Grey Wolves, Bin Laden and Pan-Turanism

* starroute:

For whatever it's worth, the Grey Wolves are also motivated by Pan-Turanism. (And no, ideology is not irrelevant. Ideology determines the channels in which greed runs.) See, for example, Wikipedia:

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Turanism forms an important aspect of the ideology of the Turkish Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), whose members are informally known as Grey Wolves...

Turanism has played a role in inspiring the early leaders Chechen rebellion against Russian rule.The current Chechan leaders have taken up a more jihadist inspiration for their struggle.

Western support for Turanism started with the Carter Administration and is a policy still held by the Bush Administration.The goal of this policy first developed by the Carter Administration was a pro-insurgency program developed to aid and inspire internal uprisings within the Islamic communities within the Soviet Union. It is believed that the CIA covertly supported the growth of the Chechan separatist and jihadist movements during the years of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan as an effective tool against the Soviets and later the Russians. This pro-Turanic policies of the Bush Administration have led to US support for Azerbajian, Uzbekistan,Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.The US has been a major contributor to oil projects in Azerbajian and other post-Soviet Turkic republics.

For more on Pan-Turanism and its significance, see here or here.

Most of us seem to think that if we can tell Sunnis from Shi'ites, we're doing pretty well when it comes to the Middle East -- but there's an enormous amount of stuff going on that's hardly even being mentioned. I sure don't know as much about Pan-Turanism as I ought to, but I do know that it's being used by Israel and the Neocons both as a way of containing the Arabs and also as a tool for trying to split off bits of Iran."

thnx starroute. ive never heard of Pan-Turanism.

(btw - this is beautiful: "And no, ideology is not irrelevant. Ideology determines the channels in which greed runs." okey-dokes - that'll be my new mantra!)

* flashback to Parry's place, 1997, (mostly because i've been meaning to use this article again for months):

"For several months, Turkey had been awash in dramatic disclosures connecting high Turkish officials to the right-wing Grey Wolves, the terrorist band which has preyed on the region for years. In 1981, a terrorist from the Grey Wolves attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II in Vatican City.

But at the center of the mushrooming Turkish scandal is whether Turkey, a strategically placed NATO country, allowed mafiosi and right-wing extremists to operate death squads and to smuggle drugs with impunity. A Turkish parliamentary commission is investigating these new charges.

The rupture of state secrets in Turkey also could release clues to other major Cold War mysteries. Besides the attempted papal assassination, the Turkish disclosures could shed light on the collapse of the Vatican bank in 1982 and the operation of a clandestine pipeline that pumped sophisticated military hardware into the Middle East -- apparently from NATO stockpiles in Europe -- in exchange for heroin sold by the Mafia in the United States.
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... the Grey Wolves gained international notoriety when Mehmet Ali Agca, one of Catli's closest collaborators, shot and nearly killed Pope John Paul II in St. Peter's Square on May 13, 1981. Catli was the leader of a fugitive terrorist cell that included Agca and a handful of other Turkish neo-fascists.
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Catli enjoyed close links to Turkish drug mafiosi, too. His Grey Wolves henchmen worked as couriers for the Turkish mob boss Abuzer Ugurlu. At Ugurlu's behest, Catli's thugs criss-crossed the infamous smugglers' route passing through Bulgaria. Those routes were the ones favored by smugglers who reportedly carried NATO military equipment to the Middle East and returned with loads of heroin.
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The Reagan administration jumped on the papal assassination attempt as a propaganda opportunity, rather than helping to unravel the larger mystery. Although the CIA's link to the arms-for-drugs traffic in Bulgaria was widely known in espionage circles, hard-line U.S. and Western European officials promoted instead a bogus conspiracy theory that blamed the papal shooting on a communist plot.

The so-called "Bulgarian connection" became one of the more effective disinformation schemes hatched during the Reagan era. It reinforced the notion of the Soviet Union as an evil empire. But the apparent hoax also diverted attention from extensive -- and potentially embarrassing -- ties between U.S. intelligence and the Turkey's narco-trafficking ultra-right.
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Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, the CIA station chief in Rome at the time of the papal shooting, had previously been posted in Ankara. Clarridge was the CIA's man-on-the-spot in Turkey in the 1970s when armed bands of Grey Wolves unleashed a wave of bomb attacks and shootings that killed thousands of people, including public officials, journalists, students, lawyers, labor organizers, social democrats, left-wing activists and ethnic Kurds. [In his 1997 memoirs, A Spy for All Seasons, Clarridge makes no reference to the Turkish unrest or to the pope shooting.]

During those violent 1970s, the Grey Wolves operated with the encouragement and protection of the Counter-Guerrilla Organization, a section of the Turkish Army's Special Warfare Department. Headquartered in the U.S. Military Aid Mission building in Ankara, the Special Warfare Department received funds and training from U.S. advisors to create "stay behind" squads comprised of civilian irregulars. They were supposed to go underground and engage in acts of sabotage if the Soviets invaded.

Similar Cold War paramilitary units were established in every NATO member state, covering all non-Communist Europe like a spider web that would entangle Soviet invaders. But instead of preparing for foreign enemies, U.S.-sponsored stay-behind operatives in Turkey and several European countries used their skills to attack domestic opponents and foment violent disorders. Some of those attacks were intended to spark right-wing military coups.
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Across the Atlantic in Washington, the U.S. government has yet to acknowledge any responsibility for the Turkish Frankenstein that U.S. Cold War strategy helped to create. When asked about the Susurluk affair, a State Department spokesperson said it was "an internal Turkish matter." He declined further comment."

more on Stay-Behind, Grey Wolves and NATO here:

In 1980, the time of yet another Turkish coup d’etat, there were around 200,000 members of the Grey Wolves in Turkey, as well as 1,000,000 sympathizers, all playing a pivotal role in establishing military rule in the country. Even though a lot of military leaders were skeptical of their relations with international terrorism, it was too late for an effective action to take place. That period also coincided with the beginning of the Kurdish PKK guerilla war in 1984, a conflict which ironically gave plentiful of opportunities for the paramilitary force – never having been required for its original, anti-Soviet purposes – to excel on its natural turf.

At the same time, this conflict also presented the opportunity for the expansion of heroin smuggling, an age-old practice in the tri-national borders between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. This to some extent complicated relations between Turkey and the West, since the bulk of the narcotics were exported into Europe via numerous channels, all more or less controlled by the Turkish secret services.

That said, it is worthwhile to mention the complexity of the contra-guerrillas’ activity within the international criminal network that in essence was connected with international terrorism. A network of gigantic proportions was created based around contra-guerrilla activities, which resulted in a plethora of criminal activities around the world.

It's these circles that are at the heart of the Sibel/Feith/Perle/ Ledeen/Al Qaeda conspiracy.

I'll also note this, again, from my interview with Verboud:

"MV: Yes. In the film, we expand on these notions with ex-CIA officer Philip Giraldi, who recently wrote a very interesting article about Sibel. He has suspicions that Douglas Feith and Richard Perle may have helped, or been instrumental, in establishing false end-user-certificates that enabled weapons to be sent over to the Chechen guerillas - many of them being very closely linked to Al-Qaeda."

As miguel wrote a while back:

"We should not underestimate the importance of this story of Bin Laden's visits to Turkey, if the story is true. It would be the first confirmation that I know of, outside Sibel Edmonds herself, that there was a Turkish connection to al-Qaeda and Bin Laden. And it fits with Sibel's story: she has consistently said that Turkish countries and lobbying/cultural organizations are tied to al-Qaeda through money laundering and other illegal activities. This article clearly states that Bin Laden was in Turkey to meet with the "most distinguished representatives of the Turkish financial elite."

One can see, if the article's charges are true, why the American Turkish Council would have wanted to penetrate the FBI translation program after 9-11. The exposure of Turkey, Turkic and Baltic countries, and related organizations to al-Qaeda money laundering would have been very bad for business. Of course, in retrospect, they needn't have bothered, for the Bush Administration was always going to be on their side (with a little help from the feckless Democrats.)"

more here and here

and Damien:

" Could people like Jan Dickerson be part of an extended Al Qaeda network through Turkey? My suspicion is that she was part of the Turkish connections of the criminal US-headed RogueNet.
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RogueNet, as I termed it, goes back to Poppy Bush as head of the CIA and Iran/Contra and has, at times, liased with elements of the Russian, Israeli and Turkish mafia in regard to drugs and arms trafficking. In Turkey this would involve military insiders. RogueNet piggybacks on US intelligence and is just the Bushes/Neocons controlled intelligence operatives or crime connections used by them at any particular time - in the US it consists of elements of the CIA, State Dept etc. Remember, this is a full on criminal cabal using the organs of the State. "

how bout them apples?