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This program was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: We begin by revisiting our guests’ first book Invisible History; Afghanistan’s Untold Story (See FTR #‘s 678, 680, 683, 685.) Zbigniew Brzezinski–Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser–concocted a scheme to draw the Soviet Union into a war in Afghanistan–the goal being to draw the USSR into their own “Afghanistan.” Seeing Afghanistan as a key to controlling the Earth Island or the World Island (see below), Brzezinski saw using Islamists as proxy warriors to defeat the Soviets.
Next, we examine an article written by our guests. Discussing Zbigniew Brzezinski’s doctrine of controlling Eurasia by controlling the “pivot point” of Ukraine. Fundamental to this analysis is the concept of the Earth Island or World Island as it is sometimes known.
Stretching from the Straits of Gibraltar, all across Europe, most of the Middle East, Eurasia, Russia, China and India, that stretch of land: comprises most of the world’s land mass; contains most of the world’s population and most of the world’s natural resources (including oil and natural gas.) Geopoliticians have long seen controlling that land mass as the key to world domination. The population that occupies the middle of that stretch of geography is largely Muslim.
Utilizing that Muslim population to control the resources of the Earth Island is a stratagem that has been in effect in the West for a century.
Brzezinski utilized that gambit to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan and the presence of Chechen fighters operating under Pravy Sektor administrative command may very well derive from the same concept.
We note that Brzezinski has spawned like-minded progeny: his daughter Mika holds forth on MSNBC and Ian is advocating for a change in the chain of command which would permit the use of nuclear weapons much easier.
In addition to the use of Islamists as proxy warriors, the Muslim Brotherhood’s corporatist economic philosophy has endeared the Chechens, al-Qaeda et al to the transnational corporate elite and associated political and national security elements.
Program Highlights Include:
- Brzezinski’s involvement with the Rockefeller milieu, the Trilateral Commission in particular.
- The effect of the American loss in Vietnam on the formation of Brzezinski’s Afghanistan gambit.
- Review of both Brzezinski’s and Rockefeller protege Henry Kissinger’s historical involvement with the Nazi intelligence milieu imported into the U.S.
- The sleep-walking of the U.S. toward nuclear war.
- Russian military entry into Syria, possibly to neutralize the Islamists now turning up in Ukraine, the Caucasus and elsewhere.
- America’s violation of a promise to Gorbachev not to walk NATO up to the Russian border.
- The inept, economically bankrupt nature of the U.S.-installed government of Ukraine.
- Review of Graham Fuller’s role in precipitating the first Afghan war.
- Review of the Boston Marathon Bombing, which appears to have been “blowback” from an apparent covert operation in the Caucasus.
1. We begin by revisiting our guests’ first book Invisible History; Afghanistan’s Untold Story (See FTR #‘s 678, 680, 683, 685.) Zbigniew Brzezinski–Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser–concocted a scheme to draw the Soviet Union into a war in Afghanistan–the goal being to draw the USSR into their own “Afghanistan.” Seeing Afghanistan as a key to controlling the Earth Island or the World Island (see below), Brzezinski saw using Islamists as proxy warriors to defeat the Soviets. (The gambit of using Muslim combatants as proxy warriors is a longstanding national security tactic, originally crafted by Imperial Germany during World War I.)
2. Next, we examine an article written by our guests. Discussing Zbigniew Brzezinski’s doctrine of controlling Eurasia by controlling the “pivot point” of Ukraine. Fundamental to this analysis is the concept of the Earth Island or World Island as it is sometimes known.
Stretching from the Straits of Gibraltar, all across Europe, most of the Middle East, Eurasia, Russia, China and India, that stretch of land: comprises most of the world’s land mass; contains most of the world’s population and most of the world’s natural resources (including oil and natural gas.) Geopoliticians have long seen controlling that land mass as the key to world domination. The population that occupies the middle of that stretch of geography is largely Muslim.
Utilizing that Muslim population to control the resources of the Earth Island is a stratagem that has been in effect in the West for a century.
Brzezinski utilized that gambit to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan and the presence of Chechen fighters operating under Pravy Sektor administrative command may very well derive from the same concept.
Russia historian Stephen Cohen points to the neoconservative establishment for America’s latest outbreak of what can only be referred to as late-stage imperial dementia. Neocons Robert Kagan and wife Victoria Nuland have certainly done the heavy lifting to make Ukraine the staging ground for what appears to be a NATO blitzkrieg on Moscow. But whatever the determination of the neocon plot, they are only the barking dogs of master imperialist Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose grand design has been creeping over the globe since he stepped into the Oval office as National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter in 1977.
Brzezinski stands apart as the inspiration for the Ukraine crisis. His 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives lays out the blueprint for how American primacists should feel towards drawing Ukraine away from Russia because, “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”
Brzezinski’s obsession derives from British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder’s 1904 definition of the Central-Eastern nations of Europe as the “Pivot Area”, whose geographic position made them “the vital springboards for the attainment of continental domination.” Whether anyone realizes it, the Obama administration’s current campaign against Russia in Ukraine is of Mackinder’s design brought forward by Brzezinski.
To an expert like Stephen Cohen, the Obama administration’s indictment of Russia over Ukraine “doesn’t correspond to the facts and above all it has no logic.” But a look back forty years reveals that a lot of Cold War thinking wasn’t fact-based either and it may now be instructive to look for answers to Washington’s current dose of illogic in the covert origins of the U.S. supported 1970s war for Afghanistan.
As the first Americans to gain access to Kabul after the Soviet invasion for an American TV crew in 1981 we got a close-up look at the narrative supporting President Carter’s “greatest threat to peace since the Second World War” and it didn’t hold up. What had been presented as an open and shut case of Soviet expansion by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes on the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour could just as easily have been defined as a defensive action within the Soviets’ legitimate sphere of influence. Three years earlier, Pipes’Team B Strategic Objectives Panel had been accused of subverting the process of making national security estimates by inventing threats where they didn’t exist and intentionally skewing its findings along ideological lines. Now that ideology was being presented as fact by America’s Public Broadcasting System.
In 1983 we returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation Project Director Roger Fisher for ABC’s Nightline. Our aim was to establish the credibility of the American claims. We discovered from high level Soviet officials that the Kremlin wanted desperately to abandon the war but the Reagan administration was dragging its feet. From the moment they entered office, the Reagan administration demanded that the Soviets withdraw their forces, while at the same time keeping them pinned down through covert action so they couldn’t leave. Though lacking in facts and dripping in right wing ideology, this hypocritical campaign was embraced by the entire American political spectrum and left willfully-unexamined by America’s mainstream media.
At a conference conducted by the Nobel Institute in 1995, a high level group of former US and Soviet officials faced off over the question: Why did the Soviets invade Afghanistan? Former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick established that the U.S. had assigned Afghanistan to the Soviet sphere of influence years before the invasion. So why did the US choose an ideologically biased position when there were any number of verifiable fact-based explanations for why the Soviets had invaded?
To former CIA Director Stansfield Turner, responsibility could only be located in the personality of one specific individual. “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole.” Turner said. “[T]he fact that Brzezinski is a Pole, it seems to me was terribly important.”
What Stansfield Turner was saying in 1995 was that Brzezinski’s well-known hatred of Russia led him to take advantage of the Soviet’s miscalculation. But it wasn’t until the 1998 Nouvel Observateur interview that Brzezinski boasted that he had provoked the invasion by getting Carter to authorize a Presidential finding to intentionally suck the Soviets in six months before they even considered invading.
Yet, despite Brzezinski’s admission, Washington’s entire political spectrum continued to embrace his original false narrative that the Soviets had embarked on a world conquest.
For Brzezinski, getting the Soviets to invade Afghanistan was an opportunity to shift Washington toward an unrelenting hard line against the Soviet Union. By using covert action, he created the conditions needed to provoke a Soviet defensive response which he’d then used as evidence of unrelenting Soviet expansion. However, once his exaggerations and lies about Soviet intentions became accepted, they found a home in America’s imagination and never left.
The Brzezinski-drafted Carter Doctrine put the U.S. into the Middle East with the Rapid Deployment Force, China became engaged as a US military ally and detente with the Soviet Union was dead. The Reagan administration would soon advance on this agenda with a massive military buildup as well as expanded covert actions inside the Soviet Union by the Nationalities Working Group.
The Polish born Brzezinski represented the ascendency of a radical new breed of xenophobic Eastern and Central European intellectual bent on holding Soviet/American policy hostage to their pre-World War II world view. His early support for expanding NATO into Eastern Europe and Ukraine was opposed by 46 senior foreign policy advisors who referred to it in a letter to President Clinton as “a policy error of historic proportions.” Yet in 1999, the Clinton administration, urged on by what Time Magazine described as “Ethnic lobbying groups such as the Polish American Congress,” began implementing the plan.
US policy since that time has operated in a delusion of triumphalism that both provokes international incidents and then capitalizes on the chaos. A destabilizing strategy of sanctions against Russia, the American military’s training of the Ukrainian National Guard, US troops parading armored vehicles within 300 yards of Russia’s border and warlike statements by NATO leaders can only mean the US is committed to Brzezinski’s strategy of seizing the “Pivot Area” and holding it.
Today it’s Brzezinski’s son Ian who finds Moscow at the root of America’s problems regardless of the facts. He recently recommended to the Senate Armed Services Committee that the authority to make war on Russia should be taken out of President Obama’s hands and given to NATO’s top commander, General Phillip Breedlove; a man accused by the German government of exaggerating the Russian threat in eastern Ukraine by spreading “dangerous propaganda”.
The time has come for the American public to be let in on what US foreign policy has become and to decide whether the Brzezinski family’s personal obsession with fulfilling Mackinder’s directive for conquering the pivot of Eurasia at any cost, should be America’s goal as well.
3. We note that Brzezinski has spawned like-minded progeny: his daughter Mika holds forth on MSNBC and Ian is advocating for a change in the chain of command which would permit the use of nuclear weapons much easier.
4. In addition to their utility as proxy warriors in the World Island, our guests note that Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood also favor “corporatist’ economics. For convenience, we review information about this dynamic from previous programs:
Highlighting the comparisons between the Brotherhood’s program and those of Mussolini and Hitler, we note:
. . . . Taking Italy’s choices under Mussolini for inspiration, the economic program set three priorities . . . The social policy foresaw a new law on labor, founded on corporations. This economic program would more directly reveal its relationship to totalitarian ideologies a few years later, with the works of Mohamed Ghazali . . . . Mohamed Ghazali recommended ‘an economic regimen similar to that which existed in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.’ . . . The moral code is also an important component in this program, which is intended to create the ‘new Muslim man.’ . . . The notion of the equality of the sexes is inherently negated by the concept of the supremacy of male social responsibilities. . .the ‘natural’ place of the woman is in the home. . . .
5. About the Muslim Brotherhood’s economic doctrine:
“Islam in Office” by Stephen Glain; Newsweek; 7/3–10/2006.
Judeo-Christian scripture offers little economic instruction. The Book of Deuteronomy, for example, is loaded with edicts on how the faithful should pray, eat, bequeath, keep the holy festivals and treat slaves and spouses, but it is silent on trade and commerce. In Matthew, when Christ admonishes his followers to ‘give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s,’ he is effectively conceding fiscal and monetary authority to pagan Rome. Islam is different. The prophet Muhammad—himself a trader—preached merchant honor, the only regulation that the borderless Levantine market knew. . . .
. . . In Muslim liturgy, the deals cut in the souk become a metaphor for the contract between God and the faithful. And the business model Muhammad prescribed, according to Muslim scholars and economists, is very much in the laissez-faire tradition later embraced by the West. Prices were to be set by God alone—anticipating by more than a millennium Adam Smith’s reference to the ‘invisible hand’ of market-based pricing. Merchants were not to cut deals outside the souk, an early attempt to thwart insider trading. . . . In the days of the caliphate, Islam developed the most sophisticated monetary system the world had yet known. Today, some economists cite Islamic banking as further evidence of an intrinsic Islamic pragmatism. Though still guided by a Qur’anic ban on riba, or interest, Islamic banking has adapted to the needs of a booming oil region for liquidity. In recent years, some 500 Islamic banks and investment firms holding $2 trillion in assets have emerged in the Gulf States, with more in Islamic communities of the West.
British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown wants to make London a global center for Islamic finance—and elicits no howl of protest from fundamentalists. How Islamists might run a central bank is more problematic: scholars say they would manipulate currency reserves, not interest rates.
The Muslim Brotherhood hails 14th century philosopher Ibn Khaldun as its economic guide. Anticipating supply-side economics, Khaldun argued that cutting taxes raises production and tax revenues, and that state control should be limited to providing water, fire and free grazing land, the utilities of the ancient world. The World Bank has called Ibn Khaldun the first advocate of privatization. [Emphasis added.] His founding influence is a sign of moderation. If Islamists in power ever do clash with the West, it won’t be over commerce. . . .
6. In addition to the apparent use of Muslim Brotherhood/Islamist elements as proxy warriors against Russia and China, the Brotherhood’s corporatist economics are beloved to Graham Fuller, as well as corporate elements championed by Grover Norquist. Evidence suggests that the Boston Marathon Bombing was blowback from a covert operation in the Caucasus, not unlike the 9/11 attacks. Fuller’s name crops up prominently in the background of the attacks.
“Chechnyan Power” by Mark Ames; nsfwcorp.com; 6/5/2013.
. . . Fuller comes from that faction of CIA Cold Warriors who believed (and still apparently believe) that fundamentalist Islam, even in its radical jihadi form, does not pose a threat to the West, for the simple reason that fundamentalist Islam is conservative, against social justice, against socialism and redistribution of wealth, and in favor of hierarchical socio-economic structures. Socialism is the common enemy to both capitalist America and to Wahhabi Islam, according to Fuller.
According to journalist Robert Dreyfuss’ book “Devil’s Game,” Fuller explained his attraction to radical Islam in neoliberal/libertarian terms:
“There is no mainstream Islamic organization...with radical social views,” he wrote. “Classical Islamic theory envisages the role of the state as limited to facilitating the well-being of markets and merchants rather than controlling them. Islamists have always powerfully objected to socialism and communism....Islam has never had problems with the idea that wealth is unevenly distributed.” . . . .
7. Fuller has long been an advocate of a “turn to the Brotherhood.”
. . . Some federal agents worry that the Muslim Brotherhood has dangerous links to terrorism. But some U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials believe its influence offers an opportunity for political engagement that could help isolate violent jihadists. ‘It is the preeminent movement in the Muslim world,’ said Graham E. Fuller, a former CIA official specializing in the Middle East. ‘It’s something we can work with.’ Demonizing the Brotherhood ‘would be foolhardy in the extreme’ he warned.” . . .
8. More about the corporatist economic philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood follows. Note that Khairat el-Shater was alleged by Egyptian intelligence to have been running Mohamed Morsi. (We covered this in FTR #787.) In turn, he was reported to be serving as a liaison between Morsi and Mohamed Zawahiri, the brother of Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri. Shater was also networked with: Anne Patterson, U.S. ambassador to Egypt, GOP Senator John McCain and GOP Senator Lidsay Graham. In turn, Shater was alleged to have transferred $50 million from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to Al-Qaeda at the time that he was networking with the Americans and Morsi. Hey, what’s $50 million between friends?
“The GOP Brotherhood of Egypt” by Avi Asher-Schapiro; Salon.com; 1/25/2012.
While Western alarmists often depict Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as a shadowy organization with terrorist ties, the Brotherhood’s ideology actually has more in common with America’s Republican Party than with al-Qaida. Few Americans know it but the Brotherhood is a free-market party led by wealthy businessmen whose economic agenda embraces privatization and foreign investment while spurning labor unions and the redistribution of wealth. Like the Republicans in the U.S., the financial interests of the party’s leadership of businessmen and professionals diverge sharply from those of its poor, socially conservative followers.
The Brotherhood, which did not initially support the revolution that began a year ago, reaped its benefits, capturing nearly half the seats in the new parliament, which was seated this week, and vaulting its top leaders into positions of power.
Arguably the most powerful man in the Muslim Brotherhood is Khairat Al-Shater, a multimillionaire tycoon whose financial interests extend into electronics, manufacturing and retail. A strong advocate of privatization, Al-Shater is one of a cadre of Muslim Brotherhood businessmen who helped finance the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party’s impressive electoral victory this winter and is now crafting the FJP’s economic agenda.
At Al-Shater’s luxury furniture outlet Istakbal, a new couch costs about 6,000 Egyptian pounds, about $1,000 in U.S. currency. In a country where 40 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day, Istakbal’s clientele is largely limited to Egypt’s upper classes.
Although the Brothers do draw significant support from Egypt’s poor and working class, “the Brotherhood is a firmly upper-middle-class organization in its leadership,” says Shadi Hamid, a leading Muslim Brotherhood expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Not surprisingly, these well-to-do Egyptians are eager to safeguard their economic position in the post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite rising economic inequality and poverty, the Brotherhood does not back radical changes in Egypt’s economy.
The FJP’s economic platform is a tame document, rife with promises to root out corruption and tweak Egypt’s tax and subsidies systems, with occasional allusions to an unspecific commitment to “social justice.” The platform praises the mechanisms of the free market and promises that the party will work for “balanced, sustainable and comprehensive economic development.” It is a program that any European conservative party could get behind. . . .
9. We also review the presence of ISIS-linked Chechen fighters in Ukraine, serving under Pravy Sektor administrative command, apparently continuing what we have termed “The Earth Island Boogie”:
Two different types of fascist cadres are operating in tandem in Ukraine–in addition to the OUN/B heirs such as the Pravy Sektor formations, Chechen fighters (almost certainly allied with some element of Muslim Brotherhood) are now fighting alongside them and under the Pravy Sektor administrative command.
The Chechen formations are described as “brothers” of the Islamic State.
Again, the Boston Marathon bombing appears to have been blowback from a covert operation backing jihadists in the Caucasus.
“Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists” by Robert Parry; Consortium News; 7/7/2015.
In a curiously upbeat account, The New York Times reports that Islamic militants have joined with Ukraine’s far-right and neo-Nazi battalions to fight ethnic Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. It appears that no combination of violent extremists is too wretched to celebrate as long as they’re killing Russ-kies.
The article by Andrew E. Kramer reports that there are now three Islamic battalions “deployed to the hottest zones,” such as around the port city of Mariupol. One of the battalions is headed by a former Chechen warlord who goes by the name “Muslim,” Kramer wrote, adding:
“The Chechen commands the Sheikh Mansur group, named for an 18th-century Chechen resistance figure. It is subordinate to the nationalist Right Sector, a Ukrainian militia. … Right Sector … formed during last year’s street protests in Kiev from a half-dozen fringe Ukrainian nationalist groups like White Hammer and the Trident of Stepan Bandera.
“Another, the Azov group, is openly neo-Nazi, using the ‘Wolf’s Hook’ symbol associated with the [Nazi] SS. Without addressing the issue of the Nazi symbol, the Chechen said he got along well with the nationalists because, like him, they loved their homeland and hated the Russians.”
As casually as Kramer acknowledges the key front-line role of neo-Nazis and white supremacists fighting for the U.S.-backed Kiev regime, his article does mark an aberration for the Times and the rest of the mainstream U.S. news media, which usually dismiss any mention of this Nazi taint as “Russian propaganda.” . . .
. . . . Now, the Kiev regime has added to those “forces of civilization” — resisting the Russ-kie barbarians — Islamic militants with ties to terrorism. Last September, Marcin Mamon, a reporter for the Intercept, reached a vanguard group of these Islamic fighters in Ukraine through the help of his “contact in Turkey with the Islamic State [who] had told me his ‘brothers’ were in Ukraine, and I could trust them.”
The new Times article avoids delving into the terrorist connections of these Islamist fighters. . . .
There’s a new #TrumpRussia scandal rumbling through DC but unlike the #RussiaGate of 2016 this scandal involves actual deaths of US troops so it’s potentially a much bigger scandal in the scheme of things: Russia allegedly paid Taliban-linked militants (the Haqqani network) and criminals a bounty for dead US troops. That’s not the scandal for Trump. The scandal for Trump is that this intelligence was apparently presented to Trump and he did nothing about it.
As we’ll see, there are real questions about the nature of the intelligence the scandal is based on, in part because it’s from interrogations of captured Taliban-linked militants. It sounds like the NSA is one of the agencies that was unconvinced about the veracity of the evidence, in part because it tends not to trust intelligence obtained from interrogations. That also implies the NSA couldn’t confirm the allegations from its own electronic intercepts.
It sounds like the US military’s suspicions about the alleged plot to pay bounties for US troops reportedly arose in 2019 following a suicide carbomb attack in April of 2019 that killed three US Marines as they were traveling back to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan and information collected in raids and interrogations. It’s unclear if the interrogations were of Taliban members or criminal elements but we’re told by Gen. Zaman Mamozai, the former police chief of Parwan Province, where Bagram Airfield is, that the Taliban there hire freelancers from local criminal networks, often blurring the lines of who carried out what attacks. We’re also told that Russian operatives have become more aggressive in attempt to contract with the Talbian and the Haqqani network.
So it sounds like this attack on the US marines may have been carried out by criminal networks and/or the Haqqani network and interrogations of those elements led to claims if this Russian/Taliban plot. Based on the NSA’s apparent rejection of this assessment, it would appear that the information from the interrogations played a significant role in these suspicions. We’re also told more sensitive and unspecified intelligence that came in over time contributed to this conclusion but we don’t have more specifics than that. So we know almost nothing about the nature of the intelligence other than that it was based on interrogations.
But there are a couple of details. For example, Russian operatives are said to have met with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar and inside Afghanistan. We’re told it’s not known if the meetings were to discuss bounties. Just that the meetings happened. We’re also told that about $500,000 in cash that was discovered in a Taliban outpost which solidified suspicions that bounties were being paid. So based on those two examples it sounds like a game of ‘connect-the-dots’ was being played to paint a very abstract evidentiary picture of this plot and the evidence was ultimately thin enough that the NSA never signed on to the assessment.
That said, it’s worth recalling the recently revealed plot by Ethan Melzer — the neo-Nazis Satanic member of the Order of the Nine Angles (ONA) — to coordinate with an al Qaeda member to orchestrate an attack on his unit as was traveling in a convoy somewhere around Turkey. Might there an association between the “Taliban-linked militants” allegedly involved with the Afghan plot to kill US troops and the al Qaeda elements Melzer was conspiring with? Who knows, but it’s a possibility worth keeping in mind.
Also recall how Melzer said in the encrypted texts with his co-conspirators that he was trying to spark a new conflict in the Middle East by arranging for his convoy to be attack. It’s the kind of plot that could be particularly relevant for Afghanistan given the context of the Afghan war in 2019, with the US trying to negotiate with the Taliban the terms of the US’s withdrawal from the nearly 20-year old war. Note that those negotiations took place in Doha, so if Russian representatives met with the Taliban in Doha there’s a good chance in the was in the context of those talks.
And that’s all part of what makes this alleged Russian plot so mysterious: would a plot to pay the Taliban — or Taliban-linked militants and criminals — to kill US troops in the context of US talks with the Taliban to negotiate a US withdrawal from the conflict more likely be a plot to drive the US out of Afghanistan faster or to sabotage the talks and keep the US there longer? It’s a pretty important question to answer when it comes to establishing a realistic motive:
“The assessments pointing to a Russian scheme to offer bounties to Taliban-linked militants and criminals were based on information collected in raids and interrogations on the ground in Afghanistan, where American military commanders came to believe Russia was behind the plot, as well as more sensitive and unspecified intelligence that came in over time, an American official said.”
Information collected in raids and interrogations. So it’s more than just a single data point, but it hasn’t been compelling enough to avoid a dispute within the intelligence community over whether or not such a plot actually exists. And while we aren’t told exactly what the dispute is over, it sounds like the NSA still hasn’t been convinced due in part to a wariness of interrogation-based information. And while we don’t know who exactly was captured and interrogated it sounds like it was criminal networks. So this plot allegation appears to be based on the claims of interrogated criminal networks. It’s not exactly rock solid evidence:
And now here’s an AP piece that gives us a few more details on the nature of the evidence behind this plot. Specifically, $500,000 in cash was found in a Taliban outpost and Russia sent a representative to meet the Taliban in Doha, although it isn’t known what they discussed. It’s not exactly compelling evidence on its own so one would hope there’s quite a bit of additional evidence that isn’t being reported. The report also mentions that US officials are claiming that Russian operatives became more aggressive in their desire to contract with the Taliban and members of the Haqqani Network. So the Taliban-linked militants who carried out this plot are presumably members of the Haqqani Network. So it sounds like criminal elements and the Haqqani Network attacked US troops, got captured in raids, and told the US the attacks were part of a Russian/Taliban plot:
“While Russian meddling in Afghanistan is not a new phenomenon for seasoned U.S. intelligence officials and military commandos, officials said Russian operatives became more aggressive in their desire to contract with the Taliban and members of the Haqqani Network, a militant group that is aligned with the Taliban in Afghanistan and that was designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 2012. Russian operatives are said to have met with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar and inside Afghanistan; however, it is not known if the meetings were to discuss bounties.”
Are the Russians contracting the Taliban and Haqqani Network to kill US troops? Well, if so, it’s unclear why since the Taliban and Haqqani Network were attacking US troops anyway. But we’re told that cash found at a Taliban outpost was seen as evidence that the plot is real:
Overall, at this point the big question is whether or not the driving force between this bounty plot allegation was statements that came from criminals and Haqqani Network members captured in raids. Is that the primary basis for these charges or is there something more than just finding cash in an outpost? And it’s that extreme ambiguity over the quality of this intelligence that leaves it very up in the air as to whether or not we’re seeing the first public details of a real Russian plot to pay forces that were already killing US troops to kill more US troops or if we’re seeing another example of why the NSA is suspicious of information gathered from interrogations. And that’s assuming it’s not a neo-Nazi Satanic jihadist plot to reignite the Afghan war.
There’s more reporting on the nature of the allegations about Russia paying the Taliban bounties to kill US troops in Afghanistan. We’re now learning from the New York Times about the figure seen as being at the center of the plot: Rahmatullah Azizi, a low-level drug smuggler who somehow ended up working as a contractor building roads in the Northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz. As we’ll see in the second article below, it was Germany’s coalition forces who hired him. It sounds like Azizi has become noticeably much wealthier in recent years and the source of that wealth remained a mystery, acquiring multiple houses, fancy cars, and even a security detail.
Azizi is accused being one of the key middlemen between the GRU and the Taliban-linked militants, traveling to Russia to pick up GRU cash. Although it sounds like these “Taliban-linked militants” are more like criminals for hire who don’t actually share the Taliban’s ideology. So criminals for hire are the group seen as carrying out the actual attacks on US troops for a bounty.
Around six months ago there were raids to arrest dozens of Azizi’s relatives and associates but Azizi had already fled and was believed to be in Russia. Around half of million dollars in cash was found in one of his homes in Kabul. According to his business associates Azizi then used a regional network of Hawalah’s (informal money-transfer networks popular in the Middle East that are notoriously great for money-laundering) to funnel the cash through regional countries before it would arrive in Afghanistan an be delivered to the militants. The details of how that money was actually dispersed to militants remains unclear. But it sounds like much of these details implicating Azizi in the scheme have come from either associates or Afghan security forces.
We’re told that US intelligence believes it’s the GRU Unit 29155 running the operation. So what is the evidence that Azizi was taking cash from the GRU? That remains entirely unclear. And that gets us to the second set of evidence that the GRU was behind this plot: US intelligence claims that it detected large transfers from GRU bank accounts to Taliban-linked accounts. That’s what we’re told in a separate New York Times report. We’re also told tha the discovery of this direct bank transfer was used as evidence to help reduce the disagreement within the intelligence community over the veracity of these bounty plot.
So the GRU apparently had Azizi — a guy with not obvious Taliban or jihadist ties but instead has been working as a contractor for coalition forces — travel to Russia to collect GRU cash that was then routed around the world using the convoluted hawala system to pay the Taliban-linked militants and obscure the financial flows, but there was also a large financial transfer directly from a GRU bank account to a Taliban-lnked account. It’s an odd juxtaposition of operational security but that’s what we’re being asked to accept as compelling evidence of this plot.
Ok, first, here’s the New York Times piece describing how Rahmatullah Azizi is seen as a key middle-man between the GRU and these criminals for hire:
“Now Rahmatullah Azizi stands as a central piece of a puzzle rocking Washington, named in American intelligence reports and confirmed by Afghan officials as a key middleman who for years handed out money from a Russian military intelligence unit to reward Taliban-linked fighters for targeting American troops in Afghanistan, according to American and Afghan officials.”
A key middleman who for years was running this cash-disbursement network. That’s how US and Afghan officials describe Rahmatullah Azizi. The GRU’s Unit 29155 allegedly ran the operation, where Azizi would collect cash in Russia and then funnel it around the regions with hawalas. The details about how the cash was actually disbursed is unclear:
And note that the groups that were allegedly paid to carry out these attacks weren’t the Taliban. It was criminal networks who often sell their services to several groups at the same time:
And that fact that the criminal networks that apparently carried out these attacks sell their services to different groups at the same time raises an obvious question: how do we know the Taliban was necessarily even involved in this scheme. We’re told that Azizi traveled to Russia to collect cash (allegedly GRU cash) and then use hawalas to distribute it to these criminal networks that are often hired by the Taliban. So where exactly does the Taliban itself come into the actual operation of this network? It’s a particularly relevant question since these bounty-fueled attacks happened when the US was deeply involved in negotiations with the Taliban and the Trump administration had been reach out to Russia for cooperation on the peace talks:
Finally, note that Azizi reportedly didn’t begin to show off his wealth until he established some sort of base in Russia and it was was in recent years that began showing it off. It would be interesting to know the exact timing of this wealth-flaunting in relation to this alleged bounty plot:
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Ok, now here’s a quick excerpt from an TOLO News article (a local Afghanistan news outlet) that includes the additional detail on how Rahmatullah Azizi first got into the contracting business with coalition forces: He was hired by German coalition forces to build roads in Kunduz and formed a construction company in 2008:
“According to the source, Rahmatullah was not stable economically in the initial days the US forces came to Afghanistan, however, later on, he obtained several contracts from the German forces in Kunduz and received a lot of money and then established a construction company in 2008.”
So Rahmatullah Azizi has been building up his contracting business for well over a decade now. It raises a question about the timeline here: since Azizi reportedly got suspiciously wealthy in recent years and acquired multiple houses and fancy cars, when exactly did that happen? Was it just in the last year or two? Or before then? Because we’re being led to believe that Azizi’s sudden wealth was a result of operating has this GRU middleman so we wouldn’t expect Azizi to suddenly get very wealthy until after that arrangement was established withe GRU. Does the timeline reflect that? We’re told above he began showing off his wealth in “recent years”. So has the bounty plot been carried out for “recent years” too? It sounds like it started last year.
Ok, now here’s a New York Times that was published just before the above piece describing the evidence that suggested the GRU is the source of the cash Rahmatullah Azizi has been handing out to these ‘Taliban-linked’ criminal networks: an intercepted electronic data showing large financial transfers from a GRU-controlled bank account to a Taliban-linked account. We aren’t told who controls the Taliban-linked account so the extent of that link to the Taliban remains entirely unclear. Was it an account closely tied to the Taliban or was it an account controlled by one of these criminal networks that sometimes sell their services to the Taliban? We have no idea. But discovering this financial transfer apparently helped reduce the dispute within the US intelligence community over whether or not this plot was real:
“The intercepts bolstered the findings gleaned from the interrogations, helping reduce an earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees. The disclosures further undercut White House officials’ claim that the intelligence was too uncertain to brief President Trump. In fact, the information was provided to him in his daily written brief in late February, two officials have said.”
It was an electronic intercept revealing this GRU transfer that helped resolve the dispute. Recall that it was the NSA that was reportedly skeptical of the intelligence that prompted this entire plot from interrogating detainees, so it would be interesting to know if if was the NSA that obtained that electronic intercept. It would also be interesting to know if this new information actually persuaded the NSA that the plot was real or merely helped to “reduce and earlier disagreement among intelligence analysts and agencies over the reliability of the detainees”, which is the kind of phrasing that suggests a disagreement still exists.
And note that it sounds like like some the funds Azizi — who isn’t named in the report but it’s clearly referring to him — is suspected of helping to distribute were funds associated with these large transfers. It’s someone confusing since we’re told that Azizi traveled to Russia to collect cash and then distribute it via hawalas. Was he obtaining that cashing by withdrawing it from a bank account in Russia? Because that seems like an odd operational decision to transfer from a GRU account to some other Taliban-linked account to get it to Azizi if he’s going to be disbursing cash anyway. Why not just give him the cash and avoid the financial trail?
But that’s what we’re now told to believe: a GRU account transferred money to a Taliban-linked account and Azizi was involved in disbursing those funds by traveling to Russia to collect the cash and then distributed it through hawalas.
Finally, since we’re it behooves us to ask the question of who actually benefited from disrupting the Trump peace talks with the Taliban, it’s worth recalling one major faction that had a huge incentive to see those talks ended and would have been very well poised to create an arrangement with Azizi for paying off criminal elements to attack US troops: the Afghan government which was left out the peace talks and facing an existential threat with the pull-out of US troops. But there’s another set of groups that could be facing a kind of existential threat from the peace deal. Terrorist groups like ISIS that the Taliban agreed to combat as part of the deal. So since criminal and terror groups known to work for the Taliban are the key suspects in these bounty attacks, you have to wonder if those are the groups the Taliban agreed to combat when the US pulls out:
“The deal, signed Feb. 29 in Qatar’s capital, also leaves the Afghan government in a weakened position as it prepares for its own round of talks with the Taliban, according to the Afghan officials and analysts.”
It’s not secret. The Afghan government loathed these peace talks, and understandably so from their perspective because all indications are the country is going to descend into a new round of conflict once the coalition forces leave and if a history is our guide that new round of conflict is probably going to be won by the Taliban:
But there’s another set groups that may have opposed this peace deal too: terrorist groups like ISIS. And as we’ve seen above, it sounds like these ideological terror groups, like non-ideological criminal networks, are the kind of outfits that will sell their services to multiple parties in Afghanistan. So you have to wonder how much interest there was from the various mercenary forces in Afghanistan in seeing those peace talks stopped:
How many different groups inside or outside Afghanistan would have had an interest in disrupting those peace talks? It’s a major question that should be asked in the context of this investigation and it’s unclear why exactly Russia would want to see those talks ended with attacks on US troops. But if someone was indeed hiring these Taliban-linked militants to carry out these attacks during the peace talks it sure seems like derailing the talks would have been a likely motive.
So at this point what we know is that a figure considered central to this plot, Rahmatullah Azizi, started off as a drug smuggler, then became a road building contractor for coalition forces over a decade ago, but somehow became very wealthy in recent years, acquiring a number of mansions and cars and security details. And it’s thought he traveled to Russia to collect cash which gets distributed via Hawalas to the actual paid fighters. Paid fighters that aren’t, themselves, Taliban but instead members of the various criminal elements known to work with the Taliban but not exclusively. The evidence for this plot was initially gathered from interrogated detainees, leading to disagreements in the US intelligence community about the veracity of their claims. But then an electronic intercept detected a large financial transfer from a GRU bank account to a Taliban-linked account and this was seen as reducing that disagreement. All in all, it’s the kind of explanation situation that raises a lot more questions than answers. Questions like why Russia was apparently trying to end the peace talks and ensure the US stays in Afghanistan for as long as possible.