates on the sig­nif­i­cance of the Genoud milieu’s pres­ence in the events of 9/11:

“My own belief is that it is less the appar­ently fan­tas­tic and ‘James Bond’-like qual­ity of this analy­sis that is most dif­fi­cult to under­stand. The real dif­fi­culty is the utter igno­rance of most West­ern­ers (Amer­i­cans in par­tic­u­lar) about the very exis­tence of such peo­ple as Fran­cois Genoud. Thus when Ernst Backes, one of Europe’s lead­ing experts in money laun­der­ing, told the Luxemourg-based eco­nomic jour­nal Plus Minus last year that he believed the finan­cial source of funds for the 9/11 ter­ror­ists would ulti­mately be traced back to Swiss bank accounts estab­lished by Genoud, few Amer­i­cans had any idea what Backes could pos­si­bly be talk­ing about. For this same rea­son there has been vir­tu­ally no inde­pen­dent inves­ti­ga­tion into SICO’s Bau­doin Dunand’s rela­tion­ship to Genoud or (for that mat­ter) the role Syrian-born Muham­mad Mar­dam Bay (believed to be related to a for­mer Syr­ian for­eign min­is­ter) has played both as a mem­ber of Magnin, Dunand & Asso­ciates as well as Bay’s pos­si­ble links with Genoud. And what does it mean when we are told that [Al Taqwa founder] Youssef Nada, for exam­ple, is believed by Egypt­ian author­i­ties to have worked for Ger­man intel­li­gence in World War II?”

(Ibid.; p. 15)

44. The co-chairman of the board of direc­tors of SICO is Bau­doin Dunand, once again, a friend and pro­fes­sional asso­ciate of Fran­cois Genoud. He also was Genoud’s counsel.

“This com­pany, estab­lished by the bin Ladens in 1980, is the flag­ship for the group’s activ­i­ties in Europe. It is headed by Yeslam bin Laden, and the board of direc­tors is made up almost exclu­sively of mem­bers of the fam­ily clan, except for a Swiss cit­i­zen, Bau­doin Dunand. This well-known lawyer from French-speaking Switzer­land, who is on the boards of sev­eral dozen com­pa­nies, came to pub­lic notice in 1983 when he agreed to rep­re­sent the Swiss banker Fran­cois Genoud, a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure who had been a dis­ci­ple of Hitler and sole heir of Goebbels’s copy­rights before becom­ing one of the financiers of the FLN dur­ing the Alger­ian War. The friend­ships of the bin Ladens some­times seem sur­pris­ing, but they are log­i­cal: Fran­cois Genoud has always been pro-Arab.”

(In the Name of Osama Bin Laden; by Roland Jacquard; Copy­right 2002 [SC]; Duke Uni­ver­sity Press; ISBN 0–8223-2991–3; pp. 17–18.)

45. Repris­ing an item of dis­cus­sion from FTR#357, the pro­gram cites the opin­ion of Ernest Backes (one of Europe’s fore­most experts on money laun­der­ing) con­cern­ing the role of Fran­cois Genoud in the devel­op­ment of the events of 9/11. Genoud (who com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1996) was very close to Al Taqwa per­son­ages, espe­cially Achmed Huber. Bank Al Taqwa appears to have played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the financ­ing of Al Qaeda’s activ­i­ties, as well as those of Hamas. Accord­ing to Backes, Genoud was also a finan­cial adviser to the Bin Laden family.

“Finan­cial expert Ernest Backes of Lux­em­bourg has [stud­ied] white-collar crime in the field of bank­ing for many years. Accord­ing to him, there are indi­ca­tions of unusual trans­ac­tions with which the groups [asso­ci­ated with] bin Laden could have earned money. ‘You can, for exam­ple, exam­ine whether, within a cer­tain time period there’s been an attack against the secu­ri­ties of a given air­line com­pany. Since these secu­ri­ties are safe in a ‘clear­ing sys­tem,’ you can’t get an over­all view, who the owner was at a given time.’ . . . Accord­ing to Backes’ infor­ma­tion, the trail leads to Switzer­land, to the accounts of an orga­ni­za­tion that was founded by the late lawyer Fran­cois Genoud and evi­dently still sur­vives. Says Backes, ‘One of the grounds for accu­sa­tion is that this Swiss attor­ney had the clos­est con­nec­tions with the Bin Laden fam­ily, that he was an advi­sor to the fam­ily, one of its invest­ment bankers. It’s known for cer­tain, that he sup­ported ter­ror­ism and was the estate execu­tor for Hitler and part of the ter­ror milieu.’ [Empha­sis added.]”

(“Insid­ergeschäfte vor den Ter­ro­ran­schlä­gen in den USA? [Insider Trad­ing Prior to the Ter­ror Attacks in the US?]: Spec­u­lat­ing on Terror—Who Prof­ited from the Attacks?” by Rolf Bovier & Pierre Matthias; Bay­erische Rund­funk Online (BR-Online); 9/25/2001.)

46. The pro­gram reviews an item of dis­cus­sion from FTR#352. An arti­cle in the San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle con­tains an alle­ga­tion that Fran­cois Genoud is believed to have founded Al Taqwa in order to fund ter­ror­ists such as Car­los the Jackal and Bin Laden.

“Author­i­ties believe Genoud founded Al Taqwa Bank and allo­cated its resources to sup­port inter­na­tional ter­ror­ists such as Vladimir Ilich Ramirez, alias Car­los the Jackal, and Bin Laden.”

(“Swiss Probe Anti-U.S. Neo-Nazi” by Jay Bushin­sky; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 3/12/2002; p. A12.)

47. The broad­cast sets forth some of the back­ground of Nazi/Islamist Ahmed Huber. (Huber is a direc­tor of the Bank Al Taqwa—an alleged Al Qaeda fund­ing con­duit.) Note that Huber is a sig­nif­i­cant ele­ment in the SICO/Dunand/Genoud nexus. Huber was men­tored by old-guard Third Reich vet­er­ans and helped fos­ter oper­a­tional links between neo-fascists and Islamists.

“After spend­ing more time in the Mid­dle East, Huber aban­doned his ear­lier pro-Israeli views with a vengeance. He told the French inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Pierre Pean that in 1965 he began to accept the views of the Egyptian-based Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, who gave Huber ‘a totally dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the his­tory and nature of the Third Reich. The Grand Mufti knew Hitler per­son­ally and actively col­lab­o­rated with the Axis pow­ers in World War II. (The Mufti ws even respon­si­ble for cre­at­ing the Bosnian-based 13th Waf­fen SS Divi­sion that was com­posed of Mus­lim recruits.) Huber fur­ther told Pean that, while he was in Egypt, he also grew close to Johann von Leers, a fanat­i­cal Jew hater, for­mer Nazi Pro­pa­ganda Min­istry offi­cial, and the Grand Mufti’s good friend. Leers had relo­cated to Egypt in the mid 1950’s; where he con­verted to Islam and changed his name to Umar Amin von Leers. He remained in Cairo until his death in 1965, help­ing to direct Nasser’s pro­pa­ganda appa­ra­tus, which reg­u­larly churned out Nazi-like anti-Semitic pro­pa­ganda through­out the Arab world.”

(“The Mys­te­ri­ous Achmed Huber: Friend to Hitler, Allah and Ibn Ladin?” by Kevin Coogan; [orig­i­nally pub­lished in Hit List; April/May 2002]; pp. 1–2. Be sure to check out Coogan’s other essay on Huber, “Achmed Huber, the Avalon Gemein­schaft and the Swiss ‘New Right’”.)

48. Next, the broad­cast high­lights Huber’s rela­tion­ship with key Nazi banker and agent Fran­cois Genoud.

“Back in Switzer­land, Huber next became close friends with the Swiss banker Fran­cois Genoud, whom Huber recalls first meet­ing in ‘pro-Arab asso­ci­a­tions.’ Best known for fund­ing SS butcher Klaus Barbie’s legal defense team, Genoud held the legal copy­right to writ­ings by Hitler, Goebbels and Mar­tin Bor­mann. Genoud, who com­mit­ted sui­cide in 1996, is also believed to have played a key role in the post­war man­age­ment of Nazi funds. In the late 1960’s, he also worked closely with rad­i­cal Pales­tin­ian groups, par­tic­u­larly the ‘Pop­u­lar Front for the Lib­er­a­tion of Pales­tine’ (PFLP). Along with orga­niz­ing legal sup­port for cap­tured PFLP mil­i­tants, he even helped coor­di­nate the PFLP’s hijack­ing of a Lufthansa Boe­ing 747 en route from Delhi to Aden. Through his ties to the PFLP’s leader, Dr. Wadi Had­dad (who affec­tion­ately dubbed him ‘Sheikh Fran­cois’), Genoud befriended Ilyich Ramirez Sanchez, bet­ter known as ‘Car­los the Jackal.’ Both men remained in close con­tact right up to Genoud’s death.”

(Ibid.; p. 2.)

49. Neo-Nazi/Islamist Achmed Huber has appar­ently been active in form­ing work­ing rela­tion­ships between Amer­i­can far-right and Islamist ele­ments as well—a sub­ject that will be explored at greater length below.

“ . . . Recently, he went to Chicago for a dis­creet con­gress that brought together the ‘authen­tic Right and the fight­ers for Islam,’ and he says that ‘major deci­sions were taken . . . the reuni­fi­ca­tion is under way.’”

(Dol­lars for Ter­ror: The United States and Islam; by Richard Labeviere; Copy­right 2000 [SC]; Algora Pub­lish­ing; ISBN 1–892941-06–6; p. 110; visit the Algora Pub­lish­ing website.)

50. Next, the pro­gram reviews a speech made by William Pierce 1998, the pro­gram sets forth the National Alliance leader’s eerie fore­shad­ow­ing of the events of 9/11. (Pierce is the author of The Turner Diaries and Serpent’s Walk, and the series about “Ger­man Cor­po­rate Con­trol of the Amer­i­can Media.”) Pierce spoke of Osama bin Laden attack­ing tall build­ings, such as the World Trade Cen­ter, and the com­ing of bio-terrorism to the U.S. This is but one indi­ca­tion that the rela­tion­ship between Islamists and neo-Nazis sought by Huber had become a reality—whether or not Huber was the one who cemented its gen­e­sis. Note that the National Alliance and the Ger­man NPD (with which Huber is affil­i­ated) are very close.

“Upon perus­ing his speeches from 1998–99, I dis­cov­ered that Pierce, who heads the so-called ‘National Alliance,’ did indeed utter some most inter­est­ing (pre-Sept. 11th–if not prophetic—remarks about Osama bin Laden and bio-terrorism. The run­ning theme in Pierce’s com­men­taries is—to para­phrase his hero Hitler—that Osama Bin Laden’s warn­ing to Amer­ica is ‘I Am Com­ing.’ And so is bio-terrorism.”

(“Neo-Nazis and 9/11” by Jack McCarthy; Coun­ter­punch; 10/29/2001.)

51. Pierce’s com­ments con­sti­tute some­thing very close to the legal require­ment for fore­knowl­edge of the 9/11 attacks:

“In one chill­ing com­men­tary Pierce, (after not­ing that Bin Laden and the rest of the lost gen­er­a­tion of angry Moslem youth had it with their par­ents’ com­pro­mises and were hell bent on revenge against infi­del Amer­ica) issued this stark, prophetic warn­ing in a 1998 radio address titled, ‘Stay Out of Tall Build­ings.’ ‘New York­ers who work in tall office build­ings any­thing close to the size of the World Trade Cen­ter might con­sider wear­ing hard hats . . .’ Pierce warned. . . . [Empha­sis added.]”

(Idem.)

52. Next, the dis­cus­sion reviews some of the “net­work­ing” that has occurred among the house of Saud, the Third Reich, the Dulles broth­ers (prin­ci­pal oper­a­tors in Sul­li­van & Cromwell) and British spy and Nazi agent Jack Philby. With the Saudis as well, we will see their affin­ity for both the “Old Guard” and neo-Nazis. These same ele­ments are promi­nent in the SICO nexus as well.

“This period, stretch­ing from the end of World War I to just after the end of World War II, was char­ac­ter­ized by three very evil men: Jack Philby, a British spy; Ibn Saud, his Arab pro­tégé; and Allen Dulles, an Amer­i­can spy and Wall Street lawyer spe­cial­iz­ing in inter­na­tional finance.”

(The Secret War Against the Jews: How West­ern Espi­onage Betrayed the Jew­ish Peo­ple; John Lof­tus and Mark Aarons; Copy­right 1994 [HC]; St. Martin’s Press; ISBN 0–312-15648–0; p. 21.)

53. “The racist nature of their secret war against Zion­ism does not appear in his­tory books for a sim­ple rea­son. Jack Philby later was paid by West­ern oil com­pa­nies to write pro-Arab pro­pa­ganda dis­guised as his­tory. Ibn Saud is remem­bered as the glo­ri­ous Arab leader who uni­fied Saudi Ara­bia and led the rich­est oil region in the world into part­ner­ship with the West. Philby, if he is remem­bered at all, has the rep­u­ta­tion of a schol­arly British Ara­bist over­shad­owed by his son, Kim, the infa­mous Soviet dou­ble agent.”

(Idem.)

54. “Jack Philby has become an obscure foot­note to the his­tory of the Cold War. But his legacy was far from minor. He is one of the lesser-known but most influ­en­tial per­sons in the mod­ern his­tory of the Mid­dle East, the rene­gade British intel­li­gence agent who plucked an obscure ter­ror­ist out of the desert and helped to make him the king of Saudi Ara­bia. Ibn Saud was very much his cre­ation. Philby stole the infor­ma­tion from British intel­li­gence files that engi­neered Saudi con­trol over the holi­est shrines of the Moslem world.”

(Idem.)

55. “Jack Philby and Ibn Saud betrayed the British Empire and made the Amer­i­can oil com­pa­nies eco­nomic mas­ters of the region. The man who helped them do it was Allen Dulles, an Amer­i­can spy who had befriended Philby while he was coor­di­nat­ing Amer­i­can intel­li­gence gath­er­ing in the Mid­dle East in the first half of the 1920’s.”

(Idem.)

56. “Between them, these three men built the very foun­da­tions of the mod­ern Mid­dle East. They were the archi­tects of the oil weapon, the insti­ga­tors of war, the manip­u­la­tors of his­tory. More impor­tant, Philby’s and Ibn Saud’s polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal alle­giance was to Nazi Ger­many, while much of Dulles’s prof­its came from the same source.”

(Idem.)

57. Review­ing the his­tory of the World Mus­lim Con­gress (founded by the Grand Mufti), the broad­cast details some of its fas­cist history—a his­tory that embod­ies the syn­the­sis of Third Reich-related ele­ments, neo-Nazis and Mid­dle East­ern oil king­dom money. It is this syn­the­sis that is at the foun­da­tion of the ele­ments that we are exam­in­ing in this descrip­tion. (For more about this his­tory, see—among other pro­grams—FTR#’s 367, 369, 404.)

“Another favorite IHR speaker and col­lab­o­ra­tor was Issah Nakleh of the World Mus­lim Con­gress (WMC). Based in Pak­istan, the WMC was ini­tially headed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who, like his friend H. Keith Thomp­son, stood by the Third Reich until his death in 1974. A few years later, the WMC, then headed by Pak­istani Dr. Ina­mul­lah Kahn, mailed Holocaust-denial lit­er­a­ture to every mem­ber of the U.S. Con­gress and the British Par­lia­ment. The WMC’s offi­cial mouth­piece, Mus­lim World, car­ried the ads for The Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion and Henry Ford’s The Inter­na­tional Jew. Dr. Khan’s con­gress also pub­lished Freema­sonry, a book warn­ing that Jews were using lodge mem­bers to extend secret con­trol over reli­gion and society—a para­noid the­ory that has long been pop­u­lar among Lib­erty Lobby sup­port­ers and neo-Nazi groups around the world. Acknowl­edg­ing their polit­i­cal kin­ship, WMC secretary-general Khan sent a let­ter to the Spot­light prais­ing its ‘superb in-depth analy­sis’ and stat­ing that the paper deserved ‘the thanks of all right-minded peo­ple.’ Dr. Khan also served as an advi­sor to the Saudi Ara­bian royal fam­ily, which lav­ished funds on the WMC.

In addi­tion, the Saudi Ara­bian gov­ern­ment retained the ser­vices of Amer­i­can neo-nazi William Grim­stead as a Wash­ing­ton lob­by­ist. . . Soon, the World Mus­lim Con­gress began work­ing closely with U.S. intel­li­gence and Pak­istani mil­i­tary offi­cials, who were covertly sup­port­ing the Afghan mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet-installed regime in Kabul. This effort was strongly endorsed by Dr. Khan, who served for many years as the Pak­istani rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the Nazi-infested World Anti-Communist League, which played an impor­tant role in the Rea­gan administration’s ‘secret war’ in the Golden Crescent.”

(The Beast Reawak­ens; Mar­tin A. Lee; Copy­right 1997 [HC]; Lit­tle, Brown & Co.; ISBN 0–316-51959–6; pp. 225–226.)