Sunday, May 14, 2006
Friday May 12, 2006
US in secret gun deal
Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq 'go missing' as Pentagon uses dealers
Ian Traynor in Zagreb
Friday May 12, 2006
The Guardian
The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.
According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.
Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands.
A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since the second world war.
The official told Amnesty: "Nato has no way of monitoring the shipments once they leave Bosnia. There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been siphoned off."
European administrators in Bosnia, as well as NGOs working to oversee the stockpiling and destruction of weapons from the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are furious that the Pentagon's covert arms-to-Iraq programme has undermined the disarmament project.
"It's difficult to persuade people to destroy weapons when they're all holding back and waiting for Uncle Sam to arrive with a fistful of dollars," said Adrian Wilkinson, a former British officer overseeing a UN disarmament programme in former Yugoslavia.
The international administration running Bosnia repeatedly sought to impose an arms export moratorium, but under US pressure it was suspended several times to enable the arms shipments to go ahead. The British government is funding a programme to destroy 250,000 small arms, a legacy of the Bosnian war, but the project is faltering because people are reluctant to surrender weapons that might mean money.
Nato and European officials confirm there is nothing illegal about the Bosnian government or the Pentagon taking arms to Iraq; the problem is one of transparency and the way the arms deals have been conducted.
"There are Swiss, US and UK companies involved. The deal was organised through the embassies [in Bosnia] and the military attaché offices were involved. The idea was to get the weapons out of Bosnia where they pose a threat and to Iraq where they are needed," the Nato official said.
Mr Wilkinson said: "The problem is we haven't seen the end user."
A complex web of private firms, arms brokers and freight firms, was behind the transfer of the guns, as well as millions of rounds of ammunition, to Iraq at "bargain basement prices", according to Hugh Griffiths, Amnesty's investigator.
The Moldovan air firm which flew the cargo out of a US air base at Tuzla, north-east Bosnia, was flying without a licence. The firm, Aerocom, named in a 2003 UN investigation of the diamonds-for-guns trade in Liberia and Sierra Leone, is now defunct, but its assets and aircraft are registered with another Moldovan firm, Jet Line International.
Some of the firms used in the Pentagon sponsored deals were also engaged in illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia and to Saddam Hussein four years ago.
"The sale, purchase, transportation and storage of the [Bosnian] weapons has been handled entirely by a complex network of private arms brokers, freight forwarders and air cargo companies operating at times illegally and subject to little or no governmental regulation," says the report.
The 120-page Amnesty report, focusing on the risks from the privatisation of state-sponsored arms sales worldwide, says arms traffickers have adapted swiftly to globalisation, their prowess aided by governments and defence establishments farming out contracts.
The US shipments were made over a year, from July 2004, via the American Eagle base at Tuzla, and the Croatian port of Ploce by the Bosnian border.
Aerocom is said to have carried 99 tonnes of Bosnian weaponry, almost entirely Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, in four flights from the Eagle base in August 2004, even though, under pressure from the EU, the firm had just been stripped of its operating licence by the Moldovan government because of "safety and security concerns". Amnesty said there was no available record of the guns reaching their destination.
Mr Griffiths contacted the coalition authorities in Baghdad, who denied all knowledge of any weapons purchases from Bosnia. The contracts are said to have been arranged by the military attache of the time, at the US embassy in Sarajevo. Bosnian documentation named "coalition forces in Iraq" as the end users for five arms shipments.
The Amnesty report says the command force in Iraq, the coalition group training Iraqi security forces, and the overseeing US general, had claimed "not to have ... received any weapons from Bosnia," the report says. Mr Wilkinson said: "What are the control mechanisms? How is it all verified?"
The fate of the arms cargo appears to have been buried in the miasma of contracting and subcontracting that have characterised the deals.
The Pentagon commissioned the US security firms Taos and CACI - which is known for its involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison controversy in Iraq - to orchestrate the arms purchases and shipments. They, in turn, subcontracted to a welter of firms, brokers, and shippers, involving businesses based in Britain, Switzerland, Croatia, Moldova, and Bosnia.
"The [Pentagon] and its principal US contractor, Taos, appear to have no effective systems to ensure that their contractors and subcontractors do not use firms that violate UN embargos and also do not use air cargo firms for arms deliveries that have no valid air operating certificates," Amnesty said.
Global traffic in weapons
A Dutch timber trader is in custody in Rotterdam awaiting trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Guus van Kouwenhoven was arrested last year, suspected of brokering the supply of large quantities of arms to Liberia from China in breach of a UN arms embargo.
The case is the first instance of an alleged arms trader facing trial accused of war crimes on an international scale.
For Amnesty International, the Dutch case highlights the risks emerging from the flourishing trade in largely state-sponsored arms deals where governments increasingly farm out the business to the private sector, which includes brokers, arms dealers, freight companies and shippers.
The Amnesty study points out that 35 of the world's wealthiest countries are responsible for at least 90% of the world's arms trade.
Since the end of the cold war there have been at least 50 armed conflicts worldwide, mostly in poor, "developing", countries, while the arms supplies and money fuelling these conflicts stem largely from wealthy countries.
National and international law is failing to keep up with the globalisation of the arms trade. Arms traffickers are prime beneficiaries of government-to-government business as military industries are increasingly "outsourced".
The Amnesty International UK director, Kate Allen, said: "Arms brokers and transporters have helped deliver the weapons used to commit human rights abuses all over the world. Yet only 35 states have laws to regulate brokers. Countries need to get tough ... we need an arms trade treaty to bring the whole industry under controls. The trade is out of control and costing hundreds of thousands of lives every year."
Original: http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,1773106,00.html?gusrc=rss
____________________________________________________________________________________
Local authorities investing over £700m in arms trade
Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday May 8, 2006
The Guardian
Almost all local authorities in Britain hold investments in the world's largest weapons companies, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The figures show that they invest £723m in 15 of the largest international arms companies. This is more than double what local authorities spend on promoting local enterprise and new businesses across Britain, says the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Caat, which conducted the FoI exercise. It found that 67 of Britain's 99 council pension funds invest nearly £244m in BAE Systems, the UK's largest arms company. One in three council pension funds help to finance the manufacture of nuclear weapons through investments in Lockheed Martin, the world's largest arms company, according to Caat. It says they are investing £20m in Lockheed, which manufactures Trident nuclear missiles for the US and Britain and is a contractor at the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment, which produces and maintains the UK's nuclear warheads.
Of the 88 council funds which provided information, all but two invest in arms manufacture. Three in five councils invest in companies manufacturing cluster bombs or their components. General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon all produce cluster munitions or their components, according to Human Rights Watch.
The study found that 33 councils hold investments worth £33m in Halliburton, the US military services conglomerate whose subsidiaries in Iraq are embroiled in allegations of overpricing and faulty accounting. Halliburton denies the allegations .
Campaigners opposed to the arms trade say the study raises serious questions about the ethical values and democratic oversight of local authorities' investments, largely made without the consideration of voters and council employees.
Mike Kavanagh, who has been pressing Greater Manchester pension fund to invest ethically, said: "The study destroys the argument that such council investments are supporting vital British industry: we now know that UK councils invest indiscriminately, including over £120m invested in US arms companies."
He added: "Councils also argue that selling these shares would make their investments less profitable. Yet research by Deutsche Bank last year found that ethically invested funds actually outperformed most other funds."
Caat researcher Ian Prichard said: "We were surprised by the sheer scale of the arms company shareholdings revealed by our study. These investments are unnecessary from a financial point of view: the UK arms companies in our study make up less than 2% of the FTSE100 [index]. Public money deserves to support public goods, not missiles and warheads."
Details of the investments are on Caat's website, www.caat.org.uk.
Original: http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,1769959,00.html
Small arms shipped from Bosnia to Iraq 'go missing' as Pentagon uses dealers
Ian Traynor in Zagreb
Friday May 12, 2006
The Guardian
The Pentagon has secretly shipped tens of thousands of small arms from Bosnia to Iraq in the past two years, using a web of private companies, at least one of which is a noted arms smuggler blacklisted by Washington and the UN.
According to a report by Amnesty International, which investigated the sales, the US government arranged for the delivery of at least 200,000 Kalashnikov machine guns from Bosnia to Iraq in 2004-05. But though the weaponry was said to be for arming the fledgling Iraqi military, there is no evidence of the guns reaching their recipient.
Senior western officials in the Balkans fear that some of the guns may have fallen into the wrong hands.
A Nato official described the trade as the largest arms shipments from Bosnia since the second world war.
The official told Amnesty: "Nato has no way of monitoring the shipments once they leave Bosnia. There is no tracking mechanism to ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. There are concerns that some of the weapons may have been siphoned off."
European administrators in Bosnia, as well as NGOs working to oversee the stockpiling and destruction of weapons from the Bosnian war of the 1990s, are furious that the Pentagon's covert arms-to-Iraq programme has undermined the disarmament project.
"It's difficult to persuade people to destroy weapons when they're all holding back and waiting for Uncle Sam to arrive with a fistful of dollars," said Adrian Wilkinson, a former British officer overseeing a UN disarmament programme in former Yugoslavia.
The international administration running Bosnia repeatedly sought to impose an arms export moratorium, but under US pressure it was suspended several times to enable the arms shipments to go ahead. The British government is funding a programme to destroy 250,000 small arms, a legacy of the Bosnian war, but the project is faltering because people are reluctant to surrender weapons that might mean money.
Nato and European officials confirm there is nothing illegal about the Bosnian government or the Pentagon taking arms to Iraq; the problem is one of transparency and the way the arms deals have been conducted.
"There are Swiss, US and UK companies involved. The deal was organised through the embassies [in Bosnia] and the military attaché offices were involved. The idea was to get the weapons out of Bosnia where they pose a threat and to Iraq where they are needed," the Nato official said.
Mr Wilkinson said: "The problem is we haven't seen the end user."
A complex web of private firms, arms brokers and freight firms, was behind the transfer of the guns, as well as millions of rounds of ammunition, to Iraq at "bargain basement prices", according to Hugh Griffiths, Amnesty's investigator.
The Moldovan air firm which flew the cargo out of a US air base at Tuzla, north-east Bosnia, was flying without a licence. The firm, Aerocom, named in a 2003 UN investigation of the diamonds-for-guns trade in Liberia and Sierra Leone, is now defunct, but its assets and aircraft are registered with another Moldovan firm, Jet Line International.
Some of the firms used in the Pentagon sponsored deals were also engaged in illegal arms shipments from Serbia and Bosnia to Liberia and to Saddam Hussein four years ago.
"The sale, purchase, transportation and storage of the [Bosnian] weapons has been handled entirely by a complex network of private arms brokers, freight forwarders and air cargo companies operating at times illegally and subject to little or no governmental regulation," says the report.
The 120-page Amnesty report, focusing on the risks from the privatisation of state-sponsored arms sales worldwide, says arms traffickers have adapted swiftly to globalisation, their prowess aided by governments and defence establishments farming out contracts.
The US shipments were made over a year, from July 2004, via the American Eagle base at Tuzla, and the Croatian port of Ploce by the Bosnian border.
Aerocom is said to have carried 99 tonnes of Bosnian weaponry, almost entirely Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles, in four flights from the Eagle base in August 2004, even though, under pressure from the EU, the firm had just been stripped of its operating licence by the Moldovan government because of "safety and security concerns". Amnesty said there was no available record of the guns reaching their destination.
Mr Griffiths contacted the coalition authorities in Baghdad, who denied all knowledge of any weapons purchases from Bosnia. The contracts are said to have been arranged by the military attache of the time, at the US embassy in Sarajevo. Bosnian documentation named "coalition forces in Iraq" as the end users for five arms shipments.
The Amnesty report says the command force in Iraq, the coalition group training Iraqi security forces, and the overseeing US general, had claimed "not to have ... received any weapons from Bosnia," the report says. Mr Wilkinson said: "What are the control mechanisms? How is it all verified?"
The fate of the arms cargo appears to have been buried in the miasma of contracting and subcontracting that have characterised the deals.
The Pentagon commissioned the US security firms Taos and CACI - which is known for its involvement in the Abu Ghraib prison controversy in Iraq - to orchestrate the arms purchases and shipments. They, in turn, subcontracted to a welter of firms, brokers, and shippers, involving businesses based in Britain, Switzerland, Croatia, Moldova, and Bosnia.
"The [Pentagon] and its principal US contractor, Taos, appear to have no effective systems to ensure that their contractors and subcontractors do not use firms that violate UN embargos and also do not use air cargo firms for arms deliveries that have no valid air operating certificates," Amnesty said.
Global traffic in weapons
A Dutch timber trader is in custody in Rotterdam awaiting trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Guus van Kouwenhoven was arrested last year, suspected of brokering the supply of large quantities of arms to Liberia from China in breach of a UN arms embargo.
The case is the first instance of an alleged arms trader facing trial accused of war crimes on an international scale.
For Amnesty International, the Dutch case highlights the risks emerging from the flourishing trade in largely state-sponsored arms deals where governments increasingly farm out the business to the private sector, which includes brokers, arms dealers, freight companies and shippers.
The Amnesty study points out that 35 of the world's wealthiest countries are responsible for at least 90% of the world's arms trade.
Since the end of the cold war there have been at least 50 armed conflicts worldwide, mostly in poor, "developing", countries, while the arms supplies and money fuelling these conflicts stem largely from wealthy countries.
National and international law is failing to keep up with the globalisation of the arms trade. Arms traffickers are prime beneficiaries of government-to-government business as military industries are increasingly "outsourced".
The Amnesty International UK director, Kate Allen, said: "Arms brokers and transporters have helped deliver the weapons used to commit human rights abuses all over the world. Yet only 35 states have laws to regulate brokers. Countries need to get tough ... we need an arms trade treaty to bring the whole industry under controls. The trade is out of control and costing hundreds of thousands of lives every year."
Original: http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,1773106,00.html?gusrc=rss
____________________________________________________________________________________
Local authorities investing over £700m in arms trade
Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday May 8, 2006
The Guardian
Almost all local authorities in Britain hold investments in the world's largest weapons companies, according to figures released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The figures show that they invest £723m in 15 of the largest international arms companies. This is more than double what local authorities spend on promoting local enterprise and new businesses across Britain, says the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Caat, which conducted the FoI exercise. It found that 67 of Britain's 99 council pension funds invest nearly £244m in BAE Systems, the UK's largest arms company. One in three council pension funds help to finance the manufacture of nuclear weapons through investments in Lockheed Martin, the world's largest arms company, according to Caat. It says they are investing £20m in Lockheed, which manufactures Trident nuclear missiles for the US and Britain and is a contractor at the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment, which produces and maintains the UK's nuclear warheads.
Of the 88 council funds which provided information, all but two invest in arms manufacture. Three in five councils invest in companies manufacturing cluster bombs or their components. General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon all produce cluster munitions or their components, according to Human Rights Watch.
The study found that 33 councils hold investments worth £33m in Halliburton, the US military services conglomerate whose subsidiaries in Iraq are embroiled in allegations of overpricing and faulty accounting. Halliburton denies the allegations .
Campaigners opposed to the arms trade say the study raises serious questions about the ethical values and democratic oversight of local authorities' investments, largely made without the consideration of voters and council employees.
Mike Kavanagh, who has been pressing Greater Manchester pension fund to invest ethically, said: "The study destroys the argument that such council investments are supporting vital British industry: we now know that UK councils invest indiscriminately, including over £120m invested in US arms companies."
He added: "Councils also argue that selling these shares would make their investments less profitable. Yet research by Deutsche Bank last year found that ethically invested funds actually outperformed most other funds."
Caat researcher Ian Prichard said: "We were surprised by the sheer scale of the arms company shareholdings revealed by our study. These investments are unnecessary from a financial point of view: the UK arms companies in our study make up less than 2% of the FTSE100 [index]. Public money deserves to support public goods, not missiles and warheads."
Details of the investments are on Caat's website, www.caat.org.uk.
Original: http://www.guardian.co.uk/armstrade/story/0,,1769959,00.html
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Thursday, September 08, 2005
An-26 Down in DRC
In the eastern DR Congo, an Antonov 26B has been destroyed in an accident, including everyone on board. According to Aviation Safety Network it was ER-AZT, serial number 97309005, with either "Galaxie" or "Kavatshi Airlines". ER- is Moldovan registry. I have no further information at the moment regarding who the hell G/K are. There are an enormous number of one-plane operators in the region, who lose aircraft with bloody and monotonous regularity. Some of them have connections with more important networks - some do not...
On another Viktor Bout-related issue, an anonymous commenter informs us that Ishtar Airlines of Baghdad, subject of a recent post (see Thursday, August 18, 2005), which is operating with aircraft leased from seriously dodgy characters like Dolphin Air (ex-Flying Dolphin and Santa Cruz Imperial) and African Express, is owned by none other than the Governor of Basra. African Express's aircraft come from HA Airlines/Star Air of Jordan and Air Leone of Equatorial Guinea, both of which are the work of Paddy McKay, a mercenary associated with Executive Outcomes, Sandline and Strategic Resource Corp whose airline was kicked out of Sierra Leone for being too dodgy, Phoenix Aviation, a firm associated with Viktor Bout and Chris Barrett-Jolley which is banned from UK airspace, and Trans Air Congo.
Apparently, Ishtar has (thanks to another commenter) the contract to move KBR's personnel about Iraq as a subcontractor to Skylink Air & Logistics. They won the deal from none other than...Phoenix. D'you think the Governor had some influence in that? Naaahhh! Strangely enough, the same B737-200 leased to Ishtar by Dolphin is also meant to be on lease to Iraqi Airways (yes, the one whose planes are mysteriously registered in Sierra Leone). So it would appear that the Guv'nor has just borrowed an Iraqi Airways plane for his private profit...which is pretty twisted, but not entirely surprising.
What's scarier is that according to the anonymous comment, Ishtar is trying to buy into Kuwait Airways.
LINK and alternate comments posted by Alex : 12:19 PM
(2) comments
Comments:
Paddy J. McKay also ran or runs a company called Fast Aerospace out of the UAE. Links all over central Asia and Afghanistan.
# posted by Anonymous : 3:47 PM
An-26 Down in DRC
In the eastern DR Congo, an Antonov 26B has been destroyed in an accident, including everyone on board. According to Aviation Safety Network it was ER-AZT, serial number 97309005, with either "Galaxie" or "Kavatshi Airlines". ER- is Moldovan registry. I have no further information at the moment regarding who the hell G/K are. There are an enormous number of one-plane operators in the region, who lose aircraft with bloody and monotonous regularity. Some of them have connections with more important networks - some do not...
On another Viktor Bout-related issue, an anonymous commenter informs us that Ishtar Airlines of Baghdad, subject of a recent post (see Thursday, August 18, 2005), which is operating with aircraft leased from seriously dodgy characters like Dolphin Air (ex-Flying Dolphin and Santa Cruz Imperial) and African Express, is owned by none other than the Governor of Basra. African Express's aircraft come from HA Airlines/Star Air of Jordan and Air Leone of Equatorial Guinea, both of which are the work of Paddy McKay, a mercenary associated with Executive Outcomes, Sandline and Strategic Resource Corp whose airline was kicked out of Sierra Leone for being too dodgy, Phoenix Aviation, a firm associated with Viktor Bout and Chris Barrett-Jolley which is banned from UK airspace, and Trans Air Congo.
Apparently, Ishtar has (thanks to another commenter) the contract to move KBR's personnel about Iraq as a subcontractor to Skylink Air & Logistics. They won the deal from none other than...Phoenix. D'you think the Governor had some influence in that? Naaahhh! Strangely enough, the same B737-200 leased to Ishtar by Dolphin is also meant to be on lease to Iraqi Airways (yes, the one whose planes are mysteriously registered in Sierra Leone). So it would appear that the Guv'nor has just borrowed an Iraqi Airways plane for his private profit...which is pretty twisted, but not entirely surprising.
What's scarier is that according to the anonymous comment, Ishtar is trying to buy into Kuwait Airways.
LINK and alternate comments posted by Alex : 12:19 PM
(2) comments
Comments:
Paddy J. McKay also ran or runs a company called Fast Aerospace out of the UAE. Links all over central Asia and Afghanistan.
# posted by Anonymous : 3:47 PM
New Mystery Jet Developments
Thursday, August 18, 2005
New Mystery Jet Developments
There hasn't been any Viktor Bout content here for quite a while..but fortunately, I now have some more interesting data. Everyone now knows about the flights between Baghdad International Airport and Dubai - they are still going on, by the way, under the IATA codes for Irbis, British Gulf, and Phoenix - but what about Baghdad's other airport, Al-Muthanna? This field, located near the centre of the city, has been mostly known as the location of an Iraqi CDC-then National Guard-then Army base that gets suicide-bombed with depressing frequency, usually aiming at the queue of recruits trying to get in. However, yesterday there were four flights between it and Dubai..
At 0430, flight no. FC007 left Dubai for Baghdad (al-Muthanna). This is Falcon Express Cargo Airlines, the Fedex subsidiary that at one point was chartering dubious An-12 and Il-76 aircraft and has been doing some, ah, sporting flying into various parts of the country (the joke was that the movie Air America was part of line training there). The aircraft is a Fokker F27. Given that Muthanna airfield is next door to the Green Zone, I'd suspect this is a parcels/postal run.
At 1000, flight no. XU101 leaves Dubai for the same destination. XU is African Express Airways, a company registered in Nairobi. The aircraft is a Boeing 727.
At 1400, flight no. FC008 returns from Baghdad/M to Dubai. At 1600, flight no. XU102 does the same.
What do we know about African Express? There are only two 727s in its fleet - 5Y-AXB, serial no. 19565, and 5Y-AXE, serial no. 21611. This latter one is leased out to something called "Ishtar Airlines", about which nothing is known except that it is based in either Baghdad or Dubai. Ishtar has the leased African Express 727, and one 737, registration A6-ZYC, serial no. 22679. This aircraft is leased from Dolphin Air of Dubai. Dolphin is the renamed Flying Dolphin, which was formed out of the assets of Santa Cruz Imperial by Viktor Bout and a certain sheikh, currently a minister in the UAE Government. At the moment, Dolphin is leasing one 737 to Iraqi Airways - the same one, 22679, as is on lease to Ishtar, weirdly, and operating two other aircraft itself. These are a 707, A6-ZYD serial no. 20718, and another 737-200, A6-ZYB, serial no. 21928.
Two other Dolphin aircraft, both 737s, are now with an old friend of ours - Phoenix Aviation of Kyrgyzstan. Serial numbers are 22632 and 21960. Their current registrations are respectively EX-632 and EX-006. A further 737, s/n 21926, A6-ZYA, is leased to Cameroon Airlines.
Now, African Express's fleet includes an aircraft they bought from - Phoenix Aviation! Boeing 707 5Y-AXG, s/n 19369, was once 9G-ACZ for Phoenix, before passing through many hands and eventually being destroyed at Kinshasa in a crash. And another that used to belong to the now-notorious Air Leone in Sierra Leone. Leone is the renamed Ibis Air Transport, a company set up by the mercenaries around Strategic Resource Corp, Executive Outcomes and Sandline International. And, in passing, let's not forget that Tim Spicer, ex of Sandline, has contracts in Iraq. The plane is a DC9, registration 5Y-AXF, s/n 237, formerly 9L-LDG.
5Y-AXE, meanwhile, originated with an obscure outfit called HA Airlines in Jordan, that bought three ex-Iberia 727s in 2001 but only completed the deal on one of them. HA was renamed Star Air in 2004, and moved headquarters to either Damascus or Bahrain. Who, pray, is Star Air? You may not be surprised to hear it's one Paddy McKay, who founded Air Leone as an Equatorial Guinea firm after they were run out of Freetown in September, 2004. Sierra Leone thought they were dodgy enough to cancel their AOC! Jordan followed suit in January, 2005, forcing the name change and move.
Just to finish off, A6-ZYB of Dolphin Air was bought from a firm called Trans Air Congo in Kinshasa. Where have we heard of them before? Well, you may remember a photo of an Antonov 12, registered 9L-LEC, s/n 4341803, on the ground in Baghdad in January 2004 wearing "Skylink" titles. Later information showed that it had been delivering the new Iraqi currency - a job, I seem to remember, Tim Spicer's Aegis Defence Services had a piece of. That aircraft was next photographed with TAC, in Kinshasa, looking sorry for itself, before being destroyed in an accident somewhere in the eastern DRC. And where did TAC get another An-12, serial no. 4342404, from? Why, Santa Cruz Imperial of Dubai. And where did it end up? Something called "Inter Transavia" in Kyrgyzstan.
Comments:
ISHTAR airlines is a company owned by the Governer of Basrah...theya re the ones buying Kuwait Airways.
# posted by Anonymous : 7:01 AM
*Buying* Kuwait AW? Shit!
# posted by Alex : 9:51 AM
R
uud @ 12:58AM | 2005-08-21| permalink
Excellent job tying all these companies together!
HannahKO'Luthon @ 8:54AM | 2005-08-25| permalink
I second Ruud's comment, with the added remard that "these guys" change names, cover stories, and alliances so often that trying to keep up is almost a full time job.
Meanwhile Richard Chichakli's site www.chichakli.com continues to be upgraded frequently. It's a strange mixture of hastily written (but interesting screeds) and an increasingly sophisticated web layout.
In particular, Chichakli sites an article,
THE SEARCH FOR SYRIAN LIBERALS.
Few Good Men
by Eli J. Lake
in the New Republic Online from 05.15.03
( Issue date 05.26.03). If anyone has a more
extensive excerpt of that article I'd like
to read it.
Alex @ 11:30AM | 2005-08-25| permalink
It's just crossed my mind that he is rather reminiscent of Ahmed Chalabi. D'you reckon he knows Tom DeLay?
CW @ 2:01AM | 2005-08-26| permalink
Good job Alex. I've just been digesting all the info you put out.
I cannot prove it, but I smell a connection between African Express and JetLine - because African Express appears to have also "laundered" aircraft through Libyan Arab Airlines. Whenever an aircraft gets a Libyan Arab registration but never operates for them, I sense the hand of JetLine and Victor's boys, who seem to do a lot of that.
Meanwhile I've been watching but haven't learned much interesting lately. The best I can do is that N863AA, s/n 21090, which is one of the "shell game" 727s I've been following, is now stored at Kabul (as 3D-JOY) by our buddy Imad Saba and the "Financial Advisory Group" after having been leased to Kam Air. Thin stuff, I know...
Dave @ 9:03AM | 2005-08-27| permalink
5Y AXE now flies for SkyLink ferrying KBR employees between Baghdad and Dubai.
SkyLink was recently awarded the new charter contract, replacing Phoenix Air.
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/08/new-mystery-jet-developments.html
New Mystery Jet Developments
There hasn't been any Viktor Bout content here for quite a while..but fortunately, I now have some more interesting data. Everyone now knows about the flights between Baghdad International Airport and Dubai - they are still going on, by the way, under the IATA codes for Irbis, British Gulf, and Phoenix - but what about Baghdad's other airport, Al-Muthanna? This field, located near the centre of the city, has been mostly known as the location of an Iraqi CDC-then National Guard-then Army base that gets suicide-bombed with depressing frequency, usually aiming at the queue of recruits trying to get in. However, yesterday there were four flights between it and Dubai..
At 0430, flight no. FC007 left Dubai for Baghdad (al-Muthanna). This is Falcon Express Cargo Airlines, the Fedex subsidiary that at one point was chartering dubious An-12 and Il-76 aircraft and has been doing some, ah, sporting flying into various parts of the country (the joke was that the movie Air America was part of line training there). The aircraft is a Fokker F27. Given that Muthanna airfield is next door to the Green Zone, I'd suspect this is a parcels/postal run.
At 1000, flight no. XU101 leaves Dubai for the same destination. XU is African Express Airways, a company registered in Nairobi. The aircraft is a Boeing 727.
At 1400, flight no. FC008 returns from Baghdad/M to Dubai. At 1600, flight no. XU102 does the same.
What do we know about African Express? There are only two 727s in its fleet - 5Y-AXB, serial no. 19565, and 5Y-AXE, serial no. 21611. This latter one is leased out to something called "Ishtar Airlines", about which nothing is known except that it is based in either Baghdad or Dubai. Ishtar has the leased African Express 727, and one 737, registration A6-ZYC, serial no. 22679. This aircraft is leased from Dolphin Air of Dubai. Dolphin is the renamed Flying Dolphin, which was formed out of the assets of Santa Cruz Imperial by Viktor Bout and a certain sheikh, currently a minister in the UAE Government. At the moment, Dolphin is leasing one 737 to Iraqi Airways - the same one, 22679, as is on lease to Ishtar, weirdly, and operating two other aircraft itself. These are a 707, A6-ZYD serial no. 20718, and another 737-200, A6-ZYB, serial no. 21928.
Two other Dolphin aircraft, both 737s, are now with an old friend of ours - Phoenix Aviation of Kyrgyzstan. Serial numbers are 22632 and 21960. Their current registrations are respectively EX-632 and EX-006. A further 737, s/n 21926, A6-ZYA, is leased to Cameroon Airlines.
Now, African Express's fleet includes an aircraft they bought from - Phoenix Aviation! Boeing 707 5Y-AXG, s/n 19369, was once 9G-ACZ for Phoenix, before passing through many hands and eventually being destroyed at Kinshasa in a crash. And another that used to belong to the now-notorious Air Leone in Sierra Leone. Leone is the renamed Ibis Air Transport, a company set up by the mercenaries around Strategic Resource Corp, Executive Outcomes and Sandline International. And, in passing, let's not forget that Tim Spicer, ex of Sandline, has contracts in Iraq. The plane is a DC9, registration 5Y-AXF, s/n 237, formerly 9L-LDG.
5Y-AXE, meanwhile, originated with an obscure outfit called HA Airlines in Jordan, that bought three ex-Iberia 727s in 2001 but only completed the deal on one of them. HA was renamed Star Air in 2004, and moved headquarters to either Damascus or Bahrain. Who, pray, is Star Air? You may not be surprised to hear it's one Paddy McKay, who founded Air Leone as an Equatorial Guinea firm after they were run out of Freetown in September, 2004. Sierra Leone thought they were dodgy enough to cancel their AOC! Jordan followed suit in January, 2005, forcing the name change and move.
Just to finish off, A6-ZYB of Dolphin Air was bought from a firm called Trans Air Congo in Kinshasa. Where have we heard of them before? Well, you may remember a photo of an Antonov 12, registered 9L-LEC, s/n 4341803, on the ground in Baghdad in January 2004 wearing "Skylink" titles. Later information showed that it had been delivering the new Iraqi currency - a job, I seem to remember, Tim Spicer's Aegis Defence Services had a piece of. That aircraft was next photographed with TAC, in Kinshasa, looking sorry for itself, before being destroyed in an accident somewhere in the eastern DRC. And where did TAC get another An-12, serial no. 4342404, from? Why, Santa Cruz Imperial of Dubai. And where did it end up? Something called "Inter Transavia" in Kyrgyzstan.
Comments:
ISHTAR airlines is a company owned by the Governer of Basrah...theya re the ones buying Kuwait Airways.
# posted by Anonymous : 7:01 AM
*Buying* Kuwait AW? Shit!
# posted by Alex : 9:51 AM
R
uud @ 12:58AM | 2005-08-21| permalink
Excellent job tying all these companies together!
HannahKO'Luthon @ 8:54AM | 2005-08-25| permalink
I second Ruud's comment, with the added remard that "these guys" change names, cover stories, and alliances so often that trying to keep up is almost a full time job.
Meanwhile Richard Chichakli's site www.chichakli.com continues to be upgraded frequently. It's a strange mixture of hastily written (but interesting screeds) and an increasingly sophisticated web layout.
In particular, Chichakli sites an article,
THE SEARCH FOR SYRIAN LIBERALS.
Few Good Men
by Eli J. Lake
in the New Republic Online from 05.15.03
( Issue date 05.26.03). If anyone has a more
extensive excerpt of that article I'd like
to read it.
Alex @ 11:30AM | 2005-08-25| permalink
It's just crossed my mind that he is rather reminiscent of Ahmed Chalabi. D'you reckon he knows Tom DeLay?
CW @ 2:01AM | 2005-08-26| permalink
Good job Alex. I've just been digesting all the info you put out.
I cannot prove it, but I smell a connection between African Express and JetLine - because African Express appears to have also "laundered" aircraft through Libyan Arab Airlines. Whenever an aircraft gets a Libyan Arab registration but never operates for them, I sense the hand of JetLine and Victor's boys, who seem to do a lot of that.
Meanwhile I've been watching but haven't learned much interesting lately. The best I can do is that N863AA, s/n 21090, which is one of the "shell game" 727s I've been following, is now stored at Kabul (as 3D-JOY) by our buddy Imad Saba and the "Financial Advisory Group" after having been leased to Kam Air. Thin stuff, I know...
Dave @ 9:03AM | 2005-08-27| permalink
5Y AXE now flies for SkyLink ferrying KBR employees between Baghdad and Dubai.
SkyLink was recently awarded the new charter contract, replacing Phoenix Air.
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/08/new-mystery-jet-developments.html
Iraq's New Economy
Sunday, July 03, 2005
Iraq's New Economy
Read this now. The London Review of Books on epic corruption in Iraq, including the apparent disappearance of Iraqi Airways:
"‘A complainant alleged that Iraqi Airlines was sold at a reduced price to an influential family with ties to the former regime. The investigation revealed that Iraqi Airlines was essentially dissolved, and there was no record of the transaction.’ Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPA-IG instigated related to alleged ‘theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion’. It also investigated ‘a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report’. At around this time, 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5 million, were found on a plane in Lebanon which had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister."
The "influential family" is that of Sheikh Hussain al-Khawam, owner of Teebah Airlines, which provides all the new Iraqi Airways' aircraft, which are mysteriously registered in Sierra Leone (as previously blogged, but no bugger seems to care).
Now check this out: Iraqi Airways-titled B727 9L-LEL on the ground at Baghdad. This aircraft, serial number 21483, was formerly used by KAM Air, the Afghan airline associated with heroin-smuggling, prisoner-smothering warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, old friend Viktor Bout, and convicted cocaine smuggler Chris Barrett-Jolley. Teebah provided several other aircraft for KAM, some of which also passed by Phoenix Aviation. Phoenix is a Kyrgyz-registry, Sharjah-based company whose name has been used by various Viktor Bout-related companies in Belgium, Greece, Bulgaria and the UK since 1994. Its alumni include (you guessed it) CBJ. Its current aircraft roster includes planes apparently shared with Santa Cruz Imperial of the UAE, another gun-running outfit connected with Bout and a senior UAE government minister. And here (LinkBroken) is one of its aircraft, Boeing 737 EX-450, serial no. 20450, on the ground in Baghdad. This link shows (LinkBroken)three Phoenix flights a day between Baghdad and Dubai, all using B737-200s. That's as well as British Gulf International An-12s and even a daily flight by Irbis Air Co. of Kazakhstan and, of course, Sharjah. Irbis, I repeat, is a company that the US Department of the Treasury has placed on an asset-freeze blacklist. The flight is listed as using a Yakovlev 42 aircraft. There is only one Yak42 at Irbis, registered UN-42428, serial no.4520422306016, so it is this one. It's officially leased to Sudan Airways, but as this photo (see below) demonstrates, it's still carrying the Kazakh registration that traces to Irbis. And the flights take place using Irbis's ICAO code: BIS. Moving swiftly on, the Sharjah Airport arrivals for today show an Irbis flight, BIS6372, from Balad South East airfield. Balad is a US Air Force facility: so why was it permitted to take-off again having landed there? Interestingly, the same flight number is also scheduled into Dubai from Baghdad at 1830 local time today. During the last week, Irbis flights have also taken place between Sharjah and Bagram AFB in Afghanistan, as well as between SHJ and Kabul.
And there are also flights between Iraq and Ras al-Khaimah, operated by Jupiter Airlines: which doesn't officially exist. But it is on this list of companies dissolved by the Congolese government. You can probably guess what sort of thing you'd have to do to get dissolved in the DR Congo. But aircraft with a history in West Africa are now turning up in the ranks of KAM, Teebah, FAG, Phoenix and such operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know I'm a mystery jet bore, but this is serious. These people are parasites. They infect societies like maggots, helping to create a criminal war economy, John Robb's Bazaar of Violence. Within the last ten days, we've heard that the Iraqi rebels have targeted the government's audit capability (see the LRB story and also this excellent post from Jamie Kenny), that the rebels are exporting looted antiquities, that another key export of the New Iraq is fifteen-year-old prostitutes, not to mention acting as an entrepot for heroin. As well as the deadly cocktail of military expertise and suicidal fanaticism, there is also a potent war economy emerging in Iraq to fund it. (By the way, one source on the Iraq/smack story is quoted as saying that "you can't have peace, security and development without drugs control". Bollocks. You can't have drugs control without peace, security etc; if you can't stop people blowing policemen up, it's pretty clear you can't stop them selling drugs.)
Comments:
A UK born, now French based ex FFL working for Kroll helping USAID tells me that prostitutes from Uzbek /Azebaijan / Roumania regularly are re-cycled through Bagram / Green Zone Baghdad. Apparently US staff have no great liking for teenage Arab girls.
Tells of Russian organisers using Russian aircraft with gun turrets(?) at Baghdad airport being used. Booked in as "catering staff".
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/07/iraqs-new-economy_03.html
_____________________________________________________________________________
Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Bout Flies on for the U.S., and Tim Spicer Gets a New Contract
Life is a fine thing. Thanks to the Yorkshire Ranter, we now know that Viktor Bout's planes, including the banned IRBIS Air Co., placed on the Treasury Department's OFAC list of banned companies, continues to fly regularly to the U.S.-operated Bagram air base in Afghanistan. For his details, you can visit here, and for a comprehensive list of Bout companies still operating in the region, which the Ranter has identified, go here. It is now beyond belief that a man who sold and maintained aircraft for the Taliban, flew for Muslim extremists in Bosnia, few hundreds of tons of weapons to the most brutal and illegal armies of Africa, can still pull this off. Did the OFAC action mean nothing? (Apparently not)! What are people thinking? And shouldn't it be illegal to hire banned air craft companies, which then entails paying money to a person whose assets are supposedly frozen and is unable to receive money from ANY U.S. source? It is, as Alice said in Wonderland, getting curiouser and couriouser. The more Bout companies are identified and outed, the less enforcement action is taken. Can he be that valuable an asset to the intelligence community that he simply cannot be closed down, under any circumstances?
On another truely bizzare note the Ranter mentioned, and I had gotten from aviation authorities, all the Iraqi Airways aircraft are registered in Sierra Leone. How did THAT happen?
Finally, to round out the holiday weekend, the Sunday Times of London brings the cheery news that Tim Spicer, a mercenary with a checkered past, at best and a history of illegal armed actions, got his Pentagon contract extended for at least another year. His company, Aegis Defense Services, was initially awared the contract under controversial circumstances, and the 3-year job was worth nearly $300 million. The first year is complete, and the second-year option has been picked up, with an additional $145 million thrown into the pot. Very sweet, indeed. And the third year option will likely go ahead. Nice to know our tax payer dollars are going to a Brit whose contract is questionable and whose main claim to fame is illegal, and very expensive, armed ventures in Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Angola and elsewhere. The company coordinates communicatins between coalition forces, civilian contractors and their private security firms, while providing body guards to senior U.S. and Iraqi officials. Lovely.
Original: http://www.douglasfarah.com/2005/07/bout-flies-on-for-us-and-tim-spicer.html
__________________________________________________________________________________
LRB | Vol. 27 No. 13 dated 7 July 2005 | Ed Harriman
Where has all the money gone?
Ed Harriman follows the auditors into Iraq
US House of Representatives Government Reform Committee Minority Office
| Link: http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/
US General Accountability Office
| Link: http://www.gao.gov/
Defense Contract Audit Agency
| Link: http://www.dcaa.mil/
International Advisory and Monitoring Board
| Link: http://www.iamb.info/
Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General
| Link: http://www.cpa-ig.com/
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction
| Link: http://www.sigir.mil/
On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, ‘there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.’ Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.
The ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government funded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the ‘liberated’ country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people’. Congress, it’s true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers’ money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.
The ‘financial irregularities’ described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated, handing out truckloads of dollars for which neither they nor the recipients felt any need to be accountable. The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. A further $3.4 billion earmarked by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’.
That audit reports were commissioned at all owes a lot to Henry Waxman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within six months of the invasion, Waxman’s committee had evidence that the Texas-based Halliburton corporation was being grossly overpaid by the American occupation authorities for the petrol it was importing into Iraq from Kuwait, at a profit of more than $150 million. Waxman and his assistants found that Halliburton was charging $2.64 a gallon for petrol for Iraqi civilians, while American forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon.
Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as well? Waxman’s committee instructed Congress’s General Accountability Office to look into Halliburton’s biggest contract in Iraq: providing virtually all back-up facilities – from meals to laundry soap – to American forces. LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Programme) contracts like this one are a product of the new ‘slimmed down’ American military, the quartermaster’s equivalent of Rumsfeld’s ‘invasion lite’. Rather than have uniformed troops peel potatoes and scrub floors, base support services have been privatised and contracted out so that, the idea goes, soldiers can get on with the fighting. The contracts are paid on a cost-plus basis, which allows the contractor to charge for what it has spent, then add on a profit. LOGCAP contracts have not been put out to tender, but rather awarded to a few US firms, the largest being Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root.
The GAO report of July 2004 found that in the first nine months of the occupation, KBR was allowed a free hand in Iraq: a free hand, for example, to bill the Pentagon without worrying about spending limits or management oversight or paperwork. Millions of dollars’ worth of new equipment disappeared. KBR charged $73 million for motor caravans to house the 101st Airborne Division, twice as much as the army said it would cost to build barracks itself; KBR charged $88 million for three million meals for US troops that were never served. The GAO calculated that the army could have saved $31 million a year simply by doing business directly with the catering firms that KBR hired. In June 2004, the GAO continued, ‘by eliminating the use of LOGCAP and making the LOGCAP subcontractor the prime contractor, the command reduced meal costs by 43 per cent without a loss of service or quality.’
The GAO report makes clear that the Americans had given little thought as to how they might prevent looting and rebuild Iraqi society. They hadn’t even planned how they were going to provision the US forces staying on in Iraq: ‘the Army Central Command did not develop plans to use the [KBR] contract to support its military forces in Iraq until May 2003’ – a month after Saddam fell. Even then, this contract – with an estimated value of $3.894 billion – did not adequately provide for dining facilities, pest control, laundry services, morale, welfare and recreation, troop transportation or combat support services at the American bases hastily being built across Iraq. Stung by Waxman’s revelations about Halliburton’s petrol profiteering, and realising that KBR’s costs were spiralling out of control (LOGCAP costs in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan rose from a projected yearly total of $5.8 billion in September 2003 to $8.6 billion in January 2004), the army vice chief of staff ‘asked units to control costs and look for alternatives to the LOGCAP contract’. This was the first admission that the Pentagon could not afford the occupation on top of the war.
At the same time, the Pentagon’s own auditors, the Defense Contracts Audit Agency, went to Houston to have a look at KBR’s books. They were not happy with what they found:
Our examination disclosed several deficiencies in KBR’s billing system resulting in billings to the government that are not prepared in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and contract terms. We have also found system deficiencies resulting in material invoicing misstatements that are not prevented, detected and/or corrected in a timely manner.
They also found that ‘KBR also does not monitor the ongoing physical progress of subcontracts or the related costs and billings.’ When the auditors asked to see the files of payments to subcontractors to back up the invoices KBR submitted to the government, there weren’t any: ‘We found no such documents included in KBR’s subcontract files, nor did we find any log of subcontractor payments.’ So how did KBR work out its monthly invoices to the government for its whopping $3.9 billion contract? ‘The explanation begins with the costs on a spreadsheet with no indication of where or how these costs are accumulated.’ The auditors also wanted to know what happened to the money the government had paid for those three million non-existent meals:
Despite repeated requests over two months, KBR has not been able to provide an adequate explanation or adequate documentation for the payments to any DFAC [dining-hall] subcontractors. The limited documentation that has been provided shows, for example, that KBR has added ‘overage’ factors of 10 to 35 per cent to each bill for one of the subcontractors. We still do not have an adequate explanation of the ‘overage’ factor.
KBR’s response has been to tough it out. The company wrote to the auditors saying that its position regarding the meals ‘had been misquoted as well as misinterpreted’. The auditors, the corporation said, knew full well that KBR had ‘established a Tiger Team that is actively researching and analysing the facts and circumstances surrounding each of its DFAC subcontracts’. ‘Tiger Teams’ are in-house investigative units. KBR’s Tiger Team stayed at the five-star Kuwait Kempinski Hotel, where its members ran up a bill of more than $1 million. This outraged the army, whose troops were sleeping in tents at a cost of $1.39 a day. The army asked the Tiger Team to move into tents. It refused. As to how the Tiger Team ‘actively researched and analysed the facts’, we have the sworn testimony that a KBR employee gave to Congressman Waxman’s committee: ‘The Tiger Team looked at subcontracts with no invoice and no confirmation that the products contracted for were being used. Instead of investigating further, they would recommend extending the subcontract.’
The Pentagon auditors asked to see ‘evidence that KBR’s internal audit department is functionally and organisationally independent and sufficiently removed from management to ensure that it can conduct audits objectively and can report its findings, opinions and conclusions without fear of reprisal.’ KBR locked them out of its audit department. The auditors then asked who did KBR’s audits. Halliburton, KBR wrote back. The Pentagon auditors said that from then on KBR would have to submit all bills to them ‘for provisional approval prior to submission for payment’. Tough talk. But, despite all the threats to withhold payment, and with several lawsuits pending, KBR and Halliburton have now been paid more than $10 billion for quartermastering US forces in Iraq.
One of KBR’s contracts was for transporting supplies between American bases. Fleets of new Mercedes Benz trucks, costing $85,000 each, travelled up and down Iraq’s central highways every day, accompanied by armed US military escorts. If there were no goods to transport, KBR dispatched empty lorries anyway, and billed accordingly. The lorries didn’t carry replacement air and oil filters, essential when driving in the desert. They didn’t even carry spare tyres. If one broke down, it was abandoned and destroyed so no one else could use it, and left burning by the roadside. For fear of ambush, KBR drivers were told not to slow down. ‘The truck in front of the one I was riding ran a car with an Iraqi family of four off the road,’ a KBR employee told Waxman’s committee. ‘My driver said that was normal.’
American profligacy with Iraqi money has been, if anything, even worse. According to the CPA’s own rules, the authority ‘was expected to manage Iraqi funds in a transparent manner that fully met the CPA’s obligations under international law including Security Council Resolution 1483’. Despite repeated efforts, however, it was only in October 2003, six months after the fall of Saddam, that an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), with representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, was established to provide independent, international financial oversight of the CPA’s spending.
The IAMB then spent months trying to find auditors acceptable to the US. The Bahrain office of KPMG was finally appointed in April 2004. It was stonewalled. ‘KPMG has encountered resistance from CPA staff regarding the submission of information required to complete our procedures,’ they wrote in an interim report. ‘Staff have indicated . . . that co-operation with KPMG’s undertakings is given a low priority.’ KPMG had one meeting at the Iraqi Ministry of Finance; meetings at all the other ministries were repeatedly postponed. The auditors even had trouble getting passes for the Green Zone.
There was a good reason for the Americans to stall. At the end of June 2004, the CPA would be disbanded and Bremer would leave Iraq. The Bush administration wasn’t going to allow independent auditors to be in a position to publish a report into the financial propriety of its Iraqi administration while Bremer was still answerable to the press. The report was published in July. The auditors found that the CPA hadn’t kept accounts for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries.
An Iraqi hospital administrator told me that, as he was about to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package. Iraqis who were close to the Americans, had access to the Green Zone, or held prominent posts in the new government ministries, were also in a position to benefit enormously. Iraqi businessmen complain endlessly that they had to offer substantial bribes to Iraqi middlemen just to be allowed to bid for CPA contracts. Iraqi ministers’ relatives got top jobs and fat contracts.
Hard evidence comes from a further series of audits and reports carried out by the office of the CPA’s own inspector general (CPA-IG). Set up in January 2004, it reported to Congress. Its auditors, accountants and criminal investigators often found themselves sitting alone at cafeteria tables in the Green Zone, shunned by their compatriots. Their audit, published in July 2004, found that the American contracts officers in the CPA and the Iraqi ministries ‘did not ensure that . . . contract files contained all the required documents, a fair and reasonable price was paid for the services received, contractors were capable of meeting delivery schedules, or that contractors were paid in accordance with contract requirements’.
Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11 million and $26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work: $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for ‘personnel not in the field performing work’ and ‘other improper charges’ on a single oil pipeline repair contract. An Iraqi sports coach was paid $40,000 by the CPA. He gave it to a friend who gambled it away then wrote it off as a legitimate loss. ‘A complainant alleged that Iraqi Airlines was sold at a reduced price to an influential family with ties to the former regime. The investigation revealed that Iraqi Airlines was essentially dissolved, and there was no record of the transaction.’ Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPA-IG instigated related to alleged ‘theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion’. It also investigated ‘a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report’. At around this time, 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5 million, were found on a plane in Lebanon which had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister.
The IAMB, meanwhile, discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered. Neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation nor the American authorities could give a satisfactory explanation for this. ‘The only reason you wouldn’t monitor them is if you don’t want anyone else to know how much is going through,’ one petroleum executive told me. Officially, Iraq exported oil worth $10 billion in the first year of the American occupation. Christian Aid has estimated that oil worth up to an additional $4 billion may also have been exported and is unaccounted for. If this is correct, it would have created an off the books slush fund that both the Americans and their Iraqi allies could use with impunity to cover expenditures they would rather keep secret – among them the occupation costs, which were rising far beyond what the Bush administration could comfortably admit to Congress and the international community.
America’s situation in Iraq took a turn for the worse in April 2004, with the uprisings in Najaf and Fallujah, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and mass defections from the new Iraqi security forces. ‘At the beginning of April,’ one of the audits says, ‘the Iraqi National Guard force held steady at around 32,000 personnel. Between 9 and 16 April this number dropped to a low of 17,500.’ As for the police, ‘the Iraqi Ministry of Interior has decided to reduce the number of police officers to 89,000’ – from 120,000 – ‘by trimming from its rolls those who have proved to be unsuitable.’ At the same time, ‘recent attacks on the pipelines reduced exports in April to an average of 1.7 million barrels per day and 1.4 million barrels per day in May. The total could possibly be lower in June.’ That’s a million barrels per day fewer than under Saddam. Across Iraq, hospitals and schools were derelict, electricity was intermittent, and water supplies were polluted.
The American response to the militant insurgency and to the loss of their moral credentials at Abu Ghraib was a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign. Law-abiding Iraqis were to be shown respect and given buckets of money, while Bremer and the CPA prepared to hand over the management of Iraq to an interim government picked by the Americans. KBR’s lorry drivers were told not to run Iraqis off the road. And millions of dollars in cash – most of it Iraqi money – were handed out by American commanders in local communities across Iraq in an attempt to buy friends. ‘The Commanders’ Emergency Reconstruction Programme continues to be a very effective programme . . . which has built trust and support for the United States at grass roots level,’ the CPA-IG report said. ‘As of 19 June 2004, the local commanders have spent $364.6 million . . . on over 27,600 small projects . . . repairing and refurbishing water and sewer lines, cleaning up highways by removing waste and debris, transporting water to remote villages, purchasing equipment for local police stations, upgrading schools and clinics, purchasing school supplies, removing ordnance from public spaces . . .’ It was too little too late. With the concentration on big infrastructure projects and contracts for American corporate cronies and Iraqi businessmen ‘friends’, there had been little for ordinary Iraqis to benefit from or to take part in. Rumsfeld knew by the beginning of 2004 that his and Bremer’s management was in deep trouble. ‘Iraqis are puzzled; they truly don’t know what the US really intends for them. We haven’t communicated well. The “story” has not been believed,’ a Personnel Assessment Team reported to Rumsfeld on 11 February 2004. ‘We have in essence a pick-up organisation in place to design and execute the most demanding transformation in recent history.’
Last September was the crucial month. By then the US government had spent $60 billion on the US forces in Iraq, and $1 billion on the Iraqi security forces. The Americans knew that they were widely hated. ‘In the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds . . . American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended’ was the principal finding of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board. The answer was a big rethink – a strategic spending review. The $18.4 billion Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund that Congress had voted to rebuild Iraq, and which Bremer had left largely untouched and possibly never intended to spend as mandated, would be spent on counter-insurgency warfare directed by US commanders and John Negroponte from the new US embassy in Baghdad.
First, $3 billion was diverted from the budgets to restore Iraq’s destroyed electricity supply, water supply and sewers to security and law enforcement. The reduced electricity budget (down from $5.6 billion to $4.4 billion) was to be spent patching up neighbourhoods flattened by American fire power, and electricity pylons and stations sabotaged by the insurgents. The electricity supply had become one of the war’s main battlegrounds.
This meant fewer large contracts for American and international energy firms, which were further discouraged from staying in Iraq as their personnel were attacked and the price of private security soared. It also meant flickering lights and hours of power cuts for ordinary Iraqis. Yet development and reconstruction were officially deferred. Or, as the auditors put it, ‘this redistribution of funds . . . appears to be generally consistent with the stated management objective of de-emphasising longer-term development projects as funds are shifted toward more immediately realisable goals.’
‘The country’s widely failing sewage management infrastructure and the sporadic availability of potable water,’ the auditors wrote, ‘continue to pose health threats and tarnish overall impressions of reconstruction achievements.’ Yet the water and sanitation budget was cut almost in half, as long-term development was again handed over to the Iraqi government so US funds could be doled out to Iraqis in neighbourhoods where the insurgents held sway and it was now unsafe for foreigners to go. ‘Initial plans to rehabilitate large portions of the country’s water and wastewater system through the IRRF have been curtailed,’ the auditors wrote. ‘Water resources and sanitation sector funds have been reallocated to security, governance, debt relief and efforts to boost Iraqi employment opportunities . . . creating local water and wastewater projects to stimulate Iraqi employment and deliver needed services to high-risk areas.’
The budget for employing Iraqis rose by more than 350 per cent, to be spent largely on ‘local projects that will visibly impact Iraqi communities before the 30 January 2005 national election’. At the same time, ‘the construction sector saw the withdrawal of the prime design-and-build road contractor from Iraq, reportedly because of concern for personnel and site security.’ The insurgents had forced a fundamental reshaping of US spending priorities, further widened the no man’s land between themselves and US troops, polarising Iraq, and assuming the initiative in the war.
None of this has changed. In December 2004, the US Mission in Iraq allotted an extra $457 million to keep the electricity working and ‘to boost short-term employment through health, electricity and water initiatives in Najaf, Samarra, Sadr City and Fallujah. Together,’ the auditors reported, ‘the two adjustments reflect a significant change in US spending priorities.’
In March this year, a further $832 million ‘was reprogrammed for management initiatives’, largely ‘for operations and maintenance at various power and water plants, urgent work in the electrical and oil sectors’ to repair sabotage damage, and to pay for building contracts on which it had become extremely dangerous and expensive to work. The most recent audit, issued in April, reports that projects are running between 50 and 85 per cent above the original estimated costs. The free-spending days are over. Americans are having to divert increasing amounts of US development money just to keep what remains of Iraq’s damaged public utilities working, and to finance the Iraqi police and army.
Six months into the occupation, in autumn 2003, the Americans planned to transfer security to the Iraqi police and army so they could ‘draw down US forces from Iraq’. The goal was to have 250,000 Iraqis in the security forces by the following summer. However, as a GAO report submitted to Congress in March this year explains, most of the recruits were neither vetted nor properly trained. The result has been that the ‘Ministry of Interior’s security forces committed numerous serious human rights abuses’; the Iraqi police and army have been easily infiltrated by former Ba’athists and other insurgents; and morale is low.
As the GAO put it,
police and military units performed poorly during an escalation of insurgent attacks against the Coalition in April 2004 . . . Many Iraqi security forces around the country collapsed during this uprising . . . units abandoned their posts and responsibilities and in some cases assisted the insurgency . . . Police manning a checkpoint in one area were reporting convoy movements by mobile telephone to local terrorists. Police in another area were infiltrated by former regime elements.
‘In response to the unwillingness of a regular army battalion to fight Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah’, the Americans created a special Iraqi Intervention Force. Then last autumn they decided to beef up the Iraqi police service from 90,000 to 135,000, to add 20 battalions to the Iraqi National Guard and double the border guard. This February, the State Department glowingly reported that almost 82,000 Iraqi police and 60,000 troops had been trained.
These figures are grossly misleading. According to the GAO’s March report to Congress ‘the reported number of Iraqi police is unreliable because the Minister of the Interior does not receive consistent and accurate reporting from the police forces around the country. The data does not exclude police absent from duty.’ As for the army, ‘Ministry of Defense reports exclude the absent military personnel from its totals. According to DOD officials, the number of absentees is probably in the tens of thousands.’ Furthermore the State Department no longer reports on whether Iraqi security forces have the required weapons, vehicles, communication equipment and body armour. Bluntly, ‘US government agencies do not report reliable data on the extent to which Iraqi security forces are trained and equipped.’ The GAO further found that the Iraqi police are being trained for ‘community policing in a permissive security environment’ rather than getting ‘paramilitary training for a high-threat hostile environment’. It’s hardly surprising that close to 2000 Iraqi police have been killed.
This is all horribly reminiscent of American policy in Vietnam. American troops are staying in Iraq to stiffen Iraqi forces who are dying in droves in an escalating counter-insurgency war that neither the Americans nor the Iraqi forces are prepared for. The Americans originally allocated $5.8 billion to build the Iraqi security forces. In February this year, George Bush asked Congress for another $5.7 billion to go towards this task.
What’s happened to the rebuilding of Iraqi society, and real governance based on transparency and accountability? In the few weeks before Bremer left Iraq, the CPA handed out more than $3 billion in new contracts to be paid for with Iraqi funds and managed by the US embassy in Baghdad. The CPA inspector general, now called the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has just released an audit report on the way the embassy has dealt with that responsibility. The auditors reviewed the files of 225 contracts totalling $327 million to see if the embassy ‘could identify the current value of paid and unpaid contract obligations’. It couldn’t. ‘Our review showed that financial records . . . understated payments made by $108,255,875’ and ‘overstated unpaid obligations by $119,361,286’. The auditors also reviewed the paperwork for a further 300 contracts worth $332.9 million. ‘For 198 of 300 contracts, documentation was not available . . . to indicate that contract execution was monitored for performance and payment . . . Files did not contain evidence that goods and services had been received for 154 contracts, that invoices had been submitted for 169 contracts, or that payments had been made for 144 contracts.’
Clearly the Americans see no need to account for spending the Iraqis’ national income now any more than they did when Bremer was in charge. Neither the embassy chief of mission nor the US military commander replied to the auditors’ invitation to comment. Instead, the US army contracting commander lamely pointed out that ‘the peaceful conditions envisioned in the early planning continue to elude the reconstruction efforts.’ This is a remarkable understatement. It’s also an admission that Americans can’t be expected to do their sums when they are spending other people’s money to finance a war.
Not only the Americans are guilty of a lack of accountability. In January this year, the SIGIR issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8 billion – the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 – was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and few of the ministries had budget departments. Iraq’s newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American ‘advisers’ looked on. ‘CPA personnel did not review and compare financial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results,’ the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430 million in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8206 guards, but only 602 could be accounted for. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8 billion went to pay for private militias and into private pockets.
‘It’s remarkable that the inspector general’s office could have produced even a draft report with so many misconceptions and inaccuracies,’ Bremer said in his reply to the SIGIR report. ‘At Liberation, the Iraqi economy was dead in the water. So CPA’s top priority was to get the economy going.’ The SIGIR responded by releasing another audit this April, an investigation into the way Bremer’s CPA managed cash payments from the Development Fund for Iraq in just one part of Iraq, the region around Hillah: ‘During the course of the audit, we identified deficiencies in the control of cash . . . of such magnitude as to require prompt attention. Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives.’ They found that CPA headquarters in Baghdad ‘did not maintain full control and accountability for approximately $119.9 million’, and that agents in the field ‘cannot properly account for or support over $96.6 million in cash and receipts’. These agents were mostly Americans in Iraq on short-term contracts. One agent’s account balance was ‘overstated by $2,825,755, and the error went undetected’. Another agent was given $25 million cash for which Bremer’s office ‘acknowledged not having any supporting documentation’. Of more than $23 million given to another agent, there are only records for $6,306,836 paid to contractors. Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork hours before they headed to the airport. Two left Iraq without accounting for $750,000 each; the money has never been found. CPA head office cleared several agents’ balances of between $250,000 and $12 million without any receipts. One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that ‘this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash,’ pointing out that if his original figures had been correct, he would have accounted to the CPA for approximately $3.8 million more than he had been given in the first place, which ‘suggests that the receipt documents provided to the DFI account manager were unreliable’.
Staff at the CPA head office in Baghdad usually worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often on three-month postings. They didn’t trust the computer network so many of them put their records on USB sticks and in private computer files that couldn’t be opened by their replacements. At one point there was only one officer at the CPA account manager’s office clearing all the paying agents throughout Iraq. Paying agents in the field often couldn’t get – let alone be bothered with – the paperwork, which was frustrating for the honest ones and a boon to their crooked colleagues. So where did the money go? You can’t see it in Hillah. The schools, hospitals, water supply and electricity, all of which were supposed to benefit from this money, are in ruins. The inescapable conclusion is that many of the American paying agents grabbed large bundles of cash for themselves and made sweet deals with their Iraqi contacts.
And so it continues. The IAMB’s most recent audit of Iraqi government spending, which is yet to be published, talks of ‘incomplete accounting’, ‘lack of documented justification for limited competition for contracts at the Iraqi ministries’, ‘possible misappropriation of oil revenues’, ‘significant difficulties in ensuring completeness and accuracy of Iraqi budgets and controls over expenditures’, and ‘non-deposit of proceeds of export sales of petroleum products into the appropriate accounts in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1483’.
Bremer re-established the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit a month before he left Baghdad. It is now said to have more than a thousand auditors and support personnel spread throughout Iraqi government ministries. A new Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, the equivalent of the FBI, is said to have 200 staff and 15 US advisers. Yet according to the latest American figures, of more than 3400 complaints, only about one in 50 has been passed to the Commission on Public Integrity for possible prosecution.
There is an explanation for this lack of activity. On Thursday, 1 July 2004, two days after Bremer left Baghdad, Ehsan Karim, the new head of the Board of Supreme Audit, was killed by a bomb as he left the Finance Ministry. Two weeks later, Sabir Karim (no relation) was murdered in a drive-by shooting as he set off for work at the Ministry of Industry, where he was in charge of investigating corruption. A few weeks ago, another senior official investigating corruption was murdered. The IAMB keeps the names of its Iraqi delegates secret to keep them alive.
In the absence of any meaningful accountability, Iraqis have no way of knowing how much of the nation’s wealth is being handed out to ministers’ and civil servants’ friends and families or funnelled into secret overseas bank accounts. Given that many Ba’athists are now back in government, some of that money may even be financing the insurgents.
Both Saddam and the US profited handsomely during his reign. He controlled Iraq’s wealth while most of Iraq’s oil went to Californian refineries to provide cheap petrol for American voters. US corporations, like those who enjoyed Saddam’s favour, grew rich. Today the system is much the same: the oil goes to California, and the new Iraqi government spends the country’s money with impunity.
Ed Harriman is a journalist and television documentary film-maker.
From the LRB letters page: [ 4 August 2005 ] James Hamilton-Paterson
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n13/print/harr04_.html
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July 01, 2005
guys get paid, guys get whacked
Somewhere in hell, the ghost of Mobuto whistles and applauds:
On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, ‘there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.’ Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.
via. Later in the same article:
On Thursday, 1 July 2004, two days after Bremer left Baghdad, Ehsan Karim, the new head of the Board of Supreme Audit, was killed by a bomb as he left the Finance Ministry. Two weeks later, Sabir Karim (no relation) was murdered in a drive-by shooting as he set off for work at the Ministry of Industry, where he was in charge of investigating corruption. A few weeks ago, another senior official investigating corruption was murdered. The IAMB keeps the names of its Iraqi delegates secret to keep them alive.
So who's murdering these guys? The insurgency have an interest. Corruption keeps the state in failure and enables them to protect themselves and acquire targets through bribery. But the most direct suspects have to be the people who actually skim off the money. And who's to say that there's no freelancing. On Monday it's Iraqi cops versus Iraqi insurgents. On Tuesday, boith get together to make a little extra. If you're trying to make a few quid in the bazaar of violence, you don't turn down business opportunities.
Posted by jamie k at 03:11 PM | Permalink
Original: http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2005/07/guys_get_paid_g.html
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'Looted art used to fund terrorist activity in Iraq'
Associated Press
Paris, June 24, 2005
Money from the sale of stolen artifacts in Iraq is being used to fund terrorist activity, the director of Iraq's National Museum has said.
Donny George, speaking to reporters at a UNESCO conference on Iraq's cultural heritage, said some of the looted objects were passing through the United States.
"Rich people are buying stolen material. ... Money is going to Iraq and they (terror groups) are buying weapons and ammunition to use against Iraqi police and American forces," he said on Thursday.
"People in the international community must stop buying these things..." He said. "This money is going to the terrorists."
George said police in the United States were doing an "excellent" job of curbing the flow of stolen artifacts there, but "a lot of material is just penetrating the country."
Priceless antiquities were looted from Iraq, where museums were pillaged of treasures dating back 5,000 years, amid the chaos of the 2003 US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
"There was a great deal of looting when coalition forces arrived," Iraqi Culture Minister Nouri Farhan al-Rawi said at the news conference. "Today, coalition forces are helping us a lot, and there are no more cases of looting or theft."
George said that of 15,000 objects stolen from the national museum, almost 4,000 had been returned to the country and more than 4,000 others were in neighbouring countries for safekeeping.
A database and Web page for the museum were expected to be ready next month, he said.
Original: http://www.hindustantimes.com/onlineCDA/PFVersion.jsp?article=http://10.81.141.122/news/181_1409698,00050003.htm
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Iraq's New Economy
Read this now. The London Review of Books on epic corruption in Iraq, including the apparent disappearance of Iraqi Airways:
"‘A complainant alleged that Iraqi Airlines was sold at a reduced price to an influential family with ties to the former regime. The investigation revealed that Iraqi Airlines was essentially dissolved, and there was no record of the transaction.’ Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPA-IG instigated related to alleged ‘theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion’. It also investigated ‘a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report’. At around this time, 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5 million, were found on a plane in Lebanon which had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister."
The "influential family" is that of Sheikh Hussain al-Khawam, owner of Teebah Airlines, which provides all the new Iraqi Airways' aircraft, which are mysteriously registered in Sierra Leone (as previously blogged, but no bugger seems to care).
Now check this out: Iraqi Airways-titled B727 9L-LEL on the ground at Baghdad. This aircraft, serial number 21483, was formerly used by KAM Air, the Afghan airline associated with heroin-smuggling, prisoner-smothering warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, old friend Viktor Bout, and convicted cocaine smuggler Chris Barrett-Jolley. Teebah provided several other aircraft for KAM, some of which also passed by Phoenix Aviation. Phoenix is a Kyrgyz-registry, Sharjah-based company whose name has been used by various Viktor Bout-related companies in Belgium, Greece, Bulgaria and the UK since 1994. Its alumni include (you guessed it) CBJ. Its current aircraft roster includes planes apparently shared with Santa Cruz Imperial of the UAE, another gun-running outfit connected with Bout and a senior UAE government minister. And here (LinkBroken) is one of its aircraft, Boeing 737 EX-450, serial no. 20450, on the ground in Baghdad. This link shows (LinkBroken)three Phoenix flights a day between Baghdad and Dubai, all using B737-200s. That's as well as British Gulf International An-12s and even a daily flight by Irbis Air Co. of Kazakhstan and, of course, Sharjah. Irbis, I repeat, is a company that the US Department of the Treasury has placed on an asset-freeze blacklist. The flight is listed as using a Yakovlev 42 aircraft. There is only one Yak42 at Irbis, registered UN-42428, serial no.4520422306016, so it is this one. It's officially leased to Sudan Airways, but as this photo (see below) demonstrates, it's still carrying the Kazakh registration that traces to Irbis. And the flights take place using Irbis's ICAO code: BIS. Moving swiftly on, the Sharjah Airport arrivals for today show an Irbis flight, BIS6372, from Balad South East airfield. Balad is a US Air Force facility: so why was it permitted to take-off again having landed there? Interestingly, the same flight number is also scheduled into Dubai from Baghdad at 1830 local time today. During the last week, Irbis flights have also taken place between Sharjah and Bagram AFB in Afghanistan, as well as between SHJ and Kabul.
And there are also flights between Iraq and Ras al-Khaimah, operated by Jupiter Airlines: which doesn't officially exist. But it is on this list of companies dissolved by the Congolese government. You can probably guess what sort of thing you'd have to do to get dissolved in the DR Congo. But aircraft with a history in West Africa are now turning up in the ranks of KAM, Teebah, FAG, Phoenix and such operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. I know I'm a mystery jet bore, but this is serious. These people are parasites. They infect societies like maggots, helping to create a criminal war economy, John Robb's Bazaar of Violence. Within the last ten days, we've heard that the Iraqi rebels have targeted the government's audit capability (see the LRB story and also this excellent post from Jamie Kenny), that the rebels are exporting looted antiquities, that another key export of the New Iraq is fifteen-year-old prostitutes, not to mention acting as an entrepot for heroin. As well as the deadly cocktail of military expertise and suicidal fanaticism, there is also a potent war economy emerging in Iraq to fund it. (By the way, one source on the Iraq/smack story is quoted as saying that "you can't have peace, security and development without drugs control". Bollocks. You can't have drugs control without peace, security etc; if you can't stop people blowing policemen up, it's pretty clear you can't stop them selling drugs.)
Comments:
A UK born, now French based ex FFL working for Kroll helping USAID tells me that prostitutes from Uzbek /Azebaijan / Roumania regularly are re-cycled through Bagram / Green Zone Baghdad. Apparently US staff have no great liking for teenage Arab girls.
Tells of Russian organisers using Russian aircraft with gun turrets(?) at Baghdad airport being used. Booked in as "catering staff".
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/07/iraqs-new-economy_03.html
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Tuesday, July 05, 2005
Bout Flies on for the U.S., and Tim Spicer Gets a New Contract
Life is a fine thing. Thanks to the Yorkshire Ranter, we now know that Viktor Bout's planes, including the banned IRBIS Air Co., placed on the Treasury Department's OFAC list of banned companies, continues to fly regularly to the U.S.-operated Bagram air base in Afghanistan. For his details, you can visit here, and for a comprehensive list of Bout companies still operating in the region, which the Ranter has identified, go here. It is now beyond belief that a man who sold and maintained aircraft for the Taliban, flew for Muslim extremists in Bosnia, few hundreds of tons of weapons to the most brutal and illegal armies of Africa, can still pull this off. Did the OFAC action mean nothing? (Apparently not)! What are people thinking? And shouldn't it be illegal to hire banned air craft companies, which then entails paying money to a person whose assets are supposedly frozen and is unable to receive money from ANY U.S. source? It is, as Alice said in Wonderland, getting curiouser and couriouser. The more Bout companies are identified and outed, the less enforcement action is taken. Can he be that valuable an asset to the intelligence community that he simply cannot be closed down, under any circumstances?
On another truely bizzare note the Ranter mentioned, and I had gotten from aviation authorities, all the Iraqi Airways aircraft are registered in Sierra Leone. How did THAT happen?
Finally, to round out the holiday weekend, the Sunday Times of London brings the cheery news that Tim Spicer, a mercenary with a checkered past, at best and a history of illegal armed actions, got his Pentagon contract extended for at least another year. His company, Aegis Defense Services, was initially awared the contract under controversial circumstances, and the 3-year job was worth nearly $300 million. The first year is complete, and the second-year option has been picked up, with an additional $145 million thrown into the pot. Very sweet, indeed. And the third year option will likely go ahead. Nice to know our tax payer dollars are going to a Brit whose contract is questionable and whose main claim to fame is illegal, and very expensive, armed ventures in Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Angola and elsewhere. The company coordinates communicatins between coalition forces, civilian contractors and their private security firms, while providing body guards to senior U.S. and Iraqi officials. Lovely.
Original: http://www.douglasfarah.com/2005/07/bout-flies-on-for-us-and-tim-spicer.html
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LRB | Vol. 27 No. 13 dated 7 July 2005 | Ed Harriman
Where has all the money gone?
Ed Harriman follows the auditors into Iraq
US House of Representatives Government Reform Committee Minority Office
| Link: http://www.democrats.reform.house.gov/
US General Accountability Office
| Link: http://www.gao.gov/
Defense Contract Audit Agency
| Link: http://www.dcaa.mil/
International Advisory and Monitoring Board
| Link: http://www.iamb.info/
Coalition Provisional Authority Inspector General
| Link: http://www.cpa-ig.com/
Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction
| Link: http://www.sigir.mil/
On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, ‘there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.’ Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.
The ‘reconstruction’ of Iraq is the largest American-led occupation programme since the Marshall Plan. But there is a difference: the US government funded the Marshall Plan whereas Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Bremer have made sure that the reconstruction of Iraq is paid for by the ‘liberated’ country, by the Iraqis themselves. There was $6 billion left over from the UN Oil for Food Programme, as well as sequestered and frozen assets, and revenue from resumed oil exports (at least $10 billion in the year following the invasion). Under Security Council Resolution 1483, passed on 22 May 2003, all of these funds were transferred into a new account held at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, called the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), so that they might be spent by the CPA ‘in a transparent manner . . . for the benefit of the Iraqi people’. Congress, it’s true, voted to spend $18.4 billion of US taxpayers’ money on the redevelopment of Iraq. But by 28 June last year, when Bremer left Baghdad two days early to avoid possible attack on the way to the airport, his CPA had spent up to $20 billion of Iraqi money, compared to $300 million of US funds.
The ‘financial irregularities’ described in audit reports carried out by agencies of the American government and auditors working for the international community collectively give a detailed insight into the mentality of the American occupation authorities and the way they operated, handing out truckloads of dollars for which neither they nor the recipients felt any need to be accountable. The auditors have so far referred more than a hundred contracts, involving billions of dollars paid to American personnel and corporations, for investigation and possible criminal prosecution. They have also discovered that $8.8 billion that passed through the new Iraqi government ministries in Baghdad while Bremer was in charge is unaccounted for, with little prospect of finding out where it went. A further $3.4 billion earmarked by Congress for Iraqi development has since been siphoned off to finance ‘security’.
That audit reports were commissioned at all owes a lot to Henry Waxman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within six months of the invasion, Waxman’s committee had evidence that the Texas-based Halliburton corporation was being grossly overpaid by the American occupation authorities for the petrol it was importing into Iraq from Kuwait, at a profit of more than $150 million. Waxman and his assistants found that Halliburton was charging $2.64 a gallon for petrol for Iraqi civilians, while American forces were importing the same fuel for $1.57 a gallon.
Halliburton’s chairman, David Lesar, who took over from Dick Cheney in July 2000, robustly defended his firm. But Waxman raised another question: if Halliburton was being allowed to rip off the Iraqi people, was the Bush administration allowing it to milk the US government as well? Waxman’s committee instructed Congress’s General Accountability Office to look into Halliburton’s biggest contract in Iraq: providing virtually all back-up facilities – from meals to laundry soap – to American forces. LOGCAP (Logistics Civil Augmentation Programme) contracts like this one are a product of the new ‘slimmed down’ American military, the quartermaster’s equivalent of Rumsfeld’s ‘invasion lite’. Rather than have uniformed troops peel potatoes and scrub floors, base support services have been privatised and contracted out so that, the idea goes, soldiers can get on with the fighting. The contracts are paid on a cost-plus basis, which allows the contractor to charge for what it has spent, then add on a profit. LOGCAP contracts have not been put out to tender, but rather awarded to a few US firms, the largest being Halliburton and its subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root.
The GAO report of July 2004 found that in the first nine months of the occupation, KBR was allowed a free hand in Iraq: a free hand, for example, to bill the Pentagon without worrying about spending limits or management oversight or paperwork. Millions of dollars’ worth of new equipment disappeared. KBR charged $73 million for motor caravans to house the 101st Airborne Division, twice as much as the army said it would cost to build barracks itself; KBR charged $88 million for three million meals for US troops that were never served. The GAO calculated that the army could have saved $31 million a year simply by doing business directly with the catering firms that KBR hired. In June 2004, the GAO continued, ‘by eliminating the use of LOGCAP and making the LOGCAP subcontractor the prime contractor, the command reduced meal costs by 43 per cent without a loss of service or quality.’
The GAO report makes clear that the Americans had given little thought as to how they might prevent looting and rebuild Iraqi society. They hadn’t even planned how they were going to provision the US forces staying on in Iraq: ‘the Army Central Command did not develop plans to use the [KBR] contract to support its military forces in Iraq until May 2003’ – a month after Saddam fell. Even then, this contract – with an estimated value of $3.894 billion – did not adequately provide for dining facilities, pest control, laundry services, morale, welfare and recreation, troop transportation or combat support services at the American bases hastily being built across Iraq. Stung by Waxman’s revelations about Halliburton’s petrol profiteering, and realising that KBR’s costs were spiralling out of control (LOGCAP costs in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan rose from a projected yearly total of $5.8 billion in September 2003 to $8.6 billion in January 2004), the army vice chief of staff ‘asked units to control costs and look for alternatives to the LOGCAP contract’. This was the first admission that the Pentagon could not afford the occupation on top of the war.
At the same time, the Pentagon’s own auditors, the Defense Contracts Audit Agency, went to Houston to have a look at KBR’s books. They were not happy with what they found:
Our examination disclosed several deficiencies in KBR’s billing system resulting in billings to the government that are not prepared in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and contract terms. We have also found system deficiencies resulting in material invoicing misstatements that are not prevented, detected and/or corrected in a timely manner.
They also found that ‘KBR also does not monitor the ongoing physical progress of subcontracts or the related costs and billings.’ When the auditors asked to see the files of payments to subcontractors to back up the invoices KBR submitted to the government, there weren’t any: ‘We found no such documents included in KBR’s subcontract files, nor did we find any log of subcontractor payments.’ So how did KBR work out its monthly invoices to the government for its whopping $3.9 billion contract? ‘The explanation begins with the costs on a spreadsheet with no indication of where or how these costs are accumulated.’ The auditors also wanted to know what happened to the money the government had paid for those three million non-existent meals:
Despite repeated requests over two months, KBR has not been able to provide an adequate explanation or adequate documentation for the payments to any DFAC [dining-hall] subcontractors. The limited documentation that has been provided shows, for example, that KBR has added ‘overage’ factors of 10 to 35 per cent to each bill for one of the subcontractors. We still do not have an adequate explanation of the ‘overage’ factor.
KBR’s response has been to tough it out. The company wrote to the auditors saying that its position regarding the meals ‘had been misquoted as well as misinterpreted’. The auditors, the corporation said, knew full well that KBR had ‘established a Tiger Team that is actively researching and analysing the facts and circumstances surrounding each of its DFAC subcontracts’. ‘Tiger Teams’ are in-house investigative units. KBR’s Tiger Team stayed at the five-star Kuwait Kempinski Hotel, where its members ran up a bill of more than $1 million. This outraged the army, whose troops were sleeping in tents at a cost of $1.39 a day. The army asked the Tiger Team to move into tents. It refused. As to how the Tiger Team ‘actively researched and analysed the facts’, we have the sworn testimony that a KBR employee gave to Congressman Waxman’s committee: ‘The Tiger Team looked at subcontracts with no invoice and no confirmation that the products contracted for were being used. Instead of investigating further, they would recommend extending the subcontract.’
The Pentagon auditors asked to see ‘evidence that KBR’s internal audit department is functionally and organisationally independent and sufficiently removed from management to ensure that it can conduct audits objectively and can report its findings, opinions and conclusions without fear of reprisal.’ KBR locked them out of its audit department. The auditors then asked who did KBR’s audits. Halliburton, KBR wrote back. The Pentagon auditors said that from then on KBR would have to submit all bills to them ‘for provisional approval prior to submission for payment’. Tough talk. But, despite all the threats to withhold payment, and with several lawsuits pending, KBR and Halliburton have now been paid more than $10 billion for quartermastering US forces in Iraq.
One of KBR’s contracts was for transporting supplies between American bases. Fleets of new Mercedes Benz trucks, costing $85,000 each, travelled up and down Iraq’s central highways every day, accompanied by armed US military escorts. If there were no goods to transport, KBR dispatched empty lorries anyway, and billed accordingly. The lorries didn’t carry replacement air and oil filters, essential when driving in the desert. They didn’t even carry spare tyres. If one broke down, it was abandoned and destroyed so no one else could use it, and left burning by the roadside. For fear of ambush, KBR drivers were told not to slow down. ‘The truck in front of the one I was riding ran a car with an Iraqi family of four off the road,’ a KBR employee told Waxman’s committee. ‘My driver said that was normal.’
American profligacy with Iraqi money has been, if anything, even worse. According to the CPA’s own rules, the authority ‘was expected to manage Iraqi funds in a transparent manner that fully met the CPA’s obligations under international law including Security Council Resolution 1483’. Despite repeated efforts, however, it was only in October 2003, six months after the fall of Saddam, that an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (IAMB), with representatives from the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF and the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, was established to provide independent, international financial oversight of the CPA’s spending.
The IAMB then spent months trying to find auditors acceptable to the US. The Bahrain office of KPMG was finally appointed in April 2004. It was stonewalled. ‘KPMG has encountered resistance from CPA staff regarding the submission of information required to complete our procedures,’ they wrote in an interim report. ‘Staff have indicated . . . that co-operation with KPMG’s undertakings is given a low priority.’ KPMG had one meeting at the Iraqi Ministry of Finance; meetings at all the other ministries were repeatedly postponed. The auditors even had trouble getting passes for the Green Zone.
There was a good reason for the Americans to stall. At the end of June 2004, the CPA would be disbanded and Bremer would leave Iraq. The Bush administration wasn’t going to allow independent auditors to be in a position to publish a report into the financial propriety of its Iraqi administration while Bremer was still answerable to the press. The report was published in July. The auditors found that the CPA hadn’t kept accounts for the hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in its vault, had awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to American firms without tender, and had no idea what was happening to the money from the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI) which was being spent by the interim Iraqi government ministries.
An Iraqi hospital administrator told me that, as he was about to sign a contract, the American army officer representing the CPA had crossed out the original price and doubled it. The Iraqi protested that the original price was enough. The American officer explained that the increase (more than $1 million) was his retirement package. Iraqis who were close to the Americans, had access to the Green Zone, or held prominent posts in the new government ministries, were also in a position to benefit enormously. Iraqi businessmen complain endlessly that they had to offer substantial bribes to Iraqi middlemen just to be allowed to bid for CPA contracts. Iraqi ministers’ relatives got top jobs and fat contracts.
Hard evidence comes from a further series of audits and reports carried out by the office of the CPA’s own inspector general (CPA-IG). Set up in January 2004, it reported to Congress. Its auditors, accountants and criminal investigators often found themselves sitting alone at cafeteria tables in the Green Zone, shunned by their compatriots. Their audit, published in July 2004, found that the American contracts officers in the CPA and the Iraqi ministries ‘did not ensure that . . . contract files contained all the required documents, a fair and reasonable price was paid for the services received, contractors were capable of meeting delivery schedules, or that contractors were paid in accordance with contract requirements’.
Pilfering was rife. Millions of dollars in cash went missing from the Iraqi Central Bank. Between $11 million and $26 million worth of Iraqi property sequestered by the CPA was unaccounted for. The payroll was padded with hundreds of ghost employees. Millions of dollars were paid to contractors for phantom work: $3,379,505 was billed, for example, for ‘personnel not in the field performing work’ and ‘other improper charges’ on a single oil pipeline repair contract. An Iraqi sports coach was paid $40,000 by the CPA. He gave it to a friend who gambled it away then wrote it off as a legitimate loss. ‘A complainant alleged that Iraqi Airlines was sold at a reduced price to an influential family with ties to the former regime. The investigation revealed that Iraqi Airlines was essentially dissolved, and there was no record of the transaction.’ Most of the 69 criminal investigations the CPA-IG instigated related to alleged ‘theft, fraud, waste, assault and extortion’. It also investigated ‘a number of other cases that, because of their sensitivity, cannot be included in this report’. At around this time, 19 billion new Iraqi dinars, worth about £6.5 million, were found on a plane in Lebanon which had been sent there by the American-appointed Iraqi interior minister.
The IAMB, meanwhile, discovered that Iraqi oil exports were unmetered. Neither the Iraqi State Oil Marketing Organisation nor the American authorities could give a satisfactory explanation for this. ‘The only reason you wouldn’t monitor them is if you don’t want anyone else to know how much is going through,’ one petroleum executive told me. Officially, Iraq exported oil worth $10 billion in the first year of the American occupation. Christian Aid has estimated that oil worth up to an additional $4 billion may also have been exported and is unaccounted for. If this is correct, it would have created an off the books slush fund that both the Americans and their Iraqi allies could use with impunity to cover expenditures they would rather keep secret – among them the occupation costs, which were rising far beyond what the Bush administration could comfortably admit to Congress and the international community.
America’s situation in Iraq took a turn for the worse in April 2004, with the uprisings in Najaf and Fallujah, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and mass defections from the new Iraqi security forces. ‘At the beginning of April,’ one of the audits says, ‘the Iraqi National Guard force held steady at around 32,000 personnel. Between 9 and 16 April this number dropped to a low of 17,500.’ As for the police, ‘the Iraqi Ministry of Interior has decided to reduce the number of police officers to 89,000’ – from 120,000 – ‘by trimming from its rolls those who have proved to be unsuitable.’ At the same time, ‘recent attacks on the pipelines reduced exports in April to an average of 1.7 million barrels per day and 1.4 million barrels per day in May. The total could possibly be lower in June.’ That’s a million barrels per day fewer than under Saddam. Across Iraq, hospitals and schools were derelict, electricity was intermittent, and water supplies were polluted.
The American response to the militant insurgency and to the loss of their moral credentials at Abu Ghraib was a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign. Law-abiding Iraqis were to be shown respect and given buckets of money, while Bremer and the CPA prepared to hand over the management of Iraq to an interim government picked by the Americans. KBR’s lorry drivers were told not to run Iraqis off the road. And millions of dollars in cash – most of it Iraqi money – were handed out by American commanders in local communities across Iraq in an attempt to buy friends. ‘The Commanders’ Emergency Reconstruction Programme continues to be a very effective programme . . . which has built trust and support for the United States at grass roots level,’ the CPA-IG report said. ‘As of 19 June 2004, the local commanders have spent $364.6 million . . . on over 27,600 small projects . . . repairing and refurbishing water and sewer lines, cleaning up highways by removing waste and debris, transporting water to remote villages, purchasing equipment for local police stations, upgrading schools and clinics, purchasing school supplies, removing ordnance from public spaces . . .’ It was too little too late. With the concentration on big infrastructure projects and contracts for American corporate cronies and Iraqi businessmen ‘friends’, there had been little for ordinary Iraqis to benefit from or to take part in. Rumsfeld knew by the beginning of 2004 that his and Bremer’s management was in deep trouble. ‘Iraqis are puzzled; they truly don’t know what the US really intends for them. We haven’t communicated well. The “story” has not been believed,’ a Personnel Assessment Team reported to Rumsfeld on 11 February 2004. ‘We have in essence a pick-up organisation in place to design and execute the most demanding transformation in recent history.’
Last September was the crucial month. By then the US government had spent $60 billion on the US forces in Iraq, and $1 billion on the Iraqi security forces. The Americans knew that they were widely hated. ‘In the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds . . . American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended’ was the principal finding of the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board. The answer was a big rethink – a strategic spending review. The $18.4 billion Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund that Congress had voted to rebuild Iraq, and which Bremer had left largely untouched and possibly never intended to spend as mandated, would be spent on counter-insurgency warfare directed by US commanders and John Negroponte from the new US embassy in Baghdad.
First, $3 billion was diverted from the budgets to restore Iraq’s destroyed electricity supply, water supply and sewers to security and law enforcement. The reduced electricity budget (down from $5.6 billion to $4.4 billion) was to be spent patching up neighbourhoods flattened by American fire power, and electricity pylons and stations sabotaged by the insurgents. The electricity supply had become one of the war’s main battlegrounds.
This meant fewer large contracts for American and international energy firms, which were further discouraged from staying in Iraq as their personnel were attacked and the price of private security soared. It also meant flickering lights and hours of power cuts for ordinary Iraqis. Yet development and reconstruction were officially deferred. Or, as the auditors put it, ‘this redistribution of funds . . . appears to be generally consistent with the stated management objective of de-emphasising longer-term development projects as funds are shifted toward more immediately realisable goals.’
‘The country’s widely failing sewage management infrastructure and the sporadic availability of potable water,’ the auditors wrote, ‘continue to pose health threats and tarnish overall impressions of reconstruction achievements.’ Yet the water and sanitation budget was cut almost in half, as long-term development was again handed over to the Iraqi government so US funds could be doled out to Iraqis in neighbourhoods where the insurgents held sway and it was now unsafe for foreigners to go. ‘Initial plans to rehabilitate large portions of the country’s water and wastewater system through the IRRF have been curtailed,’ the auditors wrote. ‘Water resources and sanitation sector funds have been reallocated to security, governance, debt relief and efforts to boost Iraqi employment opportunities . . . creating local water and wastewater projects to stimulate Iraqi employment and deliver needed services to high-risk areas.’
The budget for employing Iraqis rose by more than 350 per cent, to be spent largely on ‘local projects that will visibly impact Iraqi communities before the 30 January 2005 national election’. At the same time, ‘the construction sector saw the withdrawal of the prime design-and-build road contractor from Iraq, reportedly because of concern for personnel and site security.’ The insurgents had forced a fundamental reshaping of US spending priorities, further widened the no man’s land between themselves and US troops, polarising Iraq, and assuming the initiative in the war.
None of this has changed. In December 2004, the US Mission in Iraq allotted an extra $457 million to keep the electricity working and ‘to boost short-term employment through health, electricity and water initiatives in Najaf, Samarra, Sadr City and Fallujah. Together,’ the auditors reported, ‘the two adjustments reflect a significant change in US spending priorities.’
In March this year, a further $832 million ‘was reprogrammed for management initiatives’, largely ‘for operations and maintenance at various power and water plants, urgent work in the electrical and oil sectors’ to repair sabotage damage, and to pay for building contracts on which it had become extremely dangerous and expensive to work. The most recent audit, issued in April, reports that projects are running between 50 and 85 per cent above the original estimated costs. The free-spending days are over. Americans are having to divert increasing amounts of US development money just to keep what remains of Iraq’s damaged public utilities working, and to finance the Iraqi police and army.
Six months into the occupation, in autumn 2003, the Americans planned to transfer security to the Iraqi police and army so they could ‘draw down US forces from Iraq’. The goal was to have 250,000 Iraqis in the security forces by the following summer. However, as a GAO report submitted to Congress in March this year explains, most of the recruits were neither vetted nor properly trained. The result has been that the ‘Ministry of Interior’s security forces committed numerous serious human rights abuses’; the Iraqi police and army have been easily infiltrated by former Ba’athists and other insurgents; and morale is low.
As the GAO put it,
police and military units performed poorly during an escalation of insurgent attacks against the Coalition in April 2004 . . . Many Iraqi security forces around the country collapsed during this uprising . . . units abandoned their posts and responsibilities and in some cases assisted the insurgency . . . Police manning a checkpoint in one area were reporting convoy movements by mobile telephone to local terrorists. Police in another area were infiltrated by former regime elements.
‘In response to the unwillingness of a regular army battalion to fight Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah’, the Americans created a special Iraqi Intervention Force. Then last autumn they decided to beef up the Iraqi police service from 90,000 to 135,000, to add 20 battalions to the Iraqi National Guard and double the border guard. This February, the State Department glowingly reported that almost 82,000 Iraqi police and 60,000 troops had been trained.
These figures are grossly misleading. According to the GAO’s March report to Congress ‘the reported number of Iraqi police is unreliable because the Minister of the Interior does not receive consistent and accurate reporting from the police forces around the country. The data does not exclude police absent from duty.’ As for the army, ‘Ministry of Defense reports exclude the absent military personnel from its totals. According to DOD officials, the number of absentees is probably in the tens of thousands.’ Furthermore the State Department no longer reports on whether Iraqi security forces have the required weapons, vehicles, communication equipment and body armour. Bluntly, ‘US government agencies do not report reliable data on the extent to which Iraqi security forces are trained and equipped.’ The GAO further found that the Iraqi police are being trained for ‘community policing in a permissive security environment’ rather than getting ‘paramilitary training for a high-threat hostile environment’. It’s hardly surprising that close to 2000 Iraqi police have been killed.
This is all horribly reminiscent of American policy in Vietnam. American troops are staying in Iraq to stiffen Iraqi forces who are dying in droves in an escalating counter-insurgency war that neither the Americans nor the Iraqi forces are prepared for. The Americans originally allocated $5.8 billion to build the Iraqi security forces. In February this year, George Bush asked Congress for another $5.7 billion to go towards this task.
What’s happened to the rebuilding of Iraqi society, and real governance based on transparency and accountability? In the few weeks before Bremer left Iraq, the CPA handed out more than $3 billion in new contracts to be paid for with Iraqi funds and managed by the US embassy in Baghdad. The CPA inspector general, now called the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has just released an audit report on the way the embassy has dealt with that responsibility. The auditors reviewed the files of 225 contracts totalling $327 million to see if the embassy ‘could identify the current value of paid and unpaid contract obligations’. It couldn’t. ‘Our review showed that financial records . . . understated payments made by $108,255,875’ and ‘overstated unpaid obligations by $119,361,286’. The auditors also reviewed the paperwork for a further 300 contracts worth $332.9 million. ‘For 198 of 300 contracts, documentation was not available . . . to indicate that contract execution was monitored for performance and payment . . . Files did not contain evidence that goods and services had been received for 154 contracts, that invoices had been submitted for 169 contracts, or that payments had been made for 144 contracts.’
Clearly the Americans see no need to account for spending the Iraqis’ national income now any more than they did when Bremer was in charge. Neither the embassy chief of mission nor the US military commander replied to the auditors’ invitation to comment. Instead, the US army contracting commander lamely pointed out that ‘the peaceful conditions envisioned in the early planning continue to elude the reconstruction efforts.’ This is a remarkable understatement. It’s also an admission that Americans can’t be expected to do their sums when they are spending other people’s money to finance a war.
Not only the Americans are guilty of a lack of accountability. In January this year, the SIGIR issued a report detailing evidence of fraud, corruption and waste by the Iraqi Interim Government when Bremer was in charge. They found that $8.8 billion – the entire Iraqi Interim Government spending from October 2003 through June 2004 – was not properly accounted for. The Iraqi Office of Budget and Management at one point had only six staff, all of them inexperienced, and few of the ministries had budget departments. Iraq’s newly appointed ministers and their senior officials were free to hand out hundreds of millions of dollars in cash as they pleased, while American ‘advisers’ looked on. ‘CPA personnel did not review and compare financial, budgetary and operational performance to planned or expected results,’ the auditors explained. One ministry gave out $430 million in contracts without its CPA advisers seeing any of the paperwork. Another claimed to be paying 8206 guards, but only 602 could be accounted for. There is simply no way of knowing how much of the $8.8 billion went to pay for private militias and into private pockets.
‘It’s remarkable that the inspector general’s office could have produced even a draft report with so many misconceptions and inaccuracies,’ Bremer said in his reply to the SIGIR report. ‘At Liberation, the Iraqi economy was dead in the water. So CPA’s top priority was to get the economy going.’ The SIGIR responded by releasing another audit this April, an investigation into the way Bremer’s CPA managed cash payments from the Development Fund for Iraq in just one part of Iraq, the region around Hillah: ‘During the course of the audit, we identified deficiencies in the control of cash . . . of such magnitude as to require prompt attention. Those deficiencies were so significant that we were precluded from accomplishing our stated objectives.’ They found that CPA headquarters in Baghdad ‘did not maintain full control and accountability for approximately $119.9 million’, and that agents in the field ‘cannot properly account for or support over $96.6 million in cash and receipts’. These agents were mostly Americans in Iraq on short-term contracts. One agent’s account balance was ‘overstated by $2,825,755, and the error went undetected’. Another agent was given $25 million cash for which Bremer’s office ‘acknowledged not having any supporting documentation’. Of more than $23 million given to another agent, there are only records for $6,306,836 paid to contractors. Many of the American agents submitted their paperwork hours before they headed to the airport. Two left Iraq without accounting for $750,000 each; the money has never been found. CPA head office cleared several agents’ balances of between $250,000 and $12 million without any receipts. One agent who did submit receipts, on being told that he still owed $1,878,870, turned up three days later with exactly that amount. The auditors thought that ‘this suggests that the agent had a reserve of cash,’ pointing out that if his original figures had been correct, he would have accounted to the CPA for approximately $3.8 million more than he had been given in the first place, which ‘suggests that the receipt documents provided to the DFI account manager were unreliable’.
Staff at the CPA head office in Baghdad usually worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, often on three-month postings. They didn’t trust the computer network so many of them put their records on USB sticks and in private computer files that couldn’t be opened by their replacements. At one point there was only one officer at the CPA account manager’s office clearing all the paying agents throughout Iraq. Paying agents in the field often couldn’t get – let alone be bothered with – the paperwork, which was frustrating for the honest ones and a boon to their crooked colleagues. So where did the money go? You can’t see it in Hillah. The schools, hospitals, water supply and electricity, all of which were supposed to benefit from this money, are in ruins. The inescapable conclusion is that many of the American paying agents grabbed large bundles of cash for themselves and made sweet deals with their Iraqi contacts.
And so it continues. The IAMB’s most recent audit of Iraqi government spending, which is yet to be published, talks of ‘incomplete accounting’, ‘lack of documented justification for limited competition for contracts at the Iraqi ministries’, ‘possible misappropriation of oil revenues’, ‘significant difficulties in ensuring completeness and accuracy of Iraqi budgets and controls over expenditures’, and ‘non-deposit of proceeds of export sales of petroleum products into the appropriate accounts in contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 1483’.
Bremer re-established the Iraqi Board of Supreme Audit a month before he left Baghdad. It is now said to have more than a thousand auditors and support personnel spread throughout Iraqi government ministries. A new Iraqi Commission on Public Integrity, the equivalent of the FBI, is said to have 200 staff and 15 US advisers. Yet according to the latest American figures, of more than 3400 complaints, only about one in 50 has been passed to the Commission on Public Integrity for possible prosecution.
There is an explanation for this lack of activity. On Thursday, 1 July 2004, two days after Bremer left Baghdad, Ehsan Karim, the new head of the Board of Supreme Audit, was killed by a bomb as he left the Finance Ministry. Two weeks later, Sabir Karim (no relation) was murdered in a drive-by shooting as he set off for work at the Ministry of Industry, where he was in charge of investigating corruption. A few weeks ago, another senior official investigating corruption was murdered. The IAMB keeps the names of its Iraqi delegates secret to keep them alive.
In the absence of any meaningful accountability, Iraqis have no way of knowing how much of the nation’s wealth is being handed out to ministers’ and civil servants’ friends and families or funnelled into secret overseas bank accounts. Given that many Ba’athists are now back in government, some of that money may even be financing the insurgents.
Both Saddam and the US profited handsomely during his reign. He controlled Iraq’s wealth while most of Iraq’s oil went to Californian refineries to provide cheap petrol for American voters. US corporations, like those who enjoyed Saddam’s favour, grew rich. Today the system is much the same: the oil goes to California, and the new Iraqi government spends the country’s money with impunity.
Ed Harriman is a journalist and television documentary film-maker.
From the LRB letters page: [ 4 August 2005 ] James Hamilton-Paterson
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n13/print/harr04_.html
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Click to Enlarge
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July 01, 2005
guys get paid, guys get whacked
Somewhere in hell, the ghost of Mobuto whistles and applauds:
On 12 April 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Erbil in northern Iraq handed over $1.5 billion in cash to a local courier. The money, fresh $100 bills shrink-wrapped on pallets, which filled three Blackhawk helicopters, came from oil sales under the UN’s Oil for Food Programme, and had been entrusted by the UN Security Council to the Americans to be spent on behalf of the Iraqi people. The CPA didn’t properly check out the courier before handing over the cash, and, as a result, according to an audit report by the CPA’s inspector general, ‘there was an increased risk of the loss or theft of the cash.’ Paul Bremer, the American pro-consul in Baghdad until June last year, kept a slush fund of nearly $600 million cash for which there is no paperwork: $200 million of this was kept in a room in one of Saddam’s former palaces, and the US soldier in charge used to keep the key to the room in his backpack, which he left on his desk when he popped out for lunch. Again, this is Iraqi money, not US funds.
via. Later in the same article:
On Thursday, 1 July 2004, two days after Bremer left Baghdad, Ehsan Karim, the new head of the Board of Supreme Audit, was killed by a bomb as he left the Finance Ministry. Two weeks later, Sabir Karim (no relation) was murdered in a drive-by shooting as he set off for work at the Ministry of Industry, where he was in charge of investigating corruption. A few weeks ago, another senior official investigating corruption was murdered. The IAMB keeps the names of its Iraqi delegates secret to keep them alive.
So who's murdering these guys? The insurgency have an interest. Corruption keeps the state in failure and enables them to protect themselves and acquire targets through bribery. But the most direct suspects have to be the people who actually skim off the money. And who's to say that there's no freelancing. On Monday it's Iraqi cops versus Iraqi insurgents. On Tuesday, boith get together to make a little extra. If you're trying to make a few quid in the bazaar of violence, you don't turn down business opportunities.
Posted by jamie k at 03:11 PM | Permalink
Original: http://bloodandtreasure.typepad.com/blood_treasure/2005/07/guys_get_paid_g.html
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'Looted art used to fund terrorist activity in Iraq'
Associated Press
Paris, June 24, 2005
Money from the sale of stolen artifacts in Iraq is being used to fund terrorist activity, the director of Iraq's National Museum has said.
Donny George, speaking to reporters at a UNESCO conference on Iraq's cultural heritage, said some of the looted objects were passing through the United States.
"Rich people are buying stolen material. ... Money is going to Iraq and they (terror groups) are buying weapons and ammunition to use against Iraqi police and American forces," he said on Thursday.
"People in the international community must stop buying these things..." He said. "This money is going to the terrorists."
George said police in the United States were doing an "excellent" job of curbing the flow of stolen artifacts there, but "a lot of material is just penetrating the country."
Priceless antiquities were looted from Iraq, where museums were pillaged of treasures dating back 5,000 years, amid the chaos of the 2003 US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
"There was a great deal of looting when coalition forces arrived," Iraqi Culture Minister Nouri Farhan al-Rawi said at the news conference. "Today, coalition forces are helping us a lot, and there are no more cases of looting or theft."
George said that of 15,000 objects stolen from the national museum, almost 4,000 had been returned to the country and more than 4,000 others were in neighbouring countries for safekeeping.
A database and Web page for the museum were expected to be ready next month, he said.
Original: http://www.hindustantimes.com/onlineCDA/PFVersion.jsp?article=http://10.81.141.122/news/181_1409698,00050003.htm
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Those Departures..
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Those Departures..
Looking up those Sharjah Airport departure boards yesterday, I thought it might be an idea to collate the Boutcos as a psuedo-timetable. So here goes.
SHARJAH (SHJ)
ARRIVALS
23/06/05
0900 TEB1102 Kabul ("Tenir Airlines")
1500 PHW051 Hyderabad (Phoenix Avn)
1545 TKY118 Baghdad ("Thai Sky" - a new one on me)
1600 AWZ202 Khartoum (Airwest/East West Cargo)
1800 RQ005 Kabul (Kam Air)
DEPARTURES
0030 AWZ201 Khartoum
0113 P1019 Dubai
0119 BIS6331 Riyan Mukalla (Irbis)
0200 GFG971 Baghdad (Georgian National)
0330 CGK4365 Baghdad (Click)
0400 CGK4367 Baghdad
0430 CGK717 Baghdad
0430 CGK913 Baghdad
0500 CGK4371 Baghdad
24/06/05
1000 CGK4366 Baghdad (Click Airways)
1030 CGK4368 Baghdad
1130 CGK4372 Baghdad
1230 TXC4163 Frankfurt (Transaviaexport)
1245 AWZ336 Khartoum (Airwest)
1330 CGK718 Baghdad
1400 CGK914 Baghdad
1600 PHW005 Dubai
1800 AWZ017 Frankfurt
2030 PHW786 Dubai
DEPARTURES
0030 AWZ201 Khartoum
0100 TEB1101 Kabul
0320 TXC4162 Kandahar
2330 TXC4163 Frankfurt
DUBAI (DXB)
24/06/05 ARRIVALS
1400 P31020 Baghdad (Phoenix Avn)
1400 BIS6376 Baghdad (Irbis)
1430 BGK1230 Baghdad (British Gulf International)
1530 BGK1232 Baghdad
1700 P3606 Baghdad (Phoenix)
1700 PHW604 Baghdad
1800 RQ005 Kabul (Kam Air)
1830 BIS6372 Baghdad
DEPARTURES
0600 BGK1229 Baghdad
0630 BIS6371 Baghdad
0630 BIS6375 Baghdad
0700 BGK1231 Baghdad
0800 TEB1101 Baghdad
0815 P31019 Baghdad
25/06/05
ARRIVAL
0200 CRD090 Kabul (Aero Corridor)
DEPARTURE
0600 CRD091 Kabul
Well, that was anal, wasn't it? And there are a LOT of flights to Iraq on there, including the repeatedly-banned Irbis Air Co. of Kazakhstan, Houston and Sharjah, as well as the equally repeatedly-banned Transavia going to another western-controlled airport in Kandahar (not to mention Frankfurt!).
A note: Georgian National and Thai Sky are cases I am less certain of. In fact, Thai Sky Ltd. seems to have been created in Bangkok this year, with three aging Lockheed Tristars and no immediately obvious reasons for suspicion (yet). Tenir, though, seems to share an ICAO code (and a route network) with Teebah Airlines, the company belonging to a prominent Iraqi tribal sheikh that supplied all Iraqi Airways' aircraft (which all happened to be registered in Sierra Leone for some reason). Aero Corridor, oddly enough, is registered in Mozambique but uses only Phoenix Aviation aircraft and has been reported as operating in Iraq.
And, just for more mystery-jet goodness, one of cocaine-runners Aerocom's Antonov 24s was in Baghdad on the 6th of May: Photo.
EDITED to replace formatting chewed by Blogger.
comments? | x
Frans Groenendijk @ 3:45PM | 2005-06-26| permalink
I noticed before that this posts on *mystery-jets* are part of a complete category. Maybe it is possible to add a link to where you started this research.
I can not understand the significance of the observations you report here.
Alex @ 11:40AM | 2005-06-27| permalink
I'll put up an All the Viktor Bout Stuff Is Here post later today.
Ruud @ 3:37PM | 2005-07-25| permalink
You are right on the ball with V.Bout.
I keep as dossier on my website on this guy.
I hope you don't mind me copying part of yr text to a page of mine:
www.ruudleeuw.com/vbout26.htm
Let me know? Cheers
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/06/those-departures.html
Those Departures..
Looking up those Sharjah Airport departure boards yesterday, I thought it might be an idea to collate the Boutcos as a psuedo-timetable. So here goes.
SHARJAH (SHJ)
ARRIVALS
23/06/05
0900 TEB1102 Kabul ("Tenir Airlines")
1500 PHW051 Hyderabad (Phoenix Avn)
1545 TKY118 Baghdad ("Thai Sky" - a new one on me)
1600 AWZ202 Khartoum (Airwest/East West Cargo)
1800 RQ005 Kabul (Kam Air)
DEPARTURES
0030 AWZ201 Khartoum
0113 P1019 Dubai
0119 BIS6331 Riyan Mukalla (Irbis)
0200 GFG971 Baghdad (Georgian National)
0330 CGK4365 Baghdad (Click)
0400 CGK4367 Baghdad
0430 CGK717 Baghdad
0430 CGK913 Baghdad
0500 CGK4371 Baghdad
24/06/05
1000 CGK4366 Baghdad (Click Airways)
1030 CGK4368 Baghdad
1130 CGK4372 Baghdad
1230 TXC4163 Frankfurt (Transaviaexport)
1245 AWZ336 Khartoum (Airwest)
1330 CGK718 Baghdad
1400 CGK914 Baghdad
1600 PHW005 Dubai
1800 AWZ017 Frankfurt
2030 PHW786 Dubai
DEPARTURES
0030 AWZ201 Khartoum
0100 TEB1101 Kabul
0320 TXC4162 Kandahar
2330 TXC4163 Frankfurt
DUBAI (DXB)
24/06/05 ARRIVALS
1400 P31020 Baghdad (Phoenix Avn)
1400 BIS6376 Baghdad (Irbis)
1430 BGK1230 Baghdad (British Gulf International)
1530 BGK1232 Baghdad
1700 P3606 Baghdad (Phoenix)
1700 PHW604 Baghdad
1800 RQ005 Kabul (Kam Air)
1830 BIS6372 Baghdad
DEPARTURES
0600 BGK1229 Baghdad
0630 BIS6371 Baghdad
0630 BIS6375 Baghdad
0700 BGK1231 Baghdad
0800 TEB1101 Baghdad
0815 P31019 Baghdad
25/06/05
ARRIVAL
0200 CRD090 Kabul (Aero Corridor)
DEPARTURE
0600 CRD091 Kabul
Well, that was anal, wasn't it? And there are a LOT of flights to Iraq on there, including the repeatedly-banned Irbis Air Co. of Kazakhstan, Houston and Sharjah, as well as the equally repeatedly-banned Transavia going to another western-controlled airport in Kandahar (not to mention Frankfurt!).
A note: Georgian National and Thai Sky are cases I am less certain of. In fact, Thai Sky Ltd. seems to have been created in Bangkok this year, with three aging Lockheed Tristars and no immediately obvious reasons for suspicion (yet). Tenir, though, seems to share an ICAO code (and a route network) with Teebah Airlines, the company belonging to a prominent Iraqi tribal sheikh that supplied all Iraqi Airways' aircraft (which all happened to be registered in Sierra Leone for some reason). Aero Corridor, oddly enough, is registered in Mozambique but uses only Phoenix Aviation aircraft and has been reported as operating in Iraq.
And, just for more mystery-jet goodness, one of cocaine-runners Aerocom's Antonov 24s was in Baghdad on the 6th of May: Photo.
EDITED to replace formatting chewed by Blogger.
comments? | x
Frans Groenendijk @ 3:45PM | 2005-06-26| permalink
I noticed before that this posts on *mystery-jets* are part of a complete category. Maybe it is possible to add a link to where you started this research.
I can not understand the significance of the observations you report here.
Alex @ 11:40AM | 2005-06-27| permalink
I'll put up an All the Viktor Bout Stuff Is Here post later today.
Ruud @ 3:37PM | 2005-07-25| permalink
You are right on the ball with V.Bout.
I keep as dossier on my website on this guy.
I hope you don't mind me copying part of yr text to a page of mine:
www.ruudleeuw.com/vbout26.htm
Let me know? Cheers
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/06/those-departures.html
Mystery Jet Update
Friday, June 17, 2005
Mystery Jet Update
It's been brought to my attention that the ever-informative Sharjah Airport online departures board shows that an Irbis Air Co. flight departed for nowhere else than Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan this morning. (Thanks, Hannah!) Further digging down the lists shows that, in fact, Irbis is running a regular service to the base, which has acquired an infamous reputation after two prisoners died in captivity there. There's a flight into SHJ at 0640 (BIS6345) and a flight to Bagram at 0900 daily, flight no. BIS6355. Furthermore, British Gulf International Airlines are back on the Baghdad and Kabul runs. Ex-Dubai, flights to Iraq are continuing under Irbis's ICAO code (BIS) although they are listed as Royal Brunei Airways. Royal Brunei's code is BI.
Nobody in their right minds thinks Irbis is anything other than one of the core Viktor Bout companies, including the United Nations, the British government, and the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. OFAC have put Irbis on their list of companies (See Viktory) whose assets are to be seized. I doubt, somehow, that the Irbis plane was impounded in Bagram. What the fucking fuck is wrong with these fucking people?
Elsewhere, you might like to scoot over to Carlos's, who has a wealth of information about the missing 727 and its ties to Imad Saba, and his ties to etc etc etc. Suffice it to say that I seem to recall seeing a DOD fuel contract for one of his firms mentioned in Carlos's story (see below), Air Van. I haven't substantiated it yet, but I'll check, and I'm fairly sure I saw one.
comments? | x
CW @ 3:33AM | 2005-06-21| permalink
hahaha. I think you can say that not only does the right hand not know what the left hand is doing, the left hand doesn't even know what it is doing either. And people wonder why they never found the missing jet...
Hannah K. O'Luthon @ 4:17PM | 2005-06-21| permalink
The Irbis flights to Bagram Air Base seem to have disappeared from the
Sharjah Departures site, although I wouldn't bet that they or "repaints"
of them have been completely discontinued. It's difficult not to conjecture
opiate smuggling, but, of course for now at least, that's pure conjecture.
In any case, for the time being it would seem that Alex can paste another
jet decal onto his monitor.
Meanwhile, there's something decidedly "funny" happening at Ras Al Khaimah
airport Sharjar's less infamous neighbor in the U.A.E. Astair Airline, ICAO code SUW, serves several Russian cities as well as Baku, Azerbaigian and Bishkek, Kyrgystan. It's fleet is reported as of Jan. 2005 to consist of 2 Antonov An24's and 1 Yakolev 42-D, but according to Ras Al Khaimah airport's site it flies an IL 18 twice a week from there to MKP. What's MKP? My (undoubtedly inept) Googling shows that to be the IATA airport code for the airport in Makemo, French Polynesia.
French Polynesia is over 15,000 km from the UAE, whilst a fully loaded and fueled IL18 has a range of at most 6500 km, so there is clearly something that doesn't jibe here, over and above the fact that a tiny Russian airline is supposedly running regular flights between the UAE and that major market which is French Polynesia. It may be of further interest that both Astair Airline and Expo Aviation (Pvt.) Limited of Sri Lanka share the IATA Code 8D with a Kodiak Island - Anchorage Alaska bush-pilot airline known, interestingly enough, as Servant Air. An Ilyushin 18D leased by Expo Aviation from well known Bout firm Phoenix Air crashed in Colombo, Sri Lanka in on Feb. 4, 2004. Where in God's name Ras Al Khaimah Flight SUW9200 is really headed remains to be clarified. Of course, all might be much less sinister than it appears, if there is some alternative explanation for the MKP airport code.
Ruud Leeuw @ 6:35PM | 2005-08-11| permalink
Posted soething on the forum www.aviatsiya.ru/forums/
and got this:
- MKP sounds like Maikop, capital city of Adygeya (Adygei) Republic (SW Russia) which has no official IATA code
- The Il-18 should be RA-75834
- I am not aware of a second An-24 with Astair (but can be wrong)
- Astair code *was* 8D and is now ZA
And also:
SUW is now the code for Interavia who took over Astair
http://www.aviatsiya.ru/forums/viewtopic.php?t=366
MKP is actually МКП which is Maikop (Майкоп) in Adygeya. МКП is the Russian code for the city, as it does not have an IATA code -- ICAO code is УРКМ (URKM)
It appears they still have the Il-18 and it is a cargo flight.
Steve Sadlov @ 6:56PM | 2006-04-21| permalink
Bout is more than likely still in a secret structure emanating from the Kremlin and part of SVR black ops. Which makes it all the more worrying that some idiots in both the UK and US naively believe him to be nothing more than a "post Soviet rogue" and therefore someone who can be dealt with. Oh sure, anyone can deal with the Devil, but the wisdom of that is suspect.
Just a thought. If the Russians wanted to outsource the production of things proscribed by treaties, and wanted to have "off the books" means of transport of such items on short notice, Bout would be the perfect man for that job from the Kremlin's perspective. Oh, but what do I know? .... :)
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/06/mystery-jet-update.html
______________________________________________________________________________________
Missing 727: June 2005 Update
« H » email link
There has been a lot of new information related to the missing 727 lately - or related according to my theories, anyway. The details are so intricate and confusing that they are literally melting my tiny brain, but the bottom line is that the connection between N844AA and its twin sisters 3X-GDO and 3X-GDM has gotten stronger.
There have been a few more reports that the aircraft that crashed at Cotonou in December 2003 (UTA Flight 141) - which I still believe is the rosetta stone of the whole mystery - had "irregularities" associated with its registration and the serial numbers found on the fuselage. I believe, and the French accident investigation reports, that aircraft was 3X-GDO, serial number 21370, but some reports continue to associate serial number 21089 - which supposedly correlates to 3X-GDM - with the crashed aircraft. A lot of this new information is coming out of the Lebanese investigation into the crash.
That investigation led to the eventual arrest of Darwish Khazem, son of UTA Airlines President Ahmad Khazem, in Guinea with the intention of returning him to Lebanon for questioning about the crash. It is not clear to me that he ever made it back to Lebanon, where he first flew after the crash, only to make a hasty and surreptitious departure when he found out the Lebanese authorities were looking for him. He was onboard, and some reports say he was the UTA official who ordered the aircraft to take off heavily overloaded, leading to the crash.
The Khazem family who owned and operated UTA had leased 3X-GDO and 3X-GDM (discussed at length in my last post on the subject) from a mysterious, but apparently Victor-Bout-associated company called "Financial Advisory Group" of Miami and Sharjah, UAE. Financial Advisory Group has been associated (by common aircraft, for the most part) with BoutCos KAMAIR, East/West Airways, and Air Van, as well as with the still-mysterious Alpha-Omega Airways of Swaziland. But more on that in a moment.
The managing director of Financial Advisory Group has been reported in various sources (including my friend and fellow mystery-jet hunter Alex) as a fellow named Imad Saba. Imad Saba is described as a "Palestinian-American" and can be found on the web here. He is a VERY interesting fellow.
He reportedly lives in Miami (where the missing 727 N844AA originated before it went to Angola), where he is associated with something called "J. Taylor Investments", but works at the offices of the Victor Bout complex in Sharjah. I even found an Imad Saba who is a member of the "Don Shula 48 Ounce Club" - for eating a giant steak at a restaurant in Miami Lakes, very near Opa Locka - where the missing 727 originated.
So, giant steaks at Don Shula's aside - check out this thread from PPRUNE about our friend Mr. Saba. (Update: that thread was "edited" at PPRUNE since I published this post. See this one also. Or this one at Luchtzak Aviation.) The first thread says "Financial Advisory Group", Air Van, East/West, and IRS Airlines are all run by Mr. Saba out of the same office in Sharjah.
IRS Airlines? Where have we heard that before? IRS Airlines was the company that had been reported as having originally leased N844AA from Maury Joseph at Opa Locka.
Let's repeat for emphasis: The guy who originally made the deal for the missing N844AA with Maury Joseph's Aerospace Sales and Leasing in Miami is the same guy who leased 3X-GDO and 3X-GDM to UTA in Guinea.
Could it get any more interesting? Well lets see...
Saba is currently running Air Van, which is registered in Armenia, of all places. Who else registers aircraft in Armenia? Our buddy Victor Bout of course. And what kind of aircraft is he registering in Armenia for Air Van? 747s and 727s, reportedly. And where did Air Van get a 747? From Libyan Arab Airlines, of course, who have never operated a 747, and for some reason registered the one they have in Swaziland. Swaziland? You mean the same Swaziland where Saba's Financial Advisory Group's 3X-GDM was registered after it left UTA (as 3D-AAK), but was stored in Libya wearing a Libyan Arab Airlines paint? The same Swaziland where "Alpha Omega Airways" who provided the aircrew and documentation for the crashed 3X-GDO is registered? Yup, that Swaziland.
Confused yet? My itty bitty brain is jello - but what we have here is a clear connection between the missing 727, its twin sisters that were flown for UTA, the Victor Bout network, and Libya, all via the enterprising Mr. Saba.
Early on I speculated about IRS Airlines possible role in the disappearance of N844AA, before zeroing in on "Financial Advisory Group" and UTA. Imagine my delight to learn they are one and the same.
So..............
The latest version of my thesis about what happened to N844AA is that Imad Saba leased it (or perhaps only planned to lease it) from Maury Joseph, but his plan to operate it fell through and Keith Irwin came in with an alternative plan to fly in in Angola. But because of Irwin's bad decision to land it at Luanda, it was impounded and basically held for ransom by the Angolan government. After months of accruing fines and fees in Angola, Maury Joseph hired Ben Padilla to get it airworthy, with the intent of flying it out. But the Angolans wanted a lot of money to let the plane out of hock, so Joseph made a deal with Imad Saba - perhaps selling the plane to him outright at a cut-rate price.
But Saba couldn't get it out of Angola legally either, without paying the fines, so he sent one or two Libyan pilots down to Luanda to meet Ben Padilla, and take off in the plane while Padilla was supposedly taking it out for a maintenance turn. This may or may not have been with the cooperation of Ben Padilla.
Once out of Angola, the plane was flown to somewhere in the Congo or South Africa (or maybe Swaziland???), where it was disguised as one of Saba's other 727s - either one of the two that were eventually operated for UTA (my first guess), or one of the other IRS Airlines birds (5N-RIR or 5N-AKR). Heck it could have done both by now.
It was then flown as a "substitute" for one of the others, sharing the registration of a different aircraft. In this role it may have been involved in other types of illicit activity - smuggling, or possibly even terrorism.
But it's still out there, and Imad Saba - reportedly an American citizen - knows where it is. And more importantly, he knows what happened to Ben Padilla.
posted Thursday, 16 June 2005
Hannah K. O'Luthon made this comment,
Thanks for excellent reporting. There are certainly a lot of "striking coincidences".
comment added :: 21st June 2005, 04:08 GMT-05
MARCO made this comment,
Dear Ciolleague: I want to know if it is posible to make some thing for get back my money from Imad Saba. I was working for him,I dont wana know nothing about him,but I wan to get my money.That is my slaries,I couldnt get yet until now. If you want to contac me,please be free to sent me letter to do something. Regards. Marco.
comment added :: 8th July 2005, 22:29 GMT-05
aviator_2006 made this comment,
I can tell you that you are making alot of assumptions in your creative and elaborate piece of work. Some things mentioned are facts but alot of the associations you have made are not. The lebanese confirmed the plane that crashed in Cotonou is not the missing 727 Flown by Ben Padilla. If an american citizen was involved with this Victor Bout who you say sell guns to Osama im sure he would be jailed or worse by the US government. And there no longer are any sanctions on Libya so flying there if they did is not as shady an action as you make it seem.
comment added :: 19th August 2005, 13:54 GMT-05
AVIATOR_2006 made this comment,
here is a blog bysome one who did a whole lot of research that helps prove those 727's are different aircraft. http://www.otwa.com/community/ showthread.php?t=14340
comment added :: 22nd August 2005, 03:11 GMT-05
Carlos W made this comment,
I love it when I get new comments on my old 727 posts!
Aviator_2006: I appreciate your interest but I'm not sure I got my point across very well. This stuff is so complicated that it is very hard to tell the story simply and clearly.
I never thought that the aircraft that crashed at Cotonou was N844AA. It was definitely 3X-GDO - s/n 21370 (N844AA is s/n 20985). But I do think the aircraft are connected. I think that N844AA was used in a "shell game" with the two identical UTA aircraft - they are all ex-AA 727-223/adv's, and the only differences between them are small variations in the paint. (Or N844AA may have only been used for parts for the other two.)
But the connections between the two UTA aircraft and the missing plane are too many to ignore and I believe UTA is the key to finding 844AA. And we would never have gotten all the info about UTA except for the crash of -GDO at Cotonou.
You should read all the 727 posts (links to the right) to get a more complete idea how the investigation has evolved.
Also the US person associated with Victor Bout is Rich Chichakli - he was listed along with Victor as a "Specially Designated National" by the Treasury Department for his association with terrorism and subsequently all his assets in the US were seized. He has a web site to complain about it: www.chichakli.com. Read all about it for yourself.
comment added :: 22nd August 2005, 21:37 GMT-05
Carlos W made this comment,
Also I appreciate the link. I read that post and don't disagree with a word of it - in fact it looks like we used some of the same sources. But there are a lot more details that have come to light since that post (in Mar 04) which I've detailed in my own posts since then.
The involvement of Imad Saba is one of the biggest ones.
Mystery Jet Update
It's been brought to my attention that the ever-informative Sharjah Airport online departures board shows that an Irbis Air Co. flight departed for nowhere else than Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan this morning. (Thanks, Hannah!) Further digging down the lists shows that, in fact, Irbis is running a regular service to the base, which has acquired an infamous reputation after two prisoners died in captivity there. There's a flight into SHJ at 0640 (BIS6345) and a flight to Bagram at 0900 daily, flight no. BIS6355. Furthermore, British Gulf International Airlines are back on the Baghdad and Kabul runs. Ex-Dubai, flights to Iraq are continuing under Irbis's ICAO code (BIS) although they are listed as Royal Brunei Airways. Royal Brunei's code is BI.
Nobody in their right minds thinks Irbis is anything other than one of the core Viktor Bout companies, including the United Nations, the British government, and the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control. OFAC have put Irbis on their list of companies (See Viktory) whose assets are to be seized. I doubt, somehow, that the Irbis plane was impounded in Bagram. What the fucking fuck is wrong with these fucking people?
Elsewhere, you might like to scoot over to Carlos's, who has a wealth of information about the missing 727 and its ties to Imad Saba, and his ties to etc etc etc. Suffice it to say that I seem to recall seeing a DOD fuel contract for one of his firms mentioned in Carlos's story (see below), Air Van. I haven't substantiated it yet, but I'll check, and I'm fairly sure I saw one.
comments? | x
CW @ 3:33AM | 2005-06-21| permalink
hahaha. I think you can say that not only does the right hand not know what the left hand is doing, the left hand doesn't even know what it is doing either. And people wonder why they never found the missing jet...
Hannah K. O'Luthon @ 4:17PM | 2005-06-21| permalink
The Irbis flights to Bagram Air Base seem to have disappeared from the
Sharjah Departures site, although I wouldn't bet that they or "repaints"
of them have been completely discontinued. It's difficult not to conjecture
opiate smuggling, but, of course for now at least, that's pure conjecture.
In any case, for the time being it would seem that Alex can paste another
jet decal onto his monitor.
Meanwhile, there's something decidedly "funny" happening at Ras Al Khaimah
airport Sharjar's less infamous neighbor in the U.A.E. Astair Airline, ICAO code SUW, serves several Russian cities as well as Baku, Azerbaigian and Bishkek, Kyrgystan. It's fleet is reported as of Jan. 2005 to consist of 2 Antonov An24's and 1 Yakolev 42-D, but according to Ras Al Khaimah airport's site it flies an IL 18 twice a week from there to MKP. What's MKP? My (undoubtedly inept) Googling shows that to be the IATA airport code for the airport in Makemo, French Polynesia.
French Polynesia is over 15,000 km from the UAE, whilst a fully loaded and fueled IL18 has a range of at most 6500 km, so there is clearly something that doesn't jibe here, over and above the fact that a tiny Russian airline is supposedly running regular flights between the UAE and that major market which is French Polynesia. It may be of further interest that both Astair Airline and Expo Aviation (Pvt.) Limited of Sri Lanka share the IATA Code 8D with a Kodiak Island - Anchorage Alaska bush-pilot airline known, interestingly enough, as Servant Air. An Ilyushin 18D leased by Expo Aviation from well known Bout firm Phoenix Air crashed in Colombo, Sri Lanka in on Feb. 4, 2004. Where in God's name Ras Al Khaimah Flight SUW9200 is really headed remains to be clarified. Of course, all might be much less sinister than it appears, if there is some alternative explanation for the MKP airport code.
Ruud Leeuw @ 6:35PM | 2005-08-11| permalink
Posted soething on the forum www.aviatsiya.ru/forums/
and got this:
- MKP sounds like Maikop, capital city of Adygeya (Adygei) Republic (SW Russia) which has no official IATA code
- The Il-18 should be RA-75834
- I am not aware of a second An-24 with Astair (but can be wrong)
- Astair code *was* 8D and is now ZA
And also:
SUW is now the code for Interavia who took over Astair
http://www.aviatsiya.ru/forums/viewtopic.php?t=366
MKP is actually МКП which is Maikop (Майкоп) in Adygeya. МКП is the Russian code for the city, as it does not have an IATA code -- ICAO code is УРКМ (URKM)
It appears they still have the Il-18 and it is a cargo flight.
Steve Sadlov @ 6:56PM | 2006-04-21| permalink
Bout is more than likely still in a secret structure emanating from the Kremlin and part of SVR black ops. Which makes it all the more worrying that some idiots in both the UK and US naively believe him to be nothing more than a "post Soviet rogue" and therefore someone who can be dealt with. Oh sure, anyone can deal with the Devil, but the wisdom of that is suspect.
Just a thought. If the Russians wanted to outsource the production of things proscribed by treaties, and wanted to have "off the books" means of transport of such items on short notice, Bout would be the perfect man for that job from the Kremlin's perspective. Oh, but what do I know? .... :)
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/06/mystery-jet-update.html
______________________________________________________________________________________
Missing 727: June 2005 Update
« H » email link
There has been a lot of new information related to the missing 727 lately - or related according to my theories, anyway. The details are so intricate and confusing that they are literally melting my tiny brain, but the bottom line is that the connection between N844AA and its twin sisters 3X-GDO and 3X-GDM has gotten stronger.
There have been a few more reports that the aircraft that crashed at Cotonou in December 2003 (UTA Flight 141) - which I still believe is the rosetta stone of the whole mystery - had "irregularities" associated with its registration and the serial numbers found on the fuselage. I believe, and the French accident investigation reports, that aircraft was 3X-GDO, serial number 21370, but some reports continue to associate serial number 21089 - which supposedly correlates to 3X-GDM - with the crashed aircraft. A lot of this new information is coming out of the Lebanese investigation into the crash.
That investigation led to the eventual arrest of Darwish Khazem, son of UTA Airlines President Ahmad Khazem, in Guinea with the intention of returning him to Lebanon for questioning about the crash. It is not clear to me that he ever made it back to Lebanon, where he first flew after the crash, only to make a hasty and surreptitious departure when he found out the Lebanese authorities were looking for him. He was onboard, and some reports say he was the UTA official who ordered the aircraft to take off heavily overloaded, leading to the crash.
The Khazem family who owned and operated UTA had leased 3X-GDO and 3X-GDM (discussed at length in my last post on the subject) from a mysterious, but apparently Victor-Bout-associated company called "Financial Advisory Group" of Miami and Sharjah, UAE. Financial Advisory Group has been associated (by common aircraft, for the most part) with BoutCos KAMAIR, East/West Airways, and Air Van, as well as with the still-mysterious Alpha-Omega Airways of Swaziland. But more on that in a moment.
The managing director of Financial Advisory Group has been reported in various sources (including my friend and fellow mystery-jet hunter Alex) as a fellow named Imad Saba. Imad Saba is described as a "Palestinian-American" and can be found on the web here. He is a VERY interesting fellow.
He reportedly lives in Miami (where the missing 727 N844AA originated before it went to Angola), where he is associated with something called "J. Taylor Investments", but works at the offices of the Victor Bout complex in Sharjah. I even found an Imad Saba who is a member of the "Don Shula 48 Ounce Club" - for eating a giant steak at a restaurant in Miami Lakes, very near Opa Locka - where the missing 727 originated.
So, giant steaks at Don Shula's aside - check out this thread from PPRUNE about our friend Mr. Saba. (Update: that thread was "edited" at PPRUNE since I published this post. See this one also. Or this one at Luchtzak Aviation.) The first thread says "Financial Advisory Group", Air Van, East/West, and IRS Airlines are all run by Mr. Saba out of the same office in Sharjah.
IRS Airlines? Where have we heard that before? IRS Airlines was the company that had been reported as having originally leased N844AA from Maury Joseph at Opa Locka.
Let's repeat for emphasis: The guy who originally made the deal for the missing N844AA with Maury Joseph's Aerospace Sales and Leasing in Miami is the same guy who leased 3X-GDO and 3X-GDM to UTA in Guinea.
Could it get any more interesting? Well lets see...
Saba is currently running Air Van, which is registered in Armenia, of all places. Who else registers aircraft in Armenia? Our buddy Victor Bout of course. And what kind of aircraft is he registering in Armenia for Air Van? 747s and 727s, reportedly. And where did Air Van get a 747? From Libyan Arab Airlines, of course, who have never operated a 747, and for some reason registered the one they have in Swaziland. Swaziland? You mean the same Swaziland where Saba's Financial Advisory Group's 3X-GDM was registered after it left UTA (as 3D-AAK), but was stored in Libya wearing a Libyan Arab Airlines paint? The same Swaziland where "Alpha Omega Airways" who provided the aircrew and documentation for the crashed 3X-GDO is registered? Yup, that Swaziland.
Confused yet? My itty bitty brain is jello - but what we have here is a clear connection between the missing 727, its twin sisters that were flown for UTA, the Victor Bout network, and Libya, all via the enterprising Mr. Saba.
Early on I speculated about IRS Airlines possible role in the disappearance of N844AA, before zeroing in on "Financial Advisory Group" and UTA. Imagine my delight to learn they are one and the same.
So..............
The latest version of my thesis about what happened to N844AA is that Imad Saba leased it (or perhaps only planned to lease it) from Maury Joseph, but his plan to operate it fell through and Keith Irwin came in with an alternative plan to fly in in Angola. But because of Irwin's bad decision to land it at Luanda, it was impounded and basically held for ransom by the Angolan government. After months of accruing fines and fees in Angola, Maury Joseph hired Ben Padilla to get it airworthy, with the intent of flying it out. But the Angolans wanted a lot of money to let the plane out of hock, so Joseph made a deal with Imad Saba - perhaps selling the plane to him outright at a cut-rate price.
But Saba couldn't get it out of Angola legally either, without paying the fines, so he sent one or two Libyan pilots down to Luanda to meet Ben Padilla, and take off in the plane while Padilla was supposedly taking it out for a maintenance turn. This may or may not have been with the cooperation of Ben Padilla.
Once out of Angola, the plane was flown to somewhere in the Congo or South Africa (or maybe Swaziland???), where it was disguised as one of Saba's other 727s - either one of the two that were eventually operated for UTA (my first guess), or one of the other IRS Airlines birds (5N-RIR or 5N-AKR). Heck it could have done both by now.
It was then flown as a "substitute" for one of the others, sharing the registration of a different aircraft. In this role it may have been involved in other types of illicit activity - smuggling, or possibly even terrorism.
But it's still out there, and Imad Saba - reportedly an American citizen - knows where it is. And more importantly, he knows what happened to Ben Padilla.
posted Thursday, 16 June 2005
Hannah K. O'Luthon made this comment,
Thanks for excellent reporting. There are certainly a lot of "striking coincidences".
comment added :: 21st June 2005, 04:08 GMT-05
MARCO made this comment,
Dear Ciolleague: I want to know if it is posible to make some thing for get back my money from Imad Saba. I was working for him,I dont wana know nothing about him,but I wan to get my money.That is my slaries,I couldnt get yet until now. If you want to contac me,please be free to sent me letter to do something. Regards. Marco.
comment added :: 8th July 2005, 22:29 GMT-05
aviator_2006 made this comment,
I can tell you that you are making alot of assumptions in your creative and elaborate piece of work. Some things mentioned are facts but alot of the associations you have made are not. The lebanese confirmed the plane that crashed in Cotonou is not the missing 727 Flown by Ben Padilla. If an american citizen was involved with this Victor Bout who you say sell guns to Osama im sure he would be jailed or worse by the US government. And there no longer are any sanctions on Libya so flying there if they did is not as shady an action as you make it seem.
comment added :: 19th August 2005, 13:54 GMT-05
AVIATOR_2006 made this comment,
here is a blog bysome one who did a whole lot of research that helps prove those 727's are different aircraft. http://www.otwa.com/community/ showthread.php?t=14340
comment added :: 22nd August 2005, 03:11 GMT-05
Carlos W made this comment,
I love it when I get new comments on my old 727 posts!
Aviator_2006: I appreciate your interest but I'm not sure I got my point across very well. This stuff is so complicated that it is very hard to tell the story simply and clearly.
I never thought that the aircraft that crashed at Cotonou was N844AA. It was definitely 3X-GDO - s/n 21370 (N844AA is s/n 20985). But I do think the aircraft are connected. I think that N844AA was used in a "shell game" with the two identical UTA aircraft - they are all ex-AA 727-223/adv's, and the only differences between them are small variations in the paint. (Or N844AA may have only been used for parts for the other two.)
But the connections between the two UTA aircraft and the missing plane are too many to ignore and I believe UTA is the key to finding 844AA. And we would never have gotten all the info about UTA except for the crash of -GDO at Cotonou.
You should read all the 727 posts (links to the right) to get a more complete idea how the investigation has evolved.
Also the US person associated with Victor Bout is Rich Chichakli - he was listed along with Victor as a "Specially Designated National" by the Treasury Department for his association with terrorism and subsequently all his assets in the US were seized. He has a web site to complain about it: www.chichakli.com. Read all about it for yourself.
comment added :: 22nd August 2005, 21:37 GMT-05
Carlos W made this comment,
Also I appreciate the link. I read that post and don't disagree with a word of it - in fact it looks like we used some of the same sources. But there are a lot more details that have come to light since that post (in Mar 04) which I've detailed in my own posts since then.
The involvement of Imad Saba is one of the biggest ones.
Mystery Prop Update: Transafrik
Saturday, June 04, 2005
Mystery Prop Update: Transafrik
In our last mystery-aircraft post, we were looking into the affairs of a firm called Transafrik, which operates 11 of CIA frontco Southern Air Transport's Hercules aircraft in Angola and holds UN contracts in various places. TA was based in Sao Tome for years, and I recently discovered that a Swiss merchant named Hellinger started it, but he sold up in 1993 or 1994. The biggest shareholder now is some strangelet entity called International Aircraft Management and Consulting. Well, the only Google result for that is on the TA website, but International Aircraft Management Consulting Ltd. apparently exists or existed in the Anglo-Caribbean taxdodger elysium known as the Turks and Caicos Islands, at 107 Duke Street, presumably in the capital Cockburn Town. It seems to have existed in 1994 (i.e. when Hellinger sold Transafrik).
At the time, Viktor Bout had a lucrative operation flying fuel to locations in Angola, both for the government and also for UNITA. Transafrik is described in a French TV documentary (thanks Cargodog!) as doing the same, on contract with Angolan state oil (Sonangol). Graft fans will remember Sonangol as being at the heart of the Elf-Aquitaine scandal, Angolan department, in which Elf was paying huge bribes to Angolan politicians in order to get their signatures on a contract with Sonangol to develop the country's oilfields. Further to that, the French government (the owner of Elf) was supplying arms from the ZTS Osos arsenal in Slovakia to the Angolan government via a state company, Sofremi, for which Charles Pasqua was responsible, and the arms dealers Arkadi Gaydamak and Pierre Falcone. Interestingly, the documentarists describe Transafrik as operating Boeing 707s - but no such aircraft has ever been registered to them.
However, informed sources in Angola say Transafrik served the MPLA side, and hence the government. The 707 may be a mistake, of course. 727s are present in their fleet, and the documentarist might have mistaken one of their DC8s for a 707. Possibly, the Transafrik they reported on was Trans African?
But the first time I ever heard of Viktor was in connection with Boeing 707 tankers in Angola. And can anyone tell me what on earth S9-BOP, Lockheed L-100 serial no. 4477, was doing getting itself destroyed in Luzamba, Angola whilst apparently wearing a Kazakh registration, UN-485, two months after arriving at Transafrik? Apart from delivering diesel fuel, that is. It wouldn't have surprised the plane any, though, as whilst it was with SAT it got photographed in Germany wearing "Alaska International" colours.
LINK and alternate comments posted by Alex : 11:46 AM
(9) comments
Comments:
S9-BOP was in fact ZS-RSD (Safir), the UN-485 was a temp registration used by TRANSAFRIK. Safair is registered in South Africa and was acquired by Imperial Holdings back in 1999..so what well..interestingly enough. CIA (yes the Langley one) aircraft Tail N4557C (L100-30 serial 5027) used to be ZS-JAG which is Safair..interesting how these guys always seem to have crossing paths.
# posted by Anonymous : 7:14 AM
comments? | x
cargodog @ 3:41PM | 2005-06-04| permalink
http://www.airliners.net/search/photo.search?regsearch=S9-CAX&distinct_entry=true
Things that make you go mmmmhhh!
CW @ 11:04PM | 2005-06-05| permalink
Alex it looks like you have a good link between the friends-of-Victor and Transafrik. But I believe there is a logical explanation for the "Alaska International" thing - Southern Air leased out the L-100s for several years before selling them outright.
Also this whole tangent is extremely relevant to the fate of our missing 727, N844AA, which was supposed to be in the same business - hauling diesel in Angola - only for the UNITA side.
CW @ 11:10PM | 2005-06-05| permalink
Also I think Safair leased S9-CAX from Transafrik - hence the new plain-white paintjob
While I think we're doing a pretty good job of looking into the still-extant L-100 fleet out there, but I believe most of these aircraft are only slightly shady, and not flying for either Victor or the CIA most of the time.
Alex @ 3:58PM | 2005-06-06| permalink
Slim Shady, I suppose you could say..
BTW, we've just upgraded the comments system, which is why some recent threads are missing. They should be back soon.
Chris Stiles @ 8:41PM | 2005-06-08| permalink
From the pprune boards in relation to a recent Antonov thread:
"Lots is made by many people about different aircraft seen at different times with the same Congolese registration.
The Congo has a large aviation fleet, but is one of the unfortunate countries with only 2 registration letters available, rather than the 3 most of us are used to. All Conglese civil aircraft are registered in the series 9Q-Cxx.
This means that Kinshasa has to "recycle" registrations much faster than most other countries, and coupled with the high attrition rate of Congolese aircraft, the same registration letters can be reallocted twice in a year."
Is this correct ? If it is I guess it works both ways - good way to deliberately create confusion.
Ruud @ 12:03AM | 2005-08-11| permalink
The UN-xxx serial you refer to is an added number to the aircraft for aircraft operating under UN-contract; in that case there should always be another tailnumber for the country of registration somewhere on the aircraft.
Alex @ 1:15PM | 2005-08-11| permalink
Yes, but it's also the Kazakh registry prefix. I suspect a lot of people have had a free pass because any aircraft with UN- on it is assumed to be a UN flight.
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/06/mystery-prop-update-transafrik.html
Mystery Prop Update: Transafrik
In our last mystery-aircraft post, we were looking into the affairs of a firm called Transafrik, which operates 11 of CIA frontco Southern Air Transport's Hercules aircraft in Angola and holds UN contracts in various places. TA was based in Sao Tome for years, and I recently discovered that a Swiss merchant named Hellinger started it, but he sold up in 1993 or 1994. The biggest shareholder now is some strangelet entity called International Aircraft Management and Consulting. Well, the only Google result for that is on the TA website, but International Aircraft Management Consulting Ltd. apparently exists or existed in the Anglo-Caribbean taxdodger elysium known as the Turks and Caicos Islands, at 107 Duke Street, presumably in the capital Cockburn Town. It seems to have existed in 1994 (i.e. when Hellinger sold Transafrik).
At the time, Viktor Bout had a lucrative operation flying fuel to locations in Angola, both for the government and also for UNITA. Transafrik is described in a French TV documentary (thanks Cargodog!) as doing the same, on contract with Angolan state oil (Sonangol). Graft fans will remember Sonangol as being at the heart of the Elf-Aquitaine scandal, Angolan department, in which Elf was paying huge bribes to Angolan politicians in order to get their signatures on a contract with Sonangol to develop the country's oilfields. Further to that, the French government (the owner of Elf) was supplying arms from the ZTS Osos arsenal in Slovakia to the Angolan government via a state company, Sofremi, for which Charles Pasqua was responsible, and the arms dealers Arkadi Gaydamak and Pierre Falcone. Interestingly, the documentarists describe Transafrik as operating Boeing 707s - but no such aircraft has ever been registered to them.
However, informed sources in Angola say Transafrik served the MPLA side, and hence the government. The 707 may be a mistake, of course. 727s are present in their fleet, and the documentarist might have mistaken one of their DC8s for a 707. Possibly, the Transafrik they reported on was Trans African?
But the first time I ever heard of Viktor was in connection with Boeing 707 tankers in Angola. And can anyone tell me what on earth S9-BOP, Lockheed L-100 serial no. 4477, was doing getting itself destroyed in Luzamba, Angola whilst apparently wearing a Kazakh registration, UN-485, two months after arriving at Transafrik? Apart from delivering diesel fuel, that is. It wouldn't have surprised the plane any, though, as whilst it was with SAT it got photographed in Germany wearing "Alaska International" colours.
LINK and alternate comments posted by Alex : 11:46 AM
(9) comments
Comments:
S9-BOP was in fact ZS-RSD (Safir), the UN-485 was a temp registration used by TRANSAFRIK. Safair is registered in South Africa and was acquired by Imperial Holdings back in 1999..so what well..interestingly enough. CIA (yes the Langley one) aircraft Tail N4557C (L100-30 serial 5027) used to be ZS-JAG which is Safair..interesting how these guys always seem to have crossing paths.
# posted by Anonymous : 7:14 AM
comments? | x
cargodog @ 3:41PM | 2005-06-04| permalink
http://www.airliners.net/search/photo.search?regsearch=S9-CAX&distinct_entry=true
Things that make you go mmmmhhh!
CW @ 11:04PM | 2005-06-05| permalink
Alex it looks like you have a good link between the friends-of-Victor and Transafrik. But I believe there is a logical explanation for the "Alaska International" thing - Southern Air leased out the L-100s for several years before selling them outright.
Also this whole tangent is extremely relevant to the fate of our missing 727, N844AA, which was supposed to be in the same business - hauling diesel in Angola - only for the UNITA side.
CW @ 11:10PM | 2005-06-05| permalink
Also I think Safair leased S9-CAX from Transafrik - hence the new plain-white paintjob
While I think we're doing a pretty good job of looking into the still-extant L-100 fleet out there, but I believe most of these aircraft are only slightly shady, and not flying for either Victor or the CIA most of the time.
Alex @ 3:58PM | 2005-06-06| permalink
Slim Shady, I suppose you could say..
BTW, we've just upgraded the comments system, which is why some recent threads are missing. They should be back soon.
Chris Stiles @ 8:41PM | 2005-06-08| permalink
From the pprune boards in relation to a recent Antonov thread:
"Lots is made by many people about different aircraft seen at different times with the same Congolese registration.
The Congo has a large aviation fleet, but is one of the unfortunate countries with only 2 registration letters available, rather than the 3 most of us are used to. All Conglese civil aircraft are registered in the series 9Q-Cxx.
This means that Kinshasa has to "recycle" registrations much faster than most other countries, and coupled with the high attrition rate of Congolese aircraft, the same registration letters can be reallocted twice in a year."
Is this correct ? If it is I guess it works both ways - good way to deliberately create confusion.
Ruud @ 12:03AM | 2005-08-11| permalink
The UN-xxx serial you refer to is an added number to the aircraft for aircraft operating under UN-contract; in that case there should always be another tailnumber for the country of registration somewhere on the aircraft.
Alex @ 1:15PM | 2005-08-11| permalink
Yes, but it's also the Kazakh registry prefix. I suspect a lot of people have had a free pass because any aircraft with UN- on it is assumed to be a UN flight.
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/06/mystery-prop-update-transafrik.html
If Not Mystery Jets...
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
If Not Mystery Jets...
Then at least mystery turboprops.
The New York Times has a big story on the CIA's air proprietaries, the new-old network of anonymous charter airlines that provide spook transport with deniability (at least until those pesky journalists get at them). Flying has been a CIA business since the agency was founded - the year after, it bought into the assets of Claire Chennault's postwar business venture, China Air Transport, to save it from the Communists. That became the core of what was known to the public as Air America, operating a gigantic fleet of aircraft in all kinds of places you wouldn't want to go out of a huge base in Taiwan. Pretty much anywhere the US had interests in the cold war, you could find one of the morass of frontcos they used - CAT, AA, Southern Air Transport, CNRRA, Continental Air Transport, Intermountain, Pacific Helicopters, Western Heli, Atlas Air - operating the same kind of aircraft (Dakotas, Curtiss Commandos, C-119, -123, and -130s, Twin Otters, Pilatus Porters, Helio-Couriers and choppers. Machines for the hairy of arse and horny of hand..) with the same kind of crews (madmen), doing much the same thing (delivering guns, cash, and drugs).
In fact, very often they were the same aircraft and the same crews. In the mid-80s, the Sandinistas shot down a C-46 that had been with them since the 1940s, manned by a crew who'd been with them since the 1960s..but that's enough babbling.
They had among other things the ability to strip whole C-130s, shuffle the parts like a deck of cards, and put them back together as aircraft that had officially never been built, at least as far as Lockheed knew. Most of the aircraft were on free lease (the technical term was "bailed") from the US Air Force, which drove the USAF liaison people to distraction. They, after all, had to justify their budget to Congress; and they couldn't very well say "Senator, the reason we keep buying more C-130s is because the CIA keeps crashing'em". The liaison officer, Colonel Fletcher Prouty, developed a system of collecting the fuel receipts from US bases to keep track of the aircraft (can anyone guess why I was interested in the Viktor Bout fuel contracts?).
Now, according to the Times, all the old-line features are there: there's even a Dakota still on the roster. Nobody will be very surprised to know it's these aircraft that have been hauling secret prisoners around.
This may throw light on some aspects of the Viktor Bout system. I've recently been asked for information on any C-130s operated by Viktor. The reason is that they have been spotted operating for "Air Mero", which according to Ruud, fellow Bout stalker, is a name used by both Aerocom and Jetline/Jet Line for their KBR contracts in Iraq.
Now, western aircraft are rare in the Bout inventory. But there is a possibility that something called "TransAfrik", a Sao Tome-based company set up by investors in Ireland called "IAS Group", may be at the heart of this. TransAfrik, as well as nearly sharing a name with Trans African (who, by the way, have swapped planes with Jetline in the past), own some 11 Lockheed L-100s. A Lockheed L-100 is simply a C-130 Hercules sold to a civilian owner.
These Hercs have a past, though. They all belonged to none other than that Air America isotope, Southern Air Transport.
However, Transafrik was set up in 1986. Which fits with the liquidation of SAT, but not with the only air-related IAS Group I've heard of (a KLM-owned firm established in 1994). The current owners are apparently something called TWL Ltd. Questions, questions...
On another point, the NYT story is accompanied by a nice photo of one of Aero Contractors' CASA CN-235s. The registration is N168D, which is registered to Devon Holding & Leasing, Inc. Serial no. is C135. Another Devon ship is N187D, serial C143, another CN235. Interestingly, there's one lonely CN235 knocking around the US Air Force's inventory, too, usually in Afghanistan. (Photo here.) Its serial is C-42, military reg. 96-6049. And it, too, frequents rural North Carolina..(Link)
Does that satisfy your craving for mystery aircraft, Tim?
LINK and alternate comments posted by Alex : 12:51 PM
No comments yet
Comments:
By the way, the technical word for whatever the CIA or whatever group of people is doing is called a "rendition."
I have found that many of these rendition planes make stops for some reason at low-key airports in Portugal, most probably when their destination is the US or Gitmo.
The US news networks did have a story tonight on "black" bases that used old Soviet era prisons in old Warsaw pact countries. NBC stated it would not name what these countries are but I would put my money on Poland as being a definite location.
The US Senator John McCain (Republican) has been trying to have these out-of-country locations fall under no torture laws applicable in the US. He has a great motivation because he spent about six years in a North Vietnamese prison known as the "Hanoi Hilton" during the Vietnam war. To this day he is unable to raise his arms above his waist.
# posted by Anonymous : 5:38 AM
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/06/if-not-mystery-jets.html
____________________________________________________________________________________
May 31, 2005
C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights
By SCOTT SHANE, STEPHEN GREY and MARGOT WILLIAMS
This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams and written by Mr. Shane.
SMITHFIELD, N.C. - The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero's pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.
When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.
Aero Contractors' planes dropped C.I.A. paramilitary officers into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi, Pakistan, right after the United States Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day before an American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last year, according to flight data and other records.
While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.
Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.
An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.
The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.
The civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other governments. But the cover can fail, as when two Austrian fighter jets were scrambled on Jan. 21, 2003, to intercept a C.I.A. Hercules transport plane, equipped with military communications, on its way from Germany to Azerbaijan.
"When the C.I.A. is given a task, it's usually because national policy makers don't want 'U.S. government' written all over it," said Jim Glerum, a retired C.I.A. officer who spent 18 years with the agency's Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If you're flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company."
Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency's flights in the last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements.
Inquiries From Abroad
The authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the C.I.A.'s alleged role in the seizure of suspects in those countries who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation. According to Dr. Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.
Dr. Nolte examined the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who American officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec. 31, 2003, and held for three weeks. Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan.
The episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on C.I.A. flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Mr. Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the C.I.A.-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Mr. Masri's passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.
Mr. Masri was later released by order of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients' identities. "We've been doing business with the government for a long time, and one of the reasons is, we don't talk about it," said Robert W. Blowers, Aero's assistant manager.
A Varied Fleet
But records filed with the Federal Aviation Administration provide a detailed, if incomplete, portrait of the agency's aviation wing.
The fleet includes a World War II-era DC-3 and a sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, as well as workhorse Hercules transport planes and Spanish-built aircraft that can drop into tight airstrips. The flagship is the Boeing Business Jet, based on the 737 model, which Aero flies from Kinston, N.C., because the runway at Johnston County is too short for it.
Most of the shell companies that are the planes' nominal owners hold permits to land at American military bases worldwide, a clue to their global mission. Flight records show that at least 11 of the aircraft have landed at Camp Peary, the Virginia base where the C.I.A. operates its training facility, known as "the Farm." Several planes have also made regular trips to Guantánamo.
But the facility that turns up most often in records of the 26 planes is little Johnston County Airport, which mainly serves private pilots and a few local corporations. At one end of the 5,500-foot runway are the modest airport offices, a flight school and fuel tanks. At the other end are the hangars and offices of Aero Contractors, down a tree-lined driveway named for Charlie Day, an airplane mechanic who earned a reputation as an engine magician working on secret operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.
"To tell you the truth, I don't know what they do," said Ray Blackmon, the airport manager, noting that Aero has its own mechanics and fuel tanks, keeping nosey outsiders away. But he called the Aero workers "good neighbors," always ready to lend a tool.
Son of Air America
Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated air "proprietary," as agency-controlled companies are called.
Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by corporate records.
"Jim is one of the great untold stories of heroic work for the U.S. government," said Bill Leary, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia who has written about the C.I.A.'s air operations. Mr. Rhyne had a prosthetic leg - he had lost one leg to enemy antiaircraft fire in Laos - that was blamed for his death in a 2001 crash while testing a friend's new plane at Johnston County Airport.
Mr. Rhyne had chosen the rural airfield in part because it was handy to Fort Bragg and many Special Forces veterans, and in part because it had no tower from which Aero's operations could be spied on, a former pilot said.
"Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and come out in the middle of the night with another," said the former pilot. He asked not to be identified because when he was hired, after responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the C.I.A., he signed a secrecy agreement.
While flying for Aero in the 1980's and 1990's, the pilot said, he ferried King Hussein, Jordan's late ruler, around the United States; kept American-backed rebels like Jonas Savimbi of Angola supplied with guns and food; hopped across the jungles of Colombia to fight the drug trade; and retrieved shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and other weapons from former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
Ferrying Terrorism Suspects
Aero's planes were sent to Fort Bragg to pick up Special Forces operatives for practice runs in the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina, dropping supplies or attempting emergency "exfiltrations" of agents, often at night, the former pilot said. He described flying with $50,000 in cash strapped to his legs to buy fuel and working under pseudonyms that changed from job to job.
He does not recall anyone using the word "rendition." "We used to call them 'snatches,' " he said, recalling half a dozen cases. Sometimes the goal was to take a suspect from one country to another. At other times, the C.I.A. team rescued allies, including five men believed to have been marked by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, for assassination.
Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.'s air operations. Aero's staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004, according to Dun and Bradstreet.
Despite the difficulty of determining the purpose of any single flight or who was aboard, the pattern of flights that coincide with known events is striking.
When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of Dec. 13, 2003, a Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from Dulles Airport in Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day by the Boeing Business Jet, also flying from Washington.
Flights on this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were the first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad since the beginning of the war.
Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.
A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.
Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.
Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.
The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gambia.
Most recently, flight records show the Boeing Business Jet traveling from Sudan to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on April 17, and returning to Sudan on April 22. The trip coincides with a visit of the Sudanese intelligence chief to Washington that was reported April 30 by The Los Angeles Times.
Mysterious Companies
As the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation Administration's online registry.
So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations.
On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers' offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee.
No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon, in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as 1949.
Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such name on more than one company was "bad tradecraft: you shouldn't allow an element of one entity to lead to others."
He said one method used in setting up past C.I.A. proprietaries was to ask real people to volunteer to serve as officers or directors. "It was very, very easy to find patriotic Americans who were willing to help," he said.
Such an approach may have been used with Aero Contractors. William J. Rogers, 84, of Maine, said he was asked to serve on the Aero board in the 1980's because he was a former Navy pilot and past national commander of the American Legion. He knew the company did government work, but not much more, he said. "We used to meet once or twice a year," he said.
Aero's president, according to corporate records, is Norman Richardson, a North Carolina businessman who once ran a truck stop restaurant called Stormin' Norman's. Asked about his role with Aero, Mr. Richardson said only: "Most of the work we do is for the government. It's on the basis that we can't say anything about it."
Secrecy Is Difficult
Aero's much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976 just as the United States Senate's Church Committee issued a mixed report on the value of the C.I.A.'s use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned whether the nation would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment appears prescient.
When one C.I.A. official told the committee that a new air proprietary should be created only if "we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is C.I.A.," Lawrence R. Houston, then agency's general counsel, objected.
In the aviation industry, said Mr. Houston, who died in 1995, "everybody knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions."
He concluded: "I don't think you can do a real cover operation."
Ford Fessenden contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/national/31planes.html?ei=5090&en=6087acc3480a296c&ex=1275192000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
If Not Mystery Jets...
Then at least mystery turboprops.
The New York Times has a big story on the CIA's air proprietaries, the new-old network of anonymous charter airlines that provide spook transport with deniability (at least until those pesky journalists get at them). Flying has been a CIA business since the agency was founded - the year after, it bought into the assets of Claire Chennault's postwar business venture, China Air Transport, to save it from the Communists. That became the core of what was known to the public as Air America, operating a gigantic fleet of aircraft in all kinds of places you wouldn't want to go out of a huge base in Taiwan. Pretty much anywhere the US had interests in the cold war, you could find one of the morass of frontcos they used - CAT, AA, Southern Air Transport, CNRRA, Continental Air Transport, Intermountain, Pacific Helicopters, Western Heli, Atlas Air - operating the same kind of aircraft (Dakotas, Curtiss Commandos, C-119, -123, and -130s, Twin Otters, Pilatus Porters, Helio-Couriers and choppers. Machines for the hairy of arse and horny of hand..) with the same kind of crews (madmen), doing much the same thing (delivering guns, cash, and drugs).
In fact, very often they were the same aircraft and the same crews. In the mid-80s, the Sandinistas shot down a C-46 that had been with them since the 1940s, manned by a crew who'd been with them since the 1960s..but that's enough babbling.
They had among other things the ability to strip whole C-130s, shuffle the parts like a deck of cards, and put them back together as aircraft that had officially never been built, at least as far as Lockheed knew. Most of the aircraft were on free lease (the technical term was "bailed") from the US Air Force, which drove the USAF liaison people to distraction. They, after all, had to justify their budget to Congress; and they couldn't very well say "Senator, the reason we keep buying more C-130s is because the CIA keeps crashing'em". The liaison officer, Colonel Fletcher Prouty, developed a system of collecting the fuel receipts from US bases to keep track of the aircraft (can anyone guess why I was interested in the Viktor Bout fuel contracts?).
Now, according to the Times, all the old-line features are there: there's even a Dakota still on the roster. Nobody will be very surprised to know it's these aircraft that have been hauling secret prisoners around.
This may throw light on some aspects of the Viktor Bout system. I've recently been asked for information on any C-130s operated by Viktor. The reason is that they have been spotted operating for "Air Mero", which according to Ruud, fellow Bout stalker, is a name used by both Aerocom and Jetline/Jet Line for their KBR contracts in Iraq.
Now, western aircraft are rare in the Bout inventory. But there is a possibility that something called "TransAfrik", a Sao Tome-based company set up by investors in Ireland called "IAS Group", may be at the heart of this. TransAfrik, as well as nearly sharing a name with Trans African (who, by the way, have swapped planes with Jetline in the past), own some 11 Lockheed L-100s. A Lockheed L-100 is simply a C-130 Hercules sold to a civilian owner.
These Hercs have a past, though. They all belonged to none other than that Air America isotope, Southern Air Transport.
However, Transafrik was set up in 1986. Which fits with the liquidation of SAT, but not with the only air-related IAS Group I've heard of (a KLM-owned firm established in 1994). The current owners are apparently something called TWL Ltd. Questions, questions...
On another point, the NYT story is accompanied by a nice photo of one of Aero Contractors' CASA CN-235s. The registration is N168D, which is registered to Devon Holding & Leasing, Inc. Serial no. is C135. Another Devon ship is N187D, serial C143, another CN235. Interestingly, there's one lonely CN235 knocking around the US Air Force's inventory, too, usually in Afghanistan. (Photo here.) Its serial is C-42, military reg. 96-6049. And it, too, frequents rural North Carolina..(Link)
Does that satisfy your craving for mystery aircraft, Tim?
LINK and alternate comments posted by Alex : 12:51 PM
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Comments:
By the way, the technical word for whatever the CIA or whatever group of people is doing is called a "rendition."
I have found that many of these rendition planes make stops for some reason at low-key airports in Portugal, most probably when their destination is the US or Gitmo.
The US news networks did have a story tonight on "black" bases that used old Soviet era prisons in old Warsaw pact countries. NBC stated it would not name what these countries are but I would put my money on Poland as being a definite location.
The US Senator John McCain (Republican) has been trying to have these out-of-country locations fall under no torture laws applicable in the US. He has a great motivation because he spent about six years in a North Vietnamese prison known as the "Hanoi Hilton" during the Vietnam war. To this day he is unable to raise his arms above his waist.
# posted by Anonymous : 5:38 AM
Original: http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2005/06/if-not-mystery-jets.html
____________________________________________________________________________________
May 31, 2005
C.I.A. Expanding Terror Battle Under Guise of Charter Flights
By SCOTT SHANE, STEPHEN GREY and MARGOT WILLIAMS
This article was reported by Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams and written by Mr. Shane.
SMITHFIELD, N.C. - The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero's pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.
When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job. If agency experts need to fly overseas in a hurry after the capture of a prized prisoner, a plane will depart Johnston County and stop at Dulles Airport outside Washington to pick up the C.I.A. team on the way.
Aero Contractors' planes dropped C.I.A. paramilitary officers into Afghanistan in 2001; carried an American team to Karachi, Pakistan, right after the United States Consulate there was bombed in 2002; and flew from Libya to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the day before an American-held prisoner said he was questioned by Libyan intelligence agents last year, according to flight data and other records.
While posing as a private charter outfit - "aircraft rental with pilot" is the listing in Dun and Bradstreet - Aero Contractors is in fact a major domestic hub of the Central Intelligence Agency's secret air service. The company was founded in 1979 by a legendary C.I.A. officer and chief pilot for Air America, the agency's Vietnam-era air company, and it appears to be controlled by the agency, according to former employees.
Behind a surprisingly thin cover of rural hideaways, front companies and shell corporations that share officers who appear to exist only on paper, the C.I.A. has rapidly expanded its air operations since 2001 as it has pursued and questioned terrorism suspects around the world.
An analysis of thousands of flight records, aircraft registrations and corporate documents, as well as interviews with former C.I.A. officers and pilots, show that the agency owns at least 26 planes, 10 of them purchased since 2001. The agency has concealed its ownership behind a web of seven shell corporations that appear to have no employees and no function apart from owning the aircraft.
The planes, regularly supplemented by private charters, are operated by real companies controlled by or tied to the agency, including Aero Contractors and two Florida companies, Pegasus Technologies and Tepper Aviation.
The civilian planes can go places American military craft would not be welcome. They sometimes allow the agency to circumvent reporting requirements most countries impose on flights operated by other governments. But the cover can fail, as when two Austrian fighter jets were scrambled on Jan. 21, 2003, to intercept a C.I.A. Hercules transport plane, equipped with military communications, on its way from Germany to Azerbaijan.
"When the C.I.A. is given a task, it's usually because national policy makers don't want 'U.S. government' written all over it," said Jim Glerum, a retired C.I.A. officer who spent 18 years with the agency's Air America but says he has no knowledge of current operations. "If you're flying an executive jet into somewhere where there are plenty of executive jets, you can look like any other company."
Some of the C.I.A. planes have been used for carrying out renditions, the legal term for the agency's practice of seizing terrorism suspects in one foreign country and delivering them to be detained in another, including countries that routinely engage in torture. The resulting controversy has breached the secrecy of the agency's flights in the last two years, as plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements.
Inquiries From Abroad
The authorities in Italy and Sweden have opened investigations into the C.I.A.'s alleged role in the seizure of suspects in those countries who were then flown to Egypt for interrogation. According to Dr. Georg Nolte, a law professor at the University of Munich, under international law, nations are obligated to investigate any substantiated human rights violations committed on their territory or using their airspace.
Dr. Nolte examined the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who American officials have confirmed was pulled from a bus on the Serbia-Macedonia border on Dec. 31, 2003, and held for three weeks. Then he was drugged and beaten, by his account, before being flown to Afghanistan.
The episode illustrates the circumstantial nature of the evidence on C.I.A. flights, which often coincide with the arrest and transporting of Al Qaeda suspects. No public record states how Mr. Masri was taken to Afghanistan. But flight data shows a Boeing Business Jet operated by Aero Contractors and owned by Premier Executive Transport Services, one of the C.I.A.-linked shell companies, flew from Skopje, Macedonia, to Baghdad and on to Kabul on Jan. 24, 2004, the day after Mr. Masri's passport was marked with a Macedonian exit stamp.
Mr. Masri was later released by order of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, after his arrest was shown to be a case of mistaken identity.
A C.I.A. spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. Representatives of Aero Contractors, Tepper Aviation and Pegasus Technologies, which operate the agency planes, said they could not discuss their clients' identities. "We've been doing business with the government for a long time, and one of the reasons is, we don't talk about it," said Robert W. Blowers, Aero's assistant manager.
A Varied Fleet
But records filed with the Federal Aviation Administration provide a detailed, if incomplete, portrait of the agency's aviation wing.
The fleet includes a World War II-era DC-3 and a sleek Gulfstream V executive jet, as well as workhorse Hercules transport planes and Spanish-built aircraft that can drop into tight airstrips. The flagship is the Boeing Business Jet, based on the 737 model, which Aero flies from Kinston, N.C., because the runway at Johnston County is too short for it.
Most of the shell companies that are the planes' nominal owners hold permits to land at American military bases worldwide, a clue to their global mission. Flight records show that at least 11 of the aircraft have landed at Camp Peary, the Virginia base where the C.I.A. operates its training facility, known as "the Farm." Several planes have also made regular trips to Guantánamo.
But the facility that turns up most often in records of the 26 planes is little Johnston County Airport, which mainly serves private pilots and a few local corporations. At one end of the 5,500-foot runway are the modest airport offices, a flight school and fuel tanks. At the other end are the hangars and offices of Aero Contractors, down a tree-lined driveway named for Charlie Day, an airplane mechanic who earned a reputation as an engine magician working on secret operations in Laos during the Vietnam War.
"To tell you the truth, I don't know what they do," said Ray Blackmon, the airport manager, noting that Aero has its own mechanics and fuel tanks, keeping nosey outsiders away. But he called the Aero workers "good neighbors," always ready to lend a tool.
Son of Air America
Aero appears to be the direct descendant of Air America, a C.I.A.-operated air "proprietary," as agency-controlled companies are called.
Just three years after the big Asian air company was closed in 1976, one of its chief pilots, Jim Rhyne, was asked to open a new air company, according to a former Aero Contractors employee whose account is supported by corporate records.
"Jim is one of the great untold stories of heroic work for the U.S. government," said Bill Leary, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Georgia who has written about the C.I.A.'s air operations. Mr. Rhyne had a prosthetic leg - he had lost one leg to enemy antiaircraft fire in Laos - that was blamed for his death in a 2001 crash while testing a friend's new plane at Johnston County Airport.
Mr. Rhyne had chosen the rural airfield in part because it was handy to Fort Bragg and many Special Forces veterans, and in part because it had no tower from which Aero's operations could be spied on, a former pilot said.
"Sometimes a plane would go in the hangar with one tail number and come out in the middle of the night with another," said the former pilot. He asked not to be identified because when he was hired, after responding to a newspaper advertisement seeking pilots for the C.I.A., he signed a secrecy agreement.
While flying for Aero in the 1980's and 1990's, the pilot said, he ferried King Hussein, Jordan's late ruler, around the United States; kept American-backed rebels like Jonas Savimbi of Angola supplied with guns and food; hopped across the jungles of Colombia to fight the drug trade; and retrieved shoulder-fired Stinger missiles and other weapons from former Soviet republics in Central Asia.
Ferrying Terrorism Suspects
Aero's planes were sent to Fort Bragg to pick up Special Forces operatives for practice runs in the Uwharrie National Forest in North Carolina, dropping supplies or attempting emergency "exfiltrations" of agents, often at night, the former pilot said. He described flying with $50,000 in cash strapped to his legs to buy fuel and working under pseudonyms that changed from job to job.
He does not recall anyone using the word "rendition." "We used to call them 'snatches,' " he said, recalling half a dozen cases. Sometimes the goal was to take a suspect from one country to another. At other times, the C.I.A. team rescued allies, including five men believed to have been marked by Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, for assassination.
Since 2001, the battle against terrorism has refocused and expanded the C.I.A.'s air operations. Aero's staff grew to 79 from 48 from 2001 to 2004, according to Dun and Bradstreet.
Despite the difficulty of determining the purpose of any single flight or who was aboard, the pattern of flights that coincide with known events is striking.
When Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq the evening of Dec. 13, 2003, a Gulfstream V executive jet was already en route from Dulles Airport in Washington. It was joined in Baghdad the next day by the Boeing Business Jet, also flying from Washington.
Flights on this route were highly unusual, aviation records show. These were the first C.I.A. planes to file flight plans from Washington to Baghdad since the beginning of the war.
Flight logs show a C.I.A. plane left Dulles within 48 hours of the capture of several Al Qaeda leaders, flying to airports near the place of arrest. They included Abu Zubaida, a close aide to Osama bin Laden, captured on March 28, 2002; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who helped plan 9/11 from Hamburg, Germany, on Sept. 10, 2002; Abd al-Rahim al-Nashri, the Qaeda operational chief in the Persian Gulf region, on Nov. 8, 2002; and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of 9/11, on March 1, 2003.
A jet also arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from Dulles on May 31, 2003, after the killing in Saudi Arabia of Yusuf Bin-Salih al-Ayiri, a propagandist and former close associate of Mr. bin Laden, and the capture of Mr. Ayiri's deputy, Abdullah al-Shabrani.
Flight records sometimes lend support to otherwise unsubstantiated reports. Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born prisoner in the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has said through his lawyer that four Libyan intelligence service officers appeared in September in an interrogation cell.
Aviation records cannot corroborate his claim that the men questioned him and threatened his life. But they do show that a Gulfstream V registered to one of the C.I.A. shell companies flew from Tripoli, Libya, to Guantánamo on Sept. 8, the day before Mr. Deghayes reported first meeting the Libyan agents. The plane stopped in Jamaica and at Dulles before returning to the Johnston County Airport, flight records show.
The same Gulfstream has been linked - through witness accounts, government inquiries and news reports - to prisoner renditions from Sweden, Pakistan, Indonesia and Gambia.
Most recently, flight records show the Boeing Business Jet traveling from Sudan to Baltimore-Washington International Airport on April 17, and returning to Sudan on April 22. The trip coincides with a visit of the Sudanese intelligence chief to Washington that was reported April 30 by The Los Angeles Times.
Mysterious Companies
As the C.I.A. tries to veil such air operations, aviation regulations pose a major obstacle. Planes must have visible tail numbers, and their ownership can be easily checked by entering the number into the Federal Aviation Administration's online registry.
So, rather than purchase aircraft outright, the C.I.A. uses shell companies whose names appear unremarkable in casual checks of F.A.A. registrations.
On closer examination, however, it becomes clear that those companies appear to have no premises, only post office boxes or addresses in care of lawyers' offices. Their officers and directors, listed in state corporate databases, seem to have been invented. A search of public records for ordinary identifying information about the officers - addresses, phone numbers, house purchases, and so on - comes up with only post office boxes in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.
But whoever created the companies used some of the same post office box addresses and the same apparently fictitious officers for two or more of the companies. One of those seeming ghost executives, Philip P. Quincannon, for instance, is listed as an officer of Premier Executive Transport Services and Crowell Aviation Technologies, both listed to the same Massachusetts address, as well as Stevens Express Leasing in Tennessee.
No one by that name can be found in any public record other than post office boxes in Washington and Dunn Loring, Va. Those listings for Mr. Quincannon, in commercial databases, include an anomaly: His Social Security number was issued in Washington between 1993 and 1995, but his birth year is listed as 1949.
Mr. Glerum, the C.I.A. and Air America veteran, said the use of one such name on more than one company was "bad tradecraft: you shouldn't allow an element of one entity to lead to others."
He said one method used in setting up past C.I.A. proprietaries was to ask real people to volunteer to serve as officers or directors. "It was very, very easy to find patriotic Americans who were willing to help," he said.
Such an approach may have been used with Aero Contractors. William J. Rogers, 84, of Maine, said he was asked to serve on the Aero board in the 1980's because he was a former Navy pilot and past national commander of the American Legion. He knew the company did government work, but not much more, he said. "We used to meet once or twice a year," he said.
Aero's president, according to corporate records, is Norman Richardson, a North Carolina businessman who once ran a truck stop restaurant called Stormin' Norman's. Asked about his role with Aero, Mr. Richardson said only: "Most of the work we do is for the government. It's on the basis that we can't say anything about it."
Secrecy Is Difficult
Aero's much-larger ancestor, Air America, was closed down in 1976 just as the United States Senate's Church Committee issued a mixed report on the value of the C.I.A.'s use of proprietary companies. The committee questioned whether the nation would ever again be involved in covert wars. One comment appears prescient.
When one C.I.A. official told the committee that a new air proprietary should be created only if "we have a chance at keeping it secret that it is C.I.A.," Lawrence R. Houston, then agency's general counsel, objected.
In the aviation industry, said Mr. Houston, who died in 1995, "everybody knows what everybody is doing, and something new coming along is immediately the focus of a thousand eyes and prying questions."
He concluded: "I don't think you can do a real cover operation."
Ford Fessenden contributed reporting for this article.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/national/31planes.html?ei=5090&en=6087acc3480a296c&ex=1275192000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
