The Plot Thickens in PROMIS Affair
Feb 5, 2001
By Kelly Patricia O Meara
http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=208518
Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers Sean McDade and
Randy Buffam set out in January 2000 on an eight-month secret investigation in
the United States. The two were attempting to determine whether Canada's
law-enforcement and intelligence agencies were using an allegedly pirated
software program called PROMIS that had been modified to be monitorable by
shadowy interests said to have the electronic key; and, if so, whether Canada's
national security had been compromised because of the suspected electronic
backdoors installed in the software.
Much of the Mounties' investigation
focused on the reported activities and relationships of Michael Riconosciuto, a
computer wizard who claimed to have modified the PROMIS software for illegal
use. A convicted felon, Riconosciuto also claimed knowledge of a compendium of
suspicious characters and activities that include:
* Arms development for
an alleged joint venture between the Cabazon Indians of Indio, Calif., and the
Wackenhut Corp.;
* A former high-ranking Justice Department attorney
named Mike Abbell and his alleged relationship with the Cali drug cartel;
and
* Riconosciuto's own activity as an undercover operative in a Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) sting operation in Lebanon.
Insight has
followed the trail of the two RCMP investigators as they moved secretly
throughout the United States collecting hard data from a variety of sources and
interviewing witnesses, including Riconosciuto. They ultimately returned to
Canada to continue their still-secret national-security probe that raises
troubling questions about international espionage, crime and scandalous
cover-ups said to date back more than a decade.
In this second
installment of an exclusive four-part series, Insight focuses on Riconosciuto,
on whom the RCMP investigators invested so much time, expense and effort to
examine and try to confirm his shocking stories. By following the Mounties,
Insight has assembled new information that sheds light on the shadowy world in
which Riconosciuto operated and what the RCMP found - including long-sought
computer tapes that Riconosciuto has said contain a version of PROMIS that was
stolen by high-level U.S. government officials and that he then modified for
illegal purposes.
This was not the first time such claims had been made.
Before the RCMP got involved, a great deal of this information was provided to
Congress (among others) and surfaced during a 1992 taped telephone conversation
between Riconosciuto and an FBI agent at a time Riconosciuto was on trial for
the manufacture and sale of methamphetamine and was attempting to trade
information to the FBI in exchange for entry to the federal Witness Protection
Program.
But, as so often with Riconosciuto, the stories he offered to
federal agents were not confirmed or just ignored. That is, until the RCMP
entered the picture last year and got a break. Helping the Mounties was Cheri
Seymour, a Southern California journalist turned private detective. Years
before, in January 1992, she had retrieved boxes of documents from
Riconosciuto's hidden desert trailer. The Mounties spent three days copying
these documents and, with the help of Seymour, returned to the trailer where yet
more documents were retrieved.
These combined Riconosciuto papers
revealed the dark and disturbing landscape of crime, espionage and betrayal of
which he had been part - one that ever since his arrest and conviction in 1992
had been labeled the fictional embellishments of a convicted felon.
Each
new twist and turn of the covert investigation took the Mounties deeper into a
forest of bizarre machinations as they sought to validate information which,
though it had no direct connection to the alleged theft of the PROMIS software,
raised astonishing questions about national security and organized crime. This
is not to say the RCMP agents didn't probe the allegations that Canada's
law-enforcement and intelligence services were operating a stolen version of the
software developed years before by Bill and Nancy Hamilton.
The Hamiltons
own a company called Inslaw, and it is they who, in the early 1970s, developed a
version of PROMIS for the Justice Department. At some point, they have claimed,
a proprietary version of their software was stolen and a dispute arose with the
government. In March 1991, just before Riconosciuto was arrested on illegal drug
charges, he provided a sworn affidavit to Inslaw stating that between 1981 and
1983 he had made modifications to a pirated version of PROMIS. He told Inslaw,
and subsequently Congress and federal investigators, that he did so when he was
director of research for a joint venture between the Cabazon Indians and the
Wackenhut Corp.
At the time, there were fewer than two dozen members of
the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians. John Nichols, who is not an American
Indian, was the administrator of the tribe's business affairs, which included
the joint-venture partnership with Wackenhut, one of the top private security
agencies in the world, run by former FBI and other intelligence
specialists.
The Indian reservation presented unique opportunities for
secrecy, according to interviews and documents obtained by Insight. Under broad
state and federal exemptions, Indian reservations enjoy status just short of
being sovereign nations and are free to govern within the confines of the
reservation without outside intervention. Wackenhut was one of the first
corporations to take advantage of this special status.
Whether the
Cabazon/Wackenhut "joint venture" existed is not in question. What have been
dismissed by federal investigators are Riconosciuto's claims about what went on
at the reservation and the people involved.
For example, Riconosciuto has
maintained that one of the projects he was involved in dealt with new munitions
he and the Cabazon/Wackenhut partnership had created, not to mention a nifty new
night-vision device. RCMP officers McDade and Buffam obtained a copy of a 1991
"Special Operations Report" (SOP) that was written by Gene Gilbert, an
investigator for the district attorney's office in Riverside, Calif. In this
report - a copy of which was given to the House Judiciary Committee in 1991 and
subsequently to the Justice Department in 1993 - Gilbert describes a weapons
demonstration that took place in September 1981 at the Lake Cahuilla Shooting
Range in Indio, Calif. Details of who attended this test nearly 20 years ago,
Riconosciuto claims, should corroborate his assertions about people he
associated with involved in the alleged theft of the PROMIS software and other
activities in which the RCMP officers now are probing.
U.S. federal
investigators dismissed the report because, they said, the document was a
re-creation of 10-year-old events based on recollections Gilbert had cobbled
together at the request of federal authorities. The RCMP officers traveled to
Riverside in August 2000 to see for themselves. According to a law-enforcement
officer who asked not to be identified, Gilbert not only verified the
information in his 1991 SOP report but allowed the Mounties to review all the
contemporaneous backup in local police-department files associated with the
weapons demonstration and other activities at the reservation.
Insight
has obtained some of these crucial 1980s police-intelligence files which Gilbert
used for his 1991 SOP report. And these confirm that there was a demonstration
in 1981 consisting of tests for a new night-vision device and a firing of
special semiautomatic weapons. The records show it was attended by Riconosciuto
and 15 others - including two anticommunist Nicaraguan freedom fighters
identified as Eden Pastora Gomez (code-named "Commander Zero") and Jose Curdel
("Commander Alpha"); John Vanderworker, a former CIA employee; Wayne Reeder, a
wealthy California developer and investor in the Cabazon Reservation; Peter
Zokosky, a board member of Meridian International Logistics who also was a
Cabazon investor and former owner of Armtec Defense Products Inc.; and John
Philip Nichols, administrator of Cabazon, to name a few.
This is not the
only story that emerged as the RCMP investigated Riconosciuto's revelations. For
instance, for years he had said he'd worked for the government, briefing and
lecturing military brass and Pentagon officials. In a January 1992 letter
obtained by Insight on Wackenhut stationery, the company's director of corporate
relations, Patrick Cannan, writes that "John P. Nichols had first introduced
Riconosciuto to Wackenhut (Frye, V.P. of Wackenhut, Indio, Ca., office) on a May
1981 trip to the U.S. Army installation at Dover, N.J., where Nichols, Zokosky,
Frye and Riconosciuto met with Dr. Harry Fair and several of his Army associates
who were the project engineers on the Railgun Project. Riconosciuto and these
Army personnel conducted an extensive and highly technical `theoretical'
blackboard exercise on the Railgun and, afterward, Dr. Fair commented that he
was extremely impressed with Riconosciuto's scientific and technical knowledge
in this matter." The letter goes on to state that Dr. Fair considered
Riconosciuto a "potential national resource."
The significance of this is
that it is consistent with evidence unearthed by RCMP investigators that
Riconosciuto's claims of technical and scientific expertise and access are not
rantings.
The RCMP investigators also discovered another link in a
Riconosciuto story that had been dismissed. The permit to hold the arms
demonstration in 1981 at Lake Cahuilla was obtained by Meridian Arms, a
subsidiary of Meridian International Logistics, owned by Robert Booth Nichols, a
self-proclaimed CIA operative and licensed arms dealer (and no relation to
Cabazon administrator John Nichols). Riconosciuto for years was a partner with
Booth Nichols in the Meridian Arms business and, at the time the permits were
approved for the Lake Cahuilla weapons demonstration, Nichols was unaware that
he was being investigated by the FBI for suspected mob-related money laundering
of drug profits and for stock fraud.
Booth Nichols also served on the
board of First Intercontinental Development Corp. (FIDCO), a
building/construction company. Among Nichols' corporate partners at FIDCO in the
1980s were Michael McManus, then an aide to President Reagan; Robert Maheu,
former chief executive officer of Howard Hughes Enterprises; and Clint Murchison
Jr. of the Murchison empire based in Dallas.
Riconosciuto long has
maintained that Booth Nichols and FIDCO were associated with U.S. intelligence
agencies and used as a cutout. Again, whereas others summarily had dismissed
this claim, the RCMP investigators pursued the lead, poring over documents from
the long-abandoned Riconosciuto storage and in the files of U.S. law-enforcement
agencies. For example, RCMP obtained FBI wiretap summaries of telephone
conversations between Nichols and another of his then-partners in FIDCO, Eugene
Giaquinto, who at the same time also was president of MCA Home Entertainment
Division. The wiretap summaries reads like a who's who of alleged mob figures
with close ties to the motion-picture industry. The Mounties also received
substantial related information from classified internal FBI files.
But,
based on Insight's own sources, what the RCMP investigators were after wasn't
just PROMIS but people associated with Riconosciuto and their business ties in a
vast array of enterprises that include intelligence activities overseas.
Somehow, this network was tied in to what the Mounties were investigating
involving security lapses such as those at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
last year that McDade and Buffam knew about - and shared with Seymour and others
- months before the news hit U.S. newspapers. And it appeared that Riconosciuto
and his cronies were in the thick of such international intrigue - especially
Booth Nichols.
In response to RCMP requests to help to corroborate
Riconosciuto's claims and connections to Booth Nichols, Seymour provided McDade
a January 1992 recording of a telephone conversation between Riconosciuto and an
FBI agent. From this tape McDade heard Riconosciuto claim that Booth Nichols was
connected to a high-ranking Justice Department official. Riconosciuto also tells
the FBI agent that "the bottom line here is Bob [Nichols], Gilberto Rodriguez,
Michael Abbell [who's now an attorney in Washington but then was with the
Criminal Section of the Justice Department], Harold Okimoto, Jose Londono and
Glen Shockley are all in bed together."
Riconosciuto also details in the
tape-recorded phone call specific information about an alleged meeting between
Booth Nichols and Abbell. He subsequently provided the FBI agent a handwritten
note with additional information about the alleged Abbell meeting: "Bob
[Nichols] handed him [Abbell] $50,000 cash to handle an internal-affairs
investigation the Department of Justice was having that would lead to
extradition of [brothers] Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez and Jose Londono. Bob
said it was necessary to `crowbar' the investigation because they were
`intelligence' people."
What is significant, and of interest to the
Mounties, is that Riconosciuto fingered Abbell's ties to the Cali drug cartel
three years before Abbell was indicted in Miami on federal criminal charges that
the former official did work on behalf of the Cali cartel and its leaders.
(Abbell was convicted of money laundering in July 1998 and sentenced to seven
years in prison.) Interestingly enough, once McDade returned to Canada with
tapes of a dozen telephone conversations and his secret investigation began to
leak in the Canadian press (albeit briefly), he mailed to Seymour a transcript
of the Riconosciuto taped conversation with the FBI agent. Was this a
message?
The Mounties clearly were interested in Riconosciuto's partner
of nearly 20 years, Booth Nichols. This connection was strange, according to
those interviewed by Insight, because Booth Nichols apparently had nothing to do
with PROMIS and everything to do with other more nefarious allegations. And the
Mounties also were interested in claims Riconosciuto has made about his
participation in a DEA drug-sting operation in Cyprus.
In one of the
taped interviews Riconosciuto had with the FBI agent, he says that he was in
Lebanon working on "communications protocol" for FIDCO in the Middle East to
rebuild the infrastructure of two cities in Lebanon. Why the RCMP would be
interested in this additional twist in the intrigue is unknown, but Insight has
obtained documents that support the convicted felon's claims here as well. A
June 1983 letter from Michael McManus Jr., the Reagan assistant who also sat on
the FIDCO board, to George Pender, president of FIDCO, describes the
administration's support for the rebuilding of Lebanon: "Without question FIDCO
seems to have a considerable role to offer, particularly in the massive
financial participation being made available to the government of
Lebanon."
There also is a July 1983 letter to the president of Lebanon,
Amin Gemayel, from Pender in which FIDCO's desire to participate in the
rebuilding of Lebanon is discussed. What is interesting about this letter is
that Pender advises the Lebanese president that he (Pender) "may be reached via
telex 652483 RBN Assocs. LSA." And whose address is that? None other than Booth
Nichols. The same Nichols who at the time was a board member of FIDCO and under
investigation by the FBI for suspected drug trafficking, money laundering and
connections to the mob - and the same man who obtained the permits at the
Cahuilla gun range for the weapons demonstration to Nicaraguan Contra leaders
and others.
The more the Mounties dug, the weirder the connections got
and the more the convicted felon's stories of the bizarre underground seemed to
be borne out. Besides its interest in the RCMP probe and what it was uncovering,
Insight also sought - and confirmed - the details of many other Riconosciuto
accounts of these intrigues.
Riconosciuto has said he was involved in
that DEA drug-sting operation in the Middle East while he was working on
communications protocol for FIDCO. What part he played in any alleged sting
operation is unknown but, based on what Riconosciuto told the FBI agent in those
taped conversations, detailed information about a safe house used by the DEA in
Cyprus seems accurate. According to Riconosciuto, the DEA safe house was located
in Nicosia, Cyprus, and operated under the code name of Eurame Trading Ltd.,
which was located on Collumbra Street. "It was an apartment and it had a
ham-radio station. It was ICOM," Riconosciuto said, "a single side-band amateur
radio setup. It [the apartment] was on the top floor." There is corroboration
for these details.
Lester Coleman, a former contract employee with the
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) who was on loan to the DEA in the late 1980s,
wrote a book in 1993 called Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie,
Inside the DIA. Coleman claims there to have worked out of a safe house in
Cyprus at the same location Riconosciuto described and under the same name,
Eurame Trading Ltd. Coleman also confirmed secret Beka Valley drug shipments and
the names of the U.S. agents working undercover in Cyprus that Riconosciuto had
revealed to the FBI in 1992 - a year before it was outlined in Coleman's
book.
Insight asked Coleman who would know about such a secret U.S.
government safe house, let alone a cutout company? "I don't know," Coleman says,
"unless he was there. i I have never met or talked with [Riconosciuto], so I
have no idea whether he was there or not. i But what he is describing is
accurate. No one would know about the ICOM radio unless they had been there and
seen it," Coleman says.
Again, like Riconosciuto's comments about Justice
Department attorney Abbell and his connections to the Cali drug cartel,
Riconosciuto knew detailed information well before the public. And he tried to
tell the FBI, among others, but to no avail. The stories then seemed too wild
and woolly to be credible.
But they were credible to these RCMP
investigators, who spent considerable time, effort and money to prove or
disprove what Riconosciuto has been saying. So clearly did this key source for
their original inquiry into the alleged theft and misuse of the PROMIS software
lead the RCMP afield that one must wonder why. Is it possible that the Canadian
investigators focused so much interest on these associates and tales by
Riconosciuto to test his credibility about allied espionage matters and
PROMIS?
No one is talking about what the RCMP probe ultimately was after
or what was taken back to Canada, let alone McDade. However, according to RCMP
spokesman Michelle Gaudet, this investigation is "ongoing within the
national-security perspective."
To be continued next week.
All logos and trademarks in this site are property of their
respective owner.
FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains
copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically
authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our
efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights,
economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this
constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in
section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section
107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research
and educational purposes. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml