MAK opened up branches in 30 American cities alone. Its New York branch in Brooklyn was known as the al-Kifah Refugee Centre. Apart from the CIA, its donors included the Saudi intelligence agency, the Saudi Red Crescent, the Muslim World League, and private donors, including Saudi princes, according to the Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, in his seminal book,Taliban.
Al-Kifah routinely operated terrorist training camps inside the US with CIA approval. According to French journalist Richard Labeviere, former head of Radio France International and editor of Defence, the journal of the Paris-based Institute for Higher National Defence Studies which operates under the authority of the Prime Minister, al-Kifah even had a training camp in Connecticut, where "recruits received brief paramilitary training and weapons induction." Writing in his book, Dollars for Terror (1999), Labeviere added that former "active service" members of the CIA were employed at the camp as "expert consultants."
Former Sunday Times investigative journalist Simon Reeve further reported in his book, The New Jackals (1999), that US officials had direct contact with bin Laden. "American emissaries are understood to have traveled to Pakistan for meetings with mujaheddin leaders." He cites a former CIA official who said that "the US emissaries met directly with bin Laden, and that it was bin Laden, acting on advice from his friends in Saudi intelligence, who first suggested the mujaheddin should be given Stingers."
Those Stingers went to bin Laden's colleague Hekmatyar, who commandeered the bulk of US, Saudi and Pakistani aid to the mujahideen network.
To help run the most controversial elements of this covert operations programme, the Pentagon was allowed to establish a new US Army Special Operations division "to conceal from Congress and the media, and probably also from other executive agencies, details of covert overseas operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere and their financing," according to former ABC News journalist John K. Cooley in his classic book, Unholy Wars. These programmes reported to a group "which the Pentagon never publicly acknowledged to exist: the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA)."
ISA's highly compartmentalised Afghanistan operations were code-named 'Gray Fox,' and also worked closely with the CIA's paramilitary Special Activities Division.
Since then, the Activity has run under numerous other code-names, the latest of which is unknown.
Operating through its own command-and-control structure, the ISA is entirely free from Congressional oversight, and due to the extreme secrecy of its operations, even remains opaque to senior White House officials.
In July 2002, as Jeremy Scahill reported in Dirty Wars (2013), the ISA was transferred to the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to focus on combining surveillance, field interrogations and "the running of local sources and assets."
Under the greatly expanded and newly revamped ISA, as revealed by a 2002 document from the Pentagon's Defence Science Board, the new ISA programme under a proposed 'Pre-emptive Pro-active Operations Group' (P2OG) would involve "duping al Qaida into undertaking operations" and attempting to "stimulate terrorists into responding or moving operations""--"that is, essentially, provoking terrorists into carrying out operations: or in the words of Los Angeles Times military affairs analyst William Arkin, "prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to 'quick-response' attacks by US forces."
This would also allow more overt military action against "states/sub-state actors accountable" for harbouring terrorists. Under JSOC, the greatly expanded ISA would specialise in cultivating the capacity to penetrate and manipulate terrorist networks. This would involve harnessing human intelligence assets inside terrorist networks, and pushing terrorists to undertake violent acts to expose them to US counter-attacks.
World renowned Sahara expert Prof. Jeremy Keenan of the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS), who advises the European Union, US State Department, and UK Foreign Office on regional security issues, has shown that P2OG style operations have led to the fabrication of terrorist activity in the Islamic Maghreb, which has in turn legitimised a US-dominated counter-terrorism architecture in the region's oil-rich areas:
"Algeria's DRS [Department of Intelligence and Security], with the complicity of the US and the knowledge of other Western intelligence agencies, has used Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, through the almost complete infiltration of its leadership, to create a terrorist scenario. Much of the terrorist landscape that Algeria and its Western allies have painted in the Sahara-Sahel region is completely false."
While some terrorist incidents are "genuine," he said, "the vast majority were fabricated or orchestrated by the DRS," and included incidents such as "provoking" the indigenous Tuareg "into taking up arms" in conditions of severe economic and political repression. Keenan's analysis has been borne out by intelligence officials.
The covert strategy is deeply counter-productive. Rather than addressing the underlying causes and grievances that fuel terrorism, the strategy is to continuously infiltrate and provoke groups of terror suspects to undertake acts of terror, which would then provide the strategic opportunity to 'take them out.'
Was bin Laden's presence in Pakistan under Saudi-Pakistani protection a byproduct of the US-led 'redirection' P2OG-style strategy to mobilise Sunni Islamist militants against Iranian influence?
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