During the previous summer, Coleman had
acted as technical adviser to the Cypriot Police Force
Narcotics Squad (CPFNS) and helped train its officers in the
use of communications, surveillance and other electronic
gear paid for by the United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse
Control (UNFDAC). On returning to Cyprus that spring, he
found that the march of technology had continued in his
absence and that all the CPFNS field offices had been hooked
into a central computerized database installed by Link
Systems, Ltd., a US government 'cut-out' company set up to
carry out the contract for UNFDAC.
At CPFNS headquarters, he saw several of the officers he had
worked with unpacking software from boxes marked PROMIS Ltd,
Toronto, Canada. Sensing another Hurley enterprise that
would interest Donleavy, Coleman poked around discreetly and
discovered that Eurame had supplied, or was in process of
supplying, copies of this software to other national police
and military forces in the region, including those of Egypt,
Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Israel, Jordan, Iran and
Iraq.
Puzzled as to why the DEA and CIA would choose to do this
through a front operation in Nicosia rather than through
official channels, Coleman duly reported all this activity
to Control, but the response was so muted he could only
conclude that the DIA knew about it already.
(Much later, he discovered that PROMIS had been developed
for the US Department of Justice by Inslaw, Inc. of
Washington, D.C., as an information system for
law-enforcement agencies and government prosecutors with
heavy workloads to keep track of their cases. The systems
sold through Eurame, however, were bootleg copies, made
without the knowledge of lnslaw, to which a 'backdoor'
software routine had been added. No matter how securely the
front door might be barred with entry codes and passwords,
American operators, holding the key to the secret back door,
could break into the PROMIS systems operated by Cyprus,
Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Turkey, Kuwait, Israel, Jordan, Iran
and Iraq whenever they wished, access the data stored there
and get out again without arousing the slightest suspicion
that the security of those systems had been breached -- an
incalculable advantage, not only in collecting and verifying
intelligence data from those countries, but also in
assessing the actual, as opposed to the professed, level of
cooperation extended by their governments.)
***
On 3 August 1991, not long after the
family had moved into the refugee compound on the outskirts
of Trollhattan, Coleman took a telephone call from Danny
Casolaro, an American freelance journalist in Washington,
who had tracked him down after reading his affidavit in the
Inslaw case.
He was working on a complex story about
the octopus, Casolaro explained, linking the theft and
unauthorized sale of PROMIS software to foreign governments
with the BCCI scandal, the Iran/Contra affair and other
questionable activities, including the so-called 'October
Surprise'. Could Coleman perhaps help him with any of this?
Did he know of anyone who might have further information?
Though disturbed that Casolaro should have
traced him so easily, Coleman saw the chance of a trade-off.
He had been trying to find James McCloskey, the quickie
divorce lawyer who had recruited him into the DIA and who
might again be prepared to speak up for him, but his amiable
guru had apparently abandoned his practice and moved away
from Timonium, Maryland, without leaving a forwarding
address. When Coleman explained this to his caller, touching
on McCloskey's links with the BCCI and the intelligence
community, Casolaro thanked him for the tip and promised in
return to let Coleman know as soon as he ran McCloskey to
earth.
Nine days later, Ernest Fitzgerald,
Coleman's friend at the Pentagon, called to say that Danny
Casolaro had been found dead in a blood-boltered hotel
bathroom in Martinsburg, West Virginia, both arms slashed
open 12 times with a DIY knife blade. His briefcase was
missing, and among other suspicious circumstances, the
Martinsburg police, declaring Casolaro a suicide, had
allowed the body to be embalmed before his family was even
notified of his death. A firm of contract cleaners had also
been called in to scour the room from top to bottom, so that
any meaningful forensic investigation was impossible.
According to relatives and friends,
Casolaro had gone to West Virginia, despite recent death
threats, to see somebody he had met there who, he thought,
could supply the missing links in the story he was working
on. Everybody who knew Casolaro, including the Hamiltons and
their counsel, Elliot Richardson, were convinced he had been
murdered to shut him up.
Coleman was chilled by the news. If the
person Casolaro had gone to see was McCloskey, then Coleman
had sent Casolaro to his death. And if Casolaro had been
killed because of what he knew, then Coleman's own chances
of survival, if he fell into the same hands, looked slim.
Thankful that he and Mary-Claude had decided to get out when
they did, he prevailed on Fitzgerald to make further
inquiries, although he found it hard to believe that the
McCloskey he remembered could be involved in the murder.
The result was even more unsettling. The
likelihood that Casolaro had gone to meet McCloskey
increased when investigators established that, after leaving
Timonium, McCloskey had bought a horse farm at Shepardstown,
about fifteen minutes down the road from where Casolaro was
murdered. As against that, McCloskey had not been seen in
the area for two years, although there was a working
telephone number listed in his name.
When Coleman dialed that number from
Sweden, he got through to the Shenandoah Women's Center in
Martinsburg, which claimed never to have heard of McCloskey.
Efforts to trace him were then redoubled, but without
result, and, as far as Coleman knows, McCloskey is still
missing to this day.
Trail of the Octopus. From Beirut to
Lockerbie--Inside the DIA, by Donald
Goddard with Lester K. Coleman
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