FINAL JUDGMENT
The Missing Link in the
JFK Assassination Conspiracy
By MICHAEL COLLINS PIPER
Chapter Fourteen
The Errand Boy:
Jack Ruby Was More
"Mossad" Than "Mafia"
Jack Ruby's connections to the criminal underworld are
well-documented. However, what is almost always ignored is
Ruby's integral link to the Meyer Lansky Crime
Syndicate—not "the Mafia. And while there are occasional
references to Ruby's CIA connections, his equally profound
ties to Israeli intelligence are strictly ignored.
A complete examination of the real Jack Ruby—not the
Ruby of legend—points further toward the likelihood of
Mossad involvement in the assassination of President
Kennedy.
Organized crime historian Stephen Fox has called Dallas nightclub
operator Jack Ruby "the smoking gun, the stone, the trout in the
milk" in the JFK assassination conspiracy.442
Ironically, not only did Ruby silence Oswald and help perpetuate the
JFK assassination conspiracy and cover-up, but he also added fuel to the fire
of speculation as a consequence. Had Lee Harvey Oswald died of a heart
attack in the Dallas jail, rather than at the hands of a mob-linked thug named
Jack Ruby, suspicion of a conspiracy might not have evolved so quickly.
Yet, when Jack Ruby stepped into the public limelight and eliminated
Oswald, attention was focused on the strange background of the Chicago born
underworld figure who had killed the alleged assassin.
Ruby's criminal ties are legendary. But Jack Ruby was not—repeat not—
"Mafia." And he was more than just a "Mafia associate."
Ruby, in fact, was very much a part of the Meyer Lansky Crime
Syndicate and, what's more—the Warren Commission's conclusions
notwithstanding—was also working for Lansky's longtime collaborators in
the CIA and with Israel's Mossad (documented in detail in Chapter 8.)
The late Bernard Fensterwald, one of the leading JFK assassination
researchers, documented Ruby's Lansky connection in his encyclopedic
work, Coincidence or Conspiracy:
"Ruby told the Warren Commission on June 7, 1964 about his 1959
visit to Lewis McWillie in Havana, and also spoke of knowing
McWillie's bosses. Interestingly enough, McWillie's bosses at that time
were Meyer and Jake Lansky. Ruby mysteriously spoke of meeting two
brothers who'd owned the Tropicana Casino which McWillie managed.
Ruby said he was unsure of their last name but thought it had been Fox. It
has long been known that Meyer and Jake Lansky were in fact the two key
Tropicana owners. The Tropicana had been a cornerstone of their Cuban
holdings.
"Ruby also described 'the Fox brothers' as 'the greatest that have been
expelled from Cuba,' and said they were then living in Miami. Meyer and
Jake Lansky were known as the most prominent Syndicate men expelled by
the Castro government and were in fact then living in Miami. Ruby said he
thought one of the 'Fox brothers' first names may have been Martin.
"Ruby further testified that one of the 'Fox brothers' had later visited
him in Dallas, accompanied by Lewis McWillie. Ruby claimed that they
had dined at the Dallas airport together. Ruby further testified that Fox and
McWillie had also subsequently dropped by his nightclub, where they posed
for photographs with him. Ruby later took the photos with him when he
visited McWillie in Cuba:
"'Evidently the Foxes were in exile at that time, because when I went
to visit McWillie . . . [Cuban officials] looked through my luggage and
they saw a photograph of Mr. Fox and his wife.
"'They didn't interrogate but they went through everything and held me
up for hours . . . Evidently in my ignorance I didn't realize I was bringing a
picture [of someone] they knew was a bitter enemy." 443
There is some question, however, as to whether or not the "Fox
brothers" were, in fact, the Lansky brothers. Ruby biographer Seth Kantor
notes that there were brothers named Martin and Pedro Fox who were Cuban
nationals and involved in the Tropicana. (Nonetheless, the Tropicana was
owned by the Lansky brothers.)
Kantor writes: "The significance of all this marching up and down the
hill about the Fox brothers is that Ruby was a rational man at the time of
the Warren Commission's June 7, 1964 interview with him. He was telling
them the truth, and begged to be taken out of Texas so he could tell them
more. But no one listened, on one of the sorriest days in the Warren
Commission's history.” 444
It is interesting to note that at the time of the JFK assassination
Ruby's good friend McWillie was working at the Thunderbird Hotel in Las
Vegas, owned in part by Meyer Lansky and his brother Jake. As Peter Dale
Scott succinctly summarizes it: "In other words, McWillie was working for
the Lanskys when Ruby made seven phone calls to him in 1963.” 445 These
were among the phone calls made to organized crime-related figures that
authors David Scheim and John W. Davis and G. Robert Blakey have used
to promote the theory that "The Mafia Killed JFK."
Ruby did indeed call some seven or eight mob-linked individuals in the
period just before the JFK assassination, but, according to Peter Dale Scott,
"only one of these was Italian."446 Yet, as Scott points out, Blakey's House
Assassinations Committee preferred to cast Ruby as a "Mafia" figure and to
ignore his positioning in the Lansky sphere. "Only from officials," Scott
notes wryly, "can logic like this be encountered."447 In general Scott
describes this as a form of "conscious bias, or what might be called
contrived bias, the purpose of which is to deceive others." 448
Whatever the direct link between Lansky and Ruby in this regard,
however, JFK assassination researcher Jim Marrs states flatly that Ruby had a share in a gambling house in Hallandale, Florida along with Meyer and
Jake Lansky, among others, in the early 1950's. 449
There is no doubt that Ruby and Lansky's world of intrigue intersected in several arenas, as we shall see, whether the two actually ever were personally acquainted or not.
According to Scott: "It is certain that Ruby was investigated in the
mid-1940's for his role in an international drug-trafficking syndicate,
involving corruption of government officials in Mexico City." 450 The top
syndicate representative in Mexico City was one Harold "Happy" Meltzer,
but, in fact, it was Meyer Lansky who was "the key figure in the Meltzer
syndicate.” 451 According to Scott, "Right after World War II this was
probably the biggest drug-smuggling channel into the United States." 452
The House Assassinations Committee, in Scott's judgment, failed to note that "Ruby was in some way an important figure"453 in the linkage between organized crime and the political arena in Dallas and "on a federal level."454 Ruby, in short, was no mere mob hanger-on as some have tried to suggest and he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, part of "the Mafia" as G. Robert Blakey and some others have suggested.
According to Scott, these descriptions of organized crime "are bureaucratically distorted to the point of falsehood . . . and that this distortion involved systematic distortion of the facts, not just about Ruby, but about other aspects of the Kennedy assassination." 456
In Scott's assessment, the House Assassinations Committee investigation of Jack Ruby omitted any reference to what he delicately describes as "the ongoing, drug-fueled, intelligence -mob connection" 457 what we, in the pages of Final Judgment, more correctly and precisely call the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
As Scott has concluded (and rightly so): "The so-called Cosa Nostra has been systematically misrepresented by law enforcement investigators and prosecutors. For this active misrepresentation has deformed the two official investigations into the Kennedy assassination itself, not in marginal ways, but so as to conceal central truths about the assassination, truths that were embarrassing to those conducting the investigation.
"In the end one comes to recognize that the history of organized crime and the history of the investigation and prosecution of organized crime are closely intertwined processes affecting one another. Processes, one must add, which mutually affect the truth, but concealed, seats of political power in this country.” 458
"To sum up: official investigations of the Kennedy assassination have failed, not because the case is inherently insoluble, but because both the case and the investigations have been governed by deeper political processes, which have not yet been discerned." 459
In short, Jack Ruby was not a "Mafia” hireling, but, instead, a key point man in Dallas for the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate and, ultimately, as Stephen Fox has said, "the smoking gun, the Rosetta stone, the trout in the milk" in the JFK assassination conspiracy. The deeper political processes of which Peter Dale Scott has noted "have not yet been discerned" are now, however, in the pages of Final Judgment, being bared for the first time.
Now although Jack Ruby was long known to be proud of his Jewish
heritage, what is little known is that Ruby himself had an intimate
connection with an individual with deep ties to the world of intelligence and
to the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. This was Ruby's "longtime
associate and former lawyer,” 460 Luis Kutner of Chicago, who had
represented Ruby when Ruby was called before the staff of the Kefauver
Senate Rackets Committee in 1950 to discuss underworld activities in his
former home base of Chicago. According to Kutner, Ruby's offer was
contingent upon the condition that the Kefauver Committee stay away from
investigating organized crime in Dallas where Ruby was by then ensconced.
Peter Dale Scott notes that "The performance of the Kefauver Committee
would seem to corroborate Kutner's claim, for the Committee did give
Dallas a clean bill of health."461
Although a "mob lawyer,” it seems, Kutner did have additional interesting connections. According to Scott, "Kutner, by his own account, had known Ruby since 1936, when he had used Ruby to 'run errands' in his unsuccessful 1936 congressional campaign. Later Kutner had inserted himself into what can only be described as international intelligence operations, ranging from Latin American coups to the defense of ousted Congolese leader Moise Tshombe."462
But Kutner was himself also active in efforts to advance the interests of
Israel. He was among a host of people who formed the Center for Global Security, Inc., which he served as "honorary counsel." Serving as "honorary
chairman" of this pro-Israel lobbying group was General Julius Klein, an
American military figure who not only played a major role in supplying
weapons to the Israeli Haganah underground prior to the establishment of
Israel, but also assisted in the founding and training of the Israeli Mossad.
Clearly, Jack Ruby's friend and lawyer, Kutner, was a man with important ties to Israel and its global power networks. So, what Peter Dale Scott says regarding Ruby's association with Kutner is not an overstatement: "Kutner's involvement with Ruby confirms that Ruby should not just be thought of as a man with local influence with the Dallas police, but as a player in international deep politics." 463
Yet, when G. Robert Blakey and the House Assassinations Committee were looking into Ruby's connections and when Blakey later wrote about his findings, Blakey never once mentioned Kutner—a significant Ruby connection, particularly in light of what we have already outlined—and will examine further—in the pages of Final Judgment. 464
In addition, citing FBI documents, Weberman notes that Lawrence Meyers, Ruby's long-time friend with whom he met at the Cabana Motel the night before the JFK assassination was a salesman for Ero Manufacturing. The FBI determined that calls were made from Ero to a corporation investigated for illegal arms shipments to Israel.466
There is, in fact, evidence of other Ruby connections to Israel at the time of the JFK assassination itself. It is well known that while Ruby was milling about the Dallas Police Department after the assassination that Ruby claimed to be translating for Israeli "reporters" who were on the scene.
This is interesting, obviously, in that it seems unlikely that Israeli correspondents in the United States would have English capabilities so lacking they required the services of a Dallas strip club operator.
While Ruby's association with these Israeli reporters may have been completely innocent, what is interesting is that neither the Warren Commission nor any enterprising JFK researchers (many of whom look askance at Final Judgment) never tracked down these reporters. Why not?
At one conference of JFK assassination researchers one attendee created a bit of a stir when he asked if anyone had ever determined precisely which Israeli newspapers Jack Ruby was translating for and whether anyone ever interviewed those reporters to find out what Ruby may have said to them in those critical hours while Ruby was stalking Oswald.
The answer that the master of ceremonies, researcher Walt Brown, gave was revealing in its own fashion. Brown said—in words to this effect— "That may be the most important question asked at this conference." 467
What may, in the end, be most telling about Ruby's Mossad connections came out as late as 2003 when William F. Pepper, longtime attorney for Martin Luther King's alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, published his book An Act of State.
In that book Pepper asserted that in 1963 Ruby was involved in an international arms smuggling operation based in part in Texas—which involved "a senior Mossad agent working in South America who acted as a senior liaison to the U.S. military and CIA."' 468
Perhaps not surprisingly, Pepper did not elaborate on the Mossad connection. However, Pepper's circumspect reference to the Mossad was a lightning bolt of recall to anyone who had already read Final Judgment.
Pepper's assertion involving the Mossad link to the arms smuggling operation involving Ruby is based on statements made to one of Pepper's investigators by former Colonel John Downie of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, a unit based inside the Department of Defense.
According to Downie, the mysterious figure "Raul"—whom King's accused assassin, James Earl Ray, claimed had helped frame him (Ray) for King's murder—was part of a U.S.-based international arms smuggling operation that Pepper had already determined—through other sources— involved Jack Ruby.
The link between "Raul" and Ruby was by no means tenuous: "Raul" and Ruby were placed together by Pepper's sources on numerous occasions prior to the JFK assassination—five years before King's murder. 469
The smuggling operation utilized weapons stolen from U.S. Army bases and armories which were delivered to the New Orleans-based Carlos Marcello organized crime organization which, in turn, delivered those arms for sale in Latin and South America and elsewhere. The proceeds from the arms deals were reportedly split equally with the U.S. 902nd Military Intelligence Group using its cut for financing covert, off-budget, operations.
It appears the previously published Final Judgment had almost certainly
already pinpointed the identity of the individual described by Pepper's
source. In the photo section of Final Judgment, it is pointed out that the
famous "umbrella man" who was photographed in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on
Nov. 22, 1963 bore a remarkable resemblance to no less than the now infamous
(but then shadowy) longtime Mossad figure, Michael Harari.
In 1963, Harari was in the field as a top Mossad's assassinations specialist and would have assuredly been in Dallas if the Mossad was a prime player in the JFK conspiracy. In addition, the published record documents that—throughout his career—Harari was heavily involved in Israeli intelligence operations in Mexico, South America and the Caribbean, culminating in his later more widely-publicized role as the top adviser to then-Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega who was ultimately topped in a U.S. invasion. Was Harari, then, the "senior Mossad agent working in South America" referenced by Pepper's U.S. military source? If not, it was certainly someone Harari worked with.
That Jack Ruby—who was part of the Mossad-connected smuggling operation uncovered by Pepper had multiple Mossad and Israeli connections is no surprise to those who had already read Final Judgment (Later, in the question-and-answer section of Final Judgment, we will explore further strange Israeli connections to the Martin Luther King affair— details that have been deliberately otherwise suppressed.)
Jack Ruby's covert activities were clearly well-established. But
independent researcher Brian Downing Quig came up with a Ruby
connection that had never before been revealed. Exploring the corrupt world
of Arizona mob bagman and political boss Kemper Marley, linked to the
infamous 1976 murder of investigative reporter Don Bolles, Quig learned
from Marley's longtime publicist Al Lizanetz that not only had the Lansky linked
Bronfman bootlegging family been Marley's sponsors, but also that
Jack Ruby himself was also on the Bronfman family's payroll. 470
So when we consider the Bronfman family's intimate ties to the Permindex entity (that, as we shall see in Chapter 15, clearly played a central role in the JFK conspiracy) the Ruby connection to the Bronfman family is interesting indeed and does point further to an Israeli connection.
All of the evidence of Ruby's gun-running, both to Castro himself and,
ultimately to anti-Castro Cuban exiles, has been explored relentlessly, and
in detail, by JFK assassination researchers. But his Lansky connection has
been repeatedly ignored. Former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow reports
that Ruby's pro-Castro gun-running was done in conjunction with former
Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras. (Prio, also, had a long history of
close association with Meyer Lansky, as we saw in Chapter 7 and Chapter
11, having received lucrative Lansky pay-offs.)
According to Morrow: "With the blessing of the syndicate and the guidance of the CIA, Prio made his deal with Castro, arranging for the Mafia (which was also supporting Batista) to supply the necessary arms and finances to make Castro's revolution successful—on the condition that Fidel would reinstate him as president once Batista was overthrown. Castro agreed, and Prio turned into a high-class gun-runner. One of his partners would be Jack Ruby of Dallas, Texas, then known as Jack Rubinstein. This is supported by a Miami FBI informant named Blaney Mack Johnson who claimed Ruby supplied arms for Castro through Prio, that he had seen Ruby around a private airport, and had known Ruby to run guns by boat. There are others who confirm that Ruby was in the gunrunning business in Florida during the late 1950's. One was Eladio del Valle, a former Cuban congressman and a good friend of Mario Kohly . . .” 471
The aforementioned Kohly was one of the primary leaders of the Cuban exiles who turned against Castro after the Cuban dictator turned the tables on his previous allies in the Lansky Crime Syndicate which helped bring Castro to power (as we documented in Chapter 7). Kohly himself subsequently turned to Meyer Lansky for support and offered to return his casino rights if he, Kohly, were able to assume power in Cuba after Castro was removed. 472 Thus it was that Jack Ruby was an important errand boy in the strange pro- and anti-Castro dealings of both the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate. Nonetheless, there is clearly more to the story of Jack Ruby that needs to be explored.
A bullet was fired through Walker's window, although the general, a dedicated anti-communist and Castro critic, was unharmed. However, there is some debate among assassination researchers as to what role Oswald did play—if any—in the shooting at the Walker residence. This is yet another of the many unanswered questions surrounding the JFK mystery.
At any rate, according to Henshaw's account, a secret police investigation of the shooting linked Oswald and Ruby to the incident. Then, according to Henshaw, a high-ranking FBI official was asked by a top official in the Justice Department to intervene and stop the impending arrest of the two Dallas operatives. Henshaw said that it was the CIA itself that had asked the FBI to intervene. According to Henshaw, the CIA was using Ruby to recruit Dallas men into the anti-Castro movement. However, the FBI official refused to intervene, saying it would be obstructing justice.
The FBI official did say, though, that he would make the request only if he were formally directed to do so in a written communication signed by the Justice Department official. Shortly thereafter, according to Henshaw's account, the FBI official then received a signed directive. He contacted Dallas police and urged them not to arrest Oswald and Ruby.
But the Dallas police also wanted an official signed communication. Thereupon the Justice Department sent the communication to Dallas Police Chief Curry asking that Oswald and Ruby be left strictly alone. Justice explained it didn't want Oswald and Ruby arrested because of "reasons of state" and that the department was making the request on the CIA's behalf. 473 Henshaw's account is yet another of the significant reports which point in the direction of undisclosed covert activities by both Ruby and Oswald together, being carried out under the direction of the CIA.
Henshaw also wrote that Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr was being kept under surveillance by the FBI because he had undisclosed evidence: "The evidence includes a copy of the missing film taken moments before Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. The film covers Ruby's progress through the FBI and police screens guarding the entrance of the Dallas Police headquarters. Two cameramen had been assigned by a Dallas TV station to cover the entrance, but were ordered by federal agents to knock off film footage which showed a high official of the Justice Department escorting [Ruby] through the two security screens."474 According to Henshaw, high-level federal pressure stopped Carr's investigation after it was learned that he had an uncut copy of the entire film. He allegedly kept a copy for himself.
There is evidence of other possible contact between Ruby and Oswald— even in New Orleans. This evidence has never been published to this author's knowledge.
This author received access to a private letter written on February 20, 1967 during the controversy over New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's inquiry into the assassination. The author of the letter described the fears of his aunt, a New Orleans woman, who was a neighbor of Lee Harvey Oswald's during his sojourn in the Crescent City. "She is terrified to the point that she will not cooperate," he said. "She stated that her fear was based upon the possibility that 'Garrison would get me for withholding evidence' and the possibility that 'someone will put a bullet in my back.'
"She made the following points to me: (1) She observed Oswald having visitors three times (a) two "Cuban looking" men visited him twice and (b) a man and woman came and picked up Oswald one weekend. 'This man had the same profile as pictures of Ruby,' she said. 'Every time I see a picture of Ruby, this visitor of Oswald pops into my mind, but I am afraid to say anything about it. I could not swear that it was Ruby, but I couldn't swear that it wasn't.'"475 Ruby apparently did visit New Orleans during the time Oswald was there, ostensibly trying to find a stripper for his club. Could it be the woman seen with the Ruby-look-alike was one of these strippers?
That Jack Ruby did indeed have ties to both the Lansky Syndicate and to the CIA involving Cuba is, today, not in doubt. However, during the period of the Warren Commission investigation, the official government "investigation" preferred to look the other way. According to Ruby biographer, Seth Kantor:
"After the Ruby trial ended, Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin, the Warren Commission's two Ruby experts, tried to convince Commission members in memorandums on March 19 and April 1, 1964, that there was "substantial evidence" showing Jack Ruby had maintained unexplained Cuban associations. But the efforts of Hubert and Griffin were blocked by the CIA and discouraged by others on the Commission staff." 476
Kantor suggests that "Ruby and Oswald probably didn't know each other; yet both could have been used as separate parts of a conspiracy to commit murder in Dallas on the weekend of November 22-24, 1963. Oswald on Friday. Ruby on Sunday. Two men separately manipulated by the same power. After they were arrested and jailed, both men said they had been manipulated. 'I'm a patsy,' said Oswald. 'I've been used for a purpose,' said Ruby. 477
Despite Kantor's observations to the contrary, we have seen evidence (in Chapter 11, for example) that Ruby did almost assuredly know Lee Harvey Oswald and that Ruby did indeed participate in matters relating to the assassination. Whether Ruby—and Oswald—did, in fact, know that the assassination of Kennedy was in planning is another story.
When Milan asked who set up the shooting, Brinkman said, "I never met the guy before I was introduced to him by this broad at [Jack Ruby's] Carousel Club. And I didn't shoot nobody. There was me and two other guys. We weren't even after the president. We were supposed to shoot the governor, but things happened too fast. They were gone before anybody did anything. I think there were two other guys doin' what I was supposed to do. But I don't know who they are or where they was when the shooting started. We was just supposed to shoot at the governor when they passed and get out of there. That's all. But nuthin' happened. I mean, everything happened and I just got outta there fast." 478
Milan completed his assignment and killed Brinkman. When he returned to Washington he was met at the airport, he says, by Hoover who said, "You already know too much. So I'll just say: Johnson. No doubt. We stand away. Do you get it?" 479
Is it conceivable, perhaps, that Jack Ruby was not consciously involved in a plot that he believed was aimed at John F. Kennedy, but at John B. Connally instead? Can the same thing be said for Oswald? Is it possible that the two men were being manipulated as part of an even bigger conspiracy that they knew nothing about? This is all speculation, but it is something to consider.
The Lansky connection to Ruby's role in the JFK assassination conspiracy and cover-up goes much deeper than we have explored thus far.
David Scheim, writing in Contract on America, provides his readers a lengthy discussion of Braden, but never once mentions his connection with Lansky. Scheim prefers to leave the reader with the impression that Braden was a "Mafia" courier—not a Lansky courier. 480
Even G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings (Scheim's chief source) acknowledge in their own book that Braden was, reportedly, a "personal courier" for Lansky. "In the end," say Blakey and Billings, "we reached no firm judgment on Braden's mob connections or on whether his activities in Dallas were in any way related to the assassination." 481
What Blakey does not mention, however, is that Braden was so much a key figure in the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate that he was a charter member of the Lansky Syndicate-financed La Costa Country Club. In Chapter 10, as we have seen, it was Blakey who was on the payroll of Lansky associate, Morris Dalitz,one of the founders of La Costa, after Dalitz and his partners sued Penthouse magazine for publicizing the mob links of the Carlsbad, California resort. Blakey, in fact, served, in effect, as a character reference for the Lansky Syndicate defending the resort against the accusations—something Blakey, for obvious reasons, would not be inclined to brag about when proclaiming himself a crime-buster.
"Braden was also staying at the Cabana Motel in Dallas—a reported "mob hang-out" that was frequented by Jack Ruby and various Ruby associates. Ruby visited the Cabana Motel sometime around midnight on the night before the assassination—November 21, 1963—while Jim Braden was a guest there. Braden also has a possible connection to the late David Ferrie. According to information documented by Peter Noyes, Braden worked out of an office suite—Room 1701—in the Pere Marquette Building in New Orleans in the fall of 1963, in the weeks immediately preceding the assassination. During this same period in late 1963, David Ferrie was working for Mafia leader Carlos Marcello on the same floor . . . in the same building . . . just down the hall from Braden—in Room 1707. 482
[Fensterwald notes further that Noyes has found additional evidence that Braden once listed his address as Room 1706—right next to Ferrie! In Chapter 11 we examined the role of CIA contract agent David Ferrie and his connection to the JFK assassination conspiracy in some detail. The evidence cited by Fensterwald only draws the circle more closely.)
That one of Meyer Lansky's chief couriers would be in Dallas and moving in Ruby's sphere of operations is evidence that the fine hand of Meyer Lansky himself was in motion in Dallas and, more than likely, this is a direct link between Lansky and Ruby.
According to Lansky's West Coast henchman, Mickey Cohen (Ruby's role model) couriers such as Braden were very important in the Lansky Syndicate: "Important messages never came by phone. Anything to do with a hit, a gambling operation, to go somewhere or to see somebody, was by courier. See, we worried about wiretaps thirty years ago. Even money was only transacted person to person. If anybody had money coming or going, you put a man on a plane." 483
Another Lansky associate, Michael Milan, has also written of the importance of mob couriers and the need for secrecy. "Whenever he came to a sitdown, Mr. Lansky always had his percentage figured out in advance. He kept it all in his head, too." 484
There is evidence, however, that Ruby and Braden did indeed have a very close connection. Lansky's courier Jim Braden was also a "friend"485 of Lansky's Mexico City representative, "Happy" Meltzer," whom we met earlier in this chapter as the head of a drug-smuggling operation in which Ruby was evidently involved.
Obviously, Lansky's courier, Jim Braden, may have indeed been bringing a message from Lansky to Ruby. But whatever his role in Dallas, there's no question but that he was there for a purpose. This was not a case of coincidence, but indeed, conspiracy. All of this, taken together, suggests, as we have said, that the Lansky-Ruby connection is much deeper than might be perceived and far more than some "crime solvers" would have us realize. What is especially interesting, further, is an additional Lansky connection to Ruby that surfaced after the assassination of JFK and after the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Belli and Cohen had known each other for years. In fact, Belli was a regular at the Los Angeles nightspot, Rondelli's, of which Cohen was the secret owner. And, as we've noted, he was also Cohen's lawyer.
The two were so close that Belli even once had Cohen introduced as "Professor O'Brien from Harvard who's going to give you a talk on tax laws," 486 to a meeting of the American Bar Association in Miami.
According to Cohen, writing in his memoirs, the Los Angeles mobster assumed the platform and then began rattling on for some time, essentially saying nothing. He then concluded, "My advice to all of ya is to be sure to pay your goddamn taxes right to the letter."487
Blakey and Billings, in The Plot to Kill the President, addressed the circumstances in which the Lansky henchman's attorney came to represent Jack Ruby:
"How Melvin Belli, a nationally known trial lawyer, was brought in to handle the Ruby defense was a matter of some dispute. We heard a report that Seymour Ellison, a lawyer associated with Belli, got a phone call from `a Las Vegas attorney' who said, 'Sy, one of our guys just bumped off the son of a bitch that gunned down the President. We can't move in to handle it, but there's a million bucks for Mel if he'll take it.'
"Ellison confirmed to us that he received the phone call, but he said he did not remember the name of the Las Vegas attorney and nothing developed from the call. Belli told us a different story. He said Earl Ruby came to California three days after his brother was arrested; he watched Belli sum up a murder defense in a Los Angeles courtroom and he asked him to take the case.
"Belli said he declined at first. He had learned that his fee would be paid by the sale of Ruby's story to newspapers, and he did not care to be involved in that sort of exploitation. Nevertheless, Earl Ruby talked him into it, Belli told us, and he took the case with five goals in mind: to save Jack Ruby; to strengthen the law; to show that current legal tests for insanity were inadequate; to wed modern law to modern science; and to help Dallas 'solve its problem.'" 488
Interestingly, Blakey and Billings report further that Ruby's brother Earl had told yet another version of the "official" story. They also make passing reference to the Ruby-Cohen relationship.
Noting that "Ruby liked to tell friends that he knew Mickey Cohen," they concluded: "We could not be certain just how well Ruby knew Cohen, who also grew up in Chicago, but he admired him and tried to emulate him." 489 As far as Belli's decision to defend Ruby, Blakey and Billings said: "We found it difficult to believe that Belli did not receive a substantial fee for his defense of Ruby." 490 The two also noted that “We considered the possibility that Belli went to Mexico to pick up a fee for the Ruby defense, but we found no proof that he did." 491
Whatever the case, Belli's defense of Ruby failed. Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death. Ruby's family formally fired Belli as Ruby's attorney. But Ruby's death was announced just shortly before he was scheduled to be retried for his murder of the alleged assassin. As a consequence, any final determination of just what role Ruby played in the JFK assassination scenario became another mystery in an endless series of mysteries. Jack Ruby could never tell what he knew.
This was not the end of Melvin Belli's role in the JFK controversy, however. As pioneer JFK assassination investigator Mark Lane noted in his second book on the assassination, A Citizen's Dissent, Belli emerged as one of the leading defenders of the official Warren Commission version of the assassination.
According to Lane, ABC-TV's Les Crane show wanted to stage a debate between Lane and Belli. "I was less sanguine, for, although I was confident in my knowledge of the facts, Belli's almost legendary oratorical accomplishments had preceded him to the East coast."492
Lane points out that he subsequently received a call from the producer telling him that the debate was canceled. According to the producer: "It's the ABC brass. They have just said no. Period. They say you have the facts and the affidavits and that would just confuse the audience."493 But the show itself was not, in fact, canceled—only the debate between the well-informed Lane and Belli.
"It's just that we can't have you on." Lane was told. "There's going to be a debate anyway. We're getting Oswald's mother."494 Lane summarized the situation in this way: "And so it came to pass that the first network broadcast presenting both sides of the controversy found splendiferous Melvin Belli, conqueror of a thousand juries, opposed by a poorly educated widow. Mrs. Oswald's visceral responses were meritorious, but her lack of command over the facts, together with Belli's bully tactics, reduced the program to the low level of entertainment that the network apparently sought." 495
After some negotiations, Belli finally agreed to debate on stage under one condition--that both wear tuxedo's. There would be three debates. It was during the first debate, in San Francisco, that Belli came on stage, wearing a cape over his tuxedo, and in his concluding remarks made his final judgment on the JFK assassination conspiracy. He declared "If we cannot trust the FBI, the CIA and Earl Warren, then God pity us." 496
However, the Establishment media did not see fit to publicize the circumstances of this debate, despite the fact, as Lane points out, that Belli himself is somewhat of a celebrity. As Lane noted: "In San Francisco, if Belli's office is burglarized or if he agrees to represent a topless dancer, he is on the front page of the newspapers and may be seen repeatedly on television screens. Perhaps those assembled that evening constituted the largest paying audience to witness a debate in many years in San Francisco. Yet not one word appeared in any of the three daily newspapers the morning after the debate." 497
Lane commented: "The New York Times refers to itself as a newspaper of record. That which is not found within its many pages ostensibly did not happen. For this reason the Belli encounter in New York is known to some as the debate that never occurred." 499
That a prominent attorney who represented Mickey Cohen, a key figure in Meyer Lansky's international crime operations (and also an important cog in Israel's global machinations), later came to represent Jack Ruby is clearly significant.
Although Ruby sought to speak freely, the Warren Commission refused his entreaties to be allowed to come to Washington to tell his story. The story of how Chief Justice Earl Warren refused to give Ruby the opportunity to leave Dallas and tell his story is a famous part of JFK assassination folklore. As a consequence, Ruby never did have the chance to give his version of what really happened.
Jack Ruby was indeed "the smoking gun, the Rosetta stone, the trout in the milk." He also may have even been—as even Lee Harvey Oswald proclaimed himself—a "patsy." Just one player—albeit, in the end, an important one—Ruby played a starring role in a drama orchestrated far beyond his seamy Carousel Club in Dallas. Ruby was an errand boy in a high-stakes operation—the assassination of an American president—that was being undertaken by the joint alliance of the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate, the CIA and Israel's Mossad.
Before relating the story itself, a few words should be mentioned about the credibility of the source.
The original source was a now deceased Idaho woman named Grace Pratt who related the story to a friend (now living in Oregon) whose name must remain anonymous. This author has spoken with the Oregon man, an elderly retiree, and has concluded that he believes very strongly in the reliability of Mrs. Pratt. He has provided this author with a written summary of what Mrs. Pratt told him about her connection with Jack Ruby. The memorandum reads—in pertinent part—as follows:
"In Idaho in the 1960's I met George and Grace Pratt, who had moved to Nampa from California upon retirement. The Pratts became very good friends of mine. George had worked in the Navy yard and Grace had cooked for many years in many of the big restaurants in San Francisco.
"For a longtime she had worked for 'Tiny's.' Tiny's had a side-by-side restaurant and bar with a door between, opening into the anteroom between the dining room and the kitchen. The bar was run by Jack Ruby. He also had charge of the ladies in the basement. The bar was a place for the `underworld' to meet. After the dinner rush was over, Grace would fix her plate and one for Jack Ruby, and they would eat in the anteroom.
"One day she heard a shuffle and looked up just in time to hear the zip of a gun with a silencer. A man had rushed through the door and fallen dead on the floor. A big husky man came back, gripped her by the arm until she thought he would crush it and said, 'You didn't see anything, did you. You didn't hear anything, did you?' She answered, 'No, I was in the back of the kitchen. I did not see anything. I did not hear anything.' From then on she had their confidence. Jack shared a lot of the things that went on in the bar with her. Anyone who knew Jack Ruby that well would always be able to recognize him going or coming.
"At the top of the ramp he stopped, turned around, and looking straight into the camera he tipped his hat and entered the plane. She said she thought he was giving the message to someone that he had made it and was on his way. The Pratts were shocked. She said there had already been a number of JFK assassination witnesses who had mysteriously died. Two years after seeing him board for Israel, she heard through the underground that Ruby had gone to Brazil.
"She made me promise not to tell anyone what she told me until after her death. Grace has been gone about ten years now. Knowing Grace and her credibility, I believe every word. If someone had the clout to check the grave to have the 'body' exhumed, this might be very revealing."500
So ends the strange memorandum received by this author. The words speak for themselves.
The source who provided the author with this unusual memorandum firmly believes that Mrs. Pratt did indeed know Jack Ruby well and that Mrs. Pratt herself was convinced that she had seen Ruby boarding the plane for Israel.
Another individual who knew Mrs. Pratt told this author that she was a highly credible individual not given to tale-spinning and that she had indeed mentioned her acquaintance with Ruby (although she had not told him the story about having seen Ruby departing for Israel).
Is this story the product of one woman's imagination? Or did Mrs. Pratt indeed see just what she believed she saw? Is possible that Mrs. Pratt has provided us yet another key tying Israel to the most intimate levels of the JFK assassination conspiracy?
It is worth remembering that even as these words are written, many leaders in Israel and leaders of the Israeli lobby in the United States are working tirelessly for the pardon of American-born Israeli spy, Jonathan Jay Pollard, sentenced to life in prison for passing U.S. defense secrets to Israel. Is it possible, perhaps, that a similar, secret arrangement was made on Jack Ruby's behalf? Is it possible that, on "humanitarian" grounds, Ruby was quietly released from prison and permitted to go to Israel? (After all, it could be argued, it was Ruby who had become a hero by killing "the man who killed President Kennedy.") Is it possible that the decision was made to usher Ruby quietly out of the country so that there would be no widely publicized trial in which Ruby's connections—would be bared?
In her column datelined DALLAS, February 21, reporting on the Ruby trial, Miss Kilgallen reported that "one of the best kept secrets of the Jack Ruby trial is the extent to which the federal government is cooperating with the defense. The unprecedented alliance between Ruby's lawyers and the Department of Justice in Washington may provide the case with the one dramatic element it has lacked: MYSTERY." 502
Miss Kilgallen revealed that a deal between Ruby's lawyers and the FBI, "provides Ruby's side with reams of helpful information that they would never have been able to get without the G-Men—on the condition they do not ask for anything at all about Ruby's alleged victim, Lee Harvey Oswald. It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or suspect. Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make him, while the defense tries to rescue his killer with the help of information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway?"503
Perhaps Miss Kilgallen found out the answer to the questions. She reportedly told several friends, shortly before her "accidental" death from a combined drug overdose and alcohol, that she was about to crack the Kennedy case wide open. That Ruby's path to possible freedom was being assisted by the FBI (during his first trial) does raise questions. Then, coupled with his reported "death" prior to a second trial—especially considering the story told by the late Grace Pratt—the mystery deepens.
Did Jack Ruby really die in prison or did he secretly emigrate to the Jewish homeland of Israel? The answer to that question has no direct bearing on the thesis of Final Judgment, but it may be a mystery that deserves further scrutiny. Perhaps some enterprising researcher may answer the question: "What did happen to the `corpse' of Jack Ruby?"
"The funeral had been a closed-casket affair. I realized immediately that the closed casket would raise questions. Who was to know if Jack was really in the casket? I had heard rumors that Kennedy was not really dead, but was hidden away in South America. 'Earl,' I said, let them see. I know it sounds grisly, but let's put it to rest.' The lid of the casket was opened, and for the first time I saw Jack, the man I would learn to know almost as well as I knew myself." 504
To the best of my knowledge, this is the only known reference to anyone actually having seen Jack Ruby in the casket. In this case, the reference came from someone who had not actually known Jack Ruby in person. Although photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald (both during his autopsy and in his coffin) as well as photographs of John F. Kennedy (during his autopsy) have been widely circulated, there are no known such photographs of Ruby.
Frankly, I do not find Adelson's posthumously-published proclamation of having seen "Jack" (a man he never saw alive) as any refutation of the story by Grace Pratt. For the record, however, it seems appropriate to record the comments attributed to Adelson.
"About the Anti-Defamation League, although I do say I talked to the FBI agents about it, but not in connection with a conversation with Jack." Kaufman continued in a meandering way and then concluded: "I do want the record to be correct, because I don't think that Jack Ruby and I ever discussed the Anti-Defamation League ...."
Obviously, Kaufman very much wanted to keep the A.D.L—an arm of Israel's Mossad— from being associated with Jack Ruby. So then, just what was Ruby's association with the A.D.L? Was he perhaps an A.D.L informant? Was he an A.D.L conduit to the Dallas Police Department? What influence did the A.D.L have on Ruby, if any? The answers to these questions would be revealing.
Ironically, although I had known for years that Dallas Jewish leader Sam Bloom was in charge of planning JFK' s Dallas trip, I disregarded the point since—contrary to what my critics say—I was NOT "looking for Jews under every rock." Now, thanks to the Dallas manuscript, I have to confess that my efforts to "be moderate" and not focusing on someone who happened to be Jewish caused me to miss or ignore distinct Israeli connections in Dallas to the JFK conspiracy.
Despite all this, evil critics who charged that my book and my motivations were "antisemitic to the core" have been proven wrong, very wrong, and as far as I am concerned this alone clears me of the charge. Because I was not writing from an "antisemitic" viewpoint, as the liars charged, I missed some very serious points that, thankfully, have now been covered in this book.
"Though already dismissed as a baseless rumor, the allegation that Jack Ruby is still alive and was given a new identity by the Central Intelligence Agency was not dreamed up by the veteran conspiracy buffs but was, in fact, advanced by a former employee of the agency itself.
"The Ruby story—to the effect that the CIA, in cooperation with the KGB, sponsored Ruby's murder of Oswald before the latter could disclose damning details of U.S.-Soviet intelligence links—has been put forward privately in recent weeks by Frank Snepp, formerly of the CIA. Snepp recently published Decent Interval, a harsh denunciation of the CIA's conduct in the last days of the Vietnam War."
Central to understanding the joint Mossad-CIA-Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate nexus in the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy is to recognize the importance of a little explored corporate entity based in Rome and known as Permindex. New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, indicted by Jim Garrison for conspiracy in the JFK assassination, served on the Permindex board of directors.
Many assassination researchers have contended that Permindex was a covert CIA money laundering operation. Shaw, of course, did have ties with the CIA. Others have put forth the theory that Permindex was a front for a Nazi remnant left over from World War II. This theory, exciting though it may be, falls far off the mark.
All of the firm evidence indicates Permindex was an Israeli operation—with close CIA connections—and tied inextricably with the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
Unraveling the mystery of Permindex explains the web of intrigue that ties all of the key players in the conspiracy together. The Permindex connection is also the fa mous "French connection" to the JFK assassination. And as we shall see, the French connection is, actually, the Israeli connection.
In Oliver Stone's film, JFK, actor Kevin Costner (portraying Jim Garrison) confronts actor Tommy Lee Jones (portraying Clay Shaw) and displays Italian newspaper articles exposing the activities of a Rome-based operation known as Permindex. Shaw, an international trade executive, served on the board of Permindex. The film audience is left with the impression that Permindex was a covert CIA operation, the purpose of which—at least in the film—is never defined.
However, as the evidence now shows, Permindex was a Mossad arms trading and money laundering venture operating in conjunction with the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate. And Clay Shaw, a longtime CIA asset, serving on the Permindex board, was a prime player in the New Orleans phase of the JFK assassination conspiracy.
Therein, quite simply, lies the key to the mystery behind the JFK assassination. Therein lies the explanation as to why Jim Garrison's investigation of Clay Shaw, a director of Permindex, had to be scuttled. Not only had Garrison stumbled upon a definitive CIA link, but he had also (inadvertently) discovered the Israeli connection. But at the time Garrison himself never even suspected how deeply the Permindex nexus went. Garrison had only come across the tip of the iceberg.
Israel's Mossad was the key force behind Permindex. In fact, one of the
chief shareholders in the Permindex holding company was the Banque De
Credit International of Geneva,505 established by Tibor Rosenbaum, the
longtime Director for Finance and Supply of Israel's Mossad. It was B.C.I, as
we saw in Chapter 7 and Chapter 12, which served as Meyer Lansky 's
chief money laundering bank in Europe.
According to Meyer Lansky's sympathetic Israeli biographers: "After Israel became a state, almost 90 percent of its purchases of arms abroad was channeled through Rosenbaum's bank. The financing of many of Israel's most daring secret operations was carried out through the funds in B.C.I."506 B.C.I also served as a depository for the Permindex account.
That Tibor Rosenbaum's B.C.I was a controlling force behind the enigmatic Permindex entity places Israel and its Mossad in the very center of the conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Clay Shaw's positioning in New Orleans, site of one operational rung of the conspiracy, resulted in Shaw's implication in the investigation conducted by Jim Garrison. But the conspiracy went much deeper.
Ultimately, as we now know, Garrison came to recognize that Israel's Mossad was intimately involved in the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963. However, in the beginning, Garrison surely never even suspected it and certainly had no reason to do so. JFK's secret war with Israel was an unknown factor in the geo-political events of the period. Attention instead was focused on American involvement in Southeast Asia
"To now recognize a transnational dimension to the case is . . . to recognize that the American political system is of necessity an open one, and thus increasingly susceptible to the growing influence of money and intelligence penetration from abroad [our emphasis] . . .
"Transnational connections are common modes of interaction between intelligence agencies, often in intrigues of which heads of government may be, at best, only dimly aware. Sometimes they may give rise to more overt, structured arrangements or forums such as the World Anti-Communist League, a forum, financed over the years by countries like Nationalist China and Saudi Arabia, with recurring links to the international drug traffic."507
Scott notes additionally that "It is well known that in the 1950's and 1960's the Israel Lobby and the Taiwan Lobby were both powerful in Washington and sometimes collaborated on common projects . . . There was also a Nicaragua Lobby, or perhaps more accurately, a Somoza Lobby, which also overlapped with the Israel, China, and Cuba lobbies."508
(Scott points out, for example, that a Washington lobbyist who was close to New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello also served as a registered lobbyist for both Nicaragua and the Israeli Aircraft Industries.)
It is clear, based upon the evidence that we shall review in these pages, that Permindex, which played so central a role in the JFK assassination conspiracy, was indeed one of these transnational "overt, structured arrangements or forums" of which Scott speaks.
Flammonde cites several articles that appeared in the foreign press, specifically Italy's Paesa Sera (March 4, 1967) and the Canadian publication, Le Devoir (March 16, 1967) as his source for much of the information he provides his readers on Permindex.
These articles appeared just shortly after Clay Shaw's name first came to attention as a result of the Garrison investigation and were the articles highlighted in Oliver Stone's JFK. These articles provide the unusual background of Permindex and point toward its real origins.
"There was established in Rome an organization named the Centro Mondiale Commerciale," reported Paesa Sera. [Centro Mondiale Commerciale is Italian for "World Trade Center."] "Its origins, functions, rotating presidency, geographical displacements, sub-, subsequent, and alternate designations were so complex and labyrinthine as to make a comprehensive and comprehensible description of it in anything less than a modern-sized book impossible." 509
The C.M.C was founded in 1961 by one Giorgio Mantello. 510 The Italian name, however, was an affectation. Mantello was an Eastern European Jew originally named Georges Mandel. At the time C.M.C was established, it was asserted that C.M.C would function as an international commercial organization, that it would aid in the establishing of a permanent worldwide network of trade expositions, and generally assist concerns involved in trade matters.
Permindex was a subsidiary of C.M.C. The name Permindex is an acronym which stood for PERmanent INDustrial EXpositions.511 Clay Shaw, of course, was the founder and director of the International Trade Mart in the key port city of New Orleans. Thus, Shaw's connection with an international trade entity seems logical.
However, there was more to the story, as the foreign press revealed: "Actually it was soon to become evident that the seemingly vast, mighty structure was not a rock of solidarity, but a shell of superficiality; not constructed with mass, supporting promise, but composed of channels through which money flowed back and forth, with no one knowing the source or the destination of these liquid assets." reports Paris Flammonde.512
What about Clay Shaw? How did this New Orleans socialite come to
become involved in the strange world of the international entity known as
Permindex? Who were Clay Shaw's sponsors?
What no JFK assassination researchers—even those who cite Clay Shaw's now widely-known CIA connections—ever seem to have noted is yet another Shaw connection that places him further into the net of the CIA/Mossad-Lansky Crime Syndicate nexus.
We refer to Shaw's tie to Seymour Weiss who ran New Orleans,
alongside Carlos Marcello, for the Lansky syndicate and was Lansky's
contact man with Louisiana's famed "Kingfish," Huey P. Long.513
In Chapter 10, as we have seen, it was Lansky who installed Carlos Marcello as the Mafia boss of New Orleans. It was Weiss, however, who emerged as the Lansky syndicate bagman and political operative working in conjunction with Marcello.
In fact, Lansky's man Weiss was purportedly the prime target of the IRS investigation of Long—referenced in Chapter 10—that was initiated the day before Long's assassination, and, according to Peter Dale Scott, "Long's murder in 1935, some say, was arranged to prevent men like Weiss from going to jail." 514
Scott has noted additionally that House Assassinations Committee director G. Robert Blakey has omitted "all reference to the role of Seymour Weiss"515 in his account of Carlos Marcello's rise to power in New Orleans. To do so, of course, as we noted in Chapter 10, would point in the direction of Meyer Lansky.
In fact, one New Orleans-based CIA contract agent investigated by Jim Garrison—the ubiquitous and colorful Gordon Novel—is known to have written a letter to a "Mr. Weiss" in which Novel discussed the dangers of the Garrison investigation. The letter surfaced at the time that Garrison's inquiry was in full swing and Novel was seeking to avoid giving testimony.
Many have opined that the Mr. Weiss in question was probably Novel's CIA superior, although others have suggested the "Mr. Weiss" may have been another Weiss—and not Seymour. Whatever the case, there is no question but that Seymour Weiss—a prime figure in the Lansky syndicate— was tied closely to the intelligence community and undoubtedly worked on its behalf in the context of his role with Standard Fruit.
The major fruit companies, as numerous works can attest, had extensive interplay with the CIA inasmuch as their vested interests in the so-called "Banana Republics" of Latin America were directly affected by the governments therein. And needless to say, the CIA played a major role in the affairs of Latin America from almost its very inception.
Where then do we find a tie-in between the erudite Clay Shaw, a respectable trade executive, and the Lansky syndicate henchman—and CIA contact—Seymour Weiss? In fact, it is a very close connection indeed.
You see, it was during the time that Weiss served as a director of the
CIA-linked Standard Fruit that the powerful corporation was under the
management of one Rudolph Hecht, a leading figure in the small and tightly
knit but highly influential Jewish community of New Orleans.
Hecht, in fact, had become chairman—by the time of his death in 1956—of the executive committee of the International Trade Mart 518 of which Clay Shaw was managing director. It was Hecht and his associates, Ted Brent and Herbert 0. Schwartz, who were Shaw's sponsors.
In short, Hecht was Shaw's superior. Shaw maintained the high public profile with the Trade Mart that won him his place in New Orleans society, while Hecht and his associates were the real powers behind the scenes.
And among those who likewise served on the board of the International Trade Mart was another powerful figure in the Jewish community, Edgar Stern, Jr., whose father Edgar and his mother Edith were among the most prominent financial angels for the Israeli lobby in America. As we shall see in Chapter 17 and Appendix Three, the Sterns—perhaps Shaw's closest friends—were the forces behind the W.D.S.U media empire that played a key role in portraying Lee Harvey Oswald as a "pro-Castro agitator" prior to the JFK assassination, setting him up as the patsy.
Thus, there is indeed much more to Clay Shaw than what we have been told. But it is Shaw's tie to Permindex that places him in a web of intrigue involving Israel's Mossad and global power politics that the critics of Final Judgment would certainly prefer that we ignore.
Let us explore the Permindex connection further. As we do, the reality of what Permindex was—and how it was intimately tied to the JFK assassination—will become more apparent.
Above all, the Permindex connection to Israel and its global
intelligence network is best personified by the individual who served as
chairman of the board of Permindex: Major Louis M. Bloomfield of
Montreal, Canada, a devoted and influential supporter of the Israeli cause. It
was Bloomfield who held half the shares of Permindex and its parent
company "for party or parties unknown."
519 In fact, Permindex had its
headquarters in Bloomfield's base of operations in Montreal until 1961 at
which time it was relocated to Rome. 520
Beyond question, Bloomfield, as we shall see, was a major player in Israel's international network. Our first introduction to Bloomfield was in Chapter 7. There we learned how Bloomfield played a critical role in helping establish the state of Israel and its Mossad.
In the years that followed, Bloomfield rose high in the ranks of the Canadian business world, reputed to control Le Credit Suisse [bank] of Canada, Heineken's Breweries, Canscot Realty, the Grimaldi Siosa [shipping] Lines, Ltd—and, interestingly enough—the Israel Continental Company.521 But the real key to understanding Bloomfield is his role as a founding partner in the Phillips, Vineberg, Bloomfield and Goodman firm which represents the Canadian-based Bronfman family interests.522 This rather intriguing detail suggests that Bloomfield's wide-ranging financial interests were, in fact, those of the Bronfman family. Thus Bloomfield was essentially, a front man for the Bronfman empire.
The Bronfman family, which built its fortune working with the Lansky
Organized Crime Syndicate in the illegal liquor trade, have been key backers of
Israel and leaders in the Zionist cause. Edgar Bronfman most recently served
as president of the World Jewish Congress.
But there is yet another intriguing Bronfman family link to the JFK assassination conspiracy. When a Russian translator was needed for Lee Harvey Oswald's Russian wife, Marina, it was Texas oilman Jack Crichton, a former military intelligence officer who made the arrangements. According to JFK assassination researcher Peter Dale Scott, Crichton, until 1962, "was also a Vice-President of the Empire Trust Company, a firm whose leading shareholders, the inter-related families of Loeb, Lehman and Bronfman, are said by Stephen Birmingham to have maintained 'something like a private CIA ... around the world' to protect their other investments such as in Cuba, in Guatemala, and in General Dynamics."523
So another Bronfman family intimate was in a key position in the days following the JFK assassination. And in Appendix Four we'll see the Bronfman-Empire Trust connection arise again, this time in relation to a key figure on the Warren Commission "investigating" the JFK assassination. The Bronfman fingerprints around the JFK assassination are everywhere.
Bloomfield also maintained close links with Israel in his own Canadian business and social affairs. The director of the Israeli-Canadian Maritime League, Bloomfield also served as Chairman of the Histadrut Campaign in Canada. 524 The Histadrut, Israel's national labor federation, at one point owned over one-third of the gross national product of Israel and controlled the second largest bank in Israel, the Bank Hapoalim. This bank, as we shall see, was implicated in Permindex intrigue in Europe that comes full circle back to New Orleans and the Clay Shaw connection.
In addition, it turns out, in the critical year of 1963, Bloomfield actually transferred $7.5 million into B.C.I's coffers. According to April 9, 1975 report in the New York Times, Bloomfield arranged for the deposit into B.C.I from a charitable foundation that Bloomfield had set up on behalf of a client. This was ostensibly for the purpose of rescuing the Mossad controlled bank after the government of Liberia defaulted on a substantial loan from B.C.I, supposedly putting the bank in peril.525 So the Permindex chief and Rabbi Rosenbaum's B.C.I had a serious relationship indeed— whatever the actual purpose of the $7.5 million deposit in the B.C.I account.
In light of the critical role that the Permindex chief played in the affairs of B.C.I, it is worth noting that the same New York Times article explained precisely how critical B.C.I was to the interests of Israel. According to the Times: "[B.C.I] did a lot of business with Israel. It helped channel money from rich investors around the world into Israel and performed any number of services for the country. Once when Defense Minister Shimon Peres, then director general in the defense ministry, called Rosenbaum and told him that Israel needed $7 million within 24 hours for her national security, Rosenbaum found the money overnight. He did not ask for, but received, a commission of $500,000 for his services . . .
"The defense ministry maintained an account at the bank to buy arms in western Europe. Other accounts were held by the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, by Solel Bonhen (the Histadrut-owned supply and construction company), the Zim Navigation Co. and Israel Corporation, an investment company."526 What is particularly interesting is that the Times also added: "But [B.C.I] was not an Israeli bank. It was a Jewish bank, showing healthy balance sheet assets"527 Clearly, Permindex and B.C.I were part and parcel of the same interests—particularly in 1963.
Bloomfield was also given an officer's rank in the U.S. Army during World War II and assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S)—just as had been the American who ultimately became his fellow Permindex director, Clay Shaw.
(A witness uncovered by Jim Garrison claimed to have seen a meeting in Winnipeg airport between Clay Shaw and CIA contract agent David Ferrie with another individual who may have been Bloomfield. 528 It is known that Shaw and Ferrie journeyed in a plane flown by Ferrie to Bloomfield's home base in Montreal at some time in 1961 or 1962.) 529
Obviously, Louis Bloomfield was a key figure in the Permindex network—a vital link between Clay Shaw's operation in New Orleans and other forces operating through Permindex, most especially Israel.
When Jim Garrison first began investigating Clay Shaw, he only knew Shaw under the alias "Clay Bertrand." We can suggest one possible inspiration for Shaw's pseudonym. While serving with U.S. intelligence during World War II, Shaw was stationed for a time in France where he certainly had contact with the French intelligence.
At that time, one of the highest-ranking French intelligence officers was one Gustave Bertrand who was, in fact, a close friend (and role model) for another O.S.S officer, James J. Angleton. In later years Angleton "singled out [Bertrand] as one of the people he learned the most from in a substantive way”530 and who "remained Angleton's friend until death" 531 and who was Angleton's "great Buddha head." 532
When Shaw later adopted his alias of "Bertrand" it is entirely conceivable that he was using this name as a salute to a senior intelligence operative with whom he first made contact in Europe and with whom he probably maintained contact in the years that followed.
This is speculation, of course, but there is no question, as the evidence now shows, that Angleton and Shaw were certainly moving in the same circles during World War II—and much later. And as we shall see in this chapter and in Chapter 16, the French intelligence connections to Permindex and to the JFK assassination conspiracy are very strong indeed.
And inasmuch as Shaw later served, without question, as a valued international contact for the CIA, reporting back to the agency on his foreign ventures, it is certain that Shaw's reports would have ultimately ended upon on the desk of James J. Angleton. Shaw, in effect, was functioning (at least indirectly) as one of Angleton's operatives.
However, it is likely their initial relationship was forged during their joint service with the O.S.S during World War II.
Yet, there is one definitive Angleton-Shaw connection that has been documented and it is interesting indeed. When Shaw was later arrested by Jim Garrison, it was discovered his address book contained the private telephone number of the Principessa Marcelle Borghese. 533 The principessa was a relative of Prince Valerio Borghese who was rescued during World War II by Angleton whose exploits with the O.S.S in Italy as its station chief in Rome won him a decoration from the Vatican. 534
It will be recalled, of course, that one facet of the O.S.S-orchestrated campaign against the Nazis and the Italian fascists was known as Operation Underworld. As we saw in Chapter 7, it was Meyer Lansky who was the middle man between the O.S.S and organized crime, helping arrange for Sicilian Mafia support for the invading Allied troops in Italy. Angleton, of course, was point man in Europe for the project.
(That Permindex was based in Rome, may thus be no coincidence, considering Angleton's long-standing connections with the city, where even his father held the National Cash Register franchise for Italy.) 535
In any event there is no question whatsoever that Clay Shaw and James Angleton—along with Major Bloomfield of Permindex—had long moved in the same closely related circles on a wide variety of fronts.
Ferenc Nagy. The former premier of Hungary was a fierce anticommunist who maintained close connections not only to Israel's allies in the America CIA, but also to the anti-Castro Cuban colony in Miami, itself practically a joint operating subsidiary of both the CIA and the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate. (Nagy himself later settled in Dallas, Texas and was residing there at the time of the Kennedy assassination.)536
Hans Seligman. A member of the family which controlled the Seligman Bank of Basel and whose extended family were, in America, part of the famous "Our Crowd" (German Jewish elite) in New York City during the latter period of the 19th century. Seligman was intimately involved with the Israel-oriented Zionist agency known as the Jewish Colonization Association.537
Morris Dalitz. The former Cleveland bootlegger-turned-Las Vegas casino gambling czar. Dalitz was a longtime Lansky intimate who was Benjamin Siegel's successor as Lansky's point man in Las Vegas. 538
As we saw in Chapter 10, Dalitz later employed "racket buster" G. Robert Blakey as a consultant/character witness in a libel action in which Dalitz was contesting charges that his La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, California was linked to organized crime. It was shortly thereafter that Blakey was placed in charge of the House Assassinations Committee investigation of the JFK murder.
Dalitz himself, as noted in Chapter 10, was also a longtime fund-raiser for the Israeli lobby in the United States and honored by the aforementioned Anti-Defamation League (A.D.L ) for his services.
Carlos Prio Socarras. The President of Cuba from 1948-1952, Prio Socarras had been a front-man for Meyer Lansky's partner-in-crime, Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista. In fact, it was Lansky who persuaded Batista with a hefty bribe to "step down" in favor of Prio Socarras. 539 And as we saw in Chapter 14 Prio was engaged in gun-running with a business partner whose name is now more than a footnote in history: Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby.
No wonder then, that the Italian journal, Paesa Sera, would be moved to comment: "It is a fact that the C.M.C is nevertheless the point of contact for a number of persons who, in certain respects, have somewhat equivocal ties whose common denominator is an anti-communism so strong that it would swallow up all those in the world who have fought for decent relations between East and West, including Kennedy." 540
CMC/Permindex—it might also be added even more particularly—is nevertheless the point of contact for a number of persons who, in certain respects, have somewhat equivocal ties whose common denominator is a devotion to the cause of Israel.
(We have already examined, in Chapter 6 and Chapter 12, Lansky's central role in global drug-trafficking in Southeast Asia, all of which was made further possible—under CIA cover—as a consequence of American involvement in the Vietnam conflict.)
Two other directors of BCI—as we noted in Chapter 7 were Ed Levinson, front man at the Fremont Casino in Las Vegas for Lansky's close friend, Joseph "Doc" Stacher, who died in exile in Israel and John Pullman, Lansky's international money courier. Rosenbaum's other operation,the Swiss-Israel Trade Bank owned one-third interest in the Paz group, which had been a Rothschild family entity, maintaining control over Israel's oil and petrochemical industry.542
It was Feinberg, as we saw in Chapter 4, who was the American Jewish fund-raising contact of the 1960 Kennedy for President campaign. Feinberg's heavy-handed tactics so infuriated Kennedy that he privately told a close friend that, as president, he intended to enforce changes in campaign fund-raising regulations that would prevent powerful groups such as the American pro-Israel lobby from wielding so much influence.
Feinberg, additionally, of course, was close to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and, in fact, helped arrange the bitter meeting between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion recounted in Chapter 5.
The manager of Rosenbaum and Feinberg's Swiss-Israel Trade Bank was Gen. Julius Klein, a U.S. Army officer, who had engaged in illegally re-routing shiploads of supplies and equipment scheduled to go to post-war Germany to the Haganah, the military forces of the Jews in Palestine. Klein conducted this enterprise while chief of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in Europe at the end of World War II.
(Later, in Appendix Four, we'll meet Klein's protégé who had an unusually close relationship with a key member of the Warren Commission cover-up of the JFK assassination. However, Klein's services on behalf of the state of Israel were even more significant. It was Klein who had been involved in setting up Israel's Mossad and in training its officers. Klein worked alongside Sir William Stephenson in this particular venture.543
In Chapter 7, we learned of Sir William's clandestine alliance with Meyer Lansky and his crime syndicate in the so-called Operation Underworld apparatus aimed against Axis intelligence during World War II.
Stephenson, of course, had been the director of Britain's intelligence operations in the United States—in the critical years preceding and during World War II—and was the aforementioned Major Louis M. Bloomfield's operating superior. It was during his days working with the American O.S.S and Naval Intelligence—and the Lansky Crime Syndicate—that Stephenson cemented his ties with the Jewish anti-Nazi underground.
According to intelligence historian Richard Deacon: "Stephenson received a great deal of intelligence from Jewish scientists. This particular operation, though seemingly far removed from the story of Palestine, in the long run greatly helped Israeli Intelligence in the early days of the state of Israel. Some of these scientists who had become friends with Stephenson were encouraged to develop their talents in the cause of Allied intelligence and they not only worked for Britain in World War II, but later assisted the Israeli Secret Service."544
What's more, it might be noted, Stephenson was a close personal adviser to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Here, almost certainly, Stephenson had contact, during those early days, with a young American who became a friend of Churchill—Clay Shaw, that American Army officer detailed to the Office of Strategic Services.
Shortly after Morrow had published his first book, Betrayal, in which he described his own connections through the CIA with a number of the figures involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy, he was contacted by a young man with an incredible story he wanted to tell.
According to Morrow, "In our initial conversation, the young man claimed his father, an ex-Air Force colonel, and others working for the CIA had prior knowledge that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963 . . .
"The intelligence officer's son then made a wild accusation. He asserted that his father had been tied into organized crime and had been a bag man for at least one of the payoffs relating to the presidential assassination, transporting a large sum of money to Haiti for payoff purposes during the summer of 1963." 545
This young man told Morrow that his father was associated with a mob courier. The courier in question was Mickey Weiner. Pursuing the Weiner lead further, Morrow learned from another source that tape recordings had been uncovered in which Weiner had participated in conversations relating to the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination.
According to Morrow's source, Albert Moakler, "The tapes were indicative that there was a conversation going on which was more than idle gossip. It definitely concerned Jersey and Miami . . . the areas, people in the areas. Something concerned with the assassination." 546
(Miami, of course, was Meyer Lansky's base of operations. New Jersey, as we saw in Chapter 7, was the base of Lansky's Mafia associate, mobster Jerry Catena who was responsible for distribution of "skim" money from Lansky's Las Vegas gambling operations to Lansky's organized crime associates in the northern states.)
Morrow also determined that Weiner made regular runs between Switzerland and Miami where he would visit the Bank of Miami Beach. 547 Weiner, obviously, was one of Lansky's couriers between his banking operations in Miami and those of the Israeli Mossad's Tibor Rosenbaum and the Banque de Credit International in Switzerland.
Thus, it's clear that Lansky's courier definitely had "inside" information about the JFK assassination. We may even go so far as to speculate that it was Lansky's courier who was providing funds from Permindex to the assassination conspirators stateside.
Biegun's role in Permindex was explicitly important—even central to the operation of Permindex.
In fact, it was Biegun who oversaw the liquidation of CMC/Permindex after the company was expelled from Switzerland and Italy in 1962, subsequently relocating the operation to Johannesburg, South Africa. 550 (South Africa, it might be noted, has long been engaged in intimate international intrigues in conjunction with Israel.)
Paesa Sera speculated that [CMC/Permindex] "was a creature of the CIA . . . set up as a cover for the transfer of CIA . . . funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activities."551 The Italian journal, however, seems to have missed the multiple Israeli connections that we have explored in these pages.
Earlier in these pages, as we have seen, the rebel Secret Army Organization—known by its acronym O.A.S—was bitterly opposed to DeGaulle's decision to grant independence to Arab Algeria. (It was, as we noted in Chapter 4, John F. Kennedy who, as a young senator, riled the Israeli lobby by calling for Algerian independence in 1957.)
The O.A.S launched numerous assassination attempts against DeGaulle, none of which were successful, of course, but they did later inspire Frederick Forsythe's famous novel (later turned into a popular motion picture), The Day of the Jackal.
Following an investigation of one attempt, in 1962, French intelligence (the S.D.E.C.E) charged that Permindex laundered money into the O.A.S coffers to finance the attempt on DeGaulle's life. 552
According to DeGaulle's biographer, Jean Lacouture, "for moral as well as political reasons, [the O.A.S leadership] considered it necessary to sacrifice the Head of State, either physically or politically, so that Algeria would remain French."553
Although Soustelle himself denied any contacts with the O.A.S,557 he was one of its primary supporters, winning the plaudits of OAS partisans who promulgated the joint Israeli-OAS propaganda myth that Algerian independence would establish a Soviet foothold in North Africa. In fact, Israeli intelligence came to Soustelle's aid when he went into exile. In 1962 Soustelle took up "hiding in Rome in the house of a furniture dealer whose brother was a representative of the [Israeli] Irgun."558
Interestingly enough, according to Paesa Sera, the Italian journal which publicized the role of Permindex in the plots against DeGaulle, former Hungarian premier and Permindex board member Ferenc Nagy was a "munificent contributor"559 to Jacques Soustelle and the OAS.
What's more, we now know, one of the key bases of financial support for Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum's BCI—the key force behind Permindex and the plots against DeGaulle—were "clandestine deposits of undeclared funds from French Jews,"560 not to mention, of course, the criminal funds from the Lansky crime syndicate.
One French military leader who emerged as an O.A.S leader, General Antoine Argoud said, "the physical elimination of the Head of State poses no moral problem for any of us . . . We are all convinced . . . that DeGaulle has deserved the supreme punishment a hundred times over."561
However, there were other elements that proved supportive of the French rebels within the OAS. According to historian Alexander Harrison:
"Factors that seemed to favor the success of the [O.A.S] efforts to keep Algeria French [included]:
The complicity of the 'old boy' networks within the various intelligence agencies, most notably the French secret service, [the SDECE] and the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire [responsible for internal counterespionage] both of which at times placed loyalty to a former comrade-in-arms . . . above loyalty to the government; and
Possible logistical help from countries [such as] the United States that had been hostile to DeGaulle since the first days of the Resistance in World War II and viewed his pro-Soviet stance as a threat to Western hegemony in the Mediterranean." 562
(Earlier we learned of the CIA's covert support for the OAS, despite opposition to the OAS by JFK who had been an ardent advocate for Algerian independence much to the dismay of Israel's lobby in America.)
Another historian, Paul Henissart, has also noted an Israeli connection with the O.A.S. According to Henissart, "The O.A.S attracted hotheads including some Jews who belonged to Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Israeli underground military organization. They were recruited by the O.A.S as specialists in clandestine warfare."565
He notes additionally that while there were Jewish defense groups established in Algeria, "official Israeli delegations in Algeria to organize emigration of Jews from the coastal cities were not averse to aiding these self-defense groups. The Israeli government, however, never confirmed any connection with them."566
Nonetheless as Israeli historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has pointed out, there is evidence of official Israeli support of the OAS: "During 1961 and 1962, there were numerous reports of Israeli support for the French OAS movement in Algeria."567
He notes that the Israelis had assisted the French in the Algerian war of independence between 1954 and 1962. Then, when Algeria was finally independent and sought admission to the U.N, only Israel voted against it. Beit Hallahmi quotes another historian, Stewart Steven, as saying, "When in 1961 the O.A.S was created, it was a natural development that Israel, as keen on [French retention of Algeria as a colony] as the O.A.S themselves, should lock themselves into the [O.A.S]."568
So it was that Israeli intelligence—and its allies in the American CIA— had formed a close working alliance with the very forces that were attempting to destroy French President Charles DeGaulle. At the same time, in fact, these same elements were using their Permindex connection in yet another plot, this one aimed at the life of John F. Kennedy.
Gatlin, evidently, had many interesting international affairs. When a Latin American regional conference of a global anti-communist confederation was set in place, organized by CIA operative and Banister contact, E. Howard Hunt, the chairman of that conference was Antonio Valladares. This same Valladares, based in Guatemala, also happened to serve as an attorney for New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello whom, as we have seen, was assisting in financing Banister's anti-communist activities. In attendance at the conference, which ultimately merged into the World Anti-Communist League, was Maurice Brooks Gatlin,571 suggesting that the New Orleans connection to the CIA and other worldwide intrigue was very strong indeed.
The aforementioned Bank Hapoalim was the bank established by Israel's labor bund, the Histadrut, for which Permindex chairman Louis Bloomfield served as chief fundraiser in Canada. Guy Banister's activities were explored earlier in Chapter 10, Chapter 11 and Chapter 14.
According to Gilbert LeCavelier, an associate of the late Bernard Fensterwald (a leading JFK assassination researcher), Banister's office also served as a New Orleans headquarters for OAS-connected mercenaries.
Among those OAS mercenaries was Jean Souetre who, we noted in Chapter 12, was reported to have been picked up in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and expelled from the United States.572 In Chapter 16 we will explore Souetre's activities further.
Banister, the former FBI and Naval intelligence operative, oversaw CIA backed anti-Castro gun-running and intelligence operations out of an office at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. Closely linked to the anti-Castro Cuban movement, Banister's operation functioned with the support of the CIA. Former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow asserts in his book, Betrayal, that Permindex board member Clay Shaw was, in fact, Banister's immediate superior in coordinating CIA operations out of New Orleans.
Thus, we have CIA asset Clay Shaw, serving on the board of Permindex, which is in turn operating in conjunction with Banister's office in plots against Charles DeGaulle. And in the same period we have Banister (and Shaw) involved in manipulating the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans just prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Among others, Banister was associated with former CIA pilot and anti Castro adventurer David Ferrie (one of the key figures in Jim Garrison's case against Clay Shaw). Ferrie, as we have seen, also had a long-standing connection with Lee Harvey Oswald and, by all accounts, was associating regularly with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. And we now know for certain that Ferrie and Shaw were intimately acquainted. The connections between Ferrie, Shaw, Banister and Oswald do come full circle.
Former CIA man Morrow also reports that during his activities with the CIA, working in conjunction with David Ferrie, he and Ferrie visited a warehouse in Europe where vast amounts of arms were stored—arms intended for the anti-Castro Cuban underground. The warehouse was a Permindex operation. 573
Banister's secretary, Delphine Roberts, has been quoted as having said that Oswald was a regular visitor to 544 Camp Street engaged in some sort of "intelligence" work. 574 In fact, as is now generally acknowledged, it appears as though Oswald was being set up as a "pro-Castro" patsy.
Botnick, who reportedly considered himself "a super communist hunter," was obsessed with communism and, like Banister, believed communism to be a major force behind the civil rights movement. 576
(In 1993 it was reported that the A.D.L had spied extensively on the late Dr. Martin Luther King and then turned its findings over to J. Edgar Hoover, Banister's former superior at the FBI.) 577 In Chapter 7 and in Chapter 10 we noted the close links between the A.D.L and the Lansky Crime Syndicate, itself tied in turn to the CIA and to Israeli intelligence, most notably through the Permindex link discussed in this chapter.)
At the national level, and under Botnick in New Orleans, the A.D.L had a history of deploying agents into left-wing groups in order to spy on their activities. This, of course, fits precisely into the profile of Lee Harvey Oswald's "leftist" and "pro-Castro" activities in New Orleans during the summer of 1963, operating a "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" out of Banister's intelligence operation at 544 Camp Street.
What is additionally intriguing is that, according to former A.D.L general counsel and intelligence chief Arnold Forster, much of the A.D.L's "fact finding" (i.e. spying) utilized agents "employed by an outside investigative agency operating as an independent contractor." 578 So, in light of the close association between Botnick and Banister, it seems quite likely Botnick contracted out A.D.L work out to his fellow anti-communist.
What's more, according to the A.D.L's Forster, many of the A.D.L's fact finders were "retired local or federal government investigators"579—such as, perhaps, a likely former American intelligence agent named Oswald who had once done covert work in the Soviet Union.
We can only wonder if, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald's "left wing" activities were actually being financed by the A.D.L. Was Oswald, indeed, being utilized to infiltrate left-wing groups by Banister ostensibly as part of what appeared to be a fact-finding mission for the A.D.L but which actually was an intelligence operation with an ulterior motive?
It is thus not so extraordinary to suggest that perhaps Oswald was being "sheep-dipped" as a "pro-Castro" agitator by the A.D.L (under the guise of A.D.L "fact finding") which was functioning as a conduit for the Mossad and its CIA allies. Quite convenient indeed.
Those stressing the intelligence angle, notes Scott, point to Banister's FBI and CIA and Office of Naval Intelligence connections while those stressing the "Mafia" point to Banister's connections, through David Ferrie and others, to New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello.
As Scott notes, however, "a third and more likely possibility is that both Oswald and Banister were working for what was in effect a third force: an intelligence-Mafia gray alliance, rooted in the deep political economy of New Orleans."580 And as we have seen in this chapter and elsewhere, the A.D.L did indeed have a strong root in the deep political economy of New Orleans, even indeed in the Clay Shaw connection.
"As to the story that Oswald was an FBI informant," writes Scott, "I doubt that Oswald was directly on the FBI payroll. A more likely possibility is that he worked for a private security agency which in turn reported to the FBI, the way that ex-FBI and ex-Official of Naval Intelligence agent Guy Banister, according to a CIA document, reported to the FBI in New Orleans."581 [emphasis added]
That the A.D.L did, in fact, report back to the FBI, a long-standing relationship cemented by J. Edgar Hoover himself, is now common knowledge, a fact that we shall examine further in Chapter 17.
The FBI files of another prominent Black civil rights leader of the 1960's, Dick Gregory, demonstrate conclusively that the A.D.L which was actually monitoring his public lectures and then turning the information over to the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO operations.
And as we saw in Chapter 7, it was COINTELPRO, carried out by the FBI's Division Five, that was under the direct control of William Sullivan, who was effectively a CIA "mole" inside the FBI for his close friend, the Mossad's CIA ally, James J. Angleton.
(In Chapter 17 we will explore the activities of the A.D.L further, paying particular attention to the apparent manipulation of media coverage of the controversy over the JFK assassination by the A.D.L and by A.D.L-linked sources in New Orleans. Furthermore, in Appendix Two we shall examine a little-explored link between Lee Harvey Oswald and at least one covert government informant who almost certainly had connections with the A.D.L. And in Appendix Three we will learn much more about Guy Banister's strange "right wing" connections that actually point toward the ADL.)
Whatever the case, it is very clear that the Mossad and the CIA had a direct hand in the strange activities of Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963.
Both the Mossad and the CIA were intimately tied with the Permindex plot against French President Charles DeGaulle and with the Permindex plot against John F. Kennedy. In the bloody conflict over Algerian Arab independence both Kennedy and DeGaulle found themselves on the same side of the issue—and in opposition to the Mossad and its allies in the CIA.
King very clearly had inside information about the nature of Garrison's inquiry and was obviously interested in shutting it down before it went any further. Garrison would not be bribed, however, and promptly showed the gentleman to the door.
It just so happens that during the very period of King's mysterious visit to New Orleans, the "Denver oilman" was engaged in lucrative international business dealings with Bernie Cornfeld, the Geneva-based head of the Investors Overseas Service (I.O.S). King's other interests included oil drilling offshore of the Sinai peninsula, Arab territory seized by the Israelis in 1967.582 King's partner Cornfeld, as we saw in Chapter 7 and in Chapter 9, was, in fact, the protege and front man of Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum, founder of the Banque De Credit International (B.C.I) and a central financial figure behind Permindex.
King's visit was very clearly a friendly offer from Permindex. They hoped to silence Garrison before his inquiry went further—before he made the Clay Shaw connection, before he discovered the real origins of the Permindex plot that led to the murder of John F. Kennedy. Permindex and its backers were determined to stop the investigation in its tracks. John King's visit to New Orleans is very clear evidence, indeed, that the role of Clay Shaw and Permindex is the key to the JFK assassination mystery.
An interesting footnote: By 1967, a key player in the Permindex network of Tibor Rosenbaum and John King was the super-lawyer who represented I.O.S interests in Washington: Myer Feldman. 583 Feldman, whom we first met in Chapter 5 as JFK's liaison to the American Jewish community, after leaving the White House, signed on as a well-paid henchman for the very interests behind the JFK assassination and cover-up. And today, it just so happens, Feldman apparently serves as an attorney for the Kennedy family itself, overseeing the most private legal matters of the family of the slain American president. A small world indeed.
Yet, despite the link between Permindex and the Lansky Syndicate money laundering Banque De Credit International, those who say that "The Mafia Killed JFK" say absolutely nothing about Shaw's very firm ties— through Permindex—to this criminal banking entity, very much linked to "the Mafia" through Lansky.
To disregard the Israeli linkage to Permindex is to avoid the truth altogether. This is why those who seek to point the finger of blame toward "the Mafia," for example, are so determined to vindicate Clay Shaw. To look Shaw's direction is to look in the direction of Israel—and that is why it was so vital that Garrison's investigation had to be scuttled at all costs.
Obviously, there's much more to the Permindex controversy than many people would like to admit. And in this author's judgment it is because of the Permindex link to Israel and its Mossad that some JFK assassination researchers have chosen to ignore the truth before them.
Yet, there is something about Miss Brussell's background that is significant in light of the Israeli role in the JFK assassination as dissected here. Brussell was the daughter of Rabbi Edgar Magnin, the spiritual leader of Hollywood's Jewish community—next to the New York Jewish community the most significant force in the pro-Israel lobby in America. For this reason alone Mrs. Brussell would not be inclined to follow Permindex to its Israeli antecedents.
Mrs. Brussell and her acolyte, Dave Emory, contended that high-ranking former Nazis such as General Reinhard Gehlen who were brought under the wing of American intelligence following World War II were ultimately responsible for the Kennedy assassination—through Permindex.
However, the fact is that Israeli intelligence was working closely with the Gehlen organization in the post-World War II period. John Loftus and Mark Aarons have written of how Israeli operatives—although they found the new relationship distasteful did indeed work with reputed former Nazi war criminals in Gehlen's operation. What's more, the Israelis had completely infiltrated the Gehlen organization.
According to Loftus and Aarons: "They knew exactly what General Gehlen was doing . . . After Israel was born, sections of the Mossad arrived inside Gehlen's base to receive special training . . . Even he had no idea how many of his staff also were reporting to Tel Aviv . . . Whatever Gehlen saw, the Israelis saw."584
So if indeed (as some say) it was a "Nazi" plot that killed JFK, it seems highly unlikely that the plot somehow got by the intrepid Israelis. But, as we know now, it was not a Nazi plot—the fantasies of Dave Emory and Mae Brussell notwithstanding. Permindex was an Israeli front—not a Nazi front.
It is probably worth noting, for the record, that the first nationwide publicity that Mrs. Brussell's theory that "the Nazis Killed JFK" received was when it appeared in the pages of the short-lived magazine, The Rebel, published by highly controversial pornographer Larry Flynt. 585
Although Flynt had indeed funded legitimate independent research into the JFK assassination some time earlier (which some suggest may have led to the later attempt on Flynt's life), the Brussell article was not part of that earlier effort that came out of the Flynt publishing empire.
It is hard to say precisely what motivates Flynt, a complex individual indeed, but we do know one thing: according to George magazine, published by no less than John F. Kennedy, Jr., Flynt, at least recently, has emerged as a substantial contributor to the Anti-Defamation League (A.D.L) of B'nai B'rith.586 So in light of what we do know about the A.D.L and its multiple links to those intimately involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy, this is interesting indeed.
Despite all of Mae Brussell's ruminations, there is ironically, a genuine and bizarre "Nazi" connection to Permindex that is either misunderstood or has been deliberately obscured but which does further toward our understanding of Permindex as a transnational point of contact for the Mossad and its allies in the CIA and organized crime.
"During World War II Soviet intelligence used a network of supposedly "fascist Jews," code named Max, to penetrate the inner circles of the Third Reich and to destroy the German army on the Eastern front. The Nazis believed that the Max network was their secret intelligence source inside the Kremlin, and it did in fact give 'good' intelligence to the Germans but it was strictly controlled by the Communists.
"The Jews of the Max network were mostly Communist double agents, but they also were Jews who defected to the Zionist cause toward the end of the war and revealed [future CIA director] Allen Dulles' [pre-war and wartime] secret [financial and intelligence] deals with the Nazis.
"The Zionists," according to Loftus and Aarons, "blackmailed Dulles' [CIA] protege, James Angleton, into setting up a parallel smuggling system for Jews and fugitive Nazis."587 It was in Chapter 8 that we learned of Angleton's role in the Jewish refugee network that ultimately evolved into the modern-day Mossad.
That the Israelis were blackmailing Angleton, according to Loftus and Aarons, who are undoubtedly pro-Israeli partisans, explains much about Angleton's behavior throughout his CIA career and in the events which involved Angleton in the circumstances of the JFK assassination, more about which we shall discuss in Chapter 16.
There is indeed much more to Permindex than we have been told by some JFK assassination researchers, but ultimately the truth is that Permindex was, more than anything, predominantly a transnational arrangement with Israel's intrigues as its driving force.
Israel's worldwide connections—particularly with the anti-Kennedy forces within the CIA and the CIA-linked Lansky crime empire, along with the French OAS rebels and Charles DeGaulle's enemies within his own intelligence service—made possible the network through which the plan to kill JFK was carried out. Permindex was in the center of it all.
Through the so-called "false flag" technique in which the Mossad is so skilled (as we saw in Chapter 3), "Mafia" figures, anti-Castro Cubans, low level CIA operatives and an assortment of other strange figures were drawn into the Permindex web behind the JFK assassination conspiracy.
In the end, however, it was Permindex board member Clay Shaw who became the one person (aside from the hapless Lee Harvey Oswald) to be charged with having participated in the conspiracy. Whether Shaw knew of the impending assassination will probably never be known. That Shaw was trafficking with the likes of David Ferrie and Guy Banister—Oswald's immediate handlers—has now been firmly established. Whether Shaw knew that Oswald, ultimately, would be the patsy is another mystery. Nonetheless, the Clay Shaw link to the assassination—and to Permindex— points directly toward the Mossad role in the conspiracy.
Permindex is the key to understanding the full nature of the JFK assassination conspiracy. To ignore the Permindex connection is to ignore the reality about the origins of the plot that led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The tentacles of Permindex reached far and wide, inextricably intertwining the Mossad, the CIA and the Lansky Crime Syndicate.
Although, recently, Warren Commission enthusiast Max Holland penned an essay in the spring 2001 issue of The Wilson Quarterly purporting to "prove" that the Soviet KGB was responsible for effectively sponsoring "disinformation"—namely the Paese Sera articles that linked Clay Shaw to Permindex—Holland's opus does no more than to prove that Permindex was the subject of controversy in the first place. But, more pointedly, Holland's essay fails to address the real question: if Permindex was NOT a CIA front, was it instead an Israeli operation? Final Judgment answers the question beyond any shadow of a doubt, but it's not likely Holland will respond to that.
In our next chapter we will review, at last, the most recent, startling and definitive evidence which proves that it was Israel's ally at the CIA headquarters, James Jesus Angleton, who played a key role in the assassination conspiracy and cover-up. What's more, we will examine important new information which suggests that there was much more happening in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 than otherwise might meet the eye. We will also discover that the so-called "French connection" to the JFK assassination is, in fact, the Israeli connection.
next
Double Cross in Dallas?
notes
Chapter Fourteen The Errand Boy
442 Stephen Fox, Blood and Power. (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1989), p. 307.
443 Bernard Fensterwald and the Committee to Investigate Assassinations. Coincidence or Conspiracy? (New York: Zebra Books, 1977) pp. 371-372.
444 Seth Kantor. Who Was Jack Ruby? (New York: Everest House, 1978) pp. 13-14.
445 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 180.
446 Ibid., 184.
447 Ibid., p. 183.
448 Ibid., p. 182.
449 Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1989), p. 392.
450 Scott, p. 141.
451 Ibid., p. 144.
452 Ibid., p. 141.
453 Ibid., p. 71.
454 Ibid., p. 71.
455 Ibid., p. 70.
456 Ibid., p. 151.
457 Ibid., p. 193.
458 Ibid., p. 19.
459 Ibid., p. 21.
460 Ibid., p. 181.
461 Ibid., p. 151.
462 Ibid., p. 201.
463 Ibid., p. 201.
464 Ibid., p. 349.
465 A. J. Weberman Internet website: www.weberman.com (Nodule 27).
466 A. J. Weberman Internet website: www.weberman.com (Nodule 27).
467 Interview with Steve Frogue, who asked the question of Walt Brown.
468 William Pepper. An Act of State. (New York: Verso Books, 2003), p. 77.
469 Ibid., pp. 100-102.
470 "The Death in Arizona of the Kemper Marley Machine," by Brian Downing Quig, appearing on the Internet.
471 Robert Morrow. The Senator Must Die: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy. ( Santa Monica: CA: Roundtable Publishing, Inc., 1988), p. 19.
472 I bid., p. 49.
473 John Henshaw,The National Enquirer, May 17, 1964. 474 Ibid. 475 Private correspondence in author's files. 476 Kantor, p. 127. 477 Ibid., p. 209.
478 Mike Milan. The Squad: The U.S. Government's Secret Alliance With Organized Crime. (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1989), pp. 232-234.
479 Ibid.
480 David Scheim. Contract on America. (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, Inc., 1988), pp. 45-47.
481 G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings. The Plot to Kill the President (New York: Times Books, 1981), p. 396.
482 Fensterwald, p. 288.
483 Mickey Cohen with John Peer Nugent. Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), p. 129.
484 Milan, p. 10.
485 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 143.
486 Cohen, p. 200.
487 Ibid.
488 Blakey & Billings, p. 325.
489 Ibid., p. 327.
490 Ibid.
491 Ibid.
492 Mark Lane. A Citizens Dissent (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), pp. 30-31.
493 Ibid.
494 Ibid.
495 Ibid.
496 Ibid., p. 34.
497 Ibid.
498 Ibid., p. 36.
499 Ibid.
500 Memorandum supplied to author and interview with memo author.
501 Washington Daily News, Oct. 6, 1966.
502 Philadelphia News, February 22, 1964.
503 Ibid.
504 Alan Adelson. The Ruby-Oswald Affair. (Seattle, Washington: Romar Books, Ltd., 1988), p. 6.
Chapter Fifteen The Twain Shall Meet
505 Paris Flammonde. The Kennedy Conspiracy. (New York: Meredith Press, 1969), p. 219.
506 Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan and Eli Landau. Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob. (New York: Paddington Press, 1979), p. 276.
507 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 300-301.
508 Ibid., p. 106.
509 Ibid., p. 214 (paraphrasing Paesa Sera, March 4, 1967).
510 Ibid., p. 215.
511 Ibid.
512 Ibid., p. 216.
513 Ibid., p. 95.
514 Ibid., p. 97.
515 Ibid., p. 333.
516 Ibid., p. 97.
517 Ibid., pp 102-106.
518 Ibid., p. 333.
519 Ibid., p. 218.
520 Jim Garrison. On the Trail of the Assassins. (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988), p. 87.
521 Flammonde, p. 218.
522 Executive Intelligence Review, p. 429.
523 Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1992), p. 792.
524 Ibid., p. 430.
525 New York Times, April 9, 1975.
526 Ibid.
527 Ibid.
528 Flammonde, p. 31.
529 Garrison, p. 118.
530 Robin W. Winks. Cloak and Gown. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1996 (second edition)), pp. 376-377.
531 Ibid.
532 Ibid.
533 Flammonde, p. 224.
534 E. Mullins, The World Order (Ezra Pound Institute, 1992), p. 157.
535 Tom Mangold. Cold Warrior—James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 43.
536 Executive Intelligence Review, Dope, Inc., p. 433.
537 Ibid., p. 435.
538 Executive Intelligence Review. Dope, Inc. (1978 edition), p. 354.
539 Ibid.
540 Flammonde, p. 221.
541 Executive Intelligence Review, p. 438.
542 Ibid., p. 439.
543 Ibid., pp. 440-441.
544 Richard Deacon. The Israeli Secret Service. (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc., 1978), p. 22.
545 Robert Morrow. The Senator Must Die: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy. (Santa Monica, CA: Roundtable Publishing, Inc., 1988), p. 123.
546 Ibid., p. 133.
547 Ibid., p. 148.
548 Ibid., p.219.
549 Michael Canfield and Alan J. Weberman. Coup d'etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: The Third Press, 1975), p. 40.
550 Flammonde, Ibid.
551 Ibid. , p. 28.
552 Executive Intelligence Review. Dope, Inc. (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1986), p. 434.
553 Jean Lacouture. DeGaulle: The Ruler. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 278.
554 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Israeli Connection—Who Israel Arms and Why. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 220.
555 Executive Intelligence Review. Moscow's Secret Weapon. (Washington, DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1986), p. 42.
556 Ibid., p. 296. [476] Final Judgment 573
557 Alistair Home. A Savage War of Peace. (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 499.
558 Pierre Demaret and Christian Plume. Target DeGaulle. (New York: Dial Press, 1975), p. 220.
559 Paris Flammonde. The Kennedy Conspiracy. (New York: Meredith Press, 1969), p. 223.
560 Gerald Krefetz. Jews and Money. (NY: Ticknor & Fields, 1982), p. 104.
561 Lacouture, p. 324.
562 Alexander Harrison. Challenging DeGaulle: The OAS and the Counterrevolution in Algeria. (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 67.
563 Ibid., p. 87.
564 Ibid., p. 87.
565 Paul Henissart. Wolves in the City: The Death of French Algeria. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 346.
566 Ibid., p. 347.
567 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Israeli Connection—Who Israel Arms and Why. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 44-45.
568 Ibid.
569 Executive Intelligence Review, Dope, Inc., p. 442-443.
570 Dick Russell. The Man Who Knew Too Much. (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1993), p. 396.
571 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 109.
572 Ibid., p. 562.
573 Robert Morrow. Betrayal: A Reconstruction of Certain Clandestine Events from the Bay of Pigs to the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. (New York: Warner Books, 1976), p. 84.
574 Anthony Summers. Conspiracy. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1980), p. 324-325.
575 Executive Intelligence Review. The Ugly Truth About the ADL [Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992], p. 73.
576 Jack Nelson. Terror in the Night. [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993], p.214.
577 San Francisco Weekly, April 28, 1993.
578 A. Forster. Square One [New York: Donald Fine, Inc., 1988], p. 56.
579 Ibid.
580 Ibid.
581 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 243.
582 Washington Observer, June 15, 1970.
583 Hutchison, Robert,Vesco. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 97.
584 John Loftus and Mark Aarons. The Secret War Against the Jews. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 291-292.
585 Mae Brussell. "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination." The Rebel magazine, November 22, 1983. 574 Reference [477]
586 George magazine, spring 1997.
587 John Loftus and Mark Aarons. The Secret War Against the Jews. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), p. 134
There is no doubt that Ruby and Lansky's world of intrigue intersected in several arenas, as we shall see, whether the two actually ever were personally acquainted or not.
RUBY AND THE LANSKY DRUG RACKET
Peter Dale Scott has scored G. Robert Blakey and his House
Assassinations Committee for its dismal failure to explore and to expose
Ruby's Lansky connections which are very strong indeed. Scott, who has
studied Jack Ruby's criminal antecedents, has outlined Ruby's critical
positioning in the Lansky syndicate. The House Assassinations Committee, in Scott's judgment, failed to note that "Ruby was in some way an important figure"453 in the linkage between organized crime and the political arena in Dallas and "on a federal level."454 Ruby, in short, was no mere mob hanger-on as some have tried to suggest and he was not, by any stretch of the imagination, part of "the Mafia" as G. Robert Blakey and some others have suggested.
RUBY WAS NOT 'MAFIA'
According to Scott, the House Committee investigation of Ruby and
his underworld associates chose to focus on what Scott describes as an
"ethnic model of organized crime as 'La Cosa Nostra'"455 that is, focusing
on the so-called "Mafia," the popularized media sobriquet for Italian
elements in the organized crime underworld, rather than upon the more
substantially predominant Jewish elements personified by Meyer Lansky and
those in his sphere of influence. According to Scott, these descriptions of organized crime "are bureaucratically distorted to the point of falsehood . . . and that this distortion involved systematic distortion of the facts, not just about Ruby, but about other aspects of the Kennedy assassination." 456
In Scott's assessment, the House Assassinations Committee investigation of Jack Ruby omitted any reference to what he delicately describes as "the ongoing, drug-fueled, intelligence -mob connection" 457 what we, in the pages of Final Judgment, more correctly and precisely call the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
As Scott has concluded (and rightly so): "The so-called Cosa Nostra has been systematically misrepresented by law enforcement investigators and prosecutors. For this active misrepresentation has deformed the two official investigations into the Kennedy assassination itself, not in marginal ways, but so as to conceal central truths about the assassination, truths that were embarrassing to those conducting the investigation.
"In the end one comes to recognize that the history of organized crime and the history of the investigation and prosecution of organized crime are closely intertwined processes affecting one another. Processes, one must add, which mutually affect the truth, but concealed, seats of political power in this country.” 458
"To sum up: official investigations of the Kennedy assassination have failed, not because the case is inherently insoluble, but because both the case and the investigations have been governed by deeper political processes, which have not yet been discerned." 459
In short, Jack Ruby was not a "Mafia” hireling, but, instead, a key point man in Dallas for the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate and, ultimately, as Stephen Fox has said, "the smoking gun, the Rosetta stone, the trout in the milk" in the JFK assassination conspiracy. The deeper political processes of which Peter Dale Scott has noted "have not yet been discerned" are now, however, in the pages of Final Judgment, being bared for the first time.
RUBY'S ISRAELI CONNECTIONS
Although a "mob lawyer,” it seems, Kutner did have additional interesting connections. According to Scott, "Kutner, by his own account, had known Ruby since 1936, when he had used Ruby to 'run errands' in his unsuccessful 1936 congressional campaign. Later Kutner had inserted himself into what can only be described as international intelligence operations, ranging from Latin American coups to the defense of ousted Congolese leader Moise Tshombe."462
Clearly, Jack Ruby's friend and lawyer, Kutner, was a man with important ties to Israel and its global power networks. So, what Peter Dale Scott says regarding Ruby's association with Kutner is not an overstatement: "Kutner's involvement with Ruby confirms that Ruby should not just be thought of as a man with local influence with the Dallas police, but as a player in international deep politics." 463
Yet, when G. Robert Blakey and the House Assassinations Committee were looking into Ruby's connections and when Blakey later wrote about his findings, Blakey never once mentioned Kutner—a significant Ruby connection, particularly in light of what we have already outlined—and will examine further—in the pages of Final Judgment. 464
RUBY AND ISRAELI
ARMS SMUGGLING
JFK researcher A. J. Weberman has revealed the little-known fact that
Ruby traveled to Israel in 1955 and that while in San Francisco that year,
Ruby told a friend, "After I leave here I'm going to Florida to buy a load of
contraband to send to Israel." Ruby's notebook also contained the phone
number in New York City belonging to a Miss Snyman who told the FBI
she had diplomatic immunity and that she should be contacted through the
South African ambassador to the United Nations. Weberman raised the
question as to whether this suggested Ruby might have been involved in an
arms deal between Israel and South Africa, but noted that the FBI had then
decided the number was JE-8-7475 rather than TE-8-7475. Who that number
belonged to was apparently never resolved. 465 In addition, citing FBI documents, Weberman notes that Lawrence Meyers, Ruby's long-time friend with whom he met at the Cabana Motel the night before the JFK assassination was a salesman for Ero Manufacturing. The FBI determined that calls were made from Ero to a corporation investigated for illegal arms shipments to Israel.466
There is, in fact, evidence of other Ruby connections to Israel at the time of the JFK assassination itself. It is well known that while Ruby was milling about the Dallas Police Department after the assassination that Ruby claimed to be translating for Israeli "reporters" who were on the scene.
This is interesting, obviously, in that it seems unlikely that Israeli correspondents in the United States would have English capabilities so lacking they required the services of a Dallas strip club operator.
While Ruby's association with these Israeli reporters may have been completely innocent, what is interesting is that neither the Warren Commission nor any enterprising JFK researchers (many of whom look askance at Final Judgment) never tracked down these reporters. Why not?
At one conference of JFK assassination researchers one attendee created a bit of a stir when he asked if anyone had ever determined precisely which Israeli newspapers Jack Ruby was translating for and whether anyone ever interviewed those reporters to find out what Ruby may have said to them in those critical hours while Ruby was stalking Oswald.
The answer that the master of ceremonies, researcher Walt Brown, gave was revealing in its own fashion. Brown said—in words to this effect— "That may be the most important question asked at this conference." 467
What may, in the end, be most telling about Ruby's Mossad connections came out as late as 2003 when William F. Pepper, longtime attorney for Martin Luther King's alleged assassin, James Earl Ray, published his book An Act of State.
In that book Pepper asserted that in 1963 Ruby was involved in an international arms smuggling operation based in part in Texas—which involved "a senior Mossad agent working in South America who acted as a senior liaison to the U.S. military and CIA."' 468
Perhaps not surprisingly, Pepper did not elaborate on the Mossad connection. However, Pepper's circumspect reference to the Mossad was a lightning bolt of recall to anyone who had already read Final Judgment.
Pepper's assertion involving the Mossad link to the arms smuggling operation involving Ruby is based on statements made to one of Pepper's investigators by former Colonel John Downie of the 902nd Military Intelligence Group, a unit based inside the Department of Defense.
According to Downie, the mysterious figure "Raul"—whom King's accused assassin, James Earl Ray, claimed had helped frame him (Ray) for King's murder—was part of a U.S.-based international arms smuggling operation that Pepper had already determined—through other sources— involved Jack Ruby.
The link between "Raul" and Ruby was by no means tenuous: "Raul" and Ruby were placed together by Pepper's sources on numerous occasions prior to the JFK assassination—five years before King's murder. 469
The smuggling operation utilized weapons stolen from U.S. Army bases and armories which were delivered to the New Orleans-based Carlos Marcello organized crime organization which, in turn, delivered those arms for sale in Latin and South America and elsewhere. The proceeds from the arms deals were reportedly split equally with the U.S. 902nd Military Intelligence Group using its cut for financing covert, off-budget, operations.
In 1963, Harari was in the field as a top Mossad's assassinations specialist and would have assuredly been in Dallas if the Mossad was a prime player in the JFK conspiracy. In addition, the published record documents that—throughout his career—Harari was heavily involved in Israeli intelligence operations in Mexico, South America and the Caribbean, culminating in his later more widely-publicized role as the top adviser to then-Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega who was ultimately topped in a U.S. invasion. Was Harari, then, the "senior Mossad agent working in South America" referenced by Pepper's U.S. military source? If not, it was certainly someone Harari worked with.
That Jack Ruby—who was part of the Mossad-connected smuggling operation uncovered by Pepper had multiple Mossad and Israeli connections is no surprise to those who had already read Final Judgment (Later, in the question-and-answer section of Final Judgment, we will explore further strange Israeli connections to the Martin Luther King affair— details that have been deliberately otherwise suppressed.)
RUBY AND THE BRONFMAN FAMILY
So when we consider the Bronfman family's intimate ties to the Permindex entity (that, as we shall see in Chapter 15, clearly played a central role in the JFK conspiracy) the Ruby connection to the Bronfman family is interesting indeed and does point further to an Israeli connection.
RUBY AND THE CIA
According to Morrow: "With the blessing of the syndicate and the guidance of the CIA, Prio made his deal with Castro, arranging for the Mafia (which was also supporting Batista) to supply the necessary arms and finances to make Castro's revolution successful—on the condition that Fidel would reinstate him as president once Batista was overthrown. Castro agreed, and Prio turned into a high-class gun-runner. One of his partners would be Jack Ruby of Dallas, Texas, then known as Jack Rubinstein. This is supported by a Miami FBI informant named Blaney Mack Johnson who claimed Ruby supplied arms for Castro through Prio, that he had seen Ruby around a private airport, and had known Ruby to run guns by boat. There are others who confirm that Ruby was in the gunrunning business in Florida during the late 1950's. One was Eladio del Valle, a former Cuban congressman and a good friend of Mario Kohly . . .” 471
The aforementioned Kohly was one of the primary leaders of the Cuban exiles who turned against Castro after the Cuban dictator turned the tables on his previous allies in the Lansky Crime Syndicate which helped bring Castro to power (as we documented in Chapter 7). Kohly himself subsequently turned to Meyer Lansky for support and offered to return his casino rights if he, Kohly, were able to assume power in Cuba after Castro was removed. 472 Thus it was that Jack Ruby was an important errand boy in the strange pro- and anti-Castro dealings of both the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate. Nonetheless, there is clearly more to the story of Jack Ruby that needs to be explored.
RUBY, OSWALD AND THE CIA
The late John Henshaw, a crack investigative reporter operating out of
Washington, D.C., did some of his own digging into Ruby's background.
Henshaw, who worked as an investigator for syndicated columnist Drew
Pearson (about whom we shall see more in Chapter 17) uncovered a link
between Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, tying them together with the CIA.
According to Henshaw, Dallas police officials were actually in the process
of investigating Ruby and Oswald in the assassination attempt on retired
General Edwin Walker several months before the JFK murder. A bullet was fired through Walker's window, although the general, a dedicated anti-communist and Castro critic, was unharmed. However, there is some debate among assassination researchers as to what role Oswald did play—if any—in the shooting at the Walker residence. This is yet another of the many unanswered questions surrounding the JFK mystery.
At any rate, according to Henshaw's account, a secret police investigation of the shooting linked Oswald and Ruby to the incident. Then, according to Henshaw, a high-ranking FBI official was asked by a top official in the Justice Department to intervene and stop the impending arrest of the two Dallas operatives. Henshaw said that it was the CIA itself that had asked the FBI to intervene. According to Henshaw, the CIA was using Ruby to recruit Dallas men into the anti-Castro movement. However, the FBI official refused to intervene, saying it would be obstructing justice.
The FBI official did say, though, that he would make the request only if he were formally directed to do so in a written communication signed by the Justice Department official. Shortly thereafter, according to Henshaw's account, the FBI official then received a signed directive. He contacted Dallas police and urged them not to arrest Oswald and Ruby.
But the Dallas police also wanted an official signed communication. Thereupon the Justice Department sent the communication to Dallas Police Chief Curry asking that Oswald and Ruby be left strictly alone. Justice explained it didn't want Oswald and Ruby arrested because of "reasons of state" and that the department was making the request on the CIA's behalf. 473 Henshaw's account is yet another of the significant reports which point in the direction of undisclosed covert activities by both Ruby and Oswald together, being carried out under the direction of the CIA.
Henshaw also wrote that Texas Attorney General Waggoner Carr was being kept under surveillance by the FBI because he had undisclosed evidence: "The evidence includes a copy of the missing film taken moments before Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald. The film covers Ruby's progress through the FBI and police screens guarding the entrance of the Dallas Police headquarters. Two cameramen had been assigned by a Dallas TV station to cover the entrance, but were ordered by federal agents to knock off film footage which showed a high official of the Justice Department escorting [Ruby] through the two security screens."474 According to Henshaw, high-level federal pressure stopped Carr's investigation after it was learned that he had an uncut copy of the entire film. He allegedly kept a copy for himself.
There is evidence of other possible contact between Ruby and Oswald— even in New Orleans. This evidence has never been published to this author's knowledge.
This author received access to a private letter written on February 20, 1967 during the controversy over New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's inquiry into the assassination. The author of the letter described the fears of his aunt, a New Orleans woman, who was a neighbor of Lee Harvey Oswald's during his sojourn in the Crescent City. "She is terrified to the point that she will not cooperate," he said. "She stated that her fear was based upon the possibility that 'Garrison would get me for withholding evidence' and the possibility that 'someone will put a bullet in my back.'
"She made the following points to me: (1) She observed Oswald having visitors three times (a) two "Cuban looking" men visited him twice and (b) a man and woman came and picked up Oswald one weekend. 'This man had the same profile as pictures of Ruby,' she said. 'Every time I see a picture of Ruby, this visitor of Oswald pops into my mind, but I am afraid to say anything about it. I could not swear that it was Ruby, but I couldn't swear that it wasn't.'"475 Ruby apparently did visit New Orleans during the time Oswald was there, ostensibly trying to find a stripper for his club. Could it be the woman seen with the Ruby-look-alike was one of these strippers?
That Jack Ruby did indeed have ties to both the Lansky Syndicate and to the CIA involving Cuba is, today, not in doubt. However, during the period of the Warren Commission investigation, the official government "investigation" preferred to look the other way. According to Ruby biographer, Seth Kantor:
"After the Ruby trial ended, Leon Hubert and Burt Griffin, the Warren Commission's two Ruby experts, tried to convince Commission members in memorandums on March 19 and April 1, 1964, that there was "substantial evidence" showing Jack Ruby had maintained unexplained Cuban associations. But the efforts of Hubert and Griffin were blocked by the CIA and discouraged by others on the Commission staff." 476
Kantor suggests that "Ruby and Oswald probably didn't know each other; yet both could have been used as separate parts of a conspiracy to commit murder in Dallas on the weekend of November 22-24, 1963. Oswald on Friday. Ruby on Sunday. Two men separately manipulated by the same power. After they were arrested and jailed, both men said they had been manipulated. 'I'm a patsy,' said Oswald. 'I've been used for a purpose,' said Ruby. 477
Despite Kantor's observations to the contrary, we have seen evidence (in Chapter 11, for example) that Ruby did almost assuredly know Lee Harvey Oswald and that Ruby did indeed participate in matters relating to the assassination. Whether Ruby—and Oswald—did, in fact, know that the assassination of Kennedy was in planning is another story.
A CONSPIRACY AGAINST CONNALLY?
Michael Milan, who has written of his role in working as part of a
secret U.S. government team collaborating with the Lansky Syndicate says
there were at least several people operating in Dallas who believed that they
were not involved in a conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy, but, instead, in a
conspiracy to kill Texas Governor John B. Connally. According to Milan,
he (Milan) played a part in the JFK assassination cover-up. Milan claims
that following the assassination he was dispatched to Dallas by J. Edgar
Hoover himself. Milan's assignment was to kill a cab driver named
Brinkman. Milan met with Brinkman and began questioning him. When Milan asked who set up the shooting, Brinkman said, "I never met the guy before I was introduced to him by this broad at [Jack Ruby's] Carousel Club. And I didn't shoot nobody. There was me and two other guys. We weren't even after the president. We were supposed to shoot the governor, but things happened too fast. They were gone before anybody did anything. I think there were two other guys doin' what I was supposed to do. But I don't know who they are or where they was when the shooting started. We was just supposed to shoot at the governor when they passed and get out of there. That's all. But nuthin' happened. I mean, everything happened and I just got outta there fast." 478
Milan completed his assignment and killed Brinkman. When he returned to Washington he was met at the airport, he says, by Hoover who said, "You already know too much. So I'll just say: Johnson. No doubt. We stand away. Do you get it?" 479
Is it conceivable, perhaps, that Jack Ruby was not consciously involved in a plot that he believed was aimed at John F. Kennedy, but at John B. Connally instead? Can the same thing be said for Oswald? Is it possible that the two men were being manipulated as part of an even bigger conspiracy that they knew nothing about? This is all speculation, but it is something to consider.
The Lansky connection to Ruby's role in the JFK assassination conspiracy and cover-up goes much deeper than we have explored thus far.
LANSKY'S COURIER IN DALLAS
One day prior to the JFK assassination one of Meyer Lansky's
longtime personal couriers, one Jim Braden, was visiting in Dallas. He was
also on the scene in Dealey Plaza when JFK was assassinated, actually
being taken into custody by the Dallas police, and then released. Standard
accounts of the role of organized crime in the JFK assassination conspiracy
have frequently pointed out Braden's strange doings in Dallas. What has
been ignored, however, is his close relationship to Meyer Lansky. David Scheim, writing in Contract on America, provides his readers a lengthy discussion of Braden, but never once mentions his connection with Lansky. Scheim prefers to leave the reader with the impression that Braden was a "Mafia" courier—not a Lansky courier. 480
Even G. Robert Blakey and Richard Billings (Scheim's chief source) acknowledge in their own book that Braden was, reportedly, a "personal courier" for Lansky. "In the end," say Blakey and Billings, "we reached no firm judgment on Braden's mob connections or on whether his activities in Dallas were in any way related to the assassination." 481
What Blakey does not mention, however, is that Braden was so much a key figure in the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate that he was a charter member of the Lansky Syndicate-financed La Costa Country Club. In Chapter 10, as we have seen, it was Blakey who was on the payroll of Lansky associate, Morris Dalitz,one of the founders of La Costa, after Dalitz and his partners sued Penthouse magazine for publicizing the mob links of the Carlsbad, California resort. Blakey, in fact, served, in effect, as a character reference for the Lansky Syndicate defending the resort against the accusations—something Blakey, for obvious reasons, would not be inclined to brag about when proclaiming himself a crime-buster.
BRADEN, RUBY & FERRIE
The late Bernard Fensterwald supplies us some of the interesting details
about the activities of Lansky's courier: "Braden also had some other
startling connections which were also never discovered by the Warren
Commission. Jim Braden had visited the same Dallas office of the H. L.
Hunt Oil Company that Jack Ruby visited on November 21, 1963—the
afternoon before the assassination—and at approximately the same time. "Braden was also staying at the Cabana Motel in Dallas—a reported "mob hang-out" that was frequented by Jack Ruby and various Ruby associates. Ruby visited the Cabana Motel sometime around midnight on the night before the assassination—November 21, 1963—while Jim Braden was a guest there. Braden also has a possible connection to the late David Ferrie. According to information documented by Peter Noyes, Braden worked out of an office suite—Room 1701—in the Pere Marquette Building in New Orleans in the fall of 1963, in the weeks immediately preceding the assassination. During this same period in late 1963, David Ferrie was working for Mafia leader Carlos Marcello on the same floor . . . in the same building . . . just down the hall from Braden—in Room 1707. 482
[Fensterwald notes further that Noyes has found additional evidence that Braden once listed his address as Room 1706—right next to Ferrie! In Chapter 11 we examined the role of CIA contract agent David Ferrie and his connection to the JFK assassination conspiracy in some detail. The evidence cited by Fensterwald only draws the circle more closely.)
That one of Meyer Lansky's chief couriers would be in Dallas and moving in Ruby's sphere of operations is evidence that the fine hand of Meyer Lansky himself was in motion in Dallas and, more than likely, this is a direct link between Lansky and Ruby.
According to Lansky's West Coast henchman, Mickey Cohen (Ruby's role model) couriers such as Braden were very important in the Lansky Syndicate: "Important messages never came by phone. Anything to do with a hit, a gambling operation, to go somewhere or to see somebody, was by courier. See, we worried about wiretaps thirty years ago. Even money was only transacted person to person. If anybody had money coming or going, you put a man on a plane." 483
Another Lansky associate, Michael Milan, has also written of the importance of mob couriers and the need for secrecy. "Whenever he came to a sitdown, Mr. Lansky always had his percentage figured out in advance. He kept it all in his head, too." 484
There is evidence, however, that Ruby and Braden did indeed have a very close connection. Lansky's courier Jim Braden was also a "friend"485 of Lansky's Mexico City representative, "Happy" Meltzer," whom we met earlier in this chapter as the head of a drug-smuggling operation in which Ruby was evidently involved.
Obviously, Lansky's courier, Jim Braden, may have indeed been bringing a message from Lansky to Ruby. But whatever his role in Dallas, there's no question but that he was there for a purpose. This was not a case of coincidence, but indeed, conspiracy. All of this, taken together, suggests, as we have said, that the Lansky-Ruby connection is much deeper than might be perceived and far more than some "crime solvers" would have us realize. What is especially interesting, further, is an additional Lansky connection to Ruby that surfaced after the assassination of JFK and after the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.
MELVIN BELLI COMES TO TOWN
In Chapter 13 we examined the strange—and little known role—of Meyer
Lansky's West Coast henchman, Mickey Cohen, in the JFK assassination
conspiracy. Cohen—himself a longtime Ruby associate and the Dallas
mobster's role model—was obviously a key figure in the network of
conspiracy. It was Cohen's longtime friend—and attorney—Melvin Belli who
stepped forward as Jack Ruby's defense attorney.Belli and Cohen had known each other for years. In fact, Belli was a regular at the Los Angeles nightspot, Rondelli's, of which Cohen was the secret owner. And, as we've noted, he was also Cohen's lawyer.
The two were so close that Belli even once had Cohen introduced as "Professor O'Brien from Harvard who's going to give you a talk on tax laws," 486 to a meeting of the American Bar Association in Miami.
According to Cohen, writing in his memoirs, the Los Angeles mobster assumed the platform and then began rattling on for some time, essentially saying nothing. He then concluded, "My advice to all of ya is to be sure to pay your goddamn taxes right to the letter."487
Blakey and Billings, in The Plot to Kill the President, addressed the circumstances in which the Lansky henchman's attorney came to represent Jack Ruby:
"How Melvin Belli, a nationally known trial lawyer, was brought in to handle the Ruby defense was a matter of some dispute. We heard a report that Seymour Ellison, a lawyer associated with Belli, got a phone call from `a Las Vegas attorney' who said, 'Sy, one of our guys just bumped off the son of a bitch that gunned down the President. We can't move in to handle it, but there's a million bucks for Mel if he'll take it.'
"Ellison confirmed to us that he received the phone call, but he said he did not remember the name of the Las Vegas attorney and nothing developed from the call. Belli told us a different story. He said Earl Ruby came to California three days after his brother was arrested; he watched Belli sum up a murder defense in a Los Angeles courtroom and he asked him to take the case.
"Belli said he declined at first. He had learned that his fee would be paid by the sale of Ruby's story to newspapers, and he did not care to be involved in that sort of exploitation. Nevertheless, Earl Ruby talked him into it, Belli told us, and he took the case with five goals in mind: to save Jack Ruby; to strengthen the law; to show that current legal tests for insanity were inadequate; to wed modern law to modern science; and to help Dallas 'solve its problem.'" 488
Interestingly, Blakey and Billings report further that Ruby's brother Earl had told yet another version of the "official" story. They also make passing reference to the Ruby-Cohen relationship.
Noting that "Ruby liked to tell friends that he knew Mickey Cohen," they concluded: "We could not be certain just how well Ruby knew Cohen, who also grew up in Chicago, but he admired him and tried to emulate him." 489 As far as Belli's decision to defend Ruby, Blakey and Billings said: "We found it difficult to believe that Belli did not receive a substantial fee for his defense of Ruby." 490 The two also noted that “We considered the possibility that Belli went to Mexico to pick up a fee for the Ruby defense, but we found no proof that he did." 491
Whatever the case, Belli's defense of Ruby failed. Ruby was convicted and sentenced to death. Ruby's family formally fired Belli as Ruby's attorney. But Ruby's death was announced just shortly before he was scheduled to be retried for his murder of the alleged assassin. As a consequence, any final determination of just what role Ruby played in the JFK assassination scenario became another mystery in an endless series of mysteries. Jack Ruby could never tell what he knew.
This was not the end of Melvin Belli's role in the JFK controversy, however. As pioneer JFK assassination investigator Mark Lane noted in his second book on the assassination, A Citizen's Dissent, Belli emerged as one of the leading defenders of the official Warren Commission version of the assassination.
According to Lane, ABC-TV's Les Crane show wanted to stage a debate between Lane and Belli. "I was less sanguine, for, although I was confident in my knowledge of the facts, Belli's almost legendary oratorical accomplishments had preceded him to the East coast."492
Lane points out that he subsequently received a call from the producer telling him that the debate was canceled. According to the producer: "It's the ABC brass. They have just said no. Period. They say you have the facts and the affidavits and that would just confuse the audience."493 But the show itself was not, in fact, canceled—only the debate between the well-informed Lane and Belli.
"It's just that we can't have you on." Lane was told. "There's going to be a debate anyway. We're getting Oswald's mother."494 Lane summarized the situation in this way: "And so it came to pass that the first network broadcast presenting both sides of the controversy found splendiferous Melvin Belli, conqueror of a thousand juries, opposed by a poorly educated widow. Mrs. Oswald's visceral responses were meritorious, but her lack of command over the facts, together with Belli's bully tactics, reduced the program to the low level of entertainment that the network apparently sought." 495
After some negotiations, Belli finally agreed to debate on stage under one condition--that both wear tuxedo's. There would be three debates. It was during the first debate, in San Francisco, that Belli came on stage, wearing a cape over his tuxedo, and in his concluding remarks made his final judgment on the JFK assassination conspiracy. He declared "If we cannot trust the FBI, the CIA and Earl Warren, then God pity us." 496
However, the Establishment media did not see fit to publicize the circumstances of this debate, despite the fact, as Lane points out, that Belli himself is somewhat of a celebrity. As Lane noted: "In San Francisco, if Belli's office is burglarized or if he agrees to represent a topless dancer, he is on the front page of the newspapers and may be seen repeatedly on television screens. Perhaps those assembled that evening constituted the largest paying audience to witness a debate in many years in San Francisco. Yet not one word appeared in any of the three daily newspapers the morning after the debate." 497
MEDIA COVER-UP
The subsequent New York debate between Lane and Belli was jam packed
with the press. However, according to Lane, "Not one daily
newspaper in New York, and possibly in the nation, even mentioned that
the event had occurred." 498 This despite the fact that there were half a dozen
papers in New York at the time. Lane commented: "The New York Times refers to itself as a newspaper of record. That which is not found within its many pages ostensibly did not happen. For this reason the Belli encounter in New York is known to some as the debate that never occurred." 499
That a prominent attorney who represented Mickey Cohen, a key figure in Meyer Lansky's international crime operations (and also an important cog in Israel's global machinations), later came to represent Jack Ruby is clearly significant.
A WELL-PLACED ERRAND BOY
Although Jack Ruby's actual role in the planning stages of the JFK
assassination conspiracy will probably never be fully known, there is no
question that, in the end, Ruby became a critical factor in the cover-up. His
murder of Lee Harvey Oswald silenced the one man who could no doubt fill
in at least some of the missing pieces of the puzzle. Jack Ruby was a well placed
errand boy, not only for Meyer Lansky and his global crime
syndicate, but also, it appears, for the covert arm of the CIA as well. Ruby
did his job and he did it well. Although Ruby sought to speak freely, the Warren Commission refused his entreaties to be allowed to come to Washington to tell his story. The story of how Chief Justice Earl Warren refused to give Ruby the opportunity to leave Dallas and tell his story is a famous part of JFK assassination folklore. As a consequence, Ruby never did have the chance to give his version of what really happened.
Jack Ruby was indeed "the smoking gun, the Rosetta stone, the trout in the milk." He also may have even been—as even Lee Harvey Oswald proclaimed himself—a "patsy." Just one player—albeit, in the end, an important one—Ruby played a starring role in a drama orchestrated far beyond his seamy Carousel Club in Dallas. Ruby was an errand boy in a high-stakes operation—the assassination of an American president—that was being undertaken by the joint alliance of the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate, the CIA and Israel's Mossad.
A STRANGE STORY
As this book was being completed, a very strange story about Jack
Ruby came to this author's attention that bears repeating, if only for the
reason that it should be part of the permanent record, particularly considering
our contention that Israel did indeed have a hand in the assassination of John
F. Kennedy.Before relating the story itself, a few words should be mentioned about the credibility of the source.
The original source was a now deceased Idaho woman named Grace Pratt who related the story to a friend (now living in Oregon) whose name must remain anonymous. This author has spoken with the Oregon man, an elderly retiree, and has concluded that he believes very strongly in the reliability of Mrs. Pratt. He has provided this author with a written summary of what Mrs. Pratt told him about her connection with Jack Ruby. The memorandum reads—in pertinent part—as follows:
"In Idaho in the 1960's I met George and Grace Pratt, who had moved to Nampa from California upon retirement. The Pratts became very good friends of mine. George had worked in the Navy yard and Grace had cooked for many years in many of the big restaurants in San Francisco.
"For a longtime she had worked for 'Tiny's.' Tiny's had a side-by-side restaurant and bar with a door between, opening into the anteroom between the dining room and the kitchen. The bar was run by Jack Ruby. He also had charge of the ladies in the basement. The bar was a place for the `underworld' to meet. After the dinner rush was over, Grace would fix her plate and one for Jack Ruby, and they would eat in the anteroom.
"One day she heard a shuffle and looked up just in time to hear the zip of a gun with a silencer. A man had rushed through the door and fallen dead on the floor. A big husky man came back, gripped her by the arm until she thought he would crush it and said, 'You didn't see anything, did you. You didn't hear anything, did you?' She answered, 'No, I was in the back of the kitchen. I did not see anything. I did not hear anything.' From then on she had their confidence. Jack shared a lot of the things that went on in the bar with her. Anyone who knew Jack Ruby that well would always be able to recognize him going or coming.
BOUND FOR ISRAEL?
"Six days after Jack Ruby's funeral was publicized in the press, Grace
called me very excited and said, "I was just now watching the news. They
turned the TV camera on a ramp up to a plane loading for Israel from New
York, and who do you think went up the ramp? I screamed to George in the
other room, calling him and saying, 'Come quickly! Jack Ruby is boarding
that plane!' "At the top of the ramp he stopped, turned around, and looking straight into the camera he tipped his hat and entered the plane. She said she thought he was giving the message to someone that he had made it and was on his way. The Pratts were shocked. She said there had already been a number of JFK assassination witnesses who had mysteriously died. Two years after seeing him board for Israel, she heard through the underground that Ruby had gone to Brazil.
"She made me promise not to tell anyone what she told me until after her death. Grace has been gone about ten years now. Knowing Grace and her credibility, I believe every word. If someone had the clout to check the grave to have the 'body' exhumed, this might be very revealing."500
So ends the strange memorandum received by this author. The words speak for themselves.
The source who provided the author with this unusual memorandum firmly believes that Mrs. Pratt did indeed know Jack Ruby well and that Mrs. Pratt herself was convinced that she had seen Ruby boarding the plane for Israel.
Another individual who knew Mrs. Pratt told this author that she was a highly credible individual not given to tale-spinning and that she had indeed mentioned her acquaintance with Ruby (although she had not told him the story about having seen Ruby departing for Israel).
Is this story the product of one woman's imagination? Or did Mrs. Pratt indeed see just what she believed she saw? Is possible that Mrs. Pratt has provided us yet another key tying Israel to the most intimate levels of the JFK assassination conspiracy?
It is worth remembering that even as these words are written, many leaders in Israel and leaders of the Israeli lobby in the United States are working tirelessly for the pardon of American-born Israeli spy, Jonathan Jay Pollard, sentenced to life in prison for passing U.S. defense secrets to Israel. Is it possible, perhaps, that a similar, secret arrangement was made on Jack Ruby's behalf? Is it possible that, on "humanitarian" grounds, Ruby was quietly released from prison and permitted to go to Israel? (After all, it could be argued, it was Ruby who had become a hero by killing "the man who killed President Kennedy.") Is it possible that the decision was made to usher Ruby quietly out of the country so that there would be no widely publicized trial in which Ruby's connections—would be bared?
SOMEBODY WAS HELPING RUBY
It is interesting to note that on October 6, 1966, at the time Ruby was
granted a new trial, the Washington Daily News carried a story proclaiming
that "It's Possible for Ruby to Go Free," as a result of a second trial. The
story quoted his lawyer as saying the case was so simple that "Somebody
just out of law school can handle it." 501 What's more, it's interesting to
note a little-noticed column by veteran crime reporter Dorothy Kilgallen
who had an abiding (and perhaps fatal) interest in the JFK case. In her column datelined DALLAS, February 21, reporting on the Ruby trial, Miss Kilgallen reported that "one of the best kept secrets of the Jack Ruby trial is the extent to which the federal government is cooperating with the defense. The unprecedented alliance between Ruby's lawyers and the Department of Justice in Washington may provide the case with the one dramatic element it has lacked: MYSTERY." 502
Miss Kilgallen revealed that a deal between Ruby's lawyers and the FBI, "provides Ruby's side with reams of helpful information that they would never have been able to get without the G-Men—on the condition they do not ask for anything at all about Ruby's alleged victim, Lee Harvey Oswald. It appears that Washington knows or suspects something about Oswald that it does not want Dallas and the rest of the world to know or suspect. Why is Oswald being kept in the shadows, as dim a figure as they can make him, while the defense tries to rescue his killer with the help of information from the FBI? Who was Oswald, anyway?"503
Perhaps Miss Kilgallen found out the answer to the questions. She reportedly told several friends, shortly before her "accidental" death from a combined drug overdose and alcohol, that she was about to crack the Kennedy case wide open. That Ruby's path to possible freedom was being assisted by the FBI (during his first trial) does raise questions. Then, coupled with his reported "death" prior to a second trial—especially considering the story told by the late Grace Pratt—the mystery deepens.
Did Jack Ruby really die in prison or did he secretly emigrate to the Jewish homeland of Israel? The answer to that question has no direct bearing on the thesis of Final Judgment, but it may be a mystery that deserves further scrutiny. Perhaps some enterprising researcher may answer the question: "What did happen to the `corpse' of Jack Ruby?"
A NOTE FOR THE RECORD:
Following the release of the first edition
of Final Judgment, the author came across an obscure volume entitled The
Ruby-Oswald Affair, published in 1988. The author was the late Alan
Adelson who had served as the attorney for Jack Ruby's family in the probate of
Ruby's will. Adelson died just shortly before his book was published. At the
beginning of the book Adelson describes how he attended Ruby's funeral in the
company of Ruby's brother, Earl: "The funeral had been a closed-casket affair. I realized immediately that the closed casket would raise questions. Who was to know if Jack was really in the casket? I had heard rumors that Kennedy was not really dead, but was hidden away in South America. 'Earl,' I said, let them see. I know it sounds grisly, but let's put it to rest.' The lid of the casket was opened, and for the first time I saw Jack, the man I would learn to know almost as well as I knew myself." 504
To the best of my knowledge, this is the only known reference to anyone actually having seen Jack Ruby in the casket. In this case, the reference came from someone who had not actually known Jack Ruby in person. Although photographs of Lee Harvey Oswald (both during his autopsy and in his coffin) as well as photographs of John F. Kennedy (during his autopsy) have been widely circulated, there are no known such photographs of Ruby.
Frankly, I do not find Adelson's posthumously-published proclamation of having seen "Jack" (a man he never saw alive) as any refutation of the story by Grace Pratt. For the record, however, it seems appropriate to record the comments attributed to Adelson.
A FINAL MYSTERY
RUBY AND THE A.D.L
On June 27, 1964, Stanley Kaufman, Ruby's lawyer and longtime
friend, testified before the Warren Commission and noted the following:"About the Anti-Defamation League, although I do say I talked to the FBI agents about it, but not in connection with a conversation with Jack." Kaufman continued in a meandering way and then concluded: "I do want the record to be correct, because I don't think that Jack Ruby and I ever discussed the Anti-Defamation League ...."
Obviously, Kaufman very much wanted to keep the A.D.L—an arm of Israel's Mossad— from being associated with Jack Ruby. So then, just what was Ruby's association with the A.D.L? Was he perhaps an A.D.L informant? Was he an A.D.L conduit to the Dallas Police Department? What influence did the A.D.L have on Ruby, if any? The answers to these questions would be revealing.
NEW REVELATIONS . . .
As readers may recall from the opening pages of Final Judgment, the author received
an unusual manuscript from Dallas in the opening days of 2005. That document filled in a
vast array of details about intrigues surrounding the pro-Israel Dallas Jewish elite (and of
Texas in general) and laid to rest the myth put forth by many naive "JFK researchers"
who claim Dallas was ruled by anti-Jewish right-wing John Birchers. The document's
revelations, taken together with what had already been outlined in this chapter on Jack
Ruby, should give serious researchers more leads to follow. Ironically, although I had known for years that Dallas Jewish leader Sam Bloom was in charge of planning JFK' s Dallas trip, I disregarded the point since—contrary to what my critics say—I was NOT "looking for Jews under every rock." Now, thanks to the Dallas manuscript, I have to confess that my efforts to "be moderate" and not focusing on someone who happened to be Jewish caused me to miss or ignore distinct Israeli connections in Dallas to the JFK conspiracy.
Despite all this, evil critics who charged that my book and my motivations were "antisemitic to the core" have been proven wrong, very wrong, and as far as I am concerned this alone clears me of the charge. Because I was not writing from an "antisemitic" viewpoint, as the liars charged, I missed some very serious points that, thankfully, have now been covered in this book.
AND ONE LAST ITEM:
Although the Grace Pratt story of Jack Ruby's phony
"death" is controversial, I recently received an item from the Feb. 6, 1978 edition of The
Village Voice, written by Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway. The item lends
credence to Mrs. Pratt's story. In an article focusing on new revelations surrounding
Lee Oswald's CIA ties, Cockburn and Ridgeway wrote: "Though already dismissed as a baseless rumor, the allegation that Jack Ruby is still alive and was given a new identity by the Central Intelligence Agency was not dreamed up by the veteran conspiracy buffs but was, in fact, advanced by a former employee of the agency itself.
"The Ruby story—to the effect that the CIA, in cooperation with the KGB, sponsored Ruby's murder of Oswald before the latter could disclose damning details of U.S.-Soviet intelligence links—has been put forward privately in recent weeks by Frank Snepp, formerly of the CIA. Snepp recently published Decent Interval, a harsh denunciation of the CIA's conduct in the last days of the Vietnam War."
THE TWAIN SHALL MEET
So it is. We have examined the players. We have examined their motives. We have
examined the interplay between the relatively small group of individuals whom we have
linked to the JFK assassination conspiracy. Let us move forward and determine a critical
point of contact that ties together the diverse—yet closely connected—elements behind
the conspiracy that took the life of John F. Kennedy. This is vital to recognizing and
understanding the central role of Israel's Mossad in the crime of the century.
Chapter Fifteen
The Twain Shall Meet
The Permindex Mystery:
Israel, the CIA,
the Lansky Crime Syndicate
and the Plot to Kill John F. Kennedy
Central to understanding the joint Mossad-CIA-Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate nexus in the plot to assassinate John F. Kennedy is to recognize the importance of a little explored corporate entity based in Rome and known as Permindex. New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, indicted by Jim Garrison for conspiracy in the JFK assassination, served on the Permindex board of directors.
Many assassination researchers have contended that Permindex was a covert CIA money laundering operation. Shaw, of course, did have ties with the CIA. Others have put forth the theory that Permindex was a front for a Nazi remnant left over from World War II. This theory, exciting though it may be, falls far off the mark.
All of the firm evidence indicates Permindex was an Israeli operation—with close CIA connections—and tied inextricably with the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
Unraveling the mystery of Permindex explains the web of intrigue that ties all of the key players in the conspiracy together. The Permindex connection is also the fa mous "French connection" to the JFK assassination. And as we shall see, the French connection is, actually, the Israeli connection.
In Oliver Stone's film, JFK, actor Kevin Costner (portraying Jim Garrison) confronts actor Tommy Lee Jones (portraying Clay Shaw) and displays Italian newspaper articles exposing the activities of a Rome-based operation known as Permindex. Shaw, an international trade executive, served on the board of Permindex. The film audience is left with the impression that Permindex was a covert CIA operation, the purpose of which—at least in the film—is never defined.
However, as the evidence now shows, Permindex was a Mossad arms trading and money laundering venture operating in conjunction with the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate. And Clay Shaw, a longtime CIA asset, serving on the Permindex board, was a prime player in the New Orleans phase of the JFK assassination conspiracy.
Therein, quite simply, lies the key to the mystery behind the JFK assassination. Therein lies the explanation as to why Jim Garrison's investigation of Clay Shaw, a director of Permindex, had to be scuttled. Not only had Garrison stumbled upon a definitive CIA link, but he had also (inadvertently) discovered the Israeli connection. But at the time Garrison himself never even suspected how deeply the Permindex nexus went. Garrison had only come across the tip of the iceberg.
THE SECRET ABOUT PERMINDEX
According to Meyer Lansky's sympathetic Israeli biographers: "After Israel became a state, almost 90 percent of its purchases of arms abroad was channeled through Rosenbaum's bank. The financing of many of Israel's most daring secret operations was carried out through the funds in B.C.I."506 B.C.I also served as a depository for the Permindex account.
That Tibor Rosenbaum's B.C.I was a controlling force behind the enigmatic Permindex entity places Israel and its Mossad in the very center of the conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Clay Shaw's positioning in New Orleans, site of one operational rung of the conspiracy, resulted in Shaw's implication in the investigation conducted by Jim Garrison. But the conspiracy went much deeper.
Ultimately, as we now know, Garrison came to recognize that Israel's Mossad was intimately involved in the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963. However, in the beginning, Garrison surely never even suspected it and certainly had no reason to do so. JFK's secret war with Israel was an unknown factor in the geo-political events of the period. Attention instead was focused on American involvement in Southeast Asia
'TRANSNATIONAL CONNECTIONS'
In examining the JFK assassination conspiracy, according to researcher
Peter Dale Scott, "a first step is to suggest that one ingredient in the
complex, multi-centered intrigues that climaxed in the Kennedy
assassination was the participation of diverse unaccountable transnational
connections, each transcending the limits of American political society, and
each with distinctive motives for the murder of the president . . . "To now recognize a transnational dimension to the case is . . . to recognize that the American political system is of necessity an open one, and thus increasingly susceptible to the growing influence of money and intelligence penetration from abroad [our emphasis] . . .
"Transnational connections are common modes of interaction between intelligence agencies, often in intrigues of which heads of government may be, at best, only dimly aware. Sometimes they may give rise to more overt, structured arrangements or forums such as the World Anti-Communist League, a forum, financed over the years by countries like Nationalist China and Saudi Arabia, with recurring links to the international drug traffic."507
Scott notes additionally that "It is well known that in the 1950's and 1960's the Israel Lobby and the Taiwan Lobby were both powerful in Washington and sometimes collaborated on common projects . . . There was also a Nicaragua Lobby, or perhaps more accurately, a Somoza Lobby, which also overlapped with the Israel, China, and Cuba lobbies."508
(Scott points out, for example, that a Washington lobbyist who was close to New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello also served as a registered lobbyist for both Nicaragua and the Israeli Aircraft Industries.)
It is clear, based upon the evidence that we shall review in these pages, that Permindex, which played so central a role in the JFK assassination conspiracy, was indeed one of these transnational "overt, structured arrangements or forums" of which Scott speaks.
WHAT WAS PERMINDEX?
What exactly then was Permindex? How did Permindex fit into the
center of the international conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of
John F. Kennedy? Author Paris Flammonde's 1969 account of the Garrison
investigation, The Kennedy Conspiracy, contains valuable information on
Permindex, although, unfortunately, Flammonde didn't pursue the matter as
far as he could have. Had he done so he would have unearthed the Israeli Lansky
Organized Crime Syndicate connection. Flammonde cites several articles that appeared in the foreign press, specifically Italy's Paesa Sera (March 4, 1967) and the Canadian publication, Le Devoir (March 16, 1967) as his source for much of the information he provides his readers on Permindex.
These articles appeared just shortly after Clay Shaw's name first came to attention as a result of the Garrison investigation and were the articles highlighted in Oliver Stone's JFK. These articles provide the unusual background of Permindex and point toward its real origins.
"There was established in Rome an organization named the Centro Mondiale Commerciale," reported Paesa Sera. [Centro Mondiale Commerciale is Italian for "World Trade Center."] "Its origins, functions, rotating presidency, geographical displacements, sub-, subsequent, and alternate designations were so complex and labyrinthine as to make a comprehensive and comprehensible description of it in anything less than a modern-sized book impossible." 509
The C.M.C was founded in 1961 by one Giorgio Mantello. 510 The Italian name, however, was an affectation. Mantello was an Eastern European Jew originally named Georges Mandel. At the time C.M.C was established, it was asserted that C.M.C would function as an international commercial organization, that it would aid in the establishing of a permanent worldwide network of trade expositions, and generally assist concerns involved in trade matters.
Permindex was a subsidiary of C.M.C. The name Permindex is an acronym which stood for PERmanent INDustrial EXpositions.511 Clay Shaw, of course, was the founder and director of the International Trade Mart in the key port city of New Orleans. Thus, Shaw's connection with an international trade entity seems logical.
However, there was more to the story, as the foreign press revealed: "Actually it was soon to become evident that the seemingly vast, mighty structure was not a rock of solidarity, but a shell of superficiality; not constructed with mass, supporting promise, but composed of channels through which money flowed back and forth, with no one knowing the source or the destination of these liquid assets." reports Paris Flammonde.512
CLAY SHAW'S
LITTLE-KNOWN SPONSORS
What no JFK assassination researchers—even those who cite Clay Shaw's now widely-known CIA connections—ever seem to have noted is yet another Shaw connection that places him further into the net of the CIA/Mossad-Lansky Crime Syndicate nexus.
In Chapter 10, as we have seen, it was Lansky who installed Carlos Marcello as the Mafia boss of New Orleans. It was Weiss, however, who emerged as the Lansky syndicate bagman and political operative working in conjunction with Marcello.
In fact, Lansky's man Weiss was purportedly the prime target of the IRS investigation of Long—referenced in Chapter 10—that was initiated the day before Long's assassination, and, according to Peter Dale Scott, "Long's murder in 1935, some say, was arranged to prevent men like Weiss from going to jail." 514
Scott has noted additionally that House Assassinations Committee director G. Robert Blakey has omitted "all reference to the role of Seymour Weiss"515 in his account of Carlos Marcello's rise to power in New Orleans. To do so, of course, as we noted in Chapter 10, would point in the direction of Meyer Lansky.
SEYMOUR WEISS AND THE CIA
Now although Weiss ultimately did serve time in prison on other
racketeering charges, this did not prevent Weiss from eventually serving on
the board of Standard Fruit and Steamship 516 which maintained strong ties
with the CIA in its activities in Latin America.517 In this context it is interesting to note there have been suggestions that Weiss was a key CIA
contact in New Orleans and his record suggests he would have been perfectly
positioned to be one. In fact, one New Orleans-based CIA contract agent investigated by Jim Garrison—the ubiquitous and colorful Gordon Novel—is known to have written a letter to a "Mr. Weiss" in which Novel discussed the dangers of the Garrison investigation. The letter surfaced at the time that Garrison's inquiry was in full swing and Novel was seeking to avoid giving testimony.
Many have opined that the Mr. Weiss in question was probably Novel's CIA superior, although others have suggested the "Mr. Weiss" may have been another Weiss—and not Seymour. Whatever the case, there is no question but that Seymour Weiss—a prime figure in the Lansky syndicate— was tied closely to the intelligence community and undoubtedly worked on its behalf in the context of his role with Standard Fruit.
The major fruit companies, as numerous works can attest, had extensive interplay with the CIA inasmuch as their vested interests in the so-called "Banana Republics" of Latin America were directly affected by the governments therein. And needless to say, the CIA played a major role in the affairs of Latin America from almost its very inception.
Where then do we find a tie-in between the erudite Clay Shaw, a respectable trade executive, and the Lansky syndicate henchman—and CIA contact—Seymour Weiss? In fact, it is a very close connection indeed.
THE MEN BEHIND SHAW
Hecht, in fact, had become chairman—by the time of his death in 1956—of the executive committee of the International Trade Mart 518 of which Clay Shaw was managing director. It was Hecht and his associates, Ted Brent and Herbert 0. Schwartz, who were Shaw's sponsors.
In short, Hecht was Shaw's superior. Shaw maintained the high public profile with the Trade Mart that won him his place in New Orleans society, while Hecht and his associates were the real powers behind the scenes.
And among those who likewise served on the board of the International Trade Mart was another powerful figure in the Jewish community, Edgar Stern, Jr., whose father Edgar and his mother Edith were among the most prominent financial angels for the Israeli lobby in America. As we shall see in Chapter 17 and Appendix Three, the Sterns—perhaps Shaw's closest friends—were the forces behind the W.D.S.U media empire that played a key role in portraying Lee Harvey Oswald as a "pro-Castro agitator" prior to the JFK assassination, setting him up as the patsy.
Thus, there is indeed much more to Clay Shaw than what we have been told. But it is Shaw's tie to Permindex that places him in a web of intrigue involving Israel's Mossad and global power politics that the critics of Final Judgment would certainly prefer that we ignore.
Let us explore the Permindex connection further. As we do, the reality of what Permindex was—and how it was intimately tied to the JFK assassination—will become more apparent.
LOUIS BLOOMFIELD
THE BRONFMAN CONNECTION
Beyond question, Bloomfield, as we shall see, was a major player in Israel's international network. Our first introduction to Bloomfield was in Chapter 7. There we learned how Bloomfield played a critical role in helping establish the state of Israel and its Mossad.
In the years that followed, Bloomfield rose high in the ranks of the Canadian business world, reputed to control Le Credit Suisse [bank] of Canada, Heineken's Breweries, Canscot Realty, the Grimaldi Siosa [shipping] Lines, Ltd—and, interestingly enough—the Israel Continental Company.521 But the real key to understanding Bloomfield is his role as a founding partner in the Phillips, Vineberg, Bloomfield and Goodman firm which represents the Canadian-based Bronfman family interests.522 This rather intriguing detail suggests that Bloomfield's wide-ranging financial interests were, in fact, those of the Bronfman family. Thus Bloomfield was essentially, a front man for the Bronfman empire.
But there is yet another intriguing Bronfman family link to the JFK assassination conspiracy. When a Russian translator was needed for Lee Harvey Oswald's Russian wife, Marina, it was Texas oilman Jack Crichton, a former military intelligence officer who made the arrangements. According to JFK assassination researcher Peter Dale Scott, Crichton, until 1962, "was also a Vice-President of the Empire Trust Company, a firm whose leading shareholders, the inter-related families of Loeb, Lehman and Bronfman, are said by Stephen Birmingham to have maintained 'something like a private CIA ... around the world' to protect their other investments such as in Cuba, in Guatemala, and in General Dynamics."523
So another Bronfman family intimate was in a key position in the days following the JFK assassination. And in Appendix Four we'll see the Bronfman-Empire Trust connection arise again, this time in relation to a key figure on the Warren Commission "investigating" the JFK assassination. The Bronfman fingerprints around the JFK assassination are everywhere.
Bloomfield also maintained close links with Israel in his own Canadian business and social affairs. The director of the Israeli-Canadian Maritime League, Bloomfield also served as Chairman of the Histadrut Campaign in Canada. 524 The Histadrut, Israel's national labor federation, at one point owned over one-third of the gross national product of Israel and controlled the second largest bank in Israel, the Bank Hapoalim. This bank, as we shall see, was implicated in Permindex intrigue in Europe that comes full circle back to New Orleans and the Clay Shaw connection.
In addition, it turns out, in the critical year of 1963, Bloomfield actually transferred $7.5 million into B.C.I's coffers. According to April 9, 1975 report in the New York Times, Bloomfield arranged for the deposit into B.C.I from a charitable foundation that Bloomfield had set up on behalf of a client. This was ostensibly for the purpose of rescuing the Mossad controlled bank after the government of Liberia defaulted on a substantial loan from B.C.I, supposedly putting the bank in peril.525 So the Permindex chief and Rabbi Rosenbaum's B.C.I had a serious relationship indeed— whatever the actual purpose of the $7.5 million deposit in the B.C.I account.
In light of the critical role that the Permindex chief played in the affairs of B.C.I, it is worth noting that the same New York Times article explained precisely how critical B.C.I was to the interests of Israel. According to the Times: "[B.C.I] did a lot of business with Israel. It helped channel money from rich investors around the world into Israel and performed any number of services for the country. Once when Defense Minister Shimon Peres, then director general in the defense ministry, called Rosenbaum and told him that Israel needed $7 million within 24 hours for her national security, Rosenbaum found the money overnight. He did not ask for, but received, a commission of $500,000 for his services . . .
"The defense ministry maintained an account at the bank to buy arms in western Europe. Other accounts were held by the Histadrut, the Israeli labor federation, by Solel Bonhen (the Histadrut-owned supply and construction company), the Zim Navigation Co. and Israel Corporation, an investment company."526 What is particularly interesting is that the Times also added: "But [B.C.I] was not an Israeli bank. It was a Jewish bank, showing healthy balance sheet assets"527 Clearly, Permindex and B.C.I were part and parcel of the same interests—particularly in 1963.
BLOOMFIELD AND U.S. INTELLIGENCE
And, as we have already seen, the intelligence connections of Permindex
chief Bloomfield were impeccable. Although a Canadian by birth,
Bloomfield was hired by J. Edgar Hoover to serve as a recruiting agent for
the FBI's counterespionage division, Division Five. Through this position
Bloomfield became a working partner of Division Five chief William Sullivan, a close friend of James J. Angleton, the Mossad's CIA ally.
Sullivan was Angleton's "man inside" the FBI. Bloomfield was also given an officer's rank in the U.S. Army during World War II and assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S)—just as had been the American who ultimately became his fellow Permindex director, Clay Shaw.
(A witness uncovered by Jim Garrison claimed to have seen a meeting in Winnipeg airport between Clay Shaw and CIA contract agent David Ferrie with another individual who may have been Bloomfield. 528 It is known that Shaw and Ferrie journeyed in a plane flown by Ferrie to Bloomfield's home base in Montreal at some time in 1961 or 1962.) 529
Obviously, Louis Bloomfield was a key figure in the Permindex network—a vital link between Clay Shaw's operation in New Orleans and other forces operating through Permindex, most especially Israel.
SHAW AND ANGLETON
It is conceivable that not only did Bloomfield first come across Shaw
during his service with the O.S.S during this same period, but also even
another O.S.S man, James Jesus Angleton, who later went on to become
Israel's ally in the CIA. Angleton himself may have had contact with Shaw
at that time, although there is no firm evidence to prove it. However, there
is one intriguing item which points to a possible connection between Shaw
and Angelton during that period. When Jim Garrison first began investigating Clay Shaw, he only knew Shaw under the alias "Clay Bertrand." We can suggest one possible inspiration for Shaw's pseudonym. While serving with U.S. intelligence during World War II, Shaw was stationed for a time in France where he certainly had contact with the French intelligence.
At that time, one of the highest-ranking French intelligence officers was one Gustave Bertrand who was, in fact, a close friend (and role model) for another O.S.S officer, James J. Angleton. In later years Angleton "singled out [Bertrand] as one of the people he learned the most from in a substantive way”530 and who "remained Angleton's friend until death" 531 and who was Angleton's "great Buddha head." 532
When Shaw later adopted his alias of "Bertrand" it is entirely conceivable that he was using this name as a salute to a senior intelligence operative with whom he first made contact in Europe and with whom he probably maintained contact in the years that followed.
This is speculation, of course, but there is no question, as the evidence now shows, that Angleton and Shaw were certainly moving in the same circles during World War II—and much later. And as we shall see in this chapter and in Chapter 16, the French intelligence connections to Permindex and to the JFK assassination conspiracy are very strong indeed.
And inasmuch as Shaw later served, without question, as a valued international contact for the CIA, reporting back to the agency on his foreign ventures, it is certain that Shaw's reports would have ultimately ended upon on the desk of James J. Angleton. Shaw, in effect, was functioning (at least indirectly) as one of Angleton's operatives.
However, it is likely their initial relationship was forged during their joint service with the O.S.S during World War II.
Yet, there is one definitive Angleton-Shaw connection that has been documented and it is interesting indeed. When Shaw was later arrested by Jim Garrison, it was discovered his address book contained the private telephone number of the Principessa Marcelle Borghese. 533 The principessa was a relative of Prince Valerio Borghese who was rescued during World War II by Angleton whose exploits with the O.S.S in Italy as its station chief in Rome won him a decoration from the Vatican. 534
It will be recalled, of course, that one facet of the O.S.S-orchestrated campaign against the Nazis and the Italian fascists was known as Operation Underworld. As we saw in Chapter 7, it was Meyer Lansky who was the middle man between the O.S.S and organized crime, helping arrange for Sicilian Mafia support for the invading Allied troops in Italy. Angleton, of course, was point man in Europe for the project.
(That Permindex was based in Rome, may thus be no coincidence, considering Angleton's long-standing connections with the city, where even his father held the National Cash Register franchise for Italy.) 535
In any event there is no question whatsoever that Clay Shaw and James Angleton—along with Major Bloomfield of Permindex—had long moved in the same closely related circles on a wide variety of fronts.
MORE STRANGE CONNECTIONS
That Clay Shaw's contacts in the Mossad-linked Permindex entity had a
wide-ranging array of international interests in the world of intrigue is
further evidenced by some of the other personalities involved. Among those
who were either investors in Permindex or who shared seats on the board of
Permindex were several interesting characters with equally interesting
connections. Among them were: Ferenc Nagy. The former premier of Hungary was a fierce anticommunist who maintained close connections not only to Israel's allies in the America CIA, but also to the anti-Castro Cuban colony in Miami, itself practically a joint operating subsidiary of both the CIA and the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate. (Nagy himself later settled in Dallas, Texas and was residing there at the time of the Kennedy assassination.)536
Hans Seligman. A member of the family which controlled the Seligman Bank of Basel and whose extended family were, in America, part of the famous "Our Crowd" (German Jewish elite) in New York City during the latter period of the 19th century. Seligman was intimately involved with the Israel-oriented Zionist agency known as the Jewish Colonization Association.537
Morris Dalitz. The former Cleveland bootlegger-turned-Las Vegas casino gambling czar. Dalitz was a longtime Lansky intimate who was Benjamin Siegel's successor as Lansky's point man in Las Vegas. 538
As we saw in Chapter 10, Dalitz later employed "racket buster" G. Robert Blakey as a consultant/character witness in a libel action in which Dalitz was contesting charges that his La Costa Country Club in Carlsbad, California was linked to organized crime. It was shortly thereafter that Blakey was placed in charge of the House Assassinations Committee investigation of the JFK murder.
Dalitz himself, as noted in Chapter 10, was also a longtime fund-raiser for the Israeli lobby in the United States and honored by the aforementioned Anti-Defamation League (A.D.L ) for his services.
Carlos Prio Socarras. The President of Cuba from 1948-1952, Prio Socarras had been a front-man for Meyer Lansky's partner-in-crime, Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista. In fact, it was Lansky who persuaded Batista with a hefty bribe to "step down" in favor of Prio Socarras. 539 And as we saw in Chapter 14 Prio was engaged in gun-running with a business partner whose name is now more than a footnote in history: Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby.
No wonder then, that the Italian journal, Paesa Sera, would be moved to comment: "It is a fact that the C.M.C is nevertheless the point of contact for a number of persons who, in certain respects, have somewhat equivocal ties whose common denominator is an anti-communism so strong that it would swallow up all those in the world who have fought for decent relations between East and West, including Kennedy." 540
CMC/Permindex—it might also be added even more particularly—is nevertheless the point of contact for a number of persons who, in certain respects, have somewhat equivocal ties whose common denominator is a devotion to the cause of Israel.
ISRAEL'S ROLE COMES FULL CIRCLE
As we have noted, however, it is the Tibor Rosenbaum-B.C.I connection
with Permindex that points most definitely toward the Israeli Mossad
interest in Permindex. B.C.I, as we have seen, was very much a creature of
Israel and its Mossad. Among the directors of Rosenbaum's B.C.I was Ernest
Israel Japhet, also chairman and president of the Bank Leumi, the largest
bank in Israel. B.C.I and Bank Leumi were involved in the diamond trade and
tied into Far East drug trafficking.541 (We have already examined, in Chapter 6 and Chapter 12, Lansky's central role in global drug-trafficking in Southeast Asia, all of which was made further possible—under CIA cover—as a consequence of American involvement in the Vietnam conflict.)
Two other directors of BCI—as we noted in Chapter 7 were Ed Levinson, front man at the Fremont Casino in Las Vegas for Lansky's close friend, Joseph "Doc" Stacher, who died in exile in Israel and John Pullman, Lansky's international money courier. Rosenbaum's other operation,the Swiss-Israel Trade Bank owned one-third interest in the Paz group, which had been a Rothschild family entity, maintaining control over Israel's oil and petrochemical industry.542
EISENBERG AND FEINBERG—AGAIN
As we noted in Chapter 7, associates of Rosenbaum in the Swiss-Israel
Trade Bank included Shaul Eisenberg, a key figure in Israel's nuclear bomb
development—the central point of conflict between JFK and Israel—and
New York businessman Abe Feinberg. In Chapter 8 we learned that
Eisenberg later became a business associate of CIA figure Theodore
Shackley. Shackley, as we discovered in Chapter 11, was the CIA's chief of
station in Miami during the CIA-Lansky Crime Syndicate plots against
Fidel Castro. And, in Chapter 12, we learned, it was Shackley who was CIA
chief of station in Laos during the period of the close working relationship
between the CIA and the Lansky syndicate in the global drug racket. It was Feinberg, as we saw in Chapter 4, who was the American Jewish fund-raising contact of the 1960 Kennedy for President campaign. Feinberg's heavy-handed tactics so infuriated Kennedy that he privately told a close friend that, as president, he intended to enforce changes in campaign fund-raising regulations that would prevent powerful groups such as the American pro-Israel lobby from wielding so much influence.
Feinberg, additionally, of course, was close to Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and, in fact, helped arrange the bitter meeting between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion recounted in Chapter 5.
The manager of Rosenbaum and Feinberg's Swiss-Israel Trade Bank was Gen. Julius Klein, a U.S. Army officer, who had engaged in illegally re-routing shiploads of supplies and equipment scheduled to go to post-war Germany to the Haganah, the military forces of the Jews in Palestine. Klein conducted this enterprise while chief of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps in Europe at the end of World War II.
(Later, in Appendix Four, we'll meet Klein's protégé who had an unusually close relationship with a key member of the Warren Commission cover-up of the JFK assassination. However, Klein's services on behalf of the state of Israel were even more significant. It was Klein who had been involved in setting up Israel's Mossad and in training its officers. Klein worked alongside Sir William Stephenson in this particular venture.543
In Chapter 7, we learned of Sir William's clandestine alliance with Meyer Lansky and his crime syndicate in the so-called Operation Underworld apparatus aimed against Axis intelligence during World War II.
Stephenson, of course, had been the director of Britain's intelligence operations in the United States—in the critical years preceding and during World War II—and was the aforementioned Major Louis M. Bloomfield's operating superior. It was during his days working with the American O.S.S and Naval Intelligence—and the Lansky Crime Syndicate—that Stephenson cemented his ties with the Jewish anti-Nazi underground.
According to intelligence historian Richard Deacon: "Stephenson received a great deal of intelligence from Jewish scientists. This particular operation, though seemingly far removed from the story of Palestine, in the long run greatly helped Israeli Intelligence in the early days of the state of Israel. Some of these scientists who had become friends with Stephenson were encouraged to develop their talents in the cause of Allied intelligence and they not only worked for Britain in World War II, but later assisted the Israeli Secret Service."544
What's more, it might be noted, Stephenson was a close personal adviser to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Here, almost certainly, Stephenson had contact, during those early days, with a young American who became a friend of Churchill—Clay Shaw, that American Army officer detailed to the Office of Strategic Services.
THE PERMINDEX PLOT
Obviously, the connections (at an intimate level) between Tibor
Rosenbaum's Israeli Mossad banking operation, the Banque de Credit
International, and a wide-ranging array of figures tied closely to the Lansky
Organized Crime Syndicate and—even—to Clay Shaw, a member of the
Permindex board of directors, brings the conspiracy full circle. That B.C.I was
one of the primary shareholders of the Permindex entity clearly points
toward a Mossad role in the Permindex plot that ended the life of John F.
Kennedy. However, there is much, much more as we shall see.
LANSKY'S MIAMI-GENEVA COURIER
Research by former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow not only sheds
light on the connections between Lansky's Miami banks and Mossad officer
Tibor Rosenbaum's B.C.I, but also provides us evidence of a role by Meyer
Lansky in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Shortly after Morrow had published his first book, Betrayal, in which he described his own connections through the CIA with a number of the figures involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy, he was contacted by a young man with an incredible story he wanted to tell.
According to Morrow, "In our initial conversation, the young man claimed his father, an ex-Air Force colonel, and others working for the CIA had prior knowledge that President Kennedy was going to be assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963 . . .
"The intelligence officer's son then made a wild accusation. He asserted that his father had been tied into organized crime and had been a bag man for at least one of the payoffs relating to the presidential assassination, transporting a large sum of money to Haiti for payoff purposes during the summer of 1963." 545
This young man told Morrow that his father was associated with a mob courier. The courier in question was Mickey Weiner. Pursuing the Weiner lead further, Morrow learned from another source that tape recordings had been uncovered in which Weiner had participated in conversations relating to the circumstances of the Kennedy assassination.
According to Morrow's source, Albert Moakler, "The tapes were indicative that there was a conversation going on which was more than idle gossip. It definitely concerned Jersey and Miami . . . the areas, people in the areas. Something concerned with the assassination." 546
(Miami, of course, was Meyer Lansky's base of operations. New Jersey, as we saw in Chapter 7, was the base of Lansky's Mafia associate, mobster Jerry Catena who was responsible for distribution of "skim" money from Lansky's Las Vegas gambling operations to Lansky's organized crime associates in the northern states.)
Morrow also determined that Weiner made regular runs between Switzerland and Miami where he would visit the Bank of Miami Beach. 547 Weiner, obviously, was one of Lansky's couriers between his banking operations in Miami and those of the Israeli Mossad's Tibor Rosenbaum and the Banque de Credit International in Switzerland.
Thus, it's clear that Lansky's courier definitely had "inside" information about the JFK assassination. We may even go so far as to speculate that it was Lansky's courier who was providing funds from Permindex to the assassination conspirators stateside.
ANOTHER ISRAEL CONNECTION
A "high level financial backer" of the Permindex operation, according to
Paesa Sera, was one Dr. David Biegun, national secretary of the National
Committee for Labor Israel, Inc., based in New York. This committee was
the American affiliate of the Israeli Histadrut for which Permindex board
chairman Louis M. Bloomfield was a chief fundraiser. 548 Flammonde,
despite his excellent research, failed to carry this connection further. And
note also that ex-CIA man Philip Agee has said that the Committee for
Labor Israel is often used as a CIA cover. 549 Biegun's role in Permindex was explicitly important—even central to the operation of Permindex.
In fact, it was Biegun who oversaw the liquidation of CMC/Permindex after the company was expelled from Switzerland and Italy in 1962, subsequently relocating the operation to Johannesburg, South Africa. 550 (South Africa, it might be noted, has long been engaged in intimate international intrigues in conjunction with Israel.)
Paesa Sera speculated that [CMC/Permindex] "was a creature of the CIA . . . set up as a cover for the transfer of CIA . . . funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activities."551 The Italian journal, however, seems to have missed the multiple Israeli connections that we have explored in these pages.
PLOTS TO ASSASSINATE
CHARLES DeGAULLE
Public controversy surrounding Permindex, resulting in its expulsion
from Switzerland and Italy, involved the role of Permindex in assassination
plots aimed at French President Charles DeGaulle. And as we shall see, it is
here that we find even more intriguing connections between Permindex and
the JFK assassination. Earlier in these pages, as we have seen, the rebel Secret Army Organization—known by its acronym O.A.S—was bitterly opposed to DeGaulle's decision to grant independence to Arab Algeria. (It was, as we noted in Chapter 4, John F. Kennedy who, as a young senator, riled the Israeli lobby by calling for Algerian independence in 1957.)
The O.A.S launched numerous assassination attempts against DeGaulle, none of which were successful, of course, but they did later inspire Frederick Forsythe's famous novel (later turned into a popular motion picture), The Day of the Jackal.
Following an investigation of one attempt, in 1962, French intelligence (the S.D.E.C.E) charged that Permindex laundered money into the O.A.S coffers to finance the attempt on DeGaulle's life. 552
According to DeGaulle's biographer, Jean Lacouture, "for moral as well as political reasons, [the O.A.S leadership] considered it necessary to sacrifice the Head of State, either physically or politically, so that Algeria would remain French."553
SOUSTELLE, THE OAS
AND THE IRGUN
One of the harshest French critics of Algerian independence was Jewish-born
convert to Christianity, Jacques Soustelle, former governor-general of Algeria.
Described by Israeli historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi as being known as
one of "Israel's friends in France,"554 Soustelle, as French Atomic Energy
Minister from 1958 to 1959, cooperated closely with Yuval Ne'eman, the
father of Israel's atomic bomb project, in helping Israel develop the
groundwork for a nuclear arsenal.555 Bitterly condemning Degaulle's
reversal on Algeria, Soustelle went into self-imposed exile. 556 Although Soustelle himself denied any contacts with the O.A.S,557 he was one of its primary supporters, winning the plaudits of OAS partisans who promulgated the joint Israeli-OAS propaganda myth that Algerian independence would establish a Soviet foothold in North Africa. In fact, Israeli intelligence came to Soustelle's aid when he went into exile. In 1962 Soustelle took up "hiding in Rome in the house of a furniture dealer whose brother was a representative of the [Israeli] Irgun."558
Interestingly enough, according to Paesa Sera, the Italian journal which publicized the role of Permindex in the plots against DeGaulle, former Hungarian premier and Permindex board member Ferenc Nagy was a "munificent contributor"559 to Jacques Soustelle and the OAS.
What's more, we now know, one of the key bases of financial support for Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum's BCI—the key force behind Permindex and the plots against DeGaulle—were "clandestine deposits of undeclared funds from French Jews,"560 not to mention, of course, the criminal funds from the Lansky crime syndicate.
One French military leader who emerged as an O.A.S leader, General Antoine Argoud said, "the physical elimination of the Head of State poses no moral problem for any of us . . . We are all convinced . . . that DeGaulle has deserved the supreme punishment a hundred times over."561
However, there were other elements that proved supportive of the French rebels within the OAS. According to historian Alexander Harrison:
"Factors that seemed to favor the success of the [O.A.S] efforts to keep Algeria French [included]:
The complicity of the 'old boy' networks within the various intelligence agencies, most notably the French secret service, [the SDECE] and the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire [responsible for internal counterespionage] both of which at times placed loyalty to a former comrade-in-arms . . . above loyalty to the government; and
Possible logistical help from countries [such as] the United States that had been hostile to DeGaulle since the first days of the Resistance in World War II and viewed his pro-Soviet stance as a threat to Western hegemony in the Mediterranean." 562
(Earlier we learned of the CIA's covert support for the OAS, despite opposition to the OAS by JFK who had been an ardent advocate for Algerian independence much to the dismay of Israel's lobby in America.)
ISRAEL AND THE OAS
Not surprisingly, according to historian Harrison, whose O.A.S
sympathies are apparent "Some of the most ardent supporters of the O.A.S
in Algeria were Jews."563 What's more, notes Harrison, "a Jewish branch
of the O.A.S was created."564 Another historian, Paul Henissart, has also noted an Israeli connection with the O.A.S. According to Henissart, "The O.A.S attracted hotheads including some Jews who belonged to Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Israeli underground military organization. They were recruited by the O.A.S as specialists in clandestine warfare."565
He notes additionally that while there were Jewish defense groups established in Algeria, "official Israeli delegations in Algeria to organize emigration of Jews from the coastal cities were not averse to aiding these self-defense groups. The Israeli government, however, never confirmed any connection with them."566
Nonetheless as Israeli historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has pointed out, there is evidence of official Israeli support of the OAS: "During 1961 and 1962, there were numerous reports of Israeli support for the French OAS movement in Algeria."567
He notes that the Israelis had assisted the French in the Algerian war of independence between 1954 and 1962. Then, when Algeria was finally independent and sought admission to the U.N, only Israel voted against it. Beit Hallahmi quotes another historian, Stewart Steven, as saying, "When in 1961 the O.A.S was created, it was a natural development that Israel, as keen on [French retention of Algeria as a colony] as the O.A.S themselves, should lock themselves into the [O.A.S]."568
So it was that Israeli intelligence—and its allies in the American CIA— had formed a close working alliance with the very forces that were attempting to destroy French President Charles DeGaulle. At the same time, in fact, these same elements were using their Permindex connection in yet another plot, this one aimed at the life of John F. Kennedy.
THE OAS, PERMINDEX
AND NEW ORLEANS
There is, interestingly, a New Orleans connection here. According to a
report later issued by DeGaulle's secret service, the S.D.E.C.E, Israel's Bank
Hapoalim supplied funds to the O.A.S through the office of former FBI agent
and CIA contract operative, Guy Banister, in New Orleans.569 Banister's
agent, Maurice Brooks Gatlin, in turn, carried the money to the OAS in
Paris.570
(Several years later Gatlin died in Panama when he fell—or was
pushed—from a hotel balcony.) Gatlin, evidently, had many interesting international affairs. When a Latin American regional conference of a global anti-communist confederation was set in place, organized by CIA operative and Banister contact, E. Howard Hunt, the chairman of that conference was Antonio Valladares. This same Valladares, based in Guatemala, also happened to serve as an attorney for New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello whom, as we have seen, was assisting in financing Banister's anti-communist activities. In attendance at the conference, which ultimately merged into the World Anti-Communist League, was Maurice Brooks Gatlin,571 suggesting that the New Orleans connection to the CIA and other worldwide intrigue was very strong indeed.
The aforementioned Bank Hapoalim was the bank established by Israel's labor bund, the Histadrut, for which Permindex chairman Louis Bloomfield served as chief fundraiser in Canada. Guy Banister's activities were explored earlier in Chapter 10, Chapter 11 and Chapter 14.
According to Gilbert LeCavelier, an associate of the late Bernard Fensterwald (a leading JFK assassination researcher), Banister's office also served as a New Orleans headquarters for OAS-connected mercenaries.
Among those OAS mercenaries was Jean Souetre who, we noted in Chapter 12, was reported to have been picked up in Dallas on November 22, 1963 and expelled from the United States.572 In Chapter 16 we will explore Souetre's activities further.
Banister, the former FBI and Naval intelligence operative, oversaw CIA backed anti-Castro gun-running and intelligence operations out of an office at 544 Camp Street in New Orleans. Closely linked to the anti-Castro Cuban movement, Banister's operation functioned with the support of the CIA. Former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow asserts in his book, Betrayal, that Permindex board member Clay Shaw was, in fact, Banister's immediate superior in coordinating CIA operations out of New Orleans.
Thus, we have CIA asset Clay Shaw, serving on the board of Permindex, which is in turn operating in conjunction with Banister's office in plots against Charles DeGaulle. And in the same period we have Banister (and Shaw) involved in manipulating the activities of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans just prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Among others, Banister was associated with former CIA pilot and anti Castro adventurer David Ferrie (one of the key figures in Jim Garrison's case against Clay Shaw). Ferrie, as we have seen, also had a long-standing connection with Lee Harvey Oswald and, by all accounts, was associating regularly with Oswald in New Orleans in the summer of 1963. And we now know for certain that Ferrie and Shaw were intimately acquainted. The connections between Ferrie, Shaw, Banister and Oswald do come full circle.
Former CIA man Morrow also reports that during his activities with the CIA, working in conjunction with David Ferrie, he and Ferrie visited a warehouse in Europe where vast amounts of arms were stored—arms intended for the anti-Castro Cuban underground. The warehouse was a Permindex operation. 573
Banister's secretary, Delphine Roberts, has been quoted as having said that Oswald was a regular visitor to 544 Camp Street engaged in some sort of "intelligence" work. 574 In fact, as is now generally acknowledged, it appears as though Oswald was being set up as a "pro-Castro" patsy.
BANISTER'S ISRAELI CONNECTION
However, interestingly enough, there is yet another Israeli connection
to the New Orleans scenario that set up Lee Harvey Oswald as the fall guy
in the JFK assassination plot. It turns out that one of Banister's
longstanding friends and fellow anti-communists was one A. I. (Bee)
Botnick. 575 Botnick was a key figure in the New Orleans regional office of
the Anti-Defamation League (A.D.L) of B'nai B'rith, which is now known to
maintain close ties to the Israeli Mossad. Botnick, who reportedly considered himself "a super communist hunter," was obsessed with communism and, like Banister, believed communism to be a major force behind the civil rights movement. 576
(In 1993 it was reported that the A.D.L had spied extensively on the late Dr. Martin Luther King and then turned its findings over to J. Edgar Hoover, Banister's former superior at the FBI.) 577 In Chapter 7 and in Chapter 10 we noted the close links between the A.D.L and the Lansky Crime Syndicate, itself tied in turn to the CIA and to Israeli intelligence, most notably through the Permindex link discussed in this chapter.)
At the national level, and under Botnick in New Orleans, the A.D.L had a history of deploying agents into left-wing groups in order to spy on their activities. This, of course, fits precisely into the profile of Lee Harvey Oswald's "leftist" and "pro-Castro" activities in New Orleans during the summer of 1963, operating a "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" out of Banister's intelligence operation at 544 Camp Street.
What is additionally intriguing is that, according to former A.D.L general counsel and intelligence chief Arnold Forster, much of the A.D.L's "fact finding" (i.e. spying) utilized agents "employed by an outside investigative agency operating as an independent contractor." 578 So, in light of the close association between Botnick and Banister, it seems quite likely Botnick contracted out A.D.L work out to his fellow anti-communist.
What's more, according to the A.D.L's Forster, many of the A.D.L's fact finders were "retired local or federal government investigators"579—such as, perhaps, a likely former American intelligence agent named Oswald who had once done covert work in the Soviet Union.
We can only wonder if, in fact, Lee Harvey Oswald's "left wing" activities were actually being financed by the A.D.L. Was Oswald, indeed, being utilized to infiltrate left-wing groups by Banister ostensibly as part of what appeared to be a fact-finding mission for the A.D.L but which actually was an intelligence operation with an ulterior motive?
It is thus not so extraordinary to suggest that perhaps Oswald was being "sheep-dipped" as a "pro-Castro" agitator by the A.D.L (under the guise of A.D.L "fact finding") which was functioning as a conduit for the Mossad and its CIA allies. Quite convenient indeed.
A 'THIRD FORCE'?
Although he does not pinpoint the A.D.L as a force behind Banister's
activities, respected JFK assassination researcher Peter Dale Scott has lent
credence to the possibility that there was much more to Banister's
operations than would seem to meet the eye. According to Scott:
"Disagreement arises . . . as to who was paying for Banister's anti Communist
activities: governmental intelligence, the New Orleans Mafia,
or some third force allied with both together." [emphasis added] Those stressing the intelligence angle, notes Scott, point to Banister's FBI and CIA and Office of Naval Intelligence connections while those stressing the "Mafia" point to Banister's connections, through David Ferrie and others, to New Orleans Mafia chief Carlos Marcello.
As Scott notes, however, "a third and more likely possibility is that both Oswald and Banister were working for what was in effect a third force: an intelligence-Mafia gray alliance, rooted in the deep political economy of New Orleans."580 And as we have seen in this chapter and elsewhere, the A.D.L did indeed have a strong root in the deep political economy of New Orleans, even indeed in the Clay Shaw connection.
"As to the story that Oswald was an FBI informant," writes Scott, "I doubt that Oswald was directly on the FBI payroll. A more likely possibility is that he worked for a private security agency which in turn reported to the FBI, the way that ex-FBI and ex-Official of Naval Intelligence agent Guy Banister, according to a CIA document, reported to the FBI in New Orleans."581 [emphasis added]
That the A.D.L did, in fact, report back to the FBI, a long-standing relationship cemented by J. Edgar Hoover himself, is now common knowledge, a fact that we shall examine further in Chapter 17.
The FBI files of another prominent Black civil rights leader of the 1960's, Dick Gregory, demonstrate conclusively that the A.D.L which was actually monitoring his public lectures and then turning the information over to the FBI as part of its COINTELPRO operations.
And as we saw in Chapter 7, it was COINTELPRO, carried out by the FBI's Division Five, that was under the direct control of William Sullivan, who was effectively a CIA "mole" inside the FBI for his close friend, the Mossad's CIA ally, James J. Angleton.
(In Chapter 17 we will explore the activities of the A.D.L further, paying particular attention to the apparent manipulation of media coverage of the controversy over the JFK assassination by the A.D.L and by A.D.L-linked sources in New Orleans. Furthermore, in Appendix Two we shall examine a little-explored link between Lee Harvey Oswald and at least one covert government informant who almost certainly had connections with the A.D.L. And in Appendix Three we will learn much more about Guy Banister's strange "right wing" connections that actually point toward the ADL.)
Whatever the case, it is very clear that the Mossad and the CIA had a direct hand in the strange activities of Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans during the summer of 1963.
Both the Mossad and the CIA were intimately tied with the Permindex plot against French President Charles DeGaulle and with the Permindex plot against John F. Kennedy. In the bloody conflict over Algerian Arab independence both Kennedy and DeGaulle found themselves on the same side of the issue—and in opposition to the Mossad and its allies in the CIA.
A VISIT FROM PERMINDEX
That New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was indeed on the
right track is illustrated by a strange visit that Garrison got during the early
days of his investigation. A Denver oilman, later identified by investigators
as John King, appeared in Garrison's office and offered to arrange the district
attorney's appointment to a federal judgeship in return for Garrison's
abandonment of his investigation. King very clearly had inside information about the nature of Garrison's inquiry and was obviously interested in shutting it down before it went any further. Garrison would not be bribed, however, and promptly showed the gentleman to the door.
It just so happens that during the very period of King's mysterious visit to New Orleans, the "Denver oilman" was engaged in lucrative international business dealings with Bernie Cornfeld, the Geneva-based head of the Investors Overseas Service (I.O.S). King's other interests included oil drilling offshore of the Sinai peninsula, Arab territory seized by the Israelis in 1967.582 King's partner Cornfeld, as we saw in Chapter 7 and in Chapter 9, was, in fact, the protege and front man of Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum, founder of the Banque De Credit International (B.C.I) and a central financial figure behind Permindex.
King's visit was very clearly a friendly offer from Permindex. They hoped to silence Garrison before his inquiry went further—before he made the Clay Shaw connection, before he discovered the real origins of the Permindex plot that led to the murder of John F. Kennedy. Permindex and its backers were determined to stop the investigation in its tracks. John King's visit to New Orleans is very clear evidence, indeed, that the role of Clay Shaw and Permindex is the key to the JFK assassination mystery.
An interesting footnote: By 1967, a key player in the Permindex network of Tibor Rosenbaum and John King was the super-lawyer who represented I.O.S interests in Washington: Myer Feldman. 583 Feldman, whom we first met in Chapter 5 as JFK's liaison to the American Jewish community, after leaving the White House, signed on as a well-paid henchman for the very interests behind the JFK assassination and cover-up. And today, it just so happens, Feldman apparently serves as an attorney for the Kennedy family itself, overseeing the most private legal matters of the family of the slain American president. A small world indeed.
THE STRANGE WORLD
OF CLAY SHAW
Those who have been most strident in their denunciations of Jim
Garrison for his indictment of Clay Shaw are among those who push the
myth that "The Mafia Killed JFK." They suggest that Clay Shaw was some
innocent figure who was only rehabilitating French Quarter carriage houses. Yet, despite the link between Permindex and the Lansky Syndicate money laundering Banque De Credit International, those who say that "The Mafia Killed JFK" say absolutely nothing about Shaw's very firm ties— through Permindex—to this criminal banking entity, very much linked to "the Mafia" through Lansky.
To disregard the Israeli linkage to Permindex is to avoid the truth altogether. This is why those who seek to point the finger of blame toward "the Mafia," for example, are so determined to vindicate Clay Shaw. To look Shaw's direction is to look in the direction of Israel—and that is why it was so vital that Garrison's investigation had to be scuttled at all costs.
Obviously, there's much more to the Permindex controversy than many people would like to admit. And in this author's judgment it is because of the Permindex link to Israel and its Mossad that some JFK assassination researchers have chosen to ignore the truth before them.
WHAT ABOUT THE
'NAZI' CONNECTION?
There have been those who have proclaimed Permindex to have been
some sort of "Nazi" remnant that survived World War II. The leading
promoter of this theory was Mae Brussell, an eccentric researcher who became an icon for many obsessed with the JFK assassination, among them
one Dave Emory who insists to this day that "The Nazis Killed JFK." Yet, there is something about Miss Brussell's background that is significant in light of the Israeli role in the JFK assassination as dissected here. Brussell was the daughter of Rabbi Edgar Magnin, the spiritual leader of Hollywood's Jewish community—next to the New York Jewish community the most significant force in the pro-Israel lobby in America. For this reason alone Mrs. Brussell would not be inclined to follow Permindex to its Israeli antecedents.
Mrs. Brussell and her acolyte, Dave Emory, contended that high-ranking former Nazis such as General Reinhard Gehlen who were brought under the wing of American intelligence following World War II were ultimately responsible for the Kennedy assassination—through Permindex.
However, the fact is that Israeli intelligence was working closely with the Gehlen organization in the post-World War II period. John Loftus and Mark Aarons have written of how Israeli operatives—although they found the new relationship distasteful did indeed work with reputed former Nazi war criminals in Gehlen's operation. What's more, the Israelis had completely infiltrated the Gehlen organization.
According to Loftus and Aarons: "They knew exactly what General Gehlen was doing . . . After Israel was born, sections of the Mossad arrived inside Gehlen's base to receive special training . . . Even he had no idea how many of his staff also were reporting to Tel Aviv . . . Whatever Gehlen saw, the Israelis saw."584
So if indeed (as some say) it was a "Nazi" plot that killed JFK, it seems highly unlikely that the plot somehow got by the intrepid Israelis. But, as we know now, it was not a Nazi plot—the fantasies of Dave Emory and Mae Brussell notwithstanding. Permindex was an Israeli front—not a Nazi front.
It is probably worth noting, for the record, that the first nationwide publicity that Mrs. Brussell's theory that "the Nazis Killed JFK" received was when it appeared in the pages of the short-lived magazine, The Rebel, published by highly controversial pornographer Larry Flynt. 585
Although Flynt had indeed funded legitimate independent research into the JFK assassination some time earlier (which some suggest may have led to the later attempt on Flynt's life), the Brussell article was not part of that earlier effort that came out of the Flynt publishing empire.
It is hard to say precisely what motivates Flynt, a complex individual indeed, but we do know one thing: according to George magazine, published by no less than John F. Kennedy, Jr., Flynt, at least recently, has emerged as a substantial contributor to the Anti-Defamation League (A.D.L) of B'nai B'rith.586 So in light of what we do know about the A.D.L and its multiple links to those intimately involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy, this is interesting indeed.
Despite all of Mae Brussell's ruminations, there is ironically, a genuine and bizarre "Nazi" connection to Permindex that is either misunderstood or has been deliberately obscured but which does further toward our understanding of Permindex as a transnational point of contact for the Mossad and its allies in the CIA and organized crime.
THE 'FASCIST JEWS'
The fact is that not only Mossad figure Tibor Rosenbaum but also
Permindex figures Georges and Ernst Mandel were part of a Zionist
operation that had its origins in a multi-layered intelligence venture that laid
the groundwork for not only the establishment of the state of Israel but the
escape of former Nazi leaders out of Europe and into the Gehlen organization
(and elsewhere) following the close of World War II. According to the
aforementioned Loftus and Aarons, writing in The Secret War Against the
Jews: "During World War II Soviet intelligence used a network of supposedly "fascist Jews," code named Max, to penetrate the inner circles of the Third Reich and to destroy the German army on the Eastern front. The Nazis believed that the Max network was their secret intelligence source inside the Kremlin, and it did in fact give 'good' intelligence to the Germans but it was strictly controlled by the Communists.
"The Jews of the Max network were mostly Communist double agents, but they also were Jews who defected to the Zionist cause toward the end of the war and revealed [future CIA director] Allen Dulles' [pre-war and wartime] secret [financial and intelligence] deals with the Nazis.
"The Zionists," according to Loftus and Aarons, "blackmailed Dulles' [CIA] protege, James Angleton, into setting up a parallel smuggling system for Jews and fugitive Nazis."587 It was in Chapter 8 that we learned of Angleton's role in the Jewish refugee network that ultimately evolved into the modern-day Mossad.
That the Israelis were blackmailing Angleton, according to Loftus and Aarons, who are undoubtedly pro-Israeli partisans, explains much about Angleton's behavior throughout his CIA career and in the events which involved Angleton in the circumstances of the JFK assassination, more about which we shall discuss in Chapter 16.
A TRANSNATIONAL ARRANGEMENT
In light of all this, we now understand why Zionist operatives
collaborated with so-called "Nazi" forces in the strange transnational entity
known as Permindex. There were—as Peter Dale Scott said—common
modes of interaction between a variety of interests involved in complex,
multi-centered intrigues where these diverse elements, each with distinctive
motives, worked together on common projects, each for their own ends. There is indeed much more to Permindex than we have been told by some JFK assassination researchers, but ultimately the truth is that Permindex was, more than anything, predominantly a transnational arrangement with Israel's intrigues as its driving force.
Israel's worldwide connections—particularly with the anti-Kennedy forces within the CIA and the CIA-linked Lansky crime empire, along with the French OAS rebels and Charles DeGaulle's enemies within his own intelligence service—made possible the network through which the plan to kill JFK was carried out. Permindex was in the center of it all.
Through the so-called "false flag" technique in which the Mossad is so skilled (as we saw in Chapter 3), "Mafia" figures, anti-Castro Cubans, low level CIA operatives and an assortment of other strange figures were drawn into the Permindex web behind the JFK assassination conspiracy.
In the end, however, it was Permindex board member Clay Shaw who became the one person (aside from the hapless Lee Harvey Oswald) to be charged with having participated in the conspiracy. Whether Shaw knew of the impending assassination will probably never be known. That Shaw was trafficking with the likes of David Ferrie and Guy Banister—Oswald's immediate handlers—has now been firmly established. Whether Shaw knew that Oswald, ultimately, would be the patsy is another mystery. Nonetheless, the Clay Shaw link to the assassination—and to Permindex— points directly toward the Mossad role in the conspiracy.
Permindex is the key to understanding the full nature of the JFK assassination conspiracy. To ignore the Permindex connection is to ignore the reality about the origins of the plot that led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The tentacles of Permindex reached far and wide, inextricably intertwining the Mossad, the CIA and the Lansky Crime Syndicate.
Although, recently, Warren Commission enthusiast Max Holland penned an essay in the spring 2001 issue of The Wilson Quarterly purporting to "prove" that the Soviet KGB was responsible for effectively sponsoring "disinformation"—namely the Paese Sera articles that linked Clay Shaw to Permindex—Holland's opus does no more than to prove that Permindex was the subject of controversy in the first place. But, more pointedly, Holland's essay fails to address the real question: if Permindex was NOT a CIA front, was it instead an Israeli operation? Final Judgment answers the question beyond any shadow of a doubt, but it's not likely Holland will respond to that.
In our next chapter we will review, at last, the most recent, startling and definitive evidence which proves that it was Israel's ally at the CIA headquarters, James Jesus Angleton, who played a key role in the assassination conspiracy and cover-up. What's more, we will examine important new information which suggests that there was much more happening in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 than otherwise might meet the eye. We will also discover that the so-called "French connection" to the JFK assassination is, in fact, the Israeli connection.
next
Double Cross in Dallas?
notes
Chapter Fourteen The Errand Boy
442 Stephen Fox, Blood and Power. (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1989), p. 307.
443 Bernard Fensterwald and the Committee to Investigate Assassinations. Coincidence or Conspiracy? (New York: Zebra Books, 1977) pp. 371-372.
444 Seth Kantor. Who Was Jack Ruby? (New York: Everest House, 1978) pp. 13-14.
445 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 180.
446 Ibid., 184.
447 Ibid., p. 183.
448 Ibid., p. 182.
449 Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1989), p. 392.
450 Scott, p. 141.
451 Ibid., p. 144.
452 Ibid., p. 141.
453 Ibid., p. 71.
454 Ibid., p. 71.
455 Ibid., p. 70.
456 Ibid., p. 151.
457 Ibid., p. 193.
458 Ibid., p. 19.
459 Ibid., p. 21.
460 Ibid., p. 181.
461 Ibid., p. 151.
462 Ibid., p. 201.
463 Ibid., p. 201.
464 Ibid., p. 349.
465 A. J. Weberman Internet website: www.weberman.com (Nodule 27).
466 A. J. Weberman Internet website: www.weberman.com (Nodule 27).
467 Interview with Steve Frogue, who asked the question of Walt Brown.
468 William Pepper. An Act of State. (New York: Verso Books, 2003), p. 77.
469 Ibid., pp. 100-102.
470 "The Death in Arizona of the Kemper Marley Machine," by Brian Downing Quig, appearing on the Internet.
471 Robert Morrow. The Senator Must Die: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy. ( Santa Monica: CA: Roundtable Publishing, Inc., 1988), p. 19.
472 I bid., p. 49.
473 John Henshaw,The National Enquirer, May 17, 1964. 474 Ibid. 475 Private correspondence in author's files. 476 Kantor, p. 127. 477 Ibid., p. 209.
478 Mike Milan. The Squad: The U.S. Government's Secret Alliance With Organized Crime. (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1989), pp. 232-234.
479 Ibid.
480 David Scheim. Contract on America. (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, Inc., 1988), pp. 45-47.
481 G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings. The Plot to Kill the President (New York: Times Books, 1981), p. 396.
482 Fensterwald, p. 288.
483 Mickey Cohen with John Peer Nugent. Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), p. 129.
484 Milan, p. 10.
485 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 143.
486 Cohen, p. 200.
487 Ibid.
488 Blakey & Billings, p. 325.
489 Ibid., p. 327.
490 Ibid.
491 Ibid.
492 Mark Lane. A Citizens Dissent (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1968), pp. 30-31.
493 Ibid.
494 Ibid.
495 Ibid.
496 Ibid., p. 34.
497 Ibid.
498 Ibid., p. 36.
499 Ibid.
500 Memorandum supplied to author and interview with memo author.
501 Washington Daily News, Oct. 6, 1966.
502 Philadelphia News, February 22, 1964.
503 Ibid.
504 Alan Adelson. The Ruby-Oswald Affair. (Seattle, Washington: Romar Books, Ltd., 1988), p. 6.
Chapter Fifteen The Twain Shall Meet
505 Paris Flammonde. The Kennedy Conspiracy. (New York: Meredith Press, 1969), p. 219.
506 Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan and Eli Landau. Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob. (New York: Paddington Press, 1979), p. 276.
507 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 300-301.
508 Ibid., p. 106.
509 Ibid., p. 214 (paraphrasing Paesa Sera, March 4, 1967).
510 Ibid., p. 215.
511 Ibid.
512 Ibid., p. 216.
513 Ibid., p. 95.
514 Ibid., p. 97.
515 Ibid., p. 333.
516 Ibid., p. 97.
517 Ibid., pp 102-106.
518 Ibid., p. 333.
519 Ibid., p. 218.
520 Jim Garrison. On the Trail of the Assassins. (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988), p. 87.
521 Flammonde, p. 218.
522 Executive Intelligence Review, p. 429.
523 Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1992), p. 792.
524 Ibid., p. 430.
525 New York Times, April 9, 1975.
526 Ibid.
527 Ibid.
528 Flammonde, p. 31.
529 Garrison, p. 118.
530 Robin W. Winks. Cloak and Gown. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1996 (second edition)), pp. 376-377.
531 Ibid.
532 Ibid.
533 Flammonde, p. 224.
534 E. Mullins, The World Order (Ezra Pound Institute, 1992), p. 157.
535 Tom Mangold. Cold Warrior—James Jesus Angleton: The CIA's Master Spy Hunter (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), p. 43.
536 Executive Intelligence Review, Dope, Inc., p. 433.
537 Ibid., p. 435.
538 Executive Intelligence Review. Dope, Inc. (1978 edition), p. 354.
539 Ibid.
540 Flammonde, p. 221.
541 Executive Intelligence Review, p. 438.
542 Ibid., p. 439.
543 Ibid., pp. 440-441.
544 Richard Deacon. The Israeli Secret Service. (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co., Inc., 1978), p. 22.
545 Robert Morrow. The Senator Must Die: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy. (Santa Monica, CA: Roundtable Publishing, Inc., 1988), p. 123.
546 Ibid., p. 133.
547 Ibid., p. 148.
548 Ibid., p.219.
549 Michael Canfield and Alan J. Weberman. Coup d'etat in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: The Third Press, 1975), p. 40.
550 Flammonde, Ibid.
551 Ibid. , p. 28.
552 Executive Intelligence Review. Dope, Inc. (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1986), p. 434.
553 Jean Lacouture. DeGaulle: The Ruler. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), p. 278.
554 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Israeli Connection—Who Israel Arms and Why. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 220.
555 Executive Intelligence Review. Moscow's Secret Weapon. (Washington, DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1986), p. 42.
556 Ibid., p. 296. [476] Final Judgment 573
557 Alistair Home. A Savage War of Peace. (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 499.
558 Pierre Demaret and Christian Plume. Target DeGaulle. (New York: Dial Press, 1975), p. 220.
559 Paris Flammonde. The Kennedy Conspiracy. (New York: Meredith Press, 1969), p. 223.
560 Gerald Krefetz. Jews and Money. (NY: Ticknor & Fields, 1982), p. 104.
561 Lacouture, p. 324.
562 Alexander Harrison. Challenging DeGaulle: The OAS and the Counterrevolution in Algeria. (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 67.
563 Ibid., p. 87.
564 Ibid., p. 87.
565 Paul Henissart. Wolves in the City: The Death of French Algeria. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), p. 346.
566 Ibid., p. 347.
567 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Israeli Connection—Who Israel Arms and Why. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 44-45.
568 Ibid.
569 Executive Intelligence Review, Dope, Inc., p. 442-443.
570 Dick Russell. The Man Who Knew Too Much. (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1993), p. 396.
571 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 109.
572 Ibid., p. 562.
573 Robert Morrow. Betrayal: A Reconstruction of Certain Clandestine Events from the Bay of Pigs to the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. (New York: Warner Books, 1976), p. 84.
574 Anthony Summers. Conspiracy. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1980), p. 324-325.
575 Executive Intelligence Review. The Ugly Truth About the ADL [Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992], p. 73.
576 Jack Nelson. Terror in the Night. [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993], p.214.
577 San Francisco Weekly, April 28, 1993.
578 A. Forster. Square One [New York: Donald Fine, Inc., 1988], p. 56.
579 Ibid.
580 Ibid.
581 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 243.
582 Washington Observer, June 15, 1970.
583 Hutchison, Robert,Vesco. (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), p. 97.
584 John Loftus and Mark Aarons. The Secret War Against the Jews. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), pp. 291-292.
585 Mae Brussell. "The Nazi Connection to the John F. Kennedy Assassination." The Rebel magazine, November 22, 1983. 574 Reference [477]
586 George magazine, spring 1997.
587 John Loftus and Mark Aarons. The Secret War Against the Jews. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), p. 134
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