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Conspiracy Nation -- Vol. 9 Num. 55
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("Quid coniuratio est?")
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FOCUS ON CHARLES HAYES
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The book from which the following is excerpted, The Octopus:
Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro, by Kenn Thomas
and Jim Keith, will be available in late November from Feral
House, POB 3466, Portland, OR 97208.
One person who might have had a view of how PROMIS works was
Charles Hayes. Newspapers identified Hayes as a salvage dealer
in Pulaski County, Kentucky, near the temporary home of Ari Ben-
Menashe in Lexington, who purchased $45 worth of surplus computer
equipment from the government in July 1990. The equipment
included 13 terminals, nine printers, two cartridge module
drives, 19 backup cartridges and two central memory
units--equipment that had been used by the US Attorney's office
since 1983 to maintain information via PROMIS on the witness
protection program, informants, office employees, and outstanding
grand jury cases. In August, when federal officials discovered
that a weak magnetic screwdriver had failed to purge this
information from the equipment adequately, two FBI agents
dispatched to make inquiries of Hayes were kicked out.(1) Three
days later, Hayes began to cooperate with the US Attorney's
office, denied that he had possession of any information that
might have been on the equipment, and invited an inspection.
Inspectors discovered that the serial numbers of the two
cartridge modules that Hayes claimed were the ones he bought did
not match the numbers of the modules the Justice Department had
sold. (2) Hayes then claimed he had sold the modules, but did
not name the purchasers until after federal officials filed a
lawsuit.(3) Justice Department attorneys later claimed that Hayes
had indeed tried to sell the secret information to an undercover
informant, but criminal charges were never filed. (4) The case
led to a congressional investigation of computer security; the
Justice Department now tosses rather than sells its extra data
storage devices.
(1) Baker, David L., "Computer Records Accidentally Sold,"
Lexington Herald-Leader, September 1, 1990.
(2) Baker, David L., "Buyer Says Agents Didn't Find Computer
With Secrets," Lexington Herald-Leader, September 5, 1990.
(3) "Buyer of US Computer Files To Be Disclosed," Lexington
Herald-Leader, September 6, 1990.
(4) Baker, David L., "US Says Pulaski Man Tried To Sell
Secrets," Lexington Herald-Leader, September 22, 1990.
...and
With the help of Wackenhut and the Cabazons, according to Ari
Ben-Menashe, the US developed its own version of the back-door
and the US and Israel began looking for a neutral company through
which it could sell the program to foreign intelligence services.
The company chosen for the task was Degem, a computer firm with
offices in Israel, Guatemala and the South African Bantustan
homeland. It had been taken over for the purpose by Robert
Maxwell, the publishing mogul who drowned under mysterious
circumstances in 1991. Through Maxwell's Degem, working in
tandem with Brian's Hadron, the software found a home with the
military regime in Guatemala, where it tracked leftist
insurgents. "Even if they traveled under a false name, various
characteristics, such as height, hair color, age, were fed into
roadside terminals and PROMIS searched through its database
looking for a common denominator. It would be able to tell an
army commander that a certain dissident who was in the north
three days before had caught a train, then a bus, stayed at a
friend's house, and was now on the road under a different name.
That's how frightening the system was." According to
Ben-Menashe, PROMIS was used in South Africa to track and squelch
the organizers of a strike among the black coal miners via their
mandatory identity cards (5). Degem also sold PROMIS to the
Soviet Union and the system was utilized by its GRU intelligence
service at least until the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. (6)
(5) Oddly, a member of a congressional delegation sent on a fact-
finding tour to Johannesburg at the exact moment the world's
second largest platinum mine fired 20,000 black workers to end a
walk-out in January 1986, was Charles Hayes of Chicago. The mine
was located in the homeland of Bophuthatswana, northwest of
Johannesburg ("South African Platinum Mine Fires 20,000 Blacks
Over Strike," Lexington Herald Leader, January 7, 1986.) In
December of that year, the Charles Hayes, who would later buy the
loaded Justice Department computers but identified then as an
attorney, was involved with a gemstone smuggling operation in
Brazil with links to Kentucky. He represented one of the
Brazilian corporations indicted by the US over the smuggling.
(White, Jim, Courier-Journal, September 6, 1990.) (6)
Ben-Menashe, Profits of War, p. 141.
Kenn Thomas publishes Steamshovel Press, a journal that regularly
examines conspiracy theories. Singles issues: $5.50 in USA;
US$6.50 foreign. SUbscriptions: $22.00 in USA; US$26 foreign.
Send to Steamshovel Press, POB 23715, St. Louis, MO 63121. On
the web, Steamshovel can be found at:
http://www.umsl.edu/~skthoma
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