Putin Launches Eurasian Economic Union

Left Hook – by Dean Henderson

Last Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty with Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko and Kazakhstan President Nurultan Nazarbayev to launch the Eurasian Economic Union. The move comes on the heels of a $400 billion natural gas deal he signed with China and announcements that Russia will use rubles instead of dollars to conduct most international trade.

Western aggression in Ukraine was the last straw for the Russians, who saw this movie before in their own country.  

(Excerpted from Chapter 17: The Caspian Sea Oil Grab: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

The Russian Wall Street Mafia

In the late 1990’s. while the Four Horsemen gorged on Russian and Central Asian oil, Wall Street investment bankers were facilitating the oil grab and ripping off the Russian Treasury.  Salomon Smith Barney’s Philbro Energy oil trading subsidiary set up shop in Moscow.  Goldman Sachs was hired by Yeltsin to lure foreign capital to Russia.  Heading the Russian Goldman Sachs team was Robert Rubin, later Clinton Secretary of Treasury.  CS First Boston took a 20% stake in Lukoil, in partnership with BP Amoco.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar was in charge of Russia’s IMF-mandated economic reforms.  Gaidar knew that the oil and gas sector was the key to Rubin’s plan.  Russian opposition parties cried foul, saying US economists and the IMF were taking control of Russia’s economic and political system.  In 1994 Clinton FBI Director Louis Freeh, flaunting Constitutional restraints, personally opened an FBI office in Moscow. [749]  In 1997 Freeh’s FBI led a half-hearted investigation into a growing conflict of interest scandal involving top-level Harvard economists who had been overseeing Russia’s privatization program in tandem with Rubin and Gaidar.  Russia criticized the FBI probe, calling it a whitewash of the facts.

The controversy centered on the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID), which ran several of Russia’s privatization schemes.  HIID Directors Jonathan Hay and Jeffrey Sachs held investments in multinationals which benefited from an $89 million World Bank loan to Russia which HIID had arranged.  Russia’s top securities regulator Dmitry Vasiliev spotted this and other irregularities, terminating HIID’s contract with the Russian government. [750]  But not before the Wall Street investment bankers had gotten rich at the expense of the Russian Treasury, leading to the Russian economic collapse of 1998.

In 1999 the Bank of New York, which worked with CS First Boston in selling off Russian ownership in Lukoil, was indicted by a New York court for laundering over $10 billion in drug money for Russian mobsters, all of whom held Israeli passports.  According to Dr. Aldo Milinkovich, consultant to numerous New York financial firms, “The Israelis have infiltrated and manipulated the post-Soviet economy in Russia in pretty much the same way they have infiltrated and now manipulate Washington and Wall Street.”[751]

At the center of the scandal was Bill Casey Hardy Boy Itzak “Bruce” Rappaport, who set up a clearing affiliate called Benex which laundered drug money for three wealthy Russian/Israeli bankers.  Mikhail Khodorkovsky was one of the wealthiest people in Russia. He ran Menatep Bank until it was shut down.  In November 2003, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a crackdown on Khodorkovsky, relieving him of his controlling share in Yukos Oil.  Shlomo Mogulevich has been called the “Meyer Lansky of Russia” and was described by US law enforcement as a major arms and drugs trafficker.  Konstantin Kagalovsky was in charge of doling out IMF/World Bank funding to the Yeltsin government. [752]  All three held Israeli citizenship.

Rappaport, the National Bank of Oman crony, began buying Bank of New York shares during the 1980’s. He set up Bank of New York-Intermaritime in Geneva.  The company owns Swiss American Holdings, SA Panama, which the US government identified as key to a 1998 money laundering scandal involving Antigua Prime Minister John Fitzgerald. [753]

Rappaport arranged US financing for purchase of an Antigua melon farm by an Israeli Mossad agent named Sarafati.  The Israeli Defense Ministry funneled arms through Rappaport and Sarafati’s farm to Columbian cocaine kingpin and death squad godfather Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.  Mossad and British commandos trained Medellin Cartel death squads in a CIA program funded by President Reagan’s much-touted Project Democracy.

The Panamanian ship Sea Point that delivered Gacha his weapons was owned by CIA’s hand-picked Panamanian President Guillermo Endara, who was installed after the Noriega putsch.  In 1989 that same ship had been busted off the Mexican coast carrying a massive shipment of cocaine.  Endara and Gacha co-owned the Panamanian drug laundry Banco Interoceanico. [754]

Corruption was the modus operandi during the economic privatization of Russia, the Caucuses and Eastern Europe.

In 1996 Ukraine’s government-owned aircraft factory sold a small fleet of Antonov-32B twin-engine turboprops to Columbia cocaine cartels. [755]  In 1997 Pratt & Whitney, subsidiary of US defense giant United Technologies, was fined $14.8 million for diverting $10 million in US military aid into a slush fund controlled by Israeli Air Force officer Rami Dotan.  Saudi billionaire Sulaiman Olayan owned a big chunk of United Technologies, as did James Baker.  The slush fund was used for CIA/Mossad destabilization efforts in Central Asia . [756]

A 1997 Russian FSB report cited Alfa Group for involvement in drug trafficking.  Top company executives had met with representatives of the Cali Cartel.  The report stated that Alfa worked with a Chechen crime family, which was in charge of the drug smuggling.  An Alfa Group subsidiary is Tyumen Oil, which teamed up with Brown & Root in an oil and gas development project that received ExIm Bank financing. [757]  Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton, where Dick Cheney was Chairman and CEO at the time.  In mid-February 2001 Alfa Group bought Marc Rich Holdings from its namesake fugitive Israeli financier. Rich now lives in Switzerland after he was pardoned by President Clinton as he exited the White House. Rich is an associate of Rappaport.

Halliburton and its subsidiaries received $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans from 1996-2000. [758]  On July 9, 2002, amidst a tidal wave of corporate accounting scandals, the Washington D.C.-based Judicial Watch filed suit in Dallas charging Cheney and other Halliburton directors with making millions selling stock options while cooking the Halliburton books just before the company’s share price plummeted.  The SEC announced its own investigation of Halliburton the same day, but nothing came of it.

Chechen Drug Lords

As Saudi Taliban backer Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz’ Nimir Petroleum dug into Kazakhstan oil fields with Chevron Texaco, the Unocal-led Centgas was offering to pay the Afghan Taliban government $100 million a year to run their pipeline across Afghanistan in a deal orchestrated by Unocal adviser Hamid Karzai- now Afghanistan’s President.  Centgas arranged high-level meetings in Washington between Taliban officials and the State Department via Unocal insider and President Bush Jr. NSA Zalmay M. Khalilzad, now US Ambassador to US-occupied Iraq.  In 2005 Chevron Texaco bought Unocal.

Bush blocked US Secret Service investigations into US-based al-Qaeda terrorist sleeper cells while he continued to negotiate secretly with Taliban officials.  The last meeting was in August 2001 just five weeks before 911.  Bush Administration and Saudi officials offered aid to the Taliban to seal the Four Horsemen deal, telling the Islamists, “You either accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”[759]

In 1997 Zbigniew Brzezinski, graying but not straying from his role as go-between for the international banking houses and their global intelligence networks, wrote The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geopolitical Imperatives.  In his book the BP Amoco board member suggested that the key to global power lies in the control of Eurasia and that the “key to controlling Eurasia is controlling the Central Asian Republics”.  He singled out Uzbekistan as key to controlling Central Asia.

In 1999 a series of explosions rocked the Uzbek capital of Tashkent.  Islamic al-Qaeda-trained militants were to blame.  The rebels, who call themselves the Islamic Party of Turkistan, attempted to assassinate socialist President Islam Karimov.  They attacked the fertile Fergana Valley in an attempt to disrupt harvests and the Uzbek food supply, Pink Plan-style.  Two years earlier Enron had attempted to negotiate a $2 billion deal with the Uzbek state-owned Neftegas with help from the Bush White House. [760]

When that effort and other privatization attempts were rebuffed in 1998 by Tashkent, the Islamist attacks on Uzbekistan were ratcheted up.  After the “carpet of bombs” began raining down on neighboring Afghanistan in October 2001, Uzbekistan, along with neighbors Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, was soon sporting new US military bases.  In 2005 Kyrgyzstan’s President Askar Akayev was deposed in the “Tulip Revolution”.  Within days Donald Rumsfeld was meeting with the new leaders. [761]

The timing of both Brzezinski’s book and Bush Administration threats to the Taliban are instructive since both occurred prior to the 911 attacks, the perfect pretext for the massive Central Asian intervention that Brzezinski, Bush and their Illuminati bosses were advocating.  Dr. Johannes Koeppl, former German Defense Ministry official and adviser to NATO Secretary General Manfred Werner, explained of this rash of “coincidences” in November 2001, “The interests behind the Bush Administration, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now implementing open world dictatorship (which will be established) within the next five years.  They are not fighting against terrorists.  They are fighting against citizens.”

Central Asia came to produce 75% of the world’s opium just as the Four Horsemen and their CIA guard dogs were moving into the region.  While the US issues humiliating certifications to judge countries on their ability to stop drug traffic, Big Oil produces 90% of the chemicals needed to process cocaine and heroin, which CIA surrogates grow, process and distribute.  CIA chemists were the first to produce heroin.

As Ecuadorian Presidential Candidate Manuel Salgado put it, “This world order which professes the cult of opulence and the growing economic power of illegal drugs, doesn’t allow for any frontal attack aimed at destroying narco-trafficking because that business, which moves $400 billion annually, is far too important for the leading nations of world power to eliminate.  The US…punishes those countries which don’t do enough to fight against drugs, whereas their CIA boys have built paradises of corruption throughout the world with the drug profits.”[762]

The Afghan “paradise of corruption” yielded 4,600 metric tons of opium in 1998-1999.  When the Taliban cracked down on opium production poppy fields bloomed to the north where CIA/ISI-sponsored Islamists were fighting in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Chechnya, Dagestan and Kashmir.  Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid says the Saudis paid the moving bill. [763]

The US had harassed socialist India for decades, using Kashmiri fundamentalists based in Pakistan.  It was no coincidence that the proposed Enron pipeline to their Dabhol, India white elephant was to run right through the heart of Kashmir.  Ever since Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov proposed a “strategic triangle” between India, Russia and China as a counterbalance to “US global hegemony” in 1998, US establishment think tanks have been scratching their heads at how to derail the idea.  The Harvard-linked Olin Institute proposed attacking India, the weakest part of the triangle.

Not content with the Polish Solidarist-led grab of Eastern Europe and the partitioning of Soviet Central Asian republics, the CFR/Bilderberger crowd now used mujahadeen surrogates to further squeeze Russia.  In 1994 35,000 Chechen fighters were trained at Amir Muawia camp in Afghanistan’s Khost Province, the camp Osama bin Laden built for the CIA.  In July 1994 Chechen Commander Shamil Basayev graduated from Amir Muawia and was sent to advanced guerrilla tactics camp at Markazi-i-Dawar, Pakistan. There he met with Pakistani ISI officials, who have historically excelled at carrying out the CIA’s dirty laundry. [764]  The other main Chechen rebel Commander was Saudi-born Emir al-Khattab.

The Chechen Islamists took over a big chunk of the Golden Crescent heroin trade, working with Chechen crime families affiliated with the Russian Alfa Group that did business with Halliburton.  They also had ties to the Albanian heroin labs being run by the KLA.  A Russian FSB report stated that the Chechens began buying real estate in Kosovo in 1997, just prior to the US-led partition of Kosovo from Yugoslavia.  Chechen Commander Emir al-Khattab set up guerrilla camps to train KLA Albanian rebels.  The camps were funded by the heroin trade, prostitution rings and counterfeiting.  Recruits were invited by Chechen Commander Shamil Basayev and funded by the House of Saud Muslim Brotherhood Islamic Relief Organization. [765]

On September 20, 2002, after emerging from a White House meeting on Iraq with President Bush, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov dodged all questions regarding another round of US harassment targeting Iraq.  Instead he stated that the al Qaeda-trained Chechen rebels still targeting his country were being given safe-haven by the closest US ally in Central Asia- the government of Georgia.  The Four Horsemen’s strategic Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline was to run right through the Georgian capital Tblisi.

A month later Chechen rebels strapped with explosives entered a Moscow theater, taking hundreds hostage.  The timing was interesting, since the Russians were refusing to go along with Bush’s plans to invade Iraq.  Nearly 200 people died after Russian Special Forces stormed in to overtake the Chechens.  The US news media, fixated on al Qaeda’s every move just months earlier, ignored the link between the Chechens and their bin Laden-led cohorts.  Instead they blamed the Russians.  A week after the incident Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev claimed responsibility for the siege on a rebel website. [766]

Kremlin officials saw Basayev’s comments as a smokescreen to protect Chechnya’s elected leader Aslan Maskhadov, who was on his way to Sweden to take part in a conference on Chechnya.  Basayev was killed in Ingushetia in July 2006.

For all the hoopla over the Caspian Sea oil bonanza and after all the CIA-bred carnage wrought upon the region of Central Asia and the Russian Republic on behalf of the Four Horsemen, the huge deposits of black gold may not materialize.  According to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2003, the two countries which Big Oil had counted on to become the next Saudi Arabia –Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan – have proven oil reserves of only 63 billion and 26 billion barrels, respectively.  Russia itself, torn asunder by Big Oil and their spooks, possessed a mere 22 billion barrels of crude reserves.  It is also possible that BP is lying, using the phony “peak oil” shortage argument to rationalize gauging consumers.

Whatever the case the Four Horsemen, once again by virtue of their unscrupulous behavior, may soon be shut out of the Russian portion of the Far East oil sweepstakes. Since 2005 a now wide awake Russia has been steadily re-nationalizing its energy sector. Look for that trend to accelerate since the Ukraine putsch.

[749] “Legendary FBI Director Sets Up Shop in Moscow”. USA Today. 7-5-94

[750] “Russia Cuts Harvard Links in Flap, Throwing Aid Programs into Disarray”. Steve Liesmen & Robert Keatley. Wall Street Journal. 6-2-97. p.A19

[751] “Israelis Behind Bank of New York Scam”. Martin Mann. The Spotlight. 9-6-99. p.5

[752] Ibid.

[753] “US Fails to Recover Drug Money in Antigua”. Michael Allen. Wall Street Journal. 11-2-98. p.A27

[754] Dope Inc.: The Book that Drove Kissinger Crazy. The Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. Washington, DC. 1992. p.19

[755] “Ukraine Leasing Aircraft to Columbian Drug Traffickers”. Los Angeles Times. 2-19-96

[756] “Pratt & Whitney to Settle Israeli Slush Fund Case”. Missoulian. 5-21-97

[757] Center for Public Integrity website. January 2000.

[758] Ibid

[759] Bin Laden: The Forbidden Truth. Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie. Paris 2001

[760] “Central Asia Unveiled”. Mike Edwards. National Geographic. 2-02

[761] Reaping the Whirlwind: The Taliban Movement in Afghanistan. Michael Griffin. Pluto Press. London. 2001. p.124

[762] “The Geostrategy of Plan Columbia”. Manuel Salgado Tamayo. Covert Action Quarterly. Winter 2001. p.37

[763] Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. Ahmed Rashid. Yale University Publishing. New Haven, CT. 2001. p.145

[764] “Who is Osama bin Laden?” Michel Chossudovsky. http://www.copvcia.com 12-17-01

[765] Ibid

[766] “Rebel Warlord Takes Credit for Theatre Seige”. Springfield News Leader. 11-2-02

Dean Henderson is the author of five books: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve, Stickin’ it to the Matrix & The Federal Reserve Cartel.  You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @ www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com

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