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Intelligence historian Joe Trento writes in Prelude to Terror that the Reagan and Bush Administration entered into a quid pro quo with Pakistan and its Saudi and Gulf financial backers in exchange for their assistance in driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The financial, logistical, political and commercial networks that were cemented in place endured after the Russians retreated and the Soviet Union collapsed. To hear Trento tell it, the very same network of rogue spooks, corrupt bankers, and mercenary weapons designers was the seed from which BCCI, Iran-Contra, and 9-11 sprang.
This is the strange tale of the alliance of Middle East jihadists and their business partners, entrepreneurial elements of the CIA Old Guard led by George Herbert Walker Bush. Together, they developed a global network that peddled nuclear weapons, cultivated global terrorist groups, subverted the U.S. government, and tried to impose their own global dynasty under cover of a manufactured Forever War of religious genocide.
The Safari Club
The Khan network was the product of more than an alliance against the Soviet Union. It sprang out of a post-Watergate era partnership between disgraced former covert operators who had been thrown out of American intelligence, the Saudi Royal family, and third-country partners who provided manpower and technical assistance. It was called, “The Safari Club”. In early 1976, under its outgoing Director George H.W. Bush, elements within the Agency turned to the Saudi royal family for help. Those were difficult times for CIA Old Guard. As ground involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973, the Agency ramped up the covert operations and secret wars that spread into Laos and Cambodia. The Phoenix Program targeted tens of thousands of South Vietnamese officials and suspected Vietcong sympathizers for assassination, a program in which James Mann tells us in Rise of the Vulcans a naval officer, named Richard Armitage, participated.
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/000571... Two years later, despite the extraordinary exertions of some within the Agency, and a fellowship of committed Cold warriors, Saigon fell. Within that group was the perception that the Cause had been betrayed by liberals, Democrats, and bean counters, and that would never again be allowed to happen.
1974 had seen the unraveling of the Watergate scandal, in which the hand of the CIA Old Guard in domestic politics was revealed. Finally, by 1976, it had become widely perceived as the rogue Agency. In the “Year of Intelligence,” the Church and Pike Committees publicly exposed decades of shocking crimes carried out and covered up by the intelligence community. This forced newly-elected President Carter and Congress to finally exert real oversight and limit intelligence operations around the world.
In August 1977, CIA Director Stansfield Turner ordered 823 positions within the covert Directorate of Operations eliminated, firing most of the Agency's hard men such as Ted “Blonde Ghost” Shackley, Thomas Clines, and Edwin Wilson. Their response was to take their deadly talents and wares into the private sector. That same year, Armitage left his DIA post in Iran, where he worked with Richard Secord and the Shah’s Secret Police, SAVAK, and was reassigned to State Department cover in Thailand.
In a bid to reestablish their independence, Right-wing Agency operators turned to new sources of cash and foreign patronage, particularly the Saudis, for the resources needed to shake off strictures imposed by President Carter and the Democratic Congress.
Through the Safari Club, Trento writes, “the Saudi royal family had taken over intelligence financing for the United States” at 102. The shared cause of anticommunism justified the privatization and merger of U.S. and Saudi intelligence, but it also opened avenues for personal and political enrichment for those who would create and run a run a shadow oligarchy. It created a set of alliances and mutual obligations. It was also highly illegal under U.S. law for American intelligence officers and officials to accept private foreign cash -- whether or not this was the original intention, this ended up allowing the Saudis, Pakistanis, and other foreign members in the Safari Club blackmail and veto power over those U.S. officials involved. George H.W. Bush and those around him who had accepted the deal also had to live with it.
Another key figure in this saga is Prince Turki al-Faisal, until his sudden resignation on September 4, 2001, the 24-year veteran head of Saudi foreign intelligence, the General Intelligence Directorate - GID, and according to the Financial Times, Osama bin-Laden’s former case officer.
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