Jan 17, 2011
http://coldcaseupdate.blogspot.com/2011/01/what-ever-happened-to-peter-videnieks.html
What Ever Happened To Peter Videnieks and Joseph Cuellar?
The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro
The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaroby Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith
Copyright (C) 1996
"In the middle of the journey of life, I found myself in a dark wood, having lost the straight path."
-- Quote from Dante's Inferno -- written in Danny Casolaro's notebook.
Rounded edges of the Octopus tentacles arose briefly from under the relatively calm waters of a new administration's first year in office. Danny Casolaro was two years gone and the key players in the investigation he began ostensibly had left power after the 1993 election. Casolaro's work was left unfinished, however, and his metaphorical sea monster still swam in the sea of current events.
Columnist William Safire reported [column reprinted below] that Bill Clinton and George Bush struck a secret deal after Clinton's election that the former president would withhold criticism of the new administration for one year in exchange for Clinton's soft-pedaling of the Iran-contra investigations. A month before the end of that deal, a month before the former Arkansas governor's first anniversary as president, the Clinton administration re-opened the Inslaw investigation. In December 1993, the FBI began again to interview Casolaro's close associates and friends with an eye toward resolving the question of his death--was it a suicide or murder?
Under the new administration, the FBI was not satisfied with the determination of Judge Bua's report. It was still concerned with "Danny's state of mind at the time of his death", Casolaro girlfriend Wendy Weaver told the San Francisco Chronicle. "They said they were going to interview all these people and then bring
the findings back to their experts to determine if he was suicidal... I told them I thought it was murder." Press reports were silent as to why the case was being reopened at this time, indeed few papers other than the Chronicle reported upon it at all. Only the dim political purpose of the coming end to Bush's year of silence even suggested an answer. Did the new administration take interest in this high profle case, touching as it does on the intelligence backgrounds of prominent Republican personalities, as protection against Clinton-bashing from the Bush camp? Or was there more to it?
The review of the case had been ordered by Associate Attorney General Webster "Webb" Hubbell, then the third-ranking official at the Justice Department (seen by some as the Department's de facto head), a Clinton family friend. In noting that Hubbell had been assigned to review the Inslaw case, long-time Washington watcher Sarah McClendon also noted that Casolaro had maintained that additional details about the Inslaw relationship with the Justice Department could be had from employees in the office of Senator Robert Byrd. According to McLendon, Casolaro had scheduled an interview with these employees for the Friday preceding his death. Senator Byrd's chief of staff was the wife of Peter Videnicks, contracting officer at the Justice Department during the Inslaw period.
McClendon quoted Bill Turner [CCCU note: Was she referring to the same FBI agent who was mentioned in a book by Robert Merritt and Douglas Caddy as having been involved in Cointelpro in the 60's and 70's, or is this another Bill Turner?] as saying that Casolaro told him that he planned to meet with two members of Robert Byrd's staff. McClendon also noted the Hamiltons' complaints that Hubbell and FBI investigator Scott Erskine had plans to release a report without having talked to important Casolaro associates or investigating curious incidents, including a threat against Casolaro made by a friend of Videnieks, Joseph Cuellar, who apparently was also trailing the writer.
Hubbell himself had already been connected to the Inslaw case through the confessions of Danger Man. In April 1992 Michael Riconosciuto told Village Voice's Frank Snepp of the link between guns-and-drugs operations at an airstrip in Mena, Arkansas--a story that already loomed as a major Clinton-era scandal because of Clinton's failure to investigate the situation as governor--and Park-On-Meter (POM), a parking meter manufacturer in Russellville, Arkansas, that figured prominently in making Webb Hubbell one of the early victims of another Clinton debacle, the Whitewater affair. Riconosciuto claimed to have worked with
Terry Reed, the Mena pilot whose revelations first brought the Oliver North-styled smuggling operation to national attention.
Riconosciuto also told Mark Swaney, the head of a University of Arkansas student group responsible for a petition drive to investigate Mena, that he had been involved in developing chemical and biological weapons in a project connected to POM -- apparently never explicit that this was also connected to the work he did on Cabazon tribal lands -- and that the company also manufactured external fuel tanks for C-130 transport planes.
Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press
The CIA, Drugs...
Riconosciuto had already confided to Alexander Cockburn that he had supervised high-tech equipment transfers and developed software to help launder money at Mena and explained that POM, in conjunction with the infamous Wackenhut and Stormont Labs in Woodland, California, began production of the delivery system for the new chemical and biowarfare weaponry for use in the Contra war in 1983. Long-range transport missions require the use of external fuel tanks. Riconosciuto told Cockburn that POM made the tanks for unconventional guerilla warfare against the contras. POM was to receive chemical agents from the 354th Chemical Company of the Army Reserve, located on property across from the corrugated barn housing the POM facilities, for use in small explosive devices made with the same equipment POM used to produce parking meters.
Stormont Labs acknowledged only discussions with Wackenhut regarding biological weapons and Wackenhut denied working with POM. POM president, Seth "Skeeter" Ward II, also Webster Hubbell's brother-in-law, admitted that the company had some Pentagon contracts, but only for "re-entry nose cones for the nuclear warheads on the MX missile and nozzes for rocket engines", not chemical or biological weapons delivery systems, although he confessed to not knowing what kind of aircraft parts POM made for one of its contracts with McDonnell Douglas.
Ward also denied another central charge made by Danger Man: that POM received the first industrial development loan made by the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), a controversial state authority co-written by Webster Hubbell in 1985. Bill Clinton appointed every member of the ADFA's governing board and was required to approve its every bond issue, apparently with no other legislative means of guaranteeing that the money would be spent as intended.
The ADFA primarily served two masters: the Stephens, Inc., investment bank that received 78 percent of ADFA's underwriting fees and sales of housing and industrial bonds (Clinton had appointed two Stephens associates to the ADFA board); and Clinton crony Dan Lasater, whose Lasater and Company firm underwrote $664 million in municipal bond issues after the creation of the ADFA. Lasater was a party animal renown for cocaine soirees at his Arkansas mansion, who claimed to have paid off drug debts of the President's brother Roger. Even after a police investigation of Lasater in 1985 for drugs, Clinton approved a $30.2 million bond issue to overhaul the state police radio system. In 1986 Lasater was sentenced to 30 months in prison for the distribution of cocaine (Roger Clinton was an unindicted co-conspirator) and was pardoned for it by Clinton. He remains connected to the White House through the person of White House official Patsy Thomasson, manager of Lasater and Company while Lasater was in jail.
The Strange Death of Vincent Foster: An Investigation In this murky financial atmosphere, and despite Ward's denials, it is probable that the ADFA did issue one of its first bond issues to POM--with Clinton's required approval. For critics who complained about Clinton's passivity in investigating the Mena airstrip, a less passive reason for his inaction emerged, with a tentacle pointing tothe Inslaw affair.
Mena did not provide the only evidence that the Octopus swam in Whitewater currents, however. It's tentacles also stretched toward the most infamous developing scandal of the Clinton era: the Vince Foster death.
POM's admitted jobs for the Pentagon and the funny finances of the ADFA remained obscure for the most part in the media as Webster Hubbell's representation of POM became the official reason for his resignation from Clinton's Justice Department, one month after his re-opening of the Inslaw investigation. The Rose Law Firm declared that Hubbell had failed to provide documentation for expenses he had charged to the firm and that POM lost $1 million in litigation expenses when Hubbell unsuccessfully pursued a patent infringement case he took on a contingency basis for his brother-in-law "Skeeter" Ward. "Unfortunately, because of public speculation about me and my former law firm," Hubbell said in his resignation letter, "I will have to spend a significant amount of time on an internal matter with my former partners."
In addition to bringing POM out of the Washington spotlight, the resignation shielded Hubbell from other accusations regarding the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate investments. Specifically, Hubbell served on the Resolution Trust Corporation during its takeover of the Madison Savings and Loan, owned by
Whitewater partner James McDougal and previously represented by Hubbell. Hubbell failed to inform the RTC of the potential conflict. Unofficially, Hubbell was the second victim of Whitewater, following White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum's forced resignation for questionable meetings with federal regulators looking into the Whitewater Development Corporation real estate investments.
Nussbaum had been responsible for removing Whitewater files and a diary from the office of White House aide Vincent Foster less than three hours after Foster's death from a gunshot wound. He was accompanied on that visit by Patsy Thomasson.
Friends in High Places: Our Journey from Little Rock to Washington, D.C. Foster's last weekend had been spent in the company of Webster Hubbell, his wife and another couple, White House counsel Michael Cardozo and his wife. Hubbell joined the group in Maryland after leaving the meeting that informed William Sessions of his dismissal as FBI Director. After returning from a Hawaiian
vacation, Bill Clinton spent that weekend in Arkansas dining with David Edwards, a former Stephens Inc. employee and conduit for $23 million from the king of Saudi Arabia for the Middle Eastern studies program at the University of Arkansas. Clinton had one last twenty minute conversation with Foster the Monday night before his death. Oddly, one of Foster's last phone conversations on the morning of his death was with Brantley Buck, the Rose Law Firm partner assigned to investigate Webster Hubbell and POM.
In 1995, new suspicions arose concerning the use of PROMIS in the world banking system. One post on the internet charged (or, rather, sarcastically reported the "false" charge) that Systematics, a subsidiary of Alltech Corporation comprised of Systematics Financial Services Inc., Systematics Information Services Inc. of Little Rock, Arkansas, and Systematics Telecommunications Services Inc. of Dallas, Pennsylvania, had
modified the PROMIS software for sale to private banks, with the attendant back doors to allow the NSA to spy on banking operations. The post went on to charge that Webster Hubbell had "helped work out strategies to use Systematics software to spy on commercial and central banks." The anonymous source encouraged
Internet readers to verify the charge (or, "the utter falsehood of these malicious lies"), and attached a long list of bank and financial service addresses, executive names and capsule histories of their conversion to Systematics software, replete with citations in American Banker.
The Systematics information and Vince Foster's last weekend with Webster Hubbell and Michael Cordoza came together to float the last odd rumors about the PROMIS program. Instead of the recreational affair it was described as during the Congressional Whitewater hearings, the source of this new speculation suggested that the Clinton cronies met to plot damage control over a burgeoning scandal involving PROMIS.
Nearly $3 billion had been emptied out of Swiss bank accounts belonging to dozens of high-powered political types--both Democrats and Republicans--by a CIA faction known during this period as "the Fifth Column", but obvious Octopus clones.
A Washington Tragedy: How the Death of Vincent Foster Ignited a Political Firestorm The Fifth Columnists served as expert hackers, collecting routine foreign intelligence data presumably through the PROMIS back door, when they encountered Vince Foster's name in the Mossad system. From there, they tracked Foster's bank trail to the Banca Della Svizzera Italiana, a small Italian border bank, where the Israelis deposited $2.73 million. The rumors only speculated about what Foster gave the Israelis: high level
intelligence information; encryption codes; data on black operations subcontractors--he was dead before it could be figured out. Whatever it was, the Fifth Column tipped its hand to Foster that he was under investigation by removing the money, although according to the story his was not the only account raided. Making another in apparently regular one-day trips to Geneva, Foster discovered the missing money, and later perhaps someone mentioned to him that he was under investigation for espionage, and thereafter he became "suicidal."
THE DEAD (PROMIS/Octopus related)
Danny Casolaro
Frank Nugan
Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend and friend
Paul Morasca
Mary Quick
Larry Guerrin
Abbie Hoffman
Jonathan Moyle
Alan Standorf
Dennis Eisman
Anson Ng
Ian Spiro, His wife, and three daughters
Robert Maxwell
Paul Wilcher
Pete Sandvigen
Alan Michael May
Jonathan Myle
JohnCrawford
Vali Delahanty
Barry Kusnick
Sherman Skolnick, a long-time chairman of Chicago's Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts, charged that nearly forty witnesses in the Inslaw case had been murdered and complained that a federal judge appointed to review the case failed to show concern over the safety of other witnesses.
The body of Alfred [Fred] Alvarez, shot in the head with a .38 caliber bullet, burned in the desert heat for a day. It sat in a wooden chair behind Alvarez's house in a yard on Bob Hope Drive in Rancho Mirage, located in Riverside County. Police discovered the body along with those of two others, friends of Alvarez. Six months later, police broke open a door to a condo on Kearny street and discovered the dead body of [alleged Gambino Family money launderer] Paul Morasca, hog-tied by a telephone cord strangled slowly as his legs uncurled. Three days later, Mary Quick, a 63 year old school-teacher and head of the Women's Auxiliary of American Legion Post 509 in Fresno, was killed by a shot to the head as she approached the Legion Hall. Investigators came to believe that all three murders were connected.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On September 10, 1993, the Houston Chronicle reprinted an article by William Safire titled
"No wonder Bush is quiet about Clinton."
WILLIAM SAFIRE
The New York Times; Section A; Page 25; Column 5
September 9, 1993, Thursday, Late Edition - Final
George Bush privately assured Bill Clinton that he would not criticize the new President during the first year of his term. I cannot attribute that to any source, but trust me. And Mr. Bush has kept his word.
In what may be an unspoken quid pro quo, the Clinton Administration has moved to quash any revelations about Bush's Iraqgate scandal.
You remember Iraqgate: the White House corruption of Agriculture's loan guarantee program to slip foreign aid billions through an Italian bank to Saddam Hussein, which he used to finance his secret nuclear buildup. The Bush Justice Department sought to contain the scandal by pretending the Italian bank knew
nothing of its Atlanta office's huge Iraqi dealings -- despite suppressed C.I.A. evidence to the contrary.
During the '92 campaign, Al Gore accurately charged that "the C.I.A. reported to Secretary of State James Baker ... that Iraq was clandestinely procuring nuclear weapons" while State was urging more loan guarantees to appease the dictator. Candidate Clinton, asked if he would favor a special Iraqgate prosecutor
under a new Independent Counsel Act, replied unequivocally: "Yes."
That was then. Last week, in Atlanta Federal court, Clinton Justice arranged for the local Banca Lavoro manager to cop a plea on three minor charges of what had been a 347-count indictment, thereby blocking full disclosure of Rome's corrupt involvement -- with guilty knowledge of U.S. officials -- in a public trial.
John Hogan, Attorney General Janet Reno's longtime assistant in Miami, is the prosecutor who insists that the bank in Rome was innocent, over the plea bargainer's continued disputation. Federal Judge Marvin Shoob, the Sirica in this case, rejects Mr. Hogan's contention as "absurd ... never-never land." He sees a
"wider-ranging sophisticated conspiracy that involved B.N.L.- Rome ... and the Governments of the U.S., England, Italy and Iraq."
But Ms. Reno's man, who joined Justice on June 7, has conducted what she falsely calls "a thorough independent investigation," resulting in "no reason to change our opinion."
Thus Clinton appointees at Justice have closed ranks with prosecutors and fixers desperate not to be brought before a grand jury by a truly independent counsel. Bush Justice appointed the lawyer for Saddam's main arms purchaser as U.S. Attorney in Atlanta; Clinton Justice is appointing a lawyer from King &
Spalding, B.N.L.'s law firm, who previously worked on the case as a prosecutor to be U.S. Attorney there now.
Reno is unconcerned at how her assertion of B.N.L.-Rome's innocence bolsters the Italian bank's claim against the U.S. for $380 million of the loans to Saddam that James Baker persuaded Agriculture's Clayton Yeutter to guarantee. If the Criminal Division holds that Rome was victimized, shouldn't the U.S. pay up? "Apples and oranges," Hogan tells me; that's the Civil Division's job.
Hogan is familiar with Italian suits, having once been accused of receiving stolen clothing in a Miami "hot suit" case; he earned a straight-arrow reputation by resigning as prosecutor despite his innocence.
But now he uses "ongoing investigation" to duck questions, despite St. Janet's claim of his work having already been "thorough"; it is patently not "independent."
Did Hogan take testimony under oath from ex-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh about a White House meeting with Italian Ambassador Rinaldo Petrignani, directed by Rome to "raise the case to a political level"? Or ask the Criminal Division why an update on the B.N.L. investigation was prepared for the A.G. just
three days before that meeting?
Did he convene a grand jury to examine the Oct. 26, 1989, memo to Secretary Baker, with attached talking points and Baker notations, showing how commodity credits were abused for Saddam's backdoor financing?
Is it not a blatant conflict of interest for him to close out the Atlanta case while purporting to investigate the Atlanta prosecutors on whose work he depended?
Reno's man sayeth not. No wonder we hear not a peep of criticism about Clinton from Bush; the former President and his men are being well protected. Congress should pass the Independent Counsel Act and demand it be used in this case.
Topic: Bitcoin Created by the CIA! - page 3. (Read 6988 times)
some more....
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:stHLhJNpyCsJ:orlingrabbe.com/spookwar.htm+fifth+column+hackers&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
This is Google's cache of http://orlingrabbe.com/spookwar.htm. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Aug 5, 2011 04:26:57 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more
Text-only version
These search terms are highlighted: fifth column hackers
[Email Reply]
Spook Wars in Cyberspace--Is the FBI Railroading Charles Hayes ?
by Dick Russell
High Times, June 1997
Why does the international dope trade just keep flourishing, even while major traffickers and their government protectors keep getting exposed and imprisoned? Well, it could just possibly be that the ones going to jail aren't using the right computer software. Here's another murky peek into the legendary PROMIS conspiracy.
Spook Wars In Cyberspace - Is The Government Railroading Charles Hayes ?
This is a story straight from a Tom Clancy novel, or maybe Mission: Impossible. Shortly before last November's election, Kentucky surplus- computer dealer, who claims to be a longtime CIA contract agent, gets arrested by an FBI SWAT team and is charged with hiring an undercover agent- to murder his own son.
At his trial in January, 61-year- old Charles Hayes testifies that he's been set up by the federal government. And why? Because he's part of a team of retired intelligence types calling themselves the "Fifth Column," who've been using a supercomputer to hack into certain secret foreign bank accounts used by numerous US politicians to stash illegal funds garnered mainly from drug and arms dealers.
The prosecution's key witness against Hayes, at the trial in London, KY, turns out to be a right-wing California journalist who occasionally informs for the FBI, a fugitive with a history of mental institutionalization. For the defense, a former senior editor at Forbes magazine vouches for Hayes' credibility. After the jury hears tapes of Hayes discussing a $5,000 payoff for a prospective hit on his estranged son, the defendant responds that he'd known all along he was talking to an FBI undercover, but had been stringing the Bureau along so he could develop evidence against them. When the CIA introduces affidavits disavowing any relationship with Hayes, he takes the stand to provide his cover name, "Charles Lawson," and an ID number.
Following three hours of deliberation, the jury finds Hayes guilty, to the astonishment of nearly 100 supporters present. He says from his jail cell afterwards, while his attorney moves for a new trial, that he anticipates "assistance" from higher powers.
Hayes Gets Around
Is Charles Hayes for real, or merely a con man looking for a get-out- of-jail-free card? For months prior to his arrest last year, revelations about Hayes and his postulated Fifth Column had been circulating on the Internet and in Media Bypass, a colorful "patriot" publication out of Evansville, IN. Not only was this Fifth Column said to have downloaded financial records on government officials from up to 3,000 hidden overseas accounts, but they also allegedly wire-transferred about $4 billion clear out of those accounts into "escrow holding funds" at Federal Reserve banks.
Then, according to Hayes, these alleged Robin Hoods of cyberspace began quietly announcing their findings to certain congress people and foreign governments; which is why, so the yet- undocumented saga brags, a record number of 60-some US senators and representatives announced their retirements just before the 1996 elections. And that also is supposedly how the Mexican federales got turned on to the drug-laundered millions salted away in Switzerland by the family of ex- President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
On the face of it, these assertions might appear preposterous. But a HIGH TIMES investigation into Hayes' background reveals a tantalizing trail of evidence indicating, at the least, considerable insider knowledge about computers and smuggling.
In 1985, Charles Hayes was a key government witness in a Kentucky trial involving the largest gemstone seizure ever by US Customs-millions of dollars' worth that had been smuggled out of Brazil
In 1991, the telephone records of doomed journalist Danny Casolaro showed numerous phone calls to Hayes in the month before Casolaro was found dead in a West Virginia hotel room. Casolaro had spent the past several years investigating a tangled web of government corruption he called "the Octopus." One of Casolaro's focuses was the Inslaw case, in which the Justice Department stands accused of having stolen the company's PROMIS computer software, which was capable of tracking complicated financial transactions.
In 1992, Hayes testified about the Inslaw matter before a Chicago grand jury. In April '96, he was subpoenaed and gave a lengthy deposition about Inslaw to a Justice Department attorney, who quizzed him about his computer expertise. FBI Special Agent David Keller testified at Hayes' January trial that he knew of him from a previous FBI investigation into the Inslaw matter.
In July 1995, Rep. Jim Leach, chairman of the House Banking Committee, wrote to the director of the National Security Agency, seeking "your agency's help in verifying or laying to rest various allegations of money- laundering in Arkansas in the late 1980s." Among other matters, Rep. Leach asked about Inslaw's PROMIS software- and Charlie Hayes.
Several of Hayes' associates back up his contention that he's being framed, in an attempt to put the Fifth Column out of business. One well-placed source, who requested anonymity, affirms that Hayes was a CIA asset, adding, "I think Hayes has been set up to the nth degree to discredit him."
Mena and the Octopus
Hayes launched the five-member Fifth Column himself, he maintains to HIGH TIMES, primarily to follow the money-laundering of the international drug cartels. It's a personal crusade, according to one of his associates in Kentucky, triggered by the way Hayes' 37-year-old son, John-the alleged murder-for-hire target-supposedly "cooked his mind on drugs." Mark Swaney, whose Arkansas Committee was responsible for much of the early publicity surrounding the notorious CIA drugs-and-arms operation out of Mena, AK, (HighWitness News, Jan. 95) spoke with Hayes on a number of occasions between 1992 and '95: "A lot of what he told me about Mena turned out to be true," says Swaney.
Swaney's notes from a July '92 interview with Hayes contain charges that both the federal government and the Arkansas State Police were involved in distributing cocaine out of Mena. Asked if then-Governor Bill Clinton was aware of the Mena operation, Hayes responded, "No, but his associates were involved." He elaborated that some of the money was laundered through two powerful Arkansas companies with ties to Clinton.
In a five-hour jailhouse interview not long before his trial, Hayes, a former Air Force pilot, described a CIA assignment he'd once undertaken to fly a weapons shipment from Mena to Aruba in the Caribbean. On discovering that the cargo was actually cocaine, Hayes told me, he dumped it on the runway and ended up in a shoot-out that killed several people.
This is one of many stories, such as Hayes' claimed friendships with Fidel Castro and Sen. Edward Kennedy, that prove impossible to verify. But William Hamilton of St. Louis, the president of Inslaw, tells of encounters with Hayes which add credence to the existence of the Fifth Column. Hamilton first became aware of Hayes in 1990, in the midst of Inslaw's legal battle to prove that the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, NSA and other federal agencies had illegally appropriated their PROMIS database- management software for their own purposes.
As recounted in a heavily redacted House Judiciary Committee report, The Inslaw Affair (September 1992): "Mr. Hayes is a surplus computer dealer with alleged ties to both United States and foreign intelligence communities. Mr. Hayes first came to the attention of the Committee during August 1990, following assertions that excess Haris- Lanier word-processing equipment he had purchased from the US Attorney's office for the Eastem District of Kentucky, located in Lexington, contained the PROMIS software." The Justice Department had subsequently seized the equipment back from Hayes, preventing its use as evidence in the Inslaw case. (The computer gear had also allegedly contained sensitive classified material, such as the identities of narcotics informants.)
Hamilton therefore contacted Hayes, who told him the military owed Inslaw plenty of money, because it had secretly distributed his PROMIS software. When Hamilton subsequently learned from a CIA contact that PROMIS had indeed been used aboard US submarines, he visited Hayes in Kentucky in January '91. PROMIS was "in the CIA, DEA, FBI, everywhere," Hayes told him. Checking him out with other sources, Hamilton was told that Hayes and a partner both code- named "Running Fox" had belonged to an elite intelligence unit which "had to be able to take apart and put back together, without any diagrams, the Cray supercomputer."
According to Hayes, this elite spy unit was known as "Squad D." First mentioned in Bob Woodward's book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, Squad D was established by William Casey, Ronald Reagan's CIA director. Part of its mission was computer hacking. "There was penetration of the international banking system," Woodward wrote, "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."
And not just by the USSR. PROMIS- short for "Prosecutors' Management Information System"-had originally been designed to track complicated illegal currency transactions through intricate systems of laundering and wire- transfers; it could readily be "enhanced" to track transactions by banks and dummy corporations used by terrorists and dope dealers. Hamilton's Inslaw had sold PROMIS to the early Reagan Justice Department, which promptly reneged on a $6 million payment due, asserting that a portion of the contract was not fulfilled. Inslaw went bankrupt, and its ongoing lawsuit against the Feds is still in the US Court of Claims.
Promis Them Anything
Inslaw's attorneys, who include former Attorney General Elliott Richardson, present evidence that a covert intelligence operation in fact transformed PROMIS into an unprecedented high-tech spying tool. It seems a brilliant young CIA contract agent out of Seattle named Michael Riconosciuto, reputedly a past master at clandestine drug chemistry and computer hacking, not only "enhanced" the PROMIS package to implement its use in tracking international currency transfers, but fitted it with a secret "trap-door" access port that enabled US espionage agencies to electronically monitor its use by anyone who bought it.
According to Richardson, PROMIS was peddled to as many as 88 foreign governments by "cut-out" front men working for the Department of Justice, the NSA and CIA. It was also purchased by numerous international banks in Switzerland and elsewhere, which were interested in standardizing their wire- transfer data. None of these buyers knew about Riconosciuto's trap-door application that not only allowed Uncle Sam to monitor their money-laundering in progress, but, whenever desired, to invisibly modify it.
One of the "cut-out" peddlers of this stolen, hyped-up and poisoned money-tracking software took it to Brazil in the mid-'80s, according to Charles Hayes, who was there at the time, as a CIA contract agent, in the matter of the stolen gemstones. Dr. Earl Brian (convicted last year in Los Angeles of multimillion-dollar international financial fraud) had been California Secretary of Health during Reagan's govenorship in the '70s. Michael Riconosciuto has alleged that some time after 1979, Brian was given the PROMIS software to peddle around the world to line his personal pockets. It was during a sales trip to Brazil in 1985 that Dr. Brian allegedly told Hayes about PROMIS.
Shortly after this Brazil adventure, Hayes moved back to his hometown of Nancy, KY, and, as his CIA cover, set up a salvage company specializing in computer parts-and also began working with Riconosciuto. The Fifth Column's Cray Model 3B supercomputer was primarily constructed, it is said, through purchases at Department of Defense auctions.
Initially, Hayes' Fifth Column's work had been done under government sponsorship. Veteran investigative journalist James Norman has written that besides penetrating the international banking system, the Column had initially succeeded in downloading information from over 50 intelligence services around the globe, including the Soviet KGB and the Israeli Mossad.
Then Riconosciuto got busted for running a methamphetamine lab in 1992, and wound up in the federal penitentiary, where he currently resides. Around the same time, Hayes' team discovered that the codes in the PROMIS software featured not just one, but two trap-door ports, suggesting that Riconosciuto had planned to use one of these himself, possibly to raid accounts in banks using PROMIS.
Hayes says the Column shut down Riconosciuto's port and created their own multiple setup, by which through a modem they could dial into a computer's security systems and circumvent them with a few keystrokes. Then Hayes further customized the software to sort through vast amounts of data; using a Cray, the Column could handle astounding data rates, which could be quickly downloaded and analyzed off- line in search of money flows and other connections. (In the virtual-reality realm, "money" is merely stored information; with the proper authorization codes, computers can electronically launch volumes of digitized currency from one bank account to another.)
Charging that the CIA "didn't hold up their end" of some unspecified bargain, Hayes says that he and the other four Fifth Columnists decided to go rogue. Having sole access to their own software modifications, they were now essentially creating their own private currency tracking enterprise.
Plundering The Pirates
Secret "numbered" accounts in Swiss banks, according to Hayes, are not actually numbered but lettered, with codes which appear on the lower right-hand side of their documents; using tracking software and a sufficiently powerful computer, they are not difficult to penetrate. Hayes says the Column uncovered a $1.5 million bribe paid by the Cali cartel to a witness against former Panama dictator Manuel Noriega, who was subsequently convicted in Florida of narcotics crimes the cartel may actually have committed. Then after the Column in 1994 examined the secret accounts of the Salinas family in Europe, he says they passed the incriminating data to the DEA-which promptly alerted the Mexican government.
"On an official basis," says former Wharton School finance professor and money-laundering expert Orlin Grabbe, a friend of Hayes, "people associated with the Fifth Column had tried to take their evidence to the appropriate legislative committees and the Justice Department-and ran into a sea of corruption. So they decided to show them, 'We'll do our job anyway, even if it's in a different form.' "
Others are more skeptical. One well-placed HIGH TIMES source who requested anonymity says he believes Hayes and his associates may indeed have accessed foreign accounts, but may also have kept considerable sums for themselves rather than just transferring money to Federal Reserve accounts.
The Fifth Column first surfaced publicly in 1995, after James Norman, then a senior editor at Forbes, was alerted by Inslaw's Bill Hamilton to Hayes. Having broken a cover story on Iraqi arms-money laundering through oil markets, Norman was tipped by Hamilton to the PROMIS case: "Hamilton said that, as crazy as the things Hayes said seemed to be, they invariably had a way of proving true six months later," Norman recalls.
So Norman, who describes himself as a Liberal Democrat, visited Hayes at the Beckett Hotel in Nancy, where they spent an evening comparing notes. Hayes was interested in connections Norman had already discovered involving the PROMIS software, the NSA and a Little Rock bank-data-processing company then called Systematics (since absorbed by Alltell Information Services). Controlled by Arkansas billionaire Jackson Stephens, Systematics, according to Norman's sources, shuffled money for covert CIA and NSA spying operations, and was also involved in a massive bank-spying effort called "Follow The Money."
Sources also alleged a link to Vincent Foster, the White House deputy counsel whose death on July 20, 1993 was officially labeled a suicide. Foster was said to be a behind-the- scenes overseer for Systematics on behalf of the NSA, even while he was a partner with Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. (Alltell's chairman, Joe Ford, has denied any connection between Systematics and Vincent Foster.)
"Along about midnight," Norman remembers, "Hayes dropped this bombshel1 on me: 'You know, Vince was under investigation when he died.' I said, 'What investigation?' And Hayes, in his inimitable way, took a long drag on his cigarette, leaned back in his swivel chair, and said, 'Well, it's es- pie-oh-nage.' "
Hayes was only the first of more than a dozen sources that Norman eventually uncovered in reporting his "Fostergate" story-for Media Bypass, after Forbes backed away from publishing it. Initially Hayes did not tell Norman about the Fifth Column, which he learned of from another source. But the article was the first published reference to the Column, which had been monitoring Foster's Swiss bank account.
"They had located it," Norman wrote, "by tracking money flows from various Israeli government accounts, after finding Foster's name while secretly snooping through the electronic files of Israel's Mossad."
Foster, who was said to have had access to highly sensitive US code- encryption and data-security information, allegedly was peddling some of it to the Israelis. Norman continued: "Foster's first indication of trouble came when he inquired about his coded bank account at Banca Della Svizzera Italiana in Chiasso, Switzerland, and found the account empty. Foster was shocked to learn from the bank that someone using his secret authorization code had withdrawn all $2.75 million he had stashed there, and had moved it to, of all places, the US Treasury."
In April 1995, Norman sent a letter to White House press secretary Michael McCurry concerning his article, then slated to appear in that May's issue of Forbes. Among the allegations it spelled out were Foster's having learned from Hillary Clinton, shortly before his death, that he was under investigation by the CIA; that the President's wife was also a beneficiary of funds from Foster's Swiss account; that documents relating to the Systematics company had been removed from his office after his death, and that Systematics was also involved in laundering funds from covert operations, "including drug and arms sales related to activities in and around Mena."
A week later, the White House responded that these allegations were "outrageous" and "baseless." Forbes, at the last minute, killed Norman's story, and so it appeared in the August 1995 issue of Media Bypass. Norman was keeping in touch with Hayes, digging up new information and consulting him for leads.
From another source, months earlier, Norman had acquired some account numbers that had been found among the personal effects of Barry Seal , a cocaine-smuggling CIA asset who'd worked out of the Mena airport, and was murdered by Colombian hitmen in Baton Rouge in 1986. (See HighWitness News, Jun. '86). "In a suitcase in the trunk of Seal's car was a scrap of paper," says Norman, "with a curious string of ten letters. One source who'd been involved in money-laundering in the past was quite confident it was a Swiss bank-account number in encrypted form." Norman passed it-KPFBMMBODB along to Charles Hayes.
It was not long thereafter that Norman was informed that his "Fostergate" story was being abruptly spiked, on orders from the very top: Forbes publisher emeritus Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under Reagan. Weinberger's motivation was a mystery to Norman until he subsequently learned, from Hayes, that the encrypted number from Barry Seal's effects had led to the Union Bank of Switzerland, and to none other than Caspar Weinberger. The Fifth Column had supposedly raided $2.3 million from that very account, and then left a note in Weinberger's drop- box in Bar Harbor, ME, listing the number and a message: "You have been had."
In August 1995, Norman sent Forbes editor Jim Michaels a memo with further corroboration for his Fostergate piece, including evidence emerging from credit- card and airline frequent flier records indicating that Foster had made periodic one-day trips to Switzerland. Then Norman dropped his bomb on Forbes: "If you have any doubts about the ability of the CIA's Fifth Column to raid foreign bank accounts and withdraw funds, just ask Caspar Weinberger." Enclosing a copy of documents found in Seal's trunk, he added: "The clear implication is that Caspar Weinberger, while Secretary of Defense, was taking kickbacks on drug and arms sales. A cosignatory on this account appears to be connected with [a relative of] Howard Metzenbaum, the retired senator from Ohio. We are talking about bipartisan payola. Which helps explain why Congress is so squeamish about investigating this stuff."
After sending his internal memo, Norman was told to go on indefinite unpaid leave or to resign. As Fortune noted in an article about its rival's imbroglio that fall, "The embarrassing memo was particularly ill-timed. Malcolm S. 'Steve' Forbes Jr., the magazine's 48-year-old editor-in chief, is readying a campaign to run for President on the GOP ticket." Fortune's photo of Norman was captioned: "Ex- reporter Norman's startling sleuthing proved a little too gutsy."
Putting A Stop To It
Days later, the now-unemployed Norman met with Hayes in Pittsburgh, along with Orlin Grabbe of Reno, NV, who had started examining the Foster saga in a lengthy series on his World Wide Web page (http://www.aci.net/kalliste). "Hayes made some astounding predictions," Norman recalls about pending unprecedented departures of members of Congress and the Senate. I pooh-poohed the whole thing as ridiculous. He said, 'Wait and see.' " The Fifth Column, Hayes claimed, was sending plain brown envelopes to politicians containing copies of their illicit accounts in Switzerland and offshore banks in places like the Cayman Islands. By early 1996, Hayes' outlandish prognostications indeed seemed to becoming true, as dozens of prominent senators and representatives announced their retirements.
Norman says, "He would make allusions to some geographical area or other way of describing people other than by name, who invariably would announce they weren't going to run again. It became almost like pin-the- tail-on-the-donkey." As his findings continued to appear in Media Bypass, Norman began getting calls from other mysterious sources, who he now believes were government disinformation artists "looking for stuff on Hayes."
Both Norman and Grabbe speak of repeated attempts being made on Hayes' life, including the sabotage of his car's brakes on an occasion when all three were riding in it near Pittsburgh. Grabbe's Web page alleges that one hit plot emanated from Arkansas, farmed out through a New Orleans crime syndicate which contracted with a pair of ex-CIA assassins.
There would certainly appear to be plenty of people with reason to want Hayes and the Fifth Column put into permanent dry-dock. Hayes delights in telling a story in which the Column wire-transferred millions of dollars into the US Treasury out of secret Swiss accounts held by Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger and Oliver North , and then proceeded to play them off against one another. This happened, Hayes says, back when North was the front-runner in the polls for a Senate seat from Virginia, which he lost after Nancy got an anonymous call telling her North "had given out her unlisted account number and they got hers and Henry's money." (North's use of secret Swiss accounts in the Iran- Contra affair is notorious.)
Hayes maintains that the Fifth Column has been a leading source for Whitewater investigator Kenneth Starr, having even downloaded "the entire White House database"-with plenty of ammunition that's yet to surface concerning FBI files provided to the Clinton Administration and contributions to Democratic campaigns.
In June last year, just as the Column's purported activities emerged, then-CIA director John Deutsch announced plans to create a "cyberwar center" to protect the nation against the growing security threat posed by computer hackers. Attacks on international wire transfers, he told the Senate, were of special concern. (As to why the banks don't just change their PROMIS software, Hayes says it's not that easy to do. Besides, he claims, the banks have been informed that if they try to do that, their competitors will receive a printout listing all their illicit moneys.)
Then last September, some 16 FBI and Secret Service agents in four cars showed up in Nancy, asking questions about Hayes.Some say they were also searching for the Column's Cray supercomputer, said to have been installed in the back of a 48-foot tractor-trailer complete with backup power supply.
And on October 22, just before a meeting Hayes had arranged with some oil-company executives in the Mellon Bank case, the FBI busted him at his residence on the murder-for-hire charge. It was no secret that Hayes and his son, John Anthony, were involved in an $800,000 court property fight over Hayes' mother's will. But after Charles' arrest, John Anthony Hayes assured a local newspaper that if his dad had really wanted him out of the way, he'd have handled it himself.
Denied bond in federal court nevertheless, Hayes was remanded to the Laurel County Detention Center to await trial. Also denied the right to act as his own counsel, he hired charismatic Lexington attorney Gatewood Galbraith.
The January trial was, to say the least, bizarre. The star prosecution witness, Lawrence W. Myers, had interviewed Hayes for a magazine article last August, and then called the FBI office in Birmingham, AL, to report that Hayes was looking to have someone killed. FBI agent Don Yarborough, posing as a would-be hit man, contacted Hayes, who spoke with him about the prospective murder over an open phone line, and used his own return address on a packet of documents he sent to this make-believe assassin. The phone tapes revealed Hayes offering to provide $5,000, seven days after his son's proposed murder, at "the best place to meet-a funeral office." In his testimony, Hayes said he "figured the government was getting ready to set up something, so I thought it would be a good time to reverse it on 'em... I figured I would be able to get them caught in a trap."
Hayes had been on CIA contract since age 19, he stated under oath. The Fifth Column had "split off" from Bill Casey's Squad D to "champion a lot of peoples' rights." Asked by Galbraith to name names of politicians forced to resign because of the Column's findings, Hayes singled out former Maine senator William Cohen (recently named Secretary of Defense) and Colorado senator Pat Schroeder. (No direct evidence has been produced concerning either of Hayes' courtroom allegations.) When he began describing how Vince Foster "had been relieved of a bank account in Bern, Switzerland," the judge ruled that such detail "must be shown to be necessary" to the defense; Foster's name was not mentioned again.
At the end of the trial's fourth day, new information surfaced concerning Lawrence Myers' background. In 1985, he had been charged with extortion and spent a year in a psychiatric facility; a felony warrant for him remained active in California. It also came out that he had been sharing information on several cases with the FBI, which had doctored "rap sheets" to hide his background.
The judge granted a two-week continuance, but after the trial resumed on January 27, refused to allow most of the damaging information about Myers into evidence. [Kennetta] Williamson, an investigator for the Tennessee attorney general's office, described him in testimony as "a professional and pathological liar." Reporter Norman testified that his investigation confirmed that Hayes "had a long relationship with the CIA as a contract agent"-which was denied in three CIA affidavits later introduced by the prosecution. That was when Hayes took the stand to reveal his alias and contract number.
But the jury believed the tapes incriminated Hayes. "The main thing I can't understand," said one juror after the guilty verdict, "is how he thought he could entrap the government."
Marvin Miller, a prominent Washington criminal-defense attorney with years of experience in espionage cases, is drafting a motion for a new trial. "We believe there are significant errors that occurred at the trial," he says. "The jury simply was not allowed to hear a number of things that could have reasonably changed their decision."
Awaiting his May sentencing, Hayes says from his cell: "Hey, I love my government. They trained me well. And the Fifth Column ain't out of business yet."
Web Page: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:stHLhJNpyCsJ:orlingrabbe.com/spookwar.htm+fifth+column+hackers&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
This is Google's cache of http://orlingrabbe.com/spookwar.htm. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Aug 5, 2011 04:26:57 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more
Text-only version
These search terms are highlighted: fifth column hackers
[Email Reply]
Spook Wars in Cyberspace--Is the FBI Railroading Charles Hayes ?
by Dick Russell
High Times, June 1997
Why does the international dope trade just keep flourishing, even while major traffickers and their government protectors keep getting exposed and imprisoned? Well, it could just possibly be that the ones going to jail aren't using the right computer software. Here's another murky peek into the legendary PROMIS conspiracy.
Spook Wars In Cyberspace - Is The Government Railroading Charles Hayes ?
This is a story straight from a Tom Clancy novel, or maybe Mission: Impossible. Shortly before last November's election, Kentucky surplus- computer dealer, who claims to be a longtime CIA contract agent, gets arrested by an FBI SWAT team and is charged with hiring an undercover agent- to murder his own son.
At his trial in January, 61-year- old Charles Hayes testifies that he's been set up by the federal government. And why? Because he's part of a team of retired intelligence types calling themselves the "Fifth Column," who've been using a supercomputer to hack into certain secret foreign bank accounts used by numerous US politicians to stash illegal funds garnered mainly from drug and arms dealers.
The prosecution's key witness against Hayes, at the trial in London, KY, turns out to be a right-wing California journalist who occasionally informs for the FBI, a fugitive with a history of mental institutionalization. For the defense, a former senior editor at Forbes magazine vouches for Hayes' credibility. After the jury hears tapes of Hayes discussing a $5,000 payoff for a prospective hit on his estranged son, the defendant responds that he'd known all along he was talking to an FBI undercover, but had been stringing the Bureau along so he could develop evidence against them. When the CIA introduces affidavits disavowing any relationship with Hayes, he takes the stand to provide his cover name, "Charles Lawson," and an ID number.
Following three hours of deliberation, the jury finds Hayes guilty, to the astonishment of nearly 100 supporters present. He says from his jail cell afterwards, while his attorney moves for a new trial, that he anticipates "assistance" from higher powers.
Hayes Gets Around
Is Charles Hayes for real, or merely a con man looking for a get-out- of-jail-free card? For months prior to his arrest last year, revelations about Hayes and his postulated Fifth Column had been circulating on the Internet and in Media Bypass, a colorful "patriot" publication out of Evansville, IN. Not only was this Fifth Column said to have downloaded financial records on government officials from up to 3,000 hidden overseas accounts, but they also allegedly wire-transferred about $4 billion clear out of those accounts into "escrow holding funds" at Federal Reserve banks.
Then, according to Hayes, these alleged Robin Hoods of cyberspace began quietly announcing their findings to certain congress people and foreign governments; which is why, so the yet- undocumented saga brags, a record number of 60-some US senators and representatives announced their retirements just before the 1996 elections. And that also is supposedly how the Mexican federales got turned on to the drug-laundered millions salted away in Switzerland by the family of ex- President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
On the face of it, these assertions might appear preposterous. But a HIGH TIMES investigation into Hayes' background reveals a tantalizing trail of evidence indicating, at the least, considerable insider knowledge about computers and smuggling.
In 1985, Charles Hayes was a key government witness in a Kentucky trial involving the largest gemstone seizure ever by US Customs-millions of dollars' worth that had been smuggled out of Brazil
In 1991, the telephone records of doomed journalist Danny Casolaro showed numerous phone calls to Hayes in the month before Casolaro was found dead in a West Virginia hotel room. Casolaro had spent the past several years investigating a tangled web of government corruption he called "the Octopus." One of Casolaro's focuses was the Inslaw case, in which the Justice Department stands accused of having stolen the company's PROMIS computer software, which was capable of tracking complicated financial transactions.
In 1992, Hayes testified about the Inslaw matter before a Chicago grand jury. In April '96, he was subpoenaed and gave a lengthy deposition about Inslaw to a Justice Department attorney, who quizzed him about his computer expertise. FBI Special Agent David Keller testified at Hayes' January trial that he knew of him from a previous FBI investigation into the Inslaw matter.
In July 1995, Rep. Jim Leach, chairman of the House Banking Committee, wrote to the director of the National Security Agency, seeking "your agency's help in verifying or laying to rest various allegations of money- laundering in Arkansas in the late 1980s." Among other matters, Rep. Leach asked about Inslaw's PROMIS software- and Charlie Hayes.
Several of Hayes' associates back up his contention that he's being framed, in an attempt to put the Fifth Column out of business. One well-placed source, who requested anonymity, affirms that Hayes was a CIA asset, adding, "I think Hayes has been set up to the nth degree to discredit him."
Mena and the Octopus
Hayes launched the five-member Fifth Column himself, he maintains to HIGH TIMES, primarily to follow the money-laundering of the international drug cartels. It's a personal crusade, according to one of his associates in Kentucky, triggered by the way Hayes' 37-year-old son, John-the alleged murder-for-hire target-supposedly "cooked his mind on drugs." Mark Swaney, whose Arkansas Committee was responsible for much of the early publicity surrounding the notorious CIA drugs-and-arms operation out of Mena, AK, (HighWitness News, Jan. 95) spoke with Hayes on a number of occasions between 1992 and '95: "A lot of what he told me about Mena turned out to be true," says Swaney.
Swaney's notes from a July '92 interview with Hayes contain charges that both the federal government and the Arkansas State Police were involved in distributing cocaine out of Mena. Asked if then-Governor Bill Clinton was aware of the Mena operation, Hayes responded, "No, but his associates were involved." He elaborated that some of the money was laundered through two powerful Arkansas companies with ties to Clinton.
In a five-hour jailhouse interview not long before his trial, Hayes, a former Air Force pilot, described a CIA assignment he'd once undertaken to fly a weapons shipment from Mena to Aruba in the Caribbean. On discovering that the cargo was actually cocaine, Hayes told me, he dumped it on the runway and ended up in a shoot-out that killed several people.
This is one of many stories, such as Hayes' claimed friendships with Fidel Castro and Sen. Edward Kennedy, that prove impossible to verify. But William Hamilton of St. Louis, the president of Inslaw, tells of encounters with Hayes which add credence to the existence of the Fifth Column. Hamilton first became aware of Hayes in 1990, in the midst of Inslaw's legal battle to prove that the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, NSA and other federal agencies had illegally appropriated their PROMIS database- management software for their own purposes.
As recounted in a heavily redacted House Judiciary Committee report, The Inslaw Affair (September 1992): "Mr. Hayes is a surplus computer dealer with alleged ties to both United States and foreign intelligence communities. Mr. Hayes first came to the attention of the Committee during August 1990, following assertions that excess Haris- Lanier word-processing equipment he had purchased from the US Attorney's office for the Eastem District of Kentucky, located in Lexington, contained the PROMIS software." The Justice Department had subsequently seized the equipment back from Hayes, preventing its use as evidence in the Inslaw case. (The computer gear had also allegedly contained sensitive classified material, such as the identities of narcotics informants.)
Hamilton therefore contacted Hayes, who told him the military owed Inslaw plenty of money, because it had secretly distributed his PROMIS software. When Hamilton subsequently learned from a CIA contact that PROMIS had indeed been used aboard US submarines, he visited Hayes in Kentucky in January '91. PROMIS was "in the CIA, DEA, FBI, everywhere," Hayes told him. Checking him out with other sources, Hamilton was told that Hayes and a partner both code- named "Running Fox" had belonged to an elite intelligence unit which "had to be able to take apart and put back together, without any diagrams, the Cray supercomputer."
According to Hayes, this elite spy unit was known as "Squad D." First mentioned in Bob Woodward's book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987, Squad D was established by William Casey, Ronald Reagan's CIA director. Part of its mission was computer hacking. "There was penetration of the international banking system," Woodward wrote, "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."
And not just by the USSR. PROMIS- short for "Prosecutors' Management Information System"-had originally been designed to track complicated illegal currency transactions through intricate systems of laundering and wire- transfers; it could readily be "enhanced" to track transactions by banks and dummy corporations used by terrorists and dope dealers. Hamilton's Inslaw had sold PROMIS to the early Reagan Justice Department, which promptly reneged on a $6 million payment due, asserting that a portion of the contract was not fulfilled. Inslaw went bankrupt, and its ongoing lawsuit against the Feds is still in the US Court of Claims.
Promis Them Anything
Inslaw's attorneys, who include former Attorney General Elliott Richardson, present evidence that a covert intelligence operation in fact transformed PROMIS into an unprecedented high-tech spying tool. It seems a brilliant young CIA contract agent out of Seattle named Michael Riconosciuto, reputedly a past master at clandestine drug chemistry and computer hacking, not only "enhanced" the PROMIS package to implement its use in tracking international currency transfers, but fitted it with a secret "trap-door" access port that enabled US espionage agencies to electronically monitor its use by anyone who bought it.
According to Richardson, PROMIS was peddled to as many as 88 foreign governments by "cut-out" front men working for the Department of Justice, the NSA and CIA. It was also purchased by numerous international banks in Switzerland and elsewhere, which were interested in standardizing their wire- transfer data. None of these buyers knew about Riconosciuto's trap-door application that not only allowed Uncle Sam to monitor their money-laundering in progress, but, whenever desired, to invisibly modify it.
One of the "cut-out" peddlers of this stolen, hyped-up and poisoned money-tracking software took it to Brazil in the mid-'80s, according to Charles Hayes, who was there at the time, as a CIA contract agent, in the matter of the stolen gemstones. Dr. Earl Brian (convicted last year in Los Angeles of multimillion-dollar international financial fraud) had been California Secretary of Health during Reagan's govenorship in the '70s. Michael Riconosciuto has alleged that some time after 1979, Brian was given the PROMIS software to peddle around the world to line his personal pockets. It was during a sales trip to Brazil in 1985 that Dr. Brian allegedly told Hayes about PROMIS.
Shortly after this Brazil adventure, Hayes moved back to his hometown of Nancy, KY, and, as his CIA cover, set up a salvage company specializing in computer parts-and also began working with Riconosciuto. The Fifth Column's Cray Model 3B supercomputer was primarily constructed, it is said, through purchases at Department of Defense auctions.
Initially, Hayes' Fifth Column's work had been done under government sponsorship. Veteran investigative journalist James Norman has written that besides penetrating the international banking system, the Column had initially succeeded in downloading information from over 50 intelligence services around the globe, including the Soviet KGB and the Israeli Mossad.
Then Riconosciuto got busted for running a methamphetamine lab in 1992, and wound up in the federal penitentiary, where he currently resides. Around the same time, Hayes' team discovered that the codes in the PROMIS software featured not just one, but two trap-door ports, suggesting that Riconosciuto had planned to use one of these himself, possibly to raid accounts in banks using PROMIS.
Hayes says the Column shut down Riconosciuto's port and created their own multiple setup, by which through a modem they could dial into a computer's security systems and circumvent them with a few keystrokes. Then Hayes further customized the software to sort through vast amounts of data; using a Cray, the Column could handle astounding data rates, which could be quickly downloaded and analyzed off- line in search of money flows and other connections. (In the virtual-reality realm, "money" is merely stored information; with the proper authorization codes, computers can electronically launch volumes of digitized currency from one bank account to another.)
Charging that the CIA "didn't hold up their end" of some unspecified bargain, Hayes says that he and the other four Fifth Columnists decided to go rogue. Having sole access to their own software modifications, they were now essentially creating their own private currency tracking enterprise.
Plundering The Pirates
Secret "numbered" accounts in Swiss banks, according to Hayes, are not actually numbered but lettered, with codes which appear on the lower right-hand side of their documents; using tracking software and a sufficiently powerful computer, they are not difficult to penetrate. Hayes says the Column uncovered a $1.5 million bribe paid by the Cali cartel to a witness against former Panama dictator Manuel Noriega, who was subsequently convicted in Florida of narcotics crimes the cartel may actually have committed. Then after the Column in 1994 examined the secret accounts of the Salinas family in Europe, he says they passed the incriminating data to the DEA-which promptly alerted the Mexican government.
"On an official basis," says former Wharton School finance professor and money-laundering expert Orlin Grabbe, a friend of Hayes, "people associated with the Fifth Column had tried to take their evidence to the appropriate legislative committees and the Justice Department-and ran into a sea of corruption. So they decided to show them, 'We'll do our job anyway, even if it's in a different form.' "
Others are more skeptical. One well-placed HIGH TIMES source who requested anonymity says he believes Hayes and his associates may indeed have accessed foreign accounts, but may also have kept considerable sums for themselves rather than just transferring money to Federal Reserve accounts.
The Fifth Column first surfaced publicly in 1995, after James Norman, then a senior editor at Forbes, was alerted by Inslaw's Bill Hamilton to Hayes. Having broken a cover story on Iraqi arms-money laundering through oil markets, Norman was tipped by Hamilton to the PROMIS case: "Hamilton said that, as crazy as the things Hayes said seemed to be, they invariably had a way of proving true six months later," Norman recalls.
So Norman, who describes himself as a Liberal Democrat, visited Hayes at the Beckett Hotel in Nancy, where they spent an evening comparing notes. Hayes was interested in connections Norman had already discovered involving the PROMIS software, the NSA and a Little Rock bank-data-processing company then called Systematics (since absorbed by Alltell Information Services). Controlled by Arkansas billionaire Jackson Stephens, Systematics, according to Norman's sources, shuffled money for covert CIA and NSA spying operations, and was also involved in a massive bank-spying effort called "Follow The Money."
Sources also alleged a link to Vincent Foster, the White House deputy counsel whose death on July 20, 1993 was officially labeled a suicide. Foster was said to be a behind-the- scenes overseer for Systematics on behalf of the NSA, even while he was a partner with Hillary Clinton at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. (Alltell's chairman, Joe Ford, has denied any connection between Systematics and Vincent Foster.)
"Along about midnight," Norman remembers, "Hayes dropped this bombshel1 on me: 'You know, Vince was under investigation when he died.' I said, 'What investigation?' And Hayes, in his inimitable way, took a long drag on his cigarette, leaned back in his swivel chair, and said, 'Well, it's es- pie-oh-nage.' "
Hayes was only the first of more than a dozen sources that Norman eventually uncovered in reporting his "Fostergate" story-for Media Bypass, after Forbes backed away from publishing it. Initially Hayes did not tell Norman about the Fifth Column, which he learned of from another source. But the article was the first published reference to the Column, which had been monitoring Foster's Swiss bank account.
"They had located it," Norman wrote, "by tracking money flows from various Israeli government accounts, after finding Foster's name while secretly snooping through the electronic files of Israel's Mossad."
Foster, who was said to have had access to highly sensitive US code- encryption and data-security information, allegedly was peddling some of it to the Israelis. Norman continued: "Foster's first indication of trouble came when he inquired about his coded bank account at Banca Della Svizzera Italiana in Chiasso, Switzerland, and found the account empty. Foster was shocked to learn from the bank that someone using his secret authorization code had withdrawn all $2.75 million he had stashed there, and had moved it to, of all places, the US Treasury."
In April 1995, Norman sent a letter to White House press secretary Michael McCurry concerning his article, then slated to appear in that May's issue of Forbes. Among the allegations it spelled out were Foster's having learned from Hillary Clinton, shortly before his death, that he was under investigation by the CIA; that the President's wife was also a beneficiary of funds from Foster's Swiss account; that documents relating to the Systematics company had been removed from his office after his death, and that Systematics was also involved in laundering funds from covert operations, "including drug and arms sales related to activities in and around Mena."
A week later, the White House responded that these allegations were "outrageous" and "baseless." Forbes, at the last minute, killed Norman's story, and so it appeared in the August 1995 issue of Media Bypass. Norman was keeping in touch with Hayes, digging up new information and consulting him for leads.
From another source, months earlier, Norman had acquired some account numbers that had been found among the personal effects of Barry Seal , a cocaine-smuggling CIA asset who'd worked out of the Mena airport, and was murdered by Colombian hitmen in Baton Rouge in 1986. (See HighWitness News, Jun. '86). "In a suitcase in the trunk of Seal's car was a scrap of paper," says Norman, "with a curious string of ten letters. One source who'd been involved in money-laundering in the past was quite confident it was a Swiss bank-account number in encrypted form." Norman passed it-KPFBMMBODB along to Charles Hayes.
It was not long thereafter that Norman was informed that his "Fostergate" story was being abruptly spiked, on orders from the very top: Forbes publisher emeritus Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under Reagan. Weinberger's motivation was a mystery to Norman until he subsequently learned, from Hayes, that the encrypted number from Barry Seal's effects had led to the Union Bank of Switzerland, and to none other than Caspar Weinberger. The Fifth Column had supposedly raided $2.3 million from that very account, and then left a note in Weinberger's drop- box in Bar Harbor, ME, listing the number and a message: "You have been had."
In August 1995, Norman sent Forbes editor Jim Michaels a memo with further corroboration for his Fostergate piece, including evidence emerging from credit- card and airline frequent flier records indicating that Foster had made periodic one-day trips to Switzerland. Then Norman dropped his bomb on Forbes: "If you have any doubts about the ability of the CIA's Fifth Column to raid foreign bank accounts and withdraw funds, just ask Caspar Weinberger." Enclosing a copy of documents found in Seal's trunk, he added: "The clear implication is that Caspar Weinberger, while Secretary of Defense, was taking kickbacks on drug and arms sales. A cosignatory on this account appears to be connected with [a relative of] Howard Metzenbaum, the retired senator from Ohio. We are talking about bipartisan payola. Which helps explain why Congress is so squeamish about investigating this stuff."
After sending his internal memo, Norman was told to go on indefinite unpaid leave or to resign. As Fortune noted in an article about its rival's imbroglio that fall, "The embarrassing memo was particularly ill-timed. Malcolm S. 'Steve' Forbes Jr., the magazine's 48-year-old editor-in chief, is readying a campaign to run for President on the GOP ticket." Fortune's photo of Norman was captioned: "Ex- reporter Norman's startling sleuthing proved a little too gutsy."
Putting A Stop To It
Days later, the now-unemployed Norman met with Hayes in Pittsburgh, along with Orlin Grabbe of Reno, NV, who had started examining the Foster saga in a lengthy series on his World Wide Web page (http://www.aci.net/kalliste). "Hayes made some astounding predictions," Norman recalls about pending unprecedented departures of members of Congress and the Senate. I pooh-poohed the whole thing as ridiculous. He said, 'Wait and see.' " The Fifth Column, Hayes claimed, was sending plain brown envelopes to politicians containing copies of their illicit accounts in Switzerland and offshore banks in places like the Cayman Islands. By early 1996, Hayes' outlandish prognostications indeed seemed to becoming true, as dozens of prominent senators and representatives announced their retirements.
Norman says, "He would make allusions to some geographical area or other way of describing people other than by name, who invariably would announce they weren't going to run again. It became almost like pin-the- tail-on-the-donkey." As his findings continued to appear in Media Bypass, Norman began getting calls from other mysterious sources, who he now believes were government disinformation artists "looking for stuff on Hayes."
Both Norman and Grabbe speak of repeated attempts being made on Hayes' life, including the sabotage of his car's brakes on an occasion when all three were riding in it near Pittsburgh. Grabbe's Web page alleges that one hit plot emanated from Arkansas, farmed out through a New Orleans crime syndicate which contracted with a pair of ex-CIA assassins.
There would certainly appear to be plenty of people with reason to want Hayes and the Fifth Column put into permanent dry-dock. Hayes delights in telling a story in which the Column wire-transferred millions of dollars into the US Treasury out of secret Swiss accounts held by Nancy Reagan, Henry Kissinger and Oliver North , and then proceeded to play them off against one another. This happened, Hayes says, back when North was the front-runner in the polls for a Senate seat from Virginia, which he lost after Nancy got an anonymous call telling her North "had given out her unlisted account number and they got hers and Henry's money." (North's use of secret Swiss accounts in the Iran- Contra affair is notorious.)
Hayes maintains that the Fifth Column has been a leading source for Whitewater investigator Kenneth Starr, having even downloaded "the entire White House database"-with plenty of ammunition that's yet to surface concerning FBI files provided to the Clinton Administration and contributions to Democratic campaigns.
In June last year, just as the Column's purported activities emerged, then-CIA director John Deutsch announced plans to create a "cyberwar center" to protect the nation against the growing security threat posed by computer hackers. Attacks on international wire transfers, he told the Senate, were of special concern. (As to why the banks don't just change their PROMIS software, Hayes says it's not that easy to do. Besides, he claims, the banks have been informed that if they try to do that, their competitors will receive a printout listing all their illicit moneys.)
Then last September, some 16 FBI and Secret Service agents in four cars showed up in Nancy, asking questions about Hayes.Some say they were also searching for the Column's Cray supercomputer, said to have been installed in the back of a 48-foot tractor-trailer complete with backup power supply.
And on October 22, just before a meeting Hayes had arranged with some oil-company executives in the Mellon Bank case, the FBI busted him at his residence on the murder-for-hire charge. It was no secret that Hayes and his son, John Anthony, were involved in an $800,000 court property fight over Hayes' mother's will. But after Charles' arrest, John Anthony Hayes assured a local newspaper that if his dad had really wanted him out of the way, he'd have handled it himself.
Denied bond in federal court nevertheless, Hayes was remanded to the Laurel County Detention Center to await trial. Also denied the right to act as his own counsel, he hired charismatic Lexington attorney Gatewood Galbraith.
The January trial was, to say the least, bizarre. The star prosecution witness, Lawrence W. Myers, had interviewed Hayes for a magazine article last August, and then called the FBI office in Birmingham, AL, to report that Hayes was looking to have someone killed. FBI agent Don Yarborough, posing as a would-be hit man, contacted Hayes, who spoke with him about the prospective murder over an open phone line, and used his own return address on a packet of documents he sent to this make-believe assassin. The phone tapes revealed Hayes offering to provide $5,000, seven days after his son's proposed murder, at "the best place to meet-a funeral office." In his testimony, Hayes said he "figured the government was getting ready to set up something, so I thought it would be a good time to reverse it on 'em... I figured I would be able to get them caught in a trap."
Hayes had been on CIA contract since age 19, he stated under oath. The Fifth Column had "split off" from Bill Casey's Squad D to "champion a lot of peoples' rights." Asked by Galbraith to name names of politicians forced to resign because of the Column's findings, Hayes singled out former Maine senator William Cohen (recently named Secretary of Defense) and Colorado senator Pat Schroeder. (No direct evidence has been produced concerning either of Hayes' courtroom allegations.) When he began describing how Vince Foster "had been relieved of a bank account in Bern, Switzerland," the judge ruled that such detail "must be shown to be necessary" to the defense; Foster's name was not mentioned again.
At the end of the trial's fourth day, new information surfaced concerning Lawrence Myers' background. In 1985, he had been charged with extortion and spent a year in a psychiatric facility; a felony warrant for him remained active in California. It also came out that he had been sharing information on several cases with the FBI, which had doctored "rap sheets" to hide his background.
The judge granted a two-week continuance, but after the trial resumed on January 27, refused to allow most of the damaging information about Myers into evidence. [Kennetta] Williamson, an investigator for the Tennessee attorney general's office, described him in testimony as "a professional and pathological liar." Reporter Norman testified that his investigation confirmed that Hayes "had a long relationship with the CIA as a contract agent"-which was denied in three CIA affidavits later introduced by the prosecution. That was when Hayes took the stand to reveal his alias and contract number.
But the jury believed the tapes incriminated Hayes. "The main thing I can't understand," said one juror after the guilty verdict, "is how he thought he could entrap the government."
Marvin Miller, a prominent Washington criminal-defense attorney with years of experience in espionage cases, is drafting a motion for a new trial. "We believe there are significant errors that occurred at the trial," he says. "The jury simply was not allowed to hear a number of things that could have reasonably changed their decision."
Awaiting his May sentencing, Hayes says from his cell: "Hey, I love my government. They trained me well. And the Fifth Column ain't out of business yet."
Web Page: http://www.aci.net/kalliste/
I did find this....but it's not updated.
http://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/mag/pimp/pimp08.html
_ _ _______ _____ ___ ___ ____ _
/___/ /___/ / / /__) /_
_ __/ _/ \ _/__/ _/__) _/____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
/ I N D U S T R I E S
/ 1995
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Probe Industries Magazine Phile # 8 a.k.a. PIMP # 8 %
% ___________________________________________________ %
% In this issue various 1990's Government cover-ups %
% are discussed. Nothing can fully be proved, as is %
% normal in well planned cover-ups, but most of it is %
% true, and pretty pathetic.. yet typikal - fringe %
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
+------------------------------------------------------+
| The following sections are what this phile is div'd |
| up into; Section 1 and Section 2 relate to the same |
| topic. |
|------------------------------------------------------|
| Section: Topic: |
| |
| 1 Trap Doors in Bank Accounts |
| |
| 2 PROMIS Software |
| |
| 3 Fifth Column Hackers (CIA info) |
| |
| 4 "Fostergate" |
| -Death of Vincent Foster |
| -Possible Clintons' involvement |
+------------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
+++ 1. Trap Doors in Bank Accounts.
In 1981, President Reagan asked Norman A. Bailey, A
monetary specialist if you will, to get involved in a program
that the National Security Council wanted created. Everyone was
greatly concerned with international terrorism then, as they are
now, and what Bailey was supposedly asked to do was to create a
system of surveillance based on the terrorists' bank account
activity. In 1989, he testified before Congress about this
operation, but was under legal restraint regarding any public
discussion of its details. He testified to at least the
existence of the NSC's program when he appeared before the
Senate Judiciary Commitee in August, 1989. Bailey conceded that
within a few years after the NSC operation was put into action
by the National Security Agency, the government began to obtain
a mountain of records by tapping in to bank-wire traffic.
Anthoney Kimery, who wrote a story in the magazine "Media
Bypass", identifies the CIA as an agency that has used rigged
software to gain access to bank information. He said that CIA
Director Bill Casey used to even brag about it! Kimery went on
to say how proud Casey was that the penetration of the banks had
allowed the CIA to virtually bring the Abu Nidal Organization to
its knees. Abu Nidal was an organization of terrorists who
posed a huge threat to the United States. I guess if the United
States wanted to take down any threat to them, the easiest
simplest way would to hurt anyone is to literally "steal" their
money. In the past month, Kimery, who wrote a very informative
article in Media Bypass, lost his job; one of four journalists
to suffer the consequences of investigating the death of Vincent
Foster. Information of Vincent Foster comes later in this
phile.
One of the last stories written by Kimery has been
freelance. It was detailed on the Deposit Tracking System.
This system allows the Internal Revenue System (IRS) to monitor
EVERY BANK ACCOUNT in the country. There is no such thing as
privacy with today's government.
In 1994, a russian hacker broke into Citibank and siphoned
out $10 million dollars. The only reason this individual got
caught was due to the fact he left the safety zone,.. he walked
where there were extradition laws.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
+++ 2. PROMIS Software.
James Norman, as of August 16 the Ex-Senior Editor at
Forbes Magazine, said most information he obtained was by
informants connected with the CIA and other intelligence
organizations. Norman lost his job due to pursuing a story
which I guess the mag received too much heat due to. One method
he discussed was one adopted by the government and specifically,
the CIA. This method was a piece of software called PROMIS. It
was a data-tracking program bought back in 1982 by the Justice
Department. The company that sold it to the United States was
known as Inslaw. Inslaw went to court, later on, accusing the
government of having pirated it's software to the sum of about
$6 million dollars! They went so far as to accuse them of
selling the software to police and military intelligence
agencies in 50 countries! The judge agreed that there were
violations in the contract. Inslaw knew what they were going.
Their lawyer was Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general
under Nixon.
A book written in 1992 by Israeli Ari Ben-Manasche claims
that Robert Maxwell (he's dead now) sold doctored versions of
PROMIS to banks around the world. The fix in the software was a
backdoor that was installed. The backdoor allowed outsiders to
fully access and edit any accounts without leaving an audit
trail. There were ten sources in all to confirm this doctored
version of PROMIS. Inslaw claims that Maxwell did sell copies
of PROMIS to two U.S. research agencies. PROMIS essentially
lets the United States tap into anyone's bank account they feel
like.. and they can do whatever they want with whatever they
find.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
+++ 3. Fifth Column Hackers (CIA Info)
There is a CIA Operative group known as the "Fifth Column"
or the "Fifth Column Hackers". They are basically all the pist
off agents who are tired of high ranking officials getting paid
off for secrets. They are known to suck all the money out of
accounts in Switzerland of certain peoples and deposit it
straight into our treasury, with no name as to whom it came
from. The certain peoples include high ranking U.S. Government
Officials and former officials stretching back to the Reagan
Administration. So far, $2 Billion dollars has supposedly been
deposited into our treasury by the "Fifth Column". One high
ranking Reagan official alone got cleaned out to the tune of
$2.3 million dollars.
On July 1, 1993, Vincent Foster had scheduled a flight to
fly to Switzerland. This was three weeks before he died. He
paid for this trip with his own credit card, tis wasn't a
government funded trip. He had a bank account with $2.7 million
dollars in it, but found it had been wiped out and cancelled his
flight.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
+++ 4. "Fostergate"
That's what it has seemingly been deemed. "Fostergate".
Many, and I mean many reporters have lost their jobs over
following this story. It's too dangerous. Vincent Foster was
an Arkansas Lawyer, but yet he had $2.7 million dollars in a
Swiss Bank Account. Either he was Johnny Cochran in disguise
and got O.J. off, or something's funny. Supposedly, it's said,
that Foster made his money by selling U.S. nuclear military
secrets to the Israeli Mossad, the Israeli CIA. Supposedly, as
sources say, the Mossad's banking system was penetrated (how
uncanny eh?) and Foster's info was found out. Many government
officials were supposedly "found out" and wiped clean.
Another reporter, this one from Tyler, Texas, claims that
Foster selling secrets was dis-information from the CIA. His
death is the cover-up of four administrations in the white
house.
Foster worked for an software firm, along with Hillary
Clinton. The firm was a money-laudering outfit. Foster was
highly affiliated with the CIA. He was a man who knew too much
about everything. With the whole whitewater hearings, nothing
damaging has come out against the Clintons' and Foster is dead.
People who have spoken out to reporters have refused to go
public, and have been driving off the road and have had many
death threats. If a firm was to launder money, the perfect
system to access would be PROMIS, who knows more about it then
CIA and CIA affiliated people. People in the know can do
whatever please them. Could it be PROMIS was accessed and
Foster, among others in the firm, laundered money from our
country? If so, the Fifth Column Hackers would definately made
him as a target in Switzerland; and Foster was a definate
takedown. Here's the reality of the whole thing: When Foster
was found dead in Ft. Marcy Park, Police found no car keys on
him. How the hell did he get to the Park and commit suicide?
In the morgue, however, after two White House "Personnel"
had inspected the body, his keys were found in his right hand
pocket. At the sight where his body originally laid, it was
said he was found with a .38 in his right hand, but eye
witnesses claim they saw no gun. The report made out also said
there were large amounts of blood and a gaping hole in his head.
Yet eye witnesses claim there was little blood and no large head
wound. The head wound was the type that would be made by a
little hit pistol. Like a close range shot from a 1-shot 22.
_____-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_----
Conclusion:
_____-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_----
Overall, This phile can raise many questions.. all I can
say is that there are few answers. Most sources to newpapers
and mags refuse to go public due to fear for their life. there
is definately corruption in our gov't.. specifically the Clinton
Administration. If you have illegitimate money stashed away,
and you think you have any reason to be monitored by CIA, i.e.
mob money, etc.. there is always the chance the Fifth Column
Hackers can suck you dry.. they seem to operate only against
people who have large quantities of money due to illegal means.
Foster's death was not suicide like it was written off.. but
this is just my opinion.. our government may always be
financially secure, due to the fact we can steal money whenever
we need it,.. but they'll never be trustworthy again. If you
ever want to hear more in-depth convo on this subject, read the
posts on alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater.
If you want more info on any of these topics, i STRONGLY urge
you to pick up these books or mags:
Sep25-Oct2 Issue of Insight
October issue of Media Bypass call 1-800-4-BYPASS
(Actually the mag just rox, it's 12 issues for $30)
the r-rated book: Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA.
S.P.I. Books, 136 West 22nd St., New York, 10011; $23.95
Citizen's Independent Report
(165 pp., $15.45; printing and shipping charges only!
301-864-6882)
The New York Times, Mar 8, 1992 v141
Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1994 v113
The Washington Post, Apr 18, 1994 v117
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
I would like to give thanx to a friend of mine who only wants
to be known as "Doom and Gloom".. a stock market and government
cover-up buff.
This phile was not copied but a compilation of various info
I have read in many MANY articles. Believe or not.. I do..
these people have no reason to lie.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
**************************************************************
fRiNgE Probe Industries 1995
**************************************************************
any questions or whatever, you can reach me at:
[email protected]
Apocalypse 2000 H/P +1-847-831-0484
Poison Pen H/P +1-847-966-2095
0 Day Warez Palace H/P +1-847-256-5928
Sillicon Underground H/P +1-514-725-0189
sub terra H/P +1-904-484-5548
*************************************************************
P R O B E I N D U S T R I E S M A G A Z I N E P H I L E 8
*************************************************************
In any country, Prison is where society sends its failures,
but in this country, society itself is failure.
GO BACK...
http://dl.packetstormsecurity.net/mag/pimp/pimp08.html
_ _ _______ _____ ___ ___ ____ _
/___/ /___/ / / /__) /_
_ __/ _/ \ _/__/ _/__) _/____ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
/ I N D U S T R I E S
/ 1995
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
% Probe Industries Magazine Phile # 8 a.k.a. PIMP # 8 %
% ___________________________________________________ %
% In this issue various 1990's Government cover-ups %
% are discussed. Nothing can fully be proved, as is %
% normal in well planned cover-ups, but most of it is %
% true, and pretty pathetic.. yet typikal - fringe %
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
+------------------------------------------------------+
| The following sections are what this phile is div'd |
| up into; Section 1 and Section 2 relate to the same |
| topic. |
|------------------------------------------------------|
| Section: Topic: |
| |
| 1 Trap Doors in Bank Accounts |
| |
| 2 PROMIS Software |
| |
| 3 Fifth Column Hackers (CIA info) |
| |
| 4 "Fostergate" |
| -Death of Vincent Foster |
| -Possible Clintons' involvement |
+------------------------------------------------------+
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
+++ 1. Trap Doors in Bank Accounts.
In 1981, President Reagan asked Norman A. Bailey, A
monetary specialist if you will, to get involved in a program
that the National Security Council wanted created. Everyone was
greatly concerned with international terrorism then, as they are
now, and what Bailey was supposedly asked to do was to create a
system of surveillance based on the terrorists' bank account
activity. In 1989, he testified before Congress about this
operation, but was under legal restraint regarding any public
discussion of its details. He testified to at least the
existence of the NSC's program when he appeared before the
Senate Judiciary Commitee in August, 1989. Bailey conceded that
within a few years after the NSC operation was put into action
by the National Security Agency, the government began to obtain
a mountain of records by tapping in to bank-wire traffic.
Anthoney Kimery, who wrote a story in the magazine "Media
Bypass", identifies the CIA as an agency that has used rigged
software to gain access to bank information. He said that CIA
Director Bill Casey used to even brag about it! Kimery went on
to say how proud Casey was that the penetration of the banks had
allowed the CIA to virtually bring the Abu Nidal Organization to
its knees. Abu Nidal was an organization of terrorists who
posed a huge threat to the United States. I guess if the United
States wanted to take down any threat to them, the easiest
simplest way would to hurt anyone is to literally "steal" their
money. In the past month, Kimery, who wrote a very informative
article in Media Bypass, lost his job; one of four journalists
to suffer the consequences of investigating the death of Vincent
Foster. Information of Vincent Foster comes later in this
phile.
One of the last stories written by Kimery has been
freelance. It was detailed on the Deposit Tracking System.
This system allows the Internal Revenue System (IRS) to monitor
EVERY BANK ACCOUNT in the country. There is no such thing as
privacy with today's government.
In 1994, a russian hacker broke into Citibank and siphoned
out $10 million dollars. The only reason this individual got
caught was due to the fact he left the safety zone,.. he walked
where there were extradition laws.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
+++ 2. PROMIS Software.
James Norman, as of August 16 the Ex-Senior Editor at
Forbes Magazine, said most information he obtained was by
informants connected with the CIA and other intelligence
organizations. Norman lost his job due to pursuing a story
which I guess the mag received too much heat due to. One method
he discussed was one adopted by the government and specifically,
the CIA. This method was a piece of software called PROMIS. It
was a data-tracking program bought back in 1982 by the Justice
Department. The company that sold it to the United States was
known as Inslaw. Inslaw went to court, later on, accusing the
government of having pirated it's software to the sum of about
$6 million dollars! They went so far as to accuse them of
selling the software to police and military intelligence
agencies in 50 countries! The judge agreed that there were
violations in the contract. Inslaw knew what they were going.
Their lawyer was Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general
under Nixon.
A book written in 1992 by Israeli Ari Ben-Manasche claims
that Robert Maxwell (he's dead now) sold doctored versions of
PROMIS to banks around the world. The fix in the software was a
backdoor that was installed. The backdoor allowed outsiders to
fully access and edit any accounts without leaving an audit
trail. There were ten sources in all to confirm this doctored
version of PROMIS. Inslaw claims that Maxwell did sell copies
of PROMIS to two U.S. research agencies. PROMIS essentially
lets the United States tap into anyone's bank account they feel
like.. and they can do whatever they want with whatever they
find.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
+++ 3. Fifth Column Hackers (CIA Info)
There is a CIA Operative group known as the "Fifth Column"
or the "Fifth Column Hackers". They are basically all the pist
off agents who are tired of high ranking officials getting paid
off for secrets. They are known to suck all the money out of
accounts in Switzerland of certain peoples and deposit it
straight into our treasury, with no name as to whom it came
from. The certain peoples include high ranking U.S. Government
Officials and former officials stretching back to the Reagan
Administration. So far, $2 Billion dollars has supposedly been
deposited into our treasury by the "Fifth Column". One high
ranking Reagan official alone got cleaned out to the tune of
$2.3 million dollars.
On July 1, 1993, Vincent Foster had scheduled a flight to
fly to Switzerland. This was three weeks before he died. He
paid for this trip with his own credit card, tis wasn't a
government funded trip. He had a bank account with $2.7 million
dollars in it, but found it had been wiped out and cancelled his
flight.
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
+++ 4. "Fostergate"
That's what it has seemingly been deemed. "Fostergate".
Many, and I mean many reporters have lost their jobs over
following this story. It's too dangerous. Vincent Foster was
an Arkansas Lawyer, but yet he had $2.7 million dollars in a
Swiss Bank Account. Either he was Johnny Cochran in disguise
and got O.J. off, or something's funny. Supposedly, it's said,
that Foster made his money by selling U.S. nuclear military
secrets to the Israeli Mossad, the Israeli CIA. Supposedly, as
sources say, the Mossad's banking system was penetrated (how
uncanny eh?) and Foster's info was found out. Many government
officials were supposedly "found out" and wiped clean.
Another reporter, this one from Tyler, Texas, claims that
Foster selling secrets was dis-information from the CIA. His
death is the cover-up of four administrations in the white
house.
Foster worked for an software firm, along with Hillary
Clinton. The firm was a money-laudering outfit. Foster was
highly affiliated with the CIA. He was a man who knew too much
about everything. With the whole whitewater hearings, nothing
damaging has come out against the Clintons' and Foster is dead.
People who have spoken out to reporters have refused to go
public, and have been driving off the road and have had many
death threats. If a firm was to launder money, the perfect
system to access would be PROMIS, who knows more about it then
CIA and CIA affiliated people. People in the know can do
whatever please them. Could it be PROMIS was accessed and
Foster, among others in the firm, laundered money from our
country? If so, the Fifth Column Hackers would definately made
him as a target in Switzerland; and Foster was a definate
takedown. Here's the reality of the whole thing: When Foster
was found dead in Ft. Marcy Park, Police found no car keys on
him. How the hell did he get to the Park and commit suicide?
In the morgue, however, after two White House "Personnel"
had inspected the body, his keys were found in his right hand
pocket. At the sight where his body originally laid, it was
said he was found with a .38 in his right hand, but eye
witnesses claim they saw no gun. The report made out also said
there were large amounts of blood and a gaping hole in his head.
Yet eye witnesses claim there was little blood and no large head
wound. The head wound was the type that would be made by a
little hit pistol. Like a close range shot from a 1-shot 22.
_____-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_----
Conclusion:
_____-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_----
Overall, This phile can raise many questions.. all I can
say is that there are few answers. Most sources to newpapers
and mags refuse to go public due to fear for their life. there
is definately corruption in our gov't.. specifically the Clinton
Administration. If you have illegitimate money stashed away,
and you think you have any reason to be monitored by CIA, i.e.
mob money, etc.. there is always the chance the Fifth Column
Hackers can suck you dry.. they seem to operate only against
people who have large quantities of money due to illegal means.
Foster's death was not suicide like it was written off.. but
this is just my opinion.. our government may always be
financially secure, due to the fact we can steal money whenever
we need it,.. but they'll never be trustworthy again. If you
ever want to hear more in-depth convo on this subject, read the
posts on alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater.
If you want more info on any of these topics, i STRONGLY urge
you to pick up these books or mags:
Sep25-Oct2 Issue of Insight
October issue of Media Bypass call 1-800-4-BYPASS
(Actually the mag just rox, it's 12 issues for $30)
the r-rated book: Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA.
S.P.I. Books, 136 West 22nd St., New York, 10011; $23.95
Citizen's Independent Report
(165 pp., $15.45; printing and shipping charges only!
301-864-6882)
The New York Times, Mar 8, 1992 v141
Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1994 v113
The Washington Post, Apr 18, 1994 v117
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
I would like to give thanx to a friend of mine who only wants
to be known as "Doom and Gloom".. a stock market and government
cover-up buff.
This phile was not copied but a compilation of various info
I have read in many MANY articles. Believe or not.. I do..
these people have no reason to lie.
&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
**************************************************************
fRiNgE Probe Industries 1995
**************************************************************
any questions or whatever, you can reach me at:
[email protected]
Apocalypse 2000 H/P +1-847-831-0484
Poison Pen H/P +1-847-966-2095
0 Day Warez Palace H/P +1-847-256-5928
Sillicon Underground H/P +1-514-725-0189
sub terra H/P +1-904-484-5548
*************************************************************
P R O B E I N D U S T R I E S M A G A Z I N E P H I L E 8
*************************************************************
In any country, Prison is where society sends its failures,
but in this country, society itself is failure.
GO BACK...
Does anyone remember the story about he so called "Fifth Column"?
Did anything ever become of it?
They were supposed to be a team of rogue hacker CIA that inserted the PROMIS software into the foreign nations banking systems, and then started to blackmail politicians through their "backdoor", and even liquidated some accounts of major elite players before someone killed some of them.
I remember this was run in Media Bypass magazine many years ago, but I do not remember what ever became of it.
Anyone have any info on it?
Did anything ever become of it?
They were supposed to be a team of rogue hacker CIA that inserted the PROMIS software into the foreign nations banking systems, and then started to blackmail politicians through their "backdoor", and even liquidated some accounts of major elite players before someone killed some of them.
I remember this was run in Media Bypass magazine many years ago, but I do not remember what ever became of it.
Anyone have any info on it?
Why in the world would the CIA try to undermine their "bankster masters" if that is the hand that feeds them? There is really no longer any distinction between big business and government in our corporatist, increasingly statist America. The banksters are the masters just as much as the political elite are. The CIA --- the American gestapo --- are the last people that would spearhead the most anti-statist, anti-bankster invention in the history of man.
Because there are factions within the CIA, (there always have been and always will be), that do not agree with the current "plan" or agenda of the New World Order leaders. When you have been in power and had as much control of black ops as the CIA does, the banksters who finance you do not have as much control as they once had, when you are infinitely smarter than they are and more technically savvy. There are rogue CIA factions worldwide and they tend to work together against the current status quo.
As well, by creating an entirely new crypto currency, they become the new bankers of their own rogue operations.
a ++ win for them
Why in the world would the CIA try to undermine their "bankster masters" if that is the hand that feeds them? There is really no longer any distinction between big business and government in our corporatist, increasingly statist America. The banksters are the masters just as much as the political elite are. The CIA --- the American gestapo --- are the last people that would spearhead the most anti-statist, anti-bankster invention in the history of man.
I seriously think that bitcoin was created by the CIA. It's very possible. Not necessarily for nefarious purposes but possibly to undermine their bankster masters, and use it for untraceable revolution and black ops projects.
Since we do not know who exactly, Satoshi is, it's very possible that the CIA invented bitcoin.
One thing we know for sure, the CIA are Cryptographic masters. Some of the brightest and best in the world.
It's also true some 10 year olds are also as intelligent, but it's more likely the CIA created it.
I would think the best thing to do if I were the CIA would be to create a monetary system that revolutionaries would embrace, the banksters would not control, could not be traced, was based in cryptography and could not be destroyed or taken down.
This is not a bashing of bitcoin at all. Please don't misunderstand my post. I'm just proposing this as a serious possibility, and not necessarily a bad thing at all.
I should also reiterate the fact that the CIA is not all bad, either. There are some really good people in there that do care.
They are just surrounded by many bad folks.
Since we do not know who exactly, Satoshi is, it's very possible that the CIA invented bitcoin.
One thing we know for sure, the CIA are Cryptographic masters. Some of the brightest and best in the world.
It's also true some 10 year olds are also as intelligent, but it's more likely the CIA created it.
I would think the best thing to do if I were the CIA would be to create a monetary system that revolutionaries would embrace, the banksters would not control, could not be traced, was based in cryptography and could not be destroyed or taken down.
This is not a bashing of bitcoin at all. Please don't misunderstand my post. I'm just proposing this as a serious possibility, and not necessarily a bad thing at all.
I should also reiterate the fact that the CIA is not all bad, either. There are some really good people in there that do care.
They are just surrounded by many bad folks.
Jump to: