Why Did the 9/11 Commission Not "Follow the Money?", by Lars Schall

Submitted by smartknowledgeu on 03/30/2016 22:43 -0400

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-30/why-did-911-commission-not-follow-money-lars-schallIn the below article, independent investigative journalist Lars Schall explores the time-honored tradition of following the money in an attempt to discover answers to yet unanswered questions regarding the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York City. Here is his report below.



Why Did The 9/11 Commission Not “Follow the Money”?

Lars Schall has put some material together that brings him to the question why the time-proven approach to “follow the money” was dismissed when it came the funding of the biggest terror attack on US soil.
By Lars Schall


Bill:
Howdy! I am an investigative financial journalist from Germany, who’s in the process of finishing a book trilogy on the topic of the so-called “Deep State”. Related to that project, I examined the case of a software program called the Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS), a database system developed by INSLAW Inc., a U.S. information technology company, which was founded by William A. Hamilton, a former analyst with the National Security Agency (NSA). Indeed, in mid-2012, when he became aware of my research connected to PROMIS, Mr. Hamilton contacted me to ask me for help with investigating some certain aspects of the PROMIS case.'

Here’s a recent confirmation for this fact.

Lars:


I am pleased to confirm that I contacted you for help in investigating aspects of the INSLAW Affair in which the U.S. Department of Justice secretly misappropriated the PROMIS legal case management software from INSLAW, Inc., one of its software vendors, and disseminated stolen copies beyond the U.S. Department of Justice for U.S. and Israeli intelligence database projects, including NSA's Follow the Money Project for real-time electronic surveillance of wire transfers of money and letters of credit through the banking system; Israel's sale of a version of PROMIS equipped with a special data retrieval capability to foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies of both friendly and adversarial governments worldwide to facilitate the theft of their intelligence secrets while producing profits for intelligence insiders; the CIA's deployment of PROMIS to virtually every component of the U.S intelligence community as ’compatible database software’ for the gathering and dissemination of U.S. intelligence information between and among the entities that ’produce’ the intelligence information and the entities that ’consume’ the intelligence product; the CIA's deployment of PROMIS to the leading semi-conductor manufacturers in the world so NSA could exercise real-time electronic surveillance of the manufacturing and illicit sale of integrated circuits engineered for advanced defense and military applications; and the sale by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) proprietary company in Cyprus to the drug interdiction entities of Middle Eastern governments of a back-door version of PROMIS so DEA could augment its own drug trafficking intelligence information with the intelligence information stolen from these Middle Eastern governments.
Bill Hamilton
Founder and President INSLAW, Inc.
Washington, D.C.

The Prosecutor’s Management Information System (PROMIS) was originally developed by INSLAW for the US Justice Department. However, according to Guy Lawson’s book entitled Octopus, that sophisticated piece of software “had been so successful that the American intelligence agency apparatus had secretly stolen the software to put it to use covertly. The CIA had reconfigured the code and installed it in 32-bit Digital Equipment Corporation VAX minicomputers. The agency had used front companies to sell the new technology to banks and leading financial institutions like the Federal Reserve. Hidden inside the computer was a ‘trapdoor’ that enabled intelligence agencies to covertly monitor financial transactions digitally for the first time. (…) In Bob Woodward’s book Veil, former CIA director William Casey said the secret money-tracking system had been one of his proudest achievements. (1)

In May 1998, Dr. Norman Bailey published a monograph entitled The Strategic Plan That Won The Cold War, which references the importance of NSA’s Follow the Money Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) mission and also includes a Foreword written by William P. Clark, President Reagan’s National Security Advisor in 1982 and 1983, extolling the role of Reagan’s NSC staff in “bringing about the end of the cold war.” (2) Dr. Bailey also acknowledged several years before on the public record while being interviewed by the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) that NSA undertook its so called Follow the Money Program.

While being interviewed by PBS for a July 12, 1989 television documentary entitled Follow the Money, he stated that the Reagan White House tasked the NSA in 1981 with implanting “powerful computing mechanisms” in three major wire transfer clearinghouses: CHIPS (the Clearing House Interbank Payment System) in New York City, which reportedly records payments and settlements for foreign trade, foreign exchange, and syndicated loans for its 139 member banks in 35 countries; CHAPS in London, which reportedly performs similar functions for Sterling-denominated transactions; and SIC in Basel, Switzerland, which reportedly records the same types of transactions when they involve Swiss Francs. Dr. Bailey described the new NSA SIGINT penetration of the banking sector as giving the United States the capability to follow the money flowing from foreign governments to international terrorists through the international banking system, intercepting the fund transfer messages from one bank to another as they occurred in real time. (3)

When he was interviewed for a July 23, 2008 article by Tim Shorrock in Salon Magazine, Dr. Bailey was quoted as stating that INSLAW’s “PROMIS was the principal software element used by the NSA” for its real-time surveillance of bank transfers. (4)

In a personal message that I received in June 2013, Dr. Bailey told me:
“I was appointed Director of Planning and Evaluation on the staff of the National Security Council at the White House in early 1981, when Ronald Reagan took over the presidency. In that capacity I coordinated national security planning throughout the government and evaluated the results of operations undertaken as a result. One of the projects I personally initiated was the tracing of the funding of activities contrary to the national security interests of the United States back to their sources. This activity was given the nickname ’follow the money’. I worked especially with the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Board and the National Security Agency in carrying out this project (which is very much ongoing today). During this period I visited the NSA twice, and during my visits was told that the principal software utilized for the purpose of tracing money movements was PROMIS. At that time this meant nothing to me, as I was not a computer specialist, but rather a financial and monetary economist. Only much later did I realize that the NSA must have been given this software by the Department of Justice, which had originally utilized it to track cases. I had little to do with the Justice Department in my position, and even if I had known that such a transaction had taken place I would have found nothing wrong with it in principle, assuming the laws regarding patent protection and payment for patented products had been processed normally. That is absolutely all I know from personal experience: the NSA began to use PROMIS software sometime in 1981.”

As mentioned before, in his book, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981-1987, Bob Woodward quotes CIA Director William Casey as claiming that one of his proudest achievements as President Reagan’s CIA Director was the “penetration of the international banking system, allowing a steady flow of data from the real, secret set of books kept by many foreign banks …” (5)

Moreover, a June 5, 1986 email message from David Wigg to Colonel Oliver North, originally classified SECRET/CODE WORD but later partially declassified and released in redacted form as a result of the Iran-Contra investigations, discusses a Reagan National Security Council (NSC) staff proposal to expand NSA’s SIGINT penetration of the banking sector to add another approximately 400 major commercial banks. The email message reported on a meeting that same day with the two top officials of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to obtain a legal opinion, binding on the Executive Branch and authorizing the planned expansion. David Wigg, who had served as CIA Director Casey's liaison from the CIA to the NSC staff before transferring to the NSC staff, (6) described its objective as helping to “track financial flows through Syria, Libya, Iran, etc. through the 400 or so principal banks that make up the interbank market; to notify and work with European Govs. To fill gaps in our coverage and to cooperate with us in freezing/seizing assets as appropriate (all on a confidential basis).” (7)

The use of NSA’s bank surveillance project in the fight against international terrorism led to the decision by President Ronald Reagan to bomb Libya. That decision was based on precise Follow the Money SIGINT evidence that Libya had financed a terrorist attack in Germany that killed an American soldier. “The highly classified initiative, known as ‘Follow the Money,’ had allowed the Reagan administration to trace the Libyan government’s secret funding of a terrorist group that had bombed a disco in Berlin in 1986, killing an American soldier and wounding two hundred civilians.“ (8)

In the Preface of The 9/11 Commission Report, released in 2004, the 9/11 Commission writes near the very beginning:
“Our aim has not been to assign individual blame. Our aim has been to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11 and to identify lessons learned.“

It looks as if the lesson learned is that you can ignore the funding of a terror attack that kills more than 3.000 people on American soil, while during the presidency of Ronald Reagan the U.S. Government took the funding issue of a terror attack in Berlin extremely serious. Why do I say so? Because in Chapter 5, the 9/11 Commission states with respect to the funding issue of the 9/11 attacks:
"Ultimately the question is of little practical significance."


However, ask yourself, if you do not really investigate this question, is “the fullest account of the events surrounding 9/11” still possible? Interestingly enough, NSA’s Follow the Money mission exists until today and was expended in recent years. According to the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2013:
“Indeed, secret documents reveal that the main NSA financial database Tracfin, which collects the ’Follow the Money’ surveillance results on bank transfers, credit card transactions and money transfers, already had 180 million datasets by 2011. The corresponding figure in 2008 was merely 20 million. According to these documents, most Tracfin data is stored for five years.” (9)

Furthermore, Der Spiegel reported:

“Classified documents compiled by the US intelligence agency NSA (...) show how comprehensively and effectively the intelligence agency can track global flows of money and store the information in a powerful database developed for this purpose.
’Follow the Money’ is the name of the NSA branch that handles these matters. (…) Financial transfers are the ‘Achilles' heel’ of terrorists, as NSA analysts note in an internal report. Additional fields of activity for their ’financial intelligence’ include tracking down illegal arms deliveries and keeping tabs on the increasingly lucrative domain of cybercrime. Tracing international flows of money could help reveal political crimes, expose acts of genocide and monitor whether sanctions are being respected. (…) The classified documents show that the intelligence agency has several means of accessing the internal data traffic of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a cooperative used by more than 8,000 banks worldwide for their international transactions. The NSA specifically targets other institutes on an individual basis. Furthermore, the agency apparently has in-depth knowledge of the internal processes of credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard. (…) The collected information often provides a complete picture of individuals, including their movements, contacts and communication behavior. The success stories mentioned by the intelligence agency include operations that resulted in banks in the Arab world being placed on the US Treasury's blacklist. (…) [T]he documents reveal the close involvement of the US Treasury in selecting the program's spying targets. Indeed, according to the documents, there is an exchange of personnel in which NSA analysts are transferred for a number of months to the relevant department in the US Treasury.“ (10)

This report by Der Spiegel certainly documents that the NSA and the US Treasury are still interested in the financial activities related to terrorism. This is underlined by the fact that the US Treasury established in 2004 – the same year in which the 9/11 Commission Report was released – a special branch called the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence (TFI), which oversees the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes (TFFC). Its mission: “to combat terrorist financing domestically and internationally”. (11)

CNN stated in a detailed 2010 report that the US Treasury is:
“…one of the key players in the war on terrorism and smack in the middle of nearly every major international conflict in which the United States is involved. (…) Inside Treasury, the work is done by a low-profile but high-impact unit known as the Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence. (…) Treasury is the world's only government finance agency with its own in-house intelligence unit. It has offices as far flung as Riyadh, Islamabad, Kabul and Abu Dhabi. They're the ones seizing or freezing assets of suspected bad guys -- from terrorists to drug runners. They're a part of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, sharing information with the CIA and the FBI, among others.
‘Treasury is the only finance ministry in the world to have an intel shop that is very much focused on financial intelligence, getting access to information about the networks that support terrorists, weapons proliferation or narcotics traffickers,’ said David Cohen, assistant secretary for terrorist financing. (…) The Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence was put together six years ago following the big federal agency shuffle that created the Department of Homeland Security.
The office has more than 700 attorneys, investigators, analysts and financial experts. And the financial intelligence unit is housed with other Treasury teams, such as the financial crimes unit, that need intel on alleged dirty money transactions. (…) Sometimes the office's work has drawn controversy. For example, since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Treasury has had access to a database of intra-European financial transactions, despite protests about privacy violations.” (12)

Obviously, the U.S. Government disagrees with the 9/11 Commission in a substantial way when it comes to the “practical significance" of this specific issue, i.e. the financing of terrorism. In the 9/11 Commission Report, they tell you not a single thing about the “Follow the Money” program and its capabilities. Moreover, they give you no clue what the U.S. intelligence agencies actually did to track down the financial activities of the alleged 9/11 hijackers and their handlers. And they even made a false statement when they wrote “that the National Money-laundering Strategy Report for 2001 ’didn’t mention terrorist financing in any of its 50 pages’, when in fact that report “mentions it 17 times”. (13)
When you see it through the prism of 9/11, isn’t it justified to ask why the U.S. Government has a “Follow the Money” program at all, if the funding of 9/11 was "of little practical significance"?

Maybe the answer to this question depends on which kind of story the 9/11 Commission had in mind that it wanted to tell the public. An account as the following written by British investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed is for sure at odds with the “mythical historical narrative” that 9/11 has become. He writes:
“In his book Intelligence Matters (2004), Senator Bob Graham, co-chair of the
Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, discusses the contents of a top secret CIA memo dated 2nd August 2002 about two 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The CIA memo concluded that there is ’incontrovertible evidence that there is support for these terrorists within the Saudi government.’
The 28 page section of the Congressional report including discussion of the CIA memo was classified, but some of its contents were leaked, and related issues revealed in press reports. Early in 2000, when Almidhar and Alhazmi arrived at Los Angeles airport, they were picked up by a fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who gave them $1,500 in cash, moved them into his apartment building, and helped them apply for flight school. Al-Bayoumi worked for Dallah Avco, a Saudi-based airline chaired by Prince Bandar’s father, Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz. The firm is a major contractor for the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation.

In the following months, al-Bayoumi and his associates received regular cashier’s cheques of around $2,000 a month, totaling tens of thousands of dollars. These came from Prince Bandar and his wife, Princess Haifa bin Faisal. Both Bandar and his wife claimed the money was donated for charitable purposes (one payment track was made after one of al-Bayoumi’s associates requested assistance from the Saudi embassy for thyroid treatment), and that they had no idea it was being diverted to fund the 9/11 hijackers.
After 9/11, British authorities questioned al-Bayoumi in London about the Saudi money trail to bin Laden’s hijackers. They had discovered secret papers with the private phone numbers of senior Saudi government officials concealed beneath the floorboards of his flat in London. The investigation went nowhere: al-Bayoumi was soon released, and disappeared into Saudi Arabia.” (14)
Fact is, you won’t find this addressed in any way in the final report of the 9/11 Commission. The same is true when it comes to the allegations against a man by the name of Omar Sheikh Saeed. Why should anybody bother about this man?

Well, Nafeez Ahmed writes:
“In his memoirs, In the Line of Fire, Gen. Musharraf revealed that Omar Sheikh Saeed was a MI6 agent who had executed certain missions on behalf of the British intelligence agency, before travelling to Pakistan and Afghanistan where he met Osama bin laden and Mullah Omar. Sheikh Saeed was first recruited by MI6 while at the London School of Economics, recounts Musharraf. The agency persuaded him to join anti-Serb demonstrations during the Bosnia conflict, and later sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad. Musharraf argues that at some point, Saeed likely became ’a rogue or double agent.’
Musharraf’s claims are no doubt self-serving, deflecting from the widely-reported fact that Sheikh Saeed was an ISI asset. But they chime with other facts in the public record. Former US Justice Department prosecutor John Loftus, for instance, who held top secret national security clearances, has confirmed that MI6 was working with leaders of the now banned British group al-Muhajiroun?—?Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Hamza and Haroon Rashid Aswat (who would later become bin Laden’s bodyguard)?—?to recruit British Muslims to fight in Kosovo in 1996.
Sheikh Saeed would have been part of that MI6-backed funnel. Others in Musharraf’s government were convinced that Sheikh Saeed was also a CIA asset. In a little-noted article on Saeed’s murky background in March 2002, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that: ’There are many in Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA.’ Officials believe that ’Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.’” (15) At the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Brigadier Ijaz Shah, the former Director-General of Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan, was “the handler for Omar Saeed Sheikh, who was involved in the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002”, reported Pakistani security specialist Arif Jamal. “Omar Saeed Sheikh surrendered to Brigadier Shah who hid him for several weeks before turning him over to authorities.” (16)

As Nafeez Ahmed explains:
“Brig. Shah’s connection to Omar Sheikh Saeed is deeply troubling. Sheikh Saeed was not simply accused of murdering Daniel Pearl?—?he was al-Qaeda’s finance chief during the 9/11 attacks. After 9/11, Indian intelligence officials confirmed that then ISI director Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad had ordered Omar Saeed to wire at least $100,000 to the chief 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta. As I documented in my books The War on Truth (2005) and The War on Freedom (2002), which was among 99 books selected for the 9/11 Commissioners to use as part of their inquiries, multiple US intelligence investigations corroborated the Indian allegations. US authorities had further confirmed that Sheikh Saeed had wired as much as $500,000 if not more to several of the 9/11 hijackers?—?all at the behest of the ISI. Despite this, US authorities took no measures to designate or extradite either Sheikh Saeed or his ISI boss, Mahmoud Ahmad. As former British Cabinet Minister Michael Meacher observed: ‘It is extraordinary that neither Ahmad nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count [of financing 9/11]. Why not?’” (17) And John Newman, “a former executive assistant to the director of the NSA who spent 20 years in the US Army Intelligence and Security Command, pointed out that despite Sheikh Saeed’s kidnapping of British citizens and related terror offenses, he faced no indictments from the US or Britain, and was even able to travel back to London in January 2000. He had also kidnapped American citizens, but faced no indictments from the US until after 9/11.
‘Did the United States not indict Saeed Sheikh because he was a British informant? Did the agency [CIA] receive information provided by Saeed Sheikh from British or Pakistani intelligence?’ asked Newman rhetorically at a 2005 Congressional briefing on the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report.
‘This would help explain why Saeed Sheikh was not indicted and escaped justice for his crimes and traveled freely around England… If the foregoing analysis has any merit, Western intelligence agencies were receiving reports from a senior al-Qaeda source. Once again, however, al-Qaeda had used Western intelligence to accomplish its own mission. Saeed Sheikh was probably a triple agent.’ Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed’s role in the 9/11 attacks on behalf of the head of the ISI, Newman noted, was completely ignored by the 9/11 Commission Report.“ (18)

Another researcher is skeptical when it comes to the allegations that Nafeez Ahmed is talking about. His name: Peter Dale Scott. The former Professor for English at the University of California in Berkeley writes in his book, The Road to 9/11:
“In October 2001, shortly after the catastrophic events of 9/11, U.S. and British newspapers briefly alleged that the paymaster for the 9/11 attacks was a possible agent of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (or Sheik Syed). There was even a brief period in which it was alleged that the money had been paid at the direction of the then ISI chief, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad. (19) The London Guardian reported on October 1, 2001, that ’U.S. investigators believe they have found the ‘smoking gun’ linking Osama bin Laden to the September 11 terrorist attacks. . . . The man at the centre of the financial web is believed to be Sheikh Saeed, also known as Mustafa Mohamed Ahmad, who worked as a financial manager for Bin Laden when the Saudi exile was based in Sudan, and is still a trusted paymaster in Bin Laden’s alQaida organization.’ (20) This story was corroborated by CNN on October 6, citing a ’a senior-level U.S. government source’ who noted that ’Sheik Syed’ had been liberated from an Indian prison as a result of an airplane hijacking in December 1999.
The man liberated in this way was Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a notorious kidnapper raised in England and widely reported as a probable agent of the ISI. (21) One newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, suggested he may have been a double agent, recruited inside al Qaeda and the ISI by CIA. (22) Others have since argued that Saeed Sheikh worked for both the United States and Britain, since ’both American and British governments have studiously avoided taking any action against Sheikh despite the fact that he is a known terrorist who has targeted U.S. and UK citizens.’ (23)
Subsequent newspaper stories reported on the undoubted relationship of Saeed Sheikh to the ISI, to FBI claims that he wired $100,000 to 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s bank account, (24) to a CNN report that these funds came from Pakistan, (25) and to the uncontested statement that (as later stated in the indictment of the so-called twentieth hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui) ’on September 11, 2001, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi left the U.A.E. for Pakistan.’ (26)
The most sensational charge, alluded to earlier, came from Indian intelligence sources: that Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to Atta at the direction of Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, then director of the ISI." (27)

"All these important and alarming charges are ignored in the 9/11 Commission Report, in which the Saeed Sheikh born in London is not mentioned. (28) Instead, the report assured its readers in a carefully drafted comment that ’we have seen no evidence that any foreign government—or foreign government official—supplied any funding.’ (29) It was later reported, however, that ’the Pakistan foreign office had paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the U.S. to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission report.’ (30) The U.S. government and the mainstream media’s decisions to drop the Saeed Sheikh story in October 2001 were clearly political. On September 20, 2001, President Bush delivered his memorable ultimatum to ’every nation, in every region. . . . Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ There was probably no leader for which the choice was more difficult, or the outcome more unpredictable, than General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. But on October 7, Musharraf fired his pro-Taliban ISI chief, General Mahmoud Ahmad, along with two other ISI leaders. (31) As the historian John Newman, a former U.S. Army Intelligence analyst, has commented: ’The stakes in Pakistan were very high. As Anthony Zinni explained to CBS on 60 Minutes, ‘Musharaf may be America’s last hope in Pakistan, and if he fails the fundamentalists will get hold of the Islamic bomb.’ Musharaf was also vital to the war effort, and was the key to neutralizing Islamists and rounding up Al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan.’ (32)
A number of books, in reporting the Saeed Sheikh story, have focused on the fact that General Ahmad was in Washington on 9/11, meeting with such senior U.S. officials as CIA director George Tenet. (33) In my opinion the mystery of 9/11 must be unraveled at a deeper level, the ongoing groups inside and outside governments, in both Pakistan and America, which have continued to use groups like al Qaeda and individuals like Ahmad, for their own policy purposes. (…) They [the relationships between these groups] are far too complex to be reduced to two or three individuals. The ongoing collaboration of the ISI and CIA in promoting terrorist violence has created a complex conspiratorial milieu, in which governments now have a huge stake in preventing the emergence of the truth.” (34)


The 9/11 Commission surely would have had the chance to address the issue. But again, it decided the question was “of little practical significance".
Let me remind you on the idea of “follow the money”. Fred Shapiro, author of the book, The Yale Book of Quotations, wrote in 2011 for example: "The forthcoming Dictionary of Modern Proverbs, to be published by Yale University Press, quotes (...) a 1975 book by Clive Borrell and Brian Cashinella, Crime in Britain Today: 'Mr. [James] Crane usually offers this piece of sound advice to all new officers joining his fraud department: ‘Always follow the money. Inevitably it will lead to an oak-paneled door and behind it will be Mr. Big.’ It is a tip that has paid off in scores of cases.'” (35)

The alternative catchphrase "Money trail" refers to the same idea of following the movement of money, e.g. from one person to another, from one organization to another, from one bank account to another, in order to find out what is really happening. So, why did the 9/11 Commission deem this tried and tested approach useless? Yours truly leaves the silent answer to the reader's wisdom.

Best regards,
Lars Schall.

SOURCES:

(1) Guy Lawson: “Octopus – Sam Israel, The Secret Market, and Wall Street’s Wildest Con”, New York, Crown Publishers, 2012, page 144. On the PROMIS saga see also Cherie Seymour: “The Last Circle – Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into The Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal”, Walterville, TrineDay, 2011.

(2) See Norman A. Bailey: “The Strategic Plan that Won the Cold War – National Security Decision Directive 75”, published here: http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/book/the-strategic-plan-thatwon-

the-cold-war

(3) For the transcript of the PBS documentary “Follow the Money” see Lars Schall: “Follow the Money: The NSA’s real-time electronic surveillance of bank transactions”, published at LarsSchall.com on February 2nd, 2014 under: http://www.larsschall.com/2014/02/02/follow-themoney-

the-nsas-real-time-electronic-surveillance-of-bank-transactions/

(4) See Tim Shorrock: “Exposing Bush’s historic abuse of power”, published at Salon on September 23, 2008 under: http://www.salon.com/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/

(5) Compare Elliot L. Richardson: “INSLAW’s ANALYSIS and REBUTTAL of the BUA REPORT:

Memorandum in Response to the March 1993 Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Responding to the Allegations of INSLAW, Inc.”, published here: http://textfiles.com/law/rebuttal.txt

(6) David Wigg also earlier worked with William Casey when Casey headed the Export/Import Bank (1974-76).

(7) The National Security Archives at George Washington University published a collection of White House emails that Iran-Contra investigators had recovered from the Reagan National Security Council IBM mainframe computer after the NSC staff had deleted them as the Iran-Contra scandal began to unfold. See here: http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/white_house_email/. The documents

were later also published as a book, see Tom Blanton (ed.):
"White House E-Mail: The Top Secret Computer Messages The Reagan/Bush White House Tried to Destroy", New Press, New York, 1995. For an online reference to the email message from David Wigg to Oliver North see J. Orlin Grabbe: “Plot to Spy on Banks Outlined in White House Email”, January 2, 1997, published at Mem Research under: https://www.memresearch.org/grabbe/email.htm

(8) Guy Lawson: “Octopus”, loc. cit., page 144.

(9) See Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach and Holger Stark: “'Follow the Money': NSA Monitors Financial World”, published at Spiegel Online on September 16, 2013 under:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-nsa-spies-on-internati...

(10) Ibid.

(11) Compare “U.S. Treasury Department Announces New Executive Office for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes”, published at the website of the U.S. Treasury on March 3, 2003 under:

https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/js77.aspx

(12) Compare Jennifer Liberto: “Treasury's quiet war”, published at CNN on February 16, 2010

under: http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/16/news/international/Treasury_intelligence...

(13) Jim Hogue: “Follow the Money? God forbid”, published at Baltimore Chronicle on January 29, 2008 under: http://www.baltimorechronicle.com/2008/012908Hogue.shtml.
Hogue points in this article at “an unusual surge in the currency component of the M1 money supply” in the U.S. in July and August of 2001 that was “never investigated”. Related to this specific case see also Lars Schall:

“How does ’dirty money’ become ’clean money’?”, published at
LarsSchall.com on September 27, 2012 under: http://www.larsschall.com/2012/09/27/how-does-dirty-money-become-clean-m...,

and Lars Schall: "9/11: Currency joins insider trade claims", published at Asia Times Online on September 13, 2013 under: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/GECON-01-

130913.html

(14) Nafeez Ahmed: “The bin Laden death mythology”, published at Insurge Intelligence on July 3, 2015 under:

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-bin-laden-death-mythology-9a...

(15) Ibid.

(16) Ibid. Ahmed writes: “Jamal refers to an interview in 2000 with a Pakistani security official, who disclosed Shah’s relationship with Ahmed Omar Sheikh Saeed on condition of anonymity.”

(17) Michael Meacher: “The Pakistan connection”, published at “The Guardian” on July 22, 2004

under: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/22/usa.september11

(18) Nafeez Ahmed: “The bin Laden death mythology”, loc. cit.

The following footnotes from 19 to 33 are taken from Peter Dale Scott: “The Road to 9/11 – Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America”, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007, pp. 334-335:

(19) Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 104–7; Ahmed, War on Truth, 137–44; and Peter Dale Scott, “The CIA’s Secret Powers: Afghanistan, 9/11, and America’s Most Dangerous Enemy, Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 2 (2003): 233–58.

(20) Julian Borger and John Hooper, “Trail Links Bin Laden Aide to Hijackers,” Guardian, October 1, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,,561001,00.html.Cf. Griffin, 9/11

Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 109–10. The investigators were later identified as the FBI (Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001; CNN, October 28, 2001; and Times [London], November 16, 2001).

(21) For example, Daniel Klaidman, “Federal Grand Jury Set to Indict Sheikh,” Newsweek, March 13, 2002: U.S. officials suspect “that Sheikh has been a ‘protected asset,’ of Pakistan’s shadowy spy service, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.” The story was enhanced by Indian intelligence sources with a more sensational claim: that Saeed Sheikh had wired the money to hijacker Mohamed Atta at the direction of Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad, the director of the ISI at the time (Wall Street Journal,October 10, 2001). Indian sources later downplayed this anti-Pakistani
allegation by suggesting that the money came instead from a ransom paid to another terrorist, Aftab Ansari in Dubai, when a Kolkata businessman, Partha Roy Burman, was kidnapped in July 2001 (B. Muralidhar Reddy, “Omar Sheikh Arrested, Says Pearl Is Alive,” The Hindu, February 13, 2002).

(22) “Did Pearl Die Because Pakistan Deceived CIA?” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 3, 2002,

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/s_20141.html “There are many in Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA. The theory is that with such intense pressure to locate bin Laden, Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.”

(23) Ahmed, War on Truth, 142; cf. John Newman, “Omissions and Errors in the Commission’s Final Report: Rep. McKinney 9/11 Congressional Briefing,” August 18, 2005,

http://911readingroom.org/bib/whole_document.php?article_id=422; Musharraf, In the Line of Fire,

225: “It is believed in some quarters that while Omar Sheikh was at the LSE [London School of Economics] he was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI6. It is said that MI6 persuaded him to take an active part in demonstrations against Serbian aggression in Bosnia and even sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad. At some point he probably became a rogue or double
agent.”

(24) Maria A. Ressa, “India Wants Terror Spotlight on Kashmir,” CNN, October 8, 2001,

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/south/10/08/india.ressa/.

(25) “Sources: Suspected Terrorist Leader Was Wired Funds through Pakistan,” CNN, October 1, 2001, http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/01/inv.pakistan.funds/: “As much as $100,000 was wired in the past year from Pakistan to Mohamed Atta.” Subsequent developments lent weight to the Pakistani connection, such as the arrest of Atta’s alleged controls, Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in Pakistan.

(26) United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Alexandria Division. United States of America v. Zacarias Moussaoui, #108.

(27) “India Helped FBI Trace ISI-Terrorist Links,” Times of India, October 9, 2001; Wall Street Journal, October 10, 2001.

(28) The appendixes note, in a list of names, a “Sheikh Saeed al Masri” as an “Egyptian; head of al Qaeda finance committee.” Instead, following a previous reversal in the U.S. media, the financial role attributed earlier to Sheikh Saeed is now given to “Mustafa al Hawsawi,” the name (or pseudonym) used for the financial transactions (9/11 Commission Report, 436). The only
reference to any Sheikh Saeed in the text says that the Egyptian (or Kenyan) Sheikh Saeed “argued that al

Qaeda should defer to the Taliban’s wishes” and not attack the United States directly (9/11 Commission Report, 251). The report treats Sheikh Saeed and al-Hawsawi as two people, whereas earlier they had been identified in U.S. media reports as the same person.

(29) 9/11 Commission Report, 172.

(30) “Pakistan Weekly Spills 9/11 Beans,” Telegraph (Calcutta), March 13, 2006,

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060313/asp/nation/story_5962372.asp. The Telegraph story cited the Friday Times, a Pakistani weekly, which claimed the story was based on “disclosures made by foreign service officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting in Islamabad.”

(31) Kamran Khan and Molly Moore, “Leader Purges Top Ranks of Military, Spy Services,” Washington Post, October 8, 2001; Thompson, Terror Timeline, 260–61. It was widely reported that Mahmoud was let go for being too sympathetic to the Taliban (for example, Alan Sipress and Vernon Loeb, “CIA’s Stealth War Centers on Eroding Taliban Loyalty and Aiding Opposition,” Washington
Post, October 10, 2001).

(32) Newman, “Omissions and Errors in the Commission’s Final Report.”

(33) For example, Ahmed, War on Truth, 137–46; Griffin, 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, 103–9.

(34) Peter Dale Scott: “The Road to 9/11”, loc. cit., pp. 132-134.

(35) See Fred Shapiro: “Follow the Money”, published at Freakonomics on September 23, 2011

under: http://freakonomics.com/2011/09/23/follow-the-money/

The Secret Behind The Next Global Crash (??)

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/22/2016 18:05 -0500
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-22/secret-behind-next-global-crash

Submitted by Pepe Escobar, Op-ed via SputnikNews.com,

The World Economic Forum in Davos is submerged by a tsunami of denials, and even non-denial denials, stating there won’t be a follow-up to the Crash of 2008.

Yet there will be. And the stage is already set for it.

Selected Persian Gulf traders, and that includes Westerners working in the Gulf confirm thatSaudi Arabia is unloading at least $1 trillion in securities and crashing global markets under orders from the Masters of the Universe – those above the lame presidency of Barack Obama.

Those were the days when the House of Saud would as much as flirt with such an idea to have all their assets frozen. Yet now they are acting under orders. And more is to come; according to crack Persian Gulf traders Saudi Western security investments may amount to as much as $8 trillion, and Abu Dhabi’s as $4 trillion.

In Abu Dhabi everything was broken into compartments, so no one could figure it out, except brokers and traders who would know each supervisor of a compartment of investments. And for the House of Saud, predictably, denial is an iron rule. 

This massive securities dump has been occasionally corporate media, but the figures are grossly underestimated. The full information simply won’t filter because the Masters of the Universe have vetoed it. 

There has been a huge increase in the Saudi and Abu Dhabi dump since the start of 2016. A Persian Gulf source says the Saudi strategy “will demolish the markets.” Another referred to a case of “maggots eating the carcass in the dark”; one just had to look at the rout in Wall Street, across Europe and in Hong Kong and Tokyo on Wednesday.

So it’s already happening. And a crucial subplot may be, in the short to medium term, no less than the collapse of the eurozone.

The Crash of 2016?

So a case could be made of a panicked House of Saud being instrumentalized to crash a great deal of the global economy. Cui bono? 

 

 

Moscow and Tehran are very much on it. The logic behind crashing markets, creating a recession and a depression – from the point of view of the Masters of the Universe above the lame duck President of the United States — is to engineer a major slow down, cripple buying patterns, decrease oil and natural gas consumption, and point Russia on a road to ruin. Besides, the ultra low oil price also translates into a sort of ersatz sanction on Iran.

Still, Iranian oil about to reach the market will be around an extra 500,000 barrels a day by mid-year, plus a surplus stored in tankers in the Persian Gulf. This oil can and will be absorbed, as demand is rising (in the US, for instance, by 1.9 million barrels a day in 2015) while supply is falling.

Surging demand and falling production will reverse the oil crash by July. Moreover, China’s oil imports recently surged 9.3% at 7.85 million barrels a day, discrediting the hegemonic narrative of a collapse of China's economy – or of China being responsible for the current market blues.

So, as I outlined here, oil should turn around soon. Goldman Sachs concurs. That gives the Masters of the Universe a short window of opportunity enabling the Saudis to dump massive amounts of securities in the markets.

The House of Saud may need the money badly, considering their budget on red alert. But dumping their securities is also clearly self-destructive. They simply cannot sell $8 trillion. The House of Saud is actually destroying the balance of their wealth. As much as Western hagiography tries to paint Riyadh as a responsible player, the fact is scores of Saudi princes are horrified at the destruction of the wealth of the kingdom through this slow motion harakiri.

Would there be a Plan B? Yes. Warrior prince Mohammed bin Sultan – who’s actually running the show in Riyadh – should be on the first flight to Moscow to engineer a common strategy. Yet that won’t happen.

 

 

And as far as China – Saudi Arabia’s top oil importer — is concerned, Xi Jinping has just been to Riyadh; Aramco and Sinopec signed a strategic partnership; but the strategic partnership that really matters, considering the future of One Belt, One Road, is actually Beijing-Tehran.

The massive Saudi dumping of securities ties in with the Saudi oil price war. In the current, extremely volatile situation oil is down, stocks are down and oil stocks are down. Still the House of Saud has not understood that the Masters of the Universe are getting them to destroy themselves many times over, including flooding the oil market with their shut-in capacity. And all that to fatally wound Russia, Iran and… Saudi Arabia itself.

Only a Pawn in Their Game

Meanwhile, Riyadh is rife with rumors there will be a coup against King Salman – virtually demented and confined to a room in his palace in Riyadh. There are two possible scenarios in play:

1) King Salman, 80, abdicates in favor of his son, notorious arrogant/ignorant troublemaker Warrior Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 30, currently deputy crown prince and defense minister and the second in the line of succession but de facto running the show in Riyadh. This could happen anytime soon. As an extra bonus, current Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi, not a royal, would be replaced by Abdulaziz bin Salman, another son of the king.

2) A palace coup. Salman – and his troublemaker son – are out of the picture, replaced by Ahmed bin Abdulaziz (who was a previous Minister of the Interior), or Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (the current Minister of the Interior and Crown Prince.)

Whatever scenario prevails, the British MI6 is intimately aware of the whole pantomime. And the German BND might be. Everyone remembers the BND memo at the end of 2015 that depicted Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as a “political gambler” who is destabilizing the Arab world through proxy wars in Yemen and Syria.

Saudi sources — for obvious reasons insisting on anonymity — stress that as much as 80% of the House of Saud favors a coup.

Yet the question is whether a House reshuffle would change their slow motion hara-kiri. The categorical imperative remains; the Masters of the Universe are ready to bring the whole world down in a major recession basically to strangle Russia. The House of Saud is just a pawn in this vicious game.

On The Trail Of Dubai's Stolen Gold: A Robbed Client Breaks The Silence, And A Fascinating Detail Emerges

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/01/2016 18:43 -0500

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-01/trail-dubais-stolen-gold-client-breaks-silence-and-fascinating-detail-emerges

On Christmas Day, 2015, we told our readers the fascinating tale about the Turkish-Iranian gold smuggling ring - perhaps the biggest and most brazen in history, one which lasted for years, which saw billions in gold transported out of Turkey and into Iran to allow Tehran to circumvent the western financial sanctions using gold as a medium for bater, and which was all made possible thanks to the tiny Emirate of Dubai. 

What made this particular instance of gold smuggling especially memorable is that it reached to the very political top in both Turkey, and Iran, and Dubai.

However, while the broad framework of Turkey's exporting of gold to Iran, initially directly and then via Dubai, had been already in the public domain, Zero Hedge first revealed the man, or rather people, who made it all possible: the Dubai gold "trading" company of Gold.A.E. - is a subsidiary of Gold Holdings Ltd, a company which is owned by SBK Business Holdings and Abu Dhabi's second in command, the son and avisor to the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Sultan bin khalifah Al Nahyan.

The reason why Gold.A.E. suddenly, and very dramatically, emerged on the global arena is because as we first reported a week ago, the company's "new" management team admitted that after many months of "inquiries", it had discovered that not only had the "old" management, led by the now former CEO of Gold A.E., Mohammad Abu Alhaj disappeared, but that all the money - and gold - held at Gold.A.E. which once again was primarily a "trading" front for the Turkish-Dubai-Iran gold smuggling triangle, had been stolen.

Here, for those who missed it the first time, is the letter that Gold.A.E.'s stunned clients received in late December:

Dear Client

A group of minority shareholders of GOLD HOLDING suspected that there were questionable financial transactions being undertaken in Gold AE DMCC ("the Company"). Acting on these suspicions they initiated internal investigations. During the course of the investigations the entire then management team abruptly resigned with no notice. Since the majority shareholders also seemed to be unavailable, the minority shareholders did not accept this resignation. However, these persons went to DMCC, submitted their resignations and managed to get their visas cancelled.

Following this, in august 2015, Mr. Andre Gauthier has been appointed as the manager of the Company so that investigations continued and once completed necessary action can be taken to secure the interests of the clients and shareholders of the company. His appointment took effect from August 9 ,2015 . When he took over, new management realized that he now had access to more information concerning the activities of the previous management and, he realized that there had been substantial withdrawals from the company's account to the personal accounts of some of the management and the majority shareholders.

Management has also uncovered information with respect to the existence of a bank account with Arab Bank (Switzerland) Ltd in Switzerland in the name of the Company. An attempt has been made to approach this bank but, since none of the current management or minority shareholders are signatories to the account and, due to the stringent Swiss banking laws and regulations regarding confidentiality, no additional information or access has been provided by the bank.

In order to try and secure/recover monies that had been taken out of the accounts of the company, Mr. Gauthier in his capacity as manager has filed various cases as against the recipients of the funds from the Company (Dubai Police ( Bur Dubai Police Station), Case No: 24378). The minority shareholders are doing everything within their powers to support him in his efforts to recover these monies that were withdrawn from Gold AE in questionable circumstances.

DMCC has alleged that some of these activities undertaken by the previous management are in breach of DMCC's rules and as such they have taken the decision to terminate the license of the Company. We are working closely with DMCC to find a solution and in the meanwhile, we request that you bear with us. In the meanwhile, as a statutory consequence of the license being terminated, the trading platform of the Company has to shut down as of the date of termination of the license which is 24th November 2015.

We trust the forgoing is of assistance.

Sincerely,

On behalf of GOLD AE MANAGEMENT

Or, as we said a week ago, one can summarize the letter above by loosely paraphrasing South Park's infamous episode: "aaaannd it's gone. The gold is all gone."

In a follow up article, "The Mystery Of Dubai's Vaporized Gold: The Plot Thickens", we presented readers with the version of events as laid out by the local press, in this case Arabian Business, which tried to assign responsibility for the theft, while in the process exonerating SBK Holdings and its billionaire owner - one of the most important people in the United Arab Amirates - and "washing" their hands of any accountability.

Recall, "the rush to make sure any link between the criminal Gold.AE and its parent, SBK Holdings-owned Gold Holding is immediately severed. A spokesperson for the DIFC said: "We wish to make it clear that although Gold AE is a subsidiary of M/s Gold Holding, which is a DIFC-based holding company, Gold AE and M/s Gold Holding Ltd are two separate entities."

"We wish also to clarify that M/s Gold Holding Ltd is, to our knowledge, not involved in any trading operations, client-facing business affecting clients of Gold AE or the provision of any financial services. Accordingly, it is not regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority."

But was Gold Holding involved in the smuggling of billions in gold out of Turkey and into Iran? And then, back to Mohamed Abu Alhaj, who just a year ago was the widely respected CEO of Gold AE.

When Arabian Business emailed the public inquiries email address for Gold Holding,info@goldholding.com, it received a reply from Mohammad Abdel Khaleq Abu Al Haj, who is a member of Gold AE’s previous management team facing allegations of fraud.

Al Haj insisted in his email that Gold AE’s existing management team were responsible for the alleged fraudulent activity. He also claimed that requests by him for meetings with shareholders to discuss management issues had been refused.

In short: one side saying the other is guilty, the other side responding identically, blaming the first side. Meanwhile the money - and gold - of the clients of this company, perhaps the most important gold holding company in the Persian Gulf, has been stolen.

* * *

So while we continue to dig into the mystery of Dubai's stolen gold, one which has received absolutely no mention in the western press - in fact the only reason anyone mentioned Dubai in recent months was the dramatic burning of The Address hotel on New Year's Eve (as covered here), we got the following curious email from a former client of the company; a client whose gold is now all gone.

I'm a client of Gold.ae and live in JLT, just a short distance from where the company had their office in Saba 1 Tower, Cluster E, so I was able to carry out reasonable due diligence (for this country) prior to making any investments in PM's. I understood that Gold.ae was under the patronage of the Dubai Royal Family and had received several awards in the UAE prior to my personal involvement. Of course there was absolutely nothing to suspect any wrongdoing at this time, in fact the contrary would be true.

I did not trade with the company in the traditional sense of short term buying and selling but invested in Gold and Silver over a period of time with the view of holding for the long term.I was comfortable with this because the PM's were stored in the vault in Almas Tower (Almas meaning diamond in Arabic) under the guidance of DMCC. This vault was said to be the most secure in the region. My personal investment / loss is in the region of $[redacted].

The first I heard about the recent failing of the company was on the 23rd of December, I did not receive the earlier email dated 16th December. The company made no attempt to contact me prior to that. I have however since been in regular contact with a senior manager, my 'source' who now works out of the Gold Holding office in DIFC. He has been very helpful in passing on information and has given me the contact number of Mr. Andre Gauthier, the new CEO. Interestingly, since you published your recent article he has stopped answering his mobile. Maybe you would like to try and speak with him on our behalf, his mobile number is: 00971 50 [redacted]. You may have more luck speaking with him than the clients suffering large losses!

And here is the punchline from our source's letter:

My source has told me that he now understands that the company knew something was terribly wrong in the March - May period of this year, but it took until December for the company to notify their clients. One has to ask why nothing was done during this timeframe? My source has informed me the main individuals responsible for this are;Mohammed Abu Al Haj, Chairman and founder, Mohammed Ebdah, COO, Mohammed Adnan Younis, Sales Director and Rania, Board member. I've been told all involved are Jordanian, however, one has a Canadian passport, one has a US passport. As you know the management team conveniently resigned their positions and DMCC accepted to cancel their visas. Two of them have since set up separate companies in the UAE.

Yes, the story in which the former management team is scapegoated has been previously reported, but the main question, as our source on the ground asks, is why the all important, Gold Holdings - a company embedded into the political oligarchy of Dubai, and thus of the Persian Gulf - waited seven months before alerting clients that all their funds had disappeared. Even MF Global had just a few days to inform its clients it had gone bankrupt and thousands of small commodity traders had been Corzined.

Because as hard as we try to believe that the person whose task was to break into the Turkish market (and then Russian as we will show shortly), all signs point to the holding company as being instrumental in the vaporization of Dubai's gold.

According to a recent Gold Holdings presentation we have exclusively obtained, Gold Holdings was quite eager to disclose its desire to become the leading and most important gold company in the Persian Gulf, "A new integrated Gold and silver investment vehicle", one which covered everything from mining, to processing, to refining, to trading, to distribution, to jewelry.

This is what the October 2014 presentation boasted about Gold Holding's ambitions - nothing short of global gold commerce dominance:

• To be a premier precious metals investment vehicle, physical.
• To provide shareholders with high quality, long-term exposure to precious metals.
• To offer mine owners an attractive alternative to debt or equity.
• To be a significant and Reliable trader of Gold and Silver

Here is a map showing the tentacles of Gold Holding: note the core presence in Turkey.

The company's Org Chart is extensive, and clearly discloses the infamous Gold A.E., which curiously is shown as registered for trading not only in Dubai, but in... Shanghai? As for the distribution network, it clearly reaches all key regional money centers, and yet Iran is oddly missing...

Here is another Gold Holding chart showing where according to the old management team the risk lay; not surprisingly the biggest risk - that of corporate fraud and embezzlement - was at the Trading level, where the risk was supposed to be the lowest. Oops.

The final slide we want to bring attention to is the one laying out the Board of Directs of Gold Holding: it lists not only the abovementioned Sheikh Sultan Bin Khalifa Bin Sultan Al Nehayan as the Chairman, but the alleged mastermind behind the theft, Mohammad Abu Alhaj, in his role as board member and CEO of... Gold Holding?

Wait, wasn't Abu Alhaj supposed to be the CEO of Gold.A.E., the subsidiary of Gold Holding? Now this is odd because recall that in the Arabian Business article excerpted above, a spokesperson for the DIFC, or the Dubai International Financial Center (a Federal Financial Free Zone administered by the Government of Dubai), there is no direct link between Gold Holding and Gold AE:

"We wish to make it clear that although Gold AE is a subsidiary of M/s Gold Holding, which is a DIFC-based holding company, Gold AE and M/s Gold Holding Ltd are two separate entities."

"We wish also to clarify that M/s Gold Holding Ltd is, to our knowledge, not involved in any trading operations, client-facing business affecting clients of Gold AE or the provision of any financial services. Accordingly, it is not regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority."

It appears "your" knowledge was wrong, because unfortunately it does not make any sense that the person in charge of Gold AE was also, according to the company's own investment roadshow, the CEO of Gold Holding Ltd, and as much as the media and current management wants to make it seem there was an more than arms-length distance between the two in order to blame the theft on the "old management team", the reality is that as recently as late October 2014, or just a few months before the new management team allegedly discovered the supposed "substantial withdrawals from the company's account to the personal accounts of some of the management and the majority shareholders."

In short, the official story in which just one man is scapegoated for the theft of millions in paper and gold currency, makes less and less sense the more we dig.

Which brings us to our conclusion from a week ago:

So, is the former CEO of Gold.AE the criminal mastermind, the person who was responsible for the Turkish gold presence in Dubai, and the one who defrauded Gold.AE... or is he merely the fall guy: after all the new management team, according to Arabian Business, had been at the company since March: how could it take it 9 months to uncover that the company was nothing but a hollow shell, whose assets had been pilfered by the previous management.

And if indeed this crazy story which has every possible James Bond element in it culminates with a case of scapegoating, does that immediately mean that Sheikh Sultan Bin Khalifa, a person at the top of the Gulf's political and financial oligarchy, is involved. Because if he is, so is the US, as nothing happens in the United Arab Emirates without the United States being aware of it. Finally, if that is the case, it means that not only did the US sanction what has been the world's biggest gold smuggling ring, but that it implicitly gave Iran its blessing to use barterable Turkish gold in order to bypass sanctions imposed by... the United States!

Less than a week later, and we are getting closer to showing that we may indeed be looking at a case of not only massive corporate fraud, but even more troubling, a case of blame the other guy, when in reality the person accountable is one of the most important - and richest - people in the country, if not the entire middle eastern region.

But before we focus on the dramatic geopolitical implications of this James Bondian story that gets more complex and fascinating the more we dig, we would first like to help the small investors get back their investment, and all the money (and gold) that was stolen from them.

As such we open it up to our readers as well: below we present the latest until now confidential roadshow by Gold Holding, with hopes that someone will be able to spot something "out of place", in hopes of escalating this case of corporate fraud to the highest possible criminal instance in the UAE... which however will never be high enough if, as we now suspect, it culminates with the second most powerful person in Dubai.

* * *

And finally, while not directly related to the topic of Gold AE's massive fraud, here is the remainder of the Gold Holding investment presentation: we find it remarkable because after having covered the Turkish market, the Dubai company had its eyes set on a vastly bigger market. Russia.

... and not only that, but it was here where we found what may be the most fascinating detail of today's article, namely Gold Holding's (aka Dubai's) hint that Russian gold no longer has to be denominated in US Dollars for transaction purposes. Instead, it can be denominated in Yuan.... as can Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Africa gold transactions, in the process bypassing the SWIFT payment system entirely, and all official traces and records that a gold transaction ever took place!

Now this is simply stunning because over the past several years one of the biggest questions has been how did China smuggle thousands of tons of gold from around the world without the world, at least officially, noticing.

Well, recall how this entire story first developed: it was all thanks to Dubai acting as a middleman in smuggling billions of dollars worth of gold from Turkey to Iran, without anyone noticing for years. Could it be that maybe this tiny yet ultra rich Emirate has also been instrumental in facilitating the transfer of tens of billions of dollars from the west (mostly the UK and Switzerland) but also every other gold producer, and into China?

Because if so, it would promptly answer virtually every unanswered question about the global shadow, and very much undocumented, physical gold wave: one which takes the gold vaulted in the west, and moves it all the way as far east as Beijing... and all with Dubai's blessings?