28. Operation Cyclone

Mujahideen

The export of Wahhabism was given a further boost with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, also in 1979, the same year as the revolution in Iran, when the Saudis, supported by the Americans, supplied millions of dollars and to fund the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Mujahideen and the Wahhabi-style schools and organizations in Pakistan in order to train guerrillas, later know more infamously as the Taliban, to fight the Russians.[1] Funds accumulated through the Iran-Contra conspiracy enabled the Americans continued to secretly fund the Mujahideen factions, then being celebrated in the media as “Freedom Fighters.” Under intense lobbying, Reagan agreed to yield to the neoconservatives and signed a secret document that would allow the funding of covert operations to combat the supposed hidden Soviet threat around the world.[2] To solicit Saudi support, Casey contacted Saudi Ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar—a close family friend of the Bush family, named affectionately by George H.W. Bush’s wife Barbara as “Bandar Bush”—who arranged a meeting with King Fahd, as a result of which the Saudis would match “America dollar for dollar supporting the Mujahideen,” according to Prince Turki al Faisal, longtime head of Saudi intelligence.[3] Code-named Operation Cyclone, it became one of the longest and most expensive covert CIA operations ever undertaken, with combined contributions eventually achieving a total of ten billion dollars.[4] To ensure the CIA’s plausible deniability, support to the Mujahideen was coordinated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

Ahmed Rashid wrote that then-CIA chief Bill Casey “committed CIA support to a long-standing ISI initiative to recruit radical Muslims from around the world to come to Pakistan and fight with the Afghan Mujaheddin.”[5] The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was originally established in 1948 by Joseph Cawthorn, a British Intelligence agent of MI6, with whom it has continually maintained close ties.[6] Besides ridding themselves of an increasingly volatile section of the population, according to Craig Unger, the war in Afghanistan was:

 

…a mission that could be embraced by the gamut of Saudi society, from the wealthy merchant families and the House of Saud to the militant clerics and the fundamentalist masses.  For the royal family, the war was not just part of the cornerstone of the burgeoning Saudi alliance with the United States, but served other purposes as well.  Contributing to the war effort placated the militant clerics and helped accommodate the growing unrest and the more radical elements of society.[7]

 

The Russian invasion of Afghanistan was deliberately provoked by the Americans, with the aim of bankrupting the Soviet Union. In an interview with French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in January 1998, Carter’s former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski recounted that “according to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, kept secret until now, is quite different: Indeed, it was on July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.” Brzezinski was further quoted alleging that, “on that day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.” He admitted that the administration had “knowingly increased the probability” that the Soviets would intervene militarily, and maintained that he had no regrets as the “secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.” He added that on the “day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, effectively: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War,’” and boasted that “for almost ten years, Moscow had to wage an unbearable war for the regime, a conflict that led to the demoralization and ultimately the breakup of the Soviet empire.”[8]

From Egypt were recruited those fanatics who had been responsible for the assassination of its president Anwar Sadat in 1981.[9] At the time, in addition to the war in Afghanistan, the CIA-backed revolution had succeeded in Iran, and a wave of Islamic militancy was sweeping across the Arab world. As Robert Dreyfuss explains:

 

This extraordinary series of developments were made possible in part by Sadat’s and America’s favorite ally, Saudi Arabia. Now awash in tens of billions of petrodollars, thanks to the 1970s oil-price increases imposed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the Saudis used cold, hard cash to build a pro-American empire of Islamic banks and financial institutions in Egypt, Sudan, Kuwait, Turkey, Pakistan, and elsewhere. It was the marriage between the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology and the power of Islamic banking that finally catapulted right-wing Islamism to worldwide power.[10]

 

Sheikh Omar Abdur Rahman (1938 – 2017), also known as the Blind Sheikh, later responsible for the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, was among those involved in inspiring the radicals who carried out Sadat’s assassination in 1981. The assassination was coordinated by Abdul Salam Faraj (1954 – 1982), leader of the Cairo branch of Islamic Jihad, to which Sheikh Omar belonged. As explained by Kamal Habib, a founding member of Islamic Jihad, Faraj made a significant contribution in elevating the role of “Jihad” in radical Islam with his pamphlet Al Farida al Ghaiba (“The Neglected Obligation”). The book, which popularized the use of the bogus Mardin Fatwa, attributed to Ibn Taymiyyah, had become a manifesto for militant groups. The original goal of Faraj’s Islamic Jihad was to overthrow the Egyptian Government and replace it with an Islamic state. Later it broadened its aims to include attacking American and Israeli interests in Egypt and abroad. The culmination of this terror campaign was the assassination of Sadat at an army parade by a group of Army officers who were a part of Islamic Jihad, led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli (1955 – 1982).

Many members of Islamic Jihad were immediately arrested, and the regime launched a massive manhunt. Among the leaders arrested were Ayman al Zawahiri, later to become Osama bin Laden’s second-in-command. Zawahiri, who hails from an elite Egyptian family, was the grandson of Shaykh Mohammed al-Ahmadi al-Zawahiri, who was a leading Egyptian participant and later Shaykh al-Azhar, published his father’s recollections concerning the Caliphate Congress of 1926 in Cairo.[11] Zawahiri’s great-uncle was British agent Abdul Rahman Azzam (1893 – 1976), who was also associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. After WWI, when the Sanussi Brotherhood became an asset of British’s Arab Bureau in Cairo, Azzam was dispatched to Tripolitania to help organize the order’s political work. Azzam would eventually become the first Secretary-General of the British–sponsored League of Arab States after World War II.[12] Azzam was married to a daughter of Ibn Saud’s chief advisor and a friend of Shakib Arslan, Khalid al Hud al Gargani, who negotiated a weapons deal with the Nazis through Joachim von Ribbentrop in 1939.[13] Azzam’s daughter Muna is married to Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud, the son of the late King Faisal, and one of the pioneers of Islamic banking and insurance.[14]

Also, according to Barnett R. Rubin, a Columbia University associate professor and senior fellow at the CFR, Sheikh Omar too was in the employ of the CIA.[15] Once in the US, the CIA paid Sheikh Omar “to preach to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime.”[16] As one FBI agent said in 1993, he is “hands-off… It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he’s still in the country. He’s here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA, and the CIA.”[17] However, Sheikh Omar was finally sentenced to life imprisonment in the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. According to Rubin, not long after he was arrested, a source asked Robert Oakley, former US Ambassador to Pakistan, how the U.S. would respond if the Sheikh disclosed he had worked for the CIA. Oakley laughed, saying it would never happen, because the admission would ruin the Sheikh’s credibility with his militant followers.[18] Sheik Omar’s al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya is reported to be responsible for the killing of hundreds of Egyptian policemen, soldiers and civilians, including the 1997 Luxor massacre in which 58 foreign tourists and four Egyptians were killed.

 

Al Qaeda

Ayman al-Zawahiri went on to become bin Laden’s right-hand man, and then the leader of Islamic Jihad, after the organization was formally merged with al Qaeda. Bin Laden, according to at least two separate reports, was recruited by the CIA in 1979.[19] And contrary to common perception, he was not a fighter.[20] Working closely with Saudi intelligence, bin Laden was the bagman responsible for transmitting funds to the front and to train the thousands of Arab and other volunteer fighters recruited from around the world to fight in the “Jihad.”[21] Arab governments from around the world, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and international organizations, in addition to the Muslim Brotherhood, like the Muslim World League, the International Relief Organization, the Jamat Tabligh, a Pakistani missionary organization, all ran to recruit fighters. The Muslim World League included Brotherhood-connected Abul Ala Maududi and a Wahhabi-influenced Indian scholar named Maulana Abu Hasan al Nadvi. Maududi was the founder of a party in Pakistan named Jamaat-e-Islami.[22] The largest beneficiary of Saudi funding is believed to be the Ahlul Hadith, although also benefitting to some extent were the Deobandis and Maududi’s Jamaat-i Islami.[23] Many of Jamiat-e-Islami’s leaders, like Fareed Paracha, Munawar Hassan, Hafiz Hussain, Qazi Hussain were on the payroll of CIA.[24]

Jamiat-e-Islami, one of the most powerful of the Mujahideen groups in of the CIA’s “Jihad” in Afghanistan, was founded in 1972 by Burhanuddin Rabbani, inspired by Maududi and the Jamaat-e-Islami. Rabbani went to Egypt in 1966, and he entered the Al-Azhar where he developed close ties to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.[25] Rabbani was one of the first Afghans to translate the works of Sayyid Qutb into Persian.[26] Of the many groups that emerged in Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, the CIA chose the most radical, primarily Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, head of the Hezbi Islami, which broke away from Jamiat-e-Islami in 1975–1976. Working closely with Hekmetyar was Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), the forerunner to al-Qaeda, established in 1984 by Abdullah Azzam—a Palestinian member of the Muslim Brotherhood, associated of Sheikh Omar, and renewer of Jihad in Afghanistan and elsewhere—along with Osama bin Laden, to raise funds for the Mujahideen while also recruiting non-Afghan fighters for their cause.[27] According to Rubin, sources told him that Azzam was “enlisted” by the CIA.[28] Azzam was influenced by Maududi’s ideas concept of Islam, being modern, Muslims have fallen into pre-Islamic ignorance (Jahiliyya), and of the need for an Islamist revolutionary vanguard movement. MAK closely cooperated with Hekmetyar’s Hezbi Islami, a faction of the Peshawar Seven, an alliance which received heavy assistance from the United States, as part of Operation Cyclone, as well as from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and other countries and private international donors. MAK maintained a close liaison with Pakistan’s secret service, the ISI, through which the intelligence agency of Saudi Arabia, Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah, funneled money to the Mujahideen. The MAK paid the airfare for new recruits to be flown into the Afghan region for training.[29]

Hekmetyar was part of the illicit trade in narcotics that began in Nicaragua and eventually expanded to include opium from Afghanistan, which eventually became the world’s largest producer of the drug, accounting for 90% of world production. The opium supply chain that Hekmetyar established before he departed from Afghanistan was eventually managed by bin Laden.[30] The DEA confirms having received multi-source information that Bin Laden had been involved in the financing and facilitation of heroin trafficking activities.[31] Al Qaeda reportedly earned as much as six billion a year from drug-trafficking.[32] Bin Laden’s activities were in service of the worldwide recruitment effort endorsed by Casey in 1986.[33] In charge of the entire operation, according to John Loftus, a justice department official in the eighties, was Reagan’s Vice President George Bush Sr.[34] In his own words, as Bin Laden said, “I set up my first training camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis.”[35]

The man referred to by FBI special agent Jack Cloonan “bin Laden’s first trainer”[36] was Ali Mohamed, a double agent who worked for both the CIA and Egyptian Islamic Jihad simultaneously, reporting on the workings of each for the benefit of the other.[37] Mohamed was an Egyptian Army intelligence colonel until 1984, serving with Khalid Islambouli. In 1984, he offered his services to the CIA in Cairo station, and was transferred to Hamburg to spy on Hezbollah. Mohamed ended up in California on a visa-waiver program sponsored by the CIA, the enlisted in the U.S. Army and was stationed at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, where he was a drill sergeant and taught courses in Arabic. In 1988, Mohamed informed his superior officers that he was taking some leave time to fight Soviets in Afghanistan. In the early 1990s, Mohamed returned to Afghanistan, where “he trained the first al-Qaeda volunteers in techniques of unconventional warfare including kidnappings, assassinations, and hijacking planes, which he had learned from the American Special Forces.”[38] According to FBI special agent Jack Cloonan, in one of Mohamed’s first classes were Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and other al-Qaeda leaders.[39] Mohamed was charged with the 1998 United States embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Mohamed also conducted clandestine military and demolition training through the Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn and Jersey City, which became the de facto headquarters of Sheikh Omar.[40]

According to Deborah Scroggins, “[Azzam] had established the Al Kifah Refugee Center to function as its worldwide recruiting post, propaganda office, and fund-raising center for the mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan… It would become the nucleus of the al-Qaeda organization.”[41] Also according to Rubin, soon after Azzam was assassinated by a car bomb in Peshawar in 1989, the CIA paid to send Sheikh Omar to Peshawar “to preach to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime.”[42] To reward him for his services, the CIA gave Sheikh Omar a one-year visa to the United States in May, 1990, even though he was on a State Department terrorism watch list. However, Sheikh Omar was finally sentenced to life imprisonment in the US for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. After a public outcry in the wake of the attack, a State Department representative discovered that Sheikh Omar had received four US visas dating back to 1986, all granted by CIA agents acting as consular officers at American embassies in Khartoum and Cairo.[43] As one FBI agent said in 1993, he is “hands-off… It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he’s still in the country. He’s here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA, and the CIA.”[44] According to Rubin, not long after he was arrested, a source asked Robert Oakley, former US Ambassador to Pakistan, how the U.S. would respond if the Sheikh disclosed he had worked for the CIA. Oakley laughed, saying it would never happen, because the admission would ruin the Sheikh’s credibility with his militant followers.[45] In 1990, El Sayyid Nosair, an associate of Sheikh Omar, assassinated Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defence League (JDL) and Kach, whose legacy continues to influence militant and far-right Zionist political groups active today in Israel.[46]

Amongst Nosair’s things, in addition to thousands of rounds of ammunition and hit lists with the names of New York judges and prosecutors, investigators found classified U.S. military-training manuals. They also found a video made at Fort Bragg featuring Ali Mohammed lecturing U.S. officers and officials on the politics of Jihad. In the video, Mohammed stated:

 

Whoever recognises Israel is an apostate. We do not accept them. There will be no peace, no international compromise. Nobody can recognise Israel’s right to continue to live on stolen land… This is from the Islamic perspective.[47]

 

In 1988, a close friend of President George Bush,[48] Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, as coordinator for the United Nations humanitarian and economic aid programs to Afghanistan, launched United Nations Humanitarian and Economic Assistance Programmes relating to Afghanistan (UNOCA), which was deeply involved in pro­viding safe haven for the Afghan mujahideen, and facilitating their dispersal throughout the world.[49] Known as Operation Salam, it received more than a billion dollars of aid from the international community.[50] Responsible UN agencies included WHO, UNICEF, UNHCR, ILO, UNESCO, and UNIFEM among others.[51] According to Michael Keating, who was Prince Sadruddin’s Special Assistant in Geneva:

 

Sadruddin introduced me to the world of international affairs in a way that no-one else possibly could. He hired me as his Special Assistant when I was in my mid-twenties, and installed me in a converted attic in his elegant offices near the Old Town in Geneva. He was unbelievably well connected at the highest levels on all continents, north and south, on an astounding range of issues, including conservation, animal rights and environmental protection, cultural heritage and fine arts, refugees and humanitarian law, food security and green economics, nuclear proliferation and terrorism, religious tolerance, racism and identity politics, multilateralism and UN reform—to name a few.[52]

 

Al Taqwa, the Muslim Brotherhood’s semi-official bank, founded by Qaradawi and Nada, was eventually accused by the US Treasury Department during the Bush administration of financing al Qaeda.[53] According to reports, Bush associate and BCCI banker Khalid bin Mahfouz transferred millions of dollars through Saudi National Commercial Bank (NCB) to charities operating as fronts for al-Qaeda. Mahfouz also helped set up a charity organization called the Muwafaq Foundation, which in 2001 the U.S. Treasury Department named a front organization.[54] In 2002, a raid by Bosnian authorities on the Sarajevo offices of the Benevolence International Foundation, a multimillion-dollar charity, led to the discovery of a document called the “Golden Chain,” a list of al Qaeda sponsors. According to Jim Unger, writing in House of Bush, House of Saud, “The donors of the Golden Chain were not just wealthy Saudis—they were the crème de la crème of the great Saudi industrial and mercantile elite.”[55] In addition to bin Mahfouz, they included three billionaire bankers, a former government minister, and leading Saudi merchants and industrialists, as well as the bin Laden brothers who ran the Bin Laden Group. By that time, bin Mahfouz had taken over NCB, and become the banker of the Saudi royal family, and the most powerful banker in Saudi Arabia.[56]

 

Taliban 

Following the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1988, the Americans acquiesced to a plan devised by the ISI, whereby the nascent movement of the Taliban would be brought to power to oust the warring factions of the ensuing civil war, and purportedly create stability by uniting the country. The Taliban were for the most part Afghan refugees who had been brainwashed in Saudi-funded Madrassas in Pakistan along the Afghan border. The Madrassas were run mainly by Fazal-ur-Rehman and his Jamiat e Ulema, based on the Deobandi movement.[57] Rahman, whose party formed a combined government in Pakistani elections in 2002 and 2008, is described in a cable released by WikiLeaks as “more politician than mullah” and as professing his “support for cooperation with the United States.”[58]

The Taliban represented a cruel and grossly deformed caricature of Islam. But for a purpose. To ever remind the naive Western public of the specter of the threat of theocracy, we have the barbarous examples of “Sharia” as deployed by the likes of the profoundly misguided Taliban. As a seasoned American observer told John Cooley, author of Unholy Wars:

 

The Taliban began, essentially, as a kind of experimental Frankenstein monster. They were created in the laboratories, so to speak, of Pakistani intelligence, the ISI—in order to produce a counter-force to Iran and Iranian Islamism, which would be even more repugnant and unacceptable to the West and Russia than the Ayatollah Khomeini’s successors in Tehran. [59]

 

The creation of the Taliban was “actively encouraged by the ISI and the CIA,” according to Selig Harrison, an expert on American relations with Asia.[60] According to journalist Ahmed Rashid, author of The Taliban, “the United States encouraged Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to support the Taliban, certainly right up to their advance on Kabul.”[61] When the Taliban took power, State Department spokesperson Glyn Davies said that he saw “nothing objectionable” in the Taliban’s plans to impose strict Deobandi version of the Sharia. “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis,” said another US diplomat in 1997, “There will be ARAMCO, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that.”[62] Once the Taliban had served their purpose, they opened the way for the Americans to invade the country themselves, fulfilling Zbigniew Brzezinski’s and Halfard Mackinder’s long-term Great Game objective towards controlling Eurasia.

 


[1] Yoginder Singh Sikand. “Ulema Rivalries and the Saudi Connection.” Retrieved from https://sunninews.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/wahabiahle-hadith-deobandi-and-saudi-connection/

[2] Adam Curtis. “The Power of Nightmares.”

[3] Craig Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud, (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 98.

[4] Donald L. Barlett & James B. Steele. “The Oily Americans.” Time (May 13, 2003). Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,450997-92,00.html

[5] Ahmed Rashid. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University Press, 2010).

[6] Ibid.; “Pakistan: How the ISI works,” The Guardian (Wednesday, August 5, 2009).

[7]  Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud, p. 99.

[8] Conor Tobin. “The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap’: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan, 1978–1979.” Diplomatic History, 44: 2 (April 2020), pp. 237–264.

[9] Robert I Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.” Jewish Comment (June 28, 2002). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20060213170207/http://www.jewishcomment.com/cgibin/news.cgi?id=11&command=shownews&newsid=294

[10] Dreyfuss. Devil’s Game, p. 167.

[11] Kramer. Islam Assembled, p. 87.

[12] Dreyfuss. Hostage to Khomeini, p. 133.

[13] Nicosia. Nazi Germany and the Arab World, p. 112.

[14] “Family Tree of Muhammad bin Faysal bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud.” DataArabia. Retrieved from http://www.datarabia.com/royals/famtree.do?id=176260

[15] Transcript of Paul DeRienzo’s interview with William Kunstler, Broadcast on WBAI in New York (August 3, 1993).

[16] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[17] Freidman. “The CIA and the Sheikh.” The Village Voice (March 30, 1993).

[18] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[19] “Al-Qaeda’s origins and links.” BBC News, (July 20, 2004); Labeviere, Richard. Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam, p. 103.

[20] Steve Coll. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden (Penguin, 2005), p. 146.

[21] Ibid.

[22] “Jamaat-e-Islami’s True Colors,” News From North and South, (July 6, 2011).

[23] Yoginder Singh Sikand. “Ulema Rivalries and the Saudi Connection.” Retrieved from https://sunninews.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/wahabiahle-hadith-deobandi-and-saudi-connection/

[24] “Jamaat-e-Islami’s True Colors,” News From North and South, (July 6, 2011).

[25] Jason Burke. Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2004), pp. 66–67

[26] Ibid.

[27] Lawrence Wright. The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006).

[28] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[29] Samuel M. Katz. Relentless Pursuit: The DSS and the Manhunt for the Al-Qaeda Terrorists (Tom Doherty Associates, 2003).

[30] Richard Labeviere. Dollars for Terror. p. 104.

[31] Asa Hutchinson, DEA Administrator. “International Drug Trafficking and Terrorism.” Testimony Before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism, and Government Information. Washington, DC. March 13, 2002. Retrieved from http://www.state.gov/g/inl/rls/rm/2002/9239.htm

[32] London Daily Telegraph, 9/15/01, 9/16/01; Montreal Gazette, 9/15/01; Le Monde, 9/14/01

[33] Ahmed Rashid. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University Press, 2001)., p. 128-9.

[34] Craig Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 102.

[35] AFP, “Laden planned a global Islamic revolution in 1995,” August 27, 1998. quoted from Rashid, Taliban, p. 132.

[36] “Interview with FBI special agent Jack Cloonan.” PBS Frontline (October 18, 2005). Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20120321123520/http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/interviews/cloonan.html

[37] “Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden, Showing Failings in FBI’s Terror Policing.” Wall Street Journal (November 26, 2001). Retrieved from https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1006724165452955040

[38] “Interview with FBI special agent Jack Cloonan.” PBS Frontline.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[41] Deborah Scroggins. “Wanted Women—Faith, Lies and The War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui.” Vogue (March 1, 2005). Retrieved from http://www.vogue.com/873623/read-it-now-wanted-women-faith-lies-and-the-war-on-terror-the-lives-of-ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-aafia-siddiqui/

[42] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[43] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[44] Freidman. “The CIA and the Sheikh,” The Village Voice (March 30, 1993)

[45] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[46] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[47] Friedman. “The CIA’s Jihad.”

[48] David Hoffman. “Week in Crisis Management: ‘Learning Curve’ Led Bush from Anger to Optimism on Hostages.” Washington Post (August 5, 1989).

[49] Scott Thompson and Joseph Brewda. “Sadruddin Aga Khan: mujahideen coordinator.” Executive Intelligence Review, 22: 41 (October 13, 1995).

[50] Susan Heller Anderson. “Chronicle.” New York Times (December 10, 1990). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1990/12/10/style/chronicle-880090.html

[51] “Guidelines and Priorities.” Committed on Assistance to Disabled Afghans (Geneva: Office of the Co-ordinator for United Nations Humanitarian and Economic Assistance Programs related to Afghanistan, May 1989). Retrieved from https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/93842?v=%5B%27pdf%27%5D&ln=ar

[52] Edward Girardet. “Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan: Humanitarian & Visionary.” Global Geneva (November 2, 2017). Retrieved from https://global-geneva.com/prince-sadruddin-aga-khan-humanitarian-visionary/

[53] Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud, p. 149.

[54] Nathan. “Sins of the Father?”

[55] Craig Unger. House of Bush, House of Saud, (New York: Scribner, 2004), p. 112.

[56] Ibid.

[57] Rashid. Taliban,

[58] Ansar Abbasi. “Fazl keeps regular contact with US embassy, says cable,” The News, (December 07, 2010).

[59] Cooley. Unholy Wars, p. 121.

[60] Phil Gasper. “Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden, and the Taliban,” International Socialist Review (November-December 2001). Retrieved from http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Afghanistan/Afghanistan_CIA_Taliban.html

[61] Ibid.

[62] Ibid.

Divide & Conquer