Jude Outta Your Mind
2008-02-27 23:44:55 UTC
Israel? Where was Heinz?
<quote>
FOSTERGATE
by James R. Norman [Resigned from Forbes because this story was spiked.]
"Was White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster selling US secrets to
Israel?
The CIA suspects he was."
TWO weeks before his death on July 20, 1993, White House Deputy Counsel
Vincent W. Foster went into a deep funk. The official cause of death,
given by former Independent Counsel Robert Fiske Jr. (who was later
replaced by Kenneth Starr), was suicide driven by depression over, among
other things, several newspaper editorials. But Vince Foster had a much
bigger and darker reason to be seriously burned out. He had just learned
he was under investigation for espionage.
Outrageous? To say the least. But a lengthy investigation has located
over
a dozen sources with connections to the intelligence community who confirm
a shocking story of money laundering and espionage connected to the
highest levels of the White House. Without grants of immunity, the sources
risk going to prison for violation of the National Security Act. Virtually
all have demanded anonymity.
According to a veteran Central Intelligence Agency operative close to the
Foster investigation, Foster's first indication of trouble came when he
inquired about his coded bank account at Banca Della Svizzera Italiana in
Chiasso, Switzerland and found the account empty. Foster was shocked to
learn from the bank that someone using his secret authorization code had
withdrawn all $2.73 million he had stashed there and had moved it to, of
all places, the U.S. Treasury.
Then, according to credit card records reviewed by a private investigator
who has revealed them, Foster canceled the two-day round-trip TWA and
Swiss Air plane tickets to Geneva he had purchased on his American Express
card through the White House travel office on July 1.
Discreetly he began asking what was afoot, says the CIA source,
confirming
that someone in the White House tipped him off. It was bad news. The CIA
had Foster under serious investigation for leaking high-security secrets
to the State of Israel.
For months, a small cadre of CIA computer hackers known as the Fifth
Column, armed with a Cray supercomputer, had been monitoring Foster's
Swiss account. They had located it by tracking money flows from various
Israeli government accounts after finding Foster's name while secretly
snooping through the electronic files of Israel's Mossad. Then by snooping
through the bank files, they gathered all the information needed to
withdraw the money.
Foster was just one of the first of scores of high level U.S. political
figures to thus have their secret Swiss accounts looted of illicit funds,
according to both this veteran CIA source and a separate source in another
intelligence agency. Over the past two years, they say, more than $2
billion has been swept out of offshore bank accounts belonging to figures
connected to the U.S. government with nary a peep from the victims or
their
banks. The claim that Foster and other U.S. figures have had offshore
accounts has been confirmed by a separate high-ranking CIA source and
another in the Department of Justice.
Various sources, some of them controversial, have contributed other
pieces
to this puzzle. Whatever their motivations, those sources have proven
remarkably consistent. Their stories jibe well with known facts and offer
a most plausible explanation for Foster's mysterious depression. It would
also explain Washing-ton's determined effort to dismiss the Foster affair
as a tragic but simple suicide.
Vince Foster a spy? Actually, it is much worse than that, if the CIA's
suspicions are confirmed by the ongoing foreign counterintelligence probe.
He would have been an invaluable double agent with potential access to not
only high-level political information, but also to sensitive code,
encryption and data transmission secrets, the stuff by which modern war is
won or lost. That is because for many years, according to nine separate
current and former U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials, Foster
had been a behind-the-scenes manager of a key support company in one of
the biggest, most secretive spy efforts on record, the silent surveillance
of banking transactions both here and abroad.
This bank snooping effort began in earnest soon after Ronald Reagan
became
president in 1981. Its primary aim was to track the money behind
international terrorist groups and soon came to be dubbed, "Follow the
money", according to the originator of the program Norman A. Bailey. Now a
private Washington consultant on international banking, Bailey was an
economist and Reagan advisor on the National Security Counsel. It was
Bailey's idea to begin using powerful new computer and electronic
eavesdropping technologies then emerging to let the intelligence community
monitor the previously confidential flow of bank wire transfers.
This was no small task; more than $1 trillion a day moves through New
York
alone.
Bailey, himself constrained by the National Security Act, claims he
doesn't
know exactly how the data was collected. But he confirms that within a few
years (of 1981) The National Security Agency (NSA), the signals
intelligence arm of the government, had begun vacuuming up mountains of
data by listening in on bank wire traffic. It became a joint effort of
several Western governments with the Israelis playing a leading role,
since they were the main targets of terrorism.
Other intelligence experts say the flow of bits and bytes was captured by
various means; from simply tapping phone lines to implanting customized
chips in bank computers to store up and periodically "burst-transmit"
data, to a passing van, or low-flying "sig-int" or signals intelligence
satellite. Another part of the problem was to get the world's banks to
standardize their data so that it could be easily analyzed. And that
brings up to PROMIS, powerful tracking software developed for the U.S.
Government and then further enhanced by a little company called Inslaw
Inc.
PROMIS stands for Prosecutor's Management Information Systems and was
designed to manage legal cases. In 1982, just as Bailey's follow-the-money
effort was gaining steam, the Reagan Justice Department eagerly snapped up
Inslaw's newest version of PROMIS. But the government refused to pay the
$6 million owed for it, claiming part of the contract was not fulfilled.
Inslaw, forced into Chapter 11 reorganization, and nearly driven to quick
liquidation by the government and its former partner AT&T, hotly denied
that claim. Ultimately, a bankruptcy judge ruled the government stole the
PROMIS software by "trickery, fraud and deceit."
Why PROMIS? Because it was adaptable. Besides tracking legal cases, it
could be easily customized to track anything from computer chip design to
complex monetary transactions. It was especially useful for tracking
criminals or just plain political dissidents. Inslaw claims the software
was eventually illegally sold to as many as 50 countries for use by their
police, military or intelligence agencies, including such bloody regimes
as Guatemala, South Africa and Iraq (before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait).
Profits on these sales, Inslaw claims, went mainly into the private
pockets of Republican political cronies in the 1980s, including Reagan
confidante Barl Brain, former part-owner of UPI and FNN.
Among the biggest profiteers on PROMIS, according to the 1992 book by
former Israeli anti-terrorism staffer Ari Ben-Menaseche, was former
British publisher Bob Maxwell. On behalf of the Israelis, Maxwell
aggressively marketed a doctored version of PROMIS equipped with one or
more "back doors" to allow an outsider to tap into the user's data base
without leaving an audit trail. In fact, it may have been such rigged
programs that allowed noted Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard, from his
computer terminal at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, to
download vast amounts of top secret U.S. nuclear weapons and code data in
the mid-1980s.
According to a heavily-redacted New Mexico FBI counterintelli-gence
report,
Maxwell was apparently allowed to sell two copies of PROMIS back to the
U.S. weapons labs at Sandia and Los Alamos, for what Inslaw claims was a
hugely inflated price of $87 million. That would have allowed Pollard, if
he was using the rigged program, to obtain U.S. missile targeting data
long before Israel had its own satellite capability, thus making it a real
nuclear threat to the Soviet Union. Pollard was convicted of espionage and
sentenced in 1986 to life imprisonment. U.S. officials have vehemently
opposed efforts to gain his early release.
Maxwell, according to Ben-Menaseche and nine other sources, was also
selling pirated versions of PROMIS to major world banks for use in their
wire transfer rooms to track the blizzard of numbers, authorization codes
and confirmations required on each wire transaction. Don't expect any
banks to admit running PROMIS software. They probably now know it was
pilfered. But they readily took it both because it was the best tracking
software available at the time and because the U.S. government was tacitly
leaning on them to go along with the surveillance effort or face
regulatory reprisals or prosecution on money laundering charges. With the
widespread adoption of PROMIS, the data became standardized and much
easier to analyze by the NSA.
It took some effort to install and support PROMIS in the banking
industry.
That's where Vince Foster came in. Sources say that since at least the
late 1970s, Foster had been a silent, behind-the-scenes overseer on behalf
of the NSA for a small Little Rock, Ark., bank data processing company.
Its name was Systematics Inc., launched in 1967 and funded and controlled
for most of its life by Arkansas billionaire Jackson Stephens, a 1946
Naval Academy graduate along with Jimmy Carter. Foster was one of
Stephens' trusted deal makers at the Rose Law Firm, where he was partner
with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Webster Hubbell and William Kennedy (whose
father was a Systematics director). Hubbell also played an overseer role
at Systematics for the NSA for some years according to intelligence
sources.
Systematics has had close ties to the NSA and CIA ever since its
founding,
sources say, as a money-shuffler for covert operations. It is no secret
that there were billions of dollars moving around in "black" accounts -
from buying and selling arms to the Contras, Iran, Iraq, Angola, and other
countries to paying CIA operatives and laundering money from clandestine
CIA drug dealing (such as at Mena, Arkansas). Having taken over the
computer rooms in scores of small U.S. banks as an "out-sourced" supplier
of data processing, Systematics was in a unique position to manage that
covert money flow. Sources say the money was moved at the end of every day
disguised as a routine bank-to-bank balancing transaction, out of view of
bank regulators and even the banks themselves. In short, it became
cyber-money.
One man who uncovered the link between Systematics, Foster and covert
money
movements from arms and drugs was Bob Bickel, who was an undercover
Customs investigator in the 1980s. "We found Systematics was often a
conduit for the funds" in arms and drug transactions, says Bickel, now
living in Texas: "They were the money changers." His story is corroborated
by a former CIA employee who says it was well known within the agency in
the late 1970s that Foster was involved with Systematics in covert money
management.
Another source is Michael Ricoposciuto, former research director of the
covert arms operation at California's tiny Cabazon Indian Reservation in
the early 1980s. Ricoposciuto claims his crew of computer programmers
helped customize PROMIS there for banking and other uses. He is now
serving 80 years in a South Carolina federal prison ostensibly on drug
charges. Though maybe not a credible source on his own, his story fits
well with other sources.
Systematics' money-laundering role for the intelligence community might
help explain why Jackson Stephens tried to take over Washington-based
Financial General Bankshares in 1978 on behalf of Arab backers of the Bank
of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). BCCI's links to global
corruption and intelligence operations have been well docu-mented, though
many mysteries remain.
According to a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission,
Stephens insisted on having then-tiny Systematics brought in to take over
all of FGB's data processing. Representing Systematics in that 1978 SEC
case: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Webster Hubbell. Stephens was blocked in
that takeover. But FGB, later renamed First American, ultimately fell
under the alleged domination of BCCI through Robert Altman and former
Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. According to a technician who worked for
First American in Atlanta, Systematics became a key computer contractor
there anyway.
In the 1980s, Systematics' business boomed. When it first sold stock to
the
public in 1983, revenues were $64 million. That had risen to $230 million
by the time Stephens arranged Systematics' sale to Alltel Corp., a
telephone holding company which then moved its headquarters to Little
Rock. Last year, Systematics sales hit $861 million - a third of Alltel's
total. Stephens now owns more than 8 percent of Alltel and wields
significant influence over the company.
When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, bringing Foster, Hubbell
and Kennedy to the White House staff, Systematics' foreign bank business
flourished. It began to announce a flood of data processing deals with
major banks in Moscow, Maoso, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Trinidad and
elsewhere. According to veteran bank software vendors, and computer
intelligence specialist Wayne Madsen, co-author of a book about the NSA
called "The Puzzle Palace", it is inconceivable any U.S. company could
land such lucrative work without the intimate participation of the NSA.
Domestic business took off as well, with giants like Citibank and
NationsBank signing big data processing deals.
Working alongside Systematics in this spooky world of bank computer
spying
appears to be a cluster of other curious, loosely-affiliated companies.
For instance, there is Boston Systematics, headed by former CIA officer
Harry Wechsler, who controls two Israeli companies that also use the name
Systematics. Wechsler denies any connection to the Arkansas company (now
named Alltel Information Services) and claims to know nothing of PROMIS.
Odd, then, that Inslaw claims it got two inquiries in 1987 from Wechsler's
Israeli company seeking marketing data on PROMIS.
Many of the intelligence sources who provided information for this story
insist that Boston Systematics and the Arkansas company are, in fact,
related in some way. And based on his own source in the Justice
Department, Inslaw's founder William A. Hamilton says he believes Boston
Systematics was also closely linked with both Maxwell and Rafi Bitan, the
former head of Israel's anti-terrorism effort. Hamilton says Bitan, using
a false name, showed up at Inslaw's Washington, DC office one day in 1983
for a private demonstration of PROMIS.
Another curious company is Arkansas Systems, founded in 1974 by
Systematics
employee and formerly U.S. Army "analyst" John Chamberlain, located just
down the road from Systematics. Arkansas Systems specializes in computer
systems for foreign wire transfer centers and central banks. Among its
clients: Russia and China, according to Arkansas Systems president James
K. Hendren, a physicist formerly involved with the Safeguard anti-missile
system. Arkansas Systems was one of the first com-panies to receive
funding from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), an agency
created by Bill Clinton that is now coming under Congressional scrutiny.
What does Alltel have to say about all of this? "I've never heard
anything
so asinine in all my life," steams Joe T. Ford, Alltel's chairman and the
father of Jack Stephen's chief administrative aide.
John Stouri, a former IBM executive who is chief executive of Alltel
Information Services, says he had never heard of Boston Systematics before
this inquiry. He declares that the Arkansas company does almost no work
for the government, scoffs at the idea his company is tied to the NSA and
says Foster has never had any connection to Systematics. As for the fact
he sold half his 700,000 Alltel shares in February at $34, just before it
began skidding to under $24, he says that was merely to pay for the
exercise of options.
Why is it then that Hamilton claims sources in two separate intelligence
agencies say documents relating to Systematics were among those taken from
Foster's office immediately after Foster's death? Indeed, a private
investigator close to the continuing "Whitewater" probe by Independent
Counsel Kenneth W. Starr says he has learned that Hubbell has delivered
those documents - including papers related to Systematics - to Starr.
Hubbell pleaded guilty last December to two felony counts related to
over-billing at the Rose Law Firm and has been sentenced to 21 months in
prison.
If Foster knew the U.S. was spying on foreign banks, why would he let
himself be caught red-handed with a Swiss bank account? The answer may be
that the Israeli transactions were, in fact, well concealed, according to
the veteran CIA source. And Foster would have known that, unless a prober
knew exactly what to look for, finding his payoffs in the torrent of
routine wire transfer data would be a hopeless task. Besides that, greed
could explain a lot, if not Foster's then for whomever else he might have
been playing bagman. The CIA source says Foster was not the only one in
the White House under suspicion for peddling state secrets.
All of which helps explain Foster's odd behavior before his death. He was
a
tough, smart trial attorney at the peak of power in Washington. Only 48
years old, he was in excellent health. Suddenly, according to the Fiske
report, he couldn't sleep. He complained of heart palpitations and high
blood pressure. His sister arranged for him to see a Washington
psychiatrist, who later told the FBI he had been instructed not to take
notes because Foster's depression was "directly related to highly
sensitive and confidential matters" tied to his "top secret" government
work.
Foster never saw a shrink. Instead, about a week before he died, he hired
a
lawyer: high-powered DC criminal attorney and political fix-it man James
Hamilton. Foster's wife claims his reason was the White House Travel
Office controversy, which was expected to lead to congressional hearings.
On the weekend of July 17 and 18, Foster drove with his wife to the
eastern
shore of Maryland to relax. By "coincidence", according to the Fiske
report, so did Hubbell. They met at the posh estate of Michael Cardozo,
head of Clinton's legal defense fund and son-in-law of prominent
Democratic fund raiser Nathan Landau. Hubbell later claimed the weekend
was a laid-back gathering of tennis and poolside chit-chat.
But according to sources connected to the CIA, Justice Department and
another intelligence agency, the meeting was under surveillance. The
agenda? Heavy duty damage control. Foster was grilled. To whom else could
the Swiss money be traced? How could the scandal be contained?
Foster's wife admitted he returned to Washington even more depressed. On
Monday night, he turned down an invitation by the President to drop by the
White House to supposedly watch a movie. On Tuesday, Foster left his
office at the White House about 1 p.m. and said he'd be back later. At
5:45 p.m., his body was found neatly laid out at Fort Marcy Park, a bullet
wound in his mouth. Suicide, the Fiske report promptly declared, echoed by
a cursory (Democrat-run) Senate inquiry.
Still, nagging questions remain: Why was there no blood on the ground, no
bone fragments or brain tissue? Why were there rug fibers all over the
clothes? Why no dust on his shoes despite the long dirt path from his car
to his body?
The answer seems painfully clear; a cover-up of immense proportions for
reasons of "national security". And don't expect Whitewater prober Kenneth
Starr to spill any beans. He was in-house counsel to Reagan Attorney
General William French Smith at the time the Inslaw PROMIS software was
expropriated for intelligence use. Later, as Solicitor General, he recused
himself from an Inslaw-related matter without explanation. It seems likely
Starr would have been personally involved in launching the covert bank spy
effort, which Washington is still so nervous to keep secret.
All in the family, you might say.
</quote>
See: http://vehme.blogspot.com/2007/11/heinz-acxiom-and-911.html<quote>
FOSTERGATE
by James R. Norman [Resigned from Forbes because this story was spiked.]
"Was White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster selling US secrets to
Israel?
The CIA suspects he was."
TWO weeks before his death on July 20, 1993, White House Deputy Counsel
Vincent W. Foster went into a deep funk. The official cause of death,
given by former Independent Counsel Robert Fiske Jr. (who was later
replaced by Kenneth Starr), was suicide driven by depression over, among
other things, several newspaper editorials. But Vince Foster had a much
bigger and darker reason to be seriously burned out. He had just learned
he was under investigation for espionage.
Outrageous? To say the least. But a lengthy investigation has located
over
a dozen sources with connections to the intelligence community who confirm
a shocking story of money laundering and espionage connected to the
highest levels of the White House. Without grants of immunity, the sources
risk going to prison for violation of the National Security Act. Virtually
all have demanded anonymity.
According to a veteran Central Intelligence Agency operative close to the
Foster investigation, Foster's first indication of trouble came when he
inquired about his coded bank account at Banca Della Svizzera Italiana in
Chiasso, Switzerland and found the account empty. Foster was shocked to
learn from the bank that someone using his secret authorization code had
withdrawn all $2.73 million he had stashed there and had moved it to, of
all places, the U.S. Treasury.
Then, according to credit card records reviewed by a private investigator
who has revealed them, Foster canceled the two-day round-trip TWA and
Swiss Air plane tickets to Geneva he had purchased on his American Express
card through the White House travel office on July 1.
Discreetly he began asking what was afoot, says the CIA source,
confirming
that someone in the White House tipped him off. It was bad news. The CIA
had Foster under serious investigation for leaking high-security secrets
to the State of Israel.
For months, a small cadre of CIA computer hackers known as the Fifth
Column, armed with a Cray supercomputer, had been monitoring Foster's
Swiss account. They had located it by tracking money flows from various
Israeli government accounts after finding Foster's name while secretly
snooping through the electronic files of Israel's Mossad. Then by snooping
through the bank files, they gathered all the information needed to
withdraw the money.
Foster was just one of the first of scores of high level U.S. political
figures to thus have their secret Swiss accounts looted of illicit funds,
according to both this veteran CIA source and a separate source in another
intelligence agency. Over the past two years, they say, more than $2
billion has been swept out of offshore bank accounts belonging to figures
connected to the U.S. government with nary a peep from the victims or
their
banks. The claim that Foster and other U.S. figures have had offshore
accounts has been confirmed by a separate high-ranking CIA source and
another in the Department of Justice.
Various sources, some of them controversial, have contributed other
pieces
to this puzzle. Whatever their motivations, those sources have proven
remarkably consistent. Their stories jibe well with known facts and offer
a most plausible explanation for Foster's mysterious depression. It would
also explain Washing-ton's determined effort to dismiss the Foster affair
as a tragic but simple suicide.
Vince Foster a spy? Actually, it is much worse than that, if the CIA's
suspicions are confirmed by the ongoing foreign counterintelligence probe.
He would have been an invaluable double agent with potential access to not
only high-level political information, but also to sensitive code,
encryption and data transmission secrets, the stuff by which modern war is
won or lost. That is because for many years, according to nine separate
current and former U.S. law enforcement or intelligence officials, Foster
had been a behind-the-scenes manager of a key support company in one of
the biggest, most secretive spy efforts on record, the silent surveillance
of banking transactions both here and abroad.
This bank snooping effort began in earnest soon after Ronald Reagan
became
president in 1981. Its primary aim was to track the money behind
international terrorist groups and soon came to be dubbed, "Follow the
money", according to the originator of the program Norman A. Bailey. Now a
private Washington consultant on international banking, Bailey was an
economist and Reagan advisor on the National Security Counsel. It was
Bailey's idea to begin using powerful new computer and electronic
eavesdropping technologies then emerging to let the intelligence community
monitor the previously confidential flow of bank wire transfers.
This was no small task; more than $1 trillion a day moves through New
York
alone.
Bailey, himself constrained by the National Security Act, claims he
doesn't
know exactly how the data was collected. But he confirms that within a few
years (of 1981) The National Security Agency (NSA), the signals
intelligence arm of the government, had begun vacuuming up mountains of
data by listening in on bank wire traffic. It became a joint effort of
several Western governments with the Israelis playing a leading role,
since they were the main targets of terrorism.
Other intelligence experts say the flow of bits and bytes was captured by
various means; from simply tapping phone lines to implanting customized
chips in bank computers to store up and periodically "burst-transmit"
data, to a passing van, or low-flying "sig-int" or signals intelligence
satellite. Another part of the problem was to get the world's banks to
standardize their data so that it could be easily analyzed. And that
brings up to PROMIS, powerful tracking software developed for the U.S.
Government and then further enhanced by a little company called Inslaw
Inc.
PROMIS stands for Prosecutor's Management Information Systems and was
designed to manage legal cases. In 1982, just as Bailey's follow-the-money
effort was gaining steam, the Reagan Justice Department eagerly snapped up
Inslaw's newest version of PROMIS. But the government refused to pay the
$6 million owed for it, claiming part of the contract was not fulfilled.
Inslaw, forced into Chapter 11 reorganization, and nearly driven to quick
liquidation by the government and its former partner AT&T, hotly denied
that claim. Ultimately, a bankruptcy judge ruled the government stole the
PROMIS software by "trickery, fraud and deceit."
Why PROMIS? Because it was adaptable. Besides tracking legal cases, it
could be easily customized to track anything from computer chip design to
complex monetary transactions. It was especially useful for tracking
criminals or just plain political dissidents. Inslaw claims the software
was eventually illegally sold to as many as 50 countries for use by their
police, military or intelligence agencies, including such bloody regimes
as Guatemala, South Africa and Iraq (before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait).
Profits on these sales, Inslaw claims, went mainly into the private
pockets of Republican political cronies in the 1980s, including Reagan
confidante Barl Brain, former part-owner of UPI and FNN.
Among the biggest profiteers on PROMIS, according to the 1992 book by
former Israeli anti-terrorism staffer Ari Ben-Menaseche, was former
British publisher Bob Maxwell. On behalf of the Israelis, Maxwell
aggressively marketed a doctored version of PROMIS equipped with one or
more "back doors" to allow an outsider to tap into the user's data base
without leaving an audit trail. In fact, it may have been such rigged
programs that allowed noted Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard, from his
computer terminal at the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, to
download vast amounts of top secret U.S. nuclear weapons and code data in
the mid-1980s.
According to a heavily-redacted New Mexico FBI counterintelli-gence
report,
Maxwell was apparently allowed to sell two copies of PROMIS back to the
U.S. weapons labs at Sandia and Los Alamos, for what Inslaw claims was a
hugely inflated price of $87 million. That would have allowed Pollard, if
he was using the rigged program, to obtain U.S. missile targeting data
long before Israel had its own satellite capability, thus making it a real
nuclear threat to the Soviet Union. Pollard was convicted of espionage and
sentenced in 1986 to life imprisonment. U.S. officials have vehemently
opposed efforts to gain his early release.
Maxwell, according to Ben-Menaseche and nine other sources, was also
selling pirated versions of PROMIS to major world banks for use in their
wire transfer rooms to track the blizzard of numbers, authorization codes
and confirmations required on each wire transaction. Don't expect any
banks to admit running PROMIS software. They probably now know it was
pilfered. But they readily took it both because it was the best tracking
software available at the time and because the U.S. government was tacitly
leaning on them to go along with the surveillance effort or face
regulatory reprisals or prosecution on money laundering charges. With the
widespread adoption of PROMIS, the data became standardized and much
easier to analyze by the NSA.
It took some effort to install and support PROMIS in the banking
industry.
That's where Vince Foster came in. Sources say that since at least the
late 1970s, Foster had been a silent, behind-the-scenes overseer on behalf
of the NSA for a small Little Rock, Ark., bank data processing company.
Its name was Systematics Inc., launched in 1967 and funded and controlled
for most of its life by Arkansas billionaire Jackson Stephens, a 1946
Naval Academy graduate along with Jimmy Carter. Foster was one of
Stephens' trusted deal makers at the Rose Law Firm, where he was partner
with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Webster Hubbell and William Kennedy (whose
father was a Systematics director). Hubbell also played an overseer role
at Systematics for the NSA for some years according to intelligence
sources.
Systematics has had close ties to the NSA and CIA ever since its
founding,
sources say, as a money-shuffler for covert operations. It is no secret
that there were billions of dollars moving around in "black" accounts -
from buying and selling arms to the Contras, Iran, Iraq, Angola, and other
countries to paying CIA operatives and laundering money from clandestine
CIA drug dealing (such as at Mena, Arkansas). Having taken over the
computer rooms in scores of small U.S. banks as an "out-sourced" supplier
of data processing, Systematics was in a unique position to manage that
covert money flow. Sources say the money was moved at the end of every day
disguised as a routine bank-to-bank balancing transaction, out of view of
bank regulators and even the banks themselves. In short, it became
cyber-money.
One man who uncovered the link between Systematics, Foster and covert
money
movements from arms and drugs was Bob Bickel, who was an undercover
Customs investigator in the 1980s. "We found Systematics was often a
conduit for the funds" in arms and drug transactions, says Bickel, now
living in Texas: "They were the money changers." His story is corroborated
by a former CIA employee who says it was well known within the agency in
the late 1970s that Foster was involved with Systematics in covert money
management.
Another source is Michael Ricoposciuto, former research director of the
covert arms operation at California's tiny Cabazon Indian Reservation in
the early 1980s. Ricoposciuto claims his crew of computer programmers
helped customize PROMIS there for banking and other uses. He is now
serving 80 years in a South Carolina federal prison ostensibly on drug
charges. Though maybe not a credible source on his own, his story fits
well with other sources.
Systematics' money-laundering role for the intelligence community might
help explain why Jackson Stephens tried to take over Washington-based
Financial General Bankshares in 1978 on behalf of Arab backers of the Bank
of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). BCCI's links to global
corruption and intelligence operations have been well docu-mented, though
many mysteries remain.
According to a lawsuit filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission,
Stephens insisted on having then-tiny Systematics brought in to take over
all of FGB's data processing. Representing Systematics in that 1978 SEC
case: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Webster Hubbell. Stephens was blocked in
that takeover. But FGB, later renamed First American, ultimately fell
under the alleged domination of BCCI through Robert Altman and former
Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. According to a technician who worked for
First American in Atlanta, Systematics became a key computer contractor
there anyway.
In the 1980s, Systematics' business boomed. When it first sold stock to
the
public in 1983, revenues were $64 million. That had risen to $230 million
by the time Stephens arranged Systematics' sale to Alltel Corp., a
telephone holding company which then moved its headquarters to Little
Rock. Last year, Systematics sales hit $861 million - a third of Alltel's
total. Stephens now owns more than 8 percent of Alltel and wields
significant influence over the company.
When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, bringing Foster, Hubbell
and Kennedy to the White House staff, Systematics' foreign bank business
flourished. It began to announce a flood of data processing deals with
major banks in Moscow, Maoso, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, Trinidad and
elsewhere. According to veteran bank software vendors, and computer
intelligence specialist Wayne Madsen, co-author of a book about the NSA
called "The Puzzle Palace", it is inconceivable any U.S. company could
land such lucrative work without the intimate participation of the NSA.
Domestic business took off as well, with giants like Citibank and
NationsBank signing big data processing deals.
Working alongside Systematics in this spooky world of bank computer
spying
appears to be a cluster of other curious, loosely-affiliated companies.
For instance, there is Boston Systematics, headed by former CIA officer
Harry Wechsler, who controls two Israeli companies that also use the name
Systematics. Wechsler denies any connection to the Arkansas company (now
named Alltel Information Services) and claims to know nothing of PROMIS.
Odd, then, that Inslaw claims it got two inquiries in 1987 from Wechsler's
Israeli company seeking marketing data on PROMIS.
Many of the intelligence sources who provided information for this story
insist that Boston Systematics and the Arkansas company are, in fact,
related in some way. And based on his own source in the Justice
Department, Inslaw's founder William A. Hamilton says he believes Boston
Systematics was also closely linked with both Maxwell and Rafi Bitan, the
former head of Israel's anti-terrorism effort. Hamilton says Bitan, using
a false name, showed up at Inslaw's Washington, DC office one day in 1983
for a private demonstration of PROMIS.
Another curious company is Arkansas Systems, founded in 1974 by
Systematics
employee and formerly U.S. Army "analyst" John Chamberlain, located just
down the road from Systematics. Arkansas Systems specializes in computer
systems for foreign wire transfer centers and central banks. Among its
clients: Russia and China, according to Arkansas Systems president James
K. Hendren, a physicist formerly involved with the Safeguard anti-missile
system. Arkansas Systems was one of the first com-panies to receive
funding from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority (ADFA), an agency
created by Bill Clinton that is now coming under Congressional scrutiny.
What does Alltel have to say about all of this? "I've never heard
anything
so asinine in all my life," steams Joe T. Ford, Alltel's chairman and the
father of Jack Stephen's chief administrative aide.
John Stouri, a former IBM executive who is chief executive of Alltel
Information Services, says he had never heard of Boston Systematics before
this inquiry. He declares that the Arkansas company does almost no work
for the government, scoffs at the idea his company is tied to the NSA and
says Foster has never had any connection to Systematics. As for the fact
he sold half his 700,000 Alltel shares in February at $34, just before it
began skidding to under $24, he says that was merely to pay for the
exercise of options.
Why is it then that Hamilton claims sources in two separate intelligence
agencies say documents relating to Systematics were among those taken from
Foster's office immediately after Foster's death? Indeed, a private
investigator close to the continuing "Whitewater" probe by Independent
Counsel Kenneth W. Starr says he has learned that Hubbell has delivered
those documents - including papers related to Systematics - to Starr.
Hubbell pleaded guilty last December to two felony counts related to
over-billing at the Rose Law Firm and has been sentenced to 21 months in
prison.
If Foster knew the U.S. was spying on foreign banks, why would he let
himself be caught red-handed with a Swiss bank account? The answer may be
that the Israeli transactions were, in fact, well concealed, according to
the veteran CIA source. And Foster would have known that, unless a prober
knew exactly what to look for, finding his payoffs in the torrent of
routine wire transfer data would be a hopeless task. Besides that, greed
could explain a lot, if not Foster's then for whomever else he might have
been playing bagman. The CIA source says Foster was not the only one in
the White House under suspicion for peddling state secrets.
All of which helps explain Foster's odd behavior before his death. He was
a
tough, smart trial attorney at the peak of power in Washington. Only 48
years old, he was in excellent health. Suddenly, according to the Fiske
report, he couldn't sleep. He complained of heart palpitations and high
blood pressure. His sister arranged for him to see a Washington
psychiatrist, who later told the FBI he had been instructed not to take
notes because Foster's depression was "directly related to highly
sensitive and confidential matters" tied to his "top secret" government
work.
Foster never saw a shrink. Instead, about a week before he died, he hired
a
lawyer: high-powered DC criminal attorney and political fix-it man James
Hamilton. Foster's wife claims his reason was the White House Travel
Office controversy, which was expected to lead to congressional hearings.
On the weekend of July 17 and 18, Foster drove with his wife to the
eastern
shore of Maryland to relax. By "coincidence", according to the Fiske
report, so did Hubbell. They met at the posh estate of Michael Cardozo,
head of Clinton's legal defense fund and son-in-law of prominent
Democratic fund raiser Nathan Landau. Hubbell later claimed the weekend
was a laid-back gathering of tennis and poolside chit-chat.
But according to sources connected to the CIA, Justice Department and
another intelligence agency, the meeting was under surveillance. The
agenda? Heavy duty damage control. Foster was grilled. To whom else could
the Swiss money be traced? How could the scandal be contained?
Foster's wife admitted he returned to Washington even more depressed. On
Monday night, he turned down an invitation by the President to drop by the
White House to supposedly watch a movie. On Tuesday, Foster left his
office at the White House about 1 p.m. and said he'd be back later. At
5:45 p.m., his body was found neatly laid out at Fort Marcy Park, a bullet
wound in his mouth. Suicide, the Fiske report promptly declared, echoed by
a cursory (Democrat-run) Senate inquiry.
Still, nagging questions remain: Why was there no blood on the ground, no
bone fragments or brain tissue? Why were there rug fibers all over the
clothes? Why no dust on his shoes despite the long dirt path from his car
to his body?
The answer seems painfully clear; a cover-up of immense proportions for
reasons of "national security". And don't expect Whitewater prober Kenneth
Starr to spill any beans. He was in-house counsel to Reagan Attorney
General William French Smith at the time the Inslaw PROMIS software was
expropriated for intelligence use. Later, as Solicitor General, he recused
himself from an Inslaw-related matter without explanation. It seems likely
Starr would have been personally involved in launching the covert bank spy
effort, which Washington is still so nervous to keep secret.
All in the family, you might say.
</quote>
--
However much I may worship personality-powerful individual personality in
statesmen, inventors, artists, philosophers, or leaders, as well as the
collective personality of a historic group of human beings, which we call a
nation--however much I may worship personality, I do not regret its
disappearance. Whoever can, will, and must perish, let him perish. But the
distinctive nationality of Jews neither can, will, nor must be destroyed ~
Theodor Herzl, Father of Political Zionism
However much I may worship personality-powerful individual personality in
statesmen, inventors, artists, philosophers, or leaders, as well as the
collective personality of a historic group of human beings, which we call a
nation--however much I may worship personality, I do not regret its
disappearance. Whoever can, will, and must perish, let him perish. But the
distinctive nationality of Jews neither can, will, nor must be destroyed ~
Theodor Herzl, Father of Political Zionism