This President is why America today is run by warmongers and traitors!

[Octafish]

105. BCCI: The Bank of the CIA

BCCI -- the miracle Bank of Crooks and Criminals International* -- where the petrodollars met Old Money, as well as narco traffickers, Mafia, NAZIs, Terror Inc, Abu Nidhal, Ollie North and the rest of the BFEE did their banking.

From one great reporter:

BCCI: The Bank of the CIA

by Jack Colhoun
Covert Action Quaterly
Spring 1993

Jack Colhoun was Washington correspondent for the (New York)
Guardian news weekly from 1980 to 1992. He has a Ph.D. in
history and specializes in post-World War II U.S. foreign
policy. His soon-to-be-published book The George Bush File (Los
Angeles: ACCESS, 1993) includes reprints of several of his
articles cited below.

The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal
opens a window with a spectacular view of a subject usually
shrouded in secrecy: How the CIA uses banks to finance
clandestine operations.

The view is spectacular because BCCI, which earned the
moniker the “Bank of Crooks and Criminals International,” worked
closely with former Director of Central Intelligence William
Casey and the Reagan administration’s off-the-shelf arms
Enterprise. BCCI financed some of the Enterprise’s arms-for-
hostages deals with Iran. Arms merchants linked to the October
Surprise banked with BCCI. The CIA funneled funds through the
bank to underwrite the Agency’s secret wars in Afghanistan and
Nicaragua.

But BCCI’s ties to the shadowy world of intelligence go deeper.
Clark Clifford and Richard Helms--retired, but still connected
senior members of the U.S. intelligence community--helped pave
the way for BCCI’s secret acquisition of the Washington, D.C.-
based banking network, Financial General Bankshares. Sheikh
Kamal Adham, the founder of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service,
also played a key role on behalf of BCCI in the takeover of
Financial General, which was renamed First American Bankshares.

Casey met “every few months” with Agha Hassan Abedi, the
Pakistani founder of BCCI, in Washington, D.C. and Islamabad,
Pakistan, over a three-year period in the 1980s. Casey and Abedi
talked about Iran-Contra arms deals, the Agency-funded war in
Afghanistan, and the ever volatile situation in the Persian
Gulf. Abedi even made arrangements for Casey’s travels in
Pakistan.1

1. For the Casey-Abedi meetings, see Peter Truell and Larry
Gutwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, The
World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1992), p. 133; and NBC News, Sunday Today, February 23, 1992.

Abedi founded BCCI in 1972 in Pakistan, but the bank’s main
office was in London. BCCI also had major international banking
centers in the Cayman Islands and Luxembourg, where banking
regulations are virtually nonexistent. By 1991, when it was shut
down by international banking regulators, BCCI had branches in
more than 70 countries. This far-flung network was well suited
as a clandestine conduit for financing weapons transactions,
arranging bribes, and laundering money. Not surprisingly, the
CIA had accounts at BCCI branches around the world, including
more than 40 separate accounts at First American in Washington.

BCCI, utilizing its operations in the Cayman Islands and
Luxembourg, escaped the scrutiny of international banking
regulators. It moved money around the world for weapons
merchants and intelligence operatives through a convoluted web
of BCCI accounts and shell companies designed to camouflage
the transactions. The bank’s good connections in the Third World
enabled it to provide local financing for arms deals and covert
operations.

CONTINUED via PDF:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/152972118/BCCI-pdf

Some more background on the Petrodollar-BFEE axis of weasels:

The Family That Preys Together - the Bush Family

by Jack Colhoun
Covert Action Quarterly, 1992

EXCERPT...

Junior's value to Harken soon became apparent when the company needed an infusion of cash in the spring of 1987. Junior and other Harken officials met with Jackson Stephens, head of Stephens, Inc., a large investment bank in Little Rock, Arkansas (Stephens made a $100,000 contribution to the Reagan-Bush campaign in 1980 and gave another $100,000 to the Bush dinner committee in 1990.)

In 1987, Stephens made arrangements with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to provide $25 million to Harken in return for a stock interest in Harken. As part of the Stephens-brokered deal, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi real estate tycoon and financier, joined Harken's board as a major investor. Stephens, UBS and Bakhsh each have ties to the scandal-ridden Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

It was Stephens who suggested in the late 1970s that BCCI purchase what became First American Bankshares in Washington, D.C. BCCI later acquired First American's predecessor, Financial General Bankshares. At the time of the Harken investment, UBS was a joint-venture partner with BCCI in a bank in Geneva, Switzerland. Bakhsh has been an investment partner in Saudi Arabia with Gaith Pharoan, identified by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board as a "front man" for BCCI's secret acquisitions of U.S. banks.

Stephens, Inc. played a role in the Harken deal with Bahrain as well. Former Stephens bankers David and Mike Edwards contacted Michael Ameen, the former chief of Mobil Oil's Middle East operations, when Bahrain broke off 1989 talks with Amoco for a gas and oil exploration contract. The Edwardses recommended Harken for the job and urged Ameen to get in touch with Bahrain, which he did.

"In the midst of Harken's talks with Bahrain, Ameen-simultaneously working as a State Department consultant-briefed the incoming U.S. ambassador in Bahrain, Charles Hostler," the Wall Street Journal noted, adding that Hostler, a San Diego real estate investor, was a $100,000 contributor to the Republican Party. Hostler claimed he never discussed Harken with the Bahrainis.

CONTINUED...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3352.htm

Thank you for grokking the situation and doing what you do. Telling the truth is why you are so great and all, NeverOld.

PS: I used to have better links, but the articles no longer are available online from their original sources. Even the Waybac Machine no longer coughs 'em out to see the light of day. Oh well. If anyone wants them, PM me and I'll send a copy.

* how Robert Gates famously called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.