Part V -- Dean Henderson: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf. Chapter 5: The Royal Paymaster

The Royal Paymaster

Posted on 10/25/2016 | 2 Comments

(Excerpted from Chapter 5: Persian Gulf Rent-A-Sheik: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

Kuwait’s investments abroad have not been without scandal.  They owned two California hotels with S&L crook Charles Keating. [191]  Kuwait is part-owner of the HSBC-controlled Midland Bank, a major player in the Silver Triangle drug money shuffle and clearing agent for the government of Panama, whose board is loaded with ex-Pentagon officials.  In 1981, the same year that the GCC was created, KOC bought Sante Fe International, a US firm with close ties to the CIA.  The company had developed a horizontal drilling technology which the Kuwaitis employed in stealing Iraqi oil.

But it is the House of Saud which most frequently serves as conduit, financier and “deniability factor” for US cloak and dagger military adventures.  In 1980 the Saudis sent over $30 million to the Afghan mujahadeen.  By the end of the CIA Afghan operation the Saudis had coughed up $3.8 billion.  They gave at least $35 million for the Nicaraguan contras. Saudi arms dealer and Northrup/Lockheed bribe recipient Adnan Khashoggi played a key role in supplying Richard Secord’s Enterprise with House of Saud funding.  But while contra and mujahadeen efforts got the most newsprint, the House of Saud was busy bankrolling counterinsurgency around the world on behalf of the CIA.

In Africa the Saudis provided support for the National Front for Salvation (NFS), which operated from bases in Chad in its attempts to overthrow Libyan President Mohamar Qaddafi.  Chad has long been an important country in Exxon’s North Africa oil production schemes.  In 1990, following a successful Libyan-backed counter-coup against the Chad government which was sponsoring the NFS, the US evacuated 350 NFS leaders with Saudi financing.  The US restored $5 million in aid to the dictatorial Kenyan government of Daniel Arap Moi so that Kenya would house the NFS leaders, whom other African governments refused to take.  Arap Moi later figured in CIA covert operations in Somalia, where the Saudis had also financed counterinsurgency.

The Saudis financed Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA rebels in Angola in their brutal CIA-backed effort to topple the socialist government of MPLA President Jose dos Santos.  The Saudis sent millions to Morocco to pay for that country’s training of UNITA at CIA behest.  Angola has significant oil reserves.  In 1985 Chevron Texaco accounted for 75% of Angola’s oil revenue.  In 1990, 29% of Exxon Mobil’s US-bound crude came from Angola.  In 1992 Savimbi’s forces seized the Cuango Valley in the north of Angola, an area rich in diamonds.  Utilizing slave labor, UNITA extracted nearly $4 billion in diamonds in the next seven years to finance their genocide.  An annual report of De Beers, the Oppenheimer-family tentacle that monopolizes the world diamond trade, bragged of buying up UNITA diamonds to avoid an oversupply of gems on world markets.  Savimbi, once welcomed at the White House by President Reagan, died in 2002.

The Saudis funded RENAMO in their CIA-backed Pink Plan terror campaign against the nationalist government of Mozambique.  In the mid- 1980s both the Saudis and Oman sent weapons to RENAMO through the Comoros Islands on behalf of South Africa and the CIA.  Two Comoros Presidents, Ali Soilah and Ahmed Abdullah Abderemane, were assassinated by mercenaries who were protecting the arms traffic. [192]

In the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) CIA puppet Mobutu Sese-Seiko ruled with an iron fist for nearly four decades, guarding Zaire’s rich cobalt, uranium and molybdenum reserves which have been vital to the US nuclear weapons program.  Zaire is also rich in copper, chromium, zinc, cadmium, tin, gold and platinum.  Mobutu amassed over $5 billion in Swiss, Belgian and French bank accounts while his people lived in squalor. [193]

Mobutu was installed in the early 1960’s after CIA agent Frank Carlucci, later Reagan and Bush Defense Secretary and chairman of the Carlyle Group, worked with gangsters to assassinate the first prime minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba.  Under Mobutu’s reign, the US had military bases at Kitona and Kamina from where the CIA prosecuted its covert wars against Angola, Mozambique and Namibia.  Mobutu’s DSP palace guard was trained by the Israeli Mossad.  In the late 1970’s the Saudis financed Moroccan troops to save Mobutu from Katanganese secessionists led by Laurant Kabila.

In 1990 when Mobutu’s grip over Zaire began slipping, the dictator stripped the country’s army of ammunition and stockpiled it at his Gbadolite estate and DSP Headquarters at Tshatshi.  The CIA began building three new bases in neighboring Botswana as insurance. [194]  Mobutu was deposed in 1998 giving way to socialist Laurant Kabila.  The Saudis then financed military forays into the Congo by the governments of Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi.  Kabila was assassinated in 2000, with his son Joseph taking power.

Over 4 million people have died in Congo over the past decade as militias funded by multinational corporations have been turned loose on Kabila and the Congolese people.  The current resource prize is coltan (columbite-tantalite), a heat-resistant ore used in cell phones, laptops and other high-tech gadgets which fetches $300/lb. [195]

Lumumba and Kabila weren’t the first African nationalists targeted for elimination by the CIA.  During the 1950’s and 1960’s the Company and their French intelligence cohorts assassinated Moroccan nationalist Mehdi Ben Barka, whose Union Nationale de Forces Populaire threatened US puppet monarch King Hassan II.  Guinea’s leftist President Sekou Touré and Tunisian socialist leader Habib Bourgiba were also assassinated during this time by Western intelligence agencies.

In 1993 Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir accused the Saudis of providing arms to Johnny Garung’s Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).  The southern part of Sudan which the SPLA is trying to partition is rich in oil.  The Israeli Mossad supplied the SPLA for years through Kenya with CIA approval.  In 1996 the Clinton Administration announced military aid to Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda to be used to arm the SPLA for an offensive on Khartoum. [196]  The current crisis in Darfur is the result.

Algerian President Chadli Benjladid accused the Saudis of bankrolling the barbarous Armed Islamic Group (AIG) who, after Algeria protested the Gulf War, began a reign of gruesome terror upon the Algerian people, which culminated in Benjladid’s resignation and the hasty passage of the Hydrocarbon Law, which for the first time opened the price hawk country’s oilfields to the Four Horsemen.  The CIA later helped AIG fighters, who massacred tens of thousands of Algerians in a most gruesome manner during the 1990’s, travel to Bosnia, where they helped destroy Yugoslavia.

Algeria has a long history of defying Big Oil and was once ruled by President Houari Boumedienne, one of the great Arab socialist leaders of all time, who initiated the original ideas for a more just “New International Economic Order” in fiery speeches at the UN, where he encouraged producer cartels modeled on OPEC as a means to Third World emancipation.  In the 1960’s independent Italian oilman Enrico Mattei began negotiating with Algeria and other nationalistic OPEC states who wanted to sell their oil internationally without having to deal with the Four Horsemen.  In 1962 Mattei died in a mysterious plane crash.  Former French intelligence agent Thyraud de Vosjoli says French intelligence was involved.  William McHale of Time magazine, who covered Mattei’s attempt to break the Big Oil cartel, also died under strange circumstances. [197]

In the Middle East region, in addition to funding the Iran/Iraq War, both the Saudis and the UAE provided financial and military assistance to Oman to put down the Dhofar rebellion in the late 1970’s.  In 1975 the US sent $138 million in military aid through Saudi Arabia to Yemen, in hopes of heading off a Marxist revolution there.  That effort failed and the country split into North Yemen and South Yemen for the next two decades before merging again in the 1990’s. [198]  Saudi aid to both Yemen and Oman continues to this day in an effort to stamp out nationalist movements in those countries which border the Kingdom.  Yemenis make up over one-third of the Saudi workforce.

Kuwait also provides support to both Yemen and Oman and played a key role in brokering a truce between the countries in the 1990’s.  During the US-led effort to partition Bosnia from Yugoslavia, King Faud led calls for an end to the UN arms embargo, which made it difficult for Bosnian Muslim fighters to procure weapons.  When the embargo was lifted, the Saudis funded the arms purchases of the Bosnian Muslims.  Later the Saudis funded the Kosovo Liberation Army in their fight against the government of Yugoslavia as well as the NLA Albanian separatists attacking the government of Macedonia.

The Saudis even funded CIA covert operations in Italy, where they plunked down $10 million in 1985 to help destroy the Communist Party.  More recently, Prince Bandar donated $1 million to the Bush Sr. Presidential Library, and another $1 million to a Barbara Bush literacy campaign. [199]

In 2004 Saudi Prince Nayef bin Fawwaz Al Shaleen was cited by both FBI and DEA for having flown over two tons of cocaine on a family-owned 727 from Columbia to an airport near Paris, using diplomatic immunity. [200]

Dean Henderson is the author of five books:Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve, Stickin’ it to the Matrix & The Federal Reserve Cartel.  You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @www.hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com