vault backup: 2026-10-05 18:27:07

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Abu Nidal.md

@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ Abu Nidal, whose real name was Sabri al-Banna, was a Palestinian terrorist and t
 
 Ben-Menashe wrote that Radi later presented his case to Nidal in [[Baghdad]], claiming he had been unwittingly used by Pearson. Nidal believed his story and put out the word that Radi was "clean," placing the blame on [[Yasser Arafat|Yasser Arafat's]] group.[^1]
 
-Ben-Menashe also wrote that Nidal was involved in the [[Achille Lauro]] attack in 1985, which he described as an Israeli "black" propaganda operation. In his account, [[Rafi]] passed instructions to Radi, who then relayed orders to [[Abul Abbas]] to carry out a cruel attack. Abbas was reportedly receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons.[^1] These accounts rest on Ben-Menashe's book alone.
+Ben-Menashe also wrote that Nidal was involved in the [[Achille Lauro]] attack in 1985, which he described as an Israeli "black" propaganda operation. In his account, [[Rafael Eitan|Rafi]] passed instructions to Radi, who then relayed orders to [[Abul Abbas]] to carry out a cruel attack. Abbas was reportedly receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons.[^1] These accounts rest on Ben-Menashe's book alone.
 
 ### BCCI
 

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Amiram Nir.md

@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ location: "Israel"
 ---
 [[Amiram Nir]] was a former [[Israel|Israeli]] TV newsman and a counterterrorism adviser to [[Shimon Peres]]. He was originally a military officer in the tank corps and lost an eye in a training accident. He married [[Judy Moses]], the daughter of the owner of [[Yediot Ahronot]], a major [[Israel|Israeli]] newspaper chain.[^1]
 
-Nir resigned from his TV job to work as a public relations adviser for [[Shimon Peres|Peres]] during the 1981 elections. After [[Shimon Peres|Peres]] became prime minister in 1984, he appointed Nir as his counterterrorism adviser. Nir found documents related to [[Rafi|Eitan's]] [[United States|U.S.]] spy network and the [[Iran-Israel Joint Committee|Joint Committee's]] arms sales to [[Iran]].[^1]
+Nir resigned from his TV job to work as a public relations adviser for [[Shimon Peres|Peres]] during the 1981 elections. After [[Shimon Peres|Peres]] became prime minister in 1984, he appointed Nir as his counterterrorism adviser. Nir found documents related to [[Rafael Eitan|Eitan's]] [[United States|U.S.]] spy network and the [[Iran-Israel Joint Committee|Joint Committee's]] arms sales to [[Iran]].[^1]
 
 [[Shimon Peres|Peres]] and Nir faced challenges from the [[Likud Party]]-controlled intelligence community and the lack of financial power within the [[Labor Party]]. [[Shimon Peres|Peres]] decided to open a competing arms channel, run by Nir, to gain control over the profitable [[Iran]] arms sales and to undermine the existing intelligence-community channel. Nir, despite his lack of experience in intelligence or business, sought support from individuals like [[Al Schwimmer]] and [[Yaacov Nimrodi]].[^1]
 

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Anthony Pearson.md

@@ -15,7 +15,7 @@ According to [[Mossad]] files, Pearson could also arrange assassinations for $50
 
 Pearson recruited [[Nicholas Davies]], the London *[[Daily Mirror]]* foreign editor, for Mossad in the 1970s. He also worked with [[Mohammed Radi Abdullah]], a former colonel in the [[Jordan|Jordanian]] Army. Pearson used Radi's unwitting help to acquire intelligence about Palestinian organizations in [[Europe]] by selling arms to them. This allowed Pearson to pass intelligence to Mossad about the groups' movements and weapons. Based on Radi's tips, 14 or 15 Palestinians were eliminated over a two-month period.[^1]
 
-In 1978, Pearson offered Radi a £200,000 loan, making it clear the money came from an Israeli source, and recruited him to work for an antiterrorist group in Israel run by [[Rafi]].[^1]
+In 1978, Pearson offered Radi a £200,000 loan, making it clear the money came from an Israeli source, and recruited him to work for an antiterrorist group in Israel run by [[Rafael Eitan|Rafi]].[^1]
 
 ### Footnotes
 [^1]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network*. TrineDay, 1992.

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Cheri Seymour.md

@@ -2,24 +2,68 @@
 title: Cheri Seymour
 aliases:
   - Cheri Seymour
+  - Cheri Seymour (author)
+  - Seymour, Cheri
 created: 2026-05-17
-updated: 2026-05-17
+updated: 2026-10-05
 category: "Authors & Journalists"
 tags:
   - Person
-  - PROMIS
   - Journalist
   - Author
-  - OrganizedCrime
-summary: "Cheri Seymour is an investigative journalist and author whose book The Last Circle documented Danny Casolaro’s investigation into the PROMIS software scandal and the alleged criminal network he called The Octopus."
+  - Casolaro
+  - Inslaw
+  - PROMIS
+  - Octopus
+  - ChristianIdentity
+  - Mariposa
+summary: "Mariposa, California newspaper reporter who wrote Committee of the States (1991) on William Potter Gale's Identity movement and The Last Circle (2010), a 599-page account of Danny Casolaro's Octopus investigation."
+location: "Mariposa, California"
+relations:
+  - type: employed_by
+    with: "[[Mariposa Gazette and Miner]]"
+    start: 1986
+    role: "reporter covering the October 1986 arrests of Committee of the States members"
+    fn: 1
+  - type: investigated
+    with: "[[The Octopus]]"
+    start: 1991
+    end: 2010
+    role: "researched and interviewed sources on the Casolaro investigation, the Inslaw/PROMIS dispute and the Octopus"
+    fn: 3
 ---
+Cheri Seymour is an author who was a reporter on the *[[Mariposa Gazette and Miner]]* in [[Mariposa]], California, in the 1980s. She wrote *Committee of the States: Inside the Radical Right* ([[Camden Place Communications]], Mariposa, 1991), a study of the [[Christian Identity]] movement built on the case of Colonel [[William Potter Gale]], and *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal* ([[TrineDay]], 2010), a 599-page account of the death of [[Danny Casolaro]] and of the network he called [[The Octopus]]. An interviewer on Radio Free Kansas introduced her in 2010 as a former private investigator and non-fiction journalist whose book took 18 years to complete.[^1][^2][^3][^4]
 
-Cheri Seymour is an investigative journalist and author. She is the author of *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* Seymour was a reporter for a small newspaper in a remote community near Yosemite Valley. Her work on *The Last Circle* involved extensive investigation into organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering, and pirated software, following the trail of [[Danny Casolaro]]’s investigation into what he termed "[[The Octopus]]."[^1]
+### Committee of the States, 1991
 
-### Bibliography
+Seymour's first book carries the copyright of Seymour and the imprint of Camden Place Communications, Inc., 4859 Morningstar Lane, Mariposa (ISBN 0-9628772-0-4, Library of Congress card number 90-92264), with editing and production by Rapp Publishing and Typographic Services; the acknowledgments thank reporters at the *San Francisco Chronicle*, the *Arizona Republic*, the Fargo *Forum* and the *Davis Enterprise*, and the *Mariposa Gazette and Miner*, the *[[Las Vegas Review-Journal]]* and the *[[Los Angeles Times]]*, and reprint material from the *Sacramento Bee*, *California Magazine*, James Corcoran's *Bitter Harvest*, the [[Anti-Defamation League]]'s *The Arizona Patriots* and the *Washington Post*.[^1]
 
-- *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal* (TrineDay, 2010) - ISBN-13: 978-1-9362960-0-2
+The foreword says she attended a "Soldiers Ransom" ritual in the [[Aryan Nations]] compound, a midnight Ku Klux Klan cross burning and a Skinhead rally in Napa Valley, and a three-week Committee of the States trial in Las Vegas, and accumulated "an entire file cabinet of court transcripts and discovery material" from a two-year federal investigation called Operation Clean-Sweep, which ended in a Fort Smith, Arkansas courtroom where thirteen leaders from several states were acquitted of sedition.[^1]
+
+The book opens with the arrests of October 23, 1986. Seymour writes that she was awakened at 10 p.m. on October 22 by the executive editor of the *Gazette*, who had been told by the district attorney's office that Gale and Fortunato "Slim" Parrino would be arrested at their homes the next morning, and that Commander Rod Sinclair of the Mariposa County Sheriff's Department told her to stay out of the area. On the 23rd federal agents seized Gale, still in pajamas, on his porch in Mariposa County and took him to a detention hearing in Fresno; Parrino was arrested at Bootjack and five other members of the Committee of the States in Arizona and Nevada, on a ten-count indictment from a Las Vegas grand jury charging threats to kill four [[Internal Revenue Service]] agents and a Nevada judge by "Constructive Notices." She describes the Committee's compact, filed in Mariposa County on July 13, 1984 after a signing at the Manasseh Ranch, and writes that the case grew out of two years of undercover work by the IRS and five years of earlier FBI investigation, and that the federal government had "declared war on the radical right."[^1]
+
+### The Casolaro investigation
+
+*The Last Circle* is organized as Seymour's own account of research that began after Casolaro was found dead on August 10, 1991 in a hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia. It states that she interviewed Robert Booth Nichols at his home on February 13, 1992 and the U.S. Customs agent Scott Lawrence on February 5, 1993, and she places the murders of Neal Abernathy on February 19, 1997 among events of her investigation. Chapter 17, "The Inslaw Affair," summarizes House Judiciary Committee Report 102-857 (released September 10, 1992), the committee's three-year investigation of the Justice Department's treatment of the Hamiltons' [[Inslaw]] and its PROMIS software, with the investigators James E. Lewin and John D. Cohen, and adds [[Bill Hamilton]]'s account. In the same chapter she reproduces what she describes as a packet from a confidential source in Washington containing Judiciary Committee memoranda by Cohen, including the committee's contacts with the FBI agent [[Thomas Gates]], the prosecutors [[Marvin Rudnick]] and [[Richard Stavin]], and Casolaro's brother Dr. Anthony Casolaro.[^3][^5]
+
+According to that chapter, the memoranda record Gates telling Cohen that "the FBI feels Danny Casolaro's death was an ITAR murder" (Interstate Travel in Aid of Racketeering) and that Casolaro told him three days before his death that Nichols had visited Casolaro in Martinsburg. Seymour writes that Stavin told her by e-mail: "I never believed for a moment that Danny Casolaro committed suicide. I spoke to him for about 45 minutes the week before and this was not a despondent man," and that Stavin said Casolaro first asked whether he had to be concerned for his safety because he was going to meet Nichols. She records Stavin's opinion that the MCA prosecution of three suspects "never went forward because no one at the DOJ in Washington D.C. wanted all the wiretap affidavits in the case to be released," and that Dan Moldea was copied on her e-mail exchanges with Stavin and Rudnick.[^5]
+
+Chapter 22, "The Octopus Exposed," reports a four and a half hour meeting on February 14, 2001 at the home of [[Peter Zokosky]] and his wife Regina, with the journalist [[Kelly O'Meara]] of *Insight* magazine. Seymour attributes to Zokosky the statements that Nichols did contract work for the NSA and NSC, that the Lebanese company FIDCO was an NSA front whose directors included [[Robert Maheu]] and Glenn Shockley, and that Nichols was in Vietnam working for [[Ross Perot]]. She records that Zokosky said he believed Casolaro committed suicide, while Regina Zokosky "frowned and said she thought her husband had said otherwise at previous times." Zokosky let the two visitors read a manuscript by Nichols dated November 22, 1991, "Danny Casolaro's Octopus," and gave them a three-page FBI Los Angeles report dated December 2, 1982, which Seymour quotes: a confidential source alleged on March 16, 1978 that Nichols was "an international money launderer of money derived from both narcotics and organized crime activities," and the report concluded that Nichols "should be considered armed and dangerous."[^6]
+
+### The Cabazon killings and the final chapter
+
+Chapter 25, "Rachel's Resolution," follows [[Rachel Begley]], daughter of Ralph Boger, who was shot with Fred Alvarez, vice-chairman of the [[Cabazon Band of Mission Indians|Cabazon]] tribal council, and Patricia Castro in Rancho Mirage, California on June 29, 1981. Seymour records the autopsy finding of a single .38 caliber bullet to each head, Alvarez's prior statements to a reporter that they were marked for death, and the 2007 assignment of the cold case to Detective John Powers of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department. She reports the arrest of James "Jimmy" Hughes at Miami airport on September 26, 2009 on a California fugitive warrant for three counts of murder, and the stalling of his extradition by his Miami lawyer as of December 1, 2009. She reprints a translated *La Prensa* (Honduras) article of October 5, 2009 by Jessica Figueroa headed "Jimmy Hughes - From CIA operative and mafia hitman to evangelical pastor," and closes the chapter with Begley's statement to the court, delivered on the day Seymour records Hughes as being released, asking that he remain in custody "at least until another DOJ prosecutor who is less timid can be assigned," and that the case go to another jurisdiction or a special prosecutor.[^7]
+
+### Publication
+
+TrineDay published *The Last Circle* in September 2010 (ISBN 978-1-936296-00-2; a second ISBN, 978-1-936296-38-5, appears in library records). Chapters 17, 22 and 25 were posted on the internet with Seymour's permission from the site ark-roundtable.com. Radio Free Kansas broadcast an interview with her on October 20, 2010, whose notes say the book follows "a story that took 18 years to develop" with a "surprise conclusion that even she did not anticipate" and that the title refers to the last circle of Dante's *Inferno*, reserved for traitors.[^3][^4][^5]
 
 ### Footnotes
 
-[^1]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal*. TrineDay, 2010.
+[^1]: Seymour, Cheri. *Committee of the States: Inside the Radical Right.* Camden Place Communications, Mariposa, California, 1991, copyright page, acknowledgments, foreword and chapter "The Arrests." https://archive.org/details/seymour-cheri-committee-of-the-states
+[^2]: Radio Free Kansas, interview "Cheri Seymour 'The Last Circle,'" October 20, 2010, program notes. https://archive.org/details/CheriSeymourtheLastCircle
+[^3]: Seymour, Cheri. *The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal.* TrineDay, 2010; Open Library records 1936296004 and 9781936296002 (599 pages). https://openlibrary.org/search?q=last+circle+seymour+casolaro
+[^4]: Same as note 2.
+[^5]: Seymour, *The Last Circle*, chapter 17, "The Inslaw Affair," pp. 247 ff. https://archive.org/details/TheInslawAffair. Sole source for the passages so cited (Gates, Stavin and Rudnick statements as she records them).
+[^6]: Seymour, *The Last Circle*, chapter 22, "The Octopus Exposed," pp. 337 ff. https://archive.org/details/TheOctopusExposed. Sole source for the Zokosky meeting.
+[^7]: Seymour, *The Last Circle*, chapter 25, "Rachel's Resolution," pp. 393 ff. https://archive.org/details/RachelsResolution

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Pat Price.md

@@ -118,7 +118,7 @@ Schnabel's account of the end of the trip is the fullest. In mid-July 1975 Price
 
 Schnabel wrote that when "Richard Kennett" and others tried to find out what had happened, they learned that no autopsy had been performed, although autopsies were normal for out-of-town deaths outside hospitals; they were told that a friend of Price, not Alvarez, had arrived with a briefcase of his medical records, which with the emergency-room physician's statements led Las Vegas officials to waive the autopsy. Kennett could not identify the man with the briefcase. Schnabel recorded the rumors that followed: that the man was from the CIA, that Price had been murdered by the Soviets, that he was alive under a new identity, and that a friend had a vision in which Price's ghost said he had been poisoned. He recorded the view of those who knew of Price's heart disease that "there was no real mystery," and that a CIA official who worked with Price told him the Agency "had no connection with any of the events surrounding Price's death, including the (alleged) appearance of the mysterious man with the medical records." As late as 1994, Schnabel wrote, Targ told him: "I don't know how Pat Price died."[^24]
 
-In late summer 1977, Schnabel wrote, the day after [[The Washington Post]] published an article by [[John L. Wilhelm|John Wilhelm]] on government psychic research, [[Stansfield Turner]], the Director of Central Intelligence, was asked about the subject at a meeting with reporters and, "clearly referring to Pat Price," said that the CIA had once worked with a man who seemed to have some psychic ability, whose drawings of foreign targets he had not seen were reasonably accurate but rudimentary: "he died, and we haven't heard from him since." When the Office of Technical Service briefed the [[House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]] on November 17, 1977, it left with the staff "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price."[^25] A [[Defense Intelligence College]] thesis of 1992 quotes Turner at a breakfast for journalists in 1977 as saying the CIA "had an individual who from time to time was able to draw very elementary sketches of street scenes in foreign countries where he had never been," and that "this subject died in 1975, and we haven't heard from him since."[^26]
+In late summer 1977, Schnabel wrote, a few weeks after the Parade section of [[The Washington Post]] of August 7, 1977 carried an article headed "Psychic Spying," [[Stansfield Turner]], the Director of Central Intelligence, was asked about the subject at a meeting with reporters and, "clearly referring to Pat Price," said that the CIA had once worked with a man who seemed to have some psychic ability, whose drawings of foreign targets he had not seen were reasonably accurate but rudimentary: "he died, and we haven't heard from him since." When the Office of Technical Service briefed the [[House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence]] on November 16, 1977, a briefing the Agency's memorandum of November 17 says "was occasioned by" the Parade article, it left with the staff "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price."[^25] A [[Defense Intelligence College]] thesis of 1992 quotes Turner at a breakfast for journalists in 1977 as saying the CIA "had an individual who from time to time was able to draw very elementary sketches of street scenes in foreign countries where he had never been," and that "this subject died in 1975, and we haven't heard from him since."[^26]
 
 ### The 1995 review
 
@@ -150,6 +150,6 @@ The American Institutes for Research report of September 29, 1995 described the
 [^22]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on Swann's return and Price's departure.
 [^23]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the embassy tests; pseudonyms as listed in the book.
 [^24]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter "The Shamans" and its footnotes, including the footnote recording the statement by a CIA official who worked with Price. The pseudonym list in the same book includes Bill and Judy Alvarez and Richard Kennett.
-[^25]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the summer of 1977, naming Wilhelm's Washington Post article; the Wilhelm piece also survives in CIA files as "The Search for Superman," CIA-RDP96-00788R001100040006-1. Brandwein, David S., Director, Office of Technical Service, memoranda "Stanford Research Institute Parapsychology Research," February 20, 1976 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020001-9), and "OTS Support to Research in Parapsychology," October 7, 1976 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020016-3); memorandum for the record, "Briefing for House Permanent Select Committee re OTS Involvement in ESP Research," OTS memo 287-77, November 17, 1977 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020020-8), at which OTS left with the committee staff "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price." Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
+[^25]: Schnabel, *Remote Viewers,* 1997, chapter on the summer of 1977, on Turner's remark; OTS/BAB Memo #287-77, November 17, 1977 (CIA-RDP79-00999A000400050014-1), on the Parade article "Psychic Spying," Washington Post, August 7, 1977; reading notes on John L. Wilhelm's book *The Search for Superman* are in CIA-RDP96-00788R001100040006-1. Brandwein, David S., Director, Office of Technical Service, memoranda "Stanford Research Institute Parapsychology Research," February 20, 1976 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020001-9), and "OTS Support to Research in Parapsychology," October 7, 1976 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020016-3); memorandum for the record, "Briefing for House Permanent Select Committee re OTS Involvement in ESP Research," OTS memo 287-77, November 17, 1977 (CIA-RDP96-00787R000200020020-8), at which OTS left with the committee staff "a brief article on Mr. Pat Price." Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
 [^26]: Zarbo, Michael E. (Captain, U.S. Army), *Remote Viewing: Parapsychological Potential for Intelligence Collection?,* master's thesis, Defense Intelligence College, November 1992, CIA-RDP96-00789R002600250001-6, quoting Turner. Read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.
 [^27]: Mumford, Michael D., Andrew M. Rose, and David A. Goslin. *An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.* American Institutes for Research, September 29, 1995, chapter 3, p. 3-77 and following, CIA-RDP96-00791R000200180005-5, read in the archive.org mirror of the CIA FOIA Reading Room STARGATE collection.

10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Yitzhak Shamir.md

@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ location: "Ruzhany, Belarus"
 
 ### Coalition Government and Arms Trading
 
-[[Yitzhak Shamir|Shamir]] was a key figure in the [[Likud Party]]. He formed a bizarre coalition government with [[Shimon Peres]] of the [[Labor Party]] in 1984, sharing the roles of prime minister and foreign minister. [[Yitzhak Shamir|Shamir]] had a close relationship with [[Rafi]], who served as his counterterrorism adviser and later ran the [[Iran-Israel Joint Committee]]. [[Yitzhak Shamir|Shamir]] was involved in the decision to supply [[Iran]] with arms in its war with [[Saddam Hussein|Saddam Hussein's]] [[Iraq]], believing it was in [[Israel|Israel's]] national security interest.[^1]
+[[Yitzhak Shamir|Shamir]] was a key figure in the [[Likud Party]]. He formed a bizarre coalition government with [[Shimon Peres]] of the [[Labor Party]] in 1984, sharing the roles of prime minister and foreign minister. [[Yitzhak Shamir|Shamir]] had a close relationship with [[Rafael Eitan|Rafi]], who served as his counterterrorism adviser and later ran the [[Iran-Israel Joint Committee]]. [[Yitzhak Shamir|Shamir]] was involved in the decision to supply [[Iran]] with arms in its war with [[Saddam Hussein|Saddam Hussein's]] [[Iraq]], believing it was in [[Israel|Israel's]] national security interest.[^1]
 
 ### Pollard Espionage Case