What is the Inslaw Affair? A Deep-Dive into the 'Octopus'
Picture a scenario where a national government agency steals your legal management software to illegally traffic weapons and class-A drugs. This is exactly what happened to the software development company Inslaw in1986 in a scandal that has become known as the Inslaw Affair.
For years, the case has captivated those who have examined every detail or followed the mysterious fate of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro, who met his tragic end shortly after investigating its depths. But what really happened in the Inslaw case, and why does it continue to enthral the public years after the original scandal?
In this article, we’ll examine the case, shedding light on the allegations of government misconduct using PROMIS and the Octopus conspiracy theory.
What is Inslaw?
Inslaw, Inc. is a software company that gained significant attention in the 1980s due to its legal battles with the United States (US) government.
The company developed a case management software named PROMIS, which was initially designed to manage US caseloads efficiently.
Originally funded by a government grant in the 1970s, the development of PROMIS brought it into the public domain, making it free for use. Edwin Meese, a notable figure of the time, expressed great enthusiasm for PROMIS, which was advertised as revolutionary for law enforcement.
This sentiment culminated in a substantial contract worth $9.6 million awarded to Inslaw by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) in March 1982.
The goal? To implement the public domain version of PROMIS in select US Attorney's offices as a pilot programme, with the potential for expansion to federal prosecutors' offices nationwide.
History PROMIS Software
PROMIS, an acronym for Prosecutor's Management Information System, revolutionised legal case management with its comprehensive suite of tools developed by Inslaw.
The software emerged as a legal game-changer, providing prosecutors and law enforcement agencies with a powerful toolset to streamline case management.
While PROMIS was not the first database management system ever created, it represented a significant advancement in the field, particularly within the legal domain.
The software stood out for its specific focus on case management and its advanced capabilities tailored to the needs of prosecutors and legal professionals.
It introduced innovative features for its time, such as the ability to track legal proceedings, manage caseloads, and facilitate information sharing within legal departments. It also offered sophisticated document management functionalities, empowering users to organise, store, and retrieve case-related documents easily.
At its core, PROMIS provided a centralised repository for critical information, facilitating collaboration and information sharing among teams from initiation to resolution.
What is the Inslaw Affair?
The narrative surrounding PROMIS took a controversial turn when Inslaw accused the DOJ of illegally modifying the software.
Allegations suggested that the DOJ had implemented unauthorised changes, including backdoor functionalities, enabling covert surveillance and intelligence gathering.
According to Inslaw, the DOJ had unlawfully altered the software and disseminated it to numerous government entities and foreign intelligence agencies without authorisation.Such allegations sparked a lengthy legal battle between the company and the DOJ, which denied any wrongdoing.
However, investigations and subsequent court proceedings unearthed evidence supporting Inslaw's claims, including testimonies from former DOJ employees.
Despite years of litigation, a conclusive resolution to the case remains elusive, leaving questions about accountability and transparency within the highest levels of government.
The case remains controversial and is often cited as an example of government misconduct and the challenges faced by small companies when dealing with powerful government entities.
How did the case become famous?
The Inslaw Affair gained widespread attention in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, it was investigative journalist Danny Casolaro's deep dive into the case that propelled it into the spotlight of public scrutiny.
Casolaro's investigative focus centred on a theory proposing a nexus between disparate events such as the Inslaw case, the Iran-Contra arms deal, the October Surprise, the B.C.C.I. scandal, and even historical incidents like Watergate and the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Casolaro believed that the PROMIS software was a keystone in a sprawling network of scandals, which he famously dubbed "The Octopus Conspiracy".
As Casolaro conducted interviews, gathered evidence, and pieced together a narrative of government malfeasance, his investigation garnered significant attention. His efforts to uncover the truth behind the alleged misuse of PROMIS and its connection to broader corruption scandals captured the public and the media's imagination.
What are the Octopus Murders?
The Octopus Murders gained widespread attention after Netflix released the true crime docu-series"American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders".
This gripping series dives into Journalist Danny Casolaro's investigation into the Inslaw Conspiracy,a web of alleged government corruption, covert operations, and corporate espionage, famously referred to as the "Octopus".
Casolaro's death in a hotel room, under suspicious circumstances, remains a focal point in the series. While his investigation into the conspiracy involved claims against the US government, there has never been sufficient evidence to unravel the truth.
Released in February, the docu-series has sparked renewed interest in Casolaro's work, with viewers and conspiracy theorists searching for more information on the Octopus Murders and its connections to the Inslaw Affair.
With an 83% positive rating from critical on Rotten Tomatoes, the show has captivated audiences, leaving many wondering if the Octopus Conspiracy was based on a true story or remains a dark, unresolved mystery.
As curiosity around Danny Casolaro's death grows, the question of what really happened in the Octopus Murders continues to intrigue true crime enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists alike.
What happened to Danny Casolaro?
Casolaro's investigation was tragically cut short when he was found dead in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991. Casolaro's death was ruled a suicide, but many, including his family, have questioned this conclusion, given the nature of his investigation and the threats he received before his death.
Despite this verdict, numerous unanswered questions and inconsistencies surrounding his death have fuelled speculation and alternative theories, with some suggesting foul play and a cover-up orchestrated by powerful forces implicated in his investigation. In other words, many believe that those involved in the Octopusare the ones to blame for his death.
The mysterious circumstances of Danny Casolaro's demise continue to captivate curiosity and intrigue, leaving many to wonder what secrets he may have unearthed and who may have been responsible for silencing his investigation.
Who is Michael James Riconosciuto?
A former scientist and computer expert, Riconosciuto gained attention after claiming that he modified the PROMIS software at the request of the US government for covert surveillance purposes.
His alleged involvement in this case, alongside Danny Casolaro's investigation into government corruption, has made him a central figure in these conspiracies.
Riconosciuto's claims have sparked widespread intrigue, but his credibility remains in question due to his criminal record and subsequent legal troubles.
Despite this, he continues to be a key player in discussions surrounding the Octopus Conspiracy, with many conspiracy theorists considering him an insider with deep knowledge of covert government operations.
His connection to the Inslaw Affair and his role in modifying PROMIS software remain subjects of interest for those researching government scandals and unsolved mysteries.
What is the Octopus Conspiracy?
Dubbed "The Octopus" by Casolaro, it was allegedly a vast, interconnected network of government agencies, intelligence operatives, organised crime syndicates, and powerful individuals operating clandestinely to manipulate global events and further their own agendas.
The PROMIS software scandal was at the centre of the Octopus conspiracy. According to his theory, PROMIS served as a central tool for the Octopus, enabling the covert monitoring of individuals, financial transactions, and other sensitive information on a global scale.
Casolaro believed that the Octopus utilised PROMIS to facilitate a wide range of illicit activities, including arms trafficking, drug smuggling, money laundering, and political manipulation.
Despite the controversy surrounding the Octopus conspiracy theory and Casolaro's untimely death, his work continues to fascinate researchers, conspiracy theorists, and journalists interested in uncovering the hidden mechanisms of power and influence in society.
The Octopus remains a symbol of the complex web of secrecy and intrigue that exists within the corridors of power, prompting ongoing scrutiny and speculation into the nature of government operations and covert activities.
Among the crimes listed by the House Judiciary Committee by “high-level” Justice officials and others are:
>> 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
Naturally, no one has been arrested or held accountable for these crimes that also include the murder of investigative journalist Danny Casolaro.
“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.)”
PROMIS is believed by some to be the forefunner to the now infamous “Prism” program by the National Security Agency (NSA). The “Prism” program was brought to light by leaker Edward Snowden, yet it is now coming to light, that a program has existed long before this new revelation. It was known as PROMIS.
PROMIS is also the name for a Department of Justice computer software program. In the mid-1970s, Inslaw, Inc., a small Washington D.C. software development company, created for the a highly efficient, people-tracking, computer program known as Prosecutor’s Management Information System (Promis). Inslaw’s principal owners, William Anthony Hamilton and his wife, Nancy Burke Hamilton, later sued the United States Government (acting as principal to the Department of Justice) for not complying with the terms of the Promis contract and for refusing to pay for an enhanced version of Promis once delivered. This allegation of software piracy led to three trials in separate federal courts and two congressional hearings.
The following article excerpt is used to best explain the program as connected to the NSA – while the FOIA documents follow below.
NSA Documents Regarding PROMIS, Released 4 October 2018 [17 Pages, 2.7MB] – In March of 2016, see below, the NSA required a $440 payment in order to continue to process my request on PROMIS. Although I did not respond, I was surprised to receive this in October of 2018. It appears that this is only part of what the NSA has on PROMIS, and additional records are still being processed. I will add them when they are released to me.
NSA Documents Regarding PROMIS, Released 22 October 2018 [85 Pages, 8MB] – This release includes the user’s manual of the PROMIS system, various memorandums and more. One document was withheld entirely and this, according to the NSA, is now the final release of information.
ARCHIVED (Read Above)Letter regarding the NSA use of the PROMIS System [4 Pages, 1.1MB] – The NSA did find a considerable amount of documents, however, they are requiring a payment of $440 for the release of the material.
Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli military intelligence operative, revealed how Israel used proceeds from secret arms sales to Iran to finance black operations and false flag terrorism.
Quote: “The slush fund helped finance the intelligence community’s “black” operations around the world. These included funding Israeli-controlled “Palestinian text” who would commit crimes in the name of the Palestinian revolution, but were actually pulling them off, usually unwittingly, as part of the Israeli propaganda machine.” (Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War, 1992, chapter 8)
Annotations and hyperlinks by Swiss Policy Research (2023).
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Profits of War by Ari Ben-Menashe (1992, chapter 8, excerpts)
“By March 1981, the [Mossad-IDF] Joint Committee had set up the mechanisms for handling the secret sales of weapons to Iran that had been promised in the October Paris agreements. A number of trading companies with various names made the contacts with the Iranians and with weapons manufacturers and arms brokers, found out what weapons were needed, arranged the logistics of the shipments, and set up the discreet transfer of millions upon millions of dollars.
[Note: In the secret October 1980 Paris agreements, Iranian leaders agreed to delay the release of US hostages to help prevent Jimmy Carter’s reelection, while representatives of the Reagan campaign promised to unfreeze Iranian assets and deliver arms via Israel to Iran for the war with Iraq.]
Israel was operating under a general agreement of cooperation that Prime Minister Begin had secretly reached in principle with [Reagan’s campaign chairman and future CIA director] William Casey in August 1980.
The details of the weapons sales to Iran had been worked out in December 1980, and [Mossad spymaster] David Kimche, the senior member of the Joint Committee, was dealing directly with the CIA’s Robert Gates on their implementation. [Note: Robert Gates would become CIA director in 1991 and US Secretary of Defense in 2006.] (…)
To avoid placing all the golden eggs in one basket, 200 bank accounts were opened in 27 reputable banks around the world, but at any given time only about a quarter of these accounts were active. (…) By 1983 the slush fund was running like a well-oiled machine. Once a year the 200 numbered accounts in Europe would be changed, and the names of the paper companies would be altered. The only name that was never changed was that of the holding group, Ora [“light” in Hebrew]. (…)
While our slush funds grew steadily, unusual overhead costs diminished the profits. True, we were selling weapons to the Iranians with a 50 percent to 400 percent mark-up on the ex-factory price, but the actual cost of procuring and delivering them was high, too. There was a huge network of arms brokers to be paid, money to be handed over to those involved in “smokescreen” deals, bribes to be paid to politicians and civil servants, campaign “donations” to be made around the world, and other expenses. The “donations” sometimes cost more than the weapons themselves.
Contributions were even made from the slush fund, albeit indirectly, to U.S. politicians, including Democrats on the Iran-Contra panel. This may be one reason that the full story behind the Iran-Contra scandal never materialized. Even though Israel leaked details about some of [Iran-Contra mastermind] Oliver North’s activities, the Democrats, many of whom were well aware of what was going on, kept quiet about the huge flood of arms that had been running to Iran through Israel. Tel Aviv, not wanting its own arms deals with Tehran to be exposed, had paid them off through various, often convoluted, contributions to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). I don’t know who at AIPAC knew the ultimate source of these contributions, but it was clear someone did.
In Britain our committee passed money in the same fashion to the Jewish Reform Movement, confident that this money would be channeled to the Conservative Party [led by Margaret Thatcher]. Because of the friendship with Britain, the Mossad European operations headquarters was moved in 1982 from Paris to London and set up in a building on Bayswater Road. (…)
Despite the high costs involved, profits were still made on the sales to Iran. At various times the fund reached peaks of more than $1 billion. At its height it stood at $1.8 billion, with money constantly coming in and going out – a huge turnover that would have made a successful conventional enterprise very envious.
The Likud leaders running the government intended to use the money for three main purposes.
The first was to finance activities of [Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Shamir’s faction of the Likud Party. Between 1984 and 1989 no less than $160 million was funneled to Shamir’s faction, handled by the deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, Ehud Olmert, who was very close to the prime minister [and became PM himself in 2006]. Other funds were contributed to the whole Likud Party, especially to its 1984 and 1988 election campaigns. That amount totaled about $90 million.
Second, the slush fund helped finance the intelligence community’s “black” operations around the world. These included funding Israeli-controlled “Palestinian terrorists” who would commit crimes in the name of the Palestinian revolution, but were actually pulling them off, usually unwittingly, as part of the Israeli propaganda machine.
A key player in some of these operations was the former Jordanian Army colonel Mohammed Radi Abdullah, the man who was with [Mossad assets] Anthony Pearson [a former British special forces officer and security contractor] and Nicholas Davies [the foreign editor of the London Daily Mirror] when I made our approach to Davies. [Note: The London Daily Mirror was owned by Mossad asset Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the companion of Jeffrey Epstein.]
Today in his early 50s, Radi was decorated by King Hussein of Jordan for his bravery in the 1967 Middle East war [i.e. Israel’s Six-Day War]. However, his family fell out with the king because they were not willing to participate in the mass slaughter of Palestinians by the Jordanian Army in 1970 [during the Black September]. The family emigrated to London. The colonel married a woman related to [Iraqi President] Saddam Hussein and went about setting up a number of companies, including shipping offices in Cyprus and Sicily.
Radi became known as a businessman who championed Arab and Palestinian causes in Europe. But he missed his homeland and the days when he was lauded as a hero. He fell to the ways of the West, started drinking heavily and spent a fortune on gambling and women.
In the mid-1970s, to recoup his losses, Radi went to work for Pearson, who was supplying intelligence information to Israel. With Radi’s unwitting help, Pearson began to acquire intelligence about Palestinian organizations in Europe. The way he did it was by selling arms to those organizations.
An arms dealer named John Knight, who ran a company called Dynavest Limited, located [in London], and another dealer who operated out of Sidem International Limited [also in London], acquired arms from Yugoslavia. They would sell them to Radi, who would in turn sell them to the Palestinian terrorist, Abu Nidal, and other Palestinian groups. Radi was unaware of Pearson’s Israeli connection, as were the others involved. [Note: Abu Nidal was outed as a Mossad asset, too.]
While it may seem curious that Pearson, a man working with Mossad, was encouraging a Jordanian to sell weapons to Israel’s enemies, it was actually all part of a very cunning plot. In doing business with these groups, Radi learned what they were going to use their weapons for and unsuspectingly passed the information on to Pearson. Pearson, in turn, passed on to Mossad the intelligence about the movements of the groups and the number of weapons they had.
Based on Radi’s unwitting tips, over a two-month period 14 or 15 Palestinians were wiped out. Word went out among the Palestinian groups that Radi was working for Israeli intelligence and, fearing for his life, he took a trip to Baghdad and presented his case to Abu Nidal himself. Abu Nidal believed his story that he had been used – which he had – and put the word out that Radi was “clean.” The blame was placed on Yasser Arafat’s group [the PLO] – Palestinian factions at that time were warring among themselves. [Note: Israel usedIslamist factions, including Hamas, to undermine the secular PLO.]
Radi went back to his drinking and womanizing, and the money he made selling arms for Pearson all drained away. At that very vulnerable point, in 1978, Pearson stepped in again and offered Radi a £200,000 loan. This time, Pearson made it quite clear to him that the money was coming from an Israeli source. The desperate Radi accepted the loan and was recruited to work for an antiterrorist group in Israel run by [Israeli spymaster] Rafi Eitan.
The group’s methods were rather unconventional, one could say heinous, but it had operated successfully for years. An example is the case of the “Palestinian” attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 [i.e. the Achille Lauro hijacking]. That was, in fact, an Israeli “black” propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were.
The operation worked like this: Eitan passed instructions to Radi that it was time for the Palestinians to make an attack and do something cruel, though no specifics were laid out. Radi passed orders on to Abu Abbas [the founder and leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front], who, to follow such orders, was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons.
Abbas then gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met. As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair [former US Air Force navigator Leon Klinghoffer], killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel it was the best kind of anti-Palestinian propaganda.
In 1986, Radi was involved in another slush-fund black operation – the well-documented attempt to blow up an [Israeli] El Al plane [i.e. the Hindawi affair]. Or at least what was publicly perceived to be an attempt. In fact, it was a cold, calculated plan conceived by Rafi Eitan to discredit the Syrians.
At a secret meeting in Paris, Eitan told Radi that he wanted to implicate the Syrian Embassy in London in terrorism and have all the Syrian diplomats thrown out of England. Radi had a 35-year-old cousin, Nezar Hindawi, living in London, who had two things going for him – he was friendly with the Syrian Air Force intelligence attaché in London, and he had a problem with an Irish girlfriend who told him she was pregnant.
Radi went to his cousin and offered him $50,000. At the same time he told Hindawi that he wanted him to do some work on behalf of Palestine that would also rid him of his troublesome girlfriend.
“This money I’m offering you,” Radi told Hindawi, “is from our Syrian brothers on behalf of the Palestinians. We want to blow up a Zionist plane. All you have to do is make sure the girl gets onto an El Al plane with explosives in her bag.”
Radi arranged for his cousin to meet the Syrian intelligence officer, and Hindawi later came away with the clear impression that what he was doing was for the Arab cause. In accordance with his briefing, Hindawi told his 32-year-old girlfriend, Ann-Marie Murphy, a chambermaid at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, that he loved her and wanted to marry her. He was eager to introduce her, his future bride, to his old Palestinian parents who lived in an Arab village in Israel. He told her to go and visit them and receive their blessing. Then, when she arrived back in England, they would get married. Overjoyed, she agreed to go, not realizing that the address he gave her in Israel was bogus.
As far as Hindawi knew, the woman was going to be sacrificed. All he had to do was tell her that he wanted her to take a bag of gifts to his parents. But because he didn’t want to risk her being stopped for having too much carry-on luggage, he would arrange for a “friend” who worked at the airport to pass her the bag when she entered the El Al departure lounge. She would pass through the regular Heathrow security checks and then be given the package containing the bomb.
Hindawi had been told that a Palestinian cleaner would pass the deadly package to Ann-Marie. In mid-April 1986, he kissed her goodbye and watched her walk through passport control to what he expected would be her death, along with that of all the other 400-plus passengers on board the El Al jumbo jet.
In the El Al departure lounge, an Israeli security man dressed in casual clothes – the “Palestinian cleaner” – passed the girl the parcel. She took it. But within seconds she was asked to submit to a search. The security people, who were in on Rafi Eitan’s plan, could not afford any accidents. When the bag was opened, plastic explosives were found in a false bottom. Ann-Marie was rushed off to be interrogated by British security.
Sobbing, she told the story of the rat of a boyfriend. Police arrested Hindawi at the London Visitors Hotel, between Notting Hill and Earl’s Court, after his brother convinced him to give himself up. He spilled the beans and told them that a Syrian intelligence officer had asked him to carry out the task. But Radi was not implicated. He was under MI-5 protection. As a result, [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian Embassy in London. Rafi Eitan had had his way, Hindawi was jailed for 45 years, and Ann-Marie went home to Ireland where she gave birth to a daughter.
These were the kinds of black operations our slush fund was financing.
The third and last main purpose for the slush-fund money was to finance the housing projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for Jewish settlers who had been taking over Palestinian land there. Since many members of the U.S. Congress saw these housing projects as a provocation that would impede peace in the Middle East, a lot of U.S. aid to Israel prohibited the use of the money for building in the West Bank. As part of the coalition, the [Israeli] Labor Party, keen to participate in a peace conference, was also against a government project for West Bank housing.
The answer, as far as Likud was concerned, was to draw on the slush fund. Tens of millions of dollars were used in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to help build the foundations for new Jewish settlements and to buy the land from the Arabs. Although much land was simply confiscated and more taken through condemnation for government purposes, many Arabs, forbidden by the PLO to sell land to the Jews in the West Bank, nevertheless did so at inflated prices, even though they were putting their lives at risk should they be caught.
What they did was sell to various foreign Jewish front companies that were actually financed by the Joint Committee. Many West Bank Arabs became wealthy selling their land, taking the money and emigrating to other countries. As far as Likud was concerned, it was money well spent, because it was encouraging the Arabs to emigrate, while leaving land for the Jews to move onto. Their houses would also be subsidized by the slush fund.
Whenever money was to be disbursed in a big way for the West Bank, the aid of Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavicher Rebbe, whose court is in Brooklyn, New York, was enlisted. He gave his blessing, and through his financial institutions, large amounts of money were funneled to Drexel Burnham, the now bankrupt brokerage house where crooked stockbroker Michael Milken built his junk-bond fortune.
At times, billions of dollars paid out by the Iranians for arms they were going to receive – along with profits from earlier deals waiting to be disbursed – were held at various interest rates by Drexel on behalf of our front companies after they were funneled through American banks. These large deposits added to Drexel’s stature, and Drexel’s share of the profits from these deposits helped it underwrite huge quantities of junk bonds. (…)
As someone has pointed out, if a question had been put to a computer about what needed to be done to: 1) get the Arabs off Israel’s back; 2) part the Arabs from their money; 3) keep the Iranians contained – and part them from their money; 4) keep the oil flowing; 5) make sure the world recycled its old military equipment; 6) keep the Soviets happy; and 7) make a lot of arms dealers and defense contractors rich, it could not have come up with a better solution than the Iraq-Iran war.”
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Source: Profits of War (Ari Ben-Menashe, 1992, chapter 8)
Annotations and hyperlinks by Swiss Policy Research (2023)
Long before Edward Snowden’s claims or revelations that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency were monitoring and tracking the Internet, cell phones, e-mails and any other electronic communication they could get their hands on using a program known as PRISM, there existed PROMIS [Prosecutors Management Information Systems].
PROMIS was designed in the late 1970s and ‘80s to bring Department of Justice criminal case management from the dark ages into the light of the computer age. In the spring of 1981, the Reagan Administration hailed PROMIS as one of law enforcements greatest assets. By 1983, PROMIS had morphed into the behemoth of intelligence gathering. It was not state of the art – it was the art.
Over the ensuing decades PROMIS is reported to have been used by the DOJ, CIA, NSA, and several foreign intelligence agencies including Israel’s Mossad. The ownership of PROMIS has been the subject of federal court hearings and a congressional investigation.
The capabilities of PROMIS as a data collection and tracking program have never been a secret. But the only discussion of PROMIS has been about theft and black-market sales. Neither the courts nor Congress have ever inquired as to privacy issues or the ethics of the program. There has been no rending of political robes as seen with the Snowden case. In fact, the function of PROMIS has been discussed in open court and various public arenas.
PROMIS is a tracking program with enhancements by Washington, DC-based Inslaw Inc., owned by Bill and Nancy Hamilton. PROMIS was developed under a Law Enforcement Assistance Administration [LEAA] grant. Bill Hamilton was employed by NSA for six years. He left the agency in 1966.
PROMIS was designed to track the vast amount of criminal cases piling up in DOJ offices across the country. Bill Hamilton, in an interview for this story, recounted, “It was always a tracking program. It was designed to keep track of cases in local U.S. Attorneys’ offices, which means street crimes, keep track of the scheduled events in court, what actually takes place, who’s there, witnesses, police officers, conclusions, convictions, acquittals, whatever.”
As the LEAA dissolved in the late days of the Carter Administration, the Hamiltons formed Inslaw and began to make modifications to the public domain PROMIS. The short version: as originally designed, PROMIS ran only on 16-bit computers, using their own funds. INSLAW converted the program to run on 32-bit VAX computers which were massive for their time.
The Reagan administration was very taken with the Inslaw version of PROMIS. In March 1982 Inslaw was awarded $9.6 million to install the program in 20 U.S. Attorney’s offices, with further installations in the remaining 74 offices, if successful. This would be the last government contact the Hamiltons would receive, not because the system failed quite the contrary, it was too successful.
Hamilton explained, “We developed it originally just for prosecutors. But some of our users wanted to have it shared with the courts and the police. So, the software was engineered to make it adaptable. In making it highly adaptable, a byproduct was to make it useable for non-prosecutor tracking and that made it adaptable totally outside the criminal justice system.”
It became obvious with the latest round of modifications any data system could be integrated into PROMIS. And those data systems could interact that is, combine with each other forming a massive tracking data base of people via government documents such as birth and death certificates, licenses, mortgages, lawsuits or anything else kept in a data base. PROMIS could also track banking transactions, arms shipments, communications, airplane parts again, anything kept in a data base.
With the discovery of these new capabilities Inslaw’s problems began. Unknowingly, the Hamiltons had embarked on an odyssey winding from the White House and the heart of the Reagan inner circle, bankruptcy court, a congressional investigation, secret informants, the CIA, NSA, and the Mossad.
The odyssey began in February 1983 when Dr. Ben Orr, an Israeli prosecutor, came to Hamilton’s office for a demonstration. He left, never placed an order and was never seen again. This was just one of the many demonstrations the company provided potential customers and the press. There was no shroud of secrecy about PROMIS or its capabilities.
Shortly after Dr. Orr’s visit, DOJ terminated payments to Inslaw, but refused to return the software. The company soon [June 1986] found its way into bankruptcy court. Inslaw put forth the claim that DOJ had stolen their software and made a concerted effort to drive them out of business. Bankruptcy Judge George Bason agreed.
In a 216-page opinion delivered in 1987, Judge Bason wrote that DOJ used “trickery, fraud and deceit” to steal PROMIS. He was later overruled by the DC District Court of Appeals on jurisdictional grounds. A previous district court supported his findings that PROMIS had been stolen. Bason became one of the very few Bankruptcy judges to not be re-appointed.
As the PROMIS odyssey continued, information began to surface that DOJ had provided the NSA and CIA with the enhanced 32-bit PROMIS. Stories began to circulate that friends of the Reagan Administration were selling black-market versions of PROMIS to anyone willing to pay the price.
Time and time again the veracity of government employees was called into question. In 1989 the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jack Brooks D-Texas, launched what would become a three-year investigation into the theft of PROMIS and DOJ efforts to drive INSLAW out of business.
The Brooks report dated Aug. 11, 1992 not only agreed with Bason’s findings but went further: “High government officials were involved 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.”
The report includes scathing comments about former Attorney General Richard Thornburgh and several ranking DOJ staffers. Brooks recommended a settlement of Inslaw claims for damages and the appointment of a special prosecutor. Neither happened. Brooks said in an interview at the time, “[Inslaw] was ravaged by the Justice Department.” They were, he said, “treated like dogs.”
By this time nothing in the report surprised the Hamiltons. Seven months earlier they had discovered that their 1983 visitor, Dr. Ben Orr, was in fact Rafael Etian, chief of the Israeli Defense Force’s [IDF] anti-terrorism intelligence unit. They further learned he left Washington carrying a copy of PROMIS.
The DOJ explanation was that he was given the 16-bit version, not the new improved 32-bit VAX version. The question would be: why the subterfuge? And why show off the superior 32-bit VAX version and then only provide the cheaper model? DOJ has never answered the question.
Through all this, Inslaw has survived; Ireland installed PROMIS for case management, to track land records and in the bank credit system. Hamilton noted that every credit card transaction is tracked by PROMIS.
The Netherlands uses the program to keep track of all the inmates in their prison system. The city of Rome has PROMIS for use in their tax office. In fact PROMIS is being legally used in several countries around the world.
Illegally? Who knows. The Canadian government once wrote Inslaw asking for an operating manual. Inslaw never sold PROMIS to Canada. A similar event popped up with Lithuania when a member of their parliament asked for help with their PROMIS program. In each case, when told they may have a bootleg version, the reply was, it must be a different PROMIS.
To date, Inslaw has never received a dime for any government recommended settlements, some as high as $50 million.
Hamilton has declined to suggest that PROMIS was the frontrunner to PRISM. He said flatly in the interview for this article that his only information about PRISM is from news accounts.
Regardless of the Inslaw affair, PROMIS is still out there, still tracking whatever its masters require. And still, to this day, no one in government or otherwise has inquired, not about what PROMIS can do, but rather what is PROMIS doing, for whom and why.
PROMIS has been toiling in the intelligence caverns for nearly 30 years that’s a lot of data consumption, that’s a lot of tracking. Where is the PROMIS data? Compared to 30 years of information gathering and tracking by PROMIS, PRISM could be considered the equivalent of digital binge drinking.
Richard L. Fricker lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a regular contributor to The Oklahoma Observer, where this article first appeared. His latest book, The Last Day of the War, is available at https://www.createspace.com/3804081 or at www.richardfricker.com. The entire story of the PROMIS software, Inslaw and what became known as “The Octopus” can be found in Fricker’s article that appeared in Wired magazine: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/inslaw.html
“The Octopus”: INSLAW PROMIS software scandal and those killed by its tentacles
Octopus PROMIS: The Conspiracy Against INSLAW Software, And The Murders To Cover Up A Scandal Bigger Than Watergate
By Aaron Kesel Activist Post
The Story Of INSLAW PROMIS Software
PROMIS is said to be the forerunner to the NSA’s PRISM software that was disclosed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. PROMIS has also been forked into various different softwares over the years used for a myriad of applicable uses within government, which this writer will discuss later.
PROMIS stands for Prosecutor’s Management Information System and was software first used by the U.S. Department of Justice, and later numerous intelligence agencies domestic and foreign. The software was stolen from Bill and Nancy Hamilton of INSLAW corporation, and then bugged by Earl Brian (who was at the time one of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush’s envoy to Iran,) and Rafi Eitan, whom was director of Israeli intelligence agency LAKEM. PROMIS was then distributed to allies and enemies alike backdoored with Signal Intelligence (SIGNIT) surveillance technology accessible to U.S. and Israeli intelligence services remotely through encrypted telecommunication signals, according to sources.
This was done primarily through Brian's company Hadron, and Systematics Inc run by Jackson Stephens, as well as by Mossad-linked super spy media mogulRobert Maxwell’s company Degem who was also said to have been involved with the Russians then-Soviets, at the time. Besides Hadron and Systematics Inc, there were others involved in the theft and sale of the software including the following individuals — Adnan Khashoggi, Richard Armitage, and Manucher Ghorbanifar to name a few, according to a letter sent to then United States Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division William F. Weld discussing conspiracy to sell PROMIS to Sheik Klahid Bin Malfouz as a “gift.”
The letter doesn’t only show that the DOJ was involved in the plot against INSLAW as early as May 1st 1985, more specifically it shows conspiracy with CIA-linked persons of interest that were all involved with the famous Iran-Contra debacle.
(Document included in files for better viewing.)
In 1999, British BBC journalist and author, Gordon Thomas, published an authorized history of the Israeli Mossad entitled Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad in which he included very detailed admissions by Rafi Eitan about his initial meeting with Earl Brian in Iran in the 1970s.
Earl Brian disclosed his determination to find a way to profit personally from the sale of INSLAW, Inc.’s PROMIS software; Brian’s subsequent success was in getting the Reagan Administration to give copies of PROMIS to Rafi Eitan. Eitan then recruited British publisher Robert Maxwell to sell copies of PROMIS equipped with a Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) “back-door” to the intelligence and law enforcement agencies of friendly and adversarial governments worldwide. This was so that Israel and the NSA could steal other countries’ intelligence secrets. Maxwell succeeded in the sale of more than half a billion dollars of unauthorized, copyright-infringing versions of PROMIS, while the amount of sold copies by Khashoggi, Armitage, Ghorbanifar, Eitan and likely others are unknown.
Gordon Thomas interviewed Rafi Eitan because he had served as the Mossad’s Deputy Director for Covert Operations for almost a quarter of a century. Eitan would become the Director of LAKEM Scientific and Technical Intelligence Agency in the Israeli Ministry of Defense early during the first term of the Reagan Administration around the same time that Eitan had obtained PROMIS software, then recruited Robert Maxwell, and began selling the software to make his profit.
INSLAW Counsel Elliot Richardson passed away on the last day of 1999.
In 2000, INSLAW obtained two sworn statements, (which are included in the documents provided) from Gordon Thomas on the circumstances and content of Rafi Eitan’s disclosures regarding Earl Brian and PROMIS. INSLAW also prepared a lengthy memorandum (approximately 45 pages) of evidence the company had pieced together over the years which appeared to corroborate significant elements of Rafi Eitan’s PROMIS admissions to Gordon Thomas. (DOCUMENTS)
Further, according to testimony of former Mossad agent Ari Ben-Menashe, Brian provided a copy of PROMIS to Israel’s military intelligence through Rafi Eitan, who used the alias Joseph Ben-Orr.
Israel then contacted an Israeli American programmer, Michael Riconosciuto, who modified the software at Cabazon Indian Reservation near Indio, California.
CIA and Israeli intelligence operatives then proceeded to sell the stolen copies and work together to build a more sophisticated version of Main Core, which this author will discuss in a future article in more detail, but will briefly touch on the subject in the third section of this story.
Brian first attempted to buy out INSLAW and PROMIS and then use the company to sell the bugged version of the software. However, his venture was unsuccesful and blocked, so he then turned to Attorney General at the time Edwin Meese whose Justice Department refused to make payments to INSLAW, despite stipulation under a $9.9 million contract with the government for the company to install PROMIS as the Justice Department’s case management software in 94 U.S. attorneys’ offices.
In other words, using the software entirely for free, which INSLAW and the Hamiltons have claimed for decades was theft from the company.
Meese’s role in that decision may have been influenced by his own personal friendship with Brian, and the fact that his wife was a major investor in Brian’s businesses. Ironically, the first refused payment to INSLAW was one month after the Hamiltons refused to sell the company to Meese’s friend Brian. Meese, like Brian, was allegedly connected to affairs such as Iran-Contra and Reagan’s October Surprise.
The DOJ stopped paying the Hamiltons in 1983, claiming they weren’t fulfilling their obligations on the contract, and eventually INSLAW went bankrupt and sued the Justice Department. A key fact that most miss is that the person assigned by the Department to manage the contract, C. Madison Brewer, had previously been fired by INSLAW for unknown reasons. Just one month after the contract was signed, Brewer (a disgruntled employee) recommended that the DOJ terminate the agreement even though INSLAW was performing its duties without a single failed delivery.
As a result, INSLAW hired former Attorney General Elliot Richardson as their attorney. Richardson filed a civil suit claiming that the company had been the victim of a conspiracy by the Justice Department.
In 1987 a federal judge, George F. Bason Jr, for the bankruptcy court ordered the government to pay INSLAW $6.8 million; the order was later overturned on a technicality. The court also found that the DOJ run by Meese “took, converted, stole” the software through “trickery, fraud and deceit.”
The DOJ withheld documents on the INSLAW affair from Congress, then appointed Nicholas John Bua as Special Counsel to address the matter with an independent investigation.
Meese wasn’t the only corrupt DOJ head according to Rodney Stich in Defrauding America, “by misusing the power of their office…three U.S. attorney generals in the Reagan-Bush administrations, Edwin Meese, Richard Thornburgh, and Vice President George H.W. Bush’s man William Barr, misappropriated, or aided and abetted, the theft of the software called PROMIS.”
However, Stich missed mentioning an official of the DOJ William F. Weld whom the letter above implicates in the conspiracy to steal and resell PROMIS software.
The scandal became too noisy after several Congressional investigations concluded wrongdoing by the Justice Department and called for the appointment of a special prosecutor, who ended up being former CIA operative and current Attorney General under President Donald Trump, William Barr.
Barr previously served under the Bush administration as Assistant Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, and Attorney General.
“I started off in Washington at the Central Intelligence Agency and went to law school at night while I was working at CIA,” William Barr said during an oral history event in 2001.
As a former AG, Barr got to work helping aid the cover-up of INSLAW, just as he did for the CIA protecting the agency from Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) and BNL investigations, the Church Committee as a part of the CIA’s Office of Legislative Council (OLC) from 1973 to 1977, and ongoing scandals today walking through a revolving door.
Barr appointed a former Justice Department crony Nicholas Bua to conduct an “investigation” of the INSLAW matter, and then report back to him. The special counsel would be selected by Barr; would be subservient to him; and would report to him. Barr could then ignore the recommendations if, in the remote possibility the special counsel did not cooperate in the expected cover-up.
After INSLAW owner Bill Hamilton distributed a report on the INSLAW scandal to each member of the House Judiciary Committee dismissing Bua’s report, Congressmen Jack Brooks (D-TX) and Charlie Rose (D-NC) tried to enact a bill that would force an investigation of the Justice Department and the death of journalist Danny Casolaro, as well as pay reparations to the owners of INSLAW. Among the allegations of criminal statutes the bill and Committee accused the DOJ of included:
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 371–Conspiracy to commit an offense.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 654–Officer or employee of the United States converting the property of another.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 1341–Fraud.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 1343–Wire fraud.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 1505–Obstruction of proceedings before departments, agencies and committees.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 1512–Tampering with a witness.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 1513–Retaliation against a witness.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 1621–Perjury.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 1951–Interference with commerce by threats or violence (RICO).
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 1961 et seq: Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 2314–Transportation of stolen goods, securities, moneys.
`18 U.S.C. Sec. 2315–Receiving stolen goods.
The bill, H.R. 4862 was introduced in the House on July 29, 1994, but died without any action by the Democratic leadership in the waning days of the 103rd Congress.
There is also the fact that one week after giving an affidavit to INSLAW regarding the PROMIS software in 1991, CIA spook Riconosciuto was arrested on trumped-up drug charges that he had built a meth lab. The Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting the case attempted to cover up Riconosciuto’s intelligence background by claiming to the jury the CIA agent and programmer was “delusional.” (More on Riconosciuto and his importance later.)
Riconosciuto had been introduced to Hamilton by Jeff Steinberg, a longtime top aide in the Lyndon LaRouche organization in May of 1980. Riconosciuto stated that he was involved with the October Surprise, asserting “that he and Earl Brian had traveled to Iran in 1980 and had paid $40 million to Iranian officials to persuade them not to let the hostages go before the presidential election.”
After the two met, Riconosciuto was later introduced to Casolaro who began his investigation into the Octopus in the 1990s. Casolaro dubbed Riconosciuto “Danger Man” for many reasons that will be made apparent in this series, if the former CIA agent being still locked up in an unknown prison for whistleblowing various truths isn’t evidence enough.
In 1992, one year later the U.S. Supreme Court denied an application made by INSLAW, to hear its case. The application had been filed the previous year (see October 9, 1991), as INSLAW sought to overturn an adverse ruling by an appeals court in its dispute with the Justice Department.
Attempts To Settle INSLAW Case Stonewalled By CIA And DOJ In Modern Day
In 1998, a U.S. Federal Court ruled that INSLAW owned the copyright to PROMIS software, and that if the U.S. Government had used PROMIS illegally, then royalties should be paid to the company. However, that effort has been consistently stalled and INSLAW has never received a single penny in royalties.
As the story goes from a source, three years later in March 2001, then CIA Director George Tenet was arranged to read two affidavits together with INSLAW’s summary of the corroborative evidence (provided in the document dump) that had been obtained. After reading the documentation, Tenet made a phone call to a mutual friend of Hamiltons and said in that conversation that if the information was accurate, what the government had done to the Hamilton family “was unconscionable” and the “INSLAW case needed to be settled.”
Tenet further stated that he did not understand why Attorney General John Ashcroft was failing to settle the INSLAW case but that he was prepared, if necessary, to settle the CIA’s part of the case. Tenet also allegedly added that he had ordered the CIA General Counsel to report to him by Wednesday the following week on the matter of the CIA’s legal liability to INSLAW for payment of compensatory damages.
One week later, however, CIA Director Tenet again called that same friend to inform that the CIA General Counsel had advised him not to become involved in the INSLAW Affair. This may be because, we now know, that a memo shows that the Agency was offered a government copy of PROMIS as early as 1981, thanks to a FOIA request by Michael Best who wrote:
This is despite the CIA denying in repeated statements to Congress, to not have bought the software. This memo, however, shows that the Agency was offered the PROMIS software along with a list of other pieces of government owned software and the hardware necessary to run them. Since CIA didn’t disclose this or search those records, it’s unknown if they acquired an initial copy of the software this way. Even if it did not, it undermines their claims to have fully cooperated and searched every reasonable record and Agency component as they didn’t search their software requisition records.
The Department of Justice also repeatedly stated that, aside from a notable exception, they didn’t provide copies of PROMIS to anyone else or distribute it throughout the government. These memos, however, show that the software was being offered throughout the federal government from the beginning, making versions of the software readily acquirable for anyone in the government to review or toy around with prior to Earl Brian and Edwin Meese’s scheme to defraud INSLAW while modifying (i.e. inserting backdoors) and distributing the software through the U.S. and overseas.
Not long thereafter during the same spring of 2001, Bill Hamilton contacted retired four-star Admiral Daniel Murphy for the first time since 1991, when they had first met through Elliot Richardson former Secretary of Defense under President Nixon. Murphy had served under Richardson as his Military Adviser so he was considered trusted and loyal by INSLAW’s lawyer.
Murphy later served as Deputy Director of the CIA during the Ford Administration; as Under-Secretary of Defense for Intelligence during the Carter Administration; and as Chief of Staff to Vice President Bush during the first term of the Reagan Administration (when the Reagan Administration’s misappropriation of PROMIS for intelligence projects began).
After hearing Hamilton’s account of the abrupt turn around by CIA Director Tenet regarding his willingness to settle the CIA’s part of the INSLAW Affair, and reading the two sworn statements of Gordon Thomas along with the INSLAW memorandum summarizing evidence corroborative of significant elements of Rafi Eitan’s PROMIS-related admissions, Admiral Murphy vowed to help INSLAW.
Admiral Murphy said:
The INSLAW summary of evidence is carefully and responsibly written as though a good lawyer wrote it. It leaves no doubt about what transpired and the INSLAW case needs to be settled but INSLAW first needs to find another outstanding lawyer like Elliot Richardson because government officials will regard it as their patriotic duty to look INSLAW’s lawyer in the eyes and lie.
According to sources, in August 2001 Murphy introduced Hamilton to former FBI Director and former CIA Director William Webster believing the man could help. The three then met for three hours discussing the INSLAW case. Three days later, Webster phoned Murphy declining to take on INSLAW as a client because he stated “that he was not confident that the George W. Bush would be willing to settle the INSLAW case.”
In 2001, the FBI arrested an FBI Agent, Robert Hanssen, who was accused for almost two decades of spying for the Soviet Union and, after its fall, later for Russia, NY Timesreported.
However, in June 2001, the Washington Timespublished a front-page article reporting that sources familiar with the government’s then-ongoing security debriefing of Robert Hanssen had leaked to the Washington Times the fact that Hanssen, a computer software-savy FBI agent, had sold the Soviet KGB copies of various versions of INSLAW’s PROMIS software that the U.S. Government had misappropriated for intelligence applications, including the FBI’s PROMIS-derivative FOIMS investigative case management system and database systems used by other U.S. intelligence and defense entities.
Soon after the FBI’s arrest of Robert Hanssen, Attorney General John Ashcroft appointed none other than William Webster to conduct a security review of the FBI on the account of Hanssen’s two decades of espionage against the United States.
In September 2001 Admiral Murphy met with C. Boyden Gray, who agreed to represent INSLAW in seeking a settlement.
When Murphy was Chief of Staff to Vice President Bush, he hired Gray as the Vice President’s legal counsel and after serving as legal counsel to Vice President Bush for the two terms of the Reagan Administration, Gray became White House Counsel under President George H.W. Bush.
In a separate telephone conversation with Hamilton at the approximate time as the meeting with Gray, Admiral Murphy told Hamilton he had been thinking about what was told to him months earlier regarding the reactions of CIA Director George Tenet in March 2001. Admiral Murphy replied that he had a “hunch” that there was “another PROMIS application INSLAW had not yet discovered, and that the additional PROMIS application involves something so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem.” Murphy added that the government might never compensate INSLAW unless and until the Company “discovered that additional use of PROMIS.”
Murphy then stated that he was confident that Hamilton would figure out the additional PROMIS use and volunteered to serve as INSLAW’s “intelligence guru,” as well as attend Gray’s meetings with government officials to “keep them honest.” Murphy further told Hamilton what he expected to say to Attorney General Ashcroft when he and Gray met with Ashcroft; “John, let’s cut the crap. This case needs to be settled and here is how to settle it.”
Unfortunately, in late September 2001, Admiral Murphy died unexpectedly. Then the George W. Bush Administration stonewalled INSLAW Counsel Gray for the next two years, the same way previous Republican and Democratic administrations blocked INSLAW Counsel Elliot Richardson prior.
PROMIS Forked Application Use And The Top Secret Main Core Dissident Database
PROMIS was forked into many reported use cases for the U.S. government, including an intelligence application onboard nuclear submarines of the United States and Great Britain, and the use by both the U.S. Government and certain Allied Governments for inventory tracking of nuclear materials and long-range ballistic missiles. But the most bizarre and frightening use was to keep track of dissident Americans under Main Core.
The Main Core database isn’t just a rumor or conspiracy theory, PROMIS software was used by Iran-Contra fall guy then-National Security Council, Lt. Col. Oliver North to create the dissidents list for Rex-84 that would later evolve to Main Core. North used PROMIS software in 1982 in the Department of Justice, and at the White House, to compile a list of American dissidents to invoke if the government ever needed to do so under Ronald Reagan’s Continuity of Government (COG) program as a liaison to FEMA.
In 1993, Wired described North’s use of PROMIS in compiling the Main Core database:
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 Main Core database of individuals was given to a handful of individuals, meaning most government officials had no knowledge of the program ever existing. The database was passed off from administration to administration through National Security channels, according to sources.
Enter in the picture former CIA spook, imprisoned whistleblower and INSLAW witness Michael Riconosciuto. Riconosciuto warned about Main Core’s database and the dissident round-up program, he also stated that he was the programmer who backdoored INSLAW PROMIS software. Riconosciuto specifically testified that PROMIS “was stolen as a favor to software-company executive Earl Brian, a friend of Meese’s, for Brian’s help in persuading the Iranian government to hold on to the embassy hostages until the 1980 election was over.”
This means that in the 1990s, Riconosciuto described exactly what intelligence officials would discuss years later in Salon and Radar.
Riconosciuto also whistle-blew regarding the development of alleged ethnic bioweapons by Wackenhut and the Bio-Rad corporation, the Lockerbie incident and Wackenhut’s ties to the CIA, which is now G4S security. Riconosciuto additionally spoke about drug smuggling across various parts of the U.S., according to the book The Last Circle by Cheri Seymour, written at the behest of Congress to understand what had been uncovered by Casolaro which he deemed “The Octopus.”
Somewhere along the line this all became a tongue-in-cheek paranoid joke, and a conspiracy theory instead of a known fearful fact. Within high-reaching intelligence circles it’s one of the most well-kept secrets that the U.S. maintains a list of “marked” individuals considered dissidents to round up and bring to camp FEMA in case of “Martial Law” or a deemed “emergency” event, which isn’t clearly defined.
In 2008, Salon ran an article shedding some light, detailing Main Core software and its evolution. Investigative journalist Tim Shorrock reported the alleged disturbing domestic surveillance activities following 9/11 used by the Bush administration to spy on Americans. Which is ironic as the original non-forked backdoored PROMIS software was used to spy on American and foreign communications prior to 9/11 with Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) technologies implanted by the Israelis and another separate software iteration by the CIA.
Shorrock cited “several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations,” who stated “a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies” was included in the new and improved code of Main Core software.
Although, PROMIS is one key to 9/11, a subject too vast for full analysis in this piece. PROMIS software and Michael Riconosciuto’s own ties to 9/11 will be included in a future article by this author. This article serves as background introducing the reader to the PROMIS INSLAW affair and its many characters and twists and turns which all roads seem to lead back to the DOJ, NSA and CIA.
Another government official with a high-ranking security clearance spoke to the tabloid Radar the same year, corroborating Riconosciuto and other officials’ claims that Main Core is:
A database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.
This database had as much as 8 million American names in it, according to Journalist Christ Ketcham who reported the massive number of U.S. citizens “marked” in 2008. The number of names now in Main Core’s database according to a former intelligence source is believed to be in the “high double digit millions, heading for the triple digits millions” spanning across the political spectrum.
The other use of Main Core’s system since its creation under Reagan is using its detailed access into anyone’s life for political blackmail of members of Congress and other influential people, according to a source.
Through extensive research and the aid of several sources, this author was able to track down the evolution of Main Core which will be expanded on in a later article.
A PROMIS To Keep And Kill Over
This writer has spoken to several sources over the course of months. Ted L. Gunderson, one of this reporter’s only sources who will be made public for this article since he is now dead, first told this author about INSLAW PROMIS software almost a decade ago. Ted was a close friend of Riconosciuto and Casolaro, and may have been mutual friends with Ian Spiro, who was also a friend of the “CIA wiz kid.”
Danny Casolaro kept a transcript of a May 1991 meeting attended by Alan Boyak, a lawyer and former CIA operative, Ted L. Gunderson former LA and Dallas head of the FBI, and former CIA, Michael Riconosciuto. Boyak was representing Riconosciuto and Ted was one of the investigators involved with looking into the case to exonerate his friend.
Many remain unaware but Riconoscuito and Gunderson were very connected to intelligence and helped broker a deal for Ronald Reagan and CIA dir. Bill Casey by assisting in setting up the Mujaheddin with unassembled Chinese 107 MM rocket systems at a meeting with Tim Osman (Osama Bin Laden) and Ralph Olberg, in 1986. This was done by Riconoscuito using his contacts in the Chinese industrial and military group Norinco. These systems could then be reconfigured into portable anti-aircraft guided missile systems, and produced in Pakistan at a facility called the Pakistan Ordnance Works to fire at the Soviets in Afghanistan (Pakistani ISI).
So when Danny Casolaro was put into contact with former CIA spook Riconosciuto, former FBI LA and Dallas head Ted L. Gunderson, NSA Army whistleblower Alan Standorf and possibly even Alan Boyak, it was a significant catalyst. Although, there may have been more people involved in helping Casolaro expose the criminal aspects of “The Octopus,” these were the names that multiple sources all corroborated, with the addition of Ian Spiro, a businessman who got “caught up with the wrong crowd” and a friend of Riconosciuto who held documents for him.
For each of their own reasons, both Spiro and Casolaro tried to tell the tale of PROMIS and the then Octopus (deep state) that used Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Information flowed to Casolaro from former CIA whistleblower Michael Riconosciuto, former FBI senior agent Ted L. Gunderson and NSA whistleblower Alan Standorf, as well as their own sources. Spiro was directly involved in various operations under Eitan. Both men were met with fatal ends due to their pursuits: Spiro for his selfishness and later attempts to protect himself and his family — Casolaro for his drive to muckrake the truth, no matter what the cost.
According to a source, Rafi Eitan may have been responsible for the death of Casolaro and the deaths of Spiro’s family hiring a hitman Joseph Cueller who will be discussed later in this article. Eitan at the time had stated a threat to a friend of Casolaro stating that Danny should “mind his own business.” This was prior to Casolaro slitting his wrist an estimated 12 times; the cuts on the right wrist extended to the tendons, and the cuts on the left hit tendons. Danny was found dead in his bathtub a bloody mess in Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The exact scene seen by investigators mirrored the death of another reporter in Guatemala, Anson NG Yonc, who was also found dead in his bathtub; the only thing different was one was dead from a single gunshot, the other was dead from slit wrists, the Associated Pressreported.
Danny had come to Martinsburg two days earlier to meet new sources including William Turner, a former employee of Hughes Aircraft; he also met another source behind the IRS building, who was an unidentified U.S. Army Special Forces covert intelligence officer, presumably Joseph Cueller, according to a source knowledgeable about Casolaro’s final investigation. These sources Casolaro believed would contribute to his year-long investigation into “The Octopus” and, in his words, the evidence that would “bury the Justice Department.”
In Casolaro’s view this massive conspiracy encompassed the alleged theft of PROMIS by Justice Department officials; an effort by a former CIA operative (Riconosciuto) to use a California Indian reservation as a front for supplying weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras (Iran-Contra, Operation Pseudo Miranda); the shady connections between the Wackenhut Corporation and the CIA; the prolific BCCI scandal, S&L debacle; Pan Am 103 and the October Surprise.
This may explain in part why he went to the IRS building prior to his death to attempt to follow the missing or additional money with an audit trail. However, unbeknownst to Danny, that last meeting may have been a set up on the intrepid reporter’s life, as this article illustrates.
“Dan dealt in this nebulous, shadowy world,” Dick O’Connell, a friend of Casolaro’s and publisher of Washington Crime News Services said.
“He was saying ‘they’ took that INSLAW software and sold it overseas and took the profits from that and turned it into arms for the Contras,” O’Connell told the Associated Press. “That’s what he was working on and he told me he thought BCCI was the conduit for all of these money transactions.”
At about 5:30 p.m. the night before his death Casolaro happened to meet a man named Mike Looney who rented the room next to Casolaro’s Room 517. They chatted on two occasions — first at about 5:30 p.m. and then again at about 8:00 p.m. Looney later explained, “[Casolaro] said he was there to meet an important source who was going to give him what he needed to solve the case.”
According to Looney, Casolaro claimed that his source was scheduled to arrive by 9:00 p.m., “But as the appointed hour came and went Casolaro became embarrassed.” Casolaro left Looney, explaining that he had to make a telephone call. He returned a few minutes later and admitted that his source might have “blown him off.” Casolaro and Looney talked until about 9:30 p.m according to sources who are familiar with the story.
At around 10.00 p.m., Casolaro was last seen purchasing a coffee at a nearby convenience store. That was the last time anyone reported seeing Danny Casolaro alive according to the case documents.
Following the death of Casolaro, INSLAW Attorney Elliot Richardson called for an investigation. “It’s hard to come up with any reason for his death, other than he was deliberately murdered because he was so close to uncovering sinister elements of what he called ‘The Octopus,’” Richardson said.
In its Addendum to INSLAW’s ANALYSIS and REBUTTAL of the BUA REPORT, dated February 14, 1994, Inslaw notes the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI): “OSI’s publicly- declared mission is to locate and deport Nazi war criminals. The Nazi war criminal program is, however, a front for the Justice Department’s own covert intelligence service, according to disclosures recently made to INSLAW by several senior Justice Department career officials . . . According to written statements of which INSLAW has obtained copies, another undeclared mission of the Justice Department’s covert agents was to insure that investigative journalist Danny Casolaro remained silent about the role of the Justice Department in the INSLAW scandal by murdering him in West Virginia in August 1991.”
As Casolaro worked on his Octopus story, he came to rely increasingly on an individual named Robert Booth Nichols as a source, and as a friend. Casolaro also relied heavily on Riconosciuto. Danny even flew to Seattle to serve as Riconosciuto’s volunteer pretrial investigator when he was arrested in March 1991 on drug charges, one year after he began his investigation. In time, however, Casolaro became more skeptical of Riconosciuto’s stories which included bizarre alien retrievals by black helicopters to gun smuggling and bioweapons; and within a few months he was refusing to accept his collect calls from jail. But Casolaro had not abandoned his own investigation into The Octopus. (You can read Casolaro’s notes here.)
In July 1991, after Nichols visited Casolaro in Washington, D.C., Danny began to suspect that Nichols was far more sinister than he’d imagined, and began to investigate his past activities. This may be because Casolaro had learned just a few months before his death that Riconosciuto was the source he should have trusted. In the transcript meeting mentioned above in May 1991 with Gunderson and Boyak, Riconosciuto described an occasion where Nichols wanted to deliver a message to a mobster from Chicago. “He hung the man upside down on a hoist in an airplane hangar in front of a prop plane, then started the engine of the plane and revved it up, so that the man hanging on the hoist was sucked toward the propellers.” According to Riconosciuto, “By the time Bob got finished with him, he wanted to die.”
Three days before Casolaro died, he called Thomas Gates, who worked in the bureau’s L.A. office. As Gates testified before the House Judiciary Committee, Casolaro told Gates that Nichols had warned or threatened him after his last visit on July 7th, “If you continue this investigation, you will die.” Approximately a month later in August, Danny was found dead.
According to an affidavit sworn by Agent Gates during the course of a 1987 investigation into mob activities in Hollywood, Nichols was identified by the FBI as early as 1978 as a drug trafficker and money launderer. If that’s not enough, it turns out Nichols was head of Meridian Arms, which in turn joined up with a tiny California Indian tribe the Cabazon Band of Indians and the CIA-connected Wackenhut Corporation in a scheme to manufacture arms on the Indians’ reservation to then be sent to the Contras along with the production of bioweapons sold to the U.S. military and later Japan according to Riconosciuto.
Casolaro had become too trusting despite the nature of his investigation. On August 9th, William Turner said he delivered “two packets of documents” to Casolaro in Martinsburg. In a sworn statement, Turner explained Casolaro planned “to swap some info to his source for more information on INSLAW.” Turner stated the documents included “computer printouts and other documents Casolaro had received from Alan Standorf, Michael Riconosciuto and unnamed sources, relating to the sale of modified PROMIS software . . . to Canada, Australia and Israel to name a few countries.” Casolaro told Turner that the meeting with a source in Martinsburg “had been arranged by Joseph Cuellar” according to a March 14th, 1994 affidavit by Turner, provided in the documents.
The Murders Of Danny Casolaro, Anson NG Yonc, Ian Spiro And Alan Standorf
In 1992, Hamilton began receiving information from a never-identified U.S. intelligence source through a third party, a retired Army Criminal Investigation Division officer. “My intelligence source claimed that Danny was murdered by U.S. Army Special Forces Intelligence Major Joseph Cuellar in the course of a covert intelligence operation,” Hamilton stated. “The objective of the operation was to recover every copy of computer printouts from a Defense Intelligence Agency PROMIS-based domestic surveillance database system called Main Core, acquired through the assistance of National Security Agency employee Alan Standorf.”
Despite the fact that FBI agent Scott Erskine misconstrued Hamilton’s words, in his notes taken during their meeting about Casolaro’s death stating Danny became “embarrassed” by his own investigation. Erskine let slip a key fact that the Martinsburg Police had a witness who claimed she saw an unknown man leaving Casolaro’s room the morning of his murder that matched the description of the man he met at the bar the night before who was “impatient.”
Hamilton wonders whether Cuellar was the man an unnamed Sheraton Inn maid told the Martinsburg Police she saw leaving Casolaro’s room the morning of his death on August 10th, provided documents indicate.
“A male in his 30s, with an excellent sun tan, wearing a fashionable tee-shirt, dark slacks, and deck shoes,” according to the unknown maid and Charles Work a lawyer for INSLAW wrote in a letter to then Assistant Associate Attorney General John C. Dwyer deputy of Attorney General William Hubbell.
According to sources, this is due to a claim by a retired FBI agent, who was working for INSLAW at Business Risks International (BRI) where Cuellar was then working as well, who said the maid may have misconstrued Cuellar’s Hispanic complexion for the sun tan she described. The retired FBI agent secretly observing Cueller further stated that the maid’s description of the man’s expensive sports clothes matched the way he usually dressed.
However, this information was covered up by authorities, and the DOJ at the time ordered the notes to be sealed. Despite the fact that the description matches the same exact man Casolaro met at the bar the night before his death, INSLAW lawyer Charles Work wrote in a 1994 letter provided to this writer by INSLAW INC. months ago.
Further, the INSLAW lawyer states that INSLAW had confidential sources tell them that Casolaro had been found with ethyl alcohol absolut in his system, but not just anywhere — injected into his spine to “deaden the nerves below his head.” INSLAW was also provided the inventory lot number according to Charles which he stated was: “6810-00-242-3645.” A forensic pathologist Dr. Kit Green who worked for almost a decade at the CIA claimed the inventory number indicates the poison came from a U.S. Army inventory.
According to INSLAW’s counsel Charles Work, Danny was even warned through Hamilton after receiving a threat or warning relayed from CIA Charles Hayes not to go to DC and meet a source behind a certain facility. INSLAW suspects that building was a townhouse on Jackson Place just behind Blair House used during both the Reagan and Bush administrations for White House “dirty tricks.” The property was used by former CIA employees equipped with computer equipment and encrypted communications. It was also used for “very sensitive U.S. government intelligence, law enforcement and national security databases on U.S. citizens.”
In other words, the townhouse was likely an operation HQ of the Main Core database, which Casolaro had just obtained printouts from Alan Standorf. Allegedly, Casolaro obtained Standorf’s documents from William Turner who passed off copies to Casolaro according to a source who helped this writer tell this mysterious tale.
Hayes was a former longtime clandestine contractor with Division D of the CIA which was comprised of CIA clandestine service officers and NSA engineers. Division D was apparently the predecessor organization to the stand-alone joint NSA/CIA agency known as the Special Collection Service (SCS). Division D of the CIA allegedly had a major role within the CIA on the illicit intelligence uses of PROMIS. So the “warning” coming from Hayes alleged by Hamilton, looks much more like one of many threats that were given to Casolaro before the end of his life.
However, Hayes caused the resignation of several corrupt politicians in his time until he was thrown in prison on suspicious charges like Riconosciuto. Hayes was also dubbed on the internet as the Angel Of Death because he was the head and public representative of the Fifth Column, a group of hackers who tracked political payoffs through money-laundering channels.
On an interesting note the Angel Of Death was quoted stating: “I don”t want another Danny Casolaro on my hands,” when speaking about why the Fifth Column was necessary. Further, Hayes testified in favor of INSLAW in a a Chicago grand jury in 1992 and later in 1996 he was deposed by Department of Justice, Beth Cook. On both occasions Hayes accused the DOJ of “lying, cheating, and stealing.” Beyond that Hayes is who came up with the crafty name “The Octopus” for the web of people that surrounded scandals of the 1980s, which according to Orlingrabbe Hayes was also a source who worked with Casolaro.
So its far more likely that Hayes was sending a warning than a threat before Danny lost his life.
Hayes was later arrested in 1996 and jailed after he was accused of hiring a $5,000 hit on his son by an unknown FBI agent as testified by FBI agent David R. Keller who alleged the incident. The timing of that event was suspicious in that it occurred after Hayes assisted then Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr in drafting indictments against Hillary and Bill Clinton.
Turner also went to jail to serve time for a bank robbery that many believe he committed to avoid being killed by the same forces that killed Danny Casolaro, and Alan Standorf. Such a scenario seems nonsensical to this writer. If someone in a position of power wants to have one killed, the last place one would want to be is behind four walls with no escape. But maybe Turner felt safer behind bars? A source claim that could not be confirmed stated that Turner entered into FBI witness protection after the robbery. If true, this may indicate that Turner did the robbery to get the FBI’s attention, which would make more sense then to simply just go to prison.
Spy Magazinereported the horrific bizarre murder scene of Danny Casolaro, observed by Barbara Bittinger, the assistant head housekeeper of the Sheraton Inn in Martinsburg, West Virginia that further contradicts that Danny committed suicide.
“Under the sink, lying more or less flat, were two bloody towels. It looked like someone tried to wipe up the blood on the floor and slid the towels under the sink,” said Bittinger, who was only interviewed by police briefly the day the body was found and never by any journalists before speaking to Spy. “It looked like someone” – not the maid, Bittinger tells us – “threw the towels on the floor and tried to wipe the blood up with their foot, but they didn’t get the blood, they just smeared the floor,” Spy Magazine wrote.
According to the Bua Report, included in this document dump, Casolaro began reporting death threats “during the last few weeks of his life,” with only a single report of a death threat told to the police by Olga Mokros, an Arlington, Virginia neighbor the Monday before Casolaro’s death. According to the Bua Report, “Mokros could not recall any other specific occasions on which Mr. Casolaro received such a call, even though she was at his house nearly every day.” This statement is contradicted by the notes in a police interview with Mokros, in which it’s expressed that she had answered Casolaro’s phone months before his death only to hear threats to kill him and “cut him into pieces.”
Less than an hour later, a different man hissed in the phone to Olga: “Drop dead.” Then there was a third call…, but Olga remembered only that no one spoke and that she heard only music as though a radio were playing in the same room as the caller. “Don’t call him no more,” she said hanging up the phone. A fourth call was the same as the third, and a fifth came later that night. “No music…and no one spoke.” After this she slammed the receiver down.
Olga’s statements contradict the official claims and conclusions of the Justice Department and the Special Counsel investigation led by Judge Nicholas John Bua in the infamous Bua Report, providing another sliver of proof that Danny Casolaro didn’t commit suicide, according to a Muckrock FOIA request.
Casolaro himself documented the threats, telling his brother Tony, “I have been getting some very threatening phone calls. If anything happens to me, don’t believe it was accidental.” Tony was also skeptical because, “none of his notes on the case were found with his body.”
It turns out that Tony wasn’t the only person Danny had told that he might be in danger; he’d also told Gates, a special agent of the FBI.
As previously written, Casolaro had uncovered that one of his sources, Robert Booth Nichols, had secrets. It turned out that Nichols was an international money launderer and an associate of the Gambino organized crime family. This information was derived by Danny from his other sources, including Gates and Richard Stavin, who corroborated Riconosciuto’s claims about the man. Stavin was a former special prosecutor for the Justice Department who had been assigned to the MCA case, another case Casolaro had later eyed. In his investigation of the MCA case, it turns out Stavin unearthed documents about Nichols, who was also a target of his probe. On July 31, 1991, Casolaro had a conversation with Stavin. It was in this conversation that Stavin told Danny that Nichols had been a money launderer and that he was connected to the Gambino crime family and the Yakuza through Harold Okimoto an associate of Frank Carlucci (who served as Secretary of Defense and Deputy Director of the CIA before becoming Chairman of The Carlyle Group).
But then Stavin told Danny something that he regretted in an interview years later. Stavin expressed to Danny that Nichols had offered his services as an informant to several U.S. Government agencies. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told him,” said Stavin. In Stavin’s opinion: “It seemed like a cover-your-ass situation.”
It was during this period of Danny’s investigation that he had learned the secret hidden from many: that organized crime rings and the mafia had infiltrated intelligence agencies and government in general. Casolaro was now on borrowed time living on a thread.
One of this writer’s sources also disclosed that Eitan had been seen by a maid/witness known only as Paula at Ian Spiro’s home in the San Diego area at the time of his and his family’s murders in the fall of 1992. Spiro’s 40-year-old wife, Gail, daughters, Sara, 16, and Dina, 11, and son Adam, 14, were allegedly killed during the incident. Spiro was then found in his car miles away dead of cyanide poisoning.
Ari Ben Menashe, mentioned earlier in this article, also claimed that in approximately May 1993, Eitan met him at a hotel in Montreal and warned there would be “consequences” if both Menashe and Hamilton were to continue speaking about Israeli intelligence’s role with PROMIS software, according to Hamilton’s notes.
Menashe further claimed that Ian Spiro had served as a courier to the Middle East for Eitan of documents stolen by Jonathan Pollard and had freelanced in some way for his personal financial gain from the documents, which accounted for his murder in San Diego.
It is publicly known that Pollard had access to a massive trove of classified material which was very appealing to Israeli intelligence and Eitan. Over the years, Pollard is said to have handed over thousands of files to Israel. The U.S. government eventually caught on to Pollard’s activities and arrested him in 1985. It took years before Israel acknowledged its ties to Pollard but the Zionist state eventually admitted its connection to his espionage against the U.S.
The Israelis gave some of Pollard’s Top Secret documents to the Russians in exchange for Moscow expediting Jewish immigration to Israel. Israel also granted Pollard citizenship in 1995, despite the man being imprisoned for his crimes.
In autumn 2015, just a few years ago, U.S. authorities caved to Zionist pressure and released Pollard from prison under parole. Pollard is said to remain in New York City under round-the-clock surveillance in fear that he might escape and flee to Israel, The New York Timesreported.
Another source whom wished to remain entirely anonymous including their former profession who seemed quite knowledgeable about Spiro corroborated Menashe stating:
Ian Spiro had become involved with the “wrong crowd” to clear his debts. As a broker he passed from the halls of Wall St to the shadowy government formed during the Reagan-era, effectively signing his soul to the devil by working deals for Rafi Eitan, which included Espionage for the Israeli government. Spiro was all about making a profit, exactly like Eitan was, that’s why they got along. But something happened between the two, Spiro began having financial problems and double-crossed Eitan trying to cut him out of an intelligence deal. That’s when Spiro threatened Eitan that he would go public with the organized crimes that Eitan was involved with at the time. Think what was going on AK? I won’t get into too many specifics, but PROMIS wasn’t the only operation Eitan was involved with. Eitan was revered as a Mossad super-spy until he died earlier this year, after all he was responsible for the team that hunted down Nazi Holocaust mastermind, Adolf Eichmann. The whole PROMIS trapdoor affair had the backing of the Israeli government, Eitan wasn’t just a lone-wolf in the ordeal, his target was Earl Brian and company. He succeed in his endeavor and Brian also profited so it was a winning situation both ways for them.
The source wouldn’t confirm or deny but seemed to hint at Spiro and Eitan both being involved in Iran-Contra together. That information got this writer digging. Surprisingly, it is apparently public information that Ian Spiro was involved with the Iran-Contra weapons for Western hostages deal in Lebanon and aided Terry Waite. This fact was documented in a book by BBC journalist Gavin Hewitt and according to Oliver North’s Notes.
In other words, the evidence at hand suggests that Mossad may have been involved with the clandestine sale of guns, and trade off of guns for drugs smuggling going on in Iran-Contra and beyond (Operation Pseudo Miranda), since the two men worked so closely together. A report by Haartez in 2010, discloses an Israeli operation called ‘Tipped Kettle,’ in which weapons stolen by Israel from the PLO in Lebanon were transferred to the Contras; and the bigger kicker here is to “anti-American elements in Iran” during the 1980s. So it wouldn’t be much of a surprise if Eitan was also involved with Spiro and his connections. This time period paints a picture of a lot of secret aggression against the U.S. by Israel from espionage, to arming anti-Americans in Iran.
A report by San Diego Magazine with a quote from one of the hostages corroborates even further:
“Former hostage Peter Jacobsen confirmed to the media that Spiro was indeed involved in the release of hostages in the Middle East,” San Diego Magazinewrote.
However, Ian Spiro is much more important to INSLAW, because according to court documents filed shortly after the murders, Spiro was holding computer equipment essential for Michael Riconosciuto to prove a Justice Department conspiracy to steal the sophisticated computer software.
Just like Casolaro, Spiro started receiving threatening phone calls prior to his own death.
San Diego Magazine further reports:
Two weeks before the murders, he called Ken Quarton from his car phone, leaving a message on Ken’s answering machine. Agitated, he talked of threatening phone calls. He made a similar call to his uncle. At about the same time, Spiro asked a jeweler, a friend, for cyanide. He said he needed it to clean gold; the friend was skeptical and didn’t give it to him. Undeterred, a few days later Spiro bought cyanide from a downtown jeweler.
Spiro also was looking for a gun. “He asked me a couple of times; I just forgot about it,” says attorney James Street, who often socialized with the Spiro family. Two weeks before the murders, Spiro asked again. He said he had been getting threatening phone calls since he had approached a movie company with his story about events in the Middle East. Spiro said he was afraid for his family. This time Street gave him a gun, a .357 magnum that was “noisy as hell.”
“He seemed to be sincere,” Street says. “If it gave him some solace, it was a small thing to do. I spoke to him once after that, and he said he had heard footsteps around the house.” Spiro complained of not sleeping, saying phone calls were keeping him up. “He seemed to be under a great deal of pressure. Ian said something had come out of his past to haunt him.”
Shortly after Spiro’s death and the mass murders of his family, three rain-soaked suitcases, packed with Spiro’s papers and an audiotape apparently made by Ian just days before, appeared in a part of the desert near where he had been found dead in his car after ingesting cyanide. However, there were missing documents.
In a book titled, The Other Side of Deception, former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky states that Spiro had stolen some money from Mossad which was used to pay Hezbollah hostage takers to free Western hostages. Ostrovsky states that Spiro had taken some of the ransom money for himself and that Mossad tortured him to reveal the whereabouts of the hidden money but he ended up dying during the torture.
A former U.S. intelligence source corroborates Hamilton’s own source who stated that the men who were responsible for the deaths of Casolaro and Spiro’s family were Joseph Cuellar and Rafi Eitan at the behest of a Defense Intelligence Agency covert operation to identify and retrieve every copy of computer printouts from Main Core and other evidence that Casolaro had allegedly obtained in 1991 from Michael Riconosciuto, Alan Standorf and other sources, prior to Standorf’s own mysterious murder.
Apparently, Cueller had been used by Eitan to spy on Danny Casolaro prior to his untimely bloody death. Several questions remain, but the motivation seems to be money and to stop exposure which would have resulted in embarrassment and presumably eventually arrests of those involved.
As the Bua Reportnotes, Cuellar also reportedly threatened both Lynn Knowles, an ex-girlfriend of his, and Casolaro, referencing the murder of Anson Ng Yonc, a Financial Times reporter who had been killed in Guatemala after digging too deep into INSLAW, and weapon dealings using BCCI as a conduit to Guatemalan military according to Sen. Alan Cranston, D-Calif., at a hearing on BCCI. NG “went to Guatemala to see a key witness that was alleged to have important information tying the U.S. Justice Department to the BCCI scandal.”
Exactly like Casolaro and Spiro, the documents that NG obtained in his own investigation turned up missing after his death.
The Case of Alan Standorf’s death is yet another odd turn in the PROMIS INSLAW OCTOPUS saga. Standorf was found at a Washington, D.C., airport lifeless, his car in a toll parking lot at Metropolitan Washington National Airport.
According to Dr. Stephen Sheehy of the Medical Examiner’s Office in Northern Virginia “Standorf died of a blunt force blow to the back of the head around Jan. 4th,” The Morning Callreported in 1991. The Medical Examiner added, “Standorf’s body, with no visible wounds, was found the night of Jan. 28th under clothing and luggage on the back floor of his small car.”
Standorf’s murder was blamed on a simple robbery-homicide; authorities noted it was “unconnected to his work with the Army and NSA,” despite Standorf’s death happening a month after resigning from his former job as a civilian employee of Vint Hill Farm, a military security installation near Manassas, Va according to The Morning Call. However, the FBI claims that there is an ongoing law enforcement proceeding regarding Standorf’s death, Muckrock reported.
It turns out that Turner called the detectives involved with looking into the death of Danny Casolaro shortly after his death and told them that: “Casolaro had been investigating Standorf’s death, and now…Casolaro was dead too.”
However, the true full story is much more riveting, Standorf had perpetrated an approximate two-hour security breach of the Main Core database on behalf of Danny, then after the breach Standorf quit his job, according to sources.
Standorf marks the fourth mysterious death in the Octopus PROMIS case that we have so far explored. Which honestly in this writer’s opinion the biggest scandal of Octopus PROMIS isn’t just the stonewalling by the DOJ, and CIA for stolen software, it is the assassinations and obstruction of justice that happened to cover it all up, that we’ll explore further in the next article in this series.
There are many questions left unanswered.
But one of the most daunting questions is, what happened to CIA whistleblower Michael Riconosciuto?
Riconosciuto was set to be released in 2017, but was mysteriously imprisoned again for unknown reasons. His current location is unknown, as is the condition under which he is being held, much whether he is dead or alive.
🚨It’s as if the NDAA Act in 2011 signed by President Barack Obama, allowing indefinite imprisonment of dissident Americans was written for Riconosciuto and anyone else who is deemed a “government threat” to give the authority to use the Main Core database without press blow back.🚨
Tentacles Of The Octopus Emerge In Congress
During the Iran-Contra hearings, then- Hawaii Senator Daniel Inyoue echoed the calls of Danny Casolaro from his grave about an Octopus, in a statement about a “shadowy government with its own Air force, Navy and fund raising mechanism free from the law itself.” Keep in mind that Inyoue was partially talking about the National Security Council which Lt. Col. Oliver North was involved with at the time.
What Inyoue was referring to was the mafioso guns-for-drugs trade which embedded itself within modern government during Iran-Contra. Little did Inyoue know how deep and dark all this went. That same “shadowy government” plunged into the world of espionage with Israel through PROMIS and child trafficking blackmail operations in Omaha, Nebraska, linked into the Franklin Credit Union bank by Larry King to BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International). One of history’s dirtiest banks, where all funds were laundered then to offshore banks, like those in Panama, i.e. Operation Goldfinger during Iran-Contra, as well as other offshore havens or businesses’ “shell companies to then launder the money to continue covert compartmentalized operations worldwide.”
At the time with much of the focus on the covert Operation Pseudo Miranda, and other CIA drug running programs like Mena Arkansas, which this author will discuss later on in the series.
Inyoue noted that North confessed CIA director William Casey set up a bank without mentioning BCCI by name, used for “off the shelf organizations that would conduct covert operations forbidden to the CIA with funds generated by the sale of U.S. arms.”
This laundering model was by design as Casey helped set up the infrastructure with Pakistani intelligence officers (ISI) including Agha Hasan Abedi, a close adviser to General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan and, more importantly, the head of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Meanwhile, the infamous Rose Law Firm that was caught up in the Whitewater land scandal was the lawyer outfit for both the NSA and BCCI.
Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who also worked for Rose Law Firm, was the intellectual property lawyer for Systematics Inc, of Little Rock Arkansas, (now known as Alltel) one of the known companies that illegally marketed PROMIS software worldwide. This writer will expand on these details in a later article further detailing the PROMIS saga and Danny Casolaro’s investigation into the matters.
For now, though, this writer can exclusively reveal never before released information from former FBI Ted L. Gunderson that originates from Riconosciuto. Gunderson indicated that the imprisoned whistleblower told him that CIA-formed BCCI bank was allegedly used as “one of many ways to launder the sales of PROMIS software.”
This means that we have another corroborative answer for why the CIA General Counsel had advised former CIA director George Tenet “not to get involved with the INSLAW affair” and why the DOJ and others have covered up the theft stonewalling the investigation time and time again. As Danny suggested and suspected “filtered PROMIS money,” went through First American Bank, BCCI into the Iran-Contra affair according to the FBI expressed in its notes.
Interestingly its worth noting that BCCI’s board after its acquisition of First American Bank included Robert Keith Gray, who “boasted of his close relationship with the CIA’s William Casey; Gray used to say that before taking on a foreign client, he would clear it with Casey,” according to Newsweek.
Unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there; the advanced technology of PROMIS during the George W. Bush era is now in a forked form in the hands of the NSA under PRISM and different software for Echelon emp loyees and DHS, Gotham and Investigative Case Management under Palantir.
As this writer highlighted in a previous article titled: “Palantir’s Software For Fusion Centers Exposed In California FOIA,” software resembling Main Core is now being used against immigrants by the DHS, called Investigative Case Management (ICM), and a lesser version has found its way into the hands of Echelon employees. Ironically, this is one of the multiple purposes that North previously intended Main Core to do, keep track of “Central American immigrants and people opposed to U.S. policy in Central America during the 1980s,” according to Democracy Now.
Once isolated technology to only a small group of people in case of an “emergency” is now in the hands of thousands of Echelon employees and DHS employees. These unknown contractors and government employees alike can then utilize the software to track any individual they please and pull up everything from — a “target’s” personal information, such as education, employment history, family/friendly relationships, phone records, immigration history, biometrics data, criminal records, social media aliases, banking information, IRS tax status, and both home and work addresses. That sure does sound like Main Core was misappropriated to Palantir then given a steroid boost in its protocols and functions. PROMIS evolved first from just a Justice database and later tied into the CIA, NSA, DOJ and other interlinking within the government.
This story is significant because at Casolaro’s funeral two men approached the coffin — one wearing a raincoat, the other a beribboned black soldier in U.S. Army dress. The soldier laid a medal on the lid, saluted, and both men quickly walked away without anyone batting an eye. No one recognized either of the men, nor did Danny ever serve in or cover the military at any time during his career as a freelance journalist.
Despite this, the medal was buried with Casolaro’s coffin shrouded in a complete mystery.
Perhaps surprisingly the only things that remain from Danny’s investigation are old newspaper clippings, some documents, hard-to-decipher handwritten notes full of names of former CIA officers, various arms dealers and other persons of interests who have surfaced in various intelligence-related scandals over the years. Exactly what Danny was looking into when he was murdered might never fully be known, but it’s a fact that Daniel Joseph Casolaro and many others were murdered by a deep state of shadowy intelligence officers for digging too deep into the scandals that will be mentioned in this series.
Entire pages, and an accordion file were missing from Casolaro’s investigation. Nonetheless, it was ruled by the “official narrative” that Danny had committed suicide, despite the impossibilities like cutting into his own tendons and witness accounts mentioned earlier in this story. Casolaro’s autopsy even hinted at foul play, somehow, however, this was ignored and written off.
Today, we now know that The Octopus (deep state) still exists with former CIA whistleblower Kevin Shipp’s presentation on the structure of its tentacles currently grasped around the American people, with a tight grip squeezing out the life of Democracy and what’s left of our freedoms, the Military Industrial Complex. Casolaro was the victim of an insider war and a hero in the eyes of those working against The Octopus to out its crimes, which this writer will get into more, in-depth in a future article.
As late as 2017, the FBI was still investigating the murder of Danny Casolaro tied to the BCCI bank according to FOIA request by Muckrock, which turned up 292 pages regarding the PROMIS scandal, and the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. The website frequently used for FOIA requests also obtained 10 pages which includes outlines of Casolaro’s unfinished book.
This article barely scratches the surface of scandals relating to the misuse of PROMIS software and the INSLAW affair, lmuch less the systematic criminal enterprise known as “The Octopus,” formed during the Reagan Era with tentaces that grew under the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. The next installment in this series will delve into the case and its related unsolved homicides. Such deaths include that of lawyers, witnesses, staff, and others. We will also discuss the role of a certain North Carolina base and Guatemalan base in modifying Main Core to become what it is today, and the alleged feeder systems across the U.S. of HUMINT and SIGNIT intelligence.
Octopus PROMIS comprises a long laundry list of people barely touched in this first installment in the series, who were killed by the hidden hand inside the military industrial complex. Nonetheless, understanding the case is essential in order to comprehend the depth of today’s corruption. As we relinquish our rights to freedom of speech, press and even privacy with the emergence of facial recognition technology and artificial intelligence powered databases that would make George Orwell roll over in his grave, it’s an important story to revisit to showcase the compartmentalized nature of intelligence apparatuses or deep state authoritarianism.
As statesman, philosopher and parliament member, Edmund Burke said: “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it” and “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Important reference documents for this article and the Octopus PROMIS series can be viewed here.
The two men headed to the Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California in the late Spring of 1986 were on their way to meet representatives of the mujahadeen, the Afghan fighters resisting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
One of the two, Ted Gunderson, had had a distinguished career in the FBI, serving as some sort of supervisor over Special Agents in the early 60s, as head of the Dallas field office from 1973-75, and as head of the Los Angeles field office from 1977-1979. He retired to become an investigator for, among others, well-known attorney F. Lee Bailey.
And all along the way, Gunderson, whether or not actually a CIA contract agent, had been around to provide services to various CIA and National Security Council operations, as he was doing now.
In more recent years Gunderson was to become controversial for his investigations into child prostitution rings, after he became convinced of the innocence of an Army medical doctor named Jeffrey McDonald, who had been convicted of the murder of his wife and three young children in the 1970s. This has led to various attempts by the patrons and operators of the child prostitution industry to smear Gunderson’s reputation.
Michael Riconosciuto was there to discuss assisting the mujahadeen with MANPADs----Man Portable Air Defense Systems. Stinger missiles were one possibility. If the U.S. would permit their export, Riconosciuto could modify the Stinger’s electronics, so the guided missile would still be effective against Soviet aircraft, but would not be a threat to U.S. or NATO forces.
But Riconosciuto had another idea. Through his connections with the Chinese industrial and military group Norinco, he could obtain the basic components for the unassembled Chinese 107 MM rocket system. These could be reconfigured into a man-portable, shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft guided missile system, and produced in Pakistan at a facility called the Pakistan Ordinance Works. The mujahadeen would then have a lethal weapon against Soviet helicopter, observation, and transport aircraft.
Riconosciuto was more than just an expert on missile electronics; he was also an expert on electronic computers and associated subjects such as cryptology (see my "Michael Riconosciuto on Encryption").
Riconosciuto was a prodigy who had grown up in the spook community. The Riconosciuto family had once run Hercules, California, as a company town. In the early days (1861) a company called California Powder Works had been established in Santa Cruz, CA. It later purchased land on San Pablo Bay, and in 1881 started producing dynamite, locating buildings in gullies and ravines for safety purposes. A particularly potent type of black powder was named "Hercules Powder", which gave the name to the town of Hercules, formally incorporated in 1900. In World War I, Hercules became the largest producer of TNT in the U.S.
Hercules, however, had gotten out of the explosives business by 1940 when an anhydrous ammonia plant was constructed. In 1959 Hercules began a new manufacturing facility to produce methanol, formaldehyde, and urea formaldehyde. In 1966 the plant was sold to Valley Nitrogen Producers. Labor problems led to a plant closure in 1977. In 1979 the plant and site was purchased by a group of investors calling themselves Hercules Properties, Ltd.
However, Michael and his father Marshall Riconosciuto, a friend of Richard Nixon, continued to run the Hercules Research Corporation. In the early 1980s Michael also served as the Director of Research for a joint venture between the Wackenhut Corporation of Coral Gables, Florida, and the Cabazon Band of Indians in Indio, California.
"I’ve spoken to Michael Riconosciuto (the inventor of the a-neutronic bomb) and he’s an extraordinarily bright guy. I also have a hunch, which I can’t prove, that they both (Riconosciuto and Lavos, his partner) indirectly work for the CIA."
Riconosciuto’s bomb made suitcase nukes obsolete, because it achieved near-atomic explosive yields, but could be more easily miniaturized. You could have a suitcase a-neutronic bomb, or a briefcase a-neutronic bomb, or simply a lady’s purse a-neutronic bomb. Or just pull out your wallet for identification and ----.
The Meridian Arms Corporation, as well as the Universities of California and Chicago owned a piece of the technology.
But there was more than explosives in the portfolios of the CIA agents who surrounded Riconosciuto like moths around a candle. Both Robert Booth Nichols, the shady head of Meridian Arms Corporation (with both CIA and organized crime connections), and Dr. John Phillip Nichols, the manager of the Cabazon reservation, were involved in bio-warfare work----the first in trying to sell bio-warfare products to the army through Wackenhut, the second in giving tribal permission for research to take place at Cabazon.
According to Riconosciuto, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was in charge of the classified contracts for biological warfare research. Riconosciuto would later testify under oath that Stormont Laboratories was involved in the DARPA-Wackenhut-Cabazon project.
Jonathan Littman, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle would relate:
"Cabazons and Wackenhut appeared to be acting as middlemen between the Pentagon’s DARPA and Stormont Laboratories, a small facility in Woodland near Sacramento."
The Race Weapo
Riconosciuto would make additional claims about Bio-Rad Corporation, a medical supplier which had gradually taken over Hercules, California. They were also, Riconosciuto would say, covertly engaged in bio-warfare research -- producing some of the deadliest toxins known to man.
The focus of Bio-Rad’s research was said to be bio-active elements that could be tailored to attack those with certain types of DNA. Weapons could thus be produced that were specifically designed to wipe out specific races or genetic classes of human beings. (Alternatively, particular DNA types could be immunized against a deadly biological agent; the agent could then be released, and everyone else would die.)
A couple of years later, Meridian International Logistics, the parent company of Meridian Arms, was to farm similar research out to the Japanese. This included (according to minutes of a corporate meeting dated Aug. 26, 1988) methods for "induction and activation of cytotoxic T-lymphocytes".
Associated with Meridian’s Robert Booth Nichols in a Middle Eastern operation called FIDCO, a company that ran arms into and heroin out of Lebanon’s Beqaa (Bekaa) Valley, was Harold Okimoto, a high-ranking member of the Yakuza.
Okimoto had longed worked under Frank Carlucci (who served as Secretary of Defense and Deputy Director of the CIA before becoming Chairman of The Carlyle Group). Okimoto owned food concessions in casinos around the world----Las Vega, Reno, Macao, and the Middle East. (Free drinks and anthrax while you play blackjack, anyone?)
Meeting Riconosciuto and Gunderson at the hotel were two representatives of the mujahadeen, waiting to discuss their armament needs. One of the two was named "Ralph Olberg." The other one was called Tim Osman (or Ossman).
"Ralph Olberg" was an American businessman who was leading the procurement of American weapons and technology on behalf of the Afghan rebels. He worked through the Afghan desk at the U.S. State Department, as well as through Senator Hubert Humphrey’s office. Olberg looked after the Afghanis through a curious front called MSH----Management Sciences for Health.
https://msh.org/
The other man, dressed in Docker’s clothing, was not a native Afghan any more than Olberg was. He was a 28-year-old Saudi. Tim Osman (Ossman) has recently become better known as Osama Bin Ladin. "Tim Osman" was the name assigned to him by the CIA for his tour of the U.S. and U.S. military bases, in search of political support and armaments.
Gunderson and Riconosciuto were not on an altruistic mission. They had some conditions for their help. And they had some bad news to deliver. The mujahadeen needed to be willing to test new weapons in the field and to return a research report, complete with photos.
The bad news was that some factions of the CIA didn’t feel that Oldberg and Osman’s group were the real representatives of the Afghans. Upon hearing this both Tim and Ralph were indignant. They wanted to mount a full-court press. Round up other members of their group and do a congressional and White House lobbying effort in Washington, D.C.
DynCorp International Inc. (/ˈdaɪnkɔːrp/),[5] was an American private military contractor.[6] Starting as an aviation company, the company also provided flight operations support, training and mentoring, international development, intelligence training and support, contingency operations, security, and operations and maintenance of land vehicles.[7] DynCorp received more than 96% of its more than $3 billion in annual revenue from the U.S. federal government.[8][9] The corporate headquarters were in an unincorporated part of Fairfax County near Falls Church, Virginia, while the company's contracts were managed from its office at Alliance Airport in Fort Worth, Texas. DynCorp provided services for the U.S. military in several theaters, including Bolivia, Bosnia, Somalia, Angola, Haiti, Colombia, Kosovo and Kuwait.[10] It also provided much of the security for Afghan president Hamid Karzai's presidential guard and trained much of the police forces of Iraq and Afghanistan.[11] DynCorp was also hired to assist recovery in Louisiana and neighboring areas after Hurricane Katrina.[12][13] The company held one contract on every round of competition since receiving the first Contract Field Teams contract in 1951.
In 2020, Dyncorp was bought by Germantown, Maryland-based defense support services conglomerate Amentum. On April 21, 2021, the DynCorp name was discontinued, and employees and services transferred to Amentum.[14][15]
Jeffrey Epstein and the new “Promis”
After it was revealed that Epstein had evaded stricter sentencing in 2008 due to his links to “intelligence,” it was the Mossad ties of Ghislaine Maxwell’s father that have led many to speculate that Epstein’s sexual blackmail operation was sharing incriminating information with the Mossad. Former CBS executive producer and current journalist for the media outlet Narativ, Zev Shalev, has since claimed that he independently confirmed that Epstein was tied directly to the Mossad.
Donald and Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago club, Palm Beach, Florida in 2000. Photo | Davidoff Studios
Epstein was a long-time friend of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who has long-standing and deep ties to Israel’s intelligence community. Their decades-long friendship has been the source of recent political attacks targeting Barak, who is running in the Israeli elections against current Prime Minister Netanyahu later this year.
Barak is also close to Epstein’s chief patron and Mega Group member Leslie Wexner, whose Wexner Foundation gave Barak $2 million in 2004 for a still unspecified research program. According to Barak, he was first introduced to Epstein by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who eulogized Robert Maxwell at his funeral and had decades-long ties with the Bronfman family going back to the early 1950s. Peres was also a frequent participant in programs funded by Leslie Wexner in Israel and worked closely with the Mossad for decades.
In 2015, a few years after Epstein’s release from prison following his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor in 2008, Barak formed a company with Epstein with the chief purpose of investing in an Israeli start-up then known as Reporty. That company, now called Carbyne, sells its signature software to 911 call centers and emergency service providers and is also available to consumers as an app that provides emergency services with access to a caller’s camera and location and also runs any caller’s identity through any linked government database. It has specifically been marketed by the company itself and the Israeli press as a solutionto mass shootings in the United States and is already being used by at least two U.S. counties.
Israeli media reported that Epstein and Barak were among the company’s largest investors. Barak poured millions into the company and it was recently revealedby Haaretz that a significant amount of Barak’s total investments in Carbyne was funded by Epstein, making him a “de facto partner” in the company. Barak is now Carbyne’s chairman.
The company’s executive team are all former members of different branches of Israeli intelligence, including the elite military intelligence unit, Unit 8200, that is often likened to Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). Carbyne’s current CEO, Amir Elichai, served in Unit 8200 and tapped former Unit 8200 commander Pinchas Buchris to serve as the company’s director and on its board. In addition to Elichai, another Carbyne co-founder, Lital Leshem, also served in Unit 8200 and later worked for Israeli private spy company Black Cube. Leshem now works for a subsidiary of Erik Prince’s company Frontier Services Group, according to the independent media outlet Narativ.
The company also includes several tie-ins to the Trump administration, including Palantir founder and Trump ally Peter Thiel — an investor in Carbyne. In addition, Carbyne’s board of advisers includes former Palantir employee Trae Stephens, who was a member of the Trump transition team, as well as former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. Trump donor and New York real-estate developer Eliot Tawill is also on Carbyne’s board, alongside Ehud Barak and Pinchas Buchris.
Narativ, which wrote the first expose on Carbyne after Epstein’s arrest, noted that the Chinese government uses a smartphone app very similar to Carbyne as part of its mass surveillance apparatus, even though the original purpose of the app was for improved emergency reporting. According to Narativ, the Chinese Carbyne-equivalent “monitors every aspect of a user’s life, including personal conversations, power usage, and tracks a user’s movement.”
Given the history of Robert Maxwell — the father of Epstein’s long-time “girlfriend” and young-girl-procuring madam, Ghislaine Maxwell — in promoting the sale of Carbyne’s modified Promis software, which was also marketed as a tool to improve government efficacy but was actually a tool of mass surveillance for the benefit of Israeli intelligence, the overlap between Carbyne and Promis is troubling and warrants further investigation.
It is also worth noting that Unit 8200-connected tech start-ups are being widely integrated into U.S. companies and have developed close ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex, with Carbyne being just one example of that trend.
As MintPresspreviously reported, Unit 8200-linked outfits like Team8 have recently hired former National Security Agency (NSA) Director Mike Rogers as a senior advisor and gained prominent Silicon Valley figures, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, as key investors. Many American technology companies, from Intel to Google to Microsoft, have merged with several Unit 8200-connected start-ups in recent years and have been moving many key jobs and operations to Israel with backing from key Republican donors like Paul Singer. Many of those same companies, particularly Google and Microsoft, are also major U.S. government contractors.
What is Carbyne and what does it actually do?
Who was Epstein really working for?
Even though Jeffrey Epstein appears to have had ties to the Mossad, this series has revealed that the networks to which Epstein was connected were not Mossad-exclusive, as many of the individuals close to Epstein — Lesie Wexner, for instance — were part of a mob-connected class of oligarchs with deep ties to both the U.S. and Israel. As was discussed in Part I of this series, the sharing of “intelligence” (i.e., blackmail) between intelligence agencies and the same organized crime network connected to the Mega Group goes back decades. With Leslie Wexner of the Mega Group as Epstein’s chief patron, as opposed to a financier with direct ties to the Mossad, a similar relationship is more than likely in the case of the sexual blackmail operation that Epstein ran.
Given that intelligence agencies in both the U.S. and elsewhere often conduct covert operations for the benefit of oligarchs and large corporations as opposed to “national security interest,” Epstein’s ties to the Mega Group suggest that this group holds a unique status and influence in both the governments of the U.S. and of Israel, as well as in other countries (e.g., Russia) that were not explored in this report. This is by virtue of their role as key political donors in both countries, as well as the fact that several of them own powerful companies or financial institutions in both countries. Indeed, many members of the Mega Group have deep ties to Israel’s political class, including to Netanyahu and Ehud Barak as well as to now-deceased figures like Shimon Peres, and to members of the American political class.
Ultimately, the picture painted by the evidence is not a direct tie to a single intelligence agency but a web linking key members of the Mega Group, politicians, and officials in both the U.S. and Israel, and an organized-crime network with deep business and intelligence ties in both nations.
Though this series has so far focused on the ties of this network to main Republican Party affiliates, the next and final installment will reveal the ties developed between this web and the Clintons. As will be revealed, despite the Clintons’ willingness to embrace corrupt dealings during the span of their political careers, their mostly friendly relationship with this network still saw them use the power of sexual blackmail to obtain certain policy decisions that were favorable to their personal and financial interests but not to the Clintons’ political reputation or agendas.
Editor’s note | The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Rafi Eitan was interested in repurposing the American-made Promise software to restore his standing in Israel’s intelligence community caused by the fall-out from the Pollard Affair. The Pollard Affair occurred three years after Eitan had succeeded in repurposing the software and MintPress has removed that incorrect information from the article and regrets the error.
This article also originally neglected to mention that Eitan, at the time of his collaboration with Earl Brian to repurpose the Promis software, was the director of the now-defunct Israeli military intelligence agency Lekem at the time of those events and that information has been added to the story.
Seymour Hersh’s book The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy does not call Robert Maxwell an “agent” of the Mossad, as was stated originally in this report, but does allege clear links and cooperation between Maxwell and the Mossad. This report was updated to reflect this more accurate description.
Feature photo | Graphic by Claudio Cabrera
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile.
PRISIM is an IBM personal computer program that translates probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) information and calculates additional PRA type information for use by those who are not PRA experts. Specifically, PRISIM was developed for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for use by their resident inspectors at nuclear power plants. Inspector activities are either scheduled or are in response to a particular status of a plant. PRISIM is useful for either activity. PRISIM also contains vast amounts of pre-processed information relevant to inspection planning and inspector training. In addition to instantly available licensee event report data, dominant accident sequence explanations and other data base information, PRISIM has routines that are directly related to the NRC inspection modules, i.e., the guidelines for scheduled inspection activities. For each module, PRISIM provides all the PRA type information that can be useful in making decisions required in executing the module activities. New component ''importance'' measures had to be derived for this portion of the program. PRISIM is the most advanced software of its type available. All information is virtually instantaneously available even though a 20 mega bite hard disk is required for storing the information for one plant. The first version of PRISIM was developed for the Arkansas Nuclear One - Unit 1 (ANO-1) Plant and is currently being updated to reflect the plant's changes that have been made to the design since the PRA for ANO-1 was completed. This paper describes PRISIM and its application to ANO-1 in detail. 3 figs, 1 tab
Imprint Title
Status, experience and future prospects for the development of probabilistic safety criteria
Technical committee on status, experience and future prospects for the development of probabilistic safety criteria. , Vienna (Austria)., 27-31 Jan 1986.
Sep 1989
Fussell, J. B., Campbell, D. J., Glynn, J. C., & Burdick, G. R. (1989). PRISIM - A computer program that makes PRA useful (S. p. 219–227.).
Thank you so much for this. I first heard the name of Casolaro about 30 or so years ago at the first local patriots meeting I attended. Lots has happened to me since then, including a visit by the feds. to terrorize me because I talked to a local woman whose husband was hiding from them. They went after him illegitimately and she was a paralegal whom I met at the patriot meeting.
Thank you so much for this. I first heard the name of Casolaro about 30 or so years ago at the first local patriots meeting I attended. Lots has happened to me since then, including a visit by the feds. to terrorize me because I talked to a local woman whose husband was hiding from them. They went after him illegitimately and she was a paralegal whom I met at the patriot meeting.