Kerry Committee

The Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, conducted a two-year investigation of drugs, law enforcement and foreign policy in 1987 and 1988 and, from 1988 to 1992, the congressional investigation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) that produced the Kerry-Brown Senate Report of December 1992. Its ranking member for the BCCI inquiry was Senator Hank Brown of Colorado.¹

Origins

BCCI came to the subcommittee's attention in February 1988, during a hearing on the drug trafficking and money laundering of Manuel Noriega. In March 1988 the Foreign Relations Committee authorized subpoenas to BCCI and to those at the bank who handled Noriega's assets and the accounts of others in Panama and Colombia. Service was delayed at the request of the Justice Department and the Customs Service, which were concerned for the C-Chase sting in Tampa; by the time the subpoenas were served in late July 1988, the subcommittee's public hearings were over. BCCI officials then told its counsel, Jack Blum, that the bank and its attorneys, among them Clark Clifford and Robert Altman, were obstructing the inquiry. The subcommittee deposed Amjad Awan shortly before his arrest in the sting and a second former BCCI officer afterward.¹

In the spring of 1989, as Blum left the subcommittee, Kerry authorized him to give his information to the Justice Department; when the department did not act on it, Blum took it to the New York District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau. Kerry meanwhile continued the inquiry with two members of his personal staff. After failing to obtain authorization through the Banking Committee, he obtained it from the full Foreign Relations Committee, without dissent, on May 23, 1991, together with a new subpoena to BCCI; further subpoena authorizations followed on November 27, 1991, February 29, 1992, and June 4, 1992. The report recorded that the investigation's staff "remained limited, amounting to two attorneys, with no budget for travel," which particularly hampered its work outside the United States.¹

Hearings and Report

The subcommittee held public hearings on BCCI on August 1, 2 and 8, October 18, 22, 23, 24 and 25, and November 21, 1991, and on February 19, March 18, May 14 and July 30, 1992, with a closed hearing on October 31, 1991. It obtained documents from BCCI and its attorneys, former officials and creditors, Price Waterhouse, Clifford and Altman, First American Bank, the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Resolution Trust Corporation, Abu Dhabi, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Customs Service and the State Department.¹ Its report, Senate Print 102-140, was issued in December 1992. The archivist Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which published the committee's electronic text, noted that after its release "Sen. Hank Brown, reportedly acting at the behest of Henry Kissinger, pressed for the deletion of a few passages, particularly in Chapter 20 on 'BCCI and Kissinger Associates,'" so that the version printed by the Government Printing Office "differs slightly from the Committee's softcopy version."²