Abu Nidal Organization

The Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), which called itself the Fatah Revolutionary Council, was the Palestinian terrorist group of Sabri al-Banna, known as Abu Nidal. Its accounts were held at the Sloane Street branch in London of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), whose manager, Ghassan Qassem, passed details of them to British and American intelligence.¹

The Commercial Network

In July 1987, on the basis of Qassem's information, the State Department prepared a report, "Abu Nidal's Terror Network," which was declassified in 1991 at the request of Senator John Kerry's subcommittee. It stated: "The ANO commercial network comprises several businesses created over the past seven years with the long-term goal of establishing legitimate trading enterprises in various countries, gaining experience in commercial trade, and making a profit for the group. . . The general manager of the commercial network and the principal agent in gray-arms transactions is Samir Hasan Najm al-Din (Samir Najmeddin). He has directed many of ANO's commercial activities, both licit and illicit, from his offices in the INTRACO building in Warsaw, Poland. . . He has maintained a general account at a major West European Bank [BCCI in London] from which he transfers money to individual company accounts at local banks. He maintains joint control of each company's ban[k] accounts, along with the company manager, and he is responsible for forwarding all major contracts to Sabri al-Banna for final approval."¹

According to the Kerry-Brown Senate Report, the information on Abu Nidal's use of BCCI was detailed enough by 1986 to be disseminated within the United States intelligence community, and after its dissemination "the U.S. coordinated efforts to shut down the financing of the activities exposed in its targeting of Abu Nidal through BCCI-London, with some success."¹ The CIA, in an operation against BCCI's laundering of narcotics money that ran from 1986 to 1990, learned of BCCI's role "in supporting international terrorism, including handling the finances of Sabri Al-Bannah or Abu Nidal, and his terrorist organization."² In its chapter on Jimmy Carter's dealings with BCCI's founder, Agha Hasan Abedi, the Senate report stated that by 1986 "the State Department knew that the terrorist Abu Nidal was using the bank to finance his operations in Europe," and that Carter was never briefed about BCCI by any agency of the government.³

Disclosure

A chronology entered in the record of the House Banking Committee's hearing of September 11, 1991 dated the first press report to July 21, 1991, sixteen days after BCCI was closed: "London Sunday Times reports that Abu Nidal's terrorist group used accounts at BCCI in England."⁴ On July 25, 1991, a wire report carried in the Deseret News stated that The Guardian, "quoting what it said was a confidential French secret service document," had reported that the Kuwaiti embassy in London paid 60 million dollars into Abu Nidal's London BCCI account in 1987. The Guardian quoted the French document, dated February 1988: "Certain countries like Kuwait, which were for some time targets of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, now seem to enjoy relative peace." According to the Guardian's account of the French report, the account "was in the name of Samir Najmeddin, described as the head of the Fatah Revolutionary Council's commercial network," whom the newspaper identified as an Iraqi businessman who had supplied arms to Saddam Hussein and to Argentina during the Falklands War.⁵

After BCCI's closure, a British judge, on the application of BCCI's liquidators, refused to let the Senate subcommittee receive BCCI documents held in the United Kingdom without the written "permission" of the depositors concerned, "such as Abu Nidal, and the deceased Ben Banerjee and Cyrus Hashemi." Other BCCI documents in Britain, the Senate report stated, "have been segregated and sealed by British intelligence (MI-5), and withheld from dissemination to anyone."²

The Task Force Papers

Two papers of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the House Republican Research Committee, directed by Yossef Bodansky, were entered into the hearing record of September 11, 1991 by the committee chairman, Henry B. Gonzalez. The first, "BCCI: An Introduction," dated September 4, 1991, stated that "by the early-1980s, Sabri Al-Banna (Abu-Nidal) was extorting money from rich Arabs in Europe, and many diplomats, especially representatives of Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, had bought his 'protection.' BCCI enjoyed the fruits of these operations by handling Abu-Nidal's extortion money." It asserted that Abedi established relations with al-Banna in the early 1980s "through the mediation and recommendation of Libya and Pakistan," and quoted Abu Nidal's former deputy, Atif Abu-Bakr: "Behind the soldier there is a businessman. Abu-Nidal opened up commercial branches in London, Athens, and Cyprus." It quoted Qassem as saying that "the terrorist accounts had been set up with the knowledge of senior officials within BCCI."⁶

The second paper, "BCCI: Between Peru and Washington, D.C.," dated September 10, 1991, stated that in early 1988 "BCCI arranged for the Abu-Nidal Organization to begin helping" the Shining Path in Peru with urban operations and sabotage training, with BCCI handling the funds, and quoted Abu-Bakr: "In 1989, for example, he [Abu-Nidal] made more than $4 million in Peru, Cocaine money, to be sure." According to the paper, the money was shipped through BCCI's London branches.⁶