Category Archives: History

Osama bin Laden and the CIA

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I’ve posted  of a review in four parts on that link of this web site  about the excellent book, “The Looming Tower, al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” by Lawrence Wright. The book describes how U.S. intelligence agencies failed to share information after they finally understood the risks presented by al Qaeda. That failure was created by government actions and decrees. According to an MSNBC report, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick of the Clinton administration issued a memo in 1995 that gave detailed instructions to “…more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from…criminal investigations.” That memo resulted in what Attorney General Ashcroft later described as “…a snarled web of requirements, restrictions, and regulations… (that) prevented decisive action by our men and women in the field.” Ashcroft was testifying to the 9/11 Commission, and Jamie Gorelick, the author of the memo, was a member of that Commission. Ashcroft also told the Commission, “Government erected this wall. Government buttressed this wall. And before September 11, government was blinded by this wall.”

The CIA knew twenty months before 9/11 that there were at least two al Qaeda operatives in California and never told the FBI, perhaps because of the “wall” that had been built by the  Gorelick memo. Absent this artificial and strictly bureaucratic “wall” the CIA could have alerted the FBI that they knew al Qaeda members were in the United States and some were learning to fly planes. Absent the Gorelick memo, perhaps more attention would have been given to an e-mail from an FBI agent in Phoenix suggesting that Osama bin Laden was sending al Qaeda members to flight schools in Arizona. There also was a memo from FBI agents in Minneapolis focusing on activities of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person indicted as part of the 9/11 conspiracy. Perhaps communication between the CIA and FBI, if it had been allowed by law and not been prohibited by the Gorelick memo, would have allowed agents from the two agencies to “connect the dots” and prevent al Qaeda from flying planes into the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Regardless of what might have been if the agencies had been allowed to act responsibly
instead of according to government rules, Osama bin Laden died not knowing that he had succeeded at killing two CIA employees along with several others during the al Qaeda bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. He had said the embassy was targeted because it was a CIA station. Tom Shah and Molly Huckaby Hardy were working undercover for the CIA in the embassy. Tom Shah was the son of an Indian immigrant father and an American mother.  He had received his doctorate in music from Ball State in Indiana. He was fluent in several languages including Hindi, Arabic, and Russian. He joined the government under the cover of being a diplomat, but was immediately sent for training to become a spy. He had been dispatched to Kenya with the assignment to determine theauthenticity of a senior member of Saddam Hussein’s regime, who had said he wanted to defect. Tom walked to a window at the embassy when he heard shooting, and was killed by shredding glass when the bomb exploded.

Hardy was the other CIA agent killed by the bombing. She was a 51 year old divorced mom who had travelled to Asia, South America, and Africa. She handled finances, including handing out money used to pay sources. She was looking forward to a trip to meet a new grandchild when the bomb killed her.  She and Hardy were listed as State Department employees, but sources said they received private memorial services at CIA headquarters. Leon Panetta said after the death of bin Laden, “Throughout the effort to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda, our fallen colleagues have been with us in memory and in spirit. With their strength and determination as our guide, we achieved a great victory three weeks ago.”

The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11–Part III

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The first two parts of the review of the book by Lawrence Wright were about the origins of al-Qaeda and the role of world Arabs, including bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, in the fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan and the civil war that continued for years after the retreat of the Soviets. The young Arabs who had trained for guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan were not often welcome to return to their home countries. They had been indoctrinated with a culture of martyrdom, and takfir, which was the declaration by one Muslim that another Muslim was an unbeliever. Those who returned to Saudi Arabia were immediately arrested for several days of interrogation. In that unwelcoming atmosphere bin Laden must have been pleased when Hasan al-Turabi, a senior official in Sudan, invited him to move to his country. Bin Laden seemed to be settling into a more quiet life there, but he continued to fret about the continued presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia and continued to agitate for attacks on America. Salafist (Salafi Muslims who support jihad) movements were arising across the Arab world, and they found a safe haven to organize in Khartoum. A new vision of al-Qaeda was born with a fatwa encouraging attacks on American troops and declaring that it was allowable for innocent people to be killed in the process.

Bin Laden had once remarked about the World Trade Center was “…those awesome symbolic towers that speak of liberty, human rights and humanity…” That must have been before he began financing Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh who conspired to bring the towers down. Rahman issued a fatwa allowing bank robbery and killing of Jews, and travelled the United States and Canada giving sermons to immigrant Muslims. He preached that Americans were “…descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists.” Ramzi Yousef had been with bin Laden at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, and he was the man who was sent by Rahman to drive a rented van into the basement of the World Trade Center and light fuses attached to the load of explosives. He hoped to topple the towers and kill a quarter of a million people. The explosion did destroy six stories of structural steel and cement, killed six, and injured 1042. The towers shook and swayed, but did not fall. Yousef escaped to Manila where he plotted to blow up airliners, assassinate the Pope and President Clinton, and to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. Continue reading →

Rocky Flats Site Selection

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I’ve often heard and read that the selection of Rocky Flats as the location where a new nuclear weapons production facility code named “Project Apple” would be constructed was flawed because those doing the selection used wind direction at what was then the Stapleton Field, which led them to believe the wind would frequently blow towards the mountains instead of toward Denver. I recently found a copy of the report prepared by the Austin Company titled “Engineering Survey and Report for Santa Fe Operations Office of the Atomic Energy Commission on the Location and Site for Project Apple” in the archives of the Rocky Flats Museum.  The report, which was submitted on March 27, 1951, says in the cover letter, “As we advised representatives of…the Atomic Energy Commission, the Site Review Committee and representatives of the Dow Chemical Company …on March 14 and 15, we have recommended site 4, at Rocky Flats northwest of Denver, as best satisfying the Site Selection Criteria…” The report states that the location was to be “West of the Mississippi River, North of Texas, but include Panhandle Area, South of the northern boundary of Colorado; East of Utah.” There were nine cities that met the preliminary criteria of being 5 to 25 miles from a city of at or near 25,000 people (from which to recruit a work force). The cities were Oklahoma City, Omaha, Lincoln, Amarillo, Springfield, Topeka, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo. There were 35 sites investigated in the vicinity of those nine cities. Six additional cities with populations fewer than 25,000 were added to the consideration, but none were judged to provide any advantage that would overcome the smaller population.

The site area was required to “…be a square, two miles on a side. Land presently owned or controlled by the Government is preferable.”  The plant area had to meet some basic suitability requirements for building construction and require a minimum displacement of homes and people. It was desired that the region have living conditions, community facilities, and recreational opportunities that would be attractive to workers. A low humidity climate was a primary consideration, since the plant would require significant air conditioning that was expected to be provided by evaporative cooling. Rail, highway, and air transportation factored into the evaluation as well as availability of power, water, and fuel. It was determined that the three Colorado cities were the only ones to meet the crucial climatic criteria. “Pueblo is less suitable than Denver in being less attractive to workers and in being home of Colorado Fuel and Iron’s vital industrial operations (a possible military target). Colorado Springs has the fundamental disadvantage of being served by a relatively small local electrical utility which has no interconnections with other utilities as emergency sources.”

It was determined that a site near Denver would be selected, and dozens of potential sites were evaluated. It is frequently asked why anyone would build a plant manufacturing plutonium components near a major metropolitan area. The report makes it clear that proximity to Denver was a positive consideration to those doing the evaluation. “The field survey reduced (the number of sites) to seven sites which lie nearest to the City of Denver and could be economically served with power, water, railroads, and highways.” (Emphasis added) The seven sites were:

North of and adjacent to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal

Six and a half miles northeast of Brighton

Gunbarrel Hill seven miles northeast of Boulder

Rocky Flats

South of the Federal Center

South of Marston Lake, two miles from Littleton, by the South Platte River

Two miles south of Littleton by the South Platte River

The selected site was Rocky Flats and the alternate was the one by the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. It is interesting that an “advantage” of the Arsenal location was it was nearer to present residential areas and considerably nearer to Stapleton Field. The advantages were overcome by “…the undesirable reaction of the public to having this additional ‘secret’ project close to the civilian installations northeast of Denver and in the South Platte Valley.” One mention of wind direction was in a table that lists “Unfavorable Factors” for the sites south of Marston Lake and the one south of Littleton that the prevailing wind was toward Denver.

I wrote in my book “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats, Urban myths debunked,” that I found arguments that Rocky Flats shouldn’t have been selected because wind directions were misinterpreted to be “tedious.” The Stapleton Field wind rose shows the wind blowing in all directions, including to the north just under a fourth of the time and to the south a tenth of the time. I predict no one who thought or thinks Rocky Flats was a poor place to build a nuclear weapons plant would have endorsed any of the seven Denver locations or the 35 original sites near other cities.

The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11–Part II

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I wrote in the first part of this review of the book by Lawrence Wright that I thought it should be required reading for any public official who refuses to use the term “war on terror.”The first part focused on the origins of the radical Muslim organization called al-Qaeda. This part will cover the many failures in initial attempts by bin-Laden to develop a fighting force of world Arabs to help the mujahideen combat the Soviets in Afghanistan. That is followed by his struggles to keep his ideas about combating the west and the U.S. in particular alive after the Soviets were defeated. However, Soviet defeat wasn’t expected in the early days after the invasion. The Muslim world was shaken by the invasion, and Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal travelled to Pakistan to gauge what was going on there. He and other visitors to follow were appalled at the conditions in the refugee camps. He believed Afghanistan was lost, and that the only hope was to delay the expected invasion of Pakistan. The U.S. was hoping that the Soviets now had their own “Vietnam war.”

The mujahideen standing against the Soviets were little more than disorganized mobs. The Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI) insisted that they would only provide aid to six factions with a warlord at the head of each, and the estimated 3.27 million refugees had to sign up with one of those six parties to be eligible for aid. Turki insisted on a seventh party that would better represent Saudi interests. The seven mujahideen leaders became known to the CIA and other intelligence agencies as the Seven Dwarves. Bin Laden stayed away from the battlefield for years in “Fear of Bodily Participation,” a fact that caused him great shame. He also lost his business in Medina and forfeited about $2.5 million in profits. In 1984 he was taken to a mujahideen camp that was attacked by Soviet jets, but the missiles failed to explode. The Afghans had not even jumped into trenches with the frightened Arabs. Bin-Laden was so impressed by the bravery of the Afghans that he immediately returned to Saudi Arabia and raised millions of dollars to support efforts to help refugees. A fatwa was issued that required every able-bodied Muslim to support the jihad in Afghanistan, which was even to take precedence over the Palestinian struggle against Israel. Bin Laden was “paying the rent” for the Arabs who arrived to join the fight. Continue reading →

Soviet Support to Western Peace Organizations

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This subject was first discussed in a post dated February 25, 2011 after I had received comments from a senior DOE official about my book, “An Insider’s View of Rocky Flats, Urban Myths Debunked.” One of the comments was about the massive support the Soviet Union had given to groups that protested places such as Rocky Flats. My most recent post was about an organization named Citizens Against Nuclear Disinformation In Denver (CANDID) that was formed by nuclear scientists and engineers frustrated by the flood rhetoric being spread by the ill-informed mainstream media and anti-nuclear groups following the highly publicized FBI raid of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in June 1989. There was a CANDID article authored by Dr. Michael R. Fox titled “The Counterfeit Peace Makers” published in December 1993 that discusses the work by the Communists to influence the “peace movements.” Dr. Fox mentions that a good scouting report would be useful to understand “…the values, agendas, tactics and influence on some to the participants. Specifically, the peace groups could stand a little more glare of scrutiny.”

“That these critics have reveled in portraying Rocky Flats workers as being a collection of careless devils incarnate, RF employees and friends may still be amazed as to how their critics could have reached such conclusions. A scouting report is thus provided.”

“To understand the Western Peace Movement (WPM)…it is best to understand the World Peace Council (WPC). The FBI has identified this organization as ‘the largest and most active Soviet international front organization, with affiliates in approximately 140 countries.’ The WPC worked through its U.S. supporting groups:  the U.S. Peace Council (USPC) and the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA). Since the ‘C-word’ turns off many Americans, the WPM developed into many nice-sounding appealing organizations. Most of them were either controlled or influenced by the WPC. Since most of these groups contain members having undiluted contempt for the U.S., for capitalism, for individual freedom, and especially the U.S. military capabilities, it is not essential for the KGB or other Soviet agents…to control them. Without external control and minimum external influence they voluntarily performed their men-spirited missions, including discrediting Rocky Flats workers. All of this, of course, is done in the name of ‘peace.'”

“The WPM, almost since its inception in the 1920s, has been cursed with infiltrators from the political left, including infiltrations from the CPUSA. The pursuit of peace by true pacifists was conducted in such a way as to be willing to criticize and oppose all belligerents in…conflicts. Not so the WPM. Its motivations were and still are to discredit and dismantle the U.S. military capabilities, not those of the Soviets…”

“A major player in all of this anti-American activity is the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS)…This group has been very influential in promoting a decidedly anti-American agenda among the media, churches and clergy, and the Western Peace Movement on any number of issues has enjoyed the support of 100-200 members of Congress. It is no accident that these groups appear to be anti-American and critical of RF employees. They appear that way because they are that way, by design, training, and ideology.”

“An extraordinary debate about the nature of Pacifism has continued for 5 decades. A recent analysis of the debate was authored by Guenther Lewy…Lewy concludes, ‘While at one time pacifists were single-mindedly devoted to the principles of non-violence and reconciliation, today most pacifists groups defend the moral legitimacy of the armed struggle and guerrilla warfare, and they praise and support the Communist regimes emerging from such conflicts…”

“Finally, it comes as a surprise to many examining the peace issues to discover the existence of hundreds of peace groups in Eastern Europe. It is through their eyes that one can more clearly see the moral bankruptcy of the Western Peace Movement. People in these Eastern peace groups risked death itself fighting for their freedom through the use of the spoken and written word, and to rid themselves of their bestial tormentors, jailers, and murderers. Because the WPM is so heavily infused with Soviet apologists, it did not demand liberty, freedom, and civil rights for the people of Eastern Europe as a condition of nuclear disarmament of the West. In fact, the WPM ignored the appeals for human rights from Eastern groups….some leaders of the WPM forbade criticism of the Soviets.”

The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11–Part I

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This book by Lawrence Wright should be required reading for anyone who thinks the term “War on Terror” is insensitive or politically incorrect. The book describes the history of al-Qaeda and the disturbing story of how the failure U.S. intelligence agencies to cooperate assured that they wouldn’t detect the plans to fly airplanes into the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and White House. I intend to do the review in at least four parts, and this part will focus on the origins of al-Qaeda. The doctrine of the modern Islamic movement was developed by Sayyid Qutb (pronounced “Kuh-tub”), who at the age of 42 was a student for six months at what was then the Colorado State College of Education in Greeley, Colorado. He was an Egyptian, a fervent nationalist, and anti-communist who was radicalized by the British occupation of Egypt. He and other Arabs admired how the immigrant nation of America was “…the anticolonial paragon…,” but felt betrayed when America supported the Zionist cause beginning with Harry Truman endorsing the transfer of a hundred thousand Jewish refugees into Palestine. Qutb was influenced to join the Muslim Brothers that had been founded by Hasan al-Banna, and he gained fame as an Islamic thinker by his writings. Qutb found Greeley to be beautiful, but he was scandalized by the behavior of the students and especially the open sexuality of the women.

Qutb withdrew from classes, but spent another eight months in America. He became even more radicalized, and wrote that “The white man crushes us underfoot…” Gamal Abdul Nasser had overthrown King Faruk after Qutb had returned to Egypt, and Nasser invited him to be an advisor. Qutb advocated that the country be controlled by religion, and Nasser believed in control by a strong military. Nasser eventually threw Qutb in prison, released him in three months to be the editor of the Muslim Brothers magazine, and then shut the magazine down after several critical articles by Qutb. The Muslim Brothers attempted to assassinate Nasser and he had six hanged and thousands of others, including Qutb, imprisoned in concentration camps. Qutb smuggled a manifesto titled Milestones that would have a major influence on radical Muslims, including Osama bin Laden. Qutb plotted from prison to overthrow Nasser with money and arms supplied by Saudi Arabia. He was released from prison, but his plots were revealed. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. He declared after the sentence, “Thank God, I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.” Nasser knew Qutb was more dangerous dead than alive, and offered to spare him if Qutb appealed his sentence. He told his pleading sister, “My words will be stronger if they kill me.” He was hanged on August 29, 1966. Continue reading →