[lit-ideas] Car Bombs, part 2
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2006 23:07:14 -0700 (PDT)
The CIA's Car Bomb University (the 1980s)
"The CIA officers that Yousef worked with closely
impressed upon him one rule: never use the terms
sabotage or assassination when speaking with visiting
congressmen."
-- Steve Coll, Ghost Wars
Gunboat diplomacy had been defeated by car bombs in
Lebanon, but the Reagan administration and, above all,
CIA Director William Casey were left thirsting for
revenge against Hezbollah. "Finally in 1985,"
according to the Washington Post's Bob Woodward in
Veil, his book on Casey's career, "he worked out with
the Saudis a plan to use a car bomb to kill [Hezbollah
leader] Sheikh Fadlallah who they determined was one
of the people behind, not only the Marine barracks,
but was involved in the taking of American hostages in
Beirut? It was Casey on his own, saying, ?I?m going to
solve the big problem by essentially getting tougher
or as tough as the terrorists in using their weapon --
the car bomb.'"
The CIA's own operatives, however, proved incapable of
carrying out the bombing, so Casey subcontracted the
operation to Lebanese agents led by a former British
SAS officer and financed by Saudi Ambassador Prince
Bandar. In March 1984, a large car bomb was detonated
about 50 yards from Sheikh Fadlallah's house in Bir
El-Abed, a crowded Shiite neighborhood in southern
Beirut. The sheikh wasn't harmed, but 80 innocent
neighbors and passersby were killed and 200 wounded.
Fadlallah immediately had a huge "MADE IN USA" banner
hung across the shattered street, while Hezbollah
returned tit for tat in September when a suicide truck
driver managed to break through the supposedly
impregnable perimeter defenses of the new U.S. embassy
in eastern (Christian) Beirut, killing 23 employees
and visitors.
Despite the Fadlallah fiasco, Casey remained an
enthusiast for using urban terrorism to advance
American goals, especially against the Soviets and
their allies in Afghanistan. A year after the Bir
El-Abed massacre, Casey won President Reagan's
approval for NSDD-166, a secret directive that,
according to Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, inaugurated a
"new era of direct infusions of advanced U.S. military
technology into Afghanistan, intensified training of
Islamist guerrillas in explosives and sabotage
techniques, and targeted attacks on Soviet military
officers."
U.S. Special Forces experts would now provide
high-tech explosives and teach state-of-the-art
sabotage techniques, including the fabrication of ANFO
(ammonium nitrate-fuel oil) car bombs, to Pakistani
intelligence service (or ISI) officers under the
command of Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf. These officers,
in turn, would tutor thousands of Afghan and foreign
mujahedin, including the future cadre of al-Qaeda, in
scores of training camps financed by the Saudis.
"Under ISI direction," Coll writes, "the mujahedin
received training and malleable explosives to mount
car-bomb and even camel-bomb attacks in
Soviet-occupied cities, usually designed to kill
Soviet soldiers and commanders. Casey endorsed these
despite the qualms of some CIA career officers."
Mujahedin car bombers, working with teams of snipers
and assassins, not only terrorized uniformed Soviet
forces in a series of devastating attacks in
Afghanistan but also massacred leftwing intelligentsia
in Kabul, the country's capital. "Yousaf and the
Afghan car-bombing squads he trained," writes Coll,
"regarded Kabul University professors as fair game,"
as well as movie theaters and cultural events.
Although some members of the National Security Council
reportedly denounced the bombings and assassinations
as "outright terrorism," Casey was delighted with the
results. Meanwhile, "by the late 1980s, the ISI had
effectively eliminated all the secular, leftist, and
royalist political parties that had first formed when
Afghan refugees fled communist rule." As a result,
most of the billions of dollars that the Saudis and
Washington pumped into Afghanistan ended up in the
hands of radical Islamist groups sponsored by the ISI.
They were also the chief recipients of huge quantities
of CIA-supplied plastic explosives as well as
thousands of advanced E-cell delay detonators.
It was the greatest technology transfer of terrorist
technique in history. There was no need for angry
Islamists to take car-bomb extension courses from
Hezbollah when they could matriculate in a
CIA-supported urban-sabotage graduate program in
Pakistan's frontier provinces. "Ten years later," Coll
observes, "the vast training infrastructure that
Yousaf and his colleagues built with the enormous
budgets endorsed by NSDD-166 -- the specialized camps,
the sabotage training manuals, the electronic bomb
detonators, and so on -- would be referred to
routinely in America as ?terrorist infrastructure.'"
Moreover the alumni of the ISI training camps like
Ramzi Yousef, who plotted the first 1993 World Trade
Center attack, or his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
who allegedly designed the second, would soon be
applying their expertise on every continent.
http://www.mojones.com/commentary/columns/2006/04/car_bomb_2.html
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