textfiles-politics/regexConsp/ins-rich.xml

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    SOFTWARE TO DIE FOR

   Inslaw Lawyer Elliot Richardson Talks About Murder and the CIA

     by

     James Ridgeway

    [from "MOVING TARGET" in the September 24, 1991
   issue of the "Village Voice:"]


  WASHINGTON--"It is far worse than Watergate," says Elliot
  Richardson, the former attorney general who stood up to President
  Richard Nixon during that Republican scandal.  "For Christ's sake,
  this October Surprise business we are talking about is [built from]
  truly horrible things ...  I don't know whether it's true or not.
  [But] there are a number of elements in the situation that are hard
  to account for."
 Convinced that freelance journalist Danny Casolaro, who claimed
  to have uncovered a sprawling conspiracy linking the October
  Surprise and the Iran-contra scandal to a contract dispute between
  the Justice Department and a software company named Inslaw, was
  murdered in a West Virginia hotel last month, Richardson has asked
  the Justice Department to open a federal investigation into his
  death.  But even though Richardson, who is Inslaw's attorney, has
  made both informal and direct personal pleas to acting attorney
  general William P. Barr for a full investigation, he has so far
  received no reply.
 And that's not the first time that Richardson has been ignored by
  the Justice Department.  Richardson wrote former attorney general
  Dick Thornberg in 1989 seeking an independent counsel in the Inslaw
  case;  Thornberg never replied.
 "I have never understood why ...  I mean, I was attorney
  general when Thornberg was a U.S. attorney.  I appointed him
  chairman of a committee of U.S. attorneys, newly formed for the
  first time.  I am a responsible former public official. I am not a
  wild-eyed nut."
 So why didn't Thornberg respond to Richardson's letter?
 "You tell me.  I would have responded to a responsible lawyer
  whether I ever met him or not."  When asked if he thought the lack
  of a reply was insulting, Richardson said, "Certainly.  Let's say
  it's not easily explained, OK?
 "The key thing about the death of Casolaro," Richardson
  continues, is that "although others were seeking to delineate . . .
  the `octopus' [Casolaro's term for the wide-ranging conspiracy], he
  was the only one who told people who have no reason to misrepresent
  what he said that he had hard evidence, and was on the point of
  getting conclusive evidence.  No one else made that claim. ...  He
  told four people, one at a time.  The idea that he committed suicide
  with a razor blade under these circumstances seems highly
  implausible."
 The investigation of Casolaro's death is still in the hands of
  the West Virginia authorities, who ruled it a likely suicide August
  14.  But it is already apparent that there is more than meets the
  eye to both the freelancer's "suicide" and the Inslaw case--and that
  sealing a 10-year-old cover-up isn't necessarily the only
  conceivable motive.
 "This is a case in which any one of a number of potential
  defendants would have every reason to commit murder," says
  Richardson, "and in which the litigants have every reason to fear
  for their lives."

  THE ORIGINS of the dispute over Inslaw, at least, are clearly
  understood.  A former analyst with the National Security Agency and
  onetime contract employee of the CIA (where he prepared analyses of
  the foreign press), Bill Hamilton founded Inslaw in the early 1970s
  with his wife, Nancy.  Inslaw was initially begun with grants from
  the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration;
  when Congress killed LEAA in 1980, the Hamiltons transformed Inslaw
  into a for-profit firm and continued to do business with Justice on
  a contract basis.  Today, they are business partners with IBM.
 By that time they had developed a software package called Promis
  that enabled law enforcement agencies to-keep up-to-the-minute tabs
  on cases as they wound their way through the courts.  It was
  designed for district attorneys in large cities, and had been
  installed on a pilot basis in two large U.S. attorneys' offices.
  With Promis, a U.S. attorney could sit before a computer screen and
  quickly find where any particular case stood, locate defendants and
  witnesses, track every motion, and even follow an ongoing
  investigation from its history down to the detective's most recent
  report.  As computers became smaller, increasing efficiency and
  speed, the Hamiltons modified Promis, adding new functions and
  making it speedier and more flexible.
 In 1982, Inslaw signed a $10 million contract to install Promis
  in U.S. attorney offices across the country.  At first Justice
  balked at paying fees for what it argued was public domain software
  that had been developed under LEAA grants, but on advice of its own
  counsel, the department ultimately agreed to pay for the
  proprietary, enhanced version of Promis--whenever it was used.
 Despite this agreement, the Justice Department's contracting
  officer steadfastly refused to pay Inslaw for the use of Promis, and
  by 1985 it had withheld nearly $2 million from the Hamiltons.  At
  that point Inslaw sought refuge in Chapter 11 bankruptcy and
  proceeded to sue Justice.  In January 1988 the Bankruptcy Court
  awarded Inslaw $6.8 million in damages plus counsel fees.  Justice
  appealed that ruling, but in November 1989 the federal district
  court for the District of Columbia upheld the Bankruptcy Court's
  findings.  Nevertheless, last spring the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled
  that the case had been tried in the wrong courts for the past
  several years, and must be retried;  Inslaw is appealing to the
  Supreme Court, and if that fails, the Hamiltons will file a new,
  expanded suit.
 While on this level the Inslaw affair appears to be a fairly
  typical contract dispute, in fact the case has been marked from the
  beginning with extraordinary behind-the-scenes politicking to wrest
  control of Promis from Inslaw.  First, the Justice Department
  refused to recognize Inslaw as the rightful owner of the software it
  had developed;  then the chair of Hadron Inc., a software outfit
  controlled by a friend of then-attorney general Edwin Meese, tried
  to buy the program from Inslaw.  When Hamilton refused, Hadron's
  chair told him, "We have ways of making you sell."
 Next, a venture capital firm, citing high-level Reagan
  administration connections, tried to inveigle the Hamiltons into
  signing over their voting rights on Inslaw stock.  When the Justice
  Department's refusal to pay fees forced the company into Chapter 11,
  Justice officials didn't let up.  They tried to force Inslaw into a
  Chapter 7 liquidation, which would have finished off the company
  completely.  And when that didn't work, Justice officials encouraged
  a Pennsylvania computer company to launch its own hostile takeover
  bid.
 Why such a fuss over computer software?  In its court filings
  Inslaw alleges it is a victim of a conspiracy by Meese and his
  friends, who stole Promis to make money.  Chief among Meese's
  cronies in the affair was Earl Brian, currently chair of embattled
  Infotech, Inc., which has large holdings in the bankrupt Financial
  News Network and United Press International--not to mention Hadron,
  the company that tried to buy Promis from Inslaw.
 A combat surgeon in Vietnam, Brian was appointed secretary of
  California's Department of Health and Welfare in 1970 by then-
  governor Ronald Reagan.  When Reagan moved to the White House--with
  Meese as his counsel--Brian served as the unpaid chair of a task
  force on health care cost reduction;  Brian also served along with
  Meese as a member of a "pro-competition" committee in the White
  House.  Edwin Thomas, another longtime Meese associate who had
  worked for Meese at the University of San Diego Law School and a
  member of Reagan's California cabinet, joined them on the Reagan
  transition team in 1980.  The relationships between these three
  Californians first created a stir when Meese went before the Senate
  to be confirmed as attorney general in 1984.
 An investigation by an independent counsel revealed a suspicious
  series of events.  Early in 1981, Thomas lent Mrs. Ursula Meese
  $15,000;  at the time, Thomas was working directly for Meese as
  assistant counsel to the president.  Before he made the loan, Thomas
  discussed Brian's Infotech (then operating under the name of Biotech
  Capital Corp.) with Mrs.  Meese, and despite the fact that the
  Meeses were hard up for cash, she promptly took the money Thomas had
  loaned her and bought Biotech shares for her two children.  Meese,
  who knew about the loan, did not report it on his financial
  disclosure forms.
 Then, in July 1981, Brian loaned Thomas $100,000.  In addition,
  Thomas made calls to the Small Business Administration on behalf of
  a loan application from a Biotech subsidiary;  the SBA eventually
  granted the loan.  No wrongdoing was ever adjudged in any of this.
 In its court briefs, Inslaw cites the assertions of various
  Justice officials connecting Meese, Brian, and Hadron, Inc., with
  the harassment of the Hamiltons' company.  One whistleblower even
  called a senator to warn that, once Meese was made attorney general,
  he would award a friend with a "massive sweetheart contract" to
  install Promis in every litigation office of the Justice Department.
  After Meese was named AG, the chief investigator of the Senate
  Judiciary Committee, Ronald LeGrand, called Hamilton to pass on a
  warning.  He said that an unnamed senior official at Justice--whom
  LeGrand had known for years and trusted--had told LeGrand that the
  Inslaw case was "a lot dirtier for the Department of Justice than
  Watergate was, both in its breadth and its depth."
 Up to this point, the Inslaw case still appears to be little more
  than a contract dispute with overtones of political corruption.  But
  it doesn't stop there.  As it turns out, there is considerable
  reason to suspect that while Promis may have been meant as a plum
  for one of Meese's cronies, it may also have played a role in an
  international espionage operation conducted by the CIA.  And that's
  where the case really begins to get interesting.

  ACCORDING TO THE HAMILTONS, a high government official, nearly
  speechless in his disgust, dropped by to tell them he had discovered
  that the theft of Promis had actually begun with the military.  The
  British and U.S. navies needed a software program to conduct their
  zone defense against Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic,
  according to their informant.  All Soviet subs leave from the same
  base near the Arctic circle, where they are easily detected, and
  have to run a gauntlet of listening devices in the deep waters
  between Iceland and Ireland before they break out into the open
  ocean.  With the help of painstakingly accurate maps of the
  seafloor, the Russians have long been able to run through the
  intricate twists and turns of the deep marine trenches near Iceland
  at such speeds that they are usually able to lose their trackers.
  American and British subs needed a computer program that would allow
  them to follow every move of a Soviet sub and project its course and
  position;  they tried everything available, but no software could
  follow all the variables quickly enough.  Out of curiosity, they ran
  a test with Promis--and it worked.  So they simply appropriated the
  program.
 That, according to the Hamiltons' source, is how the theft got
  started.  But there is actually much more evidence to support
  another theory of how and why the government started playing games
  with Promis.
 Several different former intelligence agents have told the
  Hamiltons about various foreign countries that suddenly started
  using versions of Promis in the mid-1980s, ranging from Iraq to
  South Korea.  These governments could use the program not only to
  track criminals but for complex covert operations and to identify
  "undesirables"--like revolutionaries.  They suggest that the CIA
  obtained copies of the Promis software from the Justice Department
  and sold it to various police and intelligence agencies overseas;
  once installed, Promis actually became a high-tech bug, storing
  secrets of the unsuspecting host government, including intimate
  details of its internal police operations and intelligence service.
  American agencies could then penetrate and read the software.
 "It was highly adaptable to tracking information of the kind that
  intelligence agencies like to track," Richardson says, "and the CIA
  adapted it to that purpose.  Then, relying on Earl Brian, [they]
  started peddling it to foreign intelligence agencies."
 The Hamiltons got the barest inkling of the intelligence
  implications for the first time last year.  On November 5 their
  daughter Patty, who is a regional sales manager for Inslaw, got a
  call from the Department of Communications in the Canadian federal
  government.  They told her that Promis was widely used in Canada--it
  had been installed in 900 different locations--and he wondered
  whether she would help fill out a questionnaire about using the
  software in both English and French.
 This was all news to Patty, since Inslaw had never sold Promis to
  anyone in Canada.  Playing dumb, the Hamiltons filled out the
  questionnaire.  Then, on a business trip to Montreal in January,
  Patty dropped in on the Department of Communications for a chat.
  She asked the officials about the questionnaire and where Promis was
  being used.  The Canadians checked their codes and told her it was
  on line with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and with an agency
  they did not know.
 Then Patty made an unannounced visit to the responsible official
  at Mountie HQ, who promptly denied all knowledge of Promis, and
  dismissed the Department of Communications as a bunch of "kooks."
  When Patty returned to Washington, Bill Hamilton tried to, find out
  where the Canadians had gotten Promis, but suddenly everything had
  changed:  The Department of Communications begged forgiveness for
  their error, saying it wasn't the Mounties at all but the
  international development office that was using Promis.  When
  Hamilton told them the software had never been sold to anybody in
  Canada, they backtracked, apologized once again, and said that, in
  fact, no one was using it.
 That's when Michael J. Riconosciuto, a researcher and self-
  described arms expert, came forward.  Riconosciuto had first called
  Inslaw out of the blue in the spring of 1990, and he has continued
  to do so from pay phones around the West.  He claimed to have worked
  as research director for a joint venture between the Wackenhut
  Corporation, the big security outfit, and the Cabazon Indians, who
  have a reservation at Indio, California.  The joint venture
  supposedly manufactured military material, such things as night-
  vision goggles, machine guns, fuel air explosives, and biological
  and chemical weapons for foreign governments, including those in the
  Middle East and Central America, and for covert operations of one
  sort or another.  The contras were to be a prime market.  The
  Cabazon tribe enjoyed quasi-sovereign status, allowing the arms
  manufacturers to operate outside stringent restrictions on the
  manufacture of armaments in the rest of the United States.  As an
  added sweetener, the Indians could take advantage of minority set-
  aside contracts.
 Riconosciuto claims, in an affidavit given to Inslaw, to have
  made modifications on Promis software provided him by Earl Brian for
  both the Canadian Mounties and the Canadian Security and
  Intelligence Service.  Brian, he says, was the man who had sold the
  software to the Canadians.  Riconosciuto is currently in prison in
  Washington state awaiting trial on drug charges, and his statement
  would be of dubious value--except that many of the details do check
  out independently.  For one thing, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a
  series of articles on the Cabazon Indians last week that seemed to
  bear out the claims about weapons manufacturing on the reservation.

  BY THIS TIME the Hamiltons were pretty sure Promis had been pirated
  abroad, and they began to hear stories of Promis cropping up in all
  sorts of foreign countries.  Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli
  intelligence asset, provided an affidavit that says that in December
  1982 Rafael Eitan, the Israeli government's counterterrorism
  adviser, told him he had obtained Promis from Earl Brian and Robert
  McFarlane, then Reagan's national security adviser.  In 1987 Ben-
  Menashe said he was at a meeting in Israel where Brian said he owned
  Promis.  Ben-Menashe said he had been assigned to stop a sale of
  chemical weapons by Chilean arms dealer Carlos Cardoen to Iraq.
  "Mr. Carlos Cardoen ... stated to me that he brokered a deal
  between Dr. Brian and a representative of Iraqi ... military
  intelligence for the use of Promis," he recalled.
 Richard Babayan, an Iranian arms dealer, said in an affidavit
  that during 1987 he met a member of Iraqi intelligence who told him
  Iraq had acquired Promis from Brian on the recommendation of the
  Libyan government.  He went on to say he was told by an official of
  the Korea Development Corporation, which he said was a front for the
  Korean CIA that Brian had sold Promis to the Koreans as well.
 The Hamiltons also continue to get tips about Promis popping up
  all over the United States.  Although it formally denies using the
  program, high Justice Department officials have told the Hamiltons
  that FBI officials had admitted the software in their field offices
  is a renamed version of Promis.
 The possibility of Promis being employed as an espionage tool is
  given further credence by the curiously disinterested attitude of
  government in getting to the bottom of the Inslaw mess.  Inslaw
  itself has been unable to obtain subpoena power from the courts
  except for a brief period last spring, but those subpoenas were
  frustrated when the Appeals court threw out the case just as the
  deadline for Justice to turn over the documents approached.  Senator
  Sam Nunn's Senate Permanent Investigations subcommittee conducted an
  investigation, but received little cooperation from Justice.
 Texas congressman Jack Brooks's judiciary committee has been
  looking into the affair for the last two years, but only issued
  subpoenas last July.  Brooks is believed to have interviewed Meese
  and his friends.  According to the Hamiltons, the files of the
  Justice Department's chief litigating attorney on the case have
  disappeared.

  UNLIKE THE MURKY October Surprise scandal or the compromised
  congressional investigations into Iran-contra, the facts in the
  Inslaw case are clear.  Emerging from a low-level bankruptcy court,
  they paint a virtually indisputable case of corporate theft,
  political corruption, and the very real possibility of international
  espionage.  The issue goes straight to the White House and involves
  officials at the highest levels of the Justice Department in what
  appears to be a deliberate campaign of intimidation, theft, and
  corruption.  By now, that ought to have led to a serious
  congressional investigation.
 Unlike Iran-contra, no one in this case has pleaded national
  security as a defense, though that's likely before it's over.  But
  in a sense, it is already too late for that.  The facts are too
  well-delineated.  If the opinions of two judges are correct, this
  case ought to result in criminal indictments of past and present
  Justice officials.
 As Elliot Richardson says, "Why in the world would this one group
  of informers ever have come together and cooked up all this stuff?
  How did they keep it consistent from day to day among themselves as
  to who told what to whom?  There is a hell of a load of stuff
  they've told to various people, including staffers, journalists, the
  Hamiltons, me.  The picture they paint is relatively coherent and
  consistent ... and then you add the stonewalling by the Department
  of Justice.  I have never understood why."

--
      daveus rattus

    yer friendly neighborhood ratman

   KOYAANISQATSI

  ko.yan.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
  in turmoil.  3. life out of balance.  4. life disintegrating.
  5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.

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