Fourthbranch, Bandar Bush, and the 80 Billion Dollar Slush Fund

The WaPo series on Fourthbranch Cheney has given us a template for how this de facto chief executive likes to operate. We know that he likes to operate in the shadows, valuing secrecy above almost anything else. We know that he likes to be the filter through which all decisions are ultimately made. And we know, from today's third installment, that he likes to control the purse strings, and use that as a way to keep his subordinates in line (at least that's what I got from it. If he's in charge of the most minute of budget details, then the heads of NSA or State are going to want to stay on his good side).

We can put these known knowns (to borrow a Rumsfeldian phrase) to work in understanding Fourthbranch's involvement in the burgeoning scandal in Brtiain involving the Saudi Prince Bandar (a.k.a. Bandar Bush), a British defense contractor (oh wait, they're British - defence), and hundreds of billions of dollars - far more than is being discussed in most press reports.

Today BAE Systems announced that the US Department of Justice was investigating them:

BAE faces allegations that it ran a fund to help it win plane and military equipment orders from Saudi Arabia.

The allegations of illegal payments by BAE date back to the 1980s and the £43bn ($85bn) al-Yamamah deal that supplied Saudi Arabia with Tornado jets and other military equipment.

Earlier this month, the BBC and the Guardian newspaper reported that BAE had made payments worth hundreds of millions of pounds over a number of years to Prince Bandar, a leading member of the Saudi royal family.

According to the Guardian, the Department of Justice became interested because BAE used the US banking system to transfer regular payments to accounts controlled by Prince Bandar at Riggs Bank in Washington.

As a result, prosecutors decided that BAE could be investigated under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

OK, let's back up. But put that "al-Yamamah deal" in your back pocket.

What happened initially was that Bandar Bush was getting $2 billion dollar tips from BAE for helping push through enormous military aircraft deals between London and Riyadh. It was part of a large corruption investigation which was actually shut down in Britain by Tony Blair because it would potentially harm national security by damaging the fine reputation of Saudi Arabia (the 15 9/11 hijackers, apparently, didn't). Blair, I guess, got his payback by being named Mideast envoy. DoJ got involved because the tips were going into Bandar's account at Riggs Bank in Washington. This is VERY interesting, because Riggs Bank is a known launderer for dictators like Augusto Pinochet and others.

Riggs Bank courted business from former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and helped him hide millions of dollars in assets from international prosecutors while he was under house arrest in Britain, according to a report by Senate investigators.

The report also says the top federal bank examiner in charge of supervising the District's largest bank kept details about Riggs's relationship with Pinochet out of the Riggs case file. That happened a few months before the examiner retired from the government and joined Riggs as a senior executive. The examiner, R. Ashley Lee, denied the allegations to Senate investigators.

The Senate report also said Lee recommended, while still working for the government, that the bank not be punished for failing to take steps designed to prevent money laundering.

So we know that this tip money is going into a bank with a notorious history of money laundering and covering for dirty figures around the world (Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the dictator of Equatorial Guinea, also did business with Riggs Bank). We know that Riggs Bank was actually run by one of Bush's uncles along with another crony, Joe Albritton. Yet DoJ is focusing pretty much on the BAE's use of the US banking system to make these corrupt payments. By the way, BAE is effectively an American company these days, and they're trying to take over US arms companies and do lots of bsuiness with the Pentagon (now why would the former head of Halliburton have a problem with that?).

Could the Justice Department be deliberately focusing on one small part of the scandal in order to distract from the big picture:

Because we know that Fourthbranch and Bandar Bush have been in cahoots lately. Sy Hersh spelled it out.

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda [...]

The key players behind the redirection are Vice-President Dick Cheney, the deputy national-security adviser Elliott Abrams, the departing Ambassador to Iraq (and nominee for United Nations Ambassador), Zalmay Khalilzad, and Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi national-security adviser. While Rice has been deeply involved in shaping the public policy, former and current officials said that the clandestine side has been guided by Cheney. (Cheney’s office and the White House declined to comment for this story; the Pentagon did not respond to specific queries but said, “The United States is not planning to go to war with Iran.”)

One thing that struck me after reading that is, where is the money coming from for these clandestine operations in the Middle East? Is Congress appropriating it? Hersh says no. Is it part of the intelligence budget? Hersh says it's off-the-books money. So, is it coming out of Bandar Bush's tip jar? Marcy Wheeler:

Cheney and Bandar have been freelancing on foreign policy of late. Of course, Congress is not paying for that freelancing [...] So where do you think Cheney and Bandar are getting the money? [...] I can imagine how much easier it'd be to start a war with Iran if you had an independent source of funds for the propaganda to make your case for war.

Seriously though, this looks more and more like Dick Cheney, with his buddy Bandar Bush, has decided to relive both Watergate and Iran-Contra, all in one.

And apparently, there's more than just the $2 billion dollars in Bandar's tip jar. It could be up to $160 billion, and that brings us back to the Saudi-British "al-Yamamah deal". It was essentially oil-for-jet fighters, but a lot of that cash may have been skimmed into this Riggs Bank account to fund future wars:

While British news organizations, led by The Guardian and BBC have published revealing details of BAE bribery and slush funds, involving Prince Bandar, former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and the late Dutch Royal Consort, Prince Bernhard, none of the British media have touched upon the full magnitude of the scandal--the approximately $160 billion in secret oil revenues, generated by the BAE-Saudi Al-Yamamah deal, over the past 22 years (see accompanying chart for the year-by-year cash value of the Saudi oil shipments to BAE, through British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and the British government's Defence Export Sales Organization) [...]

British author William Simpson, who wrote the 2006 authorized biography of Prince Bandar, The Prince--The Secret Story of the World's Most Intriguing Royal, on the other hand, provided authoritative details "right from the prince's mouth" that should be of great interest to American Justice Department and Congressional investigators. What Simpson hinted at is perhaps the biggest covert Anglo-American slush fund in history --one that the author openly acknowledged had been used to fund clandestine wars, including the Afghantsi Mujahideen war against the Soviet Army in Afghanistan, and other covert military actions in Africa.

Managing cash in oil deals is apparently far looser in Britain than in the United States. The Saudis would pay into a fund, and in return they would get the weapons systems. But the value of the oil was about four times the value of the systems the Saudis got. That leaves hundreds of billions of dollars... unaccounted for.

Between the more than $80 billion in untraced funds generated through Al-Yamamah, according to EIR's conservative estimate, corroborated by U.S. intelligence sources, and the use of the project as a cover for covert activities around the globe and unauthorized weapons purchases, both the Justice Department and the U.S. Congress have a much bigger series of crimes to probe than the $2 billion in fees allegedly conduited through the Saudi accounts at Riggs Bank. The issue is the British corruption and subversion of American law on a grand scale.

Prince Bandar's ghost writer, William Simpson, has revealed that Al-Yamamah provided off-balance-sheet covert funding for the decade-long Mujihadeen covert war to drive the Soviet Red Army out of Afghanistan. U.S. intelligence sources have independently confirmed that at least some of those funds went to the recruitment and training of foreign Muslim fighters, who were sent to Afghanistan. Some of those fighters, following the Afghan War (1979-1990) would later surface in such far-away places as Algeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Yemen, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as Islamist insurgents, including members of Al Qaeda.

Which leads us back to Fourthbranch. We know that he has no respect for US law. If he wants to fund covert operations around the globe, he'll find a way to do it and he'll do his best to keep it a secret. This little kitty held by Bandar Bush and the Saudis is the perfect way to get the money where he feels it needs to go; we know he loves contorlling the purse strings. It appeared out of the reach of US justice system because it's a British/Saudi deal. But when Bandar got popped in Britain it threatened the whole deal. So DoJ is sent out to do a show investigation to divert attention away from this giant slush fund. I don't know exactly what's going on here, but there's a lot of strings that need to be pulled together.