Source – exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com

– “…Almost overnight, Stibam became a multi billion dollar concern, providing drugs to the American Mafia and arms to a vast array of clients, including AK-47 rifles for the Nicaraguan Contras and American missiles for the Khomeini regime in Iran. One of the most spectacular of the Stibam undertakings involved its sale of thermonuclear weapons to an Arab nation – believed to have been either Syria or Saudi Arabia”

(Continued From Part 1…)

CHAPTER 12: THE NEW NETWORK 

‘What is important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?’ – Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 1998

With the fall of Saigon, the drought in Southeast Asia, and the eradication of the poppy fields in Burma and Thailand, the CIA set its sights on the Golden Crescent, where the highlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran all converge, for a new source of drug revenue. Since the seventeenth century, opium poppies were grown in this region by local tribesmen, and the market remained regional. By the 1950’s, very little opium was being produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan, with about twenty-five hundred acres in both countries under cultivation.1 At the close of the Vietnam War, the fertile growing fields of Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley were covered with vineyards, wheat, and cotton.2

The major problem for the CIA was the Afghan government of Nur Mohammad Taraki, who sought to eradicate poppy production in the border regions of the country that remained occupied by radical Islamic fundamentalists. This attempt at eradication sprang from Taraki’s desire to unite all the Pashtun tribes under Kabul rule.3 The fundamentalists spurned such efforts not only because of their desire to keep the cash crops but also because they viewed the Taraki government as shirk (blasphemy). The modernist regime advocated female education and prohibited arranged marriages and the bride price. By 1975, the tension between the government and the fundamentalists erupted into violence when Pashtun tribesmen mounted a revolt in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul.4 The tribesmen were led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who became the new darling of the CIA.

THE MUSLIM MADMAN

Hekmatyar made his public debut in 1972 at the University of Kabul by killing a leftist student. He fled to Pakistan, where he became an agent of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and the leader of Hezb-e-Islami, an organization dedicated to the formation of a “pure” Islamic state ruled by the most intransigent interpretation of Sunni law.5 Hekmatyar urged his followers to throw acid in the faces of women not wearing a veil, kidnapped rival Islamic chieftains, and, in 1977, began to build up an arsenal, courtesy of the CIA.6 The Agency also began to funnel millions to the ISI, which became its surrogate on the Afghan border.7
The CIA believed that Hekmatyar, despite the fact that he was clearly unhinged, would be of inestimable value not only in undermining the Taraki government but also in gaining control of the poppy fields in the Helmand Valley. Its faith was not misplaced. Throughout 1978, a year before the Soviet invasion, Hekmatyar and his mujahideen (“holy warriors”) burned universities and girls’ schools throughout Afghanistan and gained feudal control over many of the poppy farmers. The proTaraki militants, aware of the destabilization plot, assassinated Adolph “Spike” Dubs, the US ambassador to Kabul, on February 14, 1979.8

Thanks to Hekmatyar’s actions, heroin production rose from four hundred tons in 1971 to twelve hundred tons in 1978. After the assassination of Dubs and after the millions had begun to flow to Hekmatyar’s guerrilla army, the production soared to eighteen hundred tons and a network of laboratories was set up by the mujahideen along the Afghan-Pakistan border.9 The morphine base was transported by caravans of trucks from the Helmand Valley through northern Iran to the Anatolian plains of Turkey.

THE HOLY WAR

In the summer of 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, the US State Department issued a memorandum making clear its stake in the mujahideen: “The United States’ larger interest…would be served by the demise of the Taraki regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reform in Afghanistan…. The overthrow of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] would show the rest of the world, particularly the Third World, that the Soviet’s view of the socialist course of history as being inevitable is not accurate.”10

In September 1979 Taraki was killed in a coup organized by Afghan military officers. Hafizullah Amin was installed as the country’s new president. Amin had impeccable western credentials. He had been educated at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin. He had served as the president of the Afghan Students Association, which had been funded by the Asia Foundation, a CIA front.11 After the coup, he met regularly with US Embassy officials, while the CIA continued to fund Hekmatyar’s rebels in Pakistan. Fearing a fundamentalist, US-backed regime at its border, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan on December 27, 1979.12

The CIA got what it wanted. The holy war had begun. For the next decade, black aid—amounting to more than $3 billion—would be poured into Afghanistan to support the holy warriors, making it the most expensive covert operation in US history.13 Such vast expenditures demanded an exponential increase in poppy production, which Hekmatyar and his fellow jihadists were pleased to provide.

AFGHANISTAN DELIGHT

The war in Afghanistan delighted state department officials, including Secretary of State Zbigniew Brzezinski. Voicing the utopian vision of what author Chalmers Johnson called the “military-industrial complex,” Brzezinski wrote of the plans to control Eurasia, including Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan:

For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…. Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia—and America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained…. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three great imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.14

Brzezinski and fellow members of his “over-world” (the elite group which puppeteers events to bring about a “new world order”) realized that the concept of democracy and freedom could never galvanize the scattered tribes and peoples of Central Asia. The people could only be unified by the cause of Allah since they were overwhelmingly Islamic. The holy war in Afghanistan, in the view of American geostrategists, offered many benefits, including the possible downfall of the Soviet Union and the possibility of gaining access and control over the vast natural gas and oil resources of Eurasia. Months before the Soviet invasion in 1979, the CIA launched Operation Cyclone, an attempt to destabilize the Soviet Union by spreading militant Islam throughout the central Asian republics.15

Eventually, this operation would serve to create hundreds of Islamic terror organizations, including al-Qaeda, al-Jihad, the Ulema Union of Afghanistan, the Salafi Group for Proselytism and Combat, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Harkat ul-Ansar, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, Jamiat Ulema-ePakistan, Lashkar e-Taiba, and the al-Jihad Group. It would also give rise to terror attacks that would kill and maim millions of people throughout the world and the dream of a New Islamic World Order, which would be espoused by Fethullah Gülen and his disciples.

THE BCCI

In 1972, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I) was set up in Karachi by Agha Hasan Abedi, a financier who had deep connections to Pakistan’s underworld, the Turkish babas (members of Turkey’s underworld), and the oil-rich sheikhs of Abu Dhabi. It represented the ideal spot for the CIA to set up a laundry within the Golden Crescent. Thanks to the Agency, the B.C.C.I was registered in Luxembourg and soon mushroomed into a vast criminal enterprise with four hundred branches in seventy-eight countries, including the First American Bank in Washington, DC, the National Bank of Georgia, and the Independence Bank of Encino, California.16 Virtually free from scrutiny, it engaged not only in laundering the heroin proceeds but also arms trafficking on a grand scale—including the sale of French-made jet fighters to Chile and Chinese silkworm missiles to Saudi Arabia. By 1985, it had become the seventh-largest financial institution in the world, handling the money for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, al-Qaeda chieftain Osama bin Laden, Liberian president Samuel Doe, and leading members of the Medellin Cartel.17

Prominent spooks, including CIA director William Casey, made regular visits to the BCCI’s headquarters in Karachi, making the Pakistani city the new haven for covert operations. The bank served the Agency in a myriad of ways, by paying bribes, providing “young beauties from Lahore,” and funneling cash for assassins.18 The enormity of the bank’s operations was evidenced by its transfer of $4 billion in covert aid to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. For the Iraqi transfer, the B.C.C.I made use of the Atlanta branch of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (B.N.L), an Italian bank with ties to the I.O.R. Henry Kissinger sat on B.N.L’s international advisory board, along with Brent Scowcroft, who became President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser.

John R. Bath, an alleged CIA operative, became one of BCCI’s directors.19 While serving the Pakistani bank, Bath was the co-owner of Arbusto Energy, a Texas oil company, with future president George W. Bush. Kamal Adham, a fellow B.C.C.I official, served, according to the Kerry Commission, as “the principal liaison for the CIA in the entire Middle East from the mid 1960’s through 1979.”20

PHONY AUDITS

Although a cursory investigation would have uncovered the bank’s engagement in issuing phony loans, making phantom deposits, and publishing false financial reports, Price Waterhouse, the prestigious London accounting firm, published annual statements, giving BCCI its unqualified approval.21 The Kerry Commission later concluded that the Price Waterhouse accountants “failed to protect BCCI’s innocent depositors and creditors from the consequences of poor practices at the bank of which the auditors were aware for years.”22

In 1991, the B.C.C.I, like so many other CIA banks, went bust, leaving a financial hole of $13 billion. Creditors subsequently brought action against Price Waterhouse, claiming damages because of the firm’s accounting negligence in excess of $11 billion. The matter was eventually settled out of court.23 Ironically, in the wake of this settlement, the Vatican turned to Price Waterhouse to certify its balance sheets—a choice that journalist David Yallop characterized as “bizarre.”24

THE CIA’S COMPLICITY

In its opening statement regarding the CIA’s relationship to B.C.C.I, the Kerry Commission maintained:

The relationships involving B.C.C.I, the CIA, and members of the United States and foreign intelligence communities have been among the most perplexing aspects of understanding the rise and fall of B.C.C.I. The CIA’s and B.C.C.I’s mutual environments of secrecy have been one obvious obstacle. For many months, the CIA resisted providing information to the Subcommittee about its involvement with and knowledge of B.C.C.I. Moreover, key players who might explain these relationships are unavailable. Some, including former CIA director William Casey, and B.C.C.I customers and Iranian arms dealers Ben Banerjee and Cyrus Hashemi, are dead. Others, including most of B.C.C.I’s key insiders, remain held incommunicado in Abu Dhabi. While promising in public hearings to provide full cooperation to the Subcommittee, to date the Abu Dhabi government has refused to make any B.C.C.I officers available for interview by the Subcommittee. Former B.C.C.I chairman Agha Hasan Abedi remains severely incapacitated due to a heart attack. Finally, some persons in a position to know portions of the truth have denied having any memory of events in which they participated and of documents which they reviewed.25

TURKEY’S “DEEP STATE”

Establishing Turkey as the pivotal center of the heroin route from the Golden Crescent was a relatively easy task for US intelligence officials. By 1970, the CIA had infiltrated the Turkish secret service MIT (Milli Istihbarat Teskilati—National Intelligence Organization). The full extent of this infiltration was made known by Sabahattin Savasman, the vice director of MIT, who testified, “The CIA has a group of at least 20 people who work together with the MIT and within the MIT at the highest level.” He said that the Agency trained all MIT personnel, provided all the necessary equipment (including a torture chamber), and paid all the bills. This payment would have been substantial since at that time the MIT employed “several hundreds of thousands” of agents, consultants, and technicians.26

Throughout the 1970’s, the CIA also continued to train and support all members of CounterGuerrilla, the organization containing all Turkish Gladio units, including the Grey Wolves. The recruits were trained at paramilitary centers in Ankara, Bolu, Kayseri, Buca (near İzmir), Çanakkale, and Cyprus by members of US Special Forces, including the Green Berets. The key training manual— FM-30-31—taught the secret soldiers how to launch terror attacks and to place the blame on the Communists. The Grey Wolves, as the militant arm of the pan-Turkism movement, embraced the training wholeheartedly. They believed in the racial superiority of the Turks and the sacred task of restoring the Ottoman Empire—the latter belief necessitating the elimination of the Kurds from the southeast region of the country. By 1976, there were seventeen hundred Grey Wolves organizations within Turkey, with about two hundred thousand registered members and well over a million sympathizers.27

WOLVES AND BABAS

Abuzer Uğurlu, Bekir Çelenk, and Huseyn Cil were Grey Wolves and leading babas (members of the Turkish underworld) with strong ties to the MIT. Uğurlu, the hulking, shaven-headed, hard-eyed “boss of all bosses,” kept a crew of professional killers at his beck and call, including Mehmet Ali Ağca, who later would shoot and nearly kill Pope John Paul II. By 1975, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), he controlled a multi billion dollar contraband operation, partially financed by the sale of narcotics.28

Bekir Çelenk, unlike Uğurlu, had few rough edges. Smooth and worldly, he was fond of sexy women, good cigars, and baccarat and served as the front man for the contraband enterprise. By 1975, Çelenk was the owner of a fleet of ships registered in Panama and a chain of hotels.29

The mustachioed and sullen Huseyn Cil represented the brains of the operation. A skilled accountant who spoke fluent Italian, he developed business contacts in Naples and Milan, which came to include leading members of the Camorra. These contacts granted him entry to Roberto Calvi, the head of Banco Ambrosiano, and, in turn, to Archbishop Marcinkus of the IOR.30

At the close of 1975, Uğurlu, Çelenk, and Cil sent Sami Duruoz to Sicily under orders to make a deal regarding the opium they were now controlling from the Golden Crescent. The babas awaited their emissary’s return in a small Yugoslav town near the Italian border. When Duruoz showed up with the news that he had failed to come to terms with Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano of the Corleonesi clan, the babas clubbed him to death, leaving his body in a Yugoslav hotel room.31 Within a year, they sent Cevdet Cil, Huseyn Cil’s brother, as their new emissary to the dons of the Sicilian Commission.32 By this time, the situation in Southeast Asia was worsening for the drug trade and the two parties came to a preliminary agreement.33

GRAND HOTEL

In 1977, meetings between the babas and the dons were held at the Hotel Vitosha in Sofia, Bulgaria. The Turks were represented by Uğurlu, Çelenk, and the Cil brothers, and the Italians by Raffaele Cutolo, the capo of the Camorra; Michele Zaza, the head of a Sicilian crime family and a Camorra deputy; Luciano Leggio, Salvatore Riina, and Bernardo Provenzano of the Corleonesi clan; and Nitto Santapaola and the Faraar brothers from Catania. Most of the Italian Men of Respect at the meetings were members of P2 and all were bound by a pact they made in Naples regarding the new drug deal.34

The Hotel Vitosha was an ideal place for the crime clan gatherings. The modern, thirty-story resort boasted a bowling alley, a sauna, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, several bars and a panoramic restaurant, chic boutiques charging Paris prices, prostitutes “licensed for foreigners,” and a gambling casino featuring blackjack and roulette. The tab for the get-together’s was paid by Kintex, an official arm of the Bulgarian government.35

DRUGS FOR ARMS

Kintex was formed in 1968 by top-ranking members of the Bulgarian Security Service. Its primary function was trafficking in illegal arms for right-wing Turkish groups (including the Grey Wolves), the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon, and the government of Israel.36 With the opening of the drug route from the Golden Crescent, it became the first outfit to offer morphine base as payment.37 The firm was used extensively by NATO and the CIA. In one typical Kintex deal, 459 rocket launchers and 100,000 missiles were shipped in May 1977 from the Black Sea port of Bourgas in a Kintex freighter under Cypriot colors. The vessel was skippered by a Greek captain. The provenance of the munitions appeared to be a NATO naval base and the probable customer was Israel.38

Duane “Dewey” Clarridge served as the CIA station chief in Ankara at the time of the meetings. He allegedly worked with the Grey Wolves and Kintex and became a key figure in the arms for drugs business.39 He should have been aware of the activities taking place at the Hotel Vitosha and the alliance being forged between the babas and the dons, even though he makes no mention of this development in his book A Spy for All Seasons. After the new drug network was established, he became the station chief in Rome, where he remained until the attempted hit on John Paul II.40

In accordance with the final agreement, the capos agreed to pay the babas for the morphine with shipments of arms, including Leopard tanks, Cobra helicopters fully loaded with rockets and guns, and R.P.G-7 rocket launchers. The Turks could then sell the arms to insurgent groups throughout Poland, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These munitions were provided by the CIA from NATO arsenals in Western Europe and from Horst Grillmayer, a German arms dealer who worked for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND—Germany’s Secret Service).41 The arms trafficking would be managed by Kintex in Bulgaria.

DRUG HUB

The operation, at the start, was tightly run, with Milan as its hub. The heroin base was smuggled into Italy by ethnic Albanians via the Balkan route, which ran from Bulgaria through Kosovo and into Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia.42 The route continued to Milan, where Salah Al Din Wakkas and Kahim Nasser, intermediaries for the babas, had set up warehouses. The product was picked up at these locations by Nunzio La Mattina and Antonio Totolo in T.I.R (Transport Internationaux Routiers) trucks and conveyed to nearby ports for shipment to the Sicilian port of Catania. In Sicily it passed into the hands of Giuseppe Calderone and Nitto Santapaola, who trucked the morphine to laboratories owned by the Gaetano brothers and operated by Gerlando Albertini and his team of Corsican chemists. Once refined, the heroin was loaded on freighters and shipped to the United States by Stibam International, a Milan-based shipping firm.43

Stibam was located at Via Oldofredi No. 2, a building owned by Banco Ambrosiano. The firm was headed by sixty-seven-year-old Henri Arsan, known as the “playboy Mafiosi.” Fond of gaudy clothes, gold chains, and loose women, the mysterious Arsan, whom various sources identified as either Syrian or Armenian, wore many hats, including that of a CIA operative.44 Another leading principal in Stibam was General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy’s military intelligence agency and prominent P2 member.45 Santovito, who played a part in the Moro kidnapping, was later responsible for expunging all traces of the Turkish Mafia’s presence in St. Peter’s Square after the pope was shot.46

Almost overnight, Stibam became a multi billion dollar concern, providing drugs to the American Mafia and arms to a vast array of clients, including AK-47 rifles for the Nicaraguan Contras and American missiles for the Khomeini regime in Iran. One of the most spectacular of the Stibam undertakings involved its sale of thermonuclear weapons to an Arab nation (believed to have been either Syria or Saudi Arabia.) This operation involved Glauco Partel, described in the Italian press as being a “missile expert” who worked for “the National Security Administration,” and Eugene Bartholomeus, a US intelligence veteran who served the CIA at the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia.47

ONE-STOP SNOOPING

For CIA officials and former spooks such as Ted Shackley, who worked for private intelligence gathering agencies like Research Associates International, Milan became a one-stop shopping and snooping center. They could visit Arsan and Çelenk at Stibam to arrange for the shipment of arms to the right-wing guerrilla army of the day, check on the latest shipment of heroin to the states, provide Çelenk with the latest hit list, receive notification of any problems concerning the Balkan route, and receive the latest list of news from the Grey Wolves in Turkey. After exchanging parting pleasantries, they could walk down the street for a meeting with Calvi, Gelli, and Archbishop Marcinkus at Banco Ambrosiano, where they could discuss the activities of the shell companies the Vatican had set up in Panama, the needs of the Christian Democratic Party, the latest developments in the strategy of tension, and the concerns of the clerical couriers who were carrying suitcases stuffed with cash to the IOR.

Few who gathered at such conferences were aware that the heady days would soon come to an end. By the end of 1983, Calvi would be found hanging from a bridge in London, Çelenk and Gelli would be wanted fugitives, Marcinkus would be a prisoner within Vatican City, and Arsan would be found dead in a jail cell.

THE HEROIN BOOM

But in 1979 business was booming. As soon as the freighters were unloaded on the docks of Miami and New York, the heroin was trucked to pizza parlors owned by the Gambino crime family in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The parlors became the centers of heroin distribution throughout much of the eastern half of the country. The cash from the drug sales, deposited in amounts less than $10,000, would flow from CIA-controlled banks—including Continental Illinois, Castle Bank & Trust, and Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I)—to the IOR and the Vatican’s chain of parochial banks throughout Italy. Eventually, the money laundering would come to involve many of the country’s most prestigious financial firms, including Citibank, the Bank of New York, and the Bank of Boston.48 In 1979, the flood of heroin from Afghanistan inundated the United States, capturing over 60 percent of the market. In New York City alone, the mob sold two tons of smack, which registered a “dramatic increase in purity.”49 Heroin addiction in the states climbed back to 450,000. Within a year, street sales increased by 22 percent and the addiction rate reached 500,000.50

SPOILED KIDS

The sons and grandsons of the Mafia dons who had pioneered the heroin industry lived in extravagant houses, dressed in Armani suits, attended prestigious schools, and, strange to say, continued for the most part in the criminal tradition of their fathers and forefathers. After Carlo Gambino died of a heart attack in 1977, Paul Castellano, who had married Carlo’s sister, became the head of the crime family. Thomas Costello, Carlo’s son, became a capo in Manhattan, retaining the family’s stranglehold on the trucking and garment industries. John, Joseph, and Rosario Gambino, Carlo’s cousins, became the capos of the Inzerillo-Gambino-Spatola family.51 Paul Castellano’s grandson, Paul, assumed control of the family’s interest in illegal garbage hauling,52 while Frank Cali, a nephew to the Gambino brothers, became a kingpin in the Gambino’s heroin trade.53

But members of this generation didn’t want to soil their hands with the business of the streets— things like debt collection, prostitution, extortion, drug delivery to choice dealers and customers, and murder were beneath them. For the most part, their opulent lifestyles gave rise to an unnatural aversion to bloodletting. And it became increasingly easy to find reliable Italian and Sicilian immigrants who were willing to pick up the slack, especially within the inner cities.

THE ALBANIAN MAFIA

The new drug network rectified this growing problem. The couriers who brought the raw opium to Italy in trucks by the Balkan route were members of the Albanian Mafia who did not flinch at committing random acts of violence. Within Italy, they began to perform much of the dirty work for the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta along the coast of the Adriatic Sea.54 Eventually, the Italian Mafia no longer spoke of the Muslim Albanians as foreigners but “cari amici” (“close friends”).55 Throughout the 1980’s, the Albanian thugs became the chief perpetrators of drug smuggling, counterfeiting, passport theft, forgery, trafficking in human body parts, sex slavery, abduction, and murder. The influence of the criminal group grew to such an extent that, in 1985, Cataldo Motta, Italy’s top prosecutor, said that the Albanian Mafia posed a threat not only to the people of Italy but to all of Western civilization.56

NEW GAMBINO GOONS

The Albanians proved so useful that they were imported by the Gambinos to serve as their enforcers. Zef Mustafa became their chief “clipper” (assassin). Mustafa’s capacity for violence was only equaled by his capacity for liquor. He drank from morning to night, often consuming two or three quarts of vodka a day.57 His skills were matched by those of Abedin “Dino” Kolbiba, who mastered the art of making bodies disappear.58 The ruthless indifference of the Balkan newcomers to murder was evidenced by Simon and Victor Deday, two Gambino assassins. They shot a waiter at the Scores restaurant in New York City to express their displeasure at the quality of the service. For good measure, they also shot the bouncer before he could utter a word of protest.59

The arrival of the so-called “Muslim Mafia” in Italy and the United States was an unexpected offshoot of the new network and the establishment of the Balkan route. By 2004, the FBI announced that the ethnic Albanians had replaced La Cosa Nostra as the “leading crime outfit in the United States.”60

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE NEW NETWORK
1. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press (New York: Verso, 1998), p. 261.
2. Ibid.
3. Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003), p. 476.
4. Ibid.
5. Robert Pelton, The World’s Most Dangerous Places (New York: Harper Resource, 2003), p. 342.
6. Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, p. 264.
7. McCoy, Politics of Heroin, p. 474.
8. Jeffrey Lord, “Jimmy Carter’s Dead Ambassador,” American Spectator, October 23, 2012, http://spectator.org/articles/34550/jimmy-carters-dead-ambassador (accessed May 21, 2014).
9. Ibid.
10. US State Department memorandum reproduced in Cockburn and St. Clair’s Whiteout, pp. 262–63.
11. Ibid., p. 263.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., p. 259.
14. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 20, 40.
15. Jagmohan Meher, America’s Afghanistan War: The Success That Failed (New Dehli, India: Gyan Books, 2004), pp. 68–69.
16. Jonathan Beaty and S. C. Gwynne, “BCCI: The World’s Dirtiest Bank,” Biblioteca Pleyades, July 29, 1991, http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/sociopol_globalbanking118.htm (accessed May 21, 2014).
17. David Sirota and Jonathan Baskin, “Follow the Money: How John Kerry Busted the Terrorists’ Favorite Bank,” Washington Monthly, September 2004, http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0409.sirota.html (accessed May 21, 2014).
18. Lucy Komisar, “The Case That Kerry Cracked,” Alter Net, October 21, 2004, http://www.alternet.org/story/20268/the_case_that_kerry_cracked (accessed May 21, 2014).
19. Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Heart of the BCCI (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 228.
20. Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, “The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations,” US Senate, December 1992, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm (accessed May 21, 2014).
21. Steve Lohr, “Auditing the Auditors—A Special Report: How BCCI’s Accounts Won Stamp of Approval,” New York Times, September 6, 1991.
22. Kerry and Brown, “BCCI Affair.”
23. David Yallop, The Power and the Glory: Inside the Dark Heart of John Paul II’s Vatican (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), p. 424. 24. Ibid.
25. Kerry and Brown, “BCCI Affair.”
26. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe (London: Frank Cass, 2005), pp. 230–31.
27. Ibid., p. 239.
28. Claire Sterling, Octopus: The Long Reach of the International Sicilian Mafia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 160. See also, “The Grey Wolves,” Organized Crime Syndicates, 2012, http://www.reocities.com/OrganizedCrimeSyndicates/GreyWolves.html (accessed May 21, 2014).
29. Vivian Freyre Zoakos, “Colossal East-West Arms and Drug Ring Cracked,” EIR International, December 14, 1982, http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1982/eirv09n48-19821214/eirv09n48-19821214_036-colossal_east_west_arms_and_drug.pdf (accessed May 21, 2014).
30. L. Puparo, “Italy Late 70’s,” Gangsters, Inc., March 5, 2010, http://z14.invisionfree.com/GangstersInc/ar/t1410.htm.
31. L. Puparo, “Judge Carlo Palermo and the Turks,” Gangsters, Inc., November 25, 2009, http://z14.invisionfree.com/GangstersInc/ar/t1357.htm (accessed May 21, 2014).
32. Sterling, Octopus, pp. 158, 343.
33. Puparo, “Italy Late 70’s.”
34. Sterling, Octopus, pp. 164–65.
35. Ibid., p. 159.
36. Richard Cottrell, Gladio: NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe (Palm Desert, CA: Progressive Press, 2012), pp. 203–204.
37. Statement of John Lawn, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, to the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, Task Force on International Narcotics Control, June 8, 1984.
38. “West Europe Report: Case Study of Agca Activities,” Information Service of the US Department of Commerce, internal document, April 23, 1983.
39. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 140.
40. Martin A. Lee, “On the Trail of Turkey’s Terrorist Grey Wolves,” Consortium News, 1997, http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/story33.html (accessed May 21, 2014).
41. David Emory, “Who Shot the Pope—Stibam,” segments 17–21, Radio Free America, May 22, 1986, http://emory.kfjc.org/archive/afa/afa_20a.mp3.
42. Umberto Pascali, “KLA and Drugs: The ‘New Colombia of Europe’ Grows in the Balkans,” Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), June 22, 2001.
43. Puparo, “Italy Late 70’s.”
44. Cottrell, Gladio, p. 278.
45. Ibid., p. 277.
46. Ibid., p. 270.
47. Emory, “Who Shot the Pope.”
48. Peter Dale Scott, “Opium and the CIA: Can the U.S. Triumph in the Drug-Addicted War in Japan?” Global Research, April 5, 2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/opium-and-the-cia-can-the-us-triumph-in-the-drug-addicted-war-in-afghanistan/18522 (accessed May 21, 2014).
49. McCoy, Politics of Heroin, p. 463.
50. Ibid., pp. 464–65.
51. Selwyn Raab, “2 Admit Importing Heroin for Mafia Crime Family,” New York Times, January 7, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/07/nyregion/2-admit-importing-heroin-for-mafia-crime-family.html.
52. Dana Sauchelli, “Mob Boss’ Grandson Arrested for Illegal Waste,” New York Post, December 20, 2013.
53. Jonathan Lamire, “Sicilian Mobsters May Become New York’s Latest Big Italian Import,” New York Daily News, February 28, 2008, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/sicilian-mobsters-new-york-latest-big-italian-import-article-1.311848 (accessed May 21, 2014).
54. Thomas Garrett, “Mafia International? Organized Crime in Central and Eastern Europe,” New East, October 7, 2011, http://thevieweast.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/mafia-international-organised-crime-in-central-and-eastern-europe/ (accessed May 21, 2014).
55. Ibid.
56. Anthony M. DeStefano, “The Balkan Connection,” Wall Street Journal, September 9, 1985.
57. Jerry Capeci, “Zef’s Got Staying Power Too,” Gangland, September 4, 2003.
58. Gus Xhudo, “Men of Purpose: The Growth of the Albanian Criminal Activity,” Ridgeway Center for International Security Studies, The University of Pittsburgh, Spring 1996.
59. M. Bozinovich, “The New Islamic Mafia,” Serbianna, February 21, 2005, http://www.serbianna.com/columns/mb/028.shtml (accessed May 21, 2014).
60. Terry Frieden, “FBI: Albanian Mobsters ‘New Mafia,’” CNN, August 19, 2004

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