News travels fast, at least the news that the establishment legacy media wants you to know about. On Sunday, July 11, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the longtime deputy leader of al-Qaeda and (since the assassination of Osama bin Laden) the ruling “general emir,” was killed by a CIA drone strike while standing on the third-floor balcony of his house in Kabul, Afghanistan. However, one key aspect about his life that was missing from most of his obituaries circulated by the mainstream media was his purported ties to Russia, namely that he was an FSB-trained asset.
The FSB, or Federal Security Service, is the primary successor to the KGB — the intelligence and counterespionage arm of the Soviet Union, which was dubbed by its founder Felix Dzerzhinsky as the “sword and shield of the [Bolshevik] revolution.” In fact, the FSB continues to use the Soviet communist iconography of the sword and shield in its official emblem.
The claim that Ayman al-Zawahiri was a Russian/FSB asset originated from former KGB/FSB Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Litvinenko, who was fatally poisoned following his defection to the United Kingdom in 2006. Prior to defecting, Litvinenko gave an interview to the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita, published on July 16, 2005. In the interview, Litvinenko identified Ayman al-Zawahiri, the then-deputy emir of al-Qaeda, as having been trained by the FSB in 1998. Below is what Litvinenko told Rzeczpospolita:
Ayman al-Zawahiri trained at a Federal Security Service (the former Russian KGB) base in Dagestan in 1998. He was then transferred to Afghanistan where he became Osama Bin Laden’s deputy. I was working in that section at the time and I can confirm the fact Zawahiri was not the only link between the FSB and Al-Qaeda.
According to Litvinenko, al-Zawahiri was only a recent example of a long line of KGB/FSB-trained terrorists and despots, among whom are Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. “Carlos the Jackal”); Yasser Arafat, former leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and first president of the Palestinian National Authority; Wadie Haddad (aka Abu Hani), the leader of external operations for the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein; former general secretary of the Lebanese Communist Party George Hawi; and Sean Garland, president of the Marxist-Leninist Workers’ Party of Ireland.
Litvinenko’s allegation of al-Zawahiri being a Russian-trained asset was corroborated by former KGB Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Preobrazhensky, who defected to the United States in 1993 and has written several books, including KGB/FSB’s New Trojan Horse: Americans of Russian Descent (2008). In an article written for the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Preobrazhensky detailed the Soviet Union/Russia’s ties to international Islamic terrorism, and more specifically the FSB’s role in training al-Zawahiri. Preobrazhensky revealed:
Long before Islamic terrorism became a global threat, the KGB had used terrorism to facilitate the victory of world Communism.
This leads to the logical connection between Russian and Islamic terrorism. The late Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned in London in November, 2006, told me that his former FSB colleagues had trained famous Al-Qaeda terrorists Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Juma Namangoniy during the 1980s and 1990s. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, has been responsible for the murder of U.S. nationals outside the United States. Before his death, Juma Namangoniy (Jumabai Hojiyev), a native of Soviet Uzbekistan, was a right-hand man of Osama bin Laden in charge of the Taliban’s northern front in Afghanistan.
In 1996, Alexander Litvinenko was responsible for securing the secrecy of Al-Zawahiri’s arrival in Russia, who was trained by FSB instructors in Dagestan, Northern Caucasus, in 1996-1997.
At that time, Litvinenko was the Head of the Subdivision for Internationally Wanted Terrorists of the First Department of the Operative-Inquiry Directorate of the FSB Anti-Terrorist Department. He was ordered to undertake the delicate mission of securing Al-Zawahiri from unintentional disclosure by the Russian police. Though Al-Zawahiri had been brought to Russia by the FSB using a false passport, it was still possible for the police to learn about his arrival and report to Moscow for verification. Such a process could disclose Al-Zawahiri as an FSB collaborator. [Emphasis added.]
Not one, but two KGB/FSB defectors alleged that al-Zawahiri was a Russian asset. Yet, the mainstream media omit this from all of their reporting about the killing of al-Zawahiri. For as much as the mainstream media and the establishment enjoy saber-rattling against Russia in order to build support for greater regional political and military integration in the form of EU and NATO expansion, they maintain virtual radio silence about any clues that may shed some light about the Soviet Union/Russian Federation’s role in facilitating international terrorism.
Throughout most of the War on Terror in Afghanistan and then Iraq, the United States and its European allies continued to maintain normal trade relations with and embrace Russia, including at international venues such as the United Nations, the G-8 (up until 2014), and the World Economic Forum. All the while, Russia continued backing regimes that were openly hostile to the West, including the Islamic Republic of Iran, Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya, Syria, and Hezbollah. Similarly, during the Vietnam War, the United States and Western Europe traded technology with the Eastern-bloc Warsaw Pact nations only to find it in the hands of the Viet Cong forces.
Regardless of any cosmetic or external differences or any seemingly harsh rhetoric that might be exchanged from time to time, ultimately communists always stick together to defeat their common “imperialist” capitalist foe: the United States. This is why building up Communist China in order to “counter” Russia and vice-versa is a foolish, if not treasonous, strategy. This also accounts for why al-Qaeda never threatened or attacked either Russia or China, despite Afghanistan’s geographic proximity to both countries and their proxy satellites.
The communists in Russia did not magically disappear following the official “collapse” of the Soviet Union in 1991, nor has the Kremlin deviated from its Soviet-era foreign policy of spreading world revolution, including with agents recruited from the Islamic world. Ayman al-Zawahiri represented a key conduit linking the Kremlin with modern international Islamic terrorism. Alexander Litvinenko’s life was taken for exposing this. We dare not emulate the behavior of either mainstream media or the Kremlin by shamelessly omitting it, especially now.
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