We are continuing the
publication of Thierry Meyssan’s new book, « Right Before Our Eyes ». In this
episode, he describes the way in which President Jimmy Carter and his national
security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, used the terrorist capacities of the
Muslim Brotherhood against the Soviets.
In
1972-1973, an official from the Foreign Office – and probably MI6 as well – Sir
James Craig, together with the British ambassador to Egypt, Sir Richard
Beaumont, began an intense lobbying campaign aimed at harnessing the Muslim
Brotherhood for use by the United Kingdom and the United States in the struggle
against the Marxists and the nationalists, not only in Egypt, but also all over
the Muslim world. Sir James was soon to be nominated as Her Majesty’s
ambassador in Syria, then in Arabia, and would find an attentive ear at the
CIA. Much later, he was to become the designer of the “Arab Springs”.
In
1977, Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States. He appointed
Zbigniew Brzeziński as his National Security Advisor. Brzeziński decided to use
Islamism against the Soviets. He gave the Saudis the go-ahead to increase their
payments to the Islamic World League, organised regime changes in Pakistan,
Iran and Syria, destabilised Afghanistan, and made US access to oil from the
“Greater Middle East” a national security objective. Finally, he entrusted the
Brotherhood with military equipment.
This strategy was clearly
explained by Bernard Lewis during the meeting of the Bilderberg Group [1], organised by NATO in Austria, April 1979.
Lewis, an Anglo-Israeli-US Islamologist, assured that the Muslim Brotherhood
could not only play a major role against the Soviets and provoke internal
trouble in Central Asia, but also balkanise the Near East in favour of Israel.
Contrary
to a widely-held belief, the Brotherhood was not happy about following the
Brzeziński plan – it was looking further afield. It had obtained the assistance
of Riyadh and Washington for the creation of other branches of the Brotherhood
in other countries – branches that were to come to fruition later on. The King
of Arabia granted an average of $5billion annually to the Muslim World League, which
extended its activities in 120 countries and financed various wars. As a point
of reference, $5 billion was the equivalent of the military budget of North
Korea. The League obtained advisory status for the Economic and Social Council
of the United Nations, and the post of observer for UNICEF.
In
Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Army Chief of Staff, trained at Fort
Bragg in the United States, overthrew President Zulfikar Alî Bhutto and had him
hanged. A member of the Jamaat-e-Islami, in other words the local version of
the Muslim Brotherhood, he went on to Islamise Pakistani society. The Sharia
was progressively established – including the death penalty for blasphemy – and
a vast network of Islamic schools was set up. It was the first time that the
Brotherhood had been in power outside of Egypt.
In
Iran, Brzeziński convinced the Shah to abdicate, and organised the return of
Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, who defined himself as a “Shiite Islamist”. In his
youth, in 1945, Khomeini had met Hasan al-Banna in Cairo, and convinced him not
to exacerbate the Sunni/Shiite conflict. Later, he translated two books by
Sayyid Qutb. The Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolutionaries agreed on social
subjects, but not at all on political questions. Brzeziński realised his
mistake the very day that the Ayatollah arrived in Teheran. Khomeini
immediately went to pray at the tombs of the martyrs of the Shah’s régime, and
called on the army to revolt against imperialism. Brzeziński committed a second
error by sending Delta Force to save the US spies who were being held hostage
in their embassy in Teheran. Even if he was able to hide from Western eyes the
fact that these “diplomats” were actually spies, he made a laughing-stock of
his soldiers with the failed mission “Eagle Claw”, and convinced the Pentagon
that it was necessary to find a way of defeating Iran.
Brzeziński set up “Operation
Cyclone” in Afghanistan. Between 17,000 and 35,000 Muslim Brothers from about
40 countries came to fight the USSR, which had come to the defence of the
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, at its request [2]. There had never been a “Soviet invasion”,
as US propaganda pretended.
The men of the Brotherhood
came to reinforce a local coalition of conservative combatants and the local
Muslim Brotherhood, including the Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Tajik
Ahmad Shah Massoud. They received the major part of their armament from
Israel [3] – officially their sworn enemy, but now
their partner. All these forces were commanded from Pakistan by General
Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. This
was the first time that the Brotherhood had been used by the Anglo-Saxons to
wage war. Among the combatants present were the future commanders of the wars
in the Caucasus, of the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah, the Abu Sayyaf group in
the Philippines, and of course al-Qaeda and Daesh. In the United States, the
anti-Soviet operation was supported by the Republican Party and a small group
from the extreme left, the Trotskyists of Social Democrats USA.
The Carter-Brzeziński
strategy represented a change of scale [4]. Saudi Arabia, which up until then had been
financing the Islamist groups, found itself tasked with managing the war funds
for the fight against the Soviets. The general director of Saudi Intelligence,
Prince Turki (son of King Faisal), became an indispensable personality for all
the Western summits on Intelligence.
In
the early phases, so many problems arose between the Afghans and Arabs that it
was impossible to get them to fight together against the Communists. Prince
Turki first sent the Palestinian Abdallah Azzam, the “Imam of Jihad”, to bring
order to the Brotherhood, and run the Kabul office of the Muslim World League,
but the office did not do well and was closed. Azzam was then succeeded by
billionaire Osama Ben Laden. Both of them had been trained in Saudi Arabia by
Sayyid Qutb’s brother.
During
Carter’s term, the Muslim Brotherhood also undertook a long campaign of terror
in Syria, including the assassination, by the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Fighting
Vanguard”, of non-Sunni cadets at the Military Academy of Aleppo. The
“Vanguard” were able to use training camps in Jordan, where the British handled
their military instruction. During these “Years of Lead”, the CIA managed to
broker an alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood and the small group of
ex-Communists under Riyadh al-Turk. He and his Syrian dissident friends,
Georges Sabra and Michel Kilo, had split with Moscow during the Lebanese civil
war to support the Western camp. They affiliated themselves with the US Trotskyist
group, Social Democrats USA. Together, the three men drew up a manifesto in
which they affirmed that the Muslim Brotherhood formed the new proletariat, and
that Syria could only be saved by US military intervention. Finally, the
Brotherhood attempted a coup d’état in Syria in 1982, with the support of the
Iraqi Ba’ath Party (which was collaborating with Washington against Iran) and
Saudi Arabia. The combats which followed at Hama caused 2,000 deaths according
to the Pentagon, 40,000 according to the Brotherhood and the CIA.
After
that, hundreds of prisoners were slaughtered in Palmyra by the brother of
President Hafez al-Assad, Rifaat, who was dismissed and forced into exile in
Paris when he attempted, in his turn, a coup d’état against his own brother.
The Trotskyists were imprisoned, and most members of the Brotherhood fled
either to Germany (home of ex-Syrian Guide Issam al-Attar), or to France (like
Abu Musab the Syrian). Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President François Mitterrand
granted them asylum. Two years later, a scandal broke out within the opposition
– which was in exile at the moment of division – $3 million had disappeared out
of an envelope of $10 million donated by the Muslim World League.
Towards the constitution of an
Internationale for jihad
During
the 1980’s, the Muslim World League received instructions from Washington to
transform Algerian society. Over a period of ten years, Riyadh paid for the
construction of mosques in the villages of Algeria. Each time, a dispensary and
a school were built alongside the mosques. The Algerian authorities were
delighted with this assistance, especially since they were no longer able to
guarantee the people’s access to health care and education. Progressively, the
Algerian working classes distanced themselves from the state which was no
longer much use to them, and grew ever closer to these generous mosques.
When
Prince Fahd became the King of Saudi Arabia in 1982, he nominated Prince Bandar
(son of the Minister for Defence) as ambassador to Washington, a post he
retained for the duration of Fahd’s reign. His function was double – on one
side, he looked after Saudi-US relations, on the other, he served as an
interface between the Director of Turkish Intelligence and the CIA. He became
friends with the vice-President and ex-Director of the CIA, George H. W. Bush,
who considered him as his “adopted son” (whence his nickname “Bandar Bush),
then with Secretary for Defense Dick Cheney and the future Director of the CIA,
George Tenet. He made his way into the social life of the elite and also had an
entrée into the Christian cult of the Pentagon Chiefs of Staff, called The
Family, as well as the ultra-conservative Bohemian Club of San Francisco.
Bandar
directed the jihadists from the Muslim World League. He negotiated with London
for the purchase of weapons from British Aerospace for his kingdom, in exchange
for oil. These record-breaking “pigeon” contracts, in Arabic “Al Yamamah”,
would cost Riyadh between 40 and 83 billion pounds sterling, of which an
important part would be transferred to the Prince by the British. A corruption
and fraud scandal arose, but was suppressed by the Saudi and British
governments.
In 1983, President Ronald
Reagan entrusted Carl Gershman, ex-leader of the aforementioned Trotskyites,
Social Democrats USA, with the directorship of the new National Endowment for
Democracy [sic] [5]. This was an agency which depended on the
“Five Eyes” agreement, camouflaged as a NGO. It was the legal window for the
secret services of Australia, Britain, Canada, the United States and New
Zealand. Gershman had already worked with his Trotskyist comrades and his
Muslim Brotherhood friends in Lebanon, Syria and Afghanistan. He set up a vast
network of associations and foundations that the CIA and MI6 used to help the
Brotherhood wherever possible. He pledged allegiance to the “Kirkpatrick
Doctrine”, which basically states that all alliances are justified so long as
they serve the interests of the United States (against its rivals, who are ipso
facto “totalitarians”.
In this context, the CIA and
MI6, who, at the peak of the Cold War, had created the World Anti-Communist
League (WACL), used this organisation to supply the necessary funds for the
jihad in Afghanistan. Oussama Ben Laden belonged to the organisation, which
included several Heads of State [6]
In
1985, the United Kingdom, faithful to its tradition of academic expertise,
equipped itself with an institute tasked with studying Muslim societies and the
ways in which the Brotherhood could influence them – the Oxford Centre for
Islamic Studies.
In
1989, the Brotherhood succeeded in perpetrating a second coup d’état, this time
in Sudan, on behalf of Colonel Omar el-Bechir, who wasted no time in nominating
the local Guide, Hassan al-Turabi, as President of the National Assembly. In a
conference held in London, al-Turabi announced that his country was going to become
the rear base for all the Islamist groups in the world.
Also in 1989, the Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS) arose in Algeria, based around Abbasi Madani, while the
party in power collapsed under the weight of numerous scandals. The FIS was
supported by the mosques “gifted” by the Saudis, and as a result, by the
Algerian people who had been frequenting them for a decade. FIS won the local
elections, due more to rejection of the country’s leaders than by belief in the
ideology of FIS. Considering the failure of the politicians and the categorical
impossibility of negotiating with the Islamists, the army carried out a coup
d’état and cancelled the elections. The country sank into a long and murderous
civil war about which we knew very little, but which claimed more than 150,000
victims. The Islamists did not hesitate to practise both individual and
collective punishments, for example when they massacred the inhabitants of Ben
Talha – guilty of having voted despite the fatwa forbidding them to do so – and
destroyed the village. Evidently, Algeria served as a laboratory for new
operations. The rumour spread that it was the army, not the Islamists, who had
massacred the villagers. In reality, several senior officers from the secret
services, who had been trained in the United States, joined the Islamists and
spread confusion.
In
1991, Osama Bin Laden, who returned to Saudi Arabia as a hero of the
anti-Communist struggle at the end of the war in Afghanistan, officially fell
out with the King, while the “Sururists”, or followers of Sheikh Surur, rose up
against the monarchy. This insurrection, the “Islamic Awakening”, lasted for
four years, and ended with the imprisonment of the principal leaders. It showed
the monarchy – who imagined that they enjoyed total authority – that by mixing
religion and politics, the Brotherhood had created the conditions for a revolt
via the mosques.
In
this context, Osama Bin Laden claimed that he had proposed the aid of a few
thousand veterans of the Afghan war to fight Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but
astonishingly, the King seemed to prefer a million soldiers from the US and
their allies. Allegedly as a result of this disagreement, Bin Laden left for
exile in Sudan – but in reality, his mission was to regain control of the
Islamists who had escaped the authority of the Brotherhood and had risen up
against the Saudi monarchy. With Sudan’s Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi, he
organised a series of popular pan-Arab and pan-Islamic conferences, to which he
invited the representatives of Islamist and Nationalist movements from about
fifty countries. The aim was to create, at the party level, the equivalent of
what Saudi Arabia had already succeeded in doing with the Organisation of
Islamic Cooperation, which brought States together. The participants did not
know that these meetings were paid for by the Saudis, and that the hotels where
they met were under CIA surveillance. Everyone participated, from Yasser Arafat
to the Lebanese Hezbollah.
The FBI managed to convict
the BCCI, a gigantic Muslim bank which had become, over time, the bank used by
the CIA for its secret operations, particularly the financing of the war in
Afghanistan – but also the narco-traffic in Latin America [7]. When the BCCI was declared bankrupt, its
smaller clients were not reimbursed, but Osama Bin Laden managed to recover
$1.4 billion to continue the Muslim Brotherhood’s work for Washington. The CIA
then transferred its activities to the Faysal Islamic Bank and its subsidiary,
Al-Baraka.
French
intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace
Conference. His columns specializing in international relations feature in
daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Arabic, Spanish and Russian. His last
two books published in English : 9/11 the Big Lie and Pentagate.
The
articles on Voltaire Network may be freely reproduced provided the source is
cited, their integrity is respected and they are not used for commercial
purposes (license CC BY-NC-ND).
