The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Joseph Cuellar.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	updated	relations
Joseph Cuellar Joe Cuellar Joseph Cuéllar	Military	Person PROMIS TheOctopus CasolaroDeath ArmyReserve DesertStorm	Army Reserve major who met Danny Casolaro in a bar in May 1991 and was asked to arrange a meeting with Peter Videnieks, and whom a 2024 article compared to a police witness sketch.	2026-10-15	type with role start fn member_of U.S. Army Army Reserve major 1991 3 type with role start fn member_of United States Southern Command in-processing after Operation Desert Storm, per the 1994 review 1991-08 1 type with role start fn participant_in PROMIS Software Scandal contact of Casolaro during the INSLAW inquiry, interviewed by the 1994 review 1991-05 3

Joseph Cuellar is an Army Reserve major who met Danny Casolaro in May 1991, during the last months of Casolaro's work on the PROMIS Software Scandal and on what Casolaro called The Octopus. Casolaro later asked him to arrange a meeting with Peter Videnieks. The Department of Justice's 1994 review found no evidence that Cuellar was involved in Casolaro's death; a 2024 article by Jeremy Kuzmarov compared a Martinsburg police witness sketch to him.¹²

Meeting at the bar

According to the Justice Department's 1994 review of the report of Nicholas J. Bua, Cuellar and Casolaro met in May 1991 at "The Sign of the Whale" bar in Arlington, Virginia. Cuellar had gone there expecting to meet friends who were celebrating his return from Operation Desert Storm. Casolaro was already seated at the bar, waiting for a friend, and struck up a conversation with him. Cuellar talked of his exploits in the Army special forces, and, according to Cuellar, Casolaro became fascinated. The two men talked on the telephone several times and saw each other at least twice more. Cuellar also began dating the woman Casolaro had been waiting to meet.³

A Justice Department review of the Casolaro matter, ordered on November 1, 1993 and carried out by Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven E. Zipperstein with FBI Supervisory Special Agent Scott A. Erskine, gives the same account. Its text describes Cuellar as "an Army Reserve Major named Joseph Cuellar, who is attached to the United States Southern Command."⁴

Other accounts place the first contact differently. 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.⁵ Seymour also wrote that sources suggested Cuellar had been a major in an Army Intelligence Agency unit and later went to work for a company that was a cutout for the Defense Intelligence Agency. She wrote that an Federal Bureau of Investigation agent reported Cuellar spoke Arabic fluently and had spent time in Iraq.⁵

Jeremy Kuzmarov wrote in CovertAction Magazine in October 2024 that in the days before Casolaro's death Cuellar "happened to bump into Casolaro near his home in Fairfax, Virginia, and gave him his business card," and that Cuellar at the time "had been contracted to investigate the theft of INSLAW's software."²

Kenn Thomas and Jim Keith wrote that the Hamiltons, whose firm was INSLAW, believed that in the last days of Casolaro's life he was being tailed by a man named Joseph Cuellar, an Army special services officer and friend of Videnieks.⁶ In the same chapter they described a restaurant encounter in which a friend of Videnieks claimed Special Forces service and earlier work for a company connected to INSLAW, and was so forthcoming that he alarmed Casolaro's companions. They did not name that man.⁶

Thomas and Keith also reported that Sarah McClendon's notes recorded complaints by the Hamiltons that Webster Hubbell and the FBI investigator Erskine planned to release a report without interviewing important Casolaro associates or looking into incidents that included a threat against Casolaro made by a friend of Videnieks, Cuellar, who apparently was also trailing the writer.⁷

Videnieks

In one conversation, Casolaro asked about the people in the Octopus story, and Cuellar said he knew Videnieks. Cuellar explained that a former fiancée had worked with Videnieks's wife in the Capitol Hill office of Senator Robert Byrd. Both men told the reviewers that "their relationship was social," that they had double-dated with their partners several times, and that they saw less of each other after Cuellar broke up with his fiancée.⁸ The Zipperstein and Erskine text states: "As best as we can tell, there was nothing sinister about the fact that Cuellar knew Videnieks; it was, at most, a coincidence."⁴

Casolaro then asked Cuellar repeatedly to arrange a meeting with Videnieks, so that he could ask about the allegation in the March 1991 affidavit of Michael Riconosciuto that Videnieks had threatened him. Cuellar called Videnieks, who refused.⁹ The Zipperstein and Erskine text records that Casolaro's notes reflect a telephone call he made to Videnieks on June 13, 1991. In that call Videnieks refused to talk and referred him to his lawyer, Charles Ruff.¹⁰

Casolaro's last weeks

Cuellar told the reviewers that Casolaro confided in him near the end of his life. Casolaro, Cuellar said, had become so absorbed in the Octopus story that he had lost his perspective and could not arrange the material into a cohesive story, and he was in financial distress and close to losing his house.¹¹

A woman who was briefly involved with Cuellar after the bar meeting told the reviewers that, after Casolaro's death and as their relationship deteriorated, Cuellar made a veiled threat. She said he told her she was asking too many questions about Casolaro, that she had two children, and that she would not be doing them a favor if she wound up like Casolaro or another journalist who had been killed in Guatemala. Cuellar denied making those statements.¹²

Findings on August 10, 1991

Casolaro's body was found in room 517 of the Sheraton Inn in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on August 10, 1991. Local authorities ruled the death a suicide in 1991 and again on January 25, 1992, after over 1,000 man-hours of investigation. The House Judiciary Committee's 1992 report recorded that it had not included the death in its formal INSLAW investigation and that the controversy over the death continued in the press.¹³ The March 1993 report of the Special Counsel, Bua, stated that Casolaro's death "was fully and fairly investigated" and that the local conclusion of suicide "was amply supported by the facts."¹⁴

The 1994 review wrote that several people had suggested Cuellar was somehow involved in Casolaro's death. "We found no evidence supporting that hypothesis." The review stated that on August 10, 1991, Cuellar was in Washington, D.C., working on his "Outprocessing" from Desert Storm and his "in-processing" into the Southern Command, and that several witnesses had verified that he was in Washington that day.¹ The review also said that it was unaware of any evidence linking Videnieks to the death.¹⁵

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."⁵

Martinsburg police file and witness sketch

The Zipperstein and Erskine text records a detail from the hotel. At about 9:00 p.m. on August 9, 1991, a guest in an adjoining room saw someone matching Casolaro's general description enter room 517 with a key. The guest did not see the man's face, because his back was to her, and he was carrying a brown paper bag.¹⁶ The same text states that no one was seen entering or leaving Casolaro's room on the morning of August 10.¹⁷

In October 2024, Kuzmarov published an article in CovertAction Magazine on the Martinsburg police report, which he wrote had recently been obtained by the Australian researcher Peter Osborne through a Freedom of Information Act request Osborne filed in 2004. The article said the report "includes a witness sketch of a man seen entering and leaving Danny Casolaro's room on the day he was found dead" and continued: "The man bears strong resemblance to Major Joseph Cuellar, a CIA and military intelligence Special Forces operative, who had long been a lead suspect in Casolaro's apparent murder." Kuzmarov added that the police file includes signed statements from a witness who saw a man other than Casolaro leaving the room with a key on the night before and the morning of Casolaro's death. A footnote to the article states that the sketch witness described the man leaving the room as wearing sports clothes that Cuellar was also known to wear.²

Kuzmarov wrote that the Martinsburg police never interviewed Cuellar and that the Justice Department claimed not to be able to find him even though he worked with the U.S. Southern Command. The 1994 review records that Cuellar and Videnieks each spoke with its reviewers.⁸ Kuzmarov further wrote that Janet Reno, John Dwyer and Zipperstein left the match between the sketch and Cuellar out of their investigation reports. He wrote that the producers of the Netflix series American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders, Christian Hansen and Zachary Treitz, received a copy of the Martinsburg report in 2014, and that the series presented Cuellar favorably on the basis of an interview with his son.²

Service record

The Justice Department's 1994 review records Cuellar as an Army Reserve major who was returning from Operation Desert Storm in May 1991 and was being processed into the Southern Command in August 1991.¹³ Kuzmarov reported that he was born in Los Angeles in 1954, took part in covert operations in Venezuela, Bosnia, Saudi Arabia and Africa, served in the Persian Gulf War, and worked at NATO headquarters.²

Kuzmarov also quoted an October 11, 1991 letter from Don Walker, whom he identified as president of Business Risks International, to Hamilton. The letter described Cuellar as an "intelligent and articulate individual" who "speaks several languages" and who had "extensive experience in U.S. army intelligence and the CIA." Kuzmarov described Business Risks International as a CIA front where Cuellar worked, and a footnote to the article states that Cuellar "is thought to have been a 'wet operative' ie. a CIA assassin."¹⁸

Footnotes

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1. 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 ↩︎

2. Kuzmarov, Jeremy. "Witness Sketch of Man Seen Entering and Leaving Journalist's Room on the Day He Was Found Dead Resembles Former CIA Agent." CovertAction Magazine, October 16, 2024. https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/10/16/witness-sketch-of-man-seen-entering-and-leaving-journalists-room-on-the-day-he-was-found-dead-resembles-former-cia-agent/ ↩︎

3. U.S. Department of Justice. Review of the Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua, September 27, 1994, pp. 160-161. https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩︎

4. U.S. Department of Justice, review of the Casolaro matter by Steven E. Zipperstein and Scott A. Erskine, ordered November 1, 1993, as reproduced in a memorandum on the BCCI and INSLAW special prosecutor contacts, undated, [1994], release pp. 41-42 (printed pp. 25-26), DOCID 70002067. https://archive.org/details/INSLAW-Casolaro ↩︎

5. Seymour, Cheri. The Last Circle: Danny Casolaro's Investigation into the Octopus and the PROMIS Software Scandal. TrineDay, 2010. ↩︎

6. Thomas, Kenn, and Jim Keith. The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Feral House, 2004, p. 102. ↩︎

7. Thomas, Kenn, and Jim Keith. The Octopus: Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. Feral House, 2004, p. 132, reporting the notes of Sarah McClendon. ↩︎

8. 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 ↩︎

9. 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 ↩︎

10. U.S. Department of Justice, review of the Casolaro matter by Zipperstein and Erskine, as reproduced in a memorandum on the BCCI and INSLAW special prosecutor contacts, undated, [1994], release p. 42 (printed p. 26), DOCID 70002067. https://archive.org/details/INSLAW-Casolaro ↩︎

11. U.S. Department of Justice. Review of the Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua, September 27, 1994, p. 162 n.5. Cuellar's account to the reviewers. https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩︎

12. U.S. Department of Justice. Review of the Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua, September 27, 1994, p. 162. Account given to the reviewers by a woman who had been involved with Cuellar; she is not named here as a private individual. https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩︎

13. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. The INSLAW Affair: Investigative Report. House Report 102-857, 102nd Congress, 2nd Session, September 10, 1992, pp. 69-72. https://archive.org/stream/InslawAffairInvestigativeReport/TheInslawAffair_djvu.txt ↩︎

14. U.S. Department of Justice. Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc. March 1993, pp. 246-250 ("B. The Death of Joseph Daniel Casolaro"), quotation at p. 248. https://archive.org/details/InslawPROMISBuaReport ↩︎

15. U.S. Department of Justice. Review of the Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua, September 27, 1994, p. 160. https://archive.org/details/doj-oip-inslaw-1993 ↩︎

16. U.S. Department of Justice, review of the Casolaro matter by Zipperstein and Erskine, as reproduced in a memorandum on the BCCI and INSLAW special prosecutor contacts, undated, [1994], release p. 69 (printed p. 53), DOCID 70002067. https://archive.org/details/INSLAW-Casolaro ↩︎

17. U.S. Department of Justice, review of the Casolaro matter by Zipperstein and Erskine, as reproduced in a memorandum on the BCCI and INSLAW special prosecutor contacts, undated, [1994], release p. 70 (printed p. 54), DOCID 70002067. https://archive.org/details/INSLAW-Casolaro ↩︎

18. Don Walker to William Hamilton, October 11, 1991, as quoted in Kuzmarov, CovertAction Magazine, October 16, 2024 (its note 3). https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/10/16/witness-sketch-of-man-seen-entering-and-leaving-journalists-room-on-the-day-he-was-found-dead-resembles-former-cia-agent/ ↩︎