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4) BCCI, Afghanistan, and Past Drug-Terrorist Networks
You can read online a US Senate Subcommittee Report entitled
"The BCCI Affair" about BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
The Report concluded The Senate Report's conclusions downplayed what the Subcommittee
had heard from Acting CIA Director Richard Kerr about
CIA knowledge of "the illegal activities that BCCI was involved in --
narcotics money-laundering, terrorism, support to terrorism, and
other activities such as that" (Hearings, III, 584), at a time
when the CIA itself banked at both BCCI and
First American, a US bank which BCCI illegally controlled.
Buried in the Report is the finding that "terrorist organizations...
received payment at BCCI-London and other branches directly from
Gulf-state patrons, and then transferred those funds wherever they
wished without apparent scrutiny."
Books such as The Outlaw Bank, by Jonathan Beaty and S.C.
Gwynne, go further. Beaty and Gwynne accuse BCCI of involvement with
Saudi and Pakistani intelligence and defense
and foreign policy (e.g. 167, 291), with the movement of narcotics to finance
the Afghan resistance of the 1980s (p. 296), and with the CIA and its director
William Casey (e.g. pp. 80-82, 250-51). They cite (on p. 118)
a Financial
Times story [7/25/91] in which the then Finance Minister of
Pakistan "appeared to accept ... that BCCI in Pakistan had been
used by the CIA to transfer money to Afghan resistance leaders and
their backers in the Pakistani military."
BCCI collapsed in 1991. It would appear that the networks and
connections persist. It is pertinent to recall the words
of a former senior DEA Agent with whom I once shared a TV panel,
whose special area was the Middle East: "In my 30-year history
in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the
major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out
to be working for the CIA" (quoted in Peter Dale Scott and
Jonathan Marshall Cocaine Politics [1998 edition], xviii).
BCCI 's funds were melded with the personal fortune of Sheikh
Zayed of Abu Dhabi, one of the UAE. According to Jonathan Beaty
(The Outlaw Bank, p. 74) a US government source told him that
"Zayed's investments in the United States amounted to a staggering
$50 billion, or more." Sheikh Zayed's fortune, reported at $30
billion a year (p. 87), was primarily due to a flow of petrodollars
which "started to flow in the mid-1960s" (p. 126). But the 1960s is
also the period in which the world began to hear of heroin refineries
near the oil refineries of Dubai and Qatar.
One cannot really understand the present crisis without
understanding the degree to which the flow of narcodollars and
petrodollars has corrupted governments, corporations and social
structures around the world, including the US. The influence
of these foreign funds is not usually visible. Most people for
example are not aware that until recently the largest shareholder
of Chevron, and the second-largest shareholder of Chase Manhattan,
were both Arabs.
I plan to post here an article I wrote for Pacific News Service
in 1990, entitled "U.S. Hungry for Kuwaiti Petro-Dollars -- Not Just Oil"
(San Francisco Chronicle, 1/2/91).
a) that BCCI constituted international financial
crime on a massive and global scale, including money-laundering and
arms trafficking,
b) that BCCI systematically
bribed leaders and politicians in 73 countries around the world,
including the US,
c) that it evaded regulatory barriers and penetrated
the US banking system. It also reached 12 other conclusions.