Richard J. Kerr

Richard J. Kerr served as Acting Central Intelligence Agency Director. In 1991, he confirmed that the agency had used BCCI to move money around the world.¹

Role in BCCI Affair

Kerr appeared before Senator John Kerry's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations on October 25, 1991, to discuss the CIA's knowledge of BCCI's activities.² He stated that the CIA had not been involved with a BCCI "black network" of thugs and assassins, nor had it used BCCI for arms sales to Iran or diversion of funds for the Nicaraguan Contras.³ He also denied that the CIA had a relationship with Agha Hasan Abedi or had placed him on a watch list.⁴

Despite these denials, Kerr admitted that the CIA did maintain accounts with BCCI, describing them as normal operational accounts.⁵ The Kerry subcommittee's report suggested that William J. Casey's actions, including any role in the Iran-Contra Affair, were undertaken in his position as an adviser to the President, rather than as Director of the CIA, allowing them to be undocumented and deniable.⁶

Testimony

Kerr first spoke publicly on BCCI on August 2, 1991. In open testimony on October 25, 1991, he told the subcommittee: "As an intelligence officer for 30 years, I find myself a little reluctant in an open hearing to talk about intelligence, intelligence sources, and intelligence methods." The subcommittee learned from him that the agency had produced not two memoranda on BCCI but hundreds, disseminated to other agencies, and that it had told the Treasury of BCCI's secret ownership of First American Bank in 1985. In closed session the following week he acknowledged that several questions he had refused to answer in public did not concern classified information, but that he had been "uncomfortable discussing information in public that might embarrass the United States, or any U.S. agency or official."⁷

He described the agency's use of BCCI for intelligence gathering as "limited and routine, and undertaken without the knowledge of any person at BCCI," a characterization a Senate Intelligence Committee audit confirmed according to a briefing given to subcommittee staff, and acknowledged that the agency had made "extensive use of First American" for "normal banking" and savings accounts, which neither Clark Clifford nor Robert Altman had known of before the summer of 1991. He testified that "allegations that the Agency had any direct or indirect relationship with Abedi or recruited him for CIA activities are absolutely baseless." The Kerry-Brown Senate Report found that the official record he presented was "by and large, accurately represented," but contained gaps concerning Kamal Adham, Abdul Raouf Khalil and Adnan Khashoggi "which strain belief."⁷