Assassinations Podcast

Four people around Danny Casolaro's case were already dead before he was found in the tub. Alan Standorf worked at Vint Hill Farm, the NSA listening post near Manassas. On January 29, 1991, he was found on the floor of his car at National Airport, hidden under a pile of luggage, killed by a blow to the head. Airport police called it a robbery homicide and said they saw no link to Casolaro. Octopus accounts say Standorf had been feeding him material on PROMIS and BCCI. That link was never proven. The death was never solved. Dennis Eisman, a Philadelphia lawyer, was found shot in his Porsche on April 23, 1991. No note. No one heard the shot. Ruled an apparent suicide. He was days from a federal indictment for drug conspiracy and money laundering. He had also been in contact with Casolaro and was reportedly about to represent Michael Riconosciuto, the technician who swore he modified PROMIS for intelligence use at the Cabazon reservation. Anson Ng, a Financial Times stringer, was shot once in the head in his Guatemala City apartment on July 29, 1991. Senator Alan Cranston said Ng was working a BCCI arms-trafficking story tied to the Guatemalan military, that friends described a professional hit, and that documents were missing from his desk. Guatemala called it common crime, then a lovers' quarrel. No bullet was recovered. Go back a decade and the reservation itself has a body count. On July 1, 1981, Cabazon vice chairman Fred Alvarez, Patricia Castro, and Ralph Boger were shot execution-style in a Rancho Mirage backyard. One round each. Alvarez had been threatening to expose reservation manager John Philip Nichols and the Cabazon-Wackenhut arms operation, the same cutout later tied to the PROMIS work. Standorf in January. Eisman in April. Ng on July 29. Casolaro on August 10. Alvarez, Castro, and Boger ten years earlier on the reservation where the software was allegedly modified. Different cities. Same closed files. Suicide, robbery, common crime. None of them testified.

The wrists are the part that does not work in the "suicide" of Danny Casolaro. Casolaro was found naked in the tub at the Martinsburg Sheraton just before 1 p.m. on August 10, 1991. About a dozen cuts. Three or four on the right wrist, seven or eight on the left. Deep enough to hit tendon. Blood on the bathroom wall and floor. One housekeeper fainted when she opened the door. The note was not in the bathroom. It was on the breakfast table by the bed. Martinsburg paramedic Don Shirley told Spy he had never seen incisions that deep in a suicide, and that he did not know how Casolaro did not pass out from the pain after the first two. Both wrists were floppy. Once the tendons are cut, the hand cannot grip a blade. So the question is simple. Which wrist did he do first, and how did he finish the other one? A George Washington University pathologist who reviewed the autopsy said the same thing from the other direction. Suicides usually leave hesitation marks, small test slices, because people do not know how much pain they can take. Casolaro had none. He cut straight down to the tendons. A Martinsburg police captain described it to an FBI agent not as cuts but as a hacking or slashing motion. Authorities still called it suicide. No forced entry. No obvious struggle. Extra razor blades in their envelopes. Dr. Henry Lee later said the blood evidence was not inconsistent with suicide. The catch is what he was shown. Police gave him a reenactment video the FBI has refused to release, and withheld towels that had been used to wipe blood at the scene. A man who hated the sight of blood. A dozen tendon-deep slashes. No hesitation marks. A hacking pattern. Blood on the walls. The note in the other room. That is the scene they closed as a probable suicide.

Whitney Webb is explaining how Palantir was built. It is the same story Danny Casolaro died chasing, and Israel and Robert Maxwell are in the middle of it. Casolaro was found dead in a Martinsburg hotel bathtub on August 10, 1991. Wrists slashed a dozen times. Ruled a suicide. He had told his brother that if he turned up dead, it would not be an accident. The files for the book he called The Octopus were gone. What he was tracking was not one scandal. It was a network. The Inslaw/PROMIS theft. Iran-Contra. BCCI. The October Surprise allegations. Arms and intel cutouts like Cabazon-Wackenhut. A bankruptcy judge had already found the Justice Department obtained Inslaw's enhanced PROMIS by "trickery, fraud and deceit." That ruling was later tossed on jurisdiction, not on the facts. The allegation that stuck was that the software was backdoored and sold or given to foreign governments so intelligence services could read the databases it sat on. Israel was at the front of that list. Webb's Palantir history is that pattern, a decade later, with some of the same people. John Poindexter was the highest-ranking Reagan official indicted over Iran-Contra. After 9/11 he was put in charge of DARPA's Total Information Awareness, a dragnet built to fuse commercial and government data and predict crime and terror before they happened. Congress defunded it in 2003 after the backlash. The same year Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Richard Perle introduced Thiel and Alex Karp to Poindexter. Perle had already been caught in the 1970s passing classified material to the Israeli embassy, and he later had deep ties to Netanyahu's first government. Karp has said the CIA was the intended client from the start. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, was an early backer. Palantir engineers were at Langley every other week in the early years. PROMIS was the 1980s case-management system allegedly turned into a spy tool. The claim Casolaro was chasing, and that Webb has documented, is that Robert Maxwell helped move the bugged version. A trapdoor was planted so Israeli intelligence could read any database the software touched, and Maxwell was the salesman who carried it to governments and institutions abroad. Palantir Gotham is the 2000s version of the same job. Stitch the databases. Surface the hidden links. Sell pre-crime as predictive policing. Same function. Private letterhead. So the constitutional fight Congress already won does not have to be refought. The part most people miss is at the end of the clip. Webb says CIA CIO Alan Wade, who helped shape the early Palantir product and had been inside the TIA world, teamed with Christine Maxwell on a homeland-security program called Chiliad. Christine is Robert Maxwell's daughter. The Maxwell family did not stop at Ghislaine. Robert Maxwell was tied to the PROMIS distribution story. His daughter shows up later on pre-crime software with a CIA official out of the same surveillance program Palantir was built to replace. So the chain runs like this. Stolen DOJ software in the 1980s. Robert Maxwell and Israeli intelligence on the backdoored version. Iran-Contra figures. Then the same Iran-Contra figure running TIA. Then a Maxwell daughter and a TIA-linked CIA official on pre-crime software. Then Palantir as the scaled private version, introduced by a man already tied to Israeli intelligence channels. Casolaro was trying to map the first half. He never got to the second half. Palantir did not exist yet. His files disappeared. The architecture did not. The Octopus was a thesis about a standing network that builds surveillance software, routes it through private cutouts, and uses Iran-Contra-era operators and Israeli intelligence partners to keep it off the books. PROMIS was tentacle one. Robert Maxwell was the courier. TIA was the failed government version. Palantir is tentacle two. The software Casolaro died investigating, after it learned to survive a congressional ban by becoming a company.