In the early 1980s, the War on (Some) Drugs and the War on (Some) Terrorists led to various U.S. government initiatives to "follow the money."

The evidence indicates that at some point National Security Agency (NSA) made the logical decision that continual access meant the NSA had to become a major provider of banking software.

A Senate subcommittee recommended that the Treasury Department should work with the "Federal Reserve Board to develop a better understanding of the financial significance and use of currency repatriation data as well as information about foreign depositors' currency deposits." (U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, *Crime and Secrecy: The Use of Offshore Banks and Companies*, U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1983.)

At the National Security Council, Norman A. Bailey, an economist who understood the electronic flow of money through SWIFT, Fedwire, and CHIPS, urged the involvement of the National Security Agency (NSA), the Ft. Meade-based Defense Department agency for signals intelligence and communications security.

Bailey "confirms that within a few years the National Security Agency . . . 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 target of terrorism" (James R. Norman, "Fostergate").

The NSA proceeded to jack into Fedwire, CHIPS, and Swift. Doing so would be a priority if the aim was to monitor banking transactions.

"(Forbe magazine 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 [ 1968? ] and funded and controlled for most of its life by Arkansas billionaire Jackson Stephens, a 1946 Naval Academy graduate. 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. Having taken over the complete computer rooms in scores of small U.S. banks as an 'outsource' 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.... .

."Systematics' money-laundering role for the intelligence community.

Another curious company is Arkansas Systems, founded in 1974 by Systematics employee and former 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. Arkansas Systems was one of the first companies to receive funding from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, an agency created by then Gov. Bill Clinton (and connected to drug trafficking by the Contras).

In 1978 Jackson Stephens tried to take over Financial General Bankshares (FGB) in Washington, D.C. (FGB was later acquired by BCCI, renamed First American, and run by Robert Altman and Clark Clifford. In the Stephens' takeover attempt, FGB sued--among others--Systematics. Briefs for Systematics were submitted by C.J. Giroir, Web Hubbell, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

First American was subsequently used by the CIA to manage and launder money for covert operations. As noted in a U.S. Senate report:

"After the CIA knew that BCCI was as an institution a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American, BCCI's secretly held U.S. subsidiary, for CIA operations. ...

"Kamal Adham, who was the CIA's principal liason for the entire Middle East from the mid-1960s through 1979, was the lead frontman for BCCI in its takeover of First American, was an important nominee shareholder for BCCI, and remains one of the key players in the entire BCCI affair." (Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, *The BCCI Affair: a Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate*, GPO, December 1992.)

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." (James R. Norman, Fostergate.)

ALLTEL Information Services (formerly Systematics), based in Little Rock, Arkansas, threaten journalists with a law suite over their investigation this issue.

Boston Systematics is "headed by former CIA officer Harry C. Wechsler, which controls two Israeli companies that also use the name Systematics" and from which "Inslaw claims it got two inquiries in 1987 from Wechsler's Israeli company seeking marketing data on PROMIS". (Jim Norman, Senior Editor at Forbes)

Vince Foster, Webster Hubbell, and Earl Brian were all involved in the NSA project to spy on banking transactions. This project utilized the modified PROMIS software sold to, and installed in, domestic banks by Systematics (Alltel Information Services) and in foreign central banks by Arkansas Systems, both of Little Rock, Arkansas. A security hole introduced in the software to allow surreptitious surveillance was reportedly the source of infection of government computers of a virus/worm.

The Federal Reserve using the Banking Secrecy Act has been forcing banks into the surveillance business, to detect money launderers and anyone else looking suspicious. But all along a top official of the Federal Reserve have presided over a nation-wide money laundering operation, in conjunction with other launderers in Little Rock, Arkansas, and Pittsburg, PA.

One example involves Manuel Noriega, who was recruited by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency in 1959, who went on the CIA payroll in 1967, and who became head of Panamanian military intelligence in 1968, where he was in a strategic position to supply both information and drugs to the United States, and later on arms to the contras in an operation based in Panama, Mexico, and Mena, Arkansas. CIA money was paid to Noriega through the Panamanian branch of BCCI. The CIA and U.S. Army only acknowledge paying Noreiga $322,226 between 1955 and 1986 (The New York Times, January 19, 1991). Be that as it may, Noriega deposited $33 million in his account (under the name of the Panamanian Defense Forces) at the Panamanian branch of BCCI. The head of this branch was the son of a former director of intelligence in Pakistan.

The CIA also used BCCI branches in Pakistan to launder payments to the Afghan rebels, and Pakistani officials used the same bank to launder heroin profits. The finance minister of Pakistan, Sarti Asis, confirms that the bank did launder CIA contributions to the Afghan rebels, but claims it was "not even handling 1 percent of total drug money" (Financial Times, July 25, 1991).

"By 1976, Noriega was fully forgiven. CIA Director George Bush arranged to pay Noriega $110,000 a year for his services, put the Panamanian up as a houseguest of his deputy CIA director, and helped to prevent an embarrassing prosecution of several American soldiers who had delivered highly classified U.S. intelligence secrets to Noriega's men. . . .

"If Carter needed friends in Panama to smooth the way for a canal treaty, Reagan (who strongly opposed that treaty) needed them to support the Contra cause. . . . CIA payments to Noriega resumed when Reagan took office in 1981, starting at $185,000 a year. At their peak, in 1985, Noriega collected $200,000 from the Agency. The CIA deposited the money in Noriega's account at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, two of whose units later pleaded guilty to laundering drug money. CIA Director William Casey frequently met with Noriega alone in Washington" (Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, University of California Press, 1991).

That Noriega was necessarily used as an NSA asset also follows from the fact that Panama served as the listening post to much of South America.

The Bush-Noriega-BCCI-Mena connection continued. Barry Seal, who flew money, drugs, and arms out of Mena, Arkansas, acquired his job through George Bush. After Seal was indicted in Ft.Lauderdale, Florida, in 1983 for a shipment of 200,000 Quaaludes, he tried in vain to make a deal with the DEA. He found a more sympathetic audience in the Vice President: ". . . in March 1984, while out of jail on an appeal bond, 'Seal flew his Lear jet to Washington and telephones Vice President Bush's office'; and he spoke on the street to staff members of the vice president's South Florida Task Force" (Scott and Marshall).

How did Jackson Stephens react to all this activity in his back yard? Well, among other things, Stephens and his Worthen National Bank invested in Harken Energy,(* see below) a Texas company in which George Bush, Jr., was a board member. "The money Stephens invested came through the Swiss BCCI subsidiary" (Rachel Ehrenfeld).

In 1987 First American bought the National Bank of Georgia, formerly acquired from Bert Lance by Pharaon.

"In October 1988, three days after the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiring with the Medellin Cartel to launder $32,000,000 in illicit drug profits ("Hill & Knowlton, Robert Gray, and the CIA," by Johan Carlisle, Covert Action Quarterly, #44, Spring 1993).

When BCCI closed, many of its money-management, money-laundering, and monetary-intelligence duties were transferred to FinCEN, a newly created unit of the U.S. Treasury.

The loss of BCCI did considerable damage to the process of intelligence collection.

The vast amounts of banking and financial data being sucked in and stored for analysis by the NSA mandated a separate facility to analyze and process the data. The volume of financial data was already taxing NSA resources. (NSA's data processing capacity has been recently expanded through installation of the world's third fastest super-computering center [according to rating criteria that may, or may not, be valid]. The center is located at E-Systems of Dallas, Texas, a company that was purchased in April 1995 by Raytheon for $2.3 billion.)

These concerns, and others, led to the creation of FinCEN, located in Vienna, Virginia. Because FinCEN was established as a unit of the U.S. Treasury, NSA's COMINT and ELINT could be combined with domestic sources of information, including information from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury's own data bases, which included various types of financial, tax, and customs information. It also meant the merger of foreign and domestic intelligence. As one cypherpunk has noted, national borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway.

A November 1993 GAO report on FinCEN lists 84 positions (out of 207 staff members) referred to as "intelligence analysts", most of whom come from the NSA. "FinCEN, planned as a hunter of tax-evaders, has become a hunter of economic and financial secrets at home and abroad" (J. Michael Springmann, "FinCEN--American Financial Intelligence Service," Unclassified, No. 33, Summer 1995.)

"And, it is clear from the March 29, 1995 draft of Clinton's executive order on access to classified information, that FinCEN's brief has been expanded. It will, in the future, conduct security clearance investigations for all government employees and contractors with access to classified information, in the process examining their bank statements, credit histories, and foreign travel records" (Springmann).

FinCEN now issues all regulations under the Banking Secrecy Act, the basis of all U.S. money laundering legislation.

This data standard, embodied in the PROMIS software, was implemented at the Justice Department, the NSA, the CIA, and the NSC. PROMIS was also sold to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to keep track of individuals (in a data base called MAINCORE) who were to be rounded up and incarcerated in the event of certain types of "national emergencies". It is also at the heart of FinCEN's data collation efforts.

The PROMIS software--whether equipped with a Trojan horse and sold to foreign intelligence organization, or similarly modified to spy on banking transactions--provides the key to a scandal that links the covert collection of data on individuals, money laundering in Arkansas and elsewhere, defense payola around the nation, and nuclear espionage at the White House, to the deaths of Danny Casolaro and Vince Foster.

The death of investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was, like that of Vince Foster, alleged to be "suicide" in the face of all contrary evidence. Three days before his murder, Casolaro showed a friend some photocopies of checks drawn on BCCI: checks, made out for $1 million and $4 million drawn on BCCI . . . accounts held by Adnon Khashoggi, the international arms merchant and factotum for the House of Saud, and by Manucher Ghorbanifar, the arms dealer and Iran-Contra middleman." (James Ridgeway and Doug Vaughan, "The Last Days of Danny Casolaro, The Village Voice, October 15, 1991).

The sale of the PROMIS software was the one of the principal topics that Danny Casolaro was investigating at the time of his death either late Friday, August 9, or early Saturday, August 10, 1991. On Saturday around noon he was found dead in his room, Room 517, at the Sheraton Martinsburg Inn in Virginia.

According to an affidavit signed by a friend of Casalaro on March 15, 1994 (hereafter F Affidavit), Casolaro had documents received from an NSA employee named Alan Standorf that were classified "top secret" and "SCI".

Casolaro had documents related to BCCI and the sale of PROMIS, according to the F Affidavit:

--Casolaro had documents proving that the PROMIS software was modified by Michael Riconosciuto.

--Casolaro had copies of wire transfers of money from accounts held at the World Bank and BCCI and paid to Earl Brian at shell companies in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland.

--Casolaro had copies of checks drawn on BCCI accounts and paid to shell accounts held by Richard Secord and Earl Brian.

--Casolaro had copies of documents of arms, gold, and software shipments cleared for export by Peter Videnieks at U.S. Customs.

--Casolaro had a document that Casolaro alleged showed the involvement of Bobby Inman and Robert McFarlane in the sale of PROMIS to Israel.

--Casolaro had meetings in Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania with a number of individuals of Arabic origin, including Iman Mashhad.

--Casolaro had documents related to "First American Bankshares" [Financial General Bankshares = First American ?] showing monies paid to officials in Justice and Treasury.

The next day after picking up two packages of documents for the meeting with Videniecks and Altman, Danny Casolaro was found dead in his hotel room at the Sheraton. Several days later a friend of Casolaro's received a phone call from Cuellar:

'What Danny Casolaro was investigating is a business. If you don't want to end up like Danny or like the journalist [Anson Ng] who died a horiffic death in Guatemala, you'll stay out of this. Anyone who asks too many questions will end up dead.'" (Bua Rebuttal)

Joseph Cuellar was/is a covert (Army/DIA) intelligence operative of the U.S. Army Special Forces.

The Mena connections to Clinton and Bush have, through Jackson Stephens, been extended to Robert Dole.

"On November 27, 1987, an Arkansas State Police detective received a call from a reporter for information about an investigation into an aircraft maintenance firm named Rich Mountain Aviation. Located at a small airport in the little town of Mena, which stands virtually alone in the far west of Arkansas near the Oklahoma border, Rich Mountain was at the center of secret operations including cocaine smuggling in the name of national security. The reporter was seeking confirmation that the drug network operating out of Rich Mountain was part of Lt. Colonel Oliver North's network. He believed this group was smuggling cocaine into the US through Mena and using the profits to support the Contras as well as themselves.

"Arkansas State Police Detective Russell Welch . . . was called by an Arkansas sheriff six weeks later who related that he had information indicating that US Senator Robert Dole was concerned about the Rich Mountain investigation. In particular, the sheriff's informant stated that Dole was worried that the investigation might in some way harm George Bush" (Alan A Block, "Drugs, Law, and the State," Hong Kong University Press, 1992).

The BCCI-Bush- Noriega-Mena connection to drug smuggling was matched by an similar Israeli connection to arms and drug dealing and money laundering. Just as the pension funds controlled by Robert Maxwell were looted to pay for Mossad operations in Europe (Victor Ostrovsky, The Other Side of Deception, HarperCollins, 1994, p. 203), so were American S&Ls in effect looted (or burdened with debt) by the financial machinations of the "Committee of Thirty" to help generate the vast funds needed to maintain and expand Israel's defense industry. Some of these funds found their way into offshore accounts held by U.S. politicians and defense personnel as bribes, kickbacks, "campaign" contributions, and payment for stolen secrets.

http://www.naturalhealthholistic.com/foster-1.html

* In 1987, Jackson Stephens (an Arkansas billionaire and shareholder of First American bank) made arrangements with Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to provide $25 million to Harken Energy in return for a stock interest in that company. As part of the deal, Sheikh Abdullah Bakhsh, a Saudi real estate billionaire, joined Harken Energy's board as a major investor. Union Bank of Switzerland, which ordinarily didn't invest in small U.S. firms, would make an exception, giving Harken $25 million in exchange for a stock interest. At the time, UBS was a joint-venture partner with the Bank of Credit and Commerce International -(BCCI) a Geneva-based bank.

Stephens was owner of a Little Rock brokerage firm which underwrote Harken Energy's $25 million stock offering. Stephens Incorporated placed the Harken Energy stock offering with the Nugan Hand Bank and the London subsidiary of Union Bank of Switzerland. During the next decade the Union Bank of Switzerland assisted BCCI in avoiding taxes by moving cash from its bank in Noriega's Panama to other locations throughout the world. "http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/Book4Ch.3.html"

Another source says:

Harken Energy's $25 million stock offering was underwritten by Stephens, Inc., an Arkansas bank whose head, Jackson Stephens. Stephens placed the offering with the London subsidiary of Union Bank of Switzerland, which (according to the Wall Street Journal) was not known as an investor in small American companies.

Union Bank of Switzerland was also involved in scandals surrounding Panamanian money laundering by BCCI, and Ferdinand Marcos' movement of 325 tons of gold out of the Phillipines.

"http://www.realchange.org/bushjr.htm" l "financing"

Sabow, Col. Jim -1991 was murdered after he had discovered CIA-connected C-130s flying tons of cocaine onto El Toro Marine Air Station in 1990 and 1991. Sabow threatened to expose an illegal covert operation at El Toro involving Sabow’s fellow officers, CIA-sponsored airlifts to Central and South America, black cargo planes landing in the middle of the night and drugs.

Decorated Vietnam veteran and lawyer Gary Eitel served as a special federal prosecutor in a case that looked into the CIA's diversion of C-130 Hercules aircraft into the hands of private companies who were operating as CIA contractors or proprietaries. These were the same C-130s that flew into Col. Jim Sabow's life. Eitel told the Sabow family that the way to prove their case was to find the refueling records that would identify the El Toro planes as the same ones he had already proven had been maneuvered through the Forest Service by the government.

The murder was made to look like a suicide.

Among other loose ends, all fingerprints had been wiped from the shotgun that killed Sabow. Several police forensics experts said that it would have been impossible for Sabow to not have left his fingerprints on the weapon he used to kill himself.

Furthermore, crime-scene photographs and reports made it clear that almost no blood had spilled from the body. If the colonel was still alive when he pulled the trigger, why hadn’t blood spilled everywhere? The only sizable spray of blood on Sabow’s body had coated a patch of his left forearm and palm, ending abruptly in a neat line across his skin. To Dr. Sabow, this seemed to suggest his brother was already lying on the ground on his right side when the shotgun went off.

Dr. Sabow provided the medical reports and photographs to several other doctors, including a team of neurologists and neuroradiologists at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine, and asked them to review the evidence. Dr. Kent B. Remley, an assistant professor of radiology and otolaryngology at the university, wrote that the "direction of the skull fracture is inconsistent with the effects of a shotgun wound."

Remley also found that the swelling was caused by an external blunt-force instrument. "The degree of soft tissue swelling in the occipital region on the right indicated that the blunt force to the head occurred prior to death," he noted.

Jack Feldman, chairman of the department of physiological science at UCLA, also reviewed the evidence. He summarized his conclusions in a June 20, 1994, written statement included in a Marine Corps report on Sabow’s death. "Colonel Sabow was rendered unconscious or immobile by a blow to the head that fractured the base of the skull, causing bleeding into the pharynx. Breathing continued after the injury, aspirating blood into the lung. At some time later, a shotgun was placed in the mouth and triggered (by another party) causing death and obscuring any evidence of prior injury. . . . I conclude that the preponderance of evidence does not support the finding that Colonel James E. Sabow died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound."

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/00/24/news-schou.php

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