Part VII -- Dean Henderson: Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Chapter 3 -- Oil & International Banksters

Oil & International Banksters

Posted on 09/13/2016 | 1 Comment

(Excerpted from Chapter 3: The House of Saud & JP Morgan: Big Oil & Their Bankers…)

By 1974 one-third of the new $60 billion pool of OPEC windfall petrodollars flowed into the largest US banks.  In 1975 the late-Senator Frank Church (D-ID) tried to obtain exact figures on this petrodollar recycling process through his Senate Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations.

The banks refused to answer subpoenas or to cooperate in any way.  But Church kept the pressure on and eventually Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns brokered a deal to get the subcommittee some, though certainly not all, pertinent information.  The figures were staggering.

Out of $14.5 billion in Middle East oil revenues that made it to US shores, 78% was deposited into six mega-banks: Chase Manhattan, Morgan Guaranty Trust, Citibank, Bank of America, Manufacturers Hanover Trust and Chemical Bank.  After a spate of recent mergers those six banks are now three: JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Bank of America.  Chase clients included the central banks of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

In 1975 Chase helped establish the Saudi Industrial Development Fund (SIDF), which then passed out lucrative modernization contracts to US multinationals in which Chase held huge blocks of stock.  The Four Horsemen, Bechtel, Grinnell, Lockheed and Northrup all feasted at the SIDF trough.  In 1977 Chase took a 20% share in Saudi Investment Banking Corporation, which sprang up to divert the Kingdom’s newfound oil wealth in a more Westerly direction. [120]

At a 1973 IMF meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, Morgan Guaranty officials convinced Anwar Ali, head of SAMA, to launch a London-based Saudi merchant bank to play the lucrative and highly secretive Eurodollar market, which was being organized by the international banking syndicate.  A Eurodollar is simply a currency traded outside its country of origin.

That same year, future Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker led US bank and oil company power brokers to a Lagos, Nigeria meeting where they convinced both the Nigerian and Kuwaiti governments to accept only US dollars when they sold their premium grades of oil on world markets.  In return, Nigerian Bonny Light and Kuwaiti Light Sweet crude oils would become the benchmark crude oils of the world, commanding a higher price on spot futures markets, which were being organized in New York and London. [121]

By setting a standard where oil could be bought only in dollars, the US bankers were effectively trying to prop up the greenback, which President Nixon was forced to twice devalue sharply in the early 1970’s due to the enormous debts the US had incurred from the Vietnam War.

The establishment of spot futures markets allowed the oil trading arms of powerful US investment banks like Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs to more easily control the price of a barrel of oil on world markets.  With the oil markets now dollarized, the bankers could, by controlling oil prices, also control the value of the US dollar.

The launching of a Eurodollar market created a vehicle for recycling the huge slush fund of petrodollars in an unregulated and highly secretive environment.  Most all the major offshore banking centers where the Eurodollar shuffle takes place (Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Bahamas, Isle of Jersey, Isle of Man, etc.) are British Crown-controlled.

It is through these offshore money centers that Big Oil money flowing through mega-bank subsidiary accounts finances CIA/Mossad/MI6 covert operations and the global drug trade.

In 1975 Anwar Ali founded the Saudi International Bank in London.  The bank plays a key role in the Eurodollar market.  SAMA owns a 50% share, while Morgan Guaranty controls a 20% stake.  Bank of Tokyo, Deutsche Bank, Banque de Nationale de Paris, National Westminster Bank and Union Bank of Switzerland each own a 5% stake. [122]

The White Fathers now directly held the reins over Saudi central bank ARAMCO oil revenues.  Despite claims of the “Saudiization” of the Kingdom’s banking industry in a recent ARAMCO World, Saudi finances are more tightly controlled than ever by the international banks.

The current Executive Director of Saudi International Bank is Peter de Roos, former Morgan Guaranty Trust director.  SAMA is advised by Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Baring Brothers, assuring New York and London control over the oil proceeds generated by the Four Horsemen.

The London Petroleum Exchange and the New York Mercantile Exchange monopolized the new oil spot markets and firms like Philbro, a subsidiary of Citigroup, and Aron, a subsidiary of Goldman Sachs, came to dominate the spot trade.

In 1972, a year before spot oil futures began to be traded, Bank of America took a 30% stake in Karachi, Pakistan-based Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI), a seedy vessel through which petrodollars were recycled amidst a cesspool of drugs, arms and gold traffic.  Saudi intelligence head Sheik Kamel Adham helped organize BCCI’s Black Network, while Sheik Khalid bin Mahfouz, billionaire owner of Saudi Arabia’s biggest bank, the National Commercial Bank, took a 20% stake in BCCI.

The ARAMCO oil spigot was now juicing CIA guns for drugs swaps worldwide.

Shortly after his speech in Guam that same year the wheels came off for President Nixon, eventually leading to his resignation amidst the Watergate scandal.  Nixon’s infamous Saturday Night Massacre, during which he fired Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson and William Ruckleshaus, occurred only three days before Arab OPEC members met in Kuwait City to launch the 1973 oil embargo. Later, at a December meeting in Tehran, OPEC ministers agreed on a new and much higher price target for crude oil.

The Shah received fresh US arms shipments, the non-compliant King Faisal was soon assassinated and Nixon, who angered the international bankers when he allowed the dollar to be severely devalued, was on his way out.  Nixon Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, long-time lieutenant of David Rockefeller, pressured Nixon to step down and busied himself creating the International Energy Agency (IEA) as a banker cartel to counter the OPEC producer cartel.  The French called the IAE a machine de guerre (instrument of war) and refused to join. [123]

All of this coincided with the advent of the Eurodollar and spot futures markets and the Lagos agreement whereby oil would be purchased only in dollars. The Lagos agreement occurred without Nixon approval in an end run by current Trilateral Commission Chairman Volker and the international bankers.

Was the Shah acting on orders from David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan when he pushed for a price hike at the OPEC gathering in Tehran?  After all, the Eurodollar market was now ready for a fresh torrent of petrodollars.  The spot futures market allowed for a new banker control lever over the price of oil.

A higher oil price would bolster demand for the US dollar, which was, after the secret Lagos agreement, the required international currency of the oil trade.  A dramatic price rise in crude would translate into increased demand for the US dollar.  Kissinger’s IAE was just another mechanism through which oil prices could be controlled by the international bankers.

OPEC nations initially shared in the petrodollar spoils generated by the banker’s various schemes.  Between 1972 and 1978 OPEC earnings rocketed from $23 billion to $140 billion.  While the Saudis and others undertook modernization programs, the benefits to the OPEC citizenry were short lived.  Most of the windfall from higher oil prices found its way back into the pockets of Western bankers, since many of OPEC’s ruling elite, fearful of local IMF-induced currency devaluations, stashed their dollars in foreign banks, causing chronic capital flight problems for their home countries.

Other windfall petrodollars went spent buying weapons from US defense contractors like Lockheed, Boeing and Northrup.  Still more greenbacks funded CIA covert operations through spook banks like BCCI and Nugan Hand.

In 1974, the year after the oil price spike, OPEC boasted a balance of payments surplus of $67 billion.  By 1978 the countries had a combined balance of payments deficit of $2 billion. [124]  OPEC is hardly a cohesive cartel.  Though established to benefit the people of developing nations by extracting a fair price for their oil, there are two distinct factions within OPEC.

One faction, known as the price hawks, has historically been led by Libya, Algeria, Iraq and Venezuela.  They have consistently called for quotas within OPEC to keep production down and oil prices fairly high.  Kissinger’s IEA was created as a counter-balance to these price hawks, creating a buyer’s cartel of Western nations which could deploy in a unified stance to lobby for high supply and low prices as soon as the US dollar stabilized.

The West already had plenty of help in this regard through the second faction of OPEC, known as the price doves, which had for decades been led by the Twin Pillars, Iran and Saudi Arabia.  Known as “swing producers”, these countries have, in reality, placed Western interests squarely above the interests of OPEC and of their own people by overproducing oil to keep prices low for the Four Horsemen and their mega-bankers.

Since Iran and Saudi Arabia were OPEC’s biggest producers during the 1973 price spike, they benefited the most from the increase.  In 1977 these two nations produced 48% of all OPEC oil.  When the Shah of Iran fell in 1979, Iran quickly became a price hawk.  The US and the IAE countered by engineering the creation of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in 1981. The GCC, consisting of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, is now firmly in the camp of the Saudi price doves and for its troubles, now receives massive US military protection.

Since both pre-revolution Iran and Saudi Arabia had oil industries owned by the same Four Horsemen through the Iranian Consortium and ARAMCO respectively, OPEC price hawk nations always viewed the Twin Pillars as puppets of the West and traitors to the cause of Arab unity.  Iraq’s Oil Minister once accused his Saudi counterpart Sheik Yamani of being, “in the service of imperialism and Zionism”.

Dean Henderson is the author of five books:Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network, The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries, Das Kartell der Federal Reserve, Stickin’ it to the Matrix & The Federal Reserve Cartel.  You can subscribe free to his weekly Left Hook column @www.hendersonlefthook.wordpress.com