Episode 245: Kenn Thomas, The Octopus, and ‘90s Paranoia feat. Devin O’Shea
Repeat guest Devin O’Shea regales the boys with a tale straight from ‘90s conspiracy theory culture. It concerns the prolific parapolitical researcher and St. Louis native Kenn Thomas. Thomas’ magazine Steamshovel Press made him a minor celebrity and earned mentions in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, and The Smithsonian. The magazine was also a source of inspiration for the writers of The X-Files. In 1996, Thomas published his career-defining book: The Octopus: The Secret Government and the Death of Danny Casolaro. The book weaves a complex tale of a massive conspiracy involving a journalist who died in an apparent suicide, Native American reservations, a state-of-the-art-security program, a source named Danger Man, the Contras, the Shah of Iran, and a private security firm called “Wackenhut.”
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Music by Pontus Berghe and Nick Sena. Editing by Corey Klotz.
Episode Written by Devin O'Shea
https://twitter.com/devintoshea
Welcome, listener, to Chapter 245 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Octopus episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Devin Thomas O'Shea, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
Greetings from inside the St.
Louis Arch, listeners, where, together, you and I have held hands riding our egg-shaped elevator up and up the silver legs of this gigantic parabola.
Our goal is to drink in a view of some bridges and the muddy Mississippi and become a little nauseous from the wind swaying this gigantic croquet loop.
In the room up here, we find ourselves in a crowded trapezoidal corridor.
Tourists from Iowa are packed around the windows, and I can hardly see over the shoulders of this visiting college softball team.
But look, at the end of the corridor, Jake, Julian, and Travis just stepped out of their egg-shaped elevator to join us.
Hey guys.
Oh, I'm not feeling so good.
My tummy hurts.
Yeah, I think I am egg-shaped myself.
We shouldn't have eaten those famous mud dogs.
Oh, the mud dogs.
The mud dogs are giving me mud sleds.
We've all had 22 toasted raviolis before getting in the elevators, so we're feeling good.
But Jake, did you know that The Arch's Finnish-American designer, Eero Saarinen, was a spy?
He was a member of the OSS, which is like the precursor to the CIA.
No, I had no idea.
That name sounds like it was designed by the CIA.
Eero Saarinen.
Yeah, Eero Saarinen sounds like something that, like, I would be injected with by, you know, by Julian and forced to tell the truth.
He does seem like a guy who would love to jump into a frozen lake every morning.
The true Finnish pervert.
Sorry to the Finnish listeners.
Yeah, absolutely.
He'd be doing, like, breathwork and just be one of those, like, unbearable, like, mindset CIA guys.
But, like, this is the kind of guy who, like, ice swims with, like, a silenced pistol.
Oh, yeah.
Julian, have you considered that the Central Intelligence Agency was penned into existence by Harry Truman, another Missourian, and that the early CIA was known to be controlled by a group of guys called the Missouri Gang?
No, but I like this attempt to make Virginia quake in their boots.
Is it the Missouri gang, the guys who beat up Brad Pitt in A River Runs Through It?
Maybe they're the same guys.
Yeah.
Excuse me, could you just, like, maybe adapt history to, like, 90s and early aughts movies for Jake so he understands what the fuck you're talking about?
Honestly, I wrote this script with that in mind, so this is perfect.
Oh, perfect.
Yeah, we're on the same page.
It's almost like there's something out here in the center of the country that's emanating a powerful evil.
Some kind of gateway to a Lovecraftian dimension, with doors wide open to a bright eldritch horror, allowing demons to come and go at will.
And maybe a byproduct of this porthole emits a mind control signal that flattens the brainwaves of citizens from shore to shore.
But anyway, hey, do you guys remember the 90s?
While we're up here, would you like to talk about conspiracy research history, Ken Thomas and the Octopus?
I would love to.
Yeah, there's a lot of wind, but I'm pretty sure I'm down for an approximately hour-long story while I take breaks to retch my mud dogs.
Yeah, I'd be down to listen, but Julian pushed me off a long time ago, so I'm a ghost at this point.
What's that, Jake?
What's that? Ooooooooh. [laughter]
Popular Alienation.
The Seam Shovel Press was an underground conspiracy publication started in the late 80s, printed out of St.
Louis.
Louis, Missouri by a freelance writer turned university archivist named Ken Thomas.
In an interview with Stephanie Russell, Thomas said this of his chosen hometown.
The thing about living in St.
Louis is, for $200, you can go to any city in this country.
And LA-centered stuff, New York-centered stuff, that's part of the conspiracy.
It's part of the homogenizing of the world.
I don't want to be part of that.
I want a bigger picture.
And you have to work harder to live in LA.
I think I've stumbled upon the perfect place.
This is so fucking funny, dude.
Oh my god.
For Thomas, the Midwest periphery was an ideal vantage point for keeping track of D.C., Roswell, Langley, and the rest.
Much like Nellie, Thomas put St.
Louis on the map in the 90s, at least in the conspiracy community.
He was a prolific publisher of conspiracy research, which was mailed to him by independent investigators across the world.
Hollywood writers of shows like Dark Skies and The X-Files were said to have looted Steam Shovel for episode ideas.
Thomas explained his view of parapolitics, his genre, in a 2008 interview.
Politics is going out and voting for people.
The para is everything that goes on behind the scenes in that process.
Steam Shovel adopted a only-publish-what-you-can-document approach, earning it a bit of legitimization in the early 90s mainstream, where paranoia was making a big comeback.
Thomas earned a recurring spot on Kevin Nealon's TV show, The Conspiracy Zone, and conspiracy theorist characters in detective fiction were getting a makeover, becoming truth-telling patriots in Oliver Stone's JFK or handsomely troubled investigators like Agent Mulder of The X-Files.
In a 2008 interview, Thomas remarked on the old caricature of this archetype.
The media depicted conspiracy research as tinfoil hat gibberish from the mouth of a cartoon picture.
It's all created by the media to keep people from taking these kinds of issues seriously.
This was a phenomena Thomas called the laughter curtain, which he spent a lifetime contending with.
The laughter curtain is a tactic a powerful organization might use to disseminate incriminating information by dressing it up in the absurd, leaving a nugget of truth at the center.
For example, Alex Jones's 2015 claim on InfoWars, which said that the globalists are turning our frogs gay and that the tap water is being used to disseminate a gay bomb.
It's easy to dismiss Jones as a lunatic, but a little digging reveals an endocrine disruptor at the center of the InfoWars story.
It's called atrazine, which is a real-life, very profitable weed killer that contaminates a whole lot of U.S.
groundwater and has been classified as a human carcinogen.
Atrazine is so commonly used on corn and lots of other crops, and there's no real effort to question it.
In frogs, the chemical has been associated with increased estrogen production and decreased fertility.
Does it turn humans gay?
Probably not.
Is it good for you?
Also, probably not.
Will it make me a hermaphrodite?
Maybe.
The gay bomb, famously, famously headed by, um, Kockenheimer.
Jesus Christ.
What the fuck?
Come on!
Who's going to the movies this weekend?
A jewel.
What's interesting about reading Ken Thomas' work is that his conspiracy landscape in the late 80s is much different and somewhat smaller than our current paranoid arrangement that's turned more regular people into skeptics and become much more polarized.
In Steam Shovel, which comes off as left-libertarian, there's a lot of critiques of scientism, little scary stories about the government using suppressed technological knowledge.
For example, you all have talked about Orgone Energy, right?
I think there was somebody at the UFO conference who wanted to sell you on the existence of Orgone Energy.
Oh yeah, we've covered Wilhelm Reich.
He is fascinating.
And I believe Travis has some sort of bat-shaped... Not just bat-shaped, it's the Batman logo-shaped slice of orgone.
Which is designed so that when he murders me with it, no one will believe it because they're like, no, you can't kill someone with that.
Travis was showing off his wares, I believe, on a stream and somebody pointed out that this piece might actually be radioactive.
I think he buried it.
What'd you do with it, Travis?
You buried it in the background?
I have it out my shed now.
Dude, some little kid is going to break into that shed and get superpowers.
I'm not using it how I was supposed to.
I was told I was supposed to put this batarang shaped slab next to my bed, put my phone on it at night.
This is supposed to prevent EMF radiation from my phone from hurting me.
But no, I don't use it for that.
Why don't you put it in your, like, belt?
Like, maybe near the front of the belt?
No, I don't think so.
You should be fine.
For Thomas, Orgone was said to be a property that Wilhelm Reich discovered, which the secret rulers of the world don't want you to know about.
Orgone was said to violate the second law of thermodynamics, which would give it all kinds of science fiction applications, like charging your phone or powering a weather control gun.
In the Reich conspiracy, Orgone was suppressed by Einstein himself.
Albert was jealous of Wilhelm and wanted to have the final word on the laws of physics, which seemed to be changing very rapidly in the 1940s.
So who's to say they didn't just keep changing in secret?
It is truly tragic to think of Wilhelm Reich because he did, like, end his life pointing these guns at the skies and convinced that he was in an actual war with UFOs.
But this also inspired a Kate Bush song called Cloud Bursting, so who's to say, you know?
Yeah, that's true.
Gotta give her some material.
Fair enough.
So who did Thomas think these rulers were, and why would they let Thomas publish all of their secrets?
As Thomas said in an interview titled, Stalking the Octopus, They are different people at different times.
This whole question of why they haven't killed me?
Why did they let Abbie Hoffman go for so long?
That's part of the Octopus story.
He was delivering his write-up of the Iran-Contra affair when he was forced off the road by a truck.
So why don't they just form an army and go out and shoot every dissident in the country?
Ken laughs at the idea and then kind of shrugs.
But they don't.
Sometimes they kill people.
Sometimes they have the laughter curtain.
They make us look like crazy people.
That's the thing about great journalists.
They know what not to ask.
In some cases, it's just to maintain access to power.
Sometimes, just to stay alive.
Damn, it's really sad when you have to be like, everybody's laughing at me, and actually this is like a, this curtain that is like, it's like he went out on stage, did a little act, and everyone just laughed, and it was the curtain closing on this act.
Tragic, man.
It's a true bummer.
Yeah, he's not wrong.
I mean, it's basically the concept of shit covering, right?
Where you just, like, you take this, like, grain of truth that you don't want people to find out and you just add a bunch of junk to it.
Either, like, funny stuff or ridiculous stuff or just excess coverage from, like, fringe publications or outlets.
Yeah, I think the thing we'll see here is that, like, where the laughter curtain begins and ends is sort of a thing that plagues all of Thomas's work.
Of course.
For more on popular alienation, you can check out my essay in Cleveland Review of Books.
But while we're up here in the Arch, I figured we'd talk about one of Thomas's career-defining publications, which also says a lot about the state of American conspiratorial thinking in the 90s.
We'll use the Arches time travel abilities to return to a pre-911 era.
This is long before Epstein or QAnon, but it's the primordial mix where these stories come from, and there are some familiar names along the way.
It's all contained in a book published in 1996 that's become quite rare and celebrated as a conspiracy classic.
The title is The Octopus, the Secret Government, and the Death of Danny Casolaro.
Just a warning here, there's some gore ahead along with discussions of suicide.
The story of Danny Casolaro and the octopus is a conspiracy that is perfectly engineered to drive Ken Thomas insane.
It lives on as a Rorschach test for conspiracy enthusiasts separating skeptics from the true believers.
No matter how much we cover here, there will always be more avenues and deeper rabbit holes, because that's the nature of the octopus.
It's designed, or maybe it evolved, to be a perfect blend of fact and speculation, always slipping out of your hands, perfect for an archivist like Thomas to spend years wrestling down with citations.
Co-written with another famous conspiracy researcher named Jim Keith, The Octopus begins with an opening scene like an X-Files episode.
Saturday, August 10th, 1991.
Shortly after 12.30 p.m., a house cleaner working the night shift at the Sheridan Inn in sleepy Martinsburg, West Virginia, knocks on the door of room 517.
Receiving no answer, she uses her passkey to enter the room.
The bed looks unslept in.
In the bathroom, blood is smeared all over the floor.
There's a dead man in the bathtub.
He has deep gashes in his forearms.
The body is identified as 40-year-old Danny Casolaro, an obscure freelance writer with a wide range of interests.
Casolaro had bylines in The Washington Star and The National Enquirer, but hailed from a fairly wealthy family and came and went from writing.
He dabbled in things and then got very seriously involved in a story about a new kind of computer software being used by the NSA.
For years, Casolaro met with sources, did research, and spent money working on a book manuscript called The Octopus.
His subject was a gigantic conspiracy involving Native American reservations, a state-of-the-art security program, a source named Danger Man, the Contras, the Shah of Iran, and a private security firm called Wackenhut.
Okay.
What?
Okay, okay, okay.
Danger Man and the Wackenhut.
It's like, yeah, a private security firm where we drag you out to the Wacken Hut, and that's where we do the Wacken.
Yeah, that's one interpretation of the Wacken Hut.
Another interpretation is I spent most of my teenage years there.
Oh, it's used for both.
Death and life, all things come to pass in the Wacken Hut.
Before Danny was killed, he stretched the truth to claim that Time magazine was interested in publishing his octopus manuscript.
Before he went to Martinsburg, West Virginia, Danny told his brother that he was receiving death threats.
According to Danny's housekeeper slash neighbor, Danny's life was being threatened via mysterious phone calls.
And like an episode of The X-Files, Casolaro said he was warned in person at a bar by someone from the State Department.
The spook said that Danny was getting too close to something, and now Casalera was going to West Virginia to meet a big source, possibly the head of the octopus.
He said to his brother, If I end up dead, it's not an accident.
Paramedics lifted Danny's body from the tub to find a single edged razor blade which had caused 10 to 12 wounds in both wrists.
There was also a shoelace tied around Casalero's neck and plastic bags floating in the tub.
Danny left a note.
To my loved ones, please forgive me, but especially my son, and be understanding.
God will let me in.
What do you guys think of that scene so far?
It's very strange.
I mean, that's a lot of cutting.
10 to 12 wounds, both wrists and the shoelace tied around the neck.
I don't know.
It's very, very odd.
Yeah.
The bags, too.
I mean, it's either a guy who really, really wants to make it work or it's messy.
I mean, were there resistance?
Like, was there, like, excess bruising or any sign of a struggle?
There was blood that had been mopped up with a bath towel that the maid found, allegedly.
Oh.
The story has a familiar true crime problem where the crime scene gets botched by local police and then conspiracy researchers comb through the information a million times.
So there are actually many tangles in the facts that yield many different patterns.
For example, Danny had multiple sclerosis and was said to be so weak from it that he was unable to swing a tennis racket.
The government report on his death said that Danny had financial troubles, but his files also contained a guest list for a big luau he was going to throw to celebrate his manuscript finally getting sold.
In any case, Danny's family believed he was murdered, law enforcement officials argued that his death deserved further scrutiny, and Casolaro's family passed all of his notes about the octopus on to ABC News and Time Magazine, both of whom investigated the case and found no evidence of murder.
The podcast, Ghost Stories for the End of the World, did a whole series on the octopus, which I highly recommend.
But for our purposes, we'll outline the centerpiece of Ken Thomas' book, a proto-NSA PRISM surveillance software called PROMIS, which Casalero was researching at the time of his death.
In their book, Jim Keith and Ken Thomas lay out Danny's story with their own research mixed in.
The Octopus was Casolaro's name for a handful of spooks and power brokers in the intelligence community who had manipulated public events as wide-ranging as the 1980 October surprise payoff that may have cost Jimmy Carter the presidency.
Danny's project was wide-ranging in the same way that Thomas's steam shovel press was capable of covering multiple subjects across a few pages.
We're talking about conspiracy researchers disagreeing with one another about the Shroud of Turin, which is set then beside the conspiracy of Reagan and the Pope plotting to overthrow the leftist government of Poland.
So perhaps seeing a bit of themselves in the handsomely dead freelance researcher, Keith and Thomas write that Danny Casolaro was just about to cinch this big case, bring the whole story together, but then... Like the tentacles of his metaphoric sea creature, the eight-and-a-half-eight slashes in either wrist pulled Casolaro down into oblivion, ending his investigation into a power cabal whose involvement in a list of notorious contemporary political crimes he had documented in his book.
Danny's conspiracy essentially explains how powers invested in a Reagan presidency may have prolonged the Iranian hostage crisis through a backdoor deal involving the software.
Prosecutor's Management Information System, aka PROMIS, was developed by a for-profit company called the Institute for Law and Social Research, which is shortened to INSLAW.
The INSLAW affair is a well-recognized legal dispute between this company and the Department of Defense.
It has its own Wikipedia page.
I apologize for how much terminology is going to be in this, but this is just how the octopus is written.
Promise originated in computerizing data from the Vietnam War for the purpose of targeting dissidents.
Inslaw received millions from the U.S.
government to develop the software into a stateside law enforcement tool.
Where we can say, you know, fascism developed at the periphery always returns to the imperial core, you know?
Yep.
Later, Inslaw accused the government of stealing the software and giving it to the NSA, which then modified and repackaged the program for purchase in international markets.
Here's how that works.
According to House Judiciary testimony over this lawsuit, this is how an international arms trader named Ari Ben-Menashe described Promise.
The program would have the ability to track the movements of vast numbers of people around the world.
Dissidents or citizens who needed to be kept under watch would be hard put to move freely again without Big Brother keeping an eye on their activities.
Using a modem, the PROMIS software would tap into the computers of services like the telephone company or the water board.
It would read data from credit card companies and search for specific information.
For example, if a person suddenly started using more water and more electricity and making more phone calls than usual, it might be suspected he had guests staying with him.
Promise would then start searching for the records of his friends and associates, and if it was found that one had stopped using electricity and water, it might be assumed, based on other records stored in Promise, that the missing person was staying with the subject of investigation.
This is like such blue-collar spying.
It's like, hey, check the electricity, check the water.
Yeah.
Well, the first thing I thought of was the 1998 Will Smith vehicle Enemy of the State.
Of course.
When's the last time you had watched that, Jake?
Probably, I would say within the last couple years.
That's one that comes up on the streaming services that I go, I'll watch that again.
Gene Hackman.
You know, I mean, that's a good one.
It's a good movie.
Absolutely.
When he puts the phone in the bag of Lay's chips and he's like, this is for security purposes.
This is for security purposes and a product placement.
Yeah.
And also how he has like a switch in it, like a kill switch in his, you know, sort of like conspiracy den that like makes the whole thing catch fire at once.
So badass.
But of course, metaphoric spy software in fiction has a real-life corollary.
For example, when an American drone strike double-taps a Yemeni's wedding because intelligence mistook the bridal party for a terrorist cell, that is this software predicted in 1991.
What may have surprised Casalero is the fact that we now live in a world where this conspiracy, one of mass surveillance for use in imperial violence, is pretty common.
But again, Casolaro was murdered in 1991, and this Inslaw Affair testimony takes place in 1992.
Back then, if you were Ken Thomas watching for the subtle tentacles of the octopus, promise would be an absolutely dystopian, and yet predictable, million-eyed demon summoned from the depths of U.S.
hegemonic world-spanning government.
It's a leftist libertarian nightmare born out of the first Bush administration.
From this 90s point of view, it's a given that the government would invest in god-like technology to attain perfect knowledge of every human on the planet.
Knowing the whereabouts of your subjects would be pretty powerful, but if a subject grew too aware of the octopus, it could also read the subject's mind and easily snuff them out.
You pull out the laughter curtain, remove the subject from the mainstream discourse, and then drive the subject insane, and you end up like Danny Casolaro.
But this 90s paranoid fear was not quite accurate.
In Thomas and Keith's book, how exactly the PROMIS software worked was a pretty muddy topic.
Testifying experts weren't really sure it could suck up any database on Earth, as was claimed, and instantly print out an accurate analysis.
The program was said to be able to run on any Unix machine, but it was also a piece of hardware composed of 88 modules, which I choose to believe is a racist dog whistle.
This hardware had chips inside of it that broadcast to NSA satellites.
So essentially, Promise had the hardware of a PlayStation 2 and the capabilities of Magic.
Not to underplay it.
I mean, to me, the PlayStation 2 was Magic at the time when it came out.
Guys, we've got Doom running on Promise.
And it's located every leftist dissonant in Guatemala.
Yeah.
Yeah, they were like, this machine can spy on millions of people and it can just barely run Metal Gear Solid 2.
But it can tell if you're wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt.
You know, this sounds a lot like the problem we have in sort of analyzing the capabilities of like Cambridge Analytica software, where it's like, wait a minute, how much of this is dystopian nightmare that is allowing the powers that be to rule us, you know, on a subliminal level?
And how much of this is hype by people who stand to profit from people believing that it's magical software?
They said that the Xbox Series X will be able to run 4K, 60 frames per second, every game.
It's just not the case.
That's an excellent point, because at the end of the day, The Promise Software was a product developed by a for-profit firm, which was stolen by the NSA, who turned around and sold it to foreign governments.
It's a product on the marketplace, and it was very lucrative.
People made money, according to Ben Minash.
The US and Israel began looking for a neutral company through which it could sell the program to foreign intelligence services.
The company chosen for the task was Degem, a computer firm with offices in Israel, Guatemala, and the South African Bantustan homeland.
It had been taken over for the purpose by Robert Maxwell, the publishing mogul who drowned under mysterious circumstances in 1991.
God dammit!
What?
Come on!
I'm pilled again!
Oh no!
I'm pilled again!
Oh no!
We've stumbled into the Epstein stuff.
It's great.
Yeah, but you know that if they're selling it, that it's either a backdoor for them or it's crap and they want everyone else to have it.
Right.
It seems a dubious project overall.
Yeah, this is a classic case of getting the software and being like, oh man, it doesn't work quite as well as we thought.
Let's just try to make money off of it.
It's a good thing that the profits from The Promise Software didn't go on to finance any of, like, Robert Maxwell's insane children or anything like that.
In any case, just like that, The Octopus can roll out an entirely new corridor of conspiracy, all emanating from a dead freelance writer in West Virginia.
For this, we'll stay focused on the program as a real-life national security affair, but there are many other branches of The Octopus.
According to Ben Minash, through Robert Maxwell's Degem Corporation, the promised software was sold to the Soviet Union.
OK, so there we go.
It's useless.
Like, I'm sorry.
If Israel and the United States are willing to sell this to the Soviet Union, it is guaranteed either a backdoor or completely useless.
It was allegedly used to squelch a black miner strike in South Africa, and it was also said to have tracked leftist insurgents in Guatemala, according to Ben Minash.
It would be able to tell an army commander that a certain dissident who was in the North three days before had caught a train, then a bus, stayed at a friend's house, and was now on the road under a different name.
Thomas and Keith compiled the sworn House Judiciary Committee testimony on Promise into the first half of their book, Pursuing the Octopus, but that court case wouldn't have been available to Danny Casolaro.
Danny's prime source was someone who testified in those hearings, a pretty wild guy, a child genius who invented an argon laser that got him invited to Stanford.
But as an adult, this guy also got arrested for trafficking methamphetamine, and Danny called this source Danger Man.
So far, you might not have picked up on how poetic Danny Casolaro could be.
He wrote a lot of short stories and poems.
Here's a sample from the Octopus manuscript.
It is a pale moon that illuminates the characters in the story.
With chords of fear and longing, it is a world of darkness and betrayal that everyone thinks they know but few have seen.
The real faces in this world are all too human.
Danger Man's mind is as balkanized as the scripts he lives and the land he travels.
I think that's some cool shit.
That's a good line.
Balkanized?
This is literally the poem from FUBAR.
Woman is a danger cat.
It helps our understanding for this part of the 90s conspiracy scene to note that Ken Thomas, too, had a big literary streak, especially as it related to the 60s counterculture.
Thomas named his steam shovel press after a Bob Dylan lyric which reads, Well, you know, I need a steam shovel mama to keep away the dead.
I need a dump truck mama to unload my head.
That's an excellent Bob Dylan impression.
Thank you.
Yeah I was going to jump in with my bad Dylan but you jumped in with your worse.
The popular alienation anthology features interviews with Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary beside Bilderberg schemes
flying saucers and the theory that Princess Diana's death was linked to Saudi aerospace contracts.
Ken Thomas studied literature at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, and this is all to say that there is a 60s literary undercurrent running throughout the 70s and 80s conspiracy scene.
Which re-emerges in the 90s with a haircut, dressed in a suit and tie, but is still gesturing at a quasi-spiritual set of hippie beliefs.
Oh yeah, I choose to imagine Mulder, you know, loosening his tie and heading up to Big Sur.
I mean, it kinda, he has like a little childlike wonder to him, of like a hippie FBI agent.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah, Mulder and Scully experimenting with quaaludes together and then experimenting with each other.
That'd be great.
Okay, alright Jake.
I know that would make a lot of people happy.
A lot of people on the internet want to see that.
Oh yeah, we all want to see Mulder drug Scully with Quaaludes.
That wasn't the story.
That was not.
It was a mutual experimentation.
Who cares?
Why do I feel like I have to defend my made-up bit?
Why do I feel like I have to defend Scully, who definitely would never take Quaaludes?
Well, if they were both hippies, why are we still here?
Why are you?
There's a new batch of characters in the 90s who take up this form, from Agent Mulder to Kevin Costner or Special Agent Dale Cooper.
Casolaro and his prime source, codenamed Danger Man, are also moral investigators and rogue poets who come to know too much.
Danger Man's real name is Michael J. Riconishito.
During the Inslaw Affair, Riconishito testified as a computer expert who buttressed the Inslaw claim.
Riconishito said he helped modify the promised software for use by those bloodthirsty Canadian Mounties, and that there were forces within the government warring with each other over Inslaw's stolen intellectual property.
But for Casolaro, Danger Man was much more than just a computer expert.
During hours of telephone calls from him, he had told me an exotic detail of his participation in an enterprise that worked its way around the world trading in dope, dirty money, weapons, biotoxins, and murder for the secrets of the temple.
For Rika Nishito, this enterprise operated through a CIA carve-out, a security firm called Wacken Hut.
We're going out to the Wacken Hut, boys.
Is this, like, is this a joke on Pizza Hut?
But, like, to whack people?
Yeah.
It is.
Yeah, the CIA certainly took a lot of people out to the Wackenhut in South America.
That is true.
Wackenhut was a private detective agency founded in 1954 by former FBI man George Wackenhut.
George had acquired private files from the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1966.
Wackenhut was said to maintain a list of four million names, which would have been the largest privately held file of suspected dissidents in America.
He basically had a thumb drive with all the findings of the Red Scare plus more.
One of Thomas's prominent octopus theories said that Casolaro was killed over promise files listing the names of state dissidents who would be jailed in the case of a big national emergency, like a big terrorist attack.
They note that this attack might be pulled off by communists, Islamists, right-wingers, or whoever.
And again, it's 1991.
The software would have been extra alarming to the conspiratorially inclined, no matter what corner of the political spectrum you reside on.
The list represents a conspiracy of the center against the fringe.
The Octopus Conspiracy is a plot to narrow the acceptable discourse to within a spectrum of beliefs and expectations, and maybe, if we're feeling theoretical, we'd call that narrowed era of discourse neoliberalism.
No doubt Wackenhut did evil and disgusting shit, but this private security firm takes on a special meaning in the octopus story.
Keith and Thomas suggest that Wackenhut protected all manner of sensitive national interests, from nuclear facilities to the aliens hidden at Area 51.
Their power also extended to an Indian reservation named for the Kabazon tribe.
And I'm not talking about aliens to discredit the story, that's just some of the stuff that Thomas named and was specifically interested in, having also written a book titled UFO and JFK.
The Gabazons were a tribe in Riverside, California, who signed on to a casino development plan in the 70s.
They numbered about 30 people, and by the 90s, Rika Nishito, Danger Man, said that the Wackenhut security firm was using the small native people's nation, and therefore their sovereign immunity status, as a way to clandestinely develop and manufacture materials like night vision goggles, machine guns, fuel-air explosives, biological and chemical weapons.
What do you think, Travis?
Would the government do that to the Native American people?
Yeah, sure.
There's some precedent for that kind of thing.
It doesn't seem very woke to me.
No.
Yeah, the new FBI would never.
It's very, very rude.
Joe Biden would do the opposite, man.
His FBI is all just wokies.
That's true.
As a story, this is a bit of connective tissue to something very real.
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration supplied weapons, cash, and tools to groups in the Middle East and Central America, like the Contras in Nicaragua and the Shah in Iran.
It was called the Iran-Contra Affair, and it was a big deal for anyone paying attention to U.S.
empire in the post-Vietnam era.
Through these lines of trafficking, the promised surveillance software was said to be offered to the Iranian terrorists during the hostage crisis as payment for drawing out the conflict.
Poppy Bush is heavily implicated here.
The goal was to make the whole affair last longer through the U.S.
election so that Reagan would get into office for sure.
What do you guys think of that?
Did Reagan need the extra juice?
I mean, if juice is like the bodily fluid that stops you from being completely demented, then yes.
He needed a lot of that juice.
It seems like Reagan was ascendant with a now fully developed suburbanized white political class, but I don't know.
For me, the horror at the center of Cassellera's story is not necessarily the political backdrop.
It's the PROMIS software itself as a forerunner technology of, for example, the cellular metadata and nodal analysis that was used to target Iraqis for death during the Iraq War.
The United States kills and imprisons perceived enemies one way or another, and the PROMIS software, along with its ancestors, apply a sheen of science and data to the operation.
This technology, no matter how accurate, removes some measure of human fault and fundamentally shifts the business of war and empire into the realm of the unhuman, into the domain of machines and numbers and analyzed data.
Looking back at Thomas' work, we can see how the 90s conspiracy researchers were trying to articulate a real truth about their times.
That the Iran-Contra conspiracy really was happening.
Spy software was growing more sophisticated and would soon control and monitor vast swaths of our lives.
But then, after the testimony section of Keith and Thomas' books, things get a little wild.
Thomas outlines rumors that the Kabazans were part of a worldwide project named, racistly I think, the Yellow Lodge, which was a large operation run through the native lands to produce advanced warfare projects, pathogenic viruses, and a center called D6, where UFO enthusiasts believe there is a huge underground joint human-alien base.
Again, the first few in that list seem more plausible than D6, but this is how The Octopus is written.
For example, one of Casalero's manuscript chapters describes the hunt for Rika Nishito, Danger Man, after he's been arrested for trafficking meth.
Danny travels with Rika Nishito's lawyer to the Key Peninsula off the Puget Sound.
This is a sort of fear and loathing section, and it's no coincidence that Hunter S. Thompson is also another example of a fringe detective freelancer.
Casalero and the lawyer are searching in the woods and brush for a recorded tape that Danger Man supposedly ejected from his car just before being arrested.
During this trip, which is sort of like a spirit quest, Danny meets a bearded Swede in a wide-brimmed leather hat.
He came out of his hut talking in staccato rhythms and reciting broken poetry.
He appeared somewhere between 60 and 70 years of age.
Can you cry, he asked me.
Then prepare to shed a tear and shed them now, he said.
Danny asks the guy if he has the tape, and the lawyer says, No, we just wanted to meet some of Michael's old friends.
We get more of Michael Rekinoshita's lore as a child genius.
As a kid, he built an alternative telephone service for his neighborhood.
The old Swede, Danger Man's father and my driver, wanted to make it very clear that this was a person who made very powerful people take notice of him when he was a boy.
These forces, the Octopus, have wanted to control Rika Nishida since the mid-80s.
Danger Man claims he was not trafficking meth, but was instead working on a way to refine platinum with materials that could be misconstrued as methamphetamine ingredients.
Mmm.
We sort of forget about that tape in the woods, but another guy Danny interviewed said that Rika Nishito had, in fact, invented a magic wand, which he considered selling to the US government.
Whatever Danger Man pointed the wand at could be blown straight up into the air, and this guy Danny talks to bemoans Rika Nishito's lack of dependability.
I had called a number of high-ranking military people and Michael was scheduled to demonstrate this new creation at Fort Hood, Texas.
When the time came and we gathered at Fort Hood, Michael just didn't show.
Wow, he didn't show to produce his magic wand.
Yeah, his magic wand expo.
He's like, hey, uh, whoa, uh, caught up in traffic boys.
Yeah, maybe he, maybe he was like feeling a little bit unconfident.
You know, he's like, oh, CIA, they just really like want, like, it'd be cool if the wand disintegrated things or made them disappear, but shoot them a couple hundred feet into the air.
Uh, I don't know.
You know, inventors have doubts.
They creep in.
Julian takes out his magic wand and points it at Jake.
Conclusion.
In stalking the octopus, Ken Thomas told St.
Louis Magazine, My mentor into the world of the weird was Timothy Leary.
And Timothy Leary would never accept negative energy.
Never.
He was in prison.
I remember seeing footage of him in 1970 where he was talking about, Whoa, how cool is this?
I can slow down.
I can just sit here and write and read and learn.
He did that.
And then, he escaped.
He went over the wall.
For a while, he was in a cell right next to Charles Manson.
He taught me that there's nothing to be afraid of.
There's no reason to let it get you down.
Soak it up.
Fight back.
And do Dharma combat with it.
Hell yeah.
Hell yeah.
Dharma combat.
Maybe he used the magic wand to get over the wall.
He might.
At times, it seemed as though the 60s counterculture had tipped everything off its axis.
There was a real threat to American hegemonic capitalism, which some were able to glimpse at just the right angle.
A crack of light between the picture and the frame.
The alternative had to be eradicated, broken up, forgotten, or most often assimilated aesthetically into a new hegemonic order that we now call neoliberalism.
An ideology that hijacks revolutionary language and turns it into another commodity that's for sale in the marketplace.
That ideology presents itself as impenetrable, and one of the worst features of conspiracy theories like the octopus is, I think, that it teaches helplessness.
The octopus is all-powerful and invisible except for those who know how to see, and at best we can only hope that more people do the research and wake up to the injustice of this semi-complicated network of corporations, weapons manufacturers, and the corrupt U.S.
government.
But after reading Thomas' account and a lot of 60s conspiracy stuff, I'm not actually sure The Octopus needs to be all-powerful in order to explain the subjects of the 90s conspiracy scene.
Just as I'm not sure that Reagan really needed the boost of the Iranian hostage crisis, or that the promised drama is not better explainable by warring factions of the security state fighting over a lucrative new technology.
And I also don't know that the octopus ever needed to whack a freelance journalist, because as one, I can attest to our stunning ignorability.
And Casolaro's mysterious death has made him famous.
It's become the most defining aspect of his life.
Jim Keith and Ken Thomas' book on Casolaro is interesting because even if you don't believe the conspiracy or any of these narratives, and Casolaro really did kill himself during mounting MS symptoms, it doesn't matter.
The Octopus is a book that has entered the canon of conspiracy research or folklore.
It's a startling tale of a poet detective uncovering the unknown.
Cassalero is just like Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor.
He's Warren Beatty in The Parallax View.
He's cool, and he's hot, and he's tragically dead.
And octopi have been popular metaphors in politics and conspiracy for forever.
The 60s novelist Thomas Pynchon mocks the trope in Gravity's Rainbow, where a secret government lab trains Gregory, their gigantic pet octopus, to attack Katya, a kinky secret agent, by forcing Gregory to watch movies of an octopus attacking a woman over and over.
One way of interpreting that is to say that conspiracies are like oily monsters from the deep, with intelligence much like ours and slithering tentacles who can learn to perform our weird libidinal death fantasies.
So what I'm preaching here is a little bit of historical pragmatism, and a philosophy book that's had a big impact on me is Hayden White's Metahistory.
At the sentence level, this book is uninterpretable outside of academia, but the long and short of it is that history is all made up.
Everything is relative, and we live in postmodernism, baby.
And whether we like it or not, history is just a bunch of agreed-upon stories.
There's no big truth we're anchored to.
The reality of the historical record is that it's just a bunch of floating narratives that can be interpreted in different genres like tragedy or comedy.
Is American electoral politics a satire, or is it a romance?
Do we live in the world of the West Wing, or is everything more like Veep?
White talks about how historical narratives can express different ideologies and use different tropes, like metaphor, like an octopus to a deep state, or a swamp to a system of insiders and outsiders.
The capital-T truth is unknowable for White because reality, time, and memory are all too chaotic.
Nonetheless, a story has to be told to make sense of it all, and the ability to manipulate and convey what White calls the fictions of factual representation is how you get people on your side in politics.
You tell a story based on as many facts as possible.
The Octopus was Ken Thomas' far-out thesis, an all-encompassing explanation of the nonsense gaps in the logic of American empire, media, and the official narratives of the day.
It's also the story of a tragedy.
Our greatest technological advances are not being used for the cause of human flourishing.
Our greatest scientific minds labor in service to sophisticated surveillance mechanisms, not peace on Earth.
The Octopus Story illustrates how the military-industrial complex and theoretically illegal organizations like drug cartels often collaborate.
The capitalist state exploits sovereign lands, which are supposed to be an aspect of reparations for genocide, because capitalism always seeks to violate borders.
Discovering new frontiers of profit.
The Octopus is a story about how we live inside systems of undemocratic parallel power structures like the CIA or the NSA, not to mention Skull & Bones or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People.
And those who try to find the truth or do something about it get slashed open and dumped in a West Virginia bathtub.
In any case, that is a real bummer to think about.
There's no feeling of confinement quite like being confined to the rigidity of your historical moment.
But here we are.
And sometimes we need stories that tune us into the reality of the prison, but more often we need narratives about escaping those structures.
As Pynchon wrote in Gravity's Rainbow, "A well-developed 'they' system is necessary, but it's only
half the story.
For every 'they,' there ought to be a 'we.' In our case, there is.
Creative paranoia means developing at least as thorough a 'we' system as a 'they' system."
That's why I'm here to tell you that the Arch was actually built by intergalactic Marxist aliens.
The Posadas were right, and Eero Saarinen was a spiritually advanced starseed who lost the instructions for how to boot up the intergalactic gate.
The blueprints are painted in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence, and somebody just needs to check.
You know what?
After all this throwing up, I am deeply dehydrated and I think you're right.
Yeah, I think that the Marxist aliens must have received only one half of the McDonald's symbol and believed that, you know, it was a cultural staple of our species, which it is.
Exactly.
I think there's like a mirrored loop that goes underground also.
And so when you turn it on, a bunch of like soil is going to disappear or something.
Oh, shit.
A little time travel divot.
I know about those.
Well, thank you for, you know, showing us more about a much more entertaining octopus than the one that gets brought up all the time these days as, you know, just a stand in for Jewish people.
Yeah, that's a problem when you're always talking about a, like, hyper-metaphoric thing that, like, is plotting against you.
The knee-jerk is just like, oh, it's anti-Semitism.
Yeah, and, like, the comparison doesn't make any sense either, because when I was growing up, you know, I always heard my mom say, I wish I had more hands!
You are you are kind of sticky like you do have a kind of suction cup like I don't know your appendages are a little a little sticky mm-hmm yeah I get sticky like I picked up this big coffee and I I can't put it down.
Yeah, yesterday we were walking around and you just had the, like, coffee cream on the tip of your nose.
Yeah.
Because you had been truffle hunting in your drink.
That's for later.
Yeah, but I'm also very smart, okay?
Very intelligent.
You put me in a glass jar, I can get out, I can slither back to the water from where I came.
What I know is that you're cute as hell.
Thank you for listening to another episode of the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnon Anonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode every week, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and our limited series.
Devin, tell us where people can find you and your work.
I'm on all the social media places, at Devin T. O'Shea, and yeah.
I hear that you're being boosted by Musk and paid a grand sum every month just for engagement in your replies.
That's right.
I've done a deal with the devil.
It's not even working out that well with me.
I'm sort of in an alliance with Cat Turd now.
It's great.
Yeah.
Someone had to take Cat Turd 3.
For everything else, we've got a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the octopus bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's Auto-Tune.
Promise is the name of one of the government's most secret computer database programs.
Computer programmer Michael Riconasciuto wrote in this affidavit that major modifications
to the program were made here in India.
On July 1st, 1981, Fred Alvarez, his girlfriend Patty Castro, and friend Ralph Bogart
were shot to death here on Bob Hope Drive in Rancho Mirage.
There was a house here that has since been bulldozed.
Nobody was ever arrested for the shooting.
Family friends say Cabazon Band of Mission Indians Vice Chairman Fred Alvarez was going to blow the whistle on this.
Documents from the early 1980s showing a business partnership between defense contractor Wackenhut Services and Cabazon manager John Philip Nichols to form Cabazon Arms.
One of their alleged projects was the PROMIS computer program.
Database and pattern recognition software was a new source of information and power in the early 1980s.
It starts when the program's designers, Inslaw Corporation, accused the U.S.
Justice Department of stealing the software for their own foreign policy purposes.
This programmer testified he altered the program to create what's called a backdoor to allow government spying.
This happened while working on Kabazon Indian sovereign land.
Well, the parties that were involved in the distribution of this software were involved in covert operations, and they were involved in Nicaragua and Central America, and they were involved in operations in the Middle East.
This U.S.
Justice Department memo from 1985 shows the promised software was being sold to Middle Eastern arms dealers and wanted no paperwork or customs inspections to interfere.
Even unsolved mysteries got on the case when the last journalist to investigate this spy scandal was found dead in his hotel room.
Danny Casolaro's wrists were slashed in 1991.
It was ruled a suicide.
But his reporter notes disappeared and the book on the conspiracy he was to title Indio was never finished.
Congressional hearings were held in 1992.
The hearings ended inconclusively.
The Promise software was allegedly altered on tribal land in India with a lack of federal oversight.
And just like Microsoft Windows, the database program kept up with the times, upgraded several times over the years.
But Promise came back to haunt America in ways never imagined.
A disturbing indication that Robert Hansen, the FBI man accused of spying for the Russians in what officials said at the time of his arrest, was a massive security breach, ended up helping Osama Bin Laden.
Correspondent Carl Cameron reports Hansen sold the Russians an extremely sensitive piece of U.S.
technology, and the indications are that they in turn sold it to Bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network.
