On May 6 2007, The Washington Times published an article by editor at large Arnaud de Borchgrave, talking about the common link between North Korea, Iran, and Libya. That would be Dr Khan’s network, of course. Or as JRR Tolkien memorably put it in the Lord of the Rings, One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
Anyway, in the course of his article, de Borchgrave mentioned Clearstream, which is a Luxemburg-based clearing division of a German stock exchange, that in the past accused of being an international platform for money laundering and tax evasion via an illegal system of secret accounts, ie, the Clearstream Affair
. But, de Borchgrave noted that earlier this year a book (English translation) was published in France. It is Rapacités (Greed), by Jean-Louis Gergorin, a prominent French strategic thinker
, who pulled a variety of financial strands together as he investigated Clearstream Banking. De Borchrave writes that From Russia’s new robber oligarchs to Colombian drug dealers to Mafiosi networks to Col Gadhafi’s secret payments to Dr AQ Khan for the do-it-yourself nuclear weapons kit, the chicanery Laundromat worked squeaky-clean wonders.
Of course, whether one is a run of the mill gun runner, drug peddler, human trafficker, or nuclear black marketer one has to have a place to cleanse your money. You can’t make that future philanthropic donation and rehabilitate your image and reputation with dirty money. Still, we don’t have any prior information on the Clearstream connection and the only semi-credible information online is de Borchgrave’s article and we don’t have a copy of Gergorin’s book. So if anyone has any further information on this, please let me know.