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These seg­ments present the sto­ry of Charles Hayes, a for­mer U.S. intel­li­gence oper­a­tive whose tan­gled sto­ry con­tains a sig­nif­i­cant amount of truth and even more tan­ta­liz­ing ele­ments that have yet to be sub­stan­ti­at­ed. Hayes main­tains that he was com­mis­sioned by the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency to use a Cray super com­put­er to pen­e­trate the inter­na­tion­al bank­ing sys­tem. Dur­ing the course of this oper­a­tion, Hayes and his fel­low oper­a­tives came across a num­ber of inter­est­ing and impor­tant things (accord­ing to Hayes.) In addi­tion to uncov­er­ing mas­sive drug-relat­ed cor­rup­tion on the part of major Amer­i­can polit­i­cal fig­ures, Hayes con­tends that he learned of the pirat­ing of the PROMIS soft­ware, devel­oped by the Inslaw com­pa­ny. One of the major intel­li­gence-con­nect­ed scan­dals of the Rea­gan-Bush years, the Inslaw case involved the ille­gal dis­sem­i­na­tion of the remark­able and ver­sa­tile PROMIS to U.S. gov­ern­ment agen­cies that had not con­tract­ed for it and (alleged­ly) the traf­fick­ing of a mod­i­fied ver­sion of the soft­ware to for­eign intel­li­gence agen­cies. The mod­i­fied ver­sion per­mits U.S. intel­li­gence to access the files of agen­cies using it (includ­ing the agen­cies of gov­ern­ments friend­ly to the Unit­ed States.) Hayes also con­tends that he and sev­er­al fel­low for­mer oper­a­tives coa­lesced as a “Fifth Col­umn” that pen­e­trat­ed the secret bank accounts of drug deal­ing-con­nect­ed politi­cians, exposed their wrong­do­ing, and trans­ferred their ill-got­ten gains back into Unit­ed States gov­ern­ment accounts. Hayes alleges that he was framed on a mur­der-for-hire con­spir­a­cy in retal­i­a­tion for the work of that “Fifth Col­umn.”