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WACKENHUT CORPORATION

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Wackenhut corporation tied to the PROMIS software scam

Table of Contents:

1. Inside the Shadow CIA, by John Connolly

2. Inslaw-Octopus Related Deaths

3. Interview with Bill Hamilton, by Paul DeRienzo

4. Interview with Harry Martin, by Paul DeRienzo

5. Interview with James Norman, by Jim Quinn

6. MCA/Curry Company Table of Contents

7. Oversight Hearings on Alyeska Covert Operations

8. Obstruction of Justice: Exposing the Inslaw Scandal and Related Crimes, byKaren Lee Bixman, Media Bypass Magazine, June, 1995

9. Pay Your Money, Take Your Chance 10.Software to Die for. Inslaw Lawyer Elliot Richardson Talks About Murder and the

CIA, by James Ridgeway

11. Rigged Software Claimed to Hack Intelligence Files, by Valerie Lawton and AllanThompson

12. Snowbound, by John Cummings and Ernest Volkman, Penthouse, 7/8913. Submission to the Electoral Funding and Disclosure Inquiry, by Marshall Wilson14. The BCCI Affair, A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States

Senate, by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, December 1992

15. The Crimes of Mena, by Sally Denton and Roger Morris, Penthouse, 7/95

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16. The Inslaw Octopus, by Richard L. Fricker17. The Last Circle, by Carol Marshall18. The Last Days of Danny Casolaro, by James Ridgeway and Doug Vaughan19. The Mysterious Death of Danny Casolaro, by David MacMichael20. The Napa Sentinel Table of Contents21.The Octopus, by Karen Bixman

22. Vince Foster Table of Contents23. Virginia McCullough Interview, by Paul DeRienzo24. Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, by Wackenhutcorrections.com25. Wackenhut Corporation, by Wackenhut.com26. Wackenhut Corporation -- A Patriot or a Partner in Executive Crime?, by Armen

Victorian

27. Wackenhut Corporation Namebase Search Results by pir.org28. When Osama Bin Laden was Tim Osman, by J. Orlin Grabbe29. Whitewater Table of Contents

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INSIDE THE SHADOW CIA

by John Connolly

SPY Magazine - Sept 1992 - Volume 6

What? A big private company - one with a board of former CIA, FBI and Pentagonofficials; one in charge of protecting Nuclear-Weapons facilities, nuclearreactors, the Alaskan oil pipeline and more than a dozen American embassies abroad;one with long-standing ties to a radical right-wing organization; one with 30,000men and women under arms - secretly helped IRAQ in its effort to obtainsophisticated weapons? And fueled unrest in Venezuela? This is all the plot of anew best-selling thriller, right? Or the ravings of some overheated conspiracybuff, right? Right?

WRONG.

In the WINTER OF 1990, David Ramirez, a 24 year-old member of the SpecialInvestigations Division of the Wackenhut Corporation, was sent by his superiors onan unusual mission. Ramirez a former Marine Corps sergeant based in Miami, was toldto fly immediately to San Antonio along with three other members of SID - a unit,known as founder and chairman George Wackenhut's "private FBI," that providedexecutive protection and conducted undercover investigations and sting operations.Once they arrived, they rented two gray Ford Tauruses and drove four hours to adesolate town on the Mexican border called Eagle Pass. There, just after dark, they met two truckdrivers who had been flown in from Houston. Inside a nearby warehouse was an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, which the two truck drivers and the four Wackenhut agentsin their rented cars were supposed to transport to Chicago. "My instructions werevery clear," Ramirez recalls. "Do not look into the trailer, secure it, and makesure it safely gets to Chicago." It went without saying that no one else wassupposed to look in the trailer, either, which is why the Wackenhut men were armedwith fully loaded Remington 870 pump-action shotguns.

The convoy drove for 30 hours straight, stopping only for gas and food. Even then,one of the Wackenhut agents had to stay with the truck, standing by one of thecars, its trunk open, shotgun within easy reach. "Whenever we stopped, I bought ashot glass with the name of the town on it," Ramirez recalls. "I have glasses fromOklahoma City, Kansas City, St. Louis."

A little before 5:00 on the morning of the third day, they delivered the trailer to a practically empty warehouse outside Chicago. A burly man who had beenwaiting for them on the loading dock told them to take off the locks and go home,and that was that. They were on a plane back to Miami that afternoon. LaterRamirez's superiors told him - as they told other SID agents about similar midnightruns - that the trucks contained $40 million worth of food stamps. Afterconsidering the secrecy, the way the team was assembled and the orders not to stopor open the truck, Ramirez decided he didn't believe that explanation.

Neither do we. One reason is simple: A Department of Agriculture official simplydenies that food stamps are shipped that way. "Someone is blowing smoke," he says.Another reason is that after a six-month investigation, in the course of which wespoke to more than 300 people, we believe we know what the truck did contain -equipment necessary for the manufacture of chemical weapons - and where it washeaded: to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the Wackenhut Corporation - a publicly tradedcompany with strong ties to the CIA and federal contracts worth $200 million a year- was making sure Saddam would be getting his equipment intact. The question iswhy. In 1954, George Wackenhut, then a 34-year old former FBI agent, joined up withthree other former FBI agents to open a company in Miami called Special Agent

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Investigators Inc. The partnership was neither successful nor harmonious - George once knocked partner Ed Dubois unconscious to end adisagreement over the direction the company would take - and in 1958, George boughtout his partners.

However capable Wackenhut's detectives may have been at their work, GeorgeWackenhut had two personal attributes that were instrumental in the company'sgrowth. First, he got along exceptionally well with important politicians. He was aclose ally of Florida governor Claude Kirk, who hired him to combat organized crimein the state; and was also friends with Senator George Smathers, an intimate ofJohn F. Kennedy's. It was Smathers who provided Wackenhut with his big break whenthe senator's law firm helped the company find a loophole in the Pinkerton law, the1893 federal statute that had made it a crime for an employee of a privatedetective agency to do work for the government. Smathers's firm set up a whollyowned subsidiary of Wackenhut that provided only guards, not detectives. Shortlythereafter, Wackenhut received multimillion-dollar contracts from the government toguard Cape Canaveral and the Nevada nuclear-bomb test site, the first of many extremely lucrative federal contracts that have sustained the company to thisday.

The second thing that helped make George Wackenhut successful was that he was, andis, a hard-line right-winger. He was able to profit from his beliefs by building updossiers on Americans suspected of being Communists or merely left-leaning -"subversives and sympathizers," as he put it-and selling the information tointerested parties. According to Frank Donner, the author of "Age of Surveillance",the Wackenhut Corporation maintained and updated its files even after theMcCarthyite hysteria had ebbed, adding the names of antiwar protesters and civil-rights demonstrators to its list of "derogatory types." By 1965, Wackenhut wasboasting to potential investors that the company maintained files on 2.5 millionsuspected dissidents - one in 46 American adults then living. in 1966, afteracquiring the private files of Karl Barslaag; a former staff member of the HouseCommittee on Un-American Activities, Wackenhut could confidently maintain that with more than 4 million names, it had the largest privately held file on suspected dissidents in America. In 1975, after Congress investigated companiesthat had private files, Wackenhut gave its files to the now-defunct anti-CommunistChurch League of America of Wheaton, Illinois. That organization had workedclosely with the red squads of big-city police departments, particularly in NewYork and L.A., spying on suspected sympathizers; George Wackenhut was personalfriends with the League's leaders, and was a major contributor to the group. To besure, after giving the League its files, Wackenhut reserved the right to use themfor its clients and friends.

Wackenhut had gone public in 1965 ; George Wackenhut retained 54 percent of thecompany. Between his salary and dividends, his annual compensation approaches $2million a year, sufficient for him to live in a $20 million castle in Coral Gables,Florida, complete with a moat and 18 full-time servants. Today the company is thethird-largest investigative security firm in the country, with offices throughoutthe United States and in 39 foreign countries.

It is not possible to overstate the special relationship Wackenhut enjoys with thefederal government. It is close. When it comes to security matters, Wackenhut inmany respects *is* the government. In 1991, a third of the company's $600- millionin revenues came from the federal government, and another large chunk fromcompanies that themselves work for the government, such as Westinghouse.

Wackenhut is the largest single company supplying security to U.S. embassiesoverseas; several of the 13 embassies it guards have been in important hotbeds ofespionage, such as Chile, Greece and El Salvador. It also guards nearly all themost strategic government facilities in the U.S., including the Alaskan oilpipeline, the Hanford nuclear-waste facility, the Savannah River plutonium plant

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and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Wackenhut maintains an especially close relationship with the federal government in other ways as well. While early boards of directors included suchprominent personalities of the political right as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker;General Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, current andrecent members of the board have included much of the country's recent national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretaryand former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci: former Defense Intelligence Agentdirector General Joseph Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J.Rowley; former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of PresidentBush's foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director AdmiralBobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late WilliamCasey was Wackenhut's outside legal counsel. The company has 30,000 armed employeeson its payroll.

We wanted to know more about this special relationship; but the government was notforthcoming. Repeated requests to the Department of Energy for an explanation ofhow one company got the security contracts for nearly all of America's moststrategic installations have gone unanswered.

Similarly, efforts to get the State Department to explain whether embassy contractswere awarded arbitrarily or through competitive bidding were fruitless;essentially, the State Department said, "Some of both. " Wackenhut's competitors -who, understandably, asked not to be quoted by name - have their own version. "Allthose contracts," said one security-firm executive, "are just another way to payWackenhut for their clandestine help. And what is the nature of that help? "It isknown throughout the industry," said retired FBI special agent William Hinshaw,"that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut." We met George Wackenhut in hisswanky, muy macho offices in Coral Gables. The rooms are paneled in a dark, richrosewood, accented with gray-blue stone. The main office is dominated byWackenhut's 12-foot-long desk and a pair of chairs shaped like elephants -"Republican chairs," he calls them - complete with real tusks, which, the old mansays with some amusement, tend to stick his visitors. The highlight of the usualcollection of pictures and awards is the Republican presidential exhibit: anautographed photo of Wackenhut shaking hands with George Bush (whom Wackenhut, according to a former associate, used to call "that pinko") aswell as framed photos of Presidents Reagan, Nixon and Bush, each accompanied by ahandwritten note. The chairman looks every inch the comfortable Floridaseptuagenarian. The day we spoke, his clothing ranged across the color spectrumfrom baby blue to light baby blue, and he wore a lot of jewelry - a huge gold watchon a thick gold band, two massive gold rings. But Wackenhut was, at 72, quick andtough in his responses. Near the end of our two-and-a-half hour interview, whenasked if his company was an arm of the CIA, he snapped, "No!"

Of course, this may just be a matter of semantics. We have spoken to numerous experts, including current and former CIA agents and analysts, current and former agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration and current andformer Wackenhut executives and employees, all of whom have said that in the mid-1970's, after the Senate Intelligence Committee's revelations of the CIA's covertand sometimes illegal overseas operations, the agency and Wackenhut grew very, veryclose. Those revelations had forced the CIA to do a housecleaning, and it becameCIA policy that certain kinds of activities would no longer officially beperformed. But that didn't always mean that the need or the desire to undertakesuch operations disappeared. And that's where Wackenhut came in.

Our sources confirm that Wackenhut has had a long- standing relationship with theCIA, and that it has deepened over the last decade or so. Bruce Berckmans, who wasassigned to the CIA station in Mexico City, left the agency in January 1975

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(putatively) to become a Wackenhut international-operations vice president.Berckmans, who left Wackenhut in 1981, told SPY that he has seen a formal proposalGeorge Wackenhut submitted to the CIA to allow the agency to use Wackenhut officesthroughout the world as fronts for CIA activities. Richard Babayan, who says hewas a CIA contract employee and is currently in jail awaiting trial on fraud andracketeering charges, has been cooperating with federal and congressionalinvestigators looking into illegal shipments of nuclear-and-chemical-weapons-making supplies to Iraq. "Wackenhut has been used by the CIA and otherintelligence agencies for years," he told SPY. "When they [the CIA] need cover,Wackenhut is there to provide it for them." Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeauwas said to have rebuffed Wackenhut's effort in the 1980's to purchase a weaponspropellant manufacturer in Quebec with the remark "We just got rid of the CIA - we don't want them back." Phillip Agee, the left-wing former CIA agent who wrote an expose of the agency in1975, told us, "I don't have the slightest doubt that the CIA and Wackenhutoverlap."

There is also testimony from people who are not convicts, renegades or Canadians. William Corbett, a terrorism expert who spent 18 years as a CIA analystand is now an ABC News consultant based in Europe, confirmed the relationshipbetween Wackenhut and the agency. "For years Wackenhut has been involved with theCIA and other intelligence organizations, including the DEA," he told SPY."Wackenhut would allow the CIA to occupy positions within the company [in order tocarry out] clandestine operations." He also said that Wackenhut would supplyintelligence agencies with information, and that it was compensated for this - "ina quid pro quo arrangement," Corbett says - with government contracts worthbillions of dollars over the years.

We have uncovered considerable evidence that Wackenhut carried the CIA's water infighting Communist encroachment in Central America in the 1980s (that is to say,during the Reagan administration when the CIA director was former Wackenhut lawyerWilliam Casey, the late superpatriot who had a proclivity for extralegal andillegal anti-Communist covert operations such as Iran-contra). In 1981, Berckmans,the CIA agent turned Wackenhut vice president, joined with other senior Wackenhutexecutives to form the company's Special Projects Division. It was this divisionthat linked up with ex-CIA man John Phillip Nichols, who had taken over the CabazonIndian reservation in California, as we described in a previous article["Badlands," April 1992], in pursuit of a scheme to manufacture explosives, poisongas and biological weapons - and then, by virtue of the tribe's status as asovereign nation, to export the weapons to the contras. This maneuver was designedto evade congressional prohibitions against the U.S. government's helping the contras. Indeed, in an interview with SPY, Eden Pastora,the contras' famous Commander Zero, who had been spotted at a test of some night-vision goggles at a firing range near the Cabazon reservation in the company ofNichols and a Wackenhut executive, offhandedly identified that executive, A. RobertFrye, as "the man from the CIA. " (In a subsequent conversation he denied knowingFrye at all; of course, in that same talk he quite unbelievably denied having everbeen a contra.)

In addition to attempted weapons supply, Wackenhut seems to have been involved inCentral America in other ways. Ernesto Bermudez who was Wackenhut's director ofinternational operations from 1987 to '89, admitted to SPY that during 1985 and '86he ran Wackenhut's operations in El Salvador, where he was in charge of 1,500 men.When asked what 1 ,500 men were doing for Wackenhut in El Salvador, Bermudezreplied coyly, "Things." Pressed, he elaborated: "Things you wouldn't want yourmother to know about." It's worth noting that Wackenhut's annual revenues fromgovernment contracts -- the alleged reward for cooperation in the government'sclandestine activities - increased by 150 million, a 45 percent jump, while RonaldReagan was in office. "You've done an awful lot of research, George Wackenhut saidto me as I was leaving. "How would you like to run all our New York operations ? "

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If that was the extent of Wackenhut's possible involvement in a government agency'sattempt to circumvent the law, then we might dismiss it as an interesting footnoteto the overheated, cowboy anti- Communist 1980s. However, the U.S. Attorney for theSouthern District of Florida has been conducting an investigation into the illegalexport of dual-use technology-that is, seemingly innocuous technology that can alsobe used to make nuclear weapons to Iraq and Libya. And SPY has learned thatWackenhut's name has come up in the federal investigation, but not at present as atarget.

Between 1987 and '89, three companies in the United States received investments from an Iraqi architect named Ihsan Barbouti. The colorful Barbouti owned an engineering company in Frankfurt that had a $552 millioncontract to build airfields in Iraq. He also admitted having designed Mu'ammar Qaddafi's infamous German-built chemical- weapons plant in Rabta, Libya.According to an attorney for one of the companies in which Barbouti invested, thearchitect owned $100 million worth of real estate and oil-drilling equipment inTexas and Oklahoma. He may also be dead, there being reports that he died of heartfailure in Hospital in London on July 1, 1990, his 63rd birthday. Barbouti,however, had faked his death once before, in 1969, after the Ba'ath takeover inIraq which brought Saddam Hussein to power as the second-in-command. That time,Barbouti escaped Iraq; resurfacing several years later in Lebanon and Libya. Thereare no reports that he is living in Jordan or, according to other reports, in a CIAsafe house in Florida. Those reports can be considered no better than rumor; whatfollows, though, is fact.

As reported on ABC's "Nightline" last year, the three companies in which Barboutiinvested were TK-7 of Oklahoma City, which makes a fuel additive; Pipeline RecoverySystems of Dallas, which makes an anti-corrosive chemical that preserves pipes; andProduct Ingredient Technology of Boca Raton, which makes food flavorings. None ofthese companies was looking to do business with Iraq; Barbouti sought them out. Whywas he interested? Because TK-7 had formulas that could extend the range of jetaircraft and liquid-fueled missiles such as the SCUD; because Pipeline Recoveryknows how to coat pipes to make them usable in nuclear reactors and chemical-weapons plants; and because one of the by- products in making cherry flavoring isferric ferrocyanide, a chemical that's used to manufacture hydrogen cyanide, which canpenetrate gas masks and protective clothing. Hydrogen cyanide was used by SaddamHussein against the Kurds in the Iran-Iraq war.

Barbouti was more than a passive investor, and soon he began pressuring thecompanies to ship not only their products but also their manufacturing technologyto corporations he owned in Europe, on which, he told the businessmen, it would besent to Libya and Iraq. In doing so, Barbouti was attempting to violate the law.First, the U.S. forbade sending anything to Libya, which was embargoed as aterrorist nation. Second, the U.S. specified that material of this sort must besent to its final destination, not to an intermediate locale, where the U.S. wouldrisk losing control of its distribution. According to former CIA contract employeeRichard Babayan, in late 1989 Barbouti met in London with Ibrahim Sabawai, SaddamHussein's half brother and European head of Iraqi intelligence, who grew excitedabout the work Pipeline Recovery was doing and called for the company's technology to berushed to Iraq, so that it could be in place by early 1990. And the owner of TK-7swears that Barbouti told him he was developing an atom device for Qaddafi thatwould be used against the U.S. in retaliation for the 1986 U.S. air strike againstLibya. Barbouti also wanted the ferrocyanide from Product Ingredient.

Assisting Barbouti with these investments was New Orleans exporter Don Seaton,business associate of Richard Secord, the right-wing U.S. Army general turned warprofiteer who was so deeply enmeshed in the Iran-contra affair. It was Secord who

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connected Barbouti with Wackenhut. Barbouti met with Secord in Florida on severaloccasions, and phone records show that several calls were placed from Barbouti'soffice to Secord's private number in McLean, Virginia; Secord has acknowledgedknowing Barbouti. He is currently a partner of Washington businessman James Tully(who is the man who leaked Bill Clinton's draft-dodge letter to ABC) and JackBrennan, a former Marine Corps colonel and longtime aide to Richard Nixon both in the WhiteHouse and in exile. Brennan has gone back to the White House, where he works as adirector of administrative operations in President Bush's office. He refused toreturn repeated calls from SPY. Interestingly, Brennan and Tully had previouslybeen involved in a $181 million business deal to supply uniforms to the Iraqi army. Oddly, they arranged to have the uniforms manufactured in Nicolae Ceaucescu's Romania. The partners in that deal were formerU.S. attorney general and Watergate felon John Mitchell and Sarkis Soghanalian, aTurkish-born Lebanese citizen. Soghanalian, who has been credited with being SaddamHussein's leading arms procurer and with introducing the demonic weapons inventorGerald Bull to the Iraqis, is currently serving a six-year sentence in federalprison in Miami for the illegal sale of 103 military helicopters to Iraq. Accordingto former Wackenhut agent David Ramirez, the company considered Soghanalian "a veryvaluable client."

Unfortunately for Barbouti, none of the companies in which he made investments was willing to ship its products or technology to his Europeandivisions. That, however, doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't get some of whathe wanted. In 1990, 2,000 gallons of ferrocyanide were found to be missing from thecherry-flavor factory in Boca Raton. Where it went is a mystery; Peter Kawaja, whowas the head of security for all of Barbouti's U.S. investments, told SPY, "We werenever burglarized, but that stuff didn't walk out by itself."

What does all this have to do with Wackenhut? Lots: According to Louis Champon, theowner of Product Ingredient Technology, it was Wackenhut that guarded his BocaRaton plant, a fact confirmed by Murray Levine, a Wackenhut vice president. Champonalso says, and Wackenhut also confirms, that the security for the plant consistedof one unarmed guard. While a Wackenhut spokesperson maintains that this was theonly job they were doing for Barbouti, he also says that they were never paid, thatBarbouti stiffed them.

This does not seem true. SPY has obtained four checks from Barbouti to Wackenhut.All were written within ten days in 1990: one on March 27 for $168.89; one on March28 for $24,828.07; another on April 5 for $756; the last on April 6 for $40,116.25.We asked Richard Kneip, Wackenhut's senior vice president for corporate planning,to explain why a single guard was worth $66,000 a year; Kneip was at a loss to doso. He was similarly at a loss to explain a fifth check, from another Barbouticompany to Wackenhut's travel-service division in 1987, almost two years beforeWackenhut has acknowledged providing security for the Boca Raton plant .

Two former CIA operatives, separately interviewed, have the explanation. CharlesHayes, who describes himself as "a CIA asset" says Wackenhut was helping Barboutiship chemicals to Iraq, "Supplying Iraq was originally a good idea," he maintains,"but then it got out of hand. Wackenhut was just in it for the money." RichardBabayan the former CIA contract employee, confirmed Hayes's account. He says thatWackenhut's relationship with Barbouti existed before the Boca Raton plant opened:"Barbouti was placed in the hands of Secord by the CIA, and Secord called in Wackenhut to handle securityand travel and protection for Barbouti and his export plans." Wackenhut, Babayansays was working for the CIA in helping Barbouti ship the chemical- and-nuclear-weapons-making equipment first to Texas, then to Chicago, and then to Baltimore tobe shipped overseas. All of which makes the story of the midnight convoy ride ofDavid Ramirez, recounted at the beginning of this article rather less mysterious.SPY has learned that this shipment is now the subject of a joint USDA- Customs

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investigation.

When we asked George Wackenhut what was being shipped from Eagle Pass to Chicago,the sharp, straightforward chairman at first claimed they were protecting anunnamed executive. He then directed an aide to get back to me. Two days later,Richard Kneip did, repeating the tale that had been passed on to David Ramirez-thatthe trucks contained food stamps. We told him that we had spoken to a Department ofAgriculture official, who informed us that food stamps are shipped from Chicago tooutlying areas, never the other way around, and that food stamps, unlike money, are used once and then destroyed. All Kneip would say then was, "We do not reveal the names of ourclients."

Wackenhut's connection to the CIA and to other government agencies raises severaltroubling questions:

First, is the CIA using Wackenhut to conduct operations that it has been forbiddento undertake? Second, is the White House or some other party in the executivebranch working through Wackenhut to conduct operations that it doesn't wantCongress to know about? Third, has Wackenhut's cozy relationship with thegovernment given it a feeling of security-or worse, an outright knowledge ofsensitive or embarrassing information-that allows the company to believe that itcan conduct itself as though it were above the law? A congressional investigationinto Wackenhut's activities in the Alyeska affair last November began to shed somelight on Wackenhut's way of doing business; clearly it's time for Congress to investigate just how far Wackenhut's other tentacles extend.

Additional reporting by Erzc Reguly, Margie Sloan and Wendell Smith ** End of article **

Wackenhut's labors on behalf of Arab despots aren't the company's only unsavoryepisodes. Here are some ocher items from our [SPY] Wackenhut file:

* Wackenhut's right-wing politics have not been confined to supporting U.S.administrations. In 1977, Wackenhut obtained special permission to operate inBelgium; according to Edward Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan's "The TerrorismIndustry," Wackenhut 'quickly got involved with right-wing terrorists who werethemselves linked to state security agents." Wackenhut's local director inBrussels, Jean-Francis Calmette, was a rightist who had hired and given combatinstruction to members of Westland New Post, a Belgian fascist group. Wackenhutleft Belgium in the early 1980s, following accusations that its guards were luringimmigrant children into basements and beating them.

* Tom Carpenter of the Washington-based Government Accountability Project, anonprofit organization that protects whistle-blowers, considers Wackenhut a majoroppressor. At many of the nuclear installations guarded by Wackenhut, the companyworks to identify and discourage whistle-blowers. Earlier this year, aninvestigation by the Energy Department's Inspector General's Office into theillegal use of electronic eavesdropping equipment at plants run by Westinghouse andother private companies in the nuclear-energy business found 147 different piecesof surveillance equipment; one could listen in on 200 phones at once. Many of thebugs had been planted by Wackenhut. The private companies agreed to dismantle theequipment, and sent the bugs off to a Department of Energy training center inAlbuquerque. As it happens, the training center is operated by Wackenhut. Theseare not the only complaints against the company. Robert Jacques of the EnergyDepartment's Inspector General's Office told SPY "We have had hundreds ofcomplaints about Wackenhut."

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* This August a House committee was due to release a report on its investigationinto the way Wackenhut's Special Investigations Division handled a job for one ofits clients, the oil consortium Alyeska. The committee has been looking intoallegations, reported on 60 Minutes and elsewhere, that Wackenhut had conductedillegal surveillance of an outspoken Alyeska critic, Chuck Hamel, who has funneledinformation about the oil consortium's safety and environmental abuses to Congressand the media for more than a decade. Wackenhut is accused of setting up a phonyenvironmental-law firm and offering money to Hamel to discover his Alyeska sources.Wackenhut says it operated legally.

* While Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA in clandestine adventures,sometimes it just goes off on its own. That's what happened last year, whenWackenhut's dirty work on behalf of a client helped bring down a presidential aideand fueled unrest that led to an attempted coup against the democratically elected,pro-American government of Venezuela.

On June 21, 1991, Wayne Black, the director of Wackenhut's Special InvestigationDivision, flew from Miami to Caracas. He traveled on an Abu Dhabi Passport, usingthe name Wayne Jenkins--the same name he'd used while heading the Alyeska business.The purpose of this trip was to destroy the reputation of Orlando Garcia, the chiefof security for President Carlos Andres Perez. According to Gus Castillo, a former FBI special agent who worked for Wackenhut,Black began last summer to plant false information about Garcia with Governmentofficials, members of opposition parties and other influential Venezuelans. Blackstories concerned an investigation by the Venezuelan attorney general intoaccusations that a munitions company owned by Garcia has taken money from the armyfor weapons it failed to supply. Garcia denied any wrongdoing but resigned later inthe year and was placed under house arrest. "You would not be wrong in saying thatWackenhut helped get Orlando Garcia out of the government," says a source in theVenezuelan government. Soon the stories Black had spread took on a life of their own. President Perez,who had been hailed by President Bush as "one of the great democratic leaders ofour hemisphere," was suffering a bout of unpopularity. Austerity measures he hadimplemented had lowered the standard of living. New allegations of corruption by amember of the president's inner circle fueled this unrest, and in February 1992 agroup of midlevel army officers attempted a military coup. In the end, Perezsurvived an attack that claimed three of his bodyguards; 17 soldiers and 42civilians were also killed. Meanwhile, Orlando Garcia fled to Paris. Wackenhut helped instigate this episode neither to forward a political philosophynot to protect any security interests, but simply for a fee. The client was BlancaIbanez, a wealthy 38-year-old Venezuelan expatriate now living in Boca Raton who isthe mistress of Jaime Lusinchi, Perez's predecessor as president. In addition toher duties as Lusinchi's personal secretary and mistress, Ibanez had anotherresponsibility—regulating the flow of hard currency in and out of Venezuela. Aftershe left public office, her activities were investigated, and she was suspected ofstealing more than $300 million. The person in charge of that investigation wasOrlando Garcia. In May 1991, Ibanez flew to Miami; when she arrived, she and herluggage were searched by U.S. Customs officials. The search was conducted at therequest of Venezuelan officials, who were hunting for financial records andevidence of offshore accounts. Nothing showed up, but Ibanez was clearly rattled.Soon afterward, she had her American attorney hire Wackenhut to stymie theVenezuelan government's investigation of her. Obviously, Wackenhut was successful,although apparently only in the shots run. This past June, the Venezuelan attorneygeneral indicted her for influence-peddling.

* Michael Riconosciuto is the mysterious convicted drug dealer who became agovernment informer and then became a Wackenhut employee, and who is now back injail [see "Badlands," April 1992] He told SPY that during the early 1980s he was

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"working for Wackenhut to adapt Inslaw's Promis." Promis is the computer programallegedly stolen by Reagan-administration officials from Inslaw, a softwarecompany, and resold for private gain. Although Wackenhut denies any involvementwith improper appropriation of software, Riconosciuto said in an interview with SPYthat he "met with George Wackenhut and John Ammarell [a Wackenhut board member andconsultant to George Wackenhut] in Las Vegas." Riconosciuto went on to say thataccompanying him was Dr. John Philip Nichols, the former CIA agent and Wackenhutbusiness partner who was running the shadowy activities on the Cabazon Indianreservation in the California desert. Riconosciuto says that during their Vegasevening together, George Wackenhut asked how his work on the software was comingalong.

Such comments from a twice-convicted felon would normally be dismissed out of hand.But in an interview with SPY Wackenhut's John Ammarell confided that such a meetingdid indeed take place in Las Vegas. "I don't remember any specific conversations,"Ammarell said, "but I think we were there to discuss the sale of George's yacht,the "Top Secret." I think Nichols said he had a potential buyer." So: The wealthypresident of a large security company with CIA ties and one of his board membersmet with a drug dealer, electronics expert and a spook turned arms supplier—and allthey discuss is the sale of a boat?

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Inslaw-Octopus Related Deaths

<MISSING>

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INTERVIEW WITH BILL HAMILTON

The following transcript was made from a broadcast over WBAI-FM 99.5 in New YorkCity on September 20, 1991: Bill Hamilton is the chief executive officer of theInslaw Corporation (a software company) and the developer of its PROMIS softwarepackage.

BILL HAMILTON: Danny [Casolaro] was found dead in West Virginia. He hadconversations with three confidants–three separate conversations which I found outabout later. And he told each of these three confidants the same thing; that he hadjust then returned from West Virginia where he had met with a source and that henow knew everything that had happened to the PROMIS software and to Inslaw, butthat he had to go back for one final meeting to pick up the last piece of evidence.And he was quite euphoric about his breakthrough. And he said to each of thesepeople that Bill and Nancy Hamilton (My wife is named Nancy–works here with me)were going to be quite excited.

One of the confidants said: "I’ve had fifty telephone hours talking to Danny."(This is someone who lives on the West Coast.) "During the past year I’ve spentabout fifty hours speaking to him on the phone. Normally, he plays chess with me.Monday night, he was like the cat who had swallowed the canary. He knew he hadbroken this thing!

So, if he was murdered–and I believe he clearly was–he was murdered because he hadfound out too much. The other thing I should mention to you is that, in the finalthree or four weeks of his life, several different people with backgrounds in U.S.covert intelligence operations, who I talk to on a regular basis, and who Dannyalso talked to on a regular basis, directly told me that they had told Danny thathis life was in jeopardy because he was having such success in breaking thiscorruption open. And they told me that some specific inquiries that Danny wasmaking could get him killed. And the West Virginia authorities have never shown anyinterest in finding that kind of thing out from people like me and others who knewprofessionally what Danny was doing.

So, to rule a suicide without examining this kind of information, is a ruling whichdoes not deserve to be taken seriously.

PAUL DeRIENZO: Can you give me some idea of those very specific things that DannyCasolaro was inquiring about? BILL HAMILTON: Danny was planning to go to a particular facility in theWashington, D.C. area, owned by the United States Government, a facility withconnections to one or more of the people who run "the Octopus". I think you canassume it’s a covert intelligence facility, from the way that it’s presented. Andjust going to this facility, I was warned, could get him killed. The other thingthat he was doing was making inquiries, over the telephone, to the Syndicate in LosAngeles. And those inquiries had rattled the cages of some people out there. Andthere was some concern that they might respond to the rattling by killing Danny.The claim that I have heard from some sources is that someone with mobresponsibilities (I guess you’d call it)–some person in the mob–is a member of theleadership of "the Octopus." And it’s someone from the Los Angeles mob. And Dannywas onto it.

PAUL DeRIENZO: Are you familiar with any of the research that was done by theChristic Institute in Washington, D.C. concerning the Iran-Contra scandal?

BILL HAMILTON: Yes. I have read it.

PAUL DeRIENZO: To your knowledge, are there any parallels there? Are some of thosesame people involved, to your knowledge?

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BILL HAMILTON: Yes. Danny’s belief about who was running "the Octopus"–about sevenor eight people–some of them are people who the Christic Institute identified:Theodore Shackley, Thomas Clines…. Danny also had people like George Pender, JohnP. Nichols, E. Howard Hunt [JD: Hunt was one of the people named in Nixon’sburglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate office building.],the former Director of the CIA Richard Helms, Ray Cline. Those are the people thatDanny had identified as the people running "the Octopus."

PAUL DeRIENZO: Anything you’d like to add to this?

BILL HAMILTON: I think it’s important that reporters try to get to the bottom ofthis because Danny was investigating corruption in the U.S. Department of Justiceitself. It makes problematical any possibility that there could be a Federalinvestigation, unless there’s an independent counsel appointed. So, the press andthe Congress are really the only hopes that we have to try to prove whether Dannywas murdered or not.

PAUL DeRIENZO: I know that you won your suit and that there were some appeals bythe government. Has that been completed yet–the legal proceedings?

BILL HAMILTON: No. The government appealed from the bankruptcy court to the U.S.District Court. The U.S. District Court, in November, 1989, affirmed the bankruptcycourt saying that the evidence was sufficient to support the findings (quote)"under any standard of review." (closed quotes). Then the Justice Departmentappealed again to the United States Court of Appeals this time. And a three- judgepanel in May said, on a narrow jurisdictional ruling, that we won the case in thewrong federal court. We should have tried it in a different federal court. We arecurrently seeking certiorari from the U.S. Supreme Court because we think that theU.S. Court of Appeals jurisdictional ruling was in error. But when the U.S. Courtof Appeals made its jurisdictional ruling, it left undisturbed the findings of thebankruptcy court that had already been upheld by the district court: that theJustice Department stole six million dollars worth of our software through"trickery, fraud and deceit", and then tried covertly to drive Inslaw out ofbusiness.

PAUL DeRIENZO: Have you received any settlement on that?

BILL HAMILTON: I’ve never received a penny! And the forty-two largest United StatesAttorneys’ offices are still running their caseloads with software that two federalcourts said was deliberately stolen by the U.S. Department of Justice headquartersin Washington.

PAUL DeRIENZO: And that was Bill Hamilton, the chair of Inslaw, a softwareproducing company in Washington, D.C. that has been battling the United StatesGovernment since the early 1980’s and whose case led to another window into theworkings of the secret team, "the Octopus", and the death of Danny Casolaro.

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INTERVIEW WITH HARRY MARTIN

The following interview was broadcast over Pacifica Radio Network station WBAI-FMon September 29, 1991.

SAMORI MARKSMAN: We go to our next guest, Harry Martin, who is the publisher of theNapa Sentinel [Napa, California] and who has been doing an extraordinary amount ofinvestigatory work around the Inslaw affair. We will begin by welcoming HarryMartin back to WBAI. Good morning. Just to let you know that I’m in the studio withPaul DeRienzo. …

HARRY MARTIN: The person who is awaiting criminal prosecution is MichaelRiconosciuto, of course. But mind you, he was not arrested at the time he made thedeposition. He gave a deposition to Congress, and he indicated to the committeethat if he went ahead and testified– as he did–therefore, he would be subject toarrest within a short period of time. Within seven days he was arrested! But AriBen-Menashe is certainly not under any criminal arrest. He is a member of theIsraeli Mossad [intelligence agency]. And the other people who have come forwardand testified to these various things are not in jail. Michael Riconosciuto is aman who has signed an affidavit, and yes, he is in jail awaiting criminal chargesof supposedly owning a Methamphetamine lab in Pearce County, Washington. However,after he was arrested–while I was on a Seattle radio show, I was on hold and thenews came on–there were three Methamphetamine labs broken up in Pearce County,Washington, not associated with him whatsoever. And it would lead to the suspicionthat perhaps they were all connected to one thing and had nothing to do withMichael, but they decided to hang one on him right after his testimony. PAUL DeRIENZO: Why don’t you give us some background on who Ari Ben-Menashe is,because his name has come up on a number of different issues. HARRY MARTIN: His name has turned up on the October Surprise and everything else.He is a member of the Mossad and he apparently indicates that he is a witness tothe exchange of the PROMIS software to the Iraqis in Santiago, Chile. Now there wasalso a British Air Force officer who was a witness to that thing, supposedly, andhe was hung. And they declared that to be suicide. That was in Chile. Ben-Menashehas come forward on a lot of things, but you have to understand that the Israelis,at the present time, are also very irritated with the Bush Administration. And youcannot be sure how much information and disinformation is being passed around. PAUL DeRIENZO: How about Mr. Riconosciuto? We discussed the legal problems he gothimself in after he spoke out. But what is his history? HARRY MARTIN: He’s a very brilliant computer scientist. He has worked inside theCIA for a long time. And nobody can deny this fact. Nobody is challenging thatparticular role. He was the man who had the access keys to almost any computersituation: monies, who’s who and everything else. He’s very dangerous in the aspectthat he has all that knowledge of the key players in many, many things. And, ofcourse, his affidavit stated that he converted the PROMIS software using theCabazon Indian reservation, in Indio, California to do this. And Dr. Earl Brian wasvery much involved there. That place was also used for the manufacture ofbiological warfare and chemical warfare to be used by the Contras in Nicaragua.Testimony has come forward from many people that that whole Indian tribe and thosepeople running it are shown by the California Department of Justice to have Mafiaand CIA ties. This is a documented situation. But jurisdiction becomes a problembecause it is an independent Indian nation. PAUL DeRIENZO: We have reports that have come out in "Computerworld" and othersources based on these statements made by Mr. Ben-Menashe and Mr. Riconosciuto thatRobert McFarlane, who was the former National Security Advisor, was involved in

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giving the Israeli Government copies of this software. Bill Hamilton says that hefound out, quite by accident, that Canada was using it widely; that the RoyalCanadian Mounted Police were using it in their intelligence facilities. HARRY MARTIN: Well, there are several Indian reservations that are being used bythe Wackenhut Corporation and intelligence agencies to do things like manufactureequipment or….. They can skip a lot of corners because these nations aretechnically independent. For instance, one reservation is in New Mexico, but italso goes across the Mexican border. Therefore, it becomes an open corridor whereyou don’t use customs or anything because part of your properties are in onecountry and part is in another. And they have used these Indian tribes foreverything from the manufacture of weapons to the software situation, opening upgambling casinos. And understand, a lot of the money involved in the savings andloan scandal came from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Bureau of Indian Affairsputs out money to be invested on short-term notices, and this is how a lot of thesavings and loans that went down started up. And that’s where a lot of their moneycame from. There could be a lot of inter-ties in there. It is so complex, and of course,Danny Casolaro referred to it as "the Octopus". You can understand why now, becauseit gets into…. You see, the trouble is, you can’t isolate Inslaw by itself. Inslawby itself is just a minor thing compared with the overall package. The totalcorruption that seems to have played around– Iran/Contra gets involved, and theOctober Surprise gets involved. There are just so many players that keep comingacross each other, and it’s a really massive story. I don’t know anybody who isgoing to get the whole picture. PAUL DeRIENZO: What I’m trying to get at are the connections that might lead to aninvestigation, or try to force an investigation into these things. Because it seemsthat when you have a reporter who is found dead under mysterious circumstances, byanybody’s definition, it deserves being looked into further rather than a simpleruling that this was a suicide because….. HARRY MARTIN: You have to understand now, Inslaw was sort of on the back burner ofthe public limelight. In other words, I’m getting letters now from your programlast week in which people say they haven’t heard too much about this thing on theEast Coast. Originally, Inslaw was carried by the Washington Times, the St. LouisPost-Dispatch and ourselves. And we’re the only three newspapers in the wholenation giving any credence or concentration to it. PAUL DeRIENZO: Actually, Barron’s also. HARRY MARTIN: The Sam Nunn Committee got nowhere because the Justice Departmentrefused to turn over any records whatsoever. And Jack Brooks’s Committee, which isin our Congress, has already had some hearings and some of the testimony is fromJudge Bason and so forth. But again, the Justice Department is stonewalling it inrefusing to give documentation up. And, of course, my question is: Who’s incontrol, the Congress or the Justice Department? The thing is that the death ofDanny Casolaro has opened this to the fact that you’re seeing more and morequestions asking: What is this Inslaw case? And that in itself is going to open upmore questions into other things. See, if they open up the Inslaw case, it’s justgoing to be the tip of the iceberg, and they may find a lot of other thingsinvolved and interconnected. Perhaps Danny’s death is going to give more impetus tothe Brooks Committee. It’s certainly beginning to wake up the national media, whichreally slept on this thing. These things take time. Look how long it tookWatergate. And Iran/Contra really never got anywhere. SAMORI MARKSMAN: We want to let our listeners know that we are speaking with HarryMartin who is the publisher of the Napa Sentinel, and as you’ve been hearing, we’refocusing on a rather intriguing story– which involves some major players in the

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political affairs of this society–but which isn’t receiving the kind of attentionthat the issue deserves. We here at WBAI are attempting to do so today and we willcontinue to do so. ….. Paul, I want to ask Harry to go back to a point, which healluded to earlier. We had been talking about the breadth of this issue, that it’snot simply the disappearance of Danny, that there are many others who have beenkilled in similarly mysterious circumstances, although some perhaps lessmysteriously than others. Could you discuss that again for us, Harry Martin, andshow what was a common thread linking these various deaths? HARRY MARTIN: Well, much of the common thread is Danny Casolaro himself. We haveStandorf, who worked for a secret [government] communications division outside ofWashington [D.C.]. He was funneling documents to Danny at all times, and he wasfound beaten to death in his car at National Airport in Washington. And of course,Danny indicated that his sources had [since] dried up. Apparently, they had set upa thing in the Hilton Hotel, in room 900, in which they had high-speed equipment,and they were duplicating everything as quickly as possible to get them back in[returned to] the files. Then of course, we have Mr. Ng who was in Guatemala. He worked for the FinancialTimes of London. He was working on this case, but he was also working on theWackenhut Corporation and following a key witness to the murders of some CabazonIndians. And he was found shot to death in Guatemala. And then, of course, Michael Riconosciuto’s attorney–Eiselman, I think it is. Idon’t have my notes in front of me–from Philadelphia, was en route to pick upmaterial proving that Riconosciuto was, in fact, telling the truth. And he wasfound shot to death. All these things, with the exception of Standorf, were written off as suicides.And Michael May, who we wrote of as being tied into that, and who had hadcommunications with Casolaro…. and also, he was the man who supposedly filtered theforty million dollars to the Iranians as the down payment on the "OctoberSurprise"– we wrote about him on a Friday in June, and on a Wednesday in SanFrancisco he was found dead. They said it was a heart attack. Later on, the autopsyrevealed that it was polypharmaceuticals that were in his system, and it was not aheart attack. Michael Riconosciuto’s arrest, of course…. It would take me forever to explainthem all, but that gives you a synopsis of some of the things that have happened topeople associated with that particular case. PAUL DeRIENZO: Let’s concentrate on one of the more outrageous of these murders.And that, besides Casolaro’s death (many people, including Bill Hamilton call thata murder)…. HARRY MARTIN: We refer to them as deaths. We’re not taking the total line yet thatthey were murders PAUL DeRIENZO: There is conflict on these [deaths], but they are very suspicious.One actual murder that nobody will deny was that of Mr. Alvarez, the crusadingmember of the Cabazon Indians who opposed the…. HARRY MARTIN: Absolutely! And he was shot with two other people, execution style.Jimmy Hughes was a man who worked for Wackenhut and who was the bagman to bring themoney over [to pay for the contract murders of Fred Alvarez and company]. And hehas testified to the Riverside County [California] District Attorney’s office. Heis now in hiding in Guatemala, of course. That’s where Mr. Ng was down to see him.He also carried a lot of other information, which was extremely damaging. We wereable to talk to people who helped him escape, because he came up this way at first,and now he’s down in Guatemala. The Indian situation itself is its own scandal.

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Then there’s the Wackenhut Corporation, and you get into Inslaw…. Like I say, itsjust so wide you would need a massive computer just to do a chart. PAUL DeRIENZO: Can we focus now on Alvarez? Can you tell us that story? HARRY MARTIN: Alvarez was basically the head of the Cabazon Indians, and whenWackenhut and Dr. Brian and people came in to take over and create the gamblingparlors and to convert the Inslaw software and to manufacture chemical warfareweapons and so forth, he protested. He wanted control of the Indian tribe back. Andhe was summarily executed. The money came from the people who were running that,according to the testimony of Jimmy Hughes, which is on file with the State ofCalifornia in the Riverside County DAs office. Incidentally now, after all theseyears they have finally reopened that case in Riverside because of the publicityassociated with the Inslaw case. PAUL DeRIENZO: At first, there was a grand jury investigation and there were noindictments or suspects mentioned in that first investigation. HARRY MARTIN: And yet, Hughes testified to names, places, events, everything. PAUL DeRIENZO: Mr. John P. Nichols, who was at that time the head of the tribe andwho now is an advisor to the Cabazon Indians, said that the death of Mr. Alvarezand two non-Indian companions, who were found shot to death with him, had nothingto do with what’s going on in the Cabazon reservation. HARRY MARTIN: Yet, Jimmy Hughes has testified to the Riverside people that JohnNichols is the one who gave him the money to deliver to the hit-man in PalmSprings. Also, Mr. John Nichols was later on convicted for murder-for-hire and hissons are now technically running the tribe. PAUL DeRIENZO: He was actually convicted rather than charged? I heard he wasbrought up on charges. But he was actually convicted of that? HARRY MARTIN: Absolutely. PAUL DeRIENZO: But Mr. Nichols seems to have a tremendous amount of support. Fromwhat I understand, he’s getting a lot of support from liberal figures such as JamesAboureszk, the former senator from South Dakota. HARRY MARTIN: You have to understand, Mr. Nichols, by his own boasting and throughother publications, indicates that he was involved in the assassination of[democratically elected President of Chile, Salvador] Allende, and he was involvedin the attempted assassination of [Cuban Premier Fidel] Castro. His links as a CIAcontractor–his links with the Mafia are well documented with the State ofCalifornia. Therefore, obviously he’s going to get some support from groups thatare probably within that channel. SAMORI MARKSMAN: Harry Martin, we’d like to thank you very much for joining usagain here on WBAI. Any closing points that you would like to make? HARRY MARTIN: Well, just that Danny’s concept of an "Octopus"…. you can seeexactly what he was talking about. The tentacles went everywhere, and he seemed tobe on the verge of breaking a lot of that information. And then all of his records,everything disappeared. And he died. To say that a journalist would commit suicidewhen he’s on the verge of breaking a big story is ludicrous because anybody knowinga journalist knows that once they are on a drive, neither food nor anything elsematters but to get that story across. He was very close to it, and you don’t cashin the chips on the verge of winning the jackpot. SAMORI MARKSMAN: So true. Harry Martin, publisher of the Napa [California]

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Sentinel, thank you very much for joining us here on WBAI, non-commercial,listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio at 99.5 FM in New York.

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RADIO INTERVIEW WITH JAMES NORMAN

The following is a Radio Interview between James Norman formerly Senior Editor ofForbes Magazine and now with Media Bypass Magazine and Jim Quinn, DJ of WRRK 96.9FM in Pittsburgh.

Quinn's Interview with Jim Norman

QUINN: Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine, and currently writingfor Media Bypass Magazine after having uncovered Caspar Weinberger's Swiss bankaccount (we do get punished for some of the truths we uncover, do we not?). Jim ison the phone with us this morning. Good Morning, Jim.

NORMAN: Hi, how are you?

QUINN: Pretty good. I want to give people a chance to get an idea of what it is weare going to launch into after 8 o'clock, and I want to give some background intothis. Is it fair to say that since Iran-Contra that the government has sort of beeninvolved in the drug business?

NORMAN: Yes, it goes way back before then, actually. It goes back even to theVietnam War days -- remember the Golden Triangle, Laos, Cambodia and all that,Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it was always on a much smaller scale. Whatapparently happened was that in the 80s we got into it in a big way, basicallynationalizing the wholesale importation of drugs from Central and South America.The idea was that we control it somehow that way; instead, it has just become thetail wagging the dog, I think.

QUINN: It's become the funding source for just about anything that the governmentcovertly wants to do, and for the moneys that various elements of the governmentdon't want to ask the Congress for, nor do they want Congress to know about.

NORMAN: Right. And it's an arms business, too. They are kind of all tied uptogether.

QUINN: So it's arms and drugs?

NORMAN: Right.

QUINN: Kenneth Starr is currently our Whitewater prosecutor, and I have long saidon this show that I find Ken Starr interesting but also troubling in that there aremany elements to the Whitewater scandal. Part of the laments have to do withbanking and have to do with Madison Savings and Loan, check kiting, stuff that wenton with the Arkansas Development Financial Authority, but basically there arereally two elements -- there is Whitewater and then there is all the stuff withMena Airport, Iran-Contra, drugs into the country, various unexplained deaths, oneof them Vince Foster, the possibility of espionage on the part of the first lady,and all of this lies behind a brick wall that Mr. Starr has been positioned upon tomake sure that they get Clinton but that the fire doesn't burn past that wall;because on the other side of that wall are Republicans and Democrats. Am I right?

NORMAN: That's right. He is not looking at Mena; he doesn't have the authority tofrom Janet Reno. He does have authority to look at the Vince Foster death, but Ithink only inasmuch as it relates to the Whitewater situation. The whole thing ishemmed in and beyond that is this whole national security blanket that has beenthrown over big parts of this thing that you couldn't touch if you wanted to.

QUINN: It's interesting, I find, that Dr. Henry Lee, who was part of the defenseteam for the Simpson trial, has ended up working on the Vince Foster affair. The

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word that I get is that he is going to say it was indeed a suicide. You have toremember something about Dr. Henry Lee -- he was, oddly enough, the guy that wascalled in to do some work on the Danny Casolaro death down in Martinsburg, way backin the early nineties. Was it 1991?

NORMAN: I think it was 1991.

QUINN: This was that reporter that you may have heard about that was found dead ina motel room, supposedly from a self-inflicted wound, even though the papers (ayear's worth of investigative reporting) were all missing. He was working on thestory that he called the "octopus" and basically it's the same story that you areworking on, isn't it?

NORMAN: Yes, I know I'm talking to a lot of the same sources. Danny supposedlyslashed his wrists twelve times, sometimes deep enough to cut the tendon.

QUINN: Yeah, right. And his files were all missing. Sure, there's a suicide. Right.And they embalmed his body before they even had a chance to inform his parents thathe was dead. So it's another "Arkanside."

NORMAN: George Williamson, who is an investigative reporter out of San Francisco,has been working on that. He has come up with all kinds of stuff -- other witnessesthat have disappeared, people in the hotel who just aren't there anymore --disappeared mysteriously.

QUINN: It's interesting. There are a lot of people who are witnesses to variousdeaths involved with this Arkansas crowd, Danny Casolaro for one. Also, the twoyoung boys on the railroad tracks down in Arkansas who stumbled on the drugoperation. A lot of the witnesses around that have met violent and untimely deathsas well. So here are a great deal of ugly people involved in this. We are going toget down to what it all means in terms of government corruption and scandal ofimmense proportions that touch both parties. This is really nonpartisan. The factthat I don't happen to like "President Pantload" doesn't have a whole lot to dowith this; he was just sort of a guy who happened to be there with his hand out atthe time. It all goes back to the late 70's, right Jim?

NORMAN: Yeah, and even before that. Let's start with the early 80s when Bill Caseycame into office in the CIA under Ronald Reagan. That's when our government decidedto embark on this amazing and extremely unbelievably successful effort to spy onthe world's banks. We did it! We have been spying on world banking transactions formore than a dozen years. The way we do it is by basically forcing foreign banks,wittingly or unwittingly, to buy bugged software and bugged computers that let ourNSA (National Security Agency) which is the intelligence arm of the government, tobasically surveil wire transfers all over the globe.

QUINN: Let me ask you this. How do you sucker the rest of the banking communityaround the globe into buying the software that you are selling?

NORMAN: First of all you sell to front companies like this company Systematics inArkansas, now called Alltel Information Services. They had another company calledBoston Systematics, an affiliate based in Israel mainly. There is Robert Maxwell,the UK publisher, who is fronting this stuff. There are a whole bunch of peoplefronting this.

QUINN: Wait a minute, Robert Maxwell -- isn't he dead?

NORMAN: Yeah, he is now.

QUINN: Didn't he have an unfortunate accident?

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NORMAN: Fell off his yacht in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere.

QUINN: Why, isn't that amazing!

NORMAN: The tinkering of it was mainly putting back doors, just a few lines ofcode, that would allow somebody to dial into a computer without leaving anyfootprints, any audit trail that you were in there. Then you could go around andlook around in files or you could collect information from a system without theuser even knowing it.

QUINN: Now this software, which was originally called Promis, was stolen from acompany called Inslaw by the Justice Department. It ended up somewhere, probably atE-Systems or somewhere, and it was converted into banking software. It Started outas software designed to track prosecutorial cases around the country. My questionis -- why didn't Ed Meese just pay the damn bill, and none of this would ever havecome to light! Danny Casolaro was chasing the stolen software when he stumbled onwhat it was being used for.

NORMAN: Well, the trouble with it was that they bought it for use in the JusticeDepartment, but they were going to use it all over the place. If they were payingroyalties on it, Inslaw would know just how extensive the use was of the software,and they didn't want people to know how extensively it was going to be used.

QUINN: I see...

NORMAN: Plus, a lot of the profits from the resale of this went back into privateprofits. It was customized and resold to the intelligence community. It became sortof a basic platform database tracking system for most of our intelligence agenciesand many of those abroad. The idea was "Well, we can all talk to each other now."In fact what it has allowed us to do is basically rifle through other people's datafiles abroad too, because the stuff was apparently being sold to foreignintelligence agencies and it was also bugged. We have other ways of basicallysurveilling and downloading foreign electronic databases. The whole computer worldis much more porous and transparent than anybody wants you to believe.

QUINN: There is a bank here that I know that uses this software right here in thistown, and I'm sure that there is probably more than one. Everybody's got it.

NORMAN: In some form or another. It goes under different names now. It's beenmodified many times. I think when Inslaw had it, it was a half million lines ofcode. I'm told now it's a couple of million lines anyway. It's gone through many,many modifications over the years.

QUINN: This company, Systematics, which is I believe still 8% owned by JacksonStevens at Stevens Inc., who, by the way, is one of the backers of Bob Dole -- howtroubling is that?

NORMAN: He is the co-chairman of Dole's finance committee.

QUINN: That's right! Bob's in town -- Hi Bob -- You'd better explain this. You'dbetter explain Mena, too, Bob, or it's going to follow you to the White House.Systematics, I understand, had an attorney who was kind of off the record doingwork for them, named Vince Foster. Is that true?

NORMAN: Yep, that's true. We've heard that from many, many sources now. In fact,Jim Leach's committee has established that pretty well with some of theinvestigation that they have done. Foster was a trusted deal guy for Stevens at thelaw firm. Although Foster never shows up officially as an attorney of record forSystematics, he was definitely in the loop, basically smoothing out things betweenSystematics and the NSA, which was the main government agency that was contracting

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for a lot of this stuff.

QUINN: So this is how Foster got involved in intelligence, right.

NORMAN: Yes, because there is heavy duty code and computer technology stuffinvolved here. Apparently, some time in the early 80s he developed thisrelationship with the State of Israel. In fact, some of the same handlers I am toldwere involved in the Jonathan Pollard case. They basically nurtured him and groomedhim for many years and then bingo, they hit the jackpot -- he ended up in the WhiteHouse. Apparently he convinced Hillary to help him out on some stuff.

QUINN: So... what is Foster involved in? It's the mid 80s...

NORMAN: Mid 80s. Foster is at the Rose Law Firm. Think of him as a high-levelmarketing guy between Systematics and the NSA. NSA -- they have all these spookycontracts that they are trying to find contractors for. Foster would have been sortof a go-between there. Plus b was actually an attorney of record for Systematicsback in 1978 when Stevens tried to take over the Financial General Bank shares inWashington. Those bank holding companies later became First American - ClarkClifford, Robert Altman, all that crowd.

QUINN: Yeah, the BCCI thing.

NORMAN: Stevens was fronting for the BCCI crowd and trying to take over thisWashington Bank Holding Co. The SEC blocked him at the time, partly because one ofthe things he was insisting on was that this company Systematics, which at thattime was a tiny little thing in Arkansas, he was insisting that they be brought into do all of the data processing for this multistate bank holding company inWashington. Hillary represented Systematics in that. Now the thing aboutSystematics at the time -- it was before they even got involved with the bankspying stuff. Abroad for many years, they had been what amounted to a laundromatfor covert funds for the CIA and the intelligence community, quite legally,probably. It was done for the national interest. Somebody had to move this moneyaround and Systematics was in a perfect place to do it because they owned thecomputers and a whole bunch of small banks. They could move this money aroundelectronically without the bankers even knowing about it necessarily, and itwouldn't go through the normal clearing houses. The regulators wouldn't see it. Itwould just crop up wherever the CIA needed it in whatever bogus front companyaccount, and it was all just bits and bytes; it was a cyberbank -- it still is.

QUINN: I'm here with Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine. You know,it's interesting, here is a guy who was with Forbes Magazine, a respected senioreditor who figured probably this would be his life's work. All of a sudden, hefinds himself a defrocked commando journalist working for Media Bypass Magazine outof what? Evanston, Illinois, or somewhere in Indiana?

NORMAN: Indiana.

QUINN: Yeah, that's right. Now, I've got a question. Before we get into VinceFoster in the mid 80s and Hillary Clinton's role in this, how did you get onto thiswhole scandal? Where did you walk through the door on this?

NORMAN: I came in the back door completely. Look, I had no ax to grind here againstBill Clinton or the Administration. I hated covering politics. I thought it was allbaloney. I'm just a business writer, and I never wanted to get enmeshed in thiswhole Whitewater/Vince Foster thing, but it started -- for a couple of years I hadbeen following this oil company bankruptcy up in Stamford, Connecticut, because Ihad covered oil. This thing never made sense to me. There is no reason why thiscompany went bust and, in fact, when I actually got into it and started redoing theoil trading transactions, the reason they lost money: they weren't losing it. They

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were hiding it. They were parking it off shore with another company that wasfinancing arms sales to Iraq, cluster bombs and stuff like that all through the80s. And, this Chilean arms dealer, Cardone, who was providing weapons, was also,it turns out, brokering some of the sales of this stolen software. Okay, that getsme into the software story.

QUINN: So that gets you onto the Promis software, and you and Danny Casolaro arenow on the same road.

NORMAN: Right, and then in the process of that, I started talking to a whole bunchof rather spooky, strange intelligence community characters, and I was sitting at aguy's living room down in Kentucky one day. He was sitting there in the middle ofthe night blowing smoke rings, and he said, "Yo, by the way, Vince Foster, he wasunder investigation."

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WACKENHUT CORPORATION - Crash RecoverySnowbound, by John Cummings and Ernest Volkman, Penthouse,...

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