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Sisyphus Press -- P.O. Box 10495 State College, Pa. 16805-0495 The Octopus: The Secret Government & the Death of Danny Casolaro by Jim Keith & Kenn Thomas For Orders in U.S. only $13.99 plus $12.99 for S&H. AIR MAIL: For Canadian + International Orders (U.S. checks, money orders, or currency only - no Canadian checks, money orders, or currency)) |
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Because circumstances have shrouded Danny Casolaro's death in mystery, the single aspect of his research that led to it may never be known for certain. Hotel workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia found the writer dead in August 1991 in what looked like a faked suicide. The "head's up" warning flashed among students of the conspiracy culture when they learned that files he had on him were missing and the details of his investigative work slowly emerged from friends, family and fellow investigators. Casolaro previously had previously had warned these same people not to believe any reports that might have fallen victim to an "accident." The fishy circumstances of his death and the probable motivations of his possible killers remain obvious. Danny Casolaro sought to document and expose sea of covert operatives, super-surveillance software and transnational spies. He called the monster he saw swimming in that sea "the Octopus." It consisted of a group of US intelligence veterans that had banded together to manipulate world events for the sake of consolidating and extending its power. Of course it involved the Kennedy assassination, but that was just one of many coups and assassinations pulled off by the Octopus since the end of World War II. The group had come together over a covert operation to invade Albania that was betrayed by famed British turncoat Kim Philby. The Octopus had overthrown Jacob Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. It had targeted operations against Fidel Castro culminating in the Bay of Pigs. It also had tentacles in the political upheavals in Angola, Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Chile, Iran and Iraq. Casolaro had as his main concern Octopus involvement with putting Ronald Reagan in power--the infamous October Surprise--and the role that played in introducing the PROMIS software into police systems around the world. Casolaro's catalogue of membership in the Octopus included such notorious spooks as John Singlaub and the late CIA director William Colby. As heads of the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam they had implemented an early version of the PROMIS tracking software to keep tabs on the Viet Cong. Other Octopus tentacles included characters like E. Howard Hunt and Bernard Baker, who later emerged as Watergate burglars. Casolaro focused on one person in the periphery of the Octopus as it had developed in the early 1980s, a man named Earl Brian, crony to Reagan's attorney general Ed Meese. Brian had been given PROMIS to sell illegally as a reward for paying off Ayatollah Khomeini to hold on to American hostages until the Carter presidential re-election campaign clearly was doomed. According to Casolaro, Meese used the US Justice department to steal PROMIS from its developers, the Inslaw group, which had its connections to the Phoenix program and also had developed the software at least in part on public money. Two congressional committees eventually agreed, however, that Inslaw was the legal private owner of PROMIS when the US Justice department shanghaied it and Earl Brian profiteered by selling it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Interpol, the Mossad and other international police agencies as well as to the military. One application of the modified PROMIS included the ability to track Soviet submarines in previously untraceable marine trenches near Iceland. If coded correctly, PROMIS could interface with other databases without reprogramming, giving ability to ostensibly track criminals-but also, potentially, political dissidents--through the computer systems of various police agencies. Casolaro's informant, Michael Riconosciuto added to this the claim that he had personally reprogrammed PROMIS with a backdoor, so it could spy on the methods of the police agencies that were using it for tracking. This gave it added appeal as a covert tool. The US could spy on the very agencies it was selling the software to illegally. Earl Brian's role in the PROMIS theft was spelled out explicitly by Inslaw lawyer Elliot Richardson, another Watergate figure in The New York Times in 1992. Richardson was the attorney general who actually stood up to Richard Nixon's corruption during the Saturday Night massacre. Brian sued over the New York Times article and lost. Richardson had written the article to encourage investigation of the case, but Brian used the opportunity to start a nuisance libel suit. On November 29, 1995, the New York Court of Appeals dismissed Brian's claim and declared that Richardson's assertions came under free speech protections. Although never prosecuted over the PROMIS allegations, Brian survived only one more year after the libel suit before other past shady deals began to catch up with him. In October 1996 a California jury convicted him of Federal bank fraud, conspiracy and lying to auditors. Prosecutors charged that Brian had drafted documents to conceal losses of the Financial News Network and United Press International, for whom he served as chief executive, in order to obtain $70 million in bank loans for his other concern, a biotyechnology firm called Infotechnology. Interestingly, the pattern of financial impropriety in the case was identical to one that happened on assassination day, November 22, 1963. Someone named Tony DeAngelis misrepresented his holdings of thousands of tons of salad oil with faked American Express warehouse receipts in order to get bank loans. The fraud's exposure was the top news story in the New York Times editions that came out before the assassination on that date. Many people profiteered from the short-selling spree on the markets consequent to that and news of JFK's murder, including American Express magnate Warren Buffet and a transnational entity called Bunge Corporation, known in the financial literature of the time. as The Octopus. In a classic work on the JFK assassination, Were We Controlled?, pseudonymous author Lincoln Lawrence argues that DeAngelis, Jack Ruby, and Lee Harvey Oswald were all mind-controlled in their actions on that day. I produced an edition of this book, with an expanded introduction and photographs, as the book NASA, Nazis & JFK: The Torbitt Document and the JFK Assassination (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1997). Add to that the fact that Earl Brian at one time a brain surgeon, and the other Watergate-Inslaw connection, E. Howard Hunt, had a phone relationship with Casolaro, has also been connect to mind control operations, and the Casolaro story takes some extremely interesting speculative turns. -------- Danny Casolaro called it "the Octopus". A vast, interlocking network of criminal conspiracy that reaches into every branch and agency of the U.S. government, many other national governments, and every sector of our societies. An investigative reporter seeking the truth, Danny told his friends he was meeting an informant to "bring back the head of the Octopus" when his body was found in a hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on August 10, 1991. Much of the evidence he had gathered was missing. The death was ruled a "suicide", but the evidence supports murder. He never had the chance to write the book he was working on. This is an attempt to finish the book Danny started, based on his surviving notes and further investigation. Critics will say that this book contains much material that is unconfirmed. The authors admit this, but much of the information is of a character that does not lend itself to confirmation, unless we some day kill the Octopus and dissect its tentacles. Nevertheless, the pieces do fit together to create a coherent picture, albeit an incomplete one. Much work remains to be done to bring the full truth to light. This book can provide a foundation for further investigation. Casolaro's investigation began with his inquiry into the case of Inslaw, from whom the U.S. Justice Department stole a software package called PROMIS and sold it to governments and financial institutions around the world, after modifying it to provide a back door by which they would track the movement of money and other assets everywhere. In investigations it is an old rule that you "follow the money", but in this case we can track the spread of the PROMIS package to follow the people who are following the money, and in so doing, exhibit the links in the network of criminal influence around the world and back to their origins, the way a physician might use an angiogram to reveal the blood flows in a human body. Along the way the authors touch on virtually every kind of criminal enterprise and official corruption and abuse. They tie it all together in what is, if nothing else, the most complete and complex conspiracy theory yet developed, and one that is perhaps the best supported by available evidence. If even a part of this is true, it demands the attention of every responsible person. There is no escaping this monster. Either we kill it or it will kill us. Much of this material will be familiar to investigators, reformers, and conspiracy buffs. But Thomas and Keith have found some new material and put the pieces together in some new ways that make sense. Time will tell how much of it is true. But the evidence, if not all valid, certainly needs to be explained. ---------- Writer Danny Casolaro was on the trail of the Octopus when he was found dead in a West Virginia hotel in 1991, becoming part of the most extraordinary political tale of the 90s. The slashes in his wrists were too deep to be self-inflicted. The accordion file with his recent research was missing. He had told his family to be gravely suspicious if an accident befell him. Casolaro had been suicided. Today, Casolaros Octopus -- a transnational power bloc pursuing its own interests through subversion and overthrow of governments, dirty money and extra-electoral manipulation -- has risen again. The players Casolaro identified in his research, including Iran-Contra spooks, Middle Eastern weapons merchants, double-dealling politicos, and terrorists, have reappeared. The story begins with October Surprise, a trading-with-the-enemy scheme that set the stage for Americas quagmire in the Middle East. The tentacles of The Octopus attach themselves to the Inslaw affair, the theft of super-surveillance software used to spy on criminals and police alike. The grisly saga continues with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, both believed to be evading capture through the use of Inslaw's PROMIS software. What survived of Casolaros research fell into the hands of two writers, Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith. In 1996 the hardcover edition of THE OCTOPUS was released. In 1999, co-author Keith died, like Casolaro, under mysterious circumstances. |
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