Mohamed was finally arrested after the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for which he had provided training, funding, and intelligence. He pled guilty to five counts of conspiracy in 2000 and hasn’t been sentenced or seen publicly in the 25 years since. His current whereabouts are unknown. The cases of Ali Mohamed and Omar Abdel-Rahman are just two examples of US-supported Islamist fighters among thousands. These Islamists derived their funding, expertise, training, and intelligence directly from the United States, first as a proxy force against the Soviets, then against Muslim states in the Middle East and Africa, and finally against the United States itself. The scale of their activities worldwide vastly exceeds that of the Cuban exiles. The results of arming these groups cost the US trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. It was used as the justification for a decades-long global war, the curtailing of civil liberties, and unprecedented destabilization in the Middle East that caused the deaths of millions and displacement of tens of millions, spawning a refugee crisis of unprecedented scale. However, it’s almost impossible to explain continued US intelligence backing of Islamic extremists as they planned and perpetrated terrorist attacks on US soil solely as institutional incompetence or a series of comical mistakes. The case of the Islamist proxies is unique in that the lag time between their status as proxy and transition to an enemy collapsed so completely that they were actively being protected even as they were directly attacking the US.

Blowback?

guitar riff UH, SPEAK ABOUT DESTRUCTION

These four examples: Cuban exiles, the South Vietnamese, Salvadorans, and the Mujahideen should be sufficient to prove the first part of our case, and this already long piece would become unwieldy if we detailed any of them in their full scope or covered the numerous other examples US and European history have to offer. For the curious, however, we can recommend researching:

• The Contras (drug trafficking)
• ISIS
• Libyan rebel groups (2017 Manchester bombing)
• Operation Gladio (terrorism across Italy and Europe, 60s - 80s)
• Brabant killers, Belgium (unproven connection to SDRA VIII stay-behind network)
• Operation Valuable (Albanian mafia networks)
• Ustase, Croatia (hijackings and bombings in Europe and Australia)
• Release of Yakuza by US occupation authorities in Japan
• Hmong organized crime in the US
• US collaboration with the Italian mafia in WW2
• Kosovo Liberation Army (human/drug trafficking)

The pattern, in the broadest terms, is one of “blowback,” where the creation of a proxy force results in that proxy force becoming a liability to its backers after a proxy conflict ends. The popular narrative of blowback portrays the phenomenon as karmic retribution for short-term thinking. But this idea has justifiably been criticized as the gaps in a patchy history of covert operations are gradually filled by the evidence. In the most extreme cases, blowback is intentional. While proxies have been powerful tools in conflicts worldwide, factions within state power structures have frequently turned this weapon inwards and used the remnants of those forces against their own domestic enemies and their populations. We’ll now turn towards the case of Ukraine.

Ukraine

Ukraine’s use as a proxy force against Russia dates back to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s deployment of Ruthenian levies against Muscovy in the 14th century. Leverage of a succession of ethnic and political entities within present-day Ukraine by the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Ottoman Empire, Sweden, Austria-Hungary, Poland, and Nazi Germany against various Russian political entities continued over the centuries. The CIA armed, trained, and inserted UPA remnants into Soviet Ukraine for intelligence gathering and partisan activity beginning in 1949 under Project Aerodynamic.

Political instability in post-Soviet Ukraine initially precluded deep and direct US intelligence ties within the Ukrainian state, with soft power mechanisms like the National Endowment of Democracy (NED) taking the lead in sabotaging Ukrainian ties with Russia. The NED and other intelligence-linked, state-sponsored funding sources flooded the country with Western cash starting in the early 2000s and quickly established firm control over parts of the Ukrainian media. In 2013 Carl Gershman, the head of the NED, described Ukraine as “the biggest prize” among post-Soviet states in countering Russia in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. These efforts were successful in shifting Ukrainian public opinion and bolstering the position of Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries, contributing to the successful overthrow of the government in the 2014 Maidan Revolution. With the Russian-neutral Yanukovych government ousted, Western intelligence had a free hand in the new Ukraine. The CIA and MI6 immediately established direct ties with Ukraine’s internal security service, the SBU, and military intelligence directorate, the GUR. SBU head Valentyn Nalyvaichenko created a “three-way partnership” between Ukraine, the CIA, and MI6 whereby the foreign intelligence services would rebuild Ukraine’s intelligence apparatus from scratch. SBU and GUR personnel were flown to locations across Europe for training by CIA and MI6 instructors, and the CIA established over a dozen bases within Ukraine, an unusually high number for a country of Ukraine’s size.

The CIA created secret Ukrainian special forces units dedicated to collecting intelligence on the Russians. CIA-trained Ukrainian spies were inserted into Russia, Europe, and Cuba. Current Ukrainian defense intelligence head Kyrylo Budanov was a member of one of the CIA’s clients, Unit 2245. Budanov led an amphibious landing in Crimea to plant explosives at an airfield in 2016. The unit was ambushed immediately by Russian Spetsnaz operators and was forced to retreat. The incident caused significant controversy in the US/Ukrainian relationship, as there was supposedly a moratorium on the CIA orchestrating lethal operations against the Russians at the time. Budanov was wounded and was flown to the US for treatment at Walter Reed Medical Center. In 2015, the CIA helped establish the “fifth directorate” of the SBU, a dedicated assassination and sabotage unit. In 2017, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine expressed “concern” that the newly rebuilt SBU was perpetrating human rights abuses through the systematic killing and torture of journalists within Ukraine. Meanwhile, the US Special Operations Command established a dedicated military and intelligence training program in Ukraine in 2015. By 2022, Ukrainian special forces units had doubled in size and been trained in sabotage, underwater demolition, and irregular warfare. The British established a permanent training presence in the country in 2015 under Operation Orbital, training 17,500 Ukrainian personnel by 2019. The US intelligence relationship with Ukraine was expanded under Trump and then further under Biden.

Azov 9/11

Western-trained Ukrainian forces present a looming danger that has the potential to be larger in scale than any of the other cases we’ve covered here. First, the scope and scale of the training and direct military assistance dwarfs that of any proxy conflict since the beginning of the Cold War era. Ukraine has been flooded with hundreds of billions of dollars of weapons, with oversight over those weapons being infamously lackadaisical. Western authorities have been sounding the alarm about this issue since the beginning of the conflict. The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC) said in a report earlier this year that Ukrainian organized crime arms trafficking is already a much larger issue than it was in past conflicts like Afghanistan and the Balkans. Spanish police have identified incidents in which drug trafficking organizations have been armed with NATO weapons donated to Ukraine. A Europol report released in April said that these criminal gangs are increasingly armed with “explosive weapons.” A 2024 DoD audit report admitted the agency had failed to track over a billion dollars in military equipment sent to Ukraine. In 2024, GI-TOC detailed some examples of weapons for sale on the international black market that Ukrainian authorities had confiscated: a Zu-23-2 23mm anti-aircraft gun, US-made machine guns, automatic rifles, automatic grenade launchers, and explosives. Many of these items were being sold by active-duty AFU servicemen.

When the conflict in Ukraine ends, whenever and however that might be, the quantity of military-grade weapons in the country will dwarf that of past Western proxy conflicts. And while international arms trafficking presents a worrying threat, the more disturbing prospect is who will be holding those weapons when the music stops. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have obtained direct experience in one of the largest conflicts since the end of WW2. Under the AFU umbrella is a hodgepodge of semi-autonomous, ideologically motivated paramilitary units. Some of these units have been conducting sabotage and assassination campaigns for a decade. Their expertise in drone warfare is unparalleled outside the Russian armed forces, and the mainstream narrative is that they’ve already perpetrated the largest terrorist attack on industrial infrastructure in modern history.