Behind the Terror Network.

Our enemy in the war on terrorism is far from an organic outgrowth of radical Islam. In fact, American aid has played a tragic role in strengthening the terrorists.

The global "war on terrorism" that began with the bombing of Kabul on October 7th will be a conflict like no other in American history. That war, which was sparked by the "Black Tuesday" terrorist attack upon our nation, may expand to include combat in scores of countries around the globe. But whatever may happen on distant battlefields, the front line is the American homeland.

Amid the horror that enveloped our nation on Black Tuesday, two questions were foremost in the minds of most Americans: How did it happen? Can it happen again? Coupled with the anger and the anguish was a chilling sense of violation as we realized that our nation -- once protected by two oceans and the world's most formidable military -- has become honeycombed with networks of foreign terrorists who are determined to kill as many Americans, and inflict as much damage upon our economy and political system, as they can. On Black Tuesday, Americans came to understand what the citizens of too many nations have learned at tragic cost: The primary target of terrorism is the sense of security and order upon which a free society depends.

"America is full of fear from its north to its south," exulted terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden in a televised speech acknowledging his responsibility for the September 11th attack. As bombs and missiles rained down on Afghanistan, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials warned that Americans should expect retaliation. "There will be more strikes by terrorists against U.S. interests," one official told Reuters news service shortly after U.S. military action began. "There are lots of potential threats out there and there is little doubt that they are going to do something. They have been killing Americans for a number of years and were going to continue doing it whether we did this or not.... Now that this has happened they can say 'OK, the next thing in our playbook let's go to it now'...."

Bin Laden and Afghanistan's Taliban regime are not the only potential adversaries in the global "war on terrorism." In his September 20th address to the nation, President Bush described our enemy as "a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them." The president promised that "we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime."

In a September 14th Washington Post op-ed column, General Wesley Clark (ret.), who was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, wrote that we "must systematically target and destroy the complex, interlocking network of international terrorism.... [T]his will be arduous, detailed and often covert work to track, detain or otherwise engage and 'take down' our adversaries, rolling them up cell by cell and headquarters by headquarters."

As we shall show, General Clark knows whereof he speaks, since he is on familiar terms with some of bin Laden's most valuable allies in the Balkans. And this illustrates a little-understood dimension of our present predicament. The "complex, interlocking network of international terrorism" against which we have gone to war was built with the help -- including military support -- of Washington. And the safe havens for bin Laden's network include Bosnia and Kosovo, which are under the control of the United Nations.

Creating an Enemy

Bin Laden is the son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian construction magnate. In fact, the September 14, 1998. San Antonio Express-News reported that the "bin Laden Construction Group" was given a $150 million contract to build a housing compound for American servicemen stationed in Saudi Arabia. The new compound replaced the Khobar Towers dorm complex, where 19 Americans were killed and 345 wounded in a 1996 terrorist bombing. That terrorist attack is believed to have been the work of Osama bin Laden.

Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, bin Laden helped recruit and train Mujahideen (holy warriors) to fight the Soviet Army's occupation troops. Writing in the May 1996 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, intelligence analyst Mary Anne Weaver points out that during bin Laden's tour in Afghanistan he allied himself with "Gulbaddin Hekmatyar and Sheik Omar [Abdel-Rahman]...." Bin Laden's associates, who were among the most militantly anti-American figures among the Mujahideen, received funding from the CIA. Hekmatyar, according to Afghan intelligence expert Ken Lohbeck, was also on the payroll of the Soviet KGB. Sheik Omar is serving a prison sentence for his role in the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Sheik Omar was one of the most outspoken advocates of Jihad, or "Holy War," against the West. During the 1980s, the Sheik preached his message freely in Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and in Islamic population centers in Turkey, Germany, England, and even the United States -- despite being on a State Department "watch list" of suspected terrorists. Weaver explains that the CIA and State Department "overlooked his anti-Western message and incitement to holy war because they wanted him to help unify the mujahideen groups." But this does not explain why Sheik Omar's access to the United States continued after the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989.

On May 10, 1990, Sheik Omar was granted a one-year visa from a CIA agent posing as an official at the U.S. Consulate in Khartoum, Sudan, and he arrived in New York in July 1990. In November of the same year Sheik Omar's visa was revoked, and the State Department advised the Immigration and Naturalization Service to be on the lookout for him. Once the INS located the sheik, it granted him a green card, rather than expelling him. As a result, Omar had time to help organize the terrorist cell that carried out the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

While Sheik Omar was plotting to bomb the World Trade Center, bin Laden was helping to raise armies of Mujahideen to fight in the Balkan civil wars. During the 1990s, the Balkans, which separate Europe from the Islamic world, were embroiled in civil wars as Yugoslavia broke up. The Muslim uprisings in Bosnia and Kosovo attracted generous support from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and other Islamic states.

The Western media depicted the Muslim uprising against Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant province, as a desperate war to prevent genocidal "ethnic cleansing." Horrible crimes were committed by all sides in the Yugoslav civil wars, and Muslims, like Serbs and Croats, were found among the innocent victims. But the leaders of the Muslim war efforts in Bosnia and Kosovo were anything but innocent. As foreign affairs analyst Steve Rodan noted in the March 24, 1999 issue of the World Tribune, several terrorist states, most notably Iran, "exploited the fighting to establish a sphere of influence that spans from Greece to the Austrian border."

Iran's power play in the region received a timely assist from the Clinton administration. In April 1994, Bill Clinton approved a plan in which Iranian arms would be sent through Croatia to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, thereby allowing the Muslim government to get around a UN arms embargo. This plan was kept hidden from Congress, the CIA, and the Departments of Defense and State until after the fact.

An investigation by a House Select Subcommittee in 1996 concluded: "The Administration's Iranian green light policy gave Iran an unprecedented foothold in Europe and has recklessly endangered American lives and U.S. strategic interests."

The report described how "Iranian elements infiltrated the Bosnian government and established close ties with the current leadership in Bosnia and the next generation of leaders. Iranian Revolutionary Guards accompanied Iranian weapons into Bosnia and soon were integrated into the Bosnian military structure from top to bottom.... The Iranian intelligence service [VEVAK] ran wild through the area developing intelligence networks, setting up terrorist support systems, recruiting terrorist 'sleeper' agents and agents of influence...."

Following publication of the report, the House urged that the Justice Department prosecute U.S. Ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith and National Security Council Director Anthony Lake. But this request was made of Janet Reno's Justice Department, where so many investigations of Executive Branch misconduct went to die. It is possible that a timely and thorough criminal investigation of the Iran/Bosnia arms pipeline might have saved thousands of American lives.

As Iran built its terrorist base in Bosnia, it brought along its radical Muslim allies, among them bin Laden. One of the "charitable" front groups used to break the arms embargo, notes a 1997 briefing paper compiled by the Senate Republican Policy Committee, was a Sudan-based entity called the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA). The paper points out that TWRA is "connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman ... and Osama bin Laden...." The Bosnian government also quickly extended citizenship to thousands of Mujahideen, many of them trained in Afghan terrorist camps run by bin Laden.

Exporting Terror

Within a remarkably short period of time, Bosnia became a staging area for radical Islamic terrorist groups throughout Europe. In August 1995, the French publication Le Figaro reported that "Islamic fundamentalists from Algeria have set up a security network across Europe with fighters trained in Afghan guerilla camps ... while some have been tested in Bosnia." In February 1996, NATO occupation troops in Bosnia raided a terrorist training camp near the town of Fojnica, arresting 11 men -- including three Iranian instructors -- and seizing explosives disguised as children's toys. NATO released the detainees into the custody of Bosnian authorities, who promptly released them.

In April of the same year, the Lebanon-based HizbAllah ("Party of God") terrorist group convened a meeting for the purpose of planning attacks upon American assets around the world. According to London's Defense and Foreign Affairs and Strategic Policy Journal, present at that meeting was an Egyptian named Ayman al-Zawahiri, who "runs the Islamist terrorist operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina from a special headquarters in Sofia, Bulgaria. His forces are already deployed throughout Bosnia," where they were awaiting word to attack U.S. targets.

While Iran consolidated its hold over the Bosnian military, the United States, under the terms of a UN "peace" settlement, was helping to arm and train that very same military. The "arm and train" mission was carried out by Virginia-based Military Professional Resources, Incorporated (MPRI), a "private" firm that is frequently used to carry out such missions. MPRI's chief contact in the Bosnian military was Brig. General Dzemal Merdan, whose office is adorned with an Iranian flag to which is pinned a button bearing the likeness of the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini.

The "arm and train" program required yearly presidential certification, which Bill Clinton granted despite Iran's growing dominance in Bosnia. The Clinton administration continued the project even after the revelation that Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic received two suitcases stuffed with money from Iranian intelligence agents shortly before the 1996 Bosnian elections.

The "arm and train" program was terminated, without public explanation, in 1999. This decision followed the interception by the CIA of a shipment of explosives from an Algerian "holy warrior" in Bosnia to an Egyptian terrorist group planning to destroy U.S. military installations in Germany. The naturalized Bosnian citizen involved in this plot was described by one U.S. official as "a junior Osama bin Laden."

It was only after Black Tuesday that serious attention was given to Bosnia's role as a terrorist base. Summarizing a classified State Department study that was prepared in late 2000, the October 7th Los Angeles Times reported that "hundreds of foreign Islamic extremists," including "hardcore terrorists, some with ties to Osama bin Laden," have been given protection by elements of the Bosnian government. As a result, "U.S. and European officials are increasingly concerned about the scope and reach of bin Laden networks in the West and the proximity of Bosnia-based terrorists to the heart of Europe."

One of the most valuable assets offered by Bosnia to bin Laden's terrorist operatives is a nearly unlimited supply of passports. Bearers of passports issued by some Middle Eastern or Northern African governments generally receive much greater scrutiny than those who carry Bosnian papers. According to a former State Department official who spoke to the Los Angeles Times, bin Laden's agents "would get boxes of blank passports and just print them up themselves." One of those bogus Bosnian passports was issued to Ahmed Ressam, who was convicted last April of plotting to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport during Y2K celebrations.

Ressam, a veteran of a bin Laden "Jihad Camp" in Afghanistan, was arrested in Port Angeles, Washington, while trying to drive across the border in a car stuffed with more than 100 pounds of high explosives. A few weeks after Ressam's conviction, Bosnian police arrested four more terrorist suspects, including Karim Said Atmani, a former Canadian roommate of Ressam. All four of the suspects "held naturalized Bosnian citizenship," observed the July 27th issue of the military journal Stars & Stripes. Atmani allegedly stole and pawned laptop computers and other valuable merchandise to raise funds for the terrorist network. According to an AP account, Canadian authorities "believe the money raised by the thefts was quickly funneled out of Canada via a sophisticated network" that included another UN-administered colony.

The Kosovo Connection

Like Bosnia, Kosovo is a former province of Yugoslavia that is now administered by a UN occupation force, which includes 4,200 American servicemen. Kosovo's "police" force, the Kosovo Protection Corps, is the renamed Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). The Corps' commander is former KLA Chief of Staff Agim Ceku, who just prior to his appointment to head the UN-created "police" force was under investigation for war crimes against Serbian civilians.

In congressional testimony last December, Ralf Mutschke, assistant director for Interpol's Criminal Intelligence Directorate, noted: "In 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization, indicating that it was financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and loans from Islamic countries and individuals, among them allegedly Osama bin Laden." According to Mutschke, bin Laden also lent to the KLA the services of one of his military commanders, who led "an elite KLA unit during the Kosovo conflict."

While funding for the KLA may have come from bin Laden, as Mutschke pointed out, training for the KLA's leaders came from American and British special forces and intelligence personnel. The March 12, 2000 issue of the London Sunday Times disclosed that "American intelligence agents have admitted they helped to train the Kosovo Liberation Army before NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia," which began in March 1999. CIA officers who were sent to Kosovo supposedly to monitor a cease-fire between the KLA and the Serbian government actually spent their time "developing ties with the KLA and giving American military training manuals and field advice on fighting the Yugoslav army and Serbian police." They also gave KLA commandos such gifts as "satellite telephones and global positioning systems." In fact, several KLA commanders "had the mobile phone number of General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander."

The March 27th issue of The Herald of London revealed: "Both the UK and the US set up clandestine camps inside Albania to teach the KLA effective guerilla tactics.... Despite govemment denials on both sides of the Atlantic, SAS [British Special Forces] and US Delta Force instructors were used to train Kosovar Volunteers in weapons handling, demolition and ambush techniques, and basic organization."

To judge from its background, the KLA would seem an unlikely recipient of such favorable attention from the West. New York Times Balkans correspondent Chris Hedges points out that the group's leadership is composed of "diehard Marxist-Leninists (who were bankrolled in the old days by the Stalinist dictatorship next door in Albania) as well as descendants of the fascist militias raised by the Italians in World War II." The January 21, 1999, issue of the French journal Liberation described the KLA as "totalitarian in its methods," and reported that its leaders have "remained largely true to the Maoist origins of its founders."

In early 1998, U.S. Balkans envoy Robert Gelbard stated that the KLA "is, without any questions, a terrorist group." Nonetheless, the Clinton administration dealt with the organization as the legitimate representative of Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population. During peace negotiations just prior to the NATO attack on Serbia, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright promised the KLA that it could send its officers to the United States "for training in transforming themselves from a guerilla group into a police force or a political entity, much like the African National Congress did in South Africa," according to the February 24, 1999, New York Times.

During NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia, the Clinton administration courted KLA frontman Hashim Thaci, who has since been given a position of prominence in the provincial government. This despite the fact that Thaci, as the June 25, 1999, New York Tunes reported, "carried out assassinations, arrests, and purges" of potential rivals for power. Thaci, whose nom de guerre was "Snake' counted among his victims a journalist named Ali Uka, who had made the mistake of publicly criticizing the KLA. Shortly thereafter, recalled the Times, Uka "was found dead in his apartment in Tirana, his face disfigured by repeated stabbings with a screwdriver and the jagged edge of a broken bottle."

The Narco-Threat

According to Interpol's Ralf Mutschke, the KLA is an example of a "hybrid" criminal group that straddles the border between ideological terrorism and international organized crime. Working with existing underworld groups, such as the Albanian Mafia and various Italian crime syndicates, the KLA has carved a niche for itself in the world of international sex slavery (the abduction of women who are forced into prostitution). But its most profitable venture is the global heroin trade.

After being given control of Kosovo by NATO and the UN in 1999, the KLA turned the former Yugoslav province into a narco-terrorist's paradise. "German Federal Police now say that Kosovar Albanians import 80 percent of Europe's heroin," reported the January/February issue of the left-wing Mother Jones magazine. "The Kosovar traffickers ship heroin exclusively from Asia's Golden Crescent," the region that begins with the Afghan poppy fields controlled by the Taliban regime that hosts Osama bin Laden. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, approximately 20 percent of the heroin seized in the United States in 1999 came from Afghanistan.

In an interview with THE NEW AMERICAN conducted two years ago, former DEA undercover agent Michael Levine insisted that Washington's support for the KLA was "simply insane.... My contacts within the DEA are quite frankly terrified, but there's not much they can say without risking their jobs. These guys have a network that's active on the streets of this country.... They're the worst elements of society that you can imagine, and now, according to my sources in drug enforcement, they're politically protected."

Levine points out that the U.S. armed and funded "the worst elements of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan - drug traffickers, arms smugglers, anti-American terrorists. We later paid the price when the World Trade Center was bombed, and we learned that some of those responsible had been trained by us. Now we're doing the same thing with the KLA."

According to Yossef Bodansky, author of Bin Laden: The Man who Declared War on America (1998), the KLA and its allies in the Albanian Mafia compose a vital part of bin Laden's terrorist apparatus within the United States. "The role of the Albanian Mafia, which is tightly connected to the KLA, is laundering money, providing technology, safe houses, and other support to terrorists within this country," Bodansky explained to THE NEW AMERICAN. "This isn't to say that the Albanians themselves would carry out the actual terrorist operations. But there are undoubtedly 'sleeper' agents within the Albanian networks, and they can rely upon those networks to provide them with support. In any case, a serious investigation of the Albanian mob isn't going to happen, because they're 'our boys' -- they're protected."

The KLA/Albanian Mafia network can also help provide camouflage to "blondehaired, blue-eyed Bosnians and Albanians who are bin Laden operatives," continued Bodansky. "After the last attack we're all looking for Arab suspects, but it's not going to be that easy." Complicating matters further is the fact that the Clinton administration allowed more than 20,000 Albanian refugees to enter the United States. While most of them were hapless refugees, it is reasonable to suspect that the influx included gangsters and potential terrorists as well.

Locking the Gates -- Too Late

While some might suggest that George W.Bush is dealing with a mess created by his predecessor, it must be understood that the Bush administration has continued the same policies that turned the Balkans into a terrorist staging area.

The September 23rd Times of London, summarizing an interview with U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain William Farish, reported, "The Bush administration is planning to strengthen its military presence in the Balkans, which it now sees as a potential buffer against terror threats from the east." This is a case of firmly locking the Gates of Troy behind the Trojan Horse: The terror network is already firmly planted in the Balkans and branching out into Europe and the United States. Keeping our troops in the region simply makes them an inviting target for terrorist reprisals.

Furthermore, the Bush administration has supported a terrorist campaign being waged against Macedonia by the National Liberation Army (NLA), a KLA offshoot. On June 25th, 81 American soldiers and a fleet of Humvees were sent to escort a group of 100 NLA guerillas from a suburb of Skopje, Macedonia's capital city. This gesture reminded some observers of the Reagan administration's decision in 1982 to rescue terrorist leader Yasser Arafat after Israeli forces had him pinned against the sea in Lebanon. At about the same time that U.S. troops were rescuing NLA guerillas, President Bush signed an order forbidding NLA supporters to raise money in the United States. A few weeks later, NATO representatives in Macedonia, with the Bush administration's support, recognized Ali Ahmeti, the Marxist head of the NLA, as a legitimate "negotiating partner." We are thus in the unfortunate position of having helped bin Laden's allies. As the July 22nd Washington Times reported, "Osama bin Laden is the biggest financial support er of the National Liberation Army (NLA) in Macedonia."

What kind of a "war on terrorism" must we fight when we have found ourselves consistently lending material, military, and political support to Osama bin Laden's allies? Or when we aid and abet the terrorist states that sponsor the international terrorist network of which bin Laden is a part (see the article on page 13)?