Clark Clifford - 31 July 1992

Of course the unavoidable, the biggest story of the week and I suppose biggest means the most surprising, the most shocking was the indictment on criminal charges of bribery and corruption of Mr Clark Clifford and his young protégé Robert Altman. I hesitated for a moment there thinking that I ought to give Mr Clifford an identifying tag as famous Washington lawyer or a distinguished advisor to presidents, but that would be like identifying Winston Churchill to a foreign audience as a former British politician or once a prominent historian. Any such label tagged briefly onto Mr Clifford would not help to convey his stature here, it would actually diminish it.

I have known Mr Clifford not well, but on and off since the late Truman days and have admired him unstintingly, especially when he stood up to President Lyndon Johnson – he was Johnson's secretary of defense – in warning him increasingly that the Vietnam war had turned into a disaster and should not be prolonged. For at least 30 years, Clark Clifford served Democratic presidents on the sidelines or rather from on high, the wisest of the wise men to call on in time of trouble. His skills varied from a mastery of corporation law, he was also President Kennedy's personal lawyer to the unsuspected ability in his early days to mount and manage the presidential campaign of Harry Truman in 1948 when the whole world except Clifford and Harry Truman knew that Truman was a goner.

I remember talking with some of the opposing team, the Republicans working to ensure a landslide for their man New York's Governor Thomas E Dewey, once a famous prosecutor of infamous gangsters, they were so amused at the notion that the drowning Truman had called on this rather courtly naive naval aid Clark Clifford to rescue him at the very moment when Thomas E Dewey not waiting for the result of the election had already begun to choose his cabinet.

On the morning after the election, when an unshaven Dewey looked less like the great prosecutor and more like a defeated district attorney in a gangster film, the Dewey people no longer thought of the young 41-year-old Clark Clifford as a naive, they thought of him as a young Machiavelli disguised as a naval lieutenant, they were the only people I've known whoever thought of Mr Clifford in that way until now.

In Washington, any man who gets a reputation for cleverness for shrewdness even for being a smart operator, also picks up unfairly a gossipy reputation as a slick performer operating skilfully in the twilight zone between what is permissible and what is illegal. I can't think offhand of any very able Washingtonian, I mean a senator, congressman, cabinet officer, a lobbyist, who has not at one time or another unfairly written or talked about as being no better than he ought to be. This is the inevitable fate of any first-rate man in a town with a huge population of third-rate hands-on who fatten up their own egos by inventing nasty things about nice people.

I have never until this year heard a syllable of slander, a suggestion of sharp practice about Mr Clark Clifford, he'd been an active advisor to three Democratic presidents, there have only been three in the past 44 years. He went on diplomatic missions for President Carter; he was still that young naval aid to the president when he played poker with Mr Churchill on the train that took them to Fulton, Missouri and the ominous Iron Curtain speech. When he retired into his legal practice, he never lacked for titans as clients, some of the largest and most prosperous corporations in the world. And throughout this long career if there were two words most accurately and often used to define his stature and his reputation they were judgement and probity.

And now what has this majestic, this upright, famous 85-year-old man come to? We shall be told in the next, but I imagine it's going to take a year at least. We shall be told that the case of the BCCI is extremely complicated and not to be understood by the likes of you and me. But to millions of creditors in 10 nations it is a very simple case: where is the money, where are the $20 billion of the bank's reported assets when it was shutdown around the world in July 1991?

Now for the alleged participation of Mr Clark Clifford. I ought to say first that we, the general public know nothing about Mr Clifford's protégé and law partner Mr Altman, but no doubt we shall learn more as time goes by. One of the two grand juries that indicted both of them sat for 16 months, this will not be credited in countries like Great Britain that abolished the grand jury system, I doubt that in any of them it would take a magistrate or a tribunal 16 months to find or not to find a case. But one thing to be said for the grand jury system is that it does require mountainous proofs and the finding of a bill of indictment is therefore more serious for the defendant than it might be from the cursory inspection of the case of two or three judges.

The two separate indictments were brought by two grand juries sitting one in New York State and one brought by federal prosecutors in Washington. Now this could, of course, mean two trials and when you reflect that the preparation for American trials, especially ones involving financial shenanigans can go on and on and on, it just strikes me maybe prematurely that the changes of bringing Mr Clifford to trial at all when he's 86 or 87 or 88 are slim! However, the main charges are simple and damming.

Ten years ago, Mr Clifford by that time a prosperous lawyer became the president of a bank, First American, the largest bank in Washington. The indictment charges that this new bank was illicitly owned by BCCI, which had been examined by Federal regulators long ago and was sufficiently suspect even then to be prohibited from owning any banks in the United States. Nevertheless, the indictment charges, BCCI bought three banks, two of them thanks to the private intervention of Mr Clifford. For about nine years or until the closing down last year, Mr Clifford was the President of the Washington Bank, but maintains he had no idea that the party of the first part BCCI owned it. In other words, he was set up as a respectable front for a bank run by Pakistani managers, a bank whose charters were established in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands and we all know that BCCI was closed down around the world because of investigations that resulted in indictments for fraud, for bribery and for money laundering.

Now, the New York State Grand Jury, the one that sat for 16 months, seriously extends the charges says that the two men – Clifford and Altman – took bribes from among others the founder of BCCI, Agha Hasan Abedi, in the form of legal fees, profits from loans, stock grants and such. It also flatly challenges their declaration of innocence about being unwitting front men, by, it documents meetings throughout the 1980s between Mr Clifford and Mr Altman and top officers of BCCI. This chronicle it would seem now is going to be the toughest of the charges to disprove.

Mr Clifford and Mr Altman maintain that all the evidence against them is circumstantial that there is no credible direct evidence and that the indictments amount to quote "a cruel and unjust abuse of prosecutorial power".

However, we've heard that a former head of Saudi Arabian intelligence came inconspicuously into New York last Monday and that he's pleaded guilty to charges of fraud in the BCCI case. The Manhattan district attorney Mr Morgenthauw who's been on this case for, I think, years and who is of course responsible for securing the New York Grand Jury's severe indictments, he appears to hint that perhaps a direct witness is on hand. He said on Wednesday when Mr Clifford and Mr Altman appeared here that today's indictment spells out that this massive fraud was not just that a criminal fraud scheme as we charged last year, but a sophisticated and corrupt criminal enterprise organised from the top down to accumulate money and gain the power and prestige that the money provided.

Mr Morgenthau was upbeat too on a more pragmatic matter, he said that the case against BCCI was only about 50% revealed and he implied they'd be convincing evidence of the bank's involvement in laundering drug money. The way he put it was this, during the past year or two in New York County we have prosecuted over 30,000 drug dealers, but these were mostly street people, it's quite another deal if you can find the bosses the men who transmit the money from the top. The question, which many more Americans than Mr Clifford's friends are asking, is "how can he come to such a pass?" He has been a very rich man for two decades at least, he is 85, if he got involved with the global crooks of BCCI he was by then already 75, he has had everything by way of honour, love, obedience, troops of friends. He said last year when it was first known that a Grand Jury was sitting that he could rightly be seen as either venal or stupid and this wise sophisticated incorruptible man chose, almost insisted, that he had been stupid. Why, what more did he need from life? Is it possible he was a victim of the famous maxim of Lord Acton who said, I believe, "power corrupts, absolutely power is absolutely delicious".

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