---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: QDQD56A(a)prodigy.com (Ct Buskuhl)
Newsgroups: alt.current-events.clinton.whitewater
Subject: Fostergate Reprint
Date: 31 Jul 1995 05:40:06 GMT
James Norman is the Senior Editor for the highly respected FORBES
magazine. Several months ago, he wrote an article about the death of
Vince Foster, called "Fostergate."
This article was set to run and was pulled at the last minute by forces
that are unknown at this time. You may recall a similar situation with
the Washington Post spiking the Mena story at the last minute - despite
their own lawyers clearing it to run. The Mena story ended up in this
month's Penthouse magazine of all places. Fortunately Mr. Norman's
article found a more respectable home - at Media Bypass!
Media Bypass will feature this article in their August issue. I
certainly owe them a little plug for posting this in advance. You may
subscribe to it by calling 1-800-4-BYPASS.
The article is as follows:
FOSTERGATE
by James R. Norman
"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had withdrawn all $2.73 million he had stashed there and had moved it to,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.
Discretely 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 Washington'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, a powerful tracking 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
confident 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 counterintelligence
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 has been well documented, 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
Nations Bank 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 Wechter'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 Rafl 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
companies 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?
Sorry. File too long. Maybe someone else can post rest.
