-Caveat Lector- an excerpt from: The Secret War Against The Jews John Loftus & Mark Aarons©1994 ISBN 0-312-11057-X 658pps - St. Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY, 10010 --[4b]-- The British secret service had no choice other than to accept this situation. Aspin and Banks had connections at the highest levels of American intelligence. More established and "well connected" British security firms were shouldered aside. Apparently, Aspin had told Bush too much. Aspin and Banks had the CIA contract for Angola, and there was nothing the British government could do about it.[54] Banks enlisted the help of a friend in Special Branch, and at least four members of the Aspin-Banks private army were members of the British secret service.[55] But all in all, Aspin's mercenaries were a motley crew. The first group of mercenaries were pulled out shortly after President Ford terminated all CIA operations in Angola except for intelligence gathering. Nothing, however, precluded a British citizen like Aspin from recruiting replacements. By summertime, Aspin's forces would be the only Western army left in Angola. The anti-Communist Angolans were getting nervous. Despite the Congressional ban, there were continued promises of American support. George Bush still had a few million dollars left in the CIA slush fund for contingencies, some of which was promised to the Angolans. Henry Kissinger told them to keep fighting no matter what Congress said and, within days of the ban, gave promises of aid to Jonas Savimbi's UNITA.[56] It was Leslie Aspin who stayed on the ground in Zaire, coordinating the war across the border. Before the Americans pulled out, he made at least one close friend from the American contingent, a young officer named Bill Buckley, who had been detached to the CIA from Special Forces, the U.S. army's elite Green Beret units, which specialize in psychological warfare and counterinsurgency. The two men forged a link that led them to work together on other under-the-table operations.[57] As will be seen in Chapter 18, it was to be a fateful connection for the secret espionage war against Israel. Aspin and Buckley were two of a kind: ex-commandos, full of fun and energy, and willing to cut a few corners for the sake of the mission. According to our sources, what endeared the pair to the CIA was their disdain for bureaucratic niceties and their willingness to bend the law a little to get the job done.[58] Officially, George Bush was telling the regular staff of the CIA that they had to obey the congressional ban and pull out of Angola. Unofficially, of course, the CIA and Kissinger were telling the Angolans to keep on fighting. Over the next year the mercenaries of the British secret service kept the Angolan guerrillas afloat. By 1977, when Carter was sworn in as U.S. president, Aspin's back-channel was well established. He had made the under-the-table link between Bush and the British and South African governments. Aspin's South African mercenary friends continued the major part of the program, with the covert support of at least one oil company.[59] It does not take a genius to figure out why an oil company was paying for mercenaries after the CIA pulled out. Several U.S. oil companies had multimillion-dollar investments in the oil-rich Cabinda region of Angola, which they did not want to see in Communist hands. The irony is that the Communist Angolan Government quickly pledged that the American oil companies would be safe from nationalization and would continue to make healthy profits in Angola. Obviously, no one believed this pledge. That, say OUT intelligence sources, was what the war was really about: As in the Middle East, the key was American oil rights.[60] Aspin's army eventually achieved its victory at the negotiating table, and the British mercenary troops eventually were called home, leaving the South Africans to launch token resistance raids. Everybody at the CIA, including Buckley, got medals. Aspin got a new job, as the unofficial British bagman for American covert operations hidden from Congress.[61] As we shall see, Aspin was one of the first arms traders to open an account in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which played such an important part in the secret espionage war against the Jews in the twelve years when George Bush was vice president and then president.[62] It is no coincidence that Aspin went back to work on joint British-American money laundering just as U.S. intelligence was closing down one of the wildest, and most illegal, money-laundering schemes in American history: the Ed Wilson Affair. The following version of events was told to us by an extremely reliable CIA official with in-depth knowledge of the Wilson case and then confirmed by other sources.[63] In 1971 Ed Wilson had been fired from the CIA and promptly hired by a Naval Intelligence-National Security Agency joint operation known as Task Force 157. The NSA was involved in this operation because as the U.S. Communications intelligence agency it was using the Task Force's rented fishing vessels to carry electronic surveillance and detection equipment to monitor the Soviet fleet in the Mediterranean.[64] As bizarre as it seems today, officials of Naval Intelligence decided in 1971 that Gadhafi's loyalty could be bought with an under-the-table sale of American arms, which the Libyan dictator preferred to poorly made Soviet weapons. Using the NSA as an unwitting cover, the navy actually funded and approved Wilson's arms shipments to Libya during the early 1970s. This incredibly stupid initiative was flatly contrary to U.S. policy, and wholly illegal.[65] The Department of the Navy was not alone in the scheme to cozy up to Gadhafi. The oil companies, in particular, continued to do business with the new madman of the Middle East, strictly in the interests of profits, and were supported by the Nixon administration.[66] The British secret service had no intention of getting along with Gadhafi and sent the ex-SAS mercenaries of the Stirling Company to plan a coup. Colonel David Stirling had founded the SAS in World War II, and later formed a company which specialized in using mercenaries as cover for official British intelligence operations. However, the Libyan coup was blocked at the last minute. The British "Foreign Office obliged Stirling to drop out because the Americans felt that Qathafi (sic) would be fairly easy to control."[67] Shortly afterward Wilson's Task Force 157 began its feeble attempt to bribe Gadhafi with guns. When bribery did not work, the United States tried to curry favor with Gadhafi by leaking information about the British coup plotters as well as his Libyan opponents.[68] Nothing seemed to work. The navy's Libyan initiative merely convinced Gadhafi that the West was weak. Subsequently, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman investigated the Task Force 157 fiasco and eventually had Ed Wilson fired. What Admiral Inman did not know was that Wilson had a business associate, an Iranian Jew named Albert Hakim. The Washington address for Wilson's firm, Consultant's International, was 1618 K Street Northwest, Washington, D.C., the same suite as Hakim's "Stanford Technology."[69] Hakim, who became Oliver North's banker in the 1980s, later testified that Wilson had "penetrated" - his Swiss banking operation and was acting without his knowledge in selling Hakim's high-tech surveillance and communications gear to Libya.[70] There is reason to suspect that Hakim was Leslie Aspin's business associate, too. Wilson's gunrunning to Libya for Task Force 157 took place from 1971 to 1974. This was, of course, the same time that Aspin was infiltrating Libyan arms networks for the British secret service with the help of a banking source. Without ever mentioning Hakim's name, Aspin confirmed that the banker was headquartered in Geneva, was affiliated with Jewish financiers, owned several ships and traded in gold and other commodities. With apologies to Albert Hakim if we have identified him unfairly, he does seem to be the only Jewish banker with an organization headquartered in Geneva who fits this description. Moreover, he certainly is the only one with an admitted connection (albeit an innocent one) to Ed Wilson's Libyan arms deals in the early 1970s. Although Hakim never mentioned Aspin's name, he did tell the IranContra investigators in Congress of his relationship with the Azima brothers in the United States. This is coincidental since the Azimas, Iranian expatriates who operated an air cargo business from their base in Kansas City, worked directly with Aspin. The name of the company was Global International Airways, or GIA.[71] Congress censored Hakim's identification, believing that the Azima family was the crucial "first contact" in opening a secret channel to Iran for Oliver North.[72] Because of the censorship, the press failed to realize that Hakim's friends the Azimas had prior experience with gun running. The local Kansas City press, however, has quite a file on the Azimas and their mysterious air cargo company. In 1979 a GIA aircraft that was supposedly hauling vegetables to Central America was found to contain rockets, mortars, and guns. GIA's pilots used to joke at their "vegetable" manifest and say that they were carrying "cabbages and cabbage launchers." The local press referred to GIA as the "little CIA."[73] Hakim strenuously denied any knowledge of Wilson's shady activities. He insisted to Congress that his Swiss operation had been penetrated by unscrupulous individuals, such as Ed Wilson and Frank Terpil, the former CIA officer who worked with Wilson to supply Gadhafi with weapons. Hakim said that when he discovered that some of his employees had been involved in shady deals behind his back, he fired everyone responsible.[74] On the one hand, it is possible that Hakim did not know that Wilson was using his company to smuggle guns to Libya. On the other hand, Hakim may not be at liberty to tell the whole story. The former intelligence officers we spoke to on this point say that Hakim is actually not a bad man, but that he is afraid to tell anyone what really happened. Our sources say that Hakim was cooperating with the British secret service. After Aspin revealed how money for Libyan arms was channeled through Switzerland, the British secret service used Hakim's legitimate business network to monitor the financial transactions of the one family that controlled and directed the gun-running operations in the Middle East: the Al-Kassars of Syria.[75] According to these sources, Hakim was an innocent pawn used first by the British secret service and then by U.S. intelligence. There is a certain irony here. At the same time that the U.S. Navy and Ed Wilson were trying to run guns to Libya behind the backs of the British, Wilson was using Hakim's company while Hakim was working with the British secret service. According to our sources, the British let the navy make fools of themselves for a little while. Then, after Inman finally fired Wilson, the British had a chat with the new CIA director, George Bush.[76] To put it bluntly, the Americans had been "caught with their pants down." Arming Gadhafi through Task Force 157 was just the kind of scandal that would tear the intelligence community apart. Bush realized that the Republican administration was in deep trouble over the Wilson affair. Instead of a thorough, searching investigation by the CIA, George Bush allegedly ordered a cover-up in 1976.[77] When Admiral Inman became deputy CIA director in 1981, he roundly criticized the so-called investigation of the Wilson affair and apparently concluded there had been a cover-up during Bush's tenure as CIA head.[78] The "old spies" say that there is a lot more to the Wilson case than has ever been made public. Much of the money generated by Wilson in Task Force 157 went to bribe Republican politicians during the Nixon administration.[79] According to a top-secret Justice Department surveillance report, Wilson was also observed passing envelopes to several members of a congressional appropriations committee.[80] Because of the sensitive political scandal, the Justice Department investigation never went forward. Neither, as Inman later discovered, did the investigation at the CIA. The whole Task Force 157 scandal was quietly swept under a rug. Also in 1976, Hakim entered into a new business relationship with the Bechtel Corporation after being screened by Bechtel General Counsel Cap Weinberger, later secretary of defense in the Reagan-Bush Administration.[81] Apparently in 1976 George Bush had become the Republican party's garbage man. He was the man in charge of the CIA when Hakim's connection to Wilson was first investigated, and when Wilson's Task Force 157 affair was first covered up. Bush was also the man in charge of the CIA during the coverup of the Angleton's Vatican-Vessel scandal, when he covered up when the CIA protected one of Nixon's Nazis, when the Wilson affair was exposed and during the Angolan mercenary operation. Our intelligence sources insist that Bush did not create these scandals. He inherited them in 1976. One "old spy" was unequivocal: "Bush was a virgin in covert ops. He spent most of his one year as DCI testifying before Congress. There was one guy in the Republican party who knew where the bodies were buried. Bush trusted Bill Casey for advice. That was his big mistake.[82] In 1976 Casey was running Reagan's presidential campaign. Casey had known Reagan since the early 1950s, when they had both worked on the Fascist "freedom fighter" program under Vice President Nixon." Later on, as president, Nixon had appointed Casey to run the Securities and Exchange Commission. Casey was one of the Republican party's leading fund-raisers. As Oliver North later would discover, Casey also had considerable knowledge of international money laundering. A number of past and present intelligence officers say that it was Casey who opened a new private channel to the British in 1976. it did not take a political genius to realize that the Democrats would take over the White House, the CIA, and the Securities Exchange Commission in 1977. Time was running out to hide a dirty chain of money laundering that stretched back to Dulles. Casey had worked with British intelligence before, and together they had no problem in devising a new and more reliable banking system that would permanently avoid congressional scrutiny. Casey, not Bush, forged the British banking-intelligence connection. George Bush just did as he was told. His only contribution was to chip in CIA funds to set up the new listening post in the Gulf states. The British took care of the rest.[84] Through a series of coups, the British secret service had placed their own puppets on the thrones of the tiny bedouin kingdoms that comprised Oman and the United Arab Emirates. These tiny countries ("tribes with flags") were totally dependent on the SAS and M16 for their survival. Virtually every aspect of their banking, intelligence, and foreign policy was handled by British advisers on the scene.[85] The capital of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, was a small town of less than 100,000 people, but it controlled 10 percent of the oil deposits in the world. The UAE was the perfect place to hide a bank, a bank to handle covert operations behind the back of the British Parliament and the U.S. Congress. The new bank would be called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI. Although it is now better known as the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals," the "old spies" say that BCCI really stands for the "British Cover for Collecting Intelligence."[86] There had been a previous American attempt to use a financial facility for covert operations, but the Nugan-Hand bank operation was exposed by the Australian media and was on its way to bankruptcy by the late 1970s. The Nugan-Hand bank unraveled along with Wilson and Task Force 157, but not before it had established close working relations in Saudi Arabia with both Aramco and the Bechtel Corporation.[87} As the old bank in Australia collapsed, the new one in Abu Dhabi was coming into being with the help of the British secret service, which used the same front men in another British colony, the Cayman Islands. In this "tax haven," Nugan-Hand's legal firm of Bruce Campbell & Company set up the International Credit & Investment Company (ICIC) as a front for the BCCI.[88] According to our sources in the intelligence community, what no one knows is that this little British island played an integral role in international money laundering for several of the Arab intelligence services.[89] The British used their M16 base on the Cayman Islands as headquarters for an "International Consortium for Intelligence Collection (ICIC)," a joint venture of several spy agencies that would secretly own the stock of an international bank. Later on several witnesses tried to tell Congress about the "consortium" entity for "Intelligence Cooperation," or IC, that had been established in the Cayman Islands. What no one realized was that the ICIC spy consortium was the same ICIC that secretly controlled all the stock of the BCCI.[90] Here, according to the "old spies," is how the BCCI-ICIC fraud worked. In 1976 British and American representatives offered stock in ICIC to the intelligence services of the UAE, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. In effect, the British secret service "borrowed" the money to start the BCCI from various friendly intelligence services. The original investors, the Arab spy agencies, were then repaid under-the-table by the ICIC after the bank started to turn a profit. The BCCI had no capital of its own, but the public believed it was funded by wealthy Arabs.[91] To Sheik Zayed of the United Arab Emirates, the scheme had appeal because the BCCI was also a perfect conduit for bribes. The sheik, whose country lived under a constant terrorist threat, was paying more than $10 million a year to the PLO. As discussed in Chapter 15, the Saudis were paying much more as bribes to Yasser Arafat. By laundering their bribes through the BCCI, the Arabs were able to let the British secret service trace the money to various terrorist cells, which would be identified quietly and then destroyed. The Saudis, in particular, were getting tired of paying ransom to every obscure terrorist group that popped up. It was cheaper, and better public relations, to let the British secretly eliminate the Arab extremists for them.[92] Monzer Al-Kassar played a key role in this, as the "Banker for the PLO." He convinced all the terrorist groups, from Abu Nidal to the Marxists, to transfer their accounts to the new BCCI branch in London. There the secret service could easily wiretap and decipher every coded transfer of the Arab bribe money to each terrorist faction in the world. There was only one problem. According to a number of our sources, to make the scheme convincing and to protect Al-Kassar's role as an informant, the terrorists would have to be allowed some successes. There would be no intelligence sharing with Israel. No Jews would be invited to the ICIC. The BCCI would become the most anti-Semitic bank in its time.[93] It took the Mossad a long time to figure out that the BCCI was an intelligence consortium among the British, the Americans, and the Arabs. it took them even longer to find out who was behind the setup back in 1976. Finding out the truth did not do them any good. Many years later, in 1992, when Israeli intelligence planted items similar to the following in the American Jewish press, no one would listen: "The CIA had a covert relationship with BCCI in 1976. At the very same time, George Bush was director of the CIA. We are told the late William Casey ... met secretly and regularly with the BCCI bank's founder, Aga Hassan Abedi. Unfortunately there are so many coincidences."[94] Israeli operatives were not the only ones to figure out that the BCCI had been founded as an intelligence front. Before he was deposed, the dictator of Pakistan, Zulfikar Bhutto also accused the BCCI's founder of having ties to American intelligence. "On several occasions, Bhutto said publicly that Abedi was in league with the CIA."[95] To be fair, the British secret service had told only a handful of people in the CIA about the bank. Abedi was only a hired hand, although he and his Pakistani friends later stole the bank blind. While the powers behind the scenes of the BCCI were the bedouin sheiks who set up the bank, behind them were their masters in British intelligence.[96] The leaders of Oman and the United Arab Emirates owe their existence to Julian Amery, a former member of the British secret service and the brother of John Amery, the British traitor who, as discussed in Chapter 5, was hanged after World War II as a pro-Nazi propagandist. Forty years later brother Julian became a paid consultant to the BCCI and its biggest defender in the British Parliament.[97] In the late 1950s Amery was the undersecretary of war who was sent to reorganize the armed forces in the area. In 1967 British mercenaries replaced the sheik of Abu Dhabi of the UAE with his brother, Sheik Zayed. In 1970 Timothy Landon of British intelligence launched another SAS mercenary coup in Oman, blasting the old ruler aside and putting Sultan Qabous on the throne. Oman and Abu Dhabi became loyal friends of Julian Amery, a staging ground for the SAS and headquarters for the BCCI.[98] The biggest British coup was in establishing liaison with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi Arabian intelligence from 1963 to 1977. As discussed in Chapter 11, following the Suez debacle in 1956, British intelligence had wound back the Mossad connection and actively courted Saudi Arabia. One of the men who established close relations with Adham was Julian Amery.[99] It is unlikely that Bush remained entirely ignorant of the new British-Arab intelligence alliance in 1976. After all, he was director of Central Intelligence. Moreover, in June 1976 the U.S. ambassador in Lebanon was killed by a terrorist bomb. It was Bush who instituted a new and "questionable policy": Instead of asking the Israelis for intelligence, Bush moved closer to the Arabs, especially Adham and his cabal of BCCI agents.[100] Bush's personal interest in the Gulf States went back to the mid-1960s, when his oil company, Zapata, had gained the contract to build Kuwait's first offshore oil rig.[101] In support of the British initiative to create the BCCI as an intelligence collection source, in 1976 Bush authorized the expenditure of CIA clandestine funds to establish an NSA signals post in the Gulf States.[102] Through these signal posts, communications from both ends of the bank's headquarters, in London and Abu Dhabi, were systematically intercepted. Because of the extreme sensitivity of British-American wiretap cooperation, the BCCI records remained with the British secret service, with access given to only a handful of CIA people.[103] Our sources insist that none of the BCCI-British intercept results were shared with the CIA after Bush left office. After Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, a number of people suddenly resigned from the CIA, went through the "revolving door," and acquired connections to the BCCI. Others, including William Casey's close friends, Robert Gray and John M. Shaheen, appear to have played innocent roles in the Iran-Contra scandal. Gray's company also represented the BCCI. The original Arab investors, Abedi, Adham, and friends, secretly bought an American front for the BCCI, from Casey's friend J. William Middendorf.[104] To be fair, Casey, his friends, and the CIA did not realize what a mess they were getting into. They did not know that the British secret service had relinquished day-to-day control of the BCCI to a group of Moslem bankers whose incompetence was exceeded only by their crookedness.[105] All that Carter's CIA inherited was Leslie Aspin. For additional training in special operations, Aspin was sent to the JFK School for Special Warfare at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he earned his "Green Beret."[106] Since he had already gone through British paratroop school and earned his SAS commando beret, the course wasn't particularly difficult for him. Not many people in the world wore both berets, had experience as an intelligence agent in hostile territories, and possessed a vast knowledge of mercenary operations, smuggling, and the Middle East. Leslie Aspin was quite a find. While assigned to Company E, 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne), of the First Special Forces unit, he was offered his first formal contract with the CIA in 1978. The Angola operation did not count-it was off the official books. Indeed, very few in the CIA even knew how the British mercenary link came about. But on April 25, 1978, the CIA director of personnel wrote to Aspin to start his official CIA career.[107] Aspin was offered a job just as a "contract" agent, someone hired for a specific job, who then goes back to his own career. Aspin's family told us that he would go on the CIA books for a day, be briefed on a mission, and then quickly taken off the books again. In that way the CIA could state truthfully that "we have no employees named Leslie Aspin."[108] Aspin went home to England for a brief rest before his next assignment. Most of the CIA's Angola staff, including Bill Buckley, headed off to the Middle East. Aspin was not far behind. In 1979 a group of radical Moslems seized the Holy Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The Saudi National Guard was not quite trained for antiterrorist warfare, so the Saudis asked for help. As Mecca was off-limits to non-Moslems, the presence of Western agents had to be a closely kept secret. The odd couple, Aspin and Buckley, went in on the British-American strike team, disguised in Saudi uniforms.[109] They blasted the terrorists out of the mosque and stood the survivors up against a wall. Aspin photographed his firing squad as it executed the radicals. Then one of the strike team members took a photo of a grinning Aspin and Buckley, with their arms around each other. Aspin kept the photos as souvenirs of their secret mission.[110] Not surprisingly, the contract to clean up the mosque went to another early BCCI insider.[111] Over the years, Aspin handled a number of covert assignments for both the British and Americans. Although Parliament had prohibited sending arms to South Africa, that was no hindrance to people like Aspin with connections in the Cayman Islands. By the late 1970s it seems that he was already involved with TransWorld arms, a Canadian firm that was later involved with Iran-Contra. Through his London contacts, Aspin was paying for his arms shipments through a "Geneva Bank," almost certainly the BCCI, which he used almost exclusively to service his varied clientele.[112] By 1980 Aspin's arm deals were going quite nicely. He bought a very expensive home in England.[113] Unfortunately, he may have been selling arms to terrorists. But, as we shall see, this may have been part of another British intelligence operation to ransom hostages.[114] We have confirmed that, starting in the early 1980s, Aspin's BCCI bank account at the London branch shows several large deposits from Ghassan Al-Kassar, Monzer's brother and business partner.[115] Our intelligence sources say the British tricked President Carter well and truly by foisting Monzer Al-Kassar's arms network on the unwitting CIA. The British secret service offered to supply Soviet-made arms to the Afghan resistance, which would disguise CIA participation as well as enable the mujahideen rebels to resupply themselves with captured Soviet ammunition. Carter gratefully accepted London's offer. As the naive president later conceded: "In a highly secret move, we also assessed the possibility of arranging for Soviet-made weapons (which would appear to have come from the Afghan military forces) to be delivered to freedom fighters in Afghanistan and of giving them what encouragement we could to resist subjugation by the Soviet invaders."[116] Our sources insist that Carter did not know that the British were buying the arms from Monzer Al-Kassar, who had become the main sales representative for the Communistcontrolled Polish and Bulgarian arms industries. To this day, the CIA does not have an inkling that it bought Eastern Bloc weapons from one of the PLO's leading terrorists.[117] Although the former intelligence officers we interviewed said that the Carter administration was totally excluded from British intelligence information collected from the BCCI, there was accidental contact. After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA was searching for a way to launder guns and money to the mujahideen freedom fighters. It was, they say, purely coincidental that Abedi's Pakistani branch of the BCCI was chosen as the repository for CIA funds for the Afghan rebels.[118] During the Carter administration, the "old spies" say, the only one who might have had an idea that there was more to the BCCI connection was Aspin's old comrade-in-arms, Bill Buckley. It was Buckley who oversaw the paramilitary side of things in Afghanistan for the CIA. The CIA money went from Buckley through BCCI, Pakistan, to the British secret service, and then to Al-Kassar.[119] If Buckley knew more about the British-BCCI connection, he took it to his grave. Buckley may not have been able to connect the chain because his British friend Aspin was away working on a different operation with Al-Kassar. In 1980 Aspin's BCCI account in London shows that the Al-Kassars were buying guns from him, not the other way around. Aspin was selling arms through the Al-Kassars for delivery to Iran. it may have been the first of Monzer's and Aspin's hostage ransom operations. it would not be the last.[120] In fact, Aspin's 1980 ransom deal was the beginning of what would turn into the American arms-for-hostages scandal, as it provided the prototype that later was used in the Iran-Contra affair. The Iranian Hezbollah had kidnapped two British citizens. Monzer Al-Kassar, playing the intermediary, told the British they could be released for a price, a small one. The Iranians just wanted to buy some machine guns for their war against Iraq. Leslie and his brother, Michael, opened a company called Delta Investments, which acquired American-made Browning machine guns.[121] After one of the AI-Kassar brothers deposited the Iranian money in Aspin's London BCCI account, the American weapons were shipped to the United Arab Emirates, where they were transshipped to the Iranians, who promptly released the British kidnap victims. Michael Aspin, unfortunately, boasted about the ransom deal to the British press, which quickly confirmed the story.[122] The media, which suspected that the British secret service was behind the ransom arrangements, made a big deal about the successful guns-for-hostages operation.[123] Leslie should have known then never to trust his brother to keep his mouth shut. Al-Kassar was too valuable to M16 to risk any more press leaks. By January 1981, when Reagan was inaugurated and Casey became head of the CIA, all the ingredients for the coming disasters were in place: Leslie's relationship with Monzer, Michael's big mouth, and, of course, the bedouin bank of BCCI that handled the under-the-table guns-for-hostages deal. Casey and the British had created a bank for spies that no one supervised, where it was impossible to trace money, and which was immune from either congressional or parliamentary scrutiny. The BCCI was a perfect vehicle for Casey's contacts in the oil industry to make their own bribes to the PLO. The Jews of Israel would never know what hit them. Neither would the innocent victims of the Third World, who invested $20 billion in a con game. While Casey was playing spy chief, his old friend Aga Hassan Abedi was stripping the bank's assets. The real villain was Monzer Al-Kassar. If he had been honest with the British, the secret service would have been able to strike a double blow against terrorism and drugs, not to mention keeping the BCCI under control. Al-Kassar could have been the best informant in the world. The problem was that he was not working for the British at all. He was working for the Communists. His only loyalty was to Soviet Military Intelligence, the GRU. Al-Kassar's antiterrorist work for M16 was probably the best sting operation in recent Soviet history.[124] As we shall see in the next chapters, the one who got stung the worst was George Bush. Within a decade Al-Kassar used his protected position within M16 to become the world's leading drug dealer. By 1989 the drug enforcement agencies of West Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States had pooled their information at a special Interpol conference concerned solely with Monzer Al-Kassar. There was no doubt about it. Al-Kassar had used political blackmail to build an arms, drugs, and terrorist empire from South America to the Middle East.[125] And, of course, Al-Kassar was killing Jews. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om