Rice caught in
Iran-Contra-style
capers in Africa
Executive Intelligence Review, November 20,
1998
An EIR team probing the causes behind the genocidal wars that have been ravaging East and Central Africa over the last four years, has uncovered a covert arms and logistical supply network run out of the U.S. State Department, which mirrors precisely the notorious Iran-Contra arms supply operation of the 1980s. As in the case of then-Vice President George Bush and Col. Oliver North's covert Iran-Contra operations, the arms and logistical supply to marauding forces in East and Central Africa is being organized "off the books," and in direct violation of the official, public policy of the United States government toward the conflicts involved.
The parallel to the Bush-North operations is precise: Incontrovertible evidence accumulated by EIR demonstrates that the same extra-governmental "assets" used by North in widespread illegal narcotics- and arms-trafficking, are channeling arms and military aid into Central Africa. In this new "Central African" supply operation, standing in for the drug-smuggling gangsters of the Nicaraguan Contra operation, are the African "rebels" fighting the governments of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and any other Central African nation targeted by British intelligence's leading warlord in the region, Ugandan dictator Yoweri Museveni.
The two leading operatives who have been caught red-handed in such dirty operations toward Central Africa are U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, and Roger Winter, executive director of the U.S. Committee on Refugees.
EIR has uncovered two, overlapping operations. First, is the covert supply of arms to the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) of John Garang, which has waged a totally unsuccessful but nevertheless genocidal war against the Sudan government since 1983. The second involves covert military logistical aid to the so-called rebel forces arrayed against the government of Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an operation being run directly out of the U.S. State Department with the oversight of Rice.
Doing the dirty work are Israeli, American, European, and Ugandan operatives, including:
Michael Harari, a longtime top agent of Israeli foreign intelligence, the Mossad, who was a security adviser to Panamanian Defense Forces Gen. Manuel Noriega. As the Mossad station chief for Central and South America in the late 1970s and into the 1980s until the U.S. invasion of Panama, after which he returned to Israel, Harari coordinated the Mossad's gun-running and drug-trafficking operations in South America.
Alberto Prado Herreros, a suspected drug-trafficker and confirmed director of a Miami-based arms company called Lomax International. Herreros was a prime contractor for the Bush-North Contra supply operation.
Daniel Eiffe, the coordinator for Central Africa of Norwegian People's Aid, which poses as a relief organization. The Norwegian government cut it off from funding in May 1998 because of its overt military and logistical support for Garang's SPLA.
Brig. Gen. James Kazini, a nephew of Ugandan dictator Museveni and the chief of staff of the Ugandan Popular Defense Forces. Kazini has been directly in charge of the Ugandan military operations against Sudan, and is now in charge on the ground of the Ugandan army invasion of the Congo. According to reports in the pro-government Ugandan daily New Vision, Kazini was last known to be stationed in Kisangani, Congo, and aided the Ugandan-Rwandan takeover of Kisangani and Bunia.
Moreover, the parallel to North's Contra supply operation is strategic. It was after Vice President Bush permitted the British to flagrantly violate the U.S. Monroe Doctrine, by furnishing his backing of Britain's Malvinas War against Argentina in 1982, that Bush then pursued the Contra option in Nicaragua, violating Congressional restrictions through providing the Contras' needs "off the books." That caper went into high gear after the Reagan administration rejected American statesman Lyndon LaRouche's Operation Juárez solution to the South American debt crisis. LaRouche's August 1982 plan called for a debt moratorium in the Ibero-American countries and a policy of economic development based on the export of capital goods to the Southern Hemisphere. With the rejection of LaRouche's proposal, Bush forced through the bogus idea of the communist threat from the Sandinista regime in Managua, as justification for a policy that, in reality, supported the Contra drug-trafficking, boosted the Colombian narco-terrorist cartels, and flooded the United States with illegal drugs. This demonstrated that Ibero-America could expect nothing more from the United States than a British colonial-style policy of war, narco-terrorism, and economic exploitation.
In Africa today, the Nicaragua bogeyman has been replaced by the government of Sudan, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or any other government or political force on the continent which stands in the way of a policy to extract every ounce of mineral wealth, with no benefit whatever to the countries possessing such wealth. This is the driving force behind the destruction of the nation-state by mercenary armies--such as Museveni's Ugandans or Rwandan Defense Minister Paul Kagame's forces--a policy that has cost the lives of millions of people. The architects of this policy reside in London and the boardrooms of the British Commonwealth mining companies, financial institutions, and private paramilitary-security firms.
While most of the players in this trade have been based in Britain or the Commonwealth countries, our report will focus on the channel that comes into and operates through the United States and also Israel, in the hopes that the Clinton administration will take appropriate action.
The evidence gathered by the EIR team, even if incomplete, tends to confirm the many rumors and allegations circulating throughout Central Africa and among those involved in Africa policy in Europe and elsewhere, that while the U.S. government's public policy to attempt to act as the "honest mediator" in the war around the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United States is, in fact, supporting--with arms, supplies, training, and logistical support--those very forces under the control of Uganda and Rwanda, which violated international law to invade the Congo on Aug. 2, and now hold large chunks of its eastern and central territory.
Thus, while Susan Rice was engaging in highly publicized shuttling among Central African capitals, to demand that Congo allies Angola and Zimbabwe withdraw their troops from the Congo, in order to prevent a "wider conflagration," back in Washington, EIR has uncovered, her underlings were in the process of vetting private contractors to give logistical support to the Ugandan- and Rwandan-backed rebels in the Congo.
The operation mirrors precisely that carried out for the Contra supply operation out of the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office in the State Department during the 1980s. In this case, according to a confidential source, under Rice's direction, Ricardo Zuniga, operations officer for the State Department's East African Affairs section, is seeking aid from private contractors to supply and provide an airlift to Museveni's combatants in the Congo. Zuniga is reportedly a middle-level foreign service officer, with previous postings in Mexico and Portugal.
Within the State Department, it is widely believed that Rice's closest adviser on Africa is Roger Winter, director of the U.S. Committee on Refugees, who has rammed through the policy of war in Central Africa as the policy of the State Department. In September 1997, Winter, along with John Prendergast of the U.S. National Security Council, declared Rice to be one of their "team" to lead the United States into support of a total war against the government of Sudan, to be waged on the ground by the Ugandan and allied armies.
Rice's other key adviser is Philip Gourevitch, a journalist with The New Yorker, who has fashioned a career for himself in the last four years as an expert on the bloodletting in Rwanda in 1994. He is known to be personally close to Rwandan Defense Minister Kagame. Prior to joining The New Yorker, Gourevitch was the New York correspondent for the neo-conservative Jewish weekly, The Forward.[FIGURE 201]
This covert operation in support of the Congolese "rebels," and by direct implication the invasion of Ugandan and Rwanda in the Congo, contradicts the stated policy of the United States, particularly that put forward on Oct. 17 by the new U.S. Ambassador to the Congo, William Swing, who said on Kinshasa TV, "We condemned the external military interference from countries such as Rwanda and Uganda back in August. It is President Clinton who accredited me to President Kabila and his government. This should represent for you a signal and evidence of where we stand in our relations with your country. I am here to support your government."
Whose policy is Susan Rice carrying out?
EIR is in possession of more detailed information concerning the operations uncovered than we present in this report. The file is by no means closed, and EIR is continuing to dig deeper, to uncover the real causes behind the terrible slaughter and suffering that have ravaged Africa under the regional leadership of Museveni.
Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, is reported to have won her post at the U.S. State Department through strong pressure from Roger Winter, executive director of the U.S. Committee on Refugees, who pushed for her candidacy over the appointment of Howard Wolpe, now U.S. Special Envoy to the Great Lakes region, who was also a contender for the post.
Her other known patron is Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has been a life-long friend of Rice and her family, as Albright is quoted in the Washington Post of March 30.
She also comes to the administration with the vetting of the neo-colonial apparatus in the British Commonwealth, which is the source of the policies Rice is carrying out. A Rhodes Scholar, she received her masters and doctorate degrees in International Relations at New College, Oxford University. In 1992, she was the recipient of the first annual award given by the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the British International Studies Association for the "most distinguished dissertation in the United Kingdom in the field of International Relations." Her topic was "The Commonwealth Initiative in Zimbabwe, 1979-80: Implications for International Peacekeeping." In 1990, she had also been awarded the Royal Commonwealth Society's Walter Frewen Lord Prize for "outstanding research in the field of Commonwealth History."
Her first job was a management consultant in Toronto, for McKinsey and Company.
Her next posting was at the U.S. National Security Council, as director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping in February 1993, and then as Special Assistant to the President and as Senior Director for African Affairs, from March 1995 until May 1997, when she was appointed by President Clinton as Assistant Secretary.
Rice has used the clout associated with her post to ram through a policy of proxy war against Sudan by the United States through Uganda and Eritrea. She was reportedly a strong advocate of the Aug. 20 U.S. air attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, on the grounds that it was housing a chemical weapons capability--charges for which the administration has not been able to present sound evidence.
In general, Rice came into the office with a policy of attaching the United States to the "new breed" of African leaders first heralded in the Jan. 14, 1997 London Times. This breed centers around Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, and included Eritrean military dictator Isaias Afwerki, Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi, Congolese dictator Laurent Kabila, and Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame. One of this coalition's major aims was to bring down the Sudan government; however, the coalition has fallen to pieces, as war has broken out between Ethiopia and Eritrea, and between Kabila's Congo on one side and Ugandan and Rwanda on the other. Rice's "peace efforts" have come to naught in both cases.
Rice's animosity toward Sudan is unyielding, as she has stated that "Sudan is the only state in sub-Saharan Africa that poses a direct threat to U.S. national security interests." In her current post, and before that, at the NSC Africa desk, she refused to meet with Sudanese Ambassador to the United States Mahdi Ibrahim Mohamed, despite the ongoing diplomatic relations between the two countries.
She has been nearly as extreme in her targetting of Nigeria. In a speech at the Brookings Institution on March 12, Rice enunciated her policy toward Nigeria: "Let me state clearly and unequivocally to you today that an electoral victory by any military candidate in the forthcoming Presidential elections would be unacceptable"--the first time that such a policy had been so stated by Washington. Her father, Emmet Rice, was a former adviser to the Central Bank of Nigeria.
To the extent that she has any expertise, it is in peacekeeping and military operations, and Rice has been involved in the details in formulating the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI), which calls for the formation of regional armies that would deploy at the behest of supranational organizations, such as the UN Security Council, or the Organization of African Unity.
The poverty of her knowledge of Africa itself has shocked the African diplomatic corps in Washington. Further, is the common complaint, she doesn't want to learn. "Many of my colleagues on Africa have a degree of understanding and expertise that I can't pretend to have," she told the Washington Post; and, says the Post, in its adulatory March 30 profile of her, "While the top brass are enchanted, she has not captured the hearts and minds of the grunts" in the State Department. She is known for not entertaining any views contradictory to the policy that has been set for her to carry out, and for blocking the flow of information that might show that policy's weakness or failure.
She brooks no opposition, it is said, even from the U.S. President. When President Clinton, in South Africa, on March 27 had voiced his hopes for Gen. Sani Abacha's moving Nigeria toward democracy, the State Department was asked by a reporter if this did not contradict the policy stated by Rice on March 12, and which policy was correct. After first denying the President's statement, State Department spokesman James Foley stood by Rice's declaration, and stated that any other idea was "wildly hypothetical." "What Assistant Secretary Rice said stands," asserted Foley.