Biden Omits Crucial Al-Zawahiri Assassination Information That Ties Everything to Russia
Ayman al-life Zawahiri’s and spectacular death have garnered a lot of attention in the days following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he had been assassinated by a CIA drone strike in Afghanistan.
The effectiveness—or lack thereof—of American over-the-horizon counterterrorism capabilities has been a major topic of discussion.
Al-connections Zawahiri’s to Russia were conspicuously absent from Biden’s primetime speech on Monday night and from the barrage of media attention that followed.
Al-Zawahiri was taught by Russia’s Federal Security Service, also known as the FSB, which is the main successor to the KGB, according to Christian Gomez’s account in The New American on Thursday.
Aleksandr Litvinenko, a former FSB lieutenant colonel who defected to the UK in 2005, made the accusation. You might remember that in 2006, radioactive polonium poisoning caused Litvinenko to pass away in London. At the time, his passing was a significant news item.
In a July 2005 interview with the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita, Litvinenko said that Ayman al-Zawahiri had received training in Dagestan in 1998 at a Federal Security Service base. After that, he was sent to Afghanistan, where he was appointed Osama bin Laden’s deputy. Zawahiri was not the only connection between the FSB and al-Qaida, as I can attest from my experience working in that division at the time.
The following year, Andrey Lugavoy and Dmitri Kovtun, two Russian men, and Litvinenko shared “odd-tasting” tea in a bar at the Millennium Hotel in London. Three weeks later, Litvinenko passed away, according to Sky News.
According to the publication, a 10-year public investigation found that the two patrons in the bar were Russian agents who “in all likelihood” killed Litvinenko with Vladimir Putin’s knowledge.
A piece in The Spectator published soon after al-Zawahiri took over as head of al-Qaida in June 2011 cautioned the West against ignoring his ties to the FSB. According to the report, Litvinenko affirmed this in multiple interviews, not just one.
Former KGB Lt. Col. Konstantin Preobrazhensky, who defected to the United States in 1993 and wrote about his experience as a Russian spy, backed up Litvinenko’s claims.
In a piece he formerly wrote for the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Preobrazhensky “explained the Soviet Union/ties Russia’s to international Islamic terrorism, and more especially the FSB’s role in training al-Zawahiri,” according to Gomez.
As Preobrazhensky said, “The KGB had used terrorism to facilitate the victory of world Communism long before Islamic terrorism became a global concern.”
He said, “Litvinenko… told me that during the 1980s and 1990s, his former FSB colleagues had trained well-known Al-Qaeda militants Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Juma Namangoniy. One of the most sought terrorists in the world, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, is accountable for the deaths of Americans abroad.
“Alexander Litvinenko was in charge of maintaining the secrecy of Al-entry Zawahiri’s into Russia in 1996. Al-Zawahiri had received FSB training in Dagestan, Northern Caucasus, in 1996-1997.”
Gomez claims that Litvinenko provided the names of numerous other terrorists and despots who had received KGB or FSB training.
The list includes Saddam Hussein, the former leader of Iraq, Yasser Arafat, the former general secretary of the Lebanese Communist Party George Hawi, and Sean Garland, the president of the Marxist-Leninist Workers’ Party of Ireland. Wadie Haddad, also known as Abu Hani, is the leader of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s external operations.
Despite the fact that this is fascinating information, nobody is reporting on it besides Gomez. Some journalists might not be aware of the connections, which could contribute to this. However, it is a given that journalists covering Islamic terrorism or Russian politics would be aware of this information.
So why has Russian support for global terrorism gone mostly unreported?
Gomez has some thoughts because he obviously knows a little bit about Russia. According to him, communists “ultimately always stick together to defeat their shared ‘imperialist’ capitalist foe: the United States.”
The Kremlin has not changed from its Soviet-era foreign policy of spreading world revolution, including with agents recruited from the Islamic world, nor have the communists in Russia magically vanished after the official “collapse” of the Soviet Union in 1991. “Ayman al-Zawahiri represented a key conduit linking the Kremlin with contemporary international Islamic terrorism. Alexander Litvinenko was murdered for disclosing this.
When then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave Sergey Lavrov a reset button in March 2009, one can only speculate as to what was going through his head.
Ellen Nimo
