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The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Richard Babayan.md

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Arms Dealers & Brokers
Person
CIA
PROMIS
Arms
Richard Babayan was a CIA contract operative and arms broker who received a reported $6 million from Earl Brian on behalf of Hadron, Inc. and who appeared in overlapping accounts of the PROMIS software scandal and Robert Maxwell's Australian operations. 2026-05-14 2026-09-22

Richard Babayan was a former arms broker and Central Intelligence Agency contract operative whose name appears across several of the major scandals investigated in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Hadron and PROMIS

Babayan was identified as a recipient of financial transfers from Earl Brian, head of the government consultancy firm Hadron, Inc. According to accounts assembled by researchers into the PROMIS scandal, Brian acted on behalf of Hadron - described as a CIA proprietary or cutout - in distributing a modified version of the PROMIS case-management software to foreign governments. Babayan reportedly received a check for approximately $6 million from Brian, an amount investigators connected to the commercialization of the PROMIS program.1

Babayan later stated that Brian played a central role in marketing PROMIS to the governments of Iraq, Libya, and Korea.1

The report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General (March 1993) stated that there was no credible evidence that Hadron had tried to acquire Inslaw or PROMIS, apart from claims by William Hamilton, and declined to pursue Ari Ben-Menashe's allegations of foreign distribution.2

Maxwell and Australian Connection

Ari Ben-Menashe alleged that in 1987 the flow of funds from PROMIS sales extended to Robert Maxwell's Australian business operations. According to Ari Ben-Menashe's account, a contribution to the West Australian Labor Party passed through one of Maxwell's Australian companies and was deposited by the Pergamon Press Trust Fund in Moscow, with Babayan and Earl Brian acting on behalf of Hadron in facilitating the transaction.3

Footnotes

  1. "Dirtier than Watergate," New Statesman, April 2011. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/04/promis-government-inslaw ↩︎

  2. Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of INSLAW, Inc., March 1993, https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩︎

  3. Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. TrineDay, 1992. ↩︎