The Real Grand Chessboard & the Profiteers of War

[Ed Jewett]

The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War

by Prof. Peter Dale Scott


Global Research, August 11, 2009

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." Dwight David Eisenhower, "Military-Industrial Complex Speech," 1961,[1]

"My observation is that the impact of national elections on the business climate for SAIC has been minimal. The emphasis on where federal spending occurs usually shifts, but total federal spending never decreases. SAIC has always continued to grow despite changes in the political leadership in Washington." Former SAIC manager, quoted in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007[2]

"We make American military doctrine" Ed Soyster, MPRI[3]

The Myth of the Grand Chessboard: Geopolitics and Imperial Folie de Grandeur

In the Road to 9/11 I summarized the dialectic of open societies: how from their energy they expand, leading to a higher level of more secretive corporations and agencies, which eventually weaken the home country through needless and crushing wars.[4] I am not alone in seeing America in the final stages of this process, which since the Renaissance has brought down Spain, the Netherlands, and Great Britain.

Much of what I wrote summarized the thoughts of writers before me like Paul Kennedy and Kevin Phillips. But there is one aspect of the curse of expansion that I underemphasized: how dominance creates megalomanic illusions of insuperable control, and how this illusion in turn is crystallized into a prevailing ideology of dominance. I am surprised that so few, heretofore, have pointed out that from a public point of view these ideologies are delusional, indeed perhaps insane. In this essay I will argue however that what looks demented from a public viewpoint makes sense from the narrower perspective of those profiting from the provision of private entrepreneurial violence and intelligence.

The ideology of dominance was expressed for British rulers by Sir Halford Mackinder in 1919: "Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World."[5] This sentence, though expressed after the power of Britain had already begun to decline, accurately articulated the anxieties of imperial planners who saw themselves playing "the Great Game," and who thus in 1809 sacrificed an entire British army of twelve thousand men in the wilderness of Afghanistan.

Expanded by Karl Haushofer and other Germans into the alleged "science" of geopolitics, this doctrine helped to inspire Hitler’s disastrous Drang nach Osten, which in short order terminated the millenary hopes of the Nazi Third Reich. One might have thought that by now the lessons of Napoleon and Hitler would have subdued all illusions that any single power could command the "World Island," let alone the world.

Kissinger for one appears to have learned this lesson, when he wrote that: "By geopolitical, I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium."[6] But (largely because of his commitment to equilibrium in world order) Kissinger was swept aside by events in the mid-1970s, leading to the triumph of the global dominance mindset, as expressed by thinkers like Zbigniew Brzezinski.[7]

Brzezinski himself has recognized how his gratuitous machinations in Afghanistan in 1978-79 produced the responses of al Qaeda and jihadi terrorism. Asked in 1998 whether he regretted his adventurism, Brzezinski replied:

"Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'"

Nouvel Observateur: "And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?"

Brzezinski: "What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

When he was asked whether Islamic fundamentalism represented a world menace, Brzezinski replied, "Nonsense!"[8]

In some ways, the post-Afghanistan Brzezinski has become more moderate in his expectations from U.S. power: he notably warned against the Gulf War in 1990 and also Vice-President Cheney’s agitations when in office for some kind of preemptive strike against Iran. But he has never retracted the Mackinderite rhetoric of his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, which revives the illusion of "controlling" the Eurasian heartland:

For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world's paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power." (p. xiii)

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia... Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia - and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained." (p.30)

"To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together." (p.40)[9]

This kind of brash talk is not unique to Brzezinski. Its call for unilateral dominance echoed the 1992 draft DPG (Defense Planning Guidance) prepared for Defense Secretary Cheney by neocons Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis "Scooter" Libby: "We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."[10] It is echoed both in the 2000 PNAC Study, "Rebuilding America’s Defenses," and the Bush-Cheney National Security Strategy of September 2002 (NSS 2002).[11] And it is epitomized by the megalomanic JCS strategic document Joint Vision 2020, "Full-spectrum dominance means the ability of U.S. forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations."[12]

Such overblown rhetoric is out of touch with reality, dangerously delusional, and even arguably insane. It is however useful, even vital, to those corporations who have become accustomed to profiting from the Cold War, and who faced deep cuts in U.S. defense and intelligence spending in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are joined by other groups (discussed below) that also have a stake in preserving the dominance mindset in Washington. These include the new purveyors of privatized military services, or what can be called entrepreneurial violence, in response to defense budget cuts.

[B]The Real Grand Chessboard: Those Profiting from Enduring Violence[/B]
The delusional grandiosity of Brzezinski’s rhetoric is inherent above all in the false metaphor of his book title. "Vassals" are not chess pieces to be moved effortlessly by a single hand. They are human beings with minds of their own; and among humans an unjust excess of power is certain to provoke not only resentment but ultimately successful resistance. One can see this easily in Asia, from the evolution of anti-Americanism in Iran to the Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT) in Central Asia: although still ostensibly nonviolent, HT’s rhetoric is now more and more aggressively anti-American.[13]
The notion of a single chess player is equally false, especially in Central Asia, where dominant states (the U.S., Russia, and China) and local states are all alike weak. Here major multinational corporations like BP and Exxon are major players. In countries like Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan they dwarf both local state power and also the U.S. governmental presence, whether official or covert. The true local powers are apt to be two which governments are notoriously inept at controlling: first, the "agitated Muslims" which Brzezinski insanely derided, and second, illicit trafficking, above all drug trafficking.[14]

Ultimately however Brzezinski is not constrained by his chess metaphor. The goal of a chess game is to win. Brzezinski’s goal is quite different: to exert permanent restraints on the power of China and above all Russia. He has thus sensibly opposed destabilizing moves like a western strike on Iran, while supporting the permanent containment of Russia with a ring of western bases and pipelines. (In 1995 Brzezinski flew to Azerbaijan and helped negotiate the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline linking Azerbaijan to Turkey.)[15]

As I have argued elsewhere, Brzezinski (though he no doubt thinks to himself in terms of strategy) thus promotes a policy that very much suits the needs of the oil industry and its backers. These last include his patrons the Rockefellers, who first launched him into national prominence.[16]

In March 2001 the biggest oil majors (Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco, and Shell) had their opportunity to design the incoming administration’s energy strategies, including Middle East policy, by participating secretly in Vice-President Cheney's Energy Task Force.[17] The Task Force, we learned later, developed a map of Iraq’s oil fields, with the southwest divided into nine "Exploration Blocks." One month earlier a Bush National Security Council document had noted that Cheney’s Task force would consider "actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields."[18] Earlier the oil companies had participated in a non-governmental task force calling for "an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments."[19]

Of course, oil companies were not alone in pushing for military action against Iraq. After 9/11, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith established the Pentagon’s neocon Office of Special Plans (OSP), which soon "rivalled both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon’s own Defense Intelligence Agency, the D.I.A., as President Bush’s main source of intelligence regarding Iraq’s possible possession of weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaeda."[20] Neocon influence in the Administration, supported by Lewis Libby in Vice-President Cheney’s office, trumped the skepticism of CIA and DIA: these two false charges against Saddam Hussein, or what one critic called "faith-based intelligence," became briefly the official ideology of the United States. Some, notably Dick Cheney, have never recanted.

Many journalists were eager to promote the OSP doctrines. Judith Miller of the New York Times wrote a series of articles on Saddam’s WMD, relying, like OSP itself, on the propaganda of Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi.[21] Miller’s book collaborator Laurie Mylroie went even further, arguing that "Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself."[22] Many of these advocates, notably Feith, Libby, and Mylroie, had links to Israel, which as much as any oil company had reasons to wish for U.S. armies to become established militarily in Central Asia.[23]

Private Military Contractors (PMCs), Whose Business is Violence for Profit

The inappropriateness of a military response to the threat of terrorism has been noted by a number of counterterrorism experts, such as retired U.S. Army colonel Andrew Bacevich:

the concept of global war as the response to violent Islamic radicalism is flawed. We ought not be in the business of invading and occupying other countries. That's not going to address the threat. It is, on the other hand, going to bankrupt the country and break the military.[24]

Because of budgetary constraints, America has resorted to uncontrollable subordinates to represent its public power in these remote places. I shall focus chiefly in this essay on one group of these, the so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) who are authorized to commit violence in the name of their employers. These corporations are reminiscent of the marauding condottieri or private mercenary armies contracted for by the wealthy city states of Renaissance Italy.[25]

With the hindsight of history, we can see the contribution of the notoriously capricious Condottieri to the violence they are supposedly hired to deal with. Some, when unemployed, became little more than predatory bandits. Others, like the celebrated Farinata whom Dante placed in the Inferno, turned against their native cities. Above all, the de facto power accumulated by the condottieri meant that, with the passage of time, they came to dictate terms to their ostensible employers.[26] (They were an early example of entrepreneurial violence, and the most common way of avoiding their path of destruction was "to buy reprieve by offering bribes."[27])

To offset the pressure on limited armed forces assets, Donald Rumsfeld escalated the increasing use of Private Military Contractors (PMCs) in the Iraq War. At one point as many as 100,000 personnel were employed by PMCs in the US Iraq occupation. Some of them were involved in controversial events there, such as the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison scandal, and the killing and burning of four contract employees in Fallujah. The license of the most controversial firm, Blackwater, was terminated by the Iraqi government in 2007, after eight Iraqi civilians were gratuitously killed in a firefight that followed a car bomb explosion.[28] (After much negative publicity, Blackwater renamed itself in 2009 as Xe Worldwide.)

Insufficiently noticed in the public furor over PMCs like Blackwater was the difference in motivation between them and the Pentagon. Whereas the stated goal of Rumsfeld and the armed forces in Iraq was to end violence there, the PMCs clearly had a financial stake in its continuation. Hence it is no surprise that some of the largest PMCs were also political supporters for pursuing the ill-conceived "War on Terror."

Blackwater was the most notorious example; Erik Prince, its founder and sole owner, is part of a family that figures among the major contributors to the Republican Party and other right-wing causes, such as the Council for National Policy. His sister once told the press that "my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party."[29]

Private Intelligence Companies and the Provision of Violence
Blackwater has attracted the critical attention of the American Mainstream Media. But it was a mere knight on the grand chessboard, albeit one with the ability to influence the moves of the game. Far less noticed has been given to Diligence LLC. Diligence, a more powerful company, that unlike Blackwater interfaced heavily with Wall Street, "set up shop in Baghdad [in July 2003] to provide security for companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction. In December, it established a new subsidiary called Diligence Middle East, and expanded its services to include screening, vetting and training of local hires, and the provision of daily intelligence briefs for its corporate clients."[30]

Certainly the political clout of Diligence outshone and outlasted Blackwater’s. Two of its founding directors (Lanny Griffiths and Ed Rogers) were also founders of the influential Republican lobbying team Barbour Griffiths and Rogers (later renamed BGR). Haley Barbour, the senior founder of BGR, also served as Chairman of the Republican National Committee from 1993 to 1997. Diligence LLC was licensed to do business in Iraq as a private military contractor (PMC). But it could be called a Private Intelligence Contractor (PIC), since it is virtually a CIA spin-off:

Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.[31]

Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose purpose has been described by the New York Times as "a consulting firm to advise companies that want to do business in Iraq, including those seeking pieces of taxpayer-financed reconstruction projects."[32] Its political clout was outlined in the Financial Times:

New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.[33]

The firm of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers was the initial funder of Diligence, which shares an office floor with BGR and New Bridge in a building four blocks from the White House. The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother.[34] When Mack McLarty, Clinton’s White House Chief of Staff, resigned, he became a director of Diligence, and also joined Henry Kissinger to head, until 2008, Kissinger McLarty Associates.

Another Private Intelligence Contractor or PIC is Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), an $8 billion corporation involved in defense, intelligence community, and homeland security contracting. In the words of veteran journalists Donald Barlett and James Steele,

SAIC has displayed an uncanny ability to thrive in every conceivable political climate. It is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national-security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word "terrorism." SAIC represents, in other words, a private business that has become a form of permanent government….[SAIC] epitomizes something beyond Eisenhower's worst nightmare—the "military-industrial-counterterrorism complex."[35]

(Later their article made it clear that SAIC is not a unified bureaucracy, but more like a platform for individual entrepreneurship in obtaining contracts: "at SAIC your job fundamentally was to sell your high-tech ideas and blue-chip expertise to [any] government agency with money to spend and an impulse to buy.")[36]

Before becoming Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates was a member of SAIC's board of directors. SAIC personnel have also been recruited from CIA, NSA, and DARPA.

Scores of influential members of the national-security establishment clambered onto SAIC's payroll, among them John M. Deutch, undersecretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter and C.I.A. director under President Bill Clinton; Rear Admiral William F. Raborn, who headed development of the Polaris submarine; and Rear Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who served variously as director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the C.I.A., and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.[37]

SAIC helped supply the faulty intelligence about Saddam’s WMD that then generated ample contracts for SAIC in Iraq.

SAIC personnel were instrumental in pressing the case that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and that war was the only way to get rid of them. When no weapons of mass destruction were found, SAIC personnel staffed the commission set up to investigate how American intelligence could have been so disastrously wrong, including Gordon Oehler, the commission's deputy director for review, a 25-year CIA veteran, Jeffrey R. Cooper, vice president and chief science officer for one of SAIC's sub-units and Samuel Visner, a SAIC vice president for corporate development who had also passed through the revolving door and back to the NSA. David Kay, who later chaired the Iraq Survey Group (which showed that Hussein didn't possess WMD, thereby proving that the war was launched under false pretenses), is also an SAIC shareholder and former director of SAIC's Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.[38]

Needless to say, this SAIC-stuffed commission did not report that SAIC itself had been a big part of the problem. But according to Barlett and Steele, the same David Kay in 1998 told the Senate Armed Services Committee:

that Saddam Hussein "remains in power with weapons of mass destruction" and that "military action is needed." He warns that unless America acts now "we're going to find the world's greatest military with its hands tied."

Over the next four years, Kay and others associated with SAIC hammered away at the threat posed by Iraq. Wayne Downing, a retired general and a close associate of Ahmad Chalabi, proselytized hard for an invasion of Iraq, stating that the Iraqis "are ready to take the war … overseas. They would use whatever means they have to attack us." In many of his appearances on network and cable television leading up to the war, Downing was identified simply as a "military analyst." It would have been just as accurate to note that he was a member of SAIC's board of directors and a company stockholder….

9/11 was a personal tragedy for thousands of families and a national tragedy for all of America, but it served the interests of private intellience and military contractors including SAIC. In the aftermath of the attacks, the Bush administration launched its "Global War on Terror" (GWOT), whose chief consequence has been to channel money by the tens of billions into companies promising they could do something—anything—to help. SAIC was ready. Four years earlier, anticipating the next big source of government revenue, SAIC had established the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis. According to SAIC, the purpose of the new unit was to take "a comprehensive view of terrorist threats, including the full range of weapons of mass destruction, more traditional high explosives, and cyber-threats to the national infrastructure." In October of 2006 the company told would-be investors flatly that the war on terror would continue to be a lucrative growth industry.[39]

Barlett and Steele could have mentioned that SAIC senior analyst Fritz Ermarth, a long-time associate of Gates from his years in the CIA, is now an official of the Nixon Center. Commenting in 2003 on State Secretary Colin Powell’s briefing to the UN Security Council, Ermarth praised Powell for his charges (repeating one of Judith Miller’s false stories) about Saddam’s acquisition of aluminum tubing "for centrifuges and not rocketry." Ermarth faulted Powell however for not mentioning two matters: Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 (a charge by Laurie Mylroie now generally discredited), and that "During the 1970s and 1980s…the USSR and its allies supported terrorists in Western Europe and in Turkey," (alluding to the false charges, promoted at the time by Robert Gates and Claire Sterling, about Mehmet Ali Agça’s attempted assassination of Pope Paul II).[40]

I certainly do not wish to suggest that SAIC single-handedly created the will to fight in Iraq. The combined efforts of defense contractors, oil companies, PMCs and PICs created a mindset in which all those eager for power were caught up, including, I have to say, career-minded academics. In Iraq as in Afghanistan and Vietnam a generation earlier, a sure ticket to consultations in Washington was support for interventions that ordinary people could see would be disastrous.

The yea-saying of academics has approved even the privatization of intelligence which we have just been describing. According to political scientist Anna Leander,

Private firms not only provide, but also analyse intelligence. Private translators, analysts and ‘interrogators’ are hired, as illustrated by the involvement of Titan and CACI in Abu Ghraib. Even more directly, private firms are hired in to assess threats and risks and suggest what to do about them. This involves constructing a security picture as done for example, by Diligence LLC and SAIC, two firms specialised in intelligence gathering and analysis….. This privatisation of intelligence has direct consequences for the relation between PMCs and security discourses. It places the firms in a position where they are directly involved in producing these discourses. They provide a growing share of the information that forms the basis of decisions on whether or not something is a security concern.

Leander concludes that this privatization is beneficial: it "empower[s] a more military understanding of security which, in turn, empowers PMCs as particularly legitimate security experts."[41]

Another political scientist, Chaim Kaufmann, has noted more critically that arguments for escalation and what he calls threat inflation against Iraq were not adequately disciplined by "the marketplace of ideas." He gives five reasons for this failure, duly supported by other political scientists. But the obvious reason mentioned by Barlett and Steele – profit – is not mentioned.[42]

What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war.


The passage of the Patriot Act generated a new realm of profit for SAIC contractors -- domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens – as well as new intelligence fusion centers to carry this out.

“As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counterintelligence Field Activity office in 2002 and filled its staff with contractors from Booz Allen, BAE systems, SAIC, and other suppliers of cleared personnel. CIFA, as we’ve seen, was used against people suspected of harboring ill will against the Bush administration and its policies….At present, there are forty-three current and planned fusion centers in the United States where data from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases, and anonymous tipsters are combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts.... According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the project “inculcates the project “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers.”[43]

These fusion centers, “which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population.” [44] Responding to such criticisms, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano stated in March 2009 that the mandate of fusion centers was not to launch independent domestic surveillance operations but connect the dots between lawfully obtained information already in fragmented “siloed” databases.[45] She did not mention that some of this information was from private and even anonymous sources.

One SAIC contractor, Neoma Syke, worked at such a fusion center, wearing two hats:

During 2003-2004, she was "working for SAIC" as a force protection analyst with "SAIC's" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion. And while she was "a contractor for SAIC", specifically, "SAIC's" 205th Military Intelligence Battalion, apparently she served as Counterintelligence Watch Officer at USARPAC's Crisis Action Center.[46]

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a poet, writer, and researcher of the New World Order. Visit his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net/


Notes

[1] Dwight David Eisenhower, "Military-Industrial Complex Speech," 1961,
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/eisenhower001.asp.

[2] Former SAIC manager, in Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703?currentPage=1.

[3] The Economist, July 8, 1999.

[4] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 7-9.

[5] Halford J. Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality (New York: Holt, 1919).

[6] Henry Kissinger, in Colin S Gray, G R Sloan. Geopolitics, Geography, and Strategy (Portland: Frank Cass Publishers, 1999).

[7] For the events leading to the displacement of Kissinger see Scott, The Road to 9/11, 50-54, etc.

[8] Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15-21, 1998. In his relentless determination to weaken the Soviet Un ion, Brzezinski also persuaded Carter to end U.S. sanctions against Pakistan for its pursuit of nuclear weapons (David Armstrong and Joseph J. Trento, America and the Islamic Bomb: The Deadly Compromise (Steerforth, 2007). Thus Brzezinski’s obsession with the Soviet Union helped produce, as unintended byproducts, both al Qaeda and the Islamic atomic arsenal.

[9] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: basic Books), xiii, 30, 40.

[10] Memorandum of February 18, 1992, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm.

[11] For specific parallels to The Grand Chessboard, see Scott, Road to 9/11, 191-2.

[12] "Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full-spectrum Dominance," DefenseLink,
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=45289, emphasis added.

[13] Zeyno Baran, "Hizb-ut-Tahrir: Islam’s Political Insurgency," Nixon Center, December 2004,
www.HizbutahrirIslamsPoliticalInsurgency.pdf.

[14] Brzezinski was so unafraid of Islamic jihadism that when National Security Adviser he convened a working group to deliberately stir up Muslim dissatisfaction inside the Soviet Union (Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-71).

[15] He has since taken credit for persuading President Aliyyev of Azerbaijan to commit to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (Zbigniew Brzezinski, "Geopolitically Speaking: Russia's `Sphere of Influence’ - Chechnya and Beyond," Azerbaijan International, Spring 2000, p. 24,
http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/81_folder/81_articles/81_brzezinski.html.

This pipeline, a favor to U.S. and British oil companies, makes geopolitical but not economic sense; and is further destabilizing an already tense region. See Pepe Escobar, "Liquid War Across Eurasia and the Asia-Pacific: Postcard from Pipelineistan," The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, http://japanfocus.org/-Pepe-Escobar/3149.

[16] Scott, Road to 9/11, 70-79.

[17] Dana Milbank and Justin Blum, "Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force," Washington Post, November 16, 2005. This story noted that CEOs of three majors had falsely denied this: " A White House document shows that executives from big oil companies met with Vice President Cheney's energy task force in 2001 -- something long suspected by environmentalists but denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress….In a joint hearing last week of the Senate Energy and Commerce committees, the chief executives of Exxon Mobil Corp., Chevron Corp. and ConocoPhillips said their firms did not participate in the 2001 task force. The president of Shell Oil said his company did not participate `to my knowledge,’ and the chief of BP America Inc. said he did not know. Chevron was not named in the White House document, but the Government Accountability Office has found that Chevron was one of several companies that 'gave detailed energy policy recommendations' to the task force."

[18] Scott, Road to 9/11, 188-89; citing Linda McQuaig, Crude Dudes," Toronto Star, September 20, 2004; Jane Mayer, "Contract Sport," New Yorker, February 16-23, 2004.

[19] Scott, Road to 9/11, 189; "Strategy Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century," Report of the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy and Council on Foreign Relations Task Force, 40, emphasis added.

[20] Seymour M. Hersh, "Selective Intelligence: Donald Rumsfeld Has His Own Special Sources. Are They Reliable?" New Yorker, May 6, 2003

[21] Michael Massing, "Now They Tell Us," New York Review of Books, February 26, 2004, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922.

[22] Peter Bergen, "Armchair Provocateur -- Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist," Washington Monthly, December 2003,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/feature...ergen.html.

[23] For Israel links, see Michael Lind, Made in Texas (New York, Basic Books), 139 (Feith); John J. Mearsheimer, Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), 166, etc. (Libby); Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War (New York: Crown, 2006), 68-70 (Mylroie).

[24] Jon Wiener, "Obama's Limits: An Interview With Andrew Bacevich," Nation, August 28, 2008,
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/350252/obama_s_limits_an_interview_with_andrew_bacevich.
Cf. Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008). Michael Scheuer also argues that the campaign against terrorism took a big step backwards when the U.S. invaded Iraq. "Experts Fears ‘Endless’ Terror War," MSNBC, July 9, 2005, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8524679. Peter Bergen agrees: "Many jihadists are so happy that the Bush administration invaded Iraq. Without the Iraq war, their movement—under assault from without and riven from within—would have imploded a year or so after Sept. 11" (Bergen, "The Jihadists Export Their Rage to Book Pages and Web Pages," Washington Post, September 11, 2005). So does Richard Clarke (Against All Enemies, 246): "Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country."

[25] I am not the first to notice the analogy. See e.g. Thomas Jäger and Gerhard Kümmel, Private Military and Security Companies (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2007), 22; Eugene B. Smith, "The New Condottieri and US Policy: The Privatization of Conflict and Its Implications," U.S. Army War College, Parameters, Winter 2002,
www.carlisle.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/02winter/smith.pdf, 104.

[26] Michael Mallett, Mercenaries and their Masters: Warfare in Renaissance Italy (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974), 22.

[27] Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds.), Crusaders, Condottieri, and Cannon (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002), 286.

[28] "Iraq Reviewing Security Firms After Blackwater Shooting," FoxNews.com, September 18, 2007,
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297153,00.html.

[29] "The former Betsy Prince -- Edgar and Elsa's daughter, Erik's sister -- married into the DeVos family, one of the country's biggest donors to Republican and conservative causes. (`I know a little something about soft money, as my family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party,’ Betsy DeVos wrote in a 1997 Op-Ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call.) She chaired the Michigan Republican Party from 1996 to 2000 and again from 2003 to 2005, and her husband, Dick, ran as the Republican candidate for Michigan governor in 2006. Erik Prince himself is no slouch when it comes to giving to Republicans and cultivating relationships with important conservatives. He and his first and second wives have donated roughly $300,000 to Republican candidates and political action committees" (Ben Van Heuvelen, "The Bush administration's ties to Blackwater," Salon, October 2, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/02/blackwater_bush/).
Cf. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill, Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Books, 2006).

[30] David Isenberg , "Corporate Mercenaries – Part 2: Myths and mystery," AsiaTimes, May 19, 2004, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FE20Ak02.html.

[31] David Isenberg, "Myths and mystery," Asia Times, 5/20/04. While in CIA, Bruner negotiated the deal for Ahmad Chalabi and the CIA to work together (Aram Roston, The Man Who Pushed America to War [New York: Nation Books, 2009], 76). Bruner later joined BGR and in 2007 became the full time chairman of BKI Strategic Intelligence. In 2004 Bruner participated with BGR and an Israeli PMC operative in a scheme to help re-elect George W. Bush. (Laura Rozen, "From Kurdistan to K Street," Mother Jones, November 2008,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2008/11/kurdistan-k-street).

[32] Douglas Jehl, "Washington Insiders' New Firm Consults on Contracts in Iraq," New York Times, September 30, 2003.

[33] Financial Times, 12/11/03. Ed Rogers, Diligence's vice chairman, was one of George H.W. Bush's top assistants when he was US president. On resigning from the White House, he negotiated a lucrative contract to act as lobbyist for the former Saudi intelligence chief and BCCI front man Kamal Adham, at a time when American and British prosecutors were preparing criminal cases against him. Rogers used Adnan Khashoggi as a go-between to secure the contract, which was canceled after White House criticism of it (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 362-64).

[34] Ibid. Cf. Mother Jones, March/April 2004: "More recently, Bush scored a $60,000-a-year consulting deal from a top adviser to New Bridge Strategies, the firm set up by George W.'s ex-campaign manager to "take advantage of business opportunities" in postwar Iraq. His job description: taking calls for three hours a week."

[35] "SAIC, which employs 44,000 people and took in $8 billion last year—sells brainpower, including a lot of the "expertise" behind the Iraq war….[SAIC is] a "stealth company" with 9,000 government contracts, many of which involve secret intelligence work" (Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow." Vanity Fair, March 2007,
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703?currentPage=1).

[36] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."

[37] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow: "Mark A. Boster left his job as a deputy assistant attorney general in 1999 to join SAIC, and was already calling Justice three months later on behalf of his new employers—a violation of federal law. Boster paid $30,000 in a civil settlement." Yet another PIC for a while was Interop, combining former CIA director James Woolsey and former FBI director Louis Freeh with former Mossad chief Danny Yatom (Rozen, "From Kurdistan to K Street).

[38] Charlie Cray, "Science Applications International Corporation," CorpWatch, http://www.corpwatch.org/section.php?id=17; cf. Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."

[39] Barlett and Steele, "Washington's $8 Billion Shadow."

[40] Fritz W. Ermarth, "Colin Powell's Briefing to the Security Council: Brief Comments from an Ex-Intelligence Officer," In the National Interest, http://inthenationalinterest.com/Articles/Powell%27s%20UN%20Speech/Powell%27s%20UN%20speech%20ermarth.html. Ermarth’s remarks were also posted by Laurie Mylroie, "Fritz Ermarth, Iraq & Al Qaeda, In The National Interest," February 5, 2003, www.mail-archive.com/sam11@erols.com/msg00040.html.

[41] Anna Leander, "The Power to Construct International Security: On the Significance of Private Military Companies," Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 2005; 33; 803, emphasis added. At the time the Observer reported from " sources in the Bush administration" an allegation that "members of the al-Qaeda network, detained and interrogated in Cairo, had obtained phials of anthrax in the Czech Republic" ("Iraq 'behind US anthrax outbreaks,’" Observer, October 14, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/terrorism.afghanistan6).

[42] Chaim Kaufmann, "Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas," International Security (Summer 2004). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/international_security/v029/29.1kaufmann.html. Neither SAIC nor Diligence is mentioned in his essay.

[43] Tim Shorrock, Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 344.

[44] Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks, http://wikileaks.org/wiki/The_spy_who_billed_me_twice. The March 2009 Army manual “US Army Concept of Operations for Police Intelligence Operations” contains phrases such as "It [fusion] does not have constraints that are emplaced on MI [Military Intelligence] activities within the US, because it operates under the auspice and oversight of the police discipline and standards."

[45] Phil Leggiere, “Napolitano Praises Fusion Centers.” HSToday, March 13, 2009, http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/7616/149/ .

[46] Assange, “The spy who billed me twice.”

[Jan Klimkowski]

A most sophisticated and astute evisceration.

Peter Dale Scott's analysis of Brzezinski is absolutely correct in all aspects. Indeed, to the real powers, Brzezinski himself is a useful idiot. A few steps up on the rung from a useless eater.

the so-called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) who are authorized to commit violence in the name of their employers. These corporations are reminiscent of the marauding condottieri or private mercenary armies contracted for by the wealthy city states of Renaissance Italy.[25]

With the hindsight of history, we can see the contribution of the notoriously capricious Condottieri to the violence they are supposedly hired to deal with. Some, when unemployed, became little more than predatory bandits. Others, like the celebrated Farinata whom Dante placed in the Inferno, turned against their native cities. Above all, the de facto power accumulated by the condottieri meant that, with the passage of time, they came to dictate terms to their ostensible employers.[26] (They were an early example of entrepreneurial violence, and the most common way of avoiding their path of destruction was "to buy reprieve by offering bribes."[27])

Entrepreneurial violence.

A most resonant, compelling and insightful phrase.

What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war.

The passage of the Patriot Act generated a new realm of profit for SAIC contractors -- domestic surveillance of U.S. citizens – as well as new intelligence fusion centers to carry this out.

I was 27 years old the first time I died...

Words uttered by the character Jack Starks, played magnificently by Adrien Brody, in The Jacket.

Jack London seen through the prism of Ken Kesey and Dr John C Lilly.....

[Chris Bowen]

The Real Grand Chessboard and the Profiteers of War (Part Two)



January 10, 2010
by Peter Dale Scott
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http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2010...-part-two/



This is the second article in a two part series. Part one was published on GlobalResearch.ca on August 11, 2009. In that article, Peter Dale Scott argued that, as a result of outsourcing, networks of private military and intelligence contractors (PMCs and PICs) are now in a position to influence or even determine U.S. foreign policy, and have clearly a profit motive to steer America into more and more grandiose and expensive foreign adventures, like the unnecessary war in Iraq. In this second part he explores the transnational aspects of the networks he previously discussed (inhabited by low-profile PMCs like SAIC and Diligence LLC), and their covert operations which have contributed to destabilization and conflict.
Diligence LLC’s Russian Connections: Alfa Bank and Far West Ltd

What we have been talking about until now is advocacy disguised as expertise. But overseas associates of Diligence LLC and its allies have also been accused of false-flag operations intended to provoke war.
Consider first the transnational connections of Diligence LLC. The Chairman of Diligence from 2001 to 2007 was former U.S. Ambassador and arms negotiator Richard Burt, of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers and McLarty Kissinger Associates. Burt, a neocon who once called the SALT agreement “a favor to the Russians,” is also on the Alfa Bank’s Senior Advisory Board in Moscow.
Alfa’s clout in Washington dates back into the mid-1990s, when its oil company, Tyumen (TNK)

was loaned $489m in credits by the US Export-Import Bank after lobbying by Halliburton; ….The [Clinton] White House and State Department tried to veto the Russian deal. But after intense lobbying by Halliburton the objections were overruled on Capitol Hill. [which then was Republican-controlled] ….The State Department’s concerns were based on the fact that Tyumen was controlled by a holding conglomerate, the Alfa Group, that had been investigated in Russia for mafia connections.[1]

At some point in time, the leaders of Halliburton and Diligence, Alfa’s allies and “roof” in Washington, allegedly made contact with a shady group in Russia with Alfa connections, a group that, back in 1998, incorporated itself as the Russian firm Far West Ltd (now Far West LLC). [2]
Vladimir Filin, the president of Far West, once described his company’s activities and backers in a press interview. Far West, he said was

connected with the secured transport of commercial shipments from Afghanistan, where we have an office, to ports on the Black Sea. …But the most commercially attractive route seems to be that from Bagram to the US air base in Magas [Manas], in Kyrgyzstan. By the way, it is quite near the Russian air base in Kant. A significant flow of shipments passes through Magas, there is a niche there for commercial shipments too. This is very profitable. It is much more profitable than routing commercial shipments from Afghanistan through Tajikistan. Therefore last year we completely withdrew from all shipping through Tajikistan and closed our office in that country….
Who our partners are is a commercial secret. I can say that they are four private firms from three countries, Turkey, Russia, and the USA, which engage among other things in shipping. One of these firms is a sub-division of a well-known American corporation. This firm is a co-founder of our agency.[3]

A hostile critic of Far West, “Yuri Yasenev” (a fictional name on the Internet), identified Far West’s U.S. partners as

- «Kellogg, Brown &Root» (KBR Halliburton) – in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia, and Iraq.
- «Diligence Iraq LLC» (controlled by the Kuwaiti Mohammed as-Sagar) – in Iraq.”[4]

More specifically “Yasenev” charged that Far West’s chief business, in Colombia and elsewhere, was drug trafficking, an activity which Filin himself attributed to the Americans controlling Bagram.[5]
Some of “Yasenev”’s charges against Far West – but not these ones – were publicized in America by the Hoover Institution scholar John Dunlop. Dunlop transmitted nothing of what “Yasenev” said about Far West’s connections to KBR and Diligence LLC, as well as to the intelligence services of Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the United States. Dunlop did not mention Far West itself at all by name. But he relied heavily on “Yasenev” to support his claim that some of Far West’s members planned in advance for what has been called “the Russian 9/11:” the series of false-flag terrorist attacks in 1999 that led to the election of Putin as Russian president and also to the second Russian war in Chechnya.[6]
The basic facts of the Russian 9/11 have been well summarized by the historian David Satter:

On August 5 [1999], a Muslim force led by Shamil Basayev, a Chechen guerilla leader, entered western Dagestan from Chechnya, ostensibly to start an anti-Russian uprising. On August 9, Stepashin was dismissed and Putin became prime minister. On August 22, the force withdrew back into Chechnya without heavy losses, amid suspicion that the incursion had been a provocation. At the end of August, Russian aircraft bombed Wahhabi villages in Dagestan in seeming retaliation for the incursion and this was followed, days later, by the explosions that obliterated the apartment buildings in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk.

According to Satter, along with other observers east and west, “the weight of the evidence supports the view that the bombings were not the work of Chechen terrorists but rather the action of the Russian government undertaken to justify the launching of the Second Chechen War.”[7]
What we may call this “first-cut” false-flag explanation for the August 1999 incidents – that it was “the action of the Russian government” – was refined by other observers, notably John B. Dunlop of the Hoover Institution and Jamestown Foundation. According to this “second cut” refinement, the August bombings and Dagestan incursion were both planned in Adnan Khashoggi’s Riviera villa the previous June, by a meeting of Chechen Islamists together with a Kremlin representative.[8] According to Dunlop the meeting was actually brokered by a retired GRU officer called Anton Surikov, who we know from other sources to have been an officer of Far West Ltd. In Dunlop’s words,

On the day following the initial incursion of rebel forces into the Dagestani highlands in early August of 1999, the investigative weekly Versiya published a path-breaking report claiming that the head of the Russian Presidential Administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had met secretly with the most wanted man in Russia, Shamil’ Basaev, through the good offices of a retired officer in the GRU, Anton Surikov, at a villa belonging to international arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi located [in Beaulieu] between Nice and Monaco.[9]

Dunlop blamed the plotting on three protégés of the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky – Valentin Yumashev [Yeltsin’s son-in-law], Alexander Voloshin, and Roman Abramovich – all of whom at this point were members of Yeltsin’s “Family” in the Kremlin. He neglected to mention that Anton Surikov had spent time at the London Centre for Defence Studies; and in addition had admittedly had contacts with former CIA officer Fritz Ermarth.[10]
Russian researchers in the group Left.ru proposed a “third cut” explanation for these events: that they furthered the needs, not just of the “Russian government” or the Berezovsky circle, but also of a CIA-linked international drug connection (of the type exemplified by Adnan Khashoggi).
Developing on their arguments, I myself suggested in particular that “the events of the Russian 9/11” were part of a larger quid-pro-quo discussed at the meeting, including a rerouting of Afghan heroin through Pristina airport in Kosovo, which Russian troops had just occupied.[11] I noted that Dunlop had reported very selectively from his chief source “Yasenev,” particularly with reference to the Far West group’s involvement with other intelligence agencies, and with drug trafficking. I proposed in short that what might have been at stake in the quid quo pro was a major realignment of politics for the sake of the drug traffic itself.
Dunlop did transmit the drug allegations concerning one participant at the meeting,

a Venezuelan banker named Alfonso Davidovich. In the Latin American press, he is said to be responsible for laundering the funds of the Columbian [sic] left insurrection organization FARC, which carries out an armed struggle with the official authorities, supported by the narcotics business.[12]

For almost four years after 2005 I was (according to Google) virtually the only western source of information about Far West Ltd. My essay, charging them with the provocation of terrorist violence and involvement with drug trafficking, was highly relevant to the argument in this chapter, that those who profit from enduring violence can also at times induce it.
My article was also largely based on controversial sources. But in June 2009, for the first time, a western mainstream newspaper, Australia’s Sunday Herald Sun, mentioned Far West Ltd. This was because an Australian citizen, Sarfraz Haider, was one of four people murdered in connection with a Far West smuggling plot I had referred to.[13] According to the Sun, Haider’s murder

was the culmination of a bizarre plot — worthy of a spy thriller — in which nuclear missiles were allegedly stolen from the Russians and sold to Iran for $63 million. ….Up to 20 nuclear-capable Kh-55 missiles — with a 3000km range — and four 200-kiloton nuclear warheads were stolen by a shadowy group of former Russian and Ukrainian intelligence and military officers…. [O]ne version of events, supported by documents obtained from the Ukrainian parliament and the investigations of the Haider family, is that they ended up in Iran and China.
Letters written by Hryhoriy Omelchenko, a former intelligence colonel to Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko, give details of the arms deal. The letters also confirm Mr Haider, 53, was suspected of being part of the arms trafficking gang that sold the missiles to Iran and China…..While wrangling with lawyers and local officials over his father’s estate in Cyprus, Sam Haider was contacted by a man called Ruslan Saidov, who claimed to be a friend and business associate of Sarfraz…. “He said the theft of the missiles was masterminded by the partners of an intelligence and military consultancy firm called Far West Ltd.”[14] [Saidov is in fact an officer of Far West.]

This Australian story corroborated an earlier one in the Ukrainian press, linking Far West to the smuggling and the murder:

three other people who had taken part in the smuggling of the Ukrainian missiles had already been killed. The first was Valeriy Malev, who headed [arms export company] Ukrspetseksport: he was killed in mysterious circumstances in a car crash on 6 March 2002. In January 2004 the general director of the company S.H. Heritage Holding Ltd, an Australian citizen, [Sarfraz Haider?], crashed while driving a quadrobike (according to information from the investigation, the missiles were transported to Iran under a fictitious contract from that company with the Iranian SATAK Co. Ltd of NIOC for the supply of gas turbine equipment). In the same month the Ukrainian businessman Serhiy Petrov, the former head of the consultancy firm Far West Ltd, was blown up in his car in South Africa.[15]

The case itself was reported aroused considerable attention in 2005. Jane’s Intelligence Digest, March 18, 2005, noted: “There is no doubt that the sale of the missiles to Iran and China could only have taken place with the knowledge and cooperation of senior Ukrainian officials. … there is … mounting evidence to suggest that the sale of missiles to Iran was undertaken with the assistance of the Russian security services.”[16]
Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, later used the case to argue that, in smuggling where government officials are involved, illicit networks rather than state organizations can be the main players.[17] This important point, consonant with my own argument here, complicates the notion of a false flag operation: events attributed to the Ukraine government may in fact have been intended by subordinate officials, at least partly, to embarrass and destabilize it.
However in the course of his argument Naím wrote that “these deals were motivated by profit, not politics.” This claim was sharply contested by a Russian news agency, quoting Ukrainian sources, which claimed that the Kh-55 smuggling was initiated by American neocons, including Cheney and Rumsfeld, in order to create a casus belli against Iran.
In 2005 Filin denied the involvement of Far West in the illegal Kh-55 sales, even as he announced that his company Far West had passed $3 million in bribes concerning other deals with the same Ukrainian state agency Ukrspetsexport.[18] According to Pravda-info, he and two other co-founders of Far West, Ltd., Anton Surikov, and Alexei Likhvintsev, met with representatives of the Bush Administration. Later Filin cited fear of criminal persecution by US law-enforcement agencies as the reason for his and his partners’ hasty relocation from Europe to Brazil and Dubai. According to Filin, he and his partners were warned by a high-ranking U.S. official that they would be brought to justice for their role in the 2001 Kh-55 affair.[19] Later Filin attended the inauguration of President Evo Morales in Bolivia, where he adopted a new and militantly anti-CIA stance, denouncing the CIA as “absolute and universal evil.”[20]
Filin’s switch-hitting in matters of alliance with official intelligence agencies may have been more a matter of theater than of substance. Even so, it corroborates a “fourth-cut” explanation for Far West’s provocations which I shall develop below. This is that Far West’s principal aim is to promote conditions that facilitate its own business prospects (including drug trafficking), and specifically the chaos that makes for future contracts as well as allowing for illegal crops to be harvested and trafficked with impunity. In would be interesting to learn if, after the exposure of the Kh-55 scandal, Far West continued to operate its “export” business out of the US-controlled airports of Bagram and Manas. An affirmative answer would indicate the tolerance, if not indeed complicity, of U.S. personnel in Far West’s activities.
A Fourth-Cut Account of Far West Ltd: an Ongoing Destabilization Machine
The ensemble of evidence now gathered suggests a fourth-cut explanation for the Russian 9/11: that it was not an ad hoc conspiracy, but part of an on-going connection for destabilization operations – not primarily to support either Russia or the United States, but to promote chaos in order to weaken legitimate government in the Caucasus, create an environment for entrepreneurial violence, and facilitate drug trafficking.[21]
The use of Khashoggi’s villa, furthermore, can be interpreted as corroboration of this. A 1991 DIA report listed numerous Colombian traffickers and their associates, and included: “69. Adnan ((Khashoggi)) — An international arms trafficker who allegedly has sold arms to the Colombian drug traffickers, especially to the Medellin Cartel.”[22] This is of course consistent with the report, transmitted by Dunlop, that Alfonso Davidovich of Far West Ltd “is said to be responsible for laundering the funds of the Columbian [sic] left insurrection organization FARC.”
Many have observed that the military incursions used by America to fight terrorism in Asia are contributing to, not reducing, the threat to this country. My own conclusion is both more severely critical, and also in the end more optimistic. It is that America has been drawn into these conflicts by forces it failed to understand, some of which it is sustaining from the public trough. What is needed more than a change in Afghanistan or in Pakistan is a change in Washington itself, to cease subsidizing the predators who have been profiting from our discomfort and casualties abroad.
It would be nice to think that understanding of this folly would lead to its termination. But what we are witnessing is precisely the progressive erosion of the power of the public state to control the billions of activities that are conducted, in its name, for private profit. Neither the President nor the Congress appears capable of reversing the tide of corruption that is overwhelming both them and us.

[1] “Cheney firm won $3.8bn contracts from government,” Observer, July 21, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/21/globalisation.georgebush.
[2] Novyi Region, November 27-30, 2006: English summary in “U.S. Companies Linked to Vice-President Cheney Supervised the Transfar of Ukrainian WMD to Iran,” Left.ru, http://www.left.ru/burtsev/ops/novyiregion.phtml.
[3] PravdaInfo, 9/2/05, http://www.pravda.info/news/3601.html.
[4] Yuri Yasenev, “Rossiyu zhdet oranzhevaya revolytsiya” (“An Orange Revolution is in Store for Russia”), compromat.ru, 12/17/04, http://www.compromat.ru/main/surikov/saidov.htm; partial translation at http://www.left.ru/burtsev/ops/yasenev_en.phtml: Yasenev implied that in 2003-04 Georgia Far West had worked with KBR on the two Rose Revolutions which ousted Shevardnadze and installed Georgia’s present ruler, Saakashvili (Scott, “The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11,” Lobster, October 29, 2005, http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/global-drug.htm).
[5] “-Vladimir Ilyich [Filin], is it true that Americans are involved in drug business?
-Yes, they are in ideal situation for this. They control the Bagram airfield from where the Air Force transport planes fly to a U.S. military base in Germany. In the last two years this base became the largest transit hub for moving Afghan heroin to other US bases and installations in Europe. Much of it goes to Kosovo in the former Yugoslavia. From there the Kosovo Albanian mafia moves heroin back to Germany and other EU countries” (Alexander Nagorny, “Narkobarony iz CIA i MI-6″ Pravda-info, September 13, 2004, translated into English at Left.ru, http://left.ru/inter/2005/narkobarons.phtml
[6] John B. Dunlop, “`Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin “Family” to Destabilize Russia,” The Hoover Institution, October 8, 2004, http://www.sais-jhu.edu/programs/res/papers/Dunlop%20paper.pdf. This article disappeared from the Johns Hopkins University SAIS website shortly after my critique of it was published in October 2005.
[7] David Satter, “The Shadow of Ryazan: Is Putin’s Government Legitimate: Is Putin’s Government Legitimate?” National Review, April 30, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-satter043002.asp. Cf. David Satter, Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State (New Haven: Yale UP, 2003), Chapter 2.
[8] Patrick Cockburn, Independent, January 29, 2000: “Boris Kagarlitsky, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Comparative Politics, writing in the weekly Novaya Gazeta, says that the bombings in Moscow and elsewhere were arranged by the GRU (the Russian military intelligence service). He says they used members of a group controlled by Shirvani Basayev, brother of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, to plant the bombs. These killed 300 people in Buikask, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September. Mr Kagarlitsky, who, from internal evidence in the article, is drawing on a source with close knowledge of the GRU, says that invasion of Dagestan by Shamil Basayev himself in August was pre-arranged with a senior Kremlin leader at a meeting in France in July.”
[9] John B. Dunlop, “`Storm in Moscow’: A Plan of the Yeltsin “Family” to Destabilize Russia,” The Hoover Institution, October 8, 2004, http://www.sais-jhu.edu/programs/res/papers/Dunlop%20paper.pdf. This article disappeared from the Johns Hopkins University SAIS website shortly after my critique of it was published in October 2005.
[10] Letter of Anton Surikov to Oleg Grechenevsky: “I am personally acquainted with Mr. Ermarth as political scientist since 1996. It’s well known by many people and we never hid this fact.” Fritz Ermarth did not retire from the CIA until 1998. Cf. Argumenty i Facty, September 15, 1999, http://www.aif.ru/oldsite/986/art010.html. That the two men met in 1996 was indeed public knowledge. (The Russian journal Commersant published a photo of the two men and others at the International Seminar on Global Security in Virginia, April 1996). However in 2002 Surikov’s paper, Pravda.ru, published a front-page story (or better, rumor) linking Ermarth to Surikov’s enemy Berezovsky: “Berezovsky is much more interesting from the point of view of different manipulations in domestic and partially in foreign political life. For this very purpose, British special services `handed Berezovsky over’ to American colleagues. We have information that Fritz Ermarth, former CIA officer and specialist on special operations in the East-European region, is in close contact with the oligarch. Russiagate, the scandal on Russian budgetary finance laundering through BONY in August to September of 1998, was one of his projects. He is in contact with Former CIA Director Woolsey, who has no official job in Washington but is known as a person close to Cheney. It is not ruled out that it was Ermarth who suggested that Berezovsky switch his attention from the weak and unpromising micro-party Liberal Russia to financing and cooperation with the Communist Party” (http://english.pravda.ru/politics/2002/10/09/37954.html).
[11] Peter Dale Scott, “The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11,” Lobster, October 2005, http://lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/global-drug.htm#_ftn9; “The Tao of 9/11,” Jacket 34, October 2007, http://jacketmagazine.com/34/scott-p-d-5p.shtml.
[12] Dunlop, “Storm in Moscow.”
[13] In a revised version of my paper I delivered at a symposium at the University of Melbourne, August 12, 2006.
[14] Laurie Nowell, “Did an Aussie sell nukes to Iran?” Sunday Herald Sun (Australia), June 7, 2009: “`He said my father had been killed because the people at Far West and their Iranian partners feared the Americans would get to him and make him tell them about the missiles. They feared that he knew too much information about their dealings, and knew more information than anybody else.’ Far West’s partners, all former Russian or Ukrainian military or intelligence officers, had close contacts with military figures and mafia groups within Russia and its former satellites. They spirited the missiles out of the Ukraine and shipped them to Cyprus under the auspices of a company called SH Heritage Holdings — whose owner and sole director was Sarfraz Haider.”
[15] Kommersant-Ukraina, Kiev, July 17, 2007, 3; as reported by BBC Monitoring Kiev Unit, July 18, 2007.
[16] “X-55 Long Range Cruise Missile,” GlobalSecurity.org, http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/x-55.htm. Cf. Financial Times, March 18, 2005.
[17] Moisés Naím. Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats Are Hijacking the Global Economy (New York: Anchor, 2006), 279-80.
[18] Pravda.info, November 16, 2005, reported in English by Left.ru, “`Consulting’ Agency Far West, LLC Paid $3 Million Bribe to Ukrainian Official For Illegal Arms Deals with Syria and Iran,” Left.ru, February 18, 2006, http://www.left.ru/burtsev/ops/lysenko.phtml). According to Left.ru, Filin’s admission was in response to an article by Ivan Demidov in the Ukrainian journal Obkom. Demidov accused two of Filin’s Far West partners, Ukrainian Generals Leonid Kosyakov and Alexei Likhvintsev, and the Russian billionaire Vyacheslav Kantor, adviser to Yushchenko, of seeking to obtain control over two Ukrainian seaports, in Odessa and Ilyichevsk. Demidov’s article (“Who Squeezes Juice from ‘Drug-Injected Oranges’”) hinted that under the guise of fertilizers to be exported to South America by Kantor’s company Akron, the group planned to transport drugs. It also reprinted a letter from a Ukrspetsexport official listing Far West’s business partners: KBR Halliburton (US), Diligence Iraq, LLC (Kuwait), and Meteoric Tactical Solutions (South Africa). And according to Left.ru, Demidov’s article “alleges that Fritz Ermarth, formerly high ranking official in the CIA, NSC, and NIC, plays the role of the “supervisor” of this GRU group on the part of the FWL’s chief partner: KBR Halliburton and the Dick Cheney circle.”
[19] Editorial staff of burtsev.ru, http://www.left.ru/burtsev/ops/bolivia.phtml; citing Vladimir Filin, Pravda-info, July 29, 2005, http://www.pravda.info/news/3377.html. Cf. Financial Times, March 18, 2005. The relocation followed Filin’s announcement that Far West had paid bribes paid to Ukrainian officials. Cf. Boston Globe, 2/12/06, A1.
[20] Natalia Roeva, Pravda-info, February 24, 2006; partially translated. Roeva is herself a partner in Far West.
[21] Far West has planted destabilizing rumors to discredit both the U.S. and Russia. Ruslan Saidov has “accused the high ranking officer of US military intelligence (DIA) Colonel Caleb Temple and his colleagues of running a heroin operation in the Near East and using the hawala money-transfer system for money laundering” (http://left.ru/burtsev/ops/hawala.phtml). In August 2009 Vladimir Filin claimed that the recently hijacked ship the Arctic Sea, under the cover of a load of Finnish timber, was delivering a shipment of weapons to Iran via Algeria (Cristina Batog, “The truth is adrift with the Arctic Sea,” Asia Times, August 26, 2009, http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/KH26Ag01.html; cf. J. R. Nyquist, “Never Ask the Wolves to Help You Against the Dogs,”
GodlikeProductions.com, August 21, 2009, http://www.godlikeproductions.com/bbs/reply.php?messageid=869607&page=1&quote=13460278).
[22] DIA Report of 9/23/91, “Subj: (U) IIR [DELETED]/Narcotics – Colombian Narco-Trafficker Profiles,” http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB131/dia910923.pdf. Cf. New York Times, 8/2/04.


Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. This essay is an excerpt from his forthcoming book, The Road to Afghanistan: The U.S. War Machine and the Global Drug Connection. His most recent books are Drugs, Oil, and War (2005), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008) and Mosaic Orpheus (poetry, 2009).
http://www.peterdalescott.net

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[Ed Jewett]

Thanks for finding Part Two, Chris. :top: