Poppy Bush, Enron, Gold and Russian Money -9/11 Triggers?
With a dash of Carlyle Group
I never paid much attention to Enron. What with 9/11, Anthrax, Patriots Act, Afghanistan/Iraq and SARS I was pretty overwhelmed. Too bad for investors but so what.
After doing a recent 9/11 review I started pondering other reasons for 9/11 beyond the obvious ones like oil, geopolitical concerns, Israel and a GWOT to boost the MIC and build a Security state under the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention building the infrastructure for a Bio-Security State, since Anthrax was clearly related to 9/11.
Thats already a lot , so what else could possibly be added to that?
My recent readings had opened my eyes to the enormity of money being laundered from Marcos Gold in the 1980’s that was used for covert operations, Drug money being laundered in the Tax Havens back into the US via Real Estate, which exploded even more when the Soviet Union broke up and Western corporations and intelligence agencies joined forced with Russians oligarchs and mafia to remove 500 billion dollars or more. The money had to go somewhere and much of it ended up in US, Switzerland, London and the other Tax Havens. Some legally, most of it not legally.
How that was done is beyond the scope of this short piece, but it led me to Enron.
Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and a past Managing Director of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read noted that Enron's trading patterns, internet money movements and [other activities] were consistent with a large-scale money laundering operation.
“The fact that subpoenas were not issued months ago to obtain all Enron Online off shore and onshore digital and paper trading records and corresponding bank records defies logic, unless one presumes that Enron's generous donations have bought them time for a shredding party that protects all the beneficiaries of the real dollars that flowed through the Enron money pipeline. ......
I will bet every last dollar I have that Enron was the largest laundromat of stolen and tax evading dollars in American history and that the Department of Justice's primary goal is cover-up --- to make sure that the money trail disappears forever."
The obvious question here is why Enron was allowed to fail given its connections to the Bush/Cheney Administration and their plans for Afghanistan, and why they would not to follow the money and recover it.
I am not sure I figured it out but it seems reasonable those behind 9/11 had a bunch of that money (and Gold) stashed somewhere, and they were worried Enron contained evidence that could expose the Great Game, Enrons piece no doubt a large one may have been small piece of a really BIG puzzle.
Lets look back on some history
1945 at the end of WWII, the treasury of the Japanese Empire was discovered in the Philippines by a staff member of General Charles Willoughby, [Edward Lansdale], who was General MacArthur’s chief of Intelligence.
Then known as the Golden Lily Treasure, this mass of wealth had been accumulated by the Japanese through over fifty years of pillaging by its army in Southeast Asia and China . Reports vary, but documents in the public domain suggest the recovered treasure was in excess of 280,000 metric tonnes of gold, not including jewels and diamonds.
Lansdale briefed Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy about the findings, and a U.S. Cabinet level decision was made to confiscate the gold and cover-up its discovery. The gold would be added to the Black Eagle Trust fund. It was McCloy, along with Secretary of the Navy Robert B. Anderson and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson who created the Black Eagle Trust.
John McCloy, went on to become President of the World Bank. Robert Andersonwould go on to operate the Commercial Exchange Bank in the British West Indies, be convicted of running illegal banking operations and tax evasion, and be sentenced to prison.
A fourth member of that group – William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan– would go on to found the CIA and distribute the gold to key banks represented by his staffers.
The Yamashita gold would become the cornerstone of the Black Eagle Fund, from which many covert operations of the U.S. intelligence would be funded.
1945-Poppy Bush participated in numerous bombing runs over the Philippine islands when they were in Japanese hands—including Manila Harbor as part of MacArthur’s effort to retake the territory.
Bush became part of a joint intelligence effort coordinated with MacArthur’s command. The association with the Bush circle would date back to the days when Douglas MacArthur was a young man and his mother contacted E. H. Harriman, father of Prescott’s future business partners, to ask the railroad tycoon to give her son a job.
At the end of the war, MacArthur appointed William Quasha as alien property administrator. “Alien property” would have included anything of value captured from the Japanese. If in fact the Japanese possessed gold, this would have been by far the top priority.
Authors Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave contend that former CIA deputy director Ray Cline told them that the United States did locate the Japanese gold and used it to fund anti-Communist operations the world over.
McCloy, Lovett and Stimson, [intelligence officer] Captain [Edward] Lansdale returned to Tokyo in November 1945 with Robert B. Anderson. General MacArthur then accompanied Anderson and Lansdale on a covert flight to Manila where they set out for a tour of the vaults [that] already had [been] opened. Probably the key figure in all this was Edward Lansdale
Lansdale was also the titular head of Operation Mongoose, the part-CIA, part-Pentagon project to assassinate Cuban leaders, as well as a top figure in counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam.
William Quasha son would one day invest in Poppy’s sons oil business
1981-Poppy Bush and Ferdinand Marcos cultivated a relationship of mutual appreciation. “We love your adherence to democratic principles,” Poppy gushed during a visit to Manila in 1981.
Poppy urged Ferdinand Marcos to invest money in the United States.Imelda has claimed that Poppy urged her husband to put “his” funds into something that Imelda knew only as the Communist Takeover Fund.
That suggests that gold in the Philippines has long been seen as a funding vehicle for off-the-books intelligence, covert operations, weapons trafficking, and even coups—plus protection money that Marcos felt he had to pay.
Having remained in the Philippines after the war, William Quasha eventually attained the rarefied status as the only American licensed to practice law there. He also picked up some intriguing clients, including the CIA-tied Nugan Hand Bank.
Philippine investigators seeking to track the billions Marcos had embezzled from the Philippine treasury or obtained as bribes found that most of the money had been moved overseas through intermediaries.
1985 Enron was founded by Kenneth Lay in the merger of two natural-gas-transmission companies, Houston Natural Gas Corporation and InterNorth, Inc.; the merged company, HNG InterNorth, was renamed Enron in 1986.
1986-under orders from Vice President George H.W. Bush, a CIA operation was led by close Bush associates to get rid of Marcos.
The operation included Richard Armitage, Paul Wolfowitz, and Adnan Khashoggi, the mysterious CIA-linked Saudi arms dealer who had been helping Marcos secretly sell the stolen Japanese gold.
After forcing the exile of a defeated Marcos to Hawaii, Bush arranged for the Marcos gold to be deposited in special accounts at several select international banks—Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), UBS of Zurich, and Banker’s Trust, later to become part of Deutsche Bank.
The Marcos gold was held in a deep underground, high-security depository in Kloten, Switzerland, beneath the Zurich International Airport.
At that same time, a murky Canadian businessman named Peter Munk, a business partner with the CIA-linked arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, cofounded a Canadian gold-mining company, Barrick Gold. Some years later Barrick Gold went on to become the world’s largest gold-mining company.
What happened to the Marcos gold after it was confiscated by U.S. agents in 1986 is not well known, but throughout the 1990s, the world gold market would be befuddled by the mysterious appearance of thousands of tonnes of gold which appeared to suppress the price of gold.
1983-William Quasha was a man to know in the Philippines. An American citizen who had served there during World War II and stayed on to become a powerful lawyer in that country, he was head of the local expatriate group Republicans Abroad, and so well connected that he even played host to a Democrat, President Bill Clinton, when he came through the isles. William Quasha’s ace in the hole was his relationship with the long-ruling president and strongman Ferdinand Marcos.
Harken’s investment banker in New York mentioned a client looking to take a major position in an oil company, a New York lawyer named Quasha. He turned out to be William Quasha’s son, Alan.
Phil Kendrick and Alan Quasha quickly struck a deal. “He wanted control of the board, so we sold our stock to him, and that gave him control,” Kendrick explained
When Quasha bought Kendrick’s stock, the money came through an entity in Bermuda, a trust in the name of Quasha’s mother, with major blocks of shares taken by other members of the Quasha family. According to company filings, his father, William Quasha, bought 21 percent of Harken’s stock.
With Kendrick out of the way, Harken began metamorphosing in strange and wondrous ways.
One of the oddest investors in Harken was the billionaire speculator, investor, and philanthropist George Soros, who first became involved shortly after Alan Quasha took over
That George Soros held a big stake and served as a board member at the time George W. Bush was welcomed into the company that would make his fortune is rife with irony.
Through its investing arm, Harvard Management Company, Harvard agreed to buy 1.35 million shares of Harken for two million dollars and invest another twenty million dollars in Harken projects—eventually pumping fifty million dollars into the company and owning 30 percent of its stock.
In 1986, Harken had a total revenue of four million dollars. In 1989, thanks to a flurry of acquisitions and infinitely complicated transactions, revenue would exceed a billion dollars.
When Alan Quasha took control of Harken , he was essentially an unknown and a small-timer. Several years later, he appeared to be on top of the world. Did gold and/or Marcos’s billions have anything to do with this?
1988-Bush allegedly called Argentina's Minister of Public Works to pressure him into awarding Enron a $300 million contract shortly after his father won the presidency. Rodolfo Terragno recalled that the younger George Bush said that giving Enron the project "would be very favorable for Argentina and its relations with the United States."
In 1991 there were a number of reports that Marcos had secreted away in UBS, large quantities of the Philippine national treasury. There was "a lot" of illegal gold and money moved to Switzerland by Marcos, with the assistance of Adnan Khashoggi. After Marcos was ousted
UBS (Union Bank of Switzerland or Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft, formerly Banque Federale or Federal Bank of Switzerland) is the long time banker to the Marcos family, Adnan Khashoggi and the Saudi Royal family, and assorted international criminals.
After the war, the Swiss banks took elaborate measures to 'hide' the Nazi gold and prevent confiscation by the Allies.
The 'undiscovered' gold in the banks would be the gold pursued in 1990s in international courts and world public opinion by the Jewish World Congress and Edgar Bronfman.
1991- Breakup of Soviet Union and Looting of Russia and FSU countries begins (I wont detail how this was done here as it deserves a piece on its own)
1993-After the U.S. Congress adopted a series of laws to deregulate the sale of natural gas in the early 1990s, the company lost its exclusive fight to operate its pipelines.
With the help of Jeffrey Skilling, who was initially a consultant and later became the company’s chief operating officer, Enron transformed itself into a trader of energy derivative contracts, acting as an intermediary between natural-gas producers and their customers. The trades allowed the producers to mitigate the risk of energy-price fluctuations by fixing the selling price of their products through a contract negotiated by Enron for a fee.
Under Skilling’s leadership, Enron soon dominated the market for natural-gas contracts, and the company started to generate huge profits on its trades.
Skilling also gradually changed the culture of the company to emphasize aggressive trading. He hired top candidates from MBA programs around the country and created an intensely competitive environment within the company, in which the focus was increasingly on closing as many cash-generating trades as possible in the shortest amount of time.
One of his brightest recruits was Andrew Fastow, who quickly rose through the ranks to become Enron’s chief financial officer. Fastow oversaw the financing of the company through investments in increasingly complex instruments, while Skilling oversaw the building of its vast trading operation.
The bull market of the 1990s helped to fuel Enron’s ambitions and contributed to its rapid growth. There were deals to be made everywhere, and the company was ready to create a market for anything that anyone was willing to trade. It thus traded derivative contracts for a wide variety of commodities—including electricity, coal, paper, and steel—and even for the weather.
1996-A number of human rights groups took on the Marcos family in US courts for violation of human rights, and won a major, billion dollar settlement against the Marcos family.
Ferdinand Marcos had died in 1989, but the judgment was levied on his estate. After losing the suit, the Marcos family claimed it did not have the resources to settle the claim.
That is when the Department of Justice was brought in to investigate the accounts identified in the Swiss banks as Marcos accounts. When the possibility of the estate being hidden in UBS was exposed by the efforts of the Philippine government, the Department of Justice began an investigation.
The search for holocaust gold was re-activated in 1996 when newly declassified documents of the Swiss government inadvertently suggested the banks were still holding on to financial assets that belonged to holocaust victims and their families.
The final front was new anti-money laundering regulations which took hold in Switzerland in late 1998. This new legislation put criminal penalties on bankers who knowingly supported money-laundering activities.
1998-Phil Gramm as head of the Senate Banking Committee achieved the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Blitey Act.
In terms of offshore bank trading programs, what it meant was that no longer did banks have to work with agents or intermediaries in concert with trading components; they could now work directly with one another, and also cut out the middle man.
Enron entities made bank trade profit monies offshore and brought them onshore by borrowing against these cash assets, or loans. Loans too are non-taxable events
Gramm was married to Wendy Gramm who was former head of the Commodity Futures Committee, which allowed Enron to do its energy dealings
When she resigned from the CFTC, she became a highly paid with perks, member of the Board of Directors with Enron.
1998-Banker’s Trust was taken over by Alex Brown & Sons, after Banker’s Trust floundered financially on its Russian loans in the mid 1990s, and both were acquired by Deutsche Bank. Those Russian loans were facilitated by Enron, starting in August of 1993
Alex Brown’s involvement would bring to the forefront the names of three names of individuals who would play multiple roles in this mystery: Buzz Krongard, Mayo Shattuck, and J Carter Beese.
Buzz Krongard is reported as the mentor of Beese and Shattuck from their years together at Alex Brown. Additionally, he managed the merger between Bankers Trust and Deutschebank Alex Brown.
Krongard would become Executive Director of the CIA at the time of September 11.
Mayo Shattuck would be reported to be the personal banker for Adnan Khashoggi and Edgar Bronfmann during their partnership at Barrick Gold.
1998-UBS and other Swiss banks reversed their position on 'not returning' holocaust gold to family survivors in August of 1998, after several months of negotiations with Edgar Bronfman, a co-investor of Adnan Khashoggi in Barrick Gold and President of the World Jewish Congress.
Pressure was brought by investigators and lawmakers on three separate fronts, and by Swiss lawmakers on a fourth front:
Edgar Bronfman, as a significant owner of Barrick, which was the primary beneficiary of the Khashoggi - conceived gold laundering operation and connections to the German bank cartel, went to Switzerland to establish a settlement that would stop the investigation, and prevent further disclosure of the true assets being held in accounts at UBS.
1999-An online trading division, Enron Online, was launched during the dot-com boom, and by 2001 it was executing online trades worth about $2.5 billion a day. Enron also invested in building a broadband telecommunications networkto facilitate high-speed trading.
Some allege the off sheet "debts" of Enron, were in fact income, generated in large part through "Federal" Reserve bank trading programs, which 9/11 was orchestrated to try to cover-up
2000-Enron, UNOCAL and other companies had completed most sectors of the gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Dabhol-India. As in the case of Enron, investment for these interlinking pipelines was obtained at the expense of gullible shareholders,
Even a Saudi prince (Badr M. Al-Aiban) was duped into investing into the project through the CentGas Consortium. The only gap was Afghanistan.
The United States government, which had earlier done its best to defend Enron’s unethical practices in India, tried to appease the Taliban by giving them $2 million and inviting their senior leaders to Texas for talks.
It should be noted that Enron was the single biggest contributor to President Bush’s first election campaign.
But the talks stalled. In his memoir, the Afghan ambassador to Pakistan during 9-11 and ex-Guantanamo detainee Abdul Salam Zaeef recalls American disappointment when the Taliban awarded the pipeline contract to an Argentinian company BRIDAS, instead of Enron cahoot UNOCAL.
2000, Reginald Howe introduced his GATA lawsuit, naming the Deutschebank as a key party to a gold price-fixing lawsuit, prompting an investigation by the FBI into Swiss and Deutschebank gold trading accounts. The FBI records for this investigation were located at WTC
2001-Scarcely a month after Bush moves into the White House, Vice President Cheney has his first secret meeting with Ken Lay and other Enron executives on February 22. Other meetings follow on March 7 and April 17. It is the details of these meetings that the Bush Administration is seeking to keep private.
It's clear the Cheney had his own conflicts of interest with Enron. A chief benefactor in the trans-Caspian pipeline deal would have been Halliburton, the huge oil pipeline construction firm which was previously headed by Cheney.
Vice President's energy task force changed a draft energy proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural gas production in India in February of last year. The amendment was so narrow that it apparently was targeted only to help Enron's Dabhol plant in India.
Later, Cheney stepped in to try to help Enron collect its $64 million debt during a June 27 meeting with India's opposition leader Sonia Gandhi.
May 2001-Thomas E. White leaves Enron to become Army Secretary. He was in charge of their trading department where all the financial games were largely played. Shortly after the Anthrax attacks he became the first interim Director of the Department of Homeland Security
August 2, 2001-Christina Rocca, in charge of Central Asian affairs for the U.S. government, met the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan in Islamabad
Rocca said the Taliban representative, Mr. Zaeef, was aware of the strong U.S. commitment to help the Afghan people and the fact that the United States had provided $132 million in relief assistance so far that year.
The Taliban demanded that the U.S. also reconstruct Afghanistan's infrastructure and that the pipeline be open for local consumption.
The U.S. allegedly threatened the Taliban during the negotiations. The directive of "we'll either carpet you in gold or carpet you in bombs" U.S. representatives were reported to have told the Taliban.
Sometime in late August the whole deal went sour.
On August 14, 2001, Enron's CEO, Jeff Skilling, resigned due to "family issues." This shocked both the industry and Enron employees. Enron chairman Ken Lay stepped in as CEO.
On August 15, Sherron Watkins, an Enron VP, wrote an anonymous letter to Ken Lay that suggested Skilling had left because of accounting improprieties and other illegal actions. She questioned Enron's accounting methods and specifically cited the Raptor transactions.
Later that same month, Chung Wu, a UBS PaineWebber broker in Houston, sent an e-mail to 73 investment clients saying Enron was in trouble and advising them to consider selling their shares.
2001- September 4, Senator Phil Gramm, announced his plans to leave the Senate exactly one week prior to 9/11. Phil Gramm became vice-Chairman of UBS (Switzerland)
On October 16, Enron announced a third quarter loss of $618 million. During 2001, Enron's stock fell from $86 to 30 cents.
On October 22, the SEC began an investigation into Enron's accounting procedures and partnerships.
In November, Enron officials admitted to overstating company earnings by $57 million since 1997. Enron, or "the crooked E," filed for bankruptcy in December of 2001.
The records of many transactions disappeared when Enron collapsed and the trading operation and all its records were taken over by UBS
The FBI was reportedly conducting an investigation into those transactions, and the investigation files were kept on the 23rd floor of the North Tower of the WTC and WTC 7
2001-Mayo Shattuck was the CEO of Deutschebank and would resign for unexplained reasons the day after September 11, and would not be at the WTC office that day when the tower collapsed.
It was his bank that was identified as the source of the illegal stock options that indicated there was insider trading taking advantage of the September 11 tragedy.
The Deutschebank, HQ which sat inside the WTC was totally decimated
Mayo Shattuck became new CEO at Constellation Energy at end of 2001 and set up a competitive market for trading energy and gold bullion using former Enron employees who were suddenly unemployed following Enrons bankruptcy (how convenient)
2002- Enron - an energy trading company - had created a gold bullion and gold derivatives trading operation. After Enron went bankrupt, Enron On-Line was bought by UBS. There is the possibility that this asset was being jettisoned because it contained trails of the transfer of assets abroad.
The former Chairman of Enron’s disgraced accounting firm Arthur Anderson became a board member of the Swiss UBS bank. Enron’s financial affiliates were also accused of manipulating the gold market by GATA. Enron had become a major distribution channel for gold derivatives such as those sold by Barrick Gold.
Questions were being asked about whether or not there were real gold mining operations to back the derivatives. The FBI led an investigation into gold price-fixing, and the records of this investigation were kept in the FBI office on the 23rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. 9/11 helped prevent these records from becoming public knowledge.
Note that this was the same FBI office where the FBI’s Bin Laden investigator John Patrick O’Neill met his death on 9/11.
The Securities and Exchange Commission held an office in World Trade Center 7, adjacent to the twin towers. Although other neighboring buildings suffered minimal damage from the collapse of the towers, this building was literally vapourized.
On September 17th 2001, we came to know that the Securities and Exchange Commission had lost many files in the collapse of World Trade Center 7.
Why wasn’t Enron bailed out? When Enron went belly-up, the losses were vast, perhaps as much as $60 billion, but the losses were widely distributed among a lot of different institutions.
The company's two largest creditors, Citi and JPMorgan/Chase, well aware of the dodgy state of the company, had packaged up their Enron debt as "credit derivatives" and sold them on to pension funds.
So Enron's crash was not going to bring down the big banks or even damage their profits (which have remained good).
Curious Facts
The Houston office building that housed both Enron and Halliburton corporate headquarters was owned by Trizec Hahn. Trizec Hahn was a merger of Peter Munk's (Barrick Gold) and the Canadian Bronfman family:
Barrick was controlled by Peter Munk, who was set up as chairman, he claimed, by Adnan Khashoggi who owned the company stock.
CEO's of both companies (Kenneth Lay and Dick Cheney ) are close associates of the Bush family, whose relationship to the founder of Barrick– Adnan Khashoggi – are extensive and stretched over at least two decades.
Barrick is also directly linked to UBS and the German bank cartel, through use of it's subsidiary gold refinery: Argor-Heraeus S.A.
Owership of this refinery was transferred from UBS to Commerzbank, also part of the German bank cartel in 1999.
Barrick's gold is refined to market delivery standards by MKS Finance S.A. in Switzerland and Argor-Heraeus S.A. also in Switzerland
Also on the Barrick Board was former Canadian Deutschebank executive Tye W. Burt -the former Chairman of Deutsche Bank Canada and Deutsche Bank Alex Brown Securities Canada, and Managing Director and Head of Deutsche Bank's Global Metals and Mining Group.
Burt was involved when the Canadian Deutschebank backed Khashoggi in the 2001 MJK Securities fraud. Burt left the bank shortly after the fraud was discovered.
Note also, two of the initial big investors in Barrick – Khashoggi and Bronfman – used the same personal financial advisor: Mayo Shattuck of the Deutschebank Alex Brown. Mayo Shattuck was the chief assistant to Buzzy Krongard when he worked at Deutschebank Alex Brown.
Both, through their executive roles at Deutschebank Alex Brown were in a position to be familiar with the Khashoggi/Marcos gold deposits at that Bank.
Krongard managed the merger between Bankers Trust and Deutschebank Alex Brown, and that Banker's Trust is the bank that received significant amounts of the Marcos gold with the assistance of Khashoggi.
The Deutsche Bank was identified as a major gold trading partner with Barrick in both the Blanchard and Howe law suits.
Enron - an energy trading company - had created a gold bullion and gold derivatives trading operation. When Enron went bankrupt, Enron On-Line was bought by UBS.
A competitive market for trading energy and gold bullion was set-up by former Deutschebank executive Mayo Shattuck as new CEO at Constellation Energy, using former Enron employees.
Further investigation would have resulted in having the Department of Justice pursuing assets into accounts that moved gold into or through Barrick for laundering. With the exposure of more that one laundering operation, the entire operation would come undone.
There was another complicating factor in bringing closure to the "bullion" issues. An article in Saturday's Financial Times of London cited a report prepared by Fitch IBCA, an international credit rating agency, that estimated a total of $136 billion was taken out of all of Russia between 1993 and 1998.
Another estimate, provided in Lloyd's article for the Times, puts the total in the neighborhood of $200-500 billion. Though the exact figure has not been determined, this vast sum not only lined the pockets of the new Russian kleptocracy, but also flowed into the coffers of US and European financial institutions.
Credit Suisse, Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS), Dresdner Bank, Westdeutsche Landesbank and Banque Internacionale of Luxembourg were all being scrutinized for their role in the matter.
It is of significant note that two primary owner-investors in two of the key banks involved in the Russian money laundering scandal were Bruce Rappaport, a Swiss- Israeli banker who was involved with Khashoggi and George Bush Sr. in the Iran- Contra, October Surprise and BCCI scandals, and Dr. Alfred Hartmann.
Dr. Alfred Hartmann, was the managing director of the BCCI Swiss subsidiary, Banque de Commerce et de Placement SA; at the same time, he ran the Zurich Rothschild Bank AG, and sat in London as a member of the board of N.M. Rothschild and Sons, Hartmann was also a business partner of Helmut Raiser, friend of de Picciotto, and linked to Nordex.
Hartmann was also chairman of the Swiss affiliate of the Italian BNL bank, which was implicated in the Bush administration illegal transfers to Iraq prior to the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
The Atlanta branch of BNL, with the knowledge of George Bush when he was vice president, conduited funds to Helmut Raiser's Zug, Switzerland company, Consen, for development of the CondorII missile program by Iraq, Egypt, and Argentina, during the Iran-Iraq War.
Hartmann was vice-chairman of another secretive private Geneva bank, the Bank of NY-Inter-Maritime Bank, a bank whose chairman, Bruce Rappaport, was one of the illegal financial conduits for Col. Oliver North's Contra drugs-for-weapons network during the late 1980.
Russian Money (just a taste)
1988, the CIA front Riggs Bank, under the direction of Jonathon Bush and J Carter Beese, would purchase controlling interest in a Swiss company in Isle of Man named Valmet Group and set up the Switzerland financial entity Riggs Valmet S.A., headquartered at 14 Chemin Rieu in Geneva.
Riggs Valmet S.A., legally incorporated in the offshore Isle of Man, was established to set up shell companies and accounts to hide and launder money, initially for companies controlled by Bank Menatep’s Khodorkovsky, Roman Abramovich, Boris Berezovsky, and other select “kids” of the corrupt Soviet KGB generals.
The Geneva arm used the offshore bank’s secrecy on the Isle of Man to further hide the paper trail. Without access to large Western banks, the new Yeltsin oligarchs could never have succeeded in moving tens of billions of dollars out of Russia and other newly independent former parts of the Soviet Union into Western offshore havens.
For the Bush CIA network, the aim was to permanently drain the funds out of Russia into accounts in the Riggs-Valmet “immediately began business contracts with Russian KGB operatives”and it was this relationship that led to the creation of Khodorkovsky’s Bank Menatep. Both Riggs-Valmet and Menatep then became conduits for moving KGB money out of Russia
From the 1999 Times (UK) article, “Yeltsin ‘Family’ Tycoon Linked to Cash Scandal” via the 9/11 report,
“The Times has learnt that Roman Abramovich, a tycoon, controls the trading arm of one of Russia’s largest oil companies through an Isle of Man company that has figured in the Bank of New York affair. Mr. Abramovich runs the Siberian oil giant Sibneft, which sells its oil through a company called Runicom.
His name has emerged after speculation that Swiss investigators are looking into the role of Runicom as part of the widening investigation into the laundering of up to $15 billion of Russian money through American banks. Runicom is owned by at least two offshore companies set up by the Valmet Group, a financial services concern partly owned by Menatep, a failed Russian bank that used the Bank of New York.
In November 1989 George H.W. Bush appears to have arranged for Alton G. Keel Jr, a former National Security Agency Director and a minor player in the Iran-Contra scandal, to go to work at Riggs Bank, where Jonathon Bush – George’s brother was an executive Vice President. Keel would head up the International Banking Group
Bush and a cadre of rogue KGB officials built a complex international network of banks and holding companies that would be used to take over ownership of the Soviet economy.
Over 300 of these KGB turncoats who supported this operation would later be re-located to the US in the early 1990s and pensioned.
Riggs Bank solidified banking relations with a couple more of the old Iran-Contra scandal participants: Swiss bankers Bruce Rappaport, and Alfred Hartmann. It is through this group that George Soros was engaged, who then opened a second front assault on the ruble.
Rappaport and Hartmann would also extend their operations network to include of the Bank of New York, and from Israel, The Eisenberg Group.
According to Heidner in Collateral Damage :
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/File:Collateral_Damage_-_part_1.pdf
Bush’s Operation Hammer used estimated 240 billions of dollars of illegal funds—funds not authorized by the US Congress—to bring down the Soviet Union.
The funds reportedly came from a secret CIA war chest of undisclosed gold seized from Japan after World War II.
On September 11, 1991 , the same day Bush announces a New World Order -$240 billion in 10-year securities were allegedly illegally created that were backed by the Marcus Gold and scheduled to come due on September 12, 2001.
On September 11, 2001 all hell would break loose when 240 million dollars in unauthorized securities came due. If not for 3 planes and no doubt plenty of explosives, the game would be up.
“…the September 11th attacks were meant as a cover-up for financial crimes being investigated by the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), whose offices in the Pentagon were destroyed on September 11th.
After six years of research, this report presents corroborating evidence which supports their claims, and proposes a new rationale for the September 11th attacks. In doing so, many of the anomalies – or inconvenient facts surrounding this event - take on a meaning that is consistent with the claims of Eastman et al.
The hypothesis of this report is: the attacks of September 11th were intended to cover-up the clearing of $240 billion dollars in securities covertly created in September 1991 to fund a covert economic war against the Soviet Union, during which ‘unknown’ western investors bought up much of the Soviet industry, with a focus on oil and gas.
The attacks of September 11th also served to derail multiple Federal investigations away from crimes associated with the 1991 covert operation. In doing so, the attacks were justified under the cardinal rule of intelligence: “protect your resources” and consistent with a modus operandi of sacrificing lives for a greater cause.”
Heidner on the Carlyle Group just for fun.
The Carlyle Group was created by in 1987 when Frank Carlucci left the Bush administration, with coterie officials from the CIA, the State Department and Security Advisor, and then Ronald Reagan's Defense Secretary.
He had the mission of cleaning up after the Iran-Contra affair in the Reagan administration, and according to those involved, allowed four of the five supply operations to continue while declaring the “unnecessary expense.’ If anyone suspected a ‘covert ops program’ was under way, no one reported their suspicion. In retrospect, that seems to have been the case.
This was in January of 1989, the same year when George H.W. Bush was placing key National Security assets in Riggs Bank, and starting the Riggs-Valmet financial penetration of the Soviet Union.
In a world where it is common for departing senior officials to enter the revolving door between government and the private sector, the practice of being accompanied by a “phalanx of CIA and Pentagon staffers” is not common, especially when joining a company that has not been financially successful in the prior years. This should have been even more so suspicious in Carlyle, where co- founder Bill Conway had a notorious reputation of being extremely harsh on
Under Carlucci, Carlyle’s first Defense industry acquisition was a defense consulting company known as BDM, in September 1990. BDM was the company used by the Iran Contra CIA operation to move illegal weapons between the Israelis and Nicaraguan Contras. It was also a major contractor in the world of “Black Projects” whose budgets remain secret for the benefit of National Security.
The world was witnessing the end of the Cold War at that time, and the stock values of Defense firms were dropping across the board. However, the Carlyle Group chose as its first acquisition, a trusted firm with the capability of discretely conducting illegal activity.
By 1994, the Washington Post was reporting that BDM was procuring ex-Soviet/Russian military technology, suggesting that the very discrete privatization of key Soviet Defense assets was already well under way.
This of course is speculation, and the unknown ownership of those ex-Soviet defense industries is now protected in the off-shore offices of the Carlyle Group and Group Menatep, which became the major financial power in the Soviet Union after the collapse of Gorbachev.
It might only be coincidental that two members on Carlyle’s Advisory Board are Planton Lebedev, the Chairman of Group Menatep and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the primary Russian front man for the Riggs-Valmet operation and Russian founder –in name – of Menatep.
It might also be ‘only coincidental’ that seven of the key players in the execution of the 1991 covert economic war were also members of Carlyle: Fred Malek, George Soros, George H.W. Bush, Robert Gates, Bruce Rappaport, James Baker, and Robert Zoellick.
The speculation of this report is that in releasing $240 Billion in covert bonds to finance the collapse of the Soviet Union, this small group of politicians and bankers created a U.S. based, private sector vehicle for controlling and profiting from those funds.
That vehicle was the Carlyle Group. Moreover, in managing the laundering of the Black Eagle Fund/Yamashita/Golden Lily/Marcos gold, Carlyle became the focal organization for doing that as well.
At least six members of Carlyle that were either familiar with the creation of the gold trusts, or were advisors to Barrick Gold included: George H.W. Bush, Richard Helms, Vernon Jordan, Fidel Ramos, Paul Desmarais Sr. and Karl Otto Pohl.
It should seem no less coincidental that “on September 11, 2001... the group had organized a meeting at Washington's Ritz Carlton Hotel with five hundred of its largest investors”.
George H.W. Bush was in attendance, sitting with Osama Bin Ladin’s brother as the 9/11 terrorists executed the carnage that was to be the cover-up for the laundering of the $240 Billion in covert bonds that seem to have fed the success of the Carlyle Group.
In the aftermath of 9/11, there would be a plethora of criticism of Carlyle and its ability to channel the profits from the Iraq War and the Homeland Security Act to individuals with the ‘inside track’.
Little noticed in the aftermath of 9/11 was the beginning of Carlyle’s Asset Management Group ‘second” private equity fund, managed by David Kupperman who was brought in from Goldman Sachs for this task. This fund would seek opportunities in new “areas of alternative asset management” also known as the “secondary, or resale, private equity original fund was begun in 2001.
By 2003, the ‘Asset Management Group’ was being spun-off in an employee buyout, with Carlyle maintaining a 40% interest. While the investments of the fund were not publicized, their direction should have been clear.
The Carlyle fund was renamed Rock Creek Potomac. One of the General Partners of Rock Creek, John Sites (who previously created the mortgage department at Bears Stearns), was named to the Fannie Mae Board of Directors.
Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC) was Carlyle’s second effort to facilitate the sub prime mortgage market. This effort was unique in the history of the firm, and was created as a publicly owned corporation. Its specialty was mortgage financing.
CCC was well positioned with relationships with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. A long time Carlyle advisor – Robert Zoellick had been Executive Vice President at Fannie Mae between 1993 and 1997.
David Moffet, who had been CEO at Freddie Mac joined Carlyle as well. The Carlyle Group’s total exposure when CCC declared bankruptcy in 2007 was $150 million, although the Carlyle Group loaned the company an additional $200 million in efforts to save it (or the reputation of the Group)– for naught.
In this situation “The naughty Capital Corporation told shareholders it had no subprime exposure. But it did. It said all the exposure was Triple A rated. But it wasn’t. It said liquidity was ample. But it wasnt.”
In the aftermath of September 11 , the Carlyle Group made two quiet efforts to facilitate the subprime mortgage market. In both cases they limited in unprecedented ways their exposure to the risk. Their company misrepresented the investments. These types of actions suggest that those in control of Carlyle had the inside track on the future of the subprime market, and did not want their personal fortunes tied up with the subprime market.
Once again, individuals close to the original September 1991 bond deal seem to be immune to the meltdown of 2008.
The group responsible for this crisis is a tight knit association of bankers and government “intelligence” officials who have formed a common bond around defending their personal definition of American democracy abroad.
They claim to defend the ideals of democracy, capitalism and the American way of life while simultaneously murdering and financially raping their fellow citizens in the name of National Security and profit.
Somehow, these crimes are rationalized as collateral damage, and being for the ‘greater good of America,’ which now seems exposed as the empty promise it has always been.
The argument that needs to now be made is: rather than being ‘over zealous patriots,’ have these men committed treason? Have they violated international treaty law? If the actions taken against the Soviet Union in 1991 can be justified as part of an ongoing Cold War, with economic acts being a legally sanctioned method of war by Executive Order, is not turning those same economic acts on the U.S. economy then an act of war against the U.S., hence treason?
If treason is considered too radical of a conclusion, then consider this insider recolection about Frank Carlucci, the executive who headed up the dark side of the Carlyle Group.
“In the late 1980s Iran-Contra whistleblower Gene Wheaton expanded on what General Walters and his associates had been doing since the 1960s. Wheaton had been a former police officer, military criminal investigator, and security contractor. He also used to be a counter-terrorism consultant for the Rockwell Corporation, the Saudi Royal Family, and the Shah of Iran, among other things. All this was before he was brought into the "inner circle", which turned out to consist of people he didn't want anything to do with.
In 2002 Wheaton recalled: In the late 70s, in fact, after Gerry Ford lost the election in ’76 to Jimmy Carter, and then these guys became exposed by Stansfield Turner and crowd for whatever reason ... there were different factions involved in all this stuff, and power plays ... Ted Shackley and Vernon Walters and Frank Carlucci and Ving West and a group of these guys used to have park-bench meetings in the late 70s in McClean, Virginia so nobody could overhear their conversations.
They basically said, "With our expertise at placing dictators in power," I’m almost quoting verbatim one of their comments, "why don’t we treat the United States like the world’s biggest banana republic and take it over?" And the first thing they had to do was to get their man in the White House, and that was George Bush..."