The Lies About Taliban Heroin - Light On Light Publishing

Russia and Oil the Real Objectives With Heroin As A Weapon of War

A Replay of CIA’s Vietnam-era Drug Dealing

Sadruddin Aga Khan: mujahideen coordinator

The Anglo-American support apparatus behind the Afghani mujahideen

FTW, October 10, 2001 – The governments of the United States and Britain – along with a lap-dog mainstream media all too willing to regurgitate falsehoods – are feeding us a line of demonstrably inaccurate lies about the Taliban and opium. We are being warned of a “new flood” of al-Q’aeda opium as the war expands. As British Prime Minister Tony Blair boasts, “We will bomb their poppy fields,” he neglects to mention that there aren’t any poppy fields in Taliban controlled areas to bomb. This outrageous deception of the public, in an effort to stir up support for the war effort, is further evidence that most of the rest of the government’s line following the attacks of September 11, is simply not credible.

A simple side-by-side comparison of reports from the UN and the U.S. government, along with major media stories from before and after the Sept. 11 attacks exposes the lie.

Even the U.S. State Department (www.state.gov/www/regions/sa/facts_taliban_drugs.html) acknowledges that in July 2000, Mullah Omar of the Taliban ordered a ban on poppy cultivation in all Taliban controlled regions of Afghanistan. That State Department Fact Sheet, published after Jan 1, 2000, however, expresses U.S. disbelief in the ban’s effectiveness. This position is, however, flatly contradicted by some very credible sources, including Secretary of State Colin Powell. He gave the Taliban $43 million this May to replace the income lost to Afghani farmers as a result of the ban. Their wheat crops had failed due to the drought and they had no money from opium harvests to buy food. The middlemen who had stockpiled the opium had income. But the farmers, who had harvested in the summer of 2000, had already been paid.

In February 2000 citing reports from Agence France-Presse, the AP, and UPI, FTW published a story describing the Taliban’s successful destruction of their poppy crop. We viewed this at the time – possibly incorrectly – as a move by the Taliban to take $90 billion in drug cash out of the western banking system. That sales remained stable, however, is reflected in the fact that heroin prices fell only slightly in 2000. Had Afghanistan stopped selling altogether, then Western Europe, which gets its opium from Afghanistan, would have seen a steep increase in prices. It did not. So why then did Powell give Afghanistan the $43 million? I wish I knew.

Now, based upon new evidence, we know that in 1999 Afghanistan produced a bumper crop of 4,600 metric tons of opium and that this has been verified by a number of sources including the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) as well as in a multitude of press stories. The 2000 harvest was close to 3,300 metric tons. The result, as Colombia expanded poppy cultivation in the late 1990s, and as the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia showed only a minor drop in output, was a glut. Therefore the Taliban’s ban on production would have had the impact of creating a price support by reducing supplies. How successful was the ban and destruction of crops? Well, aside from the above reports, which all indicated that inspections confirming the ban had taken place, consider the following:

On January 3, 2001 an ABC News story, posted on their web site stated, “Pakistan’s Foreign Secretary Inam ul-Haq’s claim to have eliminated all opium plantations in Taliban controlled territories – reported by Agence France-Presse — seems to have been confirmed by a UN survey.

“This development could have several important ramifications for both the geopolitical situation in the region and the world drug trade…

“The center of world drug production will shift from Afghanistan, which accounted for 75 percent of world opium production last year, to Colombia and the Golden Triangle on the border between Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand.

A February 16, 2001 AP story by Kathy Gannon was headlined, “Taliban virtually wipes out opium production in Afghanistan.” It opened with these lines:

“U.N. drug control officers said the Taliban religious militia has virtually wiped out opium production in Afghanistan – once the world’s largest producer – since banning poppy cultivation in July.

“A 12-member team from the U.N. Drug Control Program spent two weeks searching most of the nation’s largest opium-producing areas and found so few poppies that they do not expect any opium to come out of Afghanistan this year.

“‘We are not just guessing. We have seen the proof in the fields,’ said Bernard Frahi, regional director for the U.N. program in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He laid out photographs of vast tracts of land cultivated with wheat alongside pictures of the same fields taken a year earlier – a sea of blood red poppies.

On May 24, 2001 Barry Berak of the New York Times wrote a story entitled, “Taliban Ban on Drug Crops Is Working, U.S. Concludes.” Here are the lead paragraphs:

“ELMAND PROVINCE, Afghanistan, May 20 – This has been heroin’s great heartland, where the narcotic came to life as an opium resin taken from fragile buds of red and white poppies. Last year, 75 per cent of the world’s opium crop was grown in Afghanistan, with the biggest yield sprouting from here in the fertile plains of the country’s south, sustained by the meander of the Helmand River.

“But something astonishing has become evident with this spring’s harvest. Behind the narrow dikes of packed earth, the fields are empty of their most profitable plant. Poor farmers, scythes in hand, stoop among brown stems.

“Mile after mile, there is only a dry stubble of wheat to cut from the lumpy soil…

“But American narcotics officials who visited the country confirmed earlier United Nations reports that the Taliban had, in one growing season, managed a rare triumph in the long and losing war on drugs…”

Before looking at what the press is saying since the WTC attacks, take three facts and lock them firmly in your brain. First, the opium-growing season in the region, according to the UN and other drug monitoring agencies, is a planting in October and November with a harvest in May and June. There have been no crops planted or harvested in Afghanistan or Pakistan since the summer of 2000. The Taliban and farmers have been sustaining themselves by selling stockpiles, with the prices fairly stable since the ban.

Second, Afghanistan, for the last four years, has been suffering under one of the worst droughts in its history. The last year has been the worst.

Third, Central Asian expert, Vladimir Davlatov, writing for “1 world media,” from the Tajikistan capital of Dushnabe, interviewed a General [Rustam Nazarov] in command of Tajik border guards charged with intercepting heroin supplies smuggled out of Afghanistan. The August 31 story (Issue No. 67) quoted the General as saying, “The quality of Afghan heroin has recently deteriorate[d].”

The Propaganda

“The West At War: Drugs Wipeout – We’ll Bomb Poppy Fields – Blair Targets Terror Profits – Poppy fields which supply the Taliban’s multi-billion pound drugs trade are to be a key target of military strikes in Afghanistan” read the headline of a September 30, 2000 story in the British paper, The Sunday Mirror. The story said:

“A senior Downing street aide said: ‘We have reliable information that the Taliban are planning to use money from drugs to finance military action, and that bin Laden has ordered farmers to step up production…” How can they step up production? It takes six months to grow a crop and they have to plant one first. The planting doesn’t start until November. Meantime we’re bombing the region to smithereens. Is this a new form of plowing the soil?

“There is an estimated 3,000 tonnes of opium stockpiled inside Afghanistan …” OK, what have they been selling for the last year, wheat? Mushrooms?

“Flood of Cheap Afghan Heroin,” blazed the headline of a story in the Times of London dated September 25, 2001. The lead sentences of that story read:

“AFGHAN farmers are ready to swamp world markets with heroin amid signs that the Taleban has dropped its ban on opium growing.

“The ban was imposed by Mullah Muhammad Omar last year, leaving many farmers ruined. But the sudden halving of the price of raw opium to $250 a kg suggests the decree has been reversed.” So whose heroin is flooding the markets?

The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and the Washington Post, along with every network, have all reported that the Taliban’s response to U.S. attacks will be to increase heroin production. Strange for a country that is now militarily sealed off and has no remaining operable airfields and whose land borders are now sealed by the U.S. military. That gives a whole new meaning to the term “Thunder Road.”
On September 30 The Chicago Tribune published a story entitled “Panicked Opium Traders Unload Huge Stocks. Implying that it was the Taliban doing so, the story opened with the lead:

“ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Just as the Dow Jones industrial average fell precipitously in the wake of the terrorist attacks in the U.S., so did the main economic marker in the ramshackle street bazaars of Pakistan’s North West Frontier province.

“Traders from Peshawar reported that the price of opium had plunged from $700 a kilo to $90 since September 11…”

There is no mention in the story of the fact that Pakistan itself grows the opium poppy or that the Pakistani government of Musharraf Pervez – our erstwhile ally – has been dependent upon drug money to sustain itself for at least ten years. How come the story doesn’t look to the Pakistani issue?

The Ananova press agency reported on September 29th, “…A Downing Street spokesman says there is evidence of a sudden movement of opium out of neighboring Pakistan where it was being stockpiled.”á Now let me get this straight. The stockpiles are in Pakistan so we’re going to bomb Afghanistan for it. That makes real good sense!
In this most outrageous propaganda of all, the Indian news service PTI in New Delhi, published a story on October 4, headlined, “Laden Planned to Wreak Havoc in U.S. Through Super Heroin.” It’s lead paragraph reads:

“The most wanted terrorist Osama bin Laden had planned to develop a ‘super heroin’ drug and export the same to United States and West Europe to wreak havoc there much before the deadly September 11 attacks. ‘The terror network headed by Osama bin Laden has tried to develop a high-strength form of heroin that it planned to export to United States and Western Europe,” a major American daily said today quoting intelligence reports.”

This is the most patent b.s. I have ever read. I specialized in heroin at LAPD. I was also trained by the DEA in 1976. There is no such thing as super heroin. Heroin is a chemical, diacetyl morphine. Its purest form is 100%. It is usually “cut” at least four times – each time by 50% – to 6.25% purity or less before it is sold on the streets. There is no way to make it stronger unless you just cut it less, which automatically cuts the profits to street vendors. And it is the middlemen and retailers who do the cutting, not the manufacturer. It is easier to smuggle one kilo of pure heroin from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan or Pakistan or Turkey than it is to smuggle eight kilos at 6.25%. It would take eight times as many airplanes and trucks.

Each time a middleman cuts the heroin he has twice as much to sell.

This lie of a story implies that Osama bin Laden controls street-level drug dealing in the United States from the black ghettos of New York and L.A to the white suburbs of San Francisco and Chicago. That’s the only way it is possible to get a higher-strength heroin on the streets of America.

And what about the fact that the U.S. receives – according to the DEA and the Department of Justice – more than 60 per cent of its heroin from Colombia. Does bin Laden control Colombia too?

“Oh Yeah, We Forgot To Tell You”

Only belatedly have major outlets like the Wall Street Journal (Oct. 2), The Associated Press (Oct. 5), and the Washington Post (Oct. 5) begun to acknowledge, in stories placed well back in the paper, and with much less emphasis, that the Northern Alliance – our allies against the Taliban – are now in real control of the heroin trade. Smuggling routes have shifted from south through Pakistan northward through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. They acknowledge the obvious – that the Taliban is no longer the primary supplier of heroin. How could they be?

The Real Story

In March 2001 FTW reported from Moscow that Uzbekistan was “awash” in a sea of poppies. Since September 11 we have seen Uzbekistan not surprisingly become the hub for all U.S. military operations going into Afghanistan. It was, in fact, the very first place that U.S. military and “special operations” forces deployed – within days of the attacks. Unmentioned in press stories is the fact that firms like Southern Air, Evergreen and other CIA proprietary or contract operations have been establishing a presence in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent for more than a year. And Tashkent is a surprisingly modern city. It even has an Intercontinental Hotel. This is undoubtedly due in part to increased oil exploration, but it hauntingly parallels our experience from another era – Vietnam.

Now, as we are hearing the first reports that the Uzbeki government, fighting its own battle against a Muslim insurgency, will permit offensive operations from its military bases, FTW has had two reports that CIA operative Richard Secord has recently traveled to Tashkent. Secord’s documented history of involvement in heroin smuggling, from Vietnam, Laos and Thailand in the 1960’s and his criminal involvement in illegal operations, including drug smuggling during the Iran-Contra years, tells us exactly what is happening. These same intelligence sources have also reported that many other CIA veterans of Iran-Contra and Vietnam – despite their age – are converging on Tashkent like bees to a field of flowers – poppy flowers.

In the 1960’s and 70’s, as the Vietnam War raged, the CIA fostered and maintained a series of covert wars in Laos and Cambodia. They did this by funding their operations with heroin, refined from opium grown by indigenous tribesmen including the Hmong in Laos. The Hmong, in turn became surrogate U.S. armies and the money from the trade supported the CIA and its allies as the region became totally unstable. In the years since, the only difference is that drug money has become a $500-600 billion a year cash flow that is now an essential part of the world banking and financial system because it provides the liquid cash necessary to make the “minimum monthly payments” on huge stock and derivative and investment bubbles in the U.S. and Britain. These bubbles were already bursting in the weeks prior to the September 11 attacks.

Now, as the CIA moves to control the drug trade in the region you can be sure of several things. First, when the world sees an explosion of heroin from the region it won’t be the Taliban’s doing. Second, the cash flows from the smuggling will now be directed through U.S. banks and stocks. That is what the CIA does. Third, those cash flows – as direct air operations from Tashkent to the U.S. become commonplace – will be taken away from Russia, the Balkans, Turkey and Eastern Europe. Fourth, the result of that will be de-stabilization of the entire region. Fifth, destabilization in the region will Balkanize Russia. Sixth, the increasing U.S. military and economic presence will consolidate U.S. control over the vast oil and gas reserves in the region. A revived Unocal-Saudi pipeline project, which will begin construction soon after the U.S. establishes control, will take the oil and gas from Central Asia, through Afghanistan, and down to the Pakistani coast where it will then be sold to China and Japan. The profits from those sales will come back into Wall Street. This will be a further drain on Russian influence in the region and greatly increase global instability.

Throughout the 1990s the United States – under an exclusive arrangement coordinated by the Harvard Endowment, Goldman Sachs and the U.S Treasury – looted some $300 billion from Russia. During the period from 1989-2001 the population of that country shrank from 165 to 145 million people. As infrastructure collapsed, as services disappeared, as unemployment skyrocketed, as the Ruble collapsed, the life expectancy for a Russian male dropped from 68 to 48 years.

Make no mistake. Russia is the target here just as much as is the propping up of a feeble U.S. economy with drug money. And remember that Russia still has most of its nuclear arsenal intact.

This article appears in the October 13, 1995 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Sadruddin Aga Khan:
mujahideen coordinator

by Scott Thompson and Joseph Brewda

Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, the second son of the hereditary Imam of the Ismaili sect of Shi’ism, is a specialist in running intelligence operations under humanitarian cover. A career U.N. bureaucrat, and the former coordinator of U.N. Humanitarian and Economic Assistance Programs relating to Afghanistan, Prince Sadruddin was deeply involved in providing safe haven for the Afghan mujahideen, and facilitating their dispersal throughout the world. Because of this role, Prince Sadruddin was the British government’s preferred candidate for U.N. secretary general in 1991, even ahead of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the third-generation British agent who landed the job.

The Ismaili line of Imams traces its lineage directly back to the Prophet Mohammed. The family’s most notorious ancestors, the “Assassins,” built up a powerful cult presence in Iran, where the family resided until the 1840s, when they were driven into India. There, they became a military arm of the British raj, including in operations in Afghanistan. Prince Sadruddin’s grandfather, Aga Khan II, was a founder of the Muslim League, sponsored by the British in the wake of the Sepoy Rebellion of 1858; its activities ultimately led to the vivisection of India in 1947. His father, who was the 48th Imam, Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah Aga Khan III, was very close to the British royal family during his 72-year reign, and held the post of chairman of the League of Nation’s General Assembly for a year. The 49th Imam, Prince Agha Khan IV, was given the British title “His Highness” by Queen Elizabeth II in 1957 at the death of his grandfather. Prince Sadruddin’s title is likewise recognized by the British royal family.

Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan’s career began in the 1950s, when he became publisher of the Paris Review, one of the more important Anglo-American intelligence operations of its day, peddling the degenerate “Children of the Sun,” who were precursors of the rock-drug-sex counterculture. The managing editor of the publication, John Train, had been Prince Sadruddin’s roommate at Harvard. Train went on to become a top Wall Street financial adviser, while continuing to play a key behind-the-scenes role in diverse intelligence operations, including in Afghanistan (see article, p. 18). Train and Prince Sadruddin continue to form a team.

In the mid-1950s, Prince Sadruddin became a career U.N. civil servant. By 1962, he was U.N. deputy high commissioner for refugees, and he served as high commissioner for refugees during 1967-77. Since that time, he has been brought back to handle special crises dealing with the mass relocation of impoverished people, especially in war zones. Thus, he was made coordinator of the U.N. Humanitarian and Economic Assistance Programs relating to Afghanistan, working closely with John Train, in what was code-named Operation Salam.

Operation Salam was officially intended to organize the repatriation of Afghan refugees after the Soviet withdrawal. But under this pretext, it also oversaw the dispersal of Afghan war veterans and refugees throughout the world, and even before the fighting had stopped. Prince Sadruddin’s program also reportedly was involved in the military training and covert military supply of the Afghan mujahideen, who often operated out of U.N. refugee camps that he administered on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Even earlier, Prince Sadruddin was asked by his longtime tennis partner, Vice President George Bush, to undertake secret negotiations with the Iranian government, on behalf of freeing the U.S. hostages. During the same period, some of the arms flowing into Pakistan for use by the Afghan mujahideen were being diverted to Iran on behalf of the “Iran-Contra” deals.
Great Games and the WWF

Prince Sadruddin has also been a key figure in Prince Philip’s World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the British royal family’s most important intelligence agency. Since its creation in 1961, he has been one of is primary funders, as has his nephew, the current leader of the sect. Through his London-based Aga Khan Foundation and the associated Geneva-based Bellerive Foundation, Prince Sadruddin has emerged as a top environmentalist. Here too, we find John Train, an activist in WWF Africa causes especially. Train’s cousin Russell Train was president of the U.S. chapter of the WWF from its inception until his recent retirement.

In 1983, the WWF successfully persuaded the Pakistani government to create two national parks directly on the Afghan border in the northern region of Chitral. The remote region is not particularly reknowned either for its abundance of animal life or the existence of endangered species, and presumably the flow of eco-tourists into the region diminished during the Afghan War. Chitral is, however, reknowned for the quality and abundance of its opium poppy, which was assiduously cultivated by the mujahideen. It was also a primary staging area for smuggling arms into Afghanistan.

Around the same time that the WWF established its Pakistan parks, followers of the Aga Khan began pouring into Chitral, and the nearby regions of Gilgit and Hunza, also adjacent to Indian Kashmir. There, they have formed alliances with the British-steered Kashmiri independence movement, and are reportedly working on establishing an independent Ismaili State carved out of Pakistan.

This article appeared in the October 13, 1995 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Anglo-American support apparatus
behind the Afghani mujahideen

by Adam K. East

Following the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in December 1979, the U.S. administration, first under Carter and then under Reagan, launched a massive support and training campaign for the Afghan freedom fighters, or “mujahideen” (holy warriors), as they came to be known. In addition to overt and covert funding operations by various U.S. governmental agencies for the mujahideen, a plethora of private “aid” agencies, think-tanks, and other odd outfits joined the fray, with the ostensible aim of helping the Afghans to liberate their nation from the clutches of the Soviet invaders.

However, a closer look at the activities of these private agencies reveals that there was much more at stake. As the profiles below show, the source of policy for most of these groups was British intelligence. As such, these groups lobbied the U.S. Congress, set up conferences, launched pro-mujahideen propaganda campaigns, and, in some cases, even provided military training for various mujahideen groups. U.S. policy toward Afghanistan, and the region, was largely determined by the aims of these “committees,” which also represented the controlling “mediators” between the mujahideen and British policy.

Some of the members and leaders of the organizations profiled below were also involved with some of the figures in the drugs-for-guns related Iran-Contra networks of then-Vice President George Bush and his sidekick Oliver North.
Afghan Aid U.K./Radio Free Kabul

Afghan Aid U.K. (AIUK), together with Radio Free Kabul of London, were the two most important coordinators of Afghan mujahideen aid efforts internationally throughout the Afghan War.

Afghan Aid U.K. was set up in Peshawar, Pakistan, by Romy Fullerton, in the early stages of the war. She was the wife of the British journalist John Fullerton, who has written extensively on Afghanistan, and the Afghan War. The main sponsor and funder of the group was Viscount Cranbourne, currently Lord Privy Seal (chief of the Queen’s Privy Council), and Leader of the House of Lords.

Viscount Cranbourne is a member of the Cecil family, one of the oldest and most powerful oligarchical families in Britain, whose ancestor, Lord Burghley, was the Lord Privy Seal and Lord Treasurer of Queen Elizabeth I. Viscount Cranbourne is the son and heir to the current Sixth Marquis of Salisbury. His grandfather, the Fifth Marquis, had been a British colonial secretary in World War II, and a postwar foreign minister, as well as having been Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords. His great-great-grandfather, the famous Third Marquis of Salisbury, had been the British prime minister and foreign minister from 1878-87, and again 1900-02; he helped lay the basis for World War I. The family motto is, “Late, but seriously.”

AIUK’s initial refugee aid programs were soon expanded to include numerous other services, including medical and agricultural aid, and it even offered a hostel for British journalists. According to one U.S. journalist, AIUK received “considerable British government funding” in addition to “massive amounts of money” from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In order to solicit U.S. government funds for this British operation, Viscount Cranbourne once appeared before the U.S. Congress Special Joint Task Force on Afghanistan, where he attracted considerable attention by twirling his full-length cape around his chair before seating himself to testify.

AIUK funneled much of its support to Masood in the north of the country, to the Tajiks (as opposed to the Pushtuns in the south). Masood’s brother is currently the Afghan “ambassador” to London.
Radio Free Kabul

Radio Free Kabul was formed almost immediately after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, by Lord Nicholas Bethell, a former lord-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II. A career British intelligence official with a specialization in Iranian and Arab affairs, Lord Bethell had served in the Mideast and Soviet sections of official British intelligence, MI6. Lord Bethell had been a decades-long friend and colleague of British intelligence operative Kim Philby, who “defected” to the Soviet Union in 1963.

Radio Free Kabul, which was formed virtually single-handedly by Lord Bethell, was run out of Coutts and Co., the private banker to Queen Elizabeth.

In 1981, Lord Bethell accompanied British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on a tour of the United States dedicated to drumming up support for the mujahideen. Thatcher and Lord Bethell met over 60 congressmen and senators, and aided in organizing the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, the de facto U.S. arm of Radio Free Kabul. In 1983, Radio Free Kabul sponsored the formation of Resistance International, which pulled together various “freedom movements” sponsored by the Thatcher and Reagan-Bush administrations, including the Afghan mujahideen, the Nicaraguan Contras, anti-Castro Cubans, and various anti-communist eastern European and African movements.

Lord Bethell was also the British sponsor of the operations of Jon Speller, a former aide to CIA director Allen Dulles, who played an instrumental role, as did Bethell, in coordinating the operations of the Sikh independence movement (Khalistan), which was allied to the Afghan mujahideen.

Other figures on the board of Radio Free Kabul included:

Ray Whitney, a former British intelligence official who had for years run the disinformation operations unit of the Foreign Office, the so-called Information Research Department. Whitney's outfit was the model for the Reagan administration's new creation, the National Endowment for Democracy.

Winston Churchill III, the grandson of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a leader of Britain's Conservative Party, who was reportedly the main financial backer of the group.

Lord Morrison of Lambeth, the former head of the British Foreign Office when two of his employees, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess of the Philby ring, fled to Moscow.

Baron Chalfont, the former British foreign secretary and longtime defense correspondent, with a particular expertise in Mideast affairs.

Afghanistan Relief Commitee

The Afghan Relief Committee was established in 1980 by Wall Street investment banker and spook John Train, who handles the family fortunes of some of the oldest and most powerful U.S. establishment families, such as the Mellons. The organization was housed in Train’s investment consultant office. Train was the president of the group, and, according to a 1980 Washington Post article, “its financial whiz.” Simultaneous with his founding of ARC, Train was organizing a “media salon” of press prostitutes to launch a massive slander attack on EIR’s founder, Lyndon LaRouche.

The stated purpose of the ARC was to raise “seed money” for medical organizations treating casualties among the mujahideen. After receiving the Relief Committee’s seed money, the medical organizations were expected to go elsewhere for financing. The ARC was especially fond of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami group (see article, p. 26).

Also operative were Leo Cherne’s International Rescue Committee (IRC), whose Peshawar-based office was staffed mostly with Hekmatyar’s gang; the National Endowment for Democracy (NED); and the State Department’s Agency for International Development. CIA director William Casey was on the IRC’s board of directors, and served as its president at one time. Cherne was then vice-director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), with offices at the White House.

From its inception, the ARC worked closely with Freedom House, which had been chaired by Cherne since the 1940s, and whose treasurer, Walter Schloss, was a longtime business associate of Train. Rosanne Klass, vice president of the ARC, was also the director of Freedom House’s Afghanistan Information Center, and had formerly been the founding director of the Afghanistan Council of the Asia Society.

Founders of the ARC, in addition to Train, included four former U.S. ambassadors to Afghanistan: Francis L. Kellogg, a decades-long associate of Train from the prominent grain-interest family; Train’s cousin Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.); and the ubiquitous professors Louis Dupree and Thomas Gouttierre, both longstanding Afghan hands for U.S. intelligence. Jeane Kirkpatrick, later the Reagan administration ambassador to the U.N., was co-chairman of the group.

The main known financial beneficiaries of the group were:

Doctors Without Borders, run by Ronny Brauman in Paris. This organization, whose most prominent representative was Danielle Mitterrand, wife of President François Mitterrand of France, also received money from the National Endowment for Democracy.

Freedom Medical of Washington, D.C.

Aide Medicale International

Sainte Sud of Marseilles

Most money to such groups, although not these specifically, originated with the International Rescue Committee or Relief International. The first two listed received almost all of ARC’s funds.

ARC on-the-ground operations (like those of many other western organizations) were based in Peshawar, Pakistan, the main Pakistani base of the mujahideen. ARC-funded physicians were smuggled into Afghanistan from this base. Foreign national physicians were preferred for this function.

ARC also worked with the National Endowment for Democracy, the congressionally created funding conduit for Project Democracy, on two NED Afghan projects: the Writers Union of Free Afghanis and Freedom House’s Afghan Information Center. The two groups were dedicated to training Afghan mujahideen spokesmen in “communication skills.” Additionally, the group received NED grants to operate schools inside Afghanistan.

Honorary co-chairmen of the group drawn from the Congress included: Senators Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana, Alfonse D’Amato (R) and Daniel Moynihan (D) of New York, Claiborne Pell, Gordon Humphrey (R) of New Hampshire, Orrin Hatch (R) of Utah, and Representatives Charles Rangel (D) of New York and Bill McCollum (R) of Florida.
Committee for a Free Afghanistan

CFA was founded in 1981 in the aftermath of a trip by Prime Minister Thatcher and Radio Free Kabul founder Lord Bethell to the United States, dedicated to building U.S. support for the mujahideen. The founding executive director of CFA, Karen McKay, was reputed to be the mistress of Lord Bethell. From its inception, the CFA acted as the U.S. arm of Bethell’s London-based Radio Free Kabul.

McKay, a major in the Rapid Deployment Force reserves, had spent four years in the U.S. Army’s Delta Force, studying unconventional warfare in the 1960s. Following active duty, McKay spent nine years in Greece and Israel as a freelance journalist, during which time she also studied for a doctorate in history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She returned from Israel shortly before taking over CFA.

CFA’s publicly known funding came largely from the Heritage Foundation, an offshoot of the British Fabian Society, the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation headed by Paul Weyrich, and Accuracy in Media, of which CFA was a formal arm.

CFA also held numerous conferences and other events throughout the early and mid-1980s, which attempted to organize Americans to support the Afghan mujahideen cause, while simultaneously raising funds. It also put out a publication called the Free Afghanistan Report.

The committee actively lobbied Congress. In addition, it managed to gain the sympathy of some high-ranking military officials.

Although the CFA provided funds for almost all of the “Peshawar Seven” groups of mujahideen, the Jamiat-e-Islami, of Burhanudeen Rabbani and his military commander Ahmad Shah Masood, was CFA’s favored group. It brought various mujahideen leaders to Washington in order to influence the decision-making regarding aid for the Afghan War.

In late 1981, McKay took part in a conference in Paris organized by Lord Bethell aimed at patching together an alliance of the more traditionalist groups of the mujahideen, under the banner of the Islamic Federation of Mujahideen. The groups included the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan of Pir Sayed Ahmad Gailani—the group most patronized by Lord Bethell; the Afghan National Liberation Front of Sebghatullah Mojaddidi; and the Islamic Revolutionary Movement of Mohammed Nabi Mohammedi.

CFA was also engaged in raising funds for Radio Free Kabul, International Medical Aid, and Doctors Without Borders.

Some of CFA’s key figures included:

Maj. Gen J. Milnor Roberts, chairman of the CFA board of directors, a member of the board of the U.S. branch of World Anti-Communist League (WACL) during the 1980s, and executive director of the Reserve Officers Association. In 1984, Roberts expressed satisfaction over the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, which he stated benefited the Afghan War against the Soviets. He also later told a journalist that the 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi would help western interests in the region.

Charles Moser, professor of Slavic Studies at George Washington University.

David Isby, author of a book for Jane's Defense Weekly of Britain, which analyzed Soviet weaponry. Isby was working for Rep. Bobbi Fiedler (R-Calif.) when he joined the CFA. He later became a contributing editor and Soviet analyst for Soldier of Fortune magazine.

Brig. Gen. Theodore Mataxis, who served as a "military adviser" to the mujahideen, and also paid regular visits to the Salvadoran-based Contras, and the Cambodian rebels in Thailand. From 1986-70, Mataxis was a senior officer with the Army's Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in Iran.

The list of CFA’s Council of Advisers also included Gen. John Singlaub, the former international president of WACL who was deeply involved in various Iran-Contra operations; former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency head Gen. Daniel Graham; former Reagan-Bush administration National Security Adviser Richard V. Allen; Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Claiborne Pell, Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.), and Paul Simon (D-Ill.); and Representatives Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Gerald Solomon (R-N.Y.), Mickey Edwards (R-Okla.), and Charles Wilson (D-Tex.).

Other members of its advisory council included Washington Times editor Arnaud de Borchgrave, whose cousin Alexander de Marenches was then running French intelligence; and two known CIA operatives, Louis Dupree and Thomas Goutierre. A Peace Corps veteran of Afghanistan, Goutierre is now the director of the Center for Afghan Studies at the University of Nebraska. Dupree, formerly with the U.S. Military Academy, has written a book on Afghanistan and also authored many articles for Soldier of Fortune during the Afghan War.

Fundraisers for the CFA included the Bush-linked televangelist Pat Robertson, former Ambassador Angier Biddle Duke, and former U.S. Attorney General Eliot Richardson.
Federation for American Afghan Action

The FAAA was founded in 1983, with the help of Paul Weyrich and his Coalition for America, the Heritage Foundation, and the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, of which it was a de facto arm. The first executive director of the Federation for American Afghan Action, which was based at the Heritage Foundation, was Andrew Eiva. Eiva’s career started at West Point; upon graduation in 1972, he went on to command paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne Division in North Carolina. While with the 82nd, Eiva also led a detachment of Green Berets which specialized in Soviet weapons, tactics, and languages.

Eiva officially gave up his West Point commission in 1980, and went to Afghanistan and other places in order to train the mujahideen. He reportedly trained Afghan guerrillas in bases in West Germany and the United States. Later that year, Eiva came to know Louis Dupree of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan, and soon became president of the Free Afghanistan Alliance in Massachusetts. In that capacity, he came in contact with the CFA’s Charles Moser, who brought him to Washington, D.C.

A few notable figures who were on the FAAA board of directors include:

Louis Dupree of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan.

Don Weidenweber, who founded American Aid for Afghans (AAA) in 1980, which organized the delivery of combat supplies to the Afghan mujahideen, and which worked closely with Lord Bethell's Radio Free Kabul.

Matthew D. Erulkar, formerly with the Peace Corps in Zaire, who worked as the legislative director of FAAA, and executive director of its American Afghan Education Fund. In 1985, he formed an organization called the Afghan Support Team in Washington, D.C. That same year he claims to have covertly penetrated the Soviet Union with the Afghan mujahideen, "carrying Korans and other Islamic texts."

In cooperation with Senator Tsongas and others, FAAA introduced legislation in Congress to provide funds for the mujahideen in 1984-85. Its May 1985 International Conference on Afghanistan, held in Virginia, was attended, among others, by:

Louis Dupree, FAAA board member.

Edward Luttwak, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Col. Robert Downs (USAF, ret.), an expert in "clandestine air resupply operations," according to Karen McKay.

Anthony Arnold, a former CIA officer and author of Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Perspective, whose overseas service included two years in Afghanistan.

Ralph Magnus, a former United States Information Service (USIS) official in Kabul (1962-65). From 1983-84, Magnus served as the original project director of "Americares For Afghans," a project of the Americares Foundation, with responsibility for establishing ties between Americares and the Peshawar offices of the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, and the Belgian group Solidarité Afghanistan. Americares was created by George Bush's career-long associate, Robert C. Macauley, and included the president's brother, Prescott Bush, on its board.

Angelo Codevilla, legislative assistant to Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.).

Mike Utter, executive director of the International Medical Corps. IMC worked closely with the American Aid for Afghans and was also contracted by the USAID to help resupply the Nicaraguan Contras. IMC was instrumental in the effort to send Stinger missiles to the Afghan mujahideen, and also helped to force CIA Deputy Director John McMahon out of office. McMahon had reportedly displayed hesitancy in sending Stingers to the Afghans.

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https://web.archive.org/web/20061024014418/http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2241_aga_khan.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20061024014406/http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2241_mujahideen_control.html

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