The notion that the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 completely took the world off guard becomes increasingly improbable as one examines the geopolitical dramas of the preceding decades.

In order to adequately understand the deliberate path that led to 9/11, it is necessary to rewind the clock several decades to the Soviet-Afghan War and a covert program known as Operation: Cyclone.

History tells us that in December of 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan—supposedly unprovoked— and immediately assumed complete military and political control of Kabul and large portions of the country. The invasion would be met with resistance from an amalgam of Afghan rebel groups that had formed during the chaos of the previous communist-friendly regime of Nur Muhammad Taraki.

Before there was ISIS or the Taliban, even before the term “Al Qaeda” came into popular use, there were the fierce Mujahideen fighters. [Clip 6:03- 6:21] The term, which was plural for mujahid or “doers of jihād,” was never the official name for any particular group, but—much like the term Al Qaeda in the early 2000s—became a catch-all used in Western media to reference the various guerrilla-type militant groups in Afghanistan who were opposing the Soviets. 

The invasion, taking place at the height of the Cold War between Russia and the United States, was seen by the hawks in Washington as an opportunity. This rag-tag band of militants in the Mujahideen—much like the Ukrainian Azov Battalion of today—provided an avenue for the U.S. to damage the Soviet Union, and so Operation Cyclone was born.

Cyclone began as a program of the Central Intelligence Agency under the administration of Jimmy Carter, but would continue through the Reagan era into the Bush administration, with the CIA eventually funneling a massive $3 Billion in American Taxpayer dollars into the coffers of the Mujahadeen between 1979 and 1992.

Cyclone would go down in history as one of the agency's most expensive covert operations. 

The idea was born in the late 1970s as Pakistani intelligence officials were privately lobbying the United States and its allies to send material and financial assistance to the Mujahideen. It would be none other than President Carter’s National Security Advisor, the deep politician and Rockefeller-acolyte Zbigniew Brzezinski who would convince Carter of the importance of funding the efforts of the Afghan resistance.

Brzezinski was the quintessential high-ranking deep-state operative, often referred to as the “Democrat counterpart to Kissinger.” He was a member and product of the international think tank class, and one of only 46 people known to have attended both Bilderberg and Le Cercle meetings, two of the most exclusive of the deep-state milieu. 

Together—with the blessing of the Bilderberg Group—Brzezinski and David Rockefeller founded the infamous Trilateral Commission, a body created to coordinate imperialist strategy between Washington, Western Europe, and Japan, and whose membership included a range of household names, from Antony Blinken to Jeffery Epstein.

According to the late author Jim Marrs:

“President Jimmy Carter's administration was so filled with members of the Trilateral Commission that conspiracy researchers had a field day. Even the Establishment media began to talk.” [#]

Despite the prevailing narrative of the 80s and 90s—which suggested that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan unprovoked—it would eventually come out nearly twenty years after the fact that America's covert war in Afghanistan was masterminded by Brzezinski and initiated by the Carter administration almost six months before the Soviet invasion. 

Brzezinski, in an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, conceded that:

"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul.” [#]

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who held the position of deputy CIA Director at the height of the Soviet-Afghan war, also suggests in his personal memoirs that U.S. intelligence was directly involved from the outset, channeling aid to the Islamic brigades well before the Soviets even stepped foot in Afghanistan.

The United States was now in a proxy war. Once the Soviets took the bait and the invasion had begun, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the brain behind the operation, would travel to Khyber Pass, where he was recorded giving a religiously charged pep talk to the Pashtun rebels in early 1980.

The operation would begin to arm the Mujahideen indirectly, with funds passing through Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services-Intelligence)—an intelligence agency described by Author and Economist Michel Chossudovsky as being essentially controlled by the CIA since the Soviet-Afghan War. The Carter administration would also secure a pledge from Saudi Arabia to match US funding, going through the same channels in Pakistan before being dispersed to the various Afghan rebel groups of the Mujahideen. [#,#]

As you might expect, Pakistan proved to be just as susceptible to corruption as any government. The decision to route U.S. aid through Pakistan led to massive misappropriation of funds, and many of the weapons that were sent would end up being sold in local markets in Pakistan’s capital city Karachi rather than being delivered to the Afghan rebels. Karachi soon "became one of the most violent cities in the world."

When weapons and funding did make it to the Afghan forces, they were not distributed equally.

Though the Mujahideen was represented in the West as being a single cohesive force, hardcore ideological lines separated the various militant factions. Of the seven mujahideen groups supported by the Pakistani government, four espoused Islamic fundamentalist beliefs—and it would be these fundamentalists who received most of the funding, weapons, and training (Pakistan really put the “fund” in fundamentalist, womp womp).

These same fundamentalist factions would one day form the Taliban.

Operation Cyclone expanded tremendously during the Reagan Administration, increasing the amount of equipment delivered as well as the funding. Among the weapons provided by the CIA to the Afghani rebels was the deadly, state-of-the-art FIM-92 Stinger,  an iconic man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS) with at least 2,300 shipped into Afghanistan.

Reagan would even meet with the Mujahideen in the Oval Office on multiple occasions, providing the public with a photo op and an emotional tale to justify continued U.S. support.

Massive refugee camps would be set up along the Pakistan border, with the U.S. contributing millions of dollars in aid. These camps provided fertile ground for corrupting elements to plant the seeds of Terror that would one day necessitate another endless war in the region.

Sensing an opportunity, Saudi Arabia—with the unofficial blessing of the US Security State—would send hardline fundamentalist clerics to the camps, slowly indoctrinating tens of thousands of young rebels into religious extremism. Among this contingent of holy men was none other than Osama Bin Laden. Despite warnings that Bin Laden was preaching a dangerous fundamentalist version of Islam, the United States government not only intentionally looked the other way, but continued to arm those same militants to the teeth. [#]

The bin Laden Connection and the Intentional Radicalization of Islam

As has so often been the case throughout our history, the allies of yesterday become the enemies of tomorrow. Bin Laden and his divisions would be trained, armed, and funded by the CIA, with the Pakistani ISI acting as a sort of middleman, ostensibly so that Western intelligence officials could deny involvement and pin it all on Pakistan. [#] 

Before the formation of al-Qaeda in 1988, bin Laden ran a precursor organization called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK). In his book Prelude to Terror, investigative reporter Joseph Trento would write, citing a “former CIA officer who filed these reports” that "CIA money was actually funneled to MAK, since it was recruiting young Muslim men to come to join the jihad in Afghanistan."[#] Similarly, NBC's Michael Moran would state that "...the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan’s state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA’s primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow’s occupation.”[#]

In a 1995 interview, bin Laden himself stated:

To counter these atheist Russians, the Saudis chose me as their representative in Afghanistan, [...] I settled in Pakistan in the Afghan border region. There I received volunteers who came from the Saudi Kingdom and from all over the Arab and Muslim countries. I set up my first camp where these volunteers were trained by Pakistani and American officers. The weapons were supplied by the Americans, the money by the Saudis [#]

Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan would appear on Larry King and recount an interaction he had with bin Laden.

Not only did the United States government ignore the religiously charged radicalization process taking place within the Mujahideen, but they actively participated in it.

An article in the Washington Post from 2002 titled From the U.S., the ABC’s of Jihad described how American tax dollars would inevitably fund the radicalization process, which led to the rise of Islamic extremism in the early 2000s.

“In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. 

The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.”[#]

In addition to their corruption of the Afghani education system, the U.S. would further stoke the radicalization process by sending Egyptian double agent Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed to recruit American Muslims out of the Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn to go fight in Afghanistan.

Mohamed would preach a fiery message of holy war to impressionable Muslim youths to bolster the ranks of the Mujahideen. Ali Mohamed would eventually make his way to Pakistan and use his U.S. military training to teach the newly recruited Muslims who would go on to become the very same terrorist cells the United States would engage in Afghanistan post 9/11. FBI special agent Jack Cloonan called Mohamed "bin Laden's first trainer," as he would train both Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawari, both of whom would go on to lead Al Qaeda.

No one can, in good faith, refute that the radicalization of Islam was a Western-sponsored endeavor.

Another interesting side effect of Cyclone was the transformation of Afghanistan into the world’s largest supplier of opium. [#,#,#]

At the start of the war, Afghanistan produced roughly 100 tons of opium annually; by the time Operation Cyclone had concluded, it would be producing upward of 2,000 tons a year, accounting for roughly 80% of the global opium trade. This rise in production, perhaps uncoincidentally, coincides with the allegations of the CIA’s complicity in the global drug trade.

US funding of the Mujahideen would be supplemented by Britain’s MI6, Saudi Arabia, and even China, whose relationship with the Soviet Union had deteriorated. The invasion of Afghanistan, as predicted by Brzezinski, would indeed become a “Vietnamese quagmire” that would greatly strain the Soviet economy. Unable to quell the Western-backed insurgency, Soviet troops would begin to withdraw in the summer of 1987, with the last of their forces exiting in early 1989.

In 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski would be asked whether or not he regretted the operation, as it had indisputably led to the creation of the Taliban, to which he’d respond: 

"What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

When it comes to the Military Industrial Complex, war is good for business, and long, drawn-out wars are preferable to brief conflicts.

By the mid-80s, it was becoming clear that the Cold War wasn’t going to last forever, so the question must be asked: Was the funding, training, arming, and intentional radicalization of the Afghani militants part of an operation to create the next great enemy of America? Was Osama bin Laden molded into the new perfect villain and inevitable fall guy for the events of 9/11? 

The more you look into Operation Cyclone, the more it appears to be the bridge that the CIA, the Security State, and the Military-Industrial Complex would use to go from endlessly fighting the Cold War to endlessly fighting the War on Terror.

As the Cold War wound down and the situation in the Middle East began to ramp up, a Neoconservative think tank called the Project for a New American Century, or PNAC was busy laying the groundwork for a policy that would launch the United States into what we colloquially refer to today as the “world’s police,” and preserving the “Pax Americana” —Latin for “American Peace.”

The organization was a who’s who of neoconservative deep politicians, including Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, Max Boot, Steve Forbes, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush. [#]

PNAC’s policy document "Rebuilding America's Defences"— which was drafted in the 90s—ominously mentions how a “catastrophic and catalyzing event” akin to a “new Pearl Harbor'' would likely speed up the implementation of their desired policies. Interestingly enough, many of PNAC's recommendations would be reflected in the White House's National Security Strategy document of September 2002.

Possible Israeli Involvement

I’m sure this next section will bring me some backlash, but I am only reporting back what I found. If anything can be refuted or put in the correct context, I welcome the enrichment of my understanding of the truth.

Since the outset of the War on Terror, it has been widely speculated that the United States government conducted a deadly false flag attack on its own citizenry to justify its endless wars in the Middle East, as it was seemingly corrupt actors within the U.S. government who appeared to have benefitted the most… but there were members of another nation who benefited greatly as well.

In addition to the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Great Britain and Pakistan, the nation of Israel also played a significant role in Operation Cyclone, and indeed stood to benefit greatly from the events of 9/11.

Israeli military instructors would train thousands of Mujahideen fighters in combat and sell them weapons seized from the Soviets during the Yom Kippur War. This meant that Israeli intelligence was aware of and involved in the scheme to radicalize Afghanistan and exacerbate the threat of “Terrorism” from the start.

It was during Operation Cyclone, in 1986, when then UN Ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu repopularized and forever altered the definition of “Terrorism” upon the release of his book Terrorism: How the West Can Win. (#,#)

For more than 150 years after it was coined, “terrorism” was a term used to describe violence inflicted by the state on its people for political aims, that is, until Netanyahu’s rebranding of the term—aided by George W. Bush’s repetition of the term ad nauseam post 9-11—when the word became specifically synonymous with Islamic extremism against Western hegemony. [#]

Many researchers have neglected the role played by Israel and its intelligence arm, the Mossad. Indeed the fingerprints of the Israelis are all over 9/11. 

By the end of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and the Arab Lobby had become so intertwined with the United States that it began to rival the power of the highly influential Israel Lobby. This could not stand.

Mossad and ShinBet Founding Director and "Father of Israeli Intelligence", Isser Harel prophesied during an interview in 1980 that "Islamic terrorists" would one day attack the "tallest building in NYC" [#,#] Harel just so happened to have been behind the failed Lavon Affair of 1954, a Mossad false flag operation in which Egyptian-Israeli agents placed bombs inside British, American and Egyptian targets, hoping Muslim groups would be blamed. Israel would finally admit to the attack 51 years later, in 2005.[#, #]

But Harel wasn’t the only Israeli official to have been so prescient. In 1995, Benjamin Netanyahu warned of the exact same scenario.

In 1998, Philip Zelikow—an unrelenting supporter of Israel who would one day head up the notoriously misleading 9/11 Commission—penned an article titled “Catastrophic Terrorism: Tackling the New Danger,” which imagined a “Transformative Event” that:

“could involve loss of life and property unprecedented in peacetime and undermine America’s fundamental sense of security as did the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949.  

The United States might respond with draconian measures, scaling back civil liberties, allowing wider surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects and use of deadly force.” [#]

On September 11th, not hours after the attacks, another Israeli “Terror expert,” Ehud Barak gleefully advocated a “War on Terror” against “a kind of bin Laden Organization” well before Osama bin Laden was officially announced as the perpetrator of the attacks.

It wouldn’t be until 9:30 PM that night that CIA Director George Tenet told President George W. Bush and other senior officials that the CIA's Counterterrorism Center had determined that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the attacks.

While this is strange, it’s not completely out of the question that he would be privy to information linking bin Laden to the attacks beforehand, especially when you consider how intertwined Israeli intelligence is with the CIA. It is only when you combine this with all of the additional supporting evidence that the picture becomes more clear. 

On September 10th, the day before the attacks, Donald Rumsfeld famously announced that the Pentagon was missing $2.3 Trillion from its books.

What most people don’t know is that the comptroller at the time who would have had control over these funds was a Rabbi named Dov Zakheim.

Zakheim, in addition to being a part of both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Project for a New American Century, worked in the Pentagon during Operation: Cyclone, but would work in the private sector from 1987 to 2001 as CEO of SPC International—a high-technology firm that manufactured equipment to remotely control aircraft.

Another damning piece of information is the anonymous tip-off sent via the Israeli-owned Hebrew instant messaging service Odigo, warning users two hours before the attack to avoid the Twin Towers. Of the roughly 4,000 Israeli nationals who lived and worked in and around the World Trade Center, the number of casualties only ended up in the single digits. [#,#,#]

While these numbers are contested, video footage of Benyamin Netanyahu visiting ground zero shows him being briefed that only 4 Israelis died that day. Odigo cooperated with both Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, but eventually refused to provide any further information. A spokesperson for the company told the Washington Post, “Providing more details would only lead to more conjecture.”[#]

On September 4, 2001, one week before 9/11, ZIM, an Israeli state-owned shipping corporation with a 10,000 sq ft office in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, abruptly vacated its premises. This action resulted in the forfeiture of the $50,000 security deposit and the termination of their tenancy. Subsequently, no one inquired about this abrupt transition, and it has been discreetly disregarded and forgotten. [#,#]

And then there’s the tale of the “Dancing Israelis.”

On 9/11, eyewitnesses reported that they saw “Middle Eastern” men “dancing and celebrating” as the towers were engulfed in flames across the river in New Jersey. Officials were alerted, and the men were questioned and subsequently arrested. 

Explosive residue, box-cutters, and arab clothing were found in the moving van they were using registered under Urban Moving Systems, later discovered to be a Mossad front company managed by Israeli Dominic Suter.  The arrested men, Yaron Shmuel, Omer Marmari, Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, and Oded Ellner, were all Mossad agents.

I am not suggesting there is some vast Jewish conspiracy, like many half-witted writers before me, only that Israel’s government—particularly those elements acting without oversight—is just as susceptible as any other power center for corruption. Many of the above points are contested, and I encourage you to look into these things yourself and come to your own opinion.

Were the attacks on the World Trade Center the brainchild of the CIA, the Mossad, or Saudi Arabia? Could it have been orchestrated by all of the above? Who did or did not have prior knowledge?

Was Operation Cyclone intended to create the conditions that led to 9/11? Why is the Biden Administration still funneling taxpayer dollars to the Taliban?

Despite the wealth of supporting evidence amassed suggesting 9/11 was in some way an intentional outcome, there is far more that we don’t know than what we do know. 

9/11 was a pivotal moment in American history that will likely never be forgotten, but it is a story that is only ever half told. Allowing the anomalies and intrigues associated with the attacks on that day to be memory-holed is to do a great disservice to those who were lost.

September 11th will always be a day of mourning, but let it also be a day of remembrance, not just of the lives that were lost, but that true justice has yet to be served. 

Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.

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