Is it true that the CIA helped sow the seeds for Al Qaeda 25 yrs ago?

[rhymeandreason]

Since the persistent threat of Al Qaeda is fundamental to justifying the war on terror it would be ironic, to say the least, if the USCIA was responsible for helping to start this organization in Afghanistan twenty years ago.

Here is an excerpt from the wikipedia entry on the origins of Al Qaeda.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Qaeda#History_of_the_name

The origins of the group can be traced to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The United States viewed the conflict in Afghanistan, with the Afghan Marxists and allied Soviet troops on one side and the native Afghan mujahedeen on the other, as a blatant case of Soviet expansionism and aggression. The U.S. channelled funds through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency to the native Afghan mujahedeen fighting the Soviet occupation in a CIA program called Operation Cyclone.<44><45>

At the same time, a growing number of foreign Arab mujahedeen (also called Afghan Arabs) joined the jihad against the Afghan Marxist regime, facilitated by international Muslim organizations, particularly the Maktab al-Khidamat,<46> whose funds came from some of the $600 million a year donated to the jihad by the Saudi Arabia government and individual Muslims - particularly wealthy Saudis who were approached by Osama bin Laden.<47>

Maktab al-Khidamat was established by Abdullah Azzam and Bin Laden in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 1984. From 1986 it began to set up a network of recruiting offices in the United States, the hub of which was the Al Kifah Refugee Center at the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue. Among notable figures at the Brooklyn center were "double agent" Ali Mohamed, whom FBI special agent Jack Cloonan called "bin Laden's first trainer,"<48> and "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel-Rahman, a leading recruiter of mujahideen for Afghanistan.

The Afghan Mujahedeen of the 1980s have been alleged to be the inspiration for terrorist groups in nations such as Indonesia, the Philippines, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Chechnya, and the former Yugoslavia.<49> According to Russian sources, the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 allegedly used a manual allegedly written by the CIA for the Mujihadeen fighters in Afghanistan on how to make explosives.<50>

Al-Qaeda evolved from the Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Office), a Muslim organization founded in 1980 to raise and channel funds and recruit foreign mujahadeen for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was founded by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian Islamic scholar and member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Maktab al-Khadamat organized guest houses in Peshawar, in Pakistan, near the Afghan border, and paramilitary training camps in Afghanistan to prepare international non-Afghan recruits for the Afghan war front. Azzam persuaded Bin Laden to join MAK, to use his own money and use his connections with "the Saudi royal family and the petro-billionaires of the Gulf" to raise more to help the mujahideen.<51>

The role played by MAK and foreign Muslim volunteers, or "Afghan Arabs", in the war was not a major one. While 250,000 Afghan Mujahideen fought the Soviets and the communist Afghan government, it is estimated that were never more than 2000 foreign mujahideen in the field at any one time.<52> Nonetheless, foreign mujahedeen volunteers came from 43 countries and the number that participated in the Afghan movement between 1982 and 1992 is reported to have been 35,000.<53>

The Soviet Union finally withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. To the surprise of many, Mohammed Najibullah's communist Afghan government hung on for three more years before being overrun by elements of the mujahedeen. With mujahedeen leaders unable to agree on a structure for governance, chaos ensued, with constantly reorganizing alliances fighting for control of ill-defined territories, leaving the country devastated.

Expanding operations

Toward the end of the Soviet military mission in Afghanistan, some mujahedeen wanted to expand their operations to include Islamist struggles in other parts of the world, such as Israel and Kashmir. A number of overlapping and interrelated organizations were formed to further those aspirations.

One of these was the organization that would eventually be called al-Qaeda, formed by Osama bin Laden with an initial meeting held on August 11, 1988.<54> Bin Laden wished to establish nonmilitary operations in other parts of the world; Azzam, in contrast, wanted to remain focused on military campaigns. After Azzam was assassinated in 1989, the MAK split, with a significant number joining bin Laden's organization.

In November 1989, Ali Mohamed, a former special forces Sergeant stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, left military service and moved to Santa Clara, California. He traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan and became "deeply involved with bin Laden's plans."<55>.

A year later, on November 8, 1990, the FBI raided the New Jersey home of Mohammed's associate El Sayyid Nosair, discovering a great deal of evidence of terrorist plots, including plans to blow up New York City skyscrapers.<56> Nosair was eventually convicted in connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane on November 5, 1990. In 1991, Ali Mohammed is said to have helped orchestrate Osama bin Laden's relocation to Sudan.<57>

Is this account true?

Is it possible that the CIA may yet have influence and involvement in an organization which they were, in part, responsible for starting?

Would this make the USCIA in any way responsible for the actions of Al Qaeda?

[Realityhack]

1. Quick take...

"Is this account true?"
Yes. Largely if not entirely.

"Is it possible that the CIA may yet have influence and involvement in an organization which they were, in part, responsible for starting?"
No. Al Qaeda is a splinter group. Kind of like if the army trained someone to be a sniper then they started shooting people in Chicago. Sure they 'created' the guy but they hardly have any control now.

"Would this make the USCIA in any way responsible for the actions of Al Qaeda?"
Depends upon what you mean by responsible. Morally/ethically, in terms of being able to stop it, etc. You could say they created an armed group that then killed people so they are morally responsible. You could argue that they are not responsible for what they did not predict as they were fighting another battle at the time.
IMO it is an interesting question of unintended consequences of foreign policy/intervention. But I am not sure there is a 100% certain answer to wither they are 'responsible'.

This assumes you do not subscribe to the 'US Government runs Al Qaeda' 'theory'.

[CJCRANE]

5. Simplistic.

The CIA is a huge organization so while the CIA may no longer officially have any contact with the mujahideen it is entirely possible that current or former agents or assets do have contact "off the books".

So while your maint point is true it leaves out more nuanced possibilities.

[Realityhack]

6. It is likely...

that the CIA has some operatives inside Al Qaeda even if they didn't start it up. Same for the Mujahideen, however having an intelligence source in a terrorist network (or drug cartel etc. etc.) hardly gives you command or even significant influence.
While my analogy may have been simplistic, as you say the point stands that the CIA can hardly call up Al Qaeda and influence what they are going to do.

[jakeXT]

12. There is lots of stuff out there, if you want to believe it, go ahead

Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI--and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him

Synopsis

In the years leading to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than Ali Mohamed. A former Egyptian army captain, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA in Europe, the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, and the FBI in California - even as he helped to orchestrate the al Qaeda campaign of terror that culminated in 9/11. As investigative reporter Peter Lance demonstrates in this gripping narrative, senior U.S. law enforcement officials - including the now-celebrated U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who personally interviewed Mohamed long before he was brought to ground - were powerless to stop him. In the annals of espionage, few men have moved between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed. For almost two decades, the former Egyptian army commando succeeded in living a double life.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Triple-Cross/Peter-Lance/e/9780060886882


give me a break

[Realityhack]

15. Give you a break on what?

Are you claiming that the CIA can influence Al Qaeda's actions or even exert command over them?

[jakeXT]

16. the triple thing

From his first appearance on the FBI's radar in 1989 - training Islamic extremists on Long Island - to his presence in the database of Operation Able Danger eighteen months before 9/11, this devious triple agent was the one terrorist they had to sweep under the rug

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Triple-Cross/Peter-Lance/e/9780060886882

[rhymeandreason]

7. What about this widely circulated story, that UBL met with the CIA

two days before he checked out of a Dubai hospital which suggests an enduring connection with the USCIA right up to 9/11. This would suggest that the CIA had influence beyond any general culpability for helping to foster Al Qaeda. Is it disinformation, as the CIA maintains, or is it true?

Radio reports new CIA-Bin Laden details
By Elizabeth Bryant
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

PARIS, Nov. 1 (UPI) -- Radio France International offered additional details Thursday of allegations that terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden met with a CIA officer in the United Arab Emirates in July.

The CIA has dismissed as "total absurdity" a report carried Wednesday by Radio France and by France's Le Figaro newspaper, alleging that a CIA agent met with bin Laden at a Dubai clinic, where the suspected terrorist was reportedly treated for kidney problems.
The clinic, said to be the American Hospital in Dubai, also denied bin Laden had been a patient. The American Embassy in Paris has not commented on the report.
The Paris-based International Herald Tribune suggested the erroneous information may have been leaked by opponents in France to the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan.
"Disinformation may have been planted ... to suggest a continuing covert linkage between the CIA and bin Laden," a French intelligence source told the Herald Tribune.
Nonetheless, Radio France International, for one, said it stood by its report. In a follow-up Thursday, the French radio station identified the alleged CIA agent as Larry Mitchell, "a connoisseur of the Arab world and specialist of the (Arab) peninsula."
Mitchell's business card identified him as a "consular agent," the radio said. In fact, RFI alleged, he was a CIA agent and a prominent fixture in Dubai's expatriate community. According to both the radio and Le Figaro, Mitchell was recalled to the CIA's headquarters in McLean, Va., on July 15.
The radio also gave the precise date of Mitchell's supposed encounter with bin Laden -- July 12, two days before the Saudi dissident reportedly checked out of the hospital.
Neither the Figaro, nor Radio France offered independent confirmation of the report. The radio station also cited no source for its latest allegations. Earlier, the Figaro said its story was leaked by a partner of the hospital's management.
In an interview published Thursday in Le Figaro, Arab specialist Antoine Sfeir said he was not surprised on the alleged CIA-bin Laden ties.
"Bin Laden maintained contacts with bin Laden until 1998," Sfeir said. "Those contacts didn't end after bin Laden moved to Afghanistan. Until the last minute, CIA agents hoped bin Laden would return to U.S. command, as was the case before 1998."
Sfeir also maintained the information about the CIA-bin Laden connection had been in circulation for the past 15 days.

[Bolo Boffin]

8. What about this widely circulated story, that sightings of a hairy biped in Canada...

Come on, rhymeandreason. Your own quoted story demonstrates the he said/she said nature of this story. The McHale's Navy nature of Osama's Afghan Arabs is widely documented by Lawrence Wright from multiple sources, and there has never been any evidence presented of Osama being in the pay of the CIA.

[Bolo Boffin]

2. "a growing number of foreign Arab mujahedeen ...facilitated by international Muslim organizations"

The CIA is not an international Muslim organization.

Read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. The CIA never supported Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan or the creation of Al Qaeda.

[Realityhack]

3. Thanks Bolo...

I thought they had worked with OBL's group at one point... time for some reading.

[Bolo Boffin]

4. I thought so, too, at one point.

Wright's got a great book there.

[seemslikeadream]

9. The CIA & The Muslim Brotherhood How the CIA set the stage for Sept 11

The C.I.A. & The Muslim BrotherhoodHow the CIA set the stage for Sept11
Posted by seemslikeadream on Thu Aug-26-04 06:37 PM

Reverend Franklin Graham, the pugnacious preacher who delivered the prayer at President George W. Bush's 2001 inauguration, might have a bone to pick with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When Franklin branded Islam "a very evil and wicked religion" after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he had no idea that American spies were once eager to promote a Muslim leader in the Middle East modeled after his own father, the famous evangelist Billy Graham.

The CIA often works in mysterious ways - and so it was with this little-known cloak-and-dagger caper that set the stage for extensive collaboration between US intelligence and Islamic extremists. The genesis of this ill-starred alliance dates back to Egypt in the mid-1950s, when the CIA made discrete overtures to the Muslim Brotherhood, the influential Sunni fundamentalist movement that fostered Islamic militancy throughout the Middle East. What started as a quiet American flirtation with political Islam became a Cold War love affair on the sly - an affair that would turn out disastrously for the United States. Nearly all of today's radical Islamic groups, including al-Qaeda, trace their lineage to the Brotherhood.

.............

To understand what happened on that fateful day when terrorist strikes leveled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, one must revisit the turbulent changes that took place a half century earlier in the land of the sphinx. After seizing power in a 1952 military coup Egyptian Col. Gamal Abdul Nasser quickly threw prominent Communists in jail. This raised eyebrows among US cloak-and-dagger operatives who were eager to oblige when Nasser requested help in upgrading Egypt's ineffectual secret service. But the US government "found it highly impolitic to help him directly," the late CIA agent Miles Copeland acknowledged in his memoirs, The Game of Nations , so the CIA subcontracted more than a hundred German Third Reich vets, who specialized in Nazi security and interrogation techniques, to do the job.

..............

Copeland was off and running. He visited several Egyptian mosques in search of an Islamic preacher who could sway the Arab masses in a manner most congenial to US interests. Although Copeland never found the CIA's messiah, his furtive machinations were not without impact. While on the prowl for a Muslim Billy Graham, Copeland reached out to leaders of the religious revival movement known as the Ikhwan, or Muslim Brotherhood, which sought to build an Islamic society from the bottom up. The seeds of a clandestine relationship between the CIA and the Ikhwan were planted by Copeland, who surmised that the Muslim Brothers, by virtue of their strong antipathy to Arab nationalism as well as Communism, might be a viable counterweight to Nasser in the years ahead, US intelligence would become a defacto partner of the Brotherhood as it evolved from a mass-based social reform organization into the wellspring of Islamic terrorism.
more
http://www.razormagazine.com/feature0804c.php






rhymeandreason
I have the whole article if you would like it :hi:

[Bolo Boffin]

10. From your article:

"Any contact Miles had with the Muslim Brotherhood was not official policy," insists retired CIA officer Raymond Close, a colleague of Copeland in the Middle East. "It was strictly solo work on his part. There were an awful lot of things that Miles did that were totally off the board."

A rogue agent encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood 60 years ago is not evidence of Osama being an full-dues-paid agent of the CIA.

ETA: And anyway, the Muslim Brotherhood was already enjoying the benefit of Sayyid Qutb's writings and passionate leadership by the time Copeland could have done anything. If Copeland needed an Islamic Billy Graham, there Qutb was, and he didn't need Copeland to resist Nassar.

[Twist_U_Up]

11. Its not called Al CIAda for nothing.

google Tim Osman

[WoodrowFan]

13. It might be more accurate to say

It might be more accurate to say that the Soviets aided AQ's rise by invading Afghanistan. The US did not create the mujahedeen, it took advantage of its existence to further its own interests which temporarily coincided with the mujahedeen's.

The problem with the "CIA created AQ" tale, besides the fact that it's not true, is that once again it assumes that actors outside of the west can not take any action on their own without the west leading. Like the "19 Arabs in a cave" nonsense it's a racist view because it denies that those outside the rich, industrialized nations have the capability to act on their own, using their own resources, their own intelligence, and with their own motivations.

Did the US, through the CIA, strengthen a future adversary by helping the mujahedeen against the Soviets ? Yes, of course. Did they create that adversary? No.

[Realityhack]

14. Well put n/t

[jberryhill]

17. Charles Whitman

Charles Joseph Whitman (June 24, 1941 – August 1, 1966) was a student at the University of Texas at Austin who killed 14 people and wounded 32 others as part of a shooting rampage on and around the campus of the University of Texas at Austin.


A movie classic:

And where did he learn how to shoot?

[jschurchin]

22. United States Marines

Oh, and at home in Texas. And your Point?

[rhymeandreason]

18. From the responses so far

one of the fundamental assumptions of many in the truth movement, that UBL and Al Qaeda are USCIA operatives, is the product of speculation based on the shadowy history of the USCIA in the Middle East and a single newspaper article of dubious credibility. Am I missing something here? Is there some significant factual information specifically connecting the USCIA with UBL and Al Qaeda in the present day?

[Realityhack]

19. good question. n/t

[jakeXT]

20. Our Own Private Bin Laden ( a video that is related to this topic)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMjeEvDDFaM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WoVRoddadI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3pRSRjYla4&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQEuHGRHp3U&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thOjsn_OjIo&feature=related


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1c-d25jtek&feature=related

[OKIsItJustMe]

21. Zbigniew Brzezinski

http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

…

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic (integrisme), having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

…