153. Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 123–24, cf. 128–29: Expanding over seven pages on these and many other intelligence connections, they asked whether the bank’s illegal acquisition of an American bank holding company, First American Bankshares, was not in fact serving the purposes of U.S. intelligence: “No one can deny that virtually every major character in the takeover was connected in one way or another to U.S. intelligence: Olmsted who controlled the company [First American] for years; Middendorf, who headed the group that acquired it from him; Abedi, who arranged for clients of BCCI to buy the company from Middendorf’s group; [Mohammed Rahim Motaghi] Irvani, the chairman of one of the dummy companies set up to carry out the acquisition; [his partner Richard] Helms, who advised Irvani; [former Saudi intelligence chief Kamal] Adham, the lead investor in Abedi’s group; [Clark] Clifford, who steered the deal through the regulatory maze and then became the chairman of the company. . . . Can all this be a coincidence? Or is it possible that First American was affiliated with U.S. intelligence all along and that it was simply passed from one group of CIA associates to another, and then another? No proof has emerged that this is what happened, but it is certainly not a far-fetched theory.”
154. Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 96.
155. Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 162. BCCI also used Price Waterhouse as its auditor. In addition, BCCI and Nugan Hand used the same law firm and registered agent (Bruce Campbell & Company) in the Cayman Islands (Truell and Gurwin, False Profits, 125).
156. Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 243.
157. Bangkok embassy intelligence officer Allan Parks, to Jonathan Kwitny, in Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 59. Kwitny, inquiring about Houghton, was put in touch with Parks by Alexander Butterfield, the revealer in the Watergate Hearings of Nixon’s taping system, who earlier had also been an intelligence officer in Asia. Cf. Russ Baker, Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 234–35.
158. Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 334–35.
159. Trento, Prelude to Terror, 313–14.
160. Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots, 207, 208.
161. James A. Nathan, “Dateline Australia: America’s Foreign Watergate?” Foreign Policy, Winter 1982–1983, 183, quoted in Marshall et al., The Iran-Contra Connection, 38.
162. Scott, The Road to 9/11, 126–27.
163. Thomas Goltz, Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter’s Adventures in an Oil-Rich, War-Torn, Post-Soviet Republic (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 272–75. Richard Secord was allegedly attempting also to sell Israeli arms with the assistance of Israeli agent David Kimche, another associate of Oliver North. The mujahideen were recruited in Afghanistan by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leading recipient of CIA assistance in Afghanistan in the 1980s and most recently a leader of the al-Qaeda–Taliban resistance to the United States and its client there, Hamid Karzai. See Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 7, 8, 20.
164. Loretta Napoleoni, Terror Incorporated: Tracing the Dollars behind the Terror Networks (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 90–97: “[IMU leader] Namangiani’s networks in Tajikistan and in Central Asia were used to smuggle opium from Afghanistan. It was partly thanks to Namangiani’s contacts in Chechnya that heroin reached Europe” (91). . . . “It was thanks to the mediation of Chechen criminal groups that the KLA and the Albanian mafia managed to gain control of the transit of heroin in the Balkans” (96). Napoleoni does not mention Azerbaijan, which, however, lies between Uzbekistan and Chechnya.
165. “KLA Funding Tied to Heroin Profits,” Washington Times, May 3, 1999.
166. Daniel Ellsberg with Kris Welch, KPFA, August 26, 2006, http://wotisitgood4
.blogspot.com/2006/10/ellsberg-hastert-got-suitcases-of-al.html.
167. Sibel Edmonds and Philip Giraldi, “Found in Translation: FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds Spills Her Secrets,” American Conservative, November 2009, http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/nov/01/00006.
