The CIA’s Islamist Terrorist Network

Strategic Culture Foundation

The Central Intelligence Agency cobbled together the forerunner of the present Muslim jihadist terrorist network in the late 1970s to battle Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Throughout the next three decades, the CIA continued to maintain links with the jihadist groups, using them as allies for certain operations and attacking them when America’s «commitment» to the «war on terrorism» required an propaganda boost in the world’s media.

An example of the CIA ‘s flip-flopping between using its mujaheddin and jihadist allies and then declaring them «terrorists» and putting a price on their heads is the recent declaration by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the Haqqani network based in North Waziristan, Pakistan is a «foreign terrorist organization».

The Haqqani network, led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, was cobbled together by the CIA and the Pakistani Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in the 1980s.

The Haqqani network is the latest former CIA ally to be branded a terrorist group. The Haqqanis are the latest in a long line of so-called terrorist groups that were organized and funded by the CIA only later to be thrown to the side of the road and branded «terrorists». Others include «Al Qaeda», led by CIA Afghan war veteran Osama bin Laden and Hezb-I Islami leader Gulbuddin Hekmatayar. With the designation of the Haqqani network as a terrorist organization, after the demise of Bin Laden and the designation of Hekmatayar as a terrorist, the CIA has run the table on its old mujaheddin allies. Only those «Al Qaeda» operatives who have allied themselves with the CIA in the Western-backed insurgencies in Libya and Syria.

Bin Laden and «Al Qaeda» were the convenient scapegoats for the CIA and its Mossad allies to provide a «logical» perpetrator for the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the 11th anniversary of which is now being observed across America. Hekmatayar’s falling out with the CIA appears to be over his attempt to cut into the opium smuggling in Afghanistan run by intelligence cut-outs for the CIA, as well as the family opium harvesting and smuggling business of the family of Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

In his book on America’s dalliance with Islamist terrorists, the late ABC News Middle East correspondent John Cooley reveals the nature of the CIA’s involvement with Afghan opium smuggling in his book Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism. Getting the idea from French intelligence, the CIA launched Operation Mosquito, a program that pumped heroin and hashish into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan in order to «hook» Red Army troops on drugs and decimate their fighting potential. When supplies of narcotics from Pakistan were depleted, the drugs shipped into Afghanistan came from stockpiles of Colombian cocaine and heroin impounded by the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Customs Service, and U.S. Coast Guard. The CIA used various Afghan warlords and operatives like Bin Laden, Hekmatayar, and Haqqani to smuggle drugs into Kabul, Kandahar, and other areas where Soviet troops were concentrated. The proceeds from the drug smuggling were split between the Afghan warlords and the CIA’s off-shore slush funds.

No less an expert on «Al Qaeda» than the late British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, in an article for The Guardian newspaper published on July 8, 2005, wrote «Throughout the 80s he [Bin Laden] was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally ‘the database,’ was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians». Cook, who, as Foreign Secretary, would have had access to most of the files of two agencies subservient to him – Britain’s MI-6 Secret Intelligence Service and Britain’s U.S. National Security Agency counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) – was revealing some of the most hidden secrets about Western intelligence agency involvement in crafting and exploiting the 9/11 attacks.

Former French military intelligence officer Pierre-Henri Bunel, who tracked Islamist terrorist networks in the Balkans and discovered their CIA origins, said «Al Qaeda» was not merely a database, but an Intranet the CIA used to call up reserves of mujaheddin to engage in specified terrorist actions, much like those seen during the past few years in the remote-control bombing of civilians in Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad, various Libyan and Pakistani cities, Aden, and other locales., all carried out by «Al Qaeda» or its off shoots.

Echoing Cook’s statement, Bunel, a graduate of the elite St. Cyr military academy in France, wrote:

«The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the U.S. and the lobbyists for the U.S. war on terrorism are only interested in making money.

Bunel described in great detail how «Al Qaeda» operated. He revealed that the Al Qaeda «Intranet» was established under the auspices of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), which is based in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Users, including OIC member governments and their embassies around the world, could access the database «by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language.

A major in Pakistan’s military told Bunel that the «Al Qaeda» database was «divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, Q’eidat il-Maaloomaat and Q’eidat i-Taaleemaat. Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic Q’eidat ilmu’ti’aat, which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for ‘base.’»

Among the countries using the Al Qaeda Intranet to conduct terrorist operations was Saudi Arabia. And the «Al Qaeda» Intranet had been around for quite some time before 9/11. Bunel stated: «When Osama Bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages».

Cook died suddenly from a heart attack a month after he wrote the Guardian article. Bunel was charged, convicted, and imprisoned for a dubious claim that he spied for Serbia.

Today, the OIC is at the vanguard of providing covert support to «Al Qaeda» and affiliated rebels fighting against Bashar al Assad’s government in Syria. It is likely that the «Al Qaeda» intranet is working overtime sending coded messages between Jeddah, Riyadh, Doha, Abu Dhabi and «Al Qaeda» field units in Syria and on the Turkish side of the Syrian border. The OIC has suspended Syria from OIC membership and the only reason for such a decision was to sever Syria from the OIC «Al Qaeda» Intranet intelligence link to Syrian rebel forces and CIA covert channel terminals in Langley, Virginia.

Hekmatayar and Haqqani are arms of the ISI and when their services were needed the most by the United States, they served the interests of the CIA. There is now an attempt by the CIA to rewrite the recent history of South Asia and eliminate all the insurgents and guerrillas and their organizations that did the bidding of the CIA. Bin Laden was accused of carrying out 9/11, Hekmatayar of killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan on behalf of the Taliban and «Al Qaeda,» and now the Haqqani network, still an arm of ISI, of attacking U.S. targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

America’s love affair with Islamist radical terrorists goes back to the days of Zbigniew Brzezinki, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser, and even earlier, when journalist-turned-CIA agent Archibald Roosevelt, the grandson of U.S. uber-imperialist-turned-progressive Theodore Roosevelt, concocted a plan to bring the Soviets to their knees by stoking anti-Communist Islamists against the Soviets in places like Egypt, where the CIA supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempt to assassinate Egyptian pan-Arab socialist Gamal Abdel Nasser. Archibald’s cousin, Kermit Roosevelt, was in charge of the 1953 CIA coup that toppled Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and restored the hated Shah to power. Both decisions were monumental disasters for U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim world.

Bin Laden, Hekmatayar, and Haqqani – all one time allies of the CIA – became «problems» in CIA parlance. And like all CIA «problems», they have all possessed one ultimate destiny – termination with extreme prejudice…