P.R.O.M.I.S.
The story of the PROMIS software in the 1970s weaves a complex narrative of foreign double-agents, human trafficking, and murder.
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DEADLY GAME
A series of murders were allegedly committed in order to try to contain the scope of the spying.
Freelance journalist Danny Casolaro supposedly slashed his wrists in a hotel room after a source contacted him about the so-called Octopus: an international network of intelligence operatives.vi Also assassinated was Robert Maxwell, a UK-based publishing magnate, born in Czechoslovakia as Ján Hoch. The young Hoch escaped Nazi occupation and was decorated by the British military for his service to the Allies. MI6 used Maxwell (Hoch) as a front for its publishing arm, Springer-Verlag.vii
Using his contacts with Czech communists, he allegedly facilitated the export of aircraft parts to Israel, which helped the country win the Arab-Israeli War 1948. Maxwell became a Member of Parliament for the British Labour Party and was supposedly suspected by UK intelligence of being a Soviet-funded double-agent, though this appears to have been part of an MI5 smear campaign against the Labour Party.viii Israel’s intelligence agency, Mossad, supposedly inserted its own bugs into PROMIS and contracted Maxwell to distribute the rigged software.ix Maxwell died in 1991 after falling off his yacht.
The yacht, Lady Ghislaine, was named after his youngest child. In the same year as her father’s death, Ghislaine Maxwell met Jeffrey Epstein, a financier, fixer, and human-trafficker who was working for the CIA to blackmail businesspeople, intellectuals, politicians, and royalty.x Many suspect that Epstein was also working for Mossad.xi Epstein also died when details of his dark empire began to emerge: officially by suicide in 2019. Some people suspect that US, British, and/or Israeli intelligence helped Epstein and Maxwell, respectively, to fake their deaths, but there is little evidence to prove these theories. Elements of the Maxwell family continued their father’s interest in software.