by Jim Quinn, DJ of WRRK 96.9 FM
Pittsburgh
December 7, 1995
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QUINN: Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine, and currently writing for Media Bypass Magazine after having uncovered Caspar Weinberger's Swiss bank account (we do get punished for some of the truths we uncover, do we not?). Jim is on the phone with us this morning. Good Morning, Jim.
NORMAN: Hi, how are you?
QUINN: Pretty good. I want to give people a chance to get an idea of what it is we are going to launch into after 8 o'clock, and I want to give some background into this. Is it fair to say that since Iran-Contra that the government has sort of been involved in the drug business?
NORMAN: Yes, it goes way back before then, actually. It goes back even to the Vietnam War days -- remember the Golden Triangle, Laos, Cambodia and all that, Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it was always on a much smaller scale. What apparently happened was that in the 80s we got into it in a big way, basically nationalizing the wholesale importation of drugs from Central and South America. The idea was that we control it somehow that way; instead, it has just become the tail wagging the dog, I think.
QUINN: It's become the funding source for just about anything that the government covertly wants to do, and for the moneys that various elements of the government don't want to ask the Congress for, nor do they want Congress to know about.
NORMAN: Right. And it's an arms business, too. They are kind of all tied up together.
QUINN: So it's arms and drugs?
NORMAN: Right.
QUINN: Kenneth Starr is currently our Whitewater prosecutor, and I have long said on this show that I find Ken Starr interesting but also troubling in that there are many elements to the Whitewater scandal. Part of the laments have to do with banking and have to do with Madison Savings and Loan, check kiting, stuff that went on with the Arkansas Development Financial Authority, but basically there are really two elements -- there is Whitewater and then there is all the stuff with Mena Airport, Iran-Contra, drugs into the country, various unexplained deaths, one of them Vince Foster, the possibility of espionage on the part of the first lady, and all of this lies behind a brick wall that Mr. Starr has been positioned upon to make sure that they get Clinton but that the fire doesn't burn past that wall; because on the other side of that wall are Republicans and Democrats. Am I right?
NORMAN: That's right. He is not looking at Mena; he doesn't have the authority to from Janet Reno. He does have authority to look at the Vince Foster death, but I think only inasmuch as it relates to the Whitewater situation. The whole thing is hemmed in and beyond that is this whole national security blanket that has been thrown over big parts of this thing that you couldn't touch if you wanted to.
QUINN: It's interesting, I find, that Dr. Henry Lee, who was part of the defense team for the Simpson trial, has ended up working on the Vince Foster affair. The word that I get is that he is going to say it was indeed a suicide. You have to remember something about Dr. Henry Lee -- he was, oddly enough, the guy that was called in to do some work on the Danny Casolaro death down in Martinsburg, way back in the early nineties. Was it 1991?
NORMAN: I think it was 1991.
QUINN: This was that reporter that you may have heard about that was found dead in a motel room, supposedly from a self-inflicted wound, even though the papers (a year's worth of investigative reporting) were all missing. He was working on the story that he called the "octopus" and basically it's the same story that you are working on, isn't it?
NORMAN: Yes, I know I'm talking to a lot of the same sources. Danny supposedly slashed his wrists twelve times, sometimes deep enough to cut the tendon.
QUINN: Yeah, right. And his files were all missing. Sure, there's a suicide. Right. And they embalmed his body before they even had a chance to inform his parents that he was dead. So it's another "Arkanside."
NORMAN: George Williamson, who is an investigative reporter out of San Francisco, has been working on that. He has come up with all kinds of stuff -- other witnesses that have disappeared, people in the hotel who just aren't there anymore -- disappeared mysteriously.
QUINN: It's interesting. There are a lot of people who are witnesses to various deaths involved with this Arkansas crowd, Danny Casolaro for one. Also, the two young boys on the railroad tracks down in Arkansas who stumbled on the drug operation. A lot of the witnesses around that have met violent and untimely deaths as well. So here are a great deal of ugly people involved in this. We are going to get down to what it all means in terms of government corruption and scandal of immense proportions that touch both parties. This is really nonpartisan. The fact that I don't happen to like "President Pantload" doesn't have a whole lot to do with this; he was just sort of a guy who happened to be there with his hand out at the time. It all goes back to the late 70's, right Jim?
NORMAN: Yeah, and even before that. Let's start with the early 80s when Bill Casey came into office in the CIA under Ronald Reagan. That's when our government decided to embark on this amazing and extremely unbelievably successful effort to spy on the world's banks. We did it! We have been spying on world banking transactions for more than a dozen years. The way we do it is by basically forcing foreign banks, wittingly or unwittingly, to buy bugged software and bugged computers that let our NSA (National Security Agency) which is the intelligence arm of the government, to basically surveil wire transfers all over the globe.
QUINN: Let me ask you this. How do you sucker the rest of the banking community around the globe into buying the software that you are selling?
NORMAN: First of all you sell to front companies like this company Systematics in Arkansas, now called Alltel Information Services. They had another company called Boston Systematics, an affiliate based in Israel mainly. There is Robert Maxwell, the UK publisher, who is fronting this stuff. There are a whole bunch of people fronting this.
QUINN: Wait a minute, Robert Maxwell -- isn't he dead?
NORMAN: Yeah, he is now.
QUINN: Didn't he have an unfortunate accident?
NORMAN: Fell off his yacht in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere.
QUINN: Why, isn't that amazing!
NORMAN: The tinkering of it was mainly putting back doors, just a few lines of code, that would allow somebody to dial into a computer without leaving any footprints, any audit trail that you were in there. Then you could go around and look around in files or you could collect information from a system without the user even knowing it.
QUINN: Now this software, which was originally called Promis, was stolen from a company called Inslaw by the Justice Department. It ended up somewhere, probably at E-Systems or somewhere, and it was converted into banking software. It Started out as software designed to track prosecutorial cases around the country. My question is -- why didn't Ed Meese just pay the damn bill, and none of this would ever have come to light! Danny Casolaro was chasing the stolen software when he stumbled on what it was being used for.
NORMAN: Well, the trouble with it was that they bought it for use in the Justice Department, but they were going to use it all over the place. If they were paying royalties on it, Inslaw would know just how extensive the use was of the software, and they didn't want people to know how extensively it was going to be used.
QUINN: I see...
NORMAN: Plus, a lot of the profits from the resale of this went back into private profits. It was customized and resold to the intelligence community. It became sort of a basic platform database tracking system for most of our intelligence agencies and many of those abroad. The idea was "Well, we can all talk to each other now." In fact what it has allowed us to do is basically rifle through other people's data files abroad too, because the stuff was apparently being sold to foreign intelligence agencies and it was also bugged. We have other ways of basically surveilling and downloading foreign electronic databases. The whole computer world is much more porous and transparent than anybody wants you to believe.
QUINN: There is a bank here that I know that uses this software right here in this town, and I'm sure that there is probably more than one. Everybody's got it.
NORMAN: In some form or another. It goes under different names now. It's been modified many times. I think when Inslaw had it, it was a half million lines of code. I'm told now it's a couple of million lines anyway. It's gone through many, many modifications over the years.
QUINN: This company, Systematics, which is I believe still 8% owned by Jackson Stevens at Stevens Inc., who, by the way, is one of the backers of Bob Dole -- how troubling is that?
NORMAN: He is the co-chairman of Dole's finance committee.
QUINN: That's right! Bob's in town -- Hi Bob -- You'd better explain this. You'd better explain Mena, too, Bob, or it's going to follow you to the White House. Systematics, I understand, had an attorney who was kind of off the record doing work for them, named Vince Foster. Is that true?
NORMAN: Yep, that's true. We've heard that from many, many sources now. In fact, Jim Leach's committee has established that pretty well with some of the investigation that they have done. Foster was a trusted deal guy for Stevens at the law firm. Although Foster never shows up officially as an attorney of record for Systematics, he was definitely in the loop, basically smoothing out things between Systematics and the NSA, which was the main government agency that was contracting for a lot of this stuff.
QUINN: So this is how Foster got involved in intelligence, right.
NORMAN: Yes, because there is heavy duty code and computer technology stuff involved here. Apparently, some time in the early 80s he developed this relationship with the State of Israel. In fact, some of the same handlers I am told were involved in the Jonathan Pollard case. They basically nurtured him and groomed him for many years and then bingo, they hit the jackpot -- he ended up in the White House. Apparently he convinced Hillary to help him out on some stuff.
QUINN: So... what is Foster involved in? It's the mid 80s...
NORMAN: Mid 80s. Foster is at the Rose Law Firm. Think of him as a high-level marketing guy between Systematics and the NSA. NSA -- they have all these spooky contracts that they are trying to find contractors for. Foster would have been sort of a go-between there. Plus b was actually an attorney of record for Systematics back in 1978 when Stevens tried to take over the Financial General Bank shares in Washington. Those bank holding companies later became First American - Clark Clifford, Robert Altman, all that crowd.
QUINN: Yeah, the BCCI thing.
NORMAN: Stevens was fronting for the BCCI crowd and trying to take over this Washington Bank Holding Co. The SEC blocked him at the time, partly because one of the things he was insisting on was that this company Systematics, which at that time was a tiny little thing in Arkansas, he was insisting that they be brought in to do all of the data processing for this multistate bank holding company in Washington. Hillary represented Systematics in that. Now the thing about Systematics at the time -- it was before they even got involved with the bank spying stuff. Abroad for many years, they had been what amounted to a laundromat for covert funds for the CIA and the intelligence community, quite legally, probably. It was done for the national interest. Somebody had to move this money around and Systematics was in a perfect place to do it because they owned the computers and a whole bunch of small banks. They could move this money around electronically without the bankers even knowing about it necessarily, and it wouldn't go through the normal clearing houses. The regulators wouldn't see it. It would just crop up wherever the CIA needed it in whatever bogus front company account, and it was all just bits and bytes; it was a cyberbank -- it still is.
QUINN: I'm here with Jim Norman, former Senior Editor at Forbes Magazine. You know, it's interesting, here is a guy who was with Forbes Magazine, a respected senior editor who figured probably this would be his life's work. All of a sudden, he finds himself a defrocked commando journalist working for Media Bypass Magazine out of what? Evanston, Illinois, or somewhere in Indiana?
NORMAN: Indiana.
QUINN: Yeah, that's right. Now, I've got a question. Before we get into Vince Foster in the mid 80s and Hillary Clinton's role in this, how did you get onto this whole scandal? Where did you walk through the door on this?
NORMAN: I came in the back door completely. Look, I had no ax to grind here against Bill Clinton or the Administration. I hated covering politics. I thought it was all baloney. I'm just a business writer, and I never wanted to get enmeshed in this whole Whitewater/Vince Foster thing, but it started -- for a couple of years I had been following this oil company bankruptcy up in Stamford, Connecticut, because I had covered oil. This thing never made sense to me. There is no reason why this company went bust and, in fact, when I actually got into it and started redoing the oil trading transactions, the reason they lost money: they weren't losing it. They were hiding it. They were parking it off shore with another company that was financing arms sales to Iraq, cluster bombs and stuff like that all through the 80s. And, this Chilean arms dealer, Cardone, who was providing weapons, was also, it turns out, brokering some of the sales of this stolen software. Okay, that gets me into the software story.
QUINN: So that gets you onto the Promis software, and you and Danny Casolaro are now on the same road.
NORMAN: Right, and then in the process of that, I started talking to a whole bunch of rather spooky, strange intelligence community characters, and I was sitting at a guy's living room down in Kentucky one day. He was sitting there in the middle of the night blowing smoke rings, and he said, "Yo, by the way, Vince Foster, he was under investigation."