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Joseph Cuellar, an Army Reserve major, met Danny Casolaro at a bar in Arlington, Virginia, in May 1991 and called Peter Videnieks at Casolaro's request. | 2026-10-09 |
Joseph Cuellar, an Army Reserve major, met Danny Casolaro by chance at a bar in Arlington, Virginia, in May 1991. Cuellar talked of his exploits in the Army special forces, and according to Cuellar, Casolaro became fascinated. In a later conversation Casolaro asked about people in his "Octopus" story, and Cuellar told him he knew Peter Videnieks, because a former fiancée had worked with Videnieks' wife in the Capitol Hill office of Robert Byrd. Cuellar and Videnieks both told the reviewers that their relationship was social.1
Casolaro asked Cuellar repeatedly to arrange a meeting with Videnieks, so that he could interview him about Riconosciuto's March 1991 affidavit. Cuellar called Videnieks, who refused.2 The review found that Cuellar was in Washington, D.C., on August 10, 1991, working on his separation from Operation Desert Storm and his reassignment to a Southern Command post, and that several witnesses verified this.2
The writer Cheri Seymour wrote that Cuellar approached Casolaro in a pub during the week before his death, claimed to be a Special Forces operative and offered to arrange a rendezvous with Videnieks, and that Casolaro confided to friends that he was unnerved by the encounter.3 Sources later suggested that Cuellar was a U.S. Army Major in an Army Intelligence Agency unit who went to work for a company that was a Defense Intelligence Agency cutout. One Federal Bureau of Investigation agent reported that Cuellar spoke Arabic fluently and had spent time in Iraq.3
Bill Hamilton, president of INSLAW, stated that he had received an affidavit from Bill Turner on "highly classified computer printouts on off-shore accounts that he claimed Casolaro intended to use the night he died in a planned meeting with Peter Videnieks and Joseph Cuellar and others."3
Footnotes
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U.S. Department of Justice. Review of the Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua, September 27, 1994, p. 161. https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩︎
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U.S. Department of Justice. Review of the Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua, September 27, 1994, p. 162. https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩︎
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Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro’s Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. First Edition. TrineDay, 2010. ↩︎