CIA Car Bombs, Sabotage & Urban Terrorism

1. Car Bombs With Wings

Courtesy Of: Asia Times Online
By Mike Davis
April 16, 2006
ATimes

"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: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.

Gunboat diplomacy had been defeated by car bombs in Lebanon, but the Ronald Reagan administration and, above all, Central Intelligence Agency (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 [Muhammad Husayn] Fadlallah who they determined was one of the people behind, not only the Marine [Corps] barracks [suicide truck bomb], 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 sub-contracted the operation to Lebanese agents led by a former British SAS (Special Air Service) officer and financed by Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. In March 1984, a large car bomb was detonated about 45 meters (50 yards) from Fadlallah's house in Bir El-Abed, a crowded Shi'ite 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 US 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 Reagan's approval for NSDD-166 (national security decision directive), a secret directive that, according to Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, inaugurated a "new era of direct infusions of advanced US military technology into Afghanistan, intensified training of Islamist guerrillas in explosives and sabotage techniques and targeted attacks on Soviet military officers".

US 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 Inter-Services Intelligence (or ISI) officers under the command of Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf. These officers, in turn, would tutor thousands of Afghan and foreign mujahideen, including the future cadre of al-Qaeda, in scores of training camps financed by the Saudis.

"Under ISI direction," Coll wrote, "the mujahideen 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."

Mujahideen 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 left-wing intelligentsia in Kabul, the country's capital.

"Yousaf and the Afghan car-bombing squads he trained," wrote Coll, "regarded Kabul University professors as fair game," as well as movie theaters and cultural events.

Although some members of the US 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 observed, "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'."

...But Zarqawi did not originate car bomb terrorism along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; that dark honor belongs to the CIA and its favorite son, Iyad Allawi. As the New York Times revealed in June 2004:

Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990s to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the CIA, several former intelligence officials say.

Dr Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosives devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq ... One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed".

According to one of the Times' informants, the bombing campaign, dead school kids and all, "was a test more than anything else, to demonstrate capability".

It allowed the CIA to portray the then-exiled Allawi and his suspect group of ex-Ba'athists as a serious opposition to Saddam and an alternative to the coterie (so favored by Washington neo-conservatives) around Ahmad Chalabi.

"No one had any problem with sabotage in Baghdad back then," a CIA veteran reflected.

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2. CIA Trained Iraqi Paramilitary Group To Conduct Sabotage Operations

By Dana Priest and Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 3, 2005; Page A12
Courtesy Of: WashingtonPost

Before the war in Iraq began, the CIA recruited and trained an Iraqi paramilitary group, code-named the Scorpions, to foment rebellion, conduct sabotage, and help CIA paramilitaries who entered Baghdad and other cities target buildings and individuals. The Scorpions were trained in secret CIA bases in Jordan.

Authorized by a presidential finding signed by President Bush in February or March 2002, the Scorpions were part of a policy of "regime change" in Iraq. The covert members, many of whom were exiles recruited by the Kurds, were trained in target identification, explosives and small arms at two secret bases in Jordan, according to one U.S. government official.

They were sent surreptitiously into Iraq before the war and were in cities such as Baghdad, Fallujah and Qaim to give the impression that a rebellion was underway and to conduct light sabotage, according to the two defense sources and the three former and current intelligence officials."

They painted X's [for targeting] on buildings and things like that," said one former intelligence officer.

The CIA spent millions of dollars on the Scorpions, even giving them former Soviet Hind helicopters...

After Baghdad fell, the CIA used the Scorpions to try to infiltrate the insurgency, to help out in interrogations, and, from time to time, to do "the dirty work," as one intelligence official put it.

In one case, members of the unit, wearing masks and carrying clubs and pipes, beat up an Iraqi general in the presence of CIA and military personnel according to several defense and intelligence officials.

The Scorpions have been implicated in the events that led to the death of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush while in US captivity.

These events included the use of physical and psychological torture under the auspices of a US CIA operative identified only as "Brian".

After the initial combat phase of the war, the CIA used the paramilitary units as translators and to fetch supplies and retrieve informants in an increasingly dangerous Iraq where CIA officers largely stayed within the protected Green Zone, according to the officials.

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3. CIA Drafts Covert Plans To Topple Saddam

By Time Weiner
February 26, 1998
Courtesy Of: GlobalSecurity

The CIA has drafted plans for a major program of sabotage and subversion against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials say.

Four prior covert operations, involving everything from radio propaganda to paramilitary plots, have failed to dislodge the Iraqi leader, just as smart bombs, cruise missiles and stiff economic sanctions have failed.

...The plan calls for enlisting Kurdish and Shiite agents to destroy or damage key Iraqi pillars of economic and political power, like utility plants or government broadcast stations, the officials said.

At the same time, the plan calls for increasing political pressure on Iraq through propaganda programs like a "Radio Free Iraq" broadcast to Baghdad.

The plan aims to try to undermine Saddam by showing Iraqi citizens that he is not invincible, strengthening his opponents inside Iraq and trying to ignite a rebellion within his inner circle.

"This is not a propaganda operation," one senior government official said of the CIA's plan. "This is a major campaign of sabotage."

...Since the Persian Gulf war in 1991, the agency has backed Kurdish dissidents in the north of Iraq, Shiite Muslim groups in the south, Iraqi exiles in London and Iraqi military defectors based in Jordan. These operations, which have cost about $100 million, have had little or no success.

Most recently, in August 1996, Saddam sent tanks into northern Iraq to destroy a CIA base staffed by U.S. intelligence officers and Kurdish agents, arresting and executing scores of Kurds.

...But the Iraqi opposition is fragmented, "plagued by divisions," in the words of Wafiq Samoraei, a former head of Iraqi military intelligence based in London.

"It is lacking in sufficient support in Baghdad-controlled Iraq to be a significant factor in internal politics in Iraq," said Kenneth Katzman, a Iraq expert at the Congressional Research Service and a former CIA analyst of Persian Gulf politics.

The diplomatic, political and economic structures that can conceal CIA officers and agents -- a U.S. embassy, a network of political contacts, a bevy of businessmen going in and out of the country -- do not exist in Iraq. That makes it exceedingly hard for agents to penetrate the inner circle surrounding Saddam, who controls tens of thousands of soldiers and spies whose sole duty is to preserve his power.

The two major opposition groups in exile, the Iraqi National Congress, based in London, and the Iraqi National Accord, based in Amman, Jordan, have been riven by dissent.

The Kurds, the world's largest stateless ethnic group, have bases in northern Iraq but also are bitterly divided.

Shiite groups in the south of Iraq, some with ties to Saudi Arabia, some with ties to Iran, have proven politically impotent in the past.

Covert operations aimed at subverting Saddam's government date back to the Bush administration. Immediately after the gulf war, President George Bush ordered the CIA to support a coup against the Iraqi leader. The Kurds and Shiites were openly encouraged to rise up against him. The opposition was crushed.

Then the agency supported the Iraqi National Congress from 1992 to 1996. The group achieved little. In 1995, after some key Iraqi military officers defected, the agency shifted its support to the Iraqi National Accord. But in the summer of 1996, Saddam's military and intelligence services crushed the small clique of Iraqi military officers working with the group and destroyed a CIA base in northern Iraq.