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This dossier appears in the Aug. 16, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
SAUDI BRIEFING' FRAUD

The Sordid Sponsors
Of Perle's `French Expert'

by Our Special Correspondent

From the mid-1970s to 1990, the now-notorious Laurent Murawiec worked out of the Wiesbaden, Germany office of the publication founded by Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche, Executive Intelligence Review (EIR). At the latest, beginning in 1986, Murawiec covertly began working with a Swiss-based network of intelligence-connected weapons traffickers, whose London and Washington controllers were coordinating, that year, a high-intensity, international campaign of judicial attacks and dirty tricks against LaRouche and his associates. Murawiec was one of their catches.

Murawiec first showed his emerging corruption when he opposed the March 1986 publication of EIR's thoroughly documented special report, Moscow's Secret Weapon: Ariel Sharon and the Israeli Mafia. This 126-page report highlighted Sharon's U.S. organized-crime-connected backers who ran the infamous Israeli spy in the U.S. Defense Department, Jonathan Pollard. Highly classified material stolen by Pollard was used in Israeli "U.S. secrets-for-Jewish-emigres" trades with the kind of Soviet KGB elements who later grouped around the financial oligarchs plundering post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s.

By the late 1980s, on command, Murawiec was running an internal disruption operation within the Wiesbaden EIR office—supervised by the same people who promoted his subsequent career when his presence in that EIR office became overtly untenable, in 1990.

Monsieur Murawiec went from money from then-fugitive Marc Rich's Paris-based Marc Rich Foundation; to a dubious strategic affairs consultancy, GeoPol, hosted by a narcotics money-laundering Geneva, Switzerland bank; to a think-tank career in France promoting Pentagon Office of Net Assessments (ONA) digital cyberwar scenarios; to his posting to the Rand Corporation in Washington, and his Richard Perle-organized debutante's public appearance at Perle's American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in December 1999.

The Anti-Saudi Gambit

Murawiec's current notoriety now permits us to divulge not merely who wants to plunge the world into an era of Clash of Civilizations war, but, how much that cabal has seen Lyndon LaRouche as its main opponent to their "vision" of an America turned into a caricature of the world's discarded imperial systems.

A pathetic, babbling turncoat, Murawiec has now been moved center stage by Defense Policy Board chief Perle, in a high-stakes effort to eliminate Saudi Arabia. The July 10 caper by Murawiec, and the coverage of this caper by the Aug. 6 Washington Post, can only be seen as testimony that it is exactly LaRouche who is now feared by Perle's allies, as threatening to play a key role in extricating the U.S. government from an escalating Middle East war.

In the early 1990s, Swiss intelligence sources reported to EIR investigators working on the Murawiec case, that one of his Swiss-based controllers, weapons trafficker Helmut Raiser, had attended a mysterious 1985 Vienna meeting suspected to be related to weapons trafficking.

Meeting with Raiser was Michael Glazebrook, Henry Kissinger's personal security aide at his Kissinger Associates consultancy in New York City; and one John Wood, now the CEO of a Defense Department weapons systems integrator in northern Virginia, Telos. As we will show, Telos' Board of Directors is a Who's Who of Richard Perle associates and of promoters of Murawiec's Washington career. It was Raiser's Swiss nexus which set Murawiec up in the Geopol consultancy in late 1993.

Who's Who in GeoPol

The management of GeoPol Services SA in Geneva brought together an eerie combination of shady "private banking," the brokering of "unusual" international business contracts, international arms trafficking, and suspected laundering of drug money. The GeoPol executives are intertwined with the highest levels of the Iran-Contra and Iraq-gate weapons trafficking of the 1980s. GeoPol must be viewed as a front for dirty intelligence activities.

At GeoPol events and in its publications, Laurent Murawiec is touted as its chief intellectual, lecturer, writer, editor, and office secretary. But the sterile thinker Murawiec, far from shaping the firm's policy, is simply carrying out the assignments given him by other GeoPol executives. Murawiec, a French national, is viewed by some French intelligence circles, for example, as being under the control of foreign intelligence services. Aside from other references, they point to his (and his family's) longtime association with French Communist Party operations, including lengthy stays in Communist East Germany and Communist Czechoslovakia, and his own past connections—like many Perle associates turned right-wing military utopians of today—to international Trotskyist circles.

The president of GeoPol was Pierre Hafner, whose primary business was as director of CBI Holding Geneva, the mother company of Union Bancaire Privée (UBP). This was a merger of two Geneva financial institutions, one of which, Trade Development Bank (TDB), was "inherited" from Edmond Safra, whose banks come up in many Iran-Contra investigations. The chairman of CBI-TDB Union Bancaire Privée was Edgar De Piccioto, who was also on the board of George Soros' Quantum Fund. Piccioto is a long-time business partner of Italian businessman-financier Carlo De Benedetti, whose son, Rudolpho de Benedetti, is director of CBI Holding Milano, Italy. The older de Benedetti is a silent partner of the American fugitive from justice, Marc Rich.

Pardoned last year, Rich ran one of the largest commodity trading companies in the world in Zug, Switzerland, implicated in numerous Cold War-era, but East/West, oil-for-weapons deals, particularly around the Iran-Iraq War. He was indicted in New York City in 1984 for massive tax fraud, but fled to Zug.

Rich's Paris-based Marc Rich Foundation financed, in the early 1990s, a book on the history of anti-Semitism in the United States by French author Leon Poliakov. Poliakov credited Murawiec with being the guiding inspiration for the Rich-financed book project. Murawiec wrote a fraudulent chapter which attacked LaRouche as an anti-Semite, but where the coward never mentioned his 16 years at EIR, nor any "personal" observations. Instead, he chose as his source—and presumably, Poliakov's "inspiration"—a 1989 book against LaRouche financed by the neo-conservative Smith Richardson Foundation, and written by Dennis King.

This Marc Rich project was one of the early indications of Murawiec's emerging career.

Murawiec's praise in the book for Irving Kristol, the founder of the neo-conservative movement, speaks volumes for Murawiec's own state of mind. Irving Kristol, like Richard Perle's professor Albert Wohlstetter, was a former Trotskyist, who became something of an ideologue for Wall Street's post-war shaping of American politics. Murawiec said Kristol's career, still ongoing with the assistance of his Arab-bashing son William Kristol, is proof of what a Jew can accomplish in the United States.

Back in Geneva, the "flavor" of the GeoPol milieu was made apparent on Nov. 28, 1994, when Geneva police raided the Geneva offices of UBP, acting on the arrest, in Florida, the day before, of UBP executive Jean Jacques Handali, on narcotics money-laundering charges. Handali was subsequently convicted for laundering narcotics money into accounts in the Geneva bank. Hafner's GeoPol Services SA was housed in the same building raided by the police. Hafner himself has done jail time for business frauds, something that Murawiec seems to have so far avoided.

Helmut Raiser of GeoPol's board is a German national living in Zug, Switzerland. Raiser had been a senior manager at Germany's Bohlen Industrie GmbH, mostly concerned with armament manufacturing. He left the board of Bohlen Industries and its Wasag subsidary in 1982 and went to Zug, Switzerland, two years before Marc Rich, until 1989 running the consulting firm Consen. While still maintaining strong links with Bohlen Industries, which was a component of the European Explosives Cartel which supplied billions of dollars of explosives to both sides of the Iran-Iraq War, Raiser, from Consen, directed a network of companies in Switzerland, Austria, Monte Carlo, the United States, and Argentina.

The central project conducted through Consen was the Condor II missile development program involving Argentina, Egypt, and Iraq, and drawing on the technical expertise of West European high-technology aerospace firms. Up to 1989, when it was aborted, an estimated $5 billion flowed into the Condor II program, with Consen being the technical-administrative and financial clearinghouse. With the knowledge of the George H.W. Bush apparatus, money flowed from the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro BNL branch in Atlanta to Raiser-controlled firms in Switzerland. This pumping of billions of dollars worth of sophisticated armaments into the Middle East was perfectly in line with British geopolitical goals during the 1980s first Gulf War between Iran and Iraq. That policy merged into the second Gulf War in 1991, to destroy Iraq as an emerging industrial state.

Finally, on GeoPol's board sits Elizabeth Kopp (nee Ikle, a cousin to Pentagon "eminence grise" Fred Ikle), former Justice Minister of Switzerland. She was forced to resign in 1988 after she was caught tipping off her husband, Hans W. Kopp, to an ongoing Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) narcotics money-laundering investigation targetting the company Shakarchi Trading, on whose board Hans Kopp sat. Kopp, with Alfred Hartmann of the Swiss branch of the London Rothschild banking house, was also implicated in the scandals of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and (BNL). Both BCCI and BNL were involved in massive illicit arms trade, drug money-laundering, financing of terrorism, and intelligence operations.

Murawiec, IISS, and Gerald Segal

One frequent propagandist for military confrontation with North Korea and China was the London International Institute of Strategic Studies' deputy director for Asian Affairs, the now deceased Gerald Segal. Segal also promoted Murawiec's membership in IISS, an important part of grooming the malleable Murawiec for future assignments.

Segal's confrontationism on North Korea must be seen against the backdrop of his China policy, where he is a promoter of the breakup of China. He is the author of the March 1994 IISS/Adelfi report, "China Changes Shape: Regionalism and Foreign Policy." He wrote: "If China is left to grow economically strong and more ruthlessly nationalistic at the same time, it is likely to be far more difficult for the outside world to deal with.... It may be that the only way to ensure that China does not become more dangerous as it grows richer and stronger, is to ensure that in practice, if not in law, there is more than one China to deal with." Beijing's immediate response to the IISS report was to declare Segal persona non grata in China. Murawiec has penned numerous similar style attacks on China.

American John Wood, Raiser's 1985 confidant just before the latter picked up Murawiec, went from a Swiss banking post to become, in the early 1990s, CEO of Telos, a Department of Defense (DOD) subcontractor for computer integration of weapons systems. Elisabeth Kopp's relative, Fred Ikle, is Chairman of the Board of Telos. Ikle, along with the DOD Office of Net Assessment's (ONA) aging Andy Marshall, spans almost six decades of architecting U.S. strategic doctrine. Both he and Marshall first worked together at the Rand Corporation in the 1950s. Marshall is known as the inventor of the utopian "Revolution in Military Affairs" approach of subordinating all military considerations to U.S. digital "supremacy" in the otherwise now fast disappearing, "third wave" NASDAQ new economy. Ikle has been the senior proponent of "Homeland Defense."

Once the marketing of Murawiec was established with the GeoPol venture, he was laundered into various French military affairs think-tanks, including an alleged advisory role to the French defense department, as the emerging French expert and proponent of Marshall's startling new "revolution." His message: American power and supremacy is guaranteed by the new digital era; get on board quick.

We will spare the reader the chronological account of the bombastic "theories" Murawiec scribbled into numerous French print media and mouthed at conferences in the later 1990s.

Not irrelevant to Murawiec's insertion into French defense circles were the activities of a young assistant to Andy Marshall at ONA in the early 1980s, Mira Lansky Boland. Mira Boland studied with future Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard at Boston's Tufts University, whence she went on to the CIA and then the ONA. Upon leaving the ONA, Mira Boland became the head of the Anti-Defamation League's (ADL) Washington, D.C. office, with one job, "Get LaRouche!" She coordinated with the Paris-based, American head of the French anti-sect group Association for the Defense of the Family and Individual (ADFI), Alexandra Schmidt. Schmidt did university studies in Paris under the French neo-conservative Alain Besancon of Commentaire magazine.

ADFI worked closely in operations against LaRouche with the Wall Street-funded American Family Foundation (AFF), which got its main money from the arch-conservative Richard Mellon Scaife foundations, the Olin Foundation, and the Achelis & Bodman Foundations. Supervising AFF's work were John Irwin III—son of the American Ambassador to Paris in 1973-74, Kissinger clone John Irwin II—and President Bush, Sr.'s Ambassador to Paris (1989-93), Walter Curley. Curley and Irwin III still manage the elite Achelis & Bodman Foundations. Irving Kristol's neo-conservative movement has largely been financed by these four foundations and groups of foundations, with the addition of the Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee.

One of Perle's Swine

Joining Ikle's Telos board in 1994 was Stephen Bryen, who worked under Richard Perle in the 1980s U.S. Defense Department. During the mid-1980s when Murawiec's Swiss-based handlers were grooming him, Bryen's wife, Shoshana Bryen, ran the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Israeli interface with like-minded Pentagon factions. While her husband worked with Perle in the Pentagon, Shoshana assisted a leading dirty tricks operative of Mira Boland's ADL, Galen Kelly, in actions against LaRouche and EIR's Leesburg, Virginia U.S. headquarters.

By all indications, aging defense don Fred Ikle was the key figure in vetting Murawiec's placement at Rand. Rand's national security and strategic affairs projects are financed by pooled money from the government intelligence community. Telos' largest private shareholder is British national John Porter, the son of Dame Shirley Porter, an intimate of Lady Thatcher.

In May 1996, Perle and his cronies, along with Henry Kissinger and Lady Thatcher, created the New Atlantic Initiative (NAI) to project their policies into Europe. Murawiec attended the first meeting held that month in Prague. Perle's close associate Jeffrey Gedmin, now head of the Aspen Institute in Berlin, heads this American Enterprise Institute project.

For Laurent Murawiec's public debut in Washington in December 1999, Richard Perle organized an American Enterprise Institute seminar on technology controls whose main speaker was Richard Perle. Murawiec was introduced with his newly acquired Rand Corporation credentials. His ongoing GeoPol work was described as similar to Henry Kissinger's Kissinger Associates, "but without the accent." Thomas Donelly of William Kristol's imperial New American Century project, was to have joined Murawiec speaking at the event.

True to the Friedrich von Hayek character of Perle's AEI, Murawiec addressed a paean to Hayek's thought at a March 1999 centenary celebration of von Hayek's birth.

By 2000, Daniel Pipes, a leading advocate of expanding war throughout the Middle East, was adding copy from Murawiec to his Middle East Quarterly journal. In the Spring 2000 issue, Murawiec wrote what amounted to a long defense of Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Arc of Crisis" policy, an article entitled, "The Wacky World of French Intellectuals."

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