leveymg's Journal - PARTNERS IN CRIME: The Clintons, the Bushes, and BCCI

Part 1: How the Presidency Became a Threat to National Security

You may have heard that it takes a Clinton to punish a Bush for crimes of state. Not likely. The simple, undeniable fact is that Bill Clinton was presented the opportunity to prosecute former Bush Administration officials when he took office in 1993, but he refused to fully pursue his predecessors in the Oval Office who had been responsible for the illegal Iran-Contra operation, the S&L rip-off, and the BCCI scandals.

Instead, Clinton’s presidency was tainted by its own intelligence and campaign finance scandals – massive espionage and influence buying operations -- featuring much of the same supporting cast of foreign intelligence agencies, corrupt U.S. middlemen, and international bankers who had been at the center of the Reagan-Bush scandals.

No Clinton era official or those of two earlier Administrations were ever fully prosecuted and jailed for their role in crimes involving the CIA and BCCI, or for related crimes that have afflicted the Bush 41 and Clinton presidencies. Investigations have been repeatedly sidetracked, ignored, or when prosecutions actually occurred, top officials have been pardoned. These crimes, along with new and more lethal variations on them, carried over into the Bush 43 Administration.

Now, we are being asked to believe that Hillary Clinton is the best choice among Democratic candidates to clean house and punish the many and varied crimes of state committed by Bush-Cheney. Not bloody likely.

***

The failure of accountability for intelligence crimes in the U.S. has become a systemic weakness repeatedly exploited by Saudi, Chinese, and other foreign intelligence services. The pattern and practice is clear; operatives and foreign agents in CIA covert operations are guaranteed immunity from U.S. prosecution, and almost anything is tolerated:

• The Senate investigation of BCCI, the 1992 Kerry Commission Report, was never followed up on with effective prosecutions. More than $30 billion was looted, and the bank became a conduit for funding Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, massive money laundering, and global terrorism. Clark Clifford, and the handful of prominent American figures indicted, never went to jail. No one at CIA, which had helped run and manage BCCI as an enormous global criminal operation for more than a decade, was ever indicted.
• The 1999 Cox Commission report found that a PRC intelligence operation started 20 years earlier had managed to systematically steal U.S. nuclear secrets, had placed agents of influence within several US agencies during the Clinton Administration, and had made substantial illegal campaign payments to the Clinton White House. Specific findings of that report bearing on the full scope of espionage by China remain classified, and no one was successfully prosecuted. See, (html version) http://www.time.com/time/daily/special/new...
• Similarly, hearings about the 9/11 attack held in late 2002 before the Joint Intelligence Committee implicated many of this same network of foreign financiers and intelligence agencies which had partnered with the CIA to operate BCCI . This evidence was not subsequently addressed, developed or pursued in any publicly-visible investigation. Despite plain evidence of the involvement of U.S. and foreign intelligence services in training, financing, and directing the 9/11 hijackers, many of these investigative leads have not been followed up on. A 22-page section of the 9/11 Commission Report that did touch on the role of prominent Saudi leaders was redacted, and remains classified. The 9/11 Commission explicitly limited its inquiry so as to avoid any finding of culpability by U.S. leaders. There is currently no plans for any official inquest that might assign command responsibility.
• The interconnected “outing” of Valerie Plame and the CIA’s Counter-Proliferation Division, falsification of WMD intelligence, and the Larry Franklin-AIPAC espionage cases are examples of the pattern of limited prosecution of second-tier participants in high-stakes international espionage conspiracies directed from the Office of the Vice President. As with Iran-Contra, selected scapegoats receive the bulk of investigative and prosecutorial attention. The enormity of the crimes committed mean that investigations do develop a public record, but this is released in a piecemeal fashion so as to obscure the complicity of top officials and close foreign allies. Prosecutions are delayed long enough so the public loses interest, and the top officials either evade indictment or if convicted, are pardoned.

Under a Clinton Presidency, the Bushes have been protected, and vis-a-versa.

Under the last four Administrations, foreign intelligence operations targeting the U.S. have had a fail-safe mechanism, the assurance that investigations of espionage, terrorism, and state-sponsored criminal behavior are never fully revealed. Prosecutions of top officials either never occur because of partisan politics or those convicted are pardoned in the final hours by the outgoing President. That’s the way the game has been run.

The reason for this assurance of immunity is two-fold: firstly, prosecutors are told that certain U.S. covert intelligence operations are so vital to national security that criminal probes or trials would compromise intelligence source and methods; secondly, top U.S. political figures – specifically, the Bush and Clinton families, and some of their ranking aides and associates – have been repeatedly involved in activities which, if closely scrutinized, the public would consider to be criminally corrupt or treasonous in nature. In those instances where the public catches a glimpse of these activities, partisan politics have guaranteed political and juridical deadlock, the eventual curtailment of media interest, and an effective halt to further official investigative efforts.

This vulnerability is, of course, well-known to foreign intelligence and sophisticated criminal organizations, and repeatedly exploited by them. Attacking and looting America has become a highly-profitable game. That game is turning America into an easily-targeted, corrupt dynasty ruled by two families to the ultimate benefit of a handful of incredibly wealthy Saudi sheikhs, Mafiyya barons and Chinese party leaders who have openly patronized and illegally funneled money into the American political process.

If Hillary becomes the Democratic nominee, this dual dynasty – and their foreign patrons -- will maintain its control over the White House from 1980 until at least 2012.

There is a hidden back story to the 2008 Presidential run by Hillary Clinton. For three decades, the Clintons and the Bush Family were partners backed by the same foreign deep pockets, receiving tens of millions through the same core group of U.S. middlemen. Massive infusions of money from this cabal insured that since 1980 the Oval Office or Vice Presidency has been occupied by a member of one or two families. During this era, the U.S. has suffered an ongoing crisis with the following results:

• Repeated financial crises resulting from looted financial institutions and fraudulent growth in assets bubbles;
• Growing dependency on imported oil;
• Trade and tax policies that reward corporate disinvestment and offshoring of facilities and jobs.
* Increasingly unnecessary and ill-advised wars fought with fraudulent pretext at the instigation of ambivalent U.S. allies that have led to record U.S. foreign debt while they massively enriched Presidential cronies.

The Bush and Clinton families have been, and continue to be, literal partners in the largest crimes in U.S. history, the covert theft of U.S. nuclear and missile technologies, a multi-trillion dollar transfer of wealth to oil-producing countries, and the stripping off in plain sight of American industrial and service sector jobs.

The Bushes and Clintons have mutual clients and benefactors.

The Stephens Group: The First Saudi, PRC and CIA Bank of Little Rock

Exhibit One: the Stephens Group -- the largest brokerage firm off Wall Street -- to which both First Families owe a heavy debt for their financial and political successes. The Stephens brokered a massive sell-out of the United States of America engineered by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Peoples Republic of China.

The Stephens brothers, Jackson and W.R. “Witt” (d. 1991), contributed heavily to both major American political parties, and to the candidacies of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. The Stephens are international deal makers, par excellence, and served as the middlemen in the largest takeover deals in history. Since the mid-1970s, Jackson Stephens served as the key figure in this tale. He was the essential man in the penetration and compromise of the American Presidency, and the transformation of America from the world’s greatest constitutional republic into a declining dynastic empire. This scheme could only have been pulled by someone who is far outside of the glare of the media hotspots of New York and Washington, DC. An interesting portrait of Stephens was drawn in the November, 1993 issue of Mother Jones: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/19...

There has always been something incongruous about Stephens Inc. Despite the Little Rock firm's attempts to portray itself as a small-city operation that closes for the duck season and got fabulously lucky on a couple of down-home deals like Wal-Mart, it was the ninth-largest investment . . . bank in the country. Since it is not headquartered in New York, its dealings are local news, little noticed by the national press, even when they have national implications. And, as a source close to the company once remarked, "The farther you get from Arkansas, the better it looks."

Stephens Inc. was founded by Witt Stephens, a state legislator's son who parlayed a Depression-era belt-buckle, Bible, and municipal-bond business into an immense personal fortune. After his retirement in 1973, the company was run by his shy younger brother, Jackson (a classmate of Jimmy Carter's at the Naval Academy). Witt Stephens and Stephens Inc. did much to create the economic paradox that is modern Arkansas: a desperately poor state with a scant 2.3 million inhabitants that is nonetheless home to a number of wealthy companies. Without the financial assistance of the Stephens brothers, Sam Walton might have ended his days as the most innovative merchant in Bentonville.

Stephens money was also important to the fortunes of enterprises as various as Tyson Foods . . . Stephens Inc. is an important client of the Rose law firm, whose chairman, C. Joseph Giroir, made Hillary Rodham Clinton a partner. And back in 1977, Stephens assisted BCCI's infiltration of the American banking system by brokering the latter's purchase of National Bank of Georgia stock held by Bert Lance, former President Jimmy Carter's friend and disgraced budget director.

Jackson Stephens (who turned over the reins to his son, Warren, in the late eighties) and his firm were both substantial contributors to the campaigns of Presidents Reagan and Bush (to the tune of at least $100,000 in 1980 and 1989), but they have been closer still to Bill Clinton (whom Witt Stephens had been known to call "that boy").

On two occasions, once when Clinton was running for reelection in Arkansas in 1990 and again in March 1992, when his battered presidential campaign was broke, the Stephens family saved Clinton's bacon with an infusion of money. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that their Worthen Bank's emergency $3.5 million line of credit saved the presidential campaign from extinction. --L.J.D.

In 1975, Jackson made the initial introductions between Bert Lance, a close associate of then Governor Jimmy Carter, with Agha Hasan Abedi, then an obscure Pakistani banker with a seemingly bottomless cash flow.

According to intelligence writer, Joe Trento and other sources, Abedi’s bank, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), was in fact a front company controlled and funded by then chief of the Saudi General Intelligence Division (GID), Prince Kamal Adham. In a secret agreement between Adham’s GID and then Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush, BCCI became the primary funding conduit for a variety of covert operations forbidden by the Democratic Congress, including Iran-Contra and Pakistan’s nuclear program. See, Joseph J. Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s Private Intelligence Network”. Carrol & Graff, New York (2005) at 104.

The primary Saudi agent in this deal with G.H.W. Bush was newly-appointed GID co-director, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who would later become Saudi Ambassador to Washington during the Presidency of Bush 43. Together, then DCI Bush and Saudi intelligence leaders worked out an arrangement whereby Saudi Arabia would pay the financial costs of Agency covert operations banned after Congress cut off funding following the Church Committee revelations of CIA intelligence crimes. In exchange, the CIA would facilitate Saudi black programs in contravention of U.S. law and stated U.S. policy. This arrangement between Bush and al-Turki was part of a secret international agreement called “The Safari Club”.

Before he suddenly departed the US during the summer of 2006, then Ambassador Al-Turki publicly confirmed the existence of the Safari Club in an interview posted at the Saudi Embassy website: http://www.saudiembassy.net/2006News/State...

Another example, of more strategic and geopolitical significance was during the time when the United States was going through the post Watergate assault on your intelligence services by your Congress. There was the Church committee and so forth. By about 1975 I think there was almost a directive from your Congress that there should be no more intelligence work done outside the US until you had reviewed everything. It ended up having that affect anyway -- the laws that were passed and the regulatory criteria that your Congress put on the intelligence community.

SNIP

It was the end of 1974 and Watergate had already taken its toll. I think that President Nixon left office by that time. There was great turmoil and Comte de Marenches (head of French intelligence) made a visit to four countries in our area. He visited the Shah of Iran, he came to visit King Faisal before he died, he went to visit President Sadat and he then went on to visit with King Hassan of Morocco.

His proposition was that our American friends were in trouble, their intelligence collection and capability has been diminished to say the least and literally they didn’t have any more money left to do anything

SNIP

So the leaders from these four countries agreed to set up what was then called the Safari Club. This was the code name for it. The Safari Club included these four countries, Iran, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia plus France.

SNIP

We were able to fill the vacuum and provide some kind of assurance even to the African countries who were scared of the Communist threat but couldn’t rely on the United States at the time. All of us informed the United States that this was our activity and that we were going to do it. I think they expressed gratitude at the time and that’s how things worked. The ultimate example of Saudi-US cooperation was Afghanistan. It is well documented. I don’t have to go into detail.

The corrupt global criminal organization known as BCCI was merely the funding mechanism created to finance the military-political operation codenamed The Safari Club. This is how the Senate Committee that investigated the bank summarized how BCCI operated, and continues to operate under different names, around the world and inside the United States: see, http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/b...

"BCCI's criminality, including fraud…involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the America; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; its support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; its management of prostitution; its commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; its illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers."

Similarly, the Iran-Contra affair was also an outgrowth of the Safari Club intelligence privatization and offshore financing agreement between Bush and al-Turki. Again, that investigation was thwarted, due to White House delay and obstruction. The Clinton Administration refused to investigate some of the most compelling evidence of direct involvement in the crime by the former Vice President. The Final report of Special Prosecutor Walsh concluded that the investigation remained unfinished and incomplete: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/execs...

The secrecy concerning the Iran and contra activities was finally pierced by events that took place thousands of miles apart in the fall of 1986. The first occurred on October 5, 1986, when Nicaraguan government soldiers shot down an American cargo plane that was carrying military supplies to contra forces; the one surviving crew member, American Eugene Hasenfus, was taken into captivity and stated that he was employed by the CIA. A month after the Hasenfus shootdown, President Reagan's secret sale of U.S. arms to Iran was reported by a Lebanese publication on November 3. The joining of these two operations was made public on November 25, 1986, when Attorney General Meese announced that Justice Department officials had discovered that some of the proceeds from the Iran arms sales had been diverted to the contras.
When these operations ended, the exposure of the Iran/contra affair generated a new round of illegality. Beginning with the testimony of Elliott Abrams and others in October 1986 and continuing through the public testimony of Caspar W. Weinberger on the last day of the congressional hearings in the summer of 1987, senior Reagan Administration officials engaged in a concerted effort to deceive Congress and the public about their knowledge of and support for the operations.
Independent Counsel has concluded that the President's most senior advisers and the Cabinet members on the National Security Council participated in the strategy to make National Security staff members McFarlane, Poindexter and North the scapegoats whose sacrifice would protect the Reagan Administration in its final two years. In an important sense, this strategy succeeded. Independent Counsel discovered much of the best evidence of the cover-up in the final year of active investigation, too late for most prosecutions.

***

Under American law, it is a serious felony for intelligence officers to solicit, accept and dispense funds from foreign sources, and using them for unauthorized “off-the-books” operations. It is also a criminal, impeachable offense for the White House to direct the CIA to carry out covert programs forbidden by Congress. That was one of the major charges that came out of the botched and obstructed Iran-Contra investigations, as far as they went. In addition, Bush’s secret Safari Club deal with al-Turki was a manifest violation of the nation’s stated foreign policy. BCCI never was systematically investigated by the Department of Justice. Again, Iran-Contra and BCCI showed us traces of a much larger international black operation run with Saudi money that included nuclear proliferation, terrorist finance, and covert influence operations against the US that for three decades have violated American espionage, election and campaign finance laws, yet have never been thoroughly addressed.

The failure to investigate and prosecute the Safari Club conspiracy created lasting problems for national security far beyond the immediate corruption and rule of law issues that applied when it started. It created an opportunity for blackmail and corruption of top American officials that has persisted to this day. The costs in human life, loss to taxpayers and investors, and the general destruction and betrayal of American interests are almost beyond calculation. The Safari Club was, in the starkest terms, High Treason.

This crime of state opened Bush and his colleagues to blackmail by the Saudis and a number of third-parties to this conspiracy, and to the arms and drug running schemes, financial rip-offs, and black intelligence operations that followed. The result was a permissive environment of bribery, lawlessness, and immunity from prosecution, in which the looting of financial institutions and corporations taken over in intelligence operations became widespread. American taxpayers have always been stuck with the tab, usually bailing out major investors after the dust has settled. BCCI was the template for a series of enormous financial crimes, from the S&L scandal, to Global Crossing, Tyco, Enron to the more specific, Bush 43-era intelligence crimes involving fraudulent Iraq intelligence, MZM and the Saudi-BAE slush fund cases that are just now crawling up to the surface.

Beyond that, the 1976 Safari Club agreement and follow-on secret operations with Middle Eastern states and Jihadist groups created the environment in which transnational terrorist cells, along with their support network, took root inside the U.S. Going back to Operation Cyclone, a joint CIA-ISI-Saudi operation in the early 1990s run by the CIA, known terrorists were allowed entry and to operate inside the U.S. with inadequate control and surveillance, including a failure to employ FISA warrants. Compartmentalized CIA operations that involved the movement of jihadist commanders and financiers in and out of the U.S. continued even after the 1993 WTC bombing, under joint programs with the Saudis, Pakistanis, Turks, and Israel that targeted Bosnia and the former Soviet Republics.

FBI operations that detected these programs were repeatedly warned off or even sabotaged; soon after the 2000 elections, several major surveillance operations run by DOJ and DoD that monitored al-Qaeda cells inside the U.S. were closed down – Able-Danger (DIA), Monarch Crossing (FBI), Catcher’s Mitt (FBI) -- removing surveillance and operational safeguards over al-Qaeda cells that had been in place. FBI field offices that detected several of the 9/11 hijackers were repeatedly denied HQ cooperation and CIA files sought to obtain FISA warrants. In the final months, the White House refused repeated requests by CIA Director Tenet and top CIA counter-terrorism officials to roll-up these terrorist cells. With publication of his book last summer, Tenet confirmed that in late August 2001, he flew to Crawford for a personal meeting with Bush after he got the cold shoulder from Condi the previous month. Still, for reasons we still don’t know, George W. Bush refused to unleash the FBI to go after the al-Qaeda attack cell. Four of the principal hijackers names were added to the immigration and customs watch-list on August 24th, but that would only have detected persons attempting to board international flights leaving the country. This paved the way for the 9/11 attack, and the murder of 3,000 persons, a crime that has itself never been adequately investigated or prosecuted. See, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/... ; http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

***

In 1993, the incoming Clinton Administration was presented with the opportunity to prosecute Bush for his role in organizing BCCI, Iran-Contra and other crimes of state, but Clinton declined to do so. From the very beginning of his own Administration, a continuous flow of raw intelligence gathered by the Clinton FBI and CIA showed that foreign states were conducting criminal, terrorist, and espionage operations inside the U.S. intended to steal secrets meanwhile influencing government policy, and the outcome of U.S. elections.

This is the sort of raw intelligence that Sibel Edmonds, a translator working at the Counter-Intelligence division of the FBI’s Washington Bureau, read in early 2002, and tried to warn Congress and the American public about before she was slapped with a gag order under the misused State Secrets Act.

If Clinton’ s Justice Department had been allowed to prosecute, it need only have followed the evidence about BCCI already developed by the Kerry Commission and the Walsh Special Prosecutor findings. Among the principal findings was that the leadership of U.S. intelligence agencies going back to the Nixon-Ford era was intimately involved with a variety of Middle Eastern figures and corrupt middle-men in jointly managing a global bank whose eventual collapse was at the time, before the Iraq War, the largest criminal fraud and espionage operation in history. Conclusion 7 of the Executive of the Kerry Commission Report states:

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.

Again, as with the scandals of the Nixon-Ford and Reagan-Bush eras, investigations of illegal fundraising within and around the Clinton White House became mired in partisan conflict and denial. Every Director of Central Intelligence from Richard Helms to Porter Goss has left office tainted by and inextricably connected to this scandal. Again, the very enormity and complexity of foreign influence scandals touched both political parties making effective legal, institutional or political redress impossible. Nonetheless, the findings have been clear, even if Congressional committees could never agree on what to do about them. At the end of the Clinton presidency the system did not fix itself, as most top officials similarly escaped prosecution and pardons granted to many of the foreign political operatives involved.

1997 – Bill Clinton, John Huang, James Riady

For instance, the House Government Reform Committee archived in October, 1999 documented FBI Summaries of the Bureau’s Campaign Finance Investigations. (Originally available at http://www.house.gov/reform/99state1028.ht... Wayback Machine)

FBI Interview Summaries for John Huang
(PDF I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X)
DIRECT EXERPTS FROM FBI SUMMARIES OF HUANG INTERVIEWS:
FBI Summaries: Vols-II and III)
THE FBI CLASSIFIED NEWLY DISCOVERED EVIDENCE DETAILING HSIA'S ASSOCIATION WITH THE CHINESE GOVERNMENT AS "VOLUMINOUS":
* The Hsia evidence came to light only after (FBI Director Louis) Freeh canvassed all FBI field offices in September and ordered a "meticulous review of all file holdings in the FBI's possession that bear on attempts by the {People's Republic of China} to influence U.S. political elections." ......the FBI issued a statement saying that the files are "voluminous," consisting of "raw, uncorroborated intelligence that requires significant analysis before the information is appropriate for dissemination." Freeh's directive also produced intelligence that the Chinese government planned to use joint business ventures with U.S. companies and others to raise money that could be funneled into U.S. campaigns. Other newly uncovered reports also suggest that the Chinese government planned to spend more than the previously reported $3 million to influence U.S. campaigns, according to U.S. officials. Fragmentary intelligence also indicated that the Chinese wanted to funnel money directly to the Clinton-Gore campaign, they said. (Bob Woodward, Campaign finance // An FBI oversight adds fuel to the fire // Investigators think newly discovered files show further Chinese efforts to influence U.S. elections.. , Minneapolis Star Tribune, 11-15-1997, pp 13A.)

THE FBI ALSO UNVEILED INTELLIGENCE THAT REVEALED A CLAIM BY SOURCES INSIDE CHINA THAT THEY HELPED TO THWART THE SENATE INQUIRY:

But after Thompson announced two weeks ago that he was suspending his public hearings, officials said, the FBI obtained intelligence showing that the Chinese equivalent of the CIA boasted that it had been successful in "thwarting" the congressional inquiry.
Bob Woodward, Campaign finance // An FBI oversight adds fuel to the fire // Investigators think newly discovered files show further Chinese efforts to influence U.S. elections.. , Minneapolis Star Tribune, 11-15-1997, pp 13A.

Meanwhile, the CIA was aware of these goings on, as the memoirs of former CIA counterterrorism officer Robert Baer reveals in See No Evil , (Three Rivers Press, New York)(2002). Baer describes in graphic, disturbing and often entertaining detail the hoops and hazards that he, a career covert operator, had to go through after he returned to headquarters navigating between the monster global power players who were then lobbying the White House over deals to split up the former Soviet oil deposits in the Caspian region and related pipeline schemes. This brought Baer face to face with Roger Tamraz, a Lebanese naturalized U.S. Citizen once wanted for looting a bank in Lebanon, who was pulling strings and spreading suspected Russian money around Washington to buy face time with President Clinton to push a Chinese-funded pipeline from Turkmenistan through Turkey and Armenia to the Mediterranean.

Roger Tamraz

Baer tells us Roger Tamraz had done favors for Saudi intelligence chief Adham and to the CIA, and acted as a made man. One of Tamraz’s banks affiliated with BCCI had been used as cover by the Agency, an arrangement he had parlayed into a career brokering oil deals, bank frauds, and coups in the Caspian region organized with the husband of the Prime Minister of Turkey and the Turkish Mafiyya.

(Tamraz’s Turkmenistan deal was competing at the time with another plan -- later embraced by the Bush Administration -- backed by a second consortium of Chevron-Amoco and Enron to build pipelines from the Caspian by a southern route through Afghanistan and into India, the failure of which triggered the notorious collapse of Enron). Baer writes at 219-22:

My first and in some ways most enduring lesson about the politics of Washington arrived a little before noon on May 17, 1995, in the form of . . . a “tasker” from an NSC Staffer named Sheila Heslin, who wanted to know what the CIA knew about . . . Roger Tamraz . .. He was one of the first oilmen who showed up in Turkmenistan after independence (1992). Soon he had parlayed a suitcase of dollars of unknown origin into two prime Caspian oil reserve blocks. By 1994, he was back in the news, promoting a pipeline that would carry oil from the Caspian to the Mediterranean via Armenia . . . It turned out Heslin was right about Tamraz’s having a connection with the CIA. According to a file sent over from the Near East Division, he had been in touch with our case officers since the 1970s. At one point, he had even provided cover for two of our officers in one of his U.S. banks . . . it later surfaced that his bank was affiliated with Bank of Credit and Commerce International . (emphasis added)

SNIP

(224)

After the waiter brought us coffee, I got down to business.

“How’d your meeting with Sheila Heslin go?” I asked.

“Wonderfully, she loved the idea of the Armenian route. (According to Heslin’s version of the meeting, which I heard later, she all but threw Roger out of her office. It lated a frigid 20 minutes.)

Tamraz pulled out a map of the Caucus and Turkey, which he slid across the table for me to look at.

“I’m going to connect the Caspian with the Mediterranean with an oil pipeline,” he said, running his finger along a line that traversed Azerbaijan, Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia and Turkey. ”It’s the deal of the century.” . . .

“Seems that all that is going to cost a lot of money,” I said, hoping to sidetrack him and bring the meeting to a quick end. ”Who’s going to pay for it, Roger?”

“The Chinese.”

SNIP

(225-26)

When I started to ask my contacts in the petroleum industry about Roger, the first reaction was invariably, why would the CIA be asking about one of its own? Now I had found out how Heslin had heard about Roger’s connection with us – apparently he had told everyone he ever knew.

I went to see an oilman who knew more about crooked oil deals than Tamraz, mainly because he’d been involved n even more.

“If you need to talk about the Mafia, why don’t you go straight to it?” he asked.

I confessed I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Did you ever hear how Tamraz got started in oil?”

No.

He smiled, pleased to be the one who told me. Before he began, he poured himself a double chilled white Armagnac and clipped a cigar.

Roger Tamraz was in Beirut working for KidderPeabody on the ItraBank liquidation. He was going through one of Intra’s safes and found a document concerning the former head of Saudi intelligence, Kamal Adham. Tamraz recognized its value right away. It was crucial to resolving a dispute in Adham’s favor, so he called Adham for a meeting. When Tamraz handed Adham that document, he only said, ‘You may need this.’ Adham was stunned:’How much do I owe you?’ Tamraz replied, ‘Nothing, but let’s keep in touch.’

SNIP

(227-28)

Next, I called an oil trader who I thought might know something about Tamraz.

“Did you know that Ozer Ciller – the husband of the Turkish Prime Minister, Tansu Ciller -- and Tamraz are business partners?” he asked me.

I didn’t, although I knew that Roger that Roger had spent a lot of time in Turkey promoting his Armenian pipeline, and that he had met Prime Minister Ciller on at least one occasion. Our embassy in Ankara had reported that the Turkish ultranationalist group, the Gray Wolves, made the introduction.

As for Madame Ciller’s husband, Ozer, he was said to keep bad company. Among others, he was connected to the Turkish narcotics baron Omar Lufti Topal, who would be gunned down in a 1996 mob war in Instanbul. At the time, Omar had an outstanding arrest warrant in the U.S. for selling narcotics.

“So what business were Roger and Ozer in?” I asked.

“Oil. Tamraz is paying Ozer to front for him.”

SNIP

The Turkish Tourism and Investment Bank (TYT) loaned the money (for Tamran’s Block of oil in Turkmenistan). After Ozer and Lapis bled TYT dry, it collapsed. Both the liabilities and the assets were written off.

SNIP

I also picked up another tantalizing lead: Roger Tamraz may have been involved with Ozer Cillar and Omar Topal in a coup in Azerbaijan . . .

(247-249)

On December 6, I met with Roger Tamraz for lunch, at his request.

SNIP

“Well, I did it”, Roger said, very proud of himself. “I met the President.”

“How’d you manage to do that, Roger?” I asked, although I knew the moment the words left my mouth that they shouldn’t have.

“It was easy. Fowler gave a price list of what I could get for campaign donations, from a night in the Lincoln Bedroom to a one-on-one with the President in the Oval Office . . . Tomorrow, I have my one on one in the White House. Bill and I are going to work out a strategy for the whole area. I’ve opened a channel to Russia.”

“A channel to Russia?” The last time Tamraz was involved in a diplomatic channel, he ended up losing a bank.

“In fact, I just got back from meeting with the Russians in Milan . . . Yeltsin will sign off on the Armenian route, but in return he’ll want some money for his campaign. It will be no problem. We talked about a ballpark figure of a hundred million. The Chinese promised all the money I need. Yeltsin even agreed to let a little money leak into Bill’s campaign. Everyone walks away from this a winner. I can’t wait to see the President and tell him.”

I raced back to Langley after we had finished and told Roger’s story . . . The following day, after we learned the two Russians really had been where Roger said they were , . . (the Central Eurasian Division Chief) called then Director John Deutch and told him the story. Deutch’s assistant called back that afternoon. He said the president was going to Paris shortly and had no plans to meet Tamraz.

SNIP

(254-56)

The CIA had picked up the aroma of questionable campaign financing long before Congress and the press had. It had even started to do its own damage assessment, trying to root out the skeletons in the closet. But all the trails seemed to end up going cold.

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(T)here was the case of Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chao Ying, of Chinese military intelligence. It was Liu who gave Johnny Chung the famous $300,000 to put into Bill Clinton’s campaign. Chung must have had other things on his mind, because he forwarded only $20,000 to the DNC, but what wasn’t known was that one of our case officers had been in touch with Liu while all this was going on. It was particularly embarrassing because the CIA had neglected to tell Justice about her.

In fact, as the case officer found out, the less headquarters heard about Liu, the better. . .Nor did it want to think too hard about a company Liu had ties to: China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation, which was secretly negotiating with Iran to exchange sophisticated arms, many of US design, for oil.

The CIA did eventually send the Justice task force a set of Tamraz documents, but thy had been cherry-picked to make certain nothing would see the light of day to suggest the agency had dropped the ball.

SNIP

Like the Justice task force, (Chair of the Senate Subcommittee on Intelligence, Senator Richard) Shelby was shown only the documents the CIA wanted him to see. He hadn’t even heard about the possibility that Tamraz might have funneled Russian money into the DNC, nor am I certain that he would have cared if he had. All Shelby was after was more ammo to shoot down Tony Lake’s nomination as CIA Director. Shlby had never gotten over Lake’s wink and a nod to Iran to go into Bosnia.

The unchecked growth and dispersal of slush funds controlled by foreign states, intelligence agencies led to the BAE/“Yamamah” Scandal that has rocked the UK, and is a part of the complex espionage and foreign influence buying crimes behind the Duke Cunningham/MZM/US Attorneys firings cases. See, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

The result of the failure to prosecute BCCI and Iran-Contra is the compromise of leadership elements of US intelligence and the widespread corruption of western political and economic systems. See, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/...

***

The Safari Club went far beyond intervention in Africa. With the active participation of the Bush wing of the CIA, the Saudis proceeded to fund a series of covert operations inside the U.S. intended to further their own perceived national interests. Part of this was interference with the American political process to defeat what the Saudis and the Bush CIA saw as the dangerous meddling of liberal Democrats in Congress with the CIA.

The result was the destabilization of the Carter Administration and subversion of its foreign policies. Using BCCI money, rogue elements of the CIA did what they had in many instances previously where governments were deemed insufficiently committed to the anti-communist cause. They destabilized the country, discredited the target government, and aided the opposition. In 1978, using Saudi and Stephens funds, Abedi would soon purchase Lance’s Worthen bank in a deal brokered by Stephens – compromising the Carter Administration – and, would later go on to ensnare a number of Democratic Party worthies, including Clark Clifford, advisor to four Presidents.

Incoming President Carter declined to renew Director Bush’s CIA employment. In March, 1977, Bush assumed new duties as Chairman of the executive committee First International Bancshares, the largest bank holding company in Texas, along with its affiliates in London and Lichtenstein. Trento states, “It was through this merchant bank that Adham’s petrodollars and BCCI money flowed for a variety of intelligence operations that would span the next decade, according to the Senate BCCI investigation and the Morgenthau New York BCCI investigation.” (2005):139.

BCCI, Saudi Arabia and China

In 1975, Jackson Stephens introduced Bert Lance, Carter's OMB Director, to a Pakistani businessman, Agha Hasan Abedi. Abedi was the founder of a curious Luxembourg-registered, London-based bank called BCCI. In 1978, Abedi purchased Lance's distressed First National Bank of Georgia. Stephens later joins with Lance and a group of Mideast investors--later identified as key figures in the corrupt Bank of Credit & Commerce International--in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Financial General Bankshares in Washington, D.C. Long-time Washington insider, Clark Clifford, will later take the fall for BCCI's illegal takeover of First National Bank of Washington.

The Stephens Group was well-connected to another interesting Asian banking group, the billionaire Indonesian Riady family of Moktar and his son James Riady, who own the Lippo Bank in Indonesia. The Riadys are Chinese-Indonesian businessmen who, of all places, moved to Arkansas in the 1970’s, despite holding billions of assets in Asia. In 1991, Stephens joined BCCI investor Mochtar Riady in buying BCCI's former Hong Kong subsidiary from its liquidators.

In 1987, Stephens Inc. invested tens of millions to rescue Harken Energy, a struggling Texas oil company with George W. Bush on its board. Over the next three years, BCCI-linked investors and advisers are brought into Harken deals. One of them, Abdullah Bakhsh, purchases $10 million in shares of Stephens-dominated Worthen Bank.

Accused al-Qaeda financer, the Bin Mahfouz family, was part of the BCCI Harken "bailout" for George W. Bush. See, http://www.thedubyareport.com/bushbin.html

"Among W.'s consulting responsibilities were "equity placements." When Harken needed an infusion of cash, Bush turned to family friend and investment banker Jackson Stephens of Little Rock, AK. The firm of Stephens Inc. was at the time one of the largest investment banks outside Wall Street. (The Stephens family was also active in Republican circles: Jackson Stephens would later contribute at least $200,000 to the Bush for President campaign, and his wife would become the Arkansas campaign chair.) Stephens rescue plan was to obtain $25 million in investment capital from Union Bank of Switzerland -- a joint venture of BCCI and the Banque de Commerce et de Placements in Geneva. UBS did not normally invest in small U.S. companies, but it made an exception in this case.

As originally structured, the deal apparently did not comply with U.S. banking regulations, according to the Asian Wall Street Journal. In the course of restructuring the deal, UBS decided to sell its shares as soon as possible, and Stephens obligingly found a new buyer: Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi Arabian real-estate magnate. Bakhsh's representative is Talat Othman, a Palestinian born Chicago investor.

For several years Bakhsh was chairman of Saudi Finance Co., a holding company based in Luxembourg that operated French and Swiss financial enterprises. Bakhsh sold his interest in Saudi Finance Co. in 1983, although it is not clear to whom. By 1989 the firm was under partial control of the Gokal family of Pakistan -- shipping magnates who were BCCI shareholders. Bakhsh conducted business with the most prominent people in Saudi Arabia, reportedly including two oil ministers and members of the Saudi royal family. Among his notable co-investors was Ghaith Pharaon; Khalid bin Mahfouz was Bakhsh's banker. Bakhsh's stake in Harken was 17.6% in 1991, making him the third largest shareholder. The first, with 24.5%, is a Harvard University investment fund..."

Khalid Bin Mahfouz is also named in the 9-11 suit, as a defendent. So are Prince Turki, Prince Sultan, & the Saudi Binladen Group.

"Baker Botts, Sultan’s law firm, for example, still boasts former secretary of State James Baker as one of its senior partners. Its recent alumni include Robert Jordan, the former personal lawyer for President Bush who is now U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia.

An internal list of other law firms retained in the case, reviewed by NEWSWEEK , reads like a veritable “who’s who” of the U.S. legal community. Among those firms and their Saudi clients are: Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (Prince Mohammed al Faisal); Kellog, Huber, Hansen, Todd & Evans (Prince Turki al Faisal); Jones, Day (the Binladin Group); Ropes & Grey (Khaled bin Mahfouz); White & Case,(the Al-Rajhi Banking Group); King & Spalding (the Arab Bank and Youssef Nada); Akin Gump (Mohammed Hussein Al-Almoudi); and Fulbright & Jaworski (Nimir Petroleum.)"

James Baker, Prince Sultan, and the Bushes are all business partners in the Carlyle Group. Also "The financial assets of the Saudi Binladen Corporation (SBC) are also managed by the Carlyle Group."

While the relationship between Bush and the Saudis is widely known, an intriguing sidebar is the relationship Bill Clinton had with Saudi leaders years before he became President. That relationship may stretch back as far as 1968, when Clinton and al-Turki attended Georgetown together. Tim Weiner wrote in the New York Times:

By TIM WEINER
Published: August 23, 1993
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html...
The conventional wisdom in Washington in the election last year was that George Bush was the great friend of Saudi Arabia -- after all, he went to war to defend the kingdom.
It turns out that Bill Clinton was hardly unknown to the Saudis.
One of President Clinton's college classmates at Georgetown University was Prince Turki bin Feisal. Today Prince Turki is the head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence service. The two stay in touch, an Administration official said.
As Governor of Arkansas, Mr. Clinton worked hard to secure a multimillion-dollar Saudi donation to a Middle Eastern studies program at the University of Arkansas, said Bernard Madison, the dean of the university's Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.
The discussions about the donation began in 1989. They involved Americans with ties to both the Saudis and Mr. Clinton; officials of Stephens Group Inc., the Arkansas business empire that has provided crucial financial assistance to Mr. Clinton; and David Edwards, an investment banker in Little Rock who has Saudi clients and is a friend of Mr. Clinton.
Mr. Clinton's efforts included a 1991 meeting with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi Ambassador, the dean said.
According to Mr. Madison, the Saudis did not give their first donation to the university -- a $3.5 million gift -- until last summer.
Mr. Madison said: "The gulf war intervened. It was put on hold. They didn't have a lot of money."
One week after he was elected President, Mr. Clinton discussed the donation as part of a telephone conversation he had with Saudi Arabia's monarch, King Fahd, according to a spokesman for Mr. Clinton.

END OF PART 1.