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Invisible History
Afghanistan's Untold Story
Contents
Invisible History CIA
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul's television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, they found themselves in the midst of a swirling controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Their acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in the spring of 1981, brought them into the middle of the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the pictures and the people inside Soviet occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast on the evening news.
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
Following their exclusive news story for the CBS Evening News, they produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds) for PBS and in 1983 they returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher. They were told that the Russians wanted to go home and negotiate their way out. Peace in Afghanistan was more than a possibility. It was a desired option. But the story that President Carter called, "the greatest threat to peace since the second World War" had already been written by America's policy makers and America's pundits were not about to change the script.
As the first American journalists to get deeply inside the story they not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the US defined itself against the rest of the world under the veil of superpower confrontation. Once the Soviets had crossed the border into Afghanistan, the fate of both nations was sealed. But as Paul and Liz pursued the reasons behind the wall of propaganda that shielded the truth, they found themselves drawn into a story that was growing into mythic dimensions. Big things were brewing in Afghanistan. Old empires were being undone and new ones, hatched. America had launched a Medieval Crusade against the modern world and the ten year war against the Soviet Union was only the first chapter.
It was at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 when Paul and Liz were working on the film version of their experience under contract to Oliver Stone, that they began to piece together the mythic implications of the story. During the research for the screenplay many of the documents preceding the Afghan crisis were declassified. Over the next decade they trailed a labyrinth of clues only to find a profound likeness in Washington's official policy towards Afghanistan - in the ancient Zoroastrian war of the light against the dark - whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan. It was a likeness that grows more visible as America's involvement deepens.
Afghanistan's civil war followed America's Cold War while Washington walked away. A new strain of religious holy warrior called the Taliban arose but no one in America was listening. As the horrors of the Taliban regime began to grab headlines in 1998 Paul and Liz began collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali. Along with Wali, they contributed to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project. In 2002 they filmed Wali's first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978. The film they produced about Wali's journey home, The Woman in Exile Returns, gave audiences the chance to discover the message of one of Afghanistan's most articulate voices and her hopes for her people.
In the years since 9/11 much has happened to bring Paul and Liz's story into sharp focus. Their efforts at combining personal diplomacy with activist journalism is a model for restoring a healthy and vibrant dialogue to American democracy. Their previous book, Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story lays bare why it was inevitable that the Soviet Union and the U.S. should end up in Afghanistan and what that means to the future of the American empire. Their forthcoming book, Crossing Zero focuses on the nuances of the Obama administration's evolving military and political strategy, those who have been chosen to implement it, and the long-term consequences for the U.S. and the region.[1]
[▲] Part 1: MI6 intelligence has always been an anti-Soviet/Russian "Rumor Factory"
The Sordid History of British Manipulation of American Democracy Series: Read it and weep! (Image by Museum of London)
"The ultimate sophistication of subversion is to take over the government, not by unlawful but by lawful means." Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991
According to the dean of American intelligence scholars Loch K. Johnson as reported in the New York Times, the real story about alleged "Russian meddling" in America's presidential election is that the United States meddles in other nation's elections and in a big way. But the extent of Britain's secret services meddling in American politics - at least since - the beginning of the 20thcentury would shock even the most devout cheerleaders of ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele and his "dirty dossier".
In a case oddly reminiscent of America's current hysteria over the Russians, British intelligence even meddled with its own government back in the mid-1970s when panicked right-wing elements of the military plotted a coup d' etat of Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson based on information generated by their own disinformation campaign about the Soviet Union. As told by Colin Wallace, a psychological warfare specialist for the British army working to smear Wilson and other British politicians as Soviet puppets: "One of the main byproducts of the disinformation campaign in 1973-74 was the dramatic growth of paramilitary organizations. Bearing in mind that these people were motivated for the real reasons one can only surmise that the bulk of the information that they were reacting to was the disinformation which we and other parts of the government apparatus was producing at that stage. One of the other side effects of the psychological operations is that once we actually created false information about an individual or an organization, members of the intelligence community also believed it."
Do you get that America? In 1974 Britain's intelligence services plotted the overthrow of their own elected government in London which they had convinced themselves with their own lies had been infiltrated and subverted by KGB agents from Moscow whom they, themselves had invented. Continuing to accuse anyone who opposes the "Russians did it narrative" as working for the Russians is what used to be called paranoid right-wing McCarthyism, and the anti-Putin bureaucracy is pouring gasoline on themselves by continuing to push it. The Democratic Party has long used falsified evidence to move the United States to war against London's enemies and the British government has a reputation for producing dirty dossiers to help them. The "leak" of the 1917 Zimmerman telegram(conveniently intercepted by British intelligence) was "arranged" so as to make it politically impossible for Democratic President Woodrow Wilson to fulfill his promise to keep the United States out of World War I. In the spring of 1940, more than a year and half before America's entry into World War II, Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) created a massive covert operation in New York City known as the British Security Coordination(BSC) to conduct an illegal campaign of political subversion, propaganda and sabotage inside the United States (to frame Germany). Initiated by Winston Churchill with the private approval of Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt and the cooperation of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, who insisted "that no other US government department, including the Department of State should be informed of it", BSC's purpose was to manipulate a neutral United States once again into war with Germany. Then once Germany was dispensed with, Winston Churchill followed up with his Iron Curtain speech in the spring of 1946 and the foundation for the Cold War with the Soviet Union was laid.
The documented history of the BSC compiled by BSC officers after the war and published in 1998 as The Secret History of British Intelligence , details how deeply British intelligence penetrated American politics before during and after World War II while providing the inspiration and cultural continuity for America's Cold War national security state that followed. Military historian Nigel West expresses his disbelief in the introduction. "Overall, the history falls into two distinct parts, pre- and post-Pearl Harbor, and reveals the lengths taken to influence US public opinion and isolationist politicians. In particular the willingness of American radio commentators, then a very influential medium, to peddle what amounted to foreign propaganda, will shock."
Even more shocking is how today's influential commentators march in lockstep with their 1940s counterparts in words and deeds as they once again peddle propaganda cooked up in London to undermine an American president and prepare the United States for fighting yet another and most likely final World War against the old British Empire's most formidable enemy; Russia.
Unconstitutional in the extreme, these kinds of covert operations were privatized in the 1970s to avoid accountability and today work in tandem with corporate/business intelligence services such as London based Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd., Hakluyt & Co. and Fusion GPS, but the overall objective remains the same: Manipulating public opinion through subversion, propaganda and sabotage in order to covertly make the case for war a fait accompli. The Trump dossier is a crude piece of unsubstantiated character assassination that circulated for months among journalists who knew better than to use it and that even the FBI has yet to verify. Yet in their wonton desire to delegitimize Trump and his constituency, his enemies in the Democratic Party and Federal bureaucracy, bet the farm on it. Former MI6 agent, author Christopher Steele and his business partner and co-director Christopher Burrows are highly regarded Kremlin experts who'd previously worked at Britain's Foreign Office.
It's not unreasonable to ask what two highly regarded Kremlin experts are doing peddling unsubstantiated salacious rumor and innuendo. But as the BSC's history demonstrates - establishing a "Rumor Factory" - is exactly what MI6 intelligence experts are trained to do, replete with important rules to follow:
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1. A good rumour should never be traceable to its source.
2. A rumour should be of the kind which is likely to gain in the telling.
3. Particular rumours should be designed to appeal to particular groups.
4. A particular rumour should have a specific purpose. The objectives of rumor spreading may be many, but a single rumour cannot be expected to serve more than one of them.
5. Rumours are most effective if they can be originated in several different places simultaneously and in such a way that they shuttle back and forth, with each new report apparently confirming previous ones.
[▲] Part 2: European Imperialists have been facing the "Russia problem" since Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow in 1812
Battle of Paris 1814. By: Villevalde (Image by Source=[http://picture.art-catal])
"Psychological Action has nothing to do with the intellect, and everything to do with gut emotions. Having made a list, the next step is to find the right things to say to carefully select groups of voters." Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991
The 1975 creation of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict, WISC was not the first time British intelligence had directly interfered in a contentious struggle for political power in the United States. London had a direct hand in bringing the U.S. into both World Wars I and II. The British had schooled American OSS agents in the "dark arts" of trickery and deception during World War II, including future Reagan CIA director William Casey who'd served as OSS station chief in London. The post war CIA would be modeled on the political and secret services of the British Empire's notorious East India Company; a company that would so impress banker and former Kennedy/Johnson Under Secretary of State and Bilderberg co-founder George Ball, he recommended it as a model for a world corporate government to replace the obsolete "nation state". The CIA had worked hand in hand with Britain's Information Research Department, IRD to establish the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and helped to fund Brian Crozier's Institute for the Study of Conflict, ISC. But the WISC represented a new era in British involvement by marking a direct infusion of ultra-right-wing European and British politics into the highest level of Washington thinking without anyone realizing what it was or what it intended to do to American democracy.
The purpose for ISC's founding in 1970, as stated by Crozier in his autobiography Free Agent was "in exposing the fallacies of 'de'tente' and warning the west of the dangers inherent in a policy of illusion"; the illusion being that the West could ever have any peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union. The "Institute" got off to a quick start in the U.S. by forging an alliance with the National Strategy Information Center, NSIC a right-wing neoconservative think tank founded by Frank Barnett, William Casey and Joseph Coors in 1962 and with links to the defense industry's original anti-labor think tank, the American Security Council. ISC's first major triumph came a short time later as a result of a collaboration with the ultra-right-wing Pinay Cercle when Crozier, his prote'ge' Robert Moss and two ISC board members, Sovietologist Robert Conquest and Congress for Cultural Freedom editor Leo Labedz, produced an ISC Special Report attacking the basis for "peaceful co-existence" (and therefore the legitimacy of de'tente with the Soviet Union) called European Security and the Soviet Problem.
The study, financed by the right-wing Pinay group made no bones about its "Soviet problem" actually being the old "Russia problem" that European Imperialists had been hoping to solve since Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow in 1812. "The present rulers of the Soviet Union are heirs to the Tsar's dominions," it reads on page 1; concluding that "Their foreign policy is thus a hybrid of Great Russian imperialism and Marxist-Leninist ideology." In a development that would have made George Orwell grin, Crozier's team had turned the truth on its head by transforming Soviet calls for peace into a weapon to weaken western resolve thereby "making peace" a new a kind of waging war and anyone who aspired to it as part of a Soviet conspiracy.
Determined to undermine de'tente, the aging right-wing former French Prime Minister, Antoine Pinay was so delighted with Crozier's double-speak he presented the study in person to both President Nixon and Henry Kissinger and by 1975 the group was staged to make their move on Washington. The timing was perfect.
On March 3, 1975, less than two months before the fall of Saigon, the US Committee of the ISC (USISC) was launched which would act as the parent body of the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict. With the humiliation of Vietnam now a millstone around the neck of the Washington bureaucracy, Crozier and Pinay's extremism no longer looked so extreme. The ISC had been created specifically with CIA backing to give discredited right-wing, anti-Communist and anti-union cliche's in Britain the cover of legitimacy. Or as Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan write in their book The Terrorism Industry, "ISC would provide anti-communist propaganda under the guise of 'independent research' and analysis" based on 'evidence' that came from the files of well-known and discredited right-wing organizations whose material only took on respectability when laundered through ISC."
The ISC's stamp of approval had provoked the British intelligence services to act on their own disinformation and black propaganda to the extent they had plotted to overthrow an elected British government in a military coup and replace it with one to their liking. Now the group that had manufactured that black propaganda for the British military to use, the ISC was establishing an American satellite organization to do the same in the U.S.
Despite the growing public scandal over the CIA's use of Crozier's Forum World Features as a London-based fake news service, Washington's elites were rolling out the red carpet to welcome them and were leaving some British journalists bewildered. Steve Weissman summed up his astonishment in an August 1976 article for London's Embassy Magazine. "Crozier, of course, isn't the only one to be acutely embarrassed by the CIA scandals. But his story touches on what might become one of the more intriguing questions of the entire affair. For even as the [U.S.] Congress was investigating some of Crozier's covert propaganda activities in Latin America, he and his colleagues were helping to set up a new Institute for the Study of Conflict right in the heart of Washington, D.C. And among the Americans involved with him in this highly suspect intervention into the American political scene are two of the most likely candidates [George Ball and Zbigniew Brzezinski] to serve as the next Secretary of State."
Under the Chairmanship of Ball, WISC appeared a veritable who's who of high-level ex-CIA, neoconservative and right-wing influencers bent on striking back at the Soviet Union for their humiliation in Vietnam. Senator John McCain's father, the Admiral John S. McCain Junior, recent Commander in Chief of US Pacific Forces (CINCPAC) and a board member of the Military/Industrial think tank American Security Council had worked closely with ISC to get the WISC off the ground. Rhodes Scholar and NSIC President Frank Barnett was another committee member with long held ties to hardline neoconservative organizations such as the Smith Richardson Foundation and American Security Council. Kermit Roosevelt, high level CIA officer who'd staged the 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the duly elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and senior CIA officer Robert W. Komer architect of the U.S. government's notorious Phoenix Program in Vietnam. From Georgetown University came WISC's first President James Theberge, who's two books on Soviet influence in the Caribbean -- helped provide the pretexts for overthrowing Chile's legitimately elected leftist president Salvador Allende. And then there was Richard Pipes, the virulently anti-Soviet history professor from Harvard University, who would soon be hand-picked for his political bias to lead a radical right-wing, neoconservative attack on the CIA known as Team B. Using the ISC's methodology of fabricated threats and disinformation to win over intelligence elites at the CIA, Team B was at first seen by some inside the agency for what it was: "[A]n ideological, political foray, not an intellectual exercise. We knew the people who were pleading for it;" said one intelligence professional. Acquiesced to by then CIA director George Bush, in retrospect Team B's politicized challenge to the CIA's authority is viewed by many as the central mistake that permanently crippled the agency's effectiveness. In the words of Lawrence J. Korb, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, Pipes and the Team B were the real reason for the intelligence failures represented by 9/11 because they were "hard-liners who created the concept out of an unwillingness to accept the unbiased and balanced judgments of intelligence professionals."
But in the end the Team B gained friends and influence inside the broader intelligence and defense community and with the appointment of fellow WISC member Zbigniew Brzezinski as President Carter's national security advisor, British intelligence agent Brian Crozier's plan to infiltrate and subvert the de'tente process with the Soviet Union was complete.
That is not to say Brian Crozier was at all happy with the election of Jimmy Carter. He writes in his autobiography Free Agent, "Although fundamentally pro-American, I was explicitly and actively anti-Carter. Not only had I attacked Jimmy Carter's policies in my National Review and Now! columns and elsewhere, but I had also provided anti-Carter material to other journalists, American as well as British."
Crozier believed the Carter election would only worsen "the self-emasculation of American intelligence". His belief "[T]hat the entire security apparatus of the United States was in a state of near collapse," provoked yet another move to interfere in American politics, but this time beyond disinformation and black propaganda and into directed action. "The question was whether something could be done in the private sector -- not only in Britain, but in the United States and other countries of the Western Alliance." He writes in his autobiography. "A few of us had been exchanging views, and decided that action was indeed possible. I took the initiative by convening a very small and very secret meeting in London."
Crozier's secret meeting in "the luxurious executive suite of a leading City of London bank on the morning of Sunday 13 February 1977" would produce a secret off-the books "Private Sector Intelligence agency, beholden to no government, but at the disposal of allied or friendly governments for certain tasks which, for one reason or another, they were no longer able to tackle"" including "[S]ecret counter-subversion operations in any country in which such actions were deemed feasible."
[▲] Part 3: How U.S. foreign policy was directed by a diabolical, London-backed, private neoconservative/right-wing alliance
God en Satan, 'n skildery deur Corrado Giaquinto (Vatikaanse museum).
"This decidedly mixed record [of successful and failed African coups] did not prevent the return of some of the mercenaries to the world scene, this time to Afghanistan. By the early 1970s London had become a center of the arms trade as well as of the recruiting of already trained 'soldiers of fortune' to serve both as trainers and in operational roles" There was a covert group of such personnel, available for hire, and known in London as 'the Circuit' or sometimes simply as "the lads." John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 1999
Even at this late date few Americans understand how the U.S. government came to be owned by the London-backed neoconservative/right-wing alliance that grew out of the post-Vietnam era and how its obsessive compulsion to forge "the one ring to rule them all" has driven the U.S. and its NATO cohorts into an apocalyptic hysteria. Neither do they understand that it was the presidency of James Earl Carter and not Ronald Reagan that opened the door to the rise of Islamic extremism, the sellout of the middle class and the disenfranchisement of America's constitutional values.
Whether he admired Jimmy Carter or not, Brian Crozier and Zbigniew Brzezinski were of one mind when it came to disbelieving in "mutual coexistence" or power-sharing with the Soviet Union and Brzezinski's membership in the Washington Institute for the Study of Conflict, WISC proved it. The deep bureaucratic influence of Crozier's new institute could be measured in its choice of board members all of whom had been actively preparing the ground for an ideological rollover for decades. Thanks to WISC member Richard Pipes and the Team B, Brzezinski could now bring Britain's radical right-wing formula for social change right into the Oval Office and the new President from Georgia was ready and willing to sign on.
Working closely after the election with Carter and one of Henry Kissinger's former National Security staffers, David Aaron, on the Island retreat of St. Simon, Brzezinski devised a simple structure that channeled all executive decisions into two committees, the Policy Review Committee (PRC) and the Special Coordination Committee (SCC). The PRC's function was to deal with foreign policy, defense policy and international economic issues and would be chaired by a variety of cabinet secretaries. The SCC's responsibilities were covert intelligence and other sensitive operations, arms control and crisis management and would be chaired exclusively by Brzezinski. Carter then took it one step further by elevating the national security advisor to cabinet level and the palace coup was complete before Gerald Ford left the White House. In a fundamental break with the past, Brzezinski's SCC would now be at the center of American foreign policy and not the State Department.
As recalled with relish by the Neoconservative author and professor of international relations David J. Rothkopf in Charles Gati's 2013 book ZBIG, "It was a bureaucratic first strike of the first order. The system essentially gave responsibility for the most important and sensitive issues to Brzezinski, and the vague definition of what constituted crisis management essentially ensured that if anything came up that was important it could be claimed by the White House."
The new structure effectively froze the incoming Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance out of the decision-making process before Carter had even entered the Oval Office. More importantly, it also delivered to Brzezinski control over covert action and a free hand to use it wherever he saw fit. Former CIA Director Robert Gates recalled how President Carter pushed for covert action over diplomacy from the very beginning of his administration in his 1997 book From the Shadows. "Indeed, as Carter turned to covert action within weeks after his inauguration and increasingly frequently thereafter, the most constant criticism of CIA that I heard from both Brzezinski and Aaron was its lack of enthusiasm for covert action and its lack of imagination and boldness in implementing the President's 'findings' (legal shorthand for covert actions)."
One bold, imaginative operation initiated by Brzezinski in 1977 was the Nationalities Working Group (NWG), dedicated to weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming ethnic tensions among the Islamic populations of the South Asia region. Already in Kabul to help implement the plan was Graham Fuller whose expertise as CIA operative was on politicizing Islamic radicals on behalf of American interests. As the CIA's Kabul station chief from 1975 to 1978 Fuller was perfectly placed to provide the intelligence and the contacts necessary to coordinate Brzezinski's covert pressure from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and China with the CIA's next big adventure; Afghanistan.
Brzezinski's rewiring didn't stop at covert action but continued on into nuclear policy toward the Soviet Union beginning immediately after assuming control. On February 3, 1977 Carter attended the first session of Brzezinski's SCC on the long delayed Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) at which a competing initiative to the State Department's was put into action. Limiting the growth of nuclear weapons and delivery systems available to the Pentagon under de'tente had been an ongoing process with the Soviets under two previous presidents with agreed to protocols and expectations. Now Carter suddenly shifted the SALT structure from limitation to deep cuts forcing an unprepared Vance to fly off to meet the unprepared Soviets with a proposal that was guaranteed to fail.
Brzezinski's aggressive approach was no surprise to some on his staff who believed the offer was intended as a trick to "show up the Soviets for what they were." But the evidence of Brzezinski's rigging the deck against Vance was even clearer. David J. Rothkopf writes, "Brzezinski shepherded the process closely and even went so far as having William Hyland, working for the NSC, oversee the delivery of the negotiating instructions to ensure that they did not get into the hands of the State Department until the instant of their departure."
With Vance's hands tied by the President, a Russophobic Brzezinski expanding nuclear targeting options from 25,000 to 40,000 and covert action teams sabotaging behind Soviet lines from early 1977 onward, it doesn't take much to imagine what the Soviets were thinking. Brzezinski and Carter were letting the Soviets know they were ripping up SALT and De'tente as well as the very assumptions both were based on. Rothkopf quotes Carter Defense Secretary Harold Brown. "Brzezinski had, I think, a more apocalyptic view of the world and especially a different attitude toward the Soviets" he believed that concessions to the Russians merely encouraged them to press further, and he was willing to use almost any device or any other relationship with other countries to contain them."
Brown goes on to say Brzezinski believed that the United States "should use China as a weapon against the Soviets". But it was in Afghanistan, in the run up to the Afghan crisis where the results of Brzezinski's weaponizing can best be seen not to mention the faint traces of off-the-books secret agencies helping him do it. Selig Harrison , former Washington Post foreign correspondent and Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace commented on Brzezinski's role in fomenting the crisis in Afghanistan in his book, co-authored with Diego Cordovez Out of Afghanistan: "Brzezinski had steadily eroded Vance's power, persuading the President to transfer jurisdiction over the CIA from the Inter-Agency Policy Review Committee, headed by the Secretary of State, to the National Security Council's Special Coordinating Committee [SCC] which Brzezinski chaired as the National Security Advisor. This control over covert operations enabled Brzezinski to take the first steps toward a more aggressively anti-Soviet Afghan policy without the State Department's knowing much about it."
Brzezinski's plot to weaponize China against Russia by sacrificing Afghanistan was straight out of James Burnham's Machiavellians and the spontaneous April, 1978 Marxist coup against the King's cousin, Mohammed Daoud played like clockwork directly into his "predictions" of Soviet infiltration and subversion. Harrison writes, "Vance recalls that the April coup was depicted by Brzezinski as the opening gambit in a Soviet master plan for achieving hegemony in Southwest Asia. It would be followed in due course, Brzezinski argued, by the incorporation of Afghanistan into the Soviet orbit and ultimately by political and military moves to subjugate the Gulf oil-producing states."
Vance rejected Brzezinski's argument out of hand. As supported at the time by the State Department's own intelligence and later revealed by post-Soviet research, the coup appeared to be a spur of the moment outburst by disorganized, repressed political factions unsure of exactly what they were doing. Vance found no evidence of Soviet complicity in the coup and even Brian Crozier would later have to admit in his autobiography that none would ever materialize. In fact, the evidence suggests that the 1978 Marxist coup in Afghanistan was the end result of CIA, Pakistani and Iranian efforts to undermine Daoud's regime, and was only supported by the Soviets after it had become a fait accompli. Brzezinski's prediction was ideological wish-fulfillment, more in line with discredited right-wing ISC reports or something conjured by the mind of Team B than with any sober professional analysis of Soviet intentions. And, had it been the first shot in a Soviet master plan to seize Southwest Asia and the Middle East, the April coup plotters Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin would never have been Moscow's choice to lead it. According to David Newsom, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs who visited Kabul after the coup and met with the coup leaders, "My assessment was that we were dealing with a regime that hadn't found itself. There were divisions in it and it was still on probation in Soviet eyes."
Terror in Soviet eyes was more like it. The coup plotters were divided into two main factions that fought bitterly and the coup organizer, Hafizullah Amin had been brought to the United States by a CIA front organization on two separate occasions to be educated. According to the KGB chief Alexander Morozov, the KGB later discovered Amin's instructions to the plotters severely forbade them from informing the Russians of the plan lest they try to stop it. Amin had even admitted to the KGB that he'd taken money from the CIA. He had studied for a doctorate at Columbia University and headed up the Afghan Student Association at a time when (as exposed by Ramparts Magazine) it too was being used as a CIA recruitment tool for future Third World leaders. Hafizullah Amin was now one of those leaders and Vance was sending a new, tough and savvy American Ambassador to Kabul named Adolph "Spike" Dubs to deal with him.
[▲] Part 4: How the Safari Club became the real CIA
Mount Kenya Safari Club, from which the anti-Communist alliance derives its name. (Image by WikiSpooks)
"The Safari Club set a precedent and some guidelines for the subsequent CIA operation in Afghanistan. As its name implied, the Safari Club's main task was to carry out missions -- always anti-Communist ones, for America, on the 'good guys' side of the Cold War." John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars, 1999
The Safari club represented the true essence of what CIA Director Allen Dulles had intended when setting up the Central Intelligence Agency following World War II; an autonomous covert action organization with global reach, beyond the jurisdiction of American democracy and responsible to no one. A spinoff of the right-wing Pinay Cercle as a secret off-the books "Private Sector Intelligence agency," and in league with the CIA and Brian Crozier's 6th International, the Safari Club was only formerly acknowledged in 2002 by the one-time head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence Prince Turki Al-Faisal to have come into existence in 1976. But as revealed by John K. Cooley in his groundbreaking 1999 study, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, the Safari Club members had been active informally for yearssecretly protecting CIA assets and covert operations from the prying eyes of Congressional investigators following Watergate and the revelations of the Church Committee hearings on 30 years of CIA coups, cover-ups and assassinations.
Cooley writes, "The Carter team adopted a method of avoiding the stigma of direct CIA involvement in covert operations which could go wrong and backfire on the United States. It was a method which Henry Kissinger" had refined and applied with skill: get others to do what you want done" the 'others' in Kissinger's era of the early 1970s, a time of rehearsal for the approaching adventure in Afghanistan, were a set of unlikely colleagues.
Kissinger's set of unlikely Safari Club colleagues included, France's Count Alexandre de Marenches chief of French external intelligence, The Shah of Iran, King Hassan II of Morocco, President Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt and Kamal Adham, head of intelligence for Saudi Arabian King Faisal. More to the point, the Safari Club was more than just an off-the-books spy operation doing covert operations for the CIA whose methods the Carter team adopted. The Safari Club was the real CIA, covertly funded by Saudi Arabia and run out of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by the CIA's former director Richard Helms, U.S. Ambassador to Iran from 1973-1977.
As presented by one-time CNN Special Assignment investigator Joe Trento in his 2005 expose' Prelude To Terror , "Both Prince Turki and Sheikh Kamal Adham[head of Saudi intelligence] would play enormous roles in servicing a spy network to replace the official CIA while it was under Congressional scrutiny between the time of Watergate and the end of the Carter administration" Several top U.S. military and intelligence officials directed the operations from positions they held overseas, notably former CIA Director Richard Helms, at this time Ambassador to Iran."
According to Trento, at this time, Sheikh Kamal Adham took control of intelligence financing for the United States by setting up a network of banks with the official blessing of the CIA's George Bush; turning "a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world in order to create the biggest clandestine money network in history."
Working alongside the bank's founder Sheikh Agha Hasan Abedi, Adham not only gained "a comprehensive knowledge of U.S. intelligence operations," but expanded the very concept by using BCCI to merge the Safari Club's objectives with "every major terrorist, rebel, and underground organization in the world." A 2001 Time magazine report found that the bank functioned as "a vast, stateless, multinational corporation that deploys its own intelligence agency, complete with paramilitary wing and enforcement units, known collectively as the "black network:'" a black network that would threaten, bribe or assassinate anyone it needed to turn Afghanistan into the place to trap the Soviet Union in their own Vietnam.
Trento writes, "Adham did not rely simply on money to carry out the plan. Adham and Abedi understood they would need muscle. They tapped into the CIA's stockpile of misfits and malcontents to help man a 1,500-strong group of assassins and enforcers."
1973: The Red Prince Daoud overthrows the King
To most of Washington, the bloodless 1973palace coup of the Afghan King Zahir Shah by his cousin and former Prime Minister Mohammed Daoud along with a faction of the Afghan left was a non-event. But to the Safari Club's Shah of Iran, Daoud's coup signaled a leftward drift and provided the opportunity to demonstrate his influence as America's policeman in the Gulf. Considered to be too friendly to Moscow (which had earned him the nickname the Red Prince), Daoud was known primarily for his repeated claims to Afghan (ethnic Pashtun) provinces seized by the British during the 19thcentury in (what is today) Pakistan. Due mainly to America's lack of interest in the country, the U.S. State Department viewed Daoud mostly as an Afghan nationalist and a nuisance. Afghanistan rated at the bottom of U.S. foreign policy priorities and had since the end of the British Raj in 1947, been cast into the Soviet's sphere of influence. But as president, Daoud planned to break the mold and needed the West's economic assistance to do it. He had come to the newly oil-rich Shah of Iran for help but found himself at the mercy of the notorious Safari Club and the Shah's secret police, SAVAK. South Asia expert Selig Harrison writes, "On the one hand, Teheran used its aid leverage to press Daoud for the removal of suspected Communists. At the same time, Savak channeled U.S. weapons, communications equipment, and other paramilitary aid to anti-Daoud groups."
The Shah's campaign against Daoud quickly drove him to unceremoniously dump the Afghan left, but not before a coalition of CIA-backed agents from Pakistan and Iran had come together to organize his enemies on the left and the right against him. Harrison continues, "Pakistani harassment of Daoud reached its climax in a series of Islamabad-orchestrated raids on police posts in the Pansjer valley. Savak, the CIA and Pakistani agents were also involved in the abortive, fundamentalist-backed coup attempts against Daoud in September and December 1973 and June 1974."
One Pakistani-trained group involved in the Pansjer raids were the Setam-i Melli (Against National Oppression), a Tajik-based Shiite/Maoist splinter group broken-away from the Marxist People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). As pro-Chinese and anti-Pashtun, the Setam and a variety of other Shiite/Maoist groups would find themselves attractive to Chinese intelligence and at odds with both Prince Daoud and the Pashtun dominated PDPA and were driven underground. But as Chinese involvement in Afghanistan grew, they would return in a mysterious role that would spontaneously deliver the pivotal element Zbigniew Brzezinski would need to enact his grand plan.
Mohammed Daoud fought off the CIA's initial intrusions from Savak, the CIA's Pakistani agents and their fundamentalist (soon to be) holy warriors. But with Western influence in Southeast Asia closing out in Vietnam in 1975, a new Great Game for Central Asia was about to begin. And without the State Department knowing much about it, President Carter's national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was busy moving the chess pieces into position.
April 1978: Daoud goes down in an unusually bloody coup.
[▲] Part 5: Brzezinski's Safari Club "Friends" Did the Dirty Work Behind the Scenes
Robert Moss (Image by Source=[Wikimedia.org])
"IRAN WAS OF increasing concern to the 6I. The Imperial Throne was under siege from an alliance against nature between Shi'ite fundamentalists and Marxists. Apart from unsubtle repression by the Iranian secret service, the SAVAK, and by the armed forces, little was being done to break the unholy alliance. SAVAK was unversed in the arts of psychological action." Brian Crozier, Free Agent 1941-1991
Brian Crozier knew a lot about alliances against nature. After "spending several days closeted" with General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, helping the dictator draft (in Spanish) fifteen clauses for a new Constitution, he turned his attention in early 1978 to Iran and decided the Shah needed his advice. Warning the Shah that: "The CIA had virtually collapsed and its operational capacity had been reduced to zero," Crozier counseled that the British alone could not save him and offered him the services of his "shadowy organization," known as the 6I. A few months later the Shah agreed and Crozier returned with a team of advisors including the Shah's old friend Antoine Pinay of the Pinay Cercle.
Combined with Vietnam, Iran was cause for a fevered panic inside Brian Crozier's right-wing fascist circles of power. The Cold War strategy of suppressing Communism with military force had failed spectacularly in Vietnam and was now crumbling in Iran and Crozier, his prote'ge' Robert Moss and Zbigniew Brzezinski were pushing the idea (with no proof) that Moscow's meddling was behind it. In his book on the Iran fiasco, All Fall Down, former National Security Council staff member Dr. Gary Sick acknowledges Moss's undeserved influence on Washington's policy-making by citing Moss's December 2, 1978, article in the New Republic, "Who's meddling in Iran?"
"Brzezinski" reproduced the Moss article, circulated it to the president and other top policy makers, and cited it in policy meetings for weeks. Although Moss cited no real evidence and had no apparent qualifications as a specialist on Iran, his article attained the status of a major document in U.S. policy-making circles at a key moment.
Moss was of course wrong. As Gary Sick further cites, "the central organizing force of the revolution" was the religious network operating out of the mosques under the strategic control of Khomeini, and not the Soviets. But the idea that it was the Soviets and not their own policy failures that were wrong, was just what Washington's bureaucracy wanted to hear.
The Shah's Persian "empire" was at its core a backward, impoverished third-world country with enormous social problems and a crushing military budget. According to a 1974 Newsweek cover story America's vital Iranian ally had spent $4 billion of his $20-billion-dollar oil revenues on arms purchases from the United States in the first six months of 1973 alone, acquiring 289 fighter jets, 500 attack helicopters, 700 tanks, and six destroyers. $10 billion in foreign aid had gone to foreign governments to "expand his sphere of influence" while SAVAK had grown into one of the largest (and most feared) intelligence services in the world with somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 full-time personnel and an estimated 3 million (12 percent of the population) informers.
Obsessed with the Soviet's "grand design" to conquer the Middle East, the Shah had even constructed an invasion force for neighboring Afghanistan just in case Prince Mohammed Daoud fell to Soviet subversion, but his plan proved useless given the absence of popular support for Daoud following the bloody April 1978 Marxist coup.
The CIA's best-laid plans for their "policeman in the Gulf" had proved an expensive farce that the U.S. had no strategy for rescuing and, out of desperation, the Shah came begging to Brian Crozier for help. "In November of 1978, the Shah sent the top civilian in the SAVAK hierarchy to London to see me," Crozier writes in his autobiography Free Agent. "I arranged for him to be closeted with Robert Moss for a whole week. The outcome was a Conflict Study dated November 1978, 'The Campaign to Destabilize Iran' by Robert Moss. Shortly after the study had appeared, the Iranian charge d'affaires informed me that the Shah had authorized a first annual payment of -1 million to The 6I for a psychological-action operation on the lines we had suggested to him."
Crozier found a welcome audience with the Shah as he had with numerous other fascist dictators like Chile's Augusto Pinochet and Spain's Francisco Franco and would quite soon with U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The Shah had been installed by the U.S. and Britain at the height of its post-World War II power. But confidence in America's omnipotence had ended with Vietnam and Europe's old imperialists were quickly filtering back into their old colonies with their old habits to pick up where they'd left off. The British had been running covert and overt operations in the region since the 18th century. Generations of sons, grandsons and great grandsons of operatives who'd served the British Raj remained on the scene as journalists, businessmen and informal agents. One word from Crozier or Britain's MI6 intelligence service was all they needed to reactivate.
Joining Brian Crozier and his prote'ge' Robert Moss in engaging the Shah that autumn was a senior Chinese intelligence officer and veteran supporter of Mao by the name of Qiao Shi. John K. Cooley writes, "In September of 1978, on the way home to Beijing from one of his Balkan missions, Qiao Shi stopped over in Tehran to see the Shah of Iran, who was ill with cancer. Qiao Shi proposed to the Shah a new alliance to thwart Soviet expansion, especially in neighboring Afghanistan. Agreement was reached to undertake a covert war in Afghanistan, apparently independent of CIA plans for the same country."
According to Cooley, shortly after the Maoist Qiao Shi's agreement with the Shah's SAVAK Chief, General Nasser Moghadam, "Chinese agents began to move into position in Pakistan. Liaising with Pakistan's ISI was the Iranian ambassador in Islamabad, former head of SAVAK." Instigated by Brzezinski and backed by the CIA and MI6, the so called China-Iran-Pakistan axis began to flourish with Qiao Shi and other "senior Chinese military intelligence officials," adding to Brzezinski's ongoing destabilization.
The American Ambassador Adolph Dubs needn't have worried about Hafizullah Amin's well-known affiliation to the CIA. He had far bigger problems. Not only were Afghan rebels openly training in Pakistan but by the late fall of 1978 Chinese intelligence risked a Sino/Soviet war by training Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Islamists over the Chinese border in Xinjiang province. In addition there was the CIA's Saudi-funded stockpile of misfits and malcontents roaming the countryside, manning the Safari Club's 1,500-strong army of assassins and enforcers. And last but not least were the Chinese-supported Maoist groups like Setam-i Melli, Sholah Jaweed and SAMA operating from bases on the Pakistan and Iranian borders and programmed by Beijing to bring down their Pashtun oppressor, Hafizullah Amin.
[▲] Part 6: The Death of Adolph Dubs - Cui bono? 'To whom is it a benefit?'
Adolph Dubs
According to Lyakhovsky's account Dubs had gone to the Kabul Hotel on the 13th of February to meet with four men most likely aligned with the U.S. but opposed to the Taraki/Amin regime. Judging by their demands on the 14th, these men would have been supported by agencies friendly to the American mission, presumably in Pakistan, Iran or China. Soviet intelligence reports from the era indicate that in January 1979, Beijing had made an attempt to unite the "scattered groups of Afghan Maoists," including "Setam i Melli and other splinter groups," whose "program task" was the overthrow of the Afghan government. Recall that prior to his overthrow in April 1978, Prince Mohammed Daoud had ordered the Americans to stop meeting with the Afghan left but the Americans had not complied. Now, in one possible scenario, Dubs could have informed these pro-Maoist leftists that he did not want Amin overthrown and was ending their support by the embassy. An agreement was reached and a final payment of some sort agreed to. The next day - suitcase in hand - he was stopped at a prearranged spot by the same four men he'd met with the day before but for some unknown reason the conditions had now changed. Whatever the deal that had been struck now involved the release of Tajik/Shiite Maoists imprisoned by the regime. The Kabul Hotel was the worst possible location for such a transaction and the room 117 was indefensible. The decision to return to that room made absolutely no sense unless one of the four "kidnappers" was leading Dubs and the other three into a trap to which the busy Kabul Hotel was a key.
Dubs had put himself in the middle of a factional fight between anti-Pashtun Tajik/Shiite Maoists and pro-government Pashtun nationalist unaware that they were all being manipulated by an international criminal conspiracy working on behalf of Brzezinski's agenda to use Hafizullah Amin and three of the "kidnappers" as patsies to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam.
Why assault the room?
Based on published accounts it's fairly certain that four men arrived at the hotel with Dubs but agreement on every other aspect of the so called "kidnapping" and death ends there. According to the Afghan report of the events three were killed in the room with Dubs, a fourth kidnapper was wounded and a short time later died of his wounds. The Americans claimed that two kidnappers were killed in the room, a third was taken alive downstairs early on and was later seen being taken from the hotel "alive and relatively unharmed."
A third account by Soviet KGB defector Vasiliy Mitrokhin maintains that of the four terrorists "Two died in the attack, one was taken into custody, and one escaped -- it isn't clear how," suggesting that the fourth kidnapper had been helped.
Echoing Brzezinski's longstanding practice of automatically claiming Soviet culpability before the facts were even known, the American report - leaked to the Washington Post by anonymous sources -- openly claims a Soviet responsibility for Dubs' death. Newsweek's Ron Moreau cited unnamed"U.S. congressional sources" stating that "the Russians had wanted Dubs to die." But Mitrokhin goes out of his way to insist that whatever influence KGB advisors might have had on the Afghan police that day, there was no "preconceived Soviet plot to kill Dubs."
The Afghans produced four dead bodies for the Americans that evening and claimed they were the kidnappers. Bruce Flatin recognized the two that had died with Dubs and a third who'd been taken alive from the hotel, but the fourth was a man he had never seen before. "In Kabul," Flatin told his Washingtonian interviewer, "it was easy to get a fourth body--right out of the jail. So there he was, the fill-in." The autopsy revealed that Dubs had been killed by 4 shots to the head delivered at close range from a .22 caliber weapon. Not the kind of weapon, according to Flatin, used by Afghan soldiers or police, but the favorite type of weapon used by professional assassins.
No one has ever suggested the existence of a separate non-governmental agency in the death of Adolph Dubs, nor even hinted at it. The existence of the Safari Club was only formerly acknowledged to have existed by the one-time head of Saudi Arabian Intelligence Prince Turki Al-Faisal at a Georgetown University event in 2002. But the Safari Club's no-compromise, anti-Communist agenda had been brought directly into the White House with Brzezinski's National Security Council in 1977 and it had been active in Afghanistan long before February 14, 1979. If ever there was an opportunity for their 1,500-strong "black network" of CIA misfits, malcontents, assassins and enforcers to act on Brzezinski's agenda to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam, it was at room 117 of the Kabul Hotel on February 14.
Hafizullah Amin later took full responsibility for Dubs' death and absolved the Soviets, saying they had nothing at all to do with the decision-making. The case was supposed to be closed but it was clear that in addition to Dubs, the other target that day was Hafizullah Amin and thanks to Zbigniew Brzezinski for the next ten months he'd be left to twist in the wind as bait for a Soviet invasion.
[▲] Part 7: The Coup d'e'tat --
Punch Rhodes Colossus (Image by Source=[Wikimedia.org])
"Brzezinski however couldn't do much until the death of Dubs. And the death of Dubs removed the last obstacle. Then came Herat" They killed a lot of Russians and the Russians were very upset. But it gave a shot in the arm to the resistance in this country [the U.S.]. That was March of '79. So the coincidence of Dubs' death and the Herat uprising gave Brzezinski control of the policy from then on." Interview: Selig Harrison February 18, 1993
The kidnapping and assassination of Ambassador Adolph Dubs on February 14, 1979 at the Kabul Hotel ended any meaningful effort by the U.S. to prevent a Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. The death was employed however from that day forward by President Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski as the opportunity to increase the level of provocation for luring the Soviets into their own "Vietnam quagmire" and keeping them pinned down for as long as possible. Because of "Spike" Dubs' death, Zbigniew Brzezinski finally got control of foreign policy; got his hard line neoconservative policy toward the Soviet Union pushed through, ended support for de'tente once and for all, and put Strategic Arms Limitation on hold. Hafizullah Amin continued to seize power for himself, sew discord throughout the countryside with his education and land reform programs, fracture his political party the PDPA and game the Soviet leadership by asking them to intervene militarily fourteen times, knowing full well they were dead set against a military intervention.
Selig Harrison writes in his 1995 book with Diego Cordovez, Out of Afghanistan, "On the one hand, he [Amin] continued to call upon massive Soviet help in financing his regime, equipping it militarily and providing technical personnel for military operations against rebels. On the other, he resisted Soviet control, brushing aside pressure for a slowdown in reforms and for greater Soviet involvement in running the secret police and the military."
Continuing his coup d'e'tat in Washington, Brzezinski and his military assistant General William Odom proceeded with plans for the radical transformation of America's nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction -- MAD (directed mainly at the Soviet Union) into one of nuclear "war-fighting" through a series of Presidential Directives. Most of these directives excluded the State Department in the decision-making and remain in force to this day. Based entirely on the fallacious assumption that the Soviet Union believed they could fight and win a nuclear war, President Carter, Brzezinski and General William Odom set out to win one of their own and build the weapons with which to do it.
Contrary to Jimmy Carter's glowing public image as a peace-president and future Nobel Peace Prize winner, behind the scenes the former Navy man would embrace Brzezinski's vision of an inevitable conflict with the Soviet Empire and relish his role as the nuclear war-fighting Commander in Chief fighting it to his last breath.
Author Tim Weiner quotes General Odom in his 1990 expose', Blank Check, "Carter became the first President to immerse himself in the details of nuclear war-fighting scenarios. The President 'really got into the procedures, ran through numerous scenarios, and became very comfortable with it,' Odom told a Harvard seminar in 1980." Knowledge of Carter's dark side has gone unrecognized over the years but despite the end of the Cold War in 1991, the horrifying product of his decision-making has remained intact with each succeeding administration. Presidential Directives (PDs)53, 58 and 59 didn't just lower the threshold for nuclear weapons use, they encouraged it; making it appear probable that America's elites could save themselves in a protracted nuclear war of up to six months, regardless of the consequences to the nation or its population. Based on an invented threat of nuclear annihilation carried into the Carter administration by Brzezinski, PD 59 would form the groundwork of the unnecessary Reagan buildup in the 1980s which would then form the groundwork of the post-Soviet Wolfowitz Doctrine of American imperial supremacy that followed. As Tim Weiner noted with irony in 1990, "The President who vowed to rid the world of warheads wound up signing the first truly significant war-fighting plan since the heyday of Curtis LeMay."
But the real irony of the Carter presidency wasn't in his reprise of the mad bomber role from Doctor Strangelove; the real irony was that the greatest success of his presidency - the U.S- Egypt-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 - was not arranged by his skill at diplomacy or his desire for a Middle East peace but by an off the books agency doing Zbigniew Brzezinski's dirty work in Afghanistan known as the Safari Club. John K. Cooley writes in his 1999 expose' on U.S.-backed terrorism Unholy Wars, "Just before the Afghanistan war began, and because the Safari Club was keeping both Israeli and US intelligence informed of its actions, the Club was able to help bring about President Sadat's historic peacemaking visit of November 1977 to Jerusalem, leading to the US-Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty of 1979... Morocco's representative in the Safari Club hand-carried Rabin's letter to Sadat. King Hassan then sponsored the first secret meeting in Morocco""
Egypt's Anwar Sadat would play an important role in the upcoming war in Afghanistan, supplying old Soviet weapons to Zbigniew Brzezinski's so-called Freedom Fighters in an effort to fool the American public and Congress into thinking the weapons came from Soviet and Afghan defectors surrendering to CIA-backed rebels. Sadat would upset his handlers in Washington in September 1981when he spilled the beans on the secret operation and would die by assassination exactly two weeks later, but at that point his usefulness to the Safari Club had ended.
President Carter hadn't been assassinated as "Spike" Dubs had been and Hafizullah Amin would soon be, but he was served up as an unwitting participant in his own coup d'e'tat before he'd even entered the Oval office. In the wake of the Church Committee hearings and Watergate and with the President's knowledge and assistance, Zbigniew Brzezinski had rewired authority for covert action from the State Department to the National Security Council in what has been described as "a bureaucratic first strike of the first order". A Cercle of old European power had then detached the administration, sealed off the CIA in Washington from further damage and run its operations out of the Middle East. The head of French external intelligence, Pinay Cercle member and Safari Club coordinator Alexandre de Marenches had stepped in to fill the breach during the crisis, aided the operation through the Bank of Commerce and Credit International and set the stage for a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that would drag on for nearly 10 years. John K. Cooley writes, "The Safari Club player who probably helped most to draw the US into the Afghan adventure was Count Alexandre de Marenches" He had cooperated actively with the United States in warfare and covert operations since World War II. He believed it to be of advantage to France, as well as to his American friends and allies, to form a group like the Safari Club to protect and advance Western interests in the Third World."
The death of Ambassador Dubs, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 doomed Carter's reelection to failure. Afghanistan was soon to become the self-fulfilling prophecy of Soviet iniquity that the neoconservative, right-wing alliance had been trying to create for decades; a permanent, ongoing crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations which it had precipitated and then claimed to uncover and respond to. Alexandre De Marenches had done his part to put all the pieces in place. Brian Crozier and Robert Moss had written the script and Brzezinski had sold it to the highest levels of the American government. De Marenches had even knowingly tipped off his cousin, Newsweek's Arnaud de Borchgrave to be in Kabul ahead of the invasion to catch the action; action that the President of the United States (Carter) would later claim he had no foreknowledge of. But without the constant propagandizing of Brian Crozier and his prote'ge' Robert Moss working behind the scenes with their influential colleagues, the sale of a right-wing coup d'e'tat of the U.S. might never have taken off.
1980: THE SPIKE
If anything represented the payoff to the decade of neoconservative/right-wing subversion being worked on the American psyche by the Institute for the Study of Conflict, it was the 1980 publication of the fiction/fantasy/spy-novel The Spike. Whether or not the title was a perverse inside joke or a veiled reference to the death of American Ambassador "Spike" Dubs in Kabul the year before, The Spike would prove to be the Pinay Cercle's final nail in the coffin of U.S./Soviet relations. Viewed in hindsight The Spike plays out as poorly written paranoid political propaganda masquerading as fact. But viewed from the fevered perspective of the American mass media of 1980 in the run up to the election of Ronald Reagan, the #1 bestselling novel by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss was nothing less than proof of the KGB's evil "plot to destroy the U.S., exposed."
"A humdinger by two of the savviest foreign correspondents in the business." Wrote William Safire in the New York Times. "A thundering rebuttal to the architects of de'tente, critics of the CIA and editors of the opinion-forming, powerhouse newspapers from the East." Wrote the Dallas Morning News. "A thriller that is several steps ahead of the headlines." Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle.[2]
[▲] Notes and References
[1]- Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story and Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice,a novel.
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul's television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, they found themselves in the midst of a controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Their acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in 1981, brought them into the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the people inside Soviet-occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast on the evening news.
Following their news story for the CBS Evening News, they produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds) for PBS and in 1983 they returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher. Arriving in Kabul that spring they were told that the Russians wanted to go home and negotiate their way out. But the story that President Carter called, "the greatest threat to peace since the second World War" had already been written by America's pundits was not about to change the script.
As the first American journalists to get behind the official propaganda on the war, they not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the US defined itself under the veil of superpower confrontation. But as they pursued the reasons behind the propaganda, they were drawn into a story that was growing into mythic dimensions.
It was at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 when they were working on the film version of their experience under contract to Oliver Stone, that they began to piece together the mythic implications of the story. During the research for the screenplay crucial documents were declassified. Over the next decade they trailed a labyrinth of clues to find a likeness in Washington's official policy towards Afghanistan - in the ancient Zoroastrian war of the light against the dark - whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan. It was a likeness that grows more visible as America's involvement deepens. By 1998, as the horrors of the Taliban regime began to grab headlines, they started collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali. They contributed to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project. In 2002 they filmed Wali's first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978. The film they produced about Wali's journey home, The Woman in Exile Returns, gave audiences the chance to discover the message of one of Afghanistan's most articulate voices and her hopes for her people.
In the years since 9/11 much has happened to bring their story into sharp focus. Their experience at combining personal diplomacy with activist journalism could become a model for restoring a healthy and vibrant dialogue to American democracy. Ultimately, Invisible History: Afghanistan's Untold Story lays bare why it was inevitable that the Soviet Union and the U.S. should end up in Afghanistan and what that means to the future of the American emp.
[2]-
