In western nations, Kazakhstan became pressing news when Russian troops entered the country on January 9, 2022 – arriving after a large, violent mob had overrun the city of Almaty for three days. After the troops left on January 13, 2022, a few western news stories suggested a cause of the rioting – following fuel-price protests, they said, a “palace intrigue reverse coup” was tried, in which a figurehead ruler, Jomart Tokayev, had attempted to harness this unrest to seize actual power from a former president – but still a de facto ruler – Nursultan Nazarbayev.
When Tokayev said instead that a coup was attempted against him, planned and funded by “a foreign state” (leaving this state unnamed), Western media dismissed this explanation.
I believe this dismissal deserves attention.
Around the fuel-price protests, the Kazakh government suspected and probed price-fixing collusion among auto-fuel suppliers. Chevron and Exxon are minor suppliers while a state wealth fund controls major fuel suppliers.[1] The Kazakh government arrested on treason charges the man who had long controlled the wealth fund controlling the fuel prices, Karim Masimov. As well, Masimov can fairly be said to have controlled petroleum in general in Kazakhstan. More on him later.
Fuel protests are just the surface of how petroleum appears important in causation of the Almaty riots. Kazakhstan has enormous oil fields discovered by Soviet prospectors, but when the Kazakh Soviet Republic dissolved, these fields remained undeveloped. After that, in the mid-1990s Chevron and Exxon contracted a control of the giant fields.[2]
Mobil had tried its best to join them.
In 2010, a long-running bribery case closed that involved Mobil in Kazakhstan, filed 2003. The “Kazakhgate” case – involving American James Giffen – closed when the CIA let a judge read secret documents. Reading the CIA documents, Judge William Pauley found that the CIA had approved Giffen giving $78 million in bribes, from Mobil, to Kazakh officials. He fined Giffen $25.
The powerful fixer James Giffen, right, at the White House in 1976 with President Jimmy Carter, left.
What could Judge Pauley have seen, to be so telling, in these secret CIA documents? Not clear, of course, but at end of Giffen’s trial, as of August 2010, the CIA was closing a secret treaty with Kazakhstan’s spy agency, the KNB.[3]
De facto oil czar Karim Masimov, who by 2016 would also head the KNB, visited Washington DC repeatedly during James Giffen’s trial, meeting with high US officials, trying to “settle” the issue of Giffen’s bribery in Kazakhstan.[4] Giffen and Masimov were close friends (as Giffen maintained a residence in Kazakhstan, functioning as what a CIA official called “Washington’s unofficial ambassador to Kazakhstan”).
In the January 2022 riots, Masimov was arrested and charged with treason along with three of his former KNB deputies[5] for suspected planning of the riots in a coup attempt against president Jomart Tokaeyev. After all four of the spies were convicted of treason, a CIA-sponsored Radio Liberty article suggested Masimov had been singled out unfairly to receive the harshest sentence, 18 years, and that Masimov should not be called mastermind of the events of January 2022.
Radio Liberty emphasized,[6]
“But Masimov was just one of many in the KNB who was sacked.”
Two days after this CIA-sponsored story came another “don’t-blame-Masimov” story, by a former US diplomat and member of the right-wing Jamestown Foundation, Matthew Byrza, who spoke in Istanbul to a Euractiv news reporter, saying,[7]
“The illogical and ludicrous charges of treason against Karim Massimov, a two-time former prime minister, are a complete misnomer. As any Western official who has worked with him (Byrza has) can testify, Massimov evidenced no higher political ambition, therefore had no cause to risk it all in the name of revolution which makes his arrest and accusation of treason feel like a move in an ominous direction.”
But, in my opinion the record does point strongly to Masimov, in control as he was of both spy dealings and oil dealings. To review, Masimov’s power positions in Kazakhstan include the following:
- Head of the Kazakh sovereign wealth fund that pays for oil production 2014 -2017;
- Head of Kazakhstan’s spy agency KNB, 2016 until the insurrection, January 2022;
- Twice Kazakh prime Minister, first from 2007[3] to 2012 and again from April 2014 to September 2016;
- Guest of US secretaries of state Rex Tillerson, former Exxon CEO, Mike Pompeo, former CIA director; and John Kerry, advocate of doubling US spy roster; and
- Host of Hunter and Joe Biden, Hunter as a go-between for Burisma to obtain a Kazakh oil deal.
![October 2020,[8] left to right, Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, and Masimov](https://crisispainpower.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/image-7.jpeg)
Just when the CIA entered its 2010 secret treaty with Kazakhstan’s KNB, the CIA also took over paying American-trained fighters in Afghanistan when their paychecks stopped coming from ruler Hamid Karzai[9] The CIA also arranged other missions for these fighters (such as in Syria).
By 2019 the US planned military withdrawal, meaning the CIA had ample fighters coming available in Afghanistan. [10]
In 2019, entry began into Kazakhstan by men from Afghanistan believed to be mercenaries – with the KNB covertly overseeing, a Kazakh probe has found. The Aqiqat commission concluded that the Almaty riots had been planned by KNB agents, were prepared for since 2019,[11] and fueled a coup attempt against Tokaeyev relying on Masimov’s influence with the KNB.
“We have information that since 2019 people have entered Kazakhstan from Afghanistan with a certain (entry) status (from the KNB),” investigator Aiman Ulmarova said.
Ulmarova said she saw Asians who spoke neither Kazakh nor Russian among the rioters in Almaty, adding she concluded these were “professionally prepared groups come to Kazakhstan from Afghanistan.”[12]
Masimov is accused, by former government officials, of caching arms and building secret camps, for mercenaries from Afghanistan, in mountains of nearby Kyrgyzstan. The border area was closed in the mid-2000s, directly between Almaty and Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan.[13]
Citing investigative-commission findings, Tokaeyev said that at Almaty airport,
“Trained militants…flown here under the guise of being migrant laborers were led through passport control desks, released into the city, and then put in charge of the operation.”[14]
If so, fighters likely came the shortest route, and optimal would have been a 15-minute flight in Kyrgyzstan from Issyk Kul to Bishkek, followed by a 50-minute flight from Bishkek to Almaty airport.
Such a scenario is conspicuous enough that two stories rebutting it appeared January 5, 2023 – the first anniversary of the riots in Almaty.
Broadcasting from Bishkek, CIA-sponsored Radio Azattyk[15] said station personnel had “studied the (year-old) data of Internet resources that track flights” and found no flights that, it said, could have been full of “militants.”
Additionally that day, Washington DC-based Diplomat Media Inc. published “Kazakh Authorities Outline a Grand Conspiracy Behind Bloody January,” suggesting there was no motive for the West to attack the Tokayev regime.
In conclusion, Tokaeyev, by naming neither a nation perpetrator nor oil as a motive, has avoided openly breaking with western powers who presently control Kazakh petroleum.However, avoiding docility, between April and July 2023, Tokayev’s administration
- sued Exxon and Chevron for $16.5 billion;[16]
- fined $5.1 billion (for an environmental violation) against an Exxon-shared oil-field operator; and
- announced plans to build rail lines to serve China’s plans to import more Kazakh oil, following which China expects to increase its investment in the Kazakh oil-development sector. [17]
With the CIA tasked specifically to foster US investors’ interests abroad, it appears that strained anonymity can’t last forever around just which foreign state may have sponsored the 2021 Kazakhstan riots.
[1] The probe has not named Chevron or Exxon-Mobil specifically as instigators of fuel protests or of the riot chaos that followed.
[2] The Tengiz, Kashagan, and Karachaganak fields. Chevron and Exxon together own 75 percent of Tengiz, Chevron and Exxon together own a controlling 33.62 percent share of Kashagan, and Chevron owns 18 percent of Karachaganak. Reuters, June 8, 2023
[3] Wikipedia, “Foreign Intelligence Service (Kazakhstan)
[4] KzExpert Web site, May 16, 2019; Kazakhstan 2.0 news outlet May 16, 2019Some evidence suggests Masimov previously had worked a CIA internship sponsored by Columbia University. OlympicKZ Web site. Masimov completed an internship at Columbia University, begun in 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolved. All things considered, it is at least somewhat likely this internship was in International Security Policy with Columbia’s School of International Affairs The ISP concentration prepares students for a broad range of career paths, including employment in the U.S. Intelligence Community as well as for counterparts in foreign governments.”
[5] Anuar Sadykulov, Daulet Yergozhin, and Marat Osipov. –
[6] Radio Liberty, January 18, 2022
[7] Euractiv Web site, January 20, 2022
[8] New York Post, October 20, 2020
[9] Karzai stopped paying the US mercenary companies, such as Blackwater, that trained and supplied fighters to the Afghan military. Al Jazeera, August 18, 2010; France 24 News, August 19, 2010
[10] Also in 2019, with Jomart Tokaeyev newly installed as interim president of Kazakhstan, Pompeo hosted Masimov, instead, in Washington.
[11] La Prensa Latina March 14, 2022 The Aqiqat (Truth) Commission into the January 2022 riots, led by attorney and human rights activist Aiman Ulmarova.
[12] La Prensa Latina, March 14, 2022 Ulmarova may have said this in Washington to State Department officials in a March 2022 briefing, but the Kazakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs report on the briefing gave no details. This reflects that the Tokaeyev administration has not named the “foreign state” it says paid mercenaries in a coup attempt in January 2022. Lawyer and human rights activist Aiman Ulmarova is head of the Aqiqat (Truth) Commission into the January 2022 riots.
[13] GIS Reports, March 3, 2022
[14] Interview with Khabar 24 TV News, January 29, 2022.
[15] The Kyrgyz outlet for Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe
[16] The suit charges their investments are not fully “reimbursable” legally in the huge Kashagan and Karachaganak oil projects.
[17] Global Times, July 9, 2023. China, fearing US naval blockade of the Malacca Strait, route for 70 percent of its crucial imports of petroleum, views Kazakh oil as “secure oil.” “China’s Kazakhstan Gambit — What does China want in Kazakhstan?” Harvard University press, August 1, 2022