Explosion Norway

[Jan Klimkowski]

More on Valery Lunev, which appears to be a "funny name". Pseudonym and more.

Source is DPF thread on Far West here.

Of particular interest around "Lunev":

Converted Muslim. Militant Russophobe. Said to be the leader of the pro-Nato lobby in Lukashenko's close circle of military and intelligence advisers. Since 2007 operates under the cover of the Executive Director of Far West LLC.

Petrov had "introduced" Lunev to the public in his interview of Janury 2004, several days before he was blown apart by a bomb in South Africa.

his activities in the FarWest Dubai office have the blessings of President Lukashenko, who apparently values Lunev and FarWest as his back channel for a dialog and deal-making with the right-wing Republicans and neocons in the United States, not to mention "gray" and "black" arms trafficking which is another of Lunev's specialties.

Their senior partners in the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel can be described as right-wing and post-Nazi elements from the national security state (NSS) establishments that have grown tremendously during the Cold War and whose power and wealth depend on war and international tension.
(snip)
They are right-wing Republicans, Democrats, and neocons in the U.S., Conservatives and part of New Labor in Britain, the Likud in Israel and the Saud family in SA, Turkish military and pan-Turkist underground, Pakistani military and the ISI, Sufi networks...
(snip)
To give one example, the board of Diligence LLC includes or included figures like Richard Burt, Michael Howard, Lord Charles Powell, William Webster, Edward Mathias, Thomas F. McLarty, Arnaud de Borchgrave. These guys are high level operatives of powerful Atlantic elites; they run the show while the professional intelligence hacks manage it on a day to day basis. It's different with Filin, Saidov, Lunev, Surikov and others on the former SU side. They are upstarts who do not represent any old interests. Their strongest power base is Ukraine where secret services and the military are their own masters and form a state within the state just like the military and ISI in Pakistan or the military and the Grey Wolves in Turkey. Indeed, Ukraine is referred to in Europe as the "European Pakistan." But they are pretty much helpless on their own, without their senior partners, especially, the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

Also they can influence US internal politics through their agents of influence in the Ukrainian and other East European diaspora in Northern America.

Full excerpt:

According to our sources in Central Asia, last April Saidov brought to Tashkent Pakistani army chiefs, generals Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and Ahmad Shuja Pasha, for an unannounced half day long visit. Kayani is the current Chief of Army Staff of the Pakistan Army and the former director of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Pasha is the current Director of the ISI. In Tashkent they met with defense minister Mirzaev and President Karimov. The meetings were highly confidential, with Saidov acting as interpreter. Soon after that visit, the ISI controlled gang of Mullо Abdullo (Abdullah Rakhimov) crossed from Afghanistan into eastern Tajikistan. viii About 200 fighters slipped into the mountainous Tavildara district where it is difficult for the government troops to catch up with them. We have information that Rasheed, Saidov, and Lunev stayed in Abdullo's base in Afghanistan right before the raid and that Lunev has been pretty much sitting on the Afghan-Tajik border since then. This can mean only one thing Lunev supervises Abdullo's raid on behalf of the FarWest partners who had financed and prepared it. They know Abdullo since the civil war of 1992-3, when Filin, Saidov, and Lunev were on assignment in Tajikistan.

NB. Allow me to clarify that Lunev is Major-General Valery Lunev of Belorussian KGB. He was born in 1960 in the Kulyab Region of Tajikistan, fluent in Pushtu and Farsi. Served together with Filin, Saidov, and Surikov in the GRU special unit N (for narcotics) in Afghanistan. Later in the 80s Lunev was involved in the anti-COCOM network and stationed in the Netherlands. Has Dutch citizenship. Executive director of Far West LLC's central office in Dubai. Is this a fair introduction?

General-Major Valery Lunev (cover name) of Belorussian KGB.
General-Major Valery Lunev (cover name) of Belorussian KGB.

From our dossier: Born 1960 in Kulyab, Tajik SSR. Experience: Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, Defense Ministry of the USSR. Prepared for work in the Middle East. Fluent in Russian, Belorussian, Farsi, Pushtu, Arabic (Iraqi dialect), English, Dutch. Service in Afghanistan (1982-84), Western Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Iraq (1990-91, 2003). Since 1995 KGB, Republic of Belarus. Resided in the Netherlands in 1995-2006. Dutch passport. Has Chechen wife, Dudaev's relative, who served as a sniper with Basaev and Surikov during the Abkhaz-Georgian war and worked with Lunev for the GRU in Central Asia. Converted Muslim. Militant Russophobe. Said to be the leader of the pro-Nato lobby in Lukashenko's close circle of military and intelligence advisers. Since 2007 operates under the cover of the Executive Director of Far West LLC. We date this photo by the late 80s.

VS. Perhaps, a few other things can be added for those readers who have not been following our journalistic investigation. Lunev is the "funny name," as they say in Britain, of this ethnic Belorussian. We don't know his real one. He has been much less visible than his attention-hungry partners -- Filin, Saidov, and Surikov -- and was "outed" the latest. His name was not mentioned in the "conspiracy in Nice" fake of 1999-2000, either in Surikov's or Kagarlitsky's texts. Sergei Petrov had "introduced" Lunev to the public in his interview of Janury 2004, several days before he was blown apart by a bomb in South Africa. ix

NB. Do I recall it correctly that prior to their falling out Sergei Petrov was the second in command in Far West Ltd, wasn't he?

VS. This is correct. He used to be Filin's deputy. Then something happened between them and Petrov left the gang. Later, when he had learned that they were going to kill him--he tape-recorded their conversation--Petrov told the Germans and French about the criminal activities of his former company. x He also began to cooperate with Russian military counter-intelligence, apparently, hoping to nail his former partners before they got to him. Hence there was a number of "leaks" published in the fall-winter of 2003-04. This is how FarWest as organized criminal society was outed and had to withdraw from big-time narcotrafficking.

NB. They were outed but not prosecuted. Why?

VS. They were not prosecuted because they were and remain a part of the System. The Intelligence Cabal was behind them in the West as were some people in the Kremlin close to Putin. They were also protected by their own secret services-- Ukrainian, Uzbek, Belorussian, Chechen, Lithuanian. Generally, people do not realize that these relatively marginal countries have inherited powerful intelligence apparatuses of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian military intelligence is not a joke at all. It's a powerful force led by old Soviet GRU cadres of highest qualification. Besides, they have at their disposal the well-organized and politically active Ukrainian diaspora around the world. Anyway, when the Germans had gotten the goods on FarWest from Petrov (including the information on the Ukraine-to-Iran KH-55 cruise missiles deal ) they realized it was way too much for them to handle and could make the relations of the SD government with Washington even worse. I suspect that something similar happened with the French.

NB. Yet, Filin had to evacuate FarWest from Europe to Dubai and himself move to Brazil when they had that problem with Goss and Foggo. Doesn't this suggest that they are not that big, after all?

VS. That's a very different situation. There was never real threat of legal persecution in that episode. The problem was that Foggo's thugs could simply whack Filin and his associates. Actually, I tend to believe Filin that they planted a bomb under Davidovich's car in Bogota. The threat was physical, not legal. xi

Military intelligence officer Sergei Petrov (born Savchenko) aka French citizen Serge Rodin (? - 2004).

From our dossier: Sergei Petrov (born Savchenko, ? - 2004). Former GRU officer, after 1993 served in Ukrainian military intelligence. Served in Afghanistan together with Filin, Likhvintsev, Saidov, Surikov, and Lunev. In the fall of 2003 Petrov gave German and French authorities information about the criminal activities of the "consulting firm" Far West LTD that included the sale of Ukrainian WMD to Iran and China and portable SAMs to FARC. In January 2004, he was blown up in his car while staying in Cape Town, SA. Several days later, in Cyprus, there died, allegedly in a strange accident, the international arms dealer Sarfraz Haider--key figure in the sale of the Ukrainian KH-55 (Kent) cruise missiles to Iran. That sale might have included several nuclear warheads.

NB. Let's go back to General Lunev.

VS. It is relevant in the context of FarWest's anti-Obama active measures that Petrov described Lunev as a specialist on "radical solutions." His long list of "achievements" included the assassination of Sangak Safarov and Faizullah Saidov -- socialist leaders of the People's Front of Tajikistan. Lunev masterminded this political crime in the spring of 1993 on the orders of defense minister Grachev and the personal request of Boris Yeltsin. However, Lunev is not only a specialist on Central Asia and "radical solutions." He is also a high-class military-political analyst and consummate organization man. From what we know, his activities in the FarWest Dubai office have the blessings of President Lukashenko, who apparently values Lunev and FarWest as his back channel for a dialog and deal-making with the right-wing Republicans and neocons in the United States, not to mention "gray" and "black" arms trafficking which is another of Lunev's specialties. Just as Filin and Saidov, Lunev is very dangerous and his presence on the Afghan-Tajik border--clearly sanctioned by the Saudis, Pakistanis, and the rogue CIA partners of FarWest--should be a cause for grave concern to all peace-loving people around the world and, especially, in Asia.

NB. Going back to Mullo Abdullo. Why did FarWest and the ISI people send him to Tajikistan?

VS. They wanted to demonstrate their ability to destabilize Central Asia.

NB. But why in the world do they want to destabilize whatever? And to whom did they "demonstrate" this?
The Intelligence Cabal

VS. To answer these questions, we need to place FarWest within a bigger picture. The Russian-speaking part of this organization are senior military intelligence officers and agents, who began their service in the last decade of the Soviet Union. Their professional carriers, power and personal wealth have come from the confluence of two factors: 1) the special place of intelligence in the military-industrial complex and its covert networks abroad, and 2) the destruction of the Soviet Union that had allowed them to capitalize on their position.

Their senior partners in the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Israel can be described as right-wing and post-Nazi elements from the national security state (NSS) establishments that have grown tremendously during the Cold War and whose power and wealth depend on war and international tension. In the core of this loosely-knit cabal is a group of ideologically committed people, often with the family histories of struggle against Russia and the Soviet Union, who ache to settle with us some old scores and take their revanche for our victory in 1945. The NSS establishments have behind them privileged groups and sections of their national ruling classes, which has been long established economically and politically and who traditionally have been in control of the state or its big chunks. They are right-wing Republicans, Democrats, and neocons in the U.S., Conservatives and part of New Labor in Britain, the Likud in Israel and the Saud family in SA, Turkish military and pan-Turkist underground, Pakistani military and the ISI, Sufi networks... In other words, the intelligence groups, both state and private, who are directly involved or indirectly interact with FarWest have a much broader social, economic, and political base than the Russian-speaking FarWest. To give one example, the board of Diligence LLC includes or included figures like Richard Burt, Michael Howard, Lord Charles Powell, William Webster, Edward Mathias, Thomas F. McLarty, Arnaud de Borchgrave. These guys are high level operatives of powerful Atlantic elites; they run the show while the professional intelligence hacks manage it on a day to day basis. It's different with Filin, Saidov, Lunev, Surikov and others on the former SU side. They are upstarts who do not represent any old interests. Their strongest power base is Ukraine where secret services and the military are their own masters and form a state within the state just like the military and ISI in Pakistan or the military and the Grey Wolves in Turkey. Indeed, Ukraine is referred to in Europe as the "European Pakistan." But they are pretty much helpless on their own, without their senior partners, especially, the United States, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. If the power of Turkish military diminishes, its bad news for Saidov, Nukhaev, and their organization, because they cannot feel safe in and operate from Turkey without the protection of the general staff and police. If Saidov looses the confidence of Saudi sheiks his construction and real estate companies in the Middle East will go belly up the next day. Same will happen to Filin's assets around the world if their relations with the US and British "partners" go sour as they did under Goss and Foggo in the CIA. These guys can have some leeway and power of decision only as long as they remain in good standing with their senior partners. Their leash may be long, but it's still a leash and no less strong for that. So, to stay in action, they have to prove again and again their worth, their ability to stir things up, especially in the areas where the US have little leverage as in Central Asia. However, these "unequal" relations are not fixed and can change. The Russian-speaking partners of FarWest play their own or partly their own games as well. Filin coordinates the anti-German activities of Ukrainian and Polish intelligence. Saidov's death squads in Bagram, sheltered and paid by the US military, roam Afghanistan, Waziristan and the Sunni Triangle in Iraq, but Saidov's killers also have been wiping out any real or potential opposition to Kadyrov, while his Sufi activities in the Middle East and elsewhere may remain impenetrable even for US and British intelligence. Also they can influence US internal politics through their agents of influence in the Ukrainian and other East European diaspora in Northern America.

NB. And how does Abdullo's last raid in Tajikistan fit into the bigger plans of this international Intelligence Cabal?

We hear from our German friends that the Republicans who are close to the military-industrial complex, the Pentagon and intelligence have conspired with the Likud to subvert Obama's foreign policy and eventually force him out of the White House. It appears they plan to attack Obama from several directions.

1. Likud will strike in the Near East, probably, at Gaza or Lebanon, with a massive "collateral damage." This will derail Obama's peace making in that region.

2. Even more important will be the proliferation of nuclear arms, with several new countries going nuclear, either officially or de facto, after the Israeli model. FarWest have played important role in the Nuclear Consortium between Ukraine, Pakistan, Iran, China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. The unknown quantities of Soviet nuclear materials and weapons were hidden in Ukraine around the breakup of the Soviet Union and later loaned to Iran or stored in Pakistan. This allows Ukrainian military to provide technical maintenance for their nuclear devices and perhaps even develop new ones while formally not violating the denuclearized status of Ukraine.

One well-publicized case was the sale of 12 cruise missiles KH-55 from Ukraine to China and Iran in 2000-2001. It was recently claimed that the deal also included four 200-kiloton nuclear war heads. xii According to Ukrainian national security figures around Yulia Timoshenko, the sales were handled by Far West LLC, with the U.S. private intelligence company Diligence LLC "supervising" it from a distance. Victor Bout's planes were used in this operation. xiii A less known case was the theft by FarWest of two kilograms of uranium-235 from the Sukhumi Physics and Technology Institute in the early 90s. The uranium went to Iran. And this might be just the tip of the iceberg. Filin and Saidov boast that Iran already has nuclear arms and that Ukraine with Saudi Arabia will soon follow it. At the same time, they accuse Obama of "weakening America and leaving the rest of the world in chaos." This tactics subverts Obama's commitment to the non-proliferation of nuclear arms and missile technology, while providing the military-industrial complex with arguments in favor of expanding the anti-missile defense R&D and deployment.

3. Afghanistan and Pakistan will be turned into examples of Obama's failure to fight "international terrorism." At the same time, Afghanistan territory will be used to destabilize Central Asia and increase pressure against Russia and China. Mullo Abdullo's raid into Tajikistan is a test of this mechanism. xiv Since the fall of 2008 at the latest, Saidov and Prince Rasheed concentrate on Afghanistan. They have been going back and forth between Kabul, Islamabad, Quetta, and El-Riyadh, meeting with Turki al-Faisal, Karzai, Nawaz Sharif and Mullah Omar. Their goal is to have an agreement between the United States and the Taliban through the mediation of the Saudis and Pakistanis. The Intelligence Cabal no longer needs Karzai. He has become a liability and has to go. But if Karzai makes a deal with the old anti-Taliban and anti-US warlords like Ismail Khan, Rashid Dostum, and Karim Khalili this can create a lot of problems for the Nato forces and the Cabal, making it impossible to use Afghanistan for de-stabilizing the Central Asia, China, and Russia.

Ruslan Saidov: Obama will suffer a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Ruslan Saidov: Obama will suffer a humiliating defeat in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

4. Those behind FarWest do not want Obama to have a new treaty with Russia on slashing nuclear stockpiles. They want a new arms race and they also see such a treaty as the important part of Obama's strategy to normalize relations with Russia. The U.S. militarists want Russia to remain the bogey man of Western propaganda.

5. They want to make permanent the simmering conflict between Russia and her neighbors Ukraine and Georgia -- so that their propaganda apparatus could continue picturing Russia as aggressor and poison our relations with Europe and the United States.

6. If they "remove" Obama, they will try to crash the oil prices and keep them below $30 for a long time, speed up the development and deployment of anti-missile defense systems against Russia and China under the pretext of the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs. Using Afghanistan as their forward base and proxies like Abdullo's gang, they will provoke military conflicts in Central Asia to make Russia and China busy. In other words, the Intelligence Cabal behind FarWest wants to copycat the strategies of the Reagan-Daddy Bush period. This is what we may get instead of a "reset" if they topple Obama.