September 25, 2004 - Manuel Noriega, you may remember him, the President of the United States invaded Panama in December 1989 just to bring him to justice and stow him away in the safe, secure, and almost soundproof confines of a United States prison cell. It was a difficult time for the President. He had been head of the Central Intelligence Agency at a time when the Agency was cultivating its network of Central American strongmen as client-operatives. Manuel Noriega had been one of the more productive. But in the mid 1980s the Junior Senator from Massachusetts, John Kerry began looking into reports that US Arms dealers were selling arms to Nicaraguan rebels in violation of US law. The probe led to Iran-Contra; President Reagan’s lapses of memory; the Vice-President’s public confession that he had been out of the loop; and exposed a shadowy network financed by a combination of laundered arms profits and drug money. Noriega ran the laundry operation cleaning the money through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.

Senator Kerry headed the subcommittee investigating BCCI with bulldog-like tenacity refusing to back off even when prominent leaders of his own party tried to divert him from the task. Too many prominent Democrats, Clark Clifford among them, would be brought down if Kerry kept pressing. What he was finding was too important, too vital to the nation’s security to back down. Simply put what Kerry’s investigation found was a widespread international criminal conspiracy centered in the Arab Mideast, laundering money through international commercial accounts, concealing its sources and financing Hamas, Abu Nidal, Saddam Hussein, and a newly emerging terrorist organization headed by Osama Bin Laden. One of its “legitimate” investments, funneled through a Bin Laden connected subsidiary was in a West Texas Oil company, Harken Oil headed by George W. Bush.

The Reagan Administration was not happy when the ties between Noriega, the CIA, the Contras, the drug lords and Arab terrorists began to be revealed and that was made clear to Senator Kerry. When his probe continued the Reagan administration did their best to discredit the investigation, Democrat power brokers were not happy that too close ties between Clark Clifford and Bert Lance and BCCI saw the light of day and that was made clear to Senator Kerry. The Medellin bosses put a price on his head and Senator Kerry commenced to travel with a security detail but he did not back down.

In 1989 Senator Claiborne Pell formally asked Kerry to end his probe. When the Justice Department was cool to the evidence that Kerry’s Committee had collected he took it to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau who launched a criminal investigation. Finally in 1991 US and British regulators could no longer ignore BCCI and commenced to act. BCCI operations were banned in 7 countries and severely restricted in several others. It faced criminal indictments. Clifford and Lance were charged. Harken’s financing dried up. The Pakistani founder of BCCI had made no secret that his objective in creating an Islamic bank was to diminish Western influence and to finance terrorist organizations. Kerry had thrown a monkey wrench into his works and brought down the Bank of Terror.