("Quid coniuratio est?")
EXPLOSIVE NEW FACTS REVEALED IN MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF FOSTER [The Spotlight, 08/07/95]
[...continued...]
TOM VALENTINE:
In other words the United States was spying on banks around the
world to track people's money?
JAMES NORMAN:
Actually, it was an allied government effort, which also included
Israel. It was originally designed as an anti-terrorist effort.
The program was nicknamed "Follow the Money."
Senior people from the Reagan years who were involved in designing and crafting this program have confirmed that there was such a program underway and that massive amounts of data were collected. However, because of the highly sensitive security nature of this, they can't say quite how it was done, but we have figured out that one of the companies involved in implementing the software system (and probably the hardware) was a company in Little Rock that went by the name of Systematics.
TOM VALENTINE:
Was the Inslaw company's computer software called PROMIS involved
anywhere in this? (The owners of Inslaw claim that during the
Reagan administration the Justice Department reneged on a
contract with them, stole the software and used it and sold it to
foreign governments. -- Ed.)
JAMES NORMAN:
Yes. It started out looking like a little cloud on the horizon,
but it's turned out that the uses to which this PROMIS software
has been put would boggle the mind. It's a very powerful system
that was initially designed for tracking legal cases, but it was
also designed to be customized so that you could adjust it to
track all kinds of things. It's been used in tracking nuclear
submarines, intelligence data and banking transactions.
It was in 1982 -- right about the time that this "Follow the Money" program was launched -- that Inslaw came up with its proprietary enhancement (PROMIS) of what had, until then, been public domain software that had been developed by the government with taxpayer dollars. The government's funding for the program had run out, but Inslaw came in and re-wrote and enhanced the software. It was those enhancements that the government took since the government was so desperate for a software to implement this "Follow the Money" program in particular since it required massive amounts of tracking.
I think what was involved here was an effort to get all of the world's megabanks to standardize their data in a way that would be easily analyzed by the National Security Agency (NSA). Now the NSA is the signals intelligence arm of the government. It's the computer spy agency, really, and highly secretive.
Systematics in Little Rock was one of a number of companies that got involved in installing, selling, supporting, customizing and managing this software and bank data center operations. Actually, it appears that there was a cluster of such companies.
Systematics was started by Jackson Stephens, the investment banker, who has been heavily involved in bond trading in Arkansas. It grew rapidly in the 1970s as it took out more domestic business. In 1982, as the government was looking for a company to help out with this "Follow the Money" program, Systematics took on a big role in that and its business boomed even more.
Then when Bill Clinton came to the White House and Foster and Hubbell came along with him, Systematics' overseas business blossomed along with it and they started getting contracts from a number of foreign banks.
TOM VALENTINE:
Was Vince Foster in the NSA?
JAMES NORMAN:
When you say "in" the NSA, it's hard to say. The way it's been
described to me is that he was an interface person between the
NSA and Systematics. The way I see it, is that Vince Foster at
the Rose Law Firm was a very quiet but a very bright guy. He was
one of Jackson Stephens' trusted "deal guys" at the law firm. He
was a litigator, but more than that he was a business lawyer.
In that role he would have been in charge of supervising contracts, setting up accounts, high-level marketing and smoothing all of the lumps that would naturally go on between [a company he represented] and a government it was involved in contracts with.
Foster never showed up as an employee of Systematics. He never billed Systematics for any time. You won't find his name cropping up on any Systematics documents, although we've been told by good sources that he was involved with Systematics, although the company denies it. There's an absolute solid wall of denials about this. Somebody's lying.
TOM VALENTINE:
Was Webb Hubbell ever retained by Systematics?
JAMES NORMAN:
They did retain Hubbell and Hillary Clinton. In 1978 Jackson
Stephens ended up being the front man for a group of Arab backers
of BCCI, which at the time tried to take over Financial General
Bankshares, a major Washington-based bank holding company. It was
one of the few banks that was then able to own banks over state
lines. Stephens came in and bought a big chunk of that bank and
wanted to take it over.
One of the things he wanted to do, according to the SEC lawsuit that blocked the takeover, was to bring in Systematics to do all of the data processing for that bank. In that case, Hubbell and Hillary Clinton ended up representing Systematics in some of the filings that they made in that case.
The reason this is significant is that, I've been told, the first work that Systematics was doing for the government really was shuffling covert money, managing the covert funds moving around in secret government covert operations accounts.
This was no small job. It took a significant amount of computer power because they were moving money around from one account to another, setting up new accounts, phony companies, etc. It was a major task and Systematics was in an ideal position to do that because its business was to outsource the data processing function in a number of small banks, mainly in the Midwest, the West Coast and Texas.
Systematics would go to these small banks and say, "You can't keep up with the technology. Why don't you just let us take your computers and your people and provide all of that processing. You don't have to worry about it." That may be a prudent thing for a small bank to do, but when it would do that, it would give up a tremendous amount of control over the guts of your bank and what this allowed to happen was the creation, essentially, of a cyberbank for the covert funds.
What we've been told -- and Systematics will adamantly deny this -- is that at the end of every day there would be a direct bank- to-bank balancing transaction of funds. We are told that imbedded in these day-end transactions would be information codes -- compressed data that would convey the information about these coded accounts. The banks that were involved themselves might not even know this was going on. However, we are told that this is how all of this money got moved around.
If you think about it, there had to be maybe hundreds of billions of dollars moving around during the 1970s and 1980s in these covert arms-and-drugs transactions. Nobody has adequately explained where that money came from or where it went. It certainly never went through Congress. It certainly was never appropriated and didn't show up in government budgets. It was not just "black" money but "black black" money that even the congressional oversight people didn't know was sloshing around out there.
TOM VALENTINE:
Has the Washington Post, for example, reported any of this?
JAMES NORMAN:
On July 4 the Washington Post published an article pooh-poohing
what they called all of the "conspiracy theories" about the
Foster death. What is interesting, though, is the shift that's
going on at the Post. Prior to that article, the Post was
utterly dismissive of any of these things. The tone in this most
recent article moves to a more neutral position. I think you are
gradually going to see more of the major media moving to get on
board this freight train before they get run over by it. The
cover-up is unraveling.
TOM VALENTINE:
So Vince Foster was investigated as a possible spy for Israel?
JAMES NORMAN:
That's what makes him a very key figure. He was a double agent in
a sense. He was overseeing a massive intelligence effort for our
country which conceivably gave him access to very high level
intelligence. You have to realize that the keys to the kingdom
these days are in computer encryption, codes, systems. That's
what loses and wins wars these days. You can listen to the other
guy's traffic.
By the nature of what Systematics was doing and what we believe was some relationship between Systematics and E-Systems which is one of the NSA's primary black operations subcontractors, it's conceivable that Foster could have had very high level code and encryption information. The problem is that he died before investigators could figure out what did or did not get out the door.
I've been told that perhaps because of Foster's long-time involvement with intelligence matters for the Rose Law Firm that when he went to the White House he was probably a key interface person between the White House and the intelligence community, which, I think, perhaps explains why there was such a frenzy of activity after he died. That's why they held the Park Police and the FBI at bay while they rifled through his papers trying to figure out what was "national security" and what wasn't. That explains so much about why this thing has been covered up.
TOM VALENTINE:
The American people have been led to believe that Foster was just
another nice-guy lawyer who came to town with Bill and Hillary.
JAMES NORMAN:
Wrong. Here's the problem: the media tries so hard to be
responsible and not get carried away and to not impugn the
government unnecessarily and the government is able to play that
like a violin and squelch any story that questions the
government's position. It's hard to get any story like that into
print because the standards of proof have to be so high. I'm
thoroughly ashamed and embarrassed at the performance of the
American major media and it makes you wonder why.
TOM VALENTINE:
Why would Israel have paid Vince Foster anything?
JAMES NORMAN:
Well, I don't think it's any secret that both Israel and the
United States have been spying on one another for a long time. As
close as the relationship is between the U.S. and Israel, there
are some things we don't want to tell them and vice versa, and
particularly during the Bush administration the relationship
soured. Israel is a foreign country and their concerns are not
always congruent to ours. Who knows?
We know Foster was under investigation for espionage. We don't know what he gave Israel. We know that there was $2.73 million in his Swiss bank account -- the funds that came from Israel. He had other Swiss bank accounts as well that were receiving funds from U.S. interests. His periodic one-day trips to Geneva are problematic in and among themselves.
TOM VALENTINE:
You discovered some other interesting things.
JAMES NORMAN:
This other matter is very troubling to me. It's another
bombshell. Foster's was not the only Swiss bank of a high-level
U.S. political figure that's been raided and deleted this way in
the past year and a half. The Fifth Column has gone into and
cleaned out probably a couple of hundred coded Swiss bank
accounts belonging to high-level U.S. political figures -- the
biggest names going -- in both parties. The take, we've been told
-- is over $2 billion, going on $3 billion.
TOM VALENTINE:
Will the Fifth Column ever go public?
JAMES NORMAN:
I don't know. I think that probably the way the intelligence
community works that the name will get changed, it will be
shuffled around and you'll never find it.
TOM VALENTINE:
This is the kind of thing that I know bothers you as a
journalist.
JAMES NORMAN:
The issues here are so immense that they've just got to be
discussed in some way. The persuasiveness of the cover stories by
the government is so disturbing. Under the cover of national
security the government is allowed to lie to the public and lie,
cheat and steal if they have to to protect national security. The
more that you look at the Foster case the more you realize that
this is an authorized cover story.
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