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al Qaeda Founder Changes Sides

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The spy who came in from al-Qaeda

Aimen Dean

Aimen Dean is a founder member of al-Qaeda, who changed tack in 1998 and became a spy for Britain’s security and intelligence services, MI5 and MI6. Interviewed by Peter Marshall, he describes his years working in Afghanistan and London as one of the West’s most valuable assets in the fight against militant Islam.

Bosnia

Dean was brought up in Saudi Arabia, where opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s made military jihad a noble concept. He was a teenager when Yugoslavia splintered, and Bosnian Muslims found themselves in mortal danger from Serb nationalists. He and a friend, Khalid al-Hajj – later to become the leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia – set off to become mujahideen.

I would say it was the most eye-opening experience I ever had. I was a bookish nerd from Saudi Arabia just weeks ago and then suddenly I find myself prancing up on the mountains of Bosnia holding an AK-47 feeling a sense of immense empowerment – and the feeling that I was participating in writing history rather than just watching history on the side.

And also at the same time, being in the military training camps, receiving knowledge that I never thought in a thousand years I would be receiving about warfare and war tactics and military manoeuvres, and to be receiving it alongside people from many different nationalities, with the one common factor among them that they were all Muslims. And they were all there in order to participate in the jihad in defence of the Bosnian population, was in itself also an overwhelming experience.

Q: You weren’t afraid?

A: Between you and me, I think at the beginning I was afraid of the unknown rather than afraid of the fact that I’m going into, embarking on a journey that might end up with all of us being killed actually.

Q: You didn’t fear death?

A: I would be lying if I say no I didn’t fear death but I started to come to peace with the idea that yes, I am entering Bosnia. Most likely I will never come out of it.

Q: Did you want martyrdom, did you want to die?

A: Yes.

Jihad school

By the end of the Bosnian conflict I started to notice something else within my comrades. Those who survived started to adopt a rather more anti-Western, anti-globalisation feeling that the global community were conspiring against the Muslims in Bosnia because they were turning the tide of the war in their favour – so they wanted to end the war there and then before they score any more victories.

At least that’s the perception. And with that perception, I think they started to feel that the West is fighting Islam as a religion… and that led to further radicalisation that made it easy for them to make the transformation from being mujahideen into being jihad operatives.

Bosnia was a school in which many talented leaders of al-Qaeda were born. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed [accused of being the architect of the 9/11 attacks] was one of those people who were in Bosnia.

The impression I had at that time, was that he was there in Bosnia in order to spot talent, let’s put it this way, in order to you know scout for talents who will be useful for the later struggle.

I remember that one of the things he said, and it was in a wedding where we were seated next to each other basically, and one of the things he said, he said, “Well, the Bosnian war seems to be ending here, that you know the end is in sight but what will happen after the war? The question is are we going to roam the globe from one hopeless battle to another trying to save a Muslim population until someone else, and then someone else come and reap the reward?”

In other words, there will be a government that is secular and doesn’t rule by the rules of Sharia. He says that this cycle need to end and that we have to think about another front where we can serve Islam and basically resurrect the spirit of jihad within the Muslim world. I think that little speech was the first indication that things are moving from jihad being an instrument to defend Muslim populations on the frontiers to an instrument to bring down regimes and to fight a terror war… against the US interests in the region.

Q: To become terrorists rather than soldiers?

A: Absolutely.

Joining al-Qaeda

I was invited to Kandahar to give the allegiance basically and as with everyone who give allegiance Osama bin Laden will give you know a one-to-one meeting basically with those who are joining and then he welcomed me into the fold. He basically said that there will be many, many years of difficulties and hardship, and that the cause of jihad is not going to start with him or end with him.

Q: You swore an oath?

A: Yes.

Q: What was the oath?

A: “I give you an allegiance to fight alongside you in good times and in bad times and to fight the jihad against the enemies of god and to obey my commanders.”

Q: What were you doing when you were swearing the oath? Do you stand, do you kneel?

A: You sit next to him on the floor basically and you know you have your hand on a copy of the Koran and you say it. Almost knees touching each other basically.

Q: And this is a moving moment presumably?

A: Yes, although like you know I have to say looking back at it basically, I felt you know the same dread of the unknown that I felt before I went to Bosnia.

Q: You knew it was a big leap you were taking?

A: Yes.

Afghanistan

At home in Saudi Arabia Aimen Dean had been a Muslim theological prodigy. In Afghanistan it was his responsibility to train al-Qaeda recruits – many from Yemen – in the basics of Islamic theology and history and the essentials of religious practice. This opened his eyes to the jihadists’ different motivations.

There is no single process of radicalisation. Some people, it took them years to be convinced of coming to the jihad and some people it took them minutes. Some people were studying in religious seminaries – they’re a minority by the way – and then decided to come and some people basically just came straight out of a night club you know while he was consuming alcohol basically to come and seek redemption there in the jihadist world.

So you know you see immediately that you know there isn’t one single classical journey there, that there are so many journeys.

Q: But they all want martyrdom?

A: They all want martyrdom and redemption and to various degrees. Some people will come to you and say you know I’m really tired, I want to be martyred as soon as possible. And some people will come to you and say I want to be martyred but not before I give the enemies of god hell on this earth. I want to live for as long as possible to give them as much hell as possible and then taken out by them.

Q: So some, some are basically suicidal to begin with, and others just have blood lust?

A: Yes.

Doubts

Dean was at a training camp in Afghanistan when the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam took place in 1998. He was concerned to learn that as well as the 12 American casualties, 240 or more local people died, and 5,000 were wounded.

I think that is when the horror of it started to sink in. And this is when I realised that if this is the opening salvo of this war, where is the next target? Argentina, South Africa, Mozambique? Are we going to fight Americans in Africa in order to expel them from the Middle East, from the Arabian peninsula? It just didn’t make sense.

And as a theologian, that’s when I started to have doubts about the legality of the whole thing. So I started to ask questions. I went, I remember, to Abdullah al Mohaja, who was the de facto mufti of al- Qaeda… I said, “It’s not that I have doubts or anything but can you please enlighten me about the religious justifications for attacking an embassy belonging to the enemy, yes, but at the same time the fact that it’s surrounded by potentially huge collateral damage?”

And he said to me, “Well look, there is a fatwa issued in the 13th Century AD throughout the Muslim world, which legitimises attacking an enemy even if it means there are civilian deaths because the enemy is using them as a human shield.” And he said, “This fatwa is comprehensive, it gives us justification and there is no doubt about the legality of what we have done.”

So I decided to go and look for myself, and this is when I received a big shock. The fatwas were issued in response to questions sent by Muslim cities in Central Asia, Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, asking this particular question: “Look, the Mongols are invading. Every time they sack a city, they take a segment of the population from that city, a thousand or two or three, and make them push the siege towers towards the walls of the next city. So do we shoot at our fellow Muslims, who are against their wills pushing the siege towers into the walls of our city, or not?”

And then the fatwa came: “Yes, this is a case where the Mongols are using civilian Muslims as human shields in order to achieve a military aim and if you don’t shoot at them, you will end up being killed yourself if the attacks succeed.”

Now when I learned of this, I was thinking: “OK, how do I reconcile this fatwa which applies to a life-and-death situation, regarding a vicious enemy using people as human shields to sack another place and to kill every man, woman and child in that city, with what happened really in Nairobi and Tanzania?” There is no resemblance here.

Q: And this fatwa based on siege towers from 800 years ago, that’s what’s used to justify all acts of jihadi terrorism?

A: That would result in civilian casualties, yes.

Q: So it’s important?

A: It is important but you know I’m not going to say it has shaky foundations. It has no foundations at all. It’s basically castle of sand in the air.

Q: It’s nonsense?

A: Absolutely, and two months down the line I decided that it’s no longer for me and that I wanted to leave.

Becoming a spy

Still barely out of his teens, and deeply troubled, Dean says he went to the Gulf for medical treatment, having privately decided not to return. Instead, he found himself in the hands of MI6. In 11 days, he says, he was turned. After four years and two months as a jihadi, he landed in London on 16 December 1998, and the debriefing began.

I think seven months of debriefings, that was more or less helping them put together a better picture of these organisations and the groups and who are the influential people within them.

Q: Because you knew Osama Bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohamed, Abu Zubeida. You knew everybody.

A: Yes… Seven months into the debriefings, that’s when the suggestion [came]: “What about you going back to Afghanistan and doing some more work for us?” And my answer was unequivocally, “Yes.” I didn’t have any qualm with that at all.

Q: What did you do?

A: Passing back information, that’s what my primary objective was, to collect as much information as possible – and that wasn’t an easy task because you have to rely entirely on your memory. You can’t write anything. Everything has to be stored in the mind, nowhere else… Whatever moral misgivings I had, I have my ex-comrades to thank for driving those moral misgivings away because the more I see what they were planning – for example, I was there basically when al-Qaeda was constructing their first workable chemical device and talking about this with such glee and such deep psychopathic satisfaction… – that is when you say to yourself, “Why do I have any moral misgivings about spying on you guys?” Whatever they are doing is justifying whatever you are doing.

Q: You had to play along with them obviously?

A: Of course. I was still preaching, I was still stating how committed I am to the cause.

Q: That must be tricky, though, because in some ways because you’re there preaching, you’re again giving theological justification for some of the bad things that you know that they’re up to.

A: Yes, but at the end of the day if you want to catch rats, you have to go into the sewage system basically and get dirty yourself.

Q: So you were in Afghanistan and you were coming back and forth to the UK as well.

A: Yes.

Q: But al- Qaeda thought they were sending you back to the UK presumably?

A: Yes. I think that’s the beauty of it.

Q: So they think you’re working for them?

A: Yes.

Q: When you’re actually working for the West?

A: Absolutely.

Spying in London

While in the UK Dean would be watching and gathering information on people like Babar Ahmed, a British man who admitted providing material support to terrorists, and Abu Hamza, convicted in the US earlier this year of supporting terrorism, and Abu Qatada, who was cleared of terrorism charges by a court in Jordan last autumn after a long legal battle to extradite him from the UK. Dean kept an eye on them and others while preaching in mosques and Islamic societies.

Q: The difficulty is though that if you’re there under cover, welcomed there as an al-Qaeda man, you have to keep up this pretence by talking to people at the mosque, you have to encourage them to join the jihad?

A: Yes… although there are limits. I was aware of my boundaries basically about how much you can incite. You use guarded words about general rather than specific incitement. But then the most difficult part actually was after 7/7, 2005. That’s when the laws and regulations regarding incitement like you know were really tightened.

Q: So you couldn’t say what, and you could say what?

A: You can’t specifically urge someone to go. You can’t specifically call for an attack. You can’t glorify violence committed against civilians. You know you have to be careful there. You can sit down there basically and blast the West for what they do. You can sit down there and talk about martyrdom in general without you know touching directly on what’s happening right now. So you have to be clever about how you phrase your words.

Q: Do you ever feel guilty about having encouraged somebody to go to jihad?

A: Yes.

Q: Are there many occasions that this might have happened?

A: There were some occasions where that happened.

Q: What’s the nature of the guilt, because of what they might have been involved in or because of how they ended up?

A: I’m glad that no one was killed. However, one particular person ended up in prison for a long time.

Q: And you were instrumental in getting him out there?

A: I was a contributing factor but I wasn’t the only one.

Saving lives

Dean says he foiled attacks involving suicide bombings and the use of poisons against civilians. He was also able to hand plans to British intelligence of a device that was intended to be used for a chemical attack on the New York subway. In the event, Osama Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off the attack.

They would have used chemical weapons if it wasn’t for al-Zawahiri saying, “No, don’t use it.”

Because it was a cell that was seeking permission from al-Zawahiri saying, “We are in possession of this weapon, we know how to use it now, we know how to deliver it and we have a target for you. It’s the New York subway because we believe that the subway system with all the ventilation mechanism there will be a perfect vehicle for delivering the gas and dispersing it across a wide network.”

And so that’s where Zawahiri said, “No, don’t do it because the retaliation could get out of control.”

Q: He didn’t stop it because he thought it was the wrong thing to do, to put gas on the subway?

A: He stopped it because he was afraid of the ramifications.

Q: So you got these important plans. Can you tell me where you got those plans from?

A: Well, I wouldn’t say even if I was allowed to!

Q: The fact you got those plans though suggests you had a high degree of clearance in al-Qaeda, trust.

A: I think I was privy to these plans because I have a certain talent, and I [pretended I] wanted to use that talent for enabling these attacks. That’s why.

Q: That’s what al-Qaeda thought?

A: Yeah.

Q: What was your certain talent?

A: I wouldn’t say!

Valued first by al-Qaeda and then British security and intelligence, Aimen Dean’s life under cover came to an abrupt end when the cover was blown. An American writer disclosed his identity with details that could only be sourced to Dean. That was eight years ago.

Why Nemtsov was Murdered

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Breaking: (Reuters) – Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said on Saturday Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was murdered because he planned to disclose evidence of Russia’s involvement in Ukraine’s separatist conflict.

Poroshenko paid tribute to Nemtsov, who was shot dead late on Friday, and said the fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin had told him a couple of weeks ago that he had proof of Russia’s role in the Ukraine crisis and would reveal it.

“He said he would reveal persuasive evidence of the involvement of Russian armed forces in Ukraine. Someone was very afraid of this … They killed him,” Poroshenko said in televised comments during a visit to the city of Vinnytsia.

More than 5,600 people have been killed since pro-Russian separatists rebelled in east Ukraine last April, after the ousting of a Moscow-backed president in Kiev and Russia’s annexation of the Crimea peninsula.

Kiev and its Western allies say the rebels are funded and armed by Moscow, and backed by Russian military units. Moscow denies aiding sympathizers in Ukraine, and says heavily armed Russian-speaking troops operating without insignia there are not its men.

And there is more as noted below.

Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov said he feared Vladimir Putin would have him killed just days before he was gunned down in front of his Ukrainian model girlfriend.
The former deputy Prime Minister, 55, and fierce critic of the Russian leader said ‘I’m afraid Putin will kill me’ in an interview shortly before he was killed in a ‘politically motivated’ attack.


Nemtsov, a married father-of-four, was shot four times by assailants in a white car as he walked across a bridge in central Moscow with Anna Duritskaya on Friday night, but the model was unhurt.
Just hours before his death he accused Putin of pushing Russia into a crisis through his ‘mad, aggressive and deadly policy of war against Ukraine’ and was due to attend an protest on Sunday.
Nemtsov had been working on a report presenting evidence he believed proved Russia’s direct involvement in the separatist rebellion that erupted in eastern Ukraine last year, For a full background of events leading up to the hit job, click here.

In part from Foreign Policy: Given these recent events, most Russian opposition leaders have given up hoping that Obama will be able to change much inside Russia. Opposition activist Boris Nemtsov met with Obama in Moscow back in 2009, but this time around he didn’t see any point to a meeting with the U.S. president.

“Obama is a Hollywood actor, a weak man with no balls,” Nemtsov said, cutting to the point. “Nobody should ever expect him to help Russians seeking civil freedom.”

While Nemtsov initially backed Putin’s presidential run, calling him “responsible and honest”, he swiftly changed his mind and became one of his bitterest foes.

He was one of the founders of Russia’s Union of Right Forces liberal party, and its leader in the early 2000s, serving as an opposition lawmaker in the parliament where he criticised Putin’s initial steps to curb political freedoms.

Always tanned and flashing smiles, Nemtsov had a quasi rock-star image, wearing designer jeans and often wearing his shirt with an extra button open. He was known for his colourful love life and popularity with women.

Along with other opposition leaders, Nemtsov unsuccessfully sued Putin after he said Nemtsov and others “wreaked havoc” in Russia during the 1990s, pillaging it of billions of dollars.

Hate figure for pro-Kremlin groups

With the Kremlin’s rhetoric focused on discrediting the political climate of the 1990s, Nemtsov became one of the most reviled faces among the opposition and pro-Kremlin groups routinely put him on their lists of “traitors” in recent years.

He had been a victim of hacking and wiretapping, and pro-Kremlin websites had written reports about his personal life and alleged affairs.

A physicist by education, Nemtsov worked in a research institute in the late Soviet era as a young man and was among a wave of academics and scientists to be swept up by the political upheaval of the perestroika reform movement, becoming a deputy in Russia’s first post-Soviet lawmaking body.

Like most others in the opposition, Nemtsov was a prolific user of social networks, calling on Muscovites to attend an opposition rally on Sunday in his most recent blog entry.

In recent years he compiled a series of pamphlets exposing corruption under Putin, zooming in on the gas behemoth Gazprom, the residences allegedly owned by Putin, and most recently the misappropriations and graft during preparations for Russia’s Olympic Games in Sochi last year.

Though he continued to be a key figure in opposition events in Moscow, Nemtsov gradually withdrew over the past decade as a younger generation of opposition leaders such as charismatic lawyer Alexei Navalny appeared.

His most recent post was as a regional lawmaker in the city of Yaroslavl north of the capital.

 

Cables Reveal Iran’s Weapons Status

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Item 7 of leaked intelligence cables from 2012 explains conditions on status of weapons.

Item 7 Iran

 

From an IAEA brief noted December 2014:
*Iran has had a nuclear weapons program since at least the late 1980s.
*In 1989, it set up a management structure for the program responsible to the Ministry of Defence, which it has reorganized over the years.
*At the start, a lot of Iran’s technical knowledge to produce nuclear weapons came from the same underground network which helped countries like Libya. *Iran has also been getting help from an unnamed “nuclear weapon state” (Russia? China?), but it has developed considerable scientific and technical capabilities of its own.
*The program has involved extensive procurement activity, much of it clandestine using false front companies, but benefitting from the fact that many of the components sought have both civilian and military applications.
*In addition to enriching uranium, Iran has been working on converting highly enriched uranium (HEU) into metal, and casting and machining it into the components of a nuclear core.
*It has done modelling and calculations on how an HEU device would function.
*Engineering work has been done on integrating a nuclear device into a missile delivery vehicle.
*Iran has been experimenting with a multipoint initiation system, with the explosives used having the dimensions of a payload that would fit into the warhead chamber of an Iranian Shahab 3 missile which has a range of some 1300 kilometers. (Iran is also working on a longer range missile.)
*Iran has been working on the development of safe, fast-acting detonators which can be triggered within a microsecond of each other in order to set off an implosion-type nuclear device.
*Work has been done on a prototype system for fuzing, arming and firing a nuclear weapon which could explode both in the air above a target and on impact.
*Iran has conducted a number of practical tests to determine how firing equipment might function over long distances with a test device located down a deep shaft; and it has studied safety arrangements for conducting a nuclear test.

***  

By the next decade, according to the IAEA, the regime would consolidate its weaponization researchers under an initiative called the “AMAD Plan,” headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a Ph.D. nuclear engineer and senior member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The AMAD Plan was charged with procuring dual-use technologies, developing nuclear detonators and conducting high-explosive experiments associated with compressing fissile material, according to Western intelligence agencies. The AMAD Plan’s most intense period of activity was in 2002-03, according to the IAEA, when current President Hasan Rouhani headed Iran’s Supreme National Security Council before becoming its chief nuclear negotiator.

Feeling the heat from the MEK’s disclosure of two nuclear facilities in 2002 and the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, the mullahs apparently halted the AMAD Plan’s activities in late 2003. But Mr. Fakhrizadeh and his scientists didn’t stop their weaponization work. As former United Nations weapons inspector David Albright told us, “Fakhrizadeh continued to run the program in the military industry, where you could work on nuclear weapons.” Much of the work, including theoretical explosive modeling, was shifted to Defense Ministry-linked universities, such as Malek Ashtar University of Technology in Tehran.

Mr. Fakhrizadeh has continued to oversee these disparate and highly compartmentalized activities, now under the auspices of Iran’s new Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research, known by its Persian acronym, SPND. The MEK first disclosed the SPND’s existence in 2011. Now the opposition group has obtained what it says are key new biographical details and the first photograph of the 56-year-old Mr. Fakhrizadeh, whom Iran has refused to make available to the IAEA for long-sought interviews.

The MEK has also compiled a list of what it says are 100 SPND researchers. Far from disbanding the SPND, the MEK alleges, the Tehran regime has kept its nucleus of researchers intact. Possibly to avoid detection by the IAEA, the MEK says, the regime recently relocated the SPND’s headquarters from Mojdeh Avenue in Tehran to Pasdaran Avenue. “The new site,” the MEK adds, “is located in between several centers and offices affiliated to the Defense Ministry . . . , the Union of IRGC, the sports organization of the Defense Ministry . . . and Chamran Hospital.”

To further mask the illicit nature of the relocation from the IAEA, the MEK says, “parts of Malek Ashtar University’s logistical activities were transferred to the former site of SPND. The objective was to avoid closing [the former] center, and in the event of inspections, to claim that the site has always had the current formation.” Don’t expect the regime to fess up to much of this by the August 25 deadline set in its joint communique with the IAEA.

The fact that the IAEA and the Western powers are now turning to the weaponization question is a sign of how far the Iranian nuclear-weapons program has progressed. As the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center’s Henry Sokolski, a former nonproliferation director at the Pentagon, told us: “A concern about weaponization followed by testing and use is the moral hazard when you don’t pay attention to fissile-material production.”

In other words, having ceded a right to enrich and permitted the Islamic Republic to develop an advanced enrichment capability, the West is now left with preventing weaponization as the final barrier against a nuclear-capable Iran. The diplomacy of Mr. Rouhani and his Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, is intended to soothe jittery Western nerves on weaponization.

That palliative effect will be reinforced by the IAEA’s latest quarterly report, also released last week, in which the Agency reported that Iran has sharply reduced its stock of 20% uranium and hasn’t enriched above 5% since the November interim agreement took effect. The report also highlights the Islamic Republic’s new willingness to address at a technical level the “possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program,” including Tehran’s development of exploding bridge-wire detonators and high-explosives testing.

But if past is precedent and the MEK’s new disclosures are to be believed, Mr. Fakhrizadeh will continue to do his work as he has to this day. The snake may shed its skin but not its temper, runs an old Persian proverb.

Putin Goes Beyond Ukraine to Artic..

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While the world is fretting with good cause over Islamic State, then al Qaeda and Ukraine, how come no one is fretting over Russia in the Artic? Where is Greenpeace or Tom Steyer? Heck where is Barack Obama?

In part from the Strategic Studies Institute , part of the U.S. Army War College:

The Arctic has reemerged as a strategic area where vital U.S. interests are at stake. The geopolitical and geo-economic importance of the Arctic region is immense, as its mineral wealth is likely to turn the region into a booming economic frontier in the 21st century. The Arctic coasts and continental shelf are estimated to hold large deposits of oil, natural gas, methane hydrate (natural gas) clusters, and large quantities of valuable minerals.
With the shrinking of the polar ice cap, navigation through the Northwest Passage along the northern coast of North America may become increasingly possible with the help of icebreakers. Similarly, Russia is seeking to make the Northern Sea Route along the northern coast of Eurasia navigable for considerably longer periods during the year and is listing it as part of its national boundaries in the Kremlin’s new Arc- tic strategy. Passage through these shorter routes will significantly cut the time and costs of shipping. (See Map 1-1.) In recent years, Russia has been particularly active in the Arctic, aggressively advancing its interests and claims by using international law and also establishing a comprehensive presence in the Arctic, including the projection of military might into the region.

Thanks to Jeff at Newsweek:

What Is Russia Up To in the Arctic?

The Mågerø air defense monitoring base is inside a mountain at the end of an unmarked country road two hours south of Oslo, Norway. With only a rudimentary sentry box, a simple draw gate and a lone soldier guarding its entrance, the installation looks more like the set for a movie about the Nazi occupation of the country than a key link in the country’s state-of-the-art defenses.

At the end of a long, narrow tunnel into the mountain, in a cavernous room filled with computers and radar monitor screens, intelligence specialists stare at blinking icons marking the movement of aircraft around Norwegian airspace. On an all-too-typical afternoon recently, they watched as two nuclear-capable Tu-95 Russian Bear Bombers floated like fireflies across the top right of their monitors. A few desks away, an airman picked up phone and called Bodø, a military base on Norway’s northern coast. Moments later, two F-16s rose to eyeball the intruders.

It turned out the Russian bombers were just practicing some kind of circling maneuver outside of Norway’s Arctic air space. But on January 28 two more Tu-95 bombers, escorted by tankers and Russia’s most advanced MiG-31 fighter jets, showed up off the coast. One of them was carrying “a nuclear payload,” according to the London Sunday Express, which cited intercepted radio traffic. And last fall, a Russian Tu-22 supersonic bomber skirting Norway’s northern airspace was photographed carrying a cruise missile in launching position, according to the Barents Observer blog. Similar examples abound.

Adding to the potential for an unintended catastrophe, Russian warplanes typically lift off without filing a flight plan and cruise the busy commercial flight lanes with their transponders off, riling airline and NATO pilots alike. In recent months Russian warplanes have been engaging in Top Gun–style stunts far from home, popping up unannounced aside an SAS airliner on a flight between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Oslo and buzzing a Norwegian F-16 pilot. (A widely watched cockpit video of the incident, released by the defense ministry, shows the pilot yelping “Holy shit!” as a MiG-31 darts past his wingtip.)

“We haven’t seen this kind of activity for many years,” Colonel Arvid Halvorsen, Mågerø’s base commander, says as he watches the blinking icons for the Russian Tu-95s on a radar screen. “The missions are also more complex lately,” he says, with larger and larger groups of bombers escorted by MiGs, tankers and surveillance aircraft.

Although Moscow isn’t threatening the West with anything near the number of warplanes deployed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, its air sorties around Norway have increased dramatically each year since 2007, when Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered his strategic bombers to resume flights in international airspace.

But late last year, with the world’s attention riveted on Ukraine, Putin put a little-noticed exclamation mark on his Arctic strategy. For the first time, the Kremlin’s announced military doctrine included instructions to prepare to defend Russia’s interests in the Arctic. Plans for two new Arctic army brigades were drawn up. An abandoned military base at Alakurtti, Russia, less than 30 miles from the Finnish border, was reopened. And military construction crews began refurbishing a string of Cold War–era bases on islands in the Arctic. “Our main objective is research and evaluation of conditions in the Arctic and the suitability of our weapons and equipment this far north,” Vladimir Kondratov, commander of the surface ships group of the Northern Fleet, told Russia Today.

New Red Dawn?

No one knows what Putin’s endgame is. And while the Norwegians would rather prepare quietly than stoke fears of a Crimean-style Russian grab in the Arctic, the country’s memory of the Nazi invasion 75 years ago remains fresh. At Mågerø and two dozen other bases scattered from Norway’s southern tip to its northern frontier with Russia, Oslo’s armed forces are preparing for the worst.

But “the worst” is a mystery. “I’d agree that the Russians have been very active,” says Keith Stinebaugh, a longtime Defense Department civilian intelligence specialist who is now a senior fellow in Arctic Security Policy at the Institute of the North in Anchorage. But “aggressive” may be overstating it, he adds. “You’d have to define what is meant by aggressive and compare it to what they did during the Cold War.… They are certainly more active around the world, not just in the Arctic.”

A Russian-speaking former CIA officer, who spent more than a dozen years operating undercover in the former Soviet Union, agrees. Today’s activities are “nothing like the Soviet air incursions that occurred on a weekly basis at the height of the Cold War,” the former officer says. And while Moscow’s armed forces, are “much improved over the past few years, [they] are still a shadow of their former Soviet selves.… Putin is very aware of this,” the officer adds, “but his beefed-up forces enhance national prestige and have allowed Russia to command more respect on the international scene.”

Which is a waste of money for Moscow, argues Ernie Regehr, a senior fellow in Arctic security at the Vancouver, British Columbia–based Simons Foundation. “Does it ever make sense to threaten to do what you know will never be in your interests to do?” Regehr recently argued in a paper for the foundation. “Symbolic flights of fighter aircraft and bombers are intended to remind the adversary that these weapons are available for use. But in any rational world, they are clearly not available for use by Russia against NATO or by NATO against Russia. There is no circumstance under which this would make sense or serve the interests of either side. Neither side wants them to be used.”

Stinebaugh, who spent 38 years in the Defense Department, suggests there may be a more prosaic reason for Russia’s Arctic buildup: money. “It may be that one way to get a project funded in the Russian military system today is to attach the word ‘Arctic’ to it, just like U.S. projects got funded by invoking [the global war on terror] and now get funded with ‘cyber’ even if the connection is tenuous,” he says.

Yet few Norwegians can completely banish the specter of the Russian bear on their doorstep, says Reidun Samuelsen, the editor at Aftenposten, Norway’s leading newspaper. “It’s never far from our minds,” she tells Newsweek.

Norwegian Nightmares

As was the case in the U.S. during the Cold War, when fears of nuclear conflict found outlets in films such as Dr. Strangelove Norwegians’ anxieties over Russian intentions will soon burst forth in Occupied, a political thriller conceived by Jo Nesbø, Norway’s internationally best-selling crime writer.

Scheduled to debut on Norwegian TV next year, the weekly drama “follows events in the close future” when Russia has carried out a “silk glove invasion” of Norway “in order to take control of its oil resources,” according to a news release.

“My idea was this,” Nesbø told Newsweek by email. “The Norwegian Green/left-wing government has decided it will stop producing fossil energy.” Russia moves in, seizing its oil facilities. When the U.S. and E.U. issue only paper protests, he says, Norwegian leaders “don’t see the point in military action, they try to negotiate while the Russians quietly take over the few things they [need] to take over to control the oil. And it’s a gentle occupation. Most Norwegians can’t really tell the difference. There are few Russians present, most of them are in suits, and there’s seemingly no censorship and Norwegians can travel freely and keep on living their lives as one of the richest populations in the world.”

News of the series emerged at about the same time Norway’s security service uncovered evidence of real-life subversion in the capital. Some foreign intelligence service—the main suspects were Russia and China, which also covets the Arctic’s future shipping routes—had planted so-called IMSI catchers, devices that can secretly capture the signals of cellphones, around Oslo’s government buildings. Officially, the perpetrator remains a mystery, but Norwegian sources tell Newsweek the government knows who did it but has shied from fingering the guilty party out of fear of triggering a full-scale international scandal.

Nesbø, whose 20 novels have sold 23 million copies in 40 countries, says the plausibility of Occupied’’s plot is beside the point. The real drama revolves around “a situation where it’s hard to pinpoint what you’ve lost in your everyday material world,” he says. “What would people be willing to sacrifice for phrases like freedom, independence and democracy? And who would be the first ones to resist? And would the nation follow?”

Guerrillas in the Arctic

Such questions are likely to rekindle unsavory memories of Norway’s capitulation to Germany in 1940 with the help of local Nazis led by the infamous Vidkun Quisling. The Norwegian king and tens of thousands of patriots escaped to England, where they set up a government in exile and formed a resistance movement eager to go back and fight. Trained by Britain’s secret services, the guerrillas of Norwegian Independent Company 1 eventually snuck back into the country and wreaked havoc on the Nazis.

Norwegians can’t get enough of this version of themselves. Every Sunday night for six weeks in January and February, more than one of every five Norwegians sat down to watch the latest episode of The Heavy Water War, a dramatization of the heroic guerrillas’ sabotage of Norway’s stocks of deuterium oxide, which the Germans seized to produce a nuclear weapon.

The guerrilla mentality remains an important strain in Norway’s military forces. Last year, Nils Johan Holte, the rangy, 57-year-old rear admiral who heads Norway’s Special Operations Command, took 10 of his officers back to the training camp in Scotland, where the first guerrillas learned hand-to-hand fighting and explosives. “It was about connecting with our origins.… ” Holte said as heavy snow fell outside his office in Oslo, “and for [the men] to understand that there’s a seriousness today about this.” It seems no accident that the headquarters of today’s Norwegian guerrillas is on the grounds of the hulking, medieval Akershus Fortress, built to defend the city from sea raiders 700 years ago. In 1940, it was occupied by the Nazis.

In 1988 the Norwegian government nearly disbanded its special operations force, which was initially set up as a small, discreet anti-terrorist unit inside the armed forces, as a money-saving move. Protests, including from the oil industry, which feared attacks on its North Sea drilling platforms—saved it. Since then, its commandos have seen action from the Balkans to Afghanistan and many secret places in between. And last year, the unit became independent, reporting directly to the chief of defense.

Like other Norwegian commanders and politicians, Holte is discreet when it comes to characterizing the recent Russian moves as sinister. Asked directly about the threat, he leans back in his chair, folds his hands behind his head, and smiles. His lone message for any potential adversary: “Do not attack Norway. We can defend ourselves.”

Obama White House Navigates with Muslim Brotherhood

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The Betrayal Papers – Part II of V: In Plain Sight: A National Security “Smoking Gun”

Primer:

The first article of the Betrayal Papers asserted that the Muslim Brotherhood was not only influential in the United States government, but in fact dominated the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama. This article will name several key people who were or are in the Obama administration and who have various, documented associations with organizations who are directly tied to and/or funded by the Muslim Brotherhood and the State of Qatar (home to their Spiritual Leader, Yusuf al-Qaradawi). These individuals have helped dictate national security policies that have crippled counterterrorism efforts at home and abroad.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Network of Civic Organizations: Apologists for Terror

In 1963, the first Muslim Brotherhood front group established itself in the United States and Canada: the Muslim Students Association of the U.S. and Canada (MSA), a group based on college campuses in North America. Through this organizational foothold, the Brotherhood has recruited and indoctrinated generations of American and Canadian Muslims into an Islamic belief system that pits Islam against the world. In more than a few cases, Muslims who join MSA chapters at their colleges have taken this ideology to its logical extreme: terrorism.

For example, it was recently reported by the Canadian Military Association that eleven (11) of Canada’s highest profile terrorists were tied to the MSA.

Since the early 1960s, the Muslim Brotherhood’s MSA has birthed a large number of purported “civic organizations,” which are anything but civil. We shall now name some of the groups, and establish the facts that link them to their parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR): CAIR was founded by two individuals with close ties to a Hamas operative. Hamas, according to its own charter, is the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. In 2007, founder Omar Ahwad was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorist financing trial. In November 2014, CAIR was designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates.

Muslim American Society (MAS): MAS was founded in 1992 by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to MAS secretary-general Shaker Elsayed. MAS, and the Muslim Brotherhood, advocate for Sharia law in the United States. MAS identifies the Islamic Society of North American (ISNA) and Muslim Students Association (MSA) as organizations with the same goal: the “Islamic revival movement.” In November 2014, MAS was designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates.

Islamic Society of North America (ISNA): ISNA was created out of four Islamic organizations, including the Muslim Students Association. Its former president Mohamed Magid was appointed an advisor to DHS and the National Security Council by Barack Obama in 2011, and was a recent guest at the White House.

Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC): MPAC was founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood, specifically Hassan and Maher Hathout, both whom were acolytes of Muslim Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna. MPAC supports the Tunisian Ennahda (Muslim Brotherhood) Party leader, Rachid Ghannouchi, whom they termed “one of the most important figures in modern Islamic political thought and theory.” Its current President is Salam Al-Marayati, who represented the US to the United Nations and UNESCO in 2010.

Muslim Students Association (MSA): The MSA, the first Muslim Brotherhood organization to gain a foothold in the United States, was founded in 1963. Many founding members were Muslim Brothers or had connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. The three most significant founders of MSA were Hisham al Talib, Jamal Barzinji, and Ahmed Totanji, and all of whom were MB leaders of Iraqi descent. While a student at George Washington University, Hillary Clinton’s personal aide Huma Abedin was on the Executive Board of her MSA.

Additionally, a 1991 internal memorandum of the Muslim Brotherhood identifies, specifically, CAIR, ISNA, and the MSA in “A list of our organizations and organizations of our friends.” (Note: CAIR’s organizational predecessor, the Islamic Association of Palestine, is named.)

Finally, CAIR and ISNA were named un-indicted co-conspirators which materially supported terrorism by a federal court, in connection with the infamous Holy Land Foundation trial, an alleged humanitarian charity for Palestine. An incorporating member of MAS, Dr. Jamal Badawi, was named an unindicted co-conspirator. MPAC and MSA members are on the record supporting the Holy Land Foundation against government terrorism charges.

This evidence begs some questions from the honest reader:

  • If these are all independent organizations, why is it that each of them is so neatly tied to the same parent organization, the Muslim Brotherhood?
  • Why are most of them named by the Muslim Brotherhood in their own memorandum?
  • Why were all involved, directly as unindicted co-conspirators or indirectly as defenders, with the Holy Land Foundation trial?

It doesn’t take a super sleuth to realize that these organizations are in fact assets of one organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. All one has to do is glance at the published information on their backgrounds, and the fact reveals itself.

The Anschluss of Georgetown and the Brookings Institution

You know the sayings. Money makes the world go ’round, and Follow the money, and Money is the root of all evil. These are important to keep in mind when considering the influence that Qatari money has had on two institutions as American as apple pie: Georgetown University and the Brookings Institution.

In 2005, Georgetown University established a new campus for their prestigious School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar. (It bears stating here that the State of Qatar was the driving Arab force behind the Arab Spring, which resulted in the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.) Today they have a faculty of more than 35 academics.

As part of Qatar’s Education City, Georgetown has had all SFS-Q campus development costs covered by the Qatar Foundation, a charity with noted links to terrorism. May this, perchance, have some influence over the education that Georgetown is giving to future American diplomats in Qatar? At the very least, it may explain some of the blatant anti-Semitic comments in Georgetown’s student newspaper.

Likewise, the Brookings Institution is also heavily funded by Qatar. In 2013, they received $14.8 million; in 2012, $100,000; and in 2011 $2.9 million. This explains why Obama had Brookings Vice President (and purported diplomat) Martin Indyk, negotiating the ‘peace terms’ between Israel and Hamas. Today, Indyk is busy negotiating with an aggressive and nuclear-aspiring Iran.

Is it any wonder why Israel doesn’t trust this administration? By all reasonable logic, they are on the side of Qatar and Hamas, which is officially the Palestinian franchise of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Obama Administration’s Agents

Given that these organizations function in a coordinated ideological manner, indeed they derive from the same root, it follows naturally that an individual associated with one organization would likely be associated with many, if not most of the others – not to mention the proxies of Georgetown and Brookings.

An experiment: Let’s choose seven Obama administration appointees with suspected ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Where to pluck these seven from? In December 2013, the Egyptian political magazine Rose El-Youssef, in an article entitled Not Huma Abedin Alone, named six (plus one Huma Abedin) Obama appointees it claimed were operatives of the Muslim Brotherhood. You can read an English translation here. Let’s see if their claims stack up, based on the information above.

Here are the seven named and their titles in the Obama administration:

Arif Alikhan – Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security for Policy Development. 2009-2010. Eboo Patel – Member of the President’s Advisory Council to the Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. 2009-Present. Huma Abedin – Personal Aide/Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 2009-2013. Mohamed Magid – DHS Countering Violence and Extremism Working Group. 2011-Present. Mohammed Elibiary – Senior Member of DHS’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. 2010-2014. Rashad Hussain – U.S. Special Envoy to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). 2010-Present. Deputy Associate Counsel to Barack Obama. 2009-2010. Salam Al-Marayati – Administration representative to UNESCO and United Nations. 2010.

(Dates in administration are best efforts based on publicly available information.)

Now let’s compare their affiliations and associations, officially and less formally, across the above named organizations. We’ll also include the Department of Homeland Security, which earlier this week was praised by CAIR for identifying “right-wing sovereign citizen extremist groups,” not Islamic terrorism, the prime terrorist threat facing the United States.

MB graph 1

 

Color Key

Green: Has worked or works in an official capacity for organization; is a named member of the organization. Yellow: Has been associated with org., e.g., authored paper on their behalf; spoke on their behalf and/or at their events; proven personal relationship between the individual and organization’s leadership, etc. Grey: No known/documented association.

No Coincidences

Notice the heavy concentration of green and yellow boxes, including for Georgetown and Brookings, in the table above. Notice the relatively few grey boxes. Individually these associations mean little; likewise, had this been just one random appointee in the entire administration, this story wouldn’t warrant the attention of the American public.

The complex of individuals and organizations, of Muslim Brotherhood money and policy recommendations, round out a picture of a carefully constructed conspiracy operating in plain sight.   It has hijacked the American government and military and used it as a tool to build a global Islamic Caliphate. The conspirators are changing the culture at home to accommodate sharia law and using law enforcement to demonize ordinary American citizens as national security threats.

These are Barack Hussein Obama’s appointees. This is Barack Hussein Obama’s administration and these are people chosen to advise him on national security and Islam.

From expunging from DHS considerations the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, to corrupting American foreign policy, the policy implications of these and similar appointments will be explored in the next articles.

* This analysis was completed after a careful survey of available press releases, news reports, and credible published information. They will be published in an upcoming report. Source material available upon request.

The Betrayal Papers is a collaborative effort by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, which includes: Andrea Shea King, Dr. Ashraf Ramelah, Benjamin Smith, Brent Parrish, Charles Ortel, Chris Nethery, Denise Simon, Dick Manasseri, Gary Kubiak, Gates of Vienna, Hannah Szenes, IQ al Rassooli, Jeff Bayard, Leslie Burt, Marcus Kohan, Mary Fanning, General Paul E. Vallely, Regina Thomson, Scott Smith, Terresa Monroe-Hamilton, Colonel Thomas Snodgrass, Trever Loudon, Wallace Bruschweiler, and William Palumbo.