The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

PROMIS

In 1982 a Washington DC software firm, Inslaw, developed a programme called PROMIS (Prosecutors’ Management Information System) for the US Justice Department. The unique feature of PROMIS was that it could collate information from different criminal databases without the information being reentered. An unseemly dispute between Inslaw and the Justice Department soon occurred as to who controlled the rights to PROMIS. The Justice Department halted all payments and Inslaw went bankrupt.

After a tenacious campaign by Bill Hamilton, Inslaw’s boss, a bankruptcy court concluded in 1987 that the Justice Department “took, converted and stole PROMIS software through trickery, fraud and deceit”.

Why, people wondered, had the Justice Department been so desperate for the PROMIS software that it was prepared to steal it? According to some American conspiracy researchers, the men behind the theft of PROMIS software were the same Reagan stooges behind the alleged 1980 “October Surprise”, whereby the Republicans did a deal with the Iranians not to release the 52 American Embassy hostages from Tehran until Reagan was ensconced in the White House. Afterwards, the software was touted to foreign intelligence agencies across the globe; not only did the exported PROMIS software garner revenue for secret CIA operations unauthorized by Congress, the software had been re-engineered to contain a “back door” that allowed the CIA to spy on its foreign users. Naturally, the Justice Department was keen to keep the lid on its creative improvement of PROMIS, and that was why it could not allow Inslaw to claim the rights.

Among the researchers on the PROMIS trail was Danny Casolaro, who believed the PROMIS theft was connected to the activities of a transnational cabal he called the Octopus. On 10 August 199 °Casolaro was found dead in room 517 of the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The official verdict was suicide, but former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, hired by Inslaw to investigate the case, said: “It’s hard to come up with any reason for Casolaro’s death other than he was deliberately murdered because he was so close to uncovering sinister elements in… the Octopus.” However, Casalaro’s notes on the Octopus, discovered after his death, turned out to be a far-fetched, fact-free, alternative history of post-war America a la the Gemstone File, in which the tentacles of the Octopus included the Mafia, Colonel Oliver D. North and the CIA.

It became tempting to dismiss Casolaro’s allegations as more Walter Mitty imaginings—except that he was more likely “suicided” than a suicide. He had slashed both wrists 12 times (once so deeply that he cut a tendon, making it virtually impossible to continue holding the razorblade), his suicide note was implausible, his briefcase was missing, and he had warned his brother the previous week: “If anything happens to me, don’t believe it was accidental.” Casolaro’s housekeeper confirmed the journalist had been receiving threatening phone calls.

During his investigation into PROMIS/the Octopus, he had been meeting with a gallery of unsavoury people. The character who provided most of Casolaro’s leads was Michael Riconoscuito, a self-professed intelligence operative who doubled as a self-professed science genius (indeed, Riconoscuito claimed to be the inventor of the “back door” on the PROMIS software). Casolaro’s other “Deep Throat” was Robert Booth Nichols. According to various sources, both Riconoscuito and Nichols worked for, or on behalf of, a private security firm called the Wackenhut Corporation, which used the semi-autonomous status of the Cabazon Indian Reservation in California to obviate laws on the manufacturing and selling of guns. The Wackenhut Corporation sometimes did “off-the- books” sales jobs for the CIA.

In his notebooks Casolaro christened Nichols “Extreme Danger Man”. Accurately enough. In addition to whatever it was he was doing down in Cabazon, Nichols was a drug trafficker with ties to the Mafia and its Japanese counterpart, the Yakuza. And Casolaro, according to Spy journalist John Connolly, had coincidentally discovered that Nichols had once offered to be an informer for the FBI. In Connolly’s words, “If John Gotti, for example, had ever found out what Danny Casolaro had found out, Nichols would be a dead man.”

To paraphrase Elliot Richardson, it is hard to come up with any reason for Casolaro’s death other than that he was deliberately murdered because he was so close to uncovering sinister elements in the PROMIS deception.

Or rogue arms sales.

Or he needed to be silenced by Nichols.

Casolaro, clearly, was on to something down in the badlands.

Conspiracy researcher Danny Casolaro was silenced to stop his investigation into the theft of PROMIS software: ALERT LEVEL 6

Further Reading

Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, The Giant Book of Conspiracies, 1998

Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, first published in its complete form as an appendix to The Anti-Christ is Near at Hand by Russian writer Sergei Nilus in 1897, is an instruction manual by which a cabal of anonymous but powerful Jews set out the secret means to rule the Christian world.

Among the chief points of the Protocols are:

The Protocol mission “will remain invisible until the moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning can any longer undermine it”. (Protocol I)

“We shall create an intensified centralization of government.” (Protocol V)

“We shall saddle and bridle it [the press] with a tight curb.” (Protocol XII)

“In order that the goyim themselves may not guess what they are about, we further distract them with amusements, games, pastimes, passions…” (Protocol XIII)

“It will be undesirable for us that there should exist any other religion than ours… We must therefore sweep away all other form of belief.” (Protocol XIV)

The impact of the Protocols was immediate. They became a sensation in Russia, and after that the world. So taken was industrialist Henry Ford by the book that he printed sections in his Dearborn Independent, stating that the Protocols “have fitted the world situation up to this time”. He also used them to influence the US Senate against joining the League of Nations. He might have done well to ponder his own maxim: History is Bunk. The Protocols were a massive hoax and forgery.

The first to debunk the Protocols was Lucien Wolf, whose The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1920) proved that sections of the document had been lifted, with only cosmetic changes, from the 1855 satire Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavelli (“Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli”) by the French lawyer Maurice Joly, who in turn was heavily influenced by Eugene Sue’s popular conspiracy novel The Mysteries of Paris (1843). Another important source for the Protocols was the 1868 novel Biarritz by Sir John Retcliffe (aka the German spy Hermann Goedsche), which included a chapter describing how a fictitious rabbinical cadre met in a cemetery at midnight every century to further the work of Jewish domination… oh, my.

So who was the forger who stitched the various sources together to make up the Protocols? Probably one Matvei Golovinski, an agent for the Russian Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. By whipping up a scare about revolutionaries in the pay of Jews seeking to bring down the Tsar, the Okhrana intended to justify the regime’s reactionary measures. The Protocols worked just fine: the 1905–06 pogroms against the Jews ensued. Just over a decade later, the “truth” of the Jewish plan outlined in the Protocols seemed confirmed by the 1917 Russian Revolution, some of whose leaders happened to be Jews.

In the febrile minds of far-right Europe, the Protocols now became indisputably