The PROMIS Affair with Robert Maxwell, Rafi Eitan & Ari Ben-Menashe

Transcript

[Music] a top secret government computer program comes back to haunt the u.s tonight you'll see how that program is now being connected to multiple local murder cases it's 11 o'clock time for news the promise computer program database and pattern recognition software was a new source of information and power in the early 1980s it starts when the program's designers ins law corporation accused the u.s justice department of stealing the software for their own foreign policy purposes this programmer testified he altered the program to create what's called a back door to allow government spying this happened while working on cabazon indian sovereign land well the parties that were involved in the distribution of this software were involved in covert operations and they were involved in nicaragua and central america and they were involved in operations in the middle east this u.s justice department memo from 1985 shows the promise software was being sold to middle eastern arms dealers and wanted no paperwork or customs inspections to interfere even unsolved mysteries got on the case when the last journalist to investigate this spy scandal was found dead in his hotel room danny casolero's wrists were slashed in 1991. it was ruled a suicide but his reporter notes disappeared and the book on the conspiracy he was to title indio was never finished congressional hearings were held in 1992 describes the committee's investigation into serious allegations that high level department of justice officials were involved in a criminal conspiracy to force inslaw a small computer company out of business and remember judge basin who found in favor of inslor against the justice department well a few months later judge bason's reappointment to the bench thought to be a formality was blocked by the justice department his career has been destroyed from an office in india to foreign capitals all over the world several murder investigations are connected to this spy scandal the number of murders that have occurred to prevent leaks are incredible there's nearly 50 murders that can be directly ascribed to this pattern of activity you have a case of forensic artistry you know shall we say where you have professionally trained people that set up a crime scene and they make it phenomenally difficult for investigators to uh to backtrack make a murder look like a suicide bad things seem to happen to people who make waves in the insular affair earlier this year michael reconniciuto contacted bill hamilton and signed a sworn affidavit for hamilton's lawsuit against the justice department almost immediately reconnectuto was contacted by a justice department official and given a very clear message back off or else less than two weeks after that threat michael reconnecto was arrested on drug charges my main concern right now is staying alive and protecting my family i think it's about time to get the whole story out his name is ari ben manashi he's a former israeli intelligence agent once it's out there's no reason to hurt me physically anymore and today he is hiding in australia in fear he says of his life so many people in the last 10 years who were working for the various governments on these issues due to cover-ups died mysteriously just recently gordon i i interviewed mr william hamilton the president of his law and we talked to him about how uh the israeli mossad stole his promised software that's right and you brought that out first in your book seeds of fire now what i didn't what i didn't know until i read uh this new book uh robert maxwell israel's super spy was that robert maxwell basically was the salesman for promise he's the one who took it and marketed around the world oh let's back up and and talk about first how israel got their hands on the ins law promise software well it was the most brilliant coup pulled off by that most brilliant spy master of all rafael 10 of mossad mossad was the creation of spy masters like raphael tan i enjoyed it i say i enjoyed it i loved it i felt it i felt as i'm creating something from nothing for me the mossad was like a studio to the artist okay that means a place where i could shape my creation and mossad was created in a very aggressive image as deputy head of operations rafi would order his agents to blackmail steal and murder it's very easy to kill a man with your hands yeah have you tried it no well luckily mossad openly boasts it's different from other secret services its agents are licensed to kill by their government prepared to ignore international law to achieve their ends for more than 20 years rafael 10 commanded hitmen from the 12th floor of this tel aviv office block mossad is still pursuing its enemies today with government approval from the highest level what rules do you have when it comes necessary to kill someone well here you are coming to a a tricky business of government okay it depends on the circumstances he at the time was in his late uh middle years but extraordinary man you have to think of raffy like a small tank is the best way to describe him he is physically so powerful he has also got this amazing ability to change his appearance with just a minimum of disguise and he said you know all this stuff about beards and all the stuff you for this guys is all nonsense he said all you need to do is put cotton wadding in your cheeks or up your nose you need to wear a pair of glasses if you don't smoke smoke if you take a pipe it's perfect if you don't use one and that's it and you may adopt a limp he said now the point is he took on the guys when he went to see bill hamilton at inslaw he took on the guise of a perp of a public prosecutor from israel what he'd done he had got hold of this real public prosecutor's passport and just simply had his forgers slip rafi's photograph into the um passport and he came though he was wanted by u.s customs for questioning over other matters to do with intelligence operations against america rafi just bowed on through uh kennedy airport nobody spotted him nobody says that looks like raphael because he had just nicely disguised himself and he turned up at install and he went in and he asked to see how this might work because at the time install was telling it of course as a piece of software to use by public prosecutors to track down criminals and rafi said there are plenty of these criminals as you know in israel unfortunately laughing he's yeah that he has this funny little laugh which is not really a laugh it's like a chilling breeze that goes past you as he as it comes out of his mouth and bill hamilton and nancy burke hamilton and these small staff were totally taken in by rafi and he sat down he had his tea with him and all that stuff and only when he left as bill tell me did he realize something strange about this guy but he didn't know what well rafi went back and with a brilliant ploy he went back to see his contact at the justice department because he had facilitated justice to get him into america by simply saying he was coming from the public prosecutor's office in israel and would like to see the software he talked about so he goes back and he goes into the office of a man called brewster who is in charge of liaison within slaw which is hamilton's company and rafi says so bruce how does it go and have this wonderful variant he said i my god he said i forgot something and bruce's supply what did you forget he said i forgot to ask mr hamilton for a copy of his software now rafi knew instinctively if he'd asked built about copy he would never have got it of course because billboard's got a popular priceless software of his brewster said no problem mr the name he's given as a public prosecutor no problem and he gave him a copy and rafi said to me sometimes you don't have to work very hard to pull something off and that's how he got it he goes back to israel now a justice department official just literally handed yeah to the one of the top mossad agents handed the promises absolutely and this of course has become a matter of huge grief for mr mrs hamilton and insult and as you know they are still battling to the courts to get justice for themselves without any success so far we were dumbfounded couldn't conceive of it hamilton's contract with the us department of justice to supply the promise software was cancelled in 1982 without any real explanation [Music] only some time later did hamilton hear that his software was turning up all over the world rafi goes back to israel and he recognized well i just can't lift this as it is i need to do something more than that he sits down with that other rogue of the story who is arie ben monashi who'd worked with him and arie ben manner she had been a very senior intelligence officer they sat down and rafi sat there and said what do we need what do we need i know what we need we'll deconstruct this take it apart rebuild it uh but nobody can ever accuse yourself of stealing it because it'll look different so his people took time to do that they did it but they then said we need something else rafi said we need to know what people are doing with us and he said i know what we need a trapdoor modifications that enabled it to key in a special access code and gain entry to all the information on the computer the israeli said we can do it but we shouldn't build the trap door here because it may just may be traced by the cia who are good at this or the british intelligence who are equally good traced back to us and then we have a problem we need to be absolutely undetectable so harry berman actually said i know a place and he came to california and he talked to this guy he'd known some years ago who ran a little company in california and he persuaded him to build the traffic only gave him five thousand dollars in cash for it and the guy said i know it's no question time but is this from mossad and harry said to him as he told me you're right it's no question time and draft and walked away as i i spent uh several thousand man hours of programming time with a programming team you know developing that subset this unlikely looking character is a computer genius his name is michael reconocituto and he says he was in charge of modifying the promise program so that it could be accessed by intelligence so whoever was holding that master key could do what basically uh break into it in spy i basically had to change the communications protocol which is how that software package interacts with other software packages already resident in the computer system now they installed the trapdoor then they had to test it and so they went to another element in this story a man called earl bryant who's now doing time in the penitentiary for mass fraud and what have you the man alleged to have helped organize this deal is a reagan political crony called earl and his payoff three years later on the promise software [Music] about an hour and a half outside washington dc you'll find this place earl bryan's multi-million dollar country estate if you believe michael reconnaischuto it's the house promise bought now we'd like to bring you earl bryan personally denying that claim but he's not being interviewed by anybody all we got was this letter from his lawyers threatening action if we so much as associated o'brien's name with this story and l brian had been very close to president reagan and had in fact worked for him he had the contacts to help make sure that certain elements in iran would not make a deal with president carter in 1980 so that president carter could not recover in the polls and that reagan would win the election hi ronald reagan do solemnly swear just five minutes after ronald reagan took the oath of office iran announced that the hostages would be released some 30 minutes ago the planes burying our prisoners left iranian airspace and are now free well now what happened he had at the time he had a company called hadron and this company was a specialist company so rafi used his company to test out if the trapdoor would work and they ran the test against their neighbor jordanian intelligence and it did work ari ben manashi confirms that promise was sold to israel but claims the israelis unlike the australians were in on the secret the whole idea was that we would study it then would sell it to our neighbors and then we could by using telephone lines get into their our neighbor's computers both harry ben mendes and rafael 10 came to the same conclusion very quickly earl bryant for all his brilliance and willingness and all this stuff did not have the resources that they wanted and they said one word robert said ben ashey and raphae complete yep maxwell he's the man so maxwell was hauled in and he immediately saw for himself this was a wonderful chance to make money and he wasn't didn't understand software at that stage but my goodness me he was on a fast learning curve and he set off [Applause] to sell promise which is the name of the software and the ironic thing is the cheeky thing is that raphia tan decided and this is what really really does take off paul bill hamilton is this rafael 10 decided oh i'll keep that name promised it's such a good name for selling and so he stole it not he just he stole the name as well and he actually sold it as promised oh yeah it still sold his promise now he went off around the world maxwell then became not just super spy but ultra super salesman he went off round the world and he pulled it off brilliantly they sold it to their allies as well including australia the list of countries which allegedly bought the promise software reads like a who's who of america's friends as well as its most bitter enemies gordon briefly explain to our listeners why mossad wanted uh maxwell to sell this promise software to other government uh agencies around the world he sold it i guess to canada and and european nations what was what was mossad's hidden motive in getting this promised software into the government computers of other nations well very simply it gave mossad an inside track view of what was happening when everybody was using promise sitting in tel aviv raphael tan and these technicians would know exactly what was going on in those departments in those people using it for instance with a single piece of paper you can pretty well track anybody in that person's life where he's done these phone calls and so on it's like a never widening ripple that goes on and on and the information is just priceless when it comes back because it's all sorted and coded for you and decoded and so on or what he was able to do for instance he would go to the russians and say you need this to keep track of what your little friends in the soviet satellites are doing and questions that you're absolutely right and maxwell would demonstrate it and the russians kgb would have it but what they didn't realize sitting in tel aviv there were people listening to what the kgb were doing it became extraordinary because maxwell enabled the israelis they were able to listen into the syrians maxwell soldiers had cut price lots to the egyptians he sold it everywhere gordon was the cia aware of the trapdoor uh or not initially because they were building their own version of promise which they'd also got from justice so this is this one for years with only the israeli mossad knowing about the trap door yeah yeah robert maxwell intimately involved with that his twin daughters christine and isabelle were intimately involved in the affairs of the front company he used to sell that bug software to u.s national laboratories uh including sandia national laboratory and um so that israel could continue spying on nuclear secrets a lot of this uh you know goes back to the same israeli spymaster raffy ayton who was running the now uh defunct israeli intelligence agency lekim that was focused on scientific espionage um and it was largely focused on u.s nukes to a huge degree one of the things that's in this book that just really uh opened my eyes stunned me was gordon's revelation of the of the relationship between robert maxwell and former texas u.s senator john tower who was at one time probably the most powerful member of the u.s senate uh gordon but let's talk about uh john tower's involvement how did how did the tower get involved with robert maxwell and what did maxwell use tower to do well originally israel arranged for henry kissinger to facilitate the introduction to tower maxwell wanted tower for israel to be his door opener into the reagan administration and more important of all to be his door opener into the nuclear arsenal of america which was los alamos tower at the time as you know i just retired from his post as a chairman of the senate armed forces committee he knew everybody in the intelligence forces everywhere and so maxwell struck a deal with tower he would pay him two hundred thousand dollars a year plus wonderful bonuses in any currency he wanted in any bank he wanted in the world because maxwell banks everywhere and in fact tower became his door opener so israel had a door opener in maxwell maxwell had a door opener in tower tower became the man who would usher in robert maxwell in to see reagan attorney general meese anybody he wanted and it was max it was tower who finally and speedily arranged for robert maxwell to sell a doctored version of promise with the trapdoor to the sandy laboratories in los alamos wait wait a minute john tower former senator of texas enabled helped robert maxwell to sell the promised software with the israeli mossad trapdoor to our to our nuclear laboratory in los alamos gave the israelis a window into los alamos correct and we substantiate every word of that by the fbi documents we have obtained with the help of bill hamilton and we've obtained elsewhere which show exactly how the fbi had tried to track this and we detail how the then director of the fbi found his moves blocked almost certainly from the white house almost certainly with people at the level of bill casey of the cia wine weinberger and people like that a lot of people suddenly decided it was not a good idea to have this investigation into what how maxwell got into los alamos and that's very frightening because in fact it was tower his influence his power still that blocked off the investigation gordon at that time was was it william webster who was fbi william webster was the head of the air webster was all he was on to this uh scandal and and he was trying to investigate the israeli mossad penetration of los alamos but high level reagan white house operatives blocked the fbi investigation that's right and it's to this day it's blocked and it's amazing because to this day you will never get to the bottom of that i mean there's been many attempts and we've come as close as anybody i think in what we've detailed but you know it was extraordinary because he i mean we have actually his pitch speeches maxwell's pitch speeds to sandia which is a marvelous it's a wonderful piece of theater he puts himself through and the result is he sells the doctor he sells it and it's in there now what happened was that when the fbi became suspicion having been alerted by their fuel stations they're blocked off and they can't do anything and maxwell got away with that with the help of tower tower was so extraordinary because tower gave additional respectability to maxwell's kind of cover uh was was john tower aware of the hidden motive of robert maxwell oh yeah there's no question about john tower knew and john tower took the maxwell dollar if you like with maxwell schilling so you're saying john tower i mean he was a traitor to the united states of america you could say that in the simplest way he was a traitor in that sense but this guy was a right-wing republican u.s senator from the state of texas and he sold us down the river yep and you know the point is he did it because he was greedy he had a reputation for for you know hard living and drinking that was one reason he i think he you know his nomination was turned down as secretary of defense they you know they tried to get him into the defense department yes yes he became next to maxwell a priceless asset for mossad because he would tell max for everything maxwell to feed straight back to tel aviv maxwell took him to bulgaria he took him to central europe he took him everywhere and so tower all the time was talking because he did have a serious problem with young girls and heavy boos and maxwell used all this and tower is to me as much a traitor as anybody else i've come across in a long time in the history of america they won't like this republicans but the fact is he was and he was very dangerous and what he's done we'll never know how much sad oh to tower