News Stories Which Highlight the Structure of the System

[Cain]

http://www.madcowprod.com/2013/03/06/source-rudi-dekkers-drug-case-will-never-go-to-trial/

The upcoming trial in Houston of Rudi Dekkers for drug trafficking has been pushed back and may now never happen, according to a lawyer close to the case.

"The case has been continued, and a plea agreement is in the works," said the attorney, who asked for anonymity. "The case will never go to trial. That's all I can say."

Who is Rudi Dekkers and why should you care?

Well, Dekkers was the man who ran the flight school in Florida which trained, among others, a certain Mohammed Atta.  While investigating, Daniel Hopsicker, the author of the above article, discovered a number of discrepancies involving Dekkers flight school which led him to believe it may have been a drug trafficking front, and that the truth of 9/11 may have more to do with the drug trade than is normally suspected.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Wow.

The CT nuts are NEVER gonna shut up now.

You should post this at HFT, for the laughs.

[Cain]

Applied to join...just waiting for someone there to OK it.

As an aside, the evidence Hopsicker gives for the drug angle on Dekkers is pretty solid.  You've got a whole cast of ex Iran-Contra types, previous convictions, unusual cash flows, off the books flights to South America, friends who also have drugs being mysteriously found on their planes and so on.

How it figures into 9/11 is anyone's guess.  It could be coincidence...but it's a hell of a one if so.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Applied to join...just waiting for someone there to OK it.

As an aside, the evidence Hopsicker gives for the drug angle on Dekkers is pretty solid.  You've got a whole cast of ex Iran-Contra types, previous convictions, unusual cash flows, off the books flights to South America, friends who also have drugs being mysteriously found on their planes and so on.

How it figures into 9/11 is anyone's guess.  It could be coincidence...but it's a hell of a one if so.

Perhaps.  Or perhaps Atta's crowd knew the guy was dirty, and used it to pressure Dekkers to take them on as students.

[Cain]

Possible. I'm going to go over the notes I made from Hopsicker's book again.   There was a lot of very juicy, detailed information in there, and it'll refresh my memory too.

[Cain]

OK, this may take some time.  I made a lot more notes than I remember, and whats more, some of this stuff is pretty damn juicy.  I'm going to go have to work in 10 minutes or so, so if I don't post before then, expect a mammoth post of quotes and info in about three hours or so.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

OK, this may take some time.  I made a lot more notes than I remember, and whats more, some of this stuff is pretty damn juicy.  I'm going to go have to work in 10 minutes or so, so if I don't post before then, expect a mammoth post of quotes and info in about three hours or so.

Looking forward to it.

[Cain]

Here's a good one already:

Flight school owner Rudi Dekkers inadvertently released paperwork showing that Atta and sidekick Marwan Al-Shehhi paid $28,000 each for what the chief flight instructor at a nearby flight school, Tom Hamersley of Jones Aviation, explained to us was available at his school—as well as dozens of others—for a fraction of this price.

And

It was a simple question, really. We wanted to know if Dekkers had any local "priors." But it made Sergeant Marty Treanor sigh. Then he started to say something, thought better of it, and sighed again. He said he couldn't tell us if Dekkers had been in any trouble in Venice, because all of his files were gone. "Gone?" "The FBI took all our files, everything. They loaded the files right outside this window," said Treanor, indicating a parking lot outside the station, "into two Ryder trucks, then drove them right onto a C-130 military cargo plane at the Sarasota airport, which took off for Washington with Jeb Bush aboard."

An aviation executive in Venice who'd recently flown into the Key West Airport filled us in on its colorful history. "For a long time down in Key West, the Sheriff's Department was under orders to keep all the dope sniffing dogs out of the airport," he said. "At one time the Sheriff would even send patrol cars to escort the dope going up the road to Miami. At least they aren't doing that any more. "But after the World Trade Center attack, it was only 4 hours before the FBI showed up at Big Pine Key. There were a bunch of Arabs on Little Pine Key," this executive said. "They were gone three hours before the FBI got there."

We get an inkling of how much strange activity goes on at the Charlotte County Airport when the Sheriff told us, a little sheepishly, that 23 helicopters have been stolen there in the last several years... Stolen from the Sheriff's Department. Later, wags at the airport told us that the helicopters hadn't really been stolen... They'd just been "released on their own recognizance."

But the real history of Atta as a student pilot at U.S. flight schools is an altogether more elaborate tale than that. For example, Atta's first flight school in the U.S. has never been named. It's identity remains a mystery. We're not sure why, but it does. After that he attended Huffman Aviation in Venice. Jones Aviation in Sarasota was next. Then Huffman Aviation again. After leaving Huffman for the second time, Atta and Marwan trained during January and February of 2001 at Professional Aviation at the Charlotte County Airport. When that school went suddenly and mysteriously bankrupt at the end of February 2001, Atta and Marwan returned to Huffman Aviation... for the third time.

Jamie Hill's partner in the company strongly suspected of having been a conduit for the disappearance of 23 helicopters from the County Sheriff's Air Wing turns out to be another notorious covert operative with a significant presence at the Charlotte County Airport. Dietrich Reinhardt's name, which could have been lifted straight out of transcripts of the Iran-Contra Hearings, had also been linked with Barry Seal's infamous Mena, Arkansas cocaine smuggling. We discovered that one of Reinhardt's companies active at the Charlotte County Airport, Caribe Air, had been doing business with Rudi Dekkers' Huffman Aviation. Caribe Air was an especially notorious CIA proprietary whose past included "blemishes" like having all its aircraft seized at Mena, Arkansas after government prosecutors accused the company of using its planes to transport cocaine worth billions of dollars into the U.S.

Reinhardt's St. Lucia flew a C-130 military cargo plane often seen delivering arms to a remote airstrip in Zaire in 1986. The New York Times reported the weapons were on their way to Angolan rebels. But Reinhardt denied any involvement in arms shipments to Angola, saying the cargo was relief goods for Zaire. Zaire is one of the African countries said to have been involved in blood diamonds, supposedly a bin Laden organization specialty.

Anne Greaves lifelong passion for aviation led her into pursuing her dream of learning to fly at Huffman Aviation. She was there at the same time as Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi were there. "When I checked with my instructor on one occasion about their (strange) habits," she told 4 Corners, "I was informed that the men we now know as Mohamed Atta and Al-Shehhi actually had royal connections with a Saudi House and that Al-Shehhi was his bodyguard."

On the Saturday following the Tuesday attack, the Los Angeles Times broke the story in a long article on their front page. "A defense official said two of the hijackers were former Saudi fighter pilots," reported the paper, "who had studied in exchange programs at the Defense Language School at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas and the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama." The story went wide the next day, Sunday, Sept 15th. Newsweek, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald all reported as many as seven of the terrorist hijackers in the Sept. 11th attacks received training at secure U.S. military installations. "Two of 19 suspects named by the FBI, Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmed Alghamdi, have the same names as men listed at a housing facility for foreign military trainees at Pensacola. Two others, Hamza Alghamdi and Ahmed Alnami, have names similar to individuals listed in public records as using the same address inside the base," the Washington Post reported. "In addition, a man named Saeed Alghamdi graduated from the Defense Language Institute at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, while men with the same names as two other hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari, appear as graduates of the U.S. International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, and the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, respectively," the Post said. According to the Post, seven of the suspected hijackers had been in the U.S. receiving military training. Newsweek said U.S. military officials gave the FBI information suggesting that five of the alleged hijackers received training in the 1990s at secure U.S. military installations. Three of them listed their address on driver licenses and car registrations as an address on the base of the Pensacola Naval Air Station which houses foreign-military flight trainees. "Pentagon spokesman, Col. Ken McClellan, said a man named Mohamed Atta had once attended the International Officer's School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala," reported USA Today.

But there's something big and important to understanding 9/11 here. Because there had been a "bus bomber Mohamed Atta," the name "Mohamed Atta" was on a special CIA-FBI federal watch list, which should have red-flagged the terrorist ringleader to authorities on numerous occasions. In fact, an NBC report the day after the attack attributed the FBI's quick zeroing in on Atta to the simple fact that they already knew who he was. They'd seen his name before, linked, said NBC's Kerry Sanders, to the bus bombing in Israel. "Agents were in Hollywood, Florida serving search warrants inside an apartment complex," Sanders reported. "They left with several boxes of evidence. The attention was really focusing on one person, Mohamed Atta, 33 years old, somebody who they know, because they've seen his name before, linked to a bombing of a bus in Israel in 1986." "Atta, 33, who was born in the United Arab Emirates, was listed as a suspect in a bus bombing in Israel in 1986. That landed him on a CIA-FBI-Immigration & Naturalization Service watch list," reported NBC's Sanders.

Chuck Clapper, owner of an air charter company in Lantana, Florida, told the Globe that several Florida flying schools had contracts with Saudi Arabian Airlines that enabled them to bypass much of the red tape involved in obtaining visas for their students. Saudi Arabia had authority to "pass through" anyone they wanted. They didn't even need to be Saudi. They just needed "Saudi affiliations."

Later a knowledgeable aviation source told us that the Lear jet in question had come from a Naples, Florida charter service. "Wally Hilliard owns the only charter Lear service in southwest Florida," said the source. "If a Lear was flying that day, it would have been his." Hilliard of course is the financier who purchased Huffman Aviation for Rudi Dekkers, and it had been the terrorist's American beachhead. So not only had Hilliard financed the operation which trained Mohamed Atta and assorted other members of his terrorist cadre to fly, but he apparently also owned a Lear jet used to extricate Saudis from the Raytheon facility in Tampa.

The French newspaper Le Monde reported that Osama bin Laden's Geneva, Switzerland-based brother Yeslam had also been sending student pilots to Venice for training. Yeslam bin Laden is one of three half brothers of Osama bin laden who head the Saudi Bin Laden Group, the parent company of the family's far-flung business ventures, which include construction, telecommunications and finance. He has been called a key figure in the family's business empire.

As a result of what Le Monde called "a still unexplained coincidence," the pilots of Yeslam bin Laden's company trained at Huffman Aviation in Florida, the paper stated.

One of the "stupid things" Hilliard is referring to was the seizure of a Lear jet he owned, on the tarmac of Orlando Executive airport in early July of 2000. DEA agents brandishing automatic weapons surrounded the plane before discovering 43 pounds of heroin onboard.

Wally Hilliard and Rudi Dekkers weren't even in the flight school business, we slowly discovered. These were not two guys forming a partnership to make a profit selling goods or services. The Dekkers-Hilliard partnership lost money from the first day it began. There was no hint it mattered to either man.

"When they bought Huffman, they were already losing $40,000 a month on the Naples school," said Stuart Burchill, a former Hilliard accountant. "It was ridiculous. No one could understand why they'd want to double the pain."

The first person we asked about Dekkers when we first arrived in Florida was a man who had just recently been pressed back into service, out of nearby McDill Air Force Base in Tampa, because his experience in the early '80s running "Northern Alliance guys" in Afghanistan was deemed useful. He had also been a "troubleshooter" during the Presidency of Ronald Reagan. What he told us was chilling. "Rudi's greedy, and when you're greedy you can be used for something," he muttered darkly. He would offer nothing further.

There were some odd "anomalies" in the circumstances surrounding the purchase of Huffman Aviation that occasioned comment out at the Venice Airport. When Hilliard and Dekkers arrived brandishing a big roll and proceeding in short order to purchase the flight school, they paid such an inflated price for the business that it appeared to local aviation observers that money was no object. There was talk. Rumors flew. "They made the deal overnight," explained Coy Jacobs, who owns Mooney Aviation, a sales and maintenance facility right next door to Huffman Aviation. "They just blew into town. They did no due diligence to the best of my knowledge. That's a cardinal no-no. I mean, you don't just come in and buy a business like that overnight."

A Naples aviation observer, Rob Tillman, confirmed Dekkers record of illegality there. "They got busted by the FAA, crashed some airplanes, violated air space enough to get grounded, chartered airplanes with no license... you name it."

Rudi Dekkers had an erratic sense of cash management that often led to speculation among aviation observers. He went from dead broke to flashing a Big Roll in the blink of an eye. "Rudi would write a lot of bad checks, disappear for a while, and come back with lots of cash," an airport observer recalled.

"I spent 5 years working at an avionics shop in Naples," one aviation mechanic told us. "There were a lot of things about the guy that just did not add up. He's claimed to me, for instance, that he's a New York cop. He's even got a plaque on his wall, with words to that effect. "A New York cop? You tell me: How does a Dutch con artist get a plaque claiming he's an officer with the New York Police Department?"

"Arne Kruithof sat across from my desk one day and told me he had trained at a U.S. military installation in southeast Missouri," said Jacob. "I'm from Missouri, and there aren't any military bases there training foreign nationals that I know of. But the thing I kept wondering was," 'What's a Dutch national doing training at a secure U.S. military facility?'"

When, less than a month before the September 11th tragedy, Rudi Dekkers finally paid Huffman Aviation's rent, even that was considered newsworthy. "Huffman pays rent," the paper headlined. It must have been good for a chuckle. But back when the Gondolier was highlighting Rudi Dekkers' shortfalls, it wasn't of interest, except locally. No one thought to question Dekkers about how he came to be suddenly flush with cash. He wasn't notorious, yet. But when we first learned the "news"—months after 9/11—that he had finally managed to pay Huffman Aviation's rent on time, our blood went cold. Because where did he come up with the money? If something changed in Rudi Dekkers financial condition just three weeks before the attack, we wanted to see him hauled in for questioning. Another question was why Dekkers, whose "clients" were forking over more than double the going rate for flight training, had always been late paying his rent.

"There was a warrant for Rudi's arrest for smuggling computer chips. Both the DEA and U.S. Customs were interested in him back in '93 and '94," he said.

"He has a warrant in Holland for smuggling-in chips," Vellada said. "He's not allowed back in Holland. He got busted for smuggling chips and money fraud. I remember when DEA, Customs, everyone was after him over here." To have aroused the interest of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Dekkers must have been involved with smuggling something besides computer chips... "Why was the DEA interested in Rudi? Nobody ever knew. That was everyone's big question," Villada replied. "All I know is the DEA was here, US Customs, Holland officials... That's when I learned he had had to flee Holland."

"I was told that Rudi doesn't check out clear," he said. "When I asked about Dekkers, I was told, 'He's bigger than national. He's transnational.' And I was warned to stay away from him." Something had now changed, apparently, because Burge was talking about Dekkers. "In the drive to indict Rudi," he told us, smiling, "virtually every branch of the U.S. government lent a helping hand. Everybody offered to help in any way they could. The INS was especially helpful."

They chose, as partner, a man named Rick Boehlke, who owned an air carrier called Harbor Air, in Gig Harbor, Washington. Boehlke was also, just then, a participant in Portland, OR., in the $340 million looting of pension funds of mostly Mob-led unions, like the Laborers Union. We wondered: who had the temerity to steal pension money from Mob-led unions? Then we learned newspapers were calling the looting "Mob-led", too. What were the odds that Rudi Dekkers and Wally Hilliard would go looking for a business partner and come up with a guy with Mob ties who's helping pull off a spectacular $300 million heist?

"When people operate suspiciously at airports around here, people start investigating," he told us. "I mean law enforcement hovers around most airports in the Southeast United States. They hover around airports around here, obviously. And they were told to stay away from that operation."

[Cain]

Although Rudi Dekkers was listed as the airline's CEO, he wasn't even supposed to be an officer, we learned. Once again, his Dutch Uncle, "Uncle Sugar," was protecting him. "Rudi is not a U.S. national, I don't believe he's a U.S. citizen," explained Coy Jacob. "And historically the FAA is pretty picky about who they allow to even own U.S. registered airplanes. Non-US citizens cannot register an airplane in the United States, let alone own an airline."

Rick Boehlke's friend Jeff Grayson had made a $6 million investment with Title Loans of America, a Georgia company that lends to individuals with low credit ratings at extremely high interest rates. The loans are secured by the titles to the borrowers' cars. Some call it legalized loan sharking, which is pretty accurate, because Georgia Title is owned by Alvin Malnik, the man labeled in print as "Meyer Lansky's heir" so often he should put it on his business cards. The New Jersey Casino Control Commission found Malnik to be a "person of unsuitable character" to have any role in the industry. Malnik was so intimately associated with organized crime figures that they denied licenses to two businessmen who had done deals with him. But it wasn't Malnik's gangster ties that made our jaw drop... It was his connection with the Saudi Royal Family. Alvin Malnik, who admits only to being a Jewish lawyer from Miami, has extremely close ties—family ties actually—to a leading prince of the Saudi royal family, King Fahd's brother, Prince Turki Al-Faisal. Malnik's son, Mark, converted to Islam, changed his name to Shareef, and married the daughter of Sheik Al-Fazzi, whose other daughter is married to Prince Turki. "The Saudi Prince not only blessed the marriage, but regularly works with the US organized crime associates," read one account. "The Saudi King would frequently send his private 747 to Florida to pick up Malnik and his associates, so they could conduct business on the plane away from prying eyes."

Well, the airline did have one other accomplishment: it was publicly endorsed by than then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

the opulent three-story red brick building is a monument to the rivers of money which have flowed through the financial empire of Jackson Stephens, whose name has been linked with every major American scandal of the past generation: from BCCI to Contra cocaine through Mena, Arkansas. Today the stately building still houses Stephen's former law firm, local political powerhouse Boone Boone & Boone, a firm which worked so closely with client Stephens that at least one of his executives was permanently housed there. Some credit the Boone law firm with running the town of Venice still. "I don't think you could safely say that they (Boone & Boone) run everything in town," one local journalist told us. "But you could safely say they run almost everything. They exert a strong influence here, including out at the airport."

He was named in the BCCI criminal bank scandal, figured somehow in the story of the death of Vince Foster, was linked to the stolen Promis software scandal of the Justice Dept., as well as the 1996 campaign finance scandal involving allegations of Red Chinese money. Most notably, Jackson Stephens was a figure in the huge scandal—involving gun-running and cocaine smuggling at Mena, Arkansas during the 1980's—that was behind both the Iran-Contra and Whitewater Scandals

The founder of Stephens' law firm in Venice, Dan Boone, we discovered, was no slouch in the college roommate department. Back when both were Florida Gators his roommate had been former Florida Governor Lawton Chiles. Bringing things full circle, Lawton Chiles, although a Democrat, had given Republican Katherine Harris her start in politics, naming her to the Board of the Ringling Art Museum in Sarasota. Small world. Stephens was the chief domestic campaign contributor to both George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton, in, of course, different campaigns.

Financier Hilliard ran money-losing flight schools. Now we discovered he leased jets to drug smugglers too. Major drug smugglers. A story in the August 2, 2000 Orlando Sentinel called the bust "the largest find of its kind in the southeastern United States in recent years."

The flight originated in Venezuela and then made a stop in Fort Lauderdale before landing in Orlando, with New York as its final destination, the paper reported. Passengers Edgar Valles and Neyra Rivas, both of Caracas, Venezuela, were arrested. Most of the heroin was found hidden in the soles of tennis shoes stashed in their luggage. Eventually five people in Orlando were convicted in connection with the seizure, including the two Venezuelans.

Wally Hilliard got his Learjet from the same people who supplied the Learjet—two decades earlier—flown by famous drug smuggler and CIA agent Barry Seal. Federal records showed Hilliard got his Learjet from World Jet, Inc., owned by the drug smuggling Whittington brothers, Don and Bill, of Fort Lauderdale, FL, who in their heyday in the early 1980s had been historic figures in the rise of the trade, commanding fleets of fishing trawlers, sailboats, power boats, and jets.

"They were told to stay away from that (Dekkers) operation." "Who was told?" we asked. "The Sarasota County Drug Interdiction people," came the response. "They were told that they had a green light to operate and that they were to stay away from them, that they were some type of... alluded to the fact that they may have some type of government protection. And the local Venice Police Department were also warned to leave them alone."

"I know more about Wally Hilliard than I ever want to know, said a former Huffman Aviation executive. "Why do you think the U.S. military didn't close the passes into Pakistan during the Tora Bora bombing? This all goes far deeper than you think."

Dekkers never actually owned the flight school, we discovered. It was a ruse, a paper agreement which was never executed, or meant to be. Wally Hilliard owned Huffman Aviation. He was the sole owner, and had been all along.

"Wally's lost $40 million in the last 3 years, which is easy to do if you are spending $14 million on jets in one year as he did," explained jet manager Villada. How does a retired insurance executive from Green Bay, WI "lose" $40 million? Whose money was Hilliard throwing around? "I managed all of his jets. And I said to him, 'You have people flying all over the world and you don't know where they are, and where they are going. This is crazy.' Wally's planes went all over the free world, flying wildly," Villada said. "How could you have a fleet of jets and not even know what they're doing?' But the pilots' attitude was always: 'I'm not telling you where I've been and I'm not telling you where I'm going.'"

Hilliard flirted with disaster in ways more staid executives avoided. He was recently subpoenaed by a Federal Court in Denver, for example, in a case in which he bought a plane from a man with connections to a Colombian drug cartel.

Hilliard was friends with Bill Clinton. He kept a picture taken of himself with Clinton prominently displayed in his $3 million Naples, FL home.

"Wally was manipulated by somebody with a lot of power," said Mark Shubin. "He was blackmailed. Rudi was the one person who knew what was going on."

Then we recognized the name of another business partner of Shubin's, a man who gained a bit of fame during the Savings and Loan Scandal of a decade ago. Mark Shubin was in business with the notorious Ken Good. Kenneth Good was a big part of the Silverado Savings and Loan collapse. He was in business with Neil Bush. In fact, Ken Good had been so clearly a Bush family retainer that it strained credulity to think that Shubin—and Wally Hilliard—now were not similarly connected.

The Houston Post's Peter Brewton, who broke the CIA-Mob connection to the Savings and Loan Scandal, said Neil Bush's Silverado partners "all had connections to individuals or S&L's in Texas that did business with organized crime figures or CIA operatives. Good is one Silverado borrower who got a large loan at a Texas S&L connected to (Herman) Beebe, allegedly connected to the underworld." Herman Beebe was an intimate, as they say, of New Orleans "Mafia Kingfish," Carlos Marcello. So Ken Good hung with both the Bushes and the Mob.

One of Hilliard's ventures, for example, is called Oryx, LLC. An "Oryx" is a kind of African gazelle, we learned. And a British mining company in Africa named Oryx was accused by the BBC of having links to Al Qaeda and trading blood diamonds.

Here's a newsflash we don't know what to do with: Atta listened to the Beastie boys, nonstop.

What was most revealing about Dekkers' crash was that before he took off for what was to be a showdown with Hilliard, he had been seriously worried about having an in-flight "mishap." Although the flight from the Naples-Fort Myers area to Venice takes barely half an hour, Dekkers prevailed on another helicopter pilot headed in the same direction, Tony Douangdara, to fly alongside him in an effort, as he explained it, unconvincingly, "to stave off boredom." Either Dekkers was psychic, or he was afraid someone might want him dead. Something clearly was going very wrong for Rudi Dekkers even before his chopper began experiencing difficulties.

When we called a man we know who used to work at something like the CIA, to ask him what could have been in that chest that was so heavy, his reply was swift and immediate, and seemed to put everything going on in Florida in its proper perspective... "Gold," he said firmly. "There was gold in that chest." Who deals in heroin? Who deals in gold? Islamic fundmentalists? Or Islamic spooks.

Our suspicions grew when we discovered one reason Britannia was able to move so smoothly from Venice to Lynchburg. Huffman Aviation's shadowy financier, Wally Hilliard, loaned Jerry Falwell a million bucks which the televangelist has shown no indication of repaying.

As we learned more about Hilliard, a picture of the shadowy financier began to slowly fall into place. We discovered, for example, that the health insurance company he founded had a highly unusual corporate motto: "Hate Sin, Fight Communism, and Back the Pack!"

After President Bush's swearing-in in January 2000, the State Department announced the change of policy, instructing the U.S. Ambassador to Columbia, Anne Hamilton to "stop its opium eradication activities in favor of eliminating coca."

Before becoming a terrorist ringleader, Atta enjoyed the patronage of a government initiative known as the "Congress-Bundestag Program," overseen by the U.S. State Department and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the German equivalent of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The jointly-funded U.S.-German government effort picked up the tab for Atta on sojourns in Cairo, Istanbul, and Aleppo in Syria during the years 1994 and 1995, as well as employing him as a "tutor" and "seminar participant" during 1996 and 1997.

"The Taliban were launching an effort to take over the worldwide heroin trade," stated this grizzled veteran of recent rescue missions behind enemy lines matter-of-factly. "They were going to use that as a basis to move into cocaine distribution as well. They were planning on supplanting the Cali Cartel."

Valles-Diaz was no ordinary South American drug dealer, Diego Levine told Shubin. He reportedly had close ties to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and a serious involvement in geopolitical intrigue in, of all places, Central Asia.

During most of the year 2000, Levine told authorities, a Russian Mobster named Felix Igor Borisovich Rabaev, living in the Russian enclave in Brighton Beach in New York City was there to meet Venezuelan drug trafficker Edgar Valles-Diaz on his arrival.

"Igor Rabaev is a name to be conjured with in certain circles," a former U.S. covert operative in Central Asia told us. Rabaev was a member of one of the three largest Russian Mob families in the U.S., who flitted in and out of Central Asia at will, using the Uzbek capital of Tashkent as a transshipment point for heroin from Afghanistan wending its way to Russia and the West. "He's from Uzbekistan, and escaped from Russia to Israel by saying he was Jewish, back when it was the only way you could get out. But he's not Jewish. He's Muslim, and he's got close ties with radical Muslim circles in the 'Stans' who serve as a conduit for heroin coming out of Afghanistan." "Non-Jewish Russian mobsters often fraudulently claimed Jewish ancestry in order to gain easier movement in and out of Israel, where the Russian Mafia has established a large operating base," said the source. "It was a real scam by Russian organized crime; it was easier for lots of these people to say they were Jewish to get into Israel, and then from Israel to become instant citizens, get Israeli passports, and then into the U.S."

During the same period Wolfgang Bohringer was hanging out with Mohamed Atta, we learned, he had been the personal pilot for a major Eastern European Mafia figure named Victor Kozeny, known both as the "Pirate of Prague."

With his ill-gotten gains, Kozeny tried to buy off top officials in the former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan to gain control of that country's state-owned oil company. One man already convicted in the scheme, Hans Bodmer, belonged to a network of Russian oligarchs, one of whom, Pyotr Aven, has been accused by a Russian corruption task force of being engaged in drug trafficking. Kozeny's partners in the Azeri scheme included a managing director of Hank Greenberg's American Insurance Group (AIG). Greenberg was forced to step down amid the Eliot Spitzer probe, a scandal, it is rumored, which involved a major Bush family and associates' international money-laundering operation that has spanned more than a generation and has been used to illegally fund US elections since the Nixon era.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Wow! Took a while to read but I'm glad I did. Cheers for that, Cain. The big question for me is, since 911 and operation-paranoid as a motherfucker came in has anything really changed regarding the whole - Saudis can do whatever the fuck they want - situation.

Strikes me that the whole - pissing off civilians at airports - bullshit is even more pointless than I'd ever imagined

[Cain]

Hard to say.  By their nature, such operations tend to be covertly arranged.  We do have confirmation from a State Department official that the US consulate in Jeddah was used to issue visas to Saudi intelligence operatives for training in the USA.  Interesting, given how many of the hijackers gained their visas from said Jeddah consulate.

There are also other interesting things in regard to this book, which I decided not to quote, in order to focus on Rudi Dekkers and the drug connection angle.  For instance, Mohammed Atta's "German friends".  Many who knew Atta in Florida saw him hanging around with a bunch of white Germans, who he called "brother" and was on very friendly terms with.  The identity of these Germans has never been discovered.  My thoughts are possibly in the direction of the BND - German intelligence took the lead on running operations in the Balkans with the KLA.  The KLA were linked to Al-Qaeda, but also, more importantly, were linked to drug smuggling.

Coincidence?  Maybe.

Also, the descriptions of Atta are quite at odds with that of an Islamic extremist.  He was by all accounts a lecherous coke-head with a bad temper.  Also a kitten killer, according to Amanda Keller, his ex-girlfriend.  And, most damningly, listened to the Beastie Boys.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Somewhere (can't remember where) I was give the impression that the jihadi vest models were given some kind of free pass to immerse themselves in western debauchery to their hearts content, given that blowing themselves up would earn them enough allah-credits to wipe the slate clean or some bullshit like that.

Let me know if this is complete bullshit (as it well might be)

[Cain]

Well, there is the Islamic concept of Taqiyya, which allows you to lie about your faith and commit blasphemous acts...but that's a Shiite concept, and almost entirely alien to Sunni Islam.

The consensus Sunni view is that you can lie if under the threat of death, and drink wine and eat pork, but Allah isn't going to be very impressed with you.

Most scholars do not accept that Al-Qaeda engages in taqqiya at all...really, the only people who do are the various loons who make up the ranks of the "Counterjihadist" movement, whose credentials on Islam are suspect at best.

[Junkenstein]

Thanks again Cain, That's another book to add to the list.

Just highlights again that the conspiracy theories you know about are quite likely to be bullshit and there's probably something much more sinister occurring.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I wouldn't necessarily say "sinister" Looks more like it's about filthy lucre. Colour me surprised