American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [74]
At one time BCCI had more than 400 branches in 78 countries and assets of over $20 billion. Most everywhere, “BCCI systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures,” as a Senate report put it. The bank had started out in Pakistan in 1972, with much of the start-up funding being provided by the CIA and the Bank of America. By the early 1980s, the National Security Council’s man charged with tracking terrorist financing, Norman Bailey, said “we were aware that BCCI was involved in drug-money transactions,” but the NSC took no action. Probably because CIA Director Casey was relying on BCCI to distribute American assistance to the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russians at the time. Except most of the aid went to the faction controlled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world. Pakistani president Muhammad Zia in 1983 let local traffickers put their drug profits into BCCI.27 John Kerry’s committee came across the bank’s role in drugs and started to investigate, but received basically zero “information or cooperation provided by other government agencies.”28
BCCI was the seventh biggest bank on the planet when it collapsed, shortly after the Soviets withdrew their troops from Afghanistan. The mainstream media had started reporting on BCCI’s activities early in 1991—“The World’s Sleaziest Bank” was the headline on Time magazine’s cover story. Soon the Bank of England pulled the plug and regulators started shutting down BCCI’s offices in dozens of countries. It was also the largest Islamic bank, and one fellow said to have lost a lot of invested money when BCCI fell apart was Osama bin Laden.29 After that, to make up for his missing revenue, bin Laden started cooperating with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan warlord who was taking profits from drugs and putting them into Islamic terrorist movements.30
This brings us up to the present, and what’s going on today in Afghanistan and Mexico. I’m going to rely first on a recent article by Peter Dale Scott, called “Afghanistan: Heroin-Ravaged State.”31 He says that’s how we should think of Afghanistan, rather than as a “failed state.” One statistic he cites is that in 2007, according to our State Department, Afghanistan was supplying 93 percent of the world’s opium, the illicit production of poppies bringing in $4 billion—more than half the country’s total economy of $7.5 billion.
But even though 90 percent of the world’s heroin is originating in Afghanistan, their share of the proceeds in dollar terms is only about 10 percent of that. It’s estimated that more than 80 percent of the profits actually get reaped in the countries where the heroin is consumed, like the U.S. According to the U.N., “money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.”
So who’s making out like bandits? It’s a familiar story. Drug trafficking is tolerated in exchange for intelligence, simple as that. Here’s what Dennis Dayle, a former top DEA agent in the Middle East, said at an anti-drug conference a couple years back: “In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”
After 9/11, when the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan that fall of 2001, “the Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA’s new NA [Northern Alliance] allies.”32 The CIA mounted its anti-Taliban coalition by recruiting and sometimes even importing drug dealers, many of them being old assets from the 1980s. Friends, family, and allies of Afghan president Hamid Karzai are heavily involved. It recently came out that Karzai’s brother is not only involved with