________
Source: Fox News
The general emphasized that maintaining U.S. security and intelligence gathering in the region will be a more difficult task now
By Jennifer Griffin , Caitlin McFall | Fox News |
In an exclusive television interview with Fox News' Jennifer Griffin in Ramstein, Germany Saturday, General Gen. Mark Milley was asked about the military operation to process 17,000 Afghan evacuees headed for the U.S.
The general emphasized that maintaining U.S. security and intelligence gathering in the region will be a more difficult task now
By Jennifer Griffin , Caitlin McFall | Fox News |
In an exclusive television interview with Fox News' Jennifer Griffin in Ramstein, Germany Saturday, General Gen. Mark Milley was asked about the military operation to process 17,000 Afghan evacuees headed for the U.S.
"What they're doing as people come in, they're getting their names registered. They're doing the biometrics. They check their irises. They do their fingerprints. They take a full facial photo," he explained, referencing not only the Department of Homeland Security but officials in the FBI, USAID, the State Department, and Customs and Border Protection.
The general – who traveled to Germany to thank troops from the U.S. European Command that scrambled to set up the massive tent city on the tarmac of the largest U.S. Airbase and transport hub in Europe – said the base had already processed about 30,000 individuals.
Milley said he is "very comfortable" with the measures being taken to approve the entry of individuals into the U.S.
DEFENSE SEC LLOYD AUSTIN ORDERED BY HOUSE COMMITTEE TO SUBMIT AFGHANISTAN PLAN ON EVACUATIONS
The general was asked whether the U.S. is safer following the complete withdrawal from Afghanistan but said it was too soon to tell.
"My military estimate is…that the conditions are likely to develop of a civil war," Milley said. "I don't know if the Taliban is going to [be] able to consolidate power and establish governance."
The general’s premonition was followed by his concern that the terrorist organizations could use the disorder in Afghanistan as an opportunity to find gains.
"I think there's at least a very good probability of a broader civil war and that will then, in turn, lead to conditions that could, in fact, lead to a reconstitution of al-Qaeda or a growth of ISIS or other myriad of terrorist groups," he told Fox News.
"You could see a resurgence of terrorism coming out of that general region within 12, 24, 36 months. And we're going to monitor that," he added.
PENTAGON SPOKESMAN DECLINES TO NAME ISIS TERRORISTS KILLED IN AIRSTRIKE, SAYS 'NO QUESTION' TARGET WAS 'VALID'
The general emphasized that maintaining U.S. security and intelligence gathering in the region will be a more difficult task now that the U.S. has no official presence inside Afghanistan.
Please go to Fox News to read more.
________
Source: Declassified UK
How MI6 backed 'right-wing religious fanatics' in Afghanistan
By Phil Miller | 4 September 2021
Source: Declassified UK
How MI6 backed 'right-wing religious fanatics' in Afghanistan
By Phil Miller | 4 September 2021
British intelligence backed Afghan mujahideen from Jamiati Islami in the 1980s. (Photo: Erwin Franzen / Creative Commons)
Secret talks between the Taliban and MI6 amid the evacuation of Kabul are the latest chapter in the British intelligence agency's long history of engagement with radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan. Much remains shrouded in secrecy, but one insider is speaking out.
• John Fullerton worked covertly for MI6 in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and now speaks to Declassified• Fullerton operated undercover as a journalist, supporting the Afghan mujahideen• Margaret Thatcher's government provided military training, equipment and "propaganda" support to Afghan Islamist forces• Foreign Office said: "Military assistance for the Afghan rebels should be provided as clandestinely as possible"• London supported fundamentalist groups knowing they were "unlikely" to be sympathetic to the West• The US hired British mercenaries to conduct covert operations inside Afghanistan
In 1980, journalist John Fullerton sat down for lunch in London with members of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6. The spooks asked the restless reporter to name five cities where he would like to work. He scrawled the answers unhesitatingly on a paper napkin.
"The top one was Peshawar in Pakistan," he told Declassified, explaining his desire to move near the turbulent Afghan border. "The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan but I couldn't find ways to be a freelancer out there. There were no journalists covering it. Everyone had left Kabul. So I wanted to cover the war and that’s how SIS employed me."
He had been on good terms with SIS for many years already, after a chance encounter with Nicholas Elliott, one of the agency's high fliers. Elliott, who famously confronted the KGB double agent Kim Philby, had just retired as an SIS director when he spotted an article by Fullerton exposing a power struggle between the police and military in apartheid South Africa.
Fullerton grew up in Cape Town, rising to night news editor on the Cape Times before migrating back to the UK, the country of his birth. After checking he was not a mole for the apartheid regime's Bureau of State Security, British intelligence eventually took him on as a “contract labourer”, a cheaper option than a permanent SIS officer position.
"They employed quite a lot of these contract labourers, many from military backgrounds," Fullerton commented. "SIS had gone through a period of retrenchment in the 1970s and early 80s and it had shrunk. From having three fully staffed stations in Latin America it went to having none."
This all changed under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who received informal advice on espionage from Elliott. "She took a great interest in foreign affairs and intelligence and she tried to beef it all up," Fullerton remarked, adding that her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington was eager to get "scenes of Afghans fighting communists onto television screens."
Carrington told his department in a classified memo from 1980: "The Afghan insurgents should be brought to understand the value of publicity, which means that films of Soviet military activity (for example, their attacks on villages, and the destruction of houses and crops) should be readily available. It should not be difficult to encourage the supply of film, cameras, etc, to the insurgents, who should be encouraged to record Soviet excesses."
So when Fullerton wrote Peshawar on his napkin months later, Whitehall was more than ready to support his career move. They dispatched the 31-year-old to Fort Monckton, an SIS training school in Gosport, southern England, where he learnt tradecraft: how to compile intelligence reports, interview assets, follow a target or lose a tail.
Most important was a crash course in operating the Super 8 video cameras that he would supply to Afghan exiles.
The Foreign Office took a similar approach to Syria's civil war thirty years later: funding scores of citizen journalists to supply Western media networks with a steady stream of regime atrocities and stories of rebel victories.
In the 1980s, Britain's psychological operations for Afghanistan were more experimental, with Fullerton having to find suitable cameramen among the maze of mujahideen groups in Peshawar or sometimes crossing the border with them to reinforce his journalistic cover as a freelance foreign correspondent.
Fullerton's espionage along the Afghan/Pakistan frontier forms the basis for his gripping new novel Spy Game, which, although fictional, closely follows his own experience and chimes with declassified Foreign Office files at the National Archives.
His insider's perspective is especially valuable since SIS has never published its records from its actions against the Soviets in Afghanistan. These ran parallel to Operation Cyclone, one of the CIA's longest and most costly covert operations, unleashed by President Carter in 1979 and continued under Ronald Reagan.
'Right-wing religious fanatics'
Fullerton worked for SIS as its head agent in Peshawar from 1981-83, before joining Reuters news agency and drifting away from the intelligence community. Although his initial assignment in Afghanistan was limited to information gathering, agent running and obtaining footage, Lord Carrington had far more hawkish aspirations.
The Foreign Secretary, who oversaw SIS, wanted the Afghan mujahideen to receive "the sort of man-portable missiles that infantry use against low-flying aircraft" as well as "anti-tank mines".
Surface-to-air missiles and landmines in Afghanistan would later cause the West massive concern, but Carrington had no such hesitations in the early 1980s.
He noted: "It seems to me that this, though a tricky area, is one where the Afghan liberation movement deserves a measure of support, and one where the injection of some slight assistance may pay substantial dividends."
Despite Carrington's early zeal, Fullerton believes SIS only became more proactive towards the mid-80s. "In my time they were quite tentative," he said. "They were happy just to try and get some propaganda going, trying to get people to help the mujahideen, and that was enough as far as the British were concerned. It was only later they started to try to push for help for Ahmad Shah Massoud."
Massoud, known as the 'Lion of Panjshir', occupied a strategic valley near Kabul which was a stronghold of resistance to the Soviets. Long portrayed as a moderate force in Afghanistan, his son, also named Ahmad, is currently among the few remaining warlords holding out against the Taliban.
The increased focus on Massoud may have come about in 1983 when the CIA's Afghan Task Force chief, Gustav Avrakotos, met with SIS in London and realised the British agency was "virtually bankrupt".
Despite lacking funds, Avrakotos believed SIS had fewer legal constraints on its activity than the CIA and better understood Afghanistan’s terrain from its imperial expeditions in the country, especially the military significance of the Panjshir Valley.
Massoud's militant group, Jamiati Islami (Islamic Society), was Fullerton's "favourite organisation” to work with in Peshawar, but its men had some dangerous tendencies. "There was this great poster on the wall of Jamiati Islami and it had a grave," he recalled.
"Next to the grave were two coffins. One with a US flag wrapped around it, and the other with a Soviet flag. And it was death to both. So on the one hand they would accept guns from the West but on the other hand they would resent those people who were trying to enforce their view of the world on them."
Fullerton fed back to the British embassy in Islamabad information on the different currents within the Afghan opposition. Declassified files show the Foreign Office regarded Massoud's group as "right-wing religious fanatics" even before Fullerton arrived in Peshawar.
'Kick out the Red Colonialism'
There were few exiles in Peshawar who Fullerton trusted. "I met Afghans who were secular nationalists and I'd get along with them far better than with anyone else but they represented nothing very much. They were tiny factions. It was pretty hopeless, I thought anyway. They didn’t have much power on the ground."
Left-wing Afghans who became disenchanted with the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party government in Kabul also came across Fullerton’s radar in Peshawar, but they lived in fear of reprisals from Pashtun religious groups and their principal backers, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
"I think the Americans were supplying the wrong people because the intelligence they were getting was flawed," Fullerton reflected. "They'd subcontracted the intelligence to Pakistan's ISI. Pakistan had a forward policy which was to control Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, to ensure that whoever was in Kabul was their man and basically to create a huge cordon sanitaire."
Pakistan was afraid of being encircled by its old rival India and wanted a buffer zone on its northwestern flank in Afghanistan.
"The ISI was interested in giving all this largesse or some of it to their people and their people were basically Islamist", Fullerton added.
The Foreign Office files support his assessment, with one official noting: "The Pakistani government, including President Zia, favour the more fundamentalist, and generally more active, resistance groups. This makes sense in that President Zia is himself something of a fundamentalist."
Please go to Declassified UK to read more.
He had been on good terms with SIS for many years already, after a chance encounter with Nicholas Elliott, one of the agency's high fliers. Elliott, who famously confronted the KGB double agent Kim Philby, had just retired as an SIS director when he spotted an article by Fullerton exposing a power struggle between the police and military in apartheid South Africa.
Fullerton grew up in Cape Town, rising to night news editor on the Cape Times before migrating back to the UK, the country of his birth. After checking he was not a mole for the apartheid regime's Bureau of State Security, British intelligence eventually took him on as a “contract labourer”, a cheaper option than a permanent SIS officer position.
"They employed quite a lot of these contract labourers, many from military backgrounds," Fullerton commented. "SIS had gone through a period of retrenchment in the 1970s and early 80s and it had shrunk. From having three fully staffed stations in Latin America it went to having none."
This all changed under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who received informal advice on espionage from Elliott. "She took a great interest in foreign affairs and intelligence and she tried to beef it all up," Fullerton remarked, adding that her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington was eager to get "scenes of Afghans fighting communists onto television screens."
Lord Carrington at Nato and Fullerton in Afghanistan (Photos: Nato, Supplied)
Carrington told his department in a classified memo from 1980: "The Afghan insurgents should be brought to understand the value of publicity, which means that films of Soviet military activity (for example, their attacks on villages, and the destruction of houses and crops) should be readily available. It should not be difficult to encourage the supply of film, cameras, etc, to the insurgents, who should be encouraged to record Soviet excesses."
So when Fullerton wrote Peshawar on his napkin months later, Whitehall was more than ready to support his career move. They dispatched the 31-year-old to Fort Monckton, an SIS training school in Gosport, southern England, where he learnt tradecraft: how to compile intelligence reports, interview assets, follow a target or lose a tail.
Most important was a crash course in operating the Super 8 video cameras that he would supply to Afghan exiles.
The Foreign Office took a similar approach to Syria's civil war thirty years later: funding scores of citizen journalists to supply Western media networks with a steady stream of regime atrocities and stories of rebel victories.
In the 1980s, Britain's psychological operations for Afghanistan were more experimental, with Fullerton having to find suitable cameramen among the maze of mujahideen groups in Peshawar or sometimes crossing the border with them to reinforce his journalistic cover as a freelance foreign correspondent.
Fullerton's espionage along the Afghan/Pakistan frontier forms the basis for his gripping new novel Spy Game, which, although fictional, closely follows his own experience and chimes with declassified Foreign Office files at the National Archives.
His insider's perspective is especially valuable since SIS has never published its records from its actions against the Soviets in Afghanistan. These ran parallel to Operation Cyclone, one of the CIA's longest and most costly covert operations, unleashed by President Carter in 1979 and continued under Ronald Reagan.
The cover of 'Spy Game' by John Fullerton.
'Right-wing religious fanatics'
Fullerton worked for SIS as its head agent in Peshawar from 1981-83, before joining Reuters news agency and drifting away from the intelligence community. Although his initial assignment in Afghanistan was limited to information gathering, agent running and obtaining footage, Lord Carrington had far more hawkish aspirations.
The Foreign Secretary, who oversaw SIS, wanted the Afghan mujahideen to receive "the sort of man-portable missiles that infantry use against low-flying aircraft" as well as "anti-tank mines".
Surface-to-air missiles and landmines in Afghanistan would later cause the West massive concern, but Carrington had no such hesitations in the early 1980s.
He noted: "It seems to me that this, though a tricky area, is one where the Afghan liberation movement deserves a measure of support, and one where the injection of some slight assistance may pay substantial dividends."
Despite Carrington's early zeal, Fullerton believes SIS only became more proactive towards the mid-80s. "In my time they were quite tentative," he said. "They were happy just to try and get some propaganda going, trying to get people to help the mujahideen, and that was enough as far as the British were concerned. It was only later they started to try to push for help for Ahmad Shah Massoud."
A poster of Ahmad Shah Massoud in Kabul, 2013 (Photo: Ninara / Flickr)
The increased focus on Massoud may have come about in 1983 when the CIA's Afghan Task Force chief, Gustav Avrakotos, met with SIS in London and realised the British agency was "virtually bankrupt".
Despite lacking funds, Avrakotos believed SIS had fewer legal constraints on its activity than the CIA and better understood Afghanistan’s terrain from its imperial expeditions in the country, especially the military significance of the Panjshir Valley.
Massoud's militant group, Jamiati Islami (Islamic Society), was Fullerton's "favourite organisation” to work with in Peshawar, but its men had some dangerous tendencies. "There was this great poster on the wall of Jamiati Islami and it had a grave," he recalled.
"Next to the grave were two coffins. One with a US flag wrapped around it, and the other with a Soviet flag. And it was death to both. So on the one hand they would accept guns from the West but on the other hand they would resent those people who were trying to enforce their view of the world on them."
Fullerton fed back to the British embassy in Islamabad information on the different currents within the Afghan opposition. Declassified files show the Foreign Office regarded Massoud's group as "right-wing religious fanatics" even before Fullerton arrived in Peshawar.
'Kick out the Red Colonialism'
There were few exiles in Peshawar who Fullerton trusted. "I met Afghans who were secular nationalists and I'd get along with them far better than with anyone else but they represented nothing very much. They were tiny factions. It was pretty hopeless, I thought anyway. They didn’t have much power on the ground."
Left-wing Afghans who became disenchanted with the Soviet-backed People's Democratic Party government in Kabul also came across Fullerton’s radar in Peshawar, but they lived in fear of reprisals from Pashtun religious groups and their principal backers, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
"I think the Americans were supplying the wrong people because the intelligence they were getting was flawed," Fullerton reflected. "They'd subcontracted the intelligence to Pakistan's ISI. Pakistan had a forward policy which was to control Pashtun areas of Afghanistan, to ensure that whoever was in Kabul was their man and basically to create a huge cordon sanitaire."
Pakistan was afraid of being encircled by its old rival India and wanted a buffer zone on its northwestern flank in Afghanistan.
"The ISI was interested in giving all this largesse or some of it to their people and their people were basically Islamist", Fullerton added.
The Foreign Office files support his assessment, with one official noting: "The Pakistani government, including President Zia, favour the more fundamentalist, and generally more active, resistance groups. This makes sense in that President Zia is himself something of a fundamentalist."
Please go to Declassified UK to read more.
________
There are now claims a hostage situation is unfolding so it may look like preparations are under way for the US to go back into Afghanistan.
There are now claims a hostage situation is unfolding so it may look like preparations are under way for the US to go back into Afghanistan.
Does the US know who all these Afghanistan people are who have been brought into the US numbering depending on different accounts around 124,000 Afghans? What a nightmare this is turning out to be with the potential of "right wing religious Islamic fanatics" being brought into the US home grown "right wing religious conservatives." Europe's fate has already been decided. America is next.
Related:
The US mandate has a global mission to destabilize countries turning the into economic basket cases with the only way out for its population being violence and bloodshed.
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