FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker (Nugan-Hand partner) [View all]

[Octafish]

Holy smokes.

IN PLAIN SIGHT

FOUND After 35 Years: CIA’s Fugitive Banker

How Michael Jon Hand, who founded an Australian bank with ties to American military and intelligence officials that defrauded depositors and investors, was tracked to Idaho.

By Raymond Bonner, Special to ProPublica, 11.10.151:00 AM ET

EXCERPT...

Amid a swirl of allegations and rumors that the Nugan Hand Bank was involved in arms smuggling, drug-running, and covert operations for the CIA, the institution’s American founder vanished from Australia. Thirty-five years later, that man, Michael Jon Hand, was tracked to a small town in Idaho where he has been living under the name of Michael Jon Fuller.

Hand was found by an Australian writer, Peter Butt, whose just-released book, Merchants of Menace, discloses Hand’s whereabouts after decades of mystery.

If finding Hand, now 73, solves one mystery, it raises another. How could he have lived in the United States so long without being detected? He changed his name only slightly, from Hand to Fuller, and did not get a new Social Security number, according to Butt.

Hand’s company, G.M.I. Manufacturing, is registered with the Idaho secretary of state. The company “now manufactures tactical weapons for US Special Forces, special operations groups and hunters,’’ Butt writes. Has Hand/Fuller been brazen, foolish, or, as Butt asks, does he belong “to a protected species, most likely of the intelligence kind?”

SNIP...

Suspicions about the bank’s links to the CIA arose almost immediately after Nugan was found dead. His wallet contained the business card of William E. Colby, who had been director of the CIA from 1973 to 1976.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/10/found-after-35-years-cia-s-fugitive-banker.html

"Hand told colleagues that it was his ambition that the bank 'become a banker for the CIA.'"