Bank of Credit and Commerce International
[Follow the money!]
(B.C.C.I)
THE BCCI AFFAIR
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
1. BCCI CONSTITUTED INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL CRIME ON A MASSIVE AND GLOBAL SCALE.
BCCI's unique criminal structure -- an elaborate corporate spider-web with BCCI's founder, Agha Hasan Abedi and his assistant, Swaleh Naqvi, in the middle -- was an essential component of its spectacular growth, and a guarantee of its eventual collapse. The structure was conceived by Abedi and managed by Naqvi for the specific purpose of evading regulation or control by governments. It functioned to frustrate the full understanding of BCCI's operations by anyone.
Unlike any ordinary bank, BCCI was from its earliest days made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, banks-within-banks, insider dealings and nominee relationships. By fracturing corporate structure, record keeping, regulatory review, and audits, the complex BCCI family of entities created by Abedi was able to evade ordinary legal restrictions on the movement of capital and goods as a matter of daily practice and routine. In creating BCCI as a vehicle fundamentally free of government control, Abedi developed in BCCI an ideal mechanism for facilitating illicit activity by others, including such activity by officials of many of the governments whose laws BCCI was breaking.
BCCI's criminality included fraud by BCCI and BCCI customers involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; management of prostitution; the commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.
Among BCCI's principal mechanisms for committing crimes were its use of shell corporations and bank confidentiality and secrecy havens; layering of its corporate structure; its use of front-men and nominees, guarantees and buy-back arrangements; back-to-back financial documentation among BCCI controlled entities, kick-backs and bribes, the intimidation of witnesses, and the retention of well-placed insiders to discourage governmental action.
2. BCCI SYSTEMATICALLY BRIBED WORLD LEADERS AND POLITICAL FIGURES THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.
BCCI's systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated. BCCI records and testimony from former BCCI officials together document BCCI's systematic securing of Central Bank deposits of Third World countries; its provision of favors to political figures; and its reliance on those figures to provide BCCI itself with favors in times of need.
These relationships were systematically turned to BCCI's use to generate cash needed to prop up its books. BCCI would obtain an important figure's agreement to give BCCI deposits from a country's Central Bank, exclusive handling of a country's use of U.S. commodity credits, preferential treatment on the processing of money coming in and out of the country where monetary controls were in place, the right to own a bank, secretly if necessary, in countries where foreign banks were not legal, or other questionable means of securing assets or profits. In return, BCCI would pay bribes to the figure, or otherwise give him other things he wanted in a simple quid-pro-quo.
The result was that BCCI had relationships that ranged from the questionable, to the improper, to the fully corrupt with officials from countries all over the world, including Argentina, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Cameroon, China, Colombia, the Congo, Ghana, Guatemala, the Ivory Coast, India, Jamaica, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritius, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Suriname, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
3. BCCI DEVELOPED A STRATEGY TO INFILTRATE THE U.S. BANKING SYSTEM, WHICH IT SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED, DESPITE REGULATORY BARRIERS THAT WERE DESIGNED TO KEEP IT OUT.
In 1977, BCCI developed a plan to infiltrate the U.S. market through secretly purchasing U.S. banks while opening branch offices of BCCI throughout the U.S., and eventually merging the institutions. BCCI had significant difficulties implementing this strategy due to regulatory barriers in the United States designed to insure accountability. Despite these barriers, which delayed BCCI's entry, BCCI was ultimately successful in acquiring four banks, operating in seven states and the District of Colombia, with no jurisdiction successfully preventing BCCI from infiltrating it.
The techniques used by BCCI in the United States had been previously perfected by BCCI, and were used in BCCI's acquisitions of banks in a number of Third World countries and in Europe. These included purchasing banks through nominees, and arranging to have its activities shielded by prestigious lawyers, accountants, and public relations firms on the one hand, and politically-well connected agents on the other. These techniques were essential to BCCI's success in the United States, because without them, BCCI would have been stopped by regulators from gaining an interest in any U.S. bank. As it was, regulatory suspicion towards BCCI required the bank to deceive regulators in collusion with nominees including the heads of state of several foreign emirates, key political and intelligence figures from the Middle East, and entities controlled by the most important bank and banker in the Middle East.
Equally important to BCCI's successful secret acquisitions of U.S. banks in the face of regulatory suspicion was its aggressive use of a series of prominent Americans, beginning with Bert Lance, and continuing with former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, former U.S. Senator Stuart Symington, well-connected former federal bank regulators, and former and current local, state and federal legislators. Wittingly or not, these individuals provided essential assistance to BCCI through lending their names and their reputations to BCCI at critical moments. Thus, it was not merely BCCI's deceptions that permitted it to infiltrate the United States and its banking system. Also essential were BCCI's use of political influence peddling and the revolving door in Washington.
4. THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT MISHANDLED ITS INVESTIGATION AND PROSECUTION OF BCCI, AND ITS RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES CONCERNING BCCI.
Federal prosecutors in Tampa handling the 1988 drug money laundering indictment of BCCI failed to recognize the importance of information they received concerning BCCI's other crimes, including its apparent secret ownership of First American. As a result, they failed adequately to investigate these allegations themselves, or to refer this portion of the case to the FBI and other agencies at the Justice Department who could have properly investigated the additional information.
The Justice Department, along with the U.S. Customs Service and Treasury Departments, failed to provide adequate support and assistance to investigators and prosecutors working on the case against BCCI in 1988 and 1989, contributing to conditions that ultimately caused the chief undercover agent who handled the sting against BCCI to quit Customs entirely.
The January 1990 plea agreement between BCCI and the U.S. Attorney in Tampa kept BCCI alive, and had the effect of discouraging BCCI's officials from telling the U.S. what they knew about BCCI's larger criminality, including its ownership of First American and other U.S. banks.
The Justice Department essentially stopped investigating BCCI following the plea agreement, until press accounts, Federal Reserve action, and the New York District Attorney's investigation in New York forced them into action in mid-1991.
Justice Department personnel in Washington lobbied state regulators to keep BCCI open after the January 1990 plea agreement, following lobbying of them by former Justice Department personnel now representing BCCI.
Relations between main Justice in Washington and the U.S. Attorney for Miami, Dexter Lehtinen, broke down on BCCI-related prosecutions, and key actions on BCCI-related cases in Miami were, as a result, delayed for months during 1991.
Justice Department personnel in Washington, Miami, and Tampa actively obstructed and impeded Congressional attempts to investigate BCCI in 1990, and this practice continued to some extent until William P. Barr became Attorney General in late October, 1991.
Justice Department personnel in Washington, Miami and Tampa obstructed and impeded attempts by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau to obtain critical information concerning BCCI in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and in one case, a federal prosecutor lied to Morgenthau's office concerning the existence of such material. Important failures of cooperation continued to take place until William P. Barr became Attorney General in late October, 1991.
Cooperation by the Justice Department with the Federal Reserve was very limited until after BCCI's global closure on July 5, 1991.
Some public statements by the Justice Department concerning its handling of matters pertaining to BCCI were more cleverly crafted than true.
5. NEW YORK DISTRICT ATTORNEY MORGENTHAU NOT ONLY BROKE THE CASE ON BCCI, BUT INDIRECTLY BROUGHT ABOUT BCCI'S GLOBAL CLOSURE.
Acting on information provided him by the Subcommittee, New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau began an investigation in 1989 of BCCI which materially contributed to the chain of events that resulted in BCCI's closure.
Questions asked by the District Attorney intensified the review of BCCI's activities by its auditors, Price Waterhouse, in England, and gave life to a moribund Federal Reserve investigation of BCCI's secret ownership of First American.
The District Attorney's criminal investigation was critical to stopping an intended reorganization of BCCI worked out through an agreement among the Bank of England, the government of Abu Dhabi, BCCI's auditors, Price Waterhouse, and BCCI itself, in which the nature and extent of BCCI's criminality would be suppressed, while Abu Dhabi would commit its financial resources to keep the bank going during a restructuring. By the late spring of 1991, the key obstacle to a successful restructuring of BCCI bankrolled up Abu Dhabi was the possibility that the District Attorney of New York would indict. Such an indictment would have inevitably caused a swift and thoroughly justified an international run on BCCI by depositors all over the world. Instead, it was a substantial factor in the decision of the Bank of England to take the information it had received from Price Waterhouse and rely on it to close BCCI.
6. BCCI'S ACCOUNTANTS FAILED TO PROTECT BCCI'S INNOCENT DEPOSITORS AND CREDITORS FROM THE CONSEQUENCES OF POOR PRACTICES AT THE BANK OF WHICH THE AUDITORS WERE AWARE FOR YEARS.
BCCI's decision to divide its operations between two auditors, neither of whom had the right to audit all BCCI operations, was a significant mechanism by which BCCI was able to hide its frauds during its early years. For more than a decade, neither of BCCI's auditors objected to this practice.
BCCI provided loans and financial benefits to some of its auditors, whose acceptance of these benefits creates an appearance of impropriety, based on the possibility that such benefits could in theory affect the independent judgment of the auditors involved. These benefits included loans to two Price Waterhouse partnerships in the Caribbean. In addition, there are serious questions concerning the acceptance of payments and possibly housing from BCCI or its affiliates by Price Waterhouse partners in the Grand Caymans, and possible acceptance of sexual favors provided by BCCI officials to certain persons affiliated with the firm.
Regardless of BCCI's attempts to hide its frauds from its outside auditors, there were numerous warning bells visible to the auditors from the early years of the bank's activities, and BCCI's auditors could have and should have done more to respond to them.
By the end of 1987, given Price Waterhouse (UK)'s knowledge about the inadequacies of BCCI's records, it had ample reason to recognize that there could be no adequate basis for certifying that it had examined BCCI's books and records and that its picture of those records were indeed a "true and fair view" of BCCI's financial state of affairs.
The certifications by BCCI's auditors that its picture of BCCI's books were "true and fair" from December 31, 1987 forward, had the consequence of assisting BCCI in misleading depositors, regulators, investigators, and other financial institutions as to BCCI's true financial condition.
Prior to 1990, Price Waterhouse (UK) knew of gross irregularities in BCCI's handling of loans to CCAH/First American and was told of violations of U.S. banking laws by BCCI and its borrowers in connection with CCAH/First American, and failed to advise the partners of its U.S. affiliate or any U.S. regulator.
There is no evidence that Price Waterhouse (UK) has to this day notified Price Waterhouse (US) of the extent of the problems it found at BCCI, or of BCCI's secret ownership of CCAH/First American. Given the lack of information provided Price Waterhouse (US) by its United Kingdom affiliate, the U.S. firm performed its auditing of BCCI's U.S. branches in a manner that was professional and diligent, albeit unilluminating concerning BCCI's true activities in the United States.
Price Waterhouse's certification of BCCI's books and records in April, 1990 was explicitly conditioned by Price Waterhouse (UK) on the proposition that Abu Dhabi would bail BCCI out of its financial losses, and that the Bank of England, Abu Dhabi and BCCI would work with the auditors to restructure the bank and avoid its collapse. Price Waterhouse would not have made the certification but for the assurances it received from the Bank of England that its continued certification of BCCI's books was appropriate, and indeed, necessary for the bank's survival.
The April 1990 agreement among Price Waterhouse (UK), Abu Dhabi, BCCI, and the Bank of England described above, resulted in Price Waterhouse (UK) certifying the financial picture presented in its audit of BCCI as "true and fair," with a single footnote material to the huge losses still to be dealt with, failed adequately to describe their serious nature. As a consequence, the certification was materially misleading to anyone who relied on it ignorant of the facts then mutually known to BCCI, Abu Dhabi, Price Waterhouse and the Bank of England.
The decision by Abu Dhabi, Price Waterhouse (UK), BCCI and the Bank of England to reorganize BCCI over the duration of 1990 and 1991, rather than to advise the public of what they knew, caused substantial injury to innocent depositors and customers of BCCI who continued to do business with an institution which each of the above parties knew had engaged in fraud.
From at least April, 1990 through November, 1990, the Government of Abu Dhabi had knowledge of BCCI's criminality and frauds which it apparently withheld from BCCI's outside auditors, contributing to the delay in the ultimate closure of the bank, and causing further injury to the bank's innocent depositors and customers.
7. THE CIA DEVELOPED IMPORTANT INFORMATION ON BCCI, AND INADVERTENTLY FAILED TO PROVIDE IT TO THOSE WHO COULD USE IT.
THE CIA AND FORMER CIA OFFICIALS HAD A FAR WIDER RANGE OF CONTACTS AND LINKS TO BCCI AND BCCI SHAREHOLDERS, OFFICERS, AND CUSTOMERS, THAN HAS BEEN ACKNOWLEDGED BY THE CIA.
By early 1985, the CIA knew more about BCCI's goals and intentions concerning the U.S. banking system than anyone else in government, and provided that information to the U.S. Treasury and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, neither of whom had the responsibility for regulating the First American Bank that BCCI had taken over. The CIA failed to provide the critical information it had gathered to the correct users of the information -- the Federal Reserve and the Justice Department.
After the CIA knew that BCCI was as an institution a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American, BCCI's secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations.
While the reporting concerning BCCI by the CIA was in some respects impressive -- especially in its assembling of the essentials of BCCI's criminality, its secret purchase of First American by 1985, and its extensive involvement in money laundering -- there were also remarkable gaps in the CIA's reported knowledge about BCCI.
Former CIA officials, including former CIA director Richard Helms and the late William Casey; former and current foreign intelligence officials, including Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil; and principal foreign agents of the U.S., such as Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar, float in and out of BCCI at critical times in its history, and participate simultaneously in the making of key episodes in U.S. foreign policy, ranging from the Camp David peace talks to the arming of Iran as part of the Iran/Contra affair. Yet the CIA has continued to maintain that it has no information regarding any involvement of these people, raising questions about the quality of intelligence the CIA is receiving generally, or its candor with the Subcommittee. The CIA's professions of total ignorance about their respective roles in BCCI are out of character with the Agency's early knowledge of many critical aspects of the bank's operations, structure, personnel, and history.
The errors made by the CIA in connection with its handling of BCCI were complicated by its handling of this Congressional investigation. Initial information that was provided by the CIA was untrue; later information that was provided was incomplete; and the Agency resisted providing a "full" account about its knowledge of BCCI until almost a year after the initial requests for the information. These experiences suggest caution in concluding that the information provided to date is full and complete. The relationships among former CIA personnel and BCCI front men and nominees, including Kamal Adham, Abdul Khalil, and Mohammed Irvani, requires further investigation.
8. THE FLAWED DECISIONS MADE BY REGULATORS IN THE US WHICH ALLOWED BCCI TO SECRETLY ACQUIRE US BANKS WERE CAUSED IN PART BY GAPS IN THE REGULATORY PROCESS AND IN PART BY BCCI'S USE OF WELL-CONNECTED LAWYERS TO HELP THEM THROUGH THE PROCESS.
When the Federal Reserve approved the take over of Financial General Bankshares by CCAH in 1981, it had substantial circumstantial evidence before it to suggest that BCCI was behind the bank's purchase. The Federal Reserve chose not to act on that evidence because of the specific representations that were made to it by CCAH's shareholders and lawyers, that BCCI was neither financing nor directing the take over. These representations were untrue and the Federal Reserve would not have approved the CCAH application but for the false statements made to it.
In approving the CCAH application, the Federal Reserve relied upon representations from the Central Intelligence Agency, State Department, and other U.S. agencies that they had no objections to or concerns about the Middle Eastern shareholders who were purporting to purchase shares in the bank. The Federal Reserve also relied upon the reputation for integrity of BCCI's lawyers, especially that of former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and former Federal Reserve counsel Baldwin Tuttle. Assurances provided the Federal Reserve by the CIA and State Department, and by both attorneys, had a material impact on the Federal Reserve's willingness to approve the CCAH application despite its concerns about BCCI's possible involvement.
In 1981, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency had additional information, from reports concerning BCCI's role in the Bank of America and the National Bank of Georgia, concerning BCCI's possible use of nominee arrangements and alter egos to purchase banks on its behalf in the United States, which it failed to pass on to the Federal Reserve. This failure was inadvertent, not intentional.
In approving the CCAH application, the Federal Reserve permitted BCCI and its attorneys to carve out a seeming loophole in the commitment that BCCI not be involved in financing or controlling CCAH's activities. This loophole permitted BCCI to act as an investment advisor and information conduit to CCAH's shareholders. The Federal Reserve's decision to accept this arrangement allowed BCCI and its attorneys and agents to use these permitted activities as a cover for the true nature of BCCI's ownership of CCAH and the First American Banks.
After approving the CCAH application in 1981, the Federal Reserve received few indicators about BCCI's possible improper involvement in CCAH/First American. However, at several critical junctures, especially the purchase by First American of the National Bank of Georgia from Ghaith Pharaon in 1986, there were obvious warnings signs that could have been investigated and which were not, until late 1990.
As a foreign bank whose branches were chartered by state banking authorities, BCCI largely escaped the Federal Reserve's scrutiny regarding its criminal activities in the United States unrelated to its interest in CCAH/First American. This gap in regulatory oversight has since been closed by the passage of the Foreign Bank Supervision Enhancement Act of 1991.
The U.S. Treasury Department failed to provide the Federal Reserve with information it received concerning BCCI's ownership of First American in 1985 and 1986 from the CIA. However, IRS agents did provide important information to the Federal Reserve on this issue in early 1989, which the Federal Reserve failed adequately to investigate at the time.
The FDIC approved Ghaith Pharaon's purchase of the Independence Bank in 1985 knowing him to be a shareholder of BCCI and knowing that he was placing a senior BCCI officer in charge of the bank, and failed to confer with the Federal Reserve or the OCC regarding their previous experiences with Pharaon and BCCI.
Once the Federal Reserve commenced a formal investigation of BCCI and First American on January 3, 1991, its investigation of BCCI and First American was aggressive and diligent. Its decisions to force BCCI out of the United States and to divest itself of First American were prompt. The charges it brought against the parties involved with BCCI in violating federal banking standards were fully justified by the record. Its investigations have over the past year contributed substantially to public understanding to date of what took place.
Even after the Federal Reserve understood the nature and scope of BCCI's frauds, it did not seek to have BCCI closed globally. This position was in some measure the consequence of the Federal Reserve's need to secure the cooperation of BCCI's majority shareholders, the government and royal family of Abu Dhabi, in providing some $190 million to prop up First American Bank and prevent an embarrassing collapse. However, Federal Reserve investigators did actively work in the spring of 1991 to have BCCI's top management removed.
In investigating BCCI, the Federal Reserve's efforts were hampered by examples of lack of cooperation by foreign governments, including most significantly the Serious Fraud Office in the United Kingdom and, since the closure of BCCI on July 5, 1991, the government of Abu Dhabi.
U.S. regulatory handling of the U.S. banks secretly owned by BCCI was hampered by lack of coordination among the regulators, which included the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the OCC, highlighting the need for further integration of these separate banking regulatory agencies on supervision and enforcement.
9. THE BANK OF ENGLAND'S REGULATION OF BCCI WAS WHOLLY INADEQUATE TO PROTECT BCCI'S DEPOSITORS AND CREDITORS, AND THE BANK OF ENGLAND WITHHELD INFORMATION ABOUT BCCI'S FRAUDS FROM PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE FOR FIFTEEN MONTHS BEFORE CLOSING THE BANK.
The Bank of England had deep concerns about BCCI from the late 1970s on, and undertook several steps to slow BCCI's expansion in the United Kingdom.
In 1988 and 1989, the Bank of England learned of BCCI's involvement in the financing of terrorism and in drug money laundering, and undertook additional, but limited supervision of BCCI in response to receiving this information.
In the spring of 1990, Price Waterhouse advised the Bank of England that there were substantial loan losses at BCCI, numerous poor banking practices, and evidence of fraud, which together had created a massive hole in BCCI's books. The Bank of England's response to the information was not to close BCCI down, but to find ways to prop up BCCI and prevent its collapse. This meant, among other things, keeping secret the very serious nature of BCCI's problems from its creditors and one million depositors.
In April, 1990, the Bank of England reached an agreement with BCCI, Abu Dhabi, and Price Waterhouse to keep BCCI from collapsing. Under the agreement, Abu Dhabi agreed to guarantee BCCI's losses and Price Waterhouse agreed to certify BCCI's books. As a consequence, innocent depositors and creditors who did business with BCCI following that date were deceived into believing that BCCI's financial problems were not as serious as each of these parties already knew them to be.
From April, 1990, the Bank of England relied on British bank secrecy and confidentiality laws to reduce the risk of BCCI's collapse if word of its improprieties leaked out. As a consequence, innocent depositors and creditors who did business with BCCI following that date were denied vital information, in the possession of the regulators, auditors, officers, and shareholders of BCCI, that could have protected them against their losses.
In order to prevent risk to its restructuring plan for BCCI and a possible run on BCCI, the Bank of England withheld important information from the Federal Reserve in the spring of 1990 about the size and scope of BCCI's lending on CCAH/First American shares, despite the Federal Reserve's requests for such information. This action by the Bank of England delayed the opening of a full investigation by the Federal Reserve for approximately eight months.
Despite its knowledge of some of BCCI's past frauds, and its own understanding that consolidation into a single entity is essential for regulating a bank, in late 1990 and early 1991 the Bank of England tentatively agreed with BCCI and its Abu Dhabi owners to permit BCCI to restructure as three "separate" institutions, based in London, Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong. This tentative decision demonstrated extraordinarily poor judgment on the part of the Bank of England. This decision was reversed abruptly when the Bank of England suddenly decided to close BCCI instead in late June, 1991.
The decision by the Bank of England in April 1990 to permit BCCI to move its headquarters, officers, and records out of British jurisdiction to Abu Dhabi has had profound negative consequences for investigations of BCCI around the world. As a result of this decision, essential records and witnesses regarding what took place were removed from the control of the British government, and placed under the control of the government of Abu Dhabi, which has to date withheld them from criminal investigators in the U.S. and U.K. This decision constituted a costly, and likely irretrievable, error on the part of the Bank of England.
10. CLARK CLIFFORD AND ROBERT ALTMAN PARTICIPATED IN IMPROPRIETIES WITH BCCI IN THE UNITED STATES.
Regardless of whether Clifford and Altman were deceived by BCCI in some respects, both men participated in some BCCI's deceptions in the United States.
Beginning in late 1977, Clifford and Altman assisted BCCI in purchasing a U.S. bank, Financial General Bankshares, with the participation of nominees, and understood BCCI's central involvement in directing and controlling the transaction.
In the years that followed, they made business decisions regarding acquisitions for First American that were motivated by BCCI's goals, rather than by the business needs of First American itself; and represented as their own to regulators decisions that had been made by Abedi and BCCI on fundamental matters concerning First American, including the purchase by First American of the National Bank of Georgia and First American's decision to purchase branches in New York City.
Clifford and Altman concealed their own financing of shares of First American by BCCI from First American's other directors and from U.S. regulators, withheld critical information that they possessed from regulators in an effort to keep the truth about BCCI's ownership of First American secret, and deceived regulators and the Congress concerning their own knowledge of and personal involvement in BCCI's illegalities in the United States.
11. ABU DHABI'S INVOLVEMENT IN BCCI'S AFFAIRS WAS FAR MORE CENTRAL THAN IT HAS ACKNOWLEDGED, INVOLVING IN SOME CASES NOMINEE RELATIONS AND NO-RISK TRANSACTIONS THAT ABU DHABI IS TODAY COVERING-UP THROUGH HIDING WITNESSES AND DOCUMENTS FROM U.S. INVESTIGATORS.
Members of Abu Dhabi's ruling family appear to have contributed no more than $500,000 to BCCI's capitalization prior to April 1990, despite being the record owner of almost one-quarter of the bank's total shares. An unknown but substantial percentage of the shares acquired by Abu Dhabi overall in BCCI appear to have been acquired on a risk-free basis -- either with guaranteed rates of return, buy-back arrangements, or both.
The interest held in BCCI by the Abu Dhabi ruling family, like the interests held by the rulers of the three other gulf sheikdoms in the United Arab Emirates who owned shares of BCCI, materially aided and abetted Abedi and BCCI in projecting the illusion that BCCI was backed by, and capitalized by, Abu Dhabi's wealth. Investments made in BCCI by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority appear to have been genuine, although possibly guaranteed by BCCI with buy-back or other no-risk arrangements.
Shares in Financial General Bankshares held by members of the Abu Dhabi royal family in late 1977 and early 1978 appear to have been nominee arrangements, adopted by Abu Dhabi as a convenience to BCCI and Abedi, under arrangements in which Abu Dhabi was to be without risk, and BCCI was to guarantee the purchase through a commitment to buy-back the stock at an agreed upon price.
Abu Dhabi's representative to BCCI's board of directors, Ghanim al Mazrui, received unorthodox financial benefits from BCCI in no-risk stock deals which may have compromised his ability to exercise independent judgment concerning BCCI's actions; confirmed at least one fraudulent transaction involving Abu Dhabi; and engaged in other improprieties pertaining to BCCI; but remains today in place at the apex of Abu Dhabi's committee designated to respond to BCCI's collapse.
In April, 1990, Abu Dhabi was told in detail about BCCI's fraud by top BCCI officials, and failed to advise BCCI's external auditors of what it had learned. Between April, 1990 and November, 1990, Abu Dhabi and BCCI together kept some information concerning BCCI's frauds hidden from the auditors.
From April, 1990 through July 5, 1991, Abu Dhabi tried to save BCCI through a massive restructuring. As part of the restructuring process, Abu Dhabi agreed to take responsibility for BCCI's losses, Price Waterhouse agreed to certify BCCI's books for another year, and Abu Dhabi, Price Waterhouse, the Bank of England, and BCCI agreed to keep all information concerning BCCI's frauds and other problems secret from BCCI's one million depositors, as well as from U.S. regulators and law enforcement, to prevent a run on the bank.
After the Federal Reserve was advised by the New York District Attorney of possible nominee arrangements involving BCCI and First American, Abu Dhabi, in an apparent effort to gain the Federal Reserve's acquiescence in BCCI's proposed restructuring, provided limited cooperation to the Federal Reserve, including access to selected documents. The cooperation did not extend to permitting the Federal Reserve open access to all BCCI documents, or substantive communication with key BCCI officials held in Abu Dhabi, such as BCCI's former president, Swaleh Naqvi. That access ended with the closure of BCCI July 5, 1991.
From November, 1990 through the present, Abu Dhabi has failed to provide documents and witnesses to U.S. law enforcement authorities and to the Congress, despite repeated commitments to do so. Instead, it has actively prevented U.S. investigators from having access to vital information necessary to investigate BCCI's global wrongdoing.
The proposed agreement between Abu Dhabi and BCCI's liquidators to settle their claims against one another contains provisions which could have the consequence of permitting Abu Dhabi to cover up any wrongdoing it may have had in connection with BCCI.
There is some evidence that the Sheikh Zayed may have had a political agenda in agreeing to the involvement of members of the Abu Dhabi royal family and its investment authority in purchasing shares of Financial General Bankshares, then of CCAH/First American. This evidence is offset, in part, by testimony that Abu Dhabi share purchases in the U.S. bank were done at Abedi's request and did not represent an actual investment by Abu Dhabi until much later.
12. BCCI MADE EXTENSIVE USE OF THE REVOLVING DOOR AND POLITICAL INFLUENCE PEDDLING IN THE UNITED STATES TO ACCOMPLISH ITS GOALS.
BCCI's political connections in Washington had a material impact on its ability to accomplish its goals in the United States. In hiring lawyers, lobbyists and public relations firms in the United States to help it deal with its problems vis a vis the government, BCCI pursued a strategy that it had practiced successfully around the world: the hiring of former government officials.
BCCI's and its shareholders' cadre of professional help in Washington D.C. included, at various times, a former Secretary of Defense (Clark Clifford), former Senators and Congressmen (John Culver, Mike Barnes), former federal prosecutors (Larry Wechsler, Raymond Banoun, and Larry Barcella, a former State Department Official (William Rogers), a former White House aide (Ed Rogers), a current Presidential campaign deputy director (James Lake), and former Federal Reserve Attorneys (Baldwin Tuttle, Jerry Hawke, and Michael Bradfield). In addition, BCCI solicited the help of Henry Kissinger, who chose not to do business with BCCI but made a referral of BCCI to his own lawyers.
At several key points in BCCI's activities in the U.S., the political influence and personal contacts of those it hired had an impact in helping BCCI accomplish its goals, including in connection with the 1981 CCAH acquisition of FGB and the handling and aftermath of BCCI's plea agreement in Tampa in 1990.
The political connections of BCCI's U.S. lawyers and lobbyists were critical to impeding Congressional and law enforcement investigations from 1988 through 1991, through a variety of techniques that included impugning the motives and integrity of investigators and journalists, withholding subpoenaed documents, and lobbying on capital hill to protect BCCI's reputation and discourage efforts to close the bank down in the United States.
13. BCCI'S PUBLIC RELATIONS FIRM SMEARED PEOPLE WHO WERE TELLING THE TRUTH AS PART OF ITS WORK FOR BCCI.
When Hill and Knowlton accepted BCCI's account in October, 1988, its partners knew of BCCI's reputation as a "sleazy" bank, but took the account anyway. In 1988 and 1989, Hill and Knowlton assisted BCCI with an aggressive public relations campaign designed to demonstrate that BCCI was not a criminal enterprise, and to put the best face possible on the Tampa drug money laundering indictments. In so doing, it disseminated materials unjustifiably and unfairly discrediting persons and publications who were telling the truth about BCCI's criminality.
Important information provided by Hill and Knowlton to Capitol Hill and provided by First American to regulators concerning the relationship between BCCI and First American in April, 1990 was false. The misleading material represented the position of BCCI, First American, Clifford and Altman concerning the relationship, and was contrary to the truth known by BCCI, Clifford and Altman.
Hill and Knowlton's representation of BCCI was within the norms and standards of the public relations industry, but raises larger questions as to the relationship of those norms and standards to the public interest.
14. BCCI ACTIVELY SOLICITED THE FRIENDSHIPS OF MAJOR U.S. POLITICAL FIGURES, AND MADE PAYMENTS TO THESE POLITICAL FIGURES, WHICH IN SOME CASES MAY HAVE BEEN IMPROPER.
Beginning with Bert Lance in 1977, whose debts BCCI paid off with a $3.5 million loan, BCCI, BCCI nominees, and top officials of BCCI systematically developed friendships and relationships with important U.S political figures. While those which are publicly known include former president Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson, and Andrew Young, the Subcommittee has received information suggesting that BCCI's network extended to other U.S. political figures. The payments made by BCCI to Andrew Young while he was a public official were at best unusual, and by all appearances, improper.
15. BCCI'S COMMODITIES AFFILIATE, CAPCOM, ENGAGED IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF LARGELY ANONYMOUS TRADING IN THE US WHICH INCLUDED A VERY SUBSTANTIAL LEVEL OF MONEY LAUNDERING, WHILE CAPCOM SIMULTANEOUSLY DEVELOPED SIGNIFICANT TIES TO IMPORTANT U.S. TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY EXECUTIVES AND FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE FIGURES.
BCCI's commodities affiliate, Capcom, based in Chicago, London and Cairo, was principally staffed by former BCCI bankers, capitalized by BCCI and BCCI customers, and owned by BCCI, BCCI shareholders, and front-men. Capcom employed many of the same practices as BCCI, especially the use of nominees and front companies to disguise ownership and the movement of money. Four U.S. citizens -- none of whom had any experience or expertise in the commodities markets -- played important and varied roles as Capcom front men in the United States.
While investigation information concerning Capcom is incomplete, its activities appear to have included misappropriation of BCCI assets; the laundering of billions of dollars from the Middle East to the US and other parts of the world; and the siphoning of assets from BCCI to create a safe haven for them outside of the official BCCI empire.
Capcom's majority shareholders, Kamal Adham and A.R. Khalil, were both former senior Saudi government officials and successively acted as Saudi Arabia's principal liaisons to the Central Intelligence Agency during the 1970's and 1980's.
Its U.S. front men included Robert Magness, the CEO of the largest U.S. cable telecommunications company, TCI; a vice-President of TCI, Larry Romrell; and two other Americans, Kerry Fox and Robert Powell, with long-standing business interests in the Middle East. Magness, Romrell and Fox received loans from BCCI for real estate ventures in the U.S., and Magness and Romrell discussed numerous business ventures between BCCI and TCI, some of which involved the possible purchase of U.S. telecommunications stock and substantial lending by BCCI.
Commodities regulators with the responsibility for investigating Capcom showed little interest in conducting a thorough investigation of its activities, and in 1989 allowed Capcom to avoid such an investigation through agreeing to cease doing business in the United States.
The Subcommittee could not determine whether BCCI, Capcom, or their shareholders or agents actually acquired equity interests in the U.S. cable industry and believes further investigation of matters pertaining to Capcom is essential.
16. INVESTIGATIONS OF BCCI TO DATE REMAIN INCOMPLETE, AND MANY LEADS CANNOT BE FOLLOWED UP, AS THE RESULT OF DOCUMENTS BEING WITHHELD FROM US INVESTIGATORS BY THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT, AND DOCUMENTS AND WITNESSES BEING WITHHELD FROM US INVESTIGATORS BY THE GOVERNMENT OF ABU DHABI.
Many of the specific criminal transactions engaged in by BCCI's customers remain hidden from investigation as the result of bank secrecy laws in many jurisdictions, British national security laws, and the holding of key witnesses and documents by the Government of Abu Dhabi. Documents pertaining to BCCI's use to finance terrorism, to assist the builders of a Pakistani nuclear bomb, to finance Iranian arms deals, and related matters have been sealed in the United Kingdom by British intelligence and remain unavailable to U.S. investigators. Many other basic matters pertaining to BCCI's criminality, including any list that may exist of BCCI's political payoffs and bribes, remain sequestered in Abu Dhabi and unavailable to U.S. investigators.
Many investigative leads remain to be explored, but cannot be answered with devoting substantial additional sources that to date no agency of government has been in a position to provide.
Unanswered questions include, but are not limited to, the relationship between BCCI and the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro; the alleged relationship between the late CIA director William Casey and BCCI; the extent of BCCI's involvement in Pakistan's nuclear program; BCCI's manipulation of commodities and securities markets in Europe and Canada; BCCI's activities in India, including its relationship with the business empire of the Hinduja family; BCCI's relationships with convicted Iraqi arms dealer Sarkis Sarkenalian, Syrian drug trafficker, terrorist, and arms trafficker Monzer Al-Kassar, and other major arms dealers; the use of BCCI by central figures in the alleged "October Surprise," BCCI's activities with the Central Bank of Syria and with the Foreign Trade Mission of the Soviet Union in London; its involvement with foreign intelligence agencies; the financial dealingst of BCCI directors with Charles Keating and several Keating affiliates and front-companies, including the possibility that BCCI related entities may have laundered funds for Keating to move them outside the United States; BCCI's financing of commodities and other business dealings of international criminal financier Marc Rich; the nature, extent and meaning of the ownership of other major U.S. financial institutions by Middle Eastern political figures; the nature, extent, and meaning of real estate and financial investments in the United States by major shareholders of BCCI; the sale of BCCI affiliate Banque de Commerce et Placement in Geneva, to the Cukorova Group of Turkey, which owned an entity involved in the BNL Iraqi arms sales, among others.
The withholding of documents and witnesses from U.S. investigators by the Government of Abu Dhabi threatens vital U.S. foreign policy, anti-narcotics and money laundering, and law enforcement interests, and should not be tolerated.
SUMMARY OF LEGISLATIVE RECOMMENDATIONS
1. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE UNITED STATES DEVELOP A MORE AGGRESSIVE AND COORDINATED APPROACH TO INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL CRIME, AND TO MOVE FURTHER AGAINST FOREIGN PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIAL LAWS THAT PROTECT CRIMINALS.
2. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT RECONSIDER THE POLICIES AND PRACTICES THAT LED TO ITS INEFFECTIVENESS IN INVESTIGATING AND PROSECUTING BCCI, AND IMPAIRED ITS ABILITY TO COOPERATE WITH OTHER INVESTIGATIONS OF BCCI BEING CONDUCTED BY THE FEDERAL RESERVE, NEW YORK DISTRICT ATTORNEY, AND THE SENATE.
3. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY AND STATE DEPARTMENT UPGRADE THE TRACKING OF FOREIGN FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND ACTIVITIES, AND THE DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION CONCERNING SUCH INSTITUTIONS.
4. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE CONGRESS CONSIDER WHETHER ADDITIONAL OVERSIGHT MECHANISMS ARE NECESSARY TO ENSURE THE CIA'S ACCOUNTABILITY ON THE PROVISION OF INFORMATION.
5. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT FEDERAL AGENCIES IMPOSE NEW REQUIREMENTS ON FOREIGN AUDITORS TO PROTECT U.S. INTERESTS IN ANY CASE IN WHICH ANY SUCH AGENCY IS RELYING ON AN AUDIT CERTIFIED BY A FOREIGN AUDITOR. AT MINIMUM, THIS SHOULD REQUIRE FOREIGN AUDITORS WHOSE CERTIFICATIONS ARE USED BY INSTITUTIONS DOING BUSINESS IN THE U.S. AGREE TO SUBMIT THEMSELVES TO U.S. LAWS.
6. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE PRESIDENT AND THE SECRETARY OF STATE ADVISE THE GOVERNMENT OF ABU DHABI THAT ITS WITHHOLDING OF DOCUMENTS AND WITNESSES PERTAINING TO BCCI FROM U.S. FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT INVESTIGATORS, THE FEDERAL RESERVE, THE NEW YORK DISTRICT ATTORNEY AND THE CONGRESS THREATENS VITAL U.S. INTERESTS AND WILL NOT BE TOLERATED.
7. FURTHER ATTENTION NEEDS TO BE GIVEN TO THE PROBLEM OF THE REVOLVING DOOR IN WASHINGTON, AND THE IMPACT ON THE REGULATORY PROCESS AND ON LAW ENFORCEMENT OF POLITICAL INFLUENCE IN WASHINGTON. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THE CONSIDERATION OF LEGISLATING A FEDERAL STATUTORY CODE OF CONDUCT FOR ATTORNEYS WHO PRACTICE BEFORE FEDERAL AGENCIES.
8. THE SELF-REGULATION OF THE U.S COMMODITIES MARKETS BY THE COMMODITIES FUTURES TRADING COMMISSION, THE CHICAGO BOARD OF TRADE, AND THE CHICAGO MERCANTILE EXCHANGE IS INADEQUATE TO PROTECT THOSE MARKETS AGAINST MONEY LAUNDERING INVOLVING TRADES
FROM ABROAD. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT THE EXCHANGES MAKE MONEY LAUNDERING ILLEGAL, AND DEMAND THAT THIS REQUIREMENT BE ACCEPTED BY FOREIGN COMMODITIES EXCHANGES WITH WHOM THEY DO BUSINESS, AS A CONDITION OF ACCESS TO US EXCHANGES.
9. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT FURTHER STEPS BE TAKEN TO INSURE ADEQUATE ACCOUNTABILITY OF FOREIGN FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS DOING BUSINESS IN THE UNITED STATES, INCLUDING REQUIRING FOREIGN BANKS FORM SEPARATELY CAPITALIZED HOLDING COMPANIES IN THE UNITED STATES AS A CONDITION OF LICENSE AND THE CONSIDERATION BY THE FEDERAL RESERVE OF ESTABLISHMENT A MINIMUM STANDARD FOR CONSOLIDATED REGULATION THAT EXCLUDES BANK REGULATORY HAVENS.
10. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT FOREIGN INVESTORS WHO PURCHASE SUBSTANTIAL SHARES OF U.S. BUSINESSES BE REQUIRED TO APPEAR PERSONALLY IN THE UNITED STATES AS INSURANCE THAT THE FOREIGN INVESTOR IS NOT ACTING AS A NOMINEE FOR SOMEONE ELSE.
11. TURF WARS CONTINUE TO SEVERELY DAMAGE THE ABILITY OF LAW-ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES IN THE UNITED STATES TO DO THEIR JOB. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A COMMITTEE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIALS WHOSE JOB IT IS TO CONDUCT OVERSIGHT OF, PREVENT, AND RESPOND TO FAILURES OF COOPERATION IN LAW ENFORCEMENT.
12. THE SUBCOMMITTEE RECOMMENDS THAT A STATUTORY MECHANISM FOR THE RECEIPT BY CONGRESS OF FOREIGN FINANCIAL INFORMATION BE ESTABLISHED.
http://www.aci.net/kalliste/bcci01.htm
http://www.skolnicksreport.com
The ENRON Black Magic - Part One
By Sherman H. Skolnick
In the often evil world of oil and natural gas, and other energy, they became the seventh largest of the Fortune 500. What has happened to put them as the largest of the No Fortune 100? How did they become, so far, the biggest loser?
The real operators of Enron Corporation are, to some, great sorcerers. They have waved their magic wand, and turned paper promises into black gold and vice versa. Sort of latter day alchemists. Later in this series we will explore the role of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush. Now just look at some of the other names.
A Director of Enron has been Wendy Gramm, wife of U.S. Senator Phil Gramm [R., Texas]. A former Professor, supposedly adept in economics and banking, Senator Gramm has been the Chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, and member of the Budget and the Finance Committees. He has blocked laws against money laundering. Convenient to the Enron mess, he decided ahead of time not to run for re-election.
For some twelve years during the Reagan/Daddy Bush Administrations, Wendy was Chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. As a highly corrupt federal regulatory agency, CFTC wields great power and influence over markets, often little understood by common Americans.
Spreading out in the 1980s worldwide was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI. Some called them, with their hundreds of branches round the world, the Bank of Crooks and Criminals International. They were actually a huge money laundry for political assassination and dirty tricks funding, as well as espionage proprietaries, for the American CIA, British MI-6, French CIA, and The Mossad of Israel.
BCCI had or were planning some five branches in the U.S. For their U.S. agenda, they needed to put the arm on the U.S. government. Elsewhere in the world, BCCI had already honed the real world specialty of buying and bribing public officials.
BCCI as a foreign entity not only dealt in secret transactions in banking but were a highly mostly covert player on the world markets, particularly the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the Chicago Board of Trade, and on markets such as LIFFE in London. Through six La Salle Street brokers, BCCI bribed and blackmailed its way into the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Key law-makers were invited to come to Chicago, all expenses paid, to supposedly give a speech for the CME, or "Merc" as some call it, and the CBOT. While in the Windy City, the law-makers were informed that their hosts, the market honchos, were opening "courtesy" accounts for them. And, that they would be informed of the good results that developed. In some instances, the so-called "courtesy" account was not told to the Representatives and Senators, but was set up in their name anyway as a blackmail device on the date of their Chicago visit.
Through a hocus-pocus series of transactions, the Chicago accounts showed a supposed loss while the London acounts showed a huge profit. In the lingo of the markets, it was called a "straddle". The Senators and Congressmen themselves, or most often their known agents, from time to time personally picked up the huge profits in London. On other occasions, someone identifying themselves with credentials as their known agents, likewise picked up the heavy profits from the "courtesy" accounts, in the British money center. It was either a direct provable bribery payment to the law-makers or verifiable record-kept blackmail. Either way, twenty five per cent of both houses of the American legislature were "hooked".
By the time BCCI supposedly collapsed in the summer of 1991, some five billion dollars had disappeared. It was used in great part to buy, that is, to bribe, 28 U.S. Senators and 108 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Bank of England, by a series of circumstances, became the kingpin in supervising and overseeing the supposed demise of BCCI. [BUT, see Foonote One, how BCCI rose from the ashes under another name.]
Notice the strange happenings. For only thirty days, the Bank of England had as an open record, the list of those bought and bribed, whether directly or through the blackmail devices, of the legislative branch of the U.S. Government. A major media correspondent got wind of this and before secrecy was clamped on the records, got a copy of the entire list of bribery/blackmail.
Part of one of the largest media operations worldwide, he went to his media editor with the details. The editor was thunder-struck. Here was documented proof that twenty five per cent of the House and Senate were bribed. "We cannot publish the list and the details that go with it", the journalist was told. The media mogul added the obvious, "It would cause the scandal downfall of the American Government", as the journalist later related the editor's statements to an independent-minded confidant.
As a last resort, the journalist gave the list and the corroborating details to our group. [This type of thing has happened again and again during the forty years our group has operated to open up deeply censored stories. I as head of the group have been jailed some eight times for contempt of court, wheelchair and all, for refusing to divulge witnesses and sources.]
Using the list and substantiating details, we began directly confronting members of the House and Senate. We began receiving threats of great harm to us after the time when we confronted Senator Phil Gramm, who was on the list and we brought up about the apparent bribery cover up of his wife Wendy, as head of the CFTC.
In going over the specifics, we discovered that BCCI was a sizeable secret funder of Ted Turner, making possible his idea for a television super-station via satellite from Atlanta, Georgia. And, that this was done through part-owner of Turner's empire, the then cable monster, TCI of Denver. In an interview with the former chief accountant of one of the La Salle Street brokers arranging the bribery, we learned that TCI also owned part of the brokers fronting for BCCI in Chicago.
We learned plenty in the process of exploring the details. We found out, for example, that BCCI, through their Chicago branch, greatly funded the television campaign commercials for the 1988 Presidential campaign for Democrat candidate Michael Dukakis. To cut off money for the badly needed television ads for Dukakis, his opponent, GOP Presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush, at the time Vice President, arranged on a holiday, Columbus Day, right before the Election, to mysteriously close up BCCI's Chicago branch, source of the tv money for Dukakis, claiming "corruption" but not disclosing details.
In putting the complex matter together, we found out about the threat of an internatinal scandal. GNP Commodities, headquartered in Chicago, wanted to merge with French entity, Bank Indo-Suez. The merger was opposed by CFTC Chairperson, Wendy Gramm, and the head of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. At a hearing in Chicago as to the merger, an attorney for GNP was heard hollaring outside the CFTC office, that if Wendy Gramm and the Fed do not get off GNP's back, there would be an "international incident". GNP, then headed by the former chieftain of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, was reportedly in a position to know about the BCCI bribery of both houses of Congress covered up not only reportedly by Wendy Gramm but by Alan Greenspan as well.
A watered down version of the GNP Commodities incident was published in the Wall Street Journal in November, 1989.
From long past experiences, I knew only one publication would run my exclusive story about the BCCI bribery of Congress. I turned it over to the populist paper, Spotlight, headquartered in the nation's Capitol. I gave them the Bank of England BCCI bribery list. In October, 1991, they ran my story minus the list which they had but the list nevertheless began circulating elsewhere anyway.
Here are some of the names from the Bank of England's reported BCCI bribery list, that included 108 members of the House and 28 U.S. Senators:
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Congressman DAN ROSTENKOWSKI (D-Illinois) Two of his daughters supposedly worked in the Chicago markets although apparently not doing much actual work. Rosty as he was called for many years headed the House tax-writing committee and put through a near-private law for the markets as a tax-loophole as to "straddles". He has been a major owner of Garfield Ridge Trust & Savings Bank of Chicago, a reputed transit point for CIA dope money from Mena, Arkansas, headed for laundering disguised as soybean and currency trading through the Chicago markets. Rosty was later sent to federal prison for defrauding the private bank of the House of Representatives.
Cong. MARTY RUSSO (D-Illinois)
Cong. THOMAS FOLEY (D-Washington)
Cong. GLENN ENGLISH (D-Oklahoma)
Cong. CARDISS COLLINS (D-Illinois)
As to her, see our website series on the "Secret History of Airplane Sabotage". She reportedly went along with the cover up of the Watergate Plane Crash, Chicago.
Cong. E (Kika) de la GARZA (D-Texas)
Cong. RICHARD GEPHARDT (D-Missouri) For 2004, is he planning to run for President? What does HE know about the murder of Mel Carnahan on the eve of the year 2000 Election debate? Carnahan had records that would have scandalized Presidential Candidate George W. Bush at a presidential candidate debate in St. Louis.
Cong. JAMES WRIGHT (D-Texas) He left Congress later in another scandal.
Cong. DAN GLICKMAN (D-Kansas)
In the Clinton administration he became head of the Department of Agriculture. BCCI/Banca Nazionale del Lavoro were implicated in a huge Atlanta scandal where billions of U.S. dollars disguised as "Agriculture" loans, were used by Daddy Bush to supply weapons to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Glickman was reportedly part of the coverup.
Cong. ROBERT MICHEL (R-Illinois) When faced with an apparent Chicago U.S. Bankruptcy scandal also involving his son, he left Congress.
Cong. RICHARD DURBIN (D-Illinois)
U.S. SENATE
Senator THOMAS DASCHLE (D-South Dakota) Does HE plan to run for President in 2004?
Sen. JAMES JEFFORDS (R-Vermont) In 2001, he changed from Republican to Democrat, upsetting the GOP control of the U.S. Senate.
Sen. LLOYD BENTSEN (D-Texas) Big-time bank owner leading up to Enron.
Sen. ALFONSE D'AMATO (R-New York) Law enforcement personnel contended D'Amato was the mafia's man in the Senate.
Sen. JESSE HELMS (R-North Carolina) Records reportedly seem to support the claim that Sen. Helms receives funding from international terrorist groups.
Sen. RICHARD LUGAR (R-Indiana)
Sen. ROBERT BYRD (D-West Virginia) There is strong reason to believe that he and some of his staff members know a lot about the murder in 1991 of Journalist/Author Danny Casalaro in West Virginia, also about the apparent frame-up of computer wizard Michael Riconosciuto.
Sen. DONALD RIEGLE (D-Michigan)
Sen. PATRICK LEAHY (D-Vermont) He has been the long-time Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. See BCCI/BNL details at listing of Cong. DAN GLICKMAN.
Sen. ALAN DIXON (D-Illinois) He previously had been Illinois Secretary of State, issuing auto and drivers licenses. Some of his family members allegedly ran stolen auto parts businesses, called "chop shops" which were covered up by fake auto registrations and such. Dixon also arranged for the mafia to slow down FBI investigations in that mafioso, through Dixon, got untraceable auto tags.
Reputed experts on covering up high crimes have been Federal Reserve Commissar Alan Greenspan (we call him REDSPAN) and former CFTC Chairperson Wendy Gramm, a Director of Enron. Through complicated dealings, were billions sucked out of Enron to try to prop up the failing U.S. Stock Markets?
FOOTNOTE ONE - Bank of Credit and Commerce International, BCCI, did NOT actually disappear despite monopoly press accounts stating so. BCCI re-emerged as PINNACLE BANC GROUP, with their flagship the highly corrupt, gangster-linked FIRST NATIONAL BANK OF CICERO (Cicero being the long-time mafia-enclave adjoining Chicago, known as Al Capone Land.) Lots of details about this on our website in prior stories. For example, dominating the bank in Cicero has been Bishop Paul Marcinkus, until 1991, head of the Vatican Bank, recently identified as a major criminal money laundry for mafia/CIA and others. To confuse matters, the bank in Cicero has changed their name several times since 1991.]
More coming.
Stay tuned.
CARTER, REAGAN, BUSH,
CLINTON, BUSH, AND BCCITHE GREATEST FINANCIAL scandal in history -- the BCCI affair -- left American participants virtually untouched. The media covered the scandal poorly even though, according to one investigative journalist, up to a hundred Washington politicians and lawyers might have been criminally liable.
As a result -- much like Clinton and the Dixie Mafia -- Americans have but the vaguest notion of what happened. In fact, the two stories overlap. And like many contemporary sagas of corruption, the two stories reached deep into both the major parties. In fact, if George W. Bush is elected, we will be entering our fifth consecutive presidential administration (two Democratic and three Republican) with direct ties to leading figures in the biggest financial scandal of all time.
This time line suggests some of the interplay of individuals and parties:
1975
National Bank of Georgia president Bert Lance, whom former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter described as being like a brother and was Carter's chosen but defeated successor, meets with Jackson Stephens, a Naval Academy classmate of Carter. Stephens Inc. arranges public offering of NBG stock. Stephens would later be described by the New York Post as the man who was to "Clinton what Bert Lance was to candidate Jimmy Carter."1976
Both Stephens and Lance help Carter in his race for the White House. Carter uses the NBG corporate plane without disclosing it. Campaign is later fined.Two Indonesian billionaires come to Arkansas. Mochtar Riady and Liem Sioe Liong are close to Suharto. Riady is looking for an American bank to buy. Riady's agent is Jackson Stephens.
1977
Lance comes to Washington as director of the Office of Management and Budget. He quickly comes under investigation for his past financial dealings and in September resigns. His lawyer is Clark Clifford, later embroiled in the BCCI case.1978
Hillary Clinton, the Arkansas governor's wife, is getting considerable business from Stephens Inc.George W. Bush begins operations of his oil firm, Arbusto Energy. He assembles several dozen investors in a limited partnership including Dorothy Bush (a friend of BCCI figure Robert Altman), Lewis Lehrman, William Draper, and James Bath, a Houston aircraft broker who bought several planes from Air America, a CIA front. Bath's firm appears to be owned by Saudi investors. He also was a part-owner of a Houston's Main Bank, along with a couple of BCCI figures.
Stephens brokers the arrival of BCCI to this country, and steers BCCI's founder, Hassan Abedi to Bert Lance.
Stephens Inc tries to sell Riady stock in the National Bank of Georgia. The Washington Post quotes a US banker suggesting that Riady is working for Suharto, who is trying to butter up Carter: "They think of this country like a 'regime' similar to their own and they just don't realize that such a ploy wouldn't work." There's no deal. Lance's bank will eventually be taken over by a BCCI front man -- Ghaith Pharaon. Pharaon later sells his bank to First American. Pharaon will be fined $37 million by the Federal Reserve Board and become a fugitive.
Abedi moves to secretly take over First American Bankshares -- later the subject of the only BCCI-connected scandal to be prosecuted in the US.1979
Mochtar Riady and Stephens Inc set up Stephens Finance Ltd. In Hong Kong.Lance is indicted on charges of violating federal banking laws. Clifford's partner, Robert Altman, represents Lance who eventually achieves a hung jury.
During this same period, Stephens is, according to Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in "False Profits," playing "a crucial role in BCCI's penetration of the US market."
1984
Mochtar Riady buys a stake in the Worthen holding company whose assets include the Stephens-controlled Worthen Bank. Price: $16 million. Other Worthen co-owners will eventually include BCCI investor Abdullah Taha Bakhish. Deal handled by C. Joseph Giroir II. Giroir is the Rose law firm chair who hired Hillary Clinton. Giroir will continue to be a deal-maker for the Riadys.1985
Arkansas state pension funds -- deposited in Worthen by Governor Bill Clinton -- suddenly lose 15% of their value because of the failure of high risk, short-term investments and the brokerage firm that bought them. The $52 million loss is covered by a Worthen check written by Jack Stephens in the middle of the night, an insurance policy, and the subsequent purchase over the next few months of 40% of the bank by Mochtar Riady. Clinton and Worthen escape a major scandal. Mochtar's son James comes back to Arkansas to manage Worthen as president.Worthen is investigated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for improper loans to companies owned by the Riadys and Stephenses.
1986
George W. Bush and partners receive more than $2 million of Harken Energy stock in exchange for a failing oil well operation, which has lost $400,000 in the prior six months. After Bush joins Harken, the largest stock position and a seat on its board is acquired by Harvard Management Company. The Harken board gives Bush $600,000 worth of the company's publicly traded stock, plus a seat on the board plus a consultancy that pays him up to $120,000 a year. When Harken runs short of cash it hooks up with Jackson Stephens, who arranges a $25 million stock purchase by Union Bank of Switzerland. Sheik Abdullah Bakhsh, who joins the board as a part of the deal, is connected to BCCI.1988
Stephens' wife Mary Ann runs George Bush's campaign in Arkansas. He is a member of Team 100 -- individuals who have given $100,000 to the Republican party.A few days before the supposedly surprise arrest of five BCCI officials, some of the world's most powerful drug dealers quietly withdraw millions of dollars from the bank. Some government investigators believe the dealers were tipped off by sources within the Reagan administration.
1989
Bahrain officials suddenly break off offshore drilling negotiations with Amoco and decide to deal with Harken Energy, George W. Bush's firm. Harken has had a series of failed ventures and no cash, so the Bass brothers are brought in to finance Harken's efforts at a cost of $50 million. Harken's investment banker is the same firm that helped in BCCI's acquisition of First American. Among the other BCCI-connected figures that help the deal: Bahrain's prime minister.1990
Bush's attorney general, Richard Thornberg, is warned about BCCI but does nothing.1991
Stephens Inc gives $100,000 to a Bush dinner committee.With Stephens, Mochtar Riady buys BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.
A former top aide to White House Chief of Staff John Sununu goes to work for a prominent figure in the BCCI scandal less than a month after leaving the Bush administration. Edward Rogers Jr. signs a $600,000 contract to give legal advice to Sheik Kamal Adham, an ex-Saudi intelligence officer who is being investigated for his role in BCCI's takeover of First American Bankshares.
The Miami acting US Attorney is reportedly rebuffed by the Justice Department in his efforts to indict BCCI and some of its principal officers on tax fraud charges. Justice Department later denies this occurred.
1992
Ronald Reagan is introduced at the GOP convention by former senator Paul Laxalt, whose law firm represented BCCI in a drug money case. The chair of the convention, Craig Fuller, has been the number two official of Hill & Knowlton which was involved in the BCCI-First American case. Bush's campaign press representatives has done PR for a Saudi sheik accused of involvement in the BCCI affair, earning $200,000 in fees in just two months.Employees of Stephens Inc. give more money to the Clinton campaign than those of any other firm except Goldman, Sachs and the NY law firm of Wilke, Farr & Gallagher.
Stephens' Worthen Bank gives Clinton a $3.5 million line of credit allowing the cash-strapped candidate to finish the primaries. Little Rock Worldwide Travel provides Clinton with $1 million in deferred billing for his campaign trips. Without the Worthen and Worldwide largess, it is unlikely that the cash-strapped candidate could have survived through the later primaries.
1995
Webster Hubbell, a former Rose law firm partner -- although not known for skill in Asian trade matters -- goes to work for a Lippo Group affiliate after being forced out of the Clinton administration and before going to jail. Hubbell represented both Worthen and James Riady during the 1980s.1998
With the settlement of civil fraud charges against Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, the puny and often diverted investigation into the American branch of the BCCI scandal effectively comes to an end. Under the deal, the pair will have to surrender $5 million in stock in First American Bankshares, which had been illegally controlled by BCCI. They will, however, get to keep $10-15 million in proceeds obtained during their tenure as First American attorneys.*****
The BCCI scandal cheated depositors out of over $10 billion worldwide. Many of these were lower income people now being paid off at 15 and 25 cents on the dollar for damage done by a illegal operation willingly used not only by hundreds of drug dealers and other criminals from various countries but by the intelligence services of five nations (including the CIA) and at least one government, Pakistan, seeking to finance its nuclear weapons development.
Things always moved a little too smoothly in the BCCI investigation, leaving scores of unanswered questions and, so far as can be determined, hardly anyone to blame. One exception, Swaleh Naqvi, BCCI's number two man, was given a mild sentence -- over the objections of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. He later told prosecutors that he had never explained to Altman and Clifford who really owned First American.Naqvi's plea bargain with Justice appeared to have been what the Wall Street Journal called "sweetheart justice." Said the Journal: "When drugs and money laundering arrive, political corruption cannot be far behind. If we had an explanation of how BCCI got away with its illegal purchase of First American, we could afford to dismiss such ambiguous connections as lawyer-client relationships. But we have no such answer, and are left to speculate why, in the Naqvi plea-bargain, the Justice Department does not seem to be pressing for one."
The American media has studiously downplayed the story to the end. The New York Times, for example, put the Altman-Clifford settlement on its business page.
But while the story has disappeared not all the characters connected to this saga have. One, for example, is still president and another is ahead in the polls.
[The best book on the BCCI scandal is False Profits]
http://prorev.com/bush2.htm#bcci
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BCCI, THE CIA AND FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE
Introduction
The relationships involving BCCI, the CIA, and members of the United States and foreign intelligence communities have been among the most perplexing aspects of understanding the rise and fall of BCCI. The CIA's and BCCI's mutual environments of secrecy have been one obvious obstacle. For many months, the CIA resisted providing information to the Subcommittee about its involvement with and knowledge of BCCI. Moreover, key players who might explain these relationships are unavailable. Some, including former CIA director William Casey, and BCCI customers and Iranian arms dealers Ben Banerjee and Cyrus Hashemi, are dead. Others, including most of BCCI's key insiders, remain held incommunicado in Abu Dhabi. While promising in public hearings to provide full cooperation to the Subcommittee, to date the Abu Dhabi government has refused to make any BCCI officers available for interview by the Subcommittee. Former BCCI chairman Agha Hasan Abedi remains severely incapacitated due to a heart attack. Finally, some persons in a position to know portions of the truth have denied having any memory of events in which they participated and of documents which they reviewed.
A baseline for assessing the BCCI-CIA story is the CIA's official record of its use of BCCI and its targeting of the bank, as set forth in several hundred CIA records created from 1982 through 1992. That record was, by and large, accurately represented by CIA acting director Richard Kerr in public testimony on October 25, 1991, supplemented by more detailed, classified testimony on October 31, 1991. Unfortunately, that record also contains ostensible gaps in knowledge on the part of the CIA about the activities of key contacts in the Middle East for U.S. intelligence -- including BCCI shareholders Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil, and BCCI customer and Iran/Contra arms merchant Adnan Khashoggi -- which strain belief.
Outside the documentary record provided to the Subcommittee by the CIA, there is additional material, consisting of BCCI documents, testimony from BCCI officials and insiders, and extrinsic, circumstantial and historic information describing other substantial contacts between BCCI and the intelligence community. These include contacts between BCCI and:
** former U.S. intelligence officials, including a former head of the CIA;
** former and current foreign intelligence officials; and
** individuals engaged in covert operations on behalf of the United States government, including in the Iran/Contra affair.
In addition, the Subcommittee has received allegations of meetings between former CIA director William Casey and BCCI's head, Agha Hasan Abedi.
CIA officials have told the Subcommittee that the CIA as an institution has rules requiring the creation of written records on every activity engaged in by the Agency, and on all significant information reported to the Agency. In the summer of 1991, the CIA engaged in what its officials described as a "dumb" or "brute force" review of its documents, essentially reviewing all possible files for information on BCCI, rather than relying on knowledgeable individuals to select such information. The review located a substantial amount of material generated by the CIA throughout the 1980's, which was produced in July and August, 1991 for CIA internal reviews, in September and October for the Congressional intelligence oversight committees, and beginning in March, 1992, to the Subcommittee.
Unfortunately, there remains a wide disparity between the CIA's official account of critical relationships between BCCI and persons associated with the CIA, and the information available from other sources, including BCCI's own records. One is left with the choice of accepting the official record, which requires an assessment that the other contacts between BCCI and U.S. intelligence figures and operations are coincidental, or of assuming that the full story of BCCI's relationship to the United States has been intentionally veiled by critical players on both sides of that relationship.
The Subcommittee Investigation and the CIA
The Subcommittee's contact with the CIA regarding BCCI began in March, 1991, when staff learned from a Subcommittee source that the CIA had prepared a report concerning BCCI's criminality which was made available to Customs in late 1988. Cleared staff contacted the CIA's congressional liaison office to request a copy of the document. The staff was told that no such document had ever existed. Perplexed, staff contacted its source to determine whether he was certain that the material had been provided. The source referred staff to former Customs Commissioner William Von Raab, who confirmed the existence of the document. Staff contacted the CIA a second time, and informed the agency that a senior Reagan administration official had viewed the document. Again, the Subcommittee was told that no documents concerning BCCI had ever been created by the CIA.(1)
Staff then met with Von Raab, who revealed that not only had the CIA provided him with a briefing paper regarding BCCI, but that he obtained it through the offices of then-CIA assistant director Robert Gates, who referred to BCCI as "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals." Von Raab also advised the Subcommittee that Customs agents handling the C-Chase investigation of BCCI had discovered in the course of their work several BCCI accounts that were actually accounts held by the CIA. Von Raab told Subcommittee staff that his agents were told to cease their investigation of those particular accounts.(2) However, in an interview with Subcommittee staff, AUSA Mark Jackowski denied that he had ever uncovered any CIA involvement with the bank and Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller testified that "at no time ...has anyone from the CIA ... attempted to obstruct or interfere with the Department of Justice's investigation and prosecution of BCCI."(3)
On May 14, 1991, Senator Kerry wrote CIA Director Webster to again request the briefing paper on BCCI prepared by the CIA, as well as information on the CIA's own use of the bank. No reply was received in response to this letter from the CIA for over two months, during which BCCI was closed globally following its seizure in the United Kingdom by the Bank of England on July 5, 1991.
In the meantime, cleared staff requested a formal briefing from CIA staff concerning the CIA's knowledge of BCCI's activities. The CIA provided an oral briefing at its offices in June, 1991 at the "secret" level, consisting of very general information concerning BCCI's use by drug traffickers, material which was by then already largely a matter of public record. The briefer provided by the CIA to Congressional staff was unfamiliar with other basic information about BCCI, such as the names of BCCI's shareholders, including former Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham, the key figure in BCCI's secret takeover of First American, and the CIA's former principal contact in the Arab Middle East. Further, the briefer also appeared to be ignorant of the principal analytic documents concerning BCCI previously prepared by the CIA and disseminated to Executive Branch agencies, which contained this and other more important information about BCCI.(4)
On July 23, 1991, CIA director Webster replied to Senator Kerry's May 14 request by letter, admitting to the existence of two documents concerning BCCI, which were described as "extremely sensitive" and therefore restricted to being held by the Senate intelligence committee.(5) On reviewing these memoranda, Senator Kerry recognized that the earlier of the two documents, created in early 1986, contained startling information -- that the First American Bank in Washington was secretly owned by BCCI. The distribution list attached to the memorandum indicated that the CIA had communicated this information at the time to the Treasury Department. These was no indication that either Treasury or the CIA had ever advised the Federal Reserve, the primary regulator of First American, of this critical information.
Senator Kerry asked Judge Webster to declassify immediately the fact that the CIA had known as of 1986 that BCCI owned First American, and to begin the process of declassifying the entirety of both memoranda. On July 31, 1991, the CIA advised Senator Kerry that he could reveal the information concerning BCCI's secret ownership of First American, but no other information from the memos. The CIA had not yet acknowledged its own use of BCCI to the Subcommittee, or provided access to any other materials prepared by the CIA concerning BCCI.
When the single sentence from the 1986 memorandum was declassified, Senator Kerry supplied it immediately to the Federal Reserve, whose counsel expressed shock that the CIA, Treasury, State Department, and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency had possessed this information in 1986 and never provided it to the Federal Reserve.(6)
On August 2, 1991, with Congress in recess, acting CIA director Richard Kerr chose to provide the first public account of the CIA's involvement with BCCI at the National Press Club, to a group of high school students, who were not permitted to ask questions.
During the August recess, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began its audit of the CIA's relationship with BCCI, and requested that the CIA provide its auditors with all documents prepared by the CIA concerning BCCI. In the same period, the CIA began its own internal reviews of its handling of BCCI, including a management review, an intelligence review, and an "independent investigation" by the CIA's statutory Inspector General.(7) By the end of August, 1991, the CIA had determined that there were several hundred reports on BCCI by the CIA, of which perhaps four dozen contained substantial information regarding the bank.
Through early October, 1991, in response to further requests from Senator Kerry, the CIA continued to refuse to declassify any of the remainder of the information concerning BCCI on the ground that to do so might imperil sources and methods. The CIA also remained unwilling to permit staff outside the Intelligence Committees to review this material. As CIA legal staff later explained it, the CIA was unaccustomed to providing information pertaining to oversight issues to staff outside the Intelligence Committees, and felt uncomfortable with the questions being posed by the Subcommittee.(8)
Ultimately, Acting Director Richard Kerr agreed to testify before the Subcommittee concerning BCCI in public, after Senator Kerry advised the CIA that the nomination of CIA director Robert Gates would be delayed until the CIA provided such testimony.
On October 25, 1991, Acting Director Kerr testified in open session before the Subcommittee regarding the CIA-BCCI relationship, expressing from his opening statement his personal discomfort about providing information concerning intelligence matters in public:
As an intelligence officer for 30 years, I find myself a little reluctant in an open hearing to talk about intelligence, intelligence sources, and intelligence methods, and the information that we acquire through that process (emphasis added).
Despite Kerr's reluctance, the information contained in his testimony, summarized below, substantially advanced the Subcommittee's knowledge of the official record regarding the CIA's contacts with BCCI. For example, the Subcommittee learned for the first time that there were not two memoranda regarding BCCI prepared by the CIA, but hundreds which had been disseminated to other agencies. Kerr also disclosed that he had provided the Treasury Department with information about BCCI's secret ownership of First American in 1985, a year earlier than previously known, and implying the existence of a separate memorandum to Treasury not previously acknowledged.
Kerr refused to answer a number of questions in open session. In closed session the following week, Kerr acknowledged that several of the questions he refused to answer did not refer to classified information or concern national security. Instead, he had refused to discuss the information in open session because he felt uncomfortable discussing information in public that might embarrass the United States, or any U.S. agency or official.(9)
Initially, Kerr resisted providing the Senators serving on the Subcommittee the opportunity to review the documentary material pertaining to BCCI created by the CIA, suggesting instead that the CIA provide the Senators only general information characterizing the number of reports and the general substance, to "protect sources and methods." Following the closed session, during which Senator Kerry pressed again for the documents, it was agreed between the Subcommittee and the CIA that all the memoranda prepared by the CIA concerning BCCI would be sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee storage facility to permit review. Months later, that material had still not been provided.
Finally, on February 18, 1992, some eleven months after the Subcommittee had first sought information concerning BCCI from the CIA, Director Gates, after meeting with Senator Kerry, directed the CIA to permit staff to review additional records at the CIA pertaining to BCCI. Following this directive from Gates, the CIA for the first time made substantial information regarding its knowledge of BCCI available to the Subcommittee, although information on CIA operations using the bank remained unavailable, channeled solely to the Congressional intelligence committees.
The Subcommittee review culminated in the CIA agreeing to declassify certain material from the 1985 memorandum about BCCI, discussed below.
The Official Record
The CIA's first user request in connection with BCCI was from the Federal Reserve in 1981, which asked the CIA whether the CIA had any derogatory information concerning the Middle Eastern shareholders who were about to buy Financial General Bankshares (FGB), which later became First American Bankshares, through the holding company CCAH. The CIA, after reviewing its records, told the Federal Reserve that it had no derogatory information on the shareholders, who included Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil, the past and then-current Saudi intelligence liaisons to the United States.(10)
The CIA did not tell the Federal Reserve that Adham and Khalil were foreign intelligence liaisons of the United States, nor did it advise the Federal Reserve that both Adham and a third FGB shareholder, Faisal al-Fulaij, had been the subject of a Securities and Exchange Commission probe in connection with violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by Boeing and Lockheed for arms sales to Saudi Arabia.(11)
There is conflicting evidence as to whether the Governors of the Federal Reserve were aware of the intelligence background of any of the CCAH shareholders. However, at the staff level at least the Federal Reserve did learn in 1981 of both the intelligence contacts of Adham and the SEC probe into his and Fulaij's alleged receipt of bribes.(12) Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who signed the order approving the application of CCAH shareholders to take over Financial Bankshares, testified before the Senate Banking Committee in early 1991 that he "wasn't aware" of Mr. Adham's intelligence background, and that "he was sure that it might send an eyebrow or two up," and that "it might provoke further investigation."(13)
Because BCCI was not officially purchasing FGB, and a condition of the purchase was that BCCI not be involved in the transaction except as an investment advisor, the Federal Reserve did not ask the CIA about BCCI itself. If it had done so, it would likely have learned about BCCI's involvement in money laundering.
According to the contemporaneous CIA records retrieved during the search of Agency files during the summer of 1991, the CIA first developed information concerning BCCI, which it provided users in the U.S. government, in 1979. After learning in the early 1980's that BCCI was, as an institution, involved in money laundering activities, the CIA began by the mid-1980's to target BCCI as an institution for foreign intelligence collection. Initially, this collection operation was small. The CIA began a larger and more comprehensive operation as of 1986, which continued through 1990. This operation focused on the "people, the mechanisms, and the way that BCCI laundered narcotics money."(14)
In the course of targeting BCCI for laundering drug money, the CIA learned of BCCI's involvement in manipulating certain financial markets, in arms trafficking, and in supporting international terrorism, including handling the finances of Sabri Al-Bannah or Abu Nidal, and his terrorist organization.(15)
Between 1979 and 1991, the Directorate of Operations of the CIA produced several hundred reports containing intelligence concerning BCCI. BCCI was also discussed in a number of finished Directorate of Intelligence analytic studies, as part of larger discussions of terrorism and counter narcotics.(16) Among these reports was detailed reporting on the use of BCCI Panama by major narcotics traffickers. The Operations Directorate also prepared three special analytic reports, incorrectly characterized by Kerr as having been prepared by the CIA's Intelligence Directorate, one each in 1985, 1986, and 1989, discussed below in some detail.(17)
Kerr acknowledged that the CIA had also used BCCI for certain intelligence-gathering operations, and characterized the use as limited and routine, and undertaken without the knowledge of any person at BCCI. A Senate Intelligence Committee audit, conducted in the summer and fall of 1991, confirmed Kerr's testimony on that point, according to a briefing provided by the auditor to Subcommittee staff. The Subcommittee was not permitted by the CIA to read the actual report generated by Senate Intelligence Committee staff, and thus detailed review by the Subcommittee of that audit has not been possible.(18)
Kerr also acknowledged what the Subcommittee had learned in testimony just one day previously from former First American president Robert Altman, that the CIA had made extensive use of First American for a variety of purposes, including as a repository for "normal banking" and for savings accounts.(19)
The agency later informed Subcommittee staff that neither Clifford nor Altman had been made aware of the existence of the accounts prior to the summer of 1991.
According to Kerr, critical to understanding the contacts between the CIA and BCCI were a number of things the CIA did not do. Kerr testified that contrary to press reports, the CIA had not been involved with any BCCI black network of thugs and assassins, had not been involved with or had knowledge of any use of BCCI for the same of arms to Iran or the diversion of funds for the Nicaraguan Contras, had not violated any laws, had no relationship with BCCI's head, Agha Hasan Abedi, and had never placed Abedi on a watch list.(20)
The 1985, 1986 and 1989 Reports
The Operations directorate produced two finished analytic reports regarding BCCI, the first in early 1986, and the second in early 1989, as well as a special intelligence report in early 1985, which was the basis of the material provided to the Treasury and to OCC. Kerr testified that as of early 1985, the CIA had learned that BCCI had succeeded in gaining control of Financial General Bankshares in late 1981, which then was renamed First American, and told the Treasury and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency ("OCC"), about BCCI's secret purchase.(21) Kerr did not inform the Subcommittee that the original report containing this information was then lost, and has never since been located by the CIA.(22) Congressional Relations at the Agency did inform Subcommittee staff that the author of the 1985 could not be identified. However, in a subsequent meeting, the Associate Director of Operations informed Subcommittee staff that, indeed, the author had been identified and that he had been asked to reconstruct the memo to the extent possible.
The 1985 Report
There are a number of oddities pertaining to the early 1985 report by the CIA on BCCI.
The first oddity is the fact that original report is missing and has not been located by the CIA, which has instead, at the request of the Subcommittee, reconstructed the contents of the report by looking to the source information it was based upon, and relying on its normal procedures for analyzing and disseminating similar material.
The second unusual aspect of the report is that the CIA has records showing it to have been commissioned by the then-head of the International Division of the OCC, Robert Bench, who has denied under oath having ever sought the information.
A third oddity is that CIA records also show Douglas P. Mulholland, then the intelligence chief of the Treasury Department, as having also solicited the information. Yet like Bench, Mulholland denies having any recollection of having done so.
Fourth, the information contained in the report -- that BCCI owned First American -- was important and startling, and would have been so recognized by anyone in the position of Mulholland or Bench -- yet neither of them recollect that the report discussed this issue. First American was by then the largest bank holding company in the metropolitan Washington area, and BCCI's prohibition from ownership had received widespread attention in the Washington Post and the financial press.
Firth, no action was taken by Mulholland or Bench in response to this critical information to alert federal law enforcement or the Federal Reserve, the primary regulator. The CIA, having provided the information to Treasury and the OCC, believed it had no further obligation to disseminate the information, either.
In an effort to sort through these anomalies, the Subcommittee in the spring of 1992 reviewed the material provided by the CIA to Mulholland and Bench in 1985. During the course of that review, the CIA provided a complete record to the Subcommittee of all the raw information upon which the 1985 memo was based. The Subcommittee requested the declassification of material from the 1985 material concerning First American and the bribery of officials. The declassification was completed on April 9, 1991, and consisted of the following account, which excerpts the substance, and on critical factual issues, the actual language, of the original 1985 material:
The CIA's Summary
Background:
In the early 1980s, as part of the overall U.S. Government effort to stop international narcotics trafficking, the Agency began collecting strategic foreign intelligence on narco-dollar money laundering. A successful intelligence collection operation in the Caribbean developed operational leads to several major foreign banks, including BCCI, suspected of narcotics money laundering. Pursuing these leads, CIA initiated a mutually productive dialogue with international banking experts at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to determine how CIA could meet OCC's intelligence needs. In late 1984, Agency officers met with a senior official from OCC, who expressed interest in a broad range of international financial intelligence CIA could provide. One of several issues in which the OCC official expressed interest was the takeover efforts and suspicious activities of institutions such as BCCI, which he specifically cited for its spectacular growth and the mystery surrounding its activities. In a later meeting, a Treasury intelligence liaison official expressed the interest of that organization in BCCI because of a possible concern about the less than wholesome reputation of the bank.
Foreign Intelligence Collection:
In late 1984 and early 1985, the Agency collected some intelligence on BCCI and disseminated the information to the Treasury Department. The foreign intelligence provided to the Treasury dealt with several activities, including the following information.
The primary goal of BCCI senior management was growth in deposits at all branches internationally. The strategy being employed by BCCI to achieve rapid growth in assets and profits included manipulation of international financial markets and bribery, which was an approved policy encouraged by senior executives, including the general managers and President Abedi. The objectives of BCCI included developing both profits and political/economic leverage in the Near East, Africa, and Asia through the use of a tremendous volume of financial assets. BCCI expansion in the United States included the secret ownership of the Washington, D.C.-based bank holding company with which BCCI was affiliated. All of the shareholders in the Washington D.C.-based bank holding company were fronts for BCCI. BCCI loaned them the capital to make the purchase in return for their shares as collateral, which was regarded as a sensitive secret within BCCI management circles. If all of BCCI's assets in the U.S. were included in their balance sheet, the bank would be much higher in the worldwide ranking of the top one hundred financial institutions.
The Agency-Treasury Dialogue:
CIA provided this foreign intelligence to the Treasury intelligence community liaison representative in January 1985 [Douglas P. Mulholland], who reported to CIA that he carried it directly to the Secretary [Donald Regan] for his further disposition. The Treasury intelligence liaison officer also recommended only two persons in the Comptroller hierarchy see this material, which he described as "dynamite." The liaison officer praised this information, promised to keep the Agency fully informed of Treasury's reaction to it, and provided follow-up collection requirements to the Agency. These included a request for examples of BCCI management encouraging the use of bribery. The Treasury liaison officer also requested the name of the Washington, D.C.-based bank holding company owned by BCCI and the names of any other U.S.-based companies controlled by BCCI.
In April 1985, Agency officers had a curiously unsatisfactory discussion with the Treasury intelligence liaison representative concerning BCCI activities reported earlier by the Agency. The Treasury official explained that the position of the Treasury enforcement offices was that the BCCI activities reported by the Agency were not surprising and complemented the general picture Treasury had of BCCI. The Treasury officer stated that although his organization was interested in BCCI's activities to manipulate an international financial market and in the bank's buying into the U.S. along the lines of its acquisition of Financial General Bankshares [First American], Treasury was not concerned enough to levy further collection requirements on the Agency. The Treasury intelligence liaison officer said that money laundering remained the major focus of Treasury's enforcement side.(23)
What is notable about the information contained in the memorandum is that it was emphatic on BCCI's ownership of a Washington, D.C. based holding company, identified by Treasury as First American. The Treasury's senior intelligence official, Mulholland, initially considered the information to be "dynamite," but by April, after conferring with then Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan, had concluded that Treasury saw no need for receiving further information about BCCI's ownership of First American, or its plans in the United States generally.
Mulholland's Testimony
On February 19, 1992, Douglas P. Mulholland, currently the Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, testified about his contacts with the CIA concerning BCCI as the special assistant for national security to the Secretary of the Treasury from 1982 through 1987, when he was the CIA's chief liaison in the Treasury.
Mulholland, a career officer of the CIA, had been placed in Treasury by CIA chief William Casey, and left his job at Treasury on retirement from the CIA in 1987 to become a researcher for the Bush election campaign, before being appointed to his current position as head of intelligence at the State Department.
Mulholland described his contacts with the CIA concerning BCCI as follows:
I have a very limited memory of any specific documents, discussions, or events relating to BCCI, including any information that may have been introduced by the intelligence community during the mid-1980's.
Although I may well have discussed sensitive information on BCCI with senior department officials, including then-Secretary Donald Regan, that was not such an unusual experience as to ingrain such a discussion in my mind. . . With regard to BCCI, I recall only receiving one report during my time at the Treasury . . . The report was hand carried to me by a CIA officer who emphasized the sensitivity of the report.
I also recall this report because of its unusual format. The report lacked any heading or identifying numbers, and was typed on a plain piece of paper. One substantive aspect of the report struck me as particularly surprising, but because this information was produced and remains controlled by CIA, I am unable to discuss with you today any of the substance.(24)
In public testimony, Mulholland therefore declined to discuss the substance of the single aspect of the report which he found surprising. However, in interviews with Subcommittee staff prior to his testimony, Mulholland advised the Subcommittee that his memory concerned a matter in the CIA report which had nothing to do with BCCI's possible ownership of U.S. institutions, and that he had no personal memory that the issue was raised in the report.(25)
Mulholland emphasized throughout his testimony that his own memory regarding the BCCI report was very limited. He acknowledged that the CIA's documents reported him having provided the report Secretary Regan, but he stated he had no personal memory of having done so.(26) He estimated the frequency of his meetings with Secretary Regan regarding CIA reports as being anywhere from "zero to one hundred percent" of the time, and said he had not the "vaguest idea" of how often he had discussed such matters with the Secretary. He testified that the secondary source chronology the CIA concerning his activities was plausible, but that he could not say for certain whether it was correct, as he had no memory of having asked for any information, or having briefed anyone else on the information.(27)
Mulholland stated that even if he had recognized that the information contained in the report important, he would not have the right at the Treasury Department, let alone the responsibility, to take any action to disseminate the information further, since the CIA was the agency which created the information and controlled it.(28)
Mulholland acknowledged that he had never received a comparable report from the CIA about any other bank besides BCCI, and that the BCCI report was not "normal." He testified that there was no record maintained at the Treasury Department of the report having been logged in, and he could not give any reason for this omission.(29)
Mulholland said he had no memory of having commissioned such a report, despite the CIA's documentary record that he had done so, and hence, he was unable to provide the Subcommittee with any reason why any person at Treasury might have asked the CIA to develop information concerning BCCI in late 1984 and early 1985.
Bench's Testimony
Bench, like Mulholland, had only a very limited memory of the 1985 report. As he testified:
I do recall reviewing a classified piece of information that dealt with BCCI. . . it was somewhere in the middle of the '82 to '87 period. I feel comfortable about that. . . I recall receiving a document from the CIA that dealt with BCCI. To the best of my recollection it didn't deal with First American and it didn't deal with anything in the United States. There is an action step that I took within the office on that information . . . which was to look at this information in terms of LCD [Lesser Developed Country] debt.(30)
In staff interviews prior to this testimony, Bench emphasized that he had no memory whatsoever of having ever been advised that BCCI held interests in any financial institution in the United States, let alone First American.(31)
Bench also told staff that not only had he no memory of having commissioned a report on BCCI, but he would have been unlikely to have done so in any case, because of the OCC's need to work abroad without officials from other countries being concerned that it was doing so in conjunction with U.S. intelligence. Bench was therefore perplexed that the CIA had identified him as the requester, noting that to the extent he had an interaction concerning BCCI, it was the CIA asking him if he wanted information.(32)
Regan's Recollection
Following the declassification of the 1985 memorandum by the CIA, the Subcommittee contacted former Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan to determine what memory he had regarding Mulholland having provided him with the 1985 memorandum. According to an aide to Regan, he initially believed he had not been shown the memorandum by Mulholland because he had left Treasury to take the position of chief of staff at the White House, and so advised a Wall Street Journal reporter who contacted him at home in August, 1991. Regan was then contacted by Mulholland in August or September, 1991, who advised Regan that Mulholland had reviewed records at the CIA showing that he did provide the memorandum to Regan, and that Mulholland had no personal recollection regarding the matter, either. According to Regan's aide, Regan still has no recollection of Mulholland ever providing information regarding BCCI to him.(33)
In reviewing the CIA documents and the testimony of Kerr, Mulholland and Bench, it appears that the CIA has accurately set forth the information regarding First American provided Mulholland, Regan and Bench in 1985, and that Mulholland, Bench and Reagan's memories that the CIA did not tell them about BCCI's secret control of First American are, at best, incorrect.
The 1986 and 1989 Reports
While the 1985 report received oddly limited distribution, the 1986 report, containing most of the key elements of the earlier report, including the fact that BCCI was owned by First American, was distributed more widely, to the Department of State, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, National Security Council, Commerce Department, and to Treasury. Thus, every major CIA user that might be interested in the information received it, except for the two agencies which would have had a statutory responsibility to begin investigations in response -- the Federal Reserve and the Justice Department. However, Treasury logs again showed no actual receipt of the document, and there is no record of Treasury having passed the information to its agents in U.S. Customs, including those in Tampa whose investigation of BCCI lead to its indictment on money laundering charges in October, 1988.(34) The 1989 report, which provided detailed information concerning BCCI's criminality, was provided both Customs and the FBI, and reiterated the information, reported in the 1985 and 1986 memos, that First American was owned by BCCI. Even at this late date, the Federal Reserve was notified by no one of the existence of the report, or of any of the material in it.
Unofficial BCCI-CIA Links
The unofficial story of BCCI's links to U.S. intelligence is complicated by the inability of investigators to determine whether private persons affiliated with U.S. intelligence were undertaking actions such as selling U.S. arms to a foreign government outside ordinary channels on their own behalf, or ostensibly under sanction of a U.S. government agency, policy, or operation.
In the 1970's and 1980's, there have been cases of people with ties to U.S. intelligence engaging in operations on their own behalf which in fact had no ties to any approved U.S. government interest, such as former CIA officer Edwin Wilson's illegal arms sales to Idi Amin of Uganda and to Colonel Qaddafi of Libya. There have been other cases, such as retired General Richard Secord's arms sales to Iran and to the contras in the Iran/Contra affair, which are hard to distinguish from Wilson's case, except for the fact that the sales had actual secret approval and support from officials within the government, although they were not authorized by law under the Arms Export Control Act, and although Congress did not receive notifications required by law from the President.
In the case of BCCI, former CIA officials, including former CIA director Richard Helms and the late William Casey; former and current foreign intelligence officials, including Kamal Adham and Abdul Raouf Khalil; and principal foreign agents of the U.S., such as Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar, float in and out of BCCI at critical times in its history, and participate simultaneously in the making of key episodes in U.S. foreign policy, ranging from the Camp David peace talks to the arming of Iran as part of the Iran/Contra affair.
As early as the mid-1980's, sources in the United Kingdom were alleging that BCCI was providing services not only to the CIA, but to intelligence agencies of a number of countries, including the Soviet Union. For example, a November 5, 1986 letter to the Governor of the Bank of England, written anonymously, stated the following:
The BCCI is involved in helping people avoid Tax, illegal transfers of money, Hawala transfers, off the record deposits, conduit for drug and crime money and also as banker to intelligence agencies for most major agencies of the world.(35)
Did BCCI, its shareholders, or its officers, perform services for the United States government during any part of its existence? Were such services linked in any respect to BCCI's activities, such as its acquisition of First American? The unofficial record, explored below, raises these questions but cannot answer them definitively.
Kamal Adham: BCCI's Godfather of Middle East Intelligence
Kamal Adham, who was the CIA's principal liaison for the entire Middle East from the mid-1960's through 1979, was the lead front-man for BCCI in its takeover of First American, was an important nominee shareholder in BCCI, and remains one of the key players in the entire BCCI affair. On July 29, 1992, he reached a plea agreement with the District Attorney of New York, acknowledging that he had been a BCCI front-man in the United States, and agreeing to provide full cooperation with U.S. law enforcement in BCCI-related investigations and prosecutions.
Adham was at the time of BCCI's creation in 1972, the brother-in-law of King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, and the head of Saudi Intelligence, responsible for internal security and relations with external intelligence agencies. Press accounts concerning Adham from the late 1970's refer to him as the "godfather of Middle East intelligence," emphasize the closeness of his ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, and describe his having had responsibility for making payments, on behalf of the CIA, to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat when Sadat was merely Nasser's Vice President and having financial troubles.(36) As Bob Woodward described it:
Relations between the CIA and the Saudi intelligence service were generally good, going back to the days when the legendary and enormously wealthy Kamal Adham had been its head. In 1970, the Saudis had provided then Egyptian Vice President Sadat with a regular income. It was impossible to determine where Saudi interests in these arrangements ended and American CIA interests began.(37)
Adham's historic relationship with U.S. intelligence was indeed unusually close. While Adham was still in place as the CIA's liaison in 1977, the CIA's station chief for Saudi Arabia, Raymond H. Close, chose to go to work for Adham upon leaving the CIA, according to press reports at the time which Close has only denied since the BCCI scandal broke.(38) As Jeff Gerth of the New York Times reported in 1981:
In the case of Mr. Close, the one time station chief in Saudi Arabia, former Government officials say his actions, while in the CIA and since retirement, are often clouded in mystery. In the first place, some think Mr. Close may still be working for the CIA in some capacity, although he officially retired in 1977. They add that a further complicating factor is that some Saudis privately share the same perception.(39)
The Times account describes how Close had actually given approval to weapons sales from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan in the early 1970's, in contravention of the "official policy" enunciated by the American ambassador, and states that Close went into business with Kamal Adham upon leaving the CIA.(40)
Within months of going into business with Close, Kamal Adham became the "lead investor" for the CCAH group taking over First American, officially on his own behalf, but in fact, acting as a nominee for BCCI. On April 23, 1981, Adham personally appeared at the Federal Reserve's hearing on the First American takeover, to inform the Federal Reserve of his personal wealth and background, and his desire to be a passive investor. In that appearance, Adham neglected to tell the Federal Reserve of his background in Saudi Arabian intelligence, historic ties to the CIA, or that Adham had acted as the most important liaison between the United States and his long-time friend, Anwar Sadat, in helping negotiate the Camp David accords.(41)
As President Carter's former Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Bert Lance, testified,
There was an opportunity there for Kamal Adham to have done the kind of work he did with regard to Sadat's visit to Jerusalem and that sort of thing, and subsequently playing a role in regards to satisfying some of the Arab countries with regard to the action that Sadat had taken, both in going to Jerusalem and also in Camp David.(42)
The key role played by Adham in Camp David was apparently to encourage other Arab political figures not to repudiate Sadat for agreeing to peace with Israel. Although such attempts may have appeared unsuccessful in terms of public statements by Gulf rulers, it is clear that many of the Gulf rulers in private provided some support for Sadat, including then-Crown Prince and now King Faud of Saudi Arabia, who sought to strengthen ties with the United States as a means of defending the Saud family from a variety of possible instabilities.
The actual intent of BCCI and its Arab shareholders in participating with BCCI in the takeover of First American remains a matter of speculation. One article, appearing in the Washington Post on December 18, 1977, at the very beginning of the takeover efforts regarding First American and the National Bank of Georgia, described the intent of BCCI and the Arabs as gaining "access to the administration" through Lance.(43) The involvement of Gulf leaders in the takeover in Washington at the same time as the Camp David accords were put into place, would have been recognized within the Middle East at the time as an important symbolic gesture by each of them to strengthen ties with Israel's superpower sponsor, the United States. Their ownership of First American also would have providing a direct means to gain influence in the U.S. through the ownership of the bank.
To recapitulate: Adham was at the same time in business with a retired CIA station chief whose activities caused people in the U.S. and Saudi governments to question whether he was truly "retired," acting as an intermediary for the U.S. in negotiations regarding Camp David, and acting as a phony "lead shareholder" in a take-over of the largest bank in the nation's capital on behalf of BCCI. The simultaneity was thus either part of a larger political plan of Adham, BCCI, and people within the Carter Administration and the CIA, or merely a coincidence.
Questioned about the concurrence of these events, Adham has told U.S. investigators that they were unrelated, and thus, BCCI's purchase of First American was not a quid pro quo for Camp David. Instead, Adham has suggested that his involvement in these events, and BCCI's later involvement in financing the Presidential library, charities, and travel of President Jimmy Carter, for whom Camp David was the major achievement of his presidency, were in fact coincidence.(44)
Clark Clifford, in sworn interrogatories, stated that he, too, believed Adham's roles in Camp David and in the simultaneous takeover of Financial General were coincidence. Clifford stated that while Adham had told him of his friendship with Sadat, he had not advised Clifford of having any role in Camp David.(45)
A fuller account of Adham's role as a front-man for BCCI from its creation and in connection with the CCAH takeover is contained in the chapter on BCCI's nominees.
Abdul Raouf Khalil
Abdul Raouf Khalil, like Kamal Adham, was a BCCI shareholder and front man from its creation, and a key nominee in BCCI's secret takeover of First American. Like Adham, Khalil appeared at the Federal Reserve on April 23, 1981 to tell the Federal Reserve he intended to be a passive investor. Like Adham, Khalil failed to advise the Federal Reserve that he was, at the time of the Federal Reserve's hearing, a key figure in Saudi Arabian intelligence, and its liaison to the United States. Indeed, Khalil's description of his activities at the hearing were fundamentally misleading on this point, as they presented Khalil to be nothing more than a private Arab businessman, who as a friend of Adham, joined Adham to be passive investor of Middle Eastern money in the stable U.S. banking system. As Khalil told the Federal Reserve:
My career has been devoted to business and I presently hold interests in real estate, mechanical and electrical maintenance projects, and commodities. In addition, I have been involved in some business ventures with American and British manufacturers for the installation of electronic and computer equipment in Saudi Arabia.(46)
Khalil did not characterize the kind of electronics and computers he was installing in Saudi Arabia, or advise the Federal Reserve of the telling name of one of his businesses: the Saudi Security and Technical Services Company. In fact, the electronic and computer equipment which Khalil referred to included the electronic and computer equipment for the Government of Saudi Arabia, and for its intelligence operations.
Price Waterhouse audit reports suggest that Khalil had no written contact with BCCI from 1985 on. By the late 1980's, senior officials of BCCI knew of no way to contact Khalil, and in some cases, such as that of chief financial officer Massihur Rahman, even doubted his existence.(47) Yet throughout this period, BCCI used Khalil -- or his name -- extensively as a nominee in transactions in Latin American and the Caribbean, as well as in Europe, while Khalil continued to have ongoing contact with the CIA, which continued, according to law enforcement officials, until well after BCCI's closure on July 5, 1991. Moreover, Khalil simultaneously was a principal shareholder and director of Capcom, BCCI's commodities trading affiliate, throughout this period.
Khalil's continuing ties to the CIA are exemplified by the experience of U.S. regulators, who asked the State Department in 1991 to locate Khalil for service of legal documents, and were told that Khalil could not be located. After some months, the regulators determined that Khalil was frequently found in the offices of the CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia. Upon making this suggestion to the State Department, the regulators found that service of the legal documents on Khalil was quickly arranged.(48)
Former CIA Director Richard Helms
and BCCI Front Man Mohammed Irvani
Adham and Khalil were not the only BCCI and CCAH shareholders with intelligence ties. Before Adham acted as the lead shareholder in the takeover of First American, another person acted as BCCI's chief front-man in an earlier, unsuccessful takeover attempt. That man, Mohammed Rahim Motaghi Irvani, was listed in the original SEC filing in the early, 1978 takeover attempt, as a 5 percent shareholder of CCAH. Irvani was at the time the principal partner of former CIA director Richard Helms in Helms' international consulting firm, Safeer, and the chief financier of that firm. During the time Irvani acted as BCCI's lead front-man in the original takeover, he received advice on how to be protected from any liability in that role by Helms. Thus, there were personal, legal, and financial links between Helms and Irvani at a critical time in the history of BCCI's acquisition of First American.
Irvani founded the Melli Industrial Group in Iran in 1949 to manufacture footwear and leather goods, and developed close ties to the government of the Shah of Iran. By the time of the first Financial General Bankshare's takeover in 1978, the Melli Industrial Group owned 23 operating companies, as well as joint ventures with foreign firms such as Goodyear and United Chemical. Irvani also owned the Alwand Industrial Co., which held interests in the Iran Arab Bank, and had a net worth estimated in financial documents of over $50 million personally and a financial empire whose corporate value was as much as $800 million.(49)
Irvani's friendship and financial support were critical to Helms in this period. Helms, a thirty-year veteran of the CIA and its predecessor, the OSS, was dismissed in February, 1973 from his position as CIA director by President Nixon and appointed Ambassador to Iran until 1977, where he met Irvani. When he returned to the U.S., Helms was indicted for lying before a Congressional committee concerning CIA activities in Chile. On October 31, 1977, Helms plead no contest to two charges, in return for a recommendation by the government that he not be sentenced to prison.
In arranging this plea agreement, Helms was represented by Washington defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams. But in addition to Williams' negotiations, Helms also called upon Clark Clifford for help. In the fall of 1977, Clifford visited a top Justice Department official to argue against an indictment of Helms, saying such charges could damage the U.S. intelligence community.(50)
Despite Clifford's successful intervention with Justice, as a result of the guilty plea, Helms was, in the words of the federal judge who presided over the case, "in disgrace and shame."(51) It was precisely at this time that Irvani provided a critical lifetime to Helms through financing the Safeer Company, named for the Iranian word for "Ambassador," as an international consulting firm whose initial business was mostly supplied by Irvani and Irvani's contacts.
According to Safeer Company corporate records and other documents on file in civil litigation in Atlanta in the case of G&H Montage, Gmbh v. Irvani, Superior Court of Gwinnett County, Georgia, 88-A-03571-6, 80 percent of Safeer was capitalized and owned by Irvani. Moreover, much of Safeer's early business activity was handled by Irvani's former chief U.S. assistant, Roy Carlson, who became Vice President of Safeer and had close ties to BCCI.
Carlson, who served as a Naval officer in the Pacific during World War II, joined the U.S. foreign service and was detailed to South Africa, before moving to the Bank of America, where he spent twenty years. While working for BOA, Carlson was stationed in Teheran in the 1960's and in Beirut in the early 1970's. Carlson ultimately became head of the bank's operations throughout the Middle East and East Africa. During that time, he came into close contact with Abedi, advising Abedi on the formation of BCCI in 1972, prior to BCCI's incorporation in Luxembourg. In turn, Abedi had introduced Carlson to Irvani, one of the most successful industrialists in Iran, who hired him to be manager of the Melli group.
During this period Carlson started his own company, the "North West Investment Company", which was created in order "to help expedite shipments through Europe to companies in Iran." (52) North West invested $120,000 into Safeer Company during its first year, and one year later, liquidated this investment in Safeer, selling its shares to an entity, "Brockton Leather Company," which in turn sold them to Richard Helms for one dollar.(53)
Corporate records obtained from Switzerland in May, 1992 show that North West is still listed as in operation, and that Carlson is listed as Vice-President of the Company and as a resident of Teheran, although Carlson lives in Snellville, Georgia. Northwest corporate records also show that Dr. Marco Jagmetti, the lawyer for Northwest, is a director of Rothschild Continuation Holdings, a holding company run by BCCI director Dr. Alfred Hartmann.(54) Although it has not been able to determine if they are related companies, the Subcommittee has uncovered documents indicating that BCCI shareholder Kamal Adham was President of a Panamanian holding company called "North West International".(55)
After the Iranian revolution, Carlson fled Iran and went to work for Richard Helms in Safeer, on transactions financed by Irvani. Then, after Ghaith Pharoan purchased National Bank of Georgia from Bert Lance on behalf of BCCI, Agha Hasan Abedi personally selected Carlson as the new head of National Bank of Georgia.(56)
A memorandum prepared by BCCI lawyers following a meeting with Carlson in November, 1990 describes how Irvani by early 1978 became a front-man for BCCI in its takeover of First American, at the very time Irvani was financing Helms' international consulting firm. The memorandum described Carlson as telling BCCI the following:
In the mid-1970's, and arising out of the relationship which had grown from Agha Hasan Abedi's involvement with Irvani over Iran Arab Bank, Agha Hasan Abedi had invited Rahim Irvani to take a 5% stake in [First American]. Carlson said that Agha Hasan Abedi wished the consortium holding the shares to have a broad background including those from Iran. Carlson said the material produced at trial purported to indicate that Rahim Irvani had applied to Credit & Commerce Americas for a loan in order to purchase the share stake... The investment had not proceeded because firstly, Rahim Irvani had never been keen to make the investment at all, but had been persuaded that he could do so on the basis of the loan to be made to him [by Abedi and BCCI.](57)
When Irvani agreed to act as a front-man, Richard Helms drafted legal language to protect Irvani against possible liability for the use of his name as a shareholder by Abedi, BCCI, and the Clifford law firm. A telex from Helms to Irvani, dated October 20, 1978, describes Helms' assistance to Irvani as follows:
Roy Carlson asked on October 19 that I have an independent attorney review the seven documents he sent me by telex. . . you are not running undue risks.
Carlson also told me that you wanted a draft of a simple agreement which would hold you harmless in these arrangements. The text of this agreement is as follows:
LETTER AGREEMENT. For value received, the undersigned jointly and severally agree to indemnify you from any liability, loss, or damage, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of or caused by your granting, as shareholder or a director, a power of attorney to any partner of Clifford, Glass, McIlwain and Finney, a Washington D.C. law firm, to act in your name with respect to the transaction involving Financial General Bankshares of Washington, D.C.(58)
The telex ended with the sign-off, "With Warmest Regards, HELMS."
With this suggestion, Helms was assisting Irvani in acting as a front-man for BCCI, who would not be at risk for the use of his name by the BCCI group represented by Clark Clifford and Robert Altman. Helms was assisting Irvani in his acting as a BCCI front-man in the takeover being handled by Clifford just
one year after Clifford had assisted Helms in his negotiations with the Justice Department on his perjury indictment.
Irvani's role in the takeover was acknowledged recently by his son, Bahman Irvani, who told the Atlanta Constitution that his father "lent his name to the 1978 takeover bid at the request of BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi."(59)
Despite the existence of the October, 1978 telex from him to Irvani regarding how to structure the hold-harmless agreement for Irvani to the Clifford firm in the original FGB takeover, Helms has recently denied that he was involved in the transaction, terming the allegation "totally untrue . . . absolute nonsense."(60)
Irvani's role in BCCI's initial attempt to acquire Financial General ended with the Iranian revolution in January 1979, as he became an unnecessary nominee.
Over the following decade, Irvani, Carlson, and Helms continued to interact with one another and with BCCI.
Helms provided introductions for Irvani to then U.S. Ambassador to Germany Walter J. Stoessel, Jr in January, 1979, and through former Senator Albert Gore Senior, contacted Senator Bumpers' office for assisting on locating rice dealers for Irvani. Helms and Irvani also continued to refer business to one another.(61)
During the 1980's, Helms continued to introduce Irvani to prominent Americans, writing Vice President Bush on Irvani's behalf in October 29, 1987, forwarding an October 16, 1991 letter from Irvani to Bush, and forwarding letters of congratulations from Irvani to President-elect Bush and Secretary of State James Baker on November 28, 1988. None of the actual letters from Irvani to George Bush discussed in the Helms-Irvani correspondence have been located. But the cover letter from Irvani to Helms on the October 16, 1987 letter, refers to Irvani's desire to provide Vice President Bush with advice on his presidential campaign.(62)
Helms took other steps on Irvani's behalf, including introducing Irvani's son Ali to Ambassador Paul Nitze, arms control advisor to President Reagan, and writing to U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner on Irvani's behalf on May 22, 1989. Helms introduced Irvani's son, Ali, to former CIA station chief for Saudi Arabia Raymond Close -- who had previously worked for Irvani's successor as BCCI's lead front-man in the First American takeover, Kamal Adham -- on July 11, 1989.(63)
Throughout this period, BCCI financed Irvani investments in the United Kingdom and in the United States, which in 1989 amounted to $38 million in a single transaction to buy a New York office building, 140 East 58th Street. Other BCCI documents show numerous loans, typically of millions of dollars at a time, to the Irvani family, as well as indications that the Irvanis also received substantial loans from the National Bank of Georgia, both while that bank was owned by BCCI through Ghaith Pharoan, and after Pharoan was replaced as a nominal owner by First American.
BCCI and William Casey and His Network
On February 23, 1992, NBC News broadcast the allegation that former Director of Central Intelligence William Casey met secretly for three years with Abedi, that such meetings took place every few months at the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C., and that they discussed matters relating to U.S. arms deals to Iran and the arming of Afghani rebels.
Prior to the broadcast, NBC contacted the CIA and was advised of the following by the CIA:
"An extensive search of CIA files and cable traffic revealed no evidence that CIA was involved in or had any knowledge of any use of BCCI for the sale of arms to Iran or the diversion of funds for the Nicaraguan contras, in connection with the Iran-contra affair."(64)
Previously, Kerr had testified before the Subcommittee on October 25, 1991 that:
allegations that the Agency had any direct or indirect relationship with Abedi or recruited him for CIA activities are absolutely baseless.(65)
According to the CIA in February, 1992, the CIA found "no records or evidence whatsoever to indicate that former Director Casey or the Agency had any sort of relationship with Abedi."(66)
Balanced against these flat denials are statements to the contrary by one BCCI official in a position to know to U.S. officials. The BCCI official explicitly described meetings between Casey and Abedi at the Madison Hotel in the mid-1980's, identified one other person who had personal knowledge of the meetings, and provided an account which one U.S. official deemed credible.(67) In addition, there are statements by BCCI officer Abdur Sakhia and Bert Lance that each had noticed in 1985 a change in Abedi's attitudes towards the United States, which they attributed to his developing a relationship with the CIA.
Sakhia testified that in 1984, he was told by Abedi, or one of his associates in London that Abedi was uncomfortable about travelling in the United States because he feared he was on a CIA watch list, but that as of a year later, Abedi's attitude had changed completely, giving Sakhia an impressions that "a deal had been struck somewhere."(68)
Lance provided a more detailed account, describing a meeting with Abedi at a symposium on conflict resolution at Emory University sponsored by President Carter in October 1983:
What [Abedi] said was . . . from the precise moment that Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President of the United States, I have been on the CIA Watch List. And my every movement, my every act, whatever I do, personally as well as through BCCI, is noted, watched, observed, under surveillance of the Central Intelligence Agency. . . I said: Well, why, Mr. Abedi? . . . And he said something that was very interesting, Mr. Chairman. He said: You have to understand that I fall into the category of being a Third World liberal . . .(69)
According to Lance, Abedi's attitude and concern about the CIA suddenly changed significantly in 1984. Where he had been concerned about making visits to the United States, and about expanding his operations in the United States, he now felt confident, leading Lance to conclude that Abedi had received "an assurance" that the U.S. government would no longer impede his activities. Lance, acknowledging he had no hard evidence for his assertion, nevertheless concluded that the CIA had made an effort "to coopt Mr. Abedi and BCCI, and in effect, turn them into the bank of the CIA."(70)
Neither Lance nor Sakhia had been exposed to the other's testimony at the time of making these statements, or had ever met one another.
One possible explanation of the contradictory accounts is that Casey undertook actions in the foreign policy or intelligence sphere while director of the CIA outside its record keeping and operations. The CIA's legal department has described such activity by Casey, including any role he had in the Iran/Contra affair, as being undertaken in his position as an advisor to the President, rather than in his position as Director of Central Intelligence.(71) In such cases, Casey would have taken actions which were outside the record keeping of the CIA, undocumented, fully deniable, and effectively irretrievable.
Iranian Arms Deals and Dealers
Regardless of whether Abedi and CIA director Casey concluded a deal under which BCCI would provide off-the-books assistant to any unofficial or "off-the-books" operation of Casey, BCCI was incontestably used by key Iran/Contra figures to finance arms shipments to Iran in connection with the secret Reagan Administration initiative. CIA records, as well as Kerr's testimony, state the CIA did not know this. However, the record is clear that a number of BCCI officials knew of the U.S. government arms sales to Iran at the time. Ironically, BCCI knew of this Reagan Administration initiative at a time when the Iranian arms sales remained secret not only from the U.S. public but the Congress, and at a time when the CIA knew that BCCI was a criminal enterprise.
BCCI was also involved in a number of other Iranian arms sales after the fall of the Shah, some of which appear not to have been completed, and others of which appear not to have involved the United States. In still other cases involving BCCI's use for arms sales to Iran, it is simply not possible to determine the extent of involvement by U.S. officials.
BCCI was used from the late 1970's in London by Iranian arms brokers who became the central figures in the "October Surprise" allegations of secret negotiations with Iran involving Casey and Iranians over the fate of U.S. hostages. It was also used by Iranian arms dealers in Britain who never completed arms sales with Iran. Most important, it was extensively used by Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar in arms deals that were directly on behalf of the United States.
1984-1986: Adnan Khashoggi and Manucher Ghorbanifar
Both Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi and Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar were central agents of the United States in selling arms to Iran in the Iran/Contra affair. According to the official chronologies of the Iran/Contra committees, Khashoggi acted as the middleman for five Iranian arms deals for the United States, financing a number of them through BCCI; and Ghorbanifar was the individual who conceptualized the arms-for-hostage negotiations, and provided the initial channel to the "Iranian moderates" with whom the Reagan Administration negotiated prior to delivering shipments of U.S. TOW missiles and HAWKs to Iran in 1985 and 1986.
Khashoggi was served as the "banker" for arms
shipments as the undercover scheme developed in 1985 and 1986. Khashoggi himself said he advanced $1 million in August 1985 to "get the deal going." According to his own and other published accounts, he provided some $30 million in loans altogether, depositing money in a Swiss bank account controlled by Lake Resources, the company run by former White House aide Oliver North, who played the pivotal role in the operation involving the arms sales and diversion of funds to Nicaraguan Contra rebels.
Both Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar banked at BCCI's offices in Monte Carlo, and for both, BCCI's services were essential as a means of providing short-term credit for sales of arms from the U.S. through Israel to Iran. Khashoggi's use of BCCI for the Iranian arms sales was first described, in passing, in an Iran/Contra committee deposition on June 8, 1987, describing the movement of $10 million from Credit Swisse which would to through BCCI four times to produce $40 million of sales "and therefore, additional profit." In the same deposition, the witness, Khashoggi business manager Emanuel Floor, described Ghorbanifar as stating, "these are my associates," and writing down the name, "BCCI." Floor described BCCI as acting not merely as Ghorbanifar and Khashoggi's bank for the purpose of these transactions, but as an actual partner in the Iranian arms deals.(72)
As described in detailed Subcommittee testimony by BCCI Paris manager Nazir Chinoy on March 18, 1992, Khashoggi came to Paris to meet with Chinoy in early 1986 to discuss continuing transactions he had until then been conducting through BCCI's Monte Carlo branch. According to Chinoy, the meeting was set up when Chinoy wished to learn more about the reasons for the sudden increase in assets and activity of the Monte Carlo branch of BCCI, which was under his jurisdiction as chief manager for the French region of the bank. He learned from Manir Karim, the branch manager for Monte Carlo that most of the new assets and activity were the result of a very successful relationship that had been developed with Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. Khashoggi had two to three "very active" deposit accounts at Monte Carlo, according to Chinoy, and kept very large balances there, paying "his crew" through travellers checks at the rate of $100,000 to $150,000 each month. Chinoy decided to learn more, and met with Khashoggi and Karim in BCCI's office in Paris:
I met Khashoggi in a small room at the bank. He told me he had a deal, he was to be a supplier, buy American arms through Israel and supply them to the Iranians. What he wanted was a four-day credit.(73)
Khashoggi told Chinoy he was working directly for the U.S. government and the CIA, and needed BCCI because none of the parties involved in the Iran/Contra affair trusted one another:
The Israelis wanted their money for the arms whereas the Iranians would only pay when the arms physically would reach them. The Americans wanted their money as soon as they gave their arms to the Israelis and Khashoggi did not have the money himself at the time. Khashoggi wanted a revolving $5 million credit, and the charges he was prepared to pay were generous -- 2% front end fees per transaction. For $2 million you would get $40,000 per transaction. Then you would get interest at 1 1/2 % over LIBOR for the actual number of days the overdraft loan or line of credit was operating. This was juicy.(74)
In meeting Khashoggi, Chinoy learned for the first time that BCCI had been providing these services for Khashoggi for a number of months through the Monte Carlo office of BCCI, without the knowledge of the Paris office, which was responsible for the Monte Carlo office. Karim explained that there had been at least five transactions as of early 1986, that had never been detected by other BCCI offices and which had never received formal approval in writing by BCCI's headquarters in London. This was done by exploiting BCCI's "float," through BCCI's officer taking a check on a Thursday or Friday from Khashoggi and holding it over the weekend, while giving Khashoggi credit for the check immediately. Khashoggi in return would use the money and make the payments to the Israelis. The arms would be delivered over the weekend and by Monday or Tuesday Khashoggi would have the check from a Swiss bank, normally Credit Suisse, where the North/Secord "Enterprise" maintained its accounts. Credit Suisse would give Khashoggi a "Demand draft," which BCCI would then cash for its credit on the transaction on a Tuesday or Wednesday after Khashoggi had his funds from the Iranians.(75)
According to Chinoy, the five or more transactions had involved eight to ten million dollars in all. Chinoy recognized that the activity was profitable, but he was uncomfortable about BCCI being involved in a transaction that secretly involved the U.S., Israel and Iran in arms deals, and that had not been and would not be approved in writing by BCCI's London office. Chinoy said that he told Khashoggi he could not continue the deals, that they would have to stop them. In the weeks that followed, Chinoy noticed that profits at the Monte Carlo branch fell, indicating to him that his subordinate had obeyed Chinoy's order. But he then learned that the arms deals started up again anyway, and that Khashoggi and Karim completed two to three more transactions out of Monte Carlo totalling $15 million to $17 million dollars.(76)
In the same period, Chinoy learned from Karim that Iranian arms sales Manucher Ghorbanifar also maintained a regular deposit account at BCCI Monte Carlo, in amounts ranging from $2 million to $2.5 million, typically kept in short-term certificates of deposit. Chinoy suggested to Karim that BCCI sever its relation with Ghorbanifar and was told:
We should let the account be. He is in very good books with French intelligence, with the American government, he is helping everybody and he has good accounts in Switzerland and I hope we will get more money from him.(77)
According to Chinoy, BCCI officers understood that Ghorbanifar had helped the French government obtain the release of hostages held in Beirut, and that accordingly, BCCI would strengthen its status in France by handling Ghorbanifar's business.
Further confirmation for Chinoy's account came from BCCI's senior office in the United States, Abdur Sakhia, who testified that in the mid-1987, he was contacted by FBI agents investigating the Iran/Contra affair who needed to obtain records from BCCI Monte Carlo, which was the "missing link" in their documentary chain involving the U.S. and Credit Suisse. According to Sakhia, the FBI told him that a BCCI branch manager in Monte Carlo had been paid $100,000, "presumably by the U.S. government," and deposited that check in Switzerland in his own account. They asked Sakhia to obtain BCCI's records concerning the transaction from Europe. Sakhia contacted his superiors in London and they discussed whether or not BCCI should provide the information to the FBI despite the fact that to do so would violate French secrecy laws. The official at BCCI-London, Ameer Siddiki, agreed with Sakhia that if BCCI's involvement in Iran/Contra became known, it would focus dangerous attention on the bank's other activities. BCCI London informed Sakhia that if the United States government agreed to prevent BCCI's involvement from becoming public, BCCI would violate French law and provide the records to the United States. The FBI agreed to this arrangement, and the records regarding the Iranian transactions were provided by BCCI to the FBI.(78)
Following this agreement, Sakhia remained concerned about the fact that the BCCI official involved, Manir Karim, had accepted a $100,000 bribe to handle the transactions, and deposited them in a non-BCCI institution, and yet had not been disciplined by BCCI. Based on this and related information, Sakhia concluded that the handling of the arms sales by BCCI "was all being orchestrated from London and London was aware of what was happening."(79)
According to the Iran/Contra deposition of Albert Hakim, banker for the North/Secord Enterprise, Khashoggi made deposits in the North/Secord accounts from BCCI in the amount of $2.5 million on February 7, 1986; $2.5 million on February 10, 1986; and two checks of $5 million each on February 18, 1986. Still additional deposits were made from BCCI by Khashoggi for $5 million on May 18, 1986. Provocatively, Hakim referred to additional transactions amounting to millions more involving an entity referred to simply as "IC" of the Grand Caymans, reminiscent of BCCI's own Grand Caymans affiliate "ICIC." (80)
Three payments to BCCI from the North/Secord accounts, including Lake Resources, the account used to finance arms to the contras, are shown in the ledger books maintained by Hakim on behalf of the enterprise, amounting to $10 million only.(81) In addition, the Hakim ledgers show five wire transfers amounting to $346,000 to First American Bank, which may merely indicate that Secord, North, or the fourth partner of the enterprise, former CIA agent Thomas Clines, may have had an account there.
Evidence for the involvement of BCCI headquarters in London and Abedi in the Iran/Contra arms transactions is contained in documents between BCCI Grand Caymans and BCCI London in March 1986 involving a $10 million arms transaction -- the exact amount referred to by Emanuel Floor as having been intended for movement through BCCI by Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar, and tracking the February 18, 1986 payments referred to by Hakim.
The documents, which refer to the use of a front company "in formation" to handle the transaction, are in the nature of preliminary discussions regarding whether BCCI would handle the transaction. But they contain a critical fact: they demonstrate the involvement of BCCI-London in transactions involving BCCI Monte Carlo and BCCI Grand Caymans. From Chinoy's point of view, the meaning of the documents is that when he expressed concern about the Khashoggi transaction, London simply went around him. From Sakhia's, the documents showed that Abedi had approved the BCCI project from the beginning. (82)
Ironically, Clark Clifford had his own long-standing ties to Khashoggi. In 1981, Khashoggi took $250,000 from Northrop intended for Saudi Arabian Air Force General Hashim M. Hashim. Four years later, Northrop released documents accusing Khashoggi of demanding the bribe for the general, and then converting it to his own use, Khashoggi retained Clifford to represent him in the subsequent federal grand jury investigation of the matter. Significantly, both Kamal Adham and Faisal al Fulaij, BCCI's front-men for the 1981 takeover, were investigated as well as Khashoggi for taking money from Northrop and Lockheed in connection with U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia.(83)
Perhaps as a matter of coincidence, the business formed by Secord in May, 1983 immediately upon his retirement from the U.S. government in partnership with Hakim, Stanford Technology Trading Group International of Vienna, Virginia, used a BCCI shareholder as its local agent in Saudi Arabia for contracts to provide security services in the Middle East. The person who Secord hired to help him acquire Saudi government contracts was Abdullah Said Bugshan and his brothers. Together, the Bugshan brothers owned about one half of one percent of BCCI during the period they reprsented Secord and Hakim in Saudi Arabia. While representing Secord, they had also deposits in BCCI ranging from $13 million to $21 milllion in BCCI and had outstanding loans of about $6 million from BCCI.(84)
Other Iranian Arms Dealers and BCCI
Ben Banerjee
A recurring question about the Iran/Contra scandal is the issue of whether there may have been earlier arms sales to Iran, prior to the period covered by the Iran/Contra Congressional committees. On September 29, 1987, Die Welt, a German newspaper, reported that in 1984, Iran's ambassador authorized the purchase of 20,000 U.S.-made TOW missiles after talks between U.S. Lt. Col. Oliver North and Iranian officials in Hamburg. According to Die Welt, the deal fell through and the weapons were never delivered after an Iranian contact disappeared with the letter of credit.
According to Die Welt, Iran's ambassador to West Germany, Mohammad Djavad Salari, signed a letter authorizing the purchase of the anti-tank weapons worth $264 million, and North, then a member of the U.S. National Security Council, took part in one
negotiating session on Nov. 20, 1984. The newspaper said the purchase authorization came after talks in a Hamburg hotel between Iranians and two British-based arms dealers, Michael J. Aspin, owner of the weapons dealership Delta Investments and Indian-born millionaire weapons dealer Ben Banerjee, chief of the British company BR and W. Industries.(85) Both Banerjee and North denied the allegation.
Documents obtained by the Subcommittee, filed in a British criminal case later brought against Aspin for fraud in connection with the attempted sale of the American TOW missiles to Iran in 1984, and a second attempted sale in 1985, include a "pro-forma invoice," dated November 21, 1985, for the supply and delivery of 1250 units of BCM 71A TOW MISSILES, manufactured in the USA, "all brand new in manufacturers original packing," from B.R. & W. Industries, Ltd., signed by Ben Banerjee, U.S., denominated "lift trucks" for the purpose of bank and customs documentation, and handled by BCCI in London. The invoice was accompanied by telexes and letters on BCCI stationary of a nature and type ordinarily used by BCCI, showing BCCI providing counter guarantees and letters of credit for a transaction involving the "lift trucks" in November and December, 1985, involving the Iranian government and its bank, Bank Melli, and channeled through the Arabian Gate General Trading Co. of Dubai, United Arab Emirates.(86) In staff interviews, BCCI Paris manager Chinoy confirmed that Banerjee banked with BCCI in London and was involved in "large dealings with Iran."(87)
During the Aspin trial, Leslie Aspin, Michael Aspin's brother, testified that the TOW missile sale was a legitimate sale authorized by the United States government as part of a 1984 -1985 effort to ransom CIA agent William Buckley, with the weapons to be transferred from Portugal to Iran. In a sworn statement of May 1, 1987, Aspin attested that he and Oliver North opened three joint accounts in BCCI Paris into which North deposited $5 million on November 15, 1984, and listed the account numbers and signature cards of the three accounts, one of which was maintained for an entity called "Devon Island," allegedly, under the signature of North and Bannerjee, and the other two accounts, which were numbered accounts, maintained under the signatures of Aspin, Bannerjee and Ghorbanifar.(88)
The Subcommittee has confirmed the existence of accounts in London involving Banerjee and in Monte Carlo involving Ghorbanifar, but has not received access to BCCI's accounts in Paris to determine whether or not the accounts referred to by Aspin existed. North has denied having maintained such an account. However, BCCI Paris manager Chinoy did learn of an account in the name "Devon Island" when he received a telephone call in 1988 from a London office of BCCI asking about it, and was advised by his assistant that the account existed but had not been used.(89)
Both Banerjee and Aspin are dead. The Subcommittee is continuing to seek Banerjee and Aspin's records from BCCI's liquidators in hopes of determining whether the arms sales to Iran in which they were participated had the backing of or involvement of any U.S. official.
1980: BCCI and October Surprise: Cyrus Hashemi
The late Cyrus Hashemi, an Iranian expatriate living in London, is a key figure in the "October Surprise" allegations charging that William Casey and other members of President Reagan's election team in 1980 engaged in negotiations with Iran, whereby Iran would delay the return of U.S. hostages held in Iran until after the November, 1980 election, in return for the U.S. providing Iran with needed arms for its war against Iraq. According to these allegations, which are substantially based on states made by Hashemi's brother Jamshid, who was based in Paris in this period, Cyrus Hashemi was to have acted as the middle-man in these secret negotiations between Casey and Iran. Later, Hashemi was indicted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for weapons dealings with Iran in a case that was ultimately thrown out of court as a result of complications arising out of the Iran/Contra affair.(90)
Without reaching any judgments concerning these allegations, records obtained by the Subcommittee demonstrate that BCCI was one of the principal banks used by Cyrus Hashemi in the United Kingdom.(91)
Bruce Rappaport, Alfred Hartmann, and BCCI
Bruce Rappaport, an Israeli-born Swiss businessman who was investigated in 1987 by Independent Counsel Robert McKay for certain activities he engaged in on behalf of former CIA director Casey, had several connections to important participants in the BCCI affair. For example, he placed one of BCCI's key "rent-a-faces," Alfred Hartmann, who headed BCCI's secretly-held Swiss affiliate, Banque de Commerce et Placements, on the board of directors of his Intermaritime Bank of Geneva and New York; developed a relationship with BCCI's original contact in the U.S., Bert Lance, in the mid-1980's, and purchased an Antiguan melon-farm from Israeli arms dealers who were significant customers of BCCI in Miami.(92)
Rappaport's links to BCCI are significant chiefly because of his relationship to Casey, a frequent golfing partner. For example, Rappaport threw a party in Washington in the summer of 1985 for Casey to demonstrate high-level support for a project to build a pipeline to ship oil from Iraq through Jordan. Rappaport was also the person who allegedly controlled accounts which received $10 million for the contras provided the North-Secord operation by the Sultan of Brunei, at the request of Elliot Abrams. The Iran/Contra Committees were told by Swiss authorities that the $10 million had disappeared, and was found to have "mistakenly" gone to an unwitting Swiss businessman, who then returned the money after the Iran/Contra affair was discovered. Press accounts, which Rappaport has denied, contend that the businessman was Rappaport. If Rappaport did indeed receive the funds, the placement of the $10 million with him would not likely have been in error, given his close relationship with Casey.(93)
Oman
While reviewing the complex relationships between BCCI and the Bank of Oman, which was affiliated with BCCI, the Subcommittee came across several linkages suggesting ties between the Sultanate of Oman, key figures in Saudi intelligence and U.S. persons with connections to the intelligence community.
As a 1985 article in the New York Times noted, Western intelligence has been a major influence in this tiny, but strategically placed, Gulf State, adjacent to the United Arab Emirates headed by Sheik Zayed. Although BCCI is not mentioned in the article, there is a substantial amount of evidence which demonstrates that both BCCI and the CIA has played a major role in the foreign policy and economic affairs of that country. The article discusses a Pasadena corporation, Tetra Tech, operated by a former CIA agent, which "helps manage several key Omani government agencies."(94)
It is clear that several companies and government agencies in Oman had multimillion dollar loans from BCCI. BCCI's loan book, dated March 3, 1991, for example, shows: Oman Aviation Service had an $8 million loan; Oman Building and Contracting Co. had over $11 million; Oman Flour Mills Co. had a $13 million loan; Oman Development Bank had $13 million; Oman Investment and Finance Company had a $10 million loan; Oman Building and contracting Services had a $16 million loan; and Sultanate of Oman had $14 million in loans. These are, of course, only the companies or government agencies which are clearly identifiable as having an Oman connection: there are undoubtedly other companies which the Subcommittee has been unable to identify.(95)
Besides the entities listed above, BCCI may have been moving money through the National Bank of Oman to fund the war in Afghanistan. British journalists have written:
"BCCI's role in assisting the U.S. to fund the Mujaheddin guerrillas fighting the Soviet occupation is drawing increasing attention. The bank's role began to surface in the mid-1980's when stories appeared in the New York Times showing how American security operatives used Oman as a staging post for Arab funds. This was confirmed in the Wall Street Journal of 23 October 1991 which quotes a member of the late General Zia's cabinet as saying 'It was Arab money that was pouring through BCCI.' The Bank which carried the money on from Oman to Pakistan and into Afghanistan was National Bank of Oman, where BCCI owned 29%."(96)
The National Bank of Oman and its CEO, Case Zawawi, also did business with Bruce Rappaport. Jerry Townsend, the President of Colonial Shipping in Atlanta, told the Subcommittee that his former employer, Bruce Rappaport, had business relations in Oman with Case Zawawi at the National Bank of Oman. Townsend, who claims to have worked as a soviet analyst with the CIA, was employed by Rappaport between 1981 and 1990. Townsend recalled that Rappaport flew Zubin Mehta and the London Philharmonic to Oman on one occasion to entertain the Sultan and other members of the royal family. More importantly, according to Townsend, Rappaport and Zawawi had numerous "contracts with the Saudis." The consolidated loan report for BCCI of March 3, 1991 shows a loan authorization of almost $11 million to the Zawawi group with an outstanding balance of nearly $8 million.(97)
Conclusions
Key questions about the relationship between U.S. intelligence and BCCI cannot be answered at this time, and may never be answered, without the ability for investigators to review BCCI records and interview BCCI witnesses held by the government of Abu Dhabi. Other questions could be answered from documents available in the United Kingdom, and subpoenaed by the Committee, but for the decision by the British judge on an application of BCCI's liquidators not to permit the Committee to receive them without the written "permission" of the depositors involved, such as Abu Nidal, and the deceased Ben Banerjee and Cyrus Hashemi. Still other BCCI documents in the United Kingdom have been segregated and sealed by British intelligence (MI-5), and withheld from dissemination to anyone.(98)
Finally, other relevant information in the possession of the CIA concerning certain important figures in BCCI's history remains classified, and hence outside the scope of this report. Summaries of some of this classified material have been provided to staff in a classified form that cannot be referred to. However, even there, the underlying material upon which these summaries were based, has been withheld, and therefore any additional relevant information the underlying material may contain can only be a matter of speculation.
However, even by its own account of its activities, the CIA made two significant mistakes in its handling of BCCI.
First, the CIA failed to provide the critical information it had gathered to the correct users of the information -- the Federal Reserve and the Justice Department. Kerr testified that he was "not sure it was a bad decision," a judgment challenged immediately during the hearing by Senator Hank Brown, who noted:
My training was that somebody's supposed to take responsibility. . . . And when a decision is made that is a bad decision, you identify who made it. . . You may feel a failure to get information about a criminal activity to the Federal Reserve is not [a bad judgment], I have a different view of it.(99)
Second, even when the CIA knew that BCCI was as an institution a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it used both BCCI and First American, BCCI's secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations. In the latter case, some First American officials actually knew of this use.(100)
While the reporting concerning BCCI by the CIA was in some respects impressive -- especially in its assembling of the essentials of BCCI's criminality, its secret purchase of First American by 1985, and its extensive involvement in money laundering -- there were also remarkable gaps in the CIA's reported knowledge about BCCI.
According to Kerr, the CIA did not have any information regarding the involvement of Kamal Adham -- its chief intelligence liaison in the Arab Middle East during the 1960's and 1970's -- in BCCI, or that of his successor, Abdul Raouf Khalil, or of Iran/Contra arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi.(101) Those statements have since been reiterated to the Subcommittee by the CIA in April 1992, following a further review of CIA records, with the caveat by the CIA that CIA record keeping is not consolidated, and that it remains possible that information which exists has not been retrievable.
The professed lack of knowledge by the CIA about the activities of its foreign intelligence liaisons and operatives who were BCCI's major shareholders and customers is perplexing and disturbing. The relationships between the CIA and Adham and Khalil were, according to public accounts, among the most important intelligence relationships the United States has had in Saudi Arabia over a quarter of a century. Similarly, Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar performed a central role for the U.S. government in connection with the Iran/Contra affair in operations that involved the direct participation of CIA personnel.
The CIA's professions of total ignorance about their respective roles in BCCI are out of character with the Agency's detailed knowledge of many critical aspects of the bank's operations, structure, personnel, and history.
If one accepts these statements at face value, it is hard not to conclude that the CIA's ignorance on these matters constituted a significant intelligence failure on the part of the CIA. Given the CIA's responsibilities to protect the U.S. against covert action by foreign powers, it would be especially disturbing if the United States does not, as a general matter, know anything whatsoever -- as the CIA has testified here -- of very substantial financial activities within the United States of chief foreign intelligence liaisons such as Adham and Khalil.
The errors made by the CIA in connection with its handling of BCCI were complicated by its handling of this Congressional investigation. Initial information that was provided by the CIA was untrue; later information that was provided was incomplete; and the Agency resisted providing a "full" account about its knowledge of BCCI until almost a year after the initial requests for the information. These experiences suggest caution in concluding that the information provided to date is full and complete. Caution is especially warranted given the CIA's recurrent statements that its record keeping has not been consolidated, and that it is possible that records pertaining to BCCI, or its shareholders, could have been missed in its search.
The lack of recollection by the chief intelligence officer of the Treasury, Douglas Mulholland, and by a then-senior official of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Robert Bench, of the CIA having told them about BCCI's secret ownership of First American, is troubling.
According to the CIA's records, Mulholland recognized at the time that the information was important, and sought more information. The original memoranda are written in a fashion that makes it unlikely that any recipient would have not have noted BCCI's secret ownership of Washington's largest bank holding company, and have remembered it later. Accordingly, the testimony of both Bench and Mulholland raises questions about their candor.
1. S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 3, pp. 569-570.
2. Id.
3. S. Hrg. 102-350, p. 794.
4. . Hrg. 102-350 pt.3, pp.569-570
5. Letter, Webster to Kerry, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 3, p. 607.
6. Communication between Subcommittee staff and Virgil Mattingly, Federal Reserve, July 31, 1991.
7. Testimony of Richard Kerr, Acting Director of Central Intelligence, S. Hrg. 1012-350 Pt. 3 p. 573.
8. Briefings, Subcommittee staff, by CIA office of general counsel and deputy director of operations, March-April, 1991.
9. Kerr testimony, closed session, Subcommittee, October 31, 1991.
10. Testimony of Virgil Mattingly, Senate Banking Subcommittee on Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, S. Hrg. 102-379 p. 141.
11. Staff interview, Virgil Mattingly, Federal Reserve, June, 1991, and review of Federal Reserve documents.
12. Testimony of Virgil Mattingly and William Taylor, Senate Banking Subcommittee on Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, S. Hrg. 102-379 pp. 141-143.
13. Senate Banking Committee Testimony, March, 1991.
14. Testimony of Kerr, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 3 p. 573.
15. Id.
16. Id.
17. Id.
18. Id. at 590-591.
19. Id., testimony of Altman, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 3, p. 259. 268.
20. Testimony of Kerr, id. at 374.
21. Testimony of Kerr, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 3, p. 573.
22. See February 18, 1992 testimony of Douglas P. Mulholland before Subcommittee.
23. CIA summary, declassified on April 9, 1992, based on Subcommittee review of internal Agency cable traffic on BCCI and CIA's interaction with Treasury, S Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4, pp. 360-363.
24Mulholland Testimony, S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4, pp. 6-7.
25. Staff interviews with Mulholland, February 14, 1991.
26. Mulholland Testimony, id. at 8.
27. Id at 32-33.
28. Mulholland Testimony, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 4 p. 9.
29. Id. p. 28.
30. Testimony Bench, S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4 pp. 36-37.
31. Staff interview, Bench, February 14, 1992.
32. Interview, Bench, March 13, 1991.
33. Staff interview with secretary to Donald Regan, May 5, 1992.
34. Kerr, id, at 573; Mazur, S Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 3, p. 673.
35. Minutes of Evidence Taken Before House of Commons Treasury and Civil Service Committee, Banking Supervision and BCCI, February 5, 1992, Sec. 252.
36. BBC, excerpts, Radio Peace and Progress in Arabic, July 1, 1981, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 3 p. 291.
37. Woodward, Veil, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1987 p. 352.
38. See Jeff Gerth, New York Times December 6, 1981, "Former Intelligence Aides Profiting From Old Ties," S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 3 pp. 293-299.
39. Id.
40. Id.
41. Statements of Adham to U.S. law enforcement officials, March, 1992.
42. Testimony of Lance, S. hrg. 102-350 p. 22.
43. Harris and Berry, "Arab Investors to Manage Funds; Arabs Want Lance to Direct Investments," Washington Post, December 18, 1977, A1.
44. Statements of Adham, id.
45. Affidavit of Clark M. Clifford, February 7, 1992, S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4 p.710.
46. Transcript, Federal Reserve Board hearing, April 23, 1981, p. 65.
47. Testimony of Rahman, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 1, p. 501.
48. Staff interview, U.S. investigator, April, 1992.
49. S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4 pp. 310-316.
50. National Law Journal, December 22, 1980; UPI, December 13, 1980.
51. Washington Post, March 1, 1981, G1.
52. staff interview by telephone with Roy Carlson, July 16, 1991.
53. Safeer Company, Second Annual Meeting, minutes, November 23, 1979, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 4, p. 255.
54. Swiss corporate register, Zurich, p.155.
55. documents filed by Kamal Adham with the Federal Reserve, 1989 FRY-6: Principal Shareholder data, p.3.
56. BCCI documents, including telex to Frank Van Court from Swaleh Naqvi, 11/12/79, "seen by Agha Saheb," curriculum vitae of Irvani, Alwand Investment Company.
57. Confidential and Privileged Attendance Note, November 19, 1990, BCCI Attorney memcom of meeting with Roy Carlson, Exhibit D in G&H Montage case, id.; S Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4 pp. 286-298.
58. Plaintiff's exhibit, Helms 9, G&H Montage, id., reprinted S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4 p. 237.
59. Peter Mantias, "BCCI: Case reveals former CIA chief's ties to bank," Atlanta Constitution, February 15, 1992, A1.
60. Atlanta Constitution, "Ex-CIA chief Helms denies helping BCCI," February 18, 1992, S Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4 p. 236.
61. Letter, Stoessel to Helms, January 26, 1979; Letter, Rahim Irvani to Helms, March 21, 1984, S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4 pp. 270-277.
62. Letters on file in G.M.H. Montage case, id.; S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4, pp. 259-260, 265, 272-273, 275.
63. Id.. S Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 4 p. 266.
64. NBC Memo, February 21, 1992.
65. Testimony of Kerr, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 3 p. 573.
66. NBC Memo, id; communications of CIA DDO to Subcommittee staff, April 9, 1992.
67. Staff interview, federal investigator.
68. Testimony of Sakhia, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 2, p. 527.
69. Testimony of Lance, S. Hrg. 102-350, p. 39.
70. Id at 40-41.
71. Staff briefing, CIA legal department staff, February, 1992.
72. Deposition of Emanuel Floor, Congressional Iran/Contra Committees, June 8, 1987, pp. 31-34, reprinted S. Hrg. 102-350 PT 2. pp. 539-540.
73. Chinoy, Staff interview, March 9-16, 1992.
74. Id.
75. Id.
76. Testimony of Chinoy, March 18, 1992, staff interviews, March 9-16, 1992.
77. Chinoy staff interview, March 9-16, 1992.
78. Testimony of Sakhia, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 2, pp. 529-531.
79. Id.
80. Hakim Deposition, April 20, 1987, Vol 13, Iran/Contra Depositions, pp. 16-17.
81. Iran-Contra Affair, Appendix A: Volume 2, Source Documents S. Rept. No. 100-216, pp. 255-256.
82. Chinoy, staff interviews, March 9-16, 1992; Sakhia testimony, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 2, pp. 530-531.
83. The New York Times, p. 56, September 3, 1975.
84. BCCI Holdings (Luxembourg), Statement of Shareholders, Giving Percentage of Shareholders, Deposits and Liabilities Including Contingent Liabilities of Each Shareholder, 1985-1987, Subcommittee document, Iran/Contra Appendix A, Volume 2, Source Documents, S. Rept. No. 100-216, p. 200.
85. See Associated Press, September 27, 1987.
86. S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 3 p. 618-628.
87. Staff interview, Chinoy, March 9-16, 1992.
88. Affidavit of John J. Loftus, Esq., September 12, 1991.
89. Staff interviews, Chinoy, March 9-16, 1992.
90. See generally October Surprise, Gary Sick, ________________, New York (1991).
91. FBI teletype, October 8, 1980, New York to Director, Attn Criminal Investigative Division, Terrorism Section, re Cyrus Hashemi.
92. See e.g. testimony of Lance, S. Hrg. 102-350, Pt. 3, p. 43-44.
93. See e.g. Legal Times, July 31, 1989, "I'm Not Rappaport."
94. New York Times, Jeff Gerth, 3/28/85 p. 5
95. BCCI Consolidated loan book, March 3, 1991.
96. Bankrupt, the BCCI Fraud, Kohan and Whittington p. 220
97. BCCI consolidated loan report. March 3, 1991
98. Communications, firm of Nussbaum and Wald, legal representatives to BCCI liquidators, Touche Ross, June, 1992.
99. S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 3 pp. 592-593.
100. Testimony of Altman, S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 3 p. 259.
101. Id. at 574.
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/11intel.htm
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[ Business as usual in Washington: Roy P.M. Carlson was the Bank of America executive who arranged that bank's purchase of 30 percent of BCCI in 1972. In 1975 he left BoA to become president of Rahim Irvani's Melli Group in Iran. BCCI founder Agha Hasan Abedi used Irvani as one of his front men in the acquisition of Financial General Bankshares, and the incorporation of Richard Helms' Safeer Company was initially a means to this end.Meanwhile, there was an inconvenient revolution in Iran. Carlson found a new job as head of National Bank of Georgia, because BCCI had secretly taken it over in 1978 through the use of Ghaith Pharaon, who bought it from Bert Lance and later sold it to BCCI's First American Bank. NBG held the paper on some large commercial loans to Jimmy Carter's peanut business.
By the second annual meeting of Safeer in November 1979, Carlson and Irvani had moved on, leaving Richard Helms as the sole owner. BCCI turned to a new front, Kamal Adham, former head of Saudi intelligence.
The books of Safeer show that Helms primarily used it as his own consulting firm, not only receiving fees from Northwest Investment Corporation (Irvani), but also from defense industry corporations with links to the intelligence community, such as Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, Mitsui, Hughes Aircraft, Itek, Electronic Data Systems, and Bechtel. Helms, of course, was CIA director from 1966-1973, and then ambassador to Iran until January, 1977. These documents were scanned from U.S., Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, hearings before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations, February 19 and March 18, 1992,The BCCI Affair, Part 4, pages 237-240 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992).
John Kerry (D-MA) presided over these hearings, but was unable to get the CIA to produce any relevant documents -- perhaps because by 1983-84, CIA director William Casey and his assistant Robert Gates were secretly meeting with Abedi. The material on Safeer originated from a civil case in Georgia, in which a German company tried to trace Irvani's assets through a maze of offshore companies. ]
Document 1, p.1
Leonard L. Silverstein
Richard A. Mullens
Gerald H. Sherman
Paul F. Schmid
Wilma E. Van Deman (1940-1976)
Charles W. Schoeneman
Arthur H. Schreiber
Robert E. Falb
Jerry J. McCoy
Adelbert L. Suwalsky, Jr.
Stuart M. Lewis
Samuel H. Black
Ronald D. Abramson
Lynn K. Pearle
Deborah M. Beers
July 28, 1977
Mr. Rahim Irvani
Industrial Development and
Service Company, Ltd.
P.O. Box 2942
Tehran, IranRe: Safeer Company
Dear Mr. Irvani:
After receiving your telex of July 21, 1977, we prepared a draft Certificate of Incorporation of Safeer Company. A copy is enclosed. In addition, I am also enclosing a draft of proposed by-laws. Both the certificate and the by-laws have been discussed with Ambassador Helms. He has asked that we call to your attention the following points about which you may have some suggestions.
1. We propose that the corporation adopt a fiscal year ending September 30 and set January 15 as the stockholders' meeting date. Actually, the corporation is free to adopt a fiscal year ending with any month. Once a fiscal year is adopted, it cannot be changed without securing permission of the Internal Revenue Service. September 30 is suggested because that would give time to prepare annual reports and tax returns prior to the usual rush which occurs subsequent to December 31.
2. The incorporators listed on page 2 of the Certificate of Incorporation would be unrelated persons selected by the Corporation Trust Company, a professional organization which is in the business of acting as the
Document 1, p.2
SILVERSTEIN AND MULLENS
Mr. Rahim Irvani
July 28, 1977
Page Tworegistered agent for a Delaware corporation. The incorporators' only function after signing the Certificate of Incorporation is to elect the initial board of directors. Thereafter control of the corporation is in the hands of the stockholders and the directors.
3. The following persons are suggested for the initial board of directors:
R. P. M. Carlson
Dr. Hamid Montakhab
Richard Helms
Cynthia R. Helms
Dennis J. Helms (He is a lawyer and Ambassador Helms' son.)We advised having at least a five-person board. Ambassador Helms was reluctant to name three persons but did so at our suggestion. He would be happy to consider any additional persons you may desire.
4. As we noted in our first telex, we recommend that the initial capital of the company be $1,000, split 80 shares to you and 20 shares to Ambassador Helms. As soon as the initial capital of $1,000 is paid in for the stock, the company may commence business. Thereafter you may make contributions to capital in whatever amounts are deemed necessary to provide the corporation with adequate funds. Under those circumstances, the stock ownership will not change. Is this satisfactory with you? In what name would you like your stock registered?
5. As soon as the corporation is organized, it is contemplated that the following officers would be elected by the board of directors:
President - Richard Helms
Vice President - R. P. M. Carlson
Secretary - Cynthia R. Helms
Treasurer - Richard Helms
Document 1, p.3
SILVERSTEIN AND MULLENS
Mr. Rahim Irvani
July 28, 1977
Page ThreeIf you have any questions or suggestions, perhaps you can contact us by telex. If you approve, please let us know by telex. Once final approval is given, it will only take a day or so to form the corporation.
Very truly yours,
SILVERSTEIN AND MULLENS
/s/
Richard A. MullensRAM:jll
Enclosurescc: Mr. R. P. M. Carlson
Ambassador Richard Helms
Document 2, p.1
O
ITT GA
ITT 10 20 1U58+
440242 SAFR UI85124880+
24880 MELIEX G
GA440242 SAFR UI
TELEX NO. 228 10/20/78
ATTENTION: Mr. Irvani
1. Roy Carlson asked on October 19 that I have an independent attorney review the seven documents he sent me by telex. Mr. Richard Mullens, whom you met in Washington, reviewed the documents carefully and states that in signing them you are not running undue risks. He further stated that there is nothing unusual in the documents.
2. Carlson also told me that you wanted a draft of a simple agreement which would hold you harmless in these arrangements. The text of this agreement is as follows:
Letter Agreement
To: Mr. Rahim Irvani
Melli Industrial Group
P.O. Box 2690
Tehran, IranFor values received, the undersigned jointly and severally agree to indemnify you from any and all liability, loss, or damage, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of or caused by your granting, as shareholder or a director, a power of attorney to any partner of Clifford, Glass, McIlwain and Finney, a Washington, D.C. law firm, to act in your name with respect to the transaction involving Financial General Bankshares of Washington, D.C.
Date:
(signature line)
With warmest regards,
Helms
24880 MELIEX G
440242 SAFR UI.....
1102EDT 003.85
http://www.pir.org/foia/helms.html==================================================
Sunday January 19, 2003
The Observer
A mega-scandal much older than Enron or WorldCom is about to shake
the British financial establishment. More than a decade after the
spectacular collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce
International, its creditors are finally to put the Bank of England
in the dock.
The stakes could not be higher for the Old Lady of Threadneedle
Street. It was the financial regulator in 1991 when the BCCI crashed
with £7 billion of undeclared debts, and has long been accused of
turning a blind eye to fraud at the Middle Eastern bank.
Now it faces a giant lawsuit brought in London by BCCI's victims, who
claim it is guilty of negligence amounting to 'misfeasance', or
wilful misconduct. The Bank has fiercely denied the charge, and made
every effort to get the legal action thrown out.
And no wonder. BCCI's creditors are claiming up to £1bn in damages.
They are also breaking new ground by challenging the Bank's statutory
immunity against being sued.
The Government's worries do not stop there. It will have to answer
potentially embarrassing questions over what Ministers, civil
servants and the regulator knew about BCCI before it crashed. The
Bank's most senior officials, past and present, are expected to go
into the witness box, and the High Court will also consider evidence
from John Major, the former Prime Minister, as well as former
Chancellors Norman Lamont, Nigel Lawson and Denis Healey.
Then there is the small matter of the role played by Britain's
intelligence services, whose relationship with BCCI has long been
questioned. Did MI6 use accounts at the secretive bank to pay sources
and operatives around the world? Did BCCI channel Western funds to
Mujahideen fighters in the Eighties - or even, as some conspiracy
theorists have surmised, to Osama bin Laden?
All this may - or may not - come out when the trial begins in
October. For now, though, both sides are engaged in pre-trial legal
tussles over secret service documents.
The creditors are led by accountant Deloitte & Touche, BCCI's
liquidator. They range from East End market traders to local councils
to the state of Abu Dhabi, which had become BCCI's principal
shareholder by 1991, and is thought to have lost £2bn.
BCCI remains the world's biggest-ever banking fraud, and the colour
and complexity of the scam is awesome.
Press attention at the time tended to focus on such unsavoury
customers as Panama's military leader Manuel Noriega, as well as the
gilt-edged lifestyles of the bank's executives, many of whom remain
fugitives from justice today. BCCI laundered drugs money, bribes and
dictators' loot. But this reflected only part of an endemic culture
of fraud, which would consume more than 90 per cent of the bank's
assets.
BCCI was founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a charismatic banker
and mystic from Pakistan. It grew rapidly, and would eventually boast
offices in 70 countries and 14,000 employees. But from the start, it
had a taste for opaque finances. It was incorporated in two tax
havens, Luxembourg and Grand Cayman, and used two sets of auditors,
allowing it to avoid publishing meaningful consolidated accounts.
Abedi's bank was beloved of Asian and Middle Eastern expatriates, and
he cherished a vision of the BCCI as a force for unity in the
developing world. But by the late Seventies, its biggest borrower,
the Gulf shipping group owned by Abbas Gokal, was heading for
bankruptcy. Concerned that regulators would shut down BCCI if its
exposures were revealed, Abedi and other executives falsified the
books. BCCI secretly poured money into Gulf, just to make it look
like a going concern capable of servicing its debts.
This deception lasted for 15 years, involved 750 false accounts and
an estimated total turnover of $15bn. BCCI also created fictitious
transactions to mask other non-performing loans, as well as hundreds
of millions of pounds' worth of losses at its London-based treasury
department. Reckless expansion into the United States and Europe
dented profitability further. By the time it went down, BCCI was
routinely plundering customer deposits to maintain an appearance of
solvency.
It had been granted a licence to trade in the UK by the Bank of
England in 1980, and opened dozens of outlets here, its largest
branch network in any single country. BCCI's collapse provoked fury
in the UK, as tens of thousands of depositors were left out of
pocket.
Several protagonists, including Gulf's Gokal, were put behind bars by
the Serious Fraud Office, and the Bank of England was castigated for
its failures of supervision by Lord Bingham, whose official inquiry
into the BCCI reported in 1992. Bingham's sentiments were forcefully
echoed by a US Senate inquiry.
Despite the criticism, Threadneedle Street has spent an estimated
£10m in legal fees fighting creditors' attempts to gain financial
redress. For years, the trial has been held up in pre-court hearings,
with Government lawyers attempting to withhold reams of classified
papers collected by Bingham's inquiry.
Much has been handed over, including witness statements from
politicians and evidence from government depart ments at home and
abroad. But the BCCI creditors have not had as much luck in getting
key intelligence documents.
Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, secured public interest immunity
orders last year to block the disclosure of 'sensitive' passages from
an unpublished appendix of the Bingham report, which dealt with the
security services.
Other material has been kept out of creditors' hands by invoking a
statute that also relates to national security. In an extraordinary
twist, however, the Government is refusing to identify exactly which
statute it has invoked. Government lawyers may fear that to identify
the statute would effectively reveal the nature of the material they
are trying to keep secret. The BCCI creditors, however, are not
satisfied. They believe they are not being given a proper chance to
challenge the Government's non-disclosure.
The creditors insist they are not making mischief for British
intelligence: they only want to find out what the Bank of England was
told about BCCI. There are still a lot of secret documents to argue
over. Expect more skirmishes in the months ahead.
Years and years of ignored warnings
1972 BCCI founded. First offices in Luxembourg, UK, Oman and United
Arab Emirates.
1976 US regulators express concern about BCCI's status.
1980 BCCI is plundering accounts to conceal substantial losses by
Gulf Shipping. Bank of England grants banking licence.
1985 Bank of England receives anonymous letter detailing fraud at
BCCI. By now, clients include Abu Nidal's terrorist organisation and
Medellin drugs cartel.
1988 BCCI employees charged with money-laundering in US. Bank of
England ignores warning about BCCI from City fraud squad.
1991 Price Waterhouse reports massive fraud. Top Bank of England
officials are 'devastated' and shut BCCI.
1992 Bingham report and the US Senate criticise Bank of England for
supervisory failures.
1993-97 Six convictions following Serious Fraud Office
investigations. Other BCCI suspects go on the run.
2001 House of Lords gives creditors leave to sue Bank of England.
http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,877668,00.html
http://www.geocities.com/burningbush2000/3.html
Jackson Stephens for whom Wesley Clark works reportedly had BCCI
connections, as well as Bath.
"JACKSON STEPHENS, SR. is a big-money man from Arkansas. A top donor
to the Reagan and GEORGE H.W. BUSH campaigns, he suddenly switched to
Clinton in 1990. He brought BCCI to US shores in 1979 and helped to
launder cocaine profits from CIA drug smuggling in Mena, Arkansas and
elsewhere."
http://www.subliminal.org/mugbook/money/stephens.html
SPECIAL REPORT: LIPPO-SUCTION
CRONY RIADY INVITES CLINTON TO JOIN LIPPO BOARDBank of England ordered to release files in BCCI caseBush, bin Laden, BCCI and the 9/11 CommissionThe Barreling BushesSenator "Cash & Carry"New World Order’s Planned Agenda for Global Mass SlaughterAs for George W. Bush, his limited ties are said to have come through investments in, and buyouts of, several of his oil businesses by CIA- and BCCI-connected firms and individuals.The House of BushThe Saudi European Investment Corp., (Part of BCCI-Bank of Credit and Commerce International)which included members of the Saudi Royal Family, Kuwait, Pakistan,including former Texas Governor John Connelly. Connelly had been the passenger inthe Presidential Limousine when President John F. Kennedy was Murdered.SNOW JOB: THE CIA, COCAINE, AND BILL CLINTONPart 2: The Money Trail
US Support of Middle Eastern Terrorism IV
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/04-10-05/discussion.cgi.29.html
Israel’s Secret Agenda: Funding Arab Terrorism
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/02-23-05/discussion.cgi.97.html
The beginning of the end for the Constitution?
http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/01-05-05/discussion.cgi.19.htmlTHE BCCI AFFAIR
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
BCCI CONSTITUTED INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL CRIME ON A MASSIVE AND GLOBAL SCALE.
http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/01exec.htmBush, bin Laden, BCCI and the 9/11 Commission
http://www.counterpunch.org/floyd01312003.htmlThe "Bank of Credit and Commerce International", shut down by the Bank of England in 1991 and followed by criminal indictments in Manhattan against company officials. CIA's Robert M. Gates called the bank the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International." http://www.nndb.com/company/838/000051685/
American Patriot Friends Network
"....a network of net workers...."
E-Mail: apfn@apfn.org
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