Adnan Khashoggi Linked to 911 Terrorists, Part I

By Alex Constantine

Decades before burning skyscrapers, codified torture, secret trials and mass
detentions, there was Barrick Gold, a mining concern in Canada with roots in
the American intelligence establishment. It is fitting that gold, the
seductive but dead heart of world capitalism, should christen a story about
the most unconscionable event in Wall Street history: 911.

Barrick's incorporation is obscure. Most accounts claim that the firm was
founded by Peter Munk, a former radio manufacturer who made a splash in the
Canadian press when he disposed of his shares in the company shortly before
it was declared insolvent, a golden parachute paid for by investors and the
Canadian taxpayer. His name was instantly mud in the investment community,
but fortunately for Munk, no indictment was ever brought against him.

Today, his overall worth is estimated at $350 million.1 Munk's redemption
was the work of Adnan Khashoggi, who would go on to
notoriety as an Ollie North intermediary in the Iran-Contra affair.
Khashoggi and Munk kicked off their partnership with a series of hotel
investments. In 1983, the raided his fat cash reserves to
purchase Barrick. Munk was installed as chairman.

Khashoggi distanced himself from Barrick shortly after the Iran-Contra
scandal broke (but held onto his stock, tied up as collateral for North's
arms transfers to Iran in 1985), notes Observer reporter Gregg Palast in a
book on the 2000 presidential election, before Bush was invited in. That was
in 1995: "Munk's reputation was restored, at least in his own mind, in part
by massive donations to the University of Toronto. Following this act of
philanthropy, the university awarded Munk­adviser Bush an honorary degree.
Several students were arrested protesting what appeared to them as a
cash-for-honors deal."2

The bonds were positively Sicilian. in 1986, Khashoggi was was arrested for
fraud and held in a New York prison. Munk paid his $4 million bail.3

Financial researcher Lois Battuello was Palast's key source of information
concerning Barrick. It was Battuello who gave Palast a file on Barrick
Resources International (BRI), the nascent firm founded two years before
Barrick Gold, a spin-off, by the Central Intelligence Agency's Kermit
Roosevelt to serve as a dummy business front.

This was roughly the same time that Roosevelt cemented relations with
Khashoggi, who brought Munk along, on behalf of the CIA. In 1983, Battuello
says, the disgraced entrepeneur "picked up the mantle of this clandestine
front (read looted taxpayer dollars) in Toronto as though it was his
operation. It was simply put together with evil money,' and it gave Adnan
Khashoggi an excuse to be visible in Toronto, where he established yet more
businesses and outposts."4 The offshore division of Khashoggi's Barrick
Resources, for instance, controlled Jetborne, Inc., a company in Toronto
used by Khashoggi to ship arms to Iran under the direction of Reagan's NSC.5

Khashoggi's empire, raised on a bed of gold, metastisized rapidly. In 1973,
he dropped in his burgeoning portfolio a company in possession of nearly two
million acres of prime real estate, the Arizona-Colorado Land & Cattle
Company -- not far from the 100,000 acre Paloma Ranch near Gila Bend, deeded
to the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt and John B. Anderson.6

Two years later, in cahoots with Sheik Kamal Adham -- then director of Saudi
intelligence (1963-79), brother-in-law of King Faisal and the CIA's key
liaison to the Arab world -- Khashoggi founded Oryx.

But the Saudi Sheik's thieving bonds with Khashoggi and the CIA were forged
decades earlier, with the incorporation of Barrick. The company's seed
investors were Saudis with Agency ties, including Shiek Kamal Adham, Adnan
Khashoggi, and Prince Nawaf bin Abdul Aziz (a major investor in Barrick,
code-named "Tumbleweed" by his CIA contacts).7 By 1978, Adham was worth
roughly $134 million.

It was but two years earlier that the son of Prescott Bush, a well-heeled
CIA director, struck up an alliance with Saudi Arabia and Iran under the
Shah. George H.W. Bush's left-hand man at Langley was Kamal Adham. After
leaving the CIA in January, 1977, Bush was appointed to the executive
committee chair of First International Bancshares (FIB), the largest bank in
the District of Columbia. (In the 1980s, the Shiek and Abdul Khalil
((Adham's successor as Saudi intelligence director)), then officers of BCCI,
were implicated in a hostile bid for FIB, by this time transmorgrified into
a dummy front for its scandal-infested parent, BCCI.)

Raymond Close, another revolving-door, covert dervish, CIA station chief in
Saudi Arabia, took arms from the Saudis and gave them to Pakistan, and in
70s left the Agency and went to work for BCCI director Kamal Adham.

Majority shares in Capcom, a BCCI susidiary, were held by Saudi spooks Adham
and Khalil. Capcom sidelines included money laundering and drug
trafficking.8 Adham was eventually prosecuted for fraud in the BCCI case and
paid a $100 million fine.

Oryx, the demonic corporate brat of Khashoggi and Adham, has recently been
linked by investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker (Welcome to Terrorland) to
Wallace Hilliard, proprietor of Huffman Aviation in Florida, where Mohammed
Atta's suicide cult trained in aero-terrorism.

Of the 220 flight schools in Florida, Atta had to pick Huffman.

Wallace Hilliard, Khashoggi's lackey, bought Huffman Aviation in 1999, and
hired Rudi Dekkers, a Dutchman, to run it. The following year, Hilliard's
LearJet was stopped on the runway at Orlando Executive Airport by armed DEA
agents.

At Huffman, too, the CIA was a silent partner. Sander Hickes, a reporter for
the Long Island Press, found that Hilliard "did business with Myron Du Bain,
who worked alongside late ex-CIA director John McCone on the boards of
several banks. Du Bain was chairman of the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company
in 1981 when the company announced plans to acquire Employers Health, an
insurance company cofounded by Hilliard."9

In July, Daniel Hopsicker, after a two-year investigation into Huffman
Aviation, offered from his MadCowMorningNews web soapbox the suggestion
that Mohammed Atta had been engaged "in a lucrative drug trafficking
operation which linked Osama bin Laden's thugs and drug lieutenants to their
equally-thuggish American counterparts. This places the two terrorists at
the same airport where DEA agents brandishing submachine guns seized a Lear
jet belonging to the owner of the flight school [Hilliard] where Atta and
Al-shehhi were taking lessons ... at that very moment."

DEA agents, Hopsicker wrote, "discovered 43 pounds of heroin aboard
Hilliard's Lear. The Orlando Sentinel hailed the bust as the largest
seizure in Central Florida's history.' After we'd learned the whole story,
we discovered the bust had been an accident, carried out by low-level DEA
operatives not clued-in to the protected nature of the trade. Nor was this
the only time Hilliard's name came up in connection with narcotics
trafficking."10

Likewise, Hilliard's Saudi boss would soon be immersed in criminal activity
of his own -- with direct ties to terrorism -- in Armenia. Banking fraud was
rampant there, Global News Wire reported in August, 2004, "thanks to the
Arab millionaire Adnan Khashoggi -- an active partner of Armenian
businessmen in the illicit drug and arms trades." Khashoggi's first
bucket-shop banking operation was a branch of the Caucasus Investment Bank
in Susa. In quick succession, with the assistance of Abu Muslum, an Arab
businessman, he opened the Hamaz and Beit ul-Muqaddas banks.

Rovsan Novruzoglu, a political scientist and director of the International
Strategic Research Center in Azerbaijan, observes that Adnan Khashoggi's
banks "played a big part in the formation of terrorist camps and in the
opening of laboratories for developing chemical and bacteriological weapons
in Nagornyy Karabakh."11

Back home, Hilliard's flight school, as Hopsicker reported, "was training
dozens of terrorists to fly -- including both pilots crashing into the World
Trade Center." ...
-------------
NOTES

1) Greg Palast, "Poppy Strikes Gold," excerpt from The Best Democracy Money
Can Buy," http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/03/07/09_gold.html.

2) Ibid.

3) Greg Palast, "Best democracy money can buy: Gregory Palast examines the
sources of the $500m that boosted Bush's bid for the White House," Observer,
November 26, 2000.

4) Lois Ann Battuello, e-mail exchange with author, October 1, 2004.

5) Ibid. Today, Khashoggi has interests in some 1500 companies, and indirect
involvement in others. The second largest shareholder in Ruppert Murdoch's
News Corp., for instance, is Prince Walid bin Talal bin Abdulaziz as Saud
(Prince Alwaleed), a Khashoggi colleague.

6) Ibid.

7) Jay Taylor, "Jay Taylor: J. Taylor's Gold and Technology Stocks" (Volume
22 No. 15), January 3 2004.

8) Martin J. Rivers, "A Wolf in Sheikhs Clothing: Bush Business Deals with 9
Partners of bin Laden's Banker," Geocities, March 15, 2004.

9) Sander Hicks, "No Easy Answer - Heroin, Al Qaeda And The Florida Flight
School," Long Island Press, February 19, 2004.

10) Daniel Hopsicker, "9/11's Big Dirty Secret," MadCowMorningNews, July 19
2004, http://www.madcowprod.com.

11) M. Macidli, "Azerbaijani Daily Outlines Activities of International
Armenian Haybun Organization," Global News Wire, August 27, 2003

Index