The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (59 page)

Mr. Casolaro died on August 10, 1991, and his death was officially ruled a suicide on January 25, 1992, over 5 months later. The criticism of the investigation of Casolaro’s death by the Martinsburg, WV, police center on the following areas: Prior to any coroner’s investigation and before his family was notified, Mr. Casolaro’s body was embalmed, which may have limited the effectiveness of autopsies or toxicological examinations. Some evidence has also surfaced indicating that immediately following the discovery of the body, the room was not sealed by the Martinsburg authorities, potentially allowing for the contamination of the possible crime scene. Additionally, it was reported that the room in which Mr. Casolaro was found was cleaned before a thorough criminal investigation could be conducted.

Information received from other sources reveal other curious circumstances surrounding Mr. Casolaro’s death that may or may not have been considered by Martinsburg authorities. In a sworn statement to the committee, Richard Stavin (a former Department of Justice Organized Crime Strike Force prosecutor) stated:

I received a call from Danny Casolaro approximately one week before he was found dead… . He spoke to me about INSLAW. He spoke to me about a group he called, the Octopus. I believe he mentioned Robert Nichols, and possibly also John Phillip Nichols, in this conversation, and was extremely interested, intrigued and frustrated in his inability to get a grasp on what he called the Octopus.

He had indicated that he had met with again I believe it was Robert Nichols on several occasions, that Robert Nichols was extremely talkative to a point, but when Mr. Casolaro would ask specific questions, he (Nichols) would become somewhat evasive.

William Hamilton and Michael Riconosciuto both told committee investigators that Robert Booth Nichols was Danny Casolaro’s primary source of information in his investigation into the theft of the PROMIS software system. In a later telephone interview, Mr. Nichols told committee investigators that he was acting as a sounding board for Mr. Casolaro and providing direction and insight for his investigation into the INSLAW matter.
Mr. Nichols would not provide a sworn statement to committee investigators.

In addition, the committee was informed by three separate individuals Mr. Riconosciuto’s attorney, a private investigator and a FBI agent that a current FBI field agent, Thomas Gates, likely had information relating to Danny Casolaro’s efforts to investigate the INSLAW matter. At the request of the committee, Director Sessions agreed to allow Special Agent Gates to provide the committee a sworn statement. Though Special Agent Gates’ statement covered a broad range of subject matter areas, some speculative and some reflecting first person accounts, he indicated under oath that he had received several calls from Mr. Casolaro, beginning approximately four weeks before his death.

Special Agent Gates stated that he was very suspicious about Mr. Casolaro’s death for several reasons, including:

In his conversations with Casolaro, even days before the reporter’s death, Gates had felt that Casolaro sounded very “upbeat” and not like a person contemplating suicide.

Mr. Casolaro had a phone book which contained his (Special Agent Gates) telephone number. Special Agent Gates said that the phone book had not been located during the police investigation.

The Martinsburg Police Department told him that the wounds to Mr. Casolaro’s arms were “hacking” wounds. Special Agent Gates felt that the amount of injury to the arms of Mr. Casolaro were not consistent with injuries inflicted by an individual who had slit his own wrists. Special Agent Gates said he was told by Martinsburg Police investigators that: “… he (Mr. Casolaro) hacked his wrists … the wrists were cut, but they were cut almost in a slashing or hacking motion …”

An open bottle of wine was allegedly found in the room, but the contents had not been tested at the time of Special Agent Gates’ conversation with Martinsburg authorities.

Special Agent Gates said that he made his suspicions known to Martinsburg authorities, and that he called the local FBI office and suggested that they investigate because it was possibly related to criminal activity which falls within the jurisdiction of the FBI.

In his sworn statement, Special Agent Gates concluded that: “… based upon my prior testimony concerning my contacts with Casolaro and also with the Captain of the Martinsburg Police Department, there is cause for suspicions to be raised… .”

2. POSSIBLE CONNECTION BETWEEN EARL BRIAN, MICHAEL RICONOSCIUTO, ROBERT BOOTH NICHOLS AND THE CABAZON INDIAN RESERVATION

Mr. Riconosciuto has alleged in a sworn statement to the committee that Dr. Brian and Mr. Peter Videnieks secretly delivered INSLAWs PROMIS software to the Cabazon Indian Reservation, located in California, for “refitting” for use by intelligence agencies in the United States and abroad. Mr. Riconosciuto could not provide evidence other than his eyewitness account that Dr. Brian was involved in the PROMIS conversion at the reservation. Dr. Brian flatly contradicts Riconosciuto’s claims in his own sworn statement to committee investigators. In addition, in a sworn affidavit provided on April 2, 1991, in connection with the INSLAW bankruptcy case, Dr. Brian stated that he had never heard of, or was associated with, the so-called Wackenhut/Cabazon Indian joint venture, nor had he ever met, or had conversations with Peter Videnieks all in direct opposition to the Riconosciuto deposition as well as to certain law enforcement information on file at the committee. In light of these disputed versions of events, the committee is not in a position to make findings of fact on Dr. Brian’s role, but would strongly recommend that further investigation be given to ascertaining the role, if any, of Dr. Brian in INSLAW-related matters including, but not limited to, questions surrounding the Department of Justice’s alleged conversion of the PROMIS software and its possible dissemination to other customers beyond the intended usage of the public domain version.

ODESSA /THE ORG

Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction.

It most definitely is in the case of
The Odessa File
, a 1972 thriller by Frederick Forsyth, which follows the adventures of a young German reporter who stumbles across an international Nazi organization dedicated to protecting former SS members after 1945. The Nazi network was called “ODESSA”, this being an acronym for the German “Organization der Ehemaligen SS-Angehoerigen”, which translates as “Organization of Former SS Members”.

ODESSA existed in fact, as well as Forsyth’s fertile imagination. Forsyth had been tipped off to ODESSA’s existence by the Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who acted as consultant to Forsyth on
The Odessa File
.

Otto Skorzeny, Hitler’s former SS Special Forces chief, is generally credited with setting up ODESSA, which was principally an escape committee, funded by looted millions, to enable ex-Nazis to flee Europe between 1947 and 1952. In organizing his “ratlines”, Skorzeny found a friend in the Vatican. In the belief that fascists on the run were “freedom fighters”, the Vatican hid them in its churches and monasteries before helping spirit them out of Europe to places where they could take up the struggle against the atheistic Communist menace. The Vatican end of the scheme was overseen by Pope Pius XII and Cardinal Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI), but run mainly by Bishop Alois Hudal of the German College of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome. Hudal’s Nazi-sympathizing credentials were impeccable; he was a former spy for Abwehr [German military intelligence organization] during World War II. In 1946 the Vatican and ODESSA managed to send an entire Ukrainian Waffen SS Division, plus their families, down the ratlines, many of them exiting Italy on Red Cross passports provided by Hudal. Some of those proceeding along the ODESSA–Vatican ratlines were much bigger fry, and included Martin Bormann, Adolf Eichmann and Treblinka commandant Franz Stangl. The Vatican’s dubiously pro-Nazi activities extended to channelling looted
Nazi Gold
and treasures into safe Swiss banks, as well as war criminals to safe havens.

ODESSA found Peron’s notoriously pro-Nazi Argentine an especially happy home for its members, but many other far right-wing regimes provided a welcome. Nazis with military expertise were highly sought after – who knew better, after all, how to run a totalitarian state? Hitler’s former henchmen ended up organizing everything from the bodyguard corps of Middle Eastern potentates’ to Latin American death squads. ODESSA helped run the secret service in Syria, and probably took a hand in the 1953 coup in Iran, which saw the installation of the pro-Nazi Pahlevi family. Egypt, meanwhile, was virtually controlled by ex-Nazis. Joachim Daumling, the former Gestapo chief in Dusseldorf, explicitly founded the Egyptian secret service on the lines of Himmler’s Reich Security Main Officer, and at least sixty former members of the Waffen-SS were employed as advisers in the Egyptian army. Then there were the 200 German and Austrian Nazi technicians who were deployed at the aircraft and missile centre at Helwan, Egypt, where the staff doctor was none other than Dr Hans Eisele, SS captain and sometime torturer at Buchenwald death camp. That Egypt under President Gamal Abdel Nasser was well disposed to the Nazis was hardly surprising: he wanted the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel. Nor, indeed, was Nasser averse to persecuting Jews inside Egypt. Unsurprisingly, Egypt’s Jews fled. From a population of 75,000 Jews in 1948, by 1974 only 350 remained, after being deprived of citizenship, forced to renounce all property rights and dismissed from official positions.

ODESSA’s circle of influential friends was not limited to the Vatican, Peron and Nasser’s Egypt. It allegedly had close links with the “the Org” of Reinhard Gehlen.

Gehlen was Hitler’s former chief of Eastern Intelligence, who had deftly avoided a Russian noose by offering his collection of intelligence on the Soviet Union (safely stored in Austrian Alps) to the American Counter-Intelligence-Corps (CIC) in return for immunity from prosecution for war crimes. So impressed was the CIC by Gehlen that they had flown him to Fort Hunt Maryland, the HQ of the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), wined and dined him, then offered him the chance to run his own former spy-ring in countries now Soviet-dominated. Known as “the Org”, Gehlen’s Bavarian-based intelligence operation was funded by the CIA to the tune of a cool $200 million.

So successful was the Org in tapping into networks of Nazi sympathizers in Eastern Europe that it became NATO’s main source of intelligence there. (Although, in retrospect, this was not an exactly miraculous achievement, given that Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary had all been fascist before the war.)

The CIA under Allen Dulles was so wholly keen on using ODESSA and the Org to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Bloc that it was quite prepared to payroll indicted war criminals as “intelligence operatives”. Said Dulles of Gehlen, “He’s on our side, and that’s all that matters,” in what effectively was the CIA’s motto concerning erstwhile Nazis. Thus Klaus Barbie, the infamous SS “Butcher of Lyon”, happily worked for Gehlen after the war. Neither was the usefulness of former fascists limited to spying in the Cold War. Under
Project Paperclip
the War Department secretly imported Nazi scientists into the US to work in the weapons industry.

Employing ex-Nazi Gehlen as NATO’s master spy may well have been a pact with the devil. In his book
Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s Recruitment of Nazis
, Christopher Simpson suggests that Gehlen deliberately exaggerated the Red threat: “Gehlen provided US Army Intelligence and later the CIA with many of the dire reports that were used to justify increased US military budgets and intensified US/USSR hostilities,” Simpson wrote. According to Simpson and other espionage historians, Gehlen’s alarmist report about an imminent Soviet invasion of the West in 1948 almost touched off a new world war. He also fed the Pentagon the specious claim that the Soviets had outstripped the US in weapons (“the missile gap”), which led to waves of anti-Commie paranoia. Plus an eye-watering national bill for military hardware.

It gets dodgier. The Org was so penetrated by Soviet agents that the CIA and Western intelligence was hampered for years. Effectively, Reinhard Gehlen had sabotaged the very security of the free West he had sought to defend.

Which raises the interesting question: was Gehlen’s Org playing a double game? Conspiracy theorist Carl Oglesby asserts that Gehlen’s Org was actually the cover for ODESSA, which was rather more than a shadowy escape outfit, but a full-blown underground movement headed by Martin Bormann with the intention of preserving the Third Reich. Oglesby’s prime piece of evidence is a declassified CIA document which reports that while Gehlen was waiting in a POW camp in Wiesbaden, Germany, he sought permission to do his deal with the Americans from Admiral Karl Donitz. The admiral was Hitler’s appointed successor. “The German chain of command was still in effect,” Oglesby concludes, “and it approved of what Gehlen was doing with the Americans.”

What can be said for sure is that the Nazis once again found themselves in a position of power in Germany. Gehlen’s Org was officially incorporated into West Germany’s state intelligence department, the
Bundesnachrichtendienst
, in 1955.