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by Michael C. Ruppert
I
wrote the following story for the October 24, 2000, issue of From The
Wilderness. I have included excerpts here, and I thank author Kevin
Phillips for
quoting from it in his 2004 bestseller, American Dynasty.
Halliburton Corporation's Brown and Root is one of the
major components of THE BUSH-CHENEY DRUG EMPIRE
FTW October 24, 2000 -- The success of Bush vice-presidential running mate
Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five-year $3.8-billion
"pig-out"
on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a partial
indicator of
what may happen if the Bush ticket wins in two weeks. A closer look at
available research, including an August 2, 2000, report by the Center for
Public
Integrity (CPI) at <www.public-i.org>, suggests that drug money has
played a
role in the successes achieved by Halliburton under Cheney's tenure as
CEO from 1995 to 2000. This is especially true for Halliburton's most
famous subsidiary, heavy construction and oil giant, Brown and Root. A deeper look
into history reveals that Brown and Root's past as well as the past of Dick
Cheney himself, connect to the international drug trade on more than one occasion
and in
more than one way.
This June the lead Washington, DC attorney for a major Russian oil
company,
connected in law enforcement reports to heroin smuggling and also a
beneficiary of US backed loans to pay for Brown and Root contracts in Russia, held a
$2.2
million fund-raiser to fill the already bulging coffers of presidential
candidate George W. Bush. This is not the first time that Brown and Root
has been connected to drugs, and the fact is that this "poster child" of American
industry may
also be a key player in Wall Street's efforts to maintain domination of
the half trillion dollar a year global drug trade and its profits. And Dick Cheney,
who has also
come closer to drugs than most people suspect, and who is also
Halliburton's
largest individual shareholder ($45.5 million), has a vested interest in
seeing to it
that Brown and Root's successes continue.
Of all American companies dealing directly with the US military and
providing cover for CIA operations, few firms can match the global presence of
this giant
construction powerhouse which employs 20,000 people in more than 100
countries. Through its sister companies or joint ventures, Brown and Root
can build
offshore oil rigs, drill wells, construct and operate everything from
harbors to
pipelines to highways to nuclear reactors. It can train and arm security
forces, and
it can now also feed, supply, and house armies. One key beacon of Brown
and
Root's overwhelming appeal to agencies like the CIA is that, from its
own corporate web page, it proudly announces that it has received the contract to
dismantle
aging Russian nuclear-tipped ICBMs in their silos.
Furthermore, the relationships between key institutions, players, and
the
Bushes themselves suggest that under a George "W" administration the
Bush family and its allies may well be able, using Brown and Root as the
operational interface,
to control the drug trade all the way from Medellin to Moscow.
Originally formed as a heavy construction company to build dams, Brown
and
Root grew its operations via shrewd political contributions to Senate
candidate
Lyndon Johnson in 1948. Expanding into the building of oil platforms,
military
bases, ports, nuclear facilities, harbors, and tunnels, Brown and Root
virtually
underwrote LBJ's political career. It prospered as a result, making
billions on US
Government contracts during the Vietnam War. The Austin Chronicle in an
August
28, Op-ed piece entitled "The Candidate From Brown and Root" labels
Republican
Cheney as the political dispenser of Brown and Root's largesse. According
to political campaign records, during Cheney's five-year tenure at Halliburton
the company's
political contributions more than doubled to $1.2 million. Not
surprisingly, most
of that money went to Republican candidates.
Independent news service, <www.newsmakingnews.com>, also describes how,
in 1998, with Cheney as chairman, Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to
purchase
Dresser Industries, a supplier of oil industry equipment and drilling
machinery.
This made Halliburton a corporation that will have a presence in almost
any future
oil drilling operation anywhere in the world. And it also brought back
into the
family fold the company that had once sent a plane -- also in 1948 -- to
fetch
the new Yale Graduate George H.W. Bush, to begin his career in the Texas
oil business. Bush the elder's father, Prescott, served as a managing director
for the firm
that once owned Dresser, Brown Brothers Harriman.
It is clear that everywhere there is
oil there is Brown and Root. But increasingly, everywhere there is war or insurrection there is Brown and Root
also. From
Bosnia and Kosovo, to Chechnya, to Rwanda, to Burma, to Pakistan, to
Laos, to
Vietnam, to Indonesia, to Iran, to Libya, to Mexico, to Colombia, Brown
and Root's traditional operations have expanded from heavy construction to
include
the provision of logistical support for the US military. Now, instead of
US Army
quartermasters, the world is likely to see Brown and Root warehouses
scoring and
managing everything from uniforms to rations to vehicles.
Drugs
As described by the Associated Press, during "Iran-Contra" Congressman
Dick
Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of
Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact that North had lied to
Cheney in a private 1986 White House briefing. Oliver North's own diaries and
subsequent investigations by the CIA inspector general have irrevocably tied him
directly to
cocaine smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts for
one firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did not stop
Cheney
from actively supporting North's 1994 unsuccessful run for the US Senate
from Virginia just a year before he took over the reins at Brown and Root's
parent company, Dallas-based Halliburton Incorporated in 1995.
As the Bush secretary of defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91),
Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish rebels in
northern Iraq.
The Kurds' primary source of income for more than 50 years has been
heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.
Having had some personal experience with Brown and Root, I took note when the
Los Angeles Times observed that on March 22, 1991, a group of gunmen burst
into the Ankara, Turkey, offices of the joint venture, Vinnell, Brown and Root
and assassinated retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant John Gandy.
In March of 1991, tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees, long-time
assets of
the CIA, were being massacred by Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf
War.
Saddam, seeking to destroy any hopes of a successful Kurdish revolt,
found it easy to kill thousands of the unwanted Kurds who had fled to the Turkish
border seeking sanctuary. There, Turkish security forces, trained in part by the Vinnell, Brown and Root partnership, turned back thousands of Kurds into certain death.
Today,
the Vinnell Corporation (a TRW Company) is, along with the firms MPRl
and
DynCorp (FN/June, 2000), one of the three pre-eminent private mercenary
corporations in the world. It is also the dominant entity for the training
of security forces throughout the Middle East. Not surprisingly the Turkish border
regions in
question were the primary transshipment points for heroin grown in
Afghanistan and Pakistan and destined for the markets of Europe.
A confidential source with intelligence experience in the region
subsequently
told me that the Kurds "got some payback against the folks that used to
help them move their drugs." He openly acknowledged that Brown and Root and Vinnell both routinely provided NOC, or non-official cover, for CIA officers. No
surprise there.
From 1994 to 1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans where,
according to "The Christian Science Monitor" and Jane's Intelligence
Review," the Kosovo Liberation Army controls 70 percent of the heroin entering
Western Europe, Cheney's Brown and Root made billions of dollars supplying US troops
from vast facilities in the region. Brown and Root support operations
continue in
Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia to this day.
Dick Cheney's footprints have come closer to drugs than is generally
recognized. A Center for Public Integrity report from last August brought
them even closer. It would be factually correct to say that there is a direct
linkage of Brown and Root facilities (often in remote and hazardous regions) between
every drug-producing region and every drug-consuming region in the world. These
coincidences,
in and of themselves, do not prove complicity in the trade. Other facts,
however, lead inescapably in that direction.
A Direct Drug Link
The CPI report entitled "Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal
Trough"
written by veteran journalists Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller describes
how, under five years of Cheney's leadership, Halliburton, largely through
subsidiary Brown and Root, enjoyed $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer
insured loans. The loans had been granted by the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and
the
Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). According to Ralph
McGehee's "CIA Base @," both institutions are heavily infiltrated by the CIA and
routinely provide NOC to its officers.
One of those loans to Russian financial/banking conglomerate The Alfa
Group
of Companies contained $292 million to pay for Brown and Root's contract
to refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by the Russian Tyumen Oil Company.
The Alfa Group completed its 51 percent acquisition of Tyumen Oil in what
was
allegedly a rigged bidding process in 1998. An official Russian
government report claimed that the Alfa Group's top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven "allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia
through Russia and into Europe."
Fridman and Aven, who reportedly smuggled the heroin in connection with
Russia's Solntsevo mob family, were the same executives who applied for
the EXIM loans that Halliburton's lobbying later safely secured. As a result,
Brown and
Root's work in Alfa Tyumen oil fields could continue -- and expand.
The CPI story reports allegations that organized criminal interests in
the Alfa
Group had stolen the oil field by fraud. It then uses official reports
from the FSB
(the Russian equivalent of the FBI), oil companies such as BP-Amoco,
former CIA and KGB officers, and press accounts to establish a solid link to Alfa Tyumen and the transportation of heroin.
In 1995, sacks of heroin disguised as sugar were stolen from a rail
container
leased by Alfa Echo and sold in the Siberian town of Khabarovsk. A
problem arose when many residents of the town became "intoxicated" or "poisoned." The
CPI story also stated, "The FSB report said that within days of the
incident, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) agents conducted raids of Alfa Eko buildings
and found
'drugs and other compromising documentation."'
Both reports claim that Alfa Bank has laundered drug funds from Russian
and
Colombian drug cartels.
The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official met
with
Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now imprisoned financial mastermind of
Colombia's notorious Cali cartel, to conclude an agreement about the
transfer of money into the Alfa Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas,
Gibraltar, and others. The plan was to insert it back into the Russian economy through
the purchase of stock in Russian companies "He (the former KGB agent] reported
that there was evidence regarding (Alfa Bank's] involvement with the money
laundering of Latin American drug cartels."
It would be difficult for Cheney and Halliburton to assert mere
coincidence in
all of this, as CPI reported that Tyumen's lead Washington attorney
James C. Langdon Jr. at the firm of Aikin Gump "helped coordinate a $2.2 million
fundraiser for Bush this June. He then agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers
and lobbyists
in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W's campaign."
The heroin mentioned in the CPI story originated in Laos, where longtime
Bush allies and covert warriors Richard Armitage (Note: Richard Armitage
is currently the U.S. deputy secretary of state) and retired CIA ADDO
(associate
deputy director of operations) Ted Shackley have been repeatedly linked
to the drug trade. It then made its way across Southeast Asia to Vietnam,
probably the port of Haiphong. Then the heroin sailed to Russia's Pacific
port of Valdivostok from whence it subsequently bounced across Siberia by rail
and
thence by truck or rail ro Europe, passing through the hands of Russian
Mafia
leaders in Chechnya and Azerbaijan. Chechnya and Azerbaijan are hotbeds
of both armed conflict and oil exploration; Brown and Root has operations
all along this route.
This long, expensive, and tortured path was hastily established, as
described by
FTW in previous issues, after President George (Herbert Walker] Bush's
personal envoy Richard Armitage, holding the rank of Ambassador, traveled to the
former Soviet Union to assist it with its "economic development" in 1989.
Trafficking heroin from the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos, and Thailand), there was
no way to deal with China and India but to go around them.
The Clinton administration took care of all that wasted travel for
heroin with
the 1998 destruction of Serbia and Kosovo and the installation of the KLA as a regional power. That opened a direct line from Afghanistan to Western
Europe, and Brown and Root was right in the middle of that too. The Clinton
skill at
streamlining drug operations was described in detail in the May issue of FTW in a story entitled
"The Democratic Party's Presidential Drug Money
Pipeline." That article has since been reprinted in three
countries. The essence of the drug economic lesson was that by growing opium in Colombia and by smuggling
cocaine and heroin from Colombia to New York City through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (a virtual straight line), additional smuggling routes
could be shortened or even eliminated. This lowered the level of risk, reduced
operating costs, increased profits, and eliminated competition.
FTW suspects the hand of Medellin co-founder Carlos Lehder in this
process
and it is interesting to note that Lehder, released from prison under
Clinton in 1995, is now reportedly active in both the Bahamas and South America. Lehder was known during the eighties as "the genius of transportation." I can
well imagine a Dick Cheney, having witnessed the complete restructuring of the
global drug trade in the last eight years, going to George W. and saying, "Look, I
know how we can make it even better." One thing is certain. As quoted in the CPI
article, a Halliburton vice president noted that if the Bush-Cheney ticket was
elected, "the company's government contracts would obviously go through the roof."
Popstcript 2003
Some two years after this story was written, I note with irony that
Brown and
Root's (now Kellogg, Brown and Root, or KBR) government services
continue to expand. This in spite of the fact that, along with about 25 other large
companies, Halliburton-KBR has been sued by stockholders and public interest groups
for
cooking its books to inflate stock values during Cheney's tenure. As in
so many
other instances, the administration has made it clear what their
response is. On July 26, 2002 process servers, seeking to serve Vice President Cheney
with a subpoena for his role in the allegedly criminal behavior, were turned away
from the White House by armed guards. 1
So much for the rule of law.
I also note with irony that, according to a November 2, 2002, Reuters
story, a
Colombian court has just ordered the release of Orejuela brothers,
Miguel and Gilberto (arrested in 1995), from prison. Pro-American President Alvaro Uribe, a staunch opponent of the FARC guerillas who control most of southern
Colombia with its oil and cocaine, has expressed shock and outrage. But I
strongly suspect that the Orejuelas are back for a purpose, i.e., the control of
narcotics cash flows once the FARC have been defeated, or as US control of the drug trade in
the occupied territories of Afghanistan and Iraq requires special expertise. 2
Gilberto Orejuela was, in fact,
released from prison speedily and without interference by the Colombian government on November 7, 2002. 3
Iraqi invasion validates the map
Shortly after the US occupation of Iraq in April 2003, a large no-bid
contract was
awarded to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to
extinguish oil well fires. 4 There were not many such fires, and long-time critics
of Halliburton
were vocal about the apparent patronage shown to the company, once
headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, by the no-bid process. Although
Halliburton- KBR efforts to get further rebuilding contracts for hospitals and bridges
were awarded to other major campaign donors like the Bechtel Group, KBR held on to
the oil contract and also secured lucrative contracts to handle food and
supplies for American troops. Just one such logistics contract had paid KBR $90 million by
early May with little positive result and no apparent stimulation for the Iraqi
economy. 5 This
is the same company that I had personally seen involved in heroin
smuggling with CIA personnel in 1977. KBR is always full of surprises.
But the biggest surprises were yet to come.
In mid-April the New York Times reported that the KBR oil well
firefighting contract was worth up to $7 billion -- which raised more eyebrows because
the
fires were out. 6 Further disclosures continued to arouse vocal public
reaction, especially from California Congressman Henry Waxman, but none so much as the
fact that the no-bid contract was ultimately found to have given
Halliburton- KBR the authority to administer all of Iraq's oil fields and
to distribute the
oil. This striking development was the result of a decision awarded under an "extra
work" clause in the firefighting contract. The original source of the contract was
the US Army Corps of Engineers, under the supervision of then Army Secretary Thomas
White, a former Enron executive. 7
I could only laugh on May 11 when a story in Pakistan's the Balochistan
Post
reported that Baghdad, which had never had a drug problem and had never
even seen heroin, had been suddenly "flooded with narcotics -- including
heroin."
Citing reports from the UK's Independent, the story said that heroin was
being traded in alleys, and that there had not been any drugs in the country until the US invasion. The story's headline read, "Where the CIA is in
control, narcotics flourish --. After Afghanistan, Baghdad is flooded with
heroin." 8 Oil
pipelines reportedly make excellent vehicles for smuggling drugs.
Oil-drilling equipment, sometimes arriving or departing by corporate jet, is rarely
inspected
for other priceless commodities.
[For more about the interrelationship between drugs and oil, I strongly
recommend
the book, Drugs, Oil and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia
and Indochina by Professor Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D.; Rowman and Littlefield,
2003.]
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