Spook Wars in Cyberspace
Is the FBI Railroading Charles Hayes?
High Times, June, 1997
by Dick
Russell
Why does the international dope trade
just keep flourishing, even while major
traffickers and their government
protectors keep getting exposed and
imprisoned? Well, it could just
possibly be that the ones going to jail
aren't using the right computer
software. Here's another murky peek
into the legendary PROMIS conspiracy.
This is a story straight from a
Tom Clancy novel, or maybe Mission:
Impossible. Shortly before last
November's election, Kentucky surplus-
computer dealer, who claims to be a
longtime CIA contract agent, gets
arrested by an FBI SWAT team and is
charged with hiring an undercover agent-
to murder his own son.
At his trial in January, 61-year-
old Charles Hayes testifies that he's
been set up by the federal government.
And why? Because he's part of a team of
retired intelligence types calling
themselves the "Fifth Column," who've
been using a supercomputer to hack into
certain secret foreign bank accounts
used by numerous US politicians to
stash illegal funds garnered mainly
from drug and arms dealers.
The prosecution's key witness
against Hayes, at the trial in London,
KY, turns out to be a right-wing
California journalist who occasionally
informs for the FBI, a fugitive with a
history of mental institutionalization.
For the defense, a former senior editor
at Forbes magazine vouches for Hayes'
credibility. After the jury hears tapes
of Hayes discussing a $5,000 payoff for
a prospective hit on his estranged son,
the defendant responds that he'd known
all along he was talking to an FBI
undercover, but had been stringing the
Bureau along so he could develop
evidence against them. When the CIA
introduces affidavits disavowing any
relationship with Hayes, he takes the
stand to provide his cover name,
"Charles Lawson," and an ID number.
Following three hours of
deliberation, the jury finds Hayes
guilty, to the astonishment of nearly
100 supporters present. He says from
his jail cell afterwards, while his
attorney moves for a new trial, that he
anticipates "assistance" from higher
powers.
Hayes Gets Around
Is Charles Hayes for real, or
merely a con man looking for a get-out-
of-jail-free card? For months prior to
his arrest last year, revelations about
Hayes and his postulated Fifth Column
had been circulating on the Internet
and in Media Bypass, a colorful
"patriot" publication out of
Evansville, IN. Not only was this Fifth
Column said to have downloaded
financial records on government
officials from up to 3,000 hidden
overseas accounts, but they also
allegedly wire-transferred about $4
billion clear out of those accounts
into "escrow holding funds" at Federal
Reserve banks.
Then, according to Hayes, these
alleged Robin Hoods of cyberspace began
quietly announcing their findings to
certain congress people and foreign
governments; which is why, so the yet-
undocumented saga brags, a record
number of 60-some US senators and
representatives announced their
retirements just before the 1996
elections. And that also is supposedly
how the Mexican federales got turned on
to the drug-laundered millions salted
away in Switzerland by the family of ex-
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.
On the face of it, these
assertions might appear preposterous.
But a HIGH TIMES investigation into
Hayes' background reveals a tantalizing
trail of evidence indicating, at the
least, considerable insider knowledge
about computers and smuggling.
In 1985, Charles Hayes was a key
government witness in a Kentucky trial
involving the largest gemstone seizure
ever by US Customs-millions of dollars'
worth that had been smuggled out of
Brazil
In 1991, the telephone records of
doomed journalist Danny Casolaro showed
numerous phone calls to Hayes in the
month before Casolaro was found dead in
a West Virginia hotel room. Casolaro
had spent the past several years
investigating a tangled web of
government corruption he called "the
Octopus." One of Casolaro's focuses was
the Inslaw case, in which the Justice
Department stands accused of having
stolen the company's PROMIS computer
software, which was capable of tracking
complicated financial transactions.
In 1992, Hayes testified about the
Inslaw matter before a Chicago grand
jury. In April '96, he was subpoenaed
and gave a lengthy deposition about
Inslaw to a Justice Department
attorney, who quizzed him about his
computer expertise. FBI Special Agent
David Keller testified at Hayes'
January trial that he knew of him from
a previous FBI investigation into the
Inslaw matter.
In July 1995, Rep. Jim Leach,
chairman of the House Banking
Committee, wrote to the director of the
National Security Agency, seeking "your
agency's help in verifying or laying to
rest various allegations of money-
laundering in Arkansas in the late
1980s." Among other matters, Rep. Leach
asked about Inslaw's PROMIS software-
and Charlie Hayes.
Several of Hayes' associates back
up his contention that he's being
framed, in an attempt to put the Fifth
Column out of business. One well-placed
source, who requested anonymity,
affirms that Hayes was a CIA asset,
adding, "I think Hayes has been set up
to the nth degree to discredit him."
Mena and the Octopus
Hayes launched the five-member
Fifth Column himself, he maintains to
HIGH TIMES, primarily to follow the
money-laundering of the international
drug cartels. It's a personal crusade,
according to one of his associates in
Kentucky, triggered by the way Hayes'
37-year-old son, John-the alleged
murder-for-hire target-supposedly
"cooked his mind on drugs." Mark
Swaney, whose Arkansas Committee was
responsible for much of the early
publicity surrounding the notorious CIA
drugs-and-arms operation out of Mena,
AK, (HighWitness News, Jan. 95) spoke
with Hayes on a number of occasions
between 1992 and '95: "A lot of what he
told me about Mena turned out to be
true," says Swaney.
Swaney's notes from a July '92
interview with Hayes contain charges
that both the federal government and
the Arkansas State Police were involved
in distributing cocaine out of Mena.
Asked if then-Governor Bill Clinton was
aware of the Mena operation, Hayes
responded, "No, but his associates were
involved." He elaborated that some of
the money was laundered through two
powerful Arkansas companies with ties
to Clinton.
In a five-hour jailhouse interview
not long before his trial, Hayes, a
former Air Force pilot, described a CIA
assignment he'd once undertaken to fly
a weapons shipment from Mena to Aruba
in the Caribbean. On discovering that
the cargo was actually cocaine, Hayes
told me, he dumped it on the runway and
ended up in a shoot-out that killed
several people.
This is one of many stories, such
as Hayes' claimed friendships with
Fidel Castro and Sen. Edward Kennedy,
that prove impossible to verify. But
William Hamilton of St. Louis, the
president of Inslaw, tells of
encounters with Hayes which add
credence to the existence of the Fifth
Column. Hamilton first became aware of
Hayes in 1990, in the midst of Inslaw's
legal battle to prove that the Justice
Department, FBI, CIA, NSA and other
federal agencies had illegally
appropriated their PROMIS database-
management software for their own
purposes.
As recounted in a heavily redacted
House Judiciary Committee report, The
Inslaw Affair (September 1992): "Mr.
Hayes is a surplus computer dealer with
alleged ties to both United States and
foreign intelligence communities. Mr.
Hayes first came to the attention of
the Committee during August 1990,
following assertions that excess Haris-
Lanier word-processing equipment he had
purchased from the US Attorney's office
for the Eastem District of Kentucky,
located in Lexington, contained the
PROMIS software." The Justice
Department had subsequently seized the
equipment back from Hayes, preventing
its use as evidence in the Inslaw case.
(The computer gear had also allegedly
contained sensitive classified
material, such as the identities of
narcotics informants.)
Hamilton therefore contacted
Hayes, who told him the military owed
Inslaw plenty of money, because it had
secretly distributed his PROMIS
software. When Hamilton subsequently
learned from a CIA contact that PROMIS
had indeed been used aboard US
submarines, he visited Hayes in
Kentucky in January '91. PROMIS was "in
the CIA, DEA, FBI, everywhere," Hayes
told him. Checking him out with other
sources, Hamilton was told
that Hayes and a partner both code-
named "Running Fox" had belonged to an
elite intelligence unit which "had to
be
able to take apart and put back
together, without any diagrams, the
Cray supercomputer."
According to Hayes, this elite spy
unit was known as "Squad D." First
mentioned in Bob Woodward's book Veil:
The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987,
Squad D was established by William
Casey, Ronald Reagan's CIA director.
Part of its mission was computer
hacking. "There was penetration of the
international banking system," Woodward
wrote, "allowing a steady flow of data
from the real, secret sets of books
kept by many foreign banks that showed
some hidden investing by the Soviet
Union."
And not just by the USSR. PROMIS-
short for "Prosecutors' Management
Information System"-had originally been
designed to track complicated illegal
currency transactions through intricate
systems of laundering and wire-
transfers; it could readily be
"enhanced" to track transactions by
banks and dummy corporations used by
terrorists and dope dealers. Hamilton's
Inslaw had sold PROMIS to the early
Reagan
Justice Department, which promptly
reneged on a $6 million payment due,
asserting that a portion of the
contract was not fulfilled. Inslaw went
bankrupt, and its ongoing lawsuit
against the Feds is still in the US
Court of Claims.
Promis Them Anything
Inslaw's attorneys, who include
former Attorney General Elliott
Richardson, present evidence that a
covert intelligence operation in fact
transformed PROMIS into an
unprecedented high-tech spying tool. It
seems a brilliant young CIA contract
agent out of Seattle named Michael
Riconosciuto, reputedly a past master
at clandestine drug chemistry and
computer hacking, not only "enhanced"
the PROMIS package to implement its use
in tracking international currency
transfers, but fitted it with a secret
"trap-door" access port that enabled US
espionage agencies to electronically
monitor its use by anyone who bought
it.
According to Richardson, PROMIS
was peddled to as many as 88 foreign
governments by "cut-out" front men
working for the Department of Justice,
the NSA and CIA. It was also purchased
by numerous international banks in
Switzerland and elsewhere, which were
interested in standardizing their wire-
transfer data. None of these buyers
knew about Riconosciuto's trap-door
application that not only allowed Uncle
Sam to monitor their money-laundering
in progress, but, whenever desired, to
invisibly modify it.
One of the "cut-out" peddlers of
this stolen, hyped-up and poisoned
money-tracking software took it to
Brazil in the mid-'80s, according to
Charles Hayes, who was there at the
time, as a CIA contract agent, in the
matter of the stolen gemstones. Dr.
Earl Brian (convicted last year in Los
Angeles of multimillion-dollar
international financial fraud) had been
California Secretary of Health during
Reagan's govenorship in the '70s.
Michael Riconosciuto has alleged that
some time after 1979, Brian was given
the PROMIS software to peddle around
the world to line his personal pockets.
It was during a sales trip to Brazil in
1985 that Dr. Brian allegedly told
Hayes about PROMIS.
Shortly after this Brazil
adventure, Hayes moved back to his
hometown of Nancy, KY, and, as his CIA
cover, set up a salvage company
specializing in computer parts-and also
began working with Riconosciuto. The
Fifth Column's Cray Model 3B
supercomputer was primarily
constructed, it is said, through
purchases at Department of Defense
auctions.
Initially, Hayes' Fifth Column's
work had been done under government
sponsorship. Veteran investigative
journalist James Norman has written
that besides penetrating the
international banking system, the
Column had initially succeeded in
downloading information from over 50
intelligence services around the globe,
including the Soviet KGB and the
Israeli Mossad.
Then Riconosciuto got busted for
running a methamphetamine lab in 1992,
and wound up in the federal
penitentiary, where he currently
resides. Around the same time, Hayes'
team discovered that the codes in the
PROMIS software featured not just one,
but two trap-door ports, suggesting
that Riconosciuto had planned to use
one of these himself, possibly to raid
accounts in banks using PROMIS.
Hayes says the Column shut down
Riconosciuto's port and created their
own multiple setup, by which through a
modem they could dial into a computer's
security systems and circumvent them
with a few keystrokes. Then Hayes
further customized the software to sort
through vast amounts of data; using a
Cray, the Column could handle
astounding data rates, which could be
quickly downloaded and analyzed off-
line in search of money flows and other
connections. (In the virtual-reality
realm, "money" is merely stored
information; with the proper
authorization codes, computers can
electronically launch volumes of
digitized currency from one bank
account to another.)
Charging that the CIA "didn't hold
up their end" of some unspecified
bargain, Hayes says that he and the
other four Fifth Columnists decided to
go rogue. Having sole access to their
own software modifications, they were
now essentially creating their own
private currency tracking enterprise.
Plundering The Pirates
Secret "numbered" accounts in
Swiss banks, according to Hayes, are
not actually numbered but lettered,
with codes which appear on the lower
right-hand side of their documents;
using tracking software and a
sufficiently powerful computer, they
are not difficult to penetrate. Hayes
says the Column uncovered a $1.5
million bribe paid by the Cali cartel
to a witness against former Panama
dictator Manuel Noriega, who was
subsequently convicted in Florida of
narcotics crimes the
cartel may actually have committed.
Then after the Column in 1994 examined
the secret accounts of the Salinas
family in Europe, he says they passed
the incriminating data to the DEA-which
promptly alerted the Mexican
government.
"On an official basis," says
former Wharton School finance professor
and money-laundering expert Orlin
Grabbe, a friend of Hayes, "people
associated with the Fifth Column had
tried to take their evidence to the
appropriate legislative committees and
the Justice Department-and ran into a
sea of corruption. So they decided to
show them, 'We'll do our job anyway,
even if it's in a different form.' "
Others are more skeptical. One
well-placed HIGH TIMES source who
requested anonymity says he believes
Hayes and his associates may indeed
have accessed foreign accounts, but may
also have kept considerable sums for
themselves rather than just
transferring money to Federal Reserve
accounts.
The Fifth Column first surfaced
publicly in 1995, after James Norman,
then a senior editor at Forbes, was
alerted by Inslaw's Bill Hamilton to
Hayes. Having broken a cover story on
Iraqi arms-money laundering through oil
markets, Norman was tipped by Hamilton
to the PROMIS case: "Hamilton said
that, as crazy as the things Hayes said
seemed to be, they invariably had a way
of proving true six months later,"
Norman recalls.
So Norman, who describes himself
as a Liberal Democrat, visited Hayes at
the Beckett Hotel in Nancy, where they
spent an evening comparing notes. Hayes
was interested in connections Norman
had already discovered involving the
PROMIS software, the NSA and a Little
Rock bank-data-processing company then
called Systematics (since absorbed by
Alltell Information Services).
Controlled by Arkansas billionaire
Jackson Stephens, Systematics,
according to Norman's sources, shuffled
money for covert CIA and NSA spying
operations, and was also involved in a
massive bank-spying effort called
"Follow The Money."
Sources also alleged a link to
Vincent Foster, the White House deputy
counsel whose death on July 20, 1993
was officially labeled a suicide.
Foster was said to be a behind-the-
scenes overseer for Systematics on
behalf of the NSA, even while he was a
partner with Hillary Clinton at the
Rose Law Firm in Little Rock.
(Alltell's chairman, Joe Ford, has
denied any connection between
Systematics and Vincent Foster.)
"Along about midnight," Norman
remembers, "Hayes dropped this
bombshel1 on me: 'You know, Vince was
under investigation when he died.' I
said, 'What investigation?' And Hayes,
in his inimitable way, took a long drag
on his cigarette, leaned back in his
swivel chair, and said, 'Well, it's es-
pie-oh-nage.' "
Hayes was only the first of more
than a dozen sources that Norman
eventually uncovered in reporting his
"Fostergate" story-for Media Bypass,
after Forbes backed away from
publishing it. Initially Hayes did not
tell Norman about the Fifth Column,
which he learned of from another
source. But the article was the first
published reference to the Column,
which had been monitoring Foster's
Swiss bank account.
"They had located it," Norman wrote,
"by tracking money flows from various
Israeli government accounts, after
finding Foster's name while secretly
snooping through the electronic files
of Israel's Mossad."
Foster, who was said to have had
access to highly sensitive US code-
encryption and data-security
information, allegedly was peddling
some of it to the Israelis. Norman
continued: "Foster's first indication
of trouble came when he inquired about
his coded bank account at Banca Della
Svizzera Italiana in Chiasso,
Switzerland, and found the account
empty. Foster was shocked to learn from
the bank that someone using his secret
authorization code had withdrawn all
$2.75 million he had stashed there, and
had moved it to, of all places, the US
Treasury."
In April 1995, Norman sent a
letter to White House press secretary
Michael McCurry concerning his article,
then slated to appear in that May's
issue of Forbes. Among the allegations
it spelled out were Foster's having
learned from Hillary Clinton, shortly
before his death, that he was under
investigation by the CIA; that the
President's wife was also a beneficiary
of funds from Foster's Swiss account;
that documents relating to the
Systematics company had been removed
from his office after his death, and
that Systematics was also involved in
laundering funds from covert
operations, "including drug and arms
sales related to activities in and
around Mena."
A week later, the White House
responded that these allegations were
"outrageous" and "baseless." Forbes, at
the last minute, killed Norman's story,
and so it
appeared in the August 1995 issue of
Media Bypass. Norman was keeping in
touch with Hayes, digging up new
information and consulting him for
leads.
From another source, months
earlier, Norman had acquired some
account numbers that had been found
among the personal effects of Barry
Seal , a cocaine-smuggling CIA asset
who'd worked out of the Mena airport,
and was murdered by Colombian hitmen in
Baton Rouge in 1986. (See HighWitness
News, Jun. '86). "In a suitcase in the
trunk of Seal's car was a scrap of
paper," says Norman, "with a curious
string of ten letters. One source who'd
been involved in money-laundering in
the past was quite confident it was a
Swiss bank-account number in encrypted
form." Norman passed it-KPFBMMBODB
along to Charles Hayes.
It was not long thereafter that
Norman was informed that his
"Fostergate" story was being abruptly
spiked, on orders from the very top:
Forbes publisher emeritus Caspar
Weinberger, Secretary of Defense under
Reagan. Weinberger's motivation was a
mystery to Norman until he subsequently
learned, from Hayes, that the encrypted
number from Barry Seal's effects had
led to
the Union Bank of Switzerland, and to
none other than Caspar Weinberger. The
Fifth Column had supposedly raided $2.3
million from that very account, and
then left a note in Weinberger's drop-
box in Bar Harbor, ME, listing the
number and a message: "You have been
had."
In August 1995, Norman sent Forbes
editor Jim Michaels a memo with further
corroboration for his Fostergate piece,
including evidence emerging from credit-
card and airline frequent flier records
indicating that Foster had made
periodic one-day trips to Switzerland.
Then Norman dropped his bomb on Forbes:
"If you have any doubts about the
ability of the CIA's Fifth Column to
raid foreign bank accounts and withdraw
funds, just ask Caspar Weinberger."
Enclosing a copy of documents found in
Seal's trunk, he added: "The clear
implication is that Caspar Weinberger,
while Secretary of Defense, was taking
kickbacks on drug and arms sales. A
cosignatory on this account appears to
be connected with [a relative of]
Howard Metzenbaum, the retired senator
from Ohio. We are talking about
bipartisan payola. Which helps explain
why Congress is so squeamish about
investigating this stuff."
After sending his internal memo,
Norman was told to go on indefinite
unpaid leave or to resign. As Fortune
noted in an article about its rival's
imbroglio that fall, "The embarrassing
memo was particularly ill-timed.
Malcolm S. 'Steve' Forbes Jr., the
magazine's 48-year-old editor-in chief,
is readying a campaign to run for
President on the GOP ticket." Fortune's
photo of Norman was captioned: "Ex-
reporter Norman's startling sleuthing
proved a little too gutsy."
Putting A Stop To It
Days later, the now-unemployed
Norman met with Hayes in Pittsburgh,
along with Orlin Grabbe of Reno, NV,
who had started examining the Foster
saga in a lengthy series on his World
Wide Web page
(http://www.aci.net/kalliste). "Hayes
made some astounding predictions,"
Norman recalls about pending
unprecedented departures of members of
Congress and the Senate. I pooh-poohed
the whole thing as ridiculous. He said,
'Wait and see.' " The Fifth Column,
Hayes claimed, was sending plain brown
envelopes to politicians containing
copies of their illicit accounts in
Switzerland and offshore banks in
places like the Cayman Islands. By
early 1996, Hayes' outlandish
prognostications indeed seemed to
becoming true, as dozens of prominent
senators and representatives announced
their retirements.
Norman says, "He would make
allusions to some geographical area or
other way of describing people other
than by name, who invariably would
announce they weren't going to run
again. It became almost like pin-the-
tail-on-the-donkey." As his findings
continued to appear in Media Bypass,
Norman began getting calls from other
mysterious sources, who he now believes
were government disinformation artists
"looking for stuff on Hayes."
Both Norman and Grabbe speak of
repeated attempts being made on Hayes'
life, including the sabotage of his
car's brakes on an occasion when all
three were riding in it near
Pittsburgh. Grabbe's Web page alleges
that one hit plot emanated from
Arkansas, farmed out through a New
Orleans crime syndicate which
contracted with a pair of ex-CIA
assassins.
There would certainly appear to be
plenty of people with reason to want
Hayes and the Fifth Column put into
permanent dry-dock. Hayes delights in
telling a story in which the Column
wire-transferred millions of dollars
into the US Treasury out of secret
Swiss accounts held by Nancy Reagan,
Henry Kissinger and Oliver North
, and
then proceeded to play them off against
one another. This happened, Hayes says,
back when North was the front-runner in
the polls for a Senate seat from
Virginia, which he lost after Nancy got
an anonymous call
telling her North "had given out her
unlisted account number and they got
hers and Henry's money." (North's use
of secret Swiss accounts in the Iran-
Contra affair is notorious.)
Hayes maintains that the Fifth
Column has been a leading source for
Whitewater investigator Kenneth Starr,
having even downloaded "the entire
White House database"-with plenty of
ammunition that's yet to surface
concerning FBI files provided to the
Clinton Administration and
contributions to Democratic campaigns.
In June last year, just as the
Column's purported activities emerged,
then-CIA director John Deutsch
announced plans to create a "cyberwar
center" to protect the nation against
the growing security threat posed by
computer hackers. Attacks on
international wire transfers, he told
the Senate, were of special concern.
(As to why the banks don't just change
their PROMIS software, Hayes says it's
not that easy to do. Besides, he
claims, the banks have been informed
that if they try to do that, their
competitors will receive a printout
listing all their illicit moneys.)
Then last September, some 16 FBI
and Secret Service agents in four cars
showed up in Nancy, asking questions
about Hayes.Some say they were also
searching for the Column's Cray
supercomputer, said to have been
installed in the back of a 48-foot
tractor-trailer complete with backup
power supply.
And on October 22, just before a
meeting Hayes had arranged with some
oil-company executives in the Mellon
Bank case, the FBI busted him at his
residence on the murder-for-hire
charge. It was no secret that Hayes and
his son, John Anthony, were involved in
an $800,000 court property fight over
Hayes' mother's will. But after
Charles' arrest, John Anthony Hayes
assured a local newspaper that if his
dad had really wanted him out of the
way, he'd have handled it himself.
Denied bond in federal court
nevertheless, Hayes was remanded to the
Laurel County Detention Center to await
trial. Also denied the right to act as
his own counsel, he hired charismatic
Lexington attorney Gatewood Galbraith.
The January trial was, to say the
least, bizarre. The star prosecution
witness, Lawrence W. Myers, had
interviewed Hayes for a magazine
article last August, and then called
the FBI office in Birmingham, AL, to
report that Hayes was looking to have
someone killed. FBI agent Don
Yarborough, posing as a would-be hit
man, contacted Hayes, who spoke with
him about the prospective murder over
an open phone line, and used his own
return address on a packet of documents
he sent to this make-believe assassin.
The phone tapes revealed Hayes offering
to provide $5,000, seven days after his
son's proposed murder, at "the best
place to meet-a funeral office." In his
testimony, Hayes said he "figured the
government was getting ready to set up
something, so I thought it would be a
good time to reverse it on 'em... I
figured I would be able to get them
caught in a trap."
Hayes had been on CIA contract
since age 19, he stated under oath. The
Fifth Column had "split off" from Bill
Casey's Squad D to "champion a lot of
peoples' rights." Asked by Galbraith to
name names of politicians forced to
resign because of the Column's
findings, Hayes singled out former
Maine senator William Cohen (recently
named Secretary of Defense) and
Colorado senator Pat Schroeder. (No
direct evidence has been produced
concerning either of Hayes' courtroom
allegations.) When he began describing
how Vince Foster "had been relieved of
a bank account in Bern, Switzerland,"
the judge ruled that such detail "must
be shown to be necessary" to the
defense; Foster's name was not
mentioned again.
At the end of the trial's fourth
day, new information surfaced
concerning Lawrence Myers' background.
In 1985, he had been charged with
extortion and spent a year in a
psychiatric facility; a felony warrant
for him remained active in California.
It also came out that he had been
sharing information on several cases
with the FBI, which had doctored "rap
sheets" to hide his background.
The judge granted a two-week
continuance, but after the trial
resumed on January 27, refused to allow
most of the damaging information about
Myers into evidence. [Kennetta]
Williamson, an investigator for the
Tennessee attorney general's office,
described him in testimony as "a
professional and pathological liar."
Reporter Norman testified that his
investigation confirmed that Hayes "had
a long relationship with the CIA as a
contract agent"-which was denied in
three CIA affidavits later introduced
by the prosecution. That was when Hayes
took the stand to reveal his alias and
contract number.
But the jury believed the tapes
incriminated Hayes. "The main thing I
can't understand," said one juror
after the guilty verdict, "is how he
thought he could entrap the
government."
Marvin Miller, a prominent
Washington criminal-defense attorney
with years of experience in espionage
cases, is drafting a motion for a new
trial. "We believe there are
significant errors that occurred at the
trial," he says. "The jury simply was
not allowed to hear a number of things
that could have reasonably changed
their decision."
Awaiting his May sentencing, Hayes
says from his cell: "Hey, I love my
government. They trained me well. And
the Fifth Column ain't out of business
yet."
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