Drug smuggling in 1970

From a Time article published in 1970 about Americans locked up abroad for drug smuggling:

Often the youthful smugglers are suckers from the start. In Lebanon, tourist guides around Baalbek's famous Roman ruins sidle up to adventurous-looking American kids and sell them not only cheap hash but identical cheap cardboard tourist suitcases to carry it in. Airport customs officials are so familiar with the suitcases that they almost yawn as they arrest the tourists who show up with them.

Then there's this:

Beirut's notorious Sands prison, where seven Americans are currently awaiting trial, is filled with rats, homosexuals and filth.

Sardinia as a staging ground for Soviet-backed terrorists

In an interesting TED Talk on the economics of terrorism, Italian economist Loretta Napoleoni relates a story told to her by a "part-timer" in the Red Brigades, a leftist Italian terrorist organization active in the '70s:

He was sailing every summer back and forth from Lebanon, where he would pick up Soviet weapons from the PLO and then carry them all the way to Sardina, where other armed organizations in Europe would go and take their share of the arms. For that service, the Red Brigades were actually paid a fee, which went to fund the organization.

She leaves some ambiguities. Were the weapons just manufactured in the USSR, or was the Soviet leadership actually directing the weapons through the PLO? (Others have claimed that the Soviet Union was directly responsible.) And were they being sold in some sort of market to all comers, or were the Red Brigades merely transporting them to groups pre-selected by the PLO (or Czechs/Soviets)? Her wording ("take their share") and the fact that they were paid a fee (as opposed to earning profit from the sales) hints at the latter.

This all happened decades ago, but Italy still hasn't escaped from the influence of Russian spies. As late as 2006, a British MEP gave a "one-minute speech" in the European Parliament where he quoted the late Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko as saying that he was warned:

Don’t go to Italy, there are many KGB agents among the politicians. Romano Prodi is our man there.

Romano Prodi, in fact, has a history of shady ties with the Red Brigades. In 1978, he was somehow privy to the location of a prominent politician kidnapped by the Brigades (and later killed), which he explained as having been revealed to him in a séance.

PS, this is my 500th post. Happy birthday, blog!

Russia and the Middle East

I found this article on Stratfor about the geopolitics of the Middle East, and they have intelligence that Russia is beefing up its presence in the Middle East and likely looking to return to its prominent Cold War role in the Middle East. There's so much information in the article that I'll just quote a huge chunk of it:

With Israel sorting itself out internally and the neighboring Arabs lying in wait for the final outcome, this brief respite presents an opportunity for the Russians in the Middle East theater. Russia brought the world back into a Cold War paradigm with its August invasion of Georgia. The idea of a revived Cold War gained further traction in recent weeks when key Russian leaders emerged from the shadows and started popping up in places such as Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua to sit down with their old Latin American drinking buddies and discuss a slew of arms deals.

While the Russians appear to be paying a lot of attention to Latin America, the Middle East remains a viable playing ground for Russia to turn the screws on the West. In fact, Stratfor already has been getting indications that Russian intelligence officers are pouring into Beirut — a traditional Cold War battleground.

Of course, much has changed since the days of Soviet-sponsored chaos in the Middle East. Many of the Palestinian leftist leaders with whom the Soviets worked are either dead or retired. Groups have gone extinct. Alliances have shifted.

Nonetheless, the Russians still have a menu of options in getting back into the Middle East game. They will find no shortage of disaffected Palestinians who are sick of the current state of affairs and would be more than happy to have a foreign state sponsor. Former Marxist groups such as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, after being beaten heavily in the past year by the Turks in northern Iraq, would likely jump at the opportunity to link up with their old Russian backers. Lebanon, which is now experiencing a higher-than-usual degree of communal volatility, has a range of factions for the Russians to choose from. And the list goes on.

Should the Russians decide that it is worth their while to incur the risk of provoking both Israel and Turkey, the Middle East is the next logical place for Moscow to ramp up covert activity. And the time to do so is now, while the Israelis are still distracted.

Turkey already sees the Russians coming. The Turks were extremely displeased to see Russia at war in the Caucasus, and they now are doing everything they can to keep the Russians as far away from the Middle East as possible. For this reason, Stratfor is hearing that the Turks are growing more and more insistent that the peace talks between Israel and Syria move forward — and quickly.

Syria, meanwhile, is in an interesting position. On the one hand, they can listen to their Turkish mediators and pursue an opening with the United States through a peace deal with Israel. On the other hand, they can choose to jump back into the Cold War game with the Russians and work against Western interests, taking all the risks that come with such a plan. In any case, the Syrians will have a lot of hard thinking to do over the next several weeks.

What the article didn't mention (though Stratfor has mentioned it before, as have Turkish journalists) is the suggestion that Russia might already have contracted out at least one operation with the PKK: the bombing of the BTC pipeline right before the South Ossetia war.

There's also no mention of Iran, though Russia's policy vis-à-vis Iran has been quite successful. It has enabled Iran to remain a minor pariah, just isolated enough to prevent the West from being willing to depend on Iran as a transit point of energy from the east, but not crazy enough to start any wars (though this would drive up energy prices and further bog down the US/Israel, which could be useful to Russia). This is significant because besides through Iran, the only other two ways to get energy from the east into Europe are through Russia and through the Caucasus. Russia obviously controls its own territory, and with the South Ossetia war, has successfully closed the Caucasus to Western energy pipelines (all three of them).