CYBER-WARFARE
Hack Attacks & Empty PROMISes
Is Cyberwarfare Part of Covert Action?
Is Cyberwarfare Part of Covert Action?
Osborne's framing, involvement & investigative backstory on PROMIS, Bill Hamilton, Catherine Austin Fitts, Mike Ruppert, etc. goes here:
The significance of PROMIS software is that it was sold to banks, who wittingly or otherwise bought it with a trap door that allowed those with the requisite codes to get in. The software was allegedly developed in the 70s by a company called Inslaw. We say allegedly because there are those who believe that William and Nancy Hamilton, the owners of Inslaw, stole it themselves in the first place. The Hamiltons sued the government for stealing it. They charged that the government modified it to enable intelligence agencies to access bank records, accounts, and databases. The Promis affair is a difficult one to research, with much mis- or disinformation floating about.
Intelligence from the PROMIS system was also used for insider trading.
Bill Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Hamilton, start Inslaw to nurture PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems). The DOJ, aware that its case management system is in dire need of automation, funds Inslaw and PROMIS. After creating a public-domain version, Inslaw makes significant enhancements to PROMIS and, aware that the US market for legal automation is worth $3 billion, goes private in the early '80s. Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.
Catherine Austin Fitts' understanding of the global financial system and the inner workings of the Wall Street-Washington axis are unparalleled. As the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Housing/Federal Housing Commissioner, Catherine was one of the first to warn of an approaching housing bubble. Her prediction that a 'strong dollar policy' would ultimately lead to a weakened federal credit is currently being proven correct.
Mike Ruppert: According to ex-LAPD drug enforcement officer, Mike Ruppert, this amazing computer software called PROMIS was: “Created in the 1970s by former National Security Agency (NSA) programmer and engineer Bill Hamilton, now President of Washington, D.C.’s Inslaw Corporation, PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) crossed a threshold in the evolution of computer programming. Working from either huge mainframe computer systems or smaller networks powered by the progenitors of today’s PCs, PROMIS, from its first “test drive” a quarter century ago, was able to do one thing that no other program had ever been able to do. It was able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or data bases simultaneously, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating system or platforms on which that data base was then currently installed.”
Software "visionaries" are, have been and will be targeted. Examples of corporate assault of this type include 1) Bill Hamilton of Inslaw, producer of the legendary PROMIS software, 2) Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari Inc, producer of Community Wizard software, and 3) Bryan Mundy of EzGov.com
Historically one of the most egregious examples is the case of Inslaw in which Department of Justice officials, acting under the aegis of Attorney General Ed Meese and former CEO of UPI, Earl Brian, actually stole an enhanced version of the PROMIS software from Hamilton's company, then resold it to numerous foreign governments including Canada and Israel.
Meanwhile the DoJ drove his company into Chapter 7 bankruptcy by withholding at least $1.6 million in payments due. The subject of a Congressional Hearing and a report called "The Inslaw Affair" (House Report 102-857), this case even included a Federal Judge who chided the US Department of Justice for its criminal behavior. Since then, investigation has suggested that a modified version of the PROMIS software with a convenient built-in trapdoor has become the defacto standard in the global banking industry.
A book called "The Octopus" by Kenn Thomas (Feral House) recounts the spooky and convoluted details of the case, as well as the murder of reporter Danny Casolaro who evidently got too close for somebody's comfort.
Catherine Fitt’s targeting by the government was because of what she discovered with software that tracked government funds through communities. What follows is a piece that she wrote in 1999 during the course of the 18 audits and investigations into her investment firm. After that is an interesting piece, “20 Questions“, with interesting information about the drug dollars moving through our financial system. That of course leads to 9.11, WTC7, and the Secret Service among other organizations. From “From the Wilderness“:
First published in 1999 by Catherine Austin Fitts: I was ten years old when the combined action of HUD housing investment and heroin trafficking destroyed my West Philadelphia neighborhood. The combined real estate and drug play destroyed the equity in our homes and businesses. Many of us left. Those who stayed were embroiled in the increasing stress of what happens as neighborhoods deteriorate into crime and decay. I decided that I would learn how money worked. I was too young to understand fully how the combination of HUD investment and drugs could move control and ownership from the many people who lived in a community to a few people who lived outside the community. — C.A.F.
* * * * *
I’m an investment banker. In the eighties I was a Managing Director and member of the Board of Directors at the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co., Inc. I managed the firm’s large municipal and government clients. My projects included the financing of billions of dollars of improvements in New York City’s subway, bus and commuter rail systems. I also organized the financing for hundreds of millions in renovations to the infrastructures of New York and New Jersey. I regularly handled hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions.
I also helped to make tens of millions of dollars in profits for my firm and I raised tens of thousands of dollars for the George Bush Presidential campaign in 1988. Nicholas Brady, who became George Bush’s Treasury Secretary, had been my partner and boss at Dillon Read.
I was a Wall Street insider and a political insider – or so I thought. I was successful at Dillon Read because I created new investment models that helped ordinary people while making a profit. I thought “outside the box.” When Iran-Contra came and went I was oblivious. I had no idea about the drugs. It never entered my mind. Yet today I am convinced that the illegal drug trade, the enormous cheap capital it generates, and the CIA’s role as enforcer/protector for the profits of that trade is a dominant factor in the economy of this country. It is a factor, which is destroying the entire American culture and is utterly out of control. As an investor and banker and as a former Cabinet level appointee, I tell you this is true.
My evolution came slowly. In 1989 I was named Assistant Secretary of Housing-FHA Commissioner under Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp. I managed $300 billion of mortgage insurance, mortgages and properties of the Federal Housing Administration and, as Commissioner, I advised the Secretary on another $1 trillion of mortgage financing. I was fired by Jack Kemp in late 1990 because I would not go along with the questionable political practices, which seem to be built into HUD’s machinery and purpose. But still I did not see the bigger picture.
In 1990, after leaving HUD, I started my own investment company, The Hamilton Securities Group, and I devised new and creative ways to save taxpayers billions of dollars. In 1993, Hamilton secured contracts with HUD through Secretary Henry Cisneros. Hamilton saved taxpayers billions of dollars by taking defaulted HUD housing mortgages, repackaging them and auctioning them on the private market. Hamilton began putting wealth back into inner city projects by hiring women living in HUD housing and teaching them how to use computers to build data bases on how money works in 63,000 neighborhoods throughout America. Hamilton started a data processing company with these women in a HUD project (Edgewood Terrace) in Washington. The women who lived there earned stock in the company. The company made money and proved the concept of what on-line access in communities could do to build jobs and businesses. We used the success of that effort to persuade HUD to fund computer learning centers in other housing projects. Hamilton was extremely successful. We made millions and we saved the government billions.
Fulfilling my childhood dream, Hamilton also created new software and money management tools, which were, for the first time ever, able to map down to the neighborhood, exactly how HUD and other federal money worked, who profited when loans defaulted, and how money came into or left a community. For example, we were often able to see where HUD was spending $100-250,000 per unit on apartment buildings when there was single family housing available within walking distance for $25-50,000.
Secretary Cisneros had been extremely supportive of our work. We had unrestricted access to rich quantities of government financial data that was supposedly public but hard to understand. We were translating that into useable information so that people in any community could see how the money flowed through their neighborhood. We helped HUD get increasing amounts of data up on its web site. An unforeseen side effect for the women at Edgewood, and for Hamilton, was that by seeing clearly how the clean money worked, we also began to see how the dirty money worked.
As an investor for more than twenty years, I believed that it was actually more profitable for people to own their own neighborhoods and businesses and to know exactly how the money worked. The MONEY MAPS we made were so simple to understand that they looked like comic books.
As it turns out we mapped a great deal more than we knew.
In 1996, as reporter Gary Webb was busy writing a series of stories connecting CIA and the Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, I was busy using the money maps in a way that would help people move people from government subsidies to home ownership and entrepreneurship.
I was also advocating that U.S. government investment in communities should be subject to the same public disclosure rules that private companies are obligated to follow under the Securities and Exchange Commission Rules. If you are a shareholder in a company, that company is using your money. The law requires that they use your money legally and that they do their best to protect your money and make you more. To earn money, and to do so in a fair, honest and competitive way, federal and state laws require companies to report performance and key transactions to you, the shareholder. Every citizen is a shareholder in the government. If governments worked like they require corporations to work, they would be required to report to you, in the sunshine, exactly how the money was working, in your neighborhood, and you could either approve – or disapprove of the fairness and effectiveness of that, based upon your understanding of your own needs. That is very threatening to those who have used agencies like HUD as a trough to pay off political cronies.
On August 1, 1996, I gave the keynote address at a Neighborhood Networksconference in Boston, Massachusetts to 500 owners, managers and tenants in private HUD housing. As part of the speech I showed a slide of one of our money maps of Los Angeles. As I put the slide up I made the following statement:
“One of the products that has been most successful for the first data servicing sites, Edgewood Technology Services, has been “geo-coding” databases and mapping. I wanted to show you this map; it’s up on the World Wide Web. This is a map of Los Angeles. Can anyone figure out where south central LA is from looking at where the HUD properties are on this map? This is the same thing as the Washington DC map I showed earlier. The little red dots are single family properties that were financed by (now) defaulted HUD-held mortgages. This map was geo-coded and designed and programmed by a woman who, four months before, had been on unemployment compensation and is a tenant in HUD housing”
If you compare this map with the fact that Freeway Ricky Ross – the crack cocaine kingpin described in Gary Webb’s Dark
Alliance was known for buying up real estate along the Harbor Freeway and selling drugs throughout this exact area – the mathematical correlation is staggering. Every dot represents a HUD mortgage where the taxpayers lost money in a defaulted FHA loan and where somebody else bought the property for pennies on the dollar. Most of those loans defaulted as the crack cocaine epidemic ravaged Los Angeles. The taxpayers bear the costs of not only the defaulted mortgages, but also deterioration in property value, the crime, and ultimately the depopulation due to very expensive prison warehousing and welfare.
Exactly who bought and traded in properties throughout this area should be the subject of congressional hearings looking into corrupt HUD practices from the period and continuing to this day. I suspect that many of the same players connected to the Savings and Loan scandals, who have also been tied to Iran-Contra and CIA’s drugs will surface yet again. Demographically it is also easy to see now that the racial composition of South Central has changed radically and that African-Americans have been geographically and politically fragmented as, I believe, an intended result. Their political power has been weakened.
Just days after showing this first map, I received a subpoena from the Office of the Inspector General of HUD asking for extensive data and records from Hamilton. Suddenly, the loan sales and Hamilton were under investigation. The HUD IGÕs actions were doubly surprising given their intimate involvement in and positive feedback about the loan sales program and because a HUD OIG audit team had just finished an audit of the loan sales program and had informed our project manager and HUD that our performance was excellent and there were no problems whatsoever.
At the same time, we got calls from a team of reporters from US News & World Report. They had been assured “at the highest levels” of the HUD Inspector GeneralÕs office that we were guilty of criminal action and that I and would soon be indicted. The recent favorable audit disappeared. Investigators started doing interviews where they did more seed planting than information gathering.
The “investigators” at HUD started suggesting to reporters that bid rigging had occurred in the loan sales. This was just after members of the HUD IG audit team had actually sat in on one sale, and concluded that bid rigging was impossible. They had also concluded that there was no way that “rigging” could have taken place because in a sealed-bid auction, you cannot favor one bidder when all bidders have access to the same information. That audit report was suppressed while the IG investigators pushed the exact opposite notion to reporters.
On August 10, Bob Dole announced Jack Kemp as his running mate. Meantime, the Republican appropriations committee, chaired by Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis of San Bernardino, gave Susan Gaffney, the HUD IG a large appropriations increase for her program Operation Safe Home, which targeted black communities for visible media “wag-the-dog” roundups of drug offenders. At the same time, our model for computer learning and data processing by people who had a stake in the company that did the work was adopted by Unicorp. Unicorp is the Department of Justice private business that markets prison labor to federal agencies.
Suddenly, the black people who were apparently not smart enough to do database and software development near their children and parents were more than competent enough to do it in prison. The prison investment boom was taking off, fueled by new and longer mandated sentences. We at Hamilton felt like we were walking around with a big bullseye on our back because we wanted the communities of America to know what we knew, which was how to make maps that tracked the money flow in their own home towns.
I was not the only one dealing with Inspector General inquiries. The HUD officials working with me were also inundated with an investigation marked by leaks and dirty tactics. The former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily at HUD, Helen Dunlap, was one of the people targeted. She was from California and had previously run the California Housing Partnership. She had lots of experience in real estate and community development in Los Angeles. Gary Squier, the Housing Commissioner of LA, on loan from Los Angeles, who was not involved in mortgage sales with Hamilton, nonetheless found himself dealing with similar probes from the HUD OIG. He was later to be turned down for a position by the White House despite impeccable credentials. No one could figure out why.
Suddenly I was persona non grata to long time friends and business relations in and around the government. I believe the leak campaign was far more sophisticated than something the HUD Inspector General could or would do on her own. It appeared that major economic and political powers had ordered that Hamilton be destroyed. More importantly, they wanted the evidence of what we knew – the maps – destroyed. That is also why, to this day, we believe the Federal government has destroyed many, but not all, of our tools and databases.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but I am now convinced that in the summer of 1996, our software and mapping techniques uncovered evidence of ethnic cleansing on Los Angeles. Hamilton’s map revealed that one of the most significant effects of the crack cocaine epidemic was that black homeowners, faced with payments on unlivable and unsellable properties, simply defaulted and fled the city to get away from the shootings and the drugs. Those properties: industrial, residential and commercial were scooped up for pennies on the dollar. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who bought the properties and how much money has been made on them since?
Thanks to people like Gary Webb, Peter Dale Scott (Cocaine Politics), Alex Cockburn (Whiteout), Mike Ruppert, brave DEA Agents like Celerino Castillo – and now to the CIA’s own reports – we can prove that the CIA knew full well what it was doing. And, as is his particular gift, Mike Ruppert, who gives us permission to see the obvious, has established that blacks were targeted by CIA and that the people who control our intelligence agencies are the same ones who control our economy and Wall Street. Mike has taken great pains to document these things in previous issues of From The Wilderness.
ETHNIC CLEANSING IN LOS ANGELES
Ethnic cleansing is a bit trickier in South Central Los Angeles than it is in South Central Europe. It is essential in a “democracy” to have people do it in a way that makes it look like they’re “doing it” to themselves. You need a socially induced suicide.
So how do you get people to commit suicide? You make it very attractive for their children to make money doing something illegal. Then you arrest them for it in a very visible way (Remember the battering rams and armored cars?). You design stories to make people blame themselves for what has happened. This is how branding works. Pepsi = tastes good, Black people = cause illegal drugs and crime. Support all this by a national media owned by defense contractors and other corporate interests. That way the nightly news has lots of moneymaking incentives to cover HUD OIG sponsored drug raids in black communities rather than doing a story on CIA drug trafficking.
The most efficient ethnic cleansing is self-financed or, better yet, profitable. Drugs and alcohol are excellent tools toward this end, especially when they are combined with easy access to guns. Sell large amounts of addictive substances to a group of people in an area you want to take over, then use the cash flow to buy up their homes and commercial real estate for 10 cents on the dollar, without much competition, while you enjoy the full value of their cash flow. You can then afford the long holding period required to make the land profitable again after the cleansing period is over.
I believe that if the Federal government would make citizens’ data (and it is our data) available, instead of trying to suppress it, it would prove that taxpayers are losing money to fund ethnic cleansing while the people in South Central LA are losing their lives. And I believe that it was the effectiveness of our maps which threatened to expose the deeper financial agendas of the eighties. I believe our current model, the Solari Investment Model, (www.solarivillage.com) which I am still developing, may well tie Iran-Contra, The Savings and Loan Scandals and the HUD scandals of the late 1980s into one big economic package designed to benefit a very few. The way to start to do this is to look closely at all the government investment, credit and regulations in Los Angeles since 1980.
Our maps suggest to me and others that the crack cocaine epidemic, created by the CIA was, I believe, just as much a program of ethnic cleansing and land grabbing economic warfare as it was about a bunch of rebels in Central America who were notthe equivalent of our Founding Fathers. But this kind of ethnic cleansing was hard to contain and it spread to other races and classes. It reached the rural and suburban neighborhoods of places like Iowa, Ohio and Tennessee. By the end of the 1980Õs it had reached all my friends and relatives who listen to Rush Limbaugh, voted for George Bush and donated money to Oliver North – not knowing that, according to CIA’s own reports, the networks he controlled were the key to the supply of drugs flowing to their kids and communities. As Michael Ventura once wrote, “We all live in the South Bronx now.” White families all across America were hurt by drugs and violence and their pocketbooks also got drained, even as the media reinforced the notion that drugs were a black problem.
The significance of PROMIS software is that it was sold to banks, who wittingly or otherwise bought it with a trap door that allowed those with the requisite codes to get in. The software was allegedly developed in the 70s by a company called Inslaw. We say allegedly because there are those who believe that William and Nancy Hamilton, the owners of Inslaw, stole it themselves in the first place. The Hamiltons sued the government for stealing it. They charged that the government modified it to enable intelligence agencies to access bank records, accounts, and databases. The Promis affair is a difficult one to research, with much mis- or disinformation floating about.
Intelligence from the PROMIS system was also used for insider trading.
- Black Money by Michael Thomas
- Electronic Freedom Foundation Archive on Inslaw
- Nothing is Secret by Kelly O’Meara
- The Plot Thickens in PROMIS Affair by Kelly O’Meara
- PROMIS Trail Leads to Justice by Kelly O’Meara
- PROMIS Spins Web of Intrigue? by Kelly O’Meara
- PROMIS By Mike Ruppert
Bill Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Hamilton, start Inslaw to nurture PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems). The DOJ, aware that its case management system is in dire need of automation, funds Inslaw and PROMIS. After creating a public-domain version, Inslaw makes significant enhancements to PROMIS and, aware that the US market for legal automation is worth $3 billion, goes private in the early '80s. Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.
Catherine Austin Fitts' understanding of the global financial system and the inner workings of the Wall Street-Washington axis are unparalleled. As the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Housing/Federal Housing Commissioner, Catherine was one of the first to warn of an approaching housing bubble. Her prediction that a 'strong dollar policy' would ultimately lead to a weakened federal credit is currently being proven correct.
Mike Ruppert: According to ex-LAPD drug enforcement officer, Mike Ruppert, this amazing computer software called PROMIS was: “Created in the 1970s by former National Security Agency (NSA) programmer and engineer Bill Hamilton, now President of Washington, D.C.’s Inslaw Corporation, PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) crossed a threshold in the evolution of computer programming. Working from either huge mainframe computer systems or smaller networks powered by the progenitors of today’s PCs, PROMIS, from its first “test drive” a quarter century ago, was able to do one thing that no other program had ever been able to do. It was able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or data bases simultaneously, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating system or platforms on which that data base was then currently installed.”
Software "visionaries" are, have been and will be targeted. Examples of corporate assault of this type include 1) Bill Hamilton of Inslaw, producer of the legendary PROMIS software, 2) Catherine Austin Fitts of Solari Inc, producer of Community Wizard software, and 3) Bryan Mundy of EzGov.com
Historically one of the most egregious examples is the case of Inslaw in which Department of Justice officials, acting under the aegis of Attorney General Ed Meese and former CEO of UPI, Earl Brian, actually stole an enhanced version of the PROMIS software from Hamilton's company, then resold it to numerous foreign governments including Canada and Israel.
Meanwhile the DoJ drove his company into Chapter 7 bankruptcy by withholding at least $1.6 million in payments due. The subject of a Congressional Hearing and a report called "The Inslaw Affair" (House Report 102-857), this case even included a Federal Judge who chided the US Department of Justice for its criminal behavior. Since then, investigation has suggested that a modified version of the PROMIS software with a convenient built-in trapdoor has become the defacto standard in the global banking industry.
A book called "The Octopus" by Kenn Thomas (Feral House) recounts the spooky and convoluted details of the case, as well as the murder of reporter Danny Casolaro who evidently got too close for somebody's comfort.
Catherine Fitt’s targeting by the government was because of what she discovered with software that tracked government funds through communities. What follows is a piece that she wrote in 1999 during the course of the 18 audits and investigations into her investment firm. After that is an interesting piece, “20 Questions“, with interesting information about the drug dollars moving through our financial system. That of course leads to 9.11, WTC7, and the Secret Service among other organizations. From “From the Wilderness“:
First published in 1999 by Catherine Austin Fitts: I was ten years old when the combined action of HUD housing investment and heroin trafficking destroyed my West Philadelphia neighborhood. The combined real estate and drug play destroyed the equity in our homes and businesses. Many of us left. Those who stayed were embroiled in the increasing stress of what happens as neighborhoods deteriorate into crime and decay. I decided that I would learn how money worked. I was too young to understand fully how the combination of HUD investment and drugs could move control and ownership from the many people who lived in a community to a few people who lived outside the community. — C.A.F.
* * * * *
I’m an investment banker. In the eighties I was a Managing Director and member of the Board of Directors at the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co., Inc. I managed the firm’s large municipal and government clients. My projects included the financing of billions of dollars of improvements in New York City’s subway, bus and commuter rail systems. I also organized the financing for hundreds of millions in renovations to the infrastructures of New York and New Jersey. I regularly handled hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions.
I also helped to make tens of millions of dollars in profits for my firm and I raised tens of thousands of dollars for the George Bush Presidential campaign in 1988. Nicholas Brady, who became George Bush’s Treasury Secretary, had been my partner and boss at Dillon Read.
I was a Wall Street insider and a political insider – or so I thought. I was successful at Dillon Read because I created new investment models that helped ordinary people while making a profit. I thought “outside the box.” When Iran-Contra came and went I was oblivious. I had no idea about the drugs. It never entered my mind. Yet today I am convinced that the illegal drug trade, the enormous cheap capital it generates, and the CIA’s role as enforcer/protector for the profits of that trade is a dominant factor in the economy of this country. It is a factor, which is destroying the entire American culture and is utterly out of control. As an investor and banker and as a former Cabinet level appointee, I tell you this is true.
My evolution came slowly. In 1989 I was named Assistant Secretary of Housing-FHA Commissioner under Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp. I managed $300 billion of mortgage insurance, mortgages and properties of the Federal Housing Administration and, as Commissioner, I advised the Secretary on another $1 trillion of mortgage financing. I was fired by Jack Kemp in late 1990 because I would not go along with the questionable political practices, which seem to be built into HUD’s machinery and purpose. But still I did not see the bigger picture.
In 1990, after leaving HUD, I started my own investment company, The Hamilton Securities Group, and I devised new and creative ways to save taxpayers billions of dollars. In 1993, Hamilton secured contracts with HUD through Secretary Henry Cisneros. Hamilton saved taxpayers billions of dollars by taking defaulted HUD housing mortgages, repackaging them and auctioning them on the private market. Hamilton began putting wealth back into inner city projects by hiring women living in HUD housing and teaching them how to use computers to build data bases on how money works in 63,000 neighborhoods throughout America. Hamilton started a data processing company with these women in a HUD project (Edgewood Terrace) in Washington. The women who lived there earned stock in the company. The company made money and proved the concept of what on-line access in communities could do to build jobs and businesses. We used the success of that effort to persuade HUD to fund computer learning centers in other housing projects. Hamilton was extremely successful. We made millions and we saved the government billions.
Fulfilling my childhood dream, Hamilton also created new software and money management tools, which were, for the first time ever, able to map down to the neighborhood, exactly how HUD and other federal money worked, who profited when loans defaulted, and how money came into or left a community. For example, we were often able to see where HUD was spending $100-250,000 per unit on apartment buildings when there was single family housing available within walking distance for $25-50,000.
Secretary Cisneros had been extremely supportive of our work. We had unrestricted access to rich quantities of government financial data that was supposedly public but hard to understand. We were translating that into useable information so that people in any community could see how the money flowed through their neighborhood. We helped HUD get increasing amounts of data up on its web site. An unforeseen side effect for the women at Edgewood, and for Hamilton, was that by seeing clearly how the clean money worked, we also began to see how the dirty money worked.
As an investor for more than twenty years, I believed that it was actually more profitable for people to own their own neighborhoods and businesses and to know exactly how the money worked. The MONEY MAPS we made were so simple to understand that they looked like comic books.
As it turns out we mapped a great deal more than we knew.
In 1996, as reporter Gary Webb was busy writing a series of stories connecting CIA and the Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, I was busy using the money maps in a way that would help people move people from government subsidies to home ownership and entrepreneurship.
I was also advocating that U.S. government investment in communities should be subject to the same public disclosure rules that private companies are obligated to follow under the Securities and Exchange Commission Rules. If you are a shareholder in a company, that company is using your money. The law requires that they use your money legally and that they do their best to protect your money and make you more. To earn money, and to do so in a fair, honest and competitive way, federal and state laws require companies to report performance and key transactions to you, the shareholder. Every citizen is a shareholder in the government. If governments worked like they require corporations to work, they would be required to report to you, in the sunshine, exactly how the money was working, in your neighborhood, and you could either approve – or disapprove of the fairness and effectiveness of that, based upon your understanding of your own needs. That is very threatening to those who have used agencies like HUD as a trough to pay off political cronies.
On August 1, 1996, I gave the keynote address at a Neighborhood Networksconference in Boston, Massachusetts to 500 owners, managers and tenants in private HUD housing. As part of the speech I showed a slide of one of our money maps of Los Angeles. As I put the slide up I made the following statement:
“One of the products that has been most successful for the first data servicing sites, Edgewood Technology Services, has been “geo-coding” databases and mapping. I wanted to show you this map; it’s up on the World Wide Web. This is a map of Los Angeles. Can anyone figure out where south central LA is from looking at where the HUD properties are on this map? This is the same thing as the Washington DC map I showed earlier. The little red dots are single family properties that were financed by (now) defaulted HUD-held mortgages. This map was geo-coded and designed and programmed by a woman who, four months before, had been on unemployment compensation and is a tenant in HUD housing”
If you compare this map with the fact that Freeway Ricky Ross – the crack cocaine kingpin described in Gary Webb’s Dark
Alliance was known for buying up real estate along the Harbor Freeway and selling drugs throughout this exact area – the mathematical correlation is staggering. Every dot represents a HUD mortgage where the taxpayers lost money in a defaulted FHA loan and where somebody else bought the property for pennies on the dollar. Most of those loans defaulted as the crack cocaine epidemic ravaged Los Angeles. The taxpayers bear the costs of not only the defaulted mortgages, but also deterioration in property value, the crime, and ultimately the depopulation due to very expensive prison warehousing and welfare.
Exactly who bought and traded in properties throughout this area should be the subject of congressional hearings looking into corrupt HUD practices from the period and continuing to this day. I suspect that many of the same players connected to the Savings and Loan scandals, who have also been tied to Iran-Contra and CIA’s drugs will surface yet again. Demographically it is also easy to see now that the racial composition of South Central has changed radically and that African-Americans have been geographically and politically fragmented as, I believe, an intended result. Their political power has been weakened.
Just days after showing this first map, I received a subpoena from the Office of the Inspector General of HUD asking for extensive data and records from Hamilton. Suddenly, the loan sales and Hamilton were under investigation. The HUD IGÕs actions were doubly surprising given their intimate involvement in and positive feedback about the loan sales program and because a HUD OIG audit team had just finished an audit of the loan sales program and had informed our project manager and HUD that our performance was excellent and there were no problems whatsoever.
At the same time, we got calls from a team of reporters from US News & World Report. They had been assured “at the highest levels” of the HUD Inspector GeneralÕs office that we were guilty of criminal action and that I and would soon be indicted. The recent favorable audit disappeared. Investigators started doing interviews where they did more seed planting than information gathering.
The “investigators” at HUD started suggesting to reporters that bid rigging had occurred in the loan sales. This was just after members of the HUD IG audit team had actually sat in on one sale, and concluded that bid rigging was impossible. They had also concluded that there was no way that “rigging” could have taken place because in a sealed-bid auction, you cannot favor one bidder when all bidders have access to the same information. That audit report was suppressed while the IG investigators pushed the exact opposite notion to reporters.
On August 10, Bob Dole announced Jack Kemp as his running mate. Meantime, the Republican appropriations committee, chaired by Republican Congressman Jerry Lewis of San Bernardino, gave Susan Gaffney, the HUD IG a large appropriations increase for her program Operation Safe Home, which targeted black communities for visible media “wag-the-dog” roundups of drug offenders. At the same time, our model for computer learning and data processing by people who had a stake in the company that did the work was adopted by Unicorp. Unicorp is the Department of Justice private business that markets prison labor to federal agencies.
Suddenly, the black people who were apparently not smart enough to do database and software development near their children and parents were more than competent enough to do it in prison. The prison investment boom was taking off, fueled by new and longer mandated sentences. We at Hamilton felt like we were walking around with a big bullseye on our back because we wanted the communities of America to know what we knew, which was how to make maps that tracked the money flow in their own home towns.
I was not the only one dealing with Inspector General inquiries. The HUD officials working with me were also inundated with an investigation marked by leaks and dirty tactics. The former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily at HUD, Helen Dunlap, was one of the people targeted. She was from California and had previously run the California Housing Partnership. She had lots of experience in real estate and community development in Los Angeles. Gary Squier, the Housing Commissioner of LA, on loan from Los Angeles, who was not involved in mortgage sales with Hamilton, nonetheless found himself dealing with similar probes from the HUD OIG. He was later to be turned down for a position by the White House despite impeccable credentials. No one could figure out why.
Suddenly I was persona non grata to long time friends and business relations in and around the government. I believe the leak campaign was far more sophisticated than something the HUD Inspector General could or would do on her own. It appeared that major economic and political powers had ordered that Hamilton be destroyed. More importantly, they wanted the evidence of what we knew – the maps – destroyed. That is also why, to this day, we believe the Federal government has destroyed many, but not all, of our tools and databases.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but I am now convinced that in the summer of 1996, our software and mapping techniques uncovered evidence of ethnic cleansing on Los Angeles. Hamilton’s map revealed that one of the most significant effects of the crack cocaine epidemic was that black homeowners, faced with payments on unlivable and unsellable properties, simply defaulted and fled the city to get away from the shootings and the drugs. Those properties: industrial, residential and commercial were scooped up for pennies on the dollar. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to know who bought the properties and how much money has been made on them since?
Thanks to people like Gary Webb, Peter Dale Scott (Cocaine Politics), Alex Cockburn (Whiteout), Mike Ruppert, brave DEA Agents like Celerino Castillo – and now to the CIA’s own reports – we can prove that the CIA knew full well what it was doing. And, as is his particular gift, Mike Ruppert, who gives us permission to see the obvious, has established that blacks were targeted by CIA and that the people who control our intelligence agencies are the same ones who control our economy and Wall Street. Mike has taken great pains to document these things in previous issues of From The Wilderness.
ETHNIC CLEANSING IN LOS ANGELES
Ethnic cleansing is a bit trickier in South Central Los Angeles than it is in South Central Europe. It is essential in a “democracy” to have people do it in a way that makes it look like they’re “doing it” to themselves. You need a socially induced suicide.
So how do you get people to commit suicide? You make it very attractive for their children to make money doing something illegal. Then you arrest them for it in a very visible way (Remember the battering rams and armored cars?). You design stories to make people blame themselves for what has happened. This is how branding works. Pepsi = tastes good, Black people = cause illegal drugs and crime. Support all this by a national media owned by defense contractors and other corporate interests. That way the nightly news has lots of moneymaking incentives to cover HUD OIG sponsored drug raids in black communities rather than doing a story on CIA drug trafficking.
The most efficient ethnic cleansing is self-financed or, better yet, profitable. Drugs and alcohol are excellent tools toward this end, especially when they are combined with easy access to guns. Sell large amounts of addictive substances to a group of people in an area you want to take over, then use the cash flow to buy up their homes and commercial real estate for 10 cents on the dollar, without much competition, while you enjoy the full value of their cash flow. You can then afford the long holding period required to make the land profitable again after the cleansing period is over.
I believe that if the Federal government would make citizens’ data (and it is our data) available, instead of trying to suppress it, it would prove that taxpayers are losing money to fund ethnic cleansing while the people in South Central LA are losing their lives. And I believe that it was the effectiveness of our maps which threatened to expose the deeper financial agendas of the eighties. I believe our current model, the Solari Investment Model, (www.solarivillage.com) which I am still developing, may well tie Iran-Contra, The Savings and Loan Scandals and the HUD scandals of the late 1980s into one big economic package designed to benefit a very few. The way to start to do this is to look closely at all the government investment, credit and regulations in Los Angeles since 1980.
Our maps suggest to me and others that the crack cocaine epidemic, created by the CIA was, I believe, just as much a program of ethnic cleansing and land grabbing economic warfare as it was about a bunch of rebels in Central America who were notthe equivalent of our Founding Fathers. But this kind of ethnic cleansing was hard to contain and it spread to other races and classes. It reached the rural and suburban neighborhoods of places like Iowa, Ohio and Tennessee. By the end of the 1980Õs it had reached all my friends and relatives who listen to Rush Limbaugh, voted for George Bush and donated money to Oliver North – not knowing that, according to CIA’s own reports, the networks he controlled were the key to the supply of drugs flowing to their kids and communities. As Michael Ventura once wrote, “We all live in the South Bronx now.” White families all across America were hurt by drugs and violence and their pocketbooks also got drained, even as the media reinforced the notion that drugs were a black problem.
INSLAW & OUTLAWS
DIRTY TRICKS: Why are some people drawn to the Shadow, to archetypal evil? Some are seduced, some are sociopathic, and some are just born into it. Others, finding themselves opposed to it, overcome their natural denial, groupthink and fear to work as watchdogs against it to help others wake up to the unpleasant realities of Transmodern life. Some live their whole lives in the Shadowlands where white is black and black is white, and no one can tell one from the other. See - http://mjrplanet.iwarp.com/index.html
Michael Riconosciuto enters the intrigue. Michael James Riconosciuto, a self proclaimed CIA operative, was a project manager for the Wackenhut Company, a security company that is virtually a CIA front. After Earl Brian of Hadron, Inc. illegally obtained the legal rights to PROMIS from Inslaw, the software company the Bill Hamilton's had owned, he hired Michael to create a "back door" into the software. This would enable the trackers of other intel agencies using PROMIS to be tracked by the CIA. Riconosciuto was working out of the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, California, a hotbed of CIA intrigue and black-ops projects. MJR morphed PROMIS into a data beast.
Previously, Michael Riconosciuto had participated in developing software enabling the CIA to launder drug money raised by trafficking drugs through an airport in Mena, Arkansas while Clinton was governor of the state and Bush Sr. was in the White House. In a signed affidavit to a federal court, Riconosciuto stated "that the Wackenthut-Cabazon joint venture was intended to support the needs of a number of foreign governments and forces, including governments and forces in Central America and the Middle East. The Contras in Nicaragua represented one of the most important priorities of the joint venture".
MEGA-HACKER, Riconsciuto is a twilight creature of both criminal underground and black ops worlds. To enter his world is to enter a wrestling match with the devil of evil that men do, but that for which they must still be held accountable. Likewise, we are all accountable for the collective evil that is done in the name of our nation -- in the name of our corporations. MJR claims he retrofitted INSLAW President Bill Hamilton's stolen software on the Cabazon Indian Reservation to feed secrets to US intelligence from friendly and unfriendly nations. The story is recounted in THE OCTOPUS, including the story of the murder of journalist Danny Casolaro. Riconosciuto made a sworn statement, prior to his arrest, about his participation in a clandestine U.S. intelligence initiative to sell INSLAW's PROMIS to foreign governments.
Riconosciuto subsequently told his story in print but the details and analysis remain the same. This is the dangerous story that got investigative journalist Danny Casolaro killed in 1991 (another “apparent suicide”), best summarized in The Final Circle, by Carol Marshall (1996), who used MJR’s secret files to connect the dots. This is the story that turned MJR’s handlers against him and “poisoned the well,” sending him to prison.
Casolaro was trying to prove that the alleged theft of the Inslaw computer program, PROMIS, was related to the October Surprise scandal, the Iran-Contra affair and the collapse of BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International). It’s no surprise Casolaro dubbed former child prodigy “Magic Mike,” now CIA rogue, “Danger Man.”
Shockingly, Riconosciuto claimed that he and Earl Brian had traveled to Iran in 1980 and paid $40 million to Iranian officials to persuade them NOT to release the hostages before the first presidential election won in 1980 by Ronald Reagan with Bush 41 as his V.P. He also claimed to be connected to satanic cults, small arms trafficking, the clandestine use of Indian reservations nationwide, bio-mass burning plants, "Trojan horses" installed in computers, the Nixon/Reagan/Bush mafia, money laundering through the national HUD agency, the CIA/mafia bust out of savings and loans, sexual slaves used to compromise power mongers, Vietnam drug money laundered to CIA banks, fuel explosives, [and] chemical and biological warfare weapons.
What brought journalist Casolaro to Riconosciuto was an affidavit where MJR claimed that when he worked on the Wackenhut-Cabazon project, he was given a copy of the Inslaw software by Dr. Earl Brian for modification. Riconosciuto also swore that Peter Videnieks, a Justice Department official associated with the Inslaw contract, had visited the Wackenhut-Cabazon project with Earl Brian. Other sources acknowledge that Riconosciuto and Brian were indeed involved in a joint venture between the Cabazon Indians and the Wackenhut Corporation.
Earl Brian ran Hadron, a front company founded in the 80s for questionable activity including germ warfare. Nearly every hospital in the world buys their products. Hadron, with Dr. Earl Brian as director, also provided engineering and computer consulting services. Brian was convicted in the 1980s on fraud charges.
Both Hadron and Dr. Brian were linked with the theft of enhanced PROMIS software from its owner, the Inslaw Corporation. PROMIS was a highly sophisticated computer program capable of integrating a wide variety of databases, now reportedly mated with artificial intelligence. PROMIS was modified for intelligence with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data from adversaries. Bio Rad made the most hazardous medical, biological and nuclear chemicals in the world. BioRad’s Earl Brian started InfoTech, then Hadron to protect the parent company from lawsuits. MJR claims they had the capacity to bioengineer DNA based, genetically targeted pathogens – ethnic bioweapons. In fact, he claimed to engineer them himself with gene-splicing.
BLUETOOTH ANTECEDENT in the 80s?: "The most startling revelation in Riconosciuto's discussion is that the PROMIS software wasn't "bugged" by any ordinary means (say, by providing a secret telephone line access). Instead, it utilized a radical new technology Riconosciuto developed that actually enabled the "bugged" computer to broadcast without wires or phone connections - signals which could be picked up at a remote site, say from an Elint satellite. The software modification forces the computer to produce non-sinusoidal waveforms called Walsh functions, waveforms different from radio waves or other kinds of transmission media. "All the files were read out, all the files were broadcast constantly," Riconosciuto said. He added that the technique has vast commercial applications, and will "allow wireless computer networking, with very small amounts of power, over very large distances."
In his affidavit, Riconosciuto said Videnieks had threatened to retaliate against Riconosciuto if he cooperated with a House Judiciary Committee probe of the Inslaw case. Seven days after filing the affidavit (which was not, technically, part of the committee investigation), Riconosciuto was arrested on drug-selling charges. www.matarese.com/matarese-...index.html
One week after giving an affidavit to Inslaw regarding the PROMIS software in 1991, Riconosciuto was arrested on trumped-up drug charges. The Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case attempted to cover up Riconosciuto's intelligence background by claiming to the jury he was "delusional." A TV station came and pointed a camera out at the desert at Cabazon and said, "Riconosciuto says he modified the PROMIS software here." Of course Riconosciuto didn't modify the software out between the cacti and yucca. Sand isn't good for computers. He did the modifications in offices in nearby Indio, California. The AUSA told reporters Riconosciuto had been diagnosed with a mental condition, the implication being "he's making all this stuff up". Yes, there had been a mental evaluation of Riconosciuto. Diagnosis: NO MENTAL DISORDER. The Department of Justice consistently and maliciously lied to the jury, just as he had been threatened by Justice Department official Peter Viednicks if Riconosciuto cooperated with the congressional investigation of PROMIS. (Grabbe)
On the Warpath
This scandal was closely tied to shady dealings by Wackenhut (second largest privte security firm in the US) to develop biological warfare viruses on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, California. According to Spy Magazine, by 1966, “Wackenhut could confidently state that it had secret files on 4 million Americans.”
And, “Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA, ex-analyst says, on a quid pro quo basis.” They subcontracted black ops projects. “Wackenhut has been used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for years…When they {the CIA} need cover, Wackenhut is there to provide it for them.” CIA director William Casey had once been Wackenhut’s lawyer. Is it surprising then that CIA used Wackenhut to conduct operations it was forbidden to undertake and wants to hide from Congress?
Wackenhut Corporation services included guards and electronic security for banks, office buildings, apartments, industrial complexes, even underground bases. In order to develop vaccines, which sounds innocuous enough, the virus must first be created. Biological warfare viruses have to be highly sophisticated to be used in military applications.
In 1981, Berckmans, the CIA agent turned Wackenhut vice president, joined with other senior Wackenhut executives to form the company's Special Projects Division. It was this division that linked up with ex-CIA man John Philip Nichols, who had taken over the Cabazon Indian reservation in California, as we described in a previous article {"Badlands;" April 1992}, in pursuit of a scheme to manufacture explosives, poison gas and biological weapons—and then, by virtue of the tribe's status as a sovereign nation, to export the weapons to the Contras. (Spy Magazine)
The darker side of Wackenhut's ambitious enterprise, is its direct involvement in illegal and black projects. In the early 1980s, Dr. John Nichols, the Cabazon tribal administrator, by obtaining a Department of Defense secret facility clearance for reservation to conduct various research projects, approached Wackenhut with a detailed joint-venture proposal to manufacture 120mm combustible cartridge cases, 9mm machine guns, laser-sighted assault weapons, sniper rifles, as well as portable rocket-launchers to be built on the Cabazon Reservation, and in Latin America. Details to develop biological weapons were among these proposals.
The reservation was a favorite visiting spot for Saudi sheiks, mob leaders, politicians, military officers, and foreign intelligence people. Two important visitors were Dr. Earl Brian, a businessman with long CIA ties and Peter Videnieks, a Customs lawyer on loan to Justice who Michael said managed the Department a software system. Brian was said to have had many transactions through BCCI and banks in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. According to both Mike and Bob Nichols, Videnieks was involved with them and Dr. Earl Brian in Hadron Corporation, which tried to buy Inslaw, producer of PROMIS software. Hadron also manufactured lasers. Nicaraguan Contra leaders visited it because weapons were being manufactured there for their use. (Michael Riconosciuto: The Math/Science Wizard Who Said too much, Part 4, by Sherman De Brosse)
Any type of biological research on an Indian reservation is not subject to scrutiny by the federal government because Indian reservations are sovereign nations. Wackenhut Corporation attempted to sell "biological warfare viruses" and vaccine kits to the U.S. government to be used against “small countries bordering Albania or large countries bordering the Soviet Union.”
William C. Patrick, III developed the process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at the level of one trillion spores per gram. Patrick has worked with Kanatjan Alibekov, known as "Ken Alibek" since he defected to the US in 1992. Remember, Alibek served as manager for a CIA biological warfare program in 1998. In Russia, Alibek was the No. 2 expert in the FSU's biowarfare program, under Vladimir Pasechnik.
Ken Alibek became President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems, a subsidiary of Alexandria, Va.-based Hadron, Inc., specializing in “the development of technical solutions for the intelligence community.” It received millions in funding for medical biodefense research in the field of non-specific immunity from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and the NIH.
By 1985, Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy in a DoJ investigation. When Inslaw refused to sell to Hadron, DOJ tried to bankrupt and liquidate Inslaw forcing the rock bottom sale of its assets, including PROMIS, perhaps to Hadron. The software was a reward for Earl Brian's role in arranging the so-called 'October Surprise' gambit. After Earl Brian sold PROMIS around the world, he returned his interests to genetic research, biological technology.
Wackenhut, a “private FBI” with black budget connections, is also linked to the Inslaw scandal. MJR said, “The purpose of the PROMIS software modification that I made in 1983 and 1984 was to support a plan for the implementation of PROMIS in law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide. Earl W. Brian was spearheading the plan for this worldwide use of the PROMIS computer software.”
Michael Riconosciuto was director of research for the Wackenhut/Cabazon joint venture in the early '80s. In a March 1991 affidavit for the Inslaw case, Riconosciuto claimed that "in connection with [Riconosciuto's] work for Wackenhut," he modified the stolen Promis software for foreign sales. "Earl W. Brian made [the software program] available to me through Wackenhut after acquiring it from Peter Videnieks, who was then a Department of Justice contracting official with responsibility for the Promis software." Videnieks, a former Customs Service official under Commissioner Chasen, served in the Justice Department from 1981 through 1990.
Do the ends justify the means? Are good and evil relative? Our destiny lies in our answer. Black Ops is a realm where it's nearly impossible to tell the difference. Some consider their mission spiritual warfare, a transcendent battle. Are they deluded or working from a broader paradigm of top secret knowledge? Is evil a vehicle, a means to an end, or an end in itself? What we do know is it bites the hand that feeds it.
DIRTY TRICKS: Why are some people drawn to the Shadow, to archetypal evil? Some are seduced, some are sociopathic, and some are just born into it. Others, finding themselves opposed to it, overcome their natural denial, groupthink and fear to work as watchdogs against it to help others wake up to the unpleasant realities of Transmodern life. Some live their whole lives in the Shadowlands where white is black and black is white, and no one can tell one from the other. See - http://mjrplanet.iwarp.com/index.html
Michael Riconosciuto enters the intrigue. Michael James Riconosciuto, a self proclaimed CIA operative, was a project manager for the Wackenhut Company, a security company that is virtually a CIA front. After Earl Brian of Hadron, Inc. illegally obtained the legal rights to PROMIS from Inslaw, the software company the Bill Hamilton's had owned, he hired Michael to create a "back door" into the software. This would enable the trackers of other intel agencies using PROMIS to be tracked by the CIA. Riconosciuto was working out of the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, California, a hotbed of CIA intrigue and black-ops projects. MJR morphed PROMIS into a data beast.
Previously, Michael Riconosciuto had participated in developing software enabling the CIA to launder drug money raised by trafficking drugs through an airport in Mena, Arkansas while Clinton was governor of the state and Bush Sr. was in the White House. In a signed affidavit to a federal court, Riconosciuto stated "that the Wackenthut-Cabazon joint venture was intended to support the needs of a number of foreign governments and forces, including governments and forces in Central America and the Middle East. The Contras in Nicaragua represented one of the most important priorities of the joint venture".
MEGA-HACKER, Riconsciuto is a twilight creature of both criminal underground and black ops worlds. To enter his world is to enter a wrestling match with the devil of evil that men do, but that for which they must still be held accountable. Likewise, we are all accountable for the collective evil that is done in the name of our nation -- in the name of our corporations. MJR claims he retrofitted INSLAW President Bill Hamilton's stolen software on the Cabazon Indian Reservation to feed secrets to US intelligence from friendly and unfriendly nations. The story is recounted in THE OCTOPUS, including the story of the murder of journalist Danny Casolaro. Riconosciuto made a sworn statement, prior to his arrest, about his participation in a clandestine U.S. intelligence initiative to sell INSLAW's PROMIS to foreign governments.
Riconosciuto subsequently told his story in print but the details and analysis remain the same. This is the dangerous story that got investigative journalist Danny Casolaro killed in 1991 (another “apparent suicide”), best summarized in The Final Circle, by Carol Marshall (1996), who used MJR’s secret files to connect the dots. This is the story that turned MJR’s handlers against him and “poisoned the well,” sending him to prison.
Casolaro was trying to prove that the alleged theft of the Inslaw computer program, PROMIS, was related to the October Surprise scandal, the Iran-Contra affair and the collapse of BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International). It’s no surprise Casolaro dubbed former child prodigy “Magic Mike,” now CIA rogue, “Danger Man.”
Shockingly, Riconosciuto claimed that he and Earl Brian had traveled to Iran in 1980 and paid $40 million to Iranian officials to persuade them NOT to release the hostages before the first presidential election won in 1980 by Ronald Reagan with Bush 41 as his V.P. He also claimed to be connected to satanic cults, small arms trafficking, the clandestine use of Indian reservations nationwide, bio-mass burning plants, "Trojan horses" installed in computers, the Nixon/Reagan/Bush mafia, money laundering through the national HUD agency, the CIA/mafia bust out of savings and loans, sexual slaves used to compromise power mongers, Vietnam drug money laundered to CIA banks, fuel explosives, [and] chemical and biological warfare weapons.
What brought journalist Casolaro to Riconosciuto was an affidavit where MJR claimed that when he worked on the Wackenhut-Cabazon project, he was given a copy of the Inslaw software by Dr. Earl Brian for modification. Riconosciuto also swore that Peter Videnieks, a Justice Department official associated with the Inslaw contract, had visited the Wackenhut-Cabazon project with Earl Brian. Other sources acknowledge that Riconosciuto and Brian were indeed involved in a joint venture between the Cabazon Indians and the Wackenhut Corporation.
Earl Brian ran Hadron, a front company founded in the 80s for questionable activity including germ warfare. Nearly every hospital in the world buys their products. Hadron, with Dr. Earl Brian as director, also provided engineering and computer consulting services. Brian was convicted in the 1980s on fraud charges.
Both Hadron and Dr. Brian were linked with the theft of enhanced PROMIS software from its owner, the Inslaw Corporation. PROMIS was a highly sophisticated computer program capable of integrating a wide variety of databases, now reportedly mated with artificial intelligence. PROMIS was modified for intelligence with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data from adversaries. Bio Rad made the most hazardous medical, biological and nuclear chemicals in the world. BioRad’s Earl Brian started InfoTech, then Hadron to protect the parent company from lawsuits. MJR claims they had the capacity to bioengineer DNA based, genetically targeted pathogens – ethnic bioweapons. In fact, he claimed to engineer them himself with gene-splicing.
BLUETOOTH ANTECEDENT in the 80s?: "The most startling revelation in Riconosciuto's discussion is that the PROMIS software wasn't "bugged" by any ordinary means (say, by providing a secret telephone line access). Instead, it utilized a radical new technology Riconosciuto developed that actually enabled the "bugged" computer to broadcast without wires or phone connections - signals which could be picked up at a remote site, say from an Elint satellite. The software modification forces the computer to produce non-sinusoidal waveforms called Walsh functions, waveforms different from radio waves or other kinds of transmission media. "All the files were read out, all the files were broadcast constantly," Riconosciuto said. He added that the technique has vast commercial applications, and will "allow wireless computer networking, with very small amounts of power, over very large distances."
In his affidavit, Riconosciuto said Videnieks had threatened to retaliate against Riconosciuto if he cooperated with a House Judiciary Committee probe of the Inslaw case. Seven days after filing the affidavit (which was not, technically, part of the committee investigation), Riconosciuto was arrested on drug-selling charges. www.matarese.com/matarese-...index.html
One week after giving an affidavit to Inslaw regarding the PROMIS software in 1991, Riconosciuto was arrested on trumped-up drug charges. The Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case attempted to cover up Riconosciuto's intelligence background by claiming to the jury he was "delusional." A TV station came and pointed a camera out at the desert at Cabazon and said, "Riconosciuto says he modified the PROMIS software here." Of course Riconosciuto didn't modify the software out between the cacti and yucca. Sand isn't good for computers. He did the modifications in offices in nearby Indio, California. The AUSA told reporters Riconosciuto had been diagnosed with a mental condition, the implication being "he's making all this stuff up". Yes, there had been a mental evaluation of Riconosciuto. Diagnosis: NO MENTAL DISORDER. The Department of Justice consistently and maliciously lied to the jury, just as he had been threatened by Justice Department official Peter Viednicks if Riconosciuto cooperated with the congressional investigation of PROMIS. (Grabbe)
On the Warpath
This scandal was closely tied to shady dealings by Wackenhut (second largest privte security firm in the US) to develop biological warfare viruses on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, California. According to Spy Magazine, by 1966, “Wackenhut could confidently state that it had secret files on 4 million Americans.”
And, “Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA, ex-analyst says, on a quid pro quo basis.” They subcontracted black ops projects. “Wackenhut has been used by the CIA and other intelligence agencies for years…When they {the CIA} need cover, Wackenhut is there to provide it for them.” CIA director William Casey had once been Wackenhut’s lawyer. Is it surprising then that CIA used Wackenhut to conduct operations it was forbidden to undertake and wants to hide from Congress?
Wackenhut Corporation services included guards and electronic security for banks, office buildings, apartments, industrial complexes, even underground bases. In order to develop vaccines, which sounds innocuous enough, the virus must first be created. Biological warfare viruses have to be highly sophisticated to be used in military applications.
In 1981, Berckmans, the CIA agent turned Wackenhut vice president, joined with other senior Wackenhut executives to form the company's Special Projects Division. It was this division that linked up with ex-CIA man John Philip Nichols, who had taken over the Cabazon Indian reservation in California, as we described in a previous article {"Badlands;" April 1992}, in pursuit of a scheme to manufacture explosives, poison gas and biological weapons—and then, by virtue of the tribe's status as a sovereign nation, to export the weapons to the Contras. (Spy Magazine)
The darker side of Wackenhut's ambitious enterprise, is its direct involvement in illegal and black projects. In the early 1980s, Dr. John Nichols, the Cabazon tribal administrator, by obtaining a Department of Defense secret facility clearance for reservation to conduct various research projects, approached Wackenhut with a detailed joint-venture proposal to manufacture 120mm combustible cartridge cases, 9mm machine guns, laser-sighted assault weapons, sniper rifles, as well as portable rocket-launchers to be built on the Cabazon Reservation, and in Latin America. Details to develop biological weapons were among these proposals.
The reservation was a favorite visiting spot for Saudi sheiks, mob leaders, politicians, military officers, and foreign intelligence people. Two important visitors were Dr. Earl Brian, a businessman with long CIA ties and Peter Videnieks, a Customs lawyer on loan to Justice who Michael said managed the Department a software system. Brian was said to have had many transactions through BCCI and banks in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. According to both Mike and Bob Nichols, Videnieks was involved with them and Dr. Earl Brian in Hadron Corporation, which tried to buy Inslaw, producer of PROMIS software. Hadron also manufactured lasers. Nicaraguan Contra leaders visited it because weapons were being manufactured there for their use. (Michael Riconosciuto: The Math/Science Wizard Who Said too much, Part 4, by Sherman De Brosse)
Any type of biological research on an Indian reservation is not subject to scrutiny by the federal government because Indian reservations are sovereign nations. Wackenhut Corporation attempted to sell "biological warfare viruses" and vaccine kits to the U.S. government to be used against “small countries bordering Albania or large countries bordering the Soviet Union.”
William C. Patrick, III developed the process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at the level of one trillion spores per gram. Patrick has worked with Kanatjan Alibekov, known as "Ken Alibek" since he defected to the US in 1992. Remember, Alibek served as manager for a CIA biological warfare program in 1998. In Russia, Alibek was the No. 2 expert in the FSU's biowarfare program, under Vladimir Pasechnik.
Ken Alibek became President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems, a subsidiary of Alexandria, Va.-based Hadron, Inc., specializing in “the development of technical solutions for the intelligence community.” It received millions in funding for medical biodefense research in the field of non-specific immunity from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and the NIH.
By 1985, Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy in a DoJ investigation. When Inslaw refused to sell to Hadron, DOJ tried to bankrupt and liquidate Inslaw forcing the rock bottom sale of its assets, including PROMIS, perhaps to Hadron. The software was a reward for Earl Brian's role in arranging the so-called 'October Surprise' gambit. After Earl Brian sold PROMIS around the world, he returned his interests to genetic research, biological technology.
Wackenhut, a “private FBI” with black budget connections, is also linked to the Inslaw scandal. MJR said, “The purpose of the PROMIS software modification that I made in 1983 and 1984 was to support a plan for the implementation of PROMIS in law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide. Earl W. Brian was spearheading the plan for this worldwide use of the PROMIS computer software.”
Michael Riconosciuto was director of research for the Wackenhut/Cabazon joint venture in the early '80s. In a March 1991 affidavit for the Inslaw case, Riconosciuto claimed that "in connection with [Riconosciuto's] work for Wackenhut," he modified the stolen Promis software for foreign sales. "Earl W. Brian made [the software program] available to me through Wackenhut after acquiring it from Peter Videnieks, who was then a Department of Justice contracting official with responsibility for the Promis software." Videnieks, a former Customs Service official under Commissioner Chasen, served in the Justice Department from 1981 through 1990.
Do the ends justify the means? Are good and evil relative? Our destiny lies in our answer. Black Ops is a realm where it's nearly impossible to tell the difference. Some consider their mission spiritual warfare, a transcendent battle. Are they deluded or working from a broader paradigm of top secret knowledge? Is evil a vehicle, a means to an end, or an end in itself? What we do know is it bites the hand that feeds it.
GENOCIDE: The PROMIS software eventually evolved into very bio-chemistry-specific versions named “Daylight” and “Oracle8i”.
This PROMIS software evolution is best understood by reading THE LAST CIRCLE by Cheri Seymour, aka Carol Marshall – particularly the 15th chapter. This chapter reveals the contents of files provided to Seymour by PROMIS program-modifier Michael Riconosciuto documenting the history of Ft. Detrick’s biological warfare development and the stated desire of our nation’s top “National Institutes of Health” and CDC scientists to use new computer technologies to create sophisticated “Designer Viruses” for covert CIA use. He also documents the INFILTRATION of ISRAELI AGENTS into the labs of Ft. Detrick.
Riconosciuto’s “modifications” are so “sensitive to national security” that Riconosciuto was placed into forced detention in a high-security federal prison – not because any “crime” had been committed – but to keep him from being kidnapped by other competing “multi-national group’s” interests.
According to Riconosciuto’s files, the NEW GENERATON of PROMIS software, today trademarked as DAYLIGHT™ and ORACLE8i™ are unbelievably complex, and have exhibited incredible ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE capabilities as portrayed so well in the movie, “Eagle Eye”.
ORACLE8i™ not only has the ability to rapidly analyze gene clade sequencing in viruses and bacteria in mere minutes, it can build a model of a complex new viral structure just as quickly, and can calculate to the minutest detail its possible “drift” of mutations after its release. This software can not only predict the DEATH TOLL the virus would produce, but also the accurate final numbers of its genetic mutations over a given period of time. In short, this software can indeed control a complex GENOCIDE AGENDA in the form of an engineered, worldwide VIRAL PANDEMIC from beginning to end – Alpha to Omega. Evidence suggests that this agenda was indeed systematically set in motion in March of 2009.
The big question is "who in the cryptocracy would NOT want this man dead?" Danny Casolaro was writing a book related to MJR called THE OCTOPUS. Inslaw, a manufacturer whose owner had accused the Justice Department of stealing its extremely powerful PROMIS case management software; the so-called "October Surprise" theory that Iran had held back the American hostages to help Ronald Reagan win the 1980 presidential election; the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International; and Iran-Contra. The scheme was so vast and complex that Casolaro referred to it as "the Octopus". Casolaro was found dead in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia in August of 1991, his wrists slashed 10 to 12 times. His death was, of course, ruled a suicide.
Casolaro's story might have continued its slow fade into the dusty corners of conspiracy theory folklore, except that charges were filed 10-4-2009 against a Miami-based missionary to Honduras named Jimmy Hughes for the 1981 slayings of Fred Alvarez and two associates in Rancho Mirage, California. It is believed that Alvarez was killed to silence
him before he could carry out a threat to exposure financial improprieties and other illegal activity on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Riverside County, California. Incredibly, what happened on Cabazon land in the late '70s and early '80s reaches around the world and into the highest levels of the US government -- part of Casolaro's "Octopus". Central to the story, especially when he tells it, is the mysterious Michael Riconosciuto, now serving a 20-year sentence for production and distribution of meth. Understanding "the Octopus" is like the old story of the blind men trying to comprehend their first encounter with an elephant: the parts you touch can appear to be completely different and totally unrelated. Running over the outlines of the case in about half an hour, we didn't even mention mainstream media reports -- published prior to 9/11 -- that FBI spy Robert Hanssen sold an upgraded version of PROMIS to Russia, which in turn sold it to Osama bin Laden. It's believed Al Qaeda used the software to penetrate databases and move funds between banks without being detected by US counterterror groups. A PROMIS derivative was also allegedly used by Chinese military intelligence to steal nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. So, like the Octopus, the tentacles extending from the modifications made by Michael Riconosciuto at the Cabazon reservation are many and far-reaching.
Danny Casolaro was found with his wrists slashed in a motel bathtub in Martinsburg, West Virginia on August 10, 1991. He was a struggling writer and something of a romantic. Recently he had also styled himself as an investigator, contacting a variety of spooks-turned-victims and weaving their stories into an "Octopus" theory. This would be the book of his career: Danny as dragon-slayer. A year later, documents were missing from Casolaro's motel room. Was it suicide or murder?
THE OCTOPUS involves Inslaw, Inc. and its Promis software, as well as Michael Riconosciuto, a child prodigy who became a secret agent and drug pusher, and still keeps a bevy of fringe journalists busy by dispatching leads from his jail cell. Mix in several years of affidavits flying like shrapnel, mostly due to Inslaw's reasonable claim that Promis was stolen by the Justice Department. Add Riconosciuto's unreasonable claim that he hacked Promis, making it so magical that U.S. intelligence tried to install it everywhere as a Trojan horse. Include more prominent names than you can shake a stick at, each with loose but spooky connections to everyone else, and throw in a few more investigative trails that end in corpses.
Michael Roconosciuto claimed to be an intelligence officer monitoring the hostage situation in Iran, staying at the apartment of Robert Booth Nichols and Ellen Hopko Nichols located near the Nicosia, Cyprus airport. This group of people, according to Michael, were also involved in the "controlled drug operation" run by the DIA. Riconosciuto stated that they were paid with unsigned BCCI travelers checks. Shortly before the Lockerbie crash Riconosciuto returned to his home in Oregon. He knew that the McKee team would be returning to the United States to "blow the whistle" on the drug operation run by George W. Bush. Riconosciuto told me that when the warning came to the unit in Nicosia that there might be a bombing of Pan Am #103, Robert Booth Nichols told Rinconosciuto that he would change the reservation for the McKee team to another flight, just as FBI agent Revell's son had done. The night of the Lockerbie crash, Bobbi Riconosciuto was watching the television with their children when she learned of the crash and heard that the McKee team went down with others on board. She woke Michael up and told him. Michael broke from Robert Booth Nichols from that point forward because he held Nichols responsible for betraying the McKee team. Robert Booth Nichols became the key source for Danny Casolaro who had contacted Lester K. Coleman seven days before his murder in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Michael Riconosciuto enters the intrigue. Michael Riconosciuto, a self proclaimed CIA operative, was a project manager for the Wackenhut Company, a security company that is virtually a CIA front. After Earl Brian of Hadron, Inc. illegally obtained the legal rights to PROMIS from Inslaw, the software company the Hamiltons had owned, he hired Michael to create a "back door" into the software. This would enable the trackers of other intel agencies using PROMIS to be tracked by the CIA. Riconosciuto was working out of the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, CA a hotbed of CIA intrigue and black-ops projects. Previously, Michael Riconosciuto had participated in developing software enabling the CIA to launder drug money raised by trafficking drugs through an airport in Mena, Arkansas while Clinton was governor of the state and Bush Sr. was in the White House. In a signed affidavit to a federal court, Riconosciuto stated "that the Wackenthut-Cabazon joint venture was intended to support the needs of a number of foreign governments and forces, including governments and forces in Central America and the Middle East. The Contras in Nicaragua represented one of the most important priorities of the joint venture". CasolaroCoincidentally, Danny Casolaro, an independently wealthy individual turned free lance, investigative journalist, was working on a book to be titled "The Octopus". His investigations lead him to the Wackenhut-Cabazon operation during Riconosciuto's involvement there. Gary Webb was another freelance investigative journalist, albeit not independently wealthy, who touched on the Wackenhut-Cabazon operations as revealed in his 1998 book "Dark Alliance." Webb stated: "Wackenhut was very active in El Salvador during the Contra war, providing employees to protect the U.S. Embassy and other installations, and doing ' "things you wouldn't want your mother to know about' ". Gary Webb goes on to explain how the isolation of the small Cabazon reservation, a tribe of thirty people, and its tax exempt status and lack of federal oversight were the advantages gained by using that location. ("Dark Allance" p.113) Webb continued " . . . Danny Casolaro was looking into the Cabazon/Wackenhut projects as part of a lager conspiracy investigation at the time he was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, allegedly a suicide victim. He had told friends he was convinced that " 'spies, arms merchants and others were using the reservation as a low-profile site on which to develop weapons for Third World armies, including the Nicaraguan Contras.' " (Dark Alliance p.113) Karen Bixman in her "Octopus" article wrote, "Riconosciuto asserted that all scandals overlap, and Casolaro, who gave Roconosciuto the title ' " Danger Man' ", was introduced to the underground world of ' "spooks' ". Amid investigating the related scandals, a pattern of mysterious deaths also began to emerge". In her "Octopus" article, Karen Bixman goes into detail on these mysterious deaths. Personally, I believe Gary Webb's death was the most recent of related mysterious deaths. Broken PROMIS: Tentacles of Cryptocracy
This germy story is linked to the Octopus conspiracy and the PROMIS software scandal of the 1980s as described by mad genius Michael James Roconosciuto. In an interview with this author shortly before he went to prison, MJR personally recounted the tangled story of the many tentacles of the metacontrol system, Octopus.
Roconosciuto subsequently told his story in print but the details and analysis remain the same. This is the dangerous story that got investigative journalist Danny Casolaro killed in 1991, best summarized in The Final Circle, by Carol Marshall (1996), who used MJR’s secret files to connect the dots. http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/last_circle/1.htm
The strongest link is personnel from Hadron, a front company, founded in the 80s, for questionable activity including germ warfare. Nearly every hospital in the world buys their products. Hadron, with Dr. Earl Brian as director, provided engineering and computer consulting services. Brian was convicted in the 1980s on fraud charges.
Both Hadron and Dr. Brian were linked with the theft of enhanced PROMIS software from its owner, the Inslaw Corporation. PROMIS was a highly sophisticated computer program capable of integrating a wide variety of databases, now reportedly mated with artificial intelligence. PROMIS was modified by intelligence agencies with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data from adversaries.
Bio Rad made the most hazardous medical, biological and nuclear chemicals in the world. BioRad’s Earl Brian started InfoTech, then Hadron to protect the parent company from lawsuits. MJR claims they had the capacity to bioengineer DNA based, genetically targeted pathogens – ethnic bioweapons.
Hadron tried to buy Inslaw and its PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) software in 1983. It could be used not only for cracking business, national or international computer systems through a built in backdoor, but also be modified to track money laundering.
By 1985, Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy in a DoJ investigation. When Inslaw refused to sell to Hadron, DOJ tried to bankrupt and liquidate Inslaw forcing the rock bottom sale of its assets, including PROMIS, perhaps to Hadron. Dr. Brian turned his interests to genetic research, biological technology.
This scandal was closely tied to shady dealings by Wackenhut to develop biological warfare viruses on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, California. In order to develop vaccines, which sounds innocuous enough, the virus must first be created. Biological warfare viruses have to be highly sophisticated to be used in military applications.
Any type of biological research on an Indian reservation is not subject to scrutiny by the federal government because Indian reservations are sovereign nations. Wackenhut Corporation attempted to sell "biological warfare viruses" and vaccine kits to the U.S. government to be used against small countries bordering Albania or large countries bordering the Soviet Union.
William C. Patrick, III developed the process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at the level of one trillion spores per gram. Patrick has worked with Kanatjan Alibekov, known as "Ken Alibek" since he defected to the US in 1992. In Russia, Alibek was the No. 2 expert in the FSU's biowarfare program, under Vladimir Pasechnik.
Ken Alibek became President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems, a subsidiary of Alexandria, Va.-based Hadron, Inc. Hadron specializes in “the development of technical solutions for the intelligence community.” It received millions in funding for medical biodefense research in the field of non-specific immunity from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and the NIH.
This PROMIS software evolution is best understood by reading THE LAST CIRCLE by Cheri Seymour, aka Carol Marshall – particularly the 15th chapter. This chapter reveals the contents of files provided to Seymour by PROMIS program-modifier Michael Riconosciuto documenting the history of Ft. Detrick’s biological warfare development and the stated desire of our nation’s top “National Institutes of Health” and CDC scientists to use new computer technologies to create sophisticated “Designer Viruses” for covert CIA use. He also documents the INFILTRATION of ISRAELI AGENTS into the labs of Ft. Detrick.
Riconosciuto’s “modifications” are so “sensitive to national security” that Riconosciuto was placed into forced detention in a high-security federal prison – not because any “crime” had been committed – but to keep him from being kidnapped by other competing “multi-national group’s” interests.
According to Riconosciuto’s files, the NEW GENERATON of PROMIS software, today trademarked as DAYLIGHT™ and ORACLE8i™ are unbelievably complex, and have exhibited incredible ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE capabilities as portrayed so well in the movie, “Eagle Eye”.
ORACLE8i™ not only has the ability to rapidly analyze gene clade sequencing in viruses and bacteria in mere minutes, it can build a model of a complex new viral structure just as quickly, and can calculate to the minutest detail its possible “drift” of mutations after its release. This software can not only predict the DEATH TOLL the virus would produce, but also the accurate final numbers of its genetic mutations over a given period of time. In short, this software can indeed control a complex GENOCIDE AGENDA in the form of an engineered, worldwide VIRAL PANDEMIC from beginning to end – Alpha to Omega. Evidence suggests that this agenda was indeed systematically set in motion in March of 2009.
The big question is "who in the cryptocracy would NOT want this man dead?" Danny Casolaro was writing a book related to MJR called THE OCTOPUS. Inslaw, a manufacturer whose owner had accused the Justice Department of stealing its extremely powerful PROMIS case management software; the so-called "October Surprise" theory that Iran had held back the American hostages to help Ronald Reagan win the 1980 presidential election; the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International; and Iran-Contra. The scheme was so vast and complex that Casolaro referred to it as "the Octopus". Casolaro was found dead in a hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia in August of 1991, his wrists slashed 10 to 12 times. His death was, of course, ruled a suicide.
Casolaro's story might have continued its slow fade into the dusty corners of conspiracy theory folklore, except that charges were filed 10-4-2009 against a Miami-based missionary to Honduras named Jimmy Hughes for the 1981 slayings of Fred Alvarez and two associates in Rancho Mirage, California. It is believed that Alvarez was killed to silence
him before he could carry out a threat to exposure financial improprieties and other illegal activity on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Riverside County, California. Incredibly, what happened on Cabazon land in the late '70s and early '80s reaches around the world and into the highest levels of the US government -- part of Casolaro's "Octopus". Central to the story, especially when he tells it, is the mysterious Michael Riconosciuto, now serving a 20-year sentence for production and distribution of meth. Understanding "the Octopus" is like the old story of the blind men trying to comprehend their first encounter with an elephant: the parts you touch can appear to be completely different and totally unrelated. Running over the outlines of the case in about half an hour, we didn't even mention mainstream media reports -- published prior to 9/11 -- that FBI spy Robert Hanssen sold an upgraded version of PROMIS to Russia, which in turn sold it to Osama bin Laden. It's believed Al Qaeda used the software to penetrate databases and move funds between banks without being detected by US counterterror groups. A PROMIS derivative was also allegedly used by Chinese military intelligence to steal nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. So, like the Octopus, the tentacles extending from the modifications made by Michael Riconosciuto at the Cabazon reservation are many and far-reaching.
Danny Casolaro was found with his wrists slashed in a motel bathtub in Martinsburg, West Virginia on August 10, 1991. He was a struggling writer and something of a romantic. Recently he had also styled himself as an investigator, contacting a variety of spooks-turned-victims and weaving their stories into an "Octopus" theory. This would be the book of his career: Danny as dragon-slayer. A year later, documents were missing from Casolaro's motel room. Was it suicide or murder?
THE OCTOPUS involves Inslaw, Inc. and its Promis software, as well as Michael Riconosciuto, a child prodigy who became a secret agent and drug pusher, and still keeps a bevy of fringe journalists busy by dispatching leads from his jail cell. Mix in several years of affidavits flying like shrapnel, mostly due to Inslaw's reasonable claim that Promis was stolen by the Justice Department. Add Riconosciuto's unreasonable claim that he hacked Promis, making it so magical that U.S. intelligence tried to install it everywhere as a Trojan horse. Include more prominent names than you can shake a stick at, each with loose but spooky connections to everyone else, and throw in a few more investigative trails that end in corpses.
Michael Roconosciuto claimed to be an intelligence officer monitoring the hostage situation in Iran, staying at the apartment of Robert Booth Nichols and Ellen Hopko Nichols located near the Nicosia, Cyprus airport. This group of people, according to Michael, were also involved in the "controlled drug operation" run by the DIA. Riconosciuto stated that they were paid with unsigned BCCI travelers checks. Shortly before the Lockerbie crash Riconosciuto returned to his home in Oregon. He knew that the McKee team would be returning to the United States to "blow the whistle" on the drug operation run by George W. Bush. Riconosciuto told me that when the warning came to the unit in Nicosia that there might be a bombing of Pan Am #103, Robert Booth Nichols told Rinconosciuto that he would change the reservation for the McKee team to another flight, just as FBI agent Revell's son had done. The night of the Lockerbie crash, Bobbi Riconosciuto was watching the television with their children when she learned of the crash and heard that the McKee team went down with others on board. She woke Michael up and told him. Michael broke from Robert Booth Nichols from that point forward because he held Nichols responsible for betraying the McKee team. Robert Booth Nichols became the key source for Danny Casolaro who had contacted Lester K. Coleman seven days before his murder in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
Michael Riconosciuto enters the intrigue. Michael Riconosciuto, a self proclaimed CIA operative, was a project manager for the Wackenhut Company, a security company that is virtually a CIA front. After Earl Brian of Hadron, Inc. illegally obtained the legal rights to PROMIS from Inslaw, the software company the Hamiltons had owned, he hired Michael to create a "back door" into the software. This would enable the trackers of other intel agencies using PROMIS to be tracked by the CIA. Riconosciuto was working out of the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, CA a hotbed of CIA intrigue and black-ops projects. Previously, Michael Riconosciuto had participated in developing software enabling the CIA to launder drug money raised by trafficking drugs through an airport in Mena, Arkansas while Clinton was governor of the state and Bush Sr. was in the White House. In a signed affidavit to a federal court, Riconosciuto stated "that the Wackenthut-Cabazon joint venture was intended to support the needs of a number of foreign governments and forces, including governments and forces in Central America and the Middle East. The Contras in Nicaragua represented one of the most important priorities of the joint venture". CasolaroCoincidentally, Danny Casolaro, an independently wealthy individual turned free lance, investigative journalist, was working on a book to be titled "The Octopus". His investigations lead him to the Wackenhut-Cabazon operation during Riconosciuto's involvement there. Gary Webb was another freelance investigative journalist, albeit not independently wealthy, who touched on the Wackenhut-Cabazon operations as revealed in his 1998 book "Dark Alliance." Webb stated: "Wackenhut was very active in El Salvador during the Contra war, providing employees to protect the U.S. Embassy and other installations, and doing ' "things you wouldn't want your mother to know about' ". Gary Webb goes on to explain how the isolation of the small Cabazon reservation, a tribe of thirty people, and its tax exempt status and lack of federal oversight were the advantages gained by using that location. ("Dark Allance" p.113) Webb continued " . . . Danny Casolaro was looking into the Cabazon/Wackenhut projects as part of a lager conspiracy investigation at the time he was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, allegedly a suicide victim. He had told friends he was convinced that " 'spies, arms merchants and others were using the reservation as a low-profile site on which to develop weapons for Third World armies, including the Nicaraguan Contras.' " (Dark Alliance p.113) Karen Bixman in her "Octopus" article wrote, "Riconosciuto asserted that all scandals overlap, and Casolaro, who gave Roconosciuto the title ' " Danger Man' ", was introduced to the underground world of ' "spooks' ". Amid investigating the related scandals, a pattern of mysterious deaths also began to emerge". In her "Octopus" article, Karen Bixman goes into detail on these mysterious deaths. Personally, I believe Gary Webb's death was the most recent of related mysterious deaths. Broken PROMIS: Tentacles of Cryptocracy
This germy story is linked to the Octopus conspiracy and the PROMIS software scandal of the 1980s as described by mad genius Michael James Roconosciuto. In an interview with this author shortly before he went to prison, MJR personally recounted the tangled story of the many tentacles of the metacontrol system, Octopus.
Roconosciuto subsequently told his story in print but the details and analysis remain the same. This is the dangerous story that got investigative journalist Danny Casolaro killed in 1991, best summarized in The Final Circle, by Carol Marshall (1996), who used MJR’s secret files to connect the dots. http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/last_circle/1.htm
The strongest link is personnel from Hadron, a front company, founded in the 80s, for questionable activity including germ warfare. Nearly every hospital in the world buys their products. Hadron, with Dr. Earl Brian as director, provided engineering and computer consulting services. Brian was convicted in the 1980s on fraud charges.
Both Hadron and Dr. Brian were linked with the theft of enhanced PROMIS software from its owner, the Inslaw Corporation. PROMIS was a highly sophisticated computer program capable of integrating a wide variety of databases, now reportedly mated with artificial intelligence. PROMIS was modified by intelligence agencies with a back door that allows for surreptitious retrieval of stored data from adversaries.
Bio Rad made the most hazardous medical, biological and nuclear chemicals in the world. BioRad’s Earl Brian started InfoTech, then Hadron to protect the parent company from lawsuits. MJR claims they had the capacity to bioengineer DNA based, genetically targeted pathogens – ethnic bioweapons.
Hadron tried to buy Inslaw and its PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) software in 1983. It could be used not only for cracking business, national or international computer systems through a built in backdoor, but also be modified to track money laundering.
By 1985, Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy in a DoJ investigation. When Inslaw refused to sell to Hadron, DOJ tried to bankrupt and liquidate Inslaw forcing the rock bottom sale of its assets, including PROMIS, perhaps to Hadron. Dr. Brian turned his interests to genetic research, biological technology.
This scandal was closely tied to shady dealings by Wackenhut to develop biological warfare viruses on the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, California. In order to develop vaccines, which sounds innocuous enough, the virus must first be created. Biological warfare viruses have to be highly sophisticated to be used in military applications.
Any type of biological research on an Indian reservation is not subject to scrutiny by the federal government because Indian reservations are sovereign nations. Wackenhut Corporation attempted to sell "biological warfare viruses" and vaccine kits to the U.S. government to be used against small countries bordering Albania or large countries bordering the Soviet Union.
William C. Patrick, III developed the process by which anthrax spores could be concentrated at the level of one trillion spores per gram. Patrick has worked with Kanatjan Alibekov, known as "Ken Alibek" since he defected to the US in 1992. In Russia, Alibek was the No. 2 expert in the FSU's biowarfare program, under Vladimir Pasechnik.
Ken Alibek became President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems, a subsidiary of Alexandria, Va.-based Hadron, Inc. Hadron specializes in “the development of technical solutions for the intelligence community.” It received millions in funding for medical biodefense research in the field of non-specific immunity from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, and the NIH.
AKA "Dangerman" Broken PROMIS: Tentacles of Cryptocracy
In Intelligence they eat their own. The sinister webwork is littered with stolen and broken promises. This germy story is linked to “The Octopus” (intelligence and black ops for profit) conspiracy and the PROMIS software scandal of the 1980s as described by eccentric scientific genius Michael James Roconosciuto, (pronounced Riconoshooto), weapons systems designer and computer software expert.
He’s been accused of being a publicity-seeking pathological liar and a disinformation agent, but the intervening years have proved him right more often than not. He has one foot in the drug underground and the other in hi tech intelligence. Still, even after he went to prison, he continued making uncanny predictions.
MJR was involved in a variety of sensitive intelligence projects besides PROMIS, from selling shoulder-fired missiles to Osama bin Laden during “Charlie Wilson’s War,” to hi-tech top-down computer programming operations, microwave transmissions, digital cash dispersal, cryptoanalytic attack, to germ warfare, and alleged drug dealing. It wouldn’t be far off to say he operated like a gangster. That is to say, this wise-guy knows the score when it comes to both state-sponsored and organized transnational crime
He even predicted 9/11 by hijacking but was ignored. According to Riconosciuto, if properly investigated, the events of 911 may not have occurred. On February 5, 2001, Riconosciuto wrote a certified letter to his attorney, Don Bailey, that he had contact with someone in an Islamic group called the "Base" (AI Qaeda), and that said group was currently in preparation for an attack in the United States, but would not divulge specific details unless the U.S. Government granted immunity from prosecution to his sources. In this letter, Riconosciuto also stated that he had an inside source who could furnish information concerning the handling of false IDs and passports for the group. (Ted Gundersson, tedgunderson.com/)
PROMIS was a people-tracking software system sold to intelligence organizations and government drug agencies worldwide. The global dispersion of PROMIS to 88 countries was part of a U.S. plot to spy on other spy agencies. Riconosciuto is one of the architects of the PROMIS backdoor. The original backdoor was a signal using a specialized chip that broadcast the contents of the existing database to monitoring vans or collection satellites using digital spread spectrum data compression whenever the software was run.
The SIGINT was embedded as ordinary computer “noise,” actually encrypted stream cipher. A stream cipher applies a time- varying transformation to individual digits or bits of data. "Time-varying" means the same sequence of plaintext data bits seen at two different points in time will be encrypted to a different sequence of ciphertext data bits. The most famous stream cipher is the Verdam cipher, or “one-time pad.” It requires independent, uniform distribution of the keys, which are used only once and then discarded.
PROMIS was eventually even sold for $2 million to the Russians by infamous traitor Robert Hanssen, who worked for FBI. The Russians passed it on to bin Laden, allowing him to monitor U.S. efforts to track him down, federal law enforcement officials said, according to the Washington Post.
October 26, 2001. Brit Hume. The software program is called Promis. Sources tell Fox that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have used and constantly modified Promis software to manage caseloads, track and store classified information, and keep it secure for decades.
But the concern is that bin Laden or Al Qaeda could get on-line and use it to monitor the worldwide criminal investigation and hide themselves, to monitor the worldwide financial investigation and hide their money, or monitor government operations of the governments that use the software.
As a senior agent in the FBI's counterterrorism bureau, sources say Hanssen was tasked with helping allies like Germany and England with the installation and use of their versions of the PROMIS program. Numerous countries now, however, are tightening their cyber security, including Germany, Great Britain and Canada has actually investigated potential tampering with its Promis programs. Israel has used it on and off for years, too. www.boingboing.net/2001/10/...it-w.html
In an interview with this author (Miller) shortly before he went to prison, MJR personally recounted the tangled story of the many tentacles of the metacontrol system, “The Octopus.” His story got weirder than The Matrix but he was perfectly lucid, easily recounting names, dates and particulars, seemingly eager to spread his story in a futile gesture to protect himself from what he perceived correctly as immanent danger. His well-placed “partners” had turned on him. This explained why he had arrived in Southern Oregon “on the lamb” in a Winnebago with a gun turret and a phalanx of body guards.
Michael Riconoscuito was a computer expert for the Central Intelligence Agency, he was their Einstein. There was nothing he couldn't do with a computer, for good or for bad. But he had many secrets and he began to see the ruthlessness of his colleagues. Michael Riconoscuito decided to testify about massive corruption in the U.S. Justice Department and the intelligence agency. He agreed to provide his insider knowledge to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee investigating the Inslaw affair. www.toddjumper.com/eaglenet...wo57.html
In Intelligence they eat their own. The sinister webwork is littered with stolen and broken promises. This germy story is linked to “The Octopus” (intelligence and black ops for profit) conspiracy and the PROMIS software scandal of the 1980s as described by eccentric scientific genius Michael James Roconosciuto, (pronounced Riconoshooto), weapons systems designer and computer software expert.
He’s been accused of being a publicity-seeking pathological liar and a disinformation agent, but the intervening years have proved him right more often than not. He has one foot in the drug underground and the other in hi tech intelligence. Still, even after he went to prison, he continued making uncanny predictions.
MJR was involved in a variety of sensitive intelligence projects besides PROMIS, from selling shoulder-fired missiles to Osama bin Laden during “Charlie Wilson’s War,” to hi-tech top-down computer programming operations, microwave transmissions, digital cash dispersal, cryptoanalytic attack, to germ warfare, and alleged drug dealing. It wouldn’t be far off to say he operated like a gangster. That is to say, this wise-guy knows the score when it comes to both state-sponsored and organized transnational crime
He even predicted 9/11 by hijacking but was ignored. According to Riconosciuto, if properly investigated, the events of 911 may not have occurred. On February 5, 2001, Riconosciuto wrote a certified letter to his attorney, Don Bailey, that he had contact with someone in an Islamic group called the "Base" (AI Qaeda), and that said group was currently in preparation for an attack in the United States, but would not divulge specific details unless the U.S. Government granted immunity from prosecution to his sources. In this letter, Riconosciuto also stated that he had an inside source who could furnish information concerning the handling of false IDs and passports for the group. (Ted Gundersson, tedgunderson.com/)
PROMIS was a people-tracking software system sold to intelligence organizations and government drug agencies worldwide. The global dispersion of PROMIS to 88 countries was part of a U.S. plot to spy on other spy agencies. Riconosciuto is one of the architects of the PROMIS backdoor. The original backdoor was a signal using a specialized chip that broadcast the contents of the existing database to monitoring vans or collection satellites using digital spread spectrum data compression whenever the software was run.
The SIGINT was embedded as ordinary computer “noise,” actually encrypted stream cipher. A stream cipher applies a time- varying transformation to individual digits or bits of data. "Time-varying" means the same sequence of plaintext data bits seen at two different points in time will be encrypted to a different sequence of ciphertext data bits. The most famous stream cipher is the Verdam cipher, or “one-time pad.” It requires independent, uniform distribution of the keys, which are used only once and then discarded.
PROMIS was eventually even sold for $2 million to the Russians by infamous traitor Robert Hanssen, who worked for FBI. The Russians passed it on to bin Laden, allowing him to monitor U.S. efforts to track him down, federal law enforcement officials said, according to the Washington Post.
October 26, 2001. Brit Hume. The software program is called Promis. Sources tell Fox that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies have used and constantly modified Promis software to manage caseloads, track and store classified information, and keep it secure for decades.
But the concern is that bin Laden or Al Qaeda could get on-line and use it to monitor the worldwide criminal investigation and hide themselves, to monitor the worldwide financial investigation and hide their money, or monitor government operations of the governments that use the software.
As a senior agent in the FBI's counterterrorism bureau, sources say Hanssen was tasked with helping allies like Germany and England with the installation and use of their versions of the PROMIS program. Numerous countries now, however, are tightening their cyber security, including Germany, Great Britain and Canada has actually investigated potential tampering with its Promis programs. Israel has used it on and off for years, too. www.boingboing.net/2001/10/...it-w.html
In an interview with this author (Miller) shortly before he went to prison, MJR personally recounted the tangled story of the many tentacles of the metacontrol system, “The Octopus.” His story got weirder than The Matrix but he was perfectly lucid, easily recounting names, dates and particulars, seemingly eager to spread his story in a futile gesture to protect himself from what he perceived correctly as immanent danger. His well-placed “partners” had turned on him. This explained why he had arrived in Southern Oregon “on the lamb” in a Winnebago with a gun turret and a phalanx of body guards.
Michael Riconoscuito was a computer expert for the Central Intelligence Agency, he was their Einstein. There was nothing he couldn't do with a computer, for good or for bad. But he had many secrets and he began to see the ruthlessness of his colleagues. Michael Riconoscuito decided to testify about massive corruption in the U.S. Justice Department and the intelligence agency. He agreed to provide his insider knowledge to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee investigating the Inslaw affair. www.toddjumper.com/eaglenet...wo57.html
Did CIA Steal Bill Hamilton's Proprietary Data-Management Software?
Did Michael James Riconosciuto and/or others alter that program into a backdoor into the computers of friendly and unfriendly foreign nations?
Principals include Cabazon Indian Reservation, Inslaw, Wackenhut, MJR, and certain three-letter acronym agencies.
Fri, 1 Oct 1999 00:18:33 -0700 -Caveat Lector-
Lots of interconnections.
Promis, William Hamilton, Michael Riconosciuto, Wackenhut, Casolaro, Blue
Grass Conspiracy.
Dave Hartley
http://www.Asheville-Computer.com
http://www.ioa.com/~davehart
"Arms for drugs, do you have proof?"
"Oh, yeah. It's a self=supporting system, they don't have to go through Congress ..."
"Michael," I pressed, "who ships the arms?" Riconosciuto quieted for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Let's start with Wackenhut. I didn't play ball with Wackenhut so they poisoned the well for me. I'm in jail because I worked for Wackenhut. The government has put together a very simple drug case against me ... as if that's what I'm about, just a druggie."
"Tell me about Wackenhut."
"It's a security corporation headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida. Wackenhut provides security for the Nevada nuclear test site, the Alaskan pipeline, Lawrence Livermore Labs, you know, all the high security government facilities in the U.S. They have about fifty thousand armed security guards that work for minimum wage or slightly above.
"On the other hand, on the Wackenhut board of directors, they have all the former heads of every government agency there ever was under Ronald Reagan and George Bush; FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service, etc.
"You know, they've got retired Admiral Stansfield Turner, a former CIA director; Clarence Kelley, former FBI director; Frank Carlucci, former CIA deputy director; James Rowley, former Secret Service director; Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former acting chairman of President Bush's foreign intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director. Before his appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut's outside legal counsel ..."
I interrupted him, wanting to know where HE fit into the picture?
"Well, I served as Director of Research for the Wackenhut facility at the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, California. In 1983-84 I modified the PROMISE computer software to be used in law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide. A man named Earl Brian was spearheading a plan for worldwide use of the software, but essentially, the modified software was being pirated from the owners, Bill and Nancy Hamilton." (see chap. 5,
half-way down)
I asked, "So how did that cause your arrest?" Michael was articulate, but his story was becoming complicated. He continued. "I signed an affidavit for the Hamiltons stating that I had been responsible for the modification. The House Judiciary Committee on Inslaw was investigating the theft of the software and I was afraid I would be implicated since I had performed the modification. Nine days later, in an attempt to discredit my testimony, I was arrested for allegedly operating a drug lab."
I didn't want to push Riconosciuto on the subject of a drug lab at that point, but voiced my foremost concern. "Will the House Judiciary Committee be bringing you in to testify?"
"Eventually, yes."
"Are you in any danger where you are right now?" I was unaware at the time that Riconosciuto had been recruited at Stanford University into the CIA nearly twenty years earlier, and danger was a matter of fact in his life.
============
http://www.tdbooks.com/ebooks/lastcircle/chpt6pt1.html
On September 13, 1985, the Los Angeles Times published the story of Thornton's death, entitled, "Former Narcotics Officer Parachutes Out of Plane, Dies with 77 Pounds of Cocaine." The article said Thornton was indicted in 1981 for "allegedly flying a plane to South America for a reputed drug ring known as `The Company.'" In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Brian Leighton said, "I'm glad his parachute didn't open. I hope he got a hell of a high out of that ..."
Thornton's mysterious death was discussed at length in a book written by Sally Denton entitled, "The Blue Grass Conspiracy." Part of The Company was headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky. Prosecutors in Lexington, Fresno, California (Brian Leighton), and Miami, Florida were working together in a joint effort to bring down The Company.
The San Francisco Chronicle noted that in January, 1982, Gene Berry, a state prosecutor in Charlotte Harbor, Florida, was shot in the face as he answered his door. Police subsequently arrested Bonnie Kelly as Berry's murderer. Bonnie's husband, Mike McClure Kelly, was a suspected member of The Company who later pleaded guilty in the Fresno, California case.
In Michael Riconosciuto's documents, I discovered a letter dated March 24, 1982, written on Cabazon letterhead to Michael McClure at Hercules Corporation from Art Welmas, President of the Cabazon Band of Indians. Copies (cc:) were also noted to Marshall Riconosciuto and Michael Riconosciuto. The letter complimented McClure's competence in presenting a clear and lucid explanation of a power pack under development at Hercules. (Hercules was owned by Marshall Riconosciuto, Michael Riconosciuto and Patrick Moriarty, the Red Devil fireworks mogul. More on Moriarty later.)
Throughout Michael's documents, I found references to Michael McClure and Bonnie Lynne G. Kelly. Michael's code word for Mike McClure was "Gopher."
Journalist Danny Casolaro had been communicating regularly with Michael Riconosciuto and obviously learned about The Company. It is not to be overlooked that coincidentally or not, Ari BenMenashe (a former Israeli intelligence agent who lived in Lexington, Kentucky) told Bill Hamilton that two Lexington FBI agents had been enroute to meet with Danny at the Martinsburg Hotel on the day of his death. The Company was headquartered in Lexington. Danny was not meeting with the FBI relative to PROMIS, he was preparing to turn over drug trafficking information on The Company.
BenMenashe further told Hamilton that one of the agents, E.B. Cartinhour, was angry that the Justice Department was not pursuing Reagan administration officials for their role in the October Surprise.
==========
The Octopus
Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro
by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith
Review by Jon Roland
Jim Keith investigator Dead from "blood clot" in hospital after broken knee @ burning man fest
Book includes interview with Michael Riconosciuto. (in prison)
Ari Ben-Menashe, Israeli intelligence officer. one of last to speak to Casolaro, gave info on "the company" & agents in Kentucky. Ben-Menashe, an Iranian-born Jew who served in Israeli military intelligence, claimed that in late January 1980, a Brian acquaintance, former Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, arranged passage from the Iranian embassy in Ottawa, Canada, to Tehran for Brian and Robert McFarlane, then a Senate staffer. Ben-Menashe asserted that Brian also was a Republican representative at later meetings in Madrid and then in Paris in October 1980. The Israeli claimed further that $4 million in CIA money was transferred into a Brian account in Phoenix, Ariz., as part of the pay-offs for the secret operation. [For details, see Ben-Menashe's Profits of War. ]
Earl Brian. Few ostensibly private citizens passed through as many controversies of the Reagan-Bush era as did Dr. Earl W. Brian, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and a longtime aide to Ronald Reagan. Even fewer found their credibility more aggressively defended by both Republicans and investigators whose job it was to get at the truth. Convicted of securities fraud / embezzlement, implicated in theft of Promis http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile11.html
http://www.delve.com/consort/archive/xfile.html
More on Earl Brian by Phil Linsalata Brian has an interesting background. He heads Infotechnology, a parent company that extends over an empire that at various times has included United Press International, Financial News Network, and The Learning Channel. A physician and decorated Vietnam veteran, Brian was once the youngest-ever director of the California Health and Welfare Agency, under Governor Reagan. There he cut back the department's services and weathered a string of controversies. Phil Linsalata is a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
http://www.cjr.org/year/91/6/octopus.asp
Charles Hayes testifies that he's been set up by the federal government. And why? Because he's part of a team of retired intelligence types calling themselves the "Fifth Column," who've been using a supercomputer to hack into certain secret foreign bank accounts used by numerous US politicians to stash illegal funds garnered mainly from drug and arms dealers. The prosecution's key witness against Hayes, at the trial in London, KY, turns out to be a right-wing California journalist who occasionally informs for the FBI, a fugitive with a history of mental institutionalization.
For the defense, a former senior editor at Forbes magazine vouches for Hayes' credibility. After the jury hears tapes of Hayes discussing a $5,000 payoff for a prospective hit on his estranged son, the defendant responds that he'd known all along he was talking to an FBI undercover, but had been stringing the Bureau along so he could develop evidence against them. When the CIA introduces affidavits disavowing any relationship with Hayes, he takes the stand to provide his cover name, "Charles Lawson," and an ID number. Following three hours of deliberation, the jury finds Hayes guilty, to the astonishment of nearly 100 supporters present. He says from his jail cell afterwards, while his attorney moves for a new trial, that he anticipates "assistance" from higher powers.
Hayes Gets Around
Is Charles Hayes for real, or merely a con man looking for a get-out-of-jail-free card? For months prior to his arrest last year, revelations about Hayes and his postulated Fifth Column had been circulating on the Internet and in Media Bypass, a colorful "patriot" publication out of Evansville, IN. Not only was this Fifth Column said to have downloaded financial records on government officials from up to 3,000 hidden overseas accounts, but they also allegedly wire-transferred about $4 billion clear out of those accounts into "escrow holding funds" at Federal Reserve banks. Then, according to Hayes, these alleged Robin Hoods of cyberspace began quietly announcing their findings to certain congress people and foreign
governments; which is why, so the yet- undocumented saga brags, a record number of 60-some US senators and representatives announced their
retirements just before the 1996 elections.
http://www.aci.net/kalliste/spookwar.htm ****
http://www.aci.net/kalliste/fantasy.htm
Lots of interconnections.
Promis, William Hamilton, Michael Riconosciuto, Wackenhut, Casolaro, Blue
Grass Conspiracy.
Dave Hartley
http://www.Asheville-Computer.com
http://www.ioa.com/~davehart
"Arms for drugs, do you have proof?"
"Oh, yeah. It's a self=supporting system, they don't have to go through Congress ..."
"Michael," I pressed, "who ships the arms?" Riconosciuto quieted for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Let's start with Wackenhut. I didn't play ball with Wackenhut so they poisoned the well for me. I'm in jail because I worked for Wackenhut. The government has put together a very simple drug case against me ... as if that's what I'm about, just a druggie."
"Tell me about Wackenhut."
"It's a security corporation headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida. Wackenhut provides security for the Nevada nuclear test site, the Alaskan pipeline, Lawrence Livermore Labs, you know, all the high security government facilities in the U.S. They have about fifty thousand armed security guards that work for minimum wage or slightly above.
"On the other hand, on the Wackenhut board of directors, they have all the former heads of every government agency there ever was under Ronald Reagan and George Bush; FBI, CIA, NSA, Secret Service, etc.
"You know, they've got retired Admiral Stansfield Turner, a former CIA director; Clarence Kelley, former FBI director; Frank Carlucci, former CIA deputy director; James Rowley, former Secret Service director; Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, former acting chairman of President Bush's foreign intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director. Before his appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut's outside legal counsel ..."
I interrupted him, wanting to know where HE fit into the picture?
"Well, I served as Director of Research for the Wackenhut facility at the Cabazon Indian reservation in Indio, California. In 1983-84 I modified the PROMISE computer software to be used in law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide. A man named Earl Brian was spearheading a plan for worldwide use of the software, but essentially, the modified software was being pirated from the owners, Bill and Nancy Hamilton." (see chap. 5,
half-way down)
I asked, "So how did that cause your arrest?" Michael was articulate, but his story was becoming complicated. He continued. "I signed an affidavit for the Hamiltons stating that I had been responsible for the modification. The House Judiciary Committee on Inslaw was investigating the theft of the software and I was afraid I would be implicated since I had performed the modification. Nine days later, in an attempt to discredit my testimony, I was arrested for allegedly operating a drug lab."
I didn't want to push Riconosciuto on the subject of a drug lab at that point, but voiced my foremost concern. "Will the House Judiciary Committee be bringing you in to testify?"
"Eventually, yes."
"Are you in any danger where you are right now?" I was unaware at the time that Riconosciuto had been recruited at Stanford University into the CIA nearly twenty years earlier, and danger was a matter of fact in his life.
============
http://www.tdbooks.com/ebooks/lastcircle/chpt6pt1.html
On September 13, 1985, the Los Angeles Times published the story of Thornton's death, entitled, "Former Narcotics Officer Parachutes Out of Plane, Dies with 77 Pounds of Cocaine." The article said Thornton was indicted in 1981 for "allegedly flying a plane to South America for a reputed drug ring known as `The Company.'" In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Brian Leighton said, "I'm glad his parachute didn't open. I hope he got a hell of a high out of that ..."
Thornton's mysterious death was discussed at length in a book written by Sally Denton entitled, "The Blue Grass Conspiracy." Part of The Company was headquartered in Lexington, Kentucky. Prosecutors in Lexington, Fresno, California (Brian Leighton), and Miami, Florida were working together in a joint effort to bring down The Company.
The San Francisco Chronicle noted that in January, 1982, Gene Berry, a state prosecutor in Charlotte Harbor, Florida, was shot in the face as he answered his door. Police subsequently arrested Bonnie Kelly as Berry's murderer. Bonnie's husband, Mike McClure Kelly, was a suspected member of The Company who later pleaded guilty in the Fresno, California case.
In Michael Riconosciuto's documents, I discovered a letter dated March 24, 1982, written on Cabazon letterhead to Michael McClure at Hercules Corporation from Art Welmas, President of the Cabazon Band of Indians. Copies (cc:) were also noted to Marshall Riconosciuto and Michael Riconosciuto. The letter complimented McClure's competence in presenting a clear and lucid explanation of a power pack under development at Hercules. (Hercules was owned by Marshall Riconosciuto, Michael Riconosciuto and Patrick Moriarty, the Red Devil fireworks mogul. More on Moriarty later.)
Throughout Michael's documents, I found references to Michael McClure and Bonnie Lynne G. Kelly. Michael's code word for Mike McClure was "Gopher."
Journalist Danny Casolaro had been communicating regularly with Michael Riconosciuto and obviously learned about The Company. It is not to be overlooked that coincidentally or not, Ari BenMenashe (a former Israeli intelligence agent who lived in Lexington, Kentucky) told Bill Hamilton that two Lexington FBI agents had been enroute to meet with Danny at the Martinsburg Hotel on the day of his death. The Company was headquartered in Lexington. Danny was not meeting with the FBI relative to PROMIS, he was preparing to turn over drug trafficking information on The Company.
BenMenashe further told Hamilton that one of the agents, E.B. Cartinhour, was angry that the Justice Department was not pursuing Reagan administration officials for their role in the October Surprise.
==========
The Octopus
Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro
by Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith
Review by Jon Roland
Jim Keith investigator Dead from "blood clot" in hospital after broken knee @ burning man fest
Book includes interview with Michael Riconosciuto. (in prison)
Ari Ben-Menashe, Israeli intelligence officer. one of last to speak to Casolaro, gave info on "the company" & agents in Kentucky. Ben-Menashe, an Iranian-born Jew who served in Israeli military intelligence, claimed that in late January 1980, a Brian acquaintance, former Iranian Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, arranged passage from the Iranian embassy in Ottawa, Canada, to Tehran for Brian and Robert McFarlane, then a Senate staffer. Ben-Menashe asserted that Brian also was a Republican representative at later meetings in Madrid and then in Paris in October 1980. The Israeli claimed further that $4 million in CIA money was transferred into a Brian account in Phoenix, Ariz., as part of the pay-offs for the secret operation. [For details, see Ben-Menashe's Profits of War. ]
Earl Brian. Few ostensibly private citizens passed through as many controversies of the Reagan-Bush era as did Dr. Earl W. Brian, a decorated Vietnam War veteran and a longtime aide to Ronald Reagan. Even fewer found their credibility more aggressively defended by both Republicans and investigators whose job it was to get at the truth. Convicted of securities fraud / embezzlement, implicated in theft of Promis http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/xfile11.html
http://www.delve.com/consort/archive/xfile.html
More on Earl Brian by Phil Linsalata Brian has an interesting background. He heads Infotechnology, a parent company that extends over an empire that at various times has included United Press International, Financial News Network, and The Learning Channel. A physician and decorated Vietnam veteran, Brian was once the youngest-ever director of the California Health and Welfare Agency, under Governor Reagan. There he cut back the department's services and weathered a string of controversies. Phil Linsalata is a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
http://www.cjr.org/year/91/6/octopus.asp
Charles Hayes testifies that he's been set up by the federal government. And why? Because he's part of a team of retired intelligence types calling themselves the "Fifth Column," who've been using a supercomputer to hack into certain secret foreign bank accounts used by numerous US politicians to stash illegal funds garnered mainly from drug and arms dealers. The prosecution's key witness against Hayes, at the trial in London, KY, turns out to be a right-wing California journalist who occasionally informs for the FBI, a fugitive with a history of mental institutionalization.
For the defense, a former senior editor at Forbes magazine vouches for Hayes' credibility. After the jury hears tapes of Hayes discussing a $5,000 payoff for a prospective hit on his estranged son, the defendant responds that he'd known all along he was talking to an FBI undercover, but had been stringing the Bureau along so he could develop evidence against them. When the CIA introduces affidavits disavowing any relationship with Hayes, he takes the stand to provide his cover name, "Charles Lawson," and an ID number. Following three hours of deliberation, the jury finds Hayes guilty, to the astonishment of nearly 100 supporters present. He says from his jail cell afterwards, while his attorney moves for a new trial, that he anticipates "assistance" from higher powers.
Hayes Gets Around
Is Charles Hayes for real, or merely a con man looking for a get-out-of-jail-free card? For months prior to his arrest last year, revelations about Hayes and his postulated Fifth Column had been circulating on the Internet and in Media Bypass, a colorful "patriot" publication out of Evansville, IN. Not only was this Fifth Column said to have downloaded financial records on government officials from up to 3,000 hidden overseas accounts, but they also allegedly wire-transferred about $4 billion clear out of those accounts into "escrow holding funds" at Federal Reserve banks. Then, according to Hayes, these alleged Robin Hoods of cyberspace began quietly announcing their findings to certain congress people and foreign
governments; which is why, so the yet- undocumented saga brags, a record number of 60-some US senators and representatives announced their
retirements just before the 1996 elections.
http://www.aci.net/kalliste/spookwar.htm ****
http://www.aci.net/kalliste/fantasy.htm
HI TECH Watergate
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw.html?topic=&topic_set=
WIRED MAGAZINE
The INSLAW Octopus
Software piracy, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action: Just another decade at the Department of Justice ...
By Richard L. Fricker
The House Judiciary Committee lists these crimes as among the possible violations perpetrated by "high-level Justice officials and private individuals":
>> Conspiracy to commit an offense
>> Fraud
>> Wire fraud
>> Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies and committees
>> Tampering with a witness
>> Retaliation against a witness
>> Perjury
>> Interference with commerce by threats or violence
>> Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) violations
>> Transportation of stolen goods, securities, moneys
>> Receiving stolen goods
Bill Hamilton, Inslaw & PROMIS
Who:
Bill Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Hamilton, start Inslaw to nurture PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems).
Why #1:
The DOJ, aware that its case management system is in dire need of automation, funds Inslaw and PROMIS. After creating a public-domain version, Inslaw makes significant enhancements to PROMIS and, aware that the US market for legal automation is worth $3 billion, goes private in the early '80s.
Why #2:
Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.
By late November, 1992 the nation had turned its attention from the election-weary capital to Little Rock, Ark., where a new generation of leaders conferred about the future. But in a small Washington D.C. office, Bill Hamilton, president and founder of Inslaw Inc., and Dean Merrill, a former Inslaw vice president, were still very much concerned about the past.
The two men studied six photographs laid out before them. "Have you ever seen any of these men?" Merrill was asked. Immediately he singled out the second photo. In a separate line up, Hamilton's secretary singled out the same photo.
Both said the man had visited Inslaw in February 1983 for a presentation of PROMIS, Inslaw's bread-and-butter legal software. Hamilton, who knew the purpose of the line-up, identified the visitor as Dr. Ben Orr. At the time of his visit, Orr claimed to be a public prosecutor from Israel.
Orr was impressed with the power of PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems), which had recently been updated by Inslaw to run on powerful 32-bit VAX computers from Digital Equipment Corp. "He fell in love with the VAX version," Hamilton recalled.
Dr. Orr never came back, and he never bought anything. No one knew why at the time. But for Hamilton, who has fought the Department of Justice (DOJ) for almost 10 years in an effort to salvage his business, once his co- workers recognized the man in the second photo, it all made perfect sense.
For the second photo was not of the mysterious Dr. Orr, it was of Rafael Etian, chief of the Israeli defense force's anti-terrorism intelligence unit. The Department of Justice sent him over for a look at the property they were about to "misappropriate," and Etian liked what he saw. Department of Justice documents record that one Dr. Ben Orr left the DOJ on May 6, 1983, with a computer tape containing PROMIS tucked under his arm.
What for the past decade has been known as the Inslaw affair began to unravel in the final, shredder-happy days of the Bush administration. According to Federal court documents, PROMIS was stolen from Inslaw by the Department of Justice directly after Etian's 1983 visit to Inslaw (a later congressional investigation preferred to use the word "misappropriated"). And according to sworn affidavits, PROMIS was then given or sold at a profit to Israel and as many as 80 other countries by Dr. Earl W. Brian, a man with close personal and business ties to then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Presidential counsel Edwin Meese.
A House Judiciary Committee report released last September found evidence raising "serious concerns" that high officials at the Department of Justice executed a pre-meditated plan to destroy Inslaw and co-opt the rights to its PROMIS software. The committee's call for an independent counsel have fallen on deaf ears. One journalist, Danny Casolaro, died as he attempted to tell the story (see sidebar), and boxes of documents relating to the case have been destroyed, stolen, or conveniently "lost" by the Department of Justice.
But so far, not a single person has been held accountable.
WIRED has spent two years searching for the answers to the questions Inslaw poses: Why would Justice steal PROMIS? Did it then cover up the theft? Did it let associates of government officials sell PROMIS to foreign governments, which then used the software to track political dissidents instead of legal cases? (Israel has reportedly used PROMIS to track troublesome Palestinians.)
The implications continue: that Meese profited from the sales of the stolen property. That Brian, Meese's business associate, may have been involved in the October Surprise (the oft-debunked but persistent theory that the Reagan campaign conspired to insure that US hostages in Iran were held until after Reagan won the 1980 election, see sidebar). That some of the moneys derived from the illegal sales of PROMIS furthered covert and illegal government programs in Nicaragua. That Oliver used PROMIS as a population tracking instrument for his White House-based domestic emergency management program.
Each new set of allegations leads to a new set of possibilities, which makes the story still more difficult to comprehend. But one truth is obvious: What the Inslaw case presents, in its broadest possible implications, is a painfully clear snapshot of how the Justice Department operated during the Reagan-Bush years.
This is the case that won't go away, the case that shows how justice and public service gave way to profit and political expediency, how those within the administration's circle of privilege were allowed to violate private property and civil rights for their own profit.
Sound like a conspiracy theorist's dream? Absolutely. But the fact is, it's true.
The Background
Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There's a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney's General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.
Along comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases, and it turns out its development was originally funded by the government under a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant in the 1970s. That means the software is public domain ... free!
Edwin Meese was apparently quite taken with PROMIS. He told an April 1981 gathering of prosecutors that PROMIS was "one of the greatest opportunities for [law enforcement] success in the future." In March 1982, Inslaw won a $9.6 million contract from the Justice Department to install the public domain version of PROMIS in 20 US Attorney's offices as a pilot program. If successful, the company would install PROMIS in the remaining 74 federal prosecutors' offices around the country. The eventual market for complete automation of the Federal court system was staggering: as much as $3 billion, according to Bill Hamilton. But Hamilton would never see another federal contract.
Designed as a case-management system for prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to track people. "Every use of PROMIS in the court system is tracking people," said Inslaw President Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases."
What this means is that PROMIS can provide a complete rundown of all federal cases in which a lawyer has been involved, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented defendant A, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented white-collar criminals, at which stage in each of the cases the lawyer agreed to a plea bargain, and so on. Based on this information, PROMIS can help a prosecutor determine when a plea will be taken in a particular type of case.
But the real power of PROMIS, according to Hamilton, is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.
At the time of its inception, PROMIS was the most powerful program of its type. But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County (Calif.) District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out. (Early in his career, Ed Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney's office. Jensen was later appointed to Meese's Justice Department during the Reagan presidency.)
In the final days of the Carter administration, the LEAA was phased out. Inslaw had made a name for itself and Hamilton wanted to stay in business, so he converted Inslaw to a for-profit, private business. The new Inslaw did not own the public domain version of PROMIS because it had been developed with LEAA funds. But because it had funded a major upgrade with its own money, Inslaw did claim ownership of the enhanced PROMIS.
Through his lawyers, Hamilton sent the Department of Justice a letter outlining his company's decision to go private with the enhanced PROMIS. The letter specifically asked the DOJ to waive any proprietary rights it might claim to the enhanced version. In a reply dated August 11, 1982, a DOJ lawyer wrote: "To the extent that any other enhancements (beyond the public domain PROMIS) were privately funded by Inslaw and not specified to be delivered to the Department of Justice under any contract or other agreement, Inslaw may assert whatever proprietary rights it may have."
Arnold Burns, then a deputy attorney general, clarified the DOJ's position in a now-critical 1988 deposition: "Our lawyers were satisfied that Inslaw's lawyers could sustain the claim in court, that we had waived those [proprietary] rights."
The enhancements Inslaw claimed were significant. In the 1970s the public- domain PROMIS was adapted to run on Burroughs, Prime, Wang and IBM machines, all of which used less-powerful 16-bit architectures. With private funds, Inslaw converted that version of PROMIS to a 32-bit architecture running on a DEC VAX minicomputer. It was this version that Etian saw in 1983. It was this version that the DOJ stole later that year through a pre-meditated plan, according to two court decisions.
The Dispute Grows
On a gorgeous spring morning in 1981, Lawrence McWhorter, director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys, put his feet on his desk, lit an Italian cigar, eyed his subordinate Frank Mallgrave and said through a haze of blue smoke: "We're out to get Inslaw."
McWhorter had just asked Mallgrave to oversee the pilot installation of PROMIS, a job Mallgrave refused, unaware at the time that he was being asked to participate in Inslaw's deliberate destruction.
"We were just in his office for what I call a B.S. type discussion," Mallgrave told WIRED. "I remember it was a bright sunny morning.... (McWhorter) asked me if I would be interested in assuming the position of Assistant Director for Data Processing...basically working with Inslaw. I told him...I just had no interest in that job. And then, almost as an afterthought, he said 'We're out to get Inslaw.' I remember it to this day."
After Mallgrave refused the job, McWhorter gave it to C. Madison "Brick" Brewer. Brewer at one time worked for Inslaw, but was allowed to resign when Hamilton found his performance inadequate, according to court documents. Brewer was then hired into the Department of Justice specifically to oversee the contract of his former employer. (The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility ruled there was no conflict of interest.) He would later tell a federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen, the same man who once supervised DALITE, the product which lost a major contract to Inslaw in the 1970s.
Brewer, who now refuses to comment on the Inslaw case, was aided in his new DOJ job by Peter Videnieks. Videnieks was fresh from the Customs Service, where he oversaw contracts between that agency and Hadron, Inc., a company controlled by Meese and Reagan-crony Earl Brian. Hadron, a closely held government systems consulting firm, was to figure prominently in the forthcoming scandal.
According to congressional and court documents, Brewer and Videnieks didn't tarry in their efforts to destroy Inslaw. After Inslaw's installation of public domain PROMIS had begun, the DOJ claimed that Inslaw, which was supporting the installation with its own computers running the enhanced version of PROMIS, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Although Inslaw was contracted to provide only the public domain PROMIS, the DOJ demanded that Inslaw turn over the enhanced version of PROMIS in case the company could not complete its contractual obligations. Inslaw agreed to this contract modification, but on two conditions: that the DOJ recognize Inslaw's proprietary rights to enhanced PROMIS, and that the DOJ not distribute enhanced PROMIS beyond the boundaries of the contract (the 94 US Attorney's offices.)
The DOJ agreed to these conditions, but requested Inslaw prove it had indeed created enhanced PROMIS with private funds. Inslaw said it would, and the enhanced software was given to the DOJ.
Once the DOJ had control of PROMIS, it dogmatically refused to verify that Inslaw had created the enhancements, essentially rendering the contract modification useless. When Inslaw protested, the DOJ began to withhold payments. Two years later, Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy.
As the contract problems with DOJ emerged, Hamilton received a phone call from Dominic Laiti, chief executive of Hadron. Laiti wanted to buy Inslaw. Hamilton refused to sell. According to Hamilton's statements in court documents, Laiti then warned him that Hadron had friends in the government and if Inslaw didn't sell willingly, it would be forced to sell.
Those government connections included Peter Videnieks over at the Justice Department, according to John Schoolmeester, Videnieks' former Customs Service supervisor. Laiti and Videnieks both deny ever meeting or having any contact, but Schoolmeester has told both WIRED and the House Judiciary Committee it was "impossible" for the pair not to know each other because of the type of work and oversight involved in Hadron's relationship with the Customs Service. Schoolmeester also said that because of Brian's relationship with then-President Reagan (see sidebar), Hadron was considered an "inside" company.
The full-court press continued. In 1985 Allen & Co., a New York investment banking concern with close business ties to Earl Brian, helped finance a second company, SCT, which also attempted to purchase Inslaw. That attempt also failed, but in the process a number of Inslaw's customers were warned by SCT that Inslaw would soon go bankrupt and would not survive reorganization, Hamilton said in court documents.
Broke and with no friends in the government, on June 9, 1986, Inslaw filed a $30 million lawsuit against the DOJ in bankruptcy court. Inslaw's attorney for the case (he was later fired from his firm under extremely suspicious circumstances -- see sidebar) was Leigh Ratiner of the Wash- ington firm Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin. Ratiner chose bankruptcy court for the filing based on the premise that Justice, the creditor, had control of PROMIS. He explained recently, "It was forbidden by the BankruptcyAct for the creditor to exercise control over the debtor property. And that theory -- that the Justice Department was exercising control -- was the basis that the bankruptcy court had jurisdiction.
"As far as I know, this was the first time this theory had been used," Ratiner told WIRED. "This was ground-breaking. It was, in fact, a legitimate use of the code."
It worked, but to only a point. In 1987, Washington, D.C., bankruptcy judge George Bason ruled in a scathing opinion that Justice had stolen PROMIS through "trickery, fraud and deceit." He awarded Inslaw $6.8 million in damages and, in the process, found that Justice Department officials made a concerted effort to bankrupt Inslaw and place the company's enhanced PROMIS up for public auction (where it would then be fodder for Brian's Hadron). Bason's findings of fact relied on testimony from Justice employees and internal memoranda, some of which outlined a plan to "get" PROMIS software.
Bason cited the testimony of a number of the government's defense witnesses as being "unbelievable" and openly questioned the credibility of others. In his 216-page ruling, Bason cites numerous instances where testimony from government witnesses is contradictory. (In a private interview with WIRED he noted that as a bankruptcy judge he was precluded from bringing perjury charges against government employees, but he had recommended to various congressional panels that an inquiry was necessary.)
When the DOJ appealed, a federal district court affirmed Bason, ruling that there was "convincing, perhaps compelling support for the findings set forth by the bankruptcy court." But the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the case on a legal technicality, finding that the bankruptcy court had no jurisdiction to hear the damages claim. A petition to the Supreme Court in October 1991 was denied review.
The IRS got into the act as well. Inslaw was audited several times in the course of their battles with the Department of Justice. In fact, the day following the bankruptcy trial, S. Martin Teel, a lawyer for the IRS, requested that Judge Bason liquidate Inslaw. Bason ruled against Teel. As a coda to the lawsuit, Bason, a respected jurist, was not re-appointed to the bench when his term expired. His replacement? S. Martin Teel. (Bason has testified before Congress that the DOJ orchestrated his replacement as punishment for his rulings in the Inslaw case.)
But Inslaw's troubles did not end with bankruptcy. Frustrated by Attorney General Dick Thornburgh's stubborn refusal to investigate the DOJ or appoint an independent prosecutor, Elliot Richardson, President Nixon's former attorney general and a counsel to Inslaw for nearly 10 years (he retired this January), filed a case in U.S. District Court demanding that Thornburgh investigate the Inslaw affair. In 1990, the court ruled that a prosecutor's decision not to investigate -- "no matter how indefensible" -- cannot be corrected by any court. Another loss for Inslaw.
Broke and still attempting to revive itself, Inslaw has not refiled its suit, preferring to wait for a new administration and a new DOJ.
By this time, the spinning jennies of the conspiracy network had grasped the Inslaw story and were all-too-eager to put their stitch in the unraveling yarn. According to documents and affidavits filed during court cases and congressional inquiries, the Hamiltons and their lawyers began receiving phone calls, visits and memos from a string of shadowy sources, many of them connected to international drug, spy and arms networks. Their allegations: That Earl Brian helped orchestrate the October Surprise for then-candidate Reagan, and that Brian's eventual payment for that orchestration was a cut of the PROMIS action. Brian and the DOJ then resold or gave PROMIS to as many as 80 foreign and domestic agencies. (Brian adamantly denies any connection to Inslaw or the October Surprise.)
These sources, which include ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe and a computer programmer of dubious reputation, Michael Riconosciuto, allege that PROMIS had been further modified by the DOJ so that any agency using it could be subject to undetected DOJ eavesdropping -- a sort of software Trojan Horse. If these allegations are true, by the late 1980s PROMIS could have become the digital ears of the US Government's spy effort -- both internal and external. Certainly something the administration wouldn't want nosy congressional committees looking into.
The diaphanous web of more than 30 sources who offered information to Inslaw were not "what a lawyer might consider ideal witnesses," Richardson admitted. But their stories yielded a surprising consistency. "The picture that emerges from the individual statements is remarkably detailed and consistent," he wrote in an Oct. 21, 1991 New York Times Op Ed.
The Congressional Investigation
The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a US district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS.
"High government officials were involved," the report states. "... (S)everal individuals testified under oath that Inslaw's PROMIS software was stolen and distributed internationally in order to provide financial gain and to further intelligence and foreign policy objectives."
"Actions against Inslaw were implemented through the Project Manager (Brick Brewer) from the beginning of the contract and under the direction of high- level Justice Department officials," the report says. "The evidence...demonstrates that high-level Department officials deliberately ignored Inslaw proprietary rights and misappropriated its PROMIS software for use at locations not covered under contract with the company."
The Committee report accuses former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh of stonewalling congressional inquiries, turning a blind eye to the possible destruction of evidence within the Justice Department, and ignoring the DOJ's harassment of employees questioned by Congressional investigators.
Rep. Brooks told WIRED that the report should be the starting point for a grand jury investigation. The owners of Inslaw, Brooks said, were "ravaged by the Justice Department...treated like dogs."
Brooks' committee voted along party lines, 21-13, to adopt the investigative report on Aug. 11, 1992. The report asked then-Attorney General William Barr to "immediately settle Inslaw's claims in a fair and equitable manner" and "strongly recommends that the Department seek the appointment of an Independent Counsel."
As he did with the burgeoning Iraqgate scandal and as his predecessor did before him, Barr refused to appoint an independent counsel to the Inslaw case, relying instead on a retired federal judge, in this case Nicholas Bua, who reported to Barr alone. In other words, the DOJ was responsible for investigating itself.
"The way in which the Department of Justice has treated this case, to me, is inexplicable," Richardson told WIRED. "I think the circumstances most strongly suggest that there must be wider ramifications."
The Threads Unravel
Proof of those wider ramifications are just starting to leak out, as DOJ and other agency employees begin to talk, although for the most part they spoke to WIRED only on condition of anonymity.
On Nov. 20, 1990, the Judiciary Committee wrote a letter asking CIA director William Webster to help the committee "by determining whether the CIA has the PROMIS software."
The official reply on December 11th: "We have checked with Agency components that track data processing procurement or that would be likely users of PROMIS, and we have been unable to find any indication that the Agency ever obtained PROMIS software."
But a retired CIA official whose job it was to investigate the Inslaw allegations internally told WIRED that the DOJ gave PROMIS to the CIA. "Well," the retired official told WIRED, "the congressional committees were after us to look into allegations that somehow the agency had been culpable of what would have been, in essence, taking advantage of, like stealing, the technology [PROMIS]. We looked into it and there was enough to it, the agency had been involved."
How was the CIA involved? According to the same source, who requested anonymity, the agency accepted stolen goods, not aware that a major scandal was brewing. In other words, the DOJ robbed the bank, and the CIA took a share of the plunder.
But the CIA was not the only place where illegal versions of PROMIS cropped up. Canadian documents (held by the House Judiciary Committee and obtained by WIRED) place PROMIS in the hands of various Canadian government agencies. These documents include two letters to Inslaw from Canadian agencies requesting detailed user manuals -- even though Inslaw has never sold PROMIS to Canada. Canadian officials now claim the letters were in error.
And, of course, the software was transferred to Rafael Etian's anti- terrorism unit in Israel. The DOJ claims it was the LEAA version, but former Israeli spy Ben Menashe and others claim it was the 32-bit version. According to Ben Menashe, other government departments within Israel also saw PROMIS, and this time the pitchman was Dr. Earl Brian. In a 1991 affidavit related to the bankruptcy proceedings, Ben Menashe claimed: "I attended a meeting at my Department's headquarters in Tel Aviv in 1987 during which Dr. Earl W. Brian of the United States made a presentation intended to facilitate the use of the PROMIS computer software."
"Dr. Brian stated during his presentation that all U.S. Intelligence Agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice were then using the PROMIS computer software," Ben Menashe continued. While the credibility of his statements has been questioned, the Israeli government has admitted that Ben Menashe had access to extremely sensitive information during his tenure at the Mossad.
Asked why Israeli intelligence would have been so interested in Inslaw and PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, "PROMIS was a very big thing for us guys, a very, very big thing ... it was probably the most important issue of the '80s because it just changed the whole intelligence outlook. The whole form of intelligence collection changed. This whole thing changed it." PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, was perfect for tracking Palestinians and other political dissidents.
(Ben Menashe's superior during this period was Rafael Etian, or Dr. Ben Orr, as he was known during his 1983 visit to Inslaw.)
Apparently, Israel was not the only country interested in using PROMIS for internal security purposes. Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ's command center.
Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North's FEMA dealings was dropped.
A Thorough Cleaning at the White House?
If the case against the Department of Justice is so solid, why hasn't anything been done? The answer is timing. The next move belongs to retired Federal Judge Bua, since he was given oversight by Attorney General Barr in lieu of an independent counsel. And everyone, including Judge Bua, whose non-binding report was pending at WIRED's early December deadline, seems to be waiting for the new administration. Both the Clinton/Gore transition team and House majority leader Richard Gephardt had no comment on the Inslaw case pending Clinton's inauguration.
But a source close to Bua's investigation said the retired judge may present the DOJ with a bombshell. While not required to suggest a settlement, the source believes Bua will reportedly recommend that Inslaw be given between $25 million and $50 million for its mistreatment by the DOJ. (In last-minute negotiations, Inslaw attorney Elliot Richardson held brief meetings with DOJ officials in mid-December. Richardson pressed for a settlement ranging from $25 million to $500 million, but the DOJ balked, according to newspaper reports.)
But the question remains: Can the DOJ paper over the willful destruction of a company, the plundering of its software, the illegal resale of that software to further foreign policy objectives, and the overt obstruction of justice with $25 million?
Bua's final recommendation, expected sometime before Clinton's inauguration, is that the Inslaw Affair "requires further investigation," the source said. That conclusion mirrors the House Judiciary Committee's report. Privately, many Democrats, including Gephardt, have expressed a strong desire to get to the bottom of the Inslaw case. Rep. Brooks will be pushing for yet another investigation of the scandal, this time independent of the Justice Department, according to Congressional sources. Once Bua's report is out, the next and possibly final move will be up to a new president, a new Congress, and, possibly, a renewed sense of justice.
Sidebars Earl W. Brian - The Consumate Insider
Dr. Earl W. Brian has made quite a career of riding Reagan and Meese's coattails. After a stint in Vietnam, where he worked as a combat physician in the unit that supplied air support for Operation Phoenix, Brian returned to California with a chest full of ribbons and a waiting job - as Secretary of Health - with then-Governor Reagan's administration. (Operation Phoenix, a well-documented CIA political assassination program, used computers to track "enemies" in Vietnam.)
In 1974, Brian resigned his cabinet post with Governor Reagan to run for the Senate against Alan Cranston. After his defeat, Brian moved into the world of business and soon ran into trouble. His flagship company, Xionics, was cited by the Security and Exchange Commission for issuing press releases designed to boost stock prices with exaggerated or bloated information. The SEC also accused Xionics of illegally paying "commissions" to brokers, according to SEC documents.
At the close of the Reagan governorship, Brian was involved in a public scandal having to do with - surprise - stolen computer tapes. The tapes, which contained records of 70,000 state welfare files, were eventually returned - Brian claimed he had a right to them under a contract signed in the last hours of the administration. (Brian said he just wanted to develop a better way of doing welfare business.)
In 1980, Brian formed Biotech Capital Corp., a venture capital firm designed to invest in biological and medical companies. Ultimately, Brian has invested in and owned several companies, including FNN (Financial News Network) and UPI, both of which ended up in dire financial straits.
Ursula Meese, who like her husband knew Brian from the Reagan cabinet, was an early investor in Biotech, using $15,000 (borrowed from Edwin Thomas, a Meese aide in the White House and another Reaganite from California) to purchase 2,000 shares on behalf of the Meese's two children, according to information made public during Meese's confirmation hearings for Attorney General.
It is those Reagan-Meese connections that continue to drag Brian into the Inslaw affair. For why would Brian, of all people, be the recipient of stolen PROMIS? PROMIS, after all, was a major part in government automation contracts estimated at $3 billion, according to Inslaw President Bill Hamilton. That's quite a political plum.
One possibility is Ed and Ursula Meese's financial connections to Brian. Another is a payoff for Brian's role in the October Surprise Even if he manages to evade the Inslaw allegations, Brian may still be in hot water. As of this writing, Financial News Network's financial dealings were under investigation by a Los Angeles Grand Jury, according to sources who have testified before it. - RLF
What A Surprise!
Earl W. Brian says he wasn't in Paris in October 1980, but investors were told a different story
As Inslaw President Bill Hamilton moved his company from non-profit status to the private sector in 1980, Ronald Reagan was running for President, negotiations for the release of the American hostages in Iran had apparently hit a snag, and Dr. Earl W. Brian was touring Canada touting stock in his newly acquired Clinical Sciences Inc.
History records that the hostages were released as Ronald Reagan took the Presidential oath of office, and that shortly thereafter, Inslaw received a $9.6 million contract from the Department of Justice. At the same time, Earl Brian was appointed to a White House post to advise on health-care issues. Brian reported directly to Ed Meese. He also arranged White House tours to woo investors in his government contracting company, Hadron Inc., according to a Canadian investment banker who took a tour.
But these seemingly random historical connections between Inslaw, Hadron, the Reagan White House and Earl Brian take on a new meaning when considered in light of the "October Surprise," the persistent allegation that the Reagan campaign negotiated with Iranian officials to guarantee that US hostages would not be released before Reagan won election in 1980.
The October Surprise theory hinges in part on alleged negotiations between the Reagan campaign and the Iranians on the weekend of Oct. 17-21, 1980, in Paris, among other places.The deal, according to former Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe, and a former CIA contract agent interviewed by WIRED, included the payment of $40 million to the Iranians.
According to several sources, Earl Brian, one of Reagan's close advisors, made it quite clear that he was planning to be in Paris that very weekend. Ben Menashe, who says he was one of six Israelis, 12 Americans and 16 Iranians present at the Paris talks, said, "I saw Brian in Paris."
Brian was interviewed by Senate investigators on July 28, 1992, and denied under oath any connection with the alleged negotiations. He told the investigators he did not have a valid passport during the October 1980 dates. But according to court documents and interviews, Brian told Canadian investors in his newly acquired Clinical Sciences, Inc., that he would be in Paris that weekend. Brian acquired controlling interest in Clinical Sciences in the summer of 1980. Clinical Sciences was then trading at around $2 a share. Brian worked with Janos P. Pasztor, a vice president and special situations analyst with the Canadian investment bank of Nesbitt, Thomson, Bongard Inc., to create a market of Canadian investors for the stock.
Pasztor later testified in court documents that Brian said he would be in Paris the weekend of October 17 to do a deal with the Pasteur Institute (a medical research firm).
Two other brokers, Harry Scully, a broker based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and John Belton, a senior account executive with Nesbitt-Thomson from 1968 to 1982 who is suing Nesbitt-Thomson and Pasztor for securities fraud, also claim that they were told that Brian was in Paris that weekend.
But if Brian went to Paris to see the Pasteur Institute, he seems to have missed his appointment. An investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into Clinical Sci-ences stock transactions revealed that the Pasteur Institute had never conducted business with, or even heard of Brian.
When asked by WIRED to elaborate on Brian's 1980 trip, Pasztor said, "These are political questions and I don't want to become involved." He refused further comment.Brian contends that the dates of his trip were in error and that he went to Paris in April 1981, not October 1980. But the passport he turned over to Senate investigators did not contain a French entry or exit stamp for April 1981.
Through his lawyers, Brian refused to be interviewed for this story. - RLF
Earl W. Brian: Closet Spook?
Michael Riconosciuto, a computer programmer and chemist who surfs the spooky fringe of the guns-'n'-money crowd, is currently serving a federal prison sentence for drug crimes. From his jail cell he has given several interviews claiming knowledge of Inslaw and the October Surprise (he also claims his jail term is the DOJ's way of punishing him for his knowledge). Much of what he claims cannot be verified, other statements have failed to be veri-fied conclusively.
But prior to his arrest in 1991, Riconosciuto provided the Hamiltons with an affidavit that once again brought Brian into the Inslaw picture. "I engaged in some software development and modification work in 1983 and 1984 on proprietary PROMIS computer software product," he stated. "The copy of PROMIS on which I worked came from the US Department of Justice. Earl W. Brian made it available to me through Wackenhut (a security company with close FBI and CIA connections) after acquiring it from Peter Videnieks, who was then a Department of Justice contracting official with the responsibility for PROMIS software. I performed the modifications to PROMIS in Indio, Calif.; Silver Springs, Md.; and Miami, Fla."
The modifications included a telecommunications "trap door" that would let the US Government eavesdrop on any other organization using the pirated software, Riconosciuto said.
Videnieks and Brian both told House investigators that they did not know Riconosciuto. After Riconosciuto was interviewed by House investigators, Videnieks refused to give Congress further interviews.
Although Brian denies any involvement with Inslaw or Riconosciuto, the House Judiciary Committee received a report from a special task force of the Riverside County, Calif., Sheriff's Office and District Attorney, stating that on the evening of Sept. 10, 1981, arms dealers, buyers and various intelligence operatives gathered at the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, Calif., for a demonstration of night warfare weapons. The demonstration was orchestrated jointly by Wackenhut and the Cabazon Indian tribe. (Many published reports allege that the Wackenhut/Cabazon joint venture served as a weapons fencing operation for Oliver North's Iran- Contra dealings.)
According to Indio city police officers hired to provide security, those attending included Earl W. Brian, who was identified as "being with the CIA," and Michael Riconosciuto. - RLF
US Deputy Attorney General Jensen Lost Once To Inslaw
Could It Be He Wanted to Even The Score? At the time of its inception, PROMIS was the most powerful program of its type. But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County, Calif., District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out.
Early in his career, Attorney General-to-be Edwin Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney's office. Jensen was later appointed as Deputy Attorney General into Meese's Justice Department.
C. Madison "Brick" Brewer, accused by the House Judiciary Committee of deliberately misappropriating PROMIS, testified in federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by D. Lowell Jensen, the same man who once supervised DALITE.
Was Israel's PROMIS to Crush the Infitada?
Asked why Israeli intelligence would have been so interested in Inslaw and PROMIS, ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe said: "PROMIS was a very big thing for us guys, a very, very big thing ... it was probably the most important issue of the '80s because it just changed the whole intelligence outlook. The whole form of intelligence collection changed. This whole thing changed it." Why? PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, was perfect for tracking the Palestinian population and other political dissidents.
Did Oliver North Use PROMIS?
Apparently, Israel was not the only country interested in using PROMIS for internal security purposes. Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ's command center.
Who Fired Inslaw's Lawyer?
As the Inslaw-DOJ battle was joined in bankruptcy court, Inslaw's chief attorney, Leigh Ratiner, was fired from Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin, the firm where he had been a partner for 10 years. His firing came after another Dickstein partner, Leonard Garment, met with Arnold Burns, then- deputy attorney general of the DOJ.
Garment was counsel to President Richard Nixon and assistant to President Gerald Ford. He testified before a Senate inquiry that he and Meese discussed the Inslaw case in October 1986, and afterward he met with Burns. Two days later Ratiner was fired.
The terms of the financial settlement between Ratiner and his firm were kept confidential, but WIRED has been told by ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe that Israeli intelligence paid to have Ratiner fired, and that the money was transferred through Hadron Inc., the same company that Earl Brian used to distribute illegal copies of PROMIS. Through informed sources, WIRED has independently confirmed portions of Ben Menashe's allegations.
Ben Menashe has told WIRED that he saw a memo in Israel, written in Hebrew, requesting funds for "a lawyer." He claims to have seen the memo at the office of a joint Mossad (Israeli CIA), Internal Defense Forces and Military committee specializing in Israeli-Iran relations. Israel admits that Ben Menashe handled communications at this level and therefore would have had access to such transmissions.
Ben Menashe said the money was used as Ratiner's settlement payment. "The money was transferred, $600,000, to Hadron," he said. As to why Hadron was used, Ben Menashe claims: "Because [Brian] was involved quite deeply." He said Ratiner was unaware of the source of the settlement funds.
Ratiner, contacted after the Ben Menashe interview, said he had never disclosed the amount of the separation settlement to anyone. He is limited contractually by his former firm from discussing any specifics of the firing. Asked if Ben Menashe's figures were correct, Ratiner said, "I can't comment because it would be the same as revealing them." WIRED located a deep background source who confirmed that the amount was "correct almost to the penny."
Ratiner said he was shocked at the allegations of money laundering. "Dickstein, Shapiro is the 10th largest firm in Washington and I had no reason to think it was other than reputable," he said. "Why is it that everyone who comes in contact with the Inslaw case becomes a victim?" - RLF
A Dead Journalist Raises Some Eyebrows
Among the many strong conclusions of the "House Judiciary Committee Report on the Inslaw Affair" was this rather startling and brief recommendation: "Investigate Mr. Casolaro's death."
Freelance reporter Danny Casolaro spent the last few years of his life investigating a pattern which he called "The Octopus." According to Casolaro, Inslaw was only part of a greater story of how intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice and even the mob had subverted the government and its various functions for their own profit.
Casolaro had hoped to write a book based on his reporting. His theories, which some seasoned investigative journalists have described as naive, led him into a Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime. On August 10th, 1991, he was found dead in a Martinsburg, W. Va., hotel room. Both wrists were deeply slashed.
Casolaro's death has only deepened the mystery surrounding Inslaw. Among the more unusual aspects of his death: He had gone to Martinsburg to meet an informant whose name he never revealed. He had called home the afternoon before his death to say he would be late for a family gathering. Martinsburg police allowed his body to be embalmed before family members were notified and warned hotel employees not to speak to reporters. The hotel room was immediately scrubbed by a cleaning service. Casolaro had told several friends and his brother that if anything ever happened to him, not to believe it was an accident. And his notes, which witnesses saw him carry into the hotel, were missing.
His death was ruled a suicide by Martinsburg and West Virginia authorities several months later. Friends, relatives and some investigators still cry foul.
A source close to retired Federal Judge Nicholas Bua (the Bush Administration appointee who is investigating Inslaw) said Bua will not come to any conclusions regarding Casolaro's fate. "I don't know if he committed suicide or if it was murder," the source said. "But the evidence is consistent with both theories. There are things that bother me but ... certainly no one can be indicted on the evidence that is available."
What does that mean? Either an independent investigation drums up more evidence, or the case may never be solved.
The House Judiciary Committee may have written what could be called the final word on Danny Casolaro's inexplicable death: "As long as the possibility exists that Danny Casolaro died as a result of his investigation into the Inslaw matter, it is imperative that further investigation be conducted." - RLF
InslawGate?
Elliot Richardson, President Nixon's former attorney general (he was fired when he refused to fire Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal) has been a counsel to Inslaw for nearly 10 years (he retired this January). In a Oct. 21, 1991 New York Times Op Ed, Richardson wrote: "This is not the first time I have had to think about the need for an independent investigator. I had been a member of the Nixon Administration from the beginning when I was nominated as Attorney General in 1973. Confidence in the integrity of the Watergate investigation could best be insured, I thought, by entrusting it to someone who had no prior connection to the White House. With Inslaw, the charges against the Justice Department make the same course even more imperative.
"When the Watergate special prosecutor began his inquiry, indications of the President's complicity were not as strong as those that now point to a broad conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of Inslaw's technology."
A Well-Covered Coverup?
The House Committee Report contained some no-holds-barred language on the issue of stonewalling:
"One of the principle reasons the committee could not reach any definitive conclusion about Inslaw's allegations of a high criminal conspiracy at Justice was the lack of cooperation from the Department," the report states. "Throughout the two Inslaw investigations, the Congress met with restrictions, delays and outright denials to requests for information and to unobstructed access to records and witnesses.
"During this committee's investigation, Attorney General Thornburgh repeatedly reneged on agreements made with this committee to provide full and open access to information and witnesses ... the Department failed to provide all the documents subpoenaed, claiming that some of the documents ... had been misplaced or accidentally destroyed."
Rep. Jack Brooks and the House Committee On the Inslaw Case
The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a U.S. district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS.
"There appears to be strong evidence," the report states, "as indicated by the findings in two Federal Court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Department of Justice 'acted willfully and fraudulently,' and 'took, converted and stole,' Inslaw's Enhanced PROMIS by 'trickery fraud and deceit.' "
"While refusing to engage in good faith negotiations with Inslaw," the report continues, "Mr. Brewer and Mr. Videnieks, with the approval of high- level Justice Department officials, proceeded to take actions to misappropriate the Enhanced PROMIS software."
Furthermore, the report states, "several individuals have stated under oath that the Enhanced PROMIS software was stolen and distributed internationally in order to provide financial gain to Dr. Brian and to further intelligence and foreign policy objectives for the United States."
Rep. Brooks told WIRED that the report should be the starting point for a grand jury investigation. The owners of Inslaw, Brooks said, were "ravaged by the Justice Department ... treated like dogs."
WIRED MAGAZINE
The INSLAW Octopus
Software piracy, conspiracy, cover-up, stonewalling, covert action: Just another decade at the Department of Justice ...
By Richard L. Fricker
The House Judiciary Committee lists these crimes as among the possible violations perpetrated by "high-level Justice officials and private individuals":
>> Conspiracy to commit an offense
>> Fraud
>> Wire fraud
>> Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies and committees
>> Tampering with a witness
>> Retaliation against a witness
>> Perjury
>> Interference with commerce by threats or violence
>> Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) violations
>> Transportation of stolen goods, securities, moneys
>> Receiving stolen goods
Bill Hamilton, Inslaw & PROMIS
Who:
Bill Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Hamilton, start Inslaw to nurture PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems).
Why #1:
The DOJ, aware that its case management system is in dire need of automation, funds Inslaw and PROMIS. After creating a public-domain version, Inslaw makes significant enhancements to PROMIS and, aware that the US market for legal automation is worth $3 billion, goes private in the early '80s.
Why #2:
Designed as case-management software for federal prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to combine disparate databases, and to track people by their involvement with the legal system. Hamilton and others now claim that the DOJ has modified PROMIS to monitor intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.
By late November, 1992 the nation had turned its attention from the election-weary capital to Little Rock, Ark., where a new generation of leaders conferred about the future. But in a small Washington D.C. office, Bill Hamilton, president and founder of Inslaw Inc., and Dean Merrill, a former Inslaw vice president, were still very much concerned about the past.
The two men studied six photographs laid out before them. "Have you ever seen any of these men?" Merrill was asked. Immediately he singled out the second photo. In a separate line up, Hamilton's secretary singled out the same photo.
Both said the man had visited Inslaw in February 1983 for a presentation of PROMIS, Inslaw's bread-and-butter legal software. Hamilton, who knew the purpose of the line-up, identified the visitor as Dr. Ben Orr. At the time of his visit, Orr claimed to be a public prosecutor from Israel.
Orr was impressed with the power of PROMIS (Prosecutors Management Information Systems), which had recently been updated by Inslaw to run on powerful 32-bit VAX computers from Digital Equipment Corp. "He fell in love with the VAX version," Hamilton recalled.
Dr. Orr never came back, and he never bought anything. No one knew why at the time. But for Hamilton, who has fought the Department of Justice (DOJ) for almost 10 years in an effort to salvage his business, once his co- workers recognized the man in the second photo, it all made perfect sense.
For the second photo was not of the mysterious Dr. Orr, it was of Rafael Etian, chief of the Israeli defense force's anti-terrorism intelligence unit. The Department of Justice sent him over for a look at the property they were about to "misappropriate," and Etian liked what he saw. Department of Justice documents record that one Dr. Ben Orr left the DOJ on May 6, 1983, with a computer tape containing PROMIS tucked under his arm.
What for the past decade has been known as the Inslaw affair began to unravel in the final, shredder-happy days of the Bush administration. According to Federal court documents, PROMIS was stolen from Inslaw by the Department of Justice directly after Etian's 1983 visit to Inslaw (a later congressional investigation preferred to use the word "misappropriated"). And according to sworn affidavits, PROMIS was then given or sold at a profit to Israel and as many as 80 other countries by Dr. Earl W. Brian, a man with close personal and business ties to then-President Ronald Reagan and then-Presidential counsel Edwin Meese.
A House Judiciary Committee report released last September found evidence raising "serious concerns" that high officials at the Department of Justice executed a pre-meditated plan to destroy Inslaw and co-opt the rights to its PROMIS software. The committee's call for an independent counsel have fallen on deaf ears. One journalist, Danny Casolaro, died as he attempted to tell the story (see sidebar), and boxes of documents relating to the case have been destroyed, stolen, or conveniently "lost" by the Department of Justice.
But so far, not a single person has been held accountable.
WIRED has spent two years searching for the answers to the questions Inslaw poses: Why would Justice steal PROMIS? Did it then cover up the theft? Did it let associates of government officials sell PROMIS to foreign governments, which then used the software to track political dissidents instead of legal cases? (Israel has reportedly used PROMIS to track troublesome Palestinians.)
The implications continue: that Meese profited from the sales of the stolen property. That Brian, Meese's business associate, may have been involved in the October Surprise (the oft-debunked but persistent theory that the Reagan campaign conspired to insure that US hostages in Iran were held until after Reagan won the 1980 election, see sidebar). That some of the moneys derived from the illegal sales of PROMIS furthered covert and illegal government programs in Nicaragua. That Oliver used PROMIS as a population tracking instrument for his White House-based domestic emergency management program.
Each new set of allegations leads to a new set of possibilities, which makes the story still more difficult to comprehend. But one truth is obvious: What the Inslaw case presents, in its broadest possible implications, is a painfully clear snapshot of how the Justice Department operated during the Reagan-Bush years.
This is the case that won't go away, the case that shows how justice and public service gave way to profit and political expediency, how those within the administration's circle of privilege were allowed to violate private property and civil rights for their own profit.
Sound like a conspiracy theorist's dream? Absolutely. But the fact is, it's true.
The Background
Imagine you are in charge of the legal arm of the most powerful government on the face of the globe, but your internal information systems are mired in the archaic technology of the 1960s. There's a Department of Justice database, a CIA database, an Attorney's General database, an IRS database, and so on, but none of them can share information. That makes tracking multiple offenders pretty darn difficult, and building cases against them a long and bureaucratic task.
Along comes a computer program that can integrate all these databases, and it turns out its development was originally funded by the government under a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration grant in the 1970s. That means the software is public domain ... free!
Edwin Meese was apparently quite taken with PROMIS. He told an April 1981 gathering of prosecutors that PROMIS was "one of the greatest opportunities for [law enforcement] success in the future." In March 1982, Inslaw won a $9.6 million contract from the Justice Department to install the public domain version of PROMIS in 20 US Attorney's offices as a pilot program. If successful, the company would install PROMIS in the remaining 74 federal prosecutors' offices around the country. The eventual market for complete automation of the Federal court system was staggering: as much as $3 billion, according to Bill Hamilton. But Hamilton would never see another federal contract.
Designed as a case-management system for prosecutors, PROMIS has the ability to track people. "Every use of PROMIS in the court system is tracking people," said Inslaw President Hamilton. "You can rotate the file by case, defendant, arresting officer, judge, defense lawyer, and it's tracking all the names of all the people in all the cases."
What this means is that PROMIS can provide a complete rundown of all federal cases in which a lawyer has been involved, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented defendant A, or all the cases in which a lawyer has represented white-collar criminals, at which stage in each of the cases the lawyer agreed to a plea bargain, and so on. Based on this information, PROMIS can help a prosecutor determine when a plea will be taken in a particular type of case.
But the real power of PROMIS, according to Hamilton, is that with a staggering 570,000 lines of computer code, PROMIS can integrate innumerable databases without requiring any reprogramming. In essence, PROMIS can turn blind data into information. And anyone in government will tell you that information, when wielded with finesse, begets power. Converted to use by intelligence agencies, as has been alleged in interviews by ex-CIA and Israeli Mossad agents, PROMIS can be a powerful tracking device capable of monitoring intelligence operations, agents and targets, instead of legal cases.
At the time of its inception, PROMIS was the most powerful program of its type. But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County (Calif.) District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out. (Early in his career, Ed Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney's office. Jensen was later appointed to Meese's Justice Department during the Reagan presidency.)
In the final days of the Carter administration, the LEAA was phased out. Inslaw had made a name for itself and Hamilton wanted to stay in business, so he converted Inslaw to a for-profit, private business. The new Inslaw did not own the public domain version of PROMIS because it had been developed with LEAA funds. But because it had funded a major upgrade with its own money, Inslaw did claim ownership of the enhanced PROMIS.
Through his lawyers, Hamilton sent the Department of Justice a letter outlining his company's decision to go private with the enhanced PROMIS. The letter specifically asked the DOJ to waive any proprietary rights it might claim to the enhanced version. In a reply dated August 11, 1982, a DOJ lawyer wrote: "To the extent that any other enhancements (beyond the public domain PROMIS) were privately funded by Inslaw and not specified to be delivered to the Department of Justice under any contract or other agreement, Inslaw may assert whatever proprietary rights it may have."
Arnold Burns, then a deputy attorney general, clarified the DOJ's position in a now-critical 1988 deposition: "Our lawyers were satisfied that Inslaw's lawyers could sustain the claim in court, that we had waived those [proprietary] rights."
The enhancements Inslaw claimed were significant. In the 1970s the public- domain PROMIS was adapted to run on Burroughs, Prime, Wang and IBM machines, all of which used less-powerful 16-bit architectures. With private funds, Inslaw converted that version of PROMIS to a 32-bit architecture running on a DEC VAX minicomputer. It was this version that Etian saw in 1983. It was this version that the DOJ stole later that year through a pre-meditated plan, according to two court decisions.
The Dispute Grows
On a gorgeous spring morning in 1981, Lawrence McWhorter, director of the Executive Office for US Attorneys, put his feet on his desk, lit an Italian cigar, eyed his subordinate Frank Mallgrave and said through a haze of blue smoke: "We're out to get Inslaw."
McWhorter had just asked Mallgrave to oversee the pilot installation of PROMIS, a job Mallgrave refused, unaware at the time that he was being asked to participate in Inslaw's deliberate destruction.
"We were just in his office for what I call a B.S. type discussion," Mallgrave told WIRED. "I remember it was a bright sunny morning.... (McWhorter) asked me if I would be interested in assuming the position of Assistant Director for Data Processing...basically working with Inslaw. I told him...I just had no interest in that job. And then, almost as an afterthought, he said 'We're out to get Inslaw.' I remember it to this day."
After Mallgrave refused the job, McWhorter gave it to C. Madison "Brick" Brewer. Brewer at one time worked for Inslaw, but was allowed to resign when Hamilton found his performance inadequate, according to court documents. Brewer was then hired into the Department of Justice specifically to oversee the contract of his former employer. (The DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility ruled there was no conflict of interest.) He would later tell a federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen, the same man who once supervised DALITE, the product which lost a major contract to Inslaw in the 1970s.
Brewer, who now refuses to comment on the Inslaw case, was aided in his new DOJ job by Peter Videnieks. Videnieks was fresh from the Customs Service, where he oversaw contracts between that agency and Hadron, Inc., a company controlled by Meese and Reagan-crony Earl Brian. Hadron, a closely held government systems consulting firm, was to figure prominently in the forthcoming scandal.
According to congressional and court documents, Brewer and Videnieks didn't tarry in their efforts to destroy Inslaw. After Inslaw's installation of public domain PROMIS had begun, the DOJ claimed that Inslaw, which was supporting the installation with its own computers running the enhanced version of PROMIS, was on the brink of bankruptcy. Although Inslaw was contracted to provide only the public domain PROMIS, the DOJ demanded that Inslaw turn over the enhanced version of PROMIS in case the company could not complete its contractual obligations. Inslaw agreed to this contract modification, but on two conditions: that the DOJ recognize Inslaw's proprietary rights to enhanced PROMIS, and that the DOJ not distribute enhanced PROMIS beyond the boundaries of the contract (the 94 US Attorney's offices.)
The DOJ agreed to these conditions, but requested Inslaw prove it had indeed created enhanced PROMIS with private funds. Inslaw said it would, and the enhanced software was given to the DOJ.
Once the DOJ had control of PROMIS, it dogmatically refused to verify that Inslaw had created the enhancements, essentially rendering the contract modification useless. When Inslaw protested, the DOJ began to withhold payments. Two years later, Inslaw was forced into bankruptcy.
As the contract problems with DOJ emerged, Hamilton received a phone call from Dominic Laiti, chief executive of Hadron. Laiti wanted to buy Inslaw. Hamilton refused to sell. According to Hamilton's statements in court documents, Laiti then warned him that Hadron had friends in the government and if Inslaw didn't sell willingly, it would be forced to sell.
Those government connections included Peter Videnieks over at the Justice Department, according to John Schoolmeester, Videnieks' former Customs Service supervisor. Laiti and Videnieks both deny ever meeting or having any contact, but Schoolmeester has told both WIRED and the House Judiciary Committee it was "impossible" for the pair not to know each other because of the type of work and oversight involved in Hadron's relationship with the Customs Service. Schoolmeester also said that because of Brian's relationship with then-President Reagan (see sidebar), Hadron was considered an "inside" company.
The full-court press continued. In 1985 Allen & Co., a New York investment banking concern with close business ties to Earl Brian, helped finance a second company, SCT, which also attempted to purchase Inslaw. That attempt also failed, but in the process a number of Inslaw's customers were warned by SCT that Inslaw would soon go bankrupt and would not survive reorganization, Hamilton said in court documents.
Broke and with no friends in the government, on June 9, 1986, Inslaw filed a $30 million lawsuit against the DOJ in bankruptcy court. Inslaw's attorney for the case (he was later fired from his firm under extremely suspicious circumstances -- see sidebar) was Leigh Ratiner of the Wash- ington firm Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin. Ratiner chose bankruptcy court for the filing based on the premise that Justice, the creditor, had control of PROMIS. He explained recently, "It was forbidden by the BankruptcyAct for the creditor to exercise control over the debtor property. And that theory -- that the Justice Department was exercising control -- was the basis that the bankruptcy court had jurisdiction.
"As far as I know, this was the first time this theory had been used," Ratiner told WIRED. "This was ground-breaking. It was, in fact, a legitimate use of the code."
It worked, but to only a point. In 1987, Washington, D.C., bankruptcy judge George Bason ruled in a scathing opinion that Justice had stolen PROMIS through "trickery, fraud and deceit." He awarded Inslaw $6.8 million in damages and, in the process, found that Justice Department officials made a concerted effort to bankrupt Inslaw and place the company's enhanced PROMIS up for public auction (where it would then be fodder for Brian's Hadron). Bason's findings of fact relied on testimony from Justice employees and internal memoranda, some of which outlined a plan to "get" PROMIS software.
Bason cited the testimony of a number of the government's defense witnesses as being "unbelievable" and openly questioned the credibility of others. In his 216-page ruling, Bason cites numerous instances where testimony from government witnesses is contradictory. (In a private interview with WIRED he noted that as a bankruptcy judge he was precluded from bringing perjury charges against government employees, but he had recommended to various congressional panels that an inquiry was necessary.)
When the DOJ appealed, a federal district court affirmed Bason, ruling that there was "convincing, perhaps compelling support for the findings set forth by the bankruptcy court." But the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the case on a legal technicality, finding that the bankruptcy court had no jurisdiction to hear the damages claim. A petition to the Supreme Court in October 1991 was denied review.
The IRS got into the act as well. Inslaw was audited several times in the course of their battles with the Department of Justice. In fact, the day following the bankruptcy trial, S. Martin Teel, a lawyer for the IRS, requested that Judge Bason liquidate Inslaw. Bason ruled against Teel. As a coda to the lawsuit, Bason, a respected jurist, was not re-appointed to the bench when his term expired. His replacement? S. Martin Teel. (Bason has testified before Congress that the DOJ orchestrated his replacement as punishment for his rulings in the Inslaw case.)
But Inslaw's troubles did not end with bankruptcy. Frustrated by Attorney General Dick Thornburgh's stubborn refusal to investigate the DOJ or appoint an independent prosecutor, Elliot Richardson, President Nixon's former attorney general and a counsel to Inslaw for nearly 10 years (he retired this January), filed a case in U.S. District Court demanding that Thornburgh investigate the Inslaw affair. In 1990, the court ruled that a prosecutor's decision not to investigate -- "no matter how indefensible" -- cannot be corrected by any court. Another loss for Inslaw.
Broke and still attempting to revive itself, Inslaw has not refiled its suit, preferring to wait for a new administration and a new DOJ.
By this time, the spinning jennies of the conspiracy network had grasped the Inslaw story and were all-too-eager to put their stitch in the unraveling yarn. According to documents and affidavits filed during court cases and congressional inquiries, the Hamiltons and their lawyers began receiving phone calls, visits and memos from a string of shadowy sources, many of them connected to international drug, spy and arms networks. Their allegations: That Earl Brian helped orchestrate the October Surprise for then-candidate Reagan, and that Brian's eventual payment for that orchestration was a cut of the PROMIS action. Brian and the DOJ then resold or gave PROMIS to as many as 80 foreign and domestic agencies. (Brian adamantly denies any connection to Inslaw or the October Surprise.)
These sources, which include ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe and a computer programmer of dubious reputation, Michael Riconosciuto, allege that PROMIS had been further modified by the DOJ so that any agency using it could be subject to undetected DOJ eavesdropping -- a sort of software Trojan Horse. If these allegations are true, by the late 1980s PROMIS could have become the digital ears of the US Government's spy effort -- both internal and external. Certainly something the administration wouldn't want nosy congressional committees looking into.
The diaphanous web of more than 30 sources who offered information to Inslaw were not "what a lawyer might consider ideal witnesses," Richardson admitted. But their stories yielded a surprising consistency. "The picture that emerges from the individual statements is remarkably detailed and consistent," he wrote in an Oct. 21, 1991 New York Times Op Ed.
The Congressional Investigation
The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a US district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS.
"High government officials were involved," the report states. "... (S)everal individuals testified under oath that Inslaw's PROMIS software was stolen and distributed internationally in order to provide financial gain and to further intelligence and foreign policy objectives."
"Actions against Inslaw were implemented through the Project Manager (Brick Brewer) from the beginning of the contract and under the direction of high- level Justice Department officials," the report says. "The evidence...demonstrates that high-level Department officials deliberately ignored Inslaw proprietary rights and misappropriated its PROMIS software for use at locations not covered under contract with the company."
The Committee report accuses former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh of stonewalling congressional inquiries, turning a blind eye to the possible destruction of evidence within the Justice Department, and ignoring the DOJ's harassment of employees questioned by Congressional investigators.
Rep. Brooks told WIRED that the report should be the starting point for a grand jury investigation. The owners of Inslaw, Brooks said, were "ravaged by the Justice Department...treated like dogs."
Brooks' committee voted along party lines, 21-13, to adopt the investigative report on Aug. 11, 1992. The report asked then-Attorney General William Barr to "immediately settle Inslaw's claims in a fair and equitable manner" and "strongly recommends that the Department seek the appointment of an Independent Counsel."
As he did with the burgeoning Iraqgate scandal and as his predecessor did before him, Barr refused to appoint an independent counsel to the Inslaw case, relying instead on a retired federal judge, in this case Nicholas Bua, who reported to Barr alone. In other words, the DOJ was responsible for investigating itself.
"The way in which the Department of Justice has treated this case, to me, is inexplicable," Richardson told WIRED. "I think the circumstances most strongly suggest that there must be wider ramifications."
The Threads Unravel
Proof of those wider ramifications are just starting to leak out, as DOJ and other agency employees begin to talk, although for the most part they spoke to WIRED only on condition of anonymity.
On Nov. 20, 1990, the Judiciary Committee wrote a letter asking CIA director William Webster to help the committee "by determining whether the CIA has the PROMIS software."
The official reply on December 11th: "We have checked with Agency components that track data processing procurement or that would be likely users of PROMIS, and we have been unable to find any indication that the Agency ever obtained PROMIS software."
But a retired CIA official whose job it was to investigate the Inslaw allegations internally told WIRED that the DOJ gave PROMIS to the CIA. "Well," the retired official told WIRED, "the congressional committees were after us to look into allegations that somehow the agency had been culpable of what would have been, in essence, taking advantage of, like stealing, the technology [PROMIS]. We looked into it and there was enough to it, the agency had been involved."
How was the CIA involved? According to the same source, who requested anonymity, the agency accepted stolen goods, not aware that a major scandal was brewing. In other words, the DOJ robbed the bank, and the CIA took a share of the plunder.
But the CIA was not the only place where illegal versions of PROMIS cropped up. Canadian documents (held by the House Judiciary Committee and obtained by WIRED) place PROMIS in the hands of various Canadian government agencies. These documents include two letters to Inslaw from Canadian agencies requesting detailed user manuals -- even though Inslaw has never sold PROMIS to Canada. Canadian officials now claim the letters were in error.
And, of course, the software was transferred to Rafael Etian's anti- terrorism unit in Israel. The DOJ claims it was the LEAA version, but former Israeli spy Ben Menashe and others claim it was the 32-bit version. According to Ben Menashe, other government departments within Israel also saw PROMIS, and this time the pitchman was Dr. Earl Brian. In a 1991 affidavit related to the bankruptcy proceedings, Ben Menashe claimed: "I attended a meeting at my Department's headquarters in Tel Aviv in 1987 during which Dr. Earl W. Brian of the United States made a presentation intended to facilitate the use of the PROMIS computer software."
"Dr. Brian stated during his presentation that all U.S. Intelligence Agencies, including the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency and the U.S. Department of Justice were then using the PROMIS computer software," Ben Menashe continued. While the credibility of his statements has been questioned, the Israeli government has admitted that Ben Menashe had access to extremely sensitive information during his tenure at the Mossad.
Asked why Israeli intelligence would have been so interested in Inslaw and PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, "PROMIS was a very big thing for us guys, a very, very big thing ... it was probably the most important issue of the '80s because it just changed the whole intelligence outlook. The whole form of intelligence collection changed. This whole thing changed it." PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, was perfect for tracking Palestinians and other political dissidents.
(Ben Menashe's superior during this period was Rafael Etian, or Dr. Ben Orr, as he was known during his 1983 visit to Inslaw.)
Apparently, Israel was not the only country interested in using PROMIS for internal security purposes. Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ's command center.
Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North's FEMA dealings was dropped.
A Thorough Cleaning at the White House?
If the case against the Department of Justice is so solid, why hasn't anything been done? The answer is timing. The next move belongs to retired Federal Judge Bua, since he was given oversight by Attorney General Barr in lieu of an independent counsel. And everyone, including Judge Bua, whose non-binding report was pending at WIRED's early December deadline, seems to be waiting for the new administration. Both the Clinton/Gore transition team and House majority leader Richard Gephardt had no comment on the Inslaw case pending Clinton's inauguration.
But a source close to Bua's investigation said the retired judge may present the DOJ with a bombshell. While not required to suggest a settlement, the source believes Bua will reportedly recommend that Inslaw be given between $25 million and $50 million for its mistreatment by the DOJ. (In last-minute negotiations, Inslaw attorney Elliot Richardson held brief meetings with DOJ officials in mid-December. Richardson pressed for a settlement ranging from $25 million to $500 million, but the DOJ balked, according to newspaper reports.)
But the question remains: Can the DOJ paper over the willful destruction of a company, the plundering of its software, the illegal resale of that software to further foreign policy objectives, and the overt obstruction of justice with $25 million?
Bua's final recommendation, expected sometime before Clinton's inauguration, is that the Inslaw Affair "requires further investigation," the source said. That conclusion mirrors the House Judiciary Committee's report. Privately, many Democrats, including Gephardt, have expressed a strong desire to get to the bottom of the Inslaw case. Rep. Brooks will be pushing for yet another investigation of the scandal, this time independent of the Justice Department, according to Congressional sources. Once Bua's report is out, the next and possibly final move will be up to a new president, a new Congress, and, possibly, a renewed sense of justice.
Sidebars Earl W. Brian - The Consumate Insider
Dr. Earl W. Brian has made quite a career of riding Reagan and Meese's coattails. After a stint in Vietnam, where he worked as a combat physician in the unit that supplied air support for Operation Phoenix, Brian returned to California with a chest full of ribbons and a waiting job - as Secretary of Health - with then-Governor Reagan's administration. (Operation Phoenix, a well-documented CIA political assassination program, used computers to track "enemies" in Vietnam.)
In 1974, Brian resigned his cabinet post with Governor Reagan to run for the Senate against Alan Cranston. After his defeat, Brian moved into the world of business and soon ran into trouble. His flagship company, Xionics, was cited by the Security and Exchange Commission for issuing press releases designed to boost stock prices with exaggerated or bloated information. The SEC also accused Xionics of illegally paying "commissions" to brokers, according to SEC documents.
At the close of the Reagan governorship, Brian was involved in a public scandal having to do with - surprise - stolen computer tapes. The tapes, which contained records of 70,000 state welfare files, were eventually returned - Brian claimed he had a right to them under a contract signed in the last hours of the administration. (Brian said he just wanted to develop a better way of doing welfare business.)
In 1980, Brian formed Biotech Capital Corp., a venture capital firm designed to invest in biological and medical companies. Ultimately, Brian has invested in and owned several companies, including FNN (Financial News Network) and UPI, both of which ended up in dire financial straits.
Ursula Meese, who like her husband knew Brian from the Reagan cabinet, was an early investor in Biotech, using $15,000 (borrowed from Edwin Thomas, a Meese aide in the White House and another Reaganite from California) to purchase 2,000 shares on behalf of the Meese's two children, according to information made public during Meese's confirmation hearings for Attorney General.
It is those Reagan-Meese connections that continue to drag Brian into the Inslaw affair. For why would Brian, of all people, be the recipient of stolen PROMIS? PROMIS, after all, was a major part in government automation contracts estimated at $3 billion, according to Inslaw President Bill Hamilton. That's quite a political plum.
One possibility is Ed and Ursula Meese's financial connections to Brian. Another is a payoff for Brian's role in the October Surprise Even if he manages to evade the Inslaw allegations, Brian may still be in hot water. As of this writing, Financial News Network's financial dealings were under investigation by a Los Angeles Grand Jury, according to sources who have testified before it. - RLF
What A Surprise!
Earl W. Brian says he wasn't in Paris in October 1980, but investors were told a different story
As Inslaw President Bill Hamilton moved his company from non-profit status to the private sector in 1980, Ronald Reagan was running for President, negotiations for the release of the American hostages in Iran had apparently hit a snag, and Dr. Earl W. Brian was touring Canada touting stock in his newly acquired Clinical Sciences Inc.
History records that the hostages were released as Ronald Reagan took the Presidential oath of office, and that shortly thereafter, Inslaw received a $9.6 million contract from the Department of Justice. At the same time, Earl Brian was appointed to a White House post to advise on health-care issues. Brian reported directly to Ed Meese. He also arranged White House tours to woo investors in his government contracting company, Hadron Inc., according to a Canadian investment banker who took a tour.
But these seemingly random historical connections between Inslaw, Hadron, the Reagan White House and Earl Brian take on a new meaning when considered in light of the "October Surprise," the persistent allegation that the Reagan campaign negotiated with Iranian officials to guarantee that US hostages would not be released before Reagan won election in 1980.
The October Surprise theory hinges in part on alleged negotiations between the Reagan campaign and the Iranians on the weekend of Oct. 17-21, 1980, in Paris, among other places.The deal, according to former Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe, and a former CIA contract agent interviewed by WIRED, included the payment of $40 million to the Iranians.
According to several sources, Earl Brian, one of Reagan's close advisors, made it quite clear that he was planning to be in Paris that very weekend. Ben Menashe, who says he was one of six Israelis, 12 Americans and 16 Iranians present at the Paris talks, said, "I saw Brian in Paris."
Brian was interviewed by Senate investigators on July 28, 1992, and denied under oath any connection with the alleged negotiations. He told the investigators he did not have a valid passport during the October 1980 dates. But according to court documents and interviews, Brian told Canadian investors in his newly acquired Clinical Sciences, Inc., that he would be in Paris that weekend. Brian acquired controlling interest in Clinical Sciences in the summer of 1980. Clinical Sciences was then trading at around $2 a share. Brian worked with Janos P. Pasztor, a vice president and special situations analyst with the Canadian investment bank of Nesbitt, Thomson, Bongard Inc., to create a market of Canadian investors for the stock.
Pasztor later testified in court documents that Brian said he would be in Paris the weekend of October 17 to do a deal with the Pasteur Institute (a medical research firm).
Two other brokers, Harry Scully, a broker based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and John Belton, a senior account executive with Nesbitt-Thomson from 1968 to 1982 who is suing Nesbitt-Thomson and Pasztor for securities fraud, also claim that they were told that Brian was in Paris that weekend.
But if Brian went to Paris to see the Pasteur Institute, he seems to have missed his appointment. An investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into Clinical Sci-ences stock transactions revealed that the Pasteur Institute had never conducted business with, or even heard of Brian.
When asked by WIRED to elaborate on Brian's 1980 trip, Pasztor said, "These are political questions and I don't want to become involved." He refused further comment.Brian contends that the dates of his trip were in error and that he went to Paris in April 1981, not October 1980. But the passport he turned over to Senate investigators did not contain a French entry or exit stamp for April 1981.
Through his lawyers, Brian refused to be interviewed for this story. - RLF
Earl W. Brian: Closet Spook?
Michael Riconosciuto, a computer programmer and chemist who surfs the spooky fringe of the guns-'n'-money crowd, is currently serving a federal prison sentence for drug crimes. From his jail cell he has given several interviews claiming knowledge of Inslaw and the October Surprise (he also claims his jail term is the DOJ's way of punishing him for his knowledge). Much of what he claims cannot be verified, other statements have failed to be veri-fied conclusively.
But prior to his arrest in 1991, Riconosciuto provided the Hamiltons with an affidavit that once again brought Brian into the Inslaw picture. "I engaged in some software development and modification work in 1983 and 1984 on proprietary PROMIS computer software product," he stated. "The copy of PROMIS on which I worked came from the US Department of Justice. Earl W. Brian made it available to me through Wackenhut (a security company with close FBI and CIA connections) after acquiring it from Peter Videnieks, who was then a Department of Justice contracting official with the responsibility for PROMIS software. I performed the modifications to PROMIS in Indio, Calif.; Silver Springs, Md.; and Miami, Fla."
The modifications included a telecommunications "trap door" that would let the US Government eavesdrop on any other organization using the pirated software, Riconosciuto said.
Videnieks and Brian both told House investigators that they did not know Riconosciuto. After Riconosciuto was interviewed by House investigators, Videnieks refused to give Congress further interviews.
Although Brian denies any involvement with Inslaw or Riconosciuto, the House Judiciary Committee received a report from a special task force of the Riverside County, Calif., Sheriff's Office and District Attorney, stating that on the evening of Sept. 10, 1981, arms dealers, buyers and various intelligence operatives gathered at the Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, Calif., for a demonstration of night warfare weapons. The demonstration was orchestrated jointly by Wackenhut and the Cabazon Indian tribe. (Many published reports allege that the Wackenhut/Cabazon joint venture served as a weapons fencing operation for Oliver North's Iran- Contra dealings.)
According to Indio city police officers hired to provide security, those attending included Earl W. Brian, who was identified as "being with the CIA," and Michael Riconosciuto. - RLF
US Deputy Attorney General Jensen Lost Once To Inslaw
Could It Be He Wanted to Even The Score? At the time of its inception, PROMIS was the most powerful program of its type. But a similar program, DALITE, was developed under another LEAA grant by D. Lowell Jensen, the Alameda County, Calif., District Attorney. In the mid-1970s, the two programs vied for a lucrative Los Angeles County contract and Inslaw won out.
Early in his career, Attorney General-to-be Edwin Meese worked under Jensen at the Alameda County District Attorney's office. Jensen was later appointed as Deputy Attorney General into Meese's Justice Department.
C. Madison "Brick" Brewer, accused by the House Judiciary Committee of deliberately misappropriating PROMIS, testified in federal court that everything he did regarding Inslaw was approved by D. Lowell Jensen, the same man who once supervised DALITE.
Was Israel's PROMIS to Crush the Infitada?
Asked why Israeli intelligence would have been so interested in Inslaw and PROMIS, ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe said: "PROMIS was a very big thing for us guys, a very, very big thing ... it was probably the most important issue of the '80s because it just changed the whole intelligence outlook. The whole form of intelligence collection changed. This whole thing changed it." Why? PROMIS, Ben Menashe said, was perfect for tracking the Palestinian population and other political dissidents.
Did Oliver North Use PROMIS?
Apparently, Israel was not the only country interested in using PROMIS for internal security purposes. Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ's command center.
Who Fired Inslaw's Lawyer?
As the Inslaw-DOJ battle was joined in bankruptcy court, Inslaw's chief attorney, Leigh Ratiner, was fired from Dickstein, Shapiro & Morin, the firm where he had been a partner for 10 years. His firing came after another Dickstein partner, Leonard Garment, met with Arnold Burns, then- deputy attorney general of the DOJ.
Garment was counsel to President Richard Nixon and assistant to President Gerald Ford. He testified before a Senate inquiry that he and Meese discussed the Inslaw case in October 1986, and afterward he met with Burns. Two days later Ratiner was fired.
The terms of the financial settlement between Ratiner and his firm were kept confidential, but WIRED has been told by ex-Israeli spy Ari Ben Menashe that Israeli intelligence paid to have Ratiner fired, and that the money was transferred through Hadron Inc., the same company that Earl Brian used to distribute illegal copies of PROMIS. Through informed sources, WIRED has independently confirmed portions of Ben Menashe's allegations.
Ben Menashe has told WIRED that he saw a memo in Israel, written in Hebrew, requesting funds for "a lawyer." He claims to have seen the memo at the office of a joint Mossad (Israeli CIA), Internal Defense Forces and Military committee specializing in Israeli-Iran relations. Israel admits that Ben Menashe handled communications at this level and therefore would have had access to such transmissions.
Ben Menashe said the money was used as Ratiner's settlement payment. "The money was transferred, $600,000, to Hadron," he said. As to why Hadron was used, Ben Menashe claims: "Because [Brian] was involved quite deeply." He said Ratiner was unaware of the source of the settlement funds.
Ratiner, contacted after the Ben Menashe interview, said he had never disclosed the amount of the separation settlement to anyone. He is limited contractually by his former firm from discussing any specifics of the firing. Asked if Ben Menashe's figures were correct, Ratiner said, "I can't comment because it would be the same as revealing them." WIRED located a deep background source who confirmed that the amount was "correct almost to the penny."
Ratiner said he was shocked at the allegations of money laundering. "Dickstein, Shapiro is the 10th largest firm in Washington and I had no reason to think it was other than reputable," he said. "Why is it that everyone who comes in contact with the Inslaw case becomes a victim?" - RLF
A Dead Journalist Raises Some Eyebrows
Among the many strong conclusions of the "House Judiciary Committee Report on the Inslaw Affair" was this rather startling and brief recommendation: "Investigate Mr. Casolaro's death."
Freelance reporter Danny Casolaro spent the last few years of his life investigating a pattern which he called "The Octopus." According to Casolaro, Inslaw was only part of a greater story of how intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice and even the mob had subverted the government and its various functions for their own profit.
Casolaro had hoped to write a book based on his reporting. His theories, which some seasoned investigative journalists have described as naive, led him into a Bermuda Triangle of spooks, guns, drugs and organized crime. On August 10th, 1991, he was found dead in a Martinsburg, W. Va., hotel room. Both wrists were deeply slashed.
Casolaro's death has only deepened the mystery surrounding Inslaw. Among the more unusual aspects of his death: He had gone to Martinsburg to meet an informant whose name he never revealed. He had called home the afternoon before his death to say he would be late for a family gathering. Martinsburg police allowed his body to be embalmed before family members were notified and warned hotel employees not to speak to reporters. The hotel room was immediately scrubbed by a cleaning service. Casolaro had told several friends and his brother that if anything ever happened to him, not to believe it was an accident. And his notes, which witnesses saw him carry into the hotel, were missing.
His death was ruled a suicide by Martinsburg and West Virginia authorities several months later. Friends, relatives and some investigators still cry foul.
A source close to retired Federal Judge Nicholas Bua (the Bush Administration appointee who is investigating Inslaw) said Bua will not come to any conclusions regarding Casolaro's fate. "I don't know if he committed suicide or if it was murder," the source said. "But the evidence is consistent with both theories. There are things that bother me but ... certainly no one can be indicted on the evidence that is available."
What does that mean? Either an independent investigation drums up more evidence, or the case may never be solved.
The House Judiciary Committee may have written what could be called the final word on Danny Casolaro's inexplicable death: "As long as the possibility exists that Danny Casolaro died as a result of his investigation into the Inslaw matter, it is imperative that further investigation be conducted." - RLF
InslawGate?
Elliot Richardson, President Nixon's former attorney general (he was fired when he refused to fire Archibald Cox during the Watergate scandal) has been a counsel to Inslaw for nearly 10 years (he retired this January). In a Oct. 21, 1991 New York Times Op Ed, Richardson wrote: "This is not the first time I have had to think about the need for an independent investigator. I had been a member of the Nixon Administration from the beginning when I was nominated as Attorney General in 1973. Confidence in the integrity of the Watergate investigation could best be insured, I thought, by entrusting it to someone who had no prior connection to the White House. With Inslaw, the charges against the Justice Department make the same course even more imperative.
"When the Watergate special prosecutor began his inquiry, indications of the President's complicity were not as strong as those that now point to a broad conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of Inslaw's technology."
A Well-Covered Coverup?
The House Committee Report contained some no-holds-barred language on the issue of stonewalling:
"One of the principle reasons the committee could not reach any definitive conclusion about Inslaw's allegations of a high criminal conspiracy at Justice was the lack of cooperation from the Department," the report states. "Throughout the two Inslaw investigations, the Congress met with restrictions, delays and outright denials to requests for information and to unobstructed access to records and witnesses.
"During this committee's investigation, Attorney General Thornburgh repeatedly reneged on agreements made with this committee to provide full and open access to information and witnesses ... the Department failed to provide all the documents subpoenaed, claiming that some of the documents ... had been misplaced or accidentally destroyed."
Rep. Jack Brooks and the House Committee On the Inslaw Case
The string of lawsuits and widening allegations caught the eye of House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jack Brooks, D-Texas, who in 1989 launched a three-year investigation into the Inslaw affair. In the resulting report, the Committee suggested that among others, Edwin Meese, while presidential counselor and later as attorney general, and D. Lowell Jensen, a former assistant and deputy attorney general and now a U.S. district judge in San Francisco, conspired to steal PROMIS.
"There appears to be strong evidence," the report states, "as indicated by the findings in two Federal Court proceedings as well as by the committee investigation, that the Department of Justice 'acted willfully and fraudulently,' and 'took, converted and stole,' Inslaw's Enhanced PROMIS by 'trickery fraud and deceit.' "
"While refusing to engage in good faith negotiations with Inslaw," the report continues, "Mr. Brewer and Mr. Videnieks, with the approval of high- level Justice Department officials, proceeded to take actions to misappropriate the Enhanced PROMIS software."
Furthermore, the report states, "several individuals have stated under oath that the Enhanced PROMIS software was stolen and distributed internationally in order to provide financial gain to Dr. Brian and to further intelligence and foreign policy objectives for the United States."
Rep. Brooks told WIRED that the report should be the starting point for a grand jury investigation. The owners of Inslaw, Brooks said, were "ravaged by the Justice Department ... treated like dogs."
By Elliot L. Richardson; Published: Monday, October 21, 1991
As a former Federal prosecutor, Massachusetts attorney general and U.S. Attorney General, I don't have to be told that the appointment of a special prosecutor is justified only in exceptional circumstances. Why, then, do I believe it should be done in the case of Inslaw Inc., a small Washington-based software company? Let me explain.
Inslaw's principal asset is a highly efficient computer program that keeps track of large numbers of legal cases. In 1982, the company contracted with the Justice Department to install this system, called Promis, in U.S. Attorneys' offices. A year later, however, the department began to raise sham disputes about Inslaw's costs and performance and then started to withhold payments. The company was forced into bankruptcy after it had installed the system in 19 U.S. Attorneys' offices. Meanwhile, the Justice Department copied the software and put it in other offices.
As one of Inslaw's lawyers, I advised its owners, William and Nancy Hamilton, to sue the department in Federal bankruptcy court. In September 1987, the judge, George Bason, found that the Justice Department used "trickery, fraud and deceit" to take Inslaw's property. He awarded Inslaw more than $7 million in damages for the stolen copies of Promis. Soon thereafter, a panel headed by a former department official recommended that Judge Bason not be reappointed. He was replaced by a Justice Department lawyer involved in the Inslaw case.
An intermediate court later affirmed Judge Bason's opinion. Though the U.S. Court of Appeals set that ruling aside in May of this year on the ground that bankruptcy courts have no power to try a case like Inslaw's, it did not disturb the conclusion that "the Government acted willfully and fraudulently to obtain property that it was not entitled to under the contract." Inslaw, which reorganized under Chapter 11, has asked the Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals decision.
After the first court's judgment, a number of present and former Justice Department employees gave the Hamiltons new information. Until then, the Hamiltons thought their problems were the result of a vendetta by a department official, C. Madison Brewer, whom Mr. Hamilton had dismissed from Inslaw several years before. How else to explain why a simple contract dispute turned into a vicious campaign to ruin a small company and take its prize possession?
The new claims alleged that Earl Brian, California health secretary under Gov. Ronald Reagan and a friend of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d, was linked to a scheme to take Inslaw's stolen software and use it to gain the inside track on a $250 million contract to automate Justice Department litigation divisions.
(In Mr. Meese's confirmation fight, it was revealed that Ursula Meese, his wife, had borrowed money to buy stock in Biotech Capital Corporation, of which Dr. Brian was the controlling shareholder. Biotech controlled Hadron Inc., a computer company that aggressively tried to buy Inslaw.)
Evidence to support the more serious accusations came from 30 people, including Justice Department sources. I long ago gave the names of most of the 30 to Mr. Meese's successor as Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh. But the department contacted only one of them, a New York judge.
Meanwhile, the department has resisted Congressional investigations. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations staff reported that its inquiry into Inslaw's charges had been "hampered by the department's lack of cooperation" and that it had found employees "who desired to speak to the subcommittee, but who chose not to out of fear for their jobs."
The department also hindered the interrogation of employees and resisted requests for documents by the House Judiciary Committee and its chairman, Representative Jack Brooks. Under subpoena, Mr. Thornburgh produced many files but the department said that a volume containing key documents was missing.
In letters to Mr. Thornburgh in 1988 and 1989, I argued for the appointment of an independent counsel. When it became obvious that Mr. Thornburgh did not intend to reply or act, Inslaw went to court to order him to act. A year ago, the U.S. District Court ruled, incorrectly I think, that a prosecutor's decision not to investigate, no matter how indefensible, cannot be corrected by any court.
In May 1988, Ronald LeGrand, chief investigator for the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the Hamiltons, and confirmed to their lawyers, that he had a trusted Justice Department source who, as Mr. LeGrand quoted him, said that the Inslaw case was "a lot dirtier for the Department of Justice than Watergate had been, both in its breadth and its depth." Mr. LeGrand now says he and his friend were only discussing rumors.
Then, in 1990, the Hamiltons received a phone call from Michael Riconosciuto, an out-of-fiction character believed by many knowledgeable sources to have C.I.A. connections. Mr. Riconosciuto claimed that the Justice Department stole the Promis software as part of a payoff to Dr. Brian for helping to get some Iranian leaders to collude in the so-called October surprise, the alleged plot by the Reagan campaign in 1980 to conspire with Iranian agents to hold up release of the American Embassy hostages until after the election. Mr. Riconosciuto is now in jail in Tacoma, Wash., awaiting trial on drug charges, which he claims are trumped up.
Since that first Riconosciuto phone call, he and other informants from the world of covert operations have talked to the Hamiltons, the Judiciary Committee staff, several reporters and Inslaw's lawyers, including me. These informants, in addition to confirming and supplementing Mr. Riconosciuto's statements, claim that scores of foreign governments now have Promis. Dr. Brian, these informants say, was given the chance to sell the software as a reward for his services in the October surprise. Dr. Brian denies all of this.
The reported sales allegedly had two aims. One was to generate revenue for covert operations not authorized by Congress. The second was to supply foreign intelligence agencies with a software system that would make it easier for U.S. eavesdroppers to read intercepted signals.
These informants are not what a lawyer might consider ideal witnesses, but the picture that emerges from the individual statements is remarkably detailed and consistent, all the more so because these people are not close associates of one another. It seems unlikely that so complex a story could have been made up, memorized all at once and closely coordinated.
It is plausible, moreover, that preventing revelations about the theft and secret sale of Inslaw's property to foreign intelligence agencies was the reason for Mr. Thornburgh's otherwise inexplicable reluctance to order a thorough investigation.
Although prepared not to believe a lot they told him, Danny Casolaro, a freelance journalist, got many leads from the same informants. The circumstances of his death in August in a Martinsburg, W.Va., hotel room increase the importance of finding out how much of what they have said to him and others is true. Mr. Casolaro told friends that he had evidence linking Inslaw, the Iran-contra affair and the October surprise, and was going to West Virginia to meet a source to receive the final piece of proof.
He was found dead with his wrists and arms slashed 12 times. The Martinsburg police ruled it a suicide, and allowed his body to be embalmed before his family was notified of his death. His briefcase was missing. I believe he was murdered, but even if that is no more than a possibility, it is a possibility with such sinister implications as to demand a serious effort to discover the truth.
This is not the first occasion I have had to think about the need for an independent investigator. I had been a member of the Nixon Administration from the beginning when I was nominated as Attorney General in 1973. Public confidence in the integrity of the Watergate investigation could best be insured, I thought, by entrusting it to someone who had no such prior connection to the White House. In the Inslaw case the charges against the Justice Department make the same course even more imperative.
When the Watergate special prosecutor began his inquiry, indications of the President's involvement were not as strong as those that now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of Inslaw's technology.
The newly designated Attorney General, William P. Barr, has assured me that he will address my concerns regarding the Inslaw case. That is a welcome departure. But the question of whether the department should appoint a special prosecutor is not one it alone should decide. Views from others in the executive branch, as well as from Congress and the public, should also be heard.
Drawing
Elliot L. Richardson, a Washington lawyer, was Attorney General in the Nixon Administration.
As a former Federal prosecutor, Massachusetts attorney general and U.S. Attorney General, I don't have to be told that the appointment of a special prosecutor is justified only in exceptional circumstances. Why, then, do I believe it should be done in the case of Inslaw Inc., a small Washington-based software company? Let me explain.
Inslaw's principal asset is a highly efficient computer program that keeps track of large numbers of legal cases. In 1982, the company contracted with the Justice Department to install this system, called Promis, in U.S. Attorneys' offices. A year later, however, the department began to raise sham disputes about Inslaw's costs and performance and then started to withhold payments. The company was forced into bankruptcy after it had installed the system in 19 U.S. Attorneys' offices. Meanwhile, the Justice Department copied the software and put it in other offices.
As one of Inslaw's lawyers, I advised its owners, William and Nancy Hamilton, to sue the department in Federal bankruptcy court. In September 1987, the judge, George Bason, found that the Justice Department used "trickery, fraud and deceit" to take Inslaw's property. He awarded Inslaw more than $7 million in damages for the stolen copies of Promis. Soon thereafter, a panel headed by a former department official recommended that Judge Bason not be reappointed. He was replaced by a Justice Department lawyer involved in the Inslaw case.
An intermediate court later affirmed Judge Bason's opinion. Though the U.S. Court of Appeals set that ruling aside in May of this year on the ground that bankruptcy courts have no power to try a case like Inslaw's, it did not disturb the conclusion that "the Government acted willfully and fraudulently to obtain property that it was not entitled to under the contract." Inslaw, which reorganized under Chapter 11, has asked the Supreme Court to review the Court of Appeals decision.
After the first court's judgment, a number of present and former Justice Department employees gave the Hamiltons new information. Until then, the Hamiltons thought their problems were the result of a vendetta by a department official, C. Madison Brewer, whom Mr. Hamilton had dismissed from Inslaw several years before. How else to explain why a simple contract dispute turned into a vicious campaign to ruin a small company and take its prize possession?
The new claims alleged that Earl Brian, California health secretary under Gov. Ronald Reagan and a friend of Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d, was linked to a scheme to take Inslaw's stolen software and use it to gain the inside track on a $250 million contract to automate Justice Department litigation divisions.
(In Mr. Meese's confirmation fight, it was revealed that Ursula Meese, his wife, had borrowed money to buy stock in Biotech Capital Corporation, of which Dr. Brian was the controlling shareholder. Biotech controlled Hadron Inc., a computer company that aggressively tried to buy Inslaw.)
Evidence to support the more serious accusations came from 30 people, including Justice Department sources. I long ago gave the names of most of the 30 to Mr. Meese's successor as Attorney General, Dick Thornburgh. But the department contacted only one of them, a New York judge.
Meanwhile, the department has resisted Congressional investigations. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations staff reported that its inquiry into Inslaw's charges had been "hampered by the department's lack of cooperation" and that it had found employees "who desired to speak to the subcommittee, but who chose not to out of fear for their jobs."
The department also hindered the interrogation of employees and resisted requests for documents by the House Judiciary Committee and its chairman, Representative Jack Brooks. Under subpoena, Mr. Thornburgh produced many files but the department said that a volume containing key documents was missing.
In letters to Mr. Thornburgh in 1988 and 1989, I argued for the appointment of an independent counsel. When it became obvious that Mr. Thornburgh did not intend to reply or act, Inslaw went to court to order him to act. A year ago, the U.S. District Court ruled, incorrectly I think, that a prosecutor's decision not to investigate, no matter how indefensible, cannot be corrected by any court.
In May 1988, Ronald LeGrand, chief investigator for the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the Hamiltons, and confirmed to their lawyers, that he had a trusted Justice Department source who, as Mr. LeGrand quoted him, said that the Inslaw case was "a lot dirtier for the Department of Justice than Watergate had been, both in its breadth and its depth." Mr. LeGrand now says he and his friend were only discussing rumors.
Then, in 1990, the Hamiltons received a phone call from Michael Riconosciuto, an out-of-fiction character believed by many knowledgeable sources to have C.I.A. connections. Mr. Riconosciuto claimed that the Justice Department stole the Promis software as part of a payoff to Dr. Brian for helping to get some Iranian leaders to collude in the so-called October surprise, the alleged plot by the Reagan campaign in 1980 to conspire with Iranian agents to hold up release of the American Embassy hostages until after the election. Mr. Riconosciuto is now in jail in Tacoma, Wash., awaiting trial on drug charges, which he claims are trumped up.
Since that first Riconosciuto phone call, he and other informants from the world of covert operations have talked to the Hamiltons, the Judiciary Committee staff, several reporters and Inslaw's lawyers, including me. These informants, in addition to confirming and supplementing Mr. Riconosciuto's statements, claim that scores of foreign governments now have Promis. Dr. Brian, these informants say, was given the chance to sell the software as a reward for his services in the October surprise. Dr. Brian denies all of this.
The reported sales allegedly had two aims. One was to generate revenue for covert operations not authorized by Congress. The second was to supply foreign intelligence agencies with a software system that would make it easier for U.S. eavesdroppers to read intercepted signals.
These informants are not what a lawyer might consider ideal witnesses, but the picture that emerges from the individual statements is remarkably detailed and consistent, all the more so because these people are not close associates of one another. It seems unlikely that so complex a story could have been made up, memorized all at once and closely coordinated.
It is plausible, moreover, that preventing revelations about the theft and secret sale of Inslaw's property to foreign intelligence agencies was the reason for Mr. Thornburgh's otherwise inexplicable reluctance to order a thorough investigation.
Although prepared not to believe a lot they told him, Danny Casolaro, a freelance journalist, got many leads from the same informants. The circumstances of his death in August in a Martinsburg, W.Va., hotel room increase the importance of finding out how much of what they have said to him and others is true. Mr. Casolaro told friends that he had evidence linking Inslaw, the Iran-contra affair and the October surprise, and was going to West Virginia to meet a source to receive the final piece of proof.
He was found dead with his wrists and arms slashed 12 times. The Martinsburg police ruled it a suicide, and allowed his body to be embalmed before his family was notified of his death. His briefcase was missing. I believe he was murdered, but even if that is no more than a possibility, it is a possibility with such sinister implications as to demand a serious effort to discover the truth.
This is not the first occasion I have had to think about the need for an independent investigator. I had been a member of the Nixon Administration from the beginning when I was nominated as Attorney General in 1973. Public confidence in the integrity of the Watergate investigation could best be insured, I thought, by entrusting it to someone who had no such prior connection to the White House. In the Inslaw case the charges against the Justice Department make the same course even more imperative.
When the Watergate special prosecutor began his inquiry, indications of the President's involvement were not as strong as those that now point to a widespread conspiracy implicating lesser Government officials in the theft of Inslaw's technology.
The newly designated Attorney General, William P. Barr, has assured me that he will address my concerns regarding the Inslaw case. That is a welcome departure. But the question of whether the department should appoint a special prosecutor is not one it alone should decide. Views from others in the executive branch, as well as from Congress and the public, should also be heard.
Drawing
Elliot L. Richardson, a Washington lawyer, was Attorney General in the Nixon Administration.