
The following is part of what Ralph Schoenman wrote to the editor of "The Nation" by 2 March 2006 in response to Max Holland's article about Garrison, Clay Shaw, Schoenman, and the "Paese Sera" article.
Max Holland has engaged for years in propagating disinformation on behalf of the CIA concerning the investigation of its role in the official execution of John F. Kennedy. Holland’s Nation article expatiates upon his fabricated thesis that Jim Garrison’s evidence of the CIA’s role in the Kennedy murder derived from a series of articles in Paese Sera in 1967.
I sent those articles to Jim Garrison in my capacity as director of the Who Killed Kennedy? committee in London, whose members and supporters included Bertrand Russell, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Arnold Toynbee, Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck and Lord Boyd Orr. The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, of which I was then executive director, had conducted an extended investigation of the role of the CIA in fomenting and coordinating brutal repression, disappearances and assassinations, which culminated in a military putsch in Greece. Our Save Greece Now Committee unearthed concrete data regarding the role of the CIA and the Greek colonels that helped mobilize the movement for which Deputy Grigoris Lambrakis paid with his life. In the aftermath, our committee and its Greek leader, Michael Peristerakis, led a demonstration of more than 1 million that brought down the regime. [emphasis added]
CIA activity across Europe led Paese Sera to undertake a six-month investigation into the role in Italy of the CIA, with its plans for a military coup. The CIA colonels’ coup in Greece unfolded shortly after Paese Sera‘s prescient series. Prominent writers and intellectuals, including Rossana Rossanda, K.S. Karol, Lelio Basso, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, supported Paese Sera.
This investigation was entirely unrelated to events in the United States or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was fortuitous that the CIA front organizations in Italy that emerged from CIA plans to overthrow the Italian government included Centro Mondiale Commerciale and Permindex, of which Clay Shaw was a director in New Orleans.
Jim Garrison was well on the trail of Shaw and his role as a CIA handler of Lee Harvey Oswald before Paese Sera published its series of articles. When I sent them to Garrison, he had already charged Shaw in relation to the murder of Kennedy. Jim found the Paese Sera series confirmatory and important, but the articles were not admissible as evidence in court.
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My comments:
Garrison charged Shaw on the same day he arrested him, 1 March 1967.
The "Paese Sera" article was published on 4 March 1967.
Richard Billings wrote in his diary on 16 March 1967 that Garrison had received “a copy of a French newspaper (L’Humanité) article that supposedly mentions Shaw’s work in Italy.”
The "L' Humanite" article had been translated into English for Garrison and was based on the "Paese Sera" article.
Garrison met with "Saturday Evening Post" writer James Phelan in Las Vegas on 3/05/67 and told him that Shaw had masterminded a Loeb-and-Leopold-like "homosexual thrill-kill" assassination of JFK.
After he received the "L' Humanite article," Garrison changed his theory against Shaw to "He organized the assassination for the CIA!!!"