by Joan Mellen
A former newscaster told Garrison that Shaw and two others had negotiated for the purchase of a closed-down nickel ore plant in Brathwaite, Louisiana. Moo Moo Sciambra interviewed Freeport vicepresident Dick Wight, who confirmed that Shaw had flown to Cuba with Ferrie; Wight had been on board. When the U.S. government financed the Braithwaite nickel plant, the deal had been checked out by Ferrie and Jack Martin, on assignment from Guy Banister.
Further confirmation came from a James J. Plaine of Houston, who was enlisted by Dick Wight in an attempt on the life of Fidel Castro. Plaine had been in New Orleans during the summer of 1963 and had in his possession a “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflet, signed “I will be up to see you soon, Lee.” In 1969, Paul A. Fabry, president of International House, sister organization of the International Trade Mart, showed a Japanese trade group a film about Freeport Sulphur. During the HSCA investigation, Gaeton Fonzi learned that David Atlee Phillips, too, had been in contact with the Freeport Sulphur people. That Freeport Sulphur was a CIA proprietary, and that Clay Shaw as a CIA operative assisted in its efforts is well documented.
After Shaw’s arrest, Jim Garrison received from Ralph Schoenman, philosopher Bertrand Russell’s secretary in London, copies of a series of articles published in an Italian newspaper of the independent left called Paese Sera. The articles had been assigned six months earlier to expose the CIA’s pernicious attempt to influence European electoral politics and to thwart the democratic process in more than one country. They focused on “Centro Mondiale Commerciale,” the world trade center in Rome, as a CIA front, one modeled, according to a 1958 State Department document, on the original CIA-created International Trade Mart in New Orleans. Paese Sera, of course, did not possess this document. Its evidence came first hand.
Centro Mondiale Commerciale was, by the U.S. government’s own admission, a CIA front, channeling money not only into legal political parties, but also into right-wing movements. Among them was the virulent paramilitary OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) in France, which employed terrorism to oppose the independence of Algeria, and was among the “most notorious fascist organizations in French history.” In New Orleans, Guy Banister and L. P. Davis had been OAS supporters.
The most notorious OAS-sponsored effort was the attempted assassination of Charles de Gaulle in 1962. Banister operative Tommy Baumler remarked that “those who killed John F. Kennedy were those who wanted to kill de Gaulle.” He was referring to the CIA, Clay Shaw, Banister, and Centro’s parent organization, PERMINDEX (Permanent Industrial Exhibition), based in Switzerland.
Having been accused of “shady speculation” by the Swiss, PERMINDEX had created the Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome, ostensibly to develop industry and trade in Italy. The Centro, however, was a trade association that rarely if ever organized an exhibit; it facilitated no commercial transactions.
CIA had, in fact, founded PERMINDEX to organize its political policymaking. In Italy, under Operation GLADIO, this had meant opposition to a coalition of socialists and communists that would have resulted in a majority government. The CIA preferred the Christian Democratic Party and so CIA Counter Intelligence chief James Angleton filtered ten million dollars of CIA money to the Christian Democrats. In Les Echos newspaper, de Gaulle named PERMINDEX as having been involved in the attempt on his life. The French, no less than the Italians, considered PERMINDEX a “subsidiary of the CIA.” Paese Sera would call PERMINDEX “a creature of the CIA . . . set up as a cover for the transfer of CIA funds in Italy for illegal political espionage activities.”
In the ranks of PERMINDEX were actual Nazis and neo-Nazis, terrorists and Mafia operatives. Typical was Prince Guterez di Spadafora, a former Mussolini undersecretary, whose son had married the daughter of Hitler’s finance minister, Hjalmar Schact, tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. The leadership of PERMINDEX included a longtime asset of CIA Deputy Director for Plans, Frank Wisner. His name was Ferenc Nagy, and he was the president of PERMINDEX. Nagy had been chairman of the Hungarian’s “People’s Party” or “Independent Party of Small Holders.” Briefly, in 1945, he had been prime minister of Hungary. But it was Nagy’s CIA history that catapulted him to the leadership of PERMINDEX. Its general secretary, Bela Kovacs, was also a CIA asset. Kovacs had been arrested by the Soviet security police and charged with spying for “a Western intelligence service.”
Nagy had been on Frank Wisner’s list of the individuals with whom his office would “have dealings in connection with our authorized activities” since September 22, 1948. Wisner then had been Assistant Director of CIA as well as “Assistant Director for Policy Coordination.” Nagy had been a “cleared contact of the International Organizations Division of the Agency,” among Wisner’s most trusted Eastern European contacts.
Nagy’s history with the CIA dates from its beginnings and links PERMINDEX with the Agency’s clandestine services. Confirming de Gaulle’s thesis that PERMINDEX funded the OAS is that Nagy was a “munificent contributor” to Jacques Soustelle, former professor at the École pratique des hautes études and former Algerian governor general. Soustelle became an OAS supporter, and his organization, Conseil national de la resistance, was all but identical to OAS. In 1960, Soustelle met in Washington, D.C., with Richard Bissell, then heading the CIA’s clandestine services. A year later, Soustelle went into exile to avoid being arrested by de Gaulle’s police. Two years after that he would be accused of colluding with OAS in the attempted assassination of de Gaulle. Soustelle had openly “advocated overthrowing de Gaulle,” while condoning OAS violence.
In New Orleans, Delphine Roberts identified Nagy from his photograph as someone she had seen at Guy Banister’s office.
Nagy’s partner in the leadership of PERMINDEX was Giorgio Mantello, a.k.a. Georges Mandel, who during World War II had traded in Jewish refugees, profiting handsomely from their misery from his perch at the consulate of El Salvador in Bern. It was Mandel who had been the official founder of PERMINDEX. CIA kept silent, but the State Department learned that, as “Georges Mandel,” Mantello had been engaged in the “wartime Jewish refugee racket” until he was expelled from Switzerland.
Although Centro Mondiale Commerciale refused to reveal the origins of its vast income, the paper trail leads to a Miami bank, Astalde Vaduz, and to the CIA front “Double-Chek.” CMC was connected as well to L. M. Bloomfield in Montreal, and to the Seligman banking family in Basel; Seligman banking in turn was allied with Sullivan and Cromwell, the law firm of CIA Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles. “My parents are very interested in PERMINDEX,” Peter Seligman-Schurch wrote to Clay Shaw.
In Switzerland, PERMINDEX soon aroused “widespread public suspicion.” Nagy and Seligman stonewalled the concerned American consulate in Bern after the Swiss complained they had “insufficient confidence in the business integrity” of PERMINDEX.
In the spring of 1958, Enrico Mantello, the vice president of PERMINDEX and brother of Giorgio, visited New Orleans. Touring the Trade Mart, he invited Clay Shaw to join the board of directors as a means of defusing the criticism of PERMINDEX; its critics by now included the State Department itself. Nagy appeared at the American Embassy in Rome to announce that he intended “to strengthen U.S. control in PERMINDEX by adding to its Board of Directors a Mr. Shaw, who is in charge of the New Orleans, Louisiana permanent exhibit.”
Nagy claimed that Shaw “had from the outset great interest in the PERMINDEX project,” and Shaw did use the term “delighted” in his cable of acceptance. He made plans to visit Italy, then canceled, despite Mantello’s urgings. When he added his PERMINDEX directorship to “Who’s Who in the South and the Southeast,” the Department of Commerce warned Shaw about “this shadowy organization.” But, as in all his CIA assignments, grateful for the career CIA made for him, Clay Shaw honored his obligation.
Internal evidence that PERMINDEX was a CIA front emerges in the fact that the CIA included PERMINDEX materials in its asset Clay Shaw’s files, three years before as well as after the Kennedy as
sassination. One of these documents, dated March 16, 1967, reveals that at the time of his arrest Clay Shaw was working with the Domestic Operations Division of the CIA’s clandestine services. This was only a seeming contradiction since the CIA’s operational component in New Orleans had resided under the umbrella of the Domestic Contact Division, at least since November 19, 1964, according to a CIA document on “Garrison and the Kennedy Assassination,” MEMORANDUM No. 8.
“Most of us consider the CIA with abhorrence,” Shaw wrote in his Diary for the record, with his customary dark laughter.
In 1962, Centro Mondiale Commerciale was expelled from Italy, ostensibly for financial malfeasance, and specious real estate dealings, but actually for subversion and illegal intelligence activity. “Who was giving money to the CMC and what was it being used for?” Paese Sera demanded. PERMINDEX relocated to a more compatible political venue, apartheid South Africa. Clay Shaw remained on its board, providing space at the Trade Mart for a permanent PERMINDEX display.
The editors of Paese Sera were astonished when their March 1967 publication date for the series on PERMINDEX coincided with the arrest of Clay Shaw. They had been working on the series for months. Now they headlined Clay Shaw’s involvement in PERMINDEX, with a subhead revealing that he had been arrested by Jim Garrison in New Orleans. Paese Sera noted that Shaw’s name had first appeared in connection with the CMC on February 14, 1962, in a Paese Sera article on the financial machinations of the organization. He had gone to Rome “during the time preceding the disbanding of the CMC,” Shaw admitted to a Paese Sera interviewer. Paese Sera wondered, too, about Shaw’s leaving the United States so soon after the assassination, remaining abroad for two years with only intermittent visits to America.
Shaw affected his customary disdain. He had agreed to be on the PERMINDEX board, he claimed, because “a young Italian came to see me in New Orleans and told me about a world trade center that was being planned in Rome.” He also told the Paese Sera interviewer that he “accepted the position in exchange for two New Orleans–Rome air tickets.” Even his closest friends were appalled. “There must have been blackmail involved—they’re very famous for that, the CIA,” Patricia Chandler says.
Jim Garrison had charged that the CIA had plotted the assassination of John F. Kennedy, for which they were aided and abetted in New Orleans by their operative, Clay Shaw. Thirty-five years later, a series of attacks on Paese Sera began to appear, accompanied by an excoriation of Jim Garrison. Among the publications sanctioning these attacks was the CIA’s own Web site, “Studies In Intelligence.” Journalist Max Holland repeated in a series of magazine articles the erroneous thesis that the only reason that Paese Sera believed that the CIA was behind PERMINDEX was that the newspaper was the victim of KGB disinformation. Jim Garrison, therefore, had connected the CIA to the Kennedy assassination and to Shaw only owing to a KGB lie.
Rather, Garrison’s attribution of the planning of the assassination to the CIA was based on his discovery of the CIA connections of Lee Harvey Oswald, and not those of Clay Shaw, an inconvenient detail Holland omits. The truth is that Garrison had focused on the CIA in December 1966 and January 1967, well before the March publication of the Paese Sera articles.
Holland was regurgitating a scenario laid down by Richard Helms. In 1961, Helms was doing damage control for the Agency by attacking European newspapers that were exposing the role of the CIA in influencing the elections in Italy, and in funding such dubious movements as the coup in Algeria designed to maintain French colonial control.
The CIA had made Paese Sera a target two years before the Kennedy assassination. Then assistant Deputy Director for Plans Helms, later to be convicted in federal court of perjury, charged, falsely, before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that Paese Sera was an outlet for Soviet Communist propaganda for daring to suggest that the attempted putsch against Charles de Gaulle by four Algerian-based generals enjoyed the support of the CIA. The fact was that Paese Sera was printing the truth. Later the Agency would accuse its old nemesis, Paese Sera, of being a Soviet conduit for disinformation fed to Jim Garrison.
Despite those denials by Helms, the New York Times itself reported that “CIA agents have recently been in touch with the anti-Gaullist generals.” The CIA had even hosted a luncheon in Washington for Jacques Soustelle. Reports had arrived from Paris that the CIA was “in touch with the insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the de Gaulle government of France.” Although Helms blamed Paese Sera, the original story had run first in France, in L’-Express. No matter, Helms accused Paese Sera of being an “outlet for disguised Soviet propaganda,” planted in Italy. Helms was obviously attempting to discredit the newspapers that dared expose CIA interference in European electoral politics.
Max Holland’s Helms-echoing attacks on Paese Sera, and his accusation that Jim Garrison was a dupe of Soviet anti-CIA propaganda, have met with outrage by the surviving Paese Sera editors. They despised the KGB and the CIA equally, they say. The Italian Communist party never made more than a token financial contribution to Paese Sera. It is “totally absurd that either the Italian or the Soviet Communist Party had any influence whatsoever in editorial policy or the political direction of the paper,” says Edo Parpalione, a staff writer at the time. Calling Paese Sera a conduit for KGB disinformation is “a conscious lie.” “Paese Sera, he says with pride, was a paper of the independent left, like La Repubblica today.”
Jean-Franco Corsini, who wrote for Paese Sera between 1964 and 1974, is also appalled by Holland’s charges. Corsini calls the false connection being made between Paese Sera and the KGB “the usual manipulation of the CIA.” As for supposed “proof” from the newly opened KGB archives, Corsini raises an eyebrow. He says he sees “no reason to trust new CIA documents any more than old KGB documents,” and hopes for the simultaneous demise of both the CIA and the KGB. “Their time will come,” he predicts, if not in his lifetime, then “in that of my children and grandchildren.” As for the Kennedy assassination itself, the writers at Paese Sera, like many Europeans, General de Gaulle not least, saw it as “an internal plot inside the United States government.”
Max Holland’s strategy of connecting Jim Garrision’s focus on CIA involvement in the assassination with KGB propaganda originates not only in Richard Helms’ false 1961 testimony. Holland is consulting another blueprint as well, a CIA document dated April 4, 1967. Titled “Countering Criticism of the Warren Report,” it is addressed to “Chief, Certain Stations and Bases” and outlines how the CIA’s media assets should respond to critics.
This document appears in fact to be aimed at one particular challenger to the Warren Commission, the one receiving national attention in New Orleans in 1967. CIA should “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critic” through “book reviews and feature articles,” CIA advises. Jim Garrison, a war hero, could not be credibly accused of “Communist sympathies,” an outworn strategy by the millennium in any case. But he might— and this is what Max Holland has done in a barrage of articles—be attacked as part of “a planned Soviet propaganda operation.”
Holland combined his CIA-authored charge that Jim Garrison was a dupe of the KGB through Paese Sera with a defense of Clay Shaw. Shaw was only one of 150,000 Americans who “volunteered information to the CIA that he routinely gathered during his frequent trips abroad,” he writes. None of Shaw’s assignments was “routine,” of course; each was initiated by the Agency.
Yet, as if they had been briefed collectively, Holland and a group of fellow writers repeat verbatim, using the same language, this falsification of the CIA career of Clay Shaw. Patricia Lambert, in a booklength attack on Jim Garrison published in 1998, writes that “Clay Shaw at one time did provide routine information to the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service,” while, she adds, QKENCHANT was “a program for routine debriefing of individuals involved in international trade,” which, of course, was not the case at all. (Emphasis added.)
Before Lambert, came a CI
A and FBI media asset, James Phelan, who wrote that Shaw had “merely been one of the many that had been routinely debriefed. . . .” Holland refers to a “devastating expose of Garrison’s sources and methods” by James Phelan. This same distortion is repeated by Helms in his autobiography, A Look Over My Shoulder, where he invokes positively both Lambert and Holland’s article on the CIA Web site.
This verbatim disinformation recalls the climax of Costa Gavras’ brilliant 1967 film Z, in which the fascist Greek colonels and the hired killers who assassinated Dr. Grigorios Lambrakis in Salonika, six months before John F. Kennedy died, are exposed in their conspiracy: on separate occasions, they utilize the identical phrase, “lithe and fierce like a tiger.”
When Jim Garrison shared the Paese Sera articles with Richard Billings, Billings discovered that “Centro Mondiale Commerciale specialized in the financing of political groups considered to be intransigent anti-communists.” Billings’ research revealed that Paese Sera was “rarely proven to be basically wrong.” When Paese Sera telephoned Garrison from Rome, he could tell them only that he had discovered that the International Trade Mart has “turned over varying sums of money to the associations of so-called Cubans in exile.” Then both he and Billings put aside the Paese Sera articles. Garrison lacked the resources to investigate in Rome. By the time he published his memoir, On the Trail of the Assassins, in the late 1980s, he had entirely forgotten when he even read the Paese Sera articles. Misremembering, he wrote that they had come to his attention only after the trial of Clay Shaw.
Garrison’s uncovering of Shaw’s CIA service alarmed the Agency. Lloyd Ray sought guidance again from Lawrence Houston. What should he do if “called upon by Mr. Garrison or any of his investigators?” Ray was authorized to refuse any requests for information, and to state that he was “under an oath of secrecy and could not discuss any official business of the Central Intelligence Agency.” Nor was the CIA pleased when on April 5th, only a few weeks after the Paese Sera articles appeared, the FBI reported to the CIA that Jim Garrison “has information that Clay Shaw has some connection with CIA.”
