Secret British Documents From 1980 Detail Origins Of Western Covert Aid To Afghan Mujahideen

The British National Archives recently released hundreds of pages of previously classified documents pertaining to Afghanistan, including early moves by the U.K. and the United States to provide covert aid to the Afghan mujahideen following the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union.

According to the documents, dated from 1980, the U.S. proposed supporting Pakistani refugee camps being used as operating bases by the mujahideen. Some of these bases would later be used by Arab volunteers in the Soviet jihad, including Makhtab al Khidmat, the predecessor group to Al Qaeda.

The documents include suggestions that the mujahideen would need surface-to-air missiles, which would later be supplied by the CIA.

INTELWIRE has obtained the documents and posted them below. These are very large PDFs, so I recommend downloading them and viewing them locally rather than trying to open them in a browser window, or using Google's QuickView.

U.K. Afghanistan Documents, 1980, Vol. 1

U.K. Afghanistan Documents, 1980, Vol. 2

For more about the documents, see this story from the Telegraph.

Labels: Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, CIA, Covert-Action, INTELFILES, Makhtab-Al-Khidmat, Mujahideen, Soviet-Union

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink

 

FBI Records Reveal Details Of Nixon-Era Racial Profiling Program Targeting Arabs

INTELWIRE is publishing 196 pages of previously secret FBI documents on the controversial racial profiling program "Operation Boulder," which screened Arab visa applicants during the early 1970s.

Read the documents (11 MB PDF)

The program was created at the direction of President Richard Nixon less than two weeks after the 1972 massacre at the Munich Olympics by members of the Black September Palestinian terrorist organization.

According to a Feb. 20, 1975 memorandum, "the program involves the systematic screening of visa applications submitted by ethnic Arabs anywhere in the world." The program began in 1972 and was terminated by the State Department over the objections of the FBI in 1975.

Applicant names were reviewed by the FBI, CIA, State Department, Secret Service and INS before approval.

At the program's peak, the FBI did background checks on 40 to 50 visa applicants per day. Arabs living in Israel and the Palestinian territories were subjected to checks by the Israeli security services, with the information being routinely forwarded to the FBI. The names of travelers and information provided by the Israelis were then indexed and stored by the FBI for future reference.

Information collected on some subjects included "subversive" (terrorism or security-related) and "non-subversive" (information not pertaining to security). For other subjects, only subversive information was collected. Despite the massive collection effort, only 23 visas were denied between 1972 and 1975.

In a related investigation, the FBI in 1972 "burlgarized" the office of the Arab Information Center, an organization for visiting Arabs in Dallas. The entry was approved by FBI headquarters but apparently lacked a warrant. "Trespass was necessary" in "surveying" the site, according to a Feb. 20, 1975 memorandum.

The office was bugged, and documents found in the office were copied. According to the FBI, the surveillance resulted in the discovery of scores of Fatah agents operating in North America.

Labels: FBI, INTELFILES, INTELWIRE-Exclusive, Operation-Boulder, Racial-Profiling

Posted by J.M. Berger | Permalink