The Kazakh Ministry of Health issued an innocuous disclaimer today denying social media reports about the seizure of a “military biological lab near Almaty by unidentified people.”
According to Tass news agency, the social media had speculated that specialists in chemical protection suits were working near the lab as “a leak of dangerous pathogens” occurred.
The carefully worded press release by the Kazakh ministry clarifies: “This is not true. The facility is being protected.” Period.
The intriguing report highlights the tip of an iceberg which has implications for public health and holds serious geopolitical ramifications.
Since the late 1990s, when it came to be known that the US was steadily establishing and building up partnerships in biological research with several ex-Soviet republics, Moscow has repeatedly alleged that such cooperation posed a threat to Russia.
These biological research facilities were originally envisaged as part of the so-called Nunn-Lugar Biological Threat Reduction Program to prevent the proliferation of expertise, materials, equipment and technologies that could contribute to the development of biological weapons.
But Moscow suspected that the exact opposite was happening — in reality, Pentagon has been sponsoring, lavishly financing and providing technical assistance to these laboratories where “under the guise of peaceful research, the US is building up its “military-biological potential.”
In a sensational statement in October 2018, Major General Igor Kirillov, the commander of Russia’s Radiological, Chemical and Biological Defense Troops went to the extent of disclosing a discernible pattern of the network of Pentagon labs being located near the borders of Russia and China.
The US-Kazakh partnership in this field dates back to 2003. Kazakhstan has been an interesting “hotspot” for infectious disease occurrence and surveillance due in part to its history, geography, and its diversity of host species. Kazakhstan has long maintained an infrastructure and tiered network for infectious disease surveillance since the time of the Tsars.
The US-funded research projects centred on studies involving select agents including zoonoses: anthrax, plague, tularemia, highly pathogenic avian influenza, brucellosis, etc. These projects funded researchers in Kazakhstan, while project collaborators in the US and UK mentored and guided these researchers to develop and test their hypotheses.
It has been a “win-win” arrangement. The Kazakh institute staff got trained in modern diagnostic and data management techniques, and did research work with lavish external funding, while the Pentagon obtained through such labs valuable inputs for US covert biological weapon programs with military application specifically directed against ethnic groups in Russia and China.
The unassumingly-named Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) in Almaty figuring in the Tass report was originally planned in 2013 with the US investing $102 million in a biosecurity lab to study some of the most deadly pathogens that could potentially be used in bioterrorism attacks.
Rather than locating the new facility in some obsecure tract of land in Nevada, the Pentagon deliberately chose a site near Almaty to securely store and study the highest-risk diseases such as plague, anthrax and cholera.
The rationale was that the lab would provide gainful employment to talented Kazakh researchers and get them off the streets, so to speak — that is, discourage them from selling their scientific expertise and services to terrorist groups who may have use for biological weapons!
But the CRL, now operational, is anchored on institutional cooperation between Kazakh government and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency under the the Pentagon, which is tasked with protecting “US National Security interests in a rapidly evolving, globalised threat environment to enable a greater understanding of our adversaries and provide solutions to WMD threats in an era of Great Power Competition.”
By the way, Germany also has a similar arrangement under the rubric German-Kazakh Network for Biosafety and Biosecurity, which is co-managed by the Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology (a military research facility of the German Armed Forces for Medical Biological Defence.)
Why is Kazakhstan a sought-after partner? Simply put, the country provides unique access to ethnic Russian and Chinese groups as “specimen” for conducting field research involving highly pathogenic, potential biological warfare agents. Kazakhstan has 13,364 km of borders with its neighbouring countries Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.
Is China indifferent to all this? Far from it. Beijing Review featured a report sourced from BBC Monitoring in 2020 conveying China’s concerns in the matter. As recently as in November last year, a Russian commentator wrote that these bio-labs are virtual Pentagon bases and demanded an international inquiry. He highlighted that the Kazakh ministry of education and science “now works mainly on Pentagon research programmes.”
How could Kazakhstan, a CSTO member country, have got away with such conduct? This needs some explaining.
Paradoxically, these biological labs are living examples of something sinister that has been going on which everyone knew and no one wanted to talk about — namely, the extensive penetration of the decadent Kazakh ruling elites by the US intelligence.
This penetration has been going on for years but significantly deepened as the 81-year old former president Nurusultan Nazarbayev’s “hands-on” leadership began to loosen and his family members and cronies increasingly began moonlighting (under the patriarch’s benevolent gaze, of course) — something akin to Yeltsin years in Russia.
Sadly, it is a familiar story. The Kazakh elites are notoriously corrupt even by Central Asian standards and the parasitic elites have preferred to keep their loot in safe havens in the western world . Unsurprisingly, they are hopelessly compromised to the US intelligence. It’s as simple as that.
Most certainly, Moscow sensed that popular disaffection was building up and the ground beneath the feet of Nazarbayev, a close friend of Putin, was shifting. But it did not — or more likely, would not — interfere since the US was operating through powerful comprador elements who happened to be the ageing patriarch’s family members and associates.
Given the clan affiliations in that part of the world, Moscow probably felt it prudent to keep its counsel to itself. An added factor would have been the fear that the US might manipulate the ultra-nationalist forces (as happened in Ukraine) to inflict harm on the vulnerable 3.5 million ethnic Russian minority (18% of the population.)
Above all, the fact of the matter is that Nazarbayev cronies held the levers of state power, especially over security apparatus, which gave Washington a decisive edge.
But things have dramatically changed this past week. Nazarbayev may still have some residual influence but not good enough to rescue the elite who subserved US interests. President Tokayev, a low-profile career diplomat by profession, is finally coming on his own.
Two of Tokayev’s decisive moves have been the replacement of Nazarbayev as the head of the National Security Council and the dismissal of the country’s powerful intelligence chief Karim Masimov (who has since been arrested along with other unidentified suspects as part of a probe into “high treason.”)
Indeed, Washington has much to worry about because, at the end of the day, Kazakhstan remains an unfinished business unless and until a colour revolution can bring about regime change and instal a pro-West ruler in power, as in Ukraine. The current turbulence signified an abortive attempt at colour revolution, which boomeranged.
Unlike in Afghanistan, CIA and Pentagon are not in a position to “evacuate” their collaborators. And the torrential flow of events has shocked the Washington establishment. Kazakhstan is a large country (two-thirds the size of India) and sparsely populated (18 million), and the CSTO forces who moved in are well-equipped and led by a tough seasoned general who crushed the US-backed insurgency in Chechnya.
The Russian forces have taken with them advanced Leer-3 electronic warfare system, which includes specially configured Orlan-10 drones, jamming devices, etc. Borders have been sealed.
The mandate for Russian forces is to protect “strategic assets”. Presumably, such assets include the Pentagon-funded labs in Kazakhstan.
Syriana analysis: Dr Marcus Papadopoulos interviewed by Kevork Almassian vid
From Peter Koenig's article 'Kazakhstan: NATO’s New Frontier? Attempted Coup? History and Analysis of “Color Revolutions”' which is a reasonable read by itself:
What happened in Kazakhstan increasingly looks like a US-Turkish-British-Israeli-led coup d’etat attempt foiled dramatically by their Eurasian adversaries
By Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and cross-posted with The Cradle
The year 2022 started with Kazakhstan on fire, a serious attack against one of the key hubs of Eurasian integration. We are only beginning to understand what and how it happened.
On Monday morning, leaders of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) held an extraordinary session to discuss Kazakhstan.
Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev framed it succinctly. Riots were “hidden behind unplanned protests.” The goal was “to seize power” – a coup attempt. Actions were “coordinated from a single center.” And “foreign militants were involved in the riots.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin went further: during the riots, “Maidan technologies were used,” a reference to the Ukrainian square where 2013 protests unseated a NATO-unfriendly government.
Defending the prompt intervention of CSTO peacekeeping forces in Kazakhstan, Putin said, “it was necessary to react without delay.” The CSTO will be on the ground “as long as necessary,” but after the mission is accomplished, “of course, the entire contingent will be withdrawn from the country.” Forces are expected to exit later this week.
But here’s the clincher: “CSTO countries have shown that they will not allow chaos and ‘color revolutions’ to be implemented inside their borders.”
Putin was in synch with Kazakh State Secretary Erlan Karin, who was the first, on the record, to apply the correct terminology to events in his country: What happened was a “hybrid terrorist attack,” by both internal and external forces, aimed at overthrowing the government.
The tangled hybrid web
Virtually no one knows about it. But last December, another coup was discreetly thwarted in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. Kyrgyz intel sources attribute the engineering to a rash of NGOs linked with Britain and Turkey. That introduces an absolutely key facet of The Big Picture: NATO-linked intel and their assets may have been preparing a simultaneous color revolution offensive across Central Asia.
On my Central Asia travels in late 2019, pre-Covid, it was plain to see how western NGOs – Hybrid War fronts – remained extremely powerful in both Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Yet, they are just one nexus in a western nebulae of Hybrid War fog deployed across Central Asia, and West Asia for that matter. Here we see the CIA and the US Deep State crisscrossing MI6 and different strands of Turkish intel.
When President Tokayev was referring, in code, to a “single center,” he meant a so far ‘secret’ US-Turk-Israeli military-intel operations room based in the southern business hub of Almaty, according to a highly placed Central Asia intel source. In this “center,” there were 22 Americans, 16 Turks, and 6 Israelis coordinating sabotage gangs – trained in West Asia by the Turks – and then rat-lined to Almaty.
The op started to unravel for good when Kazakh forces – with the help of Russian/CSTO intel – retook control of the vandalized Almaty airport, which was supposed to be turned into a hub for receiving foreign military supplies.
The Hybrid War west had to be stunned and livid at how the CSTO intercepted the Kazakh operation at such lightning speed. The key element is that the secretary of the Russian National Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, saw the Big Picture eons ago.
So, it’s no mystery why Russia’s aerospace and aero-transported forces, plus the massive necessary support infrastructure, were virtually ready to go.
Back in November, Patrushev’s laser was already focused on the degrading security situation in Afghanistan. Tajik political scientist Parviz Mullojanov was among the very few who were stressing that there were as many as 8,000 imperial machine Salafi-jihadi assets, shipped by a ratline from Syria and Iraq, loitering in the wilds of northern Afghanistan.
That’s the bulk of ISIS-Khorasan – or ISIS reconstituted near the borders of Turkmenistan. Some of them were duly transported to Kyrgyzstan. From there, it was very easy to cross the border from Bishkek and show up in Almaty.
It took no time for Patrushev and his team to figure out, after the imperial retreat from Kabul, how this jihadi reserve army would be used: along the 7,500 km-long border between Russia and the Central Asian ‘stans’.
That explains, among other things, a record number of preparation drills conducted in late 2021 at the 210th Russian military base in Tajikistan.
James Bond speaks Turkish
The breakdown of the messy Kazakh op necessarily starts with the usual suspects: the US Deep State, which all but “sang” its strategy in a 2019 RAND corporation report, Extending Russia. Chapter 4, on “geopolitical measures”, details everything from “providing lethal aid to Ukraine”, “promoting regime change in Belarus”, and “increasing support for Syrian rebels” – all major fails – to “reducing Russian influence in Central Asia.”
That was the master concept. Implementation fell to the MI6-Turk connection.
The CIA and MI6 had been investing in dodgy outfits in Central Asia since at least 2005, when they encouraged the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), then close to the Taliban, to wreak havoc in southern Kyrgyzstan. Nothing happened.
It was a completely different story by May 2021, when the MI6’s Jonathan Powell met the leadership of Jabhat al-Nusra – which harbors a lot of Central Asian jihadis – somewhere in the Turkish-Syrian border near Idlib. The deal was that these ‘moderate rebels’ – in US terminology – would cease to be branded ‘terrorists’ as long as they followed the anti-Russia NATO agenda.
That was one of the key prep moves ahead of the jihadist ratline to Afghanistan – complete with Central Asia branching out.
The genesis of the offensive should be found in June 2020, when former ambassador to Turkey from 2014 to 2018, Richard Moore, was appointed head of MI6. Moore may not have an inch of Kim Philby’s competence, but he does fit the profile: rabid Russophobe, and a cheerleader of the Great Turania fantasy, which promotes a pan-Turk confederation of Turkic-speaking peoples from West Asia and the Caucasus to Central Asia and even Russian republics in the Volga.
MI6 is deeply entrenched in all the ‘stans’ except autarchic Turkmenistan – cleverly riding the pan-Turkish offensive as the ideal vehicle to counter Russia and China.
Erdogan himself has been invested in a hardcore Great Turania offensive, especially after the creation of the Turkic Council in 2009. Crucially, next March, the summit of the Confederation Council of Turkic-speaking States – the new Turkic Council denomination – will take place in Kazakhstan. The city of Turkestan, in southern Kazakhstan, is expected to be named as the spiritual capital of the Turkic world.
And here, the ‘Turkic world’ enters into a frontal clash with the integrating Russian concept of Greater Eurasia Partnership, and even with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) that, crucially, does not count Turkey as a member.
Erdogan’s short-term ambition seems at first to be only commercial: after Azerbaijan won the Karabakh war, he expects to use Baku to get access to Central Asia via the Caspian Sea, complete with Turkey’s industrial-military complex sales of military technology to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
Turkish companies are already investing heavily in real estate and infrastructure. And in parallel, Ankara’s soft power is on overdrive, finally collecting the fruits of exercising a lot of pressure, for instance, to speed up the transition in Kazakhstan from Cyrillic script to the Latin alphabet, starting in 2023.
Yet both Russia and China are very much aware that Turkey essentially represents NATO entering Central Asia. The organization of Turkic states is cryptically called the Kazakh operation ‘fuel protests’.
It’s all very murky. Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism – which comes with massive cheerleading by his Muslim Brotherhood base – essentially has nothing to do with the pan-Turanic drive, which is a racialist movement predicating domination by relatively ‘pure’ Turks.
The problem is that they are converging while becoming more extreme, with Turkey’s right-wing Grey Wolves deeply implicated. That explains why Ankara Intel is a sponsor and, in many cases, a weaponizer of both the ISIS-Khorasan franchise and those Turan racists, from Bosnia to Xinjiang via Central Asia.
The Empire handsomely profits from this toxic association, in Armenia, for instance. And the same would happen in Kazakhstan if the operation is successful.
Bring on the Trojan Horses
Every color revolution needs a ‘Maximum’ Trojan Horse. In our case, that seems to be the role of the former head of KNB (National Security Committee) Karim Massimov, now held in prison and charged with treason.
Hugely ambitious, Massimov is half-Uyghur and that, in theory, obstructed what he saw as his pre-ordained rise to power. His connections with Turkish intel are not yet fully detailed, unlike his cozy relationship with Joe Biden and son.
A former Minister of Internal Affairs and State Security, Lt Gen Felix Kulov, has weaved a fascinating tangled web explaining the possible internal dynamics of the ‘coup’ built into the color revolution.
According to Kulov, Massimov, and Samir Abish, the nephew of recently ousted Kazakh Security Council Chairman Nursultan Nazarbayev, where up to their necks in supervising ‘secret’ units of ‘bearded men’ during the riots. The KNB was directly subordinated to Nazarbayev, who until last week was the chairman of the Security Council.
When Tokayev understood the mechanics of the coup, he demoted both Massimov and Samat Abish. Then Nazarbayev ‘voluntarily resigned from his life-long chairmanship of the Security Council. Abish then got this post, promising to stop the ‘bearded men,’ and then to resign.
So that would point directly to a Nazarbayev-Tokayev clash. It makes sense as, during his 29-year rule, Nazarbayev played a multi-vector game that was too westernized and which did not necessarily benefit Kazakhstan. He adopted British laws, played the pan-Turkic card with Erdogan, and allowed a tsunami of NGOs to promote an Atlanticist agenda.
Tokayev is a very smart operator. Trained by the foreign service of the former USSR, fluent in Russian and Chinese, he is totally aligned with Russia-China – which means fully in sync with the master plan of BRI, the Eurasia Economic Union, and the SCO.
Tokayev, much like Putin and Xi, understands how this BRI/EAEU/SCO triad represents the ultimate imperial nightmare, and how destabilizing Kazakhstan – a key actor in the triad – would be a mortal coup against Eurasian integration.
Kazakhstan, after all, represents 60 percent of Central Asia’s GDP, massive oil/gas and mineral resources, cutting-edge high-tech industries: a secular, unitary, constitutional republic bearing a rich cultural heritage.
It didn’t take long for Tokayev to understand the merits of immediately calling the CSTO to the rescue: Kazakhstan signed the treaty way back in 1994. After all, Tokayev was fighting a foreign-led coup against his government.
Putin, among others, has stressed how an official Kazakh investigation is the only one entitled to get to the heart of the matter. It’s still unclear exactly who – and to what extent – sponsored the rioting mobs. Motives abound: to sabotage a pro-Russia/China government, to provoke Russia, to sabotage BRI, to plunder mineral resources, to turbo-charge a House of Saud-style ‘Islamization’.
Rushed to only a few days before the start of the Russia-US ‘security guarantees’ in Geneva, this color revolution represented a sort of counter-ultimatum – in desperation – by the NATO establishment.
Central Asia, West Asia, and the overwhelming majority of the Global South have witnessed the lightning-fast Eurasian response by the CSTO troops – who, having now done their job, are set to leave Kazakhstan in a couple of days – and how this color revolution has failed, miserably.
It might as well be the last. Beware the rage of a humiliated Empire.
Pepe's piece is very good, informative and highly recommended nm
Thanks for that. Tbh I never knew that there was a biolab in Almaty until recently (although I did he hear there were several in Kaz). Btw one Richard A. Koch stands out as the only foreigner in that paper.
Few years back I had a very bright young Kaz engineer working for me in Atyrau. I gave him an interesting problem to work on until suddenly he keeled over, bailed out and went home (to Almaty). He acted very confused in the last few days prior - I was told it was something to do with indigenous ticks. I thought it was a cover up of sorts (that he couldn't solve the problem or similar) ... and it stayed with me. Not sure if there is a connection.
Recently came across an article by Dilyana Gaytandezhieva, Bulgarian journalist, of Georgia biolab fame:
2020 06 Pentagon Unit A1266 studies bioterrorism agents in Kazakhstan
on January 11, 2022, 8:06 pm