Agency-bank Books

This book is an expose' into the Nugan Hand international bank and it's connections to the CIA.
Jonathan Kwitny is a top-notch investigative journalist and he doesn't disappoint with "The Crimes of Patriots".

Among the topics in the book:
The origin of the "French Connection".

Fraudulent enterprises such as Ocean Shores.

The CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Australian Prime Minister Whitlam.

A shared office building and secretary used by both Nugan Hand and the D.E.A.

The work C.I.A. agents did for Muammar Qaddafi.

Mr. Kwitny cites the work of Alfred McCoy on the "the Golden Triangle" and international heroin trade.
He also covers money laundering operations, particularly for drug traffickers. Nugan Hand had to ba a C.I.A. asset!
The author has frequent footnotes documenting the sources for specific information.

The cast of characters includes some famous intelligence operatives, high ranking military officers, con artists, Air America pilots, and just about any other type of people you would expect in a best seller spy novel. But "The Crimes of Patriots" is nonfiction and very well done at that!

This book ties in nicely with Bo Gritz,
Stan Montieth, Rodney Stich, Fletch
Prouty and Tom Valentine works on the
same type subject matter. Also check
out Terry Redd's Compromised which
gores both Clinton and the Bush, the
Presidencila Elder. Highly recommended.

As an Australian I was both surprised and gratified that an American journalist should want to trace the extraordinary history of the Nugan Hand Bank's Australian operations. This great document decribes the most cut-throat, heroin dealing, crime syndicate ever to have sullied our shores, and all under the covert auspices of the C.I.A. Kwitny's research is exhaustive and his even handed way of presenting his findings is exemplary of fine journalism. The implications hatched in this veritable can of worms will have net-sleuths busy for years tracing the myriad references to the numerous associates of Nugan Hand who vanished into the night only to surface again in the Irangate scandal. Essential reading for anyone trying to come to terms with the scourge of heroin, the world arms trade and those members of the U.S.'s covert agencies that spread misery in their own and other countries...Read it if you dare!

On the advice of a friend who knows one of the "Cast Of Characters" (a "Yank In The Bank"), I ordered a used copy of this long out of print book. What an eye opener. It's amazing what a group of "former" senior military officers and spooks can get up to when allowed to run amok overseas. You name it and they got away with it. Even though some of the principals are dead, nobody has been held accountable for the myriad of crimes that have occurred abroad. With the lack of support rendered by the U.S. government (especially the F.B.I.), it makes one wonder how "former" some of these players really were. It's also amazing how many of these same people reared their ugly heads years later during "Iran-Contra". Read the book and then decide for yourself.

If the press was doing ots jobs, then Ronald Reagan would not have been able to appear in public during his Iran-Contra period without also being bombarded with cries of "What about Nugan Hand!"
The Nugan Hand scandal appears to be the biggest, dirtiest scandal to reach the upper levels of American government since Watergate. The suicide of Nugan and the flight of Hand occurred in Australia, but the scandal had all-American origins. If Australian authorities and reporter Jonathan Kwitny are right, then the coverup, which continues, involves at least the Defense and State departments, the CIA, the FBI, the Commerce Department and the National Security Council.
Such a coverup must reach at least into the president's Cabinet.
First a word about Kwitny, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. No investigative reporter in America is more highly regarded by other reporters, dating back to his exposes of the corrupt Teamsters Union Central States pension fund in the early '70s.
Frank Nugan was an Australian shyster. Mike Hand is an American, an ex-Green Beret decorated for heroism in Vietnam, later a CIA spook. Starting in 1973, the men set up a bank and a number of other financial companies, eventually opening offices around the world, though East Asia was their happy hunting ground.
Nugan Hand Bank may have been set up to launder and over up CIA money transfers; the Caribbean banks that performed that service folded about the time Nugan Hand Bank was set up.
It is not proper to be too definite about Nugan Hand. Because of incompetence by Australian investigators, many of its records were spirited away after Frank Nugan's death in 1980. (Kwitny says, "For an American, used to FBI efficiency, it is hard to imagine cops so spineless that they let criminal suspects carry evidence away right under their noses, while waiting for permission to examine it." That was written before Oliver North's testimony in the Iran-Contra scandal. Americans would have less trouble imagining such a thing now. 2007 update: This review was published in 1988. Kwitny's naivety seems quaint in the 21st century.)
"This isn't a book for people who must have their mysteries solved," Kwitny warns. No, it is only a book for those who need to have their eyes opened.
It is possible to say definitely that Nugan Hand laundered money and moved cash between countries where it is illegal to export cash. Many of their clients were trying to hide money from tax collectors -- for Australians, Nugan Hand usually charged 22 percent for this service.
Nugan Hand also was definitely, though ineffectually, trying to work illegal arms deals, and it probably was involved in a large-scale opium/heroin scheme in Burma.
Certainly, most of its prominent employees were con men, brothel keepers, dope and money smugglers, disbarred lawyers and other sleazy types. Its other top employees and consultants were retired generals of the U.S. Army and admirals of the U.S. Navy and former officials of the CIA, including former director William Colby. What, Kwitny asks, were men like that doing in association with the most notorious whoremasters and heroin pushers in Sydney, Australia?
For one thing, they were encouraging Americans who had served under them in the armed forces to place all their cash with Nugan Hand. Some of these men worked in places like Saudi Arabia, where there are no banks.
The generals and admirals later claimed that they, too, were victims of Nugan and Hand, but documents prove that these high officers were still taking in cash after Nugan Hand was in bankruptcy. Where the cash went is a mystery. The depositors didn't get it back.
Working with fragmentary records, receivers guessed that Nugan Hand owed more than $50 million when it crashed in 1980. It was probably much more -- many of the people who placed their money with Nugan and Hand were in no position to make claims against the estate in bankruptcy.
Nugan and Hand and their employees lived high, but they couldn't have spent $50 million on themselves in four years (though they started in 1973, the cash didn't start to flow in torrents until 1977.) the receivers found assets of only about $2 million.
Someone looted Nugan Hand after Nugan's death. Who?
There is a Hawaii connection to all this. There was a Nugan Hand Hawaii Inc. At the very least, Nugan Hand illegally engaged in banking in the USA without being regulated as a bank. When pushed by Kwitny, various agents of the American government have said that Nugan Hand's crimes, if any, occurred on foreign soil. But this explanation will not explain why Nugan Hand has escaped inquiry for its banking irregularities here.
It gets worse, right up to cold-blooded murder.
But the greatest value of "The Crimes of Patriots" is not just its partial exposure of a nest of very nasty crooks. Kwitny links it to a continuing pattern of lawlessness in the name of American national security that centers in the CIA -- and taints Congress and the highest levels of the executive branch. "As the theory of perpetual covert action is exercised, our national security is perpetually in the hands of criminals," he writes.
This is not news to anyone who has studied the activities of America's spymasters. But that is a tiny fraction of the voters. (See also my review of George Crile's "Charlie Wilson's War.") The torpor of most citizens in the face of repeated revelations suggests that they think that eggs have to be broken to make a spy's omelets. It is the virtue of "The Crimes of Patriots" to demonstrate that this is not so. Others have said as much, but seldom has the message come from anyone with credentials as respectable as Kwitny's.

This is an excellent book of collected essays .The various essays examine the rating agencies and the alleged,claimed,use of mathematically advanced ,quantitative risk management techniques that banks claimed they were using that could identify the different levels of risk that would result from the various different kinds of bonds available for purchase.This would bring into play differing levels of capital requirements and new ways of supposedly insuring against the risks of default.

The most inportant essay in the book is the last essay by Richard J Herring.In fact,the so called advanced, risk management models designed by economists and Subjective Expected Utility(SEU) Decision theory practioners of Bayesian probability theory only works against high frequency hazards with outcomes that have low severity.Risk management models "... are ill-equiped to deal with low frequency high severity events that are likely to be the next severe threat to financial stability... "(2002;p.345).The author makes it crystal clear that he is talking about the Keynes-Knight distinction between risk and uncertainty in Section 4 ,starting on p.353 of his article.THe banking industry is suffering from " disaster myopia ".This involves the belief that there is no such thing as uncertainty.Herring ties his analysis to a famous Keynes article, published in August, 1931 in the Evening Standard newspaper in England, that demonstrated the utter and complete failure of bankers and their economic advisors to recognize the nature of the worldwide threats emerging in the period 1930-31.Exactly the same thing is now occurring today.

One minor flaw in the paper is that Herring is unaware of the technical analysis Keynes had developed in his 1921 A Treatise on Probability book in chapters 6,15,17,20,22,and especially in sections 6,7, and 8 of chapter 26,that allowed one to deal with the problem of uncertainty in a technical manner.Instead,Herring attempts to find the answer in the work of Tversky-Kahneman.Keynes had provided a full technical account long before Tversky and Kahneman were born.


It is unfortunate that Volcker,Greenspan,Bernanke,and Paulson were not familiar with the issues raised by this book.They are repeating the same errors made by bankers in the very early 1930's by concentrating only on bailouts and massive injections of liquidity into the globsl financial system-it takes BOTH additional liquidity AND a renewal of CONFIDENCE in order to make a recovery possible.

As the editor, I can tell you that my goal in writing this book is to get students of international affairs to start looking systematically at what happens when international organizations like the UN or the EU decide to directly engage local non-governmental organizations in the Third World. This phenomenon, while widespread, has only just begun to penetrate the awareness of most experts in the field, and they often don't even know which words to use, let alone ideas, to describe and explain what is happening. I brought together a number of people with quite different perspectives on the issue and had them each write their own piece, after which we met together at a conference and compared notes. What you will find is that, although we use very different terminology, we all ended up saying many of the same things, that UN efforts to build up local organizations from the outside are analogous to other things in international relations, from neo-colonialism to balance of power politics to development aid projects. In other words, we already have the analytical tools to understand most of what is going on. We are also ina position to predict that these efforts to strengthen "civil society" within Third World countries is probably going to largely backfire unless it is done very carefully with great sensitivity to local political and social conditions. Enjoy the book!

Don't let a low credit score keep you from getting the things you want! Credit Repair Made Easy is the most complete do-it-yourself kit on the market. The CD-ROM contains all the letters and forms you need to get negative items taken off your credit report - even Bankruptcies and Judgments! You can do this! You don't need a lawyer or a credit repair consultant. Credit Repair Made Easy shows you step by step how to improve your credit score. It's the best $49.95 you'll ever invest!

Linda Cordes
Author
Credit Repair Made Easy

I agree that the author should NOT be giving her own product a review. This CD doesn't look any different from any other "Credit Repair" CD that you can buy off of eBay for ONE DOLLAR! Most of these CDs contain BS information that you can find for free by doing a Google Search. I wouldn't waste my time, let alone $50 for the CD! The author even had the nerve to give herself 5 STARS! What a joke!!! To the author: Linda Cordes, you have damaged your credibility tremendously by posting a self-review of your useless CD. One word of advice: THINK!

The Author shouldn't be placing a review under customer reviews as they are not anything but BIAS.....only CUSTOMERS that have read and put into practice the methods that are shared should be writing reviews. I found her review of her own work deplorable!
Argh! What nerve!

Any serious reader would be curious about the definition of "market for aid" before reading this little book. I began with doubt on the concept and ended with disappointment and even frustration. Yes, there are demand and supply for aid. However, many sources of aid come without a price. The authors do not start by making a careful distinction between grants and concessional loans that bear interest rates lower than market rates. They simply say "If there is a market for aid, it is a strange one" and then move on. Worse yet, their analyses often mix up aid with private loans and foreign direct investment, without making an important distinction between the social objective of aid and the commercial objective of private finance. It is laughable to read the heading "Can aid agencies be smarter than the invisible hand?" The authors appear to forget that aid agencies are in development business, not business. To be fair to the authors, the book presents a large amount of useful information and data, touches upon many serious quesions, and provides some useful ideas and policy recommendations. But the book suffers badly from a poor conceptual framework that gives reader an impression that the authors attempt to fit the rich stories of development business into a simple "Economics 101" framework. It would have been a success if the authors just focus on the political economy of grants and concessional loans. In comparison, William Easterly's "Elusive Quest for Growth" is 10 times more worthwhile to read.