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While officials were sorting through Rogers' records, a federal prosecutor met last week with Adham in Cairo in what might be a first step toward a possible deal with the Justice Department. Adham's attorney, Washington lawyer Plato Cacheris, denied that a plea bargain was in the works and said his client has documents to prove his innocence. "I'm not trying to plead," said Cacheris.
Like an oil spill, the B.C.C.I. affair has been slowly spreading, tarring a growing list of prominent U.S. politicians with links to the bank. They include Clifford, a former Secretary of Defense who is under criminal investigation; former President Jimmy Carter, who accepted millions in contributions from B.C.C.I. for his presidential library and his charitable foundation; former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who borrowed money from B.C.C.I. and did not pay it back; and former Treasury Secretary John Connally, who bought a Texas bank with B.C.C.I. front man Ghaith Pharaon. Even Secretary of State James Baker's name indirectly came up after acting CIA Director Richard Kerr testified before a Senate panel last month. Kerr revealed that in 1985 the CIA told the Treasury Department, then headed by Baker, that B.C.C.I. secretly owned First American Bank, the largest bank in the nation's capital -- a critical piece of information that Treasury never pursued. Now TIME has learned that last May B.C.C.I. paid $1.3 million in fees to the Washington law firm of Patton, Boggs and Blow, a lobbying powerhouse that includes Ron Brown, chairman of the Democratic Party, among its partners.
The Rogers episode coincided with new evidence that the Department of Justice, through blundering or design, is continuing to hamstring its own investigation and interfere with the aggressive inquiries being pursued by New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau. So far, the Justice Department's record is an odd mixture of passive and aggressive behavior: incuriously passive in its own pursuit of B.C.C.I. but intensely aggressive in turf battles with Morgenthau's investigators.
The mountain of bewilderingly complex information that has been made public about B.C.C.I. has made it easy to lose sight of why so many are agitated about this rogue Pakistani bank or why its connection to a former White House aide should be such an egregious sin. B.C.C.I. was the largest criminal enterprise in history, a bank whose principals stole an estimated $12 billion from their depositors. In the U.S., B.C.C.I. used Miami as a staging ground for the largest single drug-money operation yet recorded, secretly bought and helped run the largest bank in Washington, and played a key role in duping regulators about the failure of Miami-based CenTrust Savings and Loan, one of America's costliest thrift bankruptcies.
TIME reported in July that the Justice Department was understaffing FBI and U.S. attorneys' teams assigned to the case. Morgenthau's complaints that Justice was withholding potential witnesses and blocking access to critical records led then Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to pledge greater cooperation. That promise has not been kept, according to Morgenthau's investigators and Justice Department officials in the field, who have declined to speak on the record for fear of retaliation. "It seems more effort has gone into hunting anyone leaking information to the press," says a Senate investigator.