Syme

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. 

Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. 

It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control.

" In all of magic, there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The “Bardic” tradition of magic would place a Bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you, That might make your hands lay funny, or you might have a child born with a clubbed food. If a bard were to place, not a curse upon you, but a satire, that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a (extremely) finely worded and clever satire, that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries, then years after you were dead, people still might be reading it, and laughing… at you, your wretchedness, and absurdity. Writers, and people who had command of words were respected and feared, (just) as people who manipulated magic.

In latter times, I think the artists and writers have allowed themselves to be ‘sold down the river’. They have ACCEPTED the prevailing belief that art, that writing, are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces… that can change a human being, that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment Things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die…

It is not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience WANTS.


If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artist.

It is the job of artists to give the audience what they NEED.

'Just the man I was looking for,' said a voice at Winston's back.

He turned round. It was his friend Syme, who worked in the Research Department. Perhaps 'friend' was not exactly the right word. You did not have friends nowadays, you had comrades: but there were some comrades whose society was pleasanter than that of others. Syme was a philologist, a specialist in Newspeak. Indeed, he was one of the enormous team of experts now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large, protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search your face closely while he was speaking to you.

'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.

'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've tried all over the place. They don't exist any longer.'

Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past. At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning wool, sometimes it was shoelaces; at present it was razor blades. You could only get hold of them, if at all, by scrounging more or less furtively on the 'free' market.

'I've been using the same blade for six weeks,' he added untruthfully.

The queue gave another jerk forward. As they halted he turned and faced Syme again. Each of them took a greasy metal tray from a pile at the end of the counter.

'Did you go and see the prisoners hanged yesterday?' said Syme.

'I was working,' said Winston indifferently. 'I shall see it on the flicks, I suppose.'

'A very inadequate substitute,' said Syme.

His mocking eyes roved over Winston's face. 'I know you,' the eyes seemed to say, 'I see through you. I know very well why you didn't go to see those prisoners hanged.' In an intellectual way, Syme was venomously orthodox. He would talk with a disagreeable gloating satisfaction of helicopter raids on enemy villages, and trials and confessions of thought-criminals, the executions in the cellars of the Ministry of Love. Talking to him was largely a matter of getting him away from such subjects and entangling him, if possible, in the technicalities of Newspeak, on which he was authoritative and interesting. Winston turned his head a little aside to avoid the scrutiny of the large dark eyes.

'It was a good hanging,' said Syme reminiscently. 'I think it spoils it when they tie their feet together. I like to see them kicking. And above all, at the end, the tongue sticking right out, and blue--a quite bright blue. That's the detail that appeals to me.'

'Nex', please!' yelled the white-aproned prole with the ladle.

Winston and Syme pushed their trays beneath the grille. On to each was dumped swiftly the regulation lunch--a metal pannikin of pinkish-grey stew, a hunk of bread, a cube of cheese, a mug of milkless Victory Coffee, and one saccharine tablet.

'There's a table over there, under that telescreen,' said Syme. 'Let's pick up a gin on the way.'

The gin was served out to them in handleless china mugs. They threaded their way across the crowded room and unpacked their trays on to the metal-topped table, on one corner of which someone had left a pool of stew, a filthy liquid mess that had the appearance of vomit. Winston took up his mug of gin, paused for an instant to collect his nerve, and gulped the oily-tasting stuff down. When he had winked the tears out of his eyes he suddenly discovered that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their pannikins. From the table at Winston's left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room.

'How is the Dictionary getting on?' said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.

'Slowly,' said Syme. 'I'm on the adjectives. It's fascinating.'

He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without shouting.

'The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition,' he said. 'We're getting the language into its final shape--the shape it's going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When we've finished with it, people like you will have to learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We're destroying words--scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We're cutting the language down to the bone. The Eleventh Edition won't contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.'

He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of pedant's passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown almost dreamy.

'It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. 

It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. 

After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? 

A word contains its opposite in itself. 

Take "good", for instance. 

If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? 

"Ungood" will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. 

Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? 

"Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. 

Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. 

In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words--in reality, only one word. 

Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? 

It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought.

A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winston's face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.

'You haven't a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston,' he said almost sadly. 

'Even when you write it you're still thinking in Oldspeak. 

I've read some of those pieces that you write in "The Times" occasionally. 

They're good enough, but they're translations. 

In your heart you'd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of meaning. 

You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. 

Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?'

Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:

'Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? 

In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. 

Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. 

Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. 

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. 

Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. 

It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. 

But in the end there won't be any need even for that.

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,' he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. 

'Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?'

'Except----' began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.

It had been on the tip of his tongue to say 'Except the proles,' but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. 

Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.

'The proles are not human beings,' he said carelessly.

'By 2050--earlier, probably--all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. 

The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. 

Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron--they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. 


Even the literature of the Party will change. 

Even the slogans will change. 

How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? 

The whole climate of thought will be different. 

In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. 

Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. 

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.'

One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

Winston had finished his bread and cheese. He turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the strident voice was still talking remorselessly away. A young woman who was perhaps his secretary, and who was sitting with her back to Winston, was listening to him and seemed to be eagerly agreeing with everything that he said. From time to time Winston caught some such remark as 'I think you're so right, I do so agree with you', uttered in a youthful and rather silly feminine voice. But the other voice never stopped for an instant, even when the girl was speaking. Winston knew the man by sight, though he knew no more about him than that he held some important post in the Fiction Department. He was a man of about thirty, with a muscular throat and a large, mobile mouth. His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to Winston two blank discs instead of eyes. What was slightly horrible, was that from the stream of sound that poured out of his mouth it was almost impossible to distinguish a single word. Just once Winston caught a phrase--'complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism'--jerked out very rapidly and, as it seemed, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. For the rest it was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking. And yet, though you could not actually hear what the man was saying, you could not be in any doubt about its general nature. He might be denouncing Goldstein and demanding sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs, he might be fulminating against the atrocities of the Eurasian army, he might be praising Big Brother or the heroes on the Malabar front--it made no difference. Whatever it was, you could be certain that every word of it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc. As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Syme had fallen silent for a moment, and with the handle of his spoon was tracing patterns in the puddle of stew. The voice from the other table quacked rapidly on, easily audible in spite of the surrounding din.

'There is a word in Newspeak,' said Syme, 'I don't know whether you know it: DUCKSPEAK, to quack like a duck. 

It is one of those interesting words that have two contradictory meanings. 

Applied to an opponent, it is abuse, applied to someone you agree with, it is praise.'

Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized, Winston thought again. He thought it with a kind of sadness, although well knowing that Syme despised him and slightly disliked him, and was fully capable of denouncing him as a thought-criminal if he saw any reason for doing so. There was something subtly wrong with Syme. There was something that he lacked: discretion, aloofness, a sort of saving stupidity. You could not say that he was unorthodox. He believed in the principles of Ingsoc, he venerated Big Brother, he rejoiced over victories, he hated heretics, not merely with sincerity but with a sort of restless zeal, an up-to-dateness of information, which the ordinary Party member did not approach. Yet a faint air of disreputability always clung to him. He said things that would have been better unsaid, he had read too many books, he frequented the Chestnut Tree Cafe, haunt of painters and musicians. There was no law, not even an unwritten law, against frequenting the Chestnut Tree Cafe, yet the place was somehow ill-omened. The old, discredited leaders of the Party had been used to gather there before they were finally purged. Goldstein himself, it was said, had sometimes been seen there, years and decades ago. Syme's fate was not difficult to foresee. And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else, for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

Syme looked up. 'Here comes Parsons,' he said.

Something in the tone of his voice seemed to add, 'that bloody fool'. Parsons, Winston's fellow-tenant at Victory Mansions, was in fact threading his way across the room--a tubby, middle-sized man with fair hair and a froglike face. At thirty-five he was already putting on rolls of fat at neck and waistline, but his movements were brisk and boyish. His whole appearance was that of a little boy grown large, so much so that although he was wearing the regulation overalls, it was almost impossible not to think of him as being dressed in the blue shorts, grey shirt, and red neckerchief of the Spies. In visualizing him one saw always a picture of dimpled knees and sleeves rolled back from pudgy forearms. Parsons did, indeed, invariably revert to shorts when a community hike or any other physical activity gave him an excuse for doing so. He greeted them both with a cheery 'Hullo, hullo!' and sat down at the table, giving off an intense smell of sweat. Beads of moisture stood out all over his pink face. His powers of sweating were extraordinary. At the Community Centre you could always tell when he had been playing table-tennis by the dampness of the bat handle. Syme had produced a strip of paper on which there was a long column of words, and was studying it with an ink-pencil between his fingers.

'Look at him working away in the lunch hour,' said Parsons, nudging Winston. 'Keenness, eh? What's that you've got there, old boy? Something a bit too brainy for me, I expect. Smith, old boy, I'll tell you why I'm chasing you. It's that sub you forgot to give me.'

'Which sub is that?' said Winston, automatically feeling for money. About a quarter of one's salary had to be earmarked for voluntary subscriptions, which were so numerous that it was difficult to keep track of them.

'For Hate Week. You know--the house-by-house fund. I'm treasurer for our block. We're making an all-out effort--going to put on a tremendous show. I tell you, it won't be my fault if old Victory Mansions doesn't have the biggest outfit of flags in the whole street. Two dollars you promised me.'

Winston found and handed over two creased and filthy notes, which Parsons entered in a small notebook, in the neat handwriting of the illiterate.

'By the way, old boy,' he said. 'I hear that little beggar of mine let fly at you with his catapult yesterday. I gave him a good dressing-down for it. In fact I told him I'd take the catapult away if he does it again.'

'I think he was a little upset at not going to the execution,' said Winston.

'Ah, well--what I mean to say, shows the right spirit, doesn't it? Mischievous little beggars they are, both of them, but talk about keenness! All they think about is the Spies, and the war, of course. D'you know what that little girl of mine did last Saturday, when her troop was on a hike out Berkhamsted way? She got two other girls to go with her, slipped off from the hike, and spent the whole afternoon following a strange man. They kept on his tail for two hours, right through the woods, and then, when they got into Amersham, handed him over to the patrols.'

'What did they do that for?' said Winston, somewhat taken aback. Parsons went on triumphantly:

'My kid made sure he was some kind of enemy agent--might have been dropped by parachute, for instance. But here's the point, old boy. What do you think put her on to him in the first place? She spotted he was wearing a funny kind of shoes--said she'd never seen anyone wearing shoes like that before. So the chances were he was a foreigner. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh?'

'What happened to the man?' said Winston.

'Ah, that I couldn't say, of course. But I wouldn't be altogether surprised if----' Parsons made the motion of aiming a rifle, and clicked his tongue for the explosion.

'Good,' said Syme abstractedly, without looking up from his strip of paper.

'Of course we can't afford to take chances,' agreed Winston dutifully.

'What I mean to say, there is a war on,' said Parsons.

As though in confirmation of this, a trumpet call floated from the telescreen just above their heads. However, it was not the proclamation of a military victory this time, but merely an announcement from the Ministry of Plenty.

'Comrades!' cried an eager youthful voice. 'Attention, comrades! We have glorious news for you. We have won the battle for production! Returns now completed of the output of all classes of consumption goods show that the standard of living has risen by no less than 20 per cent over the past year. All over Oceania this morning there were irrepressible spontaneous demonstrations when workers marched out of factories and offices and paraded through the streets with banners voicing their gratitude to Big Brother for the new, happy life which his wise leadership has bestowed upon us. Here are some of the completed figures. Foodstuffs----'

The phrase 'our new, happy life' recurred several times. It had been a favourite of late with the Ministry of Plenty. Parsons, his attention caught by the trumpet call, sat listening with a sort of gaping solemnity, a sort of edified boredom. He could not follow the figures, but he was aware that they were in some way a cause for satisfaction. He had lugged out a huge and filthy pipe which was already half full of charred tobacco. With the tobacco ration at 100 grammes a week it was seldom possible to fill a pipe to the top. Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. 

Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes. 

Syme, too--in some more complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory?

The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen. As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies--more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards. As Syme had done earlier Winston had taken up his spoon and was dabbling in the pale-coloured gravy that dribbled across the table, drawing a long streak of it out into a pattern. He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient--nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was NOT the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?

He looked round the canteen again. Nearly everyone was ugly, and would still have been ugly even if dressed otherwise than in the uniform blue overalls. On the far side of the room, sitting at a table alone, a small, curiously beetle-like man was drinking a cup of coffee, his little eyes darting suspicious glances from side to side. How easy it was, thought Winston, if you did not look about you, to believe that the physical type set up by the Party as an ideal--tall muscular youths and deep-bosomed maidens, blond-haired, vital, sunburnt, carefree--existed and even predominated. Actually, so far as he could judge, the majority of people in Airstrip One were small, dark, and ill-favoured. It was curious how that beetle-like type proliferated in the Ministries: little dumpy men, growing stout very early in life, with short legs, swift scuttling movements, and fat inscrutable faces with very small eyes. It was the type that seemed to flourish best under the dominion of the Party.

The announcement from the Ministry of Plenty ended on another trumpet call and gave way to tinny music. Parsons, stirred to vague enthusiasm by the bombardment of figures, took his pipe out of his mouth.

'The Ministry of Plenty's certainly done a good job this year,' he said with a knowing shake of his head. 'By the way, Smith old boy, I suppose you haven't got any razor blades you can let me have?'

'Not one,' said Winston. 'I've been using the same blade for six weeks myself.'

'Ah, well--just thought I'd ask you, old boy.'

'Sorry,' said Winston.

The quacking voice from the next table, temporarily silenced during the Ministry's announcement, had started up again, as loud as ever. For some reason Winston suddenly found himself thinking of Mrs Parsons, with her wispy hair and the dust in the creases of her face. Within two years those children would be denouncing her to the Thought Police. Mrs Parsons would be vaporized. Syme would be vaporized. Winston would be vaporized. O'Brien would be vaporized. Parsons, on the other hand, would never be vaporized. The eyeless creature with the quacking voice would never be vaporized. The little beetle-like men who scuttle so nimbly through the labyrinthine corridors of Ministries they, too, would never be vaporized. And the girl with dark hair, the girl from the Fiction Department--she would never be vaporized either. It seemed to him that he knew instinctively who would survive and who would perish: though just what it was that made for survival, it was not easy to say.

At this moment he was dragged out of his reverie with a violent jerk. The girl at the next table had turned partly round and was looking at him. It was the girl with dark hair. She was looking at him in a sidelong way, but with curious intensity. The instant she caught his eye she looked away again.

The sweat started out on Winston's backbone. A horrible pang of terror went through him. It was gone almost at once, but it left a sort of nagging uneasiness behind. Why was she watching him? Why did she keep following him about? Unfortunately he could not remember whether she had already been at the table when he arrived, or had come there afterwards. But yesterday, at any rate, during the Two Minutes Hate, she had sat immediately behind him when there was no apparent need to do so. Quite likely her real object had been to listen to him and make sure whether he was shouting loudly enough.

His earlier thought returned to him: probably she was not actually a member of the Thought Police, but then it was precisely the amateur spy who was the greatest danger of all. He did not know how long she had been looking at him, but perhaps for as much as five minutes, and it was possible that his features had not been perfectly under control. It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.

The girl had turned her back on him again. Perhaps after all she was not really following him about, perhaps it was coincidence that she had sat so close to him two days running. His cigarette had gone out, and he laid it carefully on the edge of the table. He would finish smoking it after work, if he could keep the tobacco in it. Quite likely the person at the next table was a spy of the Thought Police, and quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted. Syme had folded up his strip of paper and stowed it away in his pocket. Parsons had begun talking again.

'Did I ever tell you, old boy,' he said, chuckling round the stem of his pipe, 'about the time when those two nippers of mine set fire to the old market-woman's skirt because they saw her wrapping up sausages in a poster of B.B.? Sneaked up behind her and set fire to it with a box of matches. Burned her quite badly, I believe. Little beggars, eh? But keen as mustard! That's a first-rate training they give them in the Spies nowadays--better than in my day, even. What d'you think's the latest thing they've served them out with? Ear trumpets for listening through keyholes! My little girl brought one home the other night--tried it out on our sitting-room door, and reckoned she could hear twice as much as with her ear to the hole. Of course it's only a toy, mind you. Still, gives 'em the right idea, eh?'

At this moment the telescreen let out a piercing whistle. It was the signal to return to work. All three men sprang to their feet to join in the struggle round the lifts, and the remaining tobacco fell out of Winston's cigarette. 

My career as a magician continues to evolve. Since I, to a certain degree, believe art and magic to be interchangeable, it has seemed only natural that art should be the means by which I express magical ideas. This has found its way into my prose writing, in works such as “Voice of the Fire”, and probably most visibly has found its way into the performance pieces that i’ve done in various locations over the past 8 years. Beautiful little psychedelic artifacts in their own right, which actually capture the kind of narrative journey that we’ve tried to take the readers on as part of these performances; to overwhelm the sensibilities of the audience; to tip them over into a kind of psychedelic state where we can hopefully actually change their consciousness and direct it to different places, different levels, hopefully into new and magical spaces.

When we are doing the will of our True Self, we are inevitably doing the Will of the Universe. In Magic these are seen as indistinguishable; that Every human soul is in fact One human soul. It is the soul of the Universe itself, and as long as you are doing the Will of the Universe, then it is impossible to do anything wrong.

The one place in which Gods and Demons inarguably exist is in the human mind, where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity. Much of magic, as I understand it in the Western occult tradition, is a search for the Self, with a capital ‘S’. This is understood as being the ‘Great Work’, as being the Gold the Alchemists sought, as being the Will, the Soul, the thing that we have inside us that is behind the intellect, the body, the dreams. The “inner dynamo of us” if you like.

Now this is the Single. Most. Important. Thing. that we can ever attain, the knowledge of our own Self. And yet, there are a frightening amount of people who seem to have the urge to, not just IGNORE the self, but actually seem to have the urge to OBLITERATE themselves. This is horrific… but you can almost understand the desire to simply “wipe out” that awareness, because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually POSSESS such a thing as a “soul”. Such a precious thing. ‘What if you break it? What if you lose it?’ Mightn’t it be best to anaesthetize it, to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure. I think that the way that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self, and then having to maintain it.

I’ve been looking at the history of magical thinking, and where it starts to go wrong. And, for my money, where it starts to go wrong is “monotheism”. I mean, if you look at the history of magic, you’ve got its origins in the caves, you’ve got its origins in shamanism, in animism, in a belief that everything around you (every tree, every rock, every animal) was inhabited by some sort of ‘essence’, some sort of spirit, that could perhaps be communicated with. You would have had some central shaman or visionary who would have been responsible for channeling ideas that were useful for survival. By the time you have reached the classical civilizations, you can see that this has formalized to a degree. The shaman was acting purely as an intermediary between the spirits and the people. He was, in his position in the village or community, I should imagine very much like a spiritual plumber. The people in the group would have had their own roles.. The person who was best at hunting would’ve been a hunter. The person who was best at talking to the spirits, perhaps because he or she was a bit crazy, a bit detached from our normal, material world, then they would have been the Shaman. They would not have been the masters of a ‘sacred craft’. They would have simply been dispensing their information throughout the community because it was believed to be helpful to the community.

When you get the actual classical cultures emerging, this has been formalized so that you’ve now got pantheons of gods, and each of those gods have a priest caste, that will act (to a certain degree) as intermediaries, who will instruct you in the worship of that god. So the relationship between ‘humans and their gods’, which could be seen a relationship between ‘humans & their highest Selves’, that was still a very direct one… When Christianity & monotheism comes in, then all of a sudden you’ve got a priest caste moving between the worshipper and the object of worship. You’ve got a priest caste becoming a kind of ‘spiritual middle management’ between humanity and the divine within itself that it is seeking. You no longer have a direct relationship with the godhead. The Priests don’t really necessarily have a direct relationship with the godhead. They’ve just got a book that tells you about some people who lived a long time ago who DID have a direct relationship with the godhead… and that’s alright. “You don’t need to have miraculous visions. You don’t need to have gods talking to you. In fact if you do have any of that stuff, you’re probably insane.” In the modern world, that stuff doesn’t happen. The only people who are allowed to talk to gods, and in a very kind of one-sided way, are priests…

Monotheism, to me, is a great simplification. I mean, the Kabbalah has a great mulitiplicity of gods, but at the very top of the Kabbalistic diagram —the tree of life—who have this one sphere that is absolute God. The Monad. Something that is indivisible, you know? And all of the other gods, and indeed everything else in the Universe, is a kind of emanation of that God. Now that’s fine, but it’s when you suggest that there is ‘only that one God’, at this kind of unreachable height above humanity, and there is nothing in between, you’re limiting and simplifying the thing… I mean I tend to think of Paganism as a kind of alphabet, as a language. It’s like all of the Gods are letters in this alphabet. They express nuances, shades of meaning, or certain subtleties of ideas. Whereas monotheism tends to be just one vowel, and it’s just something like “ooooh”. It’s like this monkey sound. You can almost imagine the Gods becoming frustrated, contemptuous.. that with all this richness of spiritual concepts that are available, why reduce it to one plaintive single note that the utterer does not even understand?

The alchemists had two components to their philosophy. These were the principles of “solve” and “coagula”. Solve was basically the equivalent of ‘analysis’. It was taking things apart to see how they worked. Coagula was basically ‘synthesis’. It was trying to put the disassembled pieces back together so that they worked more efficiently.

These are two very important principles which can be applied to almost anything in culture. Recently in literature, for example, there has been a wave of post-modernism, deconstructionism. This is Solve. Perhaps it’s time, in the arts, for a little more Coagula. Having deconstructed everything, perhaps we really should be starting to think about putting everything back together.

Spiritualism was the natural state of human thinking up until the Renaissance and the subsequent age of reason that grew out of it. Our original way of seeing the world, was as a place entirely inhabited by spirits, where everything had its indwelling essence, where everything was, in some sense, sacred, including ourselves. The age of reason changed all that. While it’s inarguable that Reason brought many great benefits, and was a necessary stage of our development, unfortunately this lead to materialism, where the physical material world was seen as the be-all and end-all of existence, where inevitably, we are seen as creatures that have no spiritual dimensions, that have no souls, in a soulless Universe of dead matter…”

"Get Clean for Gene" - The Story of a CIA Stalking Horse

America is Hard to See (1970)

"Get Clean for Gene" - The Story of a CIA Stalking Horse

Robert F. Kennedy promised his mother he would never run for President.

In October on 1967, full engagement of the United States Military was more than three years old and the draft was in full effect - yet there was no national anti-war candidate emerging from the mainstream political process for the 1968 Presidential Election.

By July of 1968, once again, there was not a single viable anti-war Presidential candidate - one had been murdered, another dropped out inexplicably from the race, along with an incumbant who had seemed unbeatable a year before - the result was a bloody disgrace at the notorious 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, a scrappy and divisive 3-way election that came close to being thrown into the House of the Representatives and the spectacle of Richard Milhous Nixon sleazing his way into the White House via the back door.

But who was Senator Eugene McCarthy - and how do we account for his strange, insurgent canpaign between October and July?

Well, according to Who's Who in the CIA, published by the East German Stasi, we find ourselves a very unsavory answer....

McCarthy ran as an anti-war candidate - but at the same time, he owned a controlling interest in the company that manufactured the Mach-10 machine pistol.

"Get Clean for Gene": The acceptable, controlled borgoise face of the anti-war movement - true radicals and long-hairs like Abbie Hoffman and the Berkley movement were excluded and marginalised, and an entire generation learnt how to cut it's hair and conform.

Jobs

"’Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we’re not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

Even now, of course, there’s no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It’s merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won’t be any need even for that.

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak,’ he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction. ’Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’

Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ”freedom is slavery” when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

"One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized.

He is too intelligent.

He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly.

The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear."

PROMIS Software - Still Available For Sale Online

http://promisinfo.cleverex.com/



"...Promis-managed data could be anything from financial records of banking institutions to compilations of various records used to track the movement of terrorists. That made the program a natural for Israel which, according to Hamilton and many other sources, was one of the first countries to acquire the bootlegged software from Meese and Company. As voluminously described by Inslaw attorney, the late Elliot Richardson, the Israeli Mossad under the direction of Rafi Eitan, allegedly modified the software yet again and sold it throughout the Middle East. It was Eitan, the legendary Mossad captor of Adolph Eichmann, according to Hamilton, who had masqueraded as an Israeli prosecutor to enter Inslaw's DC offices years earlier and obtain a first hand demonstration of what the Promis could do.


Not too many Arab nations would trust a friendly Mossad agent selling computer programs. So the Mossad provided their modified Promis to flamboyant British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, a WWII Jewish resistance fighter who had assumed the Anglo name and British citizenship after the war. It was Maxwell, capable of travelling the world and with enormous marketing resources, who became the sales agent for Promis and then sold it to, among others, the Canadian government. Maxwell drowned mysteriously in late 1991, not long after investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was "suicided" in West Virginia..."

Misc Archives #51 - For Whom the Bell Tolls: The Death of Joseph Daniel Casolaro (1991)

M-51 (ONE STEP BEYOND 8/18/91, 8/25/91, 9/1/91, 10/6/91)

Examines in detail the alleged "suicide" of free-lance journalist Danny Casolaro and the intersecting investigations he was working on at the time of his death. Casolaro was working on the tentacles of what he termed "the Octopus": connecting links between the "October Surprise" (see AFA #31). the Iran-Contra scandal, the INSLAW case and the scandal surrounding the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI).

Misc Archives #50 - We Have Ways of Making You Sell: The INSLAW Scandal (1991)

M-50 (ONE STEP BEYOND 4/28/91)

This program focuses on the U.S. Justice Department's thief and piracy of certain computer software and attempts to drive its developer out of business. It emphasizes intelligence services, and connections to the support structure for the Nicaraguan Contra war and the so-called "October-Surprise": the alleged Reagan-Bush campaign's deal to hold U.S. embassy hostages in Iran until Jimmy Carter's election defeat was assured.

For The Record #82 - The Strange Saga of Charles Hayes (1997)

FTR #82 These segments present the story of Charles Hayes, a former U.S. intelligence operative whose tangled story contains a significant amount of truth and even more tantalizing elements that have yet to be substantiated. Hayes maintains that he was commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency to use a Cray super computer to penetrate the international banking system. During the course of this operation, Hayes and his fellow operatives came across a number of interesting and important things (according to Hayes.) In addition to uncovering massive drug-related corruption on the part of major American political figures, Hayes contends that he learned of the pirating of the PROMIS software, developed by the Inslaw company. One of the major intelligence-connected scandals of the Reagan-Bush years, the Inslaw case involved the illegal dissemination of the remarkable and versatile PROMIS to U.S. government agencies that had not contracted for it and (allegedly) the trafficking of a modified version of the software to foreign intelligence agencies. The modified version permits U.S. intelligence to access the files of agencies using it (including the agencies of governments friendly to the United States.) Hayes also contends that he and several fellow former operatives coalesced as a "Fifth Column" that penetrated the secret bank accounts of drug dealing-connected politicians, exposed their wrongdoing, and transferred their ill-gotten gains back into United States government accounts. Hayes alleges that he was framed on a murder-for-hire conspiracy in retaliation for the work of that "Fifth Column."

interview w/ albert lanier on 'the octopus' (March 5, 2010)

Promis

by Michael C. Ruppert

[The following story appeared in the September, 2000 Special Edition of From The Wilderness for paid subscribers only. Read it now, free, for the first time ever on the web. © Copyright 2000, 2001. All rights reserved. Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications. See Homepage for Reprint Policy]

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/pandora/052401_promis.html

U.S. journalist Mike Ruppert, a former Los Angeles police officer who now runs a Web site that seeks to expose CIA covert operations, said he met with RCMP investigator McDade on Aug. 3 in L.A. Ruppert said the RCMP officer was anxious to see documents he received three years ago from a shadowy Green Beret named Bill Tyre [sic] detailing the sale of rigged Promis software to Canada." - The Toronto Star, September 4, 2000.

Only the legends of Excalibur, the sword of invincible power, and the Holy Grail, the chalice from which Christ took his wine at the Last Supper begin to approach the mysterious aura that have evolved in the world of secret intelligence around a computer software program named Promis. Created in the 1970s by former National Security Agency (NSA) programmer and engineer Bill Hamilton, now President of Washington, D.C.'s Inslaw Corporation, PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) crossed a threshold in the evolution of computer programming. Working from either huge mainframe computer systems or smaller networks powered by the progenitors of today's PCs, PROMIS, from its first "test drive" a quarter century ago, was able to do one thing that no other program had ever been able to do. It was able to simultaneously read and integrate any number of different computer programs or data bases simultaneously, regardless of the language in which the original programs had been written or the operating system or platforms on which that data base was then currently installed.

In the mid 1970s, at least as far as computer programs were concerned, the "universal translator" of Star Trek had become a reality. And the realm of Star Trek is exactly where most of the major media would have the general public place the Promis story in their world views. But given the fact that the government of Canada has just spent millions of dollars investigating whether or not a special version of Promis, equipped with a so-called "back door" has compromised its national security, one must concede that perhaps the myths surrounding Promis and what has happened to it need to be re-evaluated. Myths, by definition, cannot be solved, but facts can be understood and integrated. Only a very few people realize how big the Promis story really is.

It is difficult to relegate Promis to the world of myth and fantasy when so many tangible things, like the recently acknowledged RCMP investigation make it real. Canadians are not known for being wildly emotional types given to sprees. And one must also include the previous findings of Congressional oversight committees and no less than six obvious dead bodies ranging from investigative journalist Danny Casolaro in 1991, to a government employee named Alan Standorf, to British Publisher and lifelong Israeli agent Robert Maxwell also in 1991, to retired Army CID investigator Bill McCoy in 1997, to a father and son named Abernathy in a small northern California town named Hercules. The fact that commercial versions of Promis are now available for sale directly from Inslaw belies the fact that some major papers and news organizations instantly and laughably use the epithet conspiracy theorist to stigmatize anyone who discusses it. Fear may be the major obstacle or ingredient in the myth surrounding modified and "enhanced" versions of Promis that keeps researchers from fully pursuing leads rising in its wake. I was validated in this theory on September 23rd in a conversation with FTW Contributing Editor Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D. Scott, a Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and noted author. Peter, upon hearing of the details of my involvement, frankly told me that Promis frightened him. Casolaro, who was found dead in a West Virginia motel room in 1991, had Scott's name (Scott is also a Canadian) in a list of people to contact about his Promis findings. He never got that far.

A close examination of the Promis saga actually leads to more than a dozen deaths which may well be why so many people avoid it. And many of those deaths share in common a pattern where, within 48 hours of death, bodies are cremated, residences are sanitized and all files disappear. This was certainly the case with my friend Bill McCoy, a legendary retired Army CID investigator who was also the principal investigator for Hamilton in his quest to recover what may be hundreds of millions in lost royalties and to reunite him with the evolved progeny of his brain child. Those progeny now have names like SMART (Self Managing Artificial Reasoning Technology) and TECH. I will never forget hearing of McCoy's death and his immediate cremation and then trying to reconcile that with the number of times he had told me, while sitting in his Fairfax Virginia home, that he wanted to be buried next to his beloved wife in spite of the fact that he was a Taoist.

I have tried to avoid becoming involved in Promis even though I have been in possession of documents and information about the case for more than six years. Reluctantly, as I realized that recent developments gave me a moral imperative to write, I gathered all of my scattered computer files connecting the case into one place. When assembled they totaled more than seven megabytes and that did not include maybe 500 printed pages of separate files.

In researching this story I found a starkly recurring theme. It appeared first in a recent statement I tape recorded from probably one of the three best informed open sources on the story in the world, William Tyree. I also came across the same theme, almost verbatim, in a research paper that I discovered while following leads from other sources.

Tyree is no stranger to FTW. A former US Army Green Beret, framed in 1979, he has been serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife Elaine outside of Fort Devens Massachusetts, then home of the 10th Special Forces Group. I have written of him in no less than six prior issues of FTW. He has, from his prison cell in Walpole Massachusetts, been a central if little known figure in the Promis case for many years, like a monk mysteriously possessed of information that no one else could obtain. If the story is ever fully told his role may be even more significant than anyone has ever supposed.

The information from Tyree, recorded in a phone conversation on August 28, and the research work on "block-modeling" social research theory uncovered while researching other leads both describe the same unique position or vantage point from hypothetical and actual perspectives. Tyree described an actual physical point in space, further out than ever thought possible and now used by US satellites. This distance is made possible by Promis progeny so evolved that they make the original software look primitive. The social research, which included pioneering mathematical work - apparently facilitating the creation of artificial intelligence - postulated that a similar remote hypothetical position would eliminate randomness from all human activity. Everything would be visible in terms of measurable and predictable patterns - the ultimate big picture. Just one of the key web sites where I found this information is located at http://web.syr.edu/~bvmarten/socialnet.html.

One of FTW's guiding principles is our incessant drive to separate that which is important from that which is merely true. The purpose of this article is to provide leads and insights, some very concrete, for the continued investigation of the Promis saga. While we do not claim to be worthy of pulling Excalibur from the stone we do hope to be divorced enough from egotistical motivations and dreams of Pulitzers or glory to avoid being led into the trap that has befallen so many seeking the Holy Grail. FTW believes that the Promis story will only be solved by a group of people working together selflessly for a greater good. Maybe there is legend here after all. Put simply, from the vantage point of a child actor in 1970s Burger King commercials, "It's too big to eat!"

What would you do if you possessed software that could think, understand every language in the world, that provided peep holes into everyone else's computer "dressing rooms," that could insert data into computers without people's knowledge, that could fill in blanks beyond human reasoning and also predict what people would do - before they did it? You would probably use it wouldn't you? But Promis is not a virus. It has to be installed as a program on the computer systems that you want to penetrate. Being as uniquely powerful as it is this is usually not a problem. Once its power and advantages are demonstrated, most corporations, banks or nations are eager to be a part of the "exclusive" club that has it. And, as is becoming increasingly confirmed by sources connected to this story, especially in the worldwide banking system, not having Promis - by whatever name it is offered - can exclude you from participating in the ever more complex world of money transfers and money laundering. As an example, look at any of the symbols on the back of your ATM card. Picture your bank refusing to accept the software that made it possible to transfer funds from LA to St. Louis, or from St. Louis to Rome.

The other thing to remember is that where mathematics has proved that every human being on the earth is connected to every other by only six degrees of separation, in covert operations the number shrinks to around three. In the Promis story it often shrinks to two. It really is a small world.

The First Rip Off

Reagan confidant and overseer for domestic affairs from 1981 to 1985 Ed Meese loved Promis software. According to lawsuits and appeals filed by Hamilton, as well as the records of Congressional hearings, the FBI and dozens of news stories, the legend of Promis began in 1981-2. After a series of demonstrations showing how well Promis could integrate the computers of dozens of US attorneys offices around the country, the Department of Justice (DoJ) ordered an application of the software under a tightly controlled and limited license. From there, however, Meese, along with cronies D. Lowell Jensen (also no stranger to FTW's pages) and Earl Brian allegedly engaged in a conspiracy to steal the software, modify it to include a "trap door" that would allow those who knew of it to access the program in other computers, and then sell it overseas to foreign intelligence agencies. Hamilton began to smell a rat when agencies from other countries, like Canada, started asking him for support services in French when he had never made sales to Canada.

The Promis-managed data could be anything from financial records of banking institutions to compilations of various records used to track the movement of terrorists. That made the program a natural for Israel which, according to Hamilton and many other sources, was one of the first countries to acquire the bootlegged software from Meese and Company. As voluminously described by Inslaw attorney, the late Elliot Richardson, the Israeli Mossad under the direction of Rafi Eitan, allegedly modified the software yet again and sold it throughout the Middle East. It was Eitan, the legendary Mossad captor of Adolph Eichmann, according to Hamilton, who had masqueraded as an Israeli prosecutor to enter Inslaw's DC offices years earlier and obtain a first hand demonstration of what the Promis could do.

Not too many Arab nations would trust a friendly Mossad agent selling computer programs. So the Mossad provided their modified Promis to flamboyant British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell, a WWII Jewish resistance fighter who had assumed the Anglo name and British citizenship after the war. It was Maxwell, capable of travelling the world and with enormous marketing resources, who became the sales agent for Promis and then sold it to, among others, the Canadian government. Maxwell drowned mysteriously in late 1991, not long after investigative reporter Danny Casolaro was "suicided" in West Virginia. Maxwell may not have been the only one to send Promis north.

In the meantime, after winning some successes, including a resounding Congressional finding that he had been cheated, Bill Hamilton hit his own buzz saw in a series of moves by the Reagan and Bush Justice Departments and rigged court decisions intended to bankrupt him and force him out of business. He survived and fought on. In the meantime hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties and sales fees were going into the wrong pockets. And, as was later revealed from a number of directions, this initial tampering with the software was far from the only game in town. Both the CIA, through GE Aerospace in Herndon Virginia (GAO Contract #82F624620), the FBI and elements of the NSA were tinkering with Promis, not just to modify it with a trap door, but to enhance it with artificial intelligence or AI. It's worth it to note that GE Aerospace was subsequently purchased by Martin-Marietta which then merged to become Lockheed-Martin the largest defense and aerospace contractor in the world. This will become important later on.

Confidential documents obtained by FTW indicate that much of the AI development was done at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia Labs using research from other US universities, including Harvard, Cal-Tech and the University of California. And it was not just Reagan Republicans who got their hands on it either. As we'll see shortly, Promis came to life years before the election of Ronald Reagan. It was also, according to Bill Tyree, an essential element in the espionage conducted by Jonathan Pollard against not only the US government but the Washington embassies of many nations targeted by Israel's Mossad.

The Last Circle

For more than a year and half, members of the National Security Section of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) have been travelling through the US, often in the company of a savvy female homicide detective from the small California town of Hercules named Sue Todd. Even now questions linger as to what the Canadians were really after. But there is absolutely no question that while surreptitiously in the U.S. the Mounties spent more time with author and investigative reporter Cheri Seymour than with anyone else. And for good reason.

Seymour, under the pen name of Carol Marshall is the author of a meticulously researched e-book entitled The Last Circle located at 
http://www.lycaeum.org/books/books/last_circle/. 

So meticulously researched and documented is the book that FTW's researcher "The Goddess" has fact checked it and found it flawless. Same with Bill Hamilton and the Mounties, who have also told me of its precision. Anyone seeking to understand the Promis story must include this book as a part of their overall research.

I first met Cheri in person this spring after she had contacted me via the Internet. I traveled to her home, some three hours outside of Los Angeles and viewed acres of documentation for a saga that started with drug related murders and police corruption around methamphetamine production in northern California in the 1980s. That investigation later connected to politicians like Tony Coelho and major corporations like MCA and eventually led to a shadowy scientist named Michael Riconosciuto. Familiar names like Ted Gunderson and relatively unknown names like Robert Booth Nichols weave throughout this detailed epic that takes us to the Cabazon Indian Reservation in the California Desert and into the deepest recesses of the 1980s Reagan/Bush security apparatus.

Gunderson, a retired FBI Special Agent in Charge (SAC) from Los Angeles, and Nichols, a mysterious Los Angeles man, exposed through court documents obtained by Seymour as being a career CIA operative, connected with scientist/programmer, Riconosciuto in a sinister, yet now very well documented phase of Promis' development. In affidavits Riconosciuto claimed that one of the tasks he performed at the Cabazon reservation was to install a back door in the version of Promis that was sold to Canada. In August of this year the RCMP investigators told both Seymour and me that they had traveled to the reservation several times and had confirmed many details of Seymour's research. They had also interviewed Riconosciuto on more than one occasion. As with everyone else I have ever met who has spoken with him, both the Mounties and Seymour kept a reserved distance from him and always "counted their fingers after every hand shake."

By using treaties between the U.S. Government and Native American peoples that recognize Native American reservations as sovereign nations, the CIA has long and frequently avoided statutory prohibitions against operating inside the United States. The financial rewards for tribal nations have been significant and the extra security afforded by tribal police in remote areas has been a real blessing for covert operatives. The Last Circle describes in detail how Promis software was modified by Riconosciuto to allegedly include the back door "eavesdropping" capability but also enhanced with one form of AI and subsequently applied to the development of new weapons systems including "ethnospecific" biowarfare compounds capable of attacking specific races. Riconosciuto, now serving time in a Federal prison in Pennsylvania has a cell a very short distance from fellow espionage inmates Edwin Wilson and Jonathan Pollard. While his tale is critical to understanding what has happened to Promis, the fact remains that Riconosciuto has been out of the loop and in legal trouble for eight years. He has been in a maximum security prison for at least six. What was surprising was that in 1998 he contacted homicide detective Sue Todd in Hercules and told her that the murder of a father and son, execution style, was connected to the Promis story. One connection was obvious. Hercules is a "company town" connected to a weapons manufacturer described in Seymour's book that also connects to the Cabazon Indian Reservation.

The Three Bills

I lived in Washington, D.C. from August 1994 until late October of 1995. It was during that time that I was a semi-regular visitor at the Fairfax, Virginia home of Bill McCoy, a loveable sixty-something giant, always adorned with a beret who complained ruthlessly about what had happened to the United States since "The Damned Yankee Army" had taken over. Writers were "scribblers." People who thought they knew something about covert operations without ever having seen one were "spooky-groupies." "Mac," as we called him, had his investigative fingers in almost everything but he was most involved with Promis. McCoy was a retired Chief Warrant Officer from the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigation Division. He had broken some of the biggest cases in Army history. It was Mac who first introduced me to both Bill Tyree and to Bill Hamilton in 1994. I recall scratching my head as I would be sitting at Mac's dinner table when a call would come in from Hamilton asking if there was any new information from Tyree. "Not yet, " McCoy would answer, "I'll call as soon as I get something."

"How," I asked, "could a guy in a maximum security prison like Walpole State Penitentiary in Massachusetts be getting information of such quality that someone like Hamilton would be calling urgently to see what had come in?" "That," answered McCoy was the work of someone known only as "The Sergeant Major," and alternately as "His Eminence" who fed the information to Tyree, who in turn fed it to McCoy, who then passed it on to Hamilton. Sometimes however, Tyree and Hamilton communicated directly. To this day the identity of the Sergeant Major remains a mystery and the puzzle piece most pursued by the RCMP when they visited me in August, 2000.

It was also not by coincidence then that, in the same winter of 94-95, McCoy revealed to me that he was using former Green Berets to conduct physical surveillance of the Washington, D.C. offices of Microsoft in connection with the Promis case. FTW has, within the last month, received information indicating that piracy of Microsoft products at the GE Aerospace Herndon facility were likely tied to larger objectives, possibly the total compromise of any Windows based product. It is not by chance that most of the military and all of the intelligence agencies in the U.S. now operate on Macintosh systems.

In late 1996 Tyree mailed me a detailed set of diagrams and a lengthy narrative explaining the exact hows and whys of the murder of Danny Casolaro and an overall view of the Promis saga that is not only consistent with what is described by Seymour in The Last Circle but also provides many new details. Asked about Mike Riconosciuto for this story Tyree would say only that, "He's very good at what he does. There are very, very few who can touch him, maybe 200 in the whole world. Riconosciuto's in a class all by himself." Those documents, as later described to me by RCMP Investigator Sean McDade, proved to be "Awesome and right on the money."

The essence of those documents was that, not only had the Republicans under Meese exploited the software, but that the Democrats had also seen its potential and moved years earlier. Nowhere was this connection more clearly exposed than in understanding the relationship between three classmates from the U.S. Naval Academy: Jimmy Carter, Stansfield Turner (Carter's CIA director), and billionaire banker and Presidential kingmaker (Carter's Annapolis roommate), Arkansas' Jackson Stephens. The Tyree diagrams laid out in detail how Promis, after improvement with AI, had allegedly been mated with the software of Jackson Stephens' firm Systematics. In the late seventies and early eighties, Systematics handled some 60-70% of all electronic banking transactions in the U.S. The goal, according to the diagrams which laid out (subsequently verified) relationships between Stephens, Worthen Bank, the Lippo Group and the drug/intelligence bank BCCI was to penetrate every banking system in the world. This "cabal" could then use Promis both to predict and to influence the movement of financial markets worldwide. Stephens, truly bipartisan in his approach to profits, has been a lifelong supporter of George Bush and he was, at the same time, the source of the $3 million loan that rescued a faltering Clinton Campaign in early 1992. There is a great photograph of Stephens with a younger George "W" Bush in the excellent BCCI history, False Profits.

In the fall of 1997, Bill McCoy, having recently gone off of his heart medication was found dead in his favorite chair. In the days and weeks before he had been advised by Tyree that a Pakistani hit man, on an Israeli contract had been in the states seeking to fulfill a hit on McCoy. There had been other hints that someone closer to McCoy might do the job. Tyree recently told FTW that just before his death, he had given McCoy information on "Elbit" flash memory chips, allegedly designed at Kir Yat-Gat south of Tel Aviv. The unique feature of the Elbit chips was that they worked on ambient electricity in a computer. In other words, they worked when the computer was turned off. When combined with another newly developed chip, the "Petrie," which was capable of storing up to six months worth of key strokes, it was now possible to burst transmit all of a computer's activity in the middle of the night to a nearby receiver - say in a passing truck or even a low flying SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) satellite. According to Tyree this was the methodology used by Jonathan Pollard and the Israeli Mossad to compromise many foreign embassies in Washington.

Within 48 hours of his death Bill McCoy had been cremated and in less than four days all of Mac's furniture, records and personal belongings had been removed from his home by his son, a full Colonel in the Army. The house had been sanitized and repainted and, aside from the Zen garden in the back yard, there was no trace that McCoy had ever lived there.

Harvard and HUD

Former Assistant Secretary of Housing, Catherine Austin Fitts has had about as much ink in FTW as anyone else. A feisty, innovative thinker she has seen raging success as a Managing Director of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read and she has been "nuked" into near poverty after devising software strategies seeking to optimize financial data and returns for the US taxpayer. While acting as a HUD consultant in 1996, selling defaulted HUD Mortgages into the private market through her own investment bank, Hamilton Securities (no relation), she achieved unheard of taxpayer returns of around 90 cents on the dollar. In doing so she ran afoul of an entrenched Washington financial power structure feeding uncompetitively at the HUD trough.

Last month we described how Fitts devised a data optimization method using hand coding by residents of a HUD Housing project in Washington to produce Promis-like results. She successfully "mapped" the flow of HUD money and was about to create proprietary software that would make the job easier. That software would have integrated billions of pieces of disorganized HUD financial data. Suddenly, in August 1996, DoJ and HUD InspectorÕs General investigations started that seized her computers and resulted in a four-year blatantly illegal campaign to crush everything she stood for. No charges were ever brought, Fitts, her money and her data are still viciously separated.

One of the empires Fitts threatened was that of the Harvard Endowment. The Harvard Endowment is not really a benevolent university fund but an aggressive investment predator with $19 billion in assets, some from HUD subsidized housing. Harvard also has a number of other investments in high tech defense operations and had a big hand in investing George W BushÕs lackluster firm Harken Energy. "W" has a Harvard MBA. FittsÕ chief nemesis at Harvard, Herbert "Pug" Winokur, head of Capricorn Investments, and member of the board of the Harvard Endowment is also a PhD mathematician from Harvard where the mathematical breakthroughs that gave rise to Artificial Intelligence using block-modeling research were discovered. In the 60s Winokur had done social science research for the Department of Defense on causes of inner city unrest in the wake of the 1967 Detroit riots.

The pioneering research at Harvard that allegedly gave rise to the Artificial Intelligence installed in Promis later moved north. According to a Harvard website (www.analytichtech.com/mb119/chap2e.htm) "Much of the effort of the Harvard group - no longer based solely at Harvard - was centered on the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) at Toronto...". Things grew more suspicious as FittsÕ research disclosed that Winokur, through Capricorn Investments, had a decisive role in the 1980s management of the intelligence/government outsourcing mega-firm DynCorp, of Reston, VA. Winokur served as DynCorp CEO from 1989 to 1997. DynCorp handles everything for Uncle Sam from aircraft maintenance, to sheep-dipping of combat troops into private assault forces in Colombia, to the financial management of HUD records, to the maintenance of computer security at government facilities. One of DynCorpÕs most interesting contracts is with the DoJ for the financial management of assets seized in the drug war. DynCorp also counts among its shareholders former CIA Director James Woolsey. Pug Winokur made DynCorp what it is today and he still sits on the board.

In juxtaposition, Harvard and HUD differ in one striking respect according to Fitts. The Harvard Endowment has enjoyed wildly uncharacteristic above market tax-free returns for the last decade, (33% in 1999), while HUD, in the same year, was compelled to do a "manual adjustments" to reconcile a $59 billion shortfall between its accounts and the U.S. Treasury account. [This is not a typographical error]. Where did all that money go? $59 billion in an election year is a staggering amount of money. Why is no one screaming? HUD's explanation is that it was loading a new accounting system that did not work and then did not bother to balance its checkbook for over a year.

I was not surprised when Bill Hamilton confirmed to both Fitts and to me that WinokurÕs DynCorp had played a role in the evolution of Promis in the 1980s. One other surprise was to come out of FittsÕ investigations that had months earlier led her to conclude that she was up against Promis-related interests. On the very day that DoJ and HUD shut her down she was discussing software development with a Canadian firm that is at the heart of the Canadian space program, Geomatics. The term Geomatics applies to a related group of sciences - all involving satellite imagery - used to develop geographic information systems, global positioning systems and remote sensing from space that can actually determine the locations of natural resources such as oil, precious metals and other commodities.

Apparently centered in Canada, the Geomatics industry offers consulting services throughout the world in English, German, Russian, French, Arabic, Spanish and Chinese. Geomatics technology, launched aboard Canadian satellites via US, European or Japanese boosters can help developing or industrialized nations inventory and manage all of their natural resources. There are also several Geomatics related companies in the U.S. including one not far from the Johnson Space center in Houston.

This situation is custom made for enhanced Promis software with back-door technology. What better way to map and inventory all of the worldÕs resources than by making each client nation pay for the work. By providing the client nation Promis-based software it would then be possible to compile a global data base of every marketable natural resource. And it would not be necessary to even touch the resources because commodities and futures markets exist for all of them. An AI enhanced, Promis-based program would then be the perfect set up to make billions of dollars in profits by watching and manipulating the worldÕs political climate to trade in, letÕs say Tungsten futures. Such a worldwide database would be even more valuable if there were, for example, a sudden surge in the price of gold or platinum.

Bill Hamilton readily agreed that this was an ideal situation for the application of Promis technology. In furthering our research on Geomatics we discovered that almost everywhere Geomatics technology went we also found Lockheed-Martin.

Enter The Mounties

Thanks to a strong push in my direction from Cheri Seymour, the Mounties and Hercules PD Homicide Detective Sue Todd arrived at my door on August 3rd. They had already consumed most of the FTW web site and were well familiar with my writings. I had let them know, through Cheri, that I did have information on Promis from Bill Tyree and that I would be happy to share it. Before getting into details we all went out for lunch at a nearby Chinese restaurant.

In setting basic outlines for our conversations that day I indicated that, as a journalist, I viewed our discussions as off-the-record. I took no notes and did not tape record any of the discussion. I am recounting the events now only after corresponding with McDade and advising him of my intention to write. He responded and did not object. I took the same position with Detective Todd. I warned the Mounties and Todd at the outset that a sudden termination of their investigations was likely and that they would all become expendable. It happened to me once.

Over lunch the Mounties were quite candid about the fact that the RCMP had Promis software and that it even went by the name Promis. I think they may have also mentioned the name PIRS which is an acknowledged system in the RCMP network. They stated that they had been given their version of Promis by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS).

CSIS was an intelligence breakaway from the Mounties in 1984, intended to be a pure [sic] intelligence agency. It was created largely with the expertise and assistance of the CIA. All of us understood two things about that arrangement and we discussed them openly. First, there was a question as to whether or not any intelligence service created by the CIA could be completely loyal to its native country. Secondly, it was also understood that there was a rivalry between the two agencies similar to the one that existed between the FBI and the CIA, or in a larger context, the Clinton gang and the Bush gang in the US. The chief concern of the Mounties, clearly, was to ascertain whether or not their version of Promis was one that was compromised. McDade also described in detail how he knew that supposedly secure RCMP communications equipment had been compromised by the NSA. The Mounties acknowledged regular meetings with Cheri Seymour but evinced none of the interest she said that they had previously shown in the Mossad. With me their single-minded focus was Bill Tyree and where and how he obtained his information.

Sue Todd, confirmed for me suspicions that there was an unspoken alliance between the RCMP investigators and the FBI. She said that during the course of her three years of efforts to solve the double murder in Hercules, she had routinely visited FBI offices and enjoyed access to FBI files relative to both the Promis investigation and anything connected to her victims. That information was obviously being shared with the Mounties and that implied the blessings of the FBI. In short, a domestic law enforcement officer was sharing information with agents of a foreign government. In some cases that could provoke espionage charges but in this case it was apparently sanctioned. The Hercules murder victims had no apparent connection to Promis software in any way except for the fact that Riconosciuto had possessed knowledge about the murders which he had provided to Todd from prison. The Hercules Armament Corporation, featured in The Last Circle, was an obvious link. I also noted that the father in Todd's case had been a computer engineer with passions for both geological research and hypnosis and no other visible connections to the Promis story.

As we copied Tyree's papers and went through other materials the next day I was aware that the Canadians expressed special interest in Jackson Stephens and anything having to do with the manipulation of financial markets. They asked for copies of news reports I had showing that General Wesley Clark, the recently retired NATO Commander, has just gone to work for Stephens, Inc. in Little Rock Arkansas. I also provided documents showing that Stephens' financial firm Alltel, heir to Systematics, was moving heavily into the mortgage market. As the Mounties repeatedly pressed for information on the identity of the Sergeant Major I referred them to Tyree directly through his attorney Ray Kohlman and to Tyree's closest friend, the daughter of CIA bagman and paymaster Albert Carone, Dee Ferdinand. [For more on Carone visit the FTW web site].

McDade did eventually contact Ferdinand by phone and shortly thereafter one of the most bizarre twists in the whole story took place.

About a week after meeting the Mounties I heard back from Sean that the Tyree documents and flow charts from 1996 had been right on the money. A special recurring theme in those documents that meshes with Seymour's research is the fact that modified versions of Promis software with both artificial intelligence and trap doors were being smuggled out of Los Alamos nuclear labs in containers labeled as radioactive waste. According to Tyree and other sources, after an Indian reservation, the safest place in the world that no one will ever break into is a nuclear waste dump. This also applies to containers in transit between countries. The radioactive warning label guarantees unmolested movement of virtually anything. Promis software is apparently no exception.

Bill Casey and Al Carone from the Grave

Albert Vincent Carone has also been covered exhaustively in FTW, both in the newsletter and on the web site. A retired NYPD Detective, also a made-member of the Genovese crime family, Carone spent his entire working career as a CIA operative. (FTW has special reports on both Bill Tyree and Al Carone available from the web site or at the end of this newsletter). For more than 25 years before his mysterious death in 1990, Al Carone served as a bagman and liaison between George Bush, CIA Director Bill Casey, Oliver North, Richard Nixon and many other prominent figures including Robert Vesco, Manuel Noriega and Ferdinand Marcos. The Carone-Tyree connection, covered in detail in the Sept. 1998 issue (Vol. I, No.7) goes back to operations in the mid 1970s when Tyree, serving with the Special Forces, engaged in CIA directed missions for which Carone was the paymaster.

Carone's death from "chemical toxicity of unknown etiology" in 1990 resulted in the sanitizing of all of his military and NYPD records as well as the theft and disappearance of nearly ten million dollars in bank accounts, insurance policies and investments. Virtually overnight, almost every record of Carone disappeared leaving his daughter and her family nearly bankrupt under the burden of tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills. In 1996, Carone's daughter, Dee Ferdinand, discovered that Tyree and Carone had known each other and that Tyree could prove instrumental in helping to restore Carone's lost fortune. Ferdinand filed suit in U.S. District Court this spring seeking to recover pensions, insurance policies and benefits in a case which has no known connection to Promis. I have known Ferdinand and her family for more than seven years. Never once has she mentioned a connection between her father and Promis although she was well familiar with the case from Tyree and conversations with Bill Hamilton. I had referred the Mounties to her because of my belief that she could possibly help identify Tyree's source, the Sergeant Major.

On August 10th, exactly one week after the Mounties came to see me, the DoJ mailed Ferdinand a response to her suit seeking dismissal. Included in the paperwork was a bizarre document, now in FTW's possession, that, by the account of both Ferdinand and her lawyer, had absolutely nothing to do with her case. The document in question was a March 29, 1986 Declaration from CIA Director William Casey, a close friend of the Carone family. Paragraph 6 of that document (prepared for another case) stated, "Two of the documents responsive to Plaintiffs' Request No 1, specifically the one-page letter dated 28 March 1979 and a one-page letter dated 8 January 1980, have been released in the same excised form as they were previously released by the Government of Canada. I independently and formally assert the state secrets privilege for the information excised from these two documents."

Dee Ferdinand called me immediately. The letter had nothing to do with her suit. It mentioned Canada. Canada was not even mentioned in her suit. What was going on?" she asked. "It's blackmail," I answered. "CIA, which is monitoring everything the Canadians do, everything I do, everything you do, knows that I will tell the Mounties of these letters." McDade didn't grasp the concept at first. He was a straight-ahead street cop. But I had been through something similar when serving as the press spokesman for the Perot Presidential campaign in 1992. I explained it to Sean, "Sean, you and I are just the messengers. But I guarantee that at some level of your government the CIA's reference to these letters will scare people to death. It is a reminder that CIA has them."

A week later McDade told me that the dates were indeed significant - very significant. That's all he would say.

FTW has what may be a possible explanation for the dates in question. The President and CIA Director on these dates the letters were written were Jimmy Carter and Stansfield Turner. Aside from the then recent Russian invasion of Afghanistan, a saga in which the Canadian government played a minor role, the largest drama on the world scene was the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in January 1979, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Teheran later that year. The Canadian government and the CIA worked very closely in Iran, the Canadian Embassy even housing some CIA personnel who had escaped the crowds of students. But that kind of assistance is not something to hide. Another explanation was needed to explain shock waves in Ottawa.

Recently, a source using a code name known to FTW has surfaced with information relating to Promis. In his communiqués he describes the use of Promis software by the Bush family to loot the secret bank accounts of Manuel Noriega and Ferdinand Marcos. Promis is able to do this because funds can be transferred out of accounts without a trace. Remember the trap door? The rule of thumb here is that crooks, especially CIA sponsored crooks, don't usually go to the cops when somebody steals their stolen money. From my personal experience in the era, and direct exposure to two members of the Iranian Royal family, both before and after the overthrow, I am acutely aware that the Shah, then perhaps the richest man in the world, was actually targeted by the CIA. His downfall was no accident. Once worth more than $20 billion, the Shah ended his life a refugee in Egypt. Many of his billions disappeared and the family was very upset about it.

Could the financial power of Promis have been turned loose first through Canada when Carter was President in the US? The Shah did a lot of banking in Canada. We may never know the answer. But if the downfalls of wealthy US supported dictators Noriega and Marcos are any indication the answer is likely, yes. And the Shah was wealthier than both of them put together. Where'd all that money go?

Headlines

On August 25th the Toronto Star broke what was to become a series of stories by Valerie Lawson and Allan Thompson. The cat was out of the bag. Various figures known to have direct connections to Riconosciuto had been virtually dogging the Mounties' every move as they traveled in the US. One even contacted me just days after the Mounties left LA. It was a story that could not be kept under wraps forever. Most of the Star story was accurate. It was going to be difficult for the RCMP to move quietly now. A Reuters story the same day closed with the following paragraphs, "CanadaÕs national counterintelligence agency said in a June report that friendly nations were making concerted efforts to steal sensitive technology and information.

"The Canadian Security Intelligence Service said outsiders were particularly interested in aerospace, biotechnology, chemicals, communications, information technology, mining and metallurgy, nuclear energy, oil and gas, and the environment." That was Geomatics, at the heart of Canada's space program, Canada's flagship space technology. I checked the Star story. There had been no mention of high tech or space related issues. What did Reuters know? In mid September, after receiving confidential source documents related to the case telling me that one version of Promis, modified in Canada was handled through the Canadian firm I.P. Sharp, I got an answer. A quick search on the web revealed that Sharp, a well documented component of the case, had been bought by a Reuters company in the early 90s. Hamilton later told me that he had heard that Reuters possibly had the Promis software. That would explain how they knew about the aerospace connection.

Michael Dobbs of The Washington Post called and asked what I knew. I confirmed that I had met with the Mounties but didn't know much else other than giving them the Tyree flow charts. The Post was never going to tell the truth. Their business was keeping secrets, not revealing them. The Mounties had made waves.

On August 28 the phone rang and it was a collect call from Tyree. "Get a tape recorder and turn it on," he said. Over the course of the next half an hour Tyree, obviously reading from detailed and copious notes, named individuals and companies dealing with Promis software and its progeny. The tape was specific down to naming specific engineers in military and private corporations doing Promis research. Tyree described specific Congressional committees that had been infiltrated with "enhanced" Promis. Tyree described how Promis progeny, having inspired four new computer languages had made possible the positioning of satellites so far out in space that they were untouchable. At the same time the progeny had improved video quality to the point where the same satellite could focus on a single human hair. The ultimate big picture.

Promis progeny had also evolved to the point where neural pads could be attached to plugs in the back of the human head and thought could be translated into electrical impulses that would be equally capable of flying a plane or wire transferring money. Names like Sandia, Cal-Tech, Micron, Tech University of Graz, Oded Leventer and Massimo Grimaldi rolled from his lips as he tore through the pages of notes. Data, such as satellite reconnaissance, could also now be downloaded from a satellite directly into a human brain. The evolution of the artificial intelligence had progressed to a point where animal behavior and thought were being decoded. Mechanical humans were being tested. Animals were being controlled by computer.

Billy saved Canada for last.

"Here's how we fuck Canada," he started. He was laughing as he facetiously described what was coming as some sort of bizarre payback for the War of 1812. Then, placing the evolutions of Promis in context with the Canadian story Tyree asked a question as to why one would really now need to go to all the trouble of monitoring all of a foreign country's intelligence operations. "There's an easier way to get what I want," he said. "I access their banks. I access their banks and I know who does what and who's getting ready to do what," he said. He described how Canada had been provided with modified Promis software which Canada then modified, or thought they had modified, again to eliminate the trap door. That software turned loose in the financial and scientific communities then became Canada's means of believing that they were securing the trap door information from the entities to whom they provided their versions of Promis. But, unknown, to the Canadians the Elbit chips in the systems bypassed the trap doors and permitted the transmission of data when everyone thought the computers were turned off and secure. Tyree did not explain how the chips physically got into the Canadian computers.

"This," Tyree said "is how you cripple everything Canada does that you don't like. And if you want proof I offer you the fact that we toppled the government of Australia in 1980." "[Prime Minister] Gough Whitlam and Nugan Hand [Bank]," I answered. Tyree affirmed. The Labor Government of Whitlam had been suddenly unseated after making nationalistic noise and questioning the role of US intelligence agencies in Australian affairs.

The issue of a coming feud between the dollar and the Euro came up. I suggested that rapidly vanishing support in South America and Europe both were threatening the military operations of "Plan Colombia" and the economic boost it would give the US economy. Tyree jumped in, "If I can put Canada in line and show the Eurodollar, the 'Eurotrash' what I have already done to my neighbor, whom I value to some degree - remember, these are not nice people - these are financial thugs at their worst. So what they are going to do is sit down discreetly and say, 'Look, this is what we did to Canada. Now, would you like us to do this to the European market as well?' Mike, they're not going to think twice about itÉ A weapon is only good if someone knows what its capability is. Prior to using the atomic bomb it was irrelevant." He continued, "They refer to it as the Nagasaki Syndrome."

After describing in some detail how the financial powers-that-be had gutted American manufacturing productivity through globalization he described a strategy intended to halt any move by the Euro to overshadow the dollar or even compete with it. It was pure economic hostage taking and Canada would be the object lesson. Then, chillingly, he described something familiar to any military strategist. The penetration and looting of HUD was the test bed, the proving ground, the "White Sands" of the Promis economic Atom bomb. Once the CIA and the economic powers-that-be had proven that, over a period of years, they could infiltrate and loot $59 billion dollars from HUD, they knew that they could do it anywhere. Said Tyree, "Then they knew they had what it took to go abroad and create mayhemÉ It was planned twenty years ago."

It took several days to reach Sean McDade who had been on vacation. I played the Tyree tape for him over an open phone line into RCMP headquarters. He asked me to make a physical copy right away and send it to him. After he had had time to listen to it he cautioned me against sending it anywhere else. I told him that as long as his investigation was active that I would do nothing more than make the standard copies I make of any sensitive documents as a precaution. I could tell that the tape had rattled him. Though I had known from the start that the large and energetic Mountie, whom I believed to be a dedicated an honest man, would never be allowed to ride his case out to the end, I still had hopes. But in my heart I knew that Tyree was right. In all the years he had been feeding me information I had never known him to be wrong and, apparently, neither had Bill Hamilton. I did not send a copy of the tape to Hamilton because I knew how difficult and potentially dangerous McDade's job was going to be now that the press had exposed him. Having been a cop in dangerous political, CIA infested waters I knew what it was like to not know who you could trust.

If keeping the tape quiet would give the Mounties and edge I would do it - but only as long as they had a case.

Sudden Death

Then it was over.

On September 16th the Toronto Star announced that the RCMP had suddenly closed its Promis investigation with the flat disclaimer that it did not have and never did have any version of Bill Hamilton's software. That was as shocking a statement as it was absurd. "The only way that you can identify Promis," said a perplexed Bill Hamilton, "is to compare the code. Sean McDade said that he was not an engineer and couldn't read code so how did he know?" Hamilton was as emphatic as I was that McDade had said that RCMP had Promis. So was Cheri Seymour. I offered a fleeting hope that the Mounties were playing a game, saying that they had terminated the investigation to shake some of the incessant probing that had been taking place around McDade's every move.

I was finally convinced when McDade e-mailed me and said that it was his view that the Mounties did not have any version of Promis and that he had no objections if I decided to write a story. I then agreed with Seymour that, whether they had said so or not, both the Mounties and Sue Todd had left enough visible footprints that it was their intention for us to go public. It might be the only protection they had.

As I had predicted from the start, they had come too close to bigger issues and been shut down ruthlessly. I called Sue Todd who lamented that she was marking her three year homicide investigation, "Closed by the press." Even though she was convincing I had the feeling that she was playing back a rehearsed script. I told her that I was not satisfied with the statements that there was no Promis in the RCMP. I recalled our lunchtime conversation of August 3rd. She agreed with me that the RCMP mission was to determine whether or not RCMP Promis was a stolen or compromised version. She knew that they had it. So did I. I e-mailed McDade one last time saying that I was going to write it like I remembered it. He never got back to me.

Bill Hamilton added one last twist when he told me in a conversation that the Mounties claimed to have developed their software on their own. That, he said, was nonsense because the Mounties did not have that kind of sophistication or ability. He thought that the RCMP program had been specially prepared FBI. That would explain the role of retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson. Though I didn't tell him at the time I knew that he had obtained that information from Bill Tyree. And Bill Tyree and his provider, the Sergeant Major, are two people that Bill Hamilton and I both have learned to respect.

Diplomacy

Just three days after the Toronto Star announced the abrupt termination of the RCMP investigation the Canada based International Network on Disarmament and Globalization (INDG) posted an electronic bulletin on a speech by former Canadian Ambassador to the US. In an address the night before, less than 48 hours after the termination of the RCMP investigation, Derek Burney, current President of CAE, a Canadian firm manufacturing flight simulators, criticized the U.S. aerospace industry for being overly-protectionist under the guise of national security. In addressing the Aerospace Industries Association of Canada, according to large stories that appeared in CP (Canadian Press) and Toronto's Globe and Mail, Burney was characterized as sounding unusually tough in his criticism of American policy that was freezing Canadian firms out of aerospace contracts. Both stories were ambivalent in that they alternately made Burney sound critical of the U.S. while championing Canadian interests and at the same time weak as he noted that Mexico stood poised under NAFTA to replace Canada as the U.S.'s number one trading partner.

The CP story made two telling observations. It quoted Burney as saying that Canada needed to do more to "preserve and enhance its access to the American market." Then it closed it's story on Burney's speech, advocating a compromise agreement between the US and Canada, by saying that Burney's position "risks being perceived here at home as a sellout or worse."

A close examination of Burney's remarks, published in the INDG bulletin revealed something more like an obsequious surrender rather than a mere sellout. While there were a few tough-talking paragraphs that saved Canadian face, the essence of the speech was that Burney believed that American defense firms, the largest of which is Lockheed-Martin, were poised to transfer the bulk of their contracts to companies in Mexico. Citing Canada's dependence upon access to American avionics and "databases," Burney painted a picture that seemingly left Canada over a barrel. Without access to American technology the Canadian aerospace industry could not function.

Buried deep in the text of Burney's speech we found the following paragraph which is, we believe, the best place to end this story.

"That does not mean that we have to agree with everything Washington does or says or do things exactly as the Americans do. On the contrary, one of the advantages of being a good neighbor and close ally is that we can speak freely and forthrightly to the Americans - provided we have a solid case and are seeking to influence their position and not simply capture a quick headline. And, never forget, it is always more effective to be frank in private. Otherwise your motive can be somewhat suspect."

SOFTWARE TO DIE FOR – THE PROMIS SOFTWARE SCANDAL AND HOW THE U.S. JUSTICE DEPARTMENT BECAME SOFTWARE PIRAT... by Tedd St Rain