Wafai Dajani

Wafai Dajani is a businessman of Amman, owner of Amman Resources, Wafai Dajani and Sons, Arab Holdings, and Aqaba Packing. His brother was Jordan's minister of the interior, his family had been the Jordanian agent of Mobil Oil since 1921, he had formerly worked for Ghaith Pharaon, and he had a joint venture with Comet Rice of Houston. Representative Henry B. Gonzalez described him as central to the smooth running of the Commodity Credit Corporation's guarantees for Iraq, which the Atlanta branch of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro financed.¹

The Atlanta prosecutors' draft of the indictment in the BNL case named him as a defendant. On February 28, 1991, the day the indictment was returned, a State Department memorandum said the department had "no objections" to the indictment of anyone on the list and recorded "reservations about proceeding against him in light of his connections." He and Hussein Kamel, the son-in-law of Saddam Hussein, appeared in the indictment as unindicted co-conspirators. Gonzalez told the House on March 30, 1992, that the Justice Department had discouraged the indictment of the Central Bank of Iraq and of "a prominent Jordanian with close ties to the King of Jordan" on grounds of foreign policy. The branch manager, Christopher Drogoul, testified that a "Mr. Dejani" had told him of Henry Kissinger: "Kissinger, of course, he said, is the architect of foreign policy in the United States. You know that."¹²