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

Far West Ltd, Halliburton, Diligence LLC, New Bridge, and Neil Bush. / Part X

Peter Dale Scott - The connection to Far West of Filin, Likhvinsky, Surikov, and Saidov (along with Alfonso Davidovich) has since been corroborated by a news story on the Pravda-info website about Far West Ltd, and Kosyakov’s resignation from it.

At a meeting of its stockholders on 2 May in the Hotel Ritz Carlton in Dubai “Far West Ltd.” accepted the retirement of the president of the Agency Leonid Kosyakov, who moved to government service in Ukraine. Vladimir Filin, member of the Editorial Board of “Pravda-info,” was elected the new president, at the same time retaining his previous position as executive director. The meeting of stockholders, in accordance with its charter, selected new members of the board of directors of “Far West Ltd.,” which will now contain 9 members. Besides Vladimir Filin, Anatolii Baranov and Anton Surikov, it will include four more members of the Editorial Board of “Pravda-info”: Audrius Butkevicius, Aleksei Likhvintsev, Natal’ia Roeva, and Ruslan Saidov, and also Valerii Lunev, a veteran of the Armed Forces, and Alfonso Davidovich, a political scientist from Venezuela.

Far West, the story said,

specializes in consulting work on questions of security in conducting business in regions of the world with unstable environments and hiring personnel for foreign private military companies [last three words in English]. Its head office is located in Switzerland. In addition, the Agency has a network of representatives in OAE [United Arab Emirates], Afghanistan, Colombia, the autonomous region of Kosovo, the autonomous republic of Crimea, Georgia, and the Volga Federal District of the RF [Russian Federation].

Recently Filin gave Pravda.info some details about Far West’s work, and stated that the firm had been co-founded by “a sub-division of a well-known American corporation.” He said that the company’s new contract is

connected with the secured transport of commercial shipments from Afghanistan, where we have an office, to ports on the Black Sea. …But the most commercially attractive route seems to be that from Bagram to the US air base in Magas, in Kyrgyzstan. By the way, it is quite near the Russian air base in Kant. A significant flow of shipments passes through Magas, there is a niche there for commercial shipments too. This is very profitable. It is much more profitable than routing commercial shipments from Afghanistan through Tajikistan. Therefore last year we completely withdrew from all shipping through Tajikistan and closed our office in that country.

Who are your partners?
Who our partners are is a commercial secret. I can say that they are four private firms from three countries, Turkey, Russia, and the USA, which engage among other things in shipping. One of these firms is a sub-division of a well-known American corporation. This firm is a co-founder of our agency.

Pravda.info is an inside source for information about Far West, for the two organizations are in fact two different manifestations of the same group. Among the directors of Far West on the masthead of Pravda.info we find first of all Anton Surikov, followed by Anatolii Baranov, Aleksei Likhvintsev, Ruslan Saidov, Vladimir Filin, Natal’ia Roeva, and Audrius Butkevicius.

Also on the Pravda.info masthead is Boris Kagarlitsky, a major source for Western accounts of the meeting in southern France, including Dunlop’s. Many of the Far West directors, notably Anton Surikov, are or have been also associated with Kagarlitsky at the Russian Institute for Globalization Studies (IPROG).

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.

Although Filin and Pravda.info did not identify the foreign private military companies with which it worked, Yasenev did:

Filin and Likhvintsev do business with foreign private military companies (PMCs):

«Meteoric Tactical Solutions» (South Africa) – in Angola;

«Kellogg, Brown &Root» (KBR Halliburton) – in Colombia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Georgia, and Iraq.

«Diligence Iraq LLC» (controlled by the Kuwaiti Mohammed as-Sagar) – in Iraq.”

Furthermore Yasenev claims that some of Far West’s work with Halliburton is apparently approved by the CIA for geopolitical purposes:

In 2003-2004, Filin and Likhvintsev worked on the Georgian project, financed by KBR Halliburton, apparently, with the approval of the CIA. The project had the goal of weakening the competitors of Halliburton in the oil business and, in a broader context, of facilitating the geopolitical objectives of the United States in the Caucasus. The OPS man in Georgia is Audrius Butkevicius, former Lithuanian minister of defense, presently advisor to Badri Patarkatsishvili.

2003 and 2004 were the years of the two Georgian “Rose Revolutions,” in which Mikheil Saakashvili displaced Eduard Shevardnadze. A role was played by western foundations such as the Albert Einstein Institute, with which Butkevicius was allegedly associated.

Some of Yasenev’s information about Diligence Iraq is corroborated by a Press Release from Diligence itself.

Diligence LLC, a private military company (PMC), could be described as a CIA spin-off:

Diligence was founded by William Webster, the only man to head both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mike Baker, its chief executive officer, spent 14 years at the CIA as a covert field operations officer specializing in counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operations. Whitley Bruner, its chief operating officer in Baghdad, was once the CIA station chief in Iraq.

Its partner in Diligence Middle East (DME) is New Bridge Strategies, whose political clout was described by the Financial Times:

New Bridge was established in May [2003] and came to public attention because of the Republican heavyweights on its board – most linked to one or other Bush administration [officials] or to the family itself. Those include Joe Allbaugh, George W. Bush’s presidential campaign manager, and Ed Rogers and Lanny Griffith, former George H.W. Bush aides.

Joe Allbaugh, the co-chairman of the company, was head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), on the day of the 9/11 attacks, and indeed until March 2003, the month that the U.S. invaded Iraq.

The Financial Times linked the success of New Bridge in securing contracts to their relationship to Neil Bush, the President’s brother. (A major investor in Neil Bush’s educational company Ignite! is Boris Berezovsky.)