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The Eurasian Politician - November 2002
by Anssi Kullberg, 12.3.2002
When Yuri Andropov became head of the KGB in 1967, the era of modern terrorism began all over the world. In 1967-1968 left-wing student riots swept over Western Europe, and the red terrorist cells were born, a Lebanese Christian Georges Habash founded the Palestinian terrorist organisation PFLP, and Ernesto "Che" Guevara became a martyr.
Andropov’s close deputy was Semyon Tsvigun, Leonid Brezhnev’s brother-in-law, who later aided the KGB career of his son-in-law Viktor But (Victor Bout). But was probably born in Smolensk in 1967, and he also used the names Viktor Bulakin and Vadim Aminov. He has at least five passports from various countries, and residences around the world.
During the 1960s, Yevgeny Primakov acted as a KGB spy in Egypt, a country that by summer 1968 had become the most important KGB bridgehead in the Middle East. The KGB, however, suffered a bitter defeat in May 1971, when Anwar Sadat purged most of the KGB agents. KGB then allied itself with the Islamist "Muslim Brethren", and Sadat had to pay with his life in 1980. Around these times the connection between the KGB and the present Al-Qaida’s second man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was probably made.
The momentum of left-wing extremism started to be lost everywhere in the West by the end of the 1970s, so the KGB moved its emphasis to the Middle East, where its most important allies were Iraq and South Yemen. Al-Qaida’s third man, Abu Zubaida, who has turned out to be an activist of the Arab socialist Baath party, is a connection from these times. In the Al-Qaida registers captured in Kabul, the Yemenis are the biggest group of terrorists. Also Usama bin Ladin’s family originates in Yemen.
In 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini created the first Islamist state in Iran through the "Islamic revolution". In a couple of years, Moscow became the most important ally and arms provider for Islamist Iran. Soon the Marxist terrorists of the Middle East became Islamists, but their hatred against America remained the same.
In the same year, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The former KGB officer Vasily Mitrokhin revealed in February 2002 that the KGB had used the "false flag" strategy in Afghanistan. It had armed and trained Islamist provocateur groups, who claimed to get support from the CIA. Alone in 1983 as many as 86 such groups were active in Afghanistan. The supervisor was KGB officer V. Kikot from the 8th Dpt. of the Directorate "S". He had previous experience of supervising Palestinian terrorist groups. The KGB infiltrated at least 200 agents into Pakistan, and 110 agents into Iran.
It might be a consequence of KGB infiltration within the Pakistani Intelligence ISI, that the CIA for a long time supported a totally wrong guy: Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was widely believed to be a KGB provocateur, and ever more probably has turned out to be one. Hekmatyar was Usama bin Ladin’s employer in the Afghan war theatre, and he was also bin Ladin’s main Afghan contact. In order to get the support from Arab organisations to be channelled to Hekmatyar, instead of the KGB’s arch enemy Ahmad Shah Massoud, bin Ladin had his mentor, the Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, assassinated, and took over the latter’s organisation, which later became Al-Qaida. The British Intelligence was sharper-sighted than the CIA, and delivered Stingers to the right end-user, Massoud’s mujaheddin.
By the Iran-Iraq war, the KGB sided with Iran, which meant that the KGB-supervised terrorist organisations moved from Iraq to Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. An Iraqi-born member of the PFLP, Hagop Hagopian, had founded already in the 1970s an Armenian terrorist organisation ASALA, which shared training camps with the PFLP, and later with Hizbollah, in the Bekaa Valley in 1977-1982. From 1987 onwards, ASALA was reactivated against the Azerbaijanis, and it moved almost entirely to become "field commanders" in Karabagh, which has since become the most important terrorist hide in the Caucasus.
Taliban was founded around 1994 by two former communists and probable KGB provocateurs, "Mullah Borjan" and "Mullah Omar", none of whom was real mullah. They had been activists of the "Revolutionary Islamic Party". Taliban received its main weaponry from communist generals, who grew up beards and renamed themselves as "Mullahs". Their backgrounds were traced already in 1997 by Stéphane Allix in Le Monde diplomatique.
Many have accused Pakistan and the US for supporting the Taliban, but the crucial support came from Russia. Besides through the communist generals, the support came as direct arms deliveries both overland through Turkmenistan and by air. The air shipments were led by Viktor But.
When the Soviet Union fell apart, the KGB officer But had become an arms dealer. He first served in the UN troops in Angola, but later started profitable arms business to Afghanistan and Africa. In 1995 he appeared in Belgium as an owner of an air cargo company, but from 1997 onwards he traded arms to Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, and from 1998 to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Also Serbia, the Bosnian Serbs, Iraq, Peru, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka etc. got their shares.
From 1997 But was organising the arms shipments to Taliban from the United Arab Emirates. The UN sanctions that ordered all cargo to Afghanistan to be checked, did not bother But’s business, because the Bill Clinton administration’s Russia expert Strobe Talbott had in January 2001 made a last favour to Moscow by arranging that exception was made for Russian planes. Like earlier in Afghanistan, once again the British Intelligence was needed to turn the CIA’s watch to the right track.
In summer 2001, the Pakistani Intelligence captured a fax concerning But’s arms deliveries to the Taliban, using Armenian pilots, from East Africa, under the code "fish from Tanzania". The main origin of But’s arms is Transnistria, the Russian-occupied stripe between Moldova and Ukraine, governed by communist hard-liners. The Finnish chairman of the OSCE mission group on Moldova, Kimmo Kiljunen, reported in September 2001, that "Russia has been properly starting the removal of her arsenals in Moldavian territory".
The Moldavian Intelligence chief Valeriu Pasat, however, warned that Transnistria has become a centre of international terrorism and arms trade, where the active groups include the Turkish terrorist organisation PKK, Hamas, Hizbollah as well as the Muslim Brethren. The supervisor of Transnistria is in fact Yevgeny Primakov, who was appointed to Russian ambassador to Ukraine after having served as the head of the foreign espionage SVR (1991-1996), foreign minister of Russia (1996-1998), and prime minister (1998-1999).
Jane’s Intelligence Review wrote in February that as many as 200 Al-Qaida militants would have smuggled from Pakistan to Ukraine. The smugglers where But’s personnel and the obvious target was Transnistria. But made statements from his five-storey house in Moscow at the same time as the Russian office of Interpol claimed that But was nowhere to be found in Russia. Finally the Russian Ministry of Interior announced that But, although wanted by Interpol, would not be suspected for anything wrong in Russia.
The list of curious coincidences can be extended to the fact that the PKK chief Abdullah "Apo" Öcalan, who had been hiding in Moscow, flew to East Africa in February 1999, before he was caught.
The Kremlin fell into its own trap, when the US pretended to believe the Russian claims that Al-Qaida terrorists were hiding among Chechens in the Pankisi Gorge of Georgia. So the US sent her troops to Georgia, leaving Russia to boil in anger. In fact the members of Al-Qaida did not flee to Pakistan, and to Kashmir or Chechnya neither, but disappeared in good order through Iran to Turkmenistan. Also the provocateur Hekmatyar finally got an order in February to "disappear" from Tehran. This means that more probable hides for Al-Qaida leaders than Pankisi, are Karabah, Transnistria and Abkhazia.