[Geggy]

4. Al-Qaeda in North Africa
Algeria
The Armed Islamic Group (GIA) is an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group in Algeria. The group was first “created in the house of the Mujahirin in 1989 in Peshawar.” From here, on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, “the first hard core of ‘Algerian Afghans’ launched their terrorist campaign against Algeria.” The al-Qaeda veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviets, “trained in the Afghan militias, returned to Algeria with the help of international networks, via Bosnia, Albania, Italy, France, Morocco or Sudan.” (18) According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, in the late 1980s between 400 and 1,000 Algerians who trained as bin Laden’s mujahideen in Afghanistan joined various armed groups in Algeria. By January 1993, most of these groups united under the banner of the GIA. (19) The latter forged close links to al-Qaeda “in the early 1990s,” reports the Office of the Attorney-General in Australia, when the UK-based Abu Qatada “was designated by bin Laden as the spiritual adviser for Algerian groups including the GIA.” (20) Afghan veteran Khamareddine Kherbane was close to both the GIA and al-Qaeda leaderships. Both the GIA and its sub-faction the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) “developed ties with Al-Qaeda early on.” From 1997 to 1998, al-Qaeda achieved further ‘large-scale penetration of Algerian groups.” (21) So far the total civilian death toll from the GIA massacres in Algeria amounts to nearly 150,000. (22) The GIA is also implicated in terrorist atrocities outside Algeria and has been “linked to terrorist attacks in Europe.” (23) According to Stephen Cook, an expert on Algeria at the Brookings Institute, “there are Algerian (terrorist) cells spread all over Europe, Canada, and the United States.” (24)

In a detailed report, British journalists John Sweeney and Leonard Doyle interviewed ”’Yussuf-Josheph’ a career secret agent in Algeria’s securite militaire until he defected to Britain.” Algeria’s secret police state, they conclude, “is indicted by one of its own members for crimes against humanity.” “Joseph,” who spent 14 years as an Algerian secret agent, told Sweeney and Doyle that: “The bombs that outraged Paris in 1995 – blamed on Muslim fanatics – were the handiwork of the Algerian secret service. They were part of a propaganda war aimed at galvanizing French public opinion against the Islamists.”

The massacres in Algeria, blamed on the GIA, are in fact “the work of secret police and army death squads… The killing of many foreigners was organized by the secret police, not Islamic extremists.” GIA terror is, in fact, “orchestrated by two shadowy figures… Mohammed Mediane, codename ‘Tewfik,’ and General Smain Lamari, the most feared names in Algeria. They are, respectively, head of the Algerian secret service, the DRS, and its sub-department, the counter intelligence agency, the DCE.” According to Joseph:

The GIA is a pure product of Smain’s secret service. I used to read all the secret telexes. I know that the GIA has been infiltrated and manipulated by the government. The GIA has been completely turned by the government… In 1992 Smain created a special group, L’Escadron de la Mort (the Squadron of Death). One of is main missions to begin with was to kill officers, colonels. the death squads organize the massacres. If anyone inside the killing machine hesitates to torture or kill, they are automatically killed… The FIS aren’t doing the massacres.

As for the Paris bombings, Joseph reveals that Algerian secret agents sent by Smain organized “at least” two of the bombs in Paris in summer 1995. “The operation was run by colonel Soumaes Mahmoud, alias Habib, head of the secret service at the Algerian embassy in Paris.” (25)

Indeed, Western intelligence agencies know far more about the crisis than they have publicly conceded. In a remarkable report in The Guardian, Richard Norton-Taylor recorded that: “An unprecedented three-year terrorist case dramatically collapsed yesterday when an MI5 informant refused to appear in court after evidence which senior ministers tried to suppress revealed that Algerian government forces were involved in atrocities against innocent civilians.” The report refers to “secret documents showing British intelligence believed the Algerian government was involved in atrocities, contradicting the view the government was claiming in public.” Attempting to suppress the evidence, three British Cabinet ministers – Jack Straw, Geoffrey Hoon and Robin Cook – “signed public interest immunity certificates.” (26)

The secret Foreign office documents “were produced on the orders of the trial judge” 18 months late. But when they finally arrived, “they were in marked contrast to the government’s publicly-stated view, expressed by the Foreign Office in 1998, that there was ‘no credible, substantive evidence to confirm’ allegations implicating Algerian government forces in atrocities.” The documents, read out in open court, revealed that according to Whitehalls’ Joint Intelligence Committee: “responsibility for violence cannot be conclusively laid in one place… There is no firm evidence to rule out government manipulation or involvement in terrorist violence.” According to one document: “Sources had privately said some of the killings of civilians were the responsibility of the Algerian security services.” Another document from January 1997 cites a British source as follows: “military security (in Algeria) would have… no scruples about killing innocent people… My instincts remain that parts of the Algerian government would stop of nothing.” Multiple documents, according to The Guardian, “referred to the ‘manipulation’ of the GIA being used as a cover to carry out their own operations.” A US intelligence report similarly confirmed that “there was no evidence to link 1995 Paris bombings to Algerian militants.” On the contrary, the US report indicates “that one killing at the time could have been ordered by the Algerian government.” Crucially, a Whitehall document cites the danger to British government interests if this information becomes public – “if revealed,” it warns, it “could open us to detailed questioning by NGOs and journalists.” (27)

The Algerian junta-GIA-al-Qaeda terror nexus has also received heavy Western financial assistance. In the late 1990s, for instance, the European Union relased 60 million Euros – some $65 million – to the Algerian generals. The total loan package was worth 125 million Euros. (28) Algeria has the fifth largest reserves of natural gas in the world, and is the second largest gas exporter, with 130 trillion proven natural gas reserves. It ranks fourteenth for oil reserves, with official estimates at 9.2 billion barrels. Approximately 90 per cent of Algeria’s crude oil exports go to Western Europe, including Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. Algeria’s major trading partners are Italy, France, the United States, Germany, and Spain. (29)

ABC News correspondent John Cooley, a specialist in north Africa and the Middle East, further reports the presence of “500 to 600 American engineers and technicians living and working behind barbed wire” in a collection of “protected gas and oil enclaves in Algeria.” This little-publicized but heavy US commercial involvement in Algeria “began in earnest… in 1991.” At the end of that year, the regime “opened the energy sector on liberal terms to foreign investors and operators…

About 30 oil and gas fields have been attributed to foreign companies since then. The main American firms involved, Arco, Exxon, Oryx, Anadarko, Mobil and Sun Oil received exploration permits, often in association with European firms like Agip, BP, Cespa or the Korean group Daewoo… The majority of oil and gas exports go to nearby Europe… the main clients in the late 1990s (being) France, Belgium, Spain and Italy. (30)

In June 2000, US-based international banks and investment houses such as Chase Manhattan visited Algiers, along with them Under-Secretary of the Treasury Stuart Eizenstat. US private investments in Algeria were estimated at between $3.5 and $4 billion – almost entirely in oil and gas exploration and production. (31)

Libya
Anas al-Liby is on the FBI’s list of “Most Wanted Terrorists” “in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya… The Rewards For Justice Program, United States Department of State, is offering a reward of up to $25 million for information leading directly to the apprehension or conviction of Anas al-Liby” (32)

David Shayler worked for the international terrorism desk of MI5 for 6 years before resigning in 1997. In 1995, he obtained classified MI6 documents detailing a covert British intelligence plan to assassinate Libyan Head of State, Col. Mu’ammar Gaddafi. Most surprisingly, Shayler disclosed that as part of the plot, MI6 paid over 100,000 Pounds to the al-Qaeda network in Libya to conduct the assassination. The operation, however, failed. The al-Qaeda operatives working on the MI6 payroll placed a bomb under the wrong car, killing six innocent Libyan civilians. (33) In a press release on the subject, Shayler observed:

We need a statement from the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary clarifying the facts of this matter. In particular, we need to know how around 100,000 Pounds of taxpayers’ money was used to fund the sort of Islamic Extremists who have connections to Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. Did ministers give MI6 permission for this? by the time MI6 paid the group in late 1995 or early 1996, US investigators had already established that Bin Laden was implicated in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Centre. Given the timing and the close connections between Libyan and Egyptian Islamic Extremists, it may even have been used to fund the murder of British citizens in Luxor, Egypt in 1996. (34)

In a further comment piece for The Observer, Shayler elaborated on these concerns. The “real criminals,” he argued, “are the British Government and the intelligence services. The Government has a duty to uphold the law. It cannot simply be ignored because crimes are carried out by friends of the Government.” Noting his November 1999 dossier of evidence on the plot sent to Home Secretary Jack Straw, Shayler pointed out: “Although the assassination failed when attempted in 1996, innocent Libyan civilians were killed.” In the face of such compelling evidence, “these very senior Ministers should, of course, have called in the police immediately… The Government’s failure to ensure that two MI6 officers are brought to justice for their part in planning a murder is what I would expect of despots and dictators.” (35)

The British government’s response was at first to completely deny the story. Then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook described Shayler’s allegations as “pure fantasy” (36) The government then changed tactic, accusing Shayler of breaching the 1989 Official Secrets Act – his revelations, officials claimed, were a threat to British national security – and subsequently pursued legal action against him to prevent further publication of his information. Reporting on the upcoming trial in October 2002, the Evening Standard observed that:

Michael Tugendhat, QC, appearing for various national newspapers, is expected to argue that the Government has provided no evidence that national security will be threatened by the trial and will underline the importance of open justice… Shayler will be defending himself during the trial. He is expected to claim that British secret service agents paid up to 100,000 Pounds to al Qaeda terrorists for an assassination attempt on Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafy in 1996. He is seeking permission to plead a defense of “necessity” – that he acted for the greater good by revealing wrongdoing by the security service. (37)

In further startling revelations supporting Shayler’s allegations, French intelligence experts journalist Guillaume Dasquie and adviser to President Jaques Chirac, Jean-Charles Brisard, documented that among the members of the Libyan al-Qaeda cell hired by MI6 to assassinate Col. Gaddafi was one of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants Anas al-Liby, who as already noted was on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist” list for his involvement in the 1998 terrorist attacks on US embassies in Africa. London Observer home affairs editor Martin Bright reported in detail on Dasquie’s and Brisard’s devastating findings:

British intelligence paid large sums of money to an al-Qaeda cell in Libya in a doomed attempt to assassinate Colonel Gaddafi in 1996 and thwarted early attempts to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. The latest claims of MI6 involvement with Libya’s fearsome Islamic Fighting Group, which is connected to one of bin Laden’s trusted lieutenants, will be embarrassing to the Government…

The Libyan al-Qaeda cell included Anas al-Liby, who remains on the US government’s most wanted list with a reward of $25 million for his capture. He is wanted for his involvement in the African embassy bombings. Al-Liby was with bin Laden in Sudan before the al-Qaeda leader returned to Afghanistan in 1996. Astonishingly, despite suspicions that he was a high-level al-Qaeda operative, al-Liby was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000.

A police raid at al-Liby’s Manchester accommodation discovered a 180-page al-Qaeda “manual for jihad” containing instructions for terrorist attacks. According to Shayler, the plot came to his attention in formal meetings with this MI6 colleagues. The Observer’s Bright revealed that the said officers involved in the plot were “Richard Bartlett, who has previously only been known under the codename PT16 and had overall responsibility for the operation; and David Watson, codename PT16B.” The latter was the MI6 handler for Libyan al-Qaeda operative “Tunworth,” who was providing information from within the cell. Eager to crush further damaging publicity on these issues emerging from the Shayler trial, Home Secretary David Blunkett and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw “signed Public Interest Immunity certificates to protect national security. Reporters were not able to report allegations about the Gaddafi plot during the course of the trial.” (38)