Blowback - S4 Episode 1 - "Snake Eater"

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

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Afghans are thronging to Kabul's airport. Desperate to get on planes and leave the country. Grasping at U.S. military aircraft and risking their lives. Some hung on to the wheels and fell to their death. Kabul is falling now. August 2021. The military side is where the U.S. is staging an elaborate evacuation. 1,000 American troops being sent to the airport, they opened fire and killed some they considered threats.

I've concluded that it's time to end America's longest war. It's time for American troops to come home. And all of the government checkpoints, all the police, all the soldiers, they're going. Just outside the airport, here's what the people are fleeing. The Taliban have set up checkpoints across the Afghan capital. Back in control and showing it with fire. showing it with firepower. The Taliban don't just control Kabul, but the whole country, and all the weapons the U.S.

bought for the Afghan army. I did not, and nor did anyone else, see a collapse of an army that size in 11 days. The country's president has fled. The militants are much stronger now than 20 years ago when the U.S. drove them from power when they sheltered Osama bin Laden. September 2001. What's the other jet doing? What's that?

Holy fuck! Oh my God! Oh my God! American 11 are you trying to call? The cops are not answering their phone. Oh my God! Oh, my God! Good afternoon.

On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations. September 1996. After sweeping across the country, the Taliban now convented. control three quarters of Afghanistan. In the same interview you were asked whether you regretted having supported Islamic fundamentalists and having armed future terrorists. Your reply was, what is more important in the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War.

The Lisei Malalai was once the largest girls' school in Kabul. Since the Taliban entered Kabul, it has remained closed. Yes, compared to the Soviet Union and to its country. until its collapse, the Taliban were unimportant. 1989. Superpowers aren't supposed to lose, but today the Soviet Union concluded its retreat from Afghanistan. The Soviet ambassador and the general of the army, Varanika, for leaving Kabul under a very strong fire of the Majahedin.

So I'm afraid there's going to be a bloodbath in Afghanistan. A bloodbath. 1980. U.S. National Security Advisor Brezhinsky flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role. On the Afghan border near the Kaiba Pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts. That land over there is yours. You'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your home.

and your mosques back again because your cause is right and God is on your side. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 4, Episode 1, Snake Eater. Here we are. Welcome, Friends Old and New, to Season 4. And thanks, as always, most of all, to everyone who listened last season. And thank you to everyone who is subscribing to join us for this season. As usual, this first episode will be free for all.

And we hope you join us on the other side at Blowback. show where you can sign up and get not only the rest of the season, but 10 more bonus episodes, our ad-free back catalog of all other seasons, and a few other goodies that we'll list at the end of the episode. And this season, we'll just tell you up front, is our most ambitious yet, the saga of war in Afghanistan. And it's a story that winds through decade after decade, a covert war started by the CIA in the 70s, which explodes into a full-scale invasion and occupation by the Soviet Union through the

1980s. In the wake of the Soviet defeat, the jihad in Afghanistan spreads over the world through the 1990s until America itself gets a taste in September 2001. The U.S. unleashes a new war on terror, not just in Afghanistan, but all over the world. So think of this season as a two-parter. first half will be in the 1980s during the Soviet-Afghan War, and the second half will lead us up to 9-11 and America's War on Terror and Occupation of Afghanistan. Along the way, we will meet secret agents, Soviet commissars, Afghan warlords, Texas cowboys, Saudi oligarchs, and the people caught in between, in a 40-year war that may not yet be over. I don't know how much you know about Afghanistan.

Most people can't even find it on the map. From the novel, The Worm Ouroboros. The king weareth on his thumb that worm, Oroboros, which doctors have from of old made for an ensemble of eternity, whereof the end is ever at the beginning, and the beginning at the end, forevermore. In other words, the snake, eats its tail.

Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. Afghanistan. The summer of 2021 produced a very odd spectacle. The withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover that followed. In some ways, appeared to wake Americans up, almost remind them that we had been occupying a country halfway across the world for 20 years. And this news today, NBC polling shows 60% of Americans disapprove of President Biden's handling of Afghanistan. Abandoning Afghanistan is a historic mistake, read the New York Times. A dishonorable exit read the Atlantic. And said the Washington Post editorial board,

the debacle in Afghanistan is the worst kind, avoidable. There was an interesting logic at play. It was as if the chaos had started that day. And all of the violence and the horror of the past 20 years had nothing to do with the images coming out of Afghanistan. But those 20 years of American occupation hardly make much sense without going back further. John Poluska is a retired Green Beret

who served in Afghanistan and joins me now. Do you think Biden has made America safer? I don't think anything that we did in Afghanistan has made America safer. In working backwards from that American withdrawal, questions began piling up. Was this another Vietnam, or was it something quite different? Was Afghanistan the Good War, overshadowed by the criminal Iraq War? Or was it the foundation of the crusade that has turned the world upside down since 9-11?

You say you're running out of targets on Mr. Secretary and going back to the field enforces, where are you going to continue to hit? Well, for one thing, we're finding that some of the targets we hit need to be re-hit. Second, we're not running out of targets. Afghanistan is. We wanted to look at that trail, study the connections, the associations, the clues that place Afghanistan in America's crosshairs by September 2001. And then we can try to understand what the end. Americans did next. All this may help us understand whether, even after the recent U.S.

withdrawal, is this really over? Or is the snake perhaps getting ready for another bite? The first time was for himself. The second time was for his country. This time. Crabble. Something went wrong. It's for his friend. Trumpman was a good man, and I'm really very sorry. You're just leaving them? What do you expect us to do? Send in a Delta team? Create an international incident.

What about me? I think we should start here with the biggest bombshell. Many of you out there, whether you know it or not, are probably familiar with the whole vibe of American foreign policy toward Afghanistan from the following point of trivia. In Rambo 3, released in 1988, in which John Ramboe fights against the Soviet, in which John Rambo fights against the Soviets alongside the Mujahideen. The original cut of the film ended with a title card. You probably know it already.

This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan. And as if to underline the historical irony years later, after the 9-11 attacks, the home video releases of Rambo 3 changed this text to this film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan. So there it is. Everything you need to know. It's right there. Captured perfectly in this moment of 80s pop culture, right?

Well, here it is. And this brings me no pleasure to report. That entire story, that entire meme, is a myth. Reviews from the time way back, reference the title card of gallant people, not the Mujahideen fighters. No home video releases printed before 9-11 have ever been shown to contain the Mujahideen shoutout. Someone just did a really good job in Photoshop and convinced the internet, and indeed if you look it up several academics, into believing a piece of pop culture history too good to be true. It's over. Nothing is over. That said, if the trivia it's

itself is false. It is, as they say, spiritually true. And to be honest, Rambo 3 is as good a place as any to understand how Afghanistan first entered the minds of many Americans in the 1980s, a place where Russia got its own Vietnam. Every day, you're at war machines lose ground to a bunch of poorly armed, poorly equipped freedom fighters. The fact is that you underestimated your competition. If you'd studied your history, you know that these people have never given up to anyone. You can't defeat a people like that. We tried. We already had our Vietnam. Now you're going to have yours. And we'll see this season how this shorthand for the Soviet-Afghan War, Russia's Vietnam,

was really fed to the American media, be they artists or the press, and how it gave the Americans only a few years after Vietnam, the opportunity to finally play the anti-imperialists. Venom of the Cobra and the vengeance of the Afghan. You understand what this means? That you guys don't take any shit. Hollywood, with help from the government of the U.S., and in at least one case of apartheid South Africa, put out a slew of movies to capitalize on this opportunity to be on the right side of history. It was only five years before the Soviet-Afghan War that America had been defeated in Vietnam,

with all the national shame seeping into people's souls before an American. after. Because we live here! Movies like Rambo 3, The Beast, and on the tackier end, Red Scorpion, were essentially a spin on the pre-existing Vietnam movies, but projecting all of America's crimes and misdeeds on the Soviets. We saw in season one how architects of the Iraq War, known as the Vulcans, were haunted by and raging against so-called Vietnam syndrome.

Well, that pathology begins. decades earlier in Afghanistan. As CIA director Bill Casey himself put it, here's the beauty of the Afghan operation, Casey told us colleagues. Usually it looks like the big bad Americans are beating up on the natives. Afghanistan is just the reverse. The Russians are beating up on the little guys. We don't make it our war.

The Mujahideen have all the motivation they need. All we have to do is give them help, only more of it. That, we will find in this season, was a bit of an understatement. Red alert, red alert, red alert, red alert. You crossed my line of debt. You haven't dismantled your MX stockpile. Pakistan is threatening my border. That's it, Buster.

No more military aid. Nuke them. Get them before they get you. Another quality home game from Butler Brothers. All the way back in 1954, the Pakistani writer Sadat Monto published a series of essays called Letters to Uncle Sam. Writing satirically but with astounding prescience, he jokingly advised the new superpower of the United States to team up with hardcore Islamic militants in the region to scare away the Soviets. If this sect of Mullahs is armed American style, then the Soviet Union will have to pick up its spittoon from here.

Even before 9-11, but certainly since, there's been a popular idea of the standoff between the superpower America and terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda, a sprawling, global modern capitalism in one corner, and a reactionary militant Islam in the other. McDonald's versus jihad, to paraphrase the scholar Benjamin Barber. But in telling this season's story about Afghanistan, one that Sadat Manto predicted the better part of a century ago, we're looking to show things in quite a different light. You could look at Islamic fundamentalism

as something as American as apple pie. Scholar Timothy Mitchell refers to the phenomenon as Mickjihad. The holy wars of Islamic militants and the agendas of states like the USA are far more intertwined than either lets on. This one's containment and this one's great journey are the same. As a rule, Mitchell writes, the more closely a government is allied with Washington, the more Islamic its politics. Egypt under Nassar, Republican Iraq, the Palestine National Movement, post-independence Algeria, the Republic of South Yemen, Bathist Syria, all charted courses independent of the U.S. In contrast, those governments dependent on the United States typically claimed an Islamic authority.

There are, of course, exceptions. The split between Sunni and Shia governments has meant that the Islamic Republic of Iran is usually a sworn enemy. of the United States, except of course when President Reagan was selling the missiles where the Ayatollahs were offering to help against the Taliban. But on the whole, it is impossible to ignore the alliances, some temporary, some permanent, between the U.S. and Sunni, conservatives, and extremists. It would seem to follow, Mitchell writes, that political Islam plays an unacknowledged role in the making of what we call global capitalism.

This may explain why, as we'll see, the United States approved of Pakistan creating and managing the Taliban in the mid-90s. They could bring order to Afghanistan and make things safe for lucrative pipeline deals, a little Saudi Arabia, as one State Department official put it. And it may explain why, after the anti-Soviet jihad, the U.S. shared interests with the emerging al-Qaeda network in places like Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia. Hey, you want to see something really scary? You bet. But there are a lot of things that all these years later, most Americans have never heard about. Not only the full extent of American-backed anti-communist jihad and how far it really went back, but also the very things that shaped the nature of the war and the nature of the withdrawal

that had the American press and politicians screaming bloody murder in 2021. All right, two seconds, okay? Okay. What is it? Just pull it over. Okay. I'll show you. In the fall of 2001, as the U.S. bombing campaign routed the Taliban and al-Qaeda,

Vice President Dick Cheney, anti-terror obsessive, supervised the evacuation of hundreds of al-Qaeda and Taliban by Pakistani planes, who safely transported. them over the border, where they would enjoy protection for years. Late into the jihad of the 1980s, the CIA, not content with bleeding the Soviets dry inside Afghanistan, launched an even more secret operation in which the warlords on our payroll executed raids and attacks inside the USSR. This stunned even hardliners in the Reagan administration and the CIA. One confessed years later, putting together a military operation and carrying it into the Soviet Union had never been done.

In the 1990s, when a plucky group of religious revivalists called the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the supposedly medieval Taliban tapped top-notch public relations experts and lobbyists in Washington. Specifically, they enlisted New Jersey socialite Lely Helms, the niece of former CIA director Richard Helms. Every new weapon, including chemical warfare, has been used to eliminate these people, and they've been very successful on many levels. Long-time listeners of the show may hear echoes of the past, or rather of the future, during the Soviet-Afghan War,

when the U.S. government cooked up allegations of WMD against the Soviet Union. Accusations that the USSR was using yellow rain, toxic chemical bombs not only in Afghanistan, but also in Cambodia and Laos. This accusation made it into the aforementioned Hollywood portrayals of the war, and it sure helped to change the subject from the actual chemical agents the U.S. dropped on Vietnam a few years earlier. Afghanistan is a big place. How and where you make it.

Well, that's up to you. In the shadowy and bizarre web of connections that lead up to the September 11th attacks, one name kept coming up. Mr. Ali Muhammad, according to one FBI special agent, trained scores of Islamic militants in the 80s and 90s. The man who taught al-Qaeda the art of kidnapping, suicide bombing, and hijacking airplanes cut his teeth fighting the Soviets on behalf of the USA. Perhaps that's not too surprising. More interesting, though, is the fact that Ali Muhammad was a green beret and FBI informant and a CIA asset.

Are we ever, ever going to find Ben Laden? Yeah, of course. Absolutely. Did we ever come close? I don't know. I can't answer that. You don't know, or you... I really don't know. I'm not trying to hide anything. The first ever international warrant for Osama's arrest was not issued by the United States

even after he'd been connected to the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. and the deadly attacks on U.S. military installations in Saudi Arabia in the years after. Though it was scrubbed from the public copy of the warrant, the first government officially calling for bin Laden's capture, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi's Libya. And the reason it was kept under wraps is a whole other story. Sales went up 50% when Van Dora was on. 50%.

So the very idea that I was unaware of every detail or aspect that shows operation, Frankly, it's very insulting. So you know. It's even more insulting. Maybe the widest reaching effect of the Afghan jihad and the wars that followed was Afghanistan's transformation from a developing modern economy to far and away the world's largest supplier of heroin. As we'll see in a country of poppy fields, the Mujahideen, the CIA, and the Pakistanis juice the heroin trade in the 19. And decades later, though the Taliban insurgency used drug money to fight the American occupation, the major areas of production of heroin took place in regions controlled by the United States.

By the height of the U.S. occupation, Afghanistan was producing 90% of the world's heroin. It still dominates the market today. We paid the price, we bore the burden, and astonishingly, the evil empire collapsed. The Berlin Wall has fallen, and the Red Army has been chased from Afghanistan with their tail between their lives. Every value we were taught in our home, in our schools, and in our churches, turned out to be true. This season features our largest cast of characters yet. yet, and perhaps the most colorful as well. Among the Americans will meet Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson, the man who would become

America's spokesperson for the Islamic Jihad, a womanizer with a notorious cocaine habit. Charlie Wilson's condo sported mirrored walls and a gleaming tanning bed to maintain his year-round tan, writes his biographer, and Wilson had a near brush with jail several times. be it for charges of bribery, cocaine use, or the time he committed a hit and run in the nation's capital. Wilson exclusively staffed his office with beautiful women, known as Charlie's Angels. He once explained, quote, you can teach them how to type, but you can't teach them how to grow tits. Against this debauched lifestyle, Wilson held high ideals. His childhood hero was Douglas MacArthur, and his inspiration to enter politics was John

F. Kennedy. To pursue these ideals, Wilson made friends with dictators in Nicaragua, war criminals in Israel, and the holy warriors of Afghanistan. Visiting that front, Wilson would dress in robes, quote, staging mock raids, brandishing a sword while riding a white stallion. Using his buffoonish persona to disguise some genuine political talent, Wilson managed to transform the jihad in Afghanistan from a dirty, low-key covert op into, quote, a Washington cocktail circuit cause celeb. But to some, he would always be known as cocaine-charlie. Next call is from Houston, Texas.

Go ahead, please. That's good. Yes, Houston. And we should be trying to get along with them so they withdraw, because being hard with them will get you no place. I sure I'm glad you don't live in my district. I wish I did live in your district. Another thing, you had a cocaine.

The dayn problem. Did you clear that up? I've been cleared four or five times. I hope that's enough. The day-to-day manager of the jihad, CIA man Gus Avrakotos hailed from Aliquipa on the rolling hills just north of Pittsburgh. Avricotos represented, at least to his admirers, the new crop of blue-collar, ethnic, hard-scrabble CIA recruits that had no connection to the blue-blooded cab. ruling the agency back in the 70s and 80s. In fact, according to author George Cryal,

it was Avrakados' Greek background that made him useful as a frontline player in the CIA's program to assist the military junta taking over Greece. Sent by the agency to advise the junta to spare the country's president from execution, Avricotos recalls telling them, unofficially, as your friend,

my advice is to shoot the motherfurt. As chief of the Afghan operation, Avrakotos would run a team that sent the Mujahideen all kinds of toys and trained them in kidnapping, assassination, and other acts of terrorism. His enthusiasm for the Afghan project brought him into contact with a fellow believer in the cause, Charlie Wilson. Quote, as I saw it, the tie that bound us together was chasing pussy and killing communists. Even the boisterous Gus Avrakotos had a boss, and during the years of the U.S.-backed jihad, the agency was headed by director Bill Casey.

Casey was not only a staunch Catholic with ties to the Vatican, but also a member of the secretive religious order, the Knights of Malta. According to Steve Cole, Casey saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the realistic counter-strategy of covert action. he was forging at the CIA. An ex-Wall Street lawyer, similar to the Dulles brothers, Casey cultivated relationships with powerful foreign leaders in a position to help his causes. In particular, some people will meet this season, like Pakistan's General Zia and Saudi Arabia's King Fod.

Casey was probably the only guy who could, and did, get the Islamic Theocracy, to arrange for a Catholic Mass while he was visiting the war. the country. Zabignauzzynski was the guy who really got the whole Afghan business in motion. Zabignauzzynski was as hard and anti-communist fanatic as has ever been in the American government. In stark contrast to the flamboyant Wilson, the foul-mouthed Avrakotos, or the wild-eyed

Casey, stands the architect of the jihad inside the Carter White House. Jimmy Carter's cold mercurial national security advisor, Zabignew Brzynski. He couldn't get over what the Russians did in Poland. There was no way he was ever going to give them an inch on anything. And he led Carter into the hardest, hardest possible line position on what to do about the Russians and Afghanistan. Brzezinski once admitted to using the Majahideen, which America had begun supporting long before the Soviet invasion,

as quote-unquote, an Afghan trap to draw the Soviets into a hopeless military quagmire. He later denied saying this, but we have some interesting tapes and interviews revealing that in private, Brasinski couldn't quite help himself, bragging of his triumph in sucking the Soviet Union into Afghanistan.

Did you come to an agreement with the Chinese on how they could collaborate with the U.S. to bait the polar bear to the north? Well, first of all, Why don't you ask the questions more intelligently, because then they'll make it easier to respond. If you phrase it that way about baiting and so forth, you're really not trying to elicit constructive answers.

I'm only using your own expressions. I did not use expression, baiting. There were seven different groups of Afghans, generally thought of as four of the fundamentalists and three of the moderates. They were all to their one degree or another Islamists. Who were these Mujahideen leaders that the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan were supporting? The most celebrated of the Mujahideen was the Tajik commander Ahmed Shah Masud.

One of the young Islamists who came out of Kabul University in the 60s and 70s, Massoud cut a dashing figure. His knowledge of French and his reported taste for French nurses earned him the nickname the Parisian. Since the Soviet invasion of Christmas 1979, Massoud, a 33-year-old former engineering student, has established himself as one of the most popular guerrilla chiefs

in Afghanistan, a figure whose reputation has spread far beyond the valley itself. Indeed, European and American writers would go on to romanticize Massoud as a religious patriot, fighting for Afghan democracy. But there was a dark side to the so-called

lion of the Panshir Valley. Massoud's forces wound up dealing drugs and smuggling just as much as anybody else. Even CIA tough guy Gustafricotos, friend of junta's and warlords alike, was creeped out by the reports he was reading on Massoud's gang. There was one passage in there that really got me, he said later. A guy was sleeping, and he said he woke one night and heard horrible groans. He didn't get up, but he was able to put on his night vision goggles. and saw a group of Massoud's guys literally cornholing a Russian prisoner.

End quote. The Afghan presiding over the rape was one of Massoud's lieutenants. Golbeddin Hikmatiar. He stands for the restoration of the feudal regime in Afghanistan. The CIA wants to make him the country's prime minister. If Ahmed Shah Masud was a smooth criminal, Golbadin Hekmatjar didn't even try to hide it. Far and away, the most notorious of all the Mujahideen,

Hecmachar was the favorite of every intelligence agency. By the end of the Soviet-Afghan War, Hecmachar had received over one billion in armaments, writes Peterdale-Scott, more than any other CIA client has ever received, before, or since. Hekbitjar, with his documented fondness for throwing acid in women's faces, would have had nothing to learn from al-Qaeda, writes Andrew Coburn. In fact, according to Osama bin Laden biographer Peter Bergen,

Hecmityar and Osama worked well together, the former hosted al-Qaeda training camps in the early 1990s. When a courageous ABC news team interviewed Hecmitiar in 1993, writes Andrew, he had beheaded half a dozen people earlier that day. Later, he killed their translator. The one meeting we had together, he said, You've come to kill me. and he's sitting there with his agate prayer beads.

And he said, maybe not you, but maybe you, you're going to kill me. I often wonder how it would have been different if I'd have actually called ahead and shot him, but I did not. Another favorite of the U.S. paymasters was Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a close associate of Hekmatyar, and a good friend to the soon-to-be-notorious, so-called. called Afghan Arabs, that is, volunteers from the Muslim world who are traveling from all over to Afghanistan to join up. Syaf's training camps attracted some of the most promising future stars of international terrorism, such as Ramsey Youssef, who would go on to mastermind the first World Trade Center bombing, and Sayyaf was also an early associate of future

kingpin Osama bin Laden. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, named by the 9-11 Commission report, as the principal architect of the 9-11 plot, first conceived of it when he was with Sayoff, writes Peterdale Scott. All in all, these so-called holy warriors were less of your traditional religious figures and more of your typical mafia bosses. They ran rackets and dealt drugs.

And, like the five families in America, the Afghan gangs warred with each other over turf and money. When visiting Afghanistan, Charlie Wilson noticed the, quote, menacing bands of bodyguards surrounding Mujahideen. Wilson asked his Pakistani handler, Do they really have to worry that much about the Soviets trying to kill them? It's not the Soviets they're worried about, the ISI officer said.

It's each other. There was, of course, another figure of note. a native Afghan, but one of those so-called Afghan Arabs who had traveled to the country for a piece of the action. This was a young man named Osama. To the south of Algeria near the Sahara Desert, you see children playing football wearing a bin Laden t-shirt. This is how popular bin Laden is. The bin Laden's are more than a family. They're a dynasty.

Osama's father, Mohamed bin Laden, who created the construction conglomerate that bears his family's name, was among the Yemeni merchants who fled instability at home for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the early 20th century. Osama's father started modestly with small jobs, writes reporter John Cooley. But he soon moved into the big time by building palaces in the early 1950s for the House of Saud in the capital, Riyadh. Muhammad bin Laden's big chance, and that of his progeny, he fathered with various wives no fewer than 52 children, came when he won the contract to build a Medina Jeda Highway

in the holy province of Hijaz. Soon, the bin Laden name was legendary. Yeah, there's an arrow on the ceiling to point towards Mecca. The bin Laden group air-conditioned Mecca. It was a huge project. They made billions and billions. According to Cooley, by the mid-1960s, the bin Laden conglomerate had become the biggest private contractor of its kind.

And it was then that Muhammad bin Laden died in a plane crash. His son, Osama bin Laden, was born in 1957. By the time of the Afghan jihad, he was a young man in his 20s, using his family's wealth to make a name for himself in the world. His siblings took more traditional routes, teeming up with foreign bankers and investing the family money. His older brother, Salim, for example, was a reported investor in one failed oil concern, Arbusto Energy,

founded in 1977 by a fellow child of privilege. George W. Bush. Osama, on the other hand, used his largesse to support the Afghans, and founded so-called refugee camps where eager new recruits could receive weapons and training. Through his family businesses' work in the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, Osama seemed to both Saudi intelligence and the CIA an ideal choice for the leading role he began to play. Senior Saudi intelligence officials told Steve Cole that Osama was by this point basically

a contractor for Saudi intelligence, and it's a relationship that the kingdom has sought to downplay ever since. We have created a North Star for terrorism, and all the people who are out there who may hate us Americans have some sort of a guy. But it's almost like does Elvis Presley really control all the Elvis Presley fan clubs that are still out there? I don't think so. We tend on this program to circle back to the Bush family. And the fact is, it's nearly impossible not to. In this case, the axis between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which will condition everything from the anti-S.-Soviet war, to the rise of the Taliban, to the attacks of September 11th

in their aftermath, can be seen in the twin dynasties of both the Bush's and the Bin Laden's. A 2001 article in the Toronto Star sums it up. FBI agents had been told by the administration of George W. Bush to back off investigating members of the bin Laden clan living in the U.S.

What are we to make of all this? The paper asked. One possible conclusion was that the bin Laden terror problem was allowed to get out of hand because bin Laden himself had powerful protectors in both Washington and Saudi Arabia. Business connections linking the two families go way back. As previously mentioned, young George W. Bush's first energy concern

was chock full of cash from Salim bin Laden, Osama's brother. Both families were deeply invested also in the Carlisle Group, a massive private equity concern, still known to this day for buying up its fair share of military contractors. Beyond the bin Laden's themselves, the Saudi links with the Bush dynasty go on and on. No other political family in the United States, says writer Kevin Phillips, has had anything remotely resembling the Bush's four-decade relationship with the Saudi royal family and the oil sheikhs of the Persian Gulf.

End quote. One glaring example of Saudi influence was the American government's reluctance to prosecute, in the early 90s, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, BCCI, a global network of dark money that was used to finance crime, run drugs, and supply the Majahadine in Afghanistan. Now things are starting to make a little sense. The great people of the U.S., unfortunately, most of them, they didn't know the truth, because the war of Afghanistan was not only military invasion, it was propaganda war too.

I would substitute Bush's language that he used once and ever again. I would substitute the word crusade. It was always seen as a war to the death, a jihad, if you will. The mentor of bin Laden makes more than 20 trips to New York and Boston raising funds. someone was either highly incompetent or someone was looking the other way. This season, as ever, we have a fantastic set of guests that you're going to hear from. We had the honor of speaking with Afghan politician and social activist Malalaai Joya with Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid and the inimitable muckraker, Zai Hirsch.

We'll take you from the ancient empires to the Cold War standoff to 9-11. and beyond, in what is our most exciting season yet. So, if you want to come with and subject yourself to this maddening web of entry, head over to blowback.com and hit the big button that says subscribe. You'll also get 10 bonus episodes, full interviews with our guests, a talk about Hollywood's 1980s Afghanistan B movies, and a very special look at Soldier of Fortune magazine. You'll also get extra cuts of music from the soundtrack,

release of which will come out September 25th. And yes, we are finally putting out merch. And as a subscriber, you'll get discount codes for upcoming t-shirts, hats, and posters. So, get to it, folks. Head to blowback.com. And hit the big button that says subscribe. And we'll see you on the other side. I'm still in a dreamt sneakeda Nekeeter Thank you.