Ghassan Qassem

Ghassan Qassem was the manager of the Sloane Street branch in London of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), where he was given the accounts of the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal (Sabri al-Banna). While still at the bank he passed detailed information on those accounts to British and American intelligence, "apparently as a paid informant, according to press accounts based on interviews with Qassem," in the words of the Kerry-Brown Senate Report, which called him "a key window on BCCI's support of terrorism."¹

The Abu Nidal Accounts

By 1986, according to the Senate report, the information obtained about Abu Nidal's use of BCCI was detailed enough to be disseminated within the United States intelligence community. In July 1987, on the basis of Qassem's information, the State Department prepared a report on the Abu Nidal Organization and its finances, declassified in 1991 at the request of Senator John Kerry's subcommittee. It described the organization's commercial network as several businesses "created over the past seven years with the long-term goal of establishing legitimate trading enterprises in various countries," directed by its general manager and "principal agent in gray-arms transactions," Samir Hasan Najm al-Din (Samir Najmeddin), from offices in the INTRACO building in Warsaw. Najm al-Din "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," held joint control of each company's accounts with its manager, and forwarded all major contracts to Sabri al-Banna for approval. After the material was disseminated, the Senate report states, the United States "coordinated efforts to shut down the financing of the activities exposed" through BCCI London, "with some success."¹ Laurence Pope, the State Department's associate coordinator for counter-terrorism, testified on the matter before the subcommittee.¹

MI5

The journalist Lucy Komisar wrote that Abu Nidal, a BCCI client since 1981, held a 60 million dollar London account for arms and logistics, and that Qassem discovered that his best customer was the world's most wanted terrorist when he was shown Abu Nidal's photograph in the French magazine L'Express. By her account, BCCI headquarters told him: "Destroy it immediately, and go back to your branch, and don't you ever mention it to anyone, because the general manager has got enough problems without having to add any more." Qassem then alerted MI5, which, Komisar wrote, traced payments from the BCCI account of a Syrian intelligence operative to the Abu Nidal agent who in 1986 had used his girlfriend in the unsuccessful attempt to smuggle a bomb aboard an Israeli airliner at Heathrow; the British warned the CIA, "which apparently was not interested."² The Senate report separately listed among BCCI's clients the brothers Manzur and Ghassan al-Kassar ("the Qassar brothers"), whom it described as associated with terrorism, arms trafficking and narcotics in connection with the government of Syria and with the supply of Eastern Bloc arms to the Nicaraguan Contras.¹