-Caveat Lector-
The Octopus Conspiracy:
Has The U.S. Been Spying
On Your Bank Accounts?
By Art Kunkin
(Editor's Note: Following is an almost unbelievable and yet
true story of evil forces in the U.S. government. In the
article below, followed by linkages to many web sites where
important parts of the story are documented, we have assembled
an outline of a political-financial-murder conspiracy that
includes a vast international spying operation by the U.S. on
the banks and intelligence agencies of most of the other major
governments of the world from 1983 to the present. The
conspiracy also involves use of the protected legal status of
an American Indian reservation in California to carry on
illegal activities including chemical and biological weapons
production, murders of journalists and attorneys investigating
the situation, the development of a big brother computer
program that can consolidate the financial records of everyone
in the world into one database, and the attempted destruction
by the U.S. Department of Justice of a private American
computer company which developed this master program. The
story involves persons whose names surfaced during the
Irangate scandal, the unconstitutional activities of Oliver
North and even the Kennedy assassination. The name "Octopus"
has fittingly been given to this conspiracy by one of the
murdered journalists.
The story is so much like a fictional movie script that major
journalists and the mass media, even knowing that there have
already been court and congressional hearings about parts of
the wrong-doings, have not been willing or capable of fitting
the facts together. Nevertheless, there are growing rumors
that political forces in the American intelligence community
are preparing to publicize some parts of the Octopus
conspiracy this Spring in order to influence the presidential
elections of 1996 and destroy Clinton. However, partial
revelations motivated by partisan political considerations
will not educate the public to the fact that this is an
Octopus which has the potential of strangling constitutional
democracy. This is a story much bigger than Watergate or
Irangate or Whitewater and it must be told in as full detail
as possible.
The World Wide Free Press was alerted to this story when we
were sent the transcript of a December 7, 1995 radio interview
of James Norman, formerly Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine
(now with Media Bypass Magazine) and Jim Quinn of WRRK in
Pittsburgh. However, we felt that this interview did not
present this complex story in a clear step by step way that
can be easily grasped by the general public. Therefore, we
felt compelled to write our own account even though we know
that what we have written is at best only a first draft that
will have to be updated in the coming weeks and months as more
facts become known to us. However, with our new ability to
provide for the reader immediate Internet linkages to other
source material, the limitations of our necessarily brief
outline of this incredibly complex story are somewhat
overcome.
What follows has been assembled from a mass of documentation
available on the Internet and stories that have appeared in
New York's "Village Voice,"" In These Times,"" The Napa Valley
Sentinel" and transcripts of over 30 radio interviews
broadcast by courageous journalists on Pacifica radio. We
emphasize that it is others who have done the basic research
of this story and deserve the credit; we are latecomers who
are only synthesizing and compiling and repeating the results
of their research.
We expect that people reading this story will not know what to
do about it and will initially feel even more powerless than
before. How can ordinary citizens influence a system of big
government capable of allowing and participating in such
secret crimes? It is obvious that just electing better people
here and there will not stop a far flung conspiracy like this!
However, we do believe that it is only by relentless exposure
of the gruesome facts of such criminal activities that we will
see a day when sufficient numbers of the American people will
say that they have had enough and do everything necessary to
institute the major changes and reforms needed. We have
confidence that the American people will wake up.
--------------------------------------------------------------
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Our story begins as a peculiar but seemingly straightforward
business conflict between a computer company and a branch of
the U.S. government. But hang in there; hidden in the
financial details is the Octopus!
In the late 70's and the early 80's, a small computer company
named the Institute For Law and Social Research (later to be
known as INSLAW) developed a computer program called PROMIS
(Prosecutors Management Information System). Originally
financed by a government grant, this computer program has the
ability to integrate many different databases produced by many
different computer platforms and programs into one massive
database
. The U.S. Department of Justice, for example, saw PROMIS as
being useful in law enforcement. By using PROMIS the names of
criminals and their lawyers and the outcomes of their cases as
contained in the local computer databases of all cities and
counties in the United States can be integrated with the
national FBI and CIA databases. This gives American law
enforcement the ability to track national and even
international criminal activity involving drug production and
drug distribution and terrorist activity as never before.
Other groups interested in PROMIS included the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund. Their need for PROMIS was to
integrate many local and national bank databases throughout
the world into a single efficient international financial
database. PROMIS could do this but this is really part of the
story as it unfolds later than the early 1980's.
In 1982 Inslaw contracted with the Department of Justice (DOJ)
to install a 1970's version of PROMIS in certain DOJ offices.
However, by this time INSLAW had used private funds to develop
PROMIS far beyond the achievements of the original computer
program and was now a private company. DOJ had the legal right
to freely use the first 1970's version of PROMIS, developed
when INSLAW was still a non-profit company financed by the
government, but DOJ now (1983) entered into a modified written
contract with Inslaw to license for a fee the advanced 1980's
proprietary version of PROMIS. In entering this contract DOJ
had to agree to various restrictions wanted by Inslaw. For
example, DOJ could only use PROMIS in the twenty largest U.S.
Attorneys' offices; if DOJ wanted to install PROMIS in all of
its offices, DOJ would have to pay an increased licensing fee.
It was a normal contractual relation between a government
agency and a private company! Several million dollars were
initially involved in the DOJ contract but it was understood
that PROMIS was so powerful and had so many national and
international applications in government and business that it
could forseeably earn Inslaw as much as three billion dollars
a year.
However, after getting physical possession of the advanced
PROMIS program, DOJ surprisingly refused to pay Inslaw
according to the terms of the contract. In a Pacifica Radio
interview, Bill Hamilton, President of Inslaw and developer of
the PROMIS software, had this to say: "As soon as they took
delivery of the 1980's version, the Justice Department reneged
on the contractual promise to pay us the license fees, and
instead, started to refuse to pay us the bills for the
services we were performing. They withheld payments for two
million dollars worth of services and drove us into Chapter
Eleven bankruptcy. As soon as we went into Chapter Eleven
bankruptcy, the Justice Department launched a covert effort to
convert Inslaw from Chapter Eleven bankruptcy to Chapter Seven
bankruptcy, which means complete liquidation."
Hamilton continued, " We sued the Department of Justice in
Federal bankruptcy court, and after three weeks of trial, the
court ruled that officials of the Justice Department 'stole'
forty-four copies of the 1980's versions of PROMIS -- the
proprietary version owned by Inslaw --'through trickery, fraud
and deceit,' and then tried covertly to drive Inslaw out of
business so that Inslaw could not seek legal redress in the
courts."
Eventually there were court rulings that the American
government owed Inslaw some eight million dollars because of
the DOJ violation of its contract. However, evidently to this
day, Inslaw has collected nothing from the government even
though the government continues to use the PROMIS program.
There were even two Congressional hearings that sided with
Inslaw, and another hearing is being proposed for 1996, but
even this pressure has not helped Inslaw get its money and
continue its business. All this, of course, is a matter of
public record but has been reported mainly in computer
industry magazines and the financial press.
So why has the Department of Justice been so adamant in its
refusal to pay Inslaw. Here is where we can have the Octopus
Conspiracy enter the story.
At one time during the lengthy and publicized legal process
between DOJ and Inslaw, 1982 up to the present, a special
government counsel, Nicholas Bua, was appointed to review the
matter. Bua eventually issued a report in 1993 which defended
the actions of the Department of Justice. Then a detailed
rebuttal to this report was written by Elliot Richardson, the
attorney for Inslaw. (Elliot Richardson is a former Attorney
General of the United States. He was fired by President
Richard Nixon from that position when Richardson refused
Nixon's orders to fire the Special Counsel during the
Watergate Hearings).
Richardson's lengthy rebuttal is a remarkable document. (It
has been posted on the Internet and at the end of this article
we provide its Internet address so that you can read it for
yourself. Copies have been distributed to every member of the
present Congress and this has inspired several Congresspeople
to call for still another hearing about Inslaw).
Inslaw's rebuttal to Bua provides the reasons for the
otherwise incomprehensible actions of the Department of
Justice against Inslaw. (It is exciting reading but be
forewarned that the relevant facts emerge only within the
framework of a very long legal document constructed for
specific legal purposes). Evidently, the Department of Justice
and other U.S. government agencies (most likely the National
Security Agency), in collaboration with Israeli Intelligence,
and using several seemingly private computer companies set up
by the Israeli's, have been illegally and secretly selling the
expensive PROMIS software to such diverse organizations as the
Royal Canadian Mounties in Canada, many banks all around the
world and to as many as 88 foreign governments. The rebuttal
gives a precise identification of the main Israeli
Intelligence agent involved, a Rafi Eitan who was director of
Lakam, a super-secret agency in the Israeli Ministry of
Defense responsible for collecting scientific and intelligence
information from other countries through espionage.
This software theft, Inslaw asserts, not only was the basis
for the creation of a secret multi-million dollar slush fund
that has illegally benefited certain U.S. government insiders
(including perhaps as many as 26 U.S. Congresspeople!) but was
also motivated by the ability of the U.S. government to then
spy on the foreign governments and foreign banks that used
PROMIS.
To summarize this core of the story, Inslaw has witnesses who
have testified that the Wackenhut Corporation, a very large
security company run by former military and intelligence
officials, and a particular sub-division of the Justice
Department located in Indio, California on the Cabazon Indian
Reservation modified the PROMIS software with a secret back
"trap door" that allows U.S. Intelligence to electronically
and secretly eavesdrop on any bank or government using the
software. Among the witnesses cited by Inslaw in its rebuttal
is Michael Riconosciuto, the CIA computer expert who actually
modified the PROMIS program with the "back door." (We give
below the Internet addresses by which you can access
interviews with Michael Riconosciuto done by Pacifica Radio
journalists).
In his testimony about the work he did at the Cabazon Indian
reservation, Michael Riconosciuto revealed that he had also
been involved in another secret government project on the
reservation: the development of chemical and biological
weapons in a project fronted by Park-O-Meter, a parking meter
company. He claimed that these weapons were for the Contras,
and were designed for the C-130 transport planes which were at
the time carrying weapons and drugs in and out of Mena,
Arkansas. He further stated that he had developed computer
software to help launder drug money emanating from the Mena
operation. In a signed affidavit submitted to a federal court
proceeding, Riconsciuto stated "that the Wackenhut-Cabazon
joint venture was intended to support the need of a number of
foreign governments and forces, including forces and
governments in Central America and the Middle East. The
Contras in Nicaragua represented one of the most important
priorities for the joint venture."
The "Rebuttal To Bua" says the following about still another
witness available to prove Inslaw's claims: "This individual
claims to have knowledge, obtained contemporaneously with the
actual event in June 1983, of a meeting at the World Bank
headquarters in June 1983 concerning DOJ's conveyance of the
'proprietary VAX" version of Inslaw's PROMIS software.
According to this individual (who also claims to have
contemporaneous handwritten notes), the DOJ was represented at
the meeting by D. Lowell Jensen, then Assistant Attorney
General for the Criminal Division. Among others who this
individual claims attended the meeting were Stanley Sporkin,
then General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Acording to this individual, the initiative to implement
PROMIS at the World Bank came from the Bank Operations
Division of the CIA. (Footnote #1). Upon information and
belief, the objective of the PROMIS implementation at the
World Bank was to provide an early warning system to the U.S.
intelligence community of signs of planned defaults on
international loans. During the first few years of the Reagan
Administration, a number of the so-called less developed
countries actively considered defaulting on their
international debts."
And this is Footnote #1: "This kind of high technology
penetration of the international banking system by U.S.
intelligence is cited as one of the important accomplishments
claimed by William Casey for his tenure as Director of Central
Intelligence, in Bob Woodward's book,'VEIL: The Secret Wars of
the CIA, 1981-1987,' page 386. 'There was penetration of the
international banking system, allowing a steady flow of data
from the real, secret sets of books kept by many foreign banks
that showed some hidden investing by the Soviet Union.'
Now that we know about PROMIS and its "back door," we know
exactly how this secret high technology penetration of
international banks was done and we know why the Department of
Justice stole the software from Inslaw in the first place. If
DOJ had not stolen the software, Inslaw would have been
licensing PROMIS directly to foreign banks and foreign
governments and would then immediately have known about the
existence of secret"back doors" and illegal spying if that was
going on.
According to Bill Hamilton, President of Inslaw, "Our software
has been illegally sold to Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia,
Israel, Jordan, France, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, South
Korea and Japan. Supposedly, as many as eighty-eight countries
were induced to purchase our software by people who had no
right to sell it; who were, themselves, supported in their
illegal efforts by the United States Government in the White
House."
In an interview with Pacifica Radio journalist Paul DeRienzo,
Bill Hamilton also spoke about the strange death of Danny
Casolaro, a journalist who was found dead in his motel room in
West Virginia of 12 slashes in his wrists the day after he
told friends on the phone that he had "solved" the Inslaw
case.
Paul DeRienzo: Where does Mr. Casolaro come in? He was doing
his own research and he -- according to the newspaper
accounts -- had developed a theory which he called "the
Octopus." Are you aware of what Mr. Casolaro was working on at
the time of his death?
Bill Hamilton: "Yes, I spoke to Danny Casolaro on almost a
daily basis for the year that he worked on this
investigation....And what Danny had concluded was that a
relatively small group of people with backgrounds in U.S.
covert intelligence operations and with contacts high up in
the political leadership of the United States government, were
making a lot of money in a number of scandals: BCCI,
Iran/Contra, October Surprise and Inslaw. And they would use
the craft they had learned in foreign covert operations to
help themselves to large profits through criminal activities;
and that some of the proceeds from the illegal sales of our
software were laundered through BCCI."
Paul DeRienzo: "In West Virginia they're still saying it was a
suicide, but many of his friends and family seem to think it
was, in fact, murder. He wasn't in the mood, or the kind of
person to take his own life..."
A few other quotations of general interest from the Rebuttal
To Bua: "One of Earl Brian's sales of PROMIS was to the
military intelligence agency of the Government of Egypt,
through what appears to be a CIA holding company." This is
immediately followed by another, very suggestive paragraph:
"There is one use of PROMIS by the United States Government
that is considerably more sensitive than any that have been
identified to the Hamiltons by this individual, and so
sensitive that decisions on disclosure are restricted to the
four statutory members of the National Security Council, i.e.
the President, the Vice-President, the Secretary of State and
the Secretary of Defense."
There is some additional information available in the
transcript mentioned above of a December 7, 1995 interview
between Jim Norman, formerly Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine
(now with Media Bypass Magazine) and Jim Quinn of WRRK in
Pittsburgh.
Norman says, "Let's start with the early 80's when Bill Casey
came into office in the CIA under Ronald Reagan. That's when
our government decided to embark on this amazing and extremely
unbelievable successful effort to spy on the world's banks. We
did it! We have been spying on world banking transactions for
more than a dozen years.. The way we do it is by basically
forcing foreign banks, wittingly or unwittingly, to buy bugged
software and bugged computers that let our NSA (National
Security Agency, the intelligence arm of the government) to
basically surveill wire transfers all over the globe."
Quinn: "Let me ask you this. How do you sucker the rest of the
banking community around the globe into buying the software
that you are selling?"
Norman: "First of all you sell to front companies like this
company Systematics in Arkansas, now called Alltel Information
Services. They had another company called Boston Systematics,
an affiliate based in Israel mainly...The tinkering of it was
mainly putting back doors, just a few lines of code, that
would allow somebody to dial into a computer without leaving
any footprints, any audit trail that you were in there. Then
you could go around and look around in files or you could
collect information from a system without the user even
knowing it..."
Quinn: "Now this software, which was originally called PROMIS,
was stolen by the Justice Department from a company called
Inslaw...My question is -- why didn't Ed Meese just pay the
damn bill and none of this would have ever come to light....
Norman: "Well, the trouble with it was that they bought it for
use in the Justice Department but they were going to use it
all over the place. If they were paying royalties on it,
Inslaw would know just how extensive the use was of the
software, and they didn't want people to know how extensively
it was going to be used...What it has allowed us to do is
basically riffle through other people's data files, abroad
too, because the stuff was apparently being sold to foreign
intelligence agencies, and it was also bugged...The whole
computer world is much more porous and transparent than
anybody wants you to know..."
Norman then goes on to say that there are a group of computer
hackers at the CIA ("this sort of renegade vigilante group of
guys they call the Fifth Column") that has been monitoring
(with PROMIS?) the international transfer of drug and
terrorist monies in 3,000 foreign accounts! Norman believes
that this group of hackers is planning to influence the 1996
elections against Clinton by releasing this Spring information
it has about the Inslaw case and secret bank accounts of U.S.
Senators and Representatives containing monies from the
illegal sales of PROMIS. He even claims that this "Fifth
Column" is presently terrorizing Washington by having taken
2.5 Billion Dollars ("B") from some of these accounts but no
one has officially and openly complained about these thefts
because of the original illegal source of these monies.
However, these claims about the "Fifth Column" are not
substantiated by any facts presently in our possession.
(Above we have printed a small fraction of the information now
available on the Internet about the Inslaw case and the
Octopus Conspiracy. 141 items including the transcripts of 31
Pacifica Radio broadcasts, the Rebuttal To Bua, the Village
Voice article on the death of Danny Casolaro, etc. can be
found by opening the Lycos Search Engine and using "Inslaw" as
the search term. The "Rebuttal to Bua" can also be obtained
at:
http://www.webcom.com/~pinknoiz/covert/inslaw.rebtuttal.html.
In coming weeks, as we have more time, we will add other
sources where information about Inslaw can be obtained).
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