Below an section - from the article "KLA and Drugs: The `New Colombia
of Europe' Grows in Balkans by Umberto Pascali
(appeared in the June 22, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence
Review.)
You can find the whole article on the page:
WWW.LAROUCHEPUB.COM
Bin Laden, Bush, Afghanistan, and Texas
Reportedly, Osama's halfbrother, Sheikh Salem M. bin Laden, was in
Texas at the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, in
charge of his family's business. The family is one of Saudi Arabia's
richest and most powerful, and owns one the biggest construction
companies in the Middle East. Was Salem involved in the most crucial
part of the bin Laden Afghan operation, namely, the logistics and
supplies? According to a PBS Frontline report, "There was also a
political aspect to Salem bin Laden's financial activities.... Salem
bin Laden played a role in the U.S. operations in the Middle East and
Central America during the '80s." In fact, Salem was gravitating to
the highest political, financial, and economic circles in Texas,
where he had arrived in 1973. He also started his own air company,
Bin Laden Aviation, which was incorporated in Austin.
In 1976, he nominated another expert in air transportation, James
Bath, as his trustee. As Pete Brewton, Texas' most informed
investigative journalist, put it: "[In 1976] Bath got a huge break.
He was named as a trustee for Sheikh Salem bin Laden of Saudi Arabia,
a member of the family that owns the largest construction company in
the Middle East. Bath's job was to handle all of bin Laden's North
America investments and operations."
Bath was an aircraft broker in Houston, a businessman involved in
several private air cargo companies. Apparently, the relation with
Salem bin Laden coincided with an escalation of his activities. He
bought several planes from Air America, the company reputed to be an
intelligence front, and in 1979, became the partner of George W.
Bush. Bush's father, the future President, had only recently
completed a brief stint in 197677, as director of the Central
Intelligence Agency. In 1979, Bath became George W. Bush's partner in
an oil company called Arbusto (Spanish for "bush").
As the Progressive Review explained in 1992, "In 1979, George W. Bush
begins operations of his oil firm, Arbusto Energy. He assembles
several dozen investors in a limited partnership including Dorothy
Bush, Lewis Lehrman, William Draper, and James Bath, a Houston
aircraft broker who bought several planes from Air America, a CIA
front. Bath's firm appears to be owned by Saudi investors. He also
was a partowner of a Houston's Main Bank, along with a couple of
BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International, later prosecuted and
shut down as a moneylaundering bank] figures."
Also interesting is another Texas account of this story by Jerry
Urban in the Houston Chronicle, June 4, 1992. "The Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network�known as FinCEN�and the FBI are reviewing
accusations that entrepreneur James R. Bath guided money to Houston
from Saudi investors who wanted to influence U.S. policy under the
Reagan and Bush Administrations, sources close to the investigations
say....
"According to [Bath's former real estate business associate Bill]
White, Bath told him that he had assisted the CIA in a liaison role
with Saudi Arabia since 1976. Bath has previously denied having
worked for the CIA.... Bath received a 5% interest in the companies
that own and operate Houston Gulf Airport after purchasing it on
behalf of bin Laden in 1977."
Salem bin Laden died in a 1988 plane crash. Bin Laden Aviation was
immediately dissolved. The PBS Frontline web page, in its report
entitled "Origins of the bin Laden Family," said that "Salem bin
Laden's accidental death revived some speculation that he might have
been 'eliminated' as an 'embarrassing witness.' "
Opium War on Russia and West Europe
In the years of Salem bin Laden's business activities in Texas and
Osama bin Laden's guerrilla activities in Afghanistan, the Afghan
"operation" was not seen as embarrassing in the official world of
Washington or London. Contrary to the dirty connection of the U.S.
National Security Council's Lt. Col. Oliver North with the Nicaraguan
Contras, the support for the Afghan "freedom fighters" was official,
including substantial funds approved by the U.S. Senate. Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and the surrounding area paid a high price for this policy.
The country was destroyed not only physically, but also culturally;
now, also in the grip of a terrible threeyear drought, it is
comparable to Pol Pot's Cambodia.
An integral part of the policy was the increase in opium production.
The drug addiction statistics available for Pakistan, explain the
terrible crime committed there. Pakistan has the highest number of
heroin addicts per capita in the world. In 1980, before the start of
the Afghan operation, there was virtually no consumption of heroin in
Pakistan.
In 1988, when the Soviet troops withdrew, Afghanistan and bordering
areas in Pakistan were producing about 955 tons of opium per year,
onethird of the world's production. A tremendous financial resource
was placed in the hands of the Taliban. The opium, refined mostly in
Turkey, was smuggled into Europe by the Turkish mafia, which
dominated the socalled Balkan Route, previously given the misleading
name of the "Bulgarian Connection." Heroin was coming into Europe
through Yugoslavia, and part of it was consistently shipped into
Italy from Albania and Montenegro.
But suddenly, a new organizedcrime cartel emerged, the Albanian
mafia, or better, the Kosovo mafia.
In 1996, the DEA, in a report prepared for the National Narcotics
Intelligence Consumers Committee, stressed: "Drugtrafficking
organizations composed of ethnic Albanians from Serbia's Kosovo
Province were considered to be second only to Turkish groups as the
predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan Route. These groups
were particularly active in Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav Republic of
Macedonia, and Serbia. Kosovan traffickers were noted for their use
of violence and for their involvement in international weapons
trafficking. There is increasing evidence that ethnic criminals from
the Balkans are engaged in criminal activities in the United States
and some of that activity involves theft of licit pharmaceutical
products for illicit street distribution."
In the section on Southwest Asia, the report noted: "Despite the
country's political shift to Islamic fundamentalism, Afghanistan
maintained its position as the second largest producer of opium in
the world." The report pointed out that Afghanistan's opium
production went through "six straight years of increases during which
the crop more than tripled." It also admitted, that "according to the
United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), total opium production
is much higher [than the DEA's figures]. Relying on an incountry
survey of Afghan opium poppy farmers, the UNDCP estimates a potential
opium yield of 2,336 metric tons from 56,824 hectares of opium
poppies."
In a euphemistic passage, the DEA's report noticed with
disappointment that "despite early pronouncements on their aversion
to drug cultivation and production, the Taliban appears to have
reached an accommodation with opium poppy farmers." It was much more
than an "accommodation," of course. From then on, the Taliban's opium
invasion of Europe increased, and with it, the power and the criminal
machine of the Kosovo mafia and the KLA skyrocketted as well.
Several intelligence reports have stated that bin Laden and his
organization, alQaeda, have both trained and financially supported
the KLA. Bin Laden has been connected to one of the most prominent
"staging areas" for the KLA, before the terrorist organization took
over Kosovo with the help of 78 days of air bombing and war by NATO
in 1999. The "staging area" is the Albanian town of Tropoje.
KLA: From Hoxha to Albright
Though the KLA emerged in the international media only at the end of
the 1990s, the organization goes back at least to 1982, when the
Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha�who controlled Albania with an iron
fist and a cultlike radicalism from World War II to the early
1980s�was pushing with every means the Greater Albania project. The
first modern sponsor of Greater Albania was Hoxha, who called for the
union of all Albanians�including Albania, Kosovo, the southern part
of Serbia, the northwestern part of Macedonia, the northern part of
Greece�especially after the death of Yugoslavia's President Josip
Broz Tito in 1980.
The Kosovo radical hardcore created international centers in
Switzerland, Germany, and other European cities, in addition to
Hoxha's Albania. The KLA's original core went through a large number
of elaborated MarxistLeninist party names, mixing up the idea of
Greater Albania with radical Hoxha thought.
They were kept in a state of political suspended animation, with
minor spurts of activity, until Bosnia's Dayton Peace Agreement in
1995. Then they were activated to take advantage of the wave of
resentment which spread through the Kosovars for having been "left
out" of the Dayton agreement (the province had lost its autonomy in
1989, in a Serbian decision pushed through by then emerging leader
Slobodan Milosevic).
Of course, there were a lot of political activities in Kosovo itself
among the ethnic Albanians, but these had nothing to do with the KLA.
The Kosovars formed a sort of selfdeclared autonomy under the
leadership of Ibrahim Rugova and his Democratic League of Kosovo
(LDK); Rugova advocates nonviolence and was known as the "Gandhi of
the Balkans." Still now in Kosovo, despite the KLA terror regime,
Rugova has the support of the ethnic Albanians. However, the KLA
usurped Rugova's leadership thanks to two elements: first, the
unconditional support of U.S. and British leaders, in particular
thenU.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (a prot�g� of George
Soros and Zbigniew Brzezinski) and British Prime Minister Tony Blair;
and second, the support of the Kosovo mafia.
At the 1999 negotiations supposedly to peacefully settle the turmoil
between Serbia and Kosovo, in Rambouillet, France, Albright imposed
the young KLA political leader, Hashim Thaci, rumored to be the scion
of an important family at the center of organized crime in Kosovo, as
the top representative of the ethnic Albanians. Rugova was pushed
brutally aside. In fact, the KLA had been engaged for a long time in
a "manhunt" against Rugova and his leading officials, using
intimidation, violence, even murder. The KLA had dedicated more time
and resources to attacking ethnic Albanians around Rugova, than it
did to opposing the Serbian regime. As we shall see, the same tactics
are being repeated right now in Macedonia.
Rugova himself had expressed some perplexity when the KLA began
escalating its terror activities, expressing his suspicion that the
guerrillas could just be provocateurs, sponsored by Yugoslav
President Milosevic, to provide the pretext to bring Kosovo again
under control.
At the moment of the socalled peace negotiations in Rambouillet, a
NATO assault on Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo had already been
decided. The use of the KLA gangs inside Kosovo, especially to
"triangulate" and guide the air bombings from the ground, had also
been decided. The training of the KLA had been going on for a long
time.
The Colombia of Europe
The NATO air campaign increased the power of the Kosovo mafia
dramatically, in terms of its criminal activities and its control
over the population, by eliminating every obstacle, even the vestige
of a narcotics police. The bombing campaign also fed the KLA's
predisposition to broaden its area of control, starting with Serbia
and Macedonia.
One year after the bombing, when many thinktanks made their first
thorough analysis, the situation looked appalling. NATO's 78 days of
bombings had included the use more than 1,000 aircraft to fly more
than 38,000 "sorties" at a cost estimated in the tens of billions
dollars. About 40,000 men had been deployed in Kosovo, while
reconstruction had not taken place at all. But the KLA, under the
NATO umbrella, became the absolute master of Kosovo, and the Kosovo
mafia became one of the leading criminal organizations in the world.
Another year later, at the beginning of 2001, the KLA was ready to
launch its wellorganized expansionist assault on two sovereign
countries, Macedonia and Yugoslavia, using NATOadministered Kosovo
as its base.
Under the ceasefire agreement of June 1999, the KLA was supposed to
disarm and disband. The 5,000 KLA guerrillas were to join the
unarmed, civil protection Kosovo Protection Corps (KPC) under the
leadership of the KLA military commander, Agim Cequ. Cequ is a former
general in the Croatian army, reportedly trained by Military
Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), a U.S. firm based in Alexandria,
Virginia. MPRI includes on its board some of the highestlevel
retired U.S. military officers and is specialized in "privately"
arming, training, and "advising" foreign governments and foreign
groups, including the KLA (see box).
The KLA is better armed than ever, according to observers, and based
on the findings of secret weapons caches in Kosovo, Serbia, and
Macedonia. Evidence is also piling up that the structure of the
KLAKPC coincides with that of the Kosovo mafia. The
Albrightsponsored Thaci continues to be the political leader of
Kosovo, despite the fact that his political adversary, Ibrahim
Rugova, can still count on the large majority of the KosovoAlbanian
votes. "Kosovo is set to become the cancer center of Europe, as
Western Europe will soon discover," stated Marko Nikovic,
vicepresident of the New Yorkbased International Narcotic
Enforcement Officers Association, speaking to the London Guardian
March 13, 2000, one year after the NATO bombing campaign had
officially installed the KLA in power in Kosovo.
"It is the hardest narcotics ring to crack, because it is all run by
families," said Nikovic, who estimated that as of March 2000, the
Kosovo mafia was handling between four and a half and five tons of
heroin a month, and growing fast, compared with two tons per month
before NATO and the KLA took over the province. "It's coming through
easier and cheaper, and there is much more of it. The price is going
down, and if this goes on, we are predicting a heroin boom in Western
Europe, as there was in the early '80s"�i.e., the boom due to the
increase in opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the
Afghanistan war. Sources in the Balkans have confirmed that the
Kosovo mafia bosses, divided into four major families, are
concentrating even more on Western European and U.S. markets. A
highlevel informant admitted, "There is nobody to stop them."
"Kosovo is the Colombia of Europe," Nikovic explained. "When Serb
police [during the ruthless retaliation for the KLA assassination of
Yugoslav police officers, which led to the NATO intervention] were
burning houses in Kosovo, they were finding heroin stuffed in the
roof. As far as I know there has not been a single report in the last
year of KFOR seizing heroin. You have an entire country without a
police force that knows what is going on. Everything is worked out on
the basis of the family or clan structure�their diaspora have been in
Turkey and Germany since Tito's purges, so the whole route is set up.
Now they have found the one country between Asia and Europe that is
not a member of Interpol."
NATO Troops Do Not Police
Under the NATO protectorate, Kosovo organizedcrime activities have
been left officially undisturbed for a long time. "Generals do not
want to turn their troops into cops.... They don't want their troops
to get shot pursuing black marketeers," a top NATO official in the
Brussels headquarters told a reporter.
"The KLA is indebted to Balkan drug organizations that helped funnel
both cash and arms to the guerrillas before and after the conflict,"
according to a report published by the U.S.based Stratfor Global
Intelligence on March 3, 2000, entitled "Kosovo: One Year Later."
"Kosovo is the heart of a heroin trafficking route that runs from
Afghanistan through Turkey and the Balkans and into Western
Europe.... The KLA must now pay back the organized crime elements.
This would in turn create a surge in heroin traffic in the coming
months, just as it did following the NATO occupation of Bosnia in the
mid1990s.... The route connecting the Talibanrun opium fields of
Afghanistan to Western Europe's heroin market is dominated by the
Kosovo Albanians; this 'Balkan Route' supplied 80% of Europe's
heroin. The U.S. government has been�and likely continues to be�well
aware of the heroin trade coming through Kosovo, as well as the KLA
connection.... For the KLA, the Balkan route is not only a way to
ship heroin to Europe, but it has also acted as a conduit for weapons
filtering into the wartorn Balkans."
According to a NATO report which surfaced in June 1999, after the end
of the bombings, "the smugglers" either trade drugs directly for
weapons or buy weapons with drug earnings in Albania, Bosnia,
Croatia, Cyprus, Italy, Montenegro, Switzerland, or Turkey. The
arsenal of weapons smuggled into Kosovo has included: antiaircraft
missiles, assault rifles, sniper rifles, mortars, grenade launchers,
antipersonnel mines, and infrared night vision gear.
More Powerful Than a State
On Feb. 1, 1995, the British Jane's Intelligence Review, considered
very close to intelligence circles, wrote an analysis called "The
Balkan Medell�n," which described a scenario in which Macedonia would
became the target of "Albanian narcoterrorism," especially using the
"Albaniandominated region of western Macedonia," an area dominated
by drug trafficking that makes it much "richer" than the rest of
Macedonia.
In fact, the Jane's report was pointing to the wellknown fact that
the border area between Kosovo, Albania, Serbia proper, and Macedonia
has been, at least since the 1970s, an important center for illegal
activities. Of course, until the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early
1990s there was no border between Kosovo, Macedonia and Serbia
proper. Albania was a rigidly isolated country; however there were
still many relations and exchanges between Albania and the Albanian
community in Kosovo. This situation was exploited fully by the
Albanian mafia, and Kosovo became an area of choice, because of the
ease of running traffic through this province. It was in this
crossborder area�including southern Serbia, western Macedonia, and
northern Albania, with Kosovo at its center�where the illegal
smuggling had established a wellorganized logistical apparatus, that
the KLA emerged. This transborder area is also the region that is
supposed to constitute "Greater Albania." "The Albaniandominated
region of Western Macedonia accounts for a disproportionate share of
Macedonia's shrinking GDP," reads the 1995 Jane's report. "This
situation has strengthened Albanophobic sentiments among the ethnic
Macedonian majority, especially as a great deal of revenue is thought
to derive from Albanian narcoterrorism as well as associated
gunrunning and crossborder smuggling to and from Albania, Bulgaria
and the Kosovo province of Serbia. This rising Albanian economic
power is helping to turn the Balkans into a hub of criminality....
[The Albanian mafia is] closely associated to the powerful Sicilian
mafia. If left unchecked, this growing Albanian narcoterrorism could
lead to a Colombian syndrome in the Southern Balkans, or the
emergence of a situation in which the Albanian mafia becomes powerful
enough to control one or more states in the region. In practical
terms this will involve Albania or Macedonia or both. Politically,
this is been done by channeling growing foreignexchange profits from
narcoterrorism into local governments and political parties."
In other words, the 1995 British report was presenting the scenario
that was later on actually implemented by the KLA. As of this
writing, in June 2001, what is at stake in the ongoing KLA assault on
Macedonia is whether the KLA mafia has become powerful enough to
"break away" from its highlevel sponsors, and whether it is ready to
take control of Macedonia, after having taken over large part of
Albania and the totality of Kosovo.
Concerning the Sicilian mafia. It is important to note that a whole
new mafia branch has developed with a dramatic accumulation of power,
as a direct consequence of the Albanian mafia escalation. It is the
mafia based in Apulia, just across the Otranto Canal from Albania. It
calls itself Sacra Corona Unit� (Holy United Crown).
Confirming the existence of an integrated organizedcrime network
across the YugoslaviaAlbania borders, later used to develop the KLA
structure, was a June 1994 report by The Geopolitical Drug Dispatch.
The Dispatch, a French center for research and analysis on drug
traffic that advises governments, in a report titled "Guns and Ammo
for 'Greater Albania,' " pointed out: "Heroin shipment and marketing
networks are taking root among ethnic Albanian communities in
Albania, Macedonia and the Kosovo province of Serbia, in order to
finance large purchases of weapons destined not only for the current
conflict in Bosnia, but also for the brewing war in Kosovo. Hence on
May 18, as part of a tenmonthold operation codenamed 'Macedonia,'
the Italian police dismantled a major ItalianMacedonian network and
seized 40 kilograms of heroin produced in Turkey and shipped to Italy
via the Balkans.
"In recent months," the report continues, "significant quantities of
heroin have been seized in Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Greece,
from traffickers who usually hail from Pristina (the Kosovo capital),
Skopje (capital of Macedonia) or Skorda (a large town in Northern
Albania)."
Target: Macedonia
Nikola Dimitrov, the National Security adviser of Macedonian
President Boris Trajkovski, told the March 21, 2001 Newsweek that
"Kosovo has become the combined Afghanistan and Colombia of the
Balkans. There is no rule of law, no ethnic tolerance, no human
rights. Not even an economy, except foreign aid and organized crime."
His interviewer, not a Macedonian sympathizer, concluded: "A year
ago, that sweeping denunciation would have been easy to dismiss as
Slav rhetoric. Now it has begun to sound plausible."
The first KLA invasion of Macedonia from Kosovo at the beginning of
2001, had produced a political shock in the country's leadership,
especially when their strong protest to NATO was met with evasive
statements by the Secretary General, Lord George Robertson, and the
other military leaders responsible for Kosovo. Confronted with the
dramatic emergency appeals of the Macedonians, the NATO officials
repeatedly replied that, first, they were trying to seal the borders,
but they really did not see any invasion; second, that Macedonia
should react in a peaceful way and try to negotiate with the
aggressors; and third, the invasion looked like an internal uprising
against the government, and had little to do with outside factors.
The attitude of Lord Robertson and his cothinkers was even more
insulting because it was known in many quarters, that Tanusevci, the
Macedonian village just across the Kosovo border, which the KLA had
been occupying for weeks, was one of the "secret" weapons depots that
the KLA had already built up at the time of the NATO bombing of
Kosovo. Reportedly the Macedonian authorities had been asked to close
one or both eyes, because this operation concerned the war against
the Serbs and those weapons were never to be used against Macedonia.
To illustrate how the military and the criminal sides of the
operation are connected, it is enough to point out that the same,
very high mountain village of Tanusevci had been for many years one
of the smuggling centers to and from Kosovo. In other words, it had
been one of the bases of operation for the Kosovo mafia. According to
observers, the Kosovo mafia's territorial and logistical structures
correspond almost identically to the KLA logistical structure on the
ground.
Furthermore, the Macedonian authorities knew precisely who the man in
charge was for the Tanusevci operation: Xhavit Hasani, an ethnic
Albanian born in Tanusevci, who is a KLA member wanted in Macedonia
for shooting a policeman. He was also arrested in Kosovo by the KFOR
troops following the murder of Serb civilians.
On March 18, Prime Minister Georgievski broke the spell that had
paralyzed the country after the Tanusevci invasion and made his
dramatic denunciation of Western support for the "Taliban of Europe."
In that televised appeal to the nation, the Prime Minister said also:
"It is
not a secret for us that this aggression has been prepared, organized,
and
conducted with logistics support of parties and structures from
Macedonia's
northern neighbor. We refer to the political structure from Kosovo. We
cannot
agree with some assessments that developments in Macedonia are not a
result of
a spillover of the Kosovo crisis, an aggression from Kosovo against
Macedonia.
The reason [for this assessment] is very simple: if the international
community
admits that there is an aggression from Kosovo, then its Kosovo policy
for the
last two years has been wrong."
On March 23, at the summit of the European Union heads of state in
Stockholm,
Russia President Vladimir Putin gave his support to his Macedonian
counterpart,
Boris Trajkovski. The KLA attack must be faced "in a robust manner,"
said
Putin, comparing the Macedonian situation to Chechnya. When, in 1996,
Russia
withdrew its troops from Chechnya, the rebels attacked Dagestan. "Had we
not
taken adequate measures of reaction, we would have faced much wider
problems
these days," he said. If unchecked, the KLA terrorism "will create the
conditions for shaking Europe in its very heart." More recently, on May
24,
Macedonia began to react to the second KLA "shock," the invasion of a
group of
villages just north of Skopje in the region of Kumanovo. The terrorists
used
several thousand civilians as "human shields." And what is Kumanovo? One
of the
main centers for the Kosovo mafia; an area where the mob traditionally
enjoys a
high level of social control. Reportedly the area has hosted one of the
most
modern heroinprocessing facilities.
The IMF and the Mafia
To conclude this overview, it is necessary to emphasize one point:
Though the
KLA operation had been prepared for many years, and, as we see, its
connections
are international, the trigger element was represented by the financial,
political, and social collapse of Albania in 1997, following the
explosion of
the infamous financial pyramid scheme. Many Albanians who were told to
invest
all they had in these cancerous speculation schemes�presented as the
epitome of
the "free market"�had lost everything in a matter of days.
It was a gigantic looting operation of the poorest country in Europe.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) had provided the coup de gra�e
when it demanded that the Albanian government and Parliament not pass
an already finalized bill, requiring a "safety" deposit, before
engaging in "pyramid" speculation. The crash was mercilessly
destructive.
Reportedly, the loot ended up in the safe of some very prestigious
Western banks. The consequence was an explosive rebellion, the
collapse of the state, and the criminalization of a high percentage
of the population. Many Albanians became, from one day to the next,
refugees, black marketeers, cannon fodder for the mafia clans, ready
to do everything to survive. The organizedcrime groups (with close
links with the Italian Mafia) rapidly took over the pieces and fed on
the misery and destruction of a whole country.
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