JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Tom Graves on June 13, 2025, 02:32:15 AM
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Major Vasily Mitrokhin, the KGB’s official archivist who was given the task of organizing its operations files and moving them to a new building, was supposedly so distraught by Khruschev’s 1956 anti-Stalin speech and the 1968 USSR / Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia that he hand-copied 25,000 KGB documents between 1972 and 1985, retyped them, hid them under the floorboards of his dacha, and smuggled them to the West after the fall of The Iron Curtain — and one noticed him doing it.
Really?
The documents that MI5’s official historian, Christopher Andrew, wrote about in his books The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB and The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, either repeat what we already knew or strongly suspected (e.g., Lee Harvey Oswald’s “Dear Mr. Hunt” letter was a KGB forgery, and Mark Lane was financially supported by the CPUSA) or, if new, add little to our overall understanding of The Cold War. What’s more interesting to me is what they do not mention, e.g., that Yuri Nosenko was a false-defector-in-place in Geneva in June 1962 and that MI5’s Roger Hollis was a Soviet spy. In fact, they lend “documentary support” to what KGB-influenced espionage writers like Tom Mangold and David Wise have written about those cases.
One can only wonder why.
It’s interesting to note, however, that one of Mitrokhin’s documents says a KGB “active measures” operation in 1967 involved placing an article “in a NYC newspaper.”
Hmm.
Okay, but it would have been nice if it had admitted that the article (see below) was placed in the left-leaning National Guardian on 18 March 1967, and that it referenced another article — one which the KGB had published in a Communist-owned Italian newspaper, Paese Sera, on 4 March 1967. A French-language knockoff of the Paese Sera article was published in the far-left Paris newspaper, L'Humanité. A translated copy the Paese Sera article was given to New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison by Bertrand Russell’s London secretary, Ralph Schoenman, and a copy of the L'Humanité article also made its way to him in March. These articles motivated the overly ambitious, scandal-plagued and revengeful Garrison to change his reason for having arrested Clay Shaw, a highly successful and closeted gay New Orleans businessman, on 1 March 1967 from “He masterminded the “homosexual thrill-kill assassination of JFK!” to “He organized it for the CIA!”
How did that work out, you ask?
Well, the jury returned a “not guilty” verdict in less than an hour, Garrison wrote a specious book about the case in 1988, the book’s far-left publisher, Ellen Ray, gave a copy of it to Vietnam War-traumatized Oliver Stone at a Havana film festival, and in 1991 Stone partly based his self-described mythological (“to counter the myth of the Warren Report”) pseudo-documentary, “JFK,” on it.
Which film helped to make our body politic cynical, paranoiac, and apathetic to the point that “former” KGB officer Vladimir Putin, with help from his professional St. Petersburg trolls, et al. ad nauseam, was able to install “useful idiot” (or worse) Donald J. Trump as our president in 2017 and 2025.
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Here, for your reading pleasure, is the whole GUARDIAN article. The bit about the Paese Sera article is in bolded text.
By Robert L. Allen on 18 March 1967
The complicated skein of events involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy became even more tangled with the arrest March 1 of Clay L. Shaw, described in the press as "a prominent New Orleans businessman." New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who made the arrest, contended in a search warrant that at secret meetings in September 1963, "there was an agreement and combination among Clay Shaw (alias Clay Bertrand), Lee Harvey Oswald, and David W. Ferrie and others to kill John F. Kennedy." At GUARDIAN press time, a preliminary hearing concerning this contention was in progress. Shaw said at a press conference March 2 that he had played no part in an alleged conspiracy, and he denied that he had ever met with or known Oswald or Ferrie. He said that he had never used the name "Clay Bertrand." Ferrie, a former airlines pilot and alleged homosexual, was found dead in his bed Feb. 23. Garrison called the death a suicide; a coroner attributed it to natural causes.
The GUARDIAN has received reports from Rome linking Shaw with various right-wing organizations and individuals, and possibly with the CIA. The GUARDIAN's Rome correspondent, Phyllis Rosner, quoting the Rome daily Paese Sera, reported that from 1961 till 1965 Shaw was on the board of directors of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, which the paper said was engaged in obscure dealings in Rome. Among the directors on the CMC board, said Paese Sera, were several Swiss businessmen and bankers, the ex-Hungarian Peasant Party leader Ferenc Nagy, now living in the U.S.; Prince Guitere de Spadaforo, large Italian landowner and industrialist who is related by marriage to Hitler's 'financial wizard" Hjalmar Schacht; and Dr. Enrico Mantello, who represented himself and six other shareholders, the most important being former U.S. Army Major L.M. Bloomfield, now reportedly a banker in Montreal. Bloomfield is reported to have served in the OSS (which was the predecessor of the CIA) during World War II. French newspapers have charged, the Rome daily said, that he was a generous contributor to neo-Fascist groups in France, Italy and throughout Europe. Paese Serra said it is believed that the CMC was set up by the CIA as a cover for sending funds into Italy. Into Italy it was also reported to the GUARDIAN from a source in New Orleans that Shaw was instrumental in arranging trade with Bautista’s Cuba from 1949 to 1959. For 18 years until 1965 he has served as a director of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans, an organization which was reported recently to have arranged for the first visit of a trade delegation from U.S. Southern states to South Africa.
Shaw reportedly played a part in arranging for Kennedy to speak at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22 1963 -- the date of the assassination -- a fact which to a degree determined the fatal motorcade route from the Dallas airport. The name “Clay Bertrand” figures in the report of the Warren Commission's 1964 investigation. Dean Andrews, a lawyer in the New Orleans area, testified that Oswald and several homosexuals, whom he described as quote “Mexicanos,” were sent to his law office in the summer of 1963 by a person named “Clay Bertrand.” Andrews said that Oswald wanted help in getting his dishonorable discharge from the Marines changed to an honorable discharge. Andrews told the Commission that on November 23 1963, “Bertrand” called him and asked him to go to Dallas to defend Oswald. Andrews said he was hospitalized and under sedation at the time, He said he called another New Orleans attorney, Monk Zelden, since he was unable to go to Dallas himself. The FBI could find no record of Oswald’s visit to Andrews or locate the person who allegedly called Andrews, although it did confirm that Andrews and Zelden had talked about representing Oswald. Andrews was said to have given conflicting descriptions of “Bertrand” to the FBI and the Commission, and at one point he reportedly told the FBI that “Bertrand” was a “figment of imagination.” According to Mark Lane in his book “Rush to Judgment,” Andrews said he was so hounded by FBI agents – “like the plague” -- that he told them “to write whatever they wanted in their report and to close their file on him. The agents evidently closed the file by writing that Andrews acknowledged that Bertrand did not exist, despite the fact that Andrews swore that he had never made such a statement.” Andrews also said he saw “Bertrand” only twice and that “Bertrand” “mostly a voice on the phone.” Shaw in the March 2 news conference said that he knew of Andrews but was not personally acquainted with him. Andrews was questioned by Garrison March 2. Afterward Andrews told reporters he had talked with “Bertrand” by telephone 10 or 12 times in a year. He said “Bertrand” sent boys to him for legal representation. If the defendants were unable to pay the attorney’s fee, he said “Bertrand” would. Andrew said he “didn't know” whether “Bertrand” and Shaw were the same man. The New York Post quoted him March 2 as saying he “couldn't say for sure.” The same day, Acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark said that on the basis of an investigation in November - December 1963 by the FBI, “no connection” was established between Shaw and the Kennedy assassination. The Clark statement makes it clear that Shaw was the object of an inquiry; yet Shaw's name is not mentioned in the 29 volumes of the Warren Commission Report nor in other documents in the National Archives related to the assassination. There was testimony only concerning “Clay Bertrand.” A Just Department official told reporters that his agency was convinced that “Bertrand” and Shaw were one and the same, and that this was the basis for Clark's statement. Another aspect of the New Orleans investigation involves Cuban exiles. Several exiles in Miami and one who was a prisoner in a Louisiana State prison apparently have been questioned by Garrison's investigators. A source in Garrison’s office told the New York Post March 3 that investigations had been made at two sites in the New Orleans area which reportedly had been used by the CIA to train Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. It was also reported that Oswald had been arrested with three Cubans in the summer of 1963 while distributing “Fair Play for Cuba Committee” literature. He told police and the FBI that he was a member of the New Orleans branch of Fair Play which had 35 members. No such branch, however, had been chartered by the national Fair Play -- and he apparently was the only “member.” Strangely enough, Oswald -- or a person looking very much like Oswald -- also reportedly met with anti-Castro Cubans in the summer and fall of 1963. This brings into play the “Two Oswalds” theory advanced by Harold Weisberg in his book, “Whitewash.” This theory holds that the alleged conspiracy to kill Kennedy used a false Oswald and placed him in compromising situations in order to implicate the real Oswald as the lone assassin. The allegations listed in Garrisons search warrant were based on statements obtained from a “confidential informant” who was said to have taken part in the secret meetings with Shaw in September 1963. The reliability of this informant was reportedly checked by using sodium pentothal, a so-called “truth serum.” It was expected that the identity of this informant would be revealed at the March 14 hearing. In the meantime, Shaw is free on $10,000 bail. Louisiana law provides a penalty of up to 20 years for conspiracy to murder. There is much speculation as to what will be the eventual outcome of the Garrison investigation. A special GUARDIAN correspondent writes from New Orleans: “Both federal officials and local papers, as well as Dallas officials, are trying to discredit Garrison. And to some degree, at least locally, they are successful. “Garrison is a headstrong and determined individual, and the feeling is he will not cave in. However, he might be pressured into taking the case to court prematurely, before he has time to develop his evidence and implicate all of the suspected parties.” If the establishment is not successful in intimidating and pressuring Garrison, it is possible they will try to pressure the informants and witnesses. “The question that remains is how will Garrison hurdle the jurisdictional and other barriers which prevent him from carrying the investigation to Dallas and even further?”
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My comments:
To counter the misstatements and lies in the above article, I highly suggest reading Patricia Lambert’s 1998 book, False Witness, about Jim Garrison, Dean Andrews, and Perry Russo, et al. ad nauseam.
In his 1988 memoir, Garrison said he wasn’t aware of the Paese Serra, L'Humanité, and National Guardian articles until after the 1969 trial, but Ralph Schoenman’s ex-wife, JFKA conspiracy theorist Joan Mellen, told researcher Max Holland, after conferring with Schoenman, that he had given the Paese Serra article to Garrison in 1967.
It’s interesting to note that a version of the “Clay Shaw and the CIA were involved in the JFKA” article was published in the New Orleans-States Item newspaper on 25 April 1967, and that one of the newspaper’s former editors told investigator Max Holland