MARTIN BORMANN

Old Nazis never die. They go to Antarctica or, in the case of Adolf Hitler, to the Nazi Moon Base. Or, more plausibly, in the case of Martin Bormann they go to the Soviet Union.In May 1941 Bormann was made Nazi Party Chancellor, a position he used to become the Third Reich’s main bureaucrat. He was also Hitler’s right-hand man, his personal secretary and his sounding board, and remained with the Führer until the end. 

The last incontestable sighting of Bormann was in the early hours of 2 May 1945, on Invalidenstrasse Bridge in Berlin, as he sought to escape from encircling Russian troops. Post-war investigation by the Allies surmised that Bormann had committed suicide or been killed near the bridge, but in the absence of a body there could be no confirmation. For two decades rumours flew that Bormann was alive and well and living in (variously) Germany, South America and Spain. 

Then, in 1971, Reinhard Gehlen published his memoirs, The Service, which stated as fact that Bormann had survived the war and hidden from view in the unlikeliest place of all, the USSR, where he had only recently died.Unlike other Bormann spotters, Gehlen had pedigree. He was the former head of Nazi intelligence on the Eastern Front and, with the help of the CIA and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, had taken on the job of spy chief in the new Federal Republic of Germany. Gehlen asserted that there existed film of Bormann watching sports with Soviet bigwigs. 

And he made another sensational claim: Bormann was the Russian spy code-named Werther who had infiltrated Hitler’s military planning sessions, and passed on the top-secret knowledge to Moscow that Russia needed to win Stalingrad, Kursk and other battles on the Eastern Front.Gehlen’s identification of Bormann as Werther received a boost in 2000 with the publication of Hitler’s Traitor: Martin Bormann and the Defeat of the Reich by Louis Kilzer. So fast was intelligence passed from Hitler’s ops room to Stalin’s, Kilzer posited, that it must have come from someone right at Hitler’s side: Bormann. If Bormann was Werther it makes it natural that Stalin would have given him sanctuary after the war – hence the sightings of him in the USSR.

There is, however, strong forensic evidence that Bormann died during the battle of Berlin in 1945. In 1972 construction workers at Lehrter Banhof dug up two bodies, one of which was identified as Bormann’s by his wartime dentist Dr Hugo Blaschke. (The other body belonged to SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger.) The bodies were found just 40 feet (12m) from where Albert Krumnow, a postal worker, had previously claimed to have buried Bormann and Stumpfegger. 

In 1998 DNA tests on the skull of one of the Lehrter corpses confirmed it as Martin Bormann’s. Traces of glass in the jaws suggested the two men had committed suicide by biting on cyanide capsules.The positive identification of the Lehrter corpse as Bormann’s holes the “Bormann was Werther” theory – because, if Bormann had been a Soviet spy, presumably events would indeed have followed the scenario Gehlen proposed. So who was Werther? 

Bernd Ruland, a teleprinter supervisor at Hitler’s wartime radio centre at Zossen, suggested in a 1973 book that Werther was not one but two people: two female teleprinters at Zossen.Almost inevitably, the forensic identification of Bormann’s corpse has not killed off the conspiracy theories. In Doppelgängers, Hugh Thomas suggested there were forensic indicators that Bormann died later than 1945, notably that the condition of the teeth were those of a man older than 45 (Bormann’s age in 1945) and that there appeared to be dental work in excess of the 1945 record. 

Moreover, the skull contained traces of a volcanic red clay not found in Berlin but common in Paraguay – where there had been several Bormann sightings. Since DNA testing proved the skull to be Bormann’s, the necessary inference was that Bormann did survive the war and was reburied in Berlin by accomplices to give credence to the story that he fell in 1945.

Old Nazis do eventually die, but the conspiracy theories about them go on for ever.

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BOHEMIAN GROVE

If you go down to the Californian Sequoia woods in July you’re sure of a big surprise …Occupying 2,712 acres (l,098ha) of ancient redwood forest near Monte Rio in Sonoma County, California, the Bohemian Grove is a private camping site for an annual two-week gathering of 2,000 or so of America’s great and their guests. It is run by San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, established in 1872 as a gentlemanly refuge from the crudities of frontier life. 

Initially the Club membership comprised journalists, writers and artists – hence the “Bohemian” nomenclature – among them being Mark Twain and the socialist writer Jack London. However, the Club was persuaded by member Ed Bosque that it needed monied types to pay for better facilities. Once let into the nest, the money-men took over. 

On a visit to the Bohemians, the Victorian dramatist Oscar Wilde quipped that, “I have never see so many well-dressed, well-fed businesslike bohemians in all my life.”Bored with city life at their elegant San Francisco clubhouse, the Bohemians determined to take to the woods in an annual summer camp at the Grove. For a hundred years or more, the “Bohos” have claimed that the camp is merely an occasion for letting elite hair down and doing some uninterrupted male-bonding (women are excluded). Or, as Grove regular President Herbert Hoover put it, the Grove “is the greatest men’s party on Earth”. 

Heavy drinking, frat-pack-style “jinks”, lavish meals and musical and theatrical entertainments are certainly core to the Grove experience, in which the members and guests sleep in some 104 log-cabin “camps” scattered among the trees. As if in proof of the Bohos’ hedonistic intentions, an effigy of “Dull Care” (representing the burdens of everyday life) is burned every 14 July at the foot of a 40-foot (12m) concrete owl in the Grove’s mock-druidic “Cremation of Care Ceremony”. The motto of the Grove is: “Weaving spiders, come not here.”But weaving spiders do go to the Grove, and some of them are tarantulas. 

And what a tangled web they spin! As the leading academic historian of the Grove, Peter Martin Phillips, observed: “A person would have to look very hard to find such a dense concentration and variety of American socio-economic elites in one place anywhere else in the United States.” Additionally, one would be hard pushed outside of the KKK to find a whiter crowd of Americans: just 1 per cent of the Club’s members are not Caucasian.Every American Republican president since Calvin Coolidge has attended the Grove, including Richard Nixon, who complained that “it was the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine”. Current US politicians who attend the Grove include Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell (a rare non-white) and Newt Gingrich. Meanwhile, approximately one-third of the leading US companies have a representative at the Grove summer fest; by Phillips’s estimate 11 per cent of Bohemian Club members together own US$30.476 billion of corporate stock. 

Alan Greenspan, once of the Federal Bank, and A. W. Clausen of the World Bank are both Grove habitués. It beggars belief that these elites do not “talk shop” together. Indeed, by the Grove’s own admission, the Manhattan Project to build the US atomic bomb was conceived in Mandalay camp at the Grove. Dwight Eisenhower began his bid for the presidency after canvassing support at the Grove.

A feature of the Bohemian Grove is the daily “Lakeside Chat”, a lecture by a worthy in his field. Ostensibly these “Chats” can be on any conceivable subject, but they tend to be skewed towards politics. Titles include “Defining the New World Order” and “America’s Health Revolution: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Pays?”With its potent amalgamation of secrecy, money and power, the Bohemian Grove has been a target for investigative exposés. 

In Trance Formation of America (1995) Grove worker Cathy O’Brien recorded lurid tales of sex slaves, although no such torrid goings-on were found by British reporter Jon Ronson when he crashed the Grove for his book Them. Ronson similarly failed to find the Babylonian Brotherhood transforming themselves into giant lizards, as David Icke insisted he would, and nor did he find the New World Order there. “My lasting impression,” wrote Ronson, “was of an all-pervading sense of immaturity: the Elvis impersonators, the cod-pagan spooky rituals, the heavy drinking … emotionally they [the Grovers] seemed trapped in their college years.”Many of the liberal-left political protests against the Grove are coordinated by the Bohemian Grove Action Network. 

According to BGAN: When powerful people work together, they become even more powerful. The Grove membership is wealthy, and becoming more so, while the middle class is steadily becoming poorer. This close-knit group determines whether prices rise or fall (by their control of the banking system, money supply, and markets), and they make money whichever way markets fluctuate. They determine what our rights are and which laws have effect, by appointing judges. 

They decide who our highest officials shall be by consensus among themselves, and then selling candidates to us via the media which they own. Important issues and facts are omitted from discussion in the press, or slanted to suit their goals, but they are discussed frankly at the Grove. Is there true democracy when so much power is concentrated in so few hands? Is there any real difference between the public and private sectors when cabinet members come from the boardrooms of large corporations? Is the spending of billions on weapons, which are by consensus no longer needed, really the will of the people? 

Or is it the will of General Electric, General Dynamics, and the other weapons contractors represented at the Grove?The BGAN overstates the case: the Grove is too unwieldy to rule America and thus the world. Aside from injecting an annual morale-boosting shot in the arm to the US Eurocentric male elite, the Grove is a good ole boys’ networking opportunity. It is the place in America to win friends (and contracts, jobs …) and influence people in high places.

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BLACK HELICOPTERS

Sinister silent black helicopters are used for the surveillance of patriotic groups opposed to the takeover of the US by the United Nations/New World Order/foreign powers.So claimed the late Jim Keith in his celebrated books Black Helicopters Over America: Strikeforce for the New World Order and Black Helicopters II: The End Game Strategy. 

He was not alone in believing the US government uses military aircraft for surveillance of backwoods patriots: a militia in Montana tried to shoot down a National Guard AH-64 Apache as it flew over a member’s ranch. Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth of Idaho publicly charged that federal agents in black helicopters were harassing Idaho ranchers, although in her version the helicopters were implementing the Endangered Species Act for the federal government. 

Ranches seem a popular visiting place for black helicopters: the first sightings, in the 1970s, were associated with cattle mutilations by aliens. Extraterrestrial technology from back-engineering at Area 51 is believed by some ultra-patriots to be used in the making of the black choppers.

There is no doubt that the military and law-enforcement agencies of the US do use black helicopters, as the “Black Hawk Down” special forces fiasco in Somalia reminded the entire world. Indeed the stealthy UH-60 Black Hawk perfectly fits the “black helicopter” bill – except that it is not employed by the UN in a takeover bid of the Land of the Free. 

Used by the federal Drug Enforcement Agency for narcotics busting maybe, by the CIA in surveillance of the Midwest militias plausibly, but by the UN or New World Order, no.Keith’s claim that vast garrisons of UN troops, up to 20,000 strong, are already established in America, along with their matt-black choppers, might seem alarming were it not for the fact that no one save Keith and a handful of far-right paranoiacs has ever seen them. 

And even in the wide open spaces of the US, 20,000 commie-leaning blue-hatted UN troops are hard to conceal.

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BILDERBERG GROUP

The problem with being rich, powerful and influential these days is that ordinary people just don’t understand you; it’s only other rich, powerful, influential people to whom you can really relate, spend quality time with. So along with the invitation to party on down at the Bohemian Grove comes membership of a very exclusive, no-holds-barred talking shop, the Bilderberg Group.

The Group’s meetings take place once a year at a luxurious hotel somewhere nice, safe, civilized and very secret. The steering committee of around 20 members draws up a list of 100 people they think reflect the great and the good, one or two up-and-coming politicians or business people and even the odd NGO representative if it seems to make economic sense. Once gathered, the chosen ones are catered by hand-picked chefs, have the venue checked by the CIA and are guarded by mercenaries. Those, however, are all the details we have. As soon as the delegates sit down together, the media blackout begins. No one speaks about what has been discussed at the Group’s meetings, no details are leaked, no paparazzi stalk the place with their long lenses. So the kind of privacy any royal or celebrity would kill for is accorded to an innocent group of concerned and informed individuals chatting about new directions in world politics and business.

Seems fishy? Plenty of people think so. The Group is distrusted by the ultra-right, who believe it’s part of a Zionist plot to rule the world, while the far left deeply distrust its capitalist credentials. Hardline conspiracy theorists claim the Bilderberg Group has caused wars and recessions, ordered murders, ousted leaders such as John F. Kennedy and Margaret Thatcher, and dictated national policies. Unsurprisingly, the Group is also accused of having the achievement of the New World Order at the top of its secret agenda. The promotion of free trade and the elimination of protectionist policies are the first steps in its dastardly plan to undermine individual nationality, followed by a series of international conflicts which would destabilize national boundaries still further and reward its acolytes with bulging profits (lucrative Iraqi reconstruction contracts, anyone?).

The list of ready believers in this conspiracy, disturbingly, includes Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrator of the Oklahoma City Bombings, and convicted London nail-bomber David Copeland – all apparently convinced that Bilderberg pulls governments’ strings.The guest list for meetings certainly includes names weighty enough to set any sensitive terrorist’s paranoid antennae vibrating. George W. Bush and his neo-conservative cohorts Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz (quondam president of the World Bank), Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Lord Healey, Henry Kissinger and the conspiracy theorists’ favourite, David Rockefeller, have all been invited. 

One-third of the invitees are drawn from North America and the rest from Europe, with well over half being from the business, media and education worlds, while the rest are politicians or even royalty: the Queen of the Netherlands and the Crown Prince of Belgium have both attended, as have more unlikely candidates such as Jonathon Porritt from Friends of the Earth. There’s no suggestion that Prince Charles has joined the club yet.Members of the Bilderberg Group stress that it’s only an upmarket talking-shop, but it’s hard to believe that members do not influence each other or that the guest list is not manipulated to put the right people together. 

Will Hutton, editor of the Economist and ex-Bilderberger, came close to breaking the self-imposed code of silence when he likened Bilderberg to the World Economic Forum, where “the consensus established is the backdrop against which policy is made worldwide”.If Hutton is correct, then the Group will have surpassed its creators’ intentions. The original aim was to bring America and a united Europe closer together in the face of the emerging threat from Stalin’s Soviet Union and post-war anti-American feeling. 

The first meeting was masterminded by one Joseph Retinger, a Polish American with contacts in the top ranks of governments and the military, who believed peace was too important to be left to democratic means and was best brokered by powerful multinational organizations. The chosen group met in May 1954 at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Oosterbeck, near Arnhem, and was hosted by former SS officer Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.Since then it has met annually, and occasionally twice a year, to encourage trans-Atlantic co-operation, always with the CIA on hand to handle security (guaranteed to get any conspiracy theorist’s blood racing) and sheltered from prying eyes by a self-imposed ban by the world’s media; newspaper editors and media moguls are also invited to attend. It is this need for absolute privacy which seems to stick in the throats of Bilderberg’s critics. Tony Gosling, a former journalist and organizer of an anti-Bilderberg website, puts his fears succinctly: “My main problem is the secrecy. 

When so many people with so much power get together in one place I think we are owed an explanation of what is going on … One of the first places I heard about the determination of the US forces to attack Iraq was from leaks that came out of the 2002 Bilderberg meeting.”According to conspiracy-theory students David Southwell and Sean Twist, the way the secrecy is maintained also suggests there is more than a polite discussion of current affairs going on behind those closed doors. They cite the occasion of the 2003 Bilderberg meeting in Versailles, which almost coincided with the beginning of a Group of Seven meeting of finance ministers in nearby Paris. The proximity of the two events made local French security police uneasy and they tried to have the Bilderberg meeting cancelled. Someone in the force even went so far as to leak an internal memo complaining of the huge numbers of mercenaries being used to protect members, and hinted they believed the event was merely a front for something “much more sinister”.

On the other hand, defenders of the Group would say that, in the face of often biased reporting from the world’s press, business leaders and politicians have much to gain from being able to voice opinions freely without the risk of their views being taken out of context, and it is this honesty which allows a greater understanding of political situations to be reached. Financial Times journalist Martin Wolf supports this view: “It’s privacy, rather than secrecy, that is key to such a meeting. The idea that such meetings cannot be held in private is fundamentally totalitarian. It’s not an executive body; no decisions are taken there.”Is the average citizen to assume, then, that all that happens at the Bilderberg’s meetings is talk with no action? 

Some credit the Group with responsibility for the creation of the Treaty of Rome in 1957; only 18 months earlier, the Group’s 1955 meeting had concluded there was a pressing need for a closely knit European market. Others say that the 1996 delegation, which included Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Kohl, Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher, plotted the war in Kosovo that would ultimately bring down Serbia’s Slobodan Milosević, a view apparently broadcast by Serbian news agencies at the time.On other occasions it would appear that a mere invitation is enough to set a train of events in motion. 

Bill Clinton was brought to the 1991 meeting in Germany when Governor of Arkansas; two years later he was US President. Tony Blair got his call to address the meeting in 1993. Good talent-spotting on the part of the Bilderberg committee, or a cynical boost to those politicians whose views are friendly to big business?As the machinations of multinational boardrooms remain beyond the realm of “public interest”, there is no way of telling what effect the Group’s meetings have had on the business and financial worlds. Company directors are not democratically elected and are accountable only to their shareholders, but the same cannot be said of the politicians who count themselves as Bilderbergers. 

These people are the democratic leaders of the Western world, accountable to millions of people and supposedly upholders of free speech and open government. Why then would they need to discuss major issues “off the record”? The answer may lie in the very economic system which they claim is integral to democracy. As conspiracy-theory journalist Alasdair Spark says, “The idea that a shadowy clique is running the world is nothing new … Shouldn’t we expect that the rich and powerful organize things in their own interests? It’s called capitalism.”

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BCCI (Bank of Commerce and Credit International)

It used to be called usury. These days it’s called “charging interest on loans” and is the raison d’être of those ubiquitous institutions, banks. Since the 17th century banks have loaned money to nations and companies as well as to individuals, and accordingly they have been charged with manipulation of national and international affairs. According to the True Conspiracies website the following, among other sins, can be laid at the reinforced doors of “the banks” (punctuation, spelling, capitalization, etc., sic):

• Boom and bust cycles along with the depressions, stock market crashes and wars are deliberately caused to make people lose money to the conspirators. They also weaken the people and tame governments into accepting the conspirators’ solutions.
• The history books controlled by the conspiracy do not tell the full truth on why many events happen. For example the conspirators blame slavery for the American civil war but the real reason was to establish a central bank in the USA and to force a war to enable them to lend money at interest. […]
• The conspirators bribed members of the government by paying them and having them work for the bank. Intense deceptive media publicity convinced the public and politicians of the benefit of the Federal Reserve Act. It was done in ways such as by lying and saying that the banks will reduce boom and bust cycles. The Federal Reserve Act was passed near Christmas when few people were present to vote against it.
• Hitler was funded by the USA and Britain to create a bigger war. The U.S. government controlled by the bankers conspiracy, wanted Hitler to invade America but he declined due to the risk of the number of Americans with guns. The U.S. government also encouraged Japan to invade Pearl Harbor to get America into the war.
• The bankers funded Arab and Japanese companies to buy up property around the world so the bankers could gain more control of it.
• Manipulation of agriculture has and will be used to force the population to accept the conspirators’ demands such as having to surrender guns to get food.
• The U.S. deliberately tried to lose the Korean and Vietnam wars so the communists would remain with territory. […]Although involved with the conspiracy since his initial rise to power, President Kennedy was killed by an agent of the conspiracy for wanting to pull out of Vietnam and printing silver currency.
• Many countries now with conflicts had peace until the influence of International Bankers Conspiracy.
• The collapse of the Soviet Union was a hoax to fool the world into a false sense of security and also to slowly cause the world to accept communism. The bankers funded the Soviet Union to create an arms race, which cost time and money. Also it caused the nations to gladly surrender their arms in the name of peace so that the goal of a one-world army could be formed under the control of the United Nations.
• In World War 2 the US and British governments controlled by the bankers succeeded in getting the Soviet Union to control much of Eastern Europe.
• They can control the weather for Biological warfare. They are deliberately ruining the environment to gain more control.

Phew. And there’s plenty more where that came from! In the fevered minds of some conspiracy theorists, the banks are run by a cabal of families – principally the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, Loebs and the Rockefellers – who hammer out their joint policy in the Bilderberg Group and implement said policy via various front organizations. The Bank of England, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank all hold a special chill place in the hearts of the conspiracy theorists as the business end of the international banking conspiracy. And the end goal of that conspiracy? A New World Order, naturally.

A distinct flaw in the international banking conspiracy theory is that the national banks continue to operate with patriotic bias. The Bank of England still promotes British interests above all others; the Bundesbank acts resolutely in favour of German strategy (which, according to some on the British left, is a conspiracy to run Europe from Berlin, a sort of soft-glove Third Reich), and so on and so forth. Then there’s that nasty sheen of anti-Semitism over much of the banking conspiracy theory, just as it had in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler blamed “Jew financiers” for the world’s woes, principally Bolshevism. Sixty years later it’s still the Jews who “destroyed Christian old line companies … who want Islamic owned companies excluded from Dow Jones … [who] live on the labour of others” according to the internet site Jew Watch. It’s not difficult to debunk the anti-Semitic fantasy: It takes just one name, the name of J.P. Morgan. The superbanker was a white Christian. Take out the anti-Semitism and the puppet-and-string notion of politics, however, and the conspiracists raise legitimate concerns about the most powerful of financial institutions.

Banks are one of the globalizing forces seeking to enervate the nation state, and banks do discuss mutual interests in elite forums such as Bilderberg, Le Cercle and the Trilateral Commission. The International Monetary Fund does operate in the worldwide capitalist interest (as numerous left-wing regimes have discovered when obliged to alter their internal economies in return for aid). Sometimes banks are immoral: the Vatican Bank allegedly laundered money for the Mafia (see Roberto Calvi), the Banco Nationale del Lavoro funded illegal arms purchases, Barclays underpinned the apartheid regime of South Africa before, with breathtaking hypocrisy, funding the black dictatorship of Mugabe in Zimbabwe …For sheer criminality, however, the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI) remains unsurpassed.

The sorry tale of the BCCI is also one which ties in some of the biggest names of late 20th-century history, among them George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger and Osama bin Laden.The BCCI was founded in 1972 by the Pakistani banker Agha Hasan Abedi, with an initial chest of £2.5 million. In an astute piece of marketing it proclaimed itself the “Third World Bank”, with a mission to promote prosperity in the corners of the globe that Western banks ignored. Within a decade it had a million depositors and was working its way to a paper value of $25 billion. Despite its “Third World Bank” tag, BCCI was keen to break into North America, where in 1977 it bought four banks, including the First American Bank.

BCCI’s vigorous asset-buying hid the bank’s true financial status: it was verging on insolvency. And much of whatever money BCCI was making was coming from illegal activities. By the mid-1980s the CIA, the Internal Revenue Service and the Drug Enforcement Agency were respectively informing the US State, Treasury and Justice departments that BCCI was laundering drugs money. These alarms were all ignored – possibly because some branches of the CIA itself were using BCCI for clandestine purposes – until 1987, when president Manuel Noriega of Panama was discovered to be among those using BCCI to launder drugs money.

The lid could no longer be kept on. The US Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations launched an investigation into BCCI under Senator John Kerry. When Kerry eventually delivered his report on “The BCCI Affair” to the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, in December 1992, he recorded a catalogue of larceny by BCCI that ranged from narcotics trafficking to money-laundering.Such a catalogue of criminality would, one might presume, have the US administration champing at the bit to close BCCI down. Not a bit of it. Which is where the allegation of “conspiracy” enters stage right.

One of the companies which borrowed money from BCCI, Harken Energy, had on its board of directors one George W. Bush, the US president’s scion. BCCI lobbyists and advisers included Henry Kissinger’s consultancy, Kissinger Associates. The CIA, while denouncing BCCI on the one hand, was “float[ing] in and out of BCCI” (Kerry) on the other, was possibly using the bank to run funds to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, and was definitely working to some unspecified end through BCCI’s affiliate, Capcom. Even smiling Jimmy Carter and rainbow coalition leader Jesse Jackson were receivers of BCCI’s largesse. In other words, a vast number of US luminaries had a vested interest in halting Kerry’s work – which is exactly what happened in 1989, when the Justice Department stalled his investigation. According to Washington Monthly, personal pressure from no less than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was put on Kerry to desist.

To Kerry’s credit he refused to give up completely, and approached New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau with irrefutable evidence that BCCI was handling the accounts of the Colombian Medellin drugs cartel and diverting funds to the terrorist Abu Nidal. In 1990 the Bush administration gave BCCI a rap over the knuckles, but refused to close the bank down. That task fell eventually to the Bank of England in July 1991, although the publication of Kerry’s report (now co-authored by Senator Hank Brown) in the following year administered the coup de grâce. BCCI was indicted for money-laundering, bribery and grand larceny.

Shutting the doors of BCCI did not prevent $13 billion going missing – not that any of the monies went to the bank’s staff or small investors, the latter queueing fruitlessly to retrieve their deposits from BCCI branches. There are no answers as to where the missing monies went, although there are hints that some of the bank’s bigger clients received larger than usual remunerations in the run-up to the collapse.An investigation by the French intelligence service found that one Osama bin Laden was a BCCI customer. It is within the bounds of possibility that bin Laden was among those who benefited in the last days of the BCCI criminal empire.

DOCUMENT: REPORT OF SENATOR JOHN KERRY ON “THE BCCI AFFAIR” TO THE COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, UNITED STATES SENATE, IN DECEMBER 1992

BCCI’s unique criminal structure – an elaborate corporate spider-web with BCCI’s founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, and his assistant, Swaleh Naqvi, in the middle – was an essential component of its spectacular growth, and a guarantee of its eventual collapse. The structure was conceived by Abedi and managed by Naqvi for the specific purpose of evading regulation or control by governments. It functioned to frustrate the full understanding of BCCI’s operations by anyone. Unlike any ordinary bank, BCCI was from its earliest days made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, banks-within-banks, insider dealings and nominee relationships. By fracturing corporate structure, record keeping, regulatory review, and audits, the complex BCCI family of entities created by Abedi was able to evade ordinary legal restrictions on the movement of capital and goods as a matter of daily practice and routine. In creating BCCI as a vehicle fundamentally free of government control, Abedi developed in BCCI an ideal mechanism for facilitating illicit activity by others, including such activity by officials of many of the governments whose laws BCCI was breaking.[…]

Among BCCI’s principal mechanisms for committing crimes were shell corporations, bank confidentiality and secrecy havens, layering of corporate structure, front-men and nominees, back-to-back financial documentation among BCCI controlled entities, kick-backs and bribes, intimidation of witnesses, and retention of well-placed insiders to discourage governmental action.[…]

However daunting the task of explicating the full extent of BCCI’s criminality, it is essential to recognize that at core, BCCI was not a bank which made an adequate return on investment through lending out depositors’ funds like other banks, but a “Ponzi scheme,” which used new depositors’ funds to pay current expenses and to repay earlier depositors, creating a pyramid of mounting obligations that ultimately and inevitably would bring about BCCI’s collapse.[…]

From the beginning, BCCI President Abedi conceived of BCCI as a machine with two driving mechanisms – asset growth and faith. The latter was essential to prevent a day of reckoning when depositors and creditors alike would cause a run on the bank. The former was necessary to sustain the latter through bad times. Together, they worked to sustain the illusion that BCCI was solvent, when in fact, it is unlikely BCCI was ever solvent.

On 18 December 1991, in an agreement with the Justice Department and New York District Attorney, BCCI’s liquidators pleaded guilty to having engaged in a criminal conspiracy through financial fraud, and thereby constituting a Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO), whose entire assets, legitimate and illegitimate, were subject to confiscation by the government. Specific crimes admitted to by BCCI’s liquidators in the agreement included:Seeking deposits of drug proceeds and laundering drug money Seeking deposits from persons attempt to evade US income taxesUsing “straws” and nominees to acquire control of US financial institutionsLying to regulators and falsifying regulatory documentsCreating false bank records and engaging in sham transactions to deceive regulators.[…]

The New York District Attorney found that among the major actions taken by BCCI to carry out its fraud were:Employing the ruling families of a number of Middle Eastern states as nominees for BCCI, who pretended to be at risk in BCCI but who were in fact guaranteed to be held harmless by BCCI for any actual losses.Using bank secrecy havens including Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands to avoid regulation on a consolidated basis by any single regulator of BCCI, and thereby to permit BCCI to transfer assets and liabilities from bank to bank as needed to conceal BCCI’s true economic status.Paying bribes and kickbacks to agents of other banking and financial institutions, thereby avoiding the scrutiny of regulators.[…]

Money-Laundering

From the time of BCCI’s indictment on drug money-laundering charges in Tampa, Florida in October, 1988, there was little doubt to anyone looking at the facts that BCCI had been used to launder drug money.The Customs agents working on the “C-Chase” case against BCCI moved millions of dollars in US currency, representing the proceeds of cocaine sales, through BCCI Panama, BCCI Luxembourg, and LOANS Switzerland as a result of the knowing participation of several BCCI officials.As Robert Mazur, the Customs agent in Tampa who selected BCCI as the target of the Customs money-laundering sting testified, BCCI bank executives volunteered methods to enhance and improve his techniques for money-laundering, and shortly before the sting ended the operation, offered to introduce Mazur to other potential “cash” customers for money-laundering services from Bogota, Colombia.[…]

Given BCCI’s size and dispersion, money-laundering at BCCI would have been inevitable under any circumstances. Given BCCI’s never ending quest for assets and its management’s attitude towards laws, it was ubiquitous. As Akbar Bilgrami explained, Abedi was constantly telling BCCI employees that the only thing that mattered was the generation of assets. When Bilgrami was in Colombia in the mid-1980s [sic], a period when Colombia had already developed the reputation as the center for cocaine smuggling and drug money, Abedi told him that he needed to increase BCCI’s activity in Colombia to $1 billion in local currency in deposits, and $1 billion in US denominated deposits – funds which obviously could only be generated, directly or indirectly, from the drug trade.[…]

The degree of BCCI-US’s reliance on money-laundering as a principal business was demonstrated by what happened when BCCI put into place a “compliance program” as part of its January 1990 plea agreement resolving the Tampa money-laundering case: business dropped noticeably, especially referrals from other BCCI locations, because neither BCCI nor its customers wanted to provide details about the customers’ businesses.BCCI’s clients for money-laundering included Panamanian General Manuel Noriega, for whom it managed some $23 million of criminal proceeds out of its London branches; Pablo Escobar, of the Medellin cartel; Rodriguez Gacha, of the Medellin cartel; and several members of the Ochoa family.

Bribery

Bribery was a key component of BCCI’s strategy for asset growth worldwide, from the earliest days of the bank. In some cases, the recipients of funding from BCCI may not have considered the payments to be “bribes,” but simply a mechanism by which BCCI obtained what it wanted from an official, and in return the official helped BCCI, such as BCCI’s payments to two of the Gulf emirs in return for the use of their names as nominees for the purchase of First American. In other cases, the bribes were naked and direct quid pro quos, such as BCCI’s payments to Central Bank officials in return for Central Bank deposits in countries like Peru. In other cases, BCCI made campaign contributions to politicians, such as it did with General Zia in Pakistan and Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela. In still other cases, BCCI’s payments came in the guise of charitable contributions, and provided BCCI with an entree to generate deposits from others, as in the case of President Jimmy Carter. Among the Americans who BCCI provided with financial assistance in addition to Carter were US Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, Bert Lance, and Jesse Jackson. Abroad, important figures with extensive contact with BCCI included former British Prime Minister James Callaghan, then United Nations Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, Jamaican prime minister Edward Seaga, Antiguan prime minister Lester Byrd; a large number of African heads of state; and many Third World central bank officials.[…]

Support of Terrorism and Arms TraffickingBCCI’s support of terrorism and arms trafficking developed out of several factors. First, as a principal financial institution for a number of Gulf sheikhdoms, with branches all over the world, it was a logical choice for terrorist organizations, who received payment at BCCI-London and other branches directly from Gulf-state patrons, and then transferred those funds wherever they wished without apparent scrutiny. Secondly, BCCI’s flexibility regarding the falsification of documentation was helpful for such activities. Finally, to the extent that pragmatic considerations were not sufficient of themselves to recommend BCCI, the bank’s pan-third world and pro-Islam ideology would have recommended it to Arab terrorist groups.

Arms trafficking involving BCCI included the financing of Pakistan’s procurement of nuclear weapons through BCCI Canada, as documented in the Parvez case, involving a Pakistani who attempted to procure nuclear-related materials financed by BCCI through the United States.In a letter of 22 November 1991 to the Subcommittee, the CIA stated that “the Agency did have some reporting [as of 1987] on BCCI being used by third world regimes to acquire weapons and transfer technology,” but was unwilling to elaborate on the nature of this activity in public.In early August, 1991, the Committee was provided with documents from the Latin American and Caribbean Region Office (LACRO) of BCCI, describing the offer for sale by the Argentine air force of 22 Mirage aircraft for $110 million. The planned sale was to have been made to Iraq, as part of Saddam Hussein’s massive military build up prior to the Gulf war. BCCI was acting as the broker for the transaction, which was to take place in August or September of 1989, but not completed as a result of a dispute within the Argentine military itself. Arms sales involving BCCI from Latin America to the Middle East remain, as of April 1992, under active investigation by US law enforcement.Abu NidalIn the United Kingdom, a key window on BCCI’s support of terrorism was an informant named Ghassan Qassem, the former manager of the Sloan [sic] Street branch of BCCI in London. Qassem had been given the accounts of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal at BCCI, and then proceeded, while at BCCI, to provide detailed information on the accounts to British and American intelligence, apparently as a paid informant, according to press accounts based on interviews with Qassem.As of 1986, the information obtained about Abu Nidal’s use of BCCI was sufficiently detailed as to justify dissemination within the US intelligence community.[…]

Other terrorist groups continued to make use of BCCI, including one “state sponsor of terrorism,” and the Qassar brothers, Manzur and Ghassan, who have been associated with terrorism, arms trafficking, and narcotics trafficking in connection with the Government of Syria, and with the provision of East Bloc arms to the Nicaraguan contras in a transaction with the North/Secord enterprise paid for with funds from the secret US arms sales to Iran.[…]

Prostitution

BCCI’s involvement in prostitution arose out of its creation of its special protocol department in Pakistan to service the personal requirements of the Al-Nahyan family of Abu Dhabi, and on an as-needed basis, other BCCI VIPs, including the families of other Middle Eastern rulers. Several BCCI officers described the protocol department’s handling of prostitution to Senate investigators in private, and two – Abdur Sakhia and Nazir Chinoy – confirmed their general knowledge of the practice in testimony. The prostitution handled by BCCI was carried over from practices originally instituted by Abedi at the United Bank, when, working with a woman, Begum Asghari Rahim, he cemented his relationship with the Al-Nahyan family through providing them with Pakistani prostitutes.

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