Hello,
This is my first post, although I have followed this site for 2 or 3 years now.
I've also read most of Laura's books. I am so much in awe of Laura's erudition and writing ability! (and Ark - though I hardly understand a word on his Quantum website! Lol!).
I'm 22. Female. Earning my living ... and terrified, since about 16 years of age, about what seems to be approaching all of us.
OK. That's my intro. I hope I don't now go and exceed a limit on posting in a message. But, I find the whole JFK scenario so compelling and fasciniating that I though I would post Mae Brussel's (another favourite lady of mine!) full article on 'The Nazi Connection' for those who may not otherwise find it.
The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination
by Mae Brussell (from The Rebel, November 22, 1983)
1940-1945: The Nazi Connection to Dallas:General Reinhard Gehlen
The sparrow-faced man in the battle uniform of an American general clambered down the steps of the U.S. Army transport plane upon its arrival at Washington National Airport. It was August 24, 1945, two weeks after the surrender of Japan, three months after the German capitulation. The general was hustled into a van with no windows and whisked to Fort Hunt outside the capital. There he was attended by white-jacketed orderlies and, the next morning, fitted with a dark-grey business suit from one of Washington's swankiest men's stores.
General Reinhard Gehlen was ready to cut a deal. Reinhard Gehlen had been, up until the recent capitulation, Adolph Hitler's chief intelligence officer against the Soviet Union. His American captors had decked him out in one of their uniforms to deceive the Russians, who were hunting him as a war criminal. Now U.S. intelligence was going to deploy Gehlen and his network of spies against the Russians. The Cold War was on.
This is a story of how key nazis, even as the Wehrmacht was still on the offensive, anticipated military disaster and laid plans to transplant nazism, intact but disguised, in havens in the West. It is the story of how honorable men, and some not so honorable, were so blinded by the Red menace that they fell into lockstep with nazi designs. It is the story of the Odd Couple Plus One: the mob, the CIA and fanatical exiles, each with its own reason for gunning for Kennedy. It is a story that climaxes in Dallas on November 22, 1963 when John Kennedy was struck down. And it is a story with an aftermath -- America's slide to the brink of fascism. As William L. Shirer author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, put it in speaking of the excesses of the Nixon administration, "We could become the first country to go fascist through free elections."
Even Robert Ludlum would have been hard put to invent a more improbable espionage yam. In the eyes of the CIA Reinhard Gehlen was an "asset" of staggering potential. He was a professional spymaster, violently anti-Communist and, best of all, the controller of a vast underground network still in place inside Russian frontiers. His checkered past mattered not. "He's on our side and that's all that matters," chuckled Allen Dulles, a U.S. intelligence officer during the war who later headed the CIA. "Besides, one need not ask a Gehlen to one's club.
Gehlen negotiated with his American "hosts" with the cool hand of a Las Vegas gambler. When the German collapse was at hand, he had looked to the future. He lugged all his files into the Bavarian Alps and cached them at a site called, appropriately, Misery Meadows. Then he buried his Wehrmacht uniform with the embroidered eagle and swastika, donned an Alpine coat, and turned himself in to the nearest U.S. Army detachment. When the advancing Russians searched his headquarters at Zossen, all they found were empty file cabinets and litter. The deal Gehlen struck with the Americans was not, for obvious reasons, released to the Washington Post. As Heinz Hohne and Hermann Zolling phrased it in The General Was A Spy, the German general took his entire apparatus, "unpurged and without interruption, into the service of the American superpower." There is no evidence that he ever renounced the Third Reich's postwar plan, advanced by his own family's publishing house, to colonize vast regions of Eastern Russia, create a huge famine for 40,000,000, and treat the remaining 50,000,000 "racially inferior Slavs as slaves. Allen Dulles may not have invited such a man to his club, but he did the next best thing: he funneled an aggregate of $200 million in CIA funds to the Gehlen Organization as it became known. Directing operations from a fortress-like nerve center in Bavaria, Gehlen reactivated his network inside Russia. Soon, news of the first Russian jet fighter, the MiG-15, was channeled back to the West. In 1949 the general scored an espionage coup when he turned up Soviet plans for the remilitarization of East Germany.
When Dulles spoke, Gehlen listened. The CIA chief was convinced, along with his brother, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, that the "captive nations" of the Soviet bloc would rise up if given sufficient encouragement. At his behest, Gehlen recruited and trained an exile mercenary force ready to rush in without involving American units. Also at Dulles' direction, Gehlen tapped the ranks of his wartime Russian collaborators for a cadre of spies to be parachuted into the Soviet Union. Some of these spies were schooled at the CIA's clandestine base at Atsugi, Japan, where, in 1957, a young Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald was posted to the U-2 spy plane operation there.
Atsugi was only one station on Oswald's Far East intelligence route; he was also at the U-2 base at Subic Bay in the Philippines and, for a short while, at Ping-Tung. Taiwan In 1959 he was transferred to a Marine base at Santa Ana, California for instructions in radar surveillance. His training officer had graduated from the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, which had close Agency ties. In May, 1960, when President Eisenhower was planning a summit meeting with Soviet Premier Khrushchev, a U-2 was shot down over Russia and its pilot captured. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, later blamed his demise on Lee Harvey Oswald. The U-2 affair effectively sabotaged Ike's summit meeting.
In 1955, by pre-arrangement, the Gehlen Organization was transferred to the West German Government, becoming its first intelligence arm, the BND. The BND became a Siamese twin of the CIA –- a global operation. They had already worked well together, in Iran in 1953, where the country's first democratic government was in power. Two years earlier Premier Mossadegh had rashly nationalized the oil industry. Dulles, with Gehlen's help, engineered a coup that toppled Mossadegh and reestablished the Pahlevi family regime. The family patriarch, General Reza Pahlevi, had been banished from the country for his pro-nati activities during the war. Now his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, ascended the Peacock Throne. The Shah of Iran became one of the CIA's most faithful assets.
Gehlen pioneered the setting up of dummy fronts and cover companies to support his farflung covert operations. A major project was to form Eastern European emigre groups in the U.S. that could be used against the Soviets. Both the Tolstoy Foundation and the Union of Bishops of the Orthodox Church Outside Russia were funded by the CIA. When Lee and Marina Oswald arrived from the Soviet Union in June, 1962 they were befriended by some three dozen White Russians in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. Many had identifiable nazi links; others were in the oil and defense industries. It was an improbable social set for a defector to the U.S.S.R. and his wife from Minsk.
By the time the Gehlen Organization became part of the West German state, Gehlen already had his agent-in-place in the United States. He was Otto Albrecht von Bolschwing, who had been a captain in Heinrich Himmler’s dreaded SS and Adolph Eichmann's superior in Europe and Palestine. Von Bolschwing worked simultaneously for Dulles' OSS. When he entered the U.S. in February, 1954, he cleverly concealed his nazi past. He was to take over Gehlen's network not only in this country but in many corners of the globe. He became closely associated with the late Elmer Bobst of Warner-Lambert Pharmaceutical, a godfather of Richard Nixon's political career, which brought him inside Nixon's 1960 campaign for the presidency. In 1969 he showed up in California with a high-tech firm called TCI that held classified Defense Department contracts. His translator for German projects was Helene van Damme, Governor Ronald Reagan's appointments secretary. Von Damme is currently U.S. Ambassador to Austria, next door to the nazi's homeland.
In 1968 Reinhard Gehlen withdrew to his chalet in Bavaria. The chalet had been a gift from Allen Dulles
Wild Bill Donovan of the OSS, Allen Dulles and the Vatican
Allen Dulles dubbed it Operation Sunrise. He mounted it from his walk-up office in Bern, Switzerland, where, since 1942, he had maintained contact with key nazis. Operation Sunrise was conceived when these nazis decided, in the face of defeat, that they preferred to surrender to the Americans and British. The agreement, which double-crossed the Russians, was signed April 29, 1945.
The principle negotiator on the German side was SS Commander Karl Wolff, head of the Gestapo in Italy. Wolff acted with full authority, for he was formerly chief of Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. Wolff’s relationship with Dulles spared him from the dock at Nuremberg, but when it was later discovered that he had dispatched "at least" 300,000 Jews to the Treblinka death camp he was handed a token sentence. In 1983 Wolff made the social pages when he and some of his old SS buddies sojourned on the late Hermann Goering's yacht Carin II of Hamburg. The skipper was Gert Heidemann, an avowed Hamburg nazi. The yacht belonged to the widow, Emmy Goering, whose estate attorney was the celebrated Melvin Belli. Belli has always had an eclectic clientele. He represented Jack Ruby after he shot Oswald. And he represented actor Errol Flynn's family interests. Flynn (once a close friend of Ronald Reagan) has been identified as having collaborated with the Gestapo.
When Wolff hammered out the secret surrender terms with Dulles, he had in the back of his mind a safe diaspora for his nazi compatriots. This is where the OSS, William Donovan and the sovereign state of the Vatican came in. "Wild Bill" Donovan was top dog in the OSS. Shortly before the Germans overran Europe, Father Felix Morlion, a papal functionary, had set up a Vatican intelligence organization called Pro Deo in Lisbon. When the U.S. entered the war Donovan moved Morlion lock, stock and barrel to New York and opened a sizeable bank account for him to draw on. The priest founded the American Council for International Promotion of Democracy Under God, on 60th Street. In the same building is the office of William Taub, whose name popped up during the Watergate affair. Taub is well-known as a wide-ranging middleman for such powerful figures as Nixon, Howard Hughes, Aristotle Onassis and Jimmy Hoffa, and his behind-the-scenes maneuvers were invaluable to Nixon in his 1960 run at the presidency. Taub was especially close to Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviania of the Holy See, who arranged Mussolini's 1929 "donation" of $89 million to the Vatican to ensure its neutrality with Mussolini and Hitler. The money went into a special fund in the Vatican Bank, and after the war part of it was entrusted to "God's Banker" Michele Sindona for investment. Sindona channeled a good chunk of it to the Nixon campaign.
When Rome was liberated in 1944 Morlion and Pro Deo relocated there. In recognition of Donovan's good works on behalf of Pro Deo, Pope Plus XII knighted him with the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester. And before he flew off to Washington to cut his deal with the CIA, Reinhard Gehlen received the Sovereign Military Order of Malta award from the Pontiff. So did James Jesus Angleton, a Donovan operative in Rome who became the CIA's chief of counterintelligence.
For Dulles, Operation Sunset was a personal triumph, one that set in motion his rise to the top of the intelligence heap. In 1963, by virtue of that position, he became the CIA's representative on the Warren Commission.
John J. McCloy and the Chase Manhattan
President Lyndon Johnson asked John J. McCloy to serve on the Warren Commission. No less than nine presidents had called on the Wall Street lawyer for special assignments, yet he was little known to the public. McCloy said he entered the investigation "thinking there was a conspiracy," but left it convinced that Oswald acted alone. "I never saw a case that was more completely proven," he asserted.
McCloy had long been involved in the murky world of espionage, intrigue and nazis. He spent the decade of the 1930s working out of Paris. Much of his time was spent on a law case stemming from German sabotage in World War I. His investigation took him to Berlin, where he shared a box with Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. He was in contact with Rudolph Hess before the Nazi leader made a mysterious flight to England in 1941.
When the nazis occupied Europe, the banking exchanges between Britain and the U.S. on the one hand and Germany on the other carried on as usual. In Trading With the Enemy, Charles Higham documents the role of Standard Oil of New Jersey, owned by the Chase Manhattan Bank, and I.G. Farben's Sterling Products with the Bank for International Settlements. Standard Oil tankers plied the sea lanes with fuel for the nazi war machine. Prior to the war McCloy was legal counsel to Farben, the German chemical monopoly.
As an assistant secretary in the War Department during the war: (1) McCloy blocked the executions of nazi war criminals; (2) forged a pact with the Vichy Regime of pro-nazi Admiral Darlan; (3) displaced Japanese-Americans in California to internment camps; (4) refused to recommend the bombing of nazi concentration camps to spare the inmates on grounds "the cost would be out of proportion to any possible benefits;" and (5) refused Jewish refugees entry to the U.S.
When the curtain fell on the war, McCloy helped shield Klaus Barbie, the "butcher of Lyons," from the French. Barbie and other vicious dogs from Hitler's kennel were hidden out with the 370th Counter Intelligence Corps at Obergamergau. One of their keepers was Private Henry Kissinger, soon to enter Harvard as a McCloy protege.
In 1949 McCloy returned to Germany as American High Commissioner. He commuted the death sentences of a number of nazi war criminals, and gave early releases to others. One was Alfred Krupp, convicted of using slave labor in his armaments factories. Another was Hitler's financial genius, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, who subsequently went on the payroll of Aristotle Onassis.
In 1952 McCloy left a Germany that was prepared to re-arm to return to his law practice. He became president of the Chase Manhattan Bank, director of a dozen blue chip corporations, and legal counsel to the "Seven Sisters" of American oil. During this period he acquired a client, the Nobel oil firm, whose interests in Czarist Russia had been managed by the father of George de Mohrenschildt, Lee and Marina Oswald's "best friend" in Dallas.
Busy as he was McCloy found time to supervise construction of the new Pentagon building. It was nicknamed “McCloy's Folly.”
J. Edgar Hoover and Interpol
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover "mistrusted and disliked all three Kennedy brothers. President Johnson and Hoover had mutual fear and hatred for the Kennedys," wrote the late William Sullivan, for many years an assistant FBI director. Hoover hated Robert Kennedy, who as Attorney General was his boss, and feared John. In turn the President distrusted Allen Dulles, easing him out as CIA director after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle. When JFK moved to lower the oil depletion allowance, he incurred the displeasure of John McCloy, whose clients' profits would be trimmed.
Hoover, Dulles and McCloy did not belong to the Kennedy fan club. When the president was shot, Hoover controlled the field investigation, and Dulles and McCloy helped mold the final verdict of the Warren Commission.
As America stood on the threshold of World War II Hoover continued a friendly relationship with the nazis who dominated Interpol, the Berlin-based international secret police. He had been obsessed with the "Red menace" since 1919 when he became head of the Bureau's General Intelligence Division. Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Arthur Nebe and other fanatical nazis were active in Interpol. Even after Hitler occupied Czechoslovakia, Hoover ignored all evidence of nazi death squads and atrocities and cooperated with the boys in Berlin. As France fell, Hoover exchanged lists of wanted criminals, enclosing autographed photographs of himself. It was not until three days before Pearl Harbor that he called a halt -- and then only because he feared his image might be tarnished.
When the war had been imminent Roosevelt charged Hoover with ferreting out nazi spies in the Western Hemisphere. Two escaped his notice. As early as 1933 Gestapo agent Dr. Hermann Friedrick Erban recruited Errol Flynn as an intelligence source. Erban went on to become a naturalized American citizen, but never abandoned his loyalty to Hitler. Flynn went on to make "Santa Fe Trail" in 1940, co-starring with Ronald Reagan, and the two paired up for "Desperate Journey" in 1942.
George de Mohrenschildt, the Oswald's genial host in Dallas, was tagged by Hoover's FBI as a nazi spy during World War II. G-men noted that his cousin, Baron Maydell, had nazi ties, and that his uncle distributed pro-nazi films. Their suspicions were confirmed when they trailed de Mohrenschildt from New York to Corpus Christi. On October 8, 1942 a "lookout" was placed in his file in case he applied for another passport.
The parts left out of J. Edgar Hoover's investigation before and after Kennedy was killed were the nazi associations de Mohrenschildt had while working for U.S. intelligence.
George's cousin, the movie producer Baron Constantine Maydell, was one of the top German Abwehr agents in North America. Reinhard von Gehlen recruited Maydell in the post-war era to be in charge of the CIA's Russian emigre programs.
Gehlen recruited veterans of Maydell's Abwehr Group to work with East European emigre organizations inside the U.S.
Part of Lee and Marina's red carpet treatment in the U.S. started with their arrival from the USSR. Spas T. Raigkin was the ex-Secretary General of a group such as Maydell's. The AFABN, the American Friends of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, with CIA funding, assisted Lee and Marina to get settled.
J. Edgar Hoover was trained only to see if there were Communists around ...the red menace. The Abwehr, Reinhard Gehlen and Maydell were overlooked by the FBI.
After the war Interpol ostensibly cleaned up its act, moved to Paris and installed the prestigious Hoover as vice president. Yet Interpol steadfastly refused to hunt for nazi war criminals, contending it was independent of politics. The excuse appeared a bit lame when, in the 1970s, former SS officer Paul Dickopf became president.
“Sir” Charles Willoughby -- a Franco-German-American
He was a bull of a man who spoke with a German accent, wore a custom-tailored general's uniform and affected a monocle. A fellow officer in the U.S. army under his true name of Adolph Charles Weidenbach, born in Heidelberg, March 8, 1892. But by the time he became Douglas MacArthur's chief of intelligence for the war in the Pacific, he was Major General Charles A. Willoughby. Behind his back he was derisively tagged “Sir Charles.”
For a man of such Teutonic traits it was odd that Willoughby preferred his fascism with a Spanish accent. But this was an accident of geography. While serving as a military attache in Ecuador, he had received a decoration from Mussolini's government -- the Order of Saints Maurizio and Lazzaro. After delivering an impassioned paean to Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco at a lunch in Madrid, he was toasted by the secretary general of the Falangist Party, "I am happy to know a fellow Falangist and reactionary.
MacArthur's pre-war headquarters were in the Philippines, whose commerce was dominated by resident Spaniards. The Daddy Warbucks of this crowd was Andres Soriano, who owned an early-day conglomerate of airlines, mines, breweries ("Of course!") and American distributorships. During the Spanish Civil War Soriano was one of Franco's principal money-bags. When the Rising Sun flag was raised over the Philippines Soriano fled to Washington to become finance minister of the government-in-exile. But there was such a fuss over his fascist reputation that he flew off to Australia to become a colonel on MacArthur’s staff.
Willoughby accompanied the Supreme Commander to Tokyo for the occupation of Japan. His preferences remained the same; when military police shook down his hotel looking for a fugitive, they found Willoughby at dinner with the stranded Italian fascist ambassador to Japan and members of his staff. He became a heavy-handed censor, suppressing unfavorable news to the States. He delighted in falsely labeling correspondents who defied him as "Communists," a tactic Senator McCarthy would adopt with enthusiasm. But the general's priority project was a dressed-up history of the Pacific War in which MacArthur would be the towering hero. Willoughby brought in Japanese military brass for a view from the enemy side, a move that may have had an ulterior motive. The possibility existed that Willoughby was down-playing Japanese war crimes so that the perpetrators could be protected for use against the Soviets later. This was happening in Germany where the top nazis were writing the history of Malmedy. The tight security in which Willoughby wrapped the project only adds to this impression. One woman had a passkey, the wife of Dr. Mitsutaro Araki, a former exchange lecturer in Germany, who was closely tied in with high nazis in Tokyo and the Tojo clique.
Willoughby harbored another secret that only came to light last year. During the war, the Japanese conducted germ warfare experiments with human beings as guinea pigs (at least 3,000 died, including an undetermined number of captured U.S. military). The Pentagon decided that the biological research might prove handy against the Russians, and the Japanese responsible for the experiments were granted immunity from prosecution in return for their laboratory records. On December 12, 1947 the Pentagon acknowledged the "wholehearted cooperation" of Willoughby in arranging the examination of the "human pathological material which had been transferred to Japan from the biological warfare installations."
As his final public gesture to Franco, Willoughby lobbied the U.S. Congress in August, 1952 to authorize $100 million for the anti-Communist dictator's needs. Then he settled down in the U.S. to do battle with the domestic enemy. As Sir Charles and his right-wing allies saw it, Marxism wasn't the real enemy, the Liberals were.
1952: The Travels of Klaus Barbie, Evita Peron, Otto Skorzeny, and Nicola Malaxa
By 1952 Klaus Barbie had arrived in Bolivia via a stop in Argentina. He had been spirited out of Germany by the CIA, with a hand from the Vatican. Soon he teamed up with SS Major Otto Skorzeny, who now was affiliated with the CIA. Dr. Fritz Thyssen and Dr. Gustav Krupp, both beneficiaries of McCloy's amnesty, bankrolled Skorzeny from the start. Barbie and Skorzeny were soon forming death squads such as the Angels of Death in Bolivia, the Anti-Communist Alliance in Argentina, and in Spain, with Stephen Della Chiaie, the Guerrillas of Christ the King.
In 1952 the nazi, Martin Bonnann's money was released. In Argentina, Evita Peron died of cancer at age 33. In her name was deposited, in 40 Swiss banks, the nazi money. There was $100 million cash, another $40 million in diamonds. Several hundred million more were set aside with Evita's brother, Juan Duarte, as the courier. This led to three murders the following year: (1) Juan Duarte was shot to death;(2) Heinrich Dorge, an aide to Hjalmar Schacht, killed; and (3) Rudolf Feude, nazi banker who knew the locations of the money, was poisoned.
In 1952 Otto Skorzeny, who had been released from American custody in 1947, moved to Madrid. He created what is known as the International Fascista. The CIA and the Gehlen BND dispatched him to "trouble spots." On his payroll were former SS agents, French OAS terrorists and secret police from Portugal's PDID. PDID are the same initials as the Los Angeles police intelligence unit, Public Disorder Intelligence Division. The California PDID: (1) was exposed on May 24, 1983 as spying on law abiding citizens at an expense of $100,000; (2) utilizing a computerized dossier system bought by the late Representative Larry McDonald's “Western Goals.” (McDonald was a national leader of the John Birch Society, which was exceedingly active in Dallas preceding the Kennedy assassination); (3) Western Goals has offices in Germany run by Eugene Wigner that feed data to the Gehlen BND; (4) on the board of Western Goals are such Cold Warriors as Edward Teller, Admiral Thomas Moorer and Dr. Hans Senholt, once a Luftwaffe pilot.
SS Colonel Skorzeny's CIA agents participated in terror campaigns waged by Operation 40 in Guatemala, Brazil and Argentina. Skorzeny was also in charge of the Paladin mercenaries, whose cover, M.C. Inc., was a Madrid export-import firm.
Dr. Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, [formerly] of Joseph Goebbels' propaganda ministry, was M.C. operating manager. The nerve center for Skorzeny's operations was in Albufera, Spain. It was lodged in the same building as the Spanish intelligence agency SCOE under Colonel Eduardo Blanco and was also an office of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The Albufera building was the kind of intelligence nest that was duplicated in New Orleans in 1963. That summer Lee Harvey Oswald handed out pro-Castro literature stamped with the address 544 Camp Street, a commercial building. This was a blunder, because Oswald actually was under the control of an anti-Castro operation headquartered there. His controller, W. Guy Banister, was connected with military intelligence, the CIA and a section of the World Anti-Communist League that had been set up by Willoughby and his Far Pacific intelligence unit in Taiwan.
In The Great Heroin Coup, Henrik Kruger disclosed that the International Fascist was "not only the first step toward fulfilling the dream of Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid, exile Jose Lopez Rega, Juan Peron's grey eminence, and prince Justo Valerio Borghese, the Italian fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton."
A subcommittee on international operations of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee prepared a report "Latin America: Murder, Inc." that is still classified. The title repeated Lyndon Johnson's remark, three months before he died, "We were running a Murder, Inc. in the Caribbean." The report concluded: "The United States had joint operations between Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. The joint operations were known as Operation Condor. These are special teams used to carry out 'sanctions,' the killing of enemies."
Jack Anderson gave a few details in his column "Operation Condor, An Unholy Alliance" August 3, 1979: "Assassination teams are centered in Chile. This international consortium is located in Colonia Dignidad, Chile. Founded by nazis from Hitler's SS, headed by Franz Pfeiffer Richter, Adolf Hitler's 1000-year Reich may not have perished. Children are cut up in front of their parents, suspects are asphyxiated in piles of excrement or rotated to death over barbecue pits."
Otto Skorzeny code-named his assault on American soldiers in the Battle of the Bulge Operation Greif, the "Condor." He continued Condor with his post-war special teams that imposed "sanctions," meaning the assassination of enemies. Skorzeny's father-in-law was Hjalmar Schacht, president of Hitler's Reichsbank. Schacht guided Onassis' shipyards in rebuilding the German and Japanese war fleets. In 1950 Onassis signed on Lars Anderson for his whaling ships on the hunt off Antarctica and Argentina. Anderson had belonged to Vidkum Quisling's nazi collaborationist group in Norway during the war. Clay Shaw, who was charged by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison with complicity in the JFK assassination, was a close friend of Hjalmar Schacht.
In 1952 Nicola Malaxa moved from Whittler California to Argentina. Malaxa had belonged to Ottovon Bolschwing's Gestapo network, as did his associate, Viorel Trifia, who was living in Detroit. They were members of the Nazi Iron Guard in Romania, and had felt prosecution. They had one thing in common; they were friends of Richard Nixon.
Trifia had been brought to the U.S. by von Bolschwing. Malaxa had escaped from Europe with over $200 million in U.S. dollars. Upon arrival in New York he picked up another $200 million from Chase Manhattan Bank. The legal path for his entry was smoothed by the Sullivan & Cromwell law offices, the Dulles brothers firm. Undersecretary of State Adolph Berle, who had helped Nixon and star witness Whittaker Chambers convict Alger Hiss, personally testified on Malaxa's behalf before a congressional subcommittee on immigration. In 1951 Senator Nixon introduced a private bill to allow Malaxa permanent residence. Arrangements for his relocation in Whittler were made by Nixon's law office. The dummy front cover for Malaxa in Whittler was Western Tube. In 1946 Nixon had gotten a call from Herman L. Perry asking if he wanted to run for Congress against Rep. Jerry Voorhis. Perry later became president of Western Tube.
When Malaxa went to Argentina in 1952, he linked up with Juan Peron and Otto Skorzeny. Questions were raised at the time about J. Edgar Hoover, the Iron Guard, Malaxa and Vice President Nixon.
1960 Elections: Richard Nixon vs. John F. Kennedy
Before the election of 1960, a group within the Christian Right plotted to kill John Kennedy in Van Nuys, California while he was still a candidate.
The group was a meld of anti-Castro Cubans, Minutemen and home-grown nazis. Some were sought by Jim Garrison, following his arrest of Clay Shaw, for testimony before the New Orleans grand jury. When Garrison forwarded extradition papers for Edgar Eugene Bradley, a member of the group, Governor Ronald Reagan refused to sign them.
The leader of one of these groups, the Christian Defense League (CDL), was the Reverend William P. Gale. During the war Gale had been an Army colonel in the Philippines training guerilla bands. His superior officer was Willoughby. By the late 1950s Gale was recruiting veterans for his "Identity" group, which was financed by a wealthy Los Angeles man.
One of the CDL's contacts was Captain Robert K. Brown, a special forces professional from Fort Benning, Georgia. Brown was working with anti-Castro Cubans, mercenaries similar to Skorzeny's teams. Brown is now publisher of Soldier of Fortune magazine and paramilitary texts such as Silencers, Snipers, and Assassins. The book explains how Mitchell WerBell made special weapons for the CIA, Bay of Pigs assault squads and other customers. WerBell, son of a wealthy Czarist cavalry officer, perfected a silencer so effective a gun can be shot in one room and not heard in the next. It is ideal for assassinations.
There had been prolonged controversy about how many shots were fired the day Kennedy was killed. The President's wounds, nicks on the limousine and curb, and other bullet evidence indicated quite a few. But the Warren Commission concluded there were only three. It took the testimony of spectators in Dealy Plaza who said they only heard three. It never considered the possibility that silencer-fitted guns were fired.
When Clay Shaw was arrested by Jim Garrison the news was of particular interest to the Italian newspaper Paesa Sera. It followed up with a story that Shaw belonged to a cover organization in Rome named Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC). Its location was frequently moved, its presidents rotated; its modus operandi altered. CMC included Italian fascists, elements of the European paramilitary right, the CIA, and the U.S. Defense Department. There were major shareholders with banks located in Switzerland, Miami, Baser and other major cities.
CMC had been formed in 1961, one year after Kennedy was elected. Its principals had worked with fascist networks established after World War II. The board of directors numbered Ferenc Nagy, a former Hungarian premier who led that country's Anti-Communist Countrymen's Party in exile. J. Edgar Hoover brought Nagy to the United States, where there were numerous Gehlen-supported emigre organizations. On August 18, 1951, the Saturday Evening Spot pictured Nagy with Czech, Pole, Hungarian and Russian exiles under the heading: "They Want Us To Go to War Right Now." On November 22, 1963 Nagy was living in Dallas.
CMC was actually a subsidiary of Swiss-based Permindex, whose president was Prince Gutierez de Spadafora, Italian industrialist and large landowner. Spadafora's daughter-in-law was related to Hjalmar Schacht. Clay Shaw, who managed the New Orleans Intemational Trade Mart, was a director. Another was Giorgio Mantello, aka George Mandel, who would later move to New Orleans. Once convicted of "criminal activities" in Switzerland, Mantello worked closely with his fellow Hungarian Nagy. One of the goals of the CMC was that "Rome will recover once again her position as center of the civilized world."
Major L. M. Bloomfield, a veteran of the OSS who resided in Montreal, was a suspect Garrison wanted to question. In Canada he reportedly controlled Credit Suisse, Heineken's Breweries, Israel Continental Company, Grimaldo Siosa Lines and other international firms. Shaw's name was found among eleven directors of a company in Montreal that actually was based in Rome. Who was giving the virtually unlimited money to CMC, and who was getting it? The answer might have been found in the huge amounts that flowed out of Evita Peron's accounts.
Paesa Sera reported on March 4, 1967 that CMC was a creature of the CIA serving as a money conduit, and that Shaw and Bloomfield conducted illegal political espionage under its cover. In New Orleans, Shaw was the respected citizen who had helped restore the French Quarter. In Rome he was a vital member of the boards of twin companies dealing with fascists accused of European assassinations. Shaw's address book contained the private number of Principessa Marcelle Borghese, now Duchessa de Bomartao, who is related to Prince Valerio Borghese. Called the "Black Prince" and "The New Duce," Borghese was leader of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a neo-fascist syndicate. The Black Prince, who was a decorated submarine captain in the First World War, was convicted of cooperating with the nazis in WW II and given 12 years in prison.
The Black Prince is the same Borghese rescued by the CIA's James J. Angleton. No wonder Angleton was awarded the Sovereign Military Order of Malta by the Pope after the war. It might explain what Angleton was hinting at when questioned about the murder of JFK: "A mansion has many rooms; there were many things during the period; I'm not privy to who struck John."
Clay Shaw's affiliation with Permindex would plug in later to Argentina, Spain, Rome, New Orleans and Dallas. The international range of hit teams, using CIA money diverted overseas to cover companies set up by the Gehlen Organization, started coming together after Shaw's arrest.
In November, 1960 it would be Nixon versus Kennedy. Frank Sinatra introduced Judith Exner to John Kennedy on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. A few weeks later Sinatra introduced Judith Exner to Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana. So Exner became involved, as William Safire put it, in a "dual affair with the nation's most powerful mobster and the nation's most powerful political leader."
Giancana was busy with more than his love life; he was hired to form assassination teams to go after Fidel Castro. The man who retained him was Robert Maheu, a former FBI and CIA operative. It was a classic cutoff. Maheu never mentioned that the CIA was behind it. He intimated to Giancana that wealthy Cuban exiles were providing the funds. This sounded plausible, since Maheu was Howard Hughes' right-hand man.
Giancana put his Los Angeles lieutenant, Johnny Roselli, in charge of the hit squads. In 1978 when the House Select Committee questioned him, Roselli hinted that his assignment was aimed at Kennedy as well as Castro. Shortly afterward, his body was found floating in an oil drum off the Florida coast. Giancana never got a chance to testify. He was shot to death in his Chicago home.
The Howard Hughes organization, used as a cover for the kill-Castro conspiracy, (Hughes thought it was a patriotic idea) has long retained Carl Byoir Associates as its public relations arm. Throughout the war Byoir represented nazi bankers and industrialists and the I.G. Farben interests. One of his clients was Emest Schmitz, member of the I.G. Farben-Ilgner and the German American Board of Trade. His Information Services was subsidized by the nazi government. George Sylvester Viereck, editor of the German Library of Information, was also in business with Byoir. A lucrative Byoir client was the Frederick Flick Group. Flick, a Nuremberg defendant released by McCloy, was the single greatest power behind the nazi military muscle. Frederick Flick's son was close to the W.R. Grace Company, and invested over $400,000 in partnership with J. Peter Grace in the United States. During the war, WR. Grace was accused in a military report of protecting a certain nazi Colonel Brite in Bolivia. In 1951, when the CIA smuggled Barbie out of Germany, he was sent to join the same Colonel Brite. George de Mohrenschildt was a close associate of the company's founder, William Grace.
De Mohrenschildt was a man of many faces. He befriended Lee and Marina Oswald, introducing them to the White Russian community. He made phone calls to obtain Lee jobs and housing. As he told it to the Warren Commission, he was fascinated with this strange couple just out of Russia. But at the Petroleum Club in Dallas, De Mohrenschildt sang the praises of Heinrich Himmler. His travels took him all over the world on missions identified with intelligence. In 1956 he was employed by Pantepec Oil Company owned by the family of William Buckley.
De Mohrenschildt often discussed Oswald with J. Walton Moore, the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division resident in Dallas. In the spring of 1963, just after visiting the Oswalds, he went to Washington. There is a record of a phone call de Mohrenschildt made on May 7, 1963, to the Army Chief of Staff for intelligence. The same month he had a meeting in person with a member of that staff. His military connections seem to have been wide. One of the first persons de Mohrenschildt took the Oswalds to see in Dallas was retired Admiral Chester Barton.
Although De Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne testified at length before the Warren Commission, only attorney Albert Jenner and Pentagon historian Alfred Goldberg attended. One of Jenner's clients was General Dynamics, maker of the F-lll fighter that would achieve fame in Vietnam. The chief of security for General Dynamics in Dallas, Max Clark, was another De Mohrenschildt associate donating money to help Marina while George got Lee his next job in Dallas. He found one at the graphics house of Jagger-Chiles-Stovall, which held classified military contracts.
Jeanne de Mohrenschildt was originally brought to the U.S. by a family member employed by the Howard Hughes organization. In 1977 George was found fatally shot, allegedly a suicide, on the day a House Select Committee investigator came by looking for him. Jeanne consented to a press interview. She said George had been a nazi spy.
The placement de Mohrenschildt got for Oswald allowed him to visit the Sol Bloom agency at least 40 times. It was this agency that later decided the motorcade route for Kennedy's fatal visit.
Ruth Paine, whom Oswald met via George, had called Roy Truly and procured work for Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository. If Maydell and the Gehlen agents were active in the U.S. they knew all the right moves to secure their patsy.
1960: Young Americans for Freedom
President Harry Truman warned about the CIA "Gestapo" he had created.
President Eisenhower left the White House fearing the new "military-industrial complex" he handed to us.
In 1960 candidate Richard Nixon was qualified for the job of President. A lot of influential people were sure he was the only choice.
Nixon was familiar with every red scare tactic. From his first campaign against Jerry Voorhis in 1946 for the House seat, or vs. Helen Douglas in the Senate, and working with Sen. Joe McCarthy, he knew it well. The prosecution of Alger Hiss, with such flimsy evidence, proved his value alone.
But Nixon had also accumulated strong connections with members of the crime syndicate, the Vatican hierarchy, defense industries and known nazis. He knew them all.
What if he lost after those seventeen years of preparation? Would there be a back-up team for the future? Could the Pentagon or Reinhard Gehlen visualize leaving the entire United States presidency to chance elections?
Remember what happened to Senator Robert Kennedy on the eve of his primary election in June, 1968? They can't get that close to losing it again, you know. With both Kennedy's gone, Nixon finally made it.
September, 1960, two months before the elections, William F. Buckley Jr. launched his YAF, Young Americans for Freedom, from the grounds on his Connecticut estate.
Prior to that date, Buckley's career was one of the most conservative in the U.S. Following his graduation at Yale, mentor Frank Chodorov grabbed him for purposes related to his job with McCormick's Chicago Tribune.
Buckley served the CIA in Japan from 1950 to 1954.
He also did a stint with CIA in Mexico with E. Howard Hunt.
Co-founder of YAF was Douglas Caddy, whose offices were used by the CIA and Howard Hughes organization, at the time of Watergate illegal entries and other dirty tricks.
After the CIA in Japan, Buckley was ready to publish his own magazine, The National Review. This was an unusual opportunity to bring together the world's most conservative writers for publication and much propaganda accompanied by Buckley's glib innuendos.
Once the publication was going, Buckley decided to bring Young Americans for Freedom to the campus; old ideas, old money, and young minds to mold. Behind the project were always the well-funded military masters, such as the YAF's Tom Charles Huston and the Cointel-Program Nixon cooked up.
The selected advisory board for YAF was a Who's Who of oldies even then: Senator Strom Thurmond, Senator John Tower, Mr. Ronald Reagan, Professor Lev Dobriansky, General Charles Willoughby, and Mr. Robert Morris are a sample.
Robert Morris may not be a household name. But William Buckley knew him well, and Morris, Nixon, and Senator Joe McCarthy were team players. Senator Joe McCarthy's two strongest supporters for him to represent Wisconsin were Frank Seusenbrenner and Walter Harnisfeger. Both admired Adolf Hitler and made continuous trips to Germany.
Senator McCarthy obliged fast enough. Before he went after the Commies in the State Department, he had to release a few of Hitler's elite nazis lingering in the Dachau prison camp. McCarthy beat John McCloy by about three years.
In 1949, during congressional hearings on the Malmedy Massacre, the bloody Battle of the Bulge, McCarthy invited himself to take over the entire testimony. He wasn't satisfied until the prison doors flew open. The most detestable and ugly battle of World War II, an assault upon Americans and civilians in Belgium, was ignored. Hitler's precious Generals Fritz Kraemer and Sepp Dietrick, along with Hermann Priess and many others, were free.
With that business finished, McCarthy took on Robert Morris as Chief Counsel for the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. Morris' earlier training in Navy Intelligence in charge of USSR counter-intelligence and psychological warfare could be utilized well by Senator Joe. Particularly the psychological warfare part.
After McCarthy died, Morris moved to Dallas, Texas. He was a judge, and became president of Dallas University.
In 1961, a year after Buckley founded YAF, another conservative organization was formed in Munich, Germany, calling itself CUSA, Conservatism USA. These were not students, but members of the U.S. army, soon to be mustered out, then to appear in Dallas, Texas, by November 1963. The host would be Robert Morris.
A correspondence between Larry Schmidt in Dallas, to Bernie Weissman in Munich, Germany, in preparation for their arrival, was published in the Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. XVII.
Segments of the letters are as follows:
November 2, 1962: Dallas to Munich, Larry Schmidt:
"Gentlemen we got everything we wanted."
"It saved the trouble of infiltration."
"Met with Frank McGee ... (president of the Dallas Council of World Affairs.)"
"Suggest Bernie convert to Christianity and I mean it."
(Bernard Weissman, the only Jew, was brought all the way to Dallas on November 22, 1963, to lend his name to the "Wanted for Treason" fliers handed out to welcome JFK. He testified that the John Birch Society paid for the ads and "wanted a Jewish name at the bottom.")
“We must all return to the church."
“These people are religious bugs.”
"I think in terms of 300,000 members, $3,000,000.”
"The John Birch Society has a million members. Look for us to merge with them in 1964."
"Arrangements are being made for me to meet the heads of the Dallas John Birch, General Walker, and H.L. Hunt, Texas oil millionaire."
(General Walker had been retired from the military by John Kennedy for his compulsory Pro-Blud indoctrination.)
"I have already met the top editors of the Dallas Morning News, the country's most conservative newspaper.”
"These people are radicals but there is a method in their madness. You see, they're all after exactly what we're after.”
"No Liberal talk whatsoever, none."
"Down here a Negro is a nigger."
"I mean, no one is ever to say one kind word about niggers."
"Liberals are our enemies."
"The conservative isn't against the Niggers, he just wants to keep him in his place for his own good."
(Pres. John Kennedy and Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy had waged a bitter battle from Sept. 30 to Oct. 3, 1962, at the University of Mississippi. The integration of one Black student brought in the U.S. Army and caused Gen. Edwin Walker to be confined.)
January 4, 1963 Larry Schmidt to B. Weissman, Munich:
"I want big men ... believe me if I had a dozen such men I can conquer the world."
"I will go down in the history books as a great and noble man, or a tyrant."
"I expect to see you here in Dallas, especially Norman and Larry.”
"If Jim Mosely is not here by Feb. 15, he is finished."
"One thing had best be understood, I am not playing games here in Dallas and expect you not to play games in Munich."
"I am not here in Dallas for my health or because I think Dallas is a wonderful place.”
"Continue to have regular meetings and try to get things back in order in preparation for the big meetings."
End of Part 1/ Part 2 in next message
