Richard Babayan
Richard Babayan was a CIA contract operative and arms broker who received a reported $6 million from Earl Brian on behalf of Hadron, Inc. and who appeared in overlapping accounts of the PROMIS software scandal, October Surprise allegations, and Robert Maxwell's Australian operations.
Richard Babayan was a former arms broker and Central Intelligence Agency contract operative whose name appears across several of the major scandals investigated in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Hadron and PROMIS
Babayan was identified as a recipient of financial transfers from Earl Brian, head of the government consultancy firm Hadron, Inc. According to accounts assembled by researchers into the PROMIS scandal, Brian acted on behalf of Hadron - described as a CIA proprietary or cutout - in distributing a modified version of the PROMIS case-management software to foreign governments. Babayan reportedly received a check for approximately $6 million from Brian, an amount investigators connected to the commercialization of the PROMIS program.1
Babayan later stated that Brian played a central role in marketing PROMIS to the governments of Iraq, Libya, and Korea, with Babayan serving as an intermediary in at least some of those transactions.1
Maxwell and Australian Connection
In 1987, the flow of funds associated with PROMIS commercialization was alleged to extend to Robert Maxwell's Australian business operations. According to Ari Ben-Menashe's account, a contribution to the West Australian Labor Party passed through one of Maxwell's Australian companies and was deposited by the Pergamon Press Trust Fund in Moscow, with Babayan and Earl Brian acting on behalf of Hadron in facilitating the transaction.2
October Surprise Context
Babayan's name arose in investigators' research connected to the October Surprise allegations. He was among the Americans whose potential roles in Reagan campaign contacts with Iranian officials during the 1980 election were examined by congressional researchers and journalists covering the PROMIS cluster of cases. No formal finding established his direct involvement in the October Surprise negotiations.3
Sources
- "Dirtier than Watergate," New Statesman, April 2011. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/04/promis-government-inslaw ↩
- Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. TrineDay, 1992. ↩
- "1980 October Surprise conspiracy theory," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory ↩
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