WireTap

by Joel Bleifuss, In These Times, Sept. 18-24, 1991 issue

As CIA Director-designate Robert Gates pleads ignorance to knowledge of CIA misdeeds before the Senate Intelligence Committee this week, the lawmakers might do well to remember his sworn testimony of March 6, 1986. At the time, CIA Director William Casey had nominated Gates for the number-two position at the agency. In an effort to impress the senators considering his nomination, Gates said: “[Casey] and I have consulted extensively, even in my present position [as deputy director for intelligence] in all areas of intelligence policy including not just analysis and estimates but also organization, budgeting and covert action. I will now have a formal role in all of these areas.”

If Gates really had “a formal role in all of these areas” –which appears likely–he certainly knows more than he has let on. And someone should ask Gates what he knows about the Wackenhut Corporation of Coral Gables, Fla. As the Wackenhut letterhead puts in, the company provides “security systems and services throughout the world.” As Wackenhut’s Director of Special Investigations Service Wayne Black told the “Washington Times”‘ Deanna Hoagin earlier this year: “We are similar to a private FBI.” The company’s board of directors reads like a who’s who of the intelligence community. In 1984, for example, former Deputy CIA Director Bobby Inman, currently one of Gates’ main boosters in Washington, was a director of the company.

And among those on the 1983 board were two former FBI special agents, one retired Air Force general, one former commander in chief of the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), one former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, former CIA Director William Rabor, Nixon-appointed FBI Director Clarence Kelley and former CIA Deputy Director Frank Carlucci (who would later become Ronald Reagan’s national security adviser [former Managing Director of The Carlyle Group too]). Further, the 1983 board included Robert Chasen, a former FBI special agent who was Carter’s commissioner of customs until 1980, when he became a vice president of Wackenhut. Also in 1980, soon-to-be CIA chief William Casey served as Wackenhut’s outside legal counsel–the same year he managed the Reagan-Bush election campaign.

ON THE RESERVATION: It was in 1980 that Wackenhut began working closely with Southern California’s Cabazon Indians and their tribal administrator John Philip Nichols. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Jonathan Littman reported this month that Nichols, a white American who spent years in South America, has boasted to friends about working on the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro and the successful assassination of Salvador Allende.

The Cabazons hired Nichols as their administrator in 1978. Littman reports that thanks to Nichols’ connections and grantsmanship, “federal and state agencies are helping to finance nearly $250 million worth of projects on the 1,700-acre reservation” belonging to the 30-member Cabazon tribe. According to Littman, these projects include a HUD and mafia-financed casino, a 1,800-unit housing complex and a $150 million waste incinerator/power plant that was built with tax-exempt state bonds.

But most intriguing is the Wackenhut/Cabazon joint venture, which began in 1980 when the tribe was asked to design a security system for Crown Prince Fahd’s palace in Tiaf, Saudi Arabia. This was followed by Wackenhut/Cabazon joint venture proposals to develop biological weapons for the Pentagon and assemble night-vision goggles for the Guatemalan and Jordanian governments.

Why was a security firm so interested in working with a small tribe of native Americans? One good reason can be found in a May 26, 1981, inter-office memo from Wackenhut executive Robert Frye to the above-mentioned Robert Chasen. Frye described an 11-day business trip with Nichols “to explore the apparent potential for the Cabazon-Wackenhut joint venture.” Frye wrote that the reservation has “several key ingredients necessary” for a weapons plant, including “lack of opposition by adjacent governing bodies and ‘irate citizens’ over the siting of such a facility.”

John Philip Nichols is no longer officially running the reservation. According to Littman, son Mark Nichols [later fired, daughter Alexis now on board] is the tribal administrator while the elder Nichols serves as a “mental-health counselor to Cabazon reservation employees.” John Philip Nichols [d. 2001] lost his job because federal law prohibits convicted felons from running casinos.

In January, 1985, Nichols was sentenced to four years in prison for capital solicitation of murder. He served 19 months. No one was killed in that murder-for-hire scheme. However, in 1981, Alfred Alvarez, a Cabazon Indian tribal vice president, and two non-Indians were murdered execution style. Alvarez’s sister Linda Streeter Dukic says her brother and his friends died because they were about to expose mismanagement on the Cabazon reservation. Mike Kataoka of the Palm Springs “Press-Enterprise” reports that in 1985, when Nichols was arrested for hiring the hitman, the U.S. Justice Department was investigating his possible involvement in those 1981 deaths. No charges were ever filed.

ANOTHER MURDER? The Cabazon/Wackenhut connection was of particular interest to Danny Casolaro, the Washington-based journalist who was found dead in the Martinsburg, W. Va., Sheraton on August 10 (see “The First Stone,” Sept. 4 [an earlier post in this on-line series, archives not online]). Casolaro’s friends, family and professional associates fear he was murdered–and that the crime was related to his investigations into a series of corporate and governmental scandals.

Casolaro’s brother, Anthony, told the Washington-based “Corporate Crime Reporter,” “Danny was trying to track monies Wackenhut spent and what Danny found was that [Wackenhut] had ear-marked a half million dollars for what they call ‘research.’”

Anthony Casolaro said that the money “ties in Wackenhut with this Indian reservation and organized crime and CIA guys . . . Those same people showed up with Inslaw and one of them shows up in the October Surprise.”

The “October Surprise” was the alleged campaign deal between Iran and the 1980 Reagan campaign to delay the release of the U.S. hostages held in Tehran (see “In These Times,” June 24, 1987, Oct. 12, 1988 and April 27, 1991).

“Inslaw was Inslaw Inc. of Washington D.C.–a firm that has brought suit in federal court, charging that the Reagan Justice Department stole the company’s Promis case-management software program. Two judges have thus far ruled in the company’s favor. The suit is still in the courts (see “In These Times,” May 29, 1991 ["Software Pirates," an earlier on-line post in this series]).

Earlier this year, Inslaw further alleged that the Justice Department turned the stolen software over to Earl Brian, a friend of both former President Ronald Reagan and former Attorney General Edwin Meese. Inslaw charges that the software was a payback for Brian’s help in arranging the October Surprise. Former Israeli intelligence agent Ari Ben-Menashe alleges that Brian–now the head of United Press International–was directly involved in arranging the 1980 deal. Ben-Menashe claims that Brian “worked very closely” on the deal with Robert Gates, who was then a top CIA official.

NO JUSTICE: Wackenhut is also linked to the Inslaw scandal. Michael Riconosciuto–a weapons-systems designer and software specialist–was director of research for the Wackenhut/Cabazon joint venture in the early ’80s. In a March 1991 affidavit for the Inslaw case, Riconosciuto claimed that “in connection with [Riconosciuto's] work for Wackenhut,” he modified the stolen Promis software for foreign sales. “Earl W. Brian made [the software program] available to me through Wackenhut after acquiring it from Peter Videnieks, who was then a Department of Justice contracting official with responsibility for the Promis software.”

Videnieks, a former Customs Service official under Commissioner Chasen, served in the Justice Department from 1981 through 1990. In his affidavit, Riconosciuto said Videnieks had threatened to retaliate against Riconosciuto if he cooperated with a House Judiciary Committee probe of the Inslaw case. Seven days after filing the affidavit (which was not, technically, part of the committee investigation), Riconosciuto was arrested on drug-selling charges. He is now in a Seattle jail awaiting trial.

PRIVATE SPIES – The 1980s were a decade of privatization. As a for-profit intelligence service, Wackenhut appears to have taken on the kind of work that in earlier years the FBI and CIA would have done (and still do), albeit illegally.

On the environmental-crime front, Wackenhut is now the object of an investigation by the House Interior Committee. Early in 1990, the Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., a consortium of seven oil companies that run the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, hired Wackenhut to spy on environmentalists, whistleblowers and other oil company critics. Wackenhut tactics included setting up a phoney environmental organization and having agents pose as reporters. It is alleged in press reports that the company also monitored Rep. George Miller (D-CA) whose house subcommittee has been investigating environmental crimes allegedly committed by the consortium which is composed of British Petroleum, Exxon, ARCO, Phillips, Unocal, Mobil and Amerada Hess.

One of the Federal government’s most secret computer programs is now connected to several local murders. The Riverside County Sheriff’s Cold Case Squad is on the case — and so is KESQ.

KESQ: A chilling email written by a Riverside County Sheriff’s Detective highlights the danger of linking a 1981 triple murder with the deaths of six people in 2005.

Did the Justice Dept. Deliberately Bankrupt INSLAW?
By Maggie Mahar
March 21, 1988, Barron’s

“A VERY strange thing happened at the Department of Justice…”

What that very strange thing was was described in clear and exhaustive detail in Judge George Bason‘s blistering ruling before a packed Washington, D.C., courtroom last September. In a quiet voice, Bason, a 56-year-old federal bankruptcy judge with a reputation for being meticulous in his judicial approach, told the astonishing story of INSLAW vs. the United States of America.

In his ruling on the case, Bason explained how “through trickery, deceit and fraud,” the U.S. Department of Justice “took, converted, stole” software belonging to INSLAW, a Washington-based computer software firm. In 1982, INSLAW signed a $10 million contract to install its case-tracking software, PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) in the Justice Department’s offices. But instead of honoring the contract, Bason asserts, Justice officials proceeded to purposefully drive the small software company into bankruptcy, and then tried to push it into liquidation, engaging in an “outrageous, deceitful, fraudulent game of cat and mouse, demonstrating contempt for both the law and any principle of fair dealing.”

Ultimately, the series of “willful, wanton and deceitful acts” led to a cover up. Bason called statements by top Justice Department officials “ludicrous … incredible … and totally unbelievable.”

Some of the evidence against the department came from one of its own. During the course of the litigation, Anthony Pasciuto, deputy director of the department’s Executive Office for United States Trustees, met secretly with INSLAW’S president, William Hamilton. At that breakfast meeting at the Mayflower hotel, Anthony Pasciuto told Hamilton and his wife, Nancy, how the Justice Department had pressured Trustee officers to liquidate their company. Later, a superior confirmed Pasciuto’s story. But at the trial, a horrified Pasciuto listened while his superior changed his testimony. Close to tears, he, too, recanted.

Judge Bason believed Pasciuto’s original testimony however. On Feb. 2, 1988, he ordered Justice to pay INSLAW about $6.8 million in licensing fees and roughly another $1 million in legal fees. Bason wasn’t sure whether he could assess a department of the U.S. government with punitive damages. If so, damages could run as high as $25 million. Bason struggled with that legal question and finally postponed the decision to a later date.

Now, no one knows how Judge Bason would have ruled on the question of damages. In November, Judge Bason rejected a Department of Justice motion to liquidate INSLAW. A scant one month later, the Harvard Law School graduate and former law professor discovered that he was not being reappointed. The decision to replace him followed from a recommendation made by a four-man merit selection panel appointed by the chief circuit judge, Patricia Wald, a former Justice Department employee. The panel was headed up by District Judge Norma Johnson, another former Justice Department lawyer.

Judge Bason stepped down in February. He was replaced by S. Martin Teel Jr., 42, one of the Justice Department lawyers who had unsuccessfully argued the INSLAW case before Bason. Even jaded, case-hardened Washington attorneys called the action “shocking” and “eerie.”

INSLAW’S case will be assigned to another judge for disposition of damages. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is appealing Judge Bason’s initial $8 million award to U.S. District Court. And, last week, the Internal Revenue Service descended on the Hamiltons, demanding that the bankrupt company pay $600,000 in back taxes– immediately.

“I restrained the IRS from going after the Hamiltons personally–just a few days before I left the bench,” Bason recalls. “But that restraining order lasts only 10 days. I don’t know what’s happening now.”

“It seemed as if the controversy was winding down,” observes INSLAW’S former attorney, Leigh Ratiner. “It would follow a natural course in the press, and then fade from view.” Inslaw would become another shocking event that slinks off into obscurity: Someone occasionally might dimly remember and idly ask, “What ever did happen to Bill Hamilton and those INSLAW people? A real shame … I heard the judge was back teaching law somewhere….”

But at the end of last week Anthony Pasciuto instructed his lawyer to write a letter to Deputy Attorney General Arnold Burns. Pasciuto has decided to tell the full story that he began telling at the Mayflower last spring. And, in an interview with “Barron’s” at the end of the week, Pasciuto explained how the Justice Department black-listed INSLAW. It was a tale that involved two U.S. trustees, a federal judge who told two versions of the same story, and a Justice Department that routinely refused to pay certain suppliers: “If you’re on the bad list, you go in this drawer,” another Justice Department employee explained to Pasciuto.

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[Ed.:- I've embedded some informative links along the way in this, as well as made a few typographical corrections. Some of the links are to news stories, documents, images, video, etc., updating certain sections of this manuscript, as well as adding relevant tags which were not included in the original. Also, some text in square brackets are additions I've added. - April, 2010]

by Carol Marshall / Cheri Seymour
from Lycaeum Website

The following condensed version of The Last Circle was provided in October 1996 to a secret Investigative Committee comprised of Congress people, lawyers and former POW’s at their request. I originally contacted Congresswoman Maxine Waters in Washington D.C. and offered information relative to CIA drug trafficking, but was told the information was too complex and would I mind putting the information into a newspaper story, get it published and send it to her office?

I agreed and contacted a local newspaper reporter who, after reading portions of the material, decided it needed to be reviewed by individuals who had special knowledge of CIA drug trafficking, arms shipments, and biological warfare weapons.

After a brief meeting with these individuals, former Special Forces soldiers from the Vietnam era, they asked for copies of the manuscript, guaranteed an immediate congressional inquiry, and advised me NOT to place the information on the Internet as they feared the information could be, in their words, “taken as just another anti-government conspiracy.”

I condensed the manuscript into the attached treatise, covering information relative to THEIR focus, and sent it to them along with key documents. Shortly afterward, they re-contacted me and set up elaborate security measures to insure my safety. As of this writing, I’ve had no need to institute those measures.

I have in my possession five boxes of documents, obtained from a convicted methamphetamine chemist whose closest friends were a 20-year CIA operative and a former FBI Senior-Agent-in-Charge of the Los Angeles and Washington D.C. bureaus. The labyrinthine involvements of these people and their corporate partners is revealed in this manuscript, along with information obtained by Washington D.C. journalist Danny Casolaro prior to his death in 1991.

A great deal of investigation still needs to be accomplished. I have neither the financial means nor the ability to obtain “evidence” for “prosecution.” I am simply an investigative writer, placing this information into the public forum in hopes that someone, somewhere, will grasp the significance of the data and initiate a full-scale investigation with subsequent subpoena power.

With subpoena power, government agents can testify (some kept anonymous in this manuscript) who would otherwise lose their jobs and retirement if they came forward. Witnesses can be protected and/or provided immunity, and financial transactions of government and underworld figures can be scrutinized.

To date, I have not had more than one hour conversation with anyone associated with any Congressional investigation, and therefore am extremely limited in my ability to present the information I have. Much of what I learned during my five-year investigation cannot at this point be inserted into a manuscript. I must be assured the information and witnesses will be handled appropriately.

I personally do not believe the Department of Justice will ultimately “prosecute” this or any other drug trafficking case if it involves government officials. But I have made the effort to put forth enough information to generate interest and show good faith. I hope it will be of some value to the American public.

Please keep in mind as you read the attached pages that the complex corporate structures and technological projects described herein “may” have been nothing more than an elaborate smoke and mirrors cover for narcotics trafficking.

This aspect of my investigation was corroborated by several government investigators, one of whom was a House Judiciary investigator, who spent three years investigating the Inslaw stolen software case and said in response to my findings:

“There’s some great information here. You did a very good investigative job, I have to commend you on that. I realize it’s only a fraction of everything you have. What you have done, you have put the pieces of the whole thing together. Little bits and pieces of things that I have known about, that I had theorized about, you have found answers to those specific questions.” (See Chapter 13 for entire conversation). That investigator is now in the White House Office of Drug Control Policy.

To those interested, nearly everything noted in the attached manuscript is supported by documents or tape recorded interviews. Some are extremely bulky and not quoted extensively in the manuscript, such as lengthy FBI wire tap summaries.

I wish to thank Garby Leon, formerly Director of Development at Joel Silver Productions, Warner Bros. in Burbank, California for tirelessly prompting me to get a first draft of The Last Circle written in 1994 and helping me with countless tasks during our joint investigation of the death of Danny Casolaro.

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by John Connolly
SPY Magazine – Sept 1992 – Volume 6

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

WRONG.

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by John Connolly, Spy Magazine, 01/01/1993

IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER 12:30 IN THE afternoon of August 10, 1991, and Barbara Bittinger, the assistant head housekeeper of the Sheraton Inn in Martinsburg, West Virginia, had just sat down with a cheeseburger when one of the girls from the laundry room burst in and told her that one of the chambermaids was calling from upstairs and saying somebody had better get over to Room 517, there was blood. Bittinger, who had been with the hotel for seven years, went to the room and hesitantly pushed open the bathroom door. Though she surmised that something must be terribly wrong, she was still unprepared for the ghastly scene. ‘There was blood everywhere,” she recalls. Because the door opened against the bathtub, and because the shower curtain was partially closed, Bittinger couldn’t see into the tub, but she did see a half-full, open wine bottle near the toilet, and a broken glass and an ashtray on the edge of the tub. Then, as she slowly withdrew, she looked through the crack between the door jamb and the door into the bathtub, and saw two white knees sticking up. Startled, she pulled back, but not before she saw something else, something that still puzzles her today. Under the sink, lying more or less flat, were two bloody towels. “It looked like someone tried to wipe up the blood on the floor and slid the towels under the sink,” said Bittinger, who was only interviewed by police briefly the day the body was found and never by any journalists before speaking to SPY. “It looked like someone” – not the maid, Bittinger tells us – “threw the towels on the floor and tried to wipe the blood up with their foot, but they didn’t get the blood, they just smeared the floor.

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Elliot L. Richardson, a Washington lawyer, was Attorney General in the Nixon Administration.

By Elliot L. Richardson; NYTimes, Published: October 21, 1991

As a former Federal prosecutor, Massachusetts attorney general and U.S. Attorney General, I don’t have to be told that the appointment of a special prosecutor is justified only in exceptional circumstances. Why, then, do I believe it should be done in the case of Inslaw Inc., a small Washington-based software company? Let me explain.

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Gideon’s Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad by Gordon Thomas

Chapter 10
[excerpts, pages 203-219]

In 1967, communications expert William Hamilton returned to the United States from Vietnam, where he had devised a network of electronic listening posts to monitor the Vietcong as its forces moved through the jungle. Hamilton was offered a job with the National Security Agency. His first task had been to create a computerized Vietnamese-English dictionary that proved to be a powerful aid to translating Vietcong messages and interrogating prisoners.

It was an era when the revolution in electronic communications- satellite technology and microcircuitry-was changing the face of intelligence gathering: faster and more secure encryption and better imagery were coming online at increasing speed. Computers grew smaller and faster; more sophisticated sensors were able to separate thousands of conversations; photographic spectrum analysis lifted from millions of dots only the ones that were of interest; microchips made it possible to hear a whisper a hundred yards away; infrared lenses let one see in the black of night.

The fiber-optic sinews of a new society had contributed to operational intelligence: to amass and correlate data on a scale far beyond human capability offered a powerful tool in searching for a pattern and a modus operandi in terrorist actions. Work had started on the computer-driven Facial-Analysis Comparison and Elimination System (FACES) that would revolutionize the system of identifying a person from photographs. Based on forty-nine characteristics, each categorized on a 1 to 4 scale, FACES could make 15 million binary yes/no decisions in a second. Interlinked computers did simultaneous searches to eventually make a staggering 40 million binary decisions a second. Computers themselves had begun to reduce in size but retained a memory that contained the equivalent information of a five-hundred-page reference book.

Still working for the NSA, Hamilton saw an opening in this ever-expanding market; he would create a software program to interface with data banks in other computer systems. Its application in in- telligence work would mean that the owner of the program would be able to interdict most other systems without, their users’ being aware. A patriotic man, Hamilton intended his first client for the system would be the United States government.

Just as NASA had given the country an unassailable lead in space technology, so William Hamilton was confident he would do the same for the U.S. intelligence community. Encouraged by the NSA, the inventor worked sixteen-hour days, seven days a week. Obsessive and secretive, he was the quintessential researcher; the NSA was full of them.

After three years, Hamilton was close to producing the ultimate surveillance tool — a program that could track the movements of literally untold numbers of people in any part of the world. President Reagan’s warning to terrorists, “You can run, but you can’t hide,” was about to come true.

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