Daniel Murphy

Daniel Murphy was a retired four-star Admiral who served as Elliot Richardson's Military Advisor when Richardson was Secretary of Defense under Richard Nixon. He later held two of the top U.S. intelligence posts: Deputy Director of the CIA under Gerald Ford and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence under Jimmy Carter.¹

In early 1991, INSLAW Counsel Elliot Richardson asked Murphy to review the plausibility of claims about the covert dissemination of PROMIS for intelligence-tracking applications and to give his opinion on whether the claimed intelligence uses could explain Richard Thornburgh's inexplicable failure to enforce federal criminal laws in the INSLAW case. After reading the affidavits and the INSLAW lawsuit against Thornburgh, Murphy told Richardson and Bill Hamilton that there was nothing implausible about any of the claims, including Michael Riconosciuto's claim that he had modified PROMIS for U.S. intelligence on an Indian reservation in Southern California. He also stated that the available evidence made it look like an NSA operation, and if it were, it would explain Thornburgh's behavior.¹

In 2001, Murphy told Bill Hamilton that an INSLAW summary of evidence revealed that the Justice Department began misappropriating PROMIS in 1982 for three separate intelligence projects: NSA's deployment of PROMIS to banks to track wire transfers, Israeli intelligence's sale of a trap-door version of PROMIS to foreign governments, and the CIA's deployment of PROMIS throughout the U.S. Government as standard database software for intelligence gathering. Murphy told Hamilton that the INSLAW summary eliminated any doubt about what had happened and that the INSLAW case needed to be settled. He warned Hamilton that government officials would "regard it as their patriotic duty to look INSLAW's lawyer in the eyes and lie."¹

In September 2001, Murphy, who had served as Chief of Staff to Vice President George H.W. Bush during the first term of the Reagan Administration when the PROMIS misappropriations began, told Hamilton that he had a "hunch" that there was still another use of PROMIS that INSLAW had not yet discovered, that it "involves something so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem," and that the government might never compensate INSLAW unless the company discovered that additional use of PROMIS. Admiral Murphy passed away suddenly on September 21, 2001, and Hamilton was never able to obtain clarification on his hunch.¹