Lawrence of Arabia Strikes Again

Source: Voltaire Network

The Muslim Brotherhood as an auxiliary force of MI6 and the CIA

We are continuing the publication of Thierry Meyssan's new book, "Right Before Our Eyes". In this episode, he describes the way in which President Jimmy Carter and his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, used the terrorist capacities of the Muslim Brotherhood against the Soviets.

by Thierry Meyssan | Voltaire Network | Damascus (Syria) | 11 July 2019

This article is an extract from the book Fake wars and big lies. See Contents.

US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski imagined using the Muslim Brotherhood to carry out terrorist operations against the Afghan Communist government – which triggered the intervention of the USSR.

The Brotherhood in the service of the Carter-Brzeziński strategy

In 1972-1973, an official from the Foreign Office – and probably MI6 as well – Sir James Craig, together with the British ambassador to Egypt, Sir Richard Beaumont, began an intense lobbying campaign aimed at harnessing the Muslim Brotherhood for use by the United Kingdom and the United States in the struggle against the Marxists and the nationalists, not only in Egypt, but also all over the Muslim world. Sir James was soon to be nominated as Her Majesty's ambassador in Syria, then in Arabia, and would find an attentive ear at the CIA. Much later, he was to become the designer of the "Arab Springs".

Sir James MacQueen Craig, specialist of the Middle East, convinced the United Kingdom to use the Muslim Brotherhood for secret operations outside of Egypt. It was also Craig who conceived the plan for the "Arab Springs" on the model of the operation led in 1915 by Lawrence of Arabia.

In 1977, Jimmy Carter was elected President of the United States. He appointed Zbigniew Brzeziński as his National Security Advisor. Brzeziński decided to use Islamism against the Soviets. He gave the Saudis the go-ahead to increase their payments to the Islamic World League, organised regime changes in Pakistan, Iran and Syria, destabilised Afghanistan, and made US access to oil from the "Greater Middle East" a national security objective. Finally, he entrusted the Brotherhood with military equipment.

This strategy was clearly explained by Bernard Lewis during the meeting of the Bilderberg Group [1], organised by NATO in Austria, April 1979. Lewis, an Anglo-Israeli-US Islamologist, assured that the Muslim Brotherhood could not only play a major role against the Soviets and provoke internal trouble in Central Asia, but also balkanise the Near East in favour of Israel.

Contrary to a widely-held belief, the Brotherhood was not happy about following the Brzeziński plan – it was looking further afield. It had obtained the assistance of Riyadh and Washington for the creation of other branches of the Brotherhood in other countries – branches that were to come to fruition later on. The King of Arabia granted an average of $5billion annually to the Muslim World League, which extended its activities in 120 countries and financed various wars. As a point of reference, $5 billion was the equivalent of the military budget of North Korea. The League obtained advisory status for the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, and the post of observer for UNICEF.

General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the first Head of State to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood outside of Egypt, allowed combatants of the Brotherhood to have access to a rear base in their fight against the Afghan Communists.

In Pakistan, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, the Army Chief of Staff, trained at Fort Bragg in the United States, overthrew President Zulfikar Alî Bhutto and had him hanged. A member of the Jamaat-e-Islami, in other words the local version of the Muslim Brotherhood, he went on to Islamise Pakistani society. The Sharia was progressively established – including the death penalty for blasphemy – and a vast network of Islamic schools was set up. It was the first time that the Brotherhood had been in power outside of Egypt.

In Iran, Brzeziński convinced the Shah to abdicate, and organised the return of Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, who defined himself as a "Shiite Islamist". In his youth, in 1945, Khomeini had met Hasan al-Banna in Cairo, and convinced him not to exacerbate the Sunni/Shiite conflict. Later, he translated two books by Sayyid Qutb. The Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolutionaries agreed on social subjects, but not at all on political questions. Brzeziński realised his mistake the very day that the Ayatollah arrived in Teheran. Khomeini immediately went to pray at the tombs of the martyrs of the Shah's régime, and called on the army to revolt against imperialism. Brzeziński committed a second error by sending Delta Force to save the US spies who were being held hostage in their embassy in Teheran. Even if he was able to hide from Western eyes the fact that these "diplomats" were actually spies, he made a laughing-stock of his soldiers with the failed mission "Eagle Claw", and convinced the Pentagon that it was necessary to find a way of defeating Iran.

Saudi billionaire Oussama Ben Laden, hero of the Western powers against the Soviets.

Brzeziński set up "Operation Cyclone" in Afghanistan. Between 17,000 and 35,000 Muslim Brothers from about 40 countries came to fight the USSR, which had come to the defence of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, at its request [2]. There had never been a “Soviet invasion”, as US propaganda pretended.

The men of the Brotherhood came to reinforce a local coalition of conservative combatants and the local Muslim Brotherhood, including the Pashtun Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the Tajik Ahmad Shah Massoud. They received the major part of their armament from Israel [3] – officially their sworn enemy, but now their partner. All these forces were commanded from Pakistan by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, and financed by the United States and Saudi Arabia. This was the first time that the Brotherhood had been used by the Anglo-Saxons to wage war. Among the combatants present were the future commanders of the wars in the Caucasus, of the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah, the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and of course al-Qaeda and Daesh. In the United States, the anti-Soviet operation was supported by the Republican Party and a small group from the extreme left, the Trotskyists of Social Democrats USA.

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Related:

The Muslim Brotherhood as assassins 

The Muslim Brotherhood as auxiliaries of the Pentagon