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Osama bin Laden
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pre-1979-1989, Afghanistan: The CIA's Biggest Covert War
By Mark Zapezauer
During the Reagan years, the CIA ran nearly two dozen covert operations against various governments. Of these, Afghanistan was by far the biggest; it was, in fact, the biggest CIA operation of all time, both in terms of dollars spent (US$5 to US$6 billion) and personnel involved.
Its main purpose was to "bleed" the Soviet Union, just as the U.S. had been bled in Vietnam. Prior to the 1979 Russian invasion, Afghanistan was ruled by a brutal dictator. Like the neighboring shah of Iran, he allowed the CIA to set up radar installations in his country that were used to monitor the Soviets. In 1979, after several dozen Soviet advisors were massacred by Afghan tribesmen, the USSR sent in the Red Army.
The Soviets tried to install a pliable client regime, without taking local attitudes into account. Many of the mullahs who controlled chunks of Afghan territory objected to Soviet efforts to educate women and to institute land reform. Others, outraged by the USSR's attempts to suppress the heroin trade, shifted their operations to Pakistan.
As for the CIA, its aim was simply to humiliate the Soviets by arming anyone who would fight against them. The agency funneled cash and weapons to over a dozen guerrilla groups, many of whom had been staging raids from Pakistan years before the Soviet invasion. For many years, long after the Soviets left Afghanistan, most of these groups were still fighting each other for control of the country.
One notable veteran of the Afghan operation is Sheik Abdel Rahman, famous for his role in the World Trade Center bombing.
The CIA succeeded in creating chaos, but never developed a plan for ending it. When the ten-year war was over, a million people were dead, and Afghan heroin had captured 60% of the U.S. market.
Source: Excerpted from CIA's Greatest Hits
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/Afghanistan_CIAHits.html
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Osama bin Laden
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By Michael Moran, International Editor, MSNBC.
Since the early 1990s, Osama bin Laden, heir to a Saudi construction fortune, has financed attacks on interests of U.S. and its Arab allies.
As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia in 1979 to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan. By 1984, he was running Maktab al-Khidamar (MAK) that funneled money, arms and fighters into the Afghan war. MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's intelligence agency, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war in Afghanistan. Bin Laden and Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East, were partners in the CIA's war.
By 1988, bin Laden split from the relatively conventional MAK and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many MAK members.
Source: MSNBC, Aug. 24, 1998.
www.
msnbc.com/news/190144.asp
By Christopher Kremmer
Heat-seeking, supersonic shoulder-fired "stinger" missiles and launchers were doled out generously by the CIA to inflict a humiliating blow on the Soviet Union.
From 1986 to 1989, the CIA distributed more than a thousand of these surface-to-air missiles to the Afghan mujihadeen, who used some of them to bring down 270 Soviet aircraft. The U.S. is still looking for the Stinger missiles, fearing they may be in the hands of Islamic extremists, like Osama bin Laden, or hostile foreign governments.
In a covert buy-back scheme, funded by the U.S. Congress, the CIA has offered up to $US175,000 apiece, five times their original cost, to get the missiles back. The scheme initially provoked a flood of responses from Afghan warlords and shady Pakistani middlemen. Hundreds of Stingers are believed to be still unaccounted for.
Pakistani technicians trained mujihadeen fighters to use the Stingers, which enjoyed a 79% strike rate.
The lion's share of missiles went to mujihadeen leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who became Afghanistan's U.S.-backed Prime Minister. He is now exiled in Iran.
China, Iran and North Korea are among the countries rumored to possess Stingers bought from Afghan commanders.
Source: The Age, April 15, 1999.
Mujahedeen: The CIA's Heroin Heroes
CIA-supported mujahedeen engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society. The CIA's principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a major heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. They provided up to half of the heroin used annually in the U.S. and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation. In 1993, an official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.
Source: William Blum, "A Brief History of CIA Involvement in the Drug Trade," 1997.