3/8/24: THE OCTOPUS’S GARDEN W/ KRIS MILLEGAN AND ED OPPERMAN

One of the classic conspiracy stories of our time is about the suspicious death of reporter Danny Casolaro. He along with many other journalists paid the ultimate price for digging into the corrupt practices of the Deep State. Casolaro was a whistleblower who had documented evidence that a special type of software was stolen by criminal types in our government and used to hack into computer databases of many countries during the Reagan/ Bush era. He created the metaphor, “The Octopus” – a hypothetical network of conspirators who had a profound influence over politics, intelligence, and business, worldwide. A recent Netflix series called American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, has reopened this sensational case of espionage, blackmail, and murder. Tonight on Ground Zero (7-10pm, pacific time), Clyde Lewis talks with the owner of TrineDay Press, Kris Millegan, and investigative journalist, Ed Opperman about THE OCTOPUS’S GARDEN.

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Old conspiracy theories and those who uncover them die hard. Sometimes those who report them wind up paying the ultimate price for their hard work in uncovering corruption.

It was a Saturday, August 10, 1991, shortly after 12:30 p.m., there was a housecleaner working at the Sheraton Inn near Мartinsburg, West Virginia.

She was making her rounds and knocked on the door of room 517. No answer. She slid her passkey into the hole and opened the door.

The bed was turned down but looked as if it had not been slept in. There were men’s clothing resting on the bed’s foot. Glancing into the bathroom, the house cleaner saw blood on the floor. She hurriedly called the main desk and told the assistant head housekeeper, Barbara Bittinger, to rush to the room.

Bittinger arrived quickly and moved into the bathroom. The door and the shower curtain partially obscured her view, but she saw a half-empty bottle of red wine by the toilet, a cigarette ashtray by the tub, and then a piece of broken glass and copious amounts of blood splashed onto the wall.

Then she saw a body in the bathtub full of dark water. She realized that the tub was full of blood as well.

A pair of pale, bony knees stuck out from the tub. She noticed two towels drenched in blood under the sink. Bittinger recalled, “It looked like someone had thrown the towels on the floor and tried to wipe the blood up with their foot, but they didn’t get the blood, they just smeared the floor.”

The blood-filled bathtub contained the nude body of a blond man.

They found a dozen deep gashes in his wrists, a shoelace around his neck, and two plastic wastepaper basket liners floating in the tub as if someone had tried to asphyxiate him. When the paramedics lifted the body from the tub, a single-edged razor blade appeared, along with an Old Milwaukee beer can and a paper coaster.

On the bedroom desk sat an empty composition notebook, a legal pad with one page removed, and a Bic pen. The page from the legal pad lay nearby with a note written on it:

“To those who I love the most,

Please forgive me for the worst

possible thing I could have done.

Most of all l’m sorry to my son.

I know deep down inside that God will let me in.“

He was later identified as independent journalist Danny Casolaro.

His death put an end to an exhaustive investigation into government corruption and fraud.

Many believe Casolaro was murdered because of what he knew and what he discovered.

We have seen a tremendous amount of stories about journalists who have either been jailed of killed because they attempted to uncover corruption in our governments.

Gonzalo Lira, a 55-year-old Chilean American who was imprisoned in Ukraine after allegedly spreading Russian propaganda and then violating his bail conditions, has died in a Ukrainian jail.

Alexei Navalny, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most ardent critic and enemy, died at the Arctic prison where he was serving a three-decade prison term.

We also have the problem of Julian Assange, another journalist and whistleblower who many fear will die in prison if he is extradited to the United States.

I would say that this is an America-centric issue, but it appears that these individuals were seen as a threat to governments that cross several areas of the globe.

We are only part of this globalist mess.

We no longer seem to be sovereign and as our borders blur, secret combinations are made with various institutions like The UN, World Health Organization, and The World Economic Forum.

It is very hard to take any of our so-called candidates for President seriously because there always seems to be some shock to the system that will be carried out to stop the progression of our constitutional republic.

Whenever independent journalists uncover criminality within the government — they seem to be either found dead or put into prisons where they are tortured and left for dead.

One of the classic conspiracy stories of our time is the story of reporter Danny Casolaro. He along with many other journalists paid the ultimate price for digging into the corrupt practices of the deep state. You can call him a whistle-blower who first had the documented evidence to prove that a special type of software was stolen by criminal elements in our government and used to hack into computer databases of many countries during the Reagan/ Bush years.

He was uncovering allegations of blackmail and other treachery with the INSLAW scandal and PROMIS software Casolaro became convinced that no single conspiracy could explain the cover-ups and lies in government; he created the metaphor of “the Octopus,” a hypothetical network of local conspiracies and/or affinity groups that could act together as a single entity at certain times (when they had a motive to act together) and then at other times would go back to working on their own goals unrelated to each other.

This event has gone down in history as the Octopus case.

Back in 1991, Danny Casolaro told his friends he was meeting an informant to “bring back the head of the Octopus” when his body was found in a hotel in West Virginia.

Much of the evidence he had gathered was missing. The death was ruled a “suicide”, but the evidence supports murder. He never had the chance to write the book he was working on called “The Octopus.”

Casolaro’s investigation began with his inquiry into the case of Inslaw, from whom the U.S. Justice Department stole a software package called PROMIS and sold it to governments and financial institutions around the world, after modifying it to provide a back door by which they would track the movement of assets and spy on various government operatives.

However, Casolaro realized that the tentacles of the Octopus were reaching into the lives of the average American – the government was planning to devise a huge network to spy on American citizens.

One of Casolaro’s sources was Michael Riconosciuto, who was involved in the Inslaw Affair. Inslaw, the developer of PROMIS, had created the program for use by the Justice Department. However, Inslaw later accused the Justice Department of stealing PROMIS and illegally selling it to foreign intelligence agencies. According to Riconosciuto, the Justice Department had given a political figure named Earl Brian the right to sell PROMIS after his role in the “October Surprise,” another conspiracy theory in which Ronald Reagan and members of his administration allegedly bribed Iran to release the 52 Americans taken hostage in 1979. Riconosciuto claimed that he reprogrammed PROMIS so that the US could spy on intelligence agencies that bought the program.

Casolaro had told his brother that if there was an accident where he was killed — it should be investigated.

Casolaro said that he was to meet with an informant who was going to blow the case wide open.

Some have suggested that the man killed Casolaro and stole his notes, none of which have ever turned up. Others believe that the information given to Casolaro was such a letdown that the journalist destroyed his papers and decided to commit suicide.

There have been many books written about Casolaro and the dark web he was entangled in.’

There is now a Netflix series called The Octopus Murders that is also reopening the case and it is just as frustrating to watch as fee-lance reporters also become manipulated and led on different leads by shady characters.

The series is directed by director Zachary Treitz.

The film follows the journalist Christian Hansen trying to solve the riddle of Casolaro’s death – and the conspiracy theory that he claimed would rewrite American history. But Treitz maintains a healthily skeptical eye throughout.

This documentary took 10 years to make.

The documentary reports that Casolaro reported on the Watergate scandal in the 1970s and started writing about computers for an upstart industry newsletter, where he eventually became owner and managing editor. Casolaro was introduced to the founder of Inslaw, a tech company suing the justice department over the alleged intellectual theft of revolutionary criminal-case tracking software known as Promis.

He’d spent about 10 years as a trade journalist, which is maybe not the most glamorous front page of the Washington Post-style journalism. But it is journalism. You have to be more of an expert in a particular field to do what he did. He was covering the nascent computer industry.

From the Inslaw incident, Casolaro believed he was on to a thread and just kept pulling, revealing a series of interrelated international crimes and what he described as a cabal rising from the spy networks of the Second World War. It was formed by an alliance of eight people he called the Octopus.

He wrote: “They are no longer government officials but their tentacles can reach into any part of government in almost any country. They’re not known criminals but they have successfully penetrated all factions of organized crime.” Casolaro asserted that the Octopus gained momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Laos before moving into Australia, Angola, Rhodesia, Iran, and Nicaragua.

But he admitted that his contacts were plagued by contradictions and hidden motives. “Possession of a secret is no guarantee of its truth and while these allegations are indeed remarkable they’re also wrought with undocumented little details that make a traditional journalistic effort impossible.

It can be seen as a true crime in the halls of our government.

In Casolaro’s telling, the Octopus is a network of mostly former intelligence officers who used their contacts not only within the intelligence sphere but the criminal underworld – a credible scenario given that intelligence operatives often have to use criminal networks to accomplish covert goals.

Indeed, there are rabbit holes within rabbit holes.

Casolaro warned his brother Tony that if he had an accident, he and not believe it was an accident. Weeks later, on 10 August 1991, Casolaro was found dead in a hotel bathtub. A coroner determined that it was suicide; Casolaro may have reached a dead end in the story, was broken, and lost hope. But his body was quickly embalmed without the family’s permission, making an autopsy more difficult. Some close to the case believe it was murder.

The globalist government tendrils can be found in the media, in the schools, and in our neighborhoods. We have the government we see, and another government that has been called the “Deep State” led by individuals behind the scenes using well-placed programming and covering the tracks of “agents” that act on behalf of the New World Order.

The head of the multi-tentacle Octopus of Intelligence and continuity of government has been in power at crucial moments before this intelligence. The wall of secrecy has been in place through 5 presidents. The Intelligence Wall was first erected just after World War II.

The Octopus can be defined as a vast, interlocking network of criminal conspiracy that reaches into every branch and agency of the U.S. government, many other national governments, and every sector of our society.

The untold conspiracy narrative points upwards toward what can be called “elite criminals” or downward toward “subversive parasites” that are now reaching out to the intelligence agencies to bring down the United States of America.

On the outside, we have a Constitutional Republic. However, there are a few people who are aware that we have operating within our government and political system, a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state. It operates secretly, silently, and continuously to transform our government.

This group does not answer to the President, the Congress, or the courts. It is practically irremovable.

Today in America, we have conflicting visions of the future and conflicting ideas on how we are to save ourselves if America falls to some criminal or cancerous ideology. Many people are waiting for the starting gun to react to such a catastrophe.

Others see the cancerous ideology of tyranny that already has its tentacles in everything we do.

No matter what we do, the Deep State Octopus System is destined to become a figure that moves throughout our unfinished history. The looming Octopus’ tendrils have now reached out to grab at various government organizations worldwide where it is believed one by one, they will be removed by the intelligence apparatus in what can be seen as a soft coup.

Danny Casolaro believed the Octopus was responsible for criminal conspiracies which, linked, formed a virtual history of intelligence double dealing from 1950 to the present.

These events, in Casolaro’s view, included the ousters of US President Richard Nixon, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, the Shah of Iran, and the murders of Chilean President Allende, and, of course, of President John F. Kennedy.

Casolaro saw the Octopus’ tentacles entwined throughout the creation of the Golden Triangle and Latin America drug trade, the Cuban Bay of Pigs debacle, the October Surprise, the BCCI banking scandal, and, almost as an afterthought, the theft of PROMIS software.

Casolaro found a “Secret Team,” a high cabal of players operating a clandestine, parallel government, identified previously by other writers.’ The cabal had operated beyond the control or scrutiny of the elected government, financed by drug running from Southeast Asia and the Americas.

Other researchers tended to see the Octopus as a fog of political crimes ascribed to the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies, institutions, or even the natural dialectic of the modern terrorist state and its citizenry.

Casolaro’s Octopus, however, was no grand, unified mega-conspiracy theory. Casolaro believed the crimes could best be identified by linking them to a small network of named individuals that made up his Octopus. He outlined their hierarchy and provided specific details about their behind-the-scenes role in contemporary political history.

Casolaro named people both familiar and unfamiliar to other researchers.

He deemed the “first-level” operatives to be Richard Helms, George Pender, John Philip Nichols, and Ray Cline. The second level included Robert Chasen, E. Howard Hunt, Edwin Wilson, Thomas Clines, and Ted Shackley.

He also found that George H.W. Bush was part of the secret government whose tentacles were in every facet of American life.

Casolaro saw them in a new relationship, a nearly organic entity that impacted both past and then current events.

We have spoken many times about secret chiefs in power making decisions without the consent of Congress. We now see it on a worldwide level — and know of the secret architects of the New World Order.

These agencies and groups are now going unchecked because the media never reports their agendas and schemes for world takeover.

Those who uncover these groups wind up in prison or in Casolaro’s case, dead.

SHOW GUESTS: 

R.A. Kris Millegan is a publisher, writer and musician. He started TrineDay in 2000 as a vehicle to get suppressed books wider circulation, after first working in 1999 with author/investigative reporter Daniel Hopsicker in producing, Barry and the Boys: The CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History.  With no shortage of suppressed materials, TrineDay has grown to over 160 volumes in print, and has succeeded in achieving a wider distribution for suppressed works. The current catalog can be viewed at trineday.com. He is a prolific songwriter with two songs in National Lampoon’s Last Resort. His father was a government employee in the intelligence field, later becoming a lay Methodist minister. Kris lives in Oregon, USA.

Written by Ron Patton