TV Reviews : Washington Horror Stories in BCCI Report

“The Bank of Crooks and Criminals” may be a rather sensational title for tonight’s “Frontline” report (at 9 on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, and at 8 on KVCR Channel 24), but it was the phrase CIA director Robert Gates used several years ago to identify the now-notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI.

Gates should know, it turns out, because BCCI’s global financial web that included arms merchants, money launderers, drug traffickers, strongmen dictators, terrorists, espionage rings--to say nothing of key players in the U.S. government--made this Pakistan-based institution well-known within the CIA. It was the rest of us, including depositors with banks secretly owned by BCCI, who didn’t know. Reporter Eric Nadler explains how BCCI came to be, and how it garnered powerful friends in Washington.

Having formed a partnership with Bank of America, BCCI founder Agha Hassan Amedi, through his association with former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence Kamal Adham, furthered his reach inside the United States, buying banks with the influence of government contacts ranging from Jimmy Carter’s aide Bert Lance to longtime adviser to presidents Clark Clifford. Nadler reports that when evidence of illegal BCCI money laundering came to the attention of Reagan White House aides such as Donald Regan, no follow-up investigations occurred, while Sen. John Kerry’s later query into BCCI found evidence that Lt. Col. Oliver North’s name appeared on a BCCI account during the arms-for-hostages swap with Iran.

Indeed, it was Kerry’s lack of help from Senate leaders or the U.S. Justice Department (indicating, perhaps, a further trail of BCCI friends) that led his investigator, Jack Blum, to alert New York County district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau--this story’s hero--about BCCI’s vast illegal holdings.

Morgenthau’s subsequent indictment, with crucial tips from former BCCI official Masihur Rahman, finally revealed how a bank criminally operated for two decades without being caught. Abedi, Rahman says, dreamed of a Third World bank big enough to take on big shots in the West, and did it with quick money gained through Mideast oil and arms revenues, and laundered drug money.

The most troubling theme here is how BCCI’s full power is still unknown, with links to both the Bush White House and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign.