A Grand Illusion of Imperial Power: Part 2, VT Classic

by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Fitzgerald-Gould

According to one-time CNN Special Assignment investigator Joe Trento in his 2005 exposé Prelude To Terror, Saudi Arabia’s chief of intelligence Kamal Adham worked alongside the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, BCCI’s founder Agha Hasan Abedi to expand the concept of covert action by using BCCI to merge the Safari Club with

“every major terrorist, rebel, and underground organization in the world.”

A 2001 Time magazine report found that the bank functioned as “a vast, stateless, multinational corporation that deploys its own intelligence agency, complete with paramilitary wing and enforcement units, known collectively as the ‘black network:’” that would bribe or assassinate anyone to turn Afghanistan into the place to trap the Soviet Union in their own Vietnam.

Uninformed of the Safari Club’s activities, America’s ambassador proceeded to meet with Amin throughout the fall of 1978 and into the winter of 1979 often in secret meetings. But Brzezinski’s ongoing destabilization, his military relationship with the Chinese and Amin’s antagonism toward the Russians was making life for Dubs increasingly dangerous. He grew alarmed by Amin’s provocative behavior and demanded to know from his CIA station chief whether he was employed by them. He was told no, but by then Afghan rebels were openly training in Pakistan and China’s Xinjiang province.

In addition there was what Joe Trento called the CIA’s Saudi-funded stockpile of misfits and malcontents manning the Safari Club’s 1,500-strong army of assassins and enforcers. And last but not least were Chinese-backed Maoist factions Setam-i Melli, Sholah Jaweed and SAMA programmed by Beijing to bring down their Afghan oppressor, Hafizullah Amin.

Thanks to Saudi Intelligence chief Kamal Adham and BCCI banker, Agha Hasan Abedi, there were ample incentives for a holy jihad against Russia. Afghanistan offered the opportunity for BCCI to migrate the lucrative heroin business from Southeast Asia to the Pakistani/Afghan border under the protection of Western intelligence agencies.

President Carter supported Brzezinski’s cross-border raids into Soviet territory. He also sanctioned Brzezinski’s plan to use Afghanistan to lure the Soviet Union into its own Vietnam; which he lied to the public about when they fell into the trap on December 27, 1979. Joseph Trento writes, “Carter may in fact have signed his directive in July 1979, but the Safari Club’s Islamic fighters had been taunting Moscow into invading for nearly a year before that.”

“From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step,”
as Napoleon Bonaparte said, retreating from Russia

By January 1979 the newly unstable region was becoming the primary financing source for a terrorist campaign that would spread around the world. But while Dubs was pleading that destabilization would provoke direct Soviet intervention, Brzezinski was promoting armed opposition.

That same month, Brzezinski’s NSC director of South Asian affairs, Thomas P. Thornton, arrived in Kabul to shut Dubs down, yet Dubs continued his mission. Between Dubs’ arrival in July of 1978 and the fall of the Shah on January 16, 1979 American policy in Iran, China and Afghanistan had shifted into the hands of the Pinay Cercle’s right-wing cabal. Run by a consortium of intelligence influencers, the decades-long geopolitical plan to move the United States into alignment with the Pinay Cercle’s old European right-wing was nearing completion.

By mid-February the Shah had fallen and the Afghan countryside was in open revolt. The Marxist regime of Hafizullah Amin was demanding military assistance from Moscow and the only man left to hold back Soviet retaliation was Ambassador Dubs. But on the morning of February 14, 1979 Dubs himself would become the vehicle for the very outcome he had gone to Kabul to prevent when four men abducted him on his way to work and brought him to the Kabul Hotel. Three hours later the ambassador would die in a shootout that has been described as a botched rescue attempt.

The subsequent debate in Washington focused mainly on blaming the Soviets with unnamed “U.S. congressional sources” claiming “the Russians had wanted Dubs to die.”

But as described in an interview conducted for Washingtonian Magazine in 2017 with Bruce Flatin, the political counselor dispatched by the U.S. embassy to the hotel that morning, the whole affair just didn’t make sense; unless the kidnapping wasn’t intended as a kidnapping and Dubs’ unfortunate death wasn’t the result of a botched rescue attempt, but was part of a Safari Club operation to remove the last obstacle to their plan.

At a 1995 Nobel Symposium on the causes of the Afghan war – in the presence of former CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner, the former Director of Soviet affairs at the National Security Council, General William Odom and dozens of former high-level officials – the leading Russian authority, General Alexander Lyakhovsky suggested the existence of a cover up.

“Dubs was seen in the company of those same people who kidnapped him later in the same hotel—in the same room—the day before they kidnapped him. And then later Dubs was in his car, with a travel case. He stopped his car when those same people who he saw the day before ordered him to stop, as if they were known to him.”

No one has ever suggested the existence of a non-governmental agency in the death of Adolph Dubs. But the Safari Club’s anti-Communist agenda had been brought directly into the White House with Brzezinski in 1977 and it had been active in Afghanistan long before February 14, 1979. If ever there was an opportunity for their 1,500-strong “black network” of CIA misfits, malcontents, assassins and enforcers to act on Brzezinski’s agenda to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam, it was at room 117 of the Kabul Hotel on February 14, 1979.

The kidnapping and assassination of Ambassador Adolph Dubs ended any meaningful effort by the U.S. to prevent a Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan. The death was employed however from that day forward by Brzezinski as the opportunity to increase the level of provocation for luring the Soviets into their own “Vietnam quagmire” and keeping them pinned down for as long as possible.

Because of  Dubs’ death, Brzezinski got control of foreign policy; got his hard line neoconservative policy toward the Soviet Union pushed through, ended support for détente once and for all and put Strategic Arms Limitation on hold.

Continuing his coup d’état, Brzezinski proceeded with plans for the radical transformation of America’s nuclear doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction – MAD into one of  nuclear “war-fighting” through a series of Presidential Directives. But the real irony of the Carter presidency was that his greatest success – the U.S- Egypt-Israeli peace treaty – was also arranged by the Safari Club. The death of Ambassador Dubs, the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979 doomed Carter’s reelection to failure.

Afghanistan was soon to become the self-fulfilling prophecy of Soviet iniquity that the right-wing had been trying to create for decades; a permanent, ongoing crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations which it had precipitated and then claimed to uncover and respond to. Brian Crozier’s “ultimate sophistication of subversion” got its candidate Ronald Reagan elected in 1980 while completing the London-backed neoconservative/right-wing takeover of the American government. And they would never give it back.

The pattern and the profile of events parading across our screens today mirrors the pattern and profile of events engineered in the late 1970s by a London-backed neoconservative/right-wing alliance which paralleled the pattern and the profile of the late 1940s and the genesis of the Cold War.

The United States, Britain and their post-World War II European creation, the EU continue to manufacture issues with which to demonize Russia as they once demonized the Soviet Union. But in the end, the goal set out by the Pinay Cercle and implemented during the Carter administration can only be said to have failed.

In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Zbigniew Brzezinski saw the United States “as the sole and, indeed, first truly global power” using France, Germany, Poland and Ukraine as “The Democratic Bridgehead for projecting into Eurasia the international democratic collective order.”  Yet even as the United States began to flex its unchallenged global power the ethnic flaw undergirding Brzezinski’s motives began to show.

When asked the real reason why the United States had taken such a hard line toward the Soviet Union on Afghanistan at the 1995 Nobel Symposium, President Carter’s CIA Director Stansfield Turner replied the responsibility could only be located in one individual. “Brzezinski’s name comes up here every five minutes; but nobody has as yet mentioned that he is a Pole,” Turner said, implying that it was ethnic hatred of Russia that had propelled his policy against the Soviet Union; not just geopolitics. Yet anybody who knew Brzezinski at the time knew that is exactly what he was doing, but they had all looked the other way.

The year before he died Brzezinski delivered a profound revelation in an article titled “Toward a Global Realignment” warning that “the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity, but given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.”

Zbigniew Brzezinski had expected Poland to be at the center of America’s conquest of Eurasia. But after years of American missteps he realized his dream would never be. Though unapologetic at using his imperial hubris to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan, he did not expect his own beloved American Empire to fall into the same trap and ultimately lived long enough to see that in the end, his use of imperial power had won him only a Pyrrhic victory.

Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

The Grand Illusion of Imperial Power: 2 Part Series

• Part 1: How Neocon dream for everlasting Hegemony turned America into a nightmare
• Part 2: The Tragic Imperialist: Brzezinski, Afghanistan and the End of Emperors

ABOUT AUTHORS:  Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice. Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk.com