In Azerbaijan, one finds a large cast of participants all linked through supporting roles in the Iran-Contra Scandal and its cover-up. These individuals are:
Adnan Khashoggi, whose Azerbaijan banks played a big part in the formation of terrorist camps and in the opening of laboratories for developing chemical and bacteriological weapons in Nagornyy Karabakh....
Richard Secord, a former U.S. Air Force major general who been helping to recruit and train the Azerbaijani army as well as regional secret services;
Richard Armitage, acting as a consultant to Halliburton and Unocal at the time, and President of the US-Azerbaijani Chamber of Commerce;
Farhad Azima, arms merchant with Iranian background, member of US-Azerbaijani Chamber of Commerce, assisted Richard Secord in recruiting and training mujahedin mercenaries, owns the Azerbaijan Airlines, and has a twenty-year relationship with the Bush family enterprise;
Khalid bin Mahfouz, owner, with the bin Laden family and members of the Saudi royal family of the Saudi companies Delta Oil and Nimir Oil. Both are partners with Unocal in Azerbaijan.
Dick Cheney, as CEO of Halliburton, lobbyist for the Azerbaijan International Operating Company, on US-Azerbaijani Chamber of Commerce;
David Kimche, Israeli Mossad agent who brought Israeli agents into Azerbaijan at the request of Secord, and worked with Secord and the regional secret service organizations.The essence of the Azerbaijan operation was an effort by former Iran-Contra conspirators to illegally support (support was made illegal by the U.S. Congress) the despotic government of Azerbaijan in its war against Russian backed Armenia. In doing so, they supposedly sought to protect U.S. and Saudi oil interests in western access to the Caspian Oil basin, the four largest oil fields in the region. They did so by illegally recruiting Afghan mujahedin mercenaries to fight for Azerbaijan (against Russian backed Armenians), using Mega Oil as the financial cover. This approach appears to be part of the CIA handbook. This same approach of using an oil company as cover for covert operations was used in the 1970s, with right wing CIA trained death squads in South America masquerading as Bridas employees. This is the same Bridas that competed for the Afghan pipeline rights.
It is of small historic note that of the mercenaries procured by Secord, one of them was actually Osama Bin laden. Secord also brought the Mossad into Azerbaijan, which confirms reports that Israelis fought side-by-side with mujahedin. In the news report of David Kimche’s involvement, is an important observation that not only are the Mossad in Azerbaijan, but that the secret service organizations of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan were all working in unison with the Mossad and Richard Secord.
When trying to understand why such a high powered team as the Iran-Contra/October Surprise team – is reconstructed in a little country like Azerbaijan, it becomes clear that Azerbaijan is merely a base of operations for the broader Central Asian operation initiated by Bush in 1991. Secord’s employer in this operation – President Heydar Aliyev – was no novice in the realm of covert operations, being a former top KGB official. The operations were covert because American support was illegal according to Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act.
The fact that Congress had outlawed support to Azerbaijan would not have mattered to Secord. At the heart of the Iran-Contra controversy was a Congressional ban on aid to the Contras strikingly similar to Section 907, and Secord’s primary role in that first scandal was as the head of a private corporation which worked at the behest of Oliver North for covert and illegal weapons procurement for the Nicaraguan Contras. Secord appears to have been violating congressional intent in Azerbaijan exactly as he had for the Contras. It should not be assumed that he was just once again demonstrating patriotic fervor. Many forget that Secord’s involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair was motivated to a large degree by personal profit. Secord was reportedly investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice for his involvement in Azerbaijan, but there has been no mention of this report in the U.S. press, and the investigation appears to have been buried.
The collapse of the Azerbaijan regime was prevented by this tactic long enough so that when 911 occurred, the Bush administration was able to remove the law that prevented the U.S. from giving aid to despotic governments.
“The USACC Advisory Board consisted of “only” these seven men: Dr. Henry Kissinger, James A Baker III, Lloyd Bentsen, Zibigniew Brzezinski, Dick Cheney, Brent Scowcroft, John Sununu.
It is noted here that the current Vice President’s daughter, Elizabeth Cheney-Perry, has been named Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs for regional economic issues; she left Armitage Associates for the job. The USACC Vice-Chairman of the Board is James A. Baker IV (Baker Botts, L.L.P.); Chairman Emeritus is T. Don Stacy (VP, Amoco); with Richard Armitage as Board President, until he resigned to become Colin Powell’s Deputy, which rounds out the US elite running the USACC.
The remaining Board of Directors are a who’s who of the oil and gas multinational corporate interests of the west and specifically the United States. On the Board of Trustees or USACC the latter interests hold sway again with three primary exceptions: Senator Sam Brownback (`R-KS`) and Joseph R. Pitts (`R-PA`) (whose efforts formed the 1996 legislative backbone of the House/Senate Silk Road Strategy for Afghanistan, [Unocal, Texaco] et al) and Richard Perle (US Defense Policy Board).
The Legal Counsel for USACC is Ted Jones of the Texas Law firm Baker Botts L.L.P. (James A Baker III & IV’s law firm.); Treasurer is Karl Mattison (VP, Riggs Bank, NA). It was the James A. Baker III Institute of Rice University which outlined the Cheney Strategic Energy Initiative which later became the Administration’s Strategic Energy National Security Policy.
(Clearly Dick Cheney wouldn’t be interested in giving Congress the names of who he consulted on the Energy Initiative as they would amount to the remainder of the Board of Directors and Board of Trustees of USACC.)” [U.S. political objectives in the Middle East Will Fail, Creating a New Cold War with China and Russia; Target is Iran not Iraq., by Craig B Hulet]
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