Here AND There.
The Strange Saga of BCCI
"The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International"Sightings from The Catbird Seat
EXCERPT...
From The Outlaw Bank: BCCI
by Jonathan Deaty & S.C. GwynneKamal Adham was one of the true inside power players of the Middle East, a shrewd, jovial man who had for decades straddled the worlds of Middle Eastern business and politics.. He was the half brother of Iffat, the favorite wife of King Faisal, who ruled Saudi Arabia from 1964 until his death in 1975. . . .
Like so many other enterprising Arabs in the 1960s and 1970s, when oil revenues were booming and foreign companies were lining up to sell their products, Adham had used his connection to commercial advantage. The way most commoners in the Middle East got rich off the oil boom was through a simple system know as "agency" arrangements.
In order to sell a product or service in Saudi Arabia, you had to know someone in the royal family, which authorized all expenditures. If you did not know a princeling or a royal cousin, then you hired an "agent" who provided you access for a "commission." Though this commission often looks very much like a "bribe" ... it was nonetheless the way business was done, and few were better at it than Kamal Adham.
The list of his agency deals was long and illustrious. . . .
By the mid-1960s Adham's influence was such that he simultaneously came to represent three defense firms and was being ardently courted by a fourth. Said Northrop representative Kermit Roosevelt, "Adham already has a piece of the Lighting deal, the Mirage deal, and the Lockheed deal and is trying to complete the square by an arrangement with Northrup."
He also came to be the principal broker for weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia on behalf of Egypt.
But perhaps his richest contract was with Boeing Company, which paid him millions of dollars in commissions to help it sell passenger jetliners to the fledgling Saudi airlines. . . .
That and other similar transactions had led to a three-year investigation of Boeing's commission payments by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, whose goal in part was to figure out exactly who Boeing was using to accomplish these sleights of hand.
Curiously, in the words of a 1976 Wall Street Journal article, Boeing's efforts to suppress those names, particularly Adham's, "has been accomplished with significant help from the State Department, which entered a court fight between the SEC and Boeing to argue that disclosure of Boeing's 'highly placed' consultants abroad could harm U.S. foreign policy interests.
How could the mere disclosure of Adham's name affect U.S. foreign policy? In two ways.
First, Adham was the head of the Saudi internal security service - arguably the most important agency of the government, since it protected the royal family - and the General Intelligence Directorate of Saudi Arabia. In that role he was the principal liaison between the CIA and European intelligence agencies, and he even had an agency code name: Tumbleweed. In geopolitical terms, Adham was the five-hundred-pound gorilla of Saudi intelligence, an outfit know and feared for its merciless hunts for dissidents and brutal methods of repression. . . .
But the second and more important foreign policy concern was that Adham was the kingdom's key link to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the years leading to the Camp David accords in 1979 - the years following the 1973 war, when the Saudi-Egypt axis acquired key strategic importance...
CONTINUED…
http://www.the-catbird-seat.net/BCCI.htmOILa famous prayer by Firesign Theatre:“Anointed with oil on troubled waters?
Oh Heavenly Grid, help us bear up thy Standard,
our Chevron flashing bright,
across the Gulf of Compromise,
standing Humble on this Rich-field
of Mobile American thinking?
Here in this Shell, we call life.”
Of course, the BCCI affair involves many of the same crooks who run the BFEE today. And they move big petrobucks around. Big nukes around. And run America into the ground. DUers and folks who aren't familiar with the story may be surprised hear the story of James R. Bath, kicked off the Texas ANG flight line along with fellow officer, George W Bush. And both were involved with BCCI through the bin Laden family.
Small world. Still, plenty big enough for many who should know better to hide their heads in the sand.