The Promis Threat: An Octopus Slouches Toward Mena, Arkansas, Area 51, and the International UFO Congress in Las Vegas

Article Provided by Steamshovel Press (http://www.steamshovel.press)

By Kenn Thomas

The first version of the Promis software—the software that figured prominently in events leading to the suspicious death of writer Danny Casolaro in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991一had a simple purpose: to track criminals in prosecutors, offices throughout the country. With the press of a button Promis provided district attorneys with up-to-the minute case histories. Inslaw, the company owned by St. Louisans Bill and Nancy Hamilton, originally began developing the software using taxpayer money as part of the Justice Department’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in the late 1970s. When the Reagan White House nixed the LEEA in 1980, Inslaw became a for-profit corporation and continued modifying Promis as computer technology evolved. Inslaw signed a contract with the Justice Department in 1982 to supply the software exclusively to all U.S. attorney’s offices. The contract was worth $10 million.

The Justice Department never paid and in 1985 Inslaw filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and began a lawsuit. In 1988 Inslaw was awarded $7 million in damages. That settlement was upheld by the federal court but the U.S. Court of Appeals ordered it retried and Inslaw appealed to the Supreme Court. During these legal gyrations a software concern owned by Ed Brian, a friend of then attorney general Ed Meese, made a very hostile buy-out offer to Inslaw. The last legal action on this case came in the middle of October when Attorney General William Barr refused to authorize a special prosecutor to investigate the Inslaw allegations. Bill and Nancy Hamilton are no doubt studying further appeals.

The Promis modifications, of course, are what should concern the defenders of civil liberties. Even before it fell into the hands of the Justice Department, it had been shanghaied by the Navy to track and extrapolate Arctic Soviet submarine launches, which it reportedly did with extraordinary accuracy. Michael Riconosciuto, now in a Tacoma prison on drug charges and a key Casolaro informant, reports equipping Promis with a back door access, so the U.S. could spy on the police agencies to whom it illegally sold the software. The possible use of Promis in tracking political dissidents has been pointed out by Ben Price in the new IllumiNet book, The Gemstone File. It’s not difficult to imagine other applications.

According to JFK assassination lecturer Bob Harris, Jack Ruby’s closest contacts with the Dallas police were in the Criminal Intelligence Division, a division of the Dallas Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, versions of which exist in every city and perforcely one must wonder what kind of software drives their work. (Harris’ lecture notes are available for $8 from him at Box 4-18, 522 2nd Street, New York, NY 11215) The LEIU collects information on private citizens and gives it to Military Intelligence and the Domestic Con¬tacts division of the CIA. Details of how the Los An¬geles police’s version, the OCIU, spied upon and harassed private citizens, can be found in the recent LA Secret Police Files: Inside the LAPD Elite Spy Net¬work by Mike Rothmiller and Ivan G. Goldman ($5.99, Pocket Books). The celebrity status of these citizens, of course, is what made the book worthy in this instance.

Another connection between Casolaro and the JFK assassination concerns the Banca del Lavoro, a state- owned Italian bank that apparently the writer was investigating as part of the BCCI tentacle in his Octopus research. According to Sherman Skolnick, a researcher in Chicago, the Banca del Lavoro financed the training of an assassination team in Mexico, some of whom wound up in Dealey Plaza on November 22,1963. At present, Attorney General Barr is considering the appointment of a special prosecutor in a case involving $5 billion dollars in loans to Saddam Hussein made by the Atlanta branch of Banca del Lavoro prior to the Gulf War, the so-called Iraqgate scandal. The Banca del Lavoro is indeed mentioned in the Torbitt Document, “Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal” by William Torbitt, which has circulated among Kennedy researchers for twenty years, as is Ross Perot. That the Torbitt Document may have originated in the of¬fice of Lloyd Bentsen, now named by Bill Clinton as treasury secretary, as well as Bentsen’s connection to Defense Industrial Security Command~culprits in the assassination according to the Torbitt Document一 should leave the reader a long pause to ruminate over the connections spanning the years.

Back to Michael Riconosciuto: perhaps UFO Magazine editor Don Ecker summed up Riconosciuto’s credibility best when he told Steamshovel, “If he told me the sun came up in the morning and set in the evening, I’d double check it.’，Last issue, Steamshovel Press reported on Riconosciuto’s claim that a feud be-tween intelligence factions, one headed by MJ-12 of Roswell saucer crash fame, had led to Casolaro’s revelations. These claims were supported by Gunther Russbacher, the pilot who also claims to have video proof that he flew George Bush to a Paris October Surprise meeting.

Ecker notes in the latest issue of UFO Magazine (Vol.8, No.1,1993) that Riconosciuto also claimed to have witnessed an ET autopsy with Robert Booth Nichols, another ominous figure in the Inslaw milieu. To be sure, everything Michael Riconosciuto says is meant to curry favor, to get money or to bring his story to someone in the entertainment industry who can turn it into a movie or a book deal. Nevertheless, Riconosciuto’s claims about the modifications of the Promis software were supported by affidavits from Is¬rael intelligence asset Ari Ben-Menasche (who offers more details of his own in a new book, Profits of Wart published by Sheridan Square) and Iranian arms dealer Richard Babayan, both of whom came across pirated copies of Promis through Earl Brian and his friend, Reagan national security advisor Robert McFarland.

Riconosciuto is also one of the few and earliest sources for word on the airstrip in Mena, Arkansas used as a hub for the Iran/contra drugs and guns traffic, the investigation of which then-governor Bill Clin¬ton soft-pedaled to the extent that he squelched it. Ac¬cording to the Village Voice, Riconosciuto claims association with Terry K. Reed, a self-proclaimed CIA asset who trained contra pilots at Mena (“Clinton and the Smuggler’s Airport,” by Frank Snepp, Village Voice, April14,1992). Reed’s airplane, so goes the story, was stolen when he refused to give it to the Company’s “Operation Donation”, which was represented by John Cathey, aka Ollie North. Legal entanglements to recover the loss of the plane put Reed at odds with “Buddy” Young, Clinton’s security chief. Reed’s other associations include the downed contra pilot Eugene Hassenfus and JFK assassination veteran Felix Rodriguez.

Riconosciuto tells of a connection between the Arkansas Development Funding Authority (ADFA), from which Clinton fired contra player Larry Nichols一 whose subsequent lawsuit led to the Gennifer Flowers revelations一”and Park-on-Meter (POM), a company in Little Rock that made fuel tanks and helped develop chemical weapons at Mena. Riconosciuto’s revelations supplement the small but growing amount of informa¬tion about Mena, perhaps best summarized in the lat¬est issue of Paul Krassner’s newsletter, The Realist (“Clinton’s Cocaine Connection” by Mark Giacomelli, The Realist Number 122, Winter 1993). It appears that the strip was used as a major center for guns and drug smuggling since the early 1980s, most notably by a trafficker named Barry Seal, to the extent that Bill Clinton claims to have authorized the use of $25,000 in state funds to investigate and prosecute charges stemming from the activity there. The prosecuting attorney in the area claims the money never came. Other critics charge that even if it had, the amount is a drop in the bucket compared to what a full-blown investigation would have cost. Clinton’s reactions to George Bush’s Christmas pardons for Caspar Wein¬berger and other Iran-contra figures were limited to laments over Weinberger’s lying to Congress. Clinton remained silent about the underlying policy issues, which many in the press identify only as the Reagan arms-for-hostages deal. As the Mena story emerges as an important one during the Clinton administration this identification perforcely will expand to include the role of drug trafficking in üie nefarious Iran-contra affair.

Meanwhile, the Inslaw case lingers and spooks are doing untold things with the data collected through Promis. One such spook group, Wackenhut, was involved with both the Promis modifications and the contra resupply effort in tandem with the native American Cabazons in Indio, California, according to Riconosciuto. By 1966 Wackenhut had over four mil¬lion files on dissident Americans collected at the direction of founder, George Wackenhut (see: “Inside The Shadow CIA” by John Connolly, Spy Magazine, Vol¬ume 6, September 1992). George Wackenhut was a former FBI agent who apparently patterned his world view after J. Edgar Hoover’s collecting and storing information on as many people as possible. He founded and developed his private security firm through a legal loophole in the law preventing such groups from working for the government. As such, Wackenhut remains a private police force that in many ways stands outside the slim boundaries of responsibility ostensibly foisted upon the alphabet soup of government intelligence (CIA, FBI, DIA, ONI, etc., the agencies to which all top Wackenhut administrators belonged). It maintains private jails and contracts to take over police services, including surveillance. Don Ecker also notes that the oil consortium Aleyska hired Wackenhut to perform a variety of phone tapping and intercepts to disrupt a team of environment whistleblowers.

Wackenhut has contracted to provide security services to Area 51,the site outside of the Nellis Air Force base in Nevada that has almost become a Mecca for UFO watchers. Sightings of unidentified flying objects are commonplace at Area 51,as are sightings of advanced conventional aircraft, stories of a nearby underground base manned by humans and aliens and rumors that a space shuttle launches from there on regular flights to bases on the moon. Reports have it that Wackenhut personnel have harassed sky watchers, chasing them by the van-load, physically threatening them at gunpoint and confiscating camera equipment. Indeed, Wackenhut played a role in covering up an illegal takeover of 89,000 acres from families near Area 51 in 1986-87 that eventually led to a secret congressional investigation.

At the invitation of Bob Brown, organizer of the annual International UFO Congress in Las Vegas, Steamshovel editor Kenn Thomas traveled to Las Vegas to speak on the UFO work of Wilhelm Reich. After the lecture he took the three hour trip into the desert with a group of UFO watchers that included researchers Rob Baldwin, Shawn Atlanti, Susan Low, German video documentary producer Michael Hesse- man (whose documentary on crop circles, “The Mystery of Crop Circles From Another World”，won an EBE award at the Congress) and as many as a half dozen others, along with a video crew from television station KTNV Channel13 consisting of reporter Steve Crupi and cameraman Clay Downey.

As the sun went down, in a period from 6PM to 9:45PM, the group witnessed four unusual aerial displays. Some in the group speculated that one of these sightings might have been a truck-mounted, diversionary spotlight used by Wackenhut personnel to taunt ufologists. One of the other sightings was identified by Sean Morton, author of The Millenium Factor, who caught up with group at the Little A’le’Inn diner later in the evening, as an exotic SDI flare. (Morton witnessed it from a vantage point in Warm Springs, sixty miles away. Morton and Ms group, the Delphi Associates, have done a great deal of field work in Area 51.

An interview with Morton will appear in the Saucer Section of the next SteamshoveL His book, The Millenium Factor, is available for $20 from the Delphi Associates, 2207 Hermosa Avenue, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.) The two remaining light-in-the-sky events that night remain unidentified.

In the discussion on the trip through the desert and at the Little A’le’Inn afterwards, many participants described incidents of harassment at the hands of Wackenhut personnel. One major common concern involved the youth of many rank-and-file Wackenhut recruits: teenagers dangerously armed and indoctrinated to believe they belong to an elite guard (“Wacken-offs,” one observer quipped.) Signs now adorn the area announcing the authorized use of legal force by Wackenhut.

Wackenhut’s presence as dirty-trick specialists was also felt when Robert Lazar defected from his work at Area 51 and began confessing to back-engineering captured alien spacecraft for die government to television reporter George Knapp. Similarly, Steam¬shovel Press’ attempts to obtain a copy of KTNV’s broadcast of the videotaped UFOs and interviews with members of the group met with an official stonewall. Reporter Crupi advised that a tape would routinely be made available through Channel 13’s Shoshona video service. Shoshona said that the news division told it not to release that particular report. When contacted a second time, Crupi provided a weak explanation: station management did not want the footage falling into the hands of a competing station. Was this more Wackenhut spin control?

A tape of the broadcast, a camera transfer made from a TV set in the hotel room of a UFO Congress participant~did eventually circulate in the ufological underground. ‘‘Bootlegged” information artifacts such as this are perhaps the best defense against the threat of a surveillance tool like Promis. It is surprising, in fact, that hackers have not yet reproduced a copy of Promis for study somewhere in cyberspace.

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