How the CIA created Osama bin Laden
BY NORM DIXON
Throughout the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive on the moral
defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements
arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on almost every continent populated by man in the
hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters.
Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwas?
Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?
In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today's supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his
Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the evil empire, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on
March 8, 1985. The evil empire was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed
colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.
How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities the most despicable being the mass
murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 bin Laden the
freedom fighter is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a terrorist mastermind and
an evil-doer.
Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden,
the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt and perhaps the disaster that
befell New York.
The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
Mujaheddin
In April 1978, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a
crackdown against the party by that country's repressive government.
The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of
education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also
supported strengthening Afghanistan's relationship with the Soviet Union.
Such policies enraged the wealthy semi-feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were
also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government's
progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.
Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government's radical example) to its allies
in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan mujaheddin, as the contra force
was known.
Following an internal PDPA power struggle in December 1979 which toppled Afghanistan's leader, thousands of
Soviet troops entered the country to prevent the new government's fall. This only galvanised the disparate
fundamentalist factions. Their reactionary jihad now gained legitimacy as a national liberation struggle in the eyes
of many Afghans.
The Soviet Union was eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the mujaheddin captured the capital,
Kabul, in 1992.
Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20
billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujaheddin factions. Other Western governments, as
well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided
millions more.
Washington's policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops
to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim
Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.
Brzezinski's grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia ul-Haq's own ambitions to dominate
the region. US-run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central
Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-US Shah of Iran in 1979).
Washington's favoured mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The
West's distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury freedom fighter. Hekmatyar was notorious in the
1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
After the mujaheddin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar's forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on that
city killing at least 2000 civilians until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister.
Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.
Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the
mujaheddin from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the world's single largest source of heroin, supplying 60% of US drug users.
In 1995, the former director of the CIA's operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the
flow of drugs: Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets... There was a fallout in
terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.
Made in the USA
According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in 1986 CIA chief William
Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the
Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000
attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).
John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan,
America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin were
sent to Camp Peary, the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and
Jordan, and even some African-American black Muslims were taught sabotage skills.
The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained bin Laden's operatives in 1989.
These operatives were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary
training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar's forces.
Mohammed was a member of the US army's elite Green Berets.
The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called Operation Cyclone.
In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the mujaheddin factions by an organisation known
as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services MAK).
MAK was a front for Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of
the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three
people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.
Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist
Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in
1993.
The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with
the CIA's approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was partly culpable for the 1993
World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.
Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in
1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training
the estimated 35,000 non-Afghan mercenaries who joined the mujaheddin.
The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and
political ties to that country's pro-US royal family.
Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia's minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new
minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam's holiest mosques in Mecca
and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world's largest private
construction company.
Osama bin Laden's father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill-gotten business
empire.
(Bin Laden junior's oft-quoted personal fortune of US$200-300 million has been arrived at by the US State
Department by dividing today's value of the bin Laden family net worth estimated to be US$5 billion by the
number of bin Laden senior's sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama
and took control of his share.)
Osama's military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the
reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully
aware of his activities.
Milt Bearden, the CIA's station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New
Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did ... [Guys like]
bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And
that is a lot of money. It's an extra $200-$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did.
In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive
knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built training camps, some dug
deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.
These camps, now dubbed terrorist universities by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the
CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin
Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.
Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the mujaheddin told the August 13, 2000,
British Observer, The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism car
bombing and so on so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns ... Many of them are now using
their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.
Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden's organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business
enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary
force and related logistical services with legitimate business operations.
Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s fund, feed
and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes,
the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.
Bin Laden only became a terrorist in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to
allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden's anger turned
to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes such as Egypt in the Middle East
were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.
He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of
the Gulf states. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there
were frozen.
After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build
during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services and thousands of his mercenaries to the
Taliban, which took power that September.
Today, bin Laden's private army of non-Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.
Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures
remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the
Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.
In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a
senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the mujaheddin, as saying
he would make the same call again, even knowing what bin Laden would become.
It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the
Soviet Union.
Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation.
Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano,
described as a former CIA chief of counter-terrorism operations.
Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their work. He was in charge
of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid
to the Afghan mujaheddin for the US National Security Council.
The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban
or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the
Cold War?
BY NORM DIXON
Throughout the world ... its agents, client states and satellites are on the defensive on the moral
defensive, the intellectual defensive, and the political and economic defensive. Freedom movements
arise and assert themselves. They're doing so on almost every continent populated by man in the
hills of Afghanistan, in Angola, in Kampuchea, in Central America ... [They are] freedom fighters.
Is this a call to jihad (holy war) taken from one of Islamic fundamentalist Osama bin Laden's notorious fatwas?
Or perhaps a communique issued by the repressive Taliban regime in Kabul?
In fact, this glowing praise of the murderous exploits of today's supporters of arch-terrorist bin Laden and his
Taliban collaborators, and their holy war against the evil empire, was issued by US President Ronald Reagan on
March 8, 1985. The evil empire was the Soviet Union, as well as Third World movements fighting US-backed
colonialism, apartheid and dictatorship.
How things change. In the aftermath of a series of terrorist atrocities the most despicable being the mass
murder of more than 6000 working people in New York and Washington on September 11 bin Laden the
freedom fighter is now lambasted by US leaders and the Western mass media as a terrorist mastermind and
an evil-doer.
Yet the US government refuses to admit its central role in creating the vicious movement that spawned bin Laden,
the Taliban and Islamic fundamentalist terrorists that plague Algeria and Egypt and perhaps the disaster that
befell New York.
The mass media has also downplayed the origins of bin Laden and his toxic brand of Islamic fundamentalism.
Mujaheddin
In April 1978, the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in reaction to a
crackdown against the party by that country's repressive government.
The PDPA was committed to a radical land reform that favoured the peasants, trade union rights, an expansion of
education and social services, equality for women and the separation of church and state. The PDPA also
supported strengthening Afghanistan's relationship with the Soviet Union.
Such policies enraged the wealthy semi-feudal landlords, the Muslim religious establishment (many mullahs were
also big landlords) and the tribal chiefs. They immediately began organising resistance to the government's
progressive policies, under the guise of defending Islam.
Washington, fearing the spread of Soviet influence (and worse the new government's radical example) to its allies
in Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf states, immediately offered support to the Afghan mujaheddin, as the contra force
was known.
Following an internal PDPA power struggle in December 1979 which toppled Afghanistan's leader, thousands of
Soviet troops entered the country to prevent the new government's fall. This only galvanised the disparate
fundamentalist factions. Their reactionary jihad now gained legitimacy as a national liberation struggle in the eyes
of many Afghans.
The Soviet Union was eventually to withdraw from Afghanistan in 1989 and the mujaheddin captured the capital,
Kabul, in 1992.
Between 1978 and 1992, the US government poured at least US$6 billion (some estimates range as high as $20
billion) worth of arms, training and funds to prop up the mujaheddin factions. Other Western governments, as
well as oil-rich Saudi Arabia, kicked in as much again. Wealthy Arab fanatics, like Osama bin Laden, provided
millions more.
Washington's policy in Afghanistan was shaped by US President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, and was continued by his successors. His plan went far beyond simply forcing Soviet troops
to withdraw; rather it aimed to foster an international movement to spread Islamic fanaticism into the Muslim
Central Asian Soviet republics to destabilise the Soviet Union.
Brzezinski's grand plan coincided with Pakistan military dictator General Zia ul-Haq's own ambitions to dominate
the region. US-run Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe beamed Islamic fundamentalist tirades across Central
Asia (while paradoxically denouncing the Islamic revolution that toppled the pro-US Shah of Iran in 1979).
Washington's favoured mujaheddin faction was one of the most extreme, led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The
West's distaste for terrorism did not apply to this unsavoury freedom fighter. Hekmatyar was notorious in the
1970s for throwing acid in the faces of women who refused to wear the veil.
After the mujaheddin took Kabul in 1992, Hekmatyar's forces rained US-supplied missiles and rockets on that
city killing at least 2000 civilians until the new government agreed to give him the post of prime minister.
Osama bin Laden was a close associate of Hekmatyar and his faction.
Hekmatyar was also infamous for his side trade in the cultivation and trafficking in opium. Backing of the
mujaheddin from the CIA coincided with a boom in the drug business. Within two years, the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the world's single largest source of heroin, supplying 60% of US drug users.
In 1995, the former director of the CIA's operation in Afghanistan was unrepentant about the explosion in the
flow of drugs: Our main mission was to do as much damage as possible to the Soviets... There was a fallout in
terms of drugs, yes. But the main objective was accomplished. The Soviets left Afghanistan.
Made in the USA
According to Ahmed Rashid, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review, in 1986 CIA chief William
Casey committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI proposal to recruit from around the world to join the
Afghan jihad. At least 100,000 Islamic militants flocked to Pakistan between 1982 and 1992 (some 60,000
attended fundamentalist schools in Pakistan without necessarily taking part in the fighting).
John Cooley, a former journalist with the US ABC television network and author of Unholy Wars: Afghanistan,
America and International Terrorism, has revealed that Muslims recruited in the US for the mujaheddin were
sent to Camp Peary, the CIA's spy training camp in Virginia, where young Afghans, Arabs from Egypt and
Jordan, and even some African-American black Muslims were taught sabotage skills.
The November 1, 1998, British Independent reported that one of those charged with the 1998 bombings of US
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Ali Mohammed, had trained bin Laden's operatives in 1989.
These operatives were recruited at the al Kifah Refugee Centre in Brooklyn, New York, given paramilitary
training in the New York area and then sent to Afghanistan with US assistance to join Hekmatyar's forces.
Mohammed was a member of the US army's elite Green Berets.
The program, reported the Independent, was part of a Washington-approved plan called Operation Cyclone.
In Pakistan, recruits, money and equipment were distributed to the mujaheddin factions by an organisation known
as Maktab al Khidamar (Office of Services MAK).
MAK was a front for Pakistan's CIA, the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate. The ISI was the first recipient of
the vast bulk of CIA and Saudi Arabian covert assistance for the Afghan contras. Bin Laden was one of three
people who ran MAK. In 1989, he took overall charge of MAK.
Among those trained by Mohammed were El Sayyid Nosair, who was jailed in 1995 for killing Israeli rightist
Rabbi Meir Kahane and plotting with others to bomb New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center in
1993.
The Independent also suggested that Shiekh Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian religious leader also jailed for the
1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, was also part of Operation Cyclone. He entered the US in 1990 with
the CIA's approval. A confidential CIA report concluded that the agency was partly culpable for the 1993
World Trade Center blast, the Independent reported.
Bin Laden
Osama bin Laden, one of 20 sons of a billionaire construction magnate, arrived in Afghanistan to join the jihad in
1980. An austere religious fanatic and business tycoon, bin Laden specialised in recruiting, financing and training
the estimated 35,000 non-Afghan mercenaries who joined the mujaheddin.
The bin Laden family is a prominent pillar of the Saudi Arabian ruling class, with close personal, financial and
political ties to that country's pro-US royal family.
Bin Laden senior was appointed Saudi Arabia's minister of public works as a favour by King Faisal. The new
minister awarded his own construction companies lucrative contracts to rebuild Islam's holiest mosques in Mecca
and Medina. In the process, the bin Laden family company in 1966 became the world's largest private
construction company.
Osama bin Laden's father died in 1968. Until 1994, he had access to the dividends from this ill-gotten business
empire.
(Bin Laden junior's oft-quoted personal fortune of US$200-300 million has been arrived at by the US State
Department by dividing today's value of the bin Laden family net worth estimated to be US$5 billion by the
number of bin Laden senior's sons. A fact rarely mentioned is that in 1994 the bin Laden family disowned Osama
and took control of his share.)
Osama's military and business adventures in Afghanistan had the blessing of the bin Laden dynasty and the
reactionary Saudi Arabian regime. His close working relationship with MAK also meant that the CIA was fully
aware of his activities.
Milt Bearden, the CIA's station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, admitted to the January 24, 2000, New
Yorker that while he never personally met bin Laden, Did I know that he was out there? Yes, I did ... [Guys like]
bin Laden were bringing $20-$25 million a month from other Saudis and Gulf Arabs to underwrite the war. And
that is a lot of money. It's an extra $200-$300 million a year. And this is what bin Laden did.
In 1986, bin Laden brought heavy construction equipment from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan. Using his extensive
knowledge of construction techniques (he has a degree in civil engineering), he built training camps, some dug
deep into the sides of mountains, and built roads to reach them.
These camps, now dubbed terrorist universities by Washington, were built in collaboration with the ISI and the
CIA. The Afghan contra fighters, including the tens of thousands of mercenaries recruited and paid for by bin
Laden, were armed by the CIA. Pakistan, the US and Britain provided military trainers.
Tom Carew, a former British SAS soldier who secretly fought for the mujaheddin told the August 13, 2000,
British Observer, The Americans were keen to teach the Afghans the techniques of urban terrorism car
bombing and so on so that they could strike at the Russians in major towns ... Many of them are now using
their knowledge and expertise to wage war on everything they hate.
Al Qaeda (the Base), bin Laden's organisation, was established in 1987-88 to run the camps and other business
enterprises. It is a tightly-run capitalist holding company albeit one that integrates the operations of a mercenary
force and related logistical services with legitimate business operations.
Bin Laden has simply continued to do the job he was asked to do in Afghanistan during the 1980s fund, feed
and train mercenaries. All that has changed is his primary customer. Then it was the ISI and, behind the scenes,
the CIA. Today, his services are utilised primarily by the reactionary Taliban regime.
Bin Laden only became a terrorist in US eyes when he fell out with the Saudi royal family over its decision to
allow more than 540,000 US troops to be stationed on Saudi soil following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
When thousands of US troops remained in Saudi Arabia after the end of the Gulf War, bin Laden's anger turned
to outright opposition. He declared that Saudi Arabia and other regimes such as Egypt in the Middle East
were puppets of the US, just as the PDPA government of Afghanistan had been a puppet of the Soviet Union.
He called for the overthrow of these client regimes and declared it the duty of all Muslims to drive the US out of
the Gulf states. In 1994, he was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and forced to leave the country. His assets there
were frozen.
After a period in Sudan, he returned to Afghanistan in May 1996. He refurbished the camps he had helped build
during the Afghan war and offered the facilities and services and thousands of his mercenaries to the
Taliban, which took power that September.
Today, bin Laden's private army of non-Afghan religious fanatics is a key prop of the Taliban regime.
Prior to the devastating September 11 attack on the twin towers of World Trade Center, US ruling-class figures
remained unrepentant about the consequences of their dirty deals with the likes of bin Laden, Hekmatyar and the
Taliban. Since the awful attack, they have been downright hypocritical.
In an August 28, 1998, report posted on MSNBC, Michael Moran quotes Senator Orrin Hatch, who was a
senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee which approved US dealings with the mujaheddin, as saying
he would make the same call again, even knowing what bin Laden would become.
It was worth it. Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the
Soviet Union.
Hatch today is one of the most gung-ho voices demanding military retaliation.
Another face that has appeared repeatedly on television screens since the attack has been Vincent Cannistrano,
described as a former CIA chief of counter-terrorism operations.
Cannistrano is certainly an expert on terrorists like bin Laden, because he directed their work. He was in charge
of the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras during the early 1980s. In 1984, he became the supervisor of covert aid
to the Afghan mujaheddin for the US National Security Council.
The last word goes to Zbigniew Brzezinski: What was more important in the world view of history? The Taliban
or the fall of the Soviet Empire? A few stirred up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the
Cold War?
