BCCI: The Bank of the CIA
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, 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.
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