Word: raab
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...TIME and other media that the agency had kept secret accounts at B.C.C.I. to finance covert aid to U.S.-backed insurgents in Nicaragua and Afghanistan. The scandal may further jeopardize President Bush's nomination of Robert Gates to head the CIA. Last week former Customs commissioner William von Raab named Gates, then deputy director of the CIA, as the source of a five- or six-page 1988 agency report on B.C.C.I., which Gates labeled "the bank of crooks and criminals." That raised potentially embarrassing questions about just how much Gates may have known about the rogue bank...
...Gates is reported to have told a colleague that B.C.C.I. was "the bank of crooks and criminals." Yet when customs agents investigated the bank in 1988, they found "numerous CIA accounts in B.C.C.I.," says former U.S. Commissioner of Customs William von Raab. Those, he says, were being used to pay agents and "apparently to support covert activities...
...good grounds for the CIA to hire him: he was a shrewd intelligence operative, and Panama is an excellent listening post for developments throughout Central America and the Caribbean. But from early on, Noriega seemed to play Uncle Sam for a prize sucker. U.S. Customs Commissioner William von Raab once remarked that "occasionally, they ((Noriega & Co.)) swing some poor slob out, in effect give him away to make us feel they're cooperating." And once in a while Noriega would assist in the seizure of large amounts of narcotics -- cynics suggest as a way to punish traffickers...