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A Meta-Group Managing Drugs, Violence, and the State

History and the Political Requirements of the Global Drug Traffic / Part I

Peter Dale Scott - In this serie I wish to explore three important propositions concerning the global drug traffic. The first is that the highly integrated drug traffic industry, in addition to serving the political ends of world powers, has its own political as well as economic needs. It requires that in major growing areas there must be limited state control, a condition most easily reached by fostering regional rebellion and warfare, often fought by its own private armies. This is the on-going situation of designed violence in every major growing area, from Lebanon to Myanmar, Colombia to Afghanistan.

Once drug armies themselves were powerful enough to neutralize the imposition of state authority. But today there are increasing signs that those at the highest level of the drug traffic will plot with the leaders of major states to ensure, or even to stage, violence that serves the power of the state and the industry alike.

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, explores the underlying factors that have engendered a U.S. strategy of indirect intervention in Third World countries through alliances with drug-trafficking proxies.

Thanks to extensive research in Russia, we now have initial evidence of a second proposition: There exists on the global level a drug meta-group, able to manipulate the resources of the drug traffic for its own political and business ends, without being at risk for actual trafficking. These ends include the creation of designed violence to serve the purposes of cabals in political power – most conspicuously in the case of the Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin, but allegedly, according to Russian sources, also for those currently in power in the United States.

Evidence for this consists in a meeting which took place in July 1999 near Nice, at the villa in Beaulieu of Adnan Khashoggi, once called “the richest man in the world.” Those at the meeting included a member of the Yeltsin cabal in the Kremlin and four representatives from the meta-group, with passports from Venezuela, Turkey, United Arab Emirates and Germany.

The representatives are mostly veterans of Russian military intelligence (GRU) in Afghanistan. Between them they allegedly enjoyed excellent relations with:

1) Ayman al-Zawahiri, the acknowledged mastermind of 9/11 and mentor to Osama bin Laden.

2) Soviet and Cuban military intelligence.

3) FARC, the Colombian revolutionary group increasingly involved in drug trafficking.

4) the Kosovo Liberation Army, a similarly involved group.

5) a Turkish backer of the drug-trafficking IMU in Uzbekistan

6) (according to a Russian source) Saudi intelligence and the CIA.

The third proposition is that a meta-group of this scale does not just help government agencies make history. I hope to show that it, like its predecessors, has the power to manage both violence and state behavior, and thus make history to its own agenda.

As an example of drug-motivated history-making, I shall discuss the sudden occupation in 1999 of Pristina Airport in Kosovo, by the Russian Army. This appears to have consolidated a drug route through Uzbekistan and Chechnya, three countries to which the meta-group was connected.

Footnotes
1: For corroborations that the Russian military has been trafficking Afghan heroin since the early 1990s, see Igor Khokhlov.

The Meta Group Serie