'The political conspiracy of the century': Inside the hunt to expose a 'rogue' CIA plot

26 February 2024

On August 10, 1991, freelance journalist Danny Casolaro was found dead in a bathtub in a Sheraton hotel room in Martinsburg, West Virginia. Casolaro's wrists had been slit, and his death was ruled a suicide.

Casolaro, who was 44, was reportedly in Martinsburg to meet with a source for an article he was working on. The story involved what Casolaro called "The Octopus," which he believed was "the political conspiracy of the century."

The journalist's death is the focus of Netflix's new series "American Conspiracy: The Octopus Murders," produced by Mark and Jay Duplass.

Reporting on the series in the Daily Beast, journalist Nick Schager explains, "Enticing viewers with the promise of world-shattering secrets and then miring them in a thicket of debatable facts, dubious conjecture, and manic fantasy, it's an expert case of true-crime form echoing its content."

Schager, describing the series as "sprawling and convoluted," notes that although a suicide note was found after Casolaro's death, some people close to him considered his death suspicious.

"For one, Casolaro's wrists had 12 separate slash wounds that were so deep, they'd severed the tendons," Schager explains. "Moreover, there was blood all over the room, in places that made no sense if he'd simply been ending his life. Most suspicious of all, though, was the fact that just a few short weeks before his demise, Casolaro had told his brother Tony that if something happened to him, it wouldn't be an accident."

Schager continues, "Casolaro’s death, and the theory that he'd been murdered, soon became local news, since he hadn't been any old scribe. By 1991, Casolaro was knee-deep into reporting on a supposedly bombshell story about a multi-tentacled conspiracy that he referred to as 'the Octopus,' which involved software engineers, businessmen, drug dealers, gunrunners, organized crime, the CIA, FBI, NSA, and various individuals related to the Ronald Reagan White House."

Journalist Kim Masters reported on Casolaro in an article published by the Washington Post on August 30, 1991 — less than a month after his death.

Masters wrote, "What happened to Danny Casolaro? Did this freelance reporter become so disheartened in pursuit of the biggest story of his life — a story that struck even one of his best friends as improbable — that he retreated to a hotel room miles from home, got into a bathtub and slashed his arms as many as 12 times? Or was he murdered because he knew too much about a scandal that reached to the highest levels of government? Perhaps no one will ever know with any certainty.

Read the Daily Beast's full article at this link (subscription required).

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