Ledeen, JFK, and the Bushie-CIA "Spook Bank"

[kathleen]

To: Spin...@yahoogroups.com, kshe...@calea.org, fit...@gmail.com,
patrick.f...@usdoj.gov, model...@sbcglobal.net,
jdr...@nejm.org, let...@courant.com, Jgerb...@cdc.gov,
len...@courant.com, michae...@po.state.ct.us,
con...@po.state.ct.us, executiv...@nytimes.com, managing-
edi...@nytimes.com, news...@nytimes.com, the-...@nytimes.com,
biz...@nytimes.com, for...@nytimes.com, me...@nytimes.com,
nati...@nytimes.com, dv...@cdc.gov, brigidc...@optonline.net,
tr...@hotmail.com, ubi...@courant.com, ma...@concentric.net,
camp...@courant.com, jhorn...@fff.org, thomas...@usdoj.gov,
thoma...@po.state.ct.us, kur...@washpost.com,
georg...@washpost.com, hor...@courant.com,
commissi...@po.state.ct.us, cohen...@aol.com,
FalN...@aol.com, brans...@comcast.net, vts...@comcast.net,
o...@po.state.ct.us, da...@davila-dilzer.com,
scott....@po.state.ct.us, govern...@po.state.ct.us,
attorney...@po.state.ct.us, randall...@usdoj.gov
Cc: fra...@ucia.gov, dr-ahma...@president.ir,
eugener...@washpost.com, hor...@courant.com,
bmi...@newstimes.com, tr...@hotmail.com, rast...@aol.com,
billc...@gmail.com, thomas...@usdoj.gov, amcg...@rms-law.com,
rjmu...@aol.com, paulcrai...@yahoo.com,
sidney_b...@yahoo.com, criminal...@usdoj.gov,
karla.d...@usdoj.gov, christophe...@usdoj.gov

Subject: [SpinLyme] Ledeen, JFK, and the Bushie-CIA "Spook Bank"

Date: Dec 30, 2007 11:03 AM

Ledeen says the Russians did Kennedy.

Uh-uh.
It was the CIA Bushies.
http://www.tarpley.net/bush8b.htm
The Bushies hate the Kennedys so much they can't even utter their
name.

I would even venture to say the the Mossad now has the CFR by the
balls. This entire
country is bugged by Israel, and it will be an Israeli who betrays
Israel and starts
WWIII, which will be the last war. There will be no rebuilding of any
temples by
any humans.

======================
http://www.slate.com/id/2112106/

The Spook Bank

More on the Riggs-CIA connection.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, Jan. 10, 2005, at 10:37 PM ET

Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn R. Simpson earned a much-deserved
attaboy from
me last Friday for his story, "Riggs Bank Had Longstanding Link to the
CIA"
(Dec. 31, 2004), which places the Riggs Bank money-laundering scandal
in new context
by being the first to connect it to the agency.

Simpson reports how the Riggs-CIA "relationship," which goes back some
time, may foil the prosecution of alleged money-launderers employed by
the bank.
(Riggs admitted no wrong-doing last year when regulators fined it $25
million for
violating currency laws.) The connection, Simpson writes, puts the
government in
the unenviable position of convincing juries that the "bank's failure
to
disclose financial activity by the foreign officials wasn't implicitly
authorized
by parts of the U.S. government."

Simpson's piece also invites speculation that the Justice Department
might abort
the prosecutions lest courtroom brawls reveal more about Riggs and the
CIA than
the government wants made public. The Riggs-CIA romance goes back at
least to 1961,
according to this passage in Thomas Powers' biography of former CIA
head Richard
Helms, The Man Who Kept the Secrets (1979):

On Friday, April 21, 1961, for example, two days after the
surrender of the
exile invasion force [in Cuba], two men in workclothes--they might have
been taken
for window washers, say, if not for their neat Ivy League haircuts--
approached a
teller in the DuPont [sic] Circle branch of the Riggs National Bank in
Washington
with an unusual request. They asked the teller for six to eight bank
checks totaling
well over $100,000 to be made out in the name of Arthur Avignon. The
teller was
not as surprised as he might have been. Men from the CIA often arrived
quietly to
inspect the financial records of certain local embassies, and the
teller was also
familiar with several oddly active accounts in the name of groups like
the National
Association of Loggers, the Dry Cleaners' Association, and so on. When
he had
asked about these strange accounts after first going to work at the
branch he had
been told frankly, "Oh, those are dummy accounts."

Powers writes that a week later the teller read an Associated Press
story datelined
Havana in which Fidel Castro damned the CIA for its plots against Cuba
and specifically
mentioned funds that had come from Arthur Avignon.

Although the Nexis Way-Back Machine doesn't cough up many Riggs-CIA
stories,
the spooky ones it does unearth encourages further research into
Simpson's finding
that the relationship between the bank and the agency is
"longstanding."

In 1977, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward tied Riggs Bank to
payments in a
CIA operation in Iran, where the shah had contracted for a $500
million border surveillance
system. That same year, the Washington Post's Robert Meyers reported
from the
espionage trial of former CIA employee Edwin Gibbons Moore. A defense
psychiatrist
who examined Moore and thought him paranoid told the court that the
defendant claimed
to have spoken to the "CIA liaison officer at Riggs bank." (Moore was
convicted of espionage and sentenced to 15 years in prison.)

The FBI seems to have its own special relationship with Riggs. In a
1986 Nation
column, Christopher Hitchens writes that the FBI obtained--without a
subpoena or
court order--the account information of a friend of his who banked at
Riggs'
Dupont Circle branch. Later, FBI Director William Webster admitted
that the information
was made available "on two occasions" by "confidential sources."
Prior to President Bill Clinton's sacking of FBI Director William
Sessions,
a Justice Department ethics investigation determined that the director
had purchased
a $435,000 house that was beyond his means with a "sweetheart loan"
from
Riggs. Riggs Chairman Joe L. Allbritton referred Sessions and his wife
to a Riggs
bank official after he learned they were house-hunting, according to a
Feb. 4, 1993,
story in the Washington Post.

As long as we're indulging in speculation, what should we make of the
1997 deal
in which J. Bush & Co., a money management firm owned by Jonathan
Bush, George
H.W. Bush's brother and W's uncle, was purchased by a unit of Riggs
Bank?
Exactly how close is the Bush dynasty to Riggs and its scandal?

President Bush is on record promising a "full investigation" of
charges
that Riggs helped Chilean junta leader Gen. Augusto Pinochet (among
others) launder
millions. Will he make good on that promise or pretend he's protecting
national
security by shutting it down?

******

Disclosure: Glenn Simpson is a friend. Know any good Riggs-CIA
stories? Please ignore
the fact that I had a Riggs checking account from 1981 to 1995 and
send your e-mail
to pres...@hotmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the
writer stipulates
otherwise.)