Nachrichten Heute

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

Dunlop’s Account of the Beaulieu Meeting’s Purpose: The “Russian 9/11” in 1999 / Part IV

Peter Dale Scott - According to Russian sources, one of the alleged purposes of the meeting at the villa – but not the only one – was to give the threatened Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin what it supposedly needed in 1999: a Russian 9/11. Russia has been familiar for some time with charges that the bombings in Moscow in 1999, and an accompanying invasion of Russian Dagestan that rekindled the ongoing war in neighboring Chechnya, were both planned by Chechen Islamists, in collusion with a Kremin representative.

It is claimed that the well-connected drug-trafficking meta-group, with connections to both the Kremlin and the CIA, arranged in advance for the bombings and invasion at the meeting, in July 1999, at a French villa owned by Adnan Khashoggi. The group allegedly operated with support from Saudi Arabia and organized global drug trafficking, some of it probably through Kosovo.

9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, is scheduled to appear in August 2006

The evidence for this western face of the group is laid out in an article by a so-called Yuri Yasenev, on a Russian website. The article is cited – very selectively – as authoritative by a reputable Hoover Institution scholar, John B. Dunlop. But Dunlop completely ignores, indeed suppresses, Yasenev’s case as I have summarized it above. He uses the article instead to document a more familiar case: that in 1999 the Yeltsin “family” in the Kremlin dealt with this same group to create what might be called the “Russian 9/11.”

When I say that Dunlop suppresses certain details, I do not mean to suggest that he does so conspiratorially, or even consciously. My notion of deep politics, which I have developed elsewhere, posits that in every culture and society there are facts which tend to be suppressed collectively, because of the social and psychological costs of not doing so. Like all other observers, I too have involuntarily suppressed facts and even memories about the drug traffic that were too disturbing to be retained with equanimity.

Dunlop’s thesis (taken from his two main Russian sources) is that men of influence in Yeltsin’s Kremlin, building on connections established by the oligarch Boris Berezovsky, arranged for staged violence in order to reinforce support for an unpopular Russian government. This violence took the form of lethal bombings in Moscow, and an agreed-upon (and partly staged) Islamist incursion by Chechens into Russian Dagestan.

Western versions of the story, such as one in the Independent, have stressed that these events were arranged by Russian intelligence:

Boris Kagarlitsky … writing in the weekly Novaya Gazeta, says that the bombings in Moscow and elsewhere were arranged by the GRU (the Russian military intelligence service). He says they used members of a group controlled by Shirvani Basayev, brother of the Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, to plant the bombs. These killed 300 people in Buikask, Moscow and Volgodonsk in September.

The bombings and war were allegedly a stratagem to boost the popularity of the Kremlin, and particularly the little-known new Prime Minister Putin, for the coming elections in November 1999. Dunlop blames the plotting on three protégés of the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky – Valentin Yumashev, Alexander Voloshin, and Roman Abramovich – who at this point were members of Yeltsin’s “Family” in the Kremlin.

Dunlop’s thesis of Kremlin-structured violence follows the Russian journal Vestiya’s account of the Beaulieu meeting on July 4, 1999. In Dunlop’s words,

On the day following the initial incursion of rebel forces into the Dagestani highlands in early August of 1999, the investigative weekly Versiya published a path-breaking report claiming that the head of the Russian Presidential Administration, Aleksandr Voloshin, had met secretly with the most wanted man in Russia, Shamil’ Basaev, through the good offices of a retired officer in the GRU, Anton Surikov, at a villa belonging to international arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi located [in Beaulieu] between Nice and Monaco.

Since October 2005, when I first wrote about the meta-group and the Beaulieu, the Versiya/Dunlop claim that Basaev was there has been challenged, because on July 3, 1999, only one day earlier, Basaev met with Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov in Grozny, Chechnya. But Basaev’s presence or absence is not of major concern to me, because of my belief that the primary purpose of the meeting was not managed violence in Russia, but arrangements for a narcotics route through Kosovo.

If Dunlop is right about the meeting, it would be another example of the meta-group’s ability to manage both violence and the state. But in the course of this article two things should become clear. The first is that Surikov and other plotters at Beaulieu were not pro-Putin, but anti-Putin, indeed anti-Russian. The second is that Kagarlitsky, one of Dunlop’s two main sources for his story, was by 2002 close to Surikov.

We shall see that if politics were discussed at Beaulieu, it was more likely to have been the use of narcotics proceeds to finance anti-Russian Islamist activity, in a broad swathe of countries ranging from Macedonia to Russia itself. Dunlop himself corroborates a drug link to the meeting:

In June of 1999 there took up residence at the villa a Venezuelan banker named Alfonso Davidovich. In the Latin American press, he is said to be responsible for laundering the funds of the Columbian left insurrection organization FARC, which carries out an armed struggle with the official authorities, supported by the narcotics business.

But Dunlop has no explanation for his presence.