PROMISBy Michael C. RuppertUS journalist Mike Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who now runs a website that seeks to expose CIA covert operations, said he met with RCMP investigator McDade on Aug. 3 in L.A. Ruppert said the RCMP officer was anxious to see documents he received three years ago from a shadowy Green Beret named Bill Tyre [sic] detailing the sale of rigged PROMIS software to Canada. — The Toronto Star, September 4, 2000.
Only the legends of Excalibur, the sword of invincible power, and the Holy Grail, the chalice from which Christ took his wine at the Last Supper begin to approach the mysterious aura that has evolved in the world of secret intelligence around a computer software program named PROMIS. Created in the 1970s by former National Security Agency (NSA) programmer and engineer Bill Hamilton, now President of Washington, DC’s Inslaw Corporation, PROMIS (Prosecutor’s Management Information System) crossed a threshold in the evolution of computer programming. Working from either huge mainframe computer systems or smaller networks powered by the progenitors of today’s PCs, PROMIS, from its first “test drive” a quarter-century ago, was able to do one thing that no other program had ever been able to do. It was able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or databases simultaneously, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating system or platforms on which that database was then currently installed. [Note: This applied only when PROMIS had actually been physically installed on computer systems.]
In the mid 1970s, at least as far as computer programs were concerned, the “universal translator” of Star Trek had become a reality. And the realm of Star Trek is exactly where most of the major media would have the general public place the PROMIS story in their worldviews. But given the fact that the government of Canada has just spent millions of dollars investigating whether or not a special version of PROMIS, equipped with a so-called “back door” has compromised its national security, one must concede that perhaps the myths surrounding PROMIS and what has happened to it need to be re-evaluated. Myths, by definition, cannot be solved, but facts can be understood and integrated. Only a very few people realize how big the PROMIS story really is.
It is difficult to relegate PROMIS to the world of myth and fantasy when so many tangible things, like the recently acknowledged RCMP investigation, make it real. Canadians are not known for being wildly emotional types given to sprees. And one must also include the previous findings of congressional oversight committees and no less than six obvious dead bodies ranging from investigative journalist Danny Casolaro in 1991, to a government employee named Alan Standorf, to British publisher and lifelong Israeli agent Robert Maxwell also in 1991, to retired Army CID investigator Bill McCoy in 1997, to a father and son named Abernathy in a small northern California town named Hercules. The fact that commercial versions of PROMIS are now available for sale directly from Inslaw belies the fact that some major papers and news organizations instantly and laughably use the epithet “conspiracy theorist” to stigmatize anyone who discusses it. Fear may be the major obstacle or ingredient in the myth surrounding modified and “enhanced” versions of PROMIS that keeps researchers from fully pursuing leads rising in its wake. I was validated in this theory on September 23rd in a conversation with FTW Contributing Editor Peter Dale Scott, PhD, a professor emeritus at UC Berkeley and noted author. Scott, upon hearing of the details of my involvement, frankly told me that PROMIS frightened him. Casolaro, who was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, had Scott’s name (Scott is also a Canadian) in a list of people to contact about his PROMIS findings. He never got that far.
A close examination of the PROMIS saga actually leads to more than a dozen deaths that may well be why so many people avoid it. And many of those deaths share in common a pattern where, within 48 hours of death, bodies are cremated, residences are sanitized, and all files disappear. This was certainly the case with my friend Bill McCoy, a legendary retired army CID investigator who was also the principal investigator for Hamilton in his quest to recover what may be hundreds of millions in lost royalties and to reunite him with the evolved progeny of his brainchild. Those progeny now have names like SMART (Self Managing Artificial Reasoning Technology) and TECH. I will never forget hearing of McCoy’s death and his immediate cremation.
In researching this story I found a starkly recurring theme. It appeared first in a recent statement I tape-recorded from probably one of the three best-informed open sources on the story in the world, William Tyree. I also came across the same theme, almost verbatim, in a research paper that I discovered while following leads from other sources.
The information from Tyree, recorded in a phone conversation on August 28, 2000 and the research work on “block-modeling” social research theory uncovered while researching other leads both describe the same unique position or vantage point from hypothetical and actual perspectives. Tyree described an actual physical point in space, further out than ever thought possible and now used by US satellites. This distance is made possible by PROMIS progeny so evolved that they make the original software look primitive. The social research, which included pioneering mathematical work — apparently facilitating the creation of artificial intelligence — postulated that a similar remote hypothetical position would eliminate randomness from all human activity. Everything would be visible in terms of measurable and predictable patterns — the ultimate big picture. Just one of the key websites where I found this information is located at [original link archived here].
One of FTW’s guiding principles is our incessant drive to separate that which is important from that which is merely true.
What would you do if you possessed software that could think, understand every major language in the world, that provided peepholes into everyone else’s computer “dressing rooms,” that could insert data into computers without people’s knowledge, that could fill in blanks beyond human reasoning, and also predict what people would do — before they did it? You would probably use it wouldn’t you? But PROMIS is not a virus. It has to be installed as a program on the computer systems that you want to penetrate. Being as uniquely powerful as it is, this is usually not a problem. Once its power and advantages are demonstrated, most corporations, banks, or nations are eager to be a part of the “exclusive” club that has it. And, as is becoming increasingly confirmed by sources connected to this story, especially in the worldwide banking system, not having PROMIS — by whatever name it is offered — can exclude you from participating in the ever more complex world of money transfers and money laundering. As an example, look at any of the symbols on the back of your ATM card. Picture your bank refusing to accept the software that made it possible to transfer funds from LA to St. Louis, or from St. Louis to Rome.
The other thing to remember is that where mathematics has proved that every human being on Earth is connected to every other by only six degrees of separation, in covert operations the number shrinks to around three. In the PROMIS story it often shrinks to two. It really is a small world.
The first rip-off Reagan confidant and overseer for domestic affairs from 1981 to 1985, Ed Meese loved PROMIS software. According to lawsuits and appeals filed by Hamilton, as well as the records of congressional hearings, the FBI, and dozens of news stories, the legend of PROMIS began in 1981_82. After a series of demonstrations showing how well PROMIS could integrate the computers of dozens of US attorneys’ offices around the country, the Department of Justice (DoJ) ordered an application of the software under a tightly controlled and limited license. From there, however, Meese, along with cronies D. Lowell Jensen and Earl Brian allegedly engaged in a conspiracy to steal the software, modify it to include a “trap door” that would allow those who knew of it to access the program in other computers, and then sell it overseas to foreign intelligence agencies. Hamilton began to smell a rat when agencies from other countries, like Canada, started asking him for support services in French when he had never made sales to Canada.
The PROMIS-managed data could be anything from financial records of banking institutions to compilations of various records used to track the movement of terrorists. That made the program a natural for Israel that, according to Hamilton and many other sources, was one of the first countries to acquire the bootlegged software from Meese and company. As voluminously described by Inslaw attorney, the late Elliot Richardson, the Israeli Mossad under the direction of Rafi Eitan, allegedly modified the software yet again and sold it throughout the Middle East. It was Eitan, the legendary Mossad captor of Adolph Eichmann, according to Hamilton, who had masqueraded as an Israeli prosecutor to enter Inslaw’s DC offices years earlier and obtain a firsthand demonstration of what PROMIS could do.
Not too many Arab nations would trust a friendly Mossad agent selling computer programs. So the Mossad provided their modified PROMIS to flamboyant British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, a World War II Jewish resistance fighter who had assumed the Anglo name and British citizenship after the war. It was Maxwell, capable of traveling the world and with enormous marketing resources, who became the sales agent for PROMIS and then sold it to, among others, the Canadian government. Maxwell drowned mysteriously in late 1991, not long after investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was “suicided” in West Virginia. Maxwell may not have been the only one to send PROMIS north.
In the meantime, after winning some successes, including a resounding congressional finding that he had been cheated, Bill Hamilton hit his own buzz saw in a series of moves by the Reagan and Bush Justice Departments and rigged court decisions intended to bankrupt him and force him out of business. He survived and fought on. In the meantime hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties and sales fees were going into the wrong pockets. And, as was later revealed from a number of directions, this initial tampering with the software was far from the only game in town. Both the CIA, through GE Aerospace in Herndon Virginia (GAO Contract #82F624620), the FBI, and elements of the NSA were tinkering with PROMIS, not just to modify it with a trap door, but to enhance it with artificial intelligence or AI. It’s worth noting that GE Aerospace was subsequently purchased by Martin-Marietta that then merged to become Lockheed-Martin the largest defense and aerospace contractor in the world…
Confidential documents obtained by FTW indicate that much of the AI development was done at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia Labs using research from other US universities, including Harvard, Cal-Tech, and the University of California. And it was not just Reagan Republicans who got their hands on it either. As we’ll see shortly, PROMIS came to life years before the election of Ronald Reagan. It was also, according to Bill Tyree, an essential element in the espionage conducted by Jonathan Pollard against not only the US government but the Washington embassies of many nations targeted by Israel’s Mossad.
The Last Circle
For more than a year and half, members of the National Security Section of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have been traveling through the US, often in the company of a savvy female homicide detective named Sue Todd from the small California town of Hercules. Even now questions linger as to what the Canadians were really after. But there is absolutely no question that while surreptitiously in the US the Mounties spent more time with author and investigative reporter Cheri Seymour than with anyone else. And for good reason.
Seymour, under the pen name of Carol Marshall is the author of a meticulously researched e-book entitled The Last Circle, available at http://lycaeum.org/books/books/last_circle/
Our fact-checker at FTW has found the book to be meticulously researched and documented, an opinion shared by Bill Hamilton and the RCMP, who have also told me of its precision.
I first met Cheri in person this spring after she had contacted me via the Internet. I traveled to her home, some three hours outside of Los Angeles and viewed acres of documentation for a saga that started with drug-related murders and police corruption around methamphetamine production in northern California in the 1980s. That investigation later connected to politicians like Tony Coelho and major corporations like MCA and eventually led to a shadowy scientist named Michael Riconosciuto. Familiar names like Ted Gunderson and relatively unknown names like Robert Booth Nichols weave throughout this detailed epic that takes us to the Cabazon Indian Reservation in the California Desert and into the deepest recesses of the 1980s Reagan/Bush security apparatus.
Gunderson, a retired FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) from Los Angeles, and Nichols, a mysterious Los Angeles man, exposed through court documents obtained by Seymour as being a career CIA operative, connected with scientist/ programmer Riconosciuto in a sinister, yet now very well-documented phase of PROMIS’s development. In affidavits Riconosciuto claimed that one of the tasks he performed at the Cabazon reservation was to install a back door in the version of PROMIS that was sold to Canada. In August of this year the RCMP investigators told both Seymour and me that they had traveled to the reservation several times and had confirmed many details of Seymour’s research. They had also interviewed Riconosciuto on more than one occasion. As with everyone else I have ever met who has spoken with him, both the Mounties and Seymour kept a reserved distance from him and always “counted their fingers after every handshake.”
The Last Circle describes in detail how PROMIS software was modified by Riconosciuto to allegedly include the back door “eavesdropping” capability but also enhanced with one form of AI and subsequently applied to the development of new weapons systems including “ethnospecific” biowarfare compounds capable of attacking specific races. Riconosciuto, now serving time in a federal prison in Pennsylvania has a cell a very short distance from fellow espionage inmates Edwin Wilson and Jonathan Pollard. While his tale is critical to understanding what has happened to PROMIS, the fact remains that Riconosciuto has been out of the loop and in legal trouble for eight years. He has been in a maximum-security prison for at least six. What was surprising was that in 1998 he contacted homicide detective Sue Todd in Hercules and told her that the murder of a father and son, execution style, was connected to the PROMIS story. One connection was obvious. Hercules is a “company town” connected to a weapons manufacturer described in Seymour’s book that also connects to the Cabazon Indian Reservation.
The three Bills
I lived in Washington, DC from August 1994 until late October of 1995. It was during that time that I was a semi-regular visitor at the Fairfax, Virginia, home of Bill McCoy, a loveable 60-something giant, always adorned with a beret who complained ruthlessly about what had happened to the United States since “The Damned Yankee Army” had taken over. Writers were “scribblers.” People who thought they knew something about covert operations without ever having seen one were “spooky-groupies.” “Mac,” as we called him, had his investigative fingers in almost everything, but he was most involved with PROMIS. McCoy was a retired chief warrant officer from the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. He had broken some of the biggest cases in army history. It was Mac who first introduced me to both Bill Tyree and to Bill Hamilton in 1994. I recall scratching my head as I would be sitting at Mac’s dinner table when a call would come in from Hamilton asking if there was any new information from Tyree. “Not yet,” McCoy would answer, “I’ll call as soon as I get something.”
“How,” I asked, “could a guy in a maximum security prison like Walpole State Penitentiary in Massachusetts be getting information of such quality that someone like Hamilton would be calling urgently to see what had come in?” “That,” answered McCoy was the work of someone known only as “The Sergeant Major,” and alternately as “His Eminence” who fed the information to Tyree, who in turn fed it to McCoy, who then passed it on to Hamilton. Sometimes however, Tyree and Hamilton communicated directly. To this day the identity of the Sergeant Major remains a mystery and the puzzle piece most pursued by the RCMP when they visited me in August 2000.
It was also not by coincidence then that, in the same winter of 1994_95, McCoy revealed to me that he was using former Green Berets to conduct physical surveillance of the Washington, DC offices of Microsoft in connection with the PROMIS case. FTW has, within the last month, received information indicating that piracy of Microsoft products at the GE Aerospace Herndon facility were likely tied to larger objectives, possibly the total compromise of any Windows-based product. It is not by chance that most of the military and all of the intelligence agencies in the US now operate on UNIX or Macintosh systems.
In late 1996 Tyree mailed me a detailed set of diagrams and a lengthy narrative explaining the exact hows and whys of the murder of Danny Casolaro and an overall view of the PROMIS saga that is not only consistent with what is described by Seymour in The Last Circle but also provides many new details. Those documents, as later described to me by RCMP Investigator Sean McDade, proved to be “Awesome and right on the money.”
The essence of those documents was that, not only had the Republicans under Meese exploited the software, but that the Democrats had also seen its potential and moved years earlier. Nowhere was this connection more clearly exposed than in understanding the relationship between three classmates from the US Naval Academy: Jimmy Carter, Stansfield Turner (Carter’s CIA director), and billionaire banker and Presidential kingmaker (Carter’s Annapolis roommate), Arkansas’ Jackson Stephens. The Tyree diagrams laid out in detail how PROMIS, after improvement with AI, had allegedly been mated with the software of Jackson Stephens’ firm Systematics (now Axciom). In the late 70s and early 80s, Systematics handled some 60_70 percent of all electronic banking transactions in the US. The goal, according to the diagrams that laid out (subsequently verified) relationships between Stephens, Worthen Bank, the Lippo Group, and the drug/intelligence bank BCCI, was to penetrate every banking system in the world. This “cabal” could then use PROMIS both to predict and to influence the movement of financial markets worldwide. Stephens, truly bipartisan in his approach to profits, has been a lifelong supporter of George Bush, and he was, at the same time, the source of the $3-million loan that rescued a faltering Clinton Campaign in early 1992. There is a great photograph of Stephens with a younger George W. Bush in the excellent BCCI history, False Profits.
In the fall of 1997, Bill McCoy, having recently gone off his heart medication was found dead in his favorite chair. In the days and weeks before, he had been advised by Tyree that a Pakistani hit man, on an Israeli contract, had been in the states seeking to fulfill a hit on McCoy. There had been other hints that someone closer to McCoy might do the job. Tyree recently told FTW that just before his death, he had given McCoy information on Elbit flash memory chips, allegedly designed at Kir Yat-Gat south of Tel Aviv. The unique feature of the Elbit chips was that they worked on ambient electricity in a computer. In other words, they worked when the computer was turned off. When combined with another newly developed chip, the Petrie, which was capable of storing up to six months worth of key strokes, it was now possible to burst transmit all of a computer’s activity in the middle of the night to a nearby receiver — say in a passing truck or even a low-flying SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) satellite. According to Tyree this was the methodology used by Jonathan Pollard and the Israeli Mossad to compromise many foreign embassies in Washington.
Within 48 hours of his death Bill McCoy had been cremated and in less than four days, all of Mac’s furniture, records, and personal belongings had been removed from his home by his son, a full colonel in the army. The house had been sanitized and repainted, and aside from the Zen garden in the back yard, there was no trace that McCoy had ever lived there.
Harvard and HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development)
Former Assistant Secretary of Housing, Catherine Austin Fitts has had about as much ink in FTW as anyone else.
One of the empires Fitts threatened was that of the Harvard Endowment. The Harvard Endowment is not really a benevolent university fund but an aggressive investment predator with $19 billion in assets, some from HUD-subsidized housing. Harvard also has a number of other investments in high-tech defense operations and had a big hand in investing George W. Bush’s lackluster firm Harken Energy. “W” has a Harvard MBA. Fitts’ chief nemesis at Harvard, Herbert “Pug” Winokur, head of Capricorn Investments, and member of the board of the Harvard Endowment is also a PhD mathematician from Harvard where the mathematical breakthroughs that gave rise to artificial intelligence using block-modeling research were discovered. In the 60s Winokur had done social science research for the Department of Defense on causes of inner city unrest in the wake of the 1967 Detroit riots.
The pioneering research at Harvard that allegedly gave rise to the artificial intelligence installed in PROMIS later moved north. According to a Harvard website, “Much of the effort of the Harvard group — no longer based solely at Harvard — was centered on the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) at Toronto...”* Things grew more suspicious as Fitts’ research disclosed that Winokur, through Capricorn Investments, had a decisive role in the 1980s management of the intelligence/government outsourcing mega-firm DynCorp, of Reston, VA. Winokur served as DynCorp CEO from 1989 to 1997.
In juxtaposition, Harvard and HUD differ in one striking respect according to Fitts. The Harvard Endowment has enjoyed wildly uncharacteristic above-market tax-free returns for the last decade, (33 percent in 1999), while HUD, in the same year, was compelled to do a “manual adjustment” to reconcile a $59-billion shortfall between its accounts and the US Treasury account.
I was not surprised when Bill Hamilton confirmed to both Fitts and to me that Winokur’s DynCorp had played a role in the evolution of PROMIS in the 1980s. One other surprise was to come out of Fitts’s investigations that had months earlier led her to conclude that she was up against PROMIS-related interests. On the very day that DoJ and HUD shut her down she was discussing software development with a Canadian firm that is at the heart of the Canadian space program, Geomatics. The term Geomatics applies to a related group of sciences, all involving satellite imagery, used to develop geographic information systems, global positioning systems, and remote sensing from space that can actually determine the locations of natural resources such as oil, precious metals, and other commodities.
Apparently centered in Canada, the Geomatics industry offers consulting services throughout the world in English, German, Russian, French, Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese. Geomatics technology, launched aboard Canadian satellites via US, European, or Japanese boosters can help developing or industrialized nations inventory and manage all of their natural resources. There are also several Geomatics-related companies in the US including one not far from the Johnson Space center in Houston.
This situation is custom-made for enhanced PROMIS software with back-door technology. What better way to map and inventory all of the world’s resources than by making each client nation pay for the work? By providing the client nation PROMIS-based software it would then be possible to compile a global database of every marketable natural resource. And it would not be necessary to even touch the resources because commodities and futures markets exist for all of them. An AI-enhanced, PROMIS-based program would then be the perfect setup to make billions of dollars in profits by watching and manipulating the world’s political climate to trade in, let’s say Tungsten futures. Such a worldwide database would be even more valuable if there were, for example, a sudden surge in the price of gold or platinum.
Bill Hamilton readily agreed that this was an ideal situation for the application of PROMIS technology. In furthering our research on Geomatics we discovered that almost everywhere Geomatics technology went we also found Lockheed-Martin.
Enter the Mounties
Thanks to a strong push in my direction from Cheri Seymour, the Mounties and Hercules PD Homicide Detective Sue Todd arrived at my door on August 3rd. They had already consumed most of the FTW website and were well familiar with my writings. I had let them know, through Cheri, that I did have information on PROMIS from Bill Tyree and that I would be happy to share it. Before getting into details we all went out for lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant.
Over lunch the Mounties were quite candid about the fact that the RCMP had PROMIS software and that it even went by the name PROMIS. I think they may have also mentioned the name PIRS, which is an acknowledged system in the RCMP network. They stated that they had been given their version of PROMIS by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS).
CSIS was an intelligence breakaway from the Mounties in 1984, intended to be a pure [sic] intelligence agency. It was created largely with the expertise and assistance of the CIA. All of us understood two things about that arrangement, and we discussed them openly. First, there was a question as to whether or not any intelligence service created by the CIA could be completely loyal to its native country. Secondly, it was also understood that there was a rivalry between the two agencies similar to the one that existed between the FBI and the CIA, or in a larger context, the Clinton gang and the Bush gang in the US. The chief concern of the Mounties, clearly, was to ascertain whether or not their version of PROMIS was one that was compromised. McDade also described in detail how he knew that supposedly secure RCMP communications equipment had been compromised by the NSA. The Mounties acknowledged regular meetings with Cheri Seymour but evinced none of the interest she said that they had previously shown in the Mossad. With me their single-minded focus was Bill Tyree and where and how he obtained his information.
Sue Todd, confirmed for me suspicions that there was an unspoken alliance between the RCMP investigators and the FBI. She said that during the course of her three years of efforts to solve the double murder in Hercules, she had routinely visited FBI offices and enjoyed access to FBI files relative to both the PROMIS investigation and anything connected to her victims. That information was obviously being shared with the Mounties, and that implied the blessings of the FBI. In short, a domestic law enforcement officer was sharing information with agents of a foreign government. In some cases that could provoke espionage charges, but in this case it was apparently sanctioned. The Hercules murder victims had no apparent connection to PROMIS software in any way except for the fact that Riconosciuto had possessed knowledge about the murders that he had provided to Todd from prison. The Hercules Armament Corporation, featured in The Last Circle, was an obvious link. I also noted that the father in Todd’s case had been a computer engineer with passions for both geological research and hypnosis and no other visible connections to the PROMIS story.
As we copied Tyree’s papers and went through other materials the next day, I was aware that the Canadians expressed special interest in Jackson Stephens and anything having to do with the manipulation of financial markets. They asked for copies of news reports I had showing that General Wesley Clark, the recently retired NATO commander, has just gone to work for Stephens, Inc. in Little Rock, Arkansas. (Undeclared Presidential candidate Wesley Clark maintains a relationship with Stephens and Axciom to this day.) I also provided documents showing that Stephens’ financial firm Alltel, heir to Systematics, was moving heavily into the mortgage market. As the Mounties repeatedly pressed for information on the identity of the Sergeant Major I referred them to Tyree directly through his attorney Ray Kohlman and to Tyree’s closest friend, the daughter of CIA bagman and paymaster Albert Carone, Dee Ferdinand.
McDade did eventually contact Ferdinand by phone, and shortly thereafter one of the most bizarre twists in the whole story took place.
About a week after meeting the Mounties I heard back from Sean that the Tyree documents and flow charts from 1996 had been right on the money. A special recurring theme in those documents that meshes with Seymour’s research is the fact that modified versions of PROMIS software with both artificial intelligence and trap doors were being smuggled out of Los Alamos nuclear labs in containers labeled as radioactive waste. According to Tyree and other sources, after an Indian reservation, the safest place in the world that no one will ever break into is a nuclear waste dump. This also applies to containers in transit between countries. The radioactive warning label guarantees unmolested movement of virtually anything. PROMIS software is apparently no exception.
Bill Casey and Al Carone from the grave
Albert Vincent Carone has also been covered exhaustively in FTW, both in the newsletter and on the web site. A retired NYPD Detective, also a “made” member of the Genovese crime family, Carone spent his entire working career as a CIA operative. FTW has special reports on both Bill Tyree and Al Carone available from the web site. For more than 25 years before his mysterious death in 1990, Al Carone served as a bagman and liaison between George Bush, CIA Director Bill Casey, Oliver North, Richard Nixon and many other prominent figures including Robert Vesco, Manuel Noriega and Ferdinand Marcos. The Carone-Tyree connection, covered in detail in the Sept. 1998 issue (Vol. I, no. 7) goes back to operations in the mid 1970s when Tyree, serving with the Special Forces, engaged in CIA directed missions for which Carone was the paymaster.
Carone’s death from “chemical toxicity of unknown etiology” in 1990 resulted in the sanitizing of all of his military and NYPD records as well as the theft and disappearance of nearly ten million dollars in bank accounts, insurance policies and investments. Virtually overnight, almost every record of Carone disappeared leaving his daughter and her family nearly bankrupt under the burden of tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills. In 1996, Carone’s daughter, Dee Ferdinand, discovered that Tyree and Carone had known each other and that Tyree could prove instrumental in helping to restore Carone’s lost fortune. Ferdinand filed suit in US district court this spring [Note: The suit has since been dismissed] seeking to recover pensions, insurance policies and benefits in a case which has no known connection to PROMIS. I have known Ferdinand and her family for more than seven years. Never once has she mentioned a connection between her father and PROMIS although she was well familiar with the case from Tyree and conversations with Bill Hamilton. I had referred the Mounties to her because of my belief that she could possibly help identify Tyree’s source, the Sergeant Major.
On August 10th, exactly one week after the Mounties came to see me, the DoJ mailed Ferdinand a response to her suit seeking dismissal. Included in the paperwork was a bizarre document, now in FTW’s possession, that, by the account of both Ferdinand and her lawyer, had absolutely nothing to do with her case. The document in question was a March 29, 1986 Declaration from CIA Director William Casey, a close friend of the Carone family. Paragraph 6 of that document (prepared for another case) stated, “Two of the documents responsive to Plaintiffs’ Request No 1, specifically the one-page letter dated 28 March 1979 and a one-page letter dated 8 January 1980, have been released in the same excised form as they were previously released by the Government of Canada. I independently and formally assert the state secrets privilege for the information excised from these two documents.”
Dee Ferdinand called me immediately. The letter had nothing to do with her suit. It mentioned Canada. Canada was not even mentioned in her suit. What was going on?” she asked. “It’s blackmail,” I answered. “CIA, which is monitoring everything the Canadians do, everything I do, everything you do, knows that I will tell the Mounties of these letters.” McDade didn’t grasp the concept at first. He was a straight-ahead street cop. But I had been through something similar when serving as the [L.A. County] press spokesman for the Perot Presidential campaign in 1992. I explained it to Sean, “Sean, you and I are just the messengers. But I guarantee that at some level of your government the CIA’s reference to these letters will scare people to death. It is a reminder that CIA has them.”
A week later McDade told me that the dates were indeed significant — very significant. That’s all he would say…
Headlines
On August 25th the Toronto Star broke what was to become a series of stories by Valerie Lawson and Allan Thompson. The cat was out of the bag. Various figures known to have direct connections to Riconosciuto had been virtually dogging the Mounties’ every move as they traveled in the US. One even contacted me just days after the Mounties left LA. It was a story that could not be kept under wraps forever. Most of the Star story was accurate. It was going to be difficult for the RCMP to move quietly now. A Reuters story the same day closed with the following paragraphs, “Canada’s national counterintelligence agency said in a June report that friendly nations were making concerted efforts to steal sensitive technology and information.
“The Canadian Security Intelligence Service said outsiders were particularly interested in aerospace, biotechnology, chemicals, communications, information technology, mining and metallurgy, nuclear energy, oil and gas, and the environment.”
That was Geomatics, at the heart of Canada’s space program, Canada’s flagship space technology. I checked the Star story. There had been no mention of high tech or space related issues. What did Reuters know? In mid September, after receiving confidential source documents related to the case telling me that one version of PROMIS, modified in Canada was handled through the Canadian firm I.P. Sharp, I got an answer. A quick search on the web revealed that Sharp, a well documented component of the case, had been bought by a Reuters company in the early 90s. Hamilton later told me that he had heard that Reuters possibly had the PROMIS software. That would explain how they knew about the aerospace connection.
Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post called and asked what I knew. I confirmed that I had met with the Mounties but didn’t know much else other than giving them the Tyree flow charts. The Post was never going to tell the truth. Their business was keeping secrets, not revealing them. The Mounties had made waves.
On August 28 the phone rang and it was a collect call from Tyree. “Get a tape recorder and turn it on,” he said. Over the course of the next half an hour Tyree, obviously reading from detailed and copious notes, named individuals and companies dealing with PROMIS software and its progeny. The tape was specific down to naming specific engineers in military and private corporations doing PROMIS research. Tyree described specific Congressional committees that had been infiltrated with “enhanced” PROMIS. Tyree described how PROMIS progeny, having inspired four new computer languages, had made possible the positioning of satellites so far out in space that they were untouchable. At the same time the progeny had improved video quality to the point where the same satellite could focus on a single human hair. The ultimate big picture.
PROMIS progeny had also evolved to the point where neural pads could be attached to plugs in the back of the human head and thought could be translated into electrical impulses that would be equally capable of flying a plane or wire transferring money. Names like Sandia, Cal-Tech, Micron, Tech University of Graz, Oded Leventer, and Massimo Grimaldi rolled from his lips as he tore through the pages of notes. Data, such as satellite reconnaissance, could also now be downloaded from a satellite directly into a human brain. The evolution of the artificial intelligence had progressed to a point where animal behavior and thought were being decoded. Mechanical humans were being tested. Animals were being controlled by computer.
Billy saved Canada for last.
“Here’s how we fuck Canada,” he started. He was laughing as he facetiously described what was coming as some sort of bizarre payback for the War of 1812. Then, placing the evolutions of PROMIS in context with the Canadian story Tyree asked a question as to why one would really now need to go to all the trouble of monitoring all of a foreign country’s intelligence operations. “There’s an easier way to get what I want,” he said. “I access their banks. I access their banks and I know who does what and who’s getting ready to do what,” he said. He described how Canada had been provided with modified PROMIS software that Canada then modified, or thought they had modified, again to eliminate the trap door. That software, turned loose in the financial and scientific communities, then became Canada’s means of believing that they were securing the trap door information from the entities to whom they provided their versions of PROMIS. But, unknown, to the Canadians the Elbit chips in the systems bypassed the trap doors and permitted the transmission of data when everyone thought the computers were turned off and secure. Tyree did not explain how the chips physically got into the Canadian computers.
“This,” Tyree said “is how you cripple everything Canada does that you don’t like. And if you want proof I offer you the fact that we toppled the government of Australia in 1980 [sic].” “[Prime Minister] Gough Whitlam and Nugan Hand [Bank],” I answered. Tyree affirmed. The Labor Government of Whitlam had been suddenly unseated after making nationalistic noise and questioning the role of US intelligence agencies in Australian affairs.
The issue of a coming feud between the dollar and the Euro came up. I suggested that rapidly vanishing support in South America and Europe both were threatening the military operations of “Plan Colombia” and the economic boost it would give the US economy. Tyree jumped in, “If I can put Canada in line and show the Eurodollar, the ‘Eurotrash’ what I have already done to my neighbor, whom I value to some degree — remember, these are not nice people — these are financial thugs at their worst. So what they are going to do is sit down discreetly and say, ‘Look, this is what we did to Canada. Now, would you like us to do this to the European market as well?’ Mike, they’re not going to think twice about it. A weapon is only good if someone knows what its capability is. Prior to using the atomic bomb it was irrelevant.” He continued, “They refer to it as the Nagasaki Syndrome.”
…Then, chillingly, he described something familiar to any military strategist. The penetration and looting of HUD was the test bed, the proving ground, the “White Sands” of the PROMIS economic Atom bomb. Once the CIA and the economic powers-that-be had proven that, over a period of years, they could infiltrate and loot $59 billion dollars from HUD, they knew that they could do it anywhere. Said Tyree, “Then they knew they had what it took to go abroad and create mayhem. It was planned 20 years ago.”
It took several days to reach Sean McDade who had been on vacation. I played the Tyree tape for him over an open phone line into RCMP headquarters. He asked me to make a physical copy right away and send it to him. After he had had time to listen to it he cautioned me against sending it anywhere else. I told him that as long as his investigation was active that I would do nothing more than make the standard copies I make of any sensitive documents as a precaution. I could tell that the tape had rattled him...
If keeping the tape quiet would give the Mounties an edge I would do it — but only as long as they had a case.
Sudden Death
Then it was over.
On September 16th the Toronto Star announced that the RCMP had suddenly closed its PROMIS investigation with the flat disclaimer that it did not have, and never did have, any version of Bill Hamilton’s software. That was as shocking a statement as it was absurd. “The only way that you can identify PROMIS,” said a perplexed Bill Hamilton, “is to compare the code. Sean McDade said that he was not an engineer and couldn’t read code so how did he know?” Hamilton was as emphatic as I was that McDade had said that RCMP had PROMIS. So was Cheri Seymour. I offered a fleeting hope that the Mounties were playing a game, saying that they had terminated the investigation to shake some of the incessant probing that had been taking place around McDade’s every move.
I was finally convinced when McDade e-mailed me and said that it was his view that the Mounties did not have any version of PROMIS and that he had no objections if I decided to write a story. I then agreed with Seymour that, whether they had said so or not, both the Mounties and Sue Todd had left enough visible footprints that it was their intention for us to go public. It might be the only protection they had…
Diplomacy
Just three days after the Toronto Star announced the abrupt termination of the RCMP investigation the Canada based International Network on Disarmament and Globalization (INDG) posted an electronic bulletin on a speech by former Canadian Ambassador to the US. In an address the night before, less than 48 hours after the termination of the RCMP investigation, Derek Burney, current president of CAE, a Canadian firm manufacturing flight simulators, criticized the US aerospace industry for being overly protectionist under the guise of national security. In addressing the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada, according to large stories that appeared in CP (Canadian Press) and Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Burney was characterized as sounding unusually tough in his criticism of American policy that was freezing Canadian firms out of aerospace contracts. Both stories were ambivalent in that they alternately made Burney sound critical of the US while championing Canadian interests and at the same time weak as he noted that Mexico stood poised under NAFTA to replace Canada as the US ‘s number one trading partner.
The CP story made two telling observations. It quoted Burney as saying that Canada needed to do more to “preserve and enhance its access to the American market.” Then it closed it’s story on Burney’s speech, advocating a compromise agreement between the US and Canada, by saying that Burney’s position “risks being perceived here at home as a sellout or worse.”
A close examination of Burney’s remarks, published in the INDG bulletin revealed something more like an obsequious surrender rather than a mere sellout. While there were a few tough-talking paragraphs that saved Canadian face, the essence of the speech was that Burney believed that American defense firms, the largest of which is Lockheed-Martin, were poised to transfer the bulk of their contracts to companies in Mexico. Citing Canada’s dependence upon access to American avionics and “databases,” Burney painted a picture that seemingly left Canada over a barrel. Without access to American technology the Canadian aerospace industry could not function.
Buried deep in the text of Burney’s speech we found the following paragraph that is, we believe, the best place to end this story.
“That does not mean that we have to agree with everything Washington does or says or do things exactly as the Americans do. On the contrary, one of the advantages of being a good neighbor and close ally is that we can speak freely and forthrightly to the Americans - provided we have a solid case and are seeking to influence their position and not simply capture a quick headline. And, never forget, it is always more effective to be frank in private. Otherwise your motive can be somewhat suspect.”
FTW, October 26, 2001 — 1300 PDT (UPDATED November 16, 2001) — An October 16 FOX News report by correspondent Carl Cameron indicating that convicted spy, former FBI Agent Robert Hanssen, had provided a highly secret computer software program called PROMIS to Russian organized crime figures —who in turn reportedly sold it to Osama bin Laden — may signal a potential intelligence disaster for the United States. Admissions by the FBI and the Department of Justice in the FOX story that they have discontinued use of the software are most certainly a legal disaster for a government that has been engaged in a 16-year battle with the software’s creator, William Hamilton, CEO of the Inslaw Corporation. Over those 16 years, in response to lawsuits filed by Hamilton charging that the government had stolen the software from Inslaw, the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Justice have denied, in court and under oath, ever using the software.
Bin Laden’s reported possession of PROMIS software was clearly reported in a June 15, 2001 story by Washington Times reporter Jerry Seper. That story went unnoticed by the major media. In it Seper wrote, “The software delivered to the Russian handlers and later sent to bin Laden, according to sources, is believed to be an upgraded version of a program known as PROMIS — developed in the 1980s by a Washington firm, Inslaw, Inc., to give attorneys the ability to keep tabs on their caseloads. It would give bin Laden the ability to monitor US efforts to track him down, federal law-enforcement officials say. It also gives him access to databases on specific targets of his choosing and the ability to monitor electronic-banking transactions, easing money-laundering operations for himself or others, according to sources.”
In a series of excellent stories by the Washington Times, and as confirmed by parts of the FOX broadcast, it appears that Hanssen, who was arrested in February, in order to escape the death penalty this summer, agreed to provide the FBI and other intelligence agencies with a full accounting of his sale of PROMIS overseas. Reports state that almost until the moment of his capture, Hanssen was charged with “repairing” and upgrading versions of the software used by Britain and Germany.
On October 17 two different spokespersons at the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs told FTW, “The FBI has discontinued use of the PROMIS software.” The spokespersons declined to give their names.
On October 24 Department of Justice spokesperson Loren Pfeifle declined to answer any questions about where, when, or how PROMIS had been used and would say only, “I can only confirm that the DoJ has discontinued use of the program .…”
“Numerous news stories, books and investigative reports including a September 2000 story in FTW (Vol. III, no.7), spanning nearly two decades, have established that PROMIS holds unique abilities to track terrorists. The software has also, according to numerous sources including Hamilton, been modified with artificial intelligence and developed in parallel for the world’s banking systems to track money movements, stock trades and other financial dealings. Systematics — since purchased by Alltel — an Arkansas financial and technical firm headed by billionaire Jackson Stephens, has often been reported as the primary developer of PROMIS for financial intelligence use. Systematics through its various evolutions had been a primary supplier of software used in inter-bank and international money transfers for many years. Attorneys who have been connected to Systematics and PROMIS include Webster Hubbell, Hillary Clinton, and the late Vince Foster.
If true, and if claims by the FBI and the Department of Justice that they have “recently” discontinued the use of PROMIS are accurate, the likelihood than bin Laden may have compromised the systems the US government and its allies use to track him is high. Additional information in the FOX broadcast indicating that Britain stopped using the software just three months ago and that Germany stopped using the software just weeks ago are equally disturbing. These are mission-critical systems requiring years of development. What has replaced them? And even if the US government has replaced the software given to its allies with newer programs — several of which FTW knows to be in existence — the FOX report clearly implies that bin Laden and associates have had ample time to get highly secret intelligence data from both Britain and Germany. Those systems might, in turn, have compromised US systems. The WTC attacks had — by all reckoning — been in the works for years, and bin Laden would certainly have known that the US would be looking for him afterwards…”
“Approximately two weeks after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the History Channel aired a documentary entitled “The History of Terrorism.” In that documentary, a law enforcement officer described some of the methods used to track terrorist movements. He stated that “computers” were able to track such things as credit card purchases, entry and exits visas, telephone and utility usage etc. It was implied that these diverse database files could be integrated into one unified table. He gave an example that through the use of such a system it would be possible to determine that if a suspected terrorist entered the country and was going to hide out, that by monitoring the water and electrical consumption of all possible suspects in a given cell, it would be possible to determine where the terrorist was hiding out by seeing whose utility use increased. Conversely, it would be possible to determine if a terrorist was on the move if his utility consumption declined or his local shopping patterns were interrupted. Aren’t those “club” cards from your supermarket handy?
This is but the barest glimpse of what PROMIS can do. Mated with artificial intelligence it is capable of analyzing not only an individual’s, but also a community’s entire life, in real time. It is also capable of issuing warnings when irregularities appear and of predicting future movements based upon past behavior.
In the financial arena PROMIS is even more formidable. Not only is it capable of predicting movements in financial markets and tracking trades in real time. It has been reported, on a number of occasions, to have been used, via the “back door” to enter secret bank accounts, including accounts in Switzerland and then remove the money in those accounts without being traced. Court documents filed in the various INSLAW trials include documentation of this ability as well as affidavits and declarations from Israeli intelligence officers and assets...”
“…A key question that lingered after the meetings with the RCMP was how many versions of the software had the CIA and the US government given out and might they not have been also using a back door against “friendly” nations for economic motives to give advantage to US companies. It was not a question that the RCMP dismissed as unlikely.
“In another mind-boggling development, on November 10 the Calgary Sun reported: ‘US police said many of the suspected al Qaida terrorists were nabbed through the use of a state-of-the-art computer software program called PROMIS. The system interfaces with any database and can provide information on credit card, banking, pension, tax, criminal and immigration records. Police can input an alleged terrorist name or credit card and the software will provide details of the person’s movements through purchases or phone records…
“The FOX story reported that Osama bin Laden once boasted that his youth ‘knew the wrinkles of the world’s financial markets like the back of their hands and that his money would never be frozen.’ He may be right. And an administration so lost in covering up criminal conduct (no less than the conduct of the ones which preceded it) while trying to fight a war at the same time — might find itself doubly wounded by the software of Bill Hamilton and Inslaw.”
“At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, for example, the military’s Alternative Control Technology Laboratory has experimented with systems that allow pilots to ‘fly by thought.’ By controlling their brain waves, human subjects at the laboratory can steer a flight simulator left or right, up or down, a skill that most people at the lab master in only an hour...”3
Caltech researchers have invented a “neurochip” that connects a network of living brain cells wired together to electrodes incorporated into a silicon chip. The neurochips were unveiled at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, held in New Orleans the week of October 25-30, 1997.4
