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The arrest last month of a retired Pakistani general brought into sharp focus B.C.C.I.'s role in selling nuclear secrets. General Inam ul-Haq, who was arrested in Germany, has been sought since 1987 by U.S. authorities in connection with the purchase of nuclear weapons-grade steel for Pakistan's bomb-development program. The Justice Department says that B.C.C.I. was Inam's financier, and the U.S. is seeking his extradition. The alarm has spread to other branches of the U.S. government. In a recent letter to Attorney General Richard Thornburgh, Senate Governmental Affairs Committee chairman John Glenn, a Democrat from Ohio, expressed concern that "B.C.C.I. has been providing financial services to agents of the Pakistani government for the illicit purchase of nuclear weapon-related commodities in the United States and in other nations." Glenn urged Thornburgh to pursue "a full examination of such activities."
"B.C.C.I. is functioning as the owners' representative for Pakistan's nuclear-bomb project," says an international businessman who has worked through the bank to supply Pakistan's nuclear-weapons and missile industry. "In the West, Abedi presented one face, but in the Muslim world, he and his bankers have always promoted themselves as a Third World, Muslim bank that would eventually dominate global finances by using oil dollars and Abedi's network of influence. And he whispered in the ears of the sheiks and the generals that he would bring them the Muslim bomb."
While munitions-control experts in the U.S. have evidence that B.C.C.I. played a role in the delivery of munitions-grade nuclear hardware and technology to Iraq and Iran, it is the Pakistanis who are the chief beneficiaries of Abedi's multifarious services. "You can't draw a line separating the bank's black operatives and Pakistan's intelligence services," says an international arms broker, who provided details of recent B.C.C.I.-generated orders for nuclear-bomb supplies for Pakistan. "And in Karachi his bankers are surprisingly patriotic."
Sources also point to China as a supplier of nuclear hardware for Pakistan, as well as missile-delivery systems for Pakistan, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, including a B.C.C.I.-brokered sale of midrange ballistic missiles to ( the Saudis in 1988. By way of explanation, they cite B.C.C.I.'s close banking relations with China, where $400 million in assets were frozen after the bank's offices were shut down in July. Abedi's bank had been the first Western-style bank allowed to operate on the communist mainland, in part because of Abedi's early support of CITIC, the Chinese investment company that is the doorway to China's military-industrial complex. China, starved for hard currency, has thus far not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty or missile-technology-limitation agreements.