This is a really beautiful, well-made and interesting film about how falconry expert, Alan Parrot (pronounced puh-ROH) found himself in a position to help get Osama bin Laden apprehended, only to find himself completely ignored by the US Government.
As Alan explains, “To his sons, they see him as a father. To his wives, they see him as a husband. To the United States, we see him as a mass murderer. To my small organization, I see him as a falcon smuggler. And in that capacity, I went after him.”
Toward the end of the film, Alan muses, “And only after all of these obstructions, I realized, ‘You know, nobody’s going to let us get bin Laden. They’re going to hurt us if I go after him.'”
But before he reaches that conclusion, the viewer is treated to a panorama of both human and natural history, from the Gulf States, to Iran to Central Asia, to Europe and the Arctic, all around the ancient sport of falconry – and all of this colliding with the US Security State.
Who is Alan Parrot, arrayed in Turkmen regalia, so savvy to the ways of the Rogue CIA, blowing the whistle on the crooked deeds of Hillary, Obama and Biden?
Parrot, who’s been a devout Sikh for decades grew up in Maine. He departed for Iran to pursue his dream of being a falconer and succeeded in getting hired by the Shah of Iran. He also worked for the royal families of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Falconry is an ancient hunting technique whose popularity as a sport has boomed around the world in recent decades and the advent of attaching GPS transmitters to falconry birds has increased their average lifespan.
Falconry is a major status symbol in the Middle East and the finest raptors can command prices of over a million dollars each. Saudi Ambassadors request Gyr Falcons from Sweden and Denmark in exchange for better exchange rates on oil. Osama bin Laden was an avid falconer and he was known to attend the annual camps in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Central Asia while he was wanted around the world for mass murder.
Many Arabs say they feel most at home at a falconry camp. And as one US security expert here explains, they all land their planes in the middle of a desert and exchange cash and there are no official records of their agreements.
“When they hold a Majlis out in the desert, with the Pakistanis, with the generals, and hand out the money, and you’ve got a Pakistani leadership that wants to use Islam to unify the country, it’s all done in one business meeting. Falcons, madrasas, buying-off generals, buying-off the army, funding the Afghan resistance. The princes, the royal families in the Gulf paid for al-Qaeda.”
Parrot came to know an Iranian smuggler who said he’d met Bin Laden six times inside Iran between 2003 and 2008. The smuggler described bin Laden as “healthy” and so relaxed that “he travels with only four bodyguards.” But nobody in the US Government cared to meet him.
Alan says, “Nobody answered our requests for disclosures. We just encountered deafening silence. What the Hell is that all about?”
Finally, in December 2009, Bin Laden’s son came out and explained that his family had been under house arrest in a gated compound north of Tehran since 2001, which was what Alan had been explaining in more detail since January 2005.
Despite numerous reports about the detainments of Osama bin Laden’s family by Al Jazeera, these reports received almost no traction in the US mainstream media.
As of 2010, Alan said Osama was still in Iran, saying, “Bin Laden is given a long leash. He cannot leave Iran. If he does leave Iran, his family will be sacrificed in a very unpleasant way.”
Parrot has been trying to alert the US Government about bin Laden’s whereabouts for over 15 years, sending them the GPS data for the falcons that Bin Laden was flying. “They could locate him to a one-square-mile area using those unique signals,” he said. He was never contacted for follow-up. He says he sent “Tapes, registered letters, everything to Clinton.”
The Cabal that has been in control of the US for the past several decades is not in the least bit interested in any of this.
As one of the US Government insiders interivewed in the film explains, “No one wanted to embarrass the Saudis. No one wanted to drag-out before Congress what did or didn’t happen when Vice President Bush was working for Reagan. Everyone seemed to have the feeling that we should just let the whole matter drop.”
Yes, lest they jeopardize a large purchase of fighter jets from American corporations by the government of the UAE.
Hopefully, the new Trump administration will not continue to let this matter drop – and if former Congressman Curt Weldon has anything to do with it, they won’t.
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OFFICIAL SUMMARY
by AlanParrot (on Bitchute account created on Octobe 17, 2020)
FEATHERED COCAINE is not a wildlife documentary. It is a documentary about the international trade of falcons. After the trade of drugs, people and weapons, smuggling falcons is ranked No 4 in the list of the most profitable illegal trades. Most people are not aware that the effects of the falcon trade has exerted huge influence over thousands of years on politics, economy and society all around the world. FEATHERED COCAINE reveals, in an investigative way the contexts between the trade of falcons and historical events, where royal dynasties, institutions like the CIA and the KGB, the oil industry and Al Caida were involved.
Falconry is merely the entry point into a world of international intrigue and global terrorist networks, which are the true focus of this gripping documentary. Prepare to have your preconceptions jostled as you sink ever deeper into a realm known by few, and seemingly, a realm that many powerful forces wish to remain unknown.
The film’s protagonist, Alan Parrot, seems by all accounts to be an unlikely hero: Mild mannered, a loner, a Caucasian American convert to Sikhism. But don’t let the quiet demeanor fool you. Mr Parrot is a fearless defender of the object of passion: Falcons the world over. In fact, he has made it his mission in life to save them from poachers and the black market, as well as the diluting of their gene pool through the lucrative creation of hybrids.
This documentary was filmed and released shortly before the ‘supposed’ execution of Osama bin Laden, who CIA Operative Alan Parrot & his Team had met with 6 times between 2004 & 2010. As of October 11th, 2020, Alan Parrot has revealed he will be disclosing terabytes of stunning and revelatory evidence of what really happened with Osama bin Laden, Extortion 17 and the attack on Benghazi including Navy SEAL Team 6.
This is soon to become the biggest story of the decade! Updates to this developing story can be followed at the original reporter, Anna Khait @ & the Benghazi Whistleblower, Nick Noe.
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ROUGH AUTO-TRANSCRIPT
I’m interested in falcons, but I’ve been sucked into a whirlpool of intrigue involving terrorism against my will, against my interest. But what do you do when you walk in a room and you see a falcon and a terrorist? Something that you didn’t plan to see. You can report it, but then what do you do when nobody wants to hear it? We’re fighting Arab smugglers.
We’re fighting the Russian mafia. We’re fighting Central Asian governments who are helping them and making money. We’re fighting the State Department that’s afraid to offend Arabs.
And Western biologists underwriting the whole thing as sustainable with the authority of the United Nations. What we have today is a black market which is so severely out of control, it can only be characterized as something equivalent to a drug trade. These birds are feathered cocaine.
How many times has he been in jail? I don’t know, four or five times. Four or five different times in different places because he was so convinced what he was doing is correct. But he was being opposed by people who were either handling falcons just for sport or for financial gain.
And it didn’t bother him a bit who he confronted. The smugglers have kidnapped and politically imprisoned me two times. Once in Mongolia, once in the Abu Dhabi United Arab Emirates with my staff.
I’ve had nine bones broken and lost an inch in height, which is not entirely bad because I can just tie the turban an inch higher. I publicly exposed falcon smuggling by the Minister of Nature in Mongolia and several other government officials. I didn’t get any appreciation.
I got a midnight knock on the door, whispered threats through the door. Next thing I know I wake up in the morning. The bathroom sink was broken over my side.
They broke two of my ribs. They broke five of my vertebrae which were fractured and two more vertebrae were flattened. I lost an inch in height.
And I was left for dead. The perceptive abilities, the sensitivities of these birds are beyond human capacity to comprehend. So you have to marvel at them.
And then you have to contemplate what is it like for such a sensitive creature to be caught by a Middle East smuggler, whether it be a Western scientist working for a sheikh or an Arab himself, wrapped up like an Egyptian mummy, stuffed into a mailing tube and smuggled down to the Gulf and sold for a six-figure price or seven-figure price. What goes through the head of a sensitive creature? I mean, if it was just a rock or a dinosaur egg or something like that, no problem. But these are sentient beings.
And they deserve protection. I used to be in this business many, many years ago. It seems like a whole other lifetime.
But I sold gyrfalcons to Arabs. They paid $26,000, $30,000, $35,000 for a gyrfalcon. And it was dead a month later when they came back and asked for another one.
And today, they pay over a million dollars for a gyr. And they know they’re only going to get one month of pleasure hunting with the fastest bird in the world. They’ll see some great flights.
And then that Arctic bird will die in a desert environment, a place that’s so alien and hostile to their immune system and to their metabolism that they just can’t handle it, and they die. I seeded the market. I was the first person to ever legally catch and sell wild gyrfalcons for the past few centuries.
I was the first. And I felt like I opened Pandora’s box. And now I have to close it.
One thing the Arabs excel at is hunting and creating camps in the desert for the tribes to meet. The richest and the poorest Arabs are always at home in the falconry camps. I’ve been with several Arab heads of state in the desert in their falconry hunting camps.
Every one of them tells me that it’s the only place they feel relaxed and at home. In the falconry camps where I visited, there were always very nefarious characters coming and going, weapons merchants. Victor Bout was a frequent guest of Sheikh Zayed’s hunting camps.
And Osama bin Laden, for many years, made annual pilgrimages to the royal falconry camps in both Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. The former Saudi ambassador, Prince Turki, went hunting with bin Laden many times. The foreign minister of the Emirates hosted bin Laden as a VIP guest in his falconry camp, even after bin Laden was an internationally wanted mass murderer.
When bin Laden lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan, the locals hated him because he stole all the falcons. He used them for his own personal falconry, and he gave the best ones as “hadiyah” gifts, as priceless gifts to the royal sheikhs from the Emirates and the princes from Saudi Arabia.
To his sons, they see him as a father. To his wives, they see him as a husband. To the United States, we see him as a mass murderer. To my small organization, I see him as a falcon smuggler. And in that capacity, I went after him.
For some time, this was my bedroom.
And my birds used to come in the window and sit on the balcony here. And my parents would have guests down in the living room. And once in a while, someone would get crapped on.
Yes, he is addicted to falcons. Yeah, no question about it. And I don’t think that’s entirely bad, to have somebody who cares a lot to protect them.
I was faced with a choice when I was 18. One was to go to college, get a PhD. And the other was to go to the Middle East, just to play with falcons.
I wanted to go to Iran to be a professional falconer. So I knew my parents would try to stop me. I told them I was hitchhiking to California.
I hitchhiked to West Virginia and called them by collect phone calls so they would see tangible proof I was going west. And then I went back up to Boston and took the first plane to Tehran.
It was astounding. We really didn’t know what to think. We didn’t know whether something had happened to him or not, or whether he’d ever be back. How many months was it that we never heard from him? I don’t remember.
But it was considerable. When the doors opened on that airplane, I was hit by a blast furnace of hot air coming in the door with sights and smells of a country that I had only read about in magazines. In those days, you couldn’t even get good pictures of falcons.
So I drew a picture of a falcon. I’d show it to a guy and I’d say, where can I find this? And he would say, come tomorrow. And some old guy, 80 years old, would take me by one finger.
He brought me to a gated compound. When the gates opened, I was greeted by a falconer’s paradise. The lawn was covered with falcons, golden eagles, goshawks.
This was the royal falconry center for the Shah of Iran. And I was hired by Nuri Tajbakhsh to train the falcons for the Shah at the age of 18. To me, Sikh is closest to falcon.
I knew the moment I learned that the 10th Sikh guru was called Chitra Bajwala, the lord of the white falcon. He always had a white shirt falcon with him. There was a war fought over this falcon, and I figured if it’s good enough for the founder of the Sikh religion, by God, I could live with that.
It was the opening into a new era for me, a new dream, a new paradise. So it was not just a physical thing. It was an emotional thing, and for me it was even a spiritual thing.
It was a big step of my movement into the Middle East. After working for the Shah for a year, I knew I was good at what I was doing, but I was still basically just a bird perch, a human bird perch. And I was training his birds, but there was this nagging feeling that somehow I wasn’t reaching my full potential as a human bird perch.
So I returned to the States, enrolled at Cornell University in an undergraduate biology program. Wasn’t a very good student, however, because I was still dreaming about playing with falcons. So I left Cornell after three years and developed the funding and the concept of a sustainable program for giraffe falcons that we exported to Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi, the UAE president.
Falcons are the ultimate status symbol. That’s why they’re called al-har, which means the priceless. When you pay money for a falcon in the Middle East, for al-har, you can never pay money for this.
You can pay the money for the labor of the man who brings the bird to you, but the bird is too perfect, too priceless, too valuable, too free to pay money for. So you pay the man, not for the falcon. King Khalid called me from Saudi Arabia.
King Khalid wanted to buy my bird. Money is not a problem. We’ll send an airplane.
You can ask any price, and it’s yours. A lot of people wanted that bird, and I didn’t sell it to anybody. I kept that bird.
The bird actually was killed. An Arab gentleman was asking me if he could buy the bird to stuff it and put it in a bell jar on his desk, and I refused. He kept calling me and calling me, and finally I told him that if I would sell, I would give him my dead falcon, which he could stuff and put on his desk on one condition.
He said, OK, fine, I agree before you ask. I said, OK, I want you to kill your son, give him to me, I’ll stuff him and put him in a glass jar in the corner of my living room. He stopped calling me.
When you look in different cultures, you always find the falcon as a symbol. You can find it in the Egyptian culture, the Arabic culture, the Chinese culture, the European culture, where the falcon or the birds of prey is a symbol of power, beauty, and some divine, divine thing. If we go back in the history, we can see that the falcons, in fact, they really have played a role in history, a very high-valued role in history, because you could get some really good benefits of using these falcons.
The king of Denmark, he used the white falcons collected in Greenland, Iceland. He sent 10 of the white falcons to the king of France, 50 falcons to the king of Spain, to have their permission to sail with the fleet to the Mediterranean. So these falcons were really valued gifts.
Still today, there can be some sort of this type of trade. There’s been at least two requests from Saudi Arabia to both Denmark and to Sweden through their ambassadors where there has been an offer of better trade amongst other with oil. If Sweden or Denmark could bring some gyrfalcons to the market down there.
So still has some value, these birds. When the Soviet Union collapsed and all the different states, Kazakhstan, etc., there was a more or less free market and no regulation. There was a really big trade of the wild falcons.
People were knowing that the falcons had a value. Between 1981 and 1991, in any given year, there were only about 3,000 falcons in the Middle East. It could have continued forever.
When Russia opened up, it was at a high point, 14,000 falcons coming out of Central Asia. It cannot continue this way. Now it’s an unsustainable black market.
Before it was a sustainable market with some black market. Now it’s mostly bad. After the fall of the Soviet Union, I had to divorce myself from my former employers to whom I was supplying legal falcons, the royal sheikhs and princes of the Arabian Peninsula.
I dedicated my life to shutting down this black market. Always the bottom line is money. That’s why they’re doing it, to make money.
There’s lots of it to be made, unfortunately. I had information just two years ago of smugglers being in the province of Quebec where there is a form of deer falcon that’s very sought after by the Saudis. So no, they’re still doing it, and I suspect will always continue to do it because ounce for ounce, a deer falcon’s worth more money than heroin.
And the penalties for smuggling are a whole lot less. So as a profit project, much better to smuggle birds. Prince Bandar admitted his guilt.
He signed this check, Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, $150,000. We had his signature analyzed by Ronald Motley, the World Trade Center lawyer, and also the Saudi Institute, confirmed. It’s just an endless pile of material.
Here’s the Saudi prince smuggling falcons out of Mongolia on a Tristar jet. All with the approval of the Mongolian government, which was breaking its own law. I was in Kamchatka lobbying the Kamchatka government for permission to protect the deer falcons and stop the smuggling.
I had to become friends with the number one wildlife conservation officer, Dr. Vladimir Santalov. Dr. Santalov finally said that he would like me to pay $25,000 for every deer falcon, and if I could take out a certain number of deer falcons out of Kamchatka on the black market, if I would pay for them, he would organize the use of a Russian government submarine, nuclear submarine, to take the falcons under the water from Kamchatka through the Pacific, past Japan, and surfacing in the port of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. I was shocked.
It sounded like something straight out of a James Bond movie. When I was last in the Emirates, I saw for sale falcons brought down from Kamchatka. The starting price was $80,000, and they had birds that sold for over a million dollars.
They actually had a storefront in Abu Dhabi. They had a shop where they sold falcon equipment and falcons. All the sheikhs knew about it.
It was 100% illegal, and they were all wild. A few years ago, they were hunting falcons in our Jambul region. In the morning, they would let their people in with Kalashnikovs, and they would kill all the falcons, even the small ones, so that the falcons wouldn’t interfere.
At the time, I was ashamed to say this, but our special forces were there to protect us. They did it. How many times have I been told that the Arabs consider themselves Muslims, that they are Ghanaians? I doubt that this is true, because they don’t have the right to kill innocent creatures.
If they are prevented from killing a human being, they don’t feel sorry for it. That’s the kind of people I consider. There used to be a lot of falcons here, and a lot of other wild animals.
In Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the main food is large sand. Now that there are no more falcons, this sand is dangerous. It spreads diseases and plagues.
We used to come here and see falcons flying around, or pigeons flying around. But now there are no more. We just sit here.
This is a hybrid. I’m very against it. It should preserve its genetic integrity.
It’s a million years old. It was created by God. It should stay that way.
I’m against it. It’s not just for entertainment. It’s not a sport.
It should be done in nature. The biggest threat to falcons today, even greater than the smuggling, is genetic pollution and hybrids. Hybrids are when you cross two kinds of falcons.
The business with this artificial insemination started about 25, 30 years ago. The falconers rather soon found out that this was an easy way to produce new type of falcons. Then you had a greater and greater demand, especially from the Arabian market on these hybrid birds.
It’s a wholesale slaughter. These birds don’t stand a chance if this continues. And I mean only another five years perhaps.
If this continues five more years, there’ll be nothing left of what we know as wild falcons, distinct falcons that are unique to certain areas, like your Icelandic falcons. It’s all going to change. After decades of fighting this black market and having all the doors closed on us, having been attacked, having watched the falcons become regionally extinct and people getting murdered, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s a lot more at stake here.
It’s not just a matter of people trying to please Arab smugglers. It struck me that terrorists cannot have a board meeting in the Marriott Hotel. The only viable place is in the traditional Arab hunting camps.
These are al-Qaeda’s boardroom. And I was supplying and training the falcons, without which these camps could not exist. I started to notice this during my career with Sheikh Zayed.
It’s not just a matter of helping Arabs with a hobby. It’s a matter of helping Arabs network with terrorists. I spent 25 years in the Middle East.
I mean, it’s, you know, just, you know, they’re people. They’re people like other people. If you have billions and billions and untold billions, as they do today, people indulge themselves.
When these people come, they come out to falcon camps. They’ve got these bifurcated lives where they’re enormously wealthy, and yet they’re obligated to give out zakat. A lot of this zakat goes into fundamentalist schools.
And when they hold a Majlis out in the desert, with the Pakistanis, with the generals, and hand out the money, and you’ve got a Pakistani leadership that wants to use Islam to unify the country, it’s all done in one business meeting. Falcons, madrasas, buying off generals, buying off the army, funding the Afghan resistance. The princes, the royal families in the Gulf paid for al-Qaeda.
They would meet with al-Qaeda people to falconry camps. I mean, this has been seen on overhead. We know it exists.
You show up and you say, here is $100 million in cash. Take the money, and they’re buying redemption, if you like, as a Catholic would. It’s like going in and lighting a candle for them, is giving this money.
The entire 9-11 operation was not funded out of bin Laden’s personal pocket. It was not funded by Taliban. It was funded out of the Gulf.
Falconry camps are just a metaphor for the way business is done in the Middle East. If you’re going to send money to bin Laden, you do not want to send it by bank transfer. All that Gulf money came through falconry camps, came in cash, fly the airplanes in, leave the cash, come home, and there’s no proof.
I mean, how hard is that? It’s called money laundering. Before September 11th, the State Department was concerned about these falconry hunting camps because they were part of a pattern of contact between the UAE, elements of the UAE, and elements of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, including al-Qaeda. Airplanes flew in in violation of U.S. sanctions.
There were other concerns about flights between the UAE and Afghanistan that might be carrying weapons or other materials to support al-Qaeda and the Taliban. When the United States and Pakistan entered into cooperation against the Taliban, the Pakistan government disclosed to the Americans the existence of an airfield in Pakistan that was entirely dedicated to falcon hunting. It was a sort of transit point for visiting sheikhs from the Gulf to their camps.
And the United States had no idea that it was there. So that’s a signal of the kind of infrastructure that was associated with these camps. In the winter of 1999, the CIA encouraged a group of Afghans that were working for the agency to try to locate Osama bin Laden reliably enough so that the president could consider ordering one of these cruise missile strikes.
These Afghan agents gathered information that Osama bin Laden was going to attend a falcon hunting camp in the deserts south of Kandahar that had been arranged by guests from the United Arab Emirates. The CIA, as its first step, ordered satellites above this location and took photographs of the camp in some detail. They showed hunting camps.
They showed the C-130, the camouflage pattern on the airplane, and the tail number led the Central Intelligence Agency to conclude that it belonged to the government of the United Arab Emirates. The host of that camp was Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE minister of foreign affairs. He was hosting Osama bin Laden in this falconry camp as a VIP guest.
You see the foreign minister’s airplane there. Normally, then you sit the guy down and say, all right, who was at the camp? How was this arranged? How did you get, you know, who was the Taliban? And the guy sits down and submits to a briefing because the man’s indicted, bin Laden. Or he sits you down and says, he was never there.
You’d get some sort of answer, but we are too afraid to go in and ask those questions because we need cheap oil and we need jobs after we leave the government. Then in the early winter of 1999, when the CIA came up with a plan to attack a hunting camp in Afghanistan at which it felt that Osama bin Laden was present or was not present, that recommendation or that plan was ultimately aborted. Did you recommend against that plan? Yes, Senator.
What I did was to call the director of central intelligence and say that I had finally been presented with satellite photography of the facility. And it was very clear to me that this looked like something other than a terrorist camp. It looked like a luxury hunting trip.
And I asked him to look into it personally. When he did, he called back and he said that he was no longer recommending the attack. But Richard Clark only referred to it as a luxury hunting camp.
And he had the luxury of overhead viewing with satellites to see these camps, yet to our government, to our people, he referred to a city, a tented city as a luxury hunting camp, and he called off the bombing. There had been negotiations throughout this period over a large purchase of American fighter jets from American corporations by the government of the UAE. The counterterrorism and national security advisor, Richard Clark, had been involved in those negotiations.
Alan and his work and his revelations have been completely ignored. And it’s not like he came and he said he saw something. He has everything documented.
He has film, he has documentation, he has correspondence, he almost lost his life in Mongolia and other places. It’s not like he’s coming and he’s just making allegations. There is heavy documentation, yet nobody was willing to act upon it.
Why not? It’s money. The people in the State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, know that when they leave the White House, that’s the end of their government service, and they need money. You cannot afford to offend the Gulf Arabs because they’ve got the money.
It’s the golden rule. He has the gold, makes the rules. Of course, the question always comes up if Bin Laden would have been taken out at that particular money camp, would there have been a 9-11? Bin Laden, of course, and his operators planned 9-11, and they planned it in Afghanistan.
So perhaps if action would have been taken against the targeted information and intelligence we had of that particular money camp, of Bin Laden being there, in all due respect for all the naysayers and people who look at this, could we have prevented 9-11? The fact is, probably, by taking out Bin Laden in 1999 and many of his operatives, 9-11 may not have happened. 9-11, since 9-11, there’s been no investigation of the Gulf, the financing. There’s been no pressure put on Saudi Arabia, on the Emirates, any other country, to explain why they protected Bin Laden and why the administration did nothing.
Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make.
Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. I trusted the Bush administration was dealing with al-Qaeda and protecting the world. I never thought it would be up to my group of people to bring Bin Laden to justice.
I run a wildlife conservation group. My job is to save falcons from smugglers and to stop genetic pollution. And I never dreamed that this was also my responsibility, what we’ve been dealing with.
In order to protect falcons in Central Asia, I have to associate with some very diverse characters. And one of my team members, who is codenamed T2, was running a rat line from a border state through Iran up to Turkmenistan in Russia. T2 is a smuggler.
He doesn’t smuggle wildlife, but he knows how the smuggling rat lines work all through Central Asia. And he encountered – T2 encountered Bin Laden when Bin Laden was falconry hunting in Balochistan.
Six meetings happened at that same time the Bush administration was telling the world that Bin Laden was living in a cave in Waziristan. And as a result of the administration’s disclosures, billions of dollars were allocated, territorial incursions were forced onto Pakistan while their civilians were bombed, all in the hunt of al-Qaeda’s leaders who are today living in Iran. Fact is, Bin Laden doesn’t live in Waziristan. He doesn’t have a home there. He doesn’t have a post office box there. He is a guest of the Iranian government.
When Alan and his group first approached me, I was really intrigued by the idea that maybe we could do a good job and help the U.S. government locate Osama Bin Laden.
I think the most intriguing thing about the information that Alan’s source provided was the ability to electronically triangulate Osama Bin Laden’s location. Each of Osama Bin Laden’s falcons were equipped with a little backpack that had a radio transmitter. And they broadcast on unique frequencies that Osama Bin Laden could always track his birds down and retrieve them.
Well, these unique frequencies had a range of some 10 miles in cluttered area and over 100 miles in line of sight. So my thought was it should have been a very simple thing to establish a listening post outside the Iranian border but capable of sweeping this area, looking for those frequencies during the falcon hunting season and then triangulate where those frequencies were coming about, and that would give you the true location of Osama Bin Laden within, say, a square mile. In 2005, after we had received some very credible and cooperative intelligence based on the sighting of Bin Laden in Iran in November of 2004, we had processed a lot of information and intelligence to the FBI and to the Pentagon and to Secretary Rumsfeld and his assistant secretaries, undersecretaries.
We had looked for some follow-up by our military and by our intelligence people to validate or invalidate the information we received. I had just returned from Israel, from the Middle East, and went to the Pentagon when I got back and then reinforced with the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations the intel that we had on Bin Laden. Nothing happened.
My attorney works in the intelligence community. He had a frank discussion, and he was told, yes, we know Bin Laden’s in Iran. It’s a trade secret.
Leave him alone. Then two of those CIA officials told my attorney, if your team goes into Iran, as they are planning, to catch Bin Laden and deliver him to the United States, we will leak your activities to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and when you are in the desert, chasing Bin Laden, a helicopter will appear on the horizon, and it will take you to Iranian prison. They will do our dirty work for us, so leave him alone.
I spent a lot of time debriefing Iranian defectors, people who have worked for various Iranian intelligence organizations, and for whatever reason, they thought they were about to be killed, their families were in jeopardy, they decide to leave, and they come out with something. They generally come out with documents, with information, things that they think that they can use to provide for their family in the future. Now, one of these defectors came to me in early 2003, and I cite his information in my book, Countdown to Crisis, and he told me of meetings that took place in Iran before the September 11th attacks between Ayman Zawahiri, the number two of Al Qaeda, and the Iranian leadership, and between Saad Bin Laden, the son of Osama, and the Iranian leadership.
These meetings took place in January of 2001 and in May of 2001, and he provided this information to the CIA in July of 2001, but they were not interested, and they blew him away. It’s one of the reasons why the CIA has been reluctant to talk about what they knew before the 9-11 attacks about Al Qaeda involvement with Iran, because, in fact, they knew a lot. I sent a very detailed memo on July 13th to General Hayden, saying this is what we’ve found out.
We have our information from a source that hunted with Bin Laden in November 2004. He spent time with him. Bin Laden travels inside Iran with an entourage of only four persons during the falconry hunting season.
Allen and his team have a plausible eyewitness who actually spent time with Osama bin Laden and asserts that he can repeat this, that he can actually get himself back into Osama bin Laden’s camp at will. The source learned the frequencies of the telemetry transmitters on each of bin Laden’s falcons. Bin Laden uses the same three frequencies while he’s hunting.
Now, at the very least, one would think that the CIA would want to meet this guy. At this point, this is my third attempt, and so I sent the letter out certified mail. Now, the CIA doesn’t sign certified receipts, but we had proof that it was mailed, and on the per instructions, I put a certain notice on the outside of the envelope, and a friend of a friend in General Hayden’s office made sure that it was on the top of General Hayden’s inbox.
Another copy went to the head of the National Clandestine Service. Another copy went to NSA. You can say maybe one of these got lost in bureaucracy, but not all of them.
There was another eight months of silence, so I raised the funding and took a team in to the mountains of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, so that we could find T2 and interview him for a firsthand account. It took a month to organize this interview with T2. T2 made tremendous concessions and made a huge risk to grant this interview.
In exchange for that, we had to concede to protecting his identity. T2 arrived wearing a balaclava, gloves, and sunglasses. He insisted that his voice be scrambled and took every precaution to protect not only himself, but his village.
I understand you were hunting falcons a few years ago and you had an encounter with an interesting person. Could you tell us about what happened that day? I was going through Iran, and I met him in eastern Iran near Balugistan. We saw a tent at dinnertime and decided to greet the hunters.
That’s how we met. At first I thought he just looks like Osama bin Laden, very polite, but then I realized it was him. This was in November 2004, around the 20th.
Did you go for a hunt with him? Of course, I was with him for three whole days. Was it successful? Absolutely wonderful hunt, with a lot of adrenaline and pleasure. What were you hunting, a hubara? Hubara, it’s a bird half a meter high.
It was cooked in an interesting manner in the earth, very tasty. How many falcons would they have had to hunt with? He has five falcons. They’re always with him.
During the interview, which took about 55 minutes, it was an extremely warm environment, and T2 had a balaclava on, which made it very uncomfortable for him. Even with that extra added stress to the interview, I think he was certainly concerned about being there for his own safety. He really didn’t show any signs of body language deception, or in his voice, that I could detect.
The building was surrounded by his people. And all the while that we were talking to him, his phone kept ringing. And if he didn’t push the off button each time, our place would have been stormed.
Right after 9-11, there was a $25 million reward offered for the capture of bin Laden. And in 2007, the reward was doubled to $50 million, plus civilian groups, Airline Pilots Association, offered millions more. At the time that you met Osama bin Laden, did you know there was a reward for his capture? Yes, of course I knew.
He is a human being, and besides, I have enough money myself. Let those who need this money catch him. I live quite well anyway.
$50 million didn’t tempt you? No. It’s the usual American scheming. I don’t need this dirty money.
America is not interested in killing or catching Osama bin Laden. Has he met him, Osama bin Laden, since 2004? Has he had any other meetings with him? I met him five times after 2004. In 2006, and the last time I met him was in 2007, in October.
You can find him there during hunting season from September to March. He’s in good health and looks great, despite what the press writes about him. Here’s a guy who goes on vacation every year and bumps into Osama bin Laden.
But nobody in U.S. intelligence ever wants to meet the one individual who apparently is able to walk in and sit down with Osama bin Laden at will. That’s astonishing. I’ve also had contact with Iranian defectors who were able to get information out and told me about this in early 2005, about a meeting between Osama bin Laden and senior Iranian government officials, specifically the head of the Supreme Leader’s office, Natak Nouri, the former head of the parliament.
He met with bin Laden, according to this source, in November of 2004 in northern Iran. It’s extremely significant that you’re getting these different reporting streams from completely different sources, independent of each other, about Osama bin Laden meeting with Iranian officials at the same time, in the same month, in Iran. I think this is incredibly significant.
I think it’s the kind of corroborative evidence that one always looks for when you’re going into this murky world of intelligence and terrorism.
T2 represents the first friendly penetration of bin Laden’s entourage since Tora Bora. Why is it that nobody will listen to me? Nobody answered our inquiries.
Nobody answered our requests for disclosures. We just encountered deafening silence. What the hell is that all about?
In the six years since our nation was attacked, I wish I could report to you that the dangers have ended.
They have not. And so it remains the policy of this government to use every lawful and proper tool of intelligence, diplomacy, law enforcement, and military action to do our duty to find these enemies and to protect the American people. No one wanted to start a war with Iran.
No one wanted to embarrass the Saudis. No one wanted to drag out before Congress what did or didn’t happen when Vice President Bush was working for Reagan. Everyone seemed to have the feeling that we should just let the whole matter drop.
I wonder how the families of the victims of 9/11 feel about that.
Bin Laden is given a long leash. He cannot leave Iran. If he does leave Iran, his family will be sacrificed in a very unpleasant way.
And finally, in December 2009, Bin Laden’s son comes out and explains that his family has been under house arrest in a gated compound north of Tehran since 2001. And I just find this extraordinary that the son, it took five years for the son to come out with information I have been explaining in more detail since January 2005.
And only after all of these obstructions, I realized, “You know, nobody’s going to let us get Bin Laden. They’re going to hurt us if I go after him.”
So that’s when I contacted Rewards for Justice when President Obama was sworn in. And Rewards for Justice has not contacted me. When I was in India last time, I got the support of the Sikh leadership. These are signed by the most important Sikh leaders.
We’re going to explain to the United Nations and other bodies that these falcons are the national birds of the Sikhs, and they cannot be allowed to be damaged. And by speaking on behalf of 28 million Sikhs, it’s the fifth largest religion in the world. We saved our home, our land.
I dream that these steppes, these mountains, will become our homeland, our rock. We will cooperate, we will hunt together like true friends. That’s my vision.
Perfect. Reason I’m eternally optimistic is because I was raised watching just your canned John Wayne movies where the good guy wears a white hat, the bad guy wears a black hat, the bad guy goes to jail, the good guy rides off into the sunset with the girl. I always believed there’d be a happy ending, but there never was.
Instead, it was just a mudslide of hell. This is Mission Impossible. Logically speaking, I still believe we’re gonna win in the end.
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Interesting find, Alexandra.
Thx.