Chuck Hayes is a crooked government's worst nightmare. Which is probably why he's in jail without bond.
Sooner or later, Chuck Hayes and the FBI were destined for ashow-down. Either he'd get them, or they'd get him. They bothhate each other, with good reason. For many months they hadplayed cat and mouse, warily circling each other looking for anopening. Finally, Chuck Hayes got a Pearl Harbor sneak attack.
It was a little after 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 22, 1996.Sitting in the office of the 8-unit Beckett Motel in the littletown of Nancy in hilly southeastern Kentucky, overlooking ascenic arm of Lake Cumberland called Fishing Creek, Hayes watchedas three men in suits drove up and walked in. "You rent rooms bythe week or by the month?" asked one. "By the week, but not bythe month," replied the white-haired motel proprietor and retiredCIA contractor. Cordial but cautious, Hayes could smell a G-manmiles away. "Doesn't really matter," replied FBI Special AgentDavid R. Keller: "You're under arrest."
More than a month later, the 61-year-old Hayes, remainsbehind bars in the nearby Laurel County Detention Facility inLondon, Ky., held without bond. He is charged with supposedlyhiring an undercover FBI agent for a paltry $5,000 to kill hisson, John Anthony Hayes, a Louisville real estate salesman whoHayes has all but disowned over alleged drug use. The "hit"allegedly meant crossing a state line and using the mail andtelephone, so that made it a federal case. The FBI claims tohave damning evidence: taped phone conversations ordering thesupposed murder-for-hire and disposal of the body. Trial is setfor mid-January. Hayes could get 10 years in prison.
On the surface, things look grim for Hayes. On October 25,U.S. Magistrate Judge J. B. Johnson Jr., citing Hayes Internetnickname "Angel of Death," declared him a threat to society and aflight risk. So he denied Hayes the right to post bail. Threetimes Hayes thought he had hired a lawyer, but each backed outfor odd reasons amid speculation of government pressure. At apre-trial hearing November 26, Hayes had to represent himself toget his rushed trial pushed back from December 2. Hayes has yetto get a receipt for the $2,600 of cash or the credit cards takenfrom him at the jail. And to add insult to injury, the motelitself and the house Hayes lived in have been turned over to hisson, the would-be assassination target, as part of a long-runninginheritance dispute.
So is Hayes bummed out? Hardly. He sounds elated. Callingcollect from the jailhouse, Hayes declares with a laugh that hewill not only prove the FBI's case is a frame-up, but that it isfraught with perjury and ethics violations. "We've notified thecourt we intend to prosecute FBI agent Keller on several countsof perjury," says Hayes. In addition, the Assistant U.S.Attorney, Martin Hatfield "failed to carry out a court order" toturn over evidence, claims Hayes. "That can mean his lawlicense, and I intend to have it." In other words, he's got 'emright where they want him.
It gets better: "Charles Hayes is in jail because he tweakedthe government's nose," says his new lawyer, government gadfly,legalized hemp advocate and twice-defeated Kentucky gubernatorialcandidate Gatewood Galbraith of Lexington. "They tried to induceCharles into a crime. He, knowing it was the government, strungthem along until they got frustrated and arrested him. In fact,a crime never occurred." Hayes claims the 10 phone tapesbelatedly turned over to him for inspection by Asst. U.S.Attorney Hatfield, will show Hayes asking the undercover agentfor his FBI phone number, joking about stripping him of his"wire," and proposing to meet for the payoff at a governmentoffice. "The evidence will show he (Hayes) was aware of who theywere," says Galbraith: "It was a game to see how far he couldtake the ruse." Adds Hayes: "At no time was my son ever atrisk."
Game? More like a war. This is a deadly seriousconfrontation between a single-minded and unorthodox former CIAcomputer spook bent on cleaning up government and a desperatelycorrupt law enforcement juggernaut. Murder for hire plots? Thereal question is who in Arkansas or the White House has beenputting out contracts on the life of Chuck Hayes, who claims hehas had to fend off or preempt at least three would-be attemptson his own life by hired killers in the past two years.
Why Hayes? Because in recent years this wily, irascibleformer intelligence operative has been a continual thorn in thegovernment's paw by catching the bureaucracy in one crookedescapade after another. He has given testimony supporting the$300 million claim by Inslaw Inc. that its PROMIS trackingsoftware was swiped by the Justice Dept. and used in a variety ofother government applications. He bought a load of usedcomputers from the U.S. Attorney's office in Lexington in 1990and found the disk drives still had recoverable witnessprotection files, along with unlicensed Microsoft and Lotusprograms. When the feds sued to shut him up, he won an $80,000settlement. Plus, he has a $1 million claim against the CustomsDept. for a 25% reward or "mordi" on delivering a huge gemseizure in 1985, for which he's never been paid. Hayes claimsthe deadbeat government is sitting on billions of dollars worthof similar mordi claims, waiting for the claimants to die orgive up.
But those are mere annoyances. What has been giving the FBIand Justice Dept. fits is Hayes' computer hacking. Nobody seemsto be able to prove it, but this retired CIA computer spook andfour fellow intelligence veterans, calling themselves the FifthColumn, have armed themselves with one or more powerful Craysupercomputers. For at least the past 5 years, they have beenhacking their way into bank, corporate and government data basesall over the world, tracking the flow of dirty money from drug,arms and other nefarious businesses into the offshore pockets ofthe world's power elite.
First they find the money. Then they steal it. Or morecorrectly, someone using the authorization codes found for those"numbered" offshore accounts has been wire-transferring dirtymoney back into escrow at the U.S. Treasury. The tax-dodgingbribe-takers are dared to come and claim it. All the proceeds goto specified government agencies -- if they clean up their ownacts. At last count, the Fifth Column's take was pushing $4billion, from almost 1,000 offshore accounts. It hasn't stoppedthere. Starting in mid-1995 in earnest, Hayes' group beganquietly delivering plain brown envelopes to high-rankinggovernment officials caught in this net, confronting them withhundreds of pages of incontrovertible bank records and otherdocuments. The choices offered were either to retire or faceexposure, prosecution, and loss of federal pension benefits.The result has been an unprecedented deluge of unexpecteddepartures from Congress and government agencies in the pastyear, many for the patently phony excuse of spending more timewith family. Both Democrats and Republicans have been nailed.Greed knows no party lines.
On top of that, Hayes is believed to be responsible forfunneling information on funny-money bank activities to foreigngovernments like Mexico, Korea, Japan and Canada to help thosecountries go after political corruption. That led the Federalesto nearly half a billion dollars in Salinas family accounts atCitibank in Switzerland, leading to a possible criminal moneylaundering investigation of the U.S.'s biggest bank. FifthColumn information has also been going to Whitewater IndependentCounsel Kenneth Starr, who is believed to have made use of itunder national security secrecy rules to help nail down theconviction of Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker. Indeed, Fifth Columnfingerprints have been all over a spate of recent scandalousrevelations, from finding thousands of FBI files illegallyuploaded to the White House Office Data Base to tipping off TheStar tabloid and even supplying the pictures for its scoop ontoe-sucking, philandering Clinton political advisor Dick Morris.
Fifth Column snooping into unusually rich spending patternsby employees at the IRS region headquarters in Covington, Ky., issaid to have led to the arrest of five workers there for sellingcrack cocaine on the job and a grand jury is said to be lookingat possible sales of IRS files to outsiders for $500 apiece.
Circumstantial evidence that a massive, secretive upheaval isgoing on in the government is plentiful, from the recordcongressional departures to wholesale post-election resignationsin the Clinton Administration, and anticipated indictments ofFirst Lady Hillary Clinton. But there is precious little hardproof that the Fifth Column even exists. About all there is arethe sparse details Hayes, its lone spokesman, chooses to reveal.There is corroboration on some key points by other intelligencesources -- too scared to be named in print. But theimplications of all this are so staggering that even cleangovernment officials in-the-know are loath to even whisper what'sgoing on. The bad guys certainly aren't talking. Themainstream press has turned a blind eye, or pooh-poohed the storyas fanciful conspiracy theory, as if whistling past its owngraveyard. And the few journalists who have gotten a whiff ofwhat's happening can't get stories into print because there areno hard documents available. Yet. That may soon change withHayes in jail. "The column is MAD," declares Hayes. "Things areabout to start popping."
Perhaps the clearest endorsement for Hayes' claims may be thesheer fact he's been jailed on such a clearly manufacturedcharge. He must be getting under SOMEbody's skin for doing morethan spreading baseless rumors. Indeed, FBI agent Kellerapparently was part of a 16-agent task force dispatched to tryand track down the Fifth Column's computer, believed to be anair-cooled Cray model packed in a nondescript semi-trailer truckwith its own generator and satellite link. As a prank, someoneprobably a friend of Hayes, put a captured bobcat in one of theteam's empty government vehicles one evening, tearing the car'sinterior to shreds. "Maybe FBI stands for Federal BobcatInvestigator," chortles Hayes.
Another of his epithets for the FBI: "Federal Bulls***Investigators." Hayes is openly contemptuous of the FBI, aperennial intramural rival of the CIA, which Hayes also says isrife with corruption. Low paid, overgrown and prone to graft,Hayes says the FBI has been easy prey for organized crime anddrug cartel infiltration. Technically, he points out, the FBIis not legally chartered and its employees are not eligible forfederal pensions, can't carry guns, and can't legally send peopleto prison for lying to them. That's because the FBI hasoutgrown its chartered parent, the DoJ. So Hayes likes to crowthat some unknown hacker last summer busted into a governmentcomputer in Oklahoma and digitally severed FBI head Louis Freehfrom his paycheck and government pension, at least temporarily.
Hayes speaks with equal disgust of the DoJ's penchant forcovering up official wrong-doing while crushing small-frylawbreakers and political enemies using intimidation, lies,coercion and the unlimited resources of the federal bureaucracy.He laughs when he tells how, a few years back one April 27(Hayes' birthday), somebody hacked into the DoJ computer andscheduled all the Washington headquarters guards for a night off.Then a green pickup pulled up to the loading dock and made offwith a truckload of sensitive computer disks. True or false,it's a great story. But he sheds real tears when he talks ofDanny Casolaro, a free-lance journalist found "suicided" in aWest Virginia motel room in 1991 while working with Hayes onexposing offshore bank accounts of high level government figures.There is considerable evidence rogue operatives connected withDoJ's Office of Special Investigations (the vaunted Nazi-hunters)may have been involved in Casolaro's death. "There's so manycrooks in the government," snarls Hayes, "It's like shootin' fishin a barrel."
Hayes should know. He has spent most of his life working forthe government -- much of it cleaning up internal corruption. Itstarted out with him flying F86 Sabrejets at the tail end of theKorean War, being shot down later over Vietnam, rising to Colonelin the Air Force, and moving into the Central Intelligence Agencyas a contract operative. In the early 1980s, Hayes was posted toBrazil, where he ran a motor home manufacturing business -- andwas instrumental in heading-off a simmering Communistinsurgency.
At various points in his career Hayes came face-to-face withthe black reality that elements of the U.S. government wereneck-deep in drug and arms running, software piracy and a raft ofother abuses. It was personal profiteering under the guise ofnational policy. Like thousands of other straight governmentworkers who stumbled onto this dirty trail, Hayes had littlepower to stop it. But he vowed one day he would deliver justiceto the well-dressed scum that were turning his beloved UnitedStates into just another narco-republic. "Vengance is mine,sayeth the Lord," Hayes quips, "But gettin' even is Chuck's." Oras the motto says on his flag-bedecked Charles Hayes Groupletterhead: "If it is to be, it is up to me." The secret to"gettin' even" came within Hayes' reach when he was assigned to alittle known team inside the CIA called Division D, or "SquadD." According to Bob Woodward's CIA book "Veil," Division Dwas "an elite group...[which] did some of the risky breaking andentering in foreign-government offices to plant eavesdroppingequipment." Some of that was done electronically by hacking intoforeign computer systems. To do that, Hayes cryptically seemsto confirm, he was trained to maintain and customize hardware andsoftware for powerful, code-busting Cray supercomputers. Allhe will officially admit, usually grinning through a haze ofcigarette smoke: "Mah gummint trained me wellll."
Indeed, a matchup of Charles Hayes vs. The FBI may not be asuneven a fight as you might think. The smart money is probablyon Hayes, who has a reputation inside the spook world forunorthodox, sometimes illegal, but usually very effective tacticsagainst great odds. Example: Legend has it he once shot hisway out of the Israeli Mossad's "Brick on the hill" headquarterswith a high-ranking wounded female defector. True story? Whoknows.
Though he comes across intentionally on the phone as a good-ol'-boy junk dealer, swilling Maker's Mark bourbon at thatsleepy little motel in the boondocks, Hayes is far from a countryrube and drinks very little. He was raised in a prominentfamily near Ashland, Ky., with interests in trucking, heavyequipment and service stations. He learned to fly as a teenagerand attended the Greenbrier military academy. That's how he gotinto Korean air combat at age 19. He attended law school inChicago, under one of many aliases, and has practiced law in TheHague, but has never taken a U.S. bar exam. His politicalacquaintances allegedly run to high levels in both parties,nationally and in Kentucky. He claims to speak Mandarin, Farsi,German, Portuguese and a few other languages. What's certainis he's fluent in Hillbilly. Socially, he has hob-nobbed withbig names in the country & western music world, as well as theKennedy clan.
Of course, if you ask the CIA, the Pentagon, or anybody inofficial Washington if they've ever heard of Chuck Hayes, all youget are denials. Or eerie silence. His skeptics brand him ablowhard and a kook. If he IS for real, he could hardly have abetter cover, surrounded by trusted fellow military andintelligence veterans in a rural hamlet where strangers areconspicuous, and very unwelcome if they still work for thegovernment. Moreover, even Hayes' most outlandish assertionsand predictions have a way of eventually proving true.
For instance, after returning from Brazil in 1985, Hayesbecame a dealer in government surplus equipment, which hasallowed him to acquire (for mere pennies on the dollar) at leastone used Cray, from the Subic Bay naval base, and the circuitboards and other hardware to build at least a couple more Cray-equivalents. Add to that batteries of disk drives, generatorsand sophisticated signal gear. This can be confirmed by pageafter page of purchase documents, court evidence and eyewitnessinspection by at least two other journalists who have seenroomsful of Cray components and other powerful computer hardware.
One of these writers is J. Orlin Grabbe (pronounced GRAY-bee), a former Wharton School finance professor and author of thecurrent standard college text on international financial markets.Grabbe is also an expert in the arcane pricing of "derivatives:"put and call options and other financial instruments for risk-hedging. He helped launch a software company (now called FNX)that is a leader in such programs. There is no BS-ing OrlinGrabbe on bank computing, money laundering or financial markets.And when Grabbe and Hayes connected in mid-1995, they quicklydeveloped a keen mutual respect. Whatever the truth aboutHayes' other adventures, the man knew wire transfers and bankcomputer security. Better make that "in"-security. Grabbe'sinvolvement in all this started when government intelligencetypes approached the predecessor of FNX to use that company as afront for covertly spying on the financial industry. As alibertarian with a healthy skepticism about government meddlingin people's bedrooms and bank accounts, Grabbe was incensed.Especially when he came to realize the feds were using any numberof similar fronts as Trojan horses into the banking world. Oneof them, he heard, was Systematics Inc., a curious Little Rockbank data processing and software firm. Now renamed AlltelInformation Services and wholly-owned by Alltel Corp. (formerlyAllied Telephone) there, Systematics had for many years beencontrolled by Arkansas' Stephens family. What made Systematicsso peculiar to Grabbe was that this small company in Arkansas,with little proprietary software of its own, had managed to landextremely sensitive back-office bank data jobs in such unlikelyplaces as Moscow, Macao , Singapore, Malasia and Pakistan, justabout the time Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. Grabbe posteda bibliography of Systematics' press releases about these dealson the Internet, hoping it would pique someone's interest.
It certainly got mine. For several months in early 1995, asa senior editor at Forbes magazine, I had been working on acomplex story involving Inslaw and its PROMIS software. One ofthe companies suspected of illegally reselling that program, aspart of a National Security Agency effort to spy on world moneyflows, or possibly to actually launder covert funds, wasSystematics. Moreover, Deputy White House Counsel Vincent W.Foster, while an attorney at the Rose Law firm, is believed tohave been a key go-between or handler for Systematics' relationswith the super-secret National Security Agency. Systematicsadamantly denied to Forbes that it had any ties to Foster or theNSA. But Washington Weekly, under a year-old Freedom ofInformation Act Request, has recently obtained documents thatclearly tie Foster to highly sensitive NSA matters in the WhiteHouse, and show sensitive NSA contracts with a Systematicsaffiliate.
The most explosive aspect of that story, later dubbed"Fostergate," was that at the time of his supposed "suicide" inJuly 1993, I had confirmed from multiple sources that Foster wasunder counter-intelligence surveillance himself. He had beensuspected of selling high-level national security codes and othersecrets to the State of Israel. How was he first discovered?The Fifth Column had found a coded Foster account at a formerunit of the Bank Ambrosiano, the Banca della Svizzera Italianain Chiaso, Switz., with nearly $3 million in it from Israelibanks. Worse, his former Rose partner Hillary Clinton wassuspected of sharing in the proceeds of that account, with orwithout knowing how the cash was generated. Forbes declined torun the story, but gave me permission to publish it elsewhere."We can't say that about Systematics (an advertizer) and we can'tsay that about Israel" I was told. Having confirmed much ofthe story from his own sources, Grabbe posted the story onseveral Internet newsgroups. It then ran in alternative monthlycalled Media Bypass, despite efforts by Systematics (and thegovernment) to squelch it with libel threats.
That began a long series of follow-up postings on theInternet by Grabbe elaborating on the murky world ofintelligence, finance, drug-money laundering and computers. Ithas gone far to explain the depth of corruption that lies beneaththe seemingly penny-ante "Whitewater" scandal and is now anamazing library of articles on his web site athttp://www.aci.net/kalliste/. In the flurry of newsgroupchatter that followed about Swiss accounts and congressionalretirements, I posted a message to explain the Fifth Column'srole in delivering resignation ultimatums as akin to the BiblicalAngel of Death at Passover. The phrase stuck and Hayes wassoon being referred to as AOD. Of course it has never referredto anything other than career death for crooked politicians.But Judge Johnson seemed to think it was threatening enough tokeep an innocent man locked up without bail.
Indeed, FBI agent Keller, in sworn testimony, claimed incourt that Grabbe was merely a pen-name for Hayes, who was reallythe author of Grabbe's taunting Sept. 18 post presaging Hayes'arrest, titled "The Dickheads are getting desperate." In that,Grabbe poked fun at the FBI, but deftly expressed growing publicconcern over the encroachment of government authority. Kellercited that as a threat of armed reaction and blamed Hayes. TheU.S. government is determined to keep Charles locked up. Just asin 1941, Chuck Hayes has suffered a Pearl Harbor. And he maysuffer another year of setbacks, like the U.S. did in thePacific. But ultimately those World War II losses were more thanreversed and a totalitarian state was eventually crushed. Whatthe Justice Department must be wondering: Does Hayes have an A-bomb ticking?
Published in the Dec. 9, 1996 Issue of The Washington WeeklyCopyright (c) 1996 The Washington Weekly http://www.federal.comDecember 9, 1996Web Page: http://www.aci.net/kalliste - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | Dianne Day Books - Golfschläger - Månedshoroskop - Diamond Jewelry - J. Van Rijs Zevenhuizen