Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (32 page)

276
.
NYT,
12/5/78 (Ryan’s mother wanted full investigation), see fn 63;
NYT,
12/8,14,15,21/78; 1/4/79 (S.F. Grand Jury, delays, stonewalling, Stoen/Hunter).

277
.
White Night,
p. 232;
Raven,
p. 576 ($12 mil. hidden in accounts, airlift costs); “Eerie Shoes: Missing Money,”
Time,
11/18/78; “Assets Liquidated,”
Christian Century,
10/21/81; “Payoff for a Massacre,”
Macleans,
9/6/72; NYT, 11/21,23,28,29; 12/3,21/78 (estimates of wealth),
NYT,
11/25/78 and 5/19/79 (cost of airlift, $2 to $4.4 mil.);
NYT,
12/3,5,7,14/78 (Pentagon, Charles Garry, Justice Department, families claim it), 12/19/78 and 1/3,24/79 and 2/11/79 (State Department, IRS, Guyanese, court receiver claim it).

278
.
Hold Hands,
p. 134;
Raven,
p. 590, note 66;
Daily World,
6/23/81 (Holsinger suit); Personal interview with Holsinger, 1982 (suspects military intelligence).

279
.
NYT,
1/23/79 (Ryan’s children sue Temple for $1 million);
Raven,
p. 579; Personal interview with Holsinger, 1983;
NYT,
10/11/79 (695 claims for “wrongful death,” total $1.78 billion).

280
.
Philadelphia Inquirer,
4/1/81, “Hinckley Profile,” Sid Bernstein, WNET, NY, 1981;
Breaking Points,
Jack & Jo Ann Hinckley (Chosen Books, 1985).

281
. “Who Shot RR,” Lenny Lapon,
Continuing Inquiry,
5/22/81; “The Day the President Was Shot,
Investigative Reporter,
1/82.

282
.
Lennon, What Happened?
Beckley (Sunshine Pubs., 1981); “John Lennon’s Killer, the Nowhere Man,” C. Ungier, New York, 6/22/81.

283
.
World Vision Magazine,
1983; “Final Report of Israeli Commission of Inquiry,” Journal Palestinian Studies, Spring, 1983; “Kahan Commission,”
Midstream,
6-7/83;
Guardian,
11/17/81.

284
. “Terrorism in Miami: Suppressing Free Speech,”
Counterspy,
3-5/84;
Guardian,
11/17/81.

285
.
SFE,
12/18/80, op cit., fn 194.

286
.
Hold Hands,
pp. 40, 165, 187 (photo).

287
.
Journey to Nowhere,
pp. 234-5,
Hold Hands,
pp. 211-2 (FBI predict more); The Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985) (Wayne Williams, Atlanta child murders).

288
. “Jonestown Massacre Recalled,”
WP,
11/19/84; 10/10/84 (homeless controversy); “Political Storm Swirls Around Newcomers,”
NYT,
11/3/84; WP, 10/4/84 (quote).

289
. “Oregon City an Experiment in Medical Care,” L. Busch,
Amer. Med. News,
10/26/84; Eugene,
Oregon Register-Guard,
11/6/84 (injections).

290
.
Politics of Lying,
David Wise (Random House, 1973).

291
.
1984,
George Orwell (New American Library, 1961) (The book was originally entitled
1948,
not
1984).

Danny Casolaro died in the process of investigating something called the Octopus, a power cabal that had its tentacles in a variety of notorious contemporary events. The list of those events is long: the 1980 October Surprise pay-off that cost Jimmy Carter the presidency; Contra War weapons development; bizarre murders among the Cabazon Indians in Indio, California; the privatization of CIA dirty tricks in the form of the Wackenhut security firm; the Meese Justice Department’s attempt to steal software from a company known as Inslaw, and much more. What follows is a draft of Casolaro’s original proposal for his book,
Behold, A Pale Horse: A True Crime Narrative.
Later drafts retitled it simply
The Octopus.

Among researchers, the verdict has not yet been returned on whether or not Casolaro was murdered or committed suicide in the bathtub of his West Virginia hotel room on August 10, 1992. Stories have circulated about Casolaro’s despondency over publisher rejection of the
Octopus
manuscript and his fear about the recent discovery that he had multiple sclerosis. However, Casolaro died just after meeting an informant who may have provided him with the last piece of evidence he needed to prove the existence of his Octopus cabal. The gashes in his wrists were too deep to be self-inflicted. The suicide note was unconvincing.

Suspicions continue to mount. The assistant housekeeper of the hotel tells of the presence of bloody towels under a sink at the crime scene, possibly used to wipe it clean before Casolaro’s body was found. Casolaro’s body was embalmed without consulting his family. Just as the veil on the secret life of Lee Harvey Oswald is only now being lifted, what really happened to Danny Casolaro will only be revealed in time. It seems a safe bet, however, that he died in part to suppress research he had amassed for the book proposed in the following document. The proposal,
Behold, A Pale Horse,
completed in 1990, appears in the files of Danny Casolaro, which were turned over to ABC News’
Nightline
after Casolaro’s death and were eventually transferred to a small office at the University of Missouri.

This proposal covers many of the facts that have become well-known parts of the Casolaro tale and includes heretofore unreported details, such as the role of the gas explosive developed on the Cabazon reservation in the deaths of over 300 American and French military personnel after the October 23, 1983 blast at a compound in Beirut. (Interestingly, after the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center on February 26, 1993, many in the media were quick to draw comparisons to the Beirut tragedy, and some early reports mentioned the smell of gas-fuel at the Trade Center bomb site.) The biggest gap in this account is its obliquely hidden mention of the Promis software, a central and notorious part of the Casolaro saga. Promis was developed by Inslaw, a company owned by William and Nancy Sullivan of St. Louis, Missouri, to track criminal cases through various prosecutors’ offices. Although it was developed with government money, when the Reagan White House cut the program funding the development, the Hamiltons continued its development under the auspices of a private corporation, Inslaw. Modifications to Promis made it do extraordinary things, including the extrapolation of Soviet submarine launches, and it eventually came to be regarded as an indispensible police tool. It functioned well in tracking criminals and, some have said, in keeping track of political dissidents.

In 1982, Inslaw contracted to become the sole supplier of Promis to the offices of U.S. attorneys, but the Justice Department failed to deliver on the $10 million contract. While Inslaw struggled through the courts to get its due, Meese crony Earl Brian unsuccessfully attempted a hostile takeover of the company. Copies of the modified software began turning up at police agencies throughout the world. Although Brian denies it, the Hamiltons came to believe that he had sold it on the international market in violation of the Inslaw contract. Enraged, the Hamiltons put investigator Casolaro in touch with Michael Riconoscuito, who claimed not only to have made many of the Promis modifications, but also to have developed fuel-air explosives for the Contra war on the ostensibly sovereign Cabazon reservation. Riconoscuito asserted that Brian had been given Promis as a reward for paying off the Ayatollah Khomeini, who successfully delayed the release of Iranian-held American hostages until the defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Riconoscuito’s confessions include tales of intelligence agency infighting that may have contributed to George Bush’s defeat. He also claims connection to Park-On-Meter, an Arkansas company that helped develop Contra chemical weapons and flew them out on an airstrip in Mena, Arkansas, in an operation apparently covered up by then-Governor Bill Clinton. Riconoscuito also led Danny Casolaro to Area 51 in the Nevada desert, where UFO stories mix with rumors of secret, advanced military craft. Casolaro’s files, from which the following was taken, are replete with notes about “Majority 12,” the secret government task force working deals with the space aliens.

Casolaro has been slighted for not being able to discern the trustworthiness of various sources, and for being so reluctant to separate the wheat from the chaff in his research that he instead fictionalized his account of the Octopus. Nevertheless, if he was killed, it was not because he wrote bad spy fiction, it was no doubt due more to the pathways he opened to the secret and suppressed details of recent history some of which can be found on the following pages.

Behold, a pale horse and its rider’s name was death and Hades followed him, and they were given power over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.

— Revelation 6: 7-8

An international cabal whose freelance services cover parochial political intrigue, espionage, sophisticated weapon technologies that include biotoxins, drug trafficking, money laundering and murder-for-hire has emerged from an isolated desert Indian reservation just north of Mexicali.

While this cabal continues today, its origins were spawned 30 years ago in the shadow of the Cold War. In recent months, however, some of its members have emerged from the trenches like scarecrows to take gratuitous credit for their roles in delaying the release of the hostages in Iran until after the 1980 presidential election, scuttling and resettling the dope and dirty money schemes of the notorious, Australian-based Nugan Hand Bank, assisting Super Gun maker Gerald Bull who was assassinated last spring in Brussels, and for the development and distribution of the Fuel Air Explosive which can pack the power of a nuclear weapon in a shoebox.

I propose a series of articles and a book, a true crime narrative, that unravels this web of thugs and thieves who roam the earth with their weapons and their murders, trading dope and dirty money for the secrets of the temple.

Behold, A Pale Horse
will be a haunting odyssey that depicts a manifesto of deceit, decisions of conscience, good and evil, intrigue and betrayal.

John Philip Nichols found his promised land just north of Mexicali on the wild grasses above the Salton Sea.

He was 60 years old then and the Cabazon Indian Reservation on the edge of Sonora was an ideal place for him to nurse his secret self. This is the vast desert emptiness where the yucca reaches nearly 40 feet high, where the Mormons saw it as a symbol pointing to the promised land and they called it the Joshua Tree. But the Joshua Tree is an ugly, asymmetrical lily with burly arms crooked at the elbow and it points everywhere, not unlike John Philip Nichols, as if asking itself, “What shall I do next?”

There is a point on the ridge of the Little San Bernardino mountains known as Salton View where you are more than 5,000 feet above the desert and where, to the north, you can see the great escarpment of Mount San Jacinto and, to the south, the man-made Salton Sea, the orchards of the Coachella Valley and, on a clear day, Mexico.