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Saudi
terrorists, Saudi money, and JP Morgan Chase
Almost a year later the Boston
FBI had still done nothing about it. They had, in fact, shut down their cursory
investigation and taken no action.
Thus Ptech was still operating
at the highest levels of American society in the Spring of 2002, when the firm
showed up hustling business at the door of Wall Street’s JP Morgan Chase. The
question is “why?”
On its surface, the answer
appears to be “money.” Lots and lots of Saudi money.
Indira Singh, who later became
a whistleblower, was an unwitting eyewitness to the “train wreck.”
“I invited Ptech to come down
and give a presentation and a customized demo to JP Morgan Chase,” states Singh,
who was a consultant to the bank on “risk architecture,” an arcane software
specialty which calculates enterprise risk. In one of the story’s many ironic
twists, Singh was at the time designing a system to help JP Morgan Chase detect
terrorist money laundering.
When Ptech showed up, Singh
quickly realized that she was witnessing her worst fears about compromised
security come true. “Within half an hour on the premises, I knew something was
up,” she says. “They had almost immediately raised about six of my red flags, to
the point where I walked over to my desk and picked up the phone, and began
making phone calls.”
She talked with a respected
industry figure who had once worked at Ptech. “He was shocked to learn that I
had invited Ptech on the premises. He told me the company belonged to Yasin
Qadi.”
In the course of what would
otherwise have been just another day at the bank, Indira Singh made the amazing
discovery that the firm in front of her at the moment was owned by Saudis,
including Yasin Qadi, with suspected as well as proven ties to the terrorists
who carried out the 9/11 attack.
All this left her feeling more
than a little surprised.
'Chief Thug' at J.P. Morgan
Chase
Moreover, she learned, Yasin
Al-Qadi had been fingered by the Bush Administration in October 2001, over six
months before. So how was it that Ptech was still making presentations to top
American companies six months later?
The industry source Singh had
consulted on Ptech had more bad news than just Yasin Qadi. “There were several
people at Ptech who were targets of Operation Greenquest, a Dept of Treasury
terrorism investigation,” she told us, “and that the company’s funding vehicle,
BMI, was also under investigation. The list just went on and on and on. It was a
spider’s web of connections.”
When Singh flew to Washington
D.C. to meet some of the ex-Ptech employees to verify their allegations, she
received another shock. “I met with five extraordinarily scared people. These
people were scared for their lives, and for their families. Some were about to
leave the country. They told me, ‘Indira, you don’t know who you’re dealing
with.’
Sadly, when she told us what
happened next, it came as no surprise: When Singh alerted authorities, and her
employer, what she encountered was the inexplicable wrath of a top Wall Street
Bank, as well as an official wall of silence at the FBI.
“I took everything I had at
that point back to my boss at JP Morgan Chase,” she states. “He didn’t want to
deal with it. So I called his boss, because at this point I realized I was
sitting on dynamite.”
“The various heads of the
security functions at the bank set up an interview with me, and it quickly
escalated to the bank’s General Auditor, who introduced himself to me as JP
Morgan Chase’s ‘chief thug.’”
We didn’t know banks like JP Morgan had thugs, we
said.
“He introduced himself as the General Auditor,”
said Singh, “but he said, for the real purposes of what he does at JP Morgan
Chase, I am the ‘chief thug.’”
“He basically told me to keep my mouth shut and
look the other way, and enjoy a wonderful life here at JP Morgan, and if I
didn’t I was out.”
Alerting the bosses at one of America’s largest
banks to a terror threat had certainly produced a strange result. Singh had
entered a hall of mirrors, especially after she discovered that the terrorist
threat was real.
A 'problem' with the Boston FBI
“By that time, I had already talked with my
boss’s boss, to whom I had originally gone,” she says. “He told me, it was all
true. He said, ‘everything you laid out on the table was true.’”
When attempts to intimidate her into silence
failed, she became another American hero speaking out despite the consequences,
which will be described in a future report.
After talking to the Boston FBI, Singh said she
had been ''shocked'' and ''frustrated'' to learn that the FBI had not alerted
any of the government agencies using Ptech software that there were questions
about the company's ties to suspected terrorist fund-raisers.
The story is just the latest in a series of
embarrassments for the Boston FBI office, including the scandal over the
agency's coddling of murderous organized crime informants, which led to an
until-now inexplicable threat by President Bush to use “executive privilege” to
cloak details about the Boston FBI from Congressional investigators.
Still, when we first heard whistleblower Indira
Singh tell her story it sounded so incredible that we would have found it
unbelievable…except that we had already encountered stories like it in Venice,
of witnesses bullied and intimidated by authorities into silence.
For example, the FBI was all over tenants at the
Sandpiper Apartments across the street from the Venice Airport, to keep them
from talking about Mohamed Atta’s two-month long ‘shack-up’ with an American
girlfriend named Amanda Keller.
In addition to warning Keller not to talk, a
warning she took so seriously she left town and disappeared from view, FBI
agents bullied and intimidated apartment residents who remembered the pair, and
even the apartment manager of the complex, Charles Grapentine, an ex-marine, who
told us grimly, "They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut.
Nobody likes to hear that: that they didn't see something they know they saw.”
Atta and Amanda’s next door neighbor, a 50-year
old housewife named Stephanie Frederickson, confirmed the apartment manager’s
remarks.
"The question they asked was always the same,"
she told us. "You aren’t saying anything to anybody, are you?"
Now, it seems that FBI agents in Boston were
engaged in equally-dubious behavior. Mistakes, malfeasance, and even missed
opportunities to avert the Sept 11 attack… There’s been a regular drumbeat of
depressing news about the FBI.
Singh told us that disgruntled Boston FBI agents
told her privately that their hands were tied on Ptech, because, they said,
“Saudis have been given a free pass for 9/11.”
“And that,” says Singh, “is when I began to get
really scared.”
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