The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

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.