Silvan Becker

From 9/11 Encyclopedia:

Due to the book "Bin Laden- the Forbidden Truth" by Brisard and Dasquié , (->) in 1994, Bin Laden 
was accused by Libya of being behind the killing of two german intelligence agents Silvan Becker and his wife. 

At that time, as reported, Bin Laden supported a fundamentalist group called al-Muqatila, 
made up of Libyans who had fought with him against the Soviets in Afghanistan. According to the former MI5 agent David Shayler
(See Shayler-gate), al-Muqatila tried to kill to assassinate Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi  in November 1996.

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U.S. Efforts to Make Peace Summed up by 'OIL'

 A new book alleges years of attempts to arrest Osama bin Laden
 being blocked by the U.S., one of the authors tells LARA MARLOWE

 ANALYSIS: The fate of John O'Neill, the Irish-American FBI agent
 who for years led U.S. investigations into Osama bin Laden's
 Al-Qaeda network, is the most chilling revelation in the book
 Bin Laden: The Hidden Truth, published in Paris this week.

 O'Neill investigated the bombings of the World Trade Centre in
 1993, a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the US embassies in
 Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole last year.

 Jean-Charles Brisard, who wrote a report on bin Laden's finances
 for the French intelligence agency DST and is co-author of
 Hidden Truth, met O'Neill several times last summer. He
 complained bitterly that the US State Department - and behind it
 the oil lobby who make up President Bush's entourage - blocked
 attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt.

 The US Ambassador to Yemen, Ms. Barbara Bodine, forbade O'Neill
 and his team of so- called Rambos (as the Yemeni authorities
 called them) from entering Yemen. In August 2001, O'Neill
 resigned in frustration and took up a new job as head of
 security at the World Trade Center. He died in the September
 11th attack.

 Brisard and his co-author Guillaume Dasquié, the Editor of
 Intelligence Online, say their book is a tribute to O'Neill. The
 FBI agent had told Brisard: "All the answers, everything needed
 to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organisation, can be found in
 Saudi Arabia."

 But US diplomats shrank from offending the Saudi royal family.
 O'Neill went to Saudi Arabia after 19 US servicemen died in the
 bombing of a military installation in Dhahran in June 1996.
 Saudi officials interrogated the suspects, declared them guilty
 and executed them - without letting the FBI talk to them. "They
 were reduced to the role of forensic scientists, collecting
 material evidence on the bomb site," Brisard says.

 O'Neill said there was clear evidence in Yemen of bin Laden's
 guilt in the bombing of the USS Cole, in which 17 US servicemen
 died, but that the State Department prevented him from getting
 it.

 Brisard and Dasquié discovered that the first country to issue
 an international arrest warrant against bin Laden was not the
 US, but Moamar Gadafy's Libya, in March 1998. The confidential
 notice, published for the first time in their book, was sent by
 the Libyan interior ministry to Interpol on March 16th, 1998,
 and accuses bin Laden of murdering two German intelligence
 agents, Silvan Becker and his wife, in Libya in 1994.

 Bin Laden supported a fundamentalist group called al-Muqatila,
 made up of Libyans who had fought with him against the Soviets
 in Afghanistan.

 Al-Muqatila wanted to assassinate Gadafy, whom it considered an
 infidel. According to the former MI5 agent David Shayler,
 British intelligence - also in league with al-Muqatila - tried
 to assassinate Gadafy in November 1996.

 It was because of British collaboration with al-Muqatila that
 the Interpol warrant was ignored, Brisard says. Since September
 11th, al-Muqatila has been placed on President Bush's list of
 "terrorist groups".

 The central thesis of Brisard and Dasquié's book is sure to join
 the annals of 21st century conspiracy theories. The writers
 document negotiations between the Bush administration and the
 Taliban between February and August of this year.

 Less convincingly, they conjecture that the September 11th
 suicide attacks were the result of the failure of those
 negotiations.

 The chief motivation behind US attempts to make peace with the
 Taliban can be summed up in one word: oil. The former Soviet
 republics of Central Asia - Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and
 especially "the new Kuwait", Kazakhstan - have vast oil and gas
 reserves. But Russia has refused to allow the US to extract it
 through Russian pipelines and Iran is considered a dangerous
 route. That left Afghanistan.

 The US oil company Chevron - where Mr. Bush's National Security
 Advisor Condoleeza Rice was a director throughout the 1990s - is
 deeply involved in Kazakhstan. In 1995, another US company,
 Unocal (formerly Union Oil Company of California) signed a
 contract to export $8 billion worth of natural gas through a $3
 billion pipeline which would go from Turkmenistan through
 Afghanistan to Pakistan.

 The authors recall how the State Department applauded the
 Taliban takeover in September 1996, five months after a US
 assistant secretary of state warned "economic opportunities will
 be missed" if political stability was not restored in
 Afghanistan.

 Laila Helms, the part Afghan niece of the former CIA director
 and former US Ambassador to Tehran Richard Helms, is described
 as the Mata-Hari of US-Taliban negotiations.

 Ms. Helms brought Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, an adviser to
 Mullah Muhammad Omar, to Washington for five days in March
 2001 - after the Taliban had destroyed the ancient Buddhas of
 Bamiyan. Hashimi met the directorate of Central Intelligence at
 the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State
 Department.

 In negotiations which continued until July, the US then took a
 more discreet position, letting the UN envoy Francesc Vendrell
 do most of the work and appointing a former US Ambassador to
 Pakistan, Thomas Simons, to represent the US at informal
 meetings in Berlin.

 The last direct US contact with the Taliban was on August 2nd,
 2001, when Christina Rocca, the director of Asian affairs at the
 State Department, met the Taliban Ambassador in Islamabad. Ms.
 Rocca was previously in charge of contacts with Islamist
 guerrilla groups at the CIA, where in the 1980s, she oversaw the
 delivery of Stinger missiles to Afghan mujaheddin.

 Last February, the Taliban had indicated it might be willing to
 hand over bin Laden, but by June, according to Brisard and
 Dasquié, the US began considering military action. "The US
 thought they could 'decouple' Osama bin Laden from the Taliban,"
 Brisard says. "What they did not understand was that without bin
 Laden, the Taliban regime wouldn't have existed."

 By dispatching Francesc Vendrell to see the exiled King Zaher
 Shah in Rome and raising the threat of military action,
 Washington "backed the Taliban into a corner", the authors say.
 For the Taliban - assuming its leadership had advance knowledge
 of the suicide attacks - September 11th was a sort of
 pre-emptive strike.

 Brisard and Dasquié claim a significant part of the Saudi royal
 family supports bin Laden. "Saudi Arabia has always protected
 bin Laden - or protected itself from him," says Brisard. He
 points out that attacks inside the kingdom targeted US
 interests, never the Saudis.

 Khalid bin Mahfouz is the former chairman of the kingdom's
 biggest bank, the National Commercial Bank, who, with 10 family
 members received Irish citizenship in December 1990. Brisard and
 Dasquié call him "the banker of terror".

 The 73-year-old Mahfouz is now under house arrest in the Saudi
 resort of Taif, accused by the FBI and CIA of having diverted $2
 billion to Islamic charities that helped bin Laden. 

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