U.S. Secretly Tracks Global Bank Data

The program also represents a major tactical shift. U.S. investigators long have been able to subpoena records on specific accounts or transactions when they could show cause -- a painstaking process designed mainly for gathering evidence. But access to SWIFT enables them to follow suspicious financial trails around the globe, identifying new suspects without having to seek assistance from foreign banks.

SWIFT is a consortium founded in 1973 to replace telex messages. It has almost 7,900 participating institutions in more than 200 countries -- including Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase Bank, Citibank and Credit Suisse. The network handled 2.5 billion financial messages in 2005, including many originating in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates that the United States scrutinizes closely for terrorist activity.

The system does not execute the actual transfer of funds between banks; that is carried out by the Federal Reserve and its international counterparts. Rather, banks use the network to transmit instructions about such transfers. For that reason, SWIFT's data is extremely valuable to intelligence services seeking to uncover terrorist webs.

CIA operatives trying to track Osama bin Laden's money in the late 1990s figured out clandestine ways to access the SWIFT network. But a former CIA official said Treasury officials blocked the effort because they did not want to anger the banking community.

Historically, "there was always a line of contention" inside the government, said Paul Pillar, former deputy director of the CIA's counterterrorism center. "The Treasury position was placing a high priority on the integrity of the banking system. There was considerable concern from that side about anything that could be seen as compromising the integrity of international banking."

Before Sept. 11, a former senior SWIFT executive said, providing access to its sensitive data would have been anathema to the Belgium-based consortium. But the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon led to a new mind-set in many industries, including telecommunications.

SWIFT said the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control sent the first subpoena shortly after Sept. 11, seeking "limited sets of data" to learn about how Al Qaeda financed the attacks.