Jim Garrison’s Collateral Victim: Louis Bloomfield

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By Fred Litwin

 

 

    One of the greatest miscarriages of American jurisprudence occurred on 1 March 1967, when a gay man in New Orleans, Clay Shaw, was charged with having conspired to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.

    The district attorney, Jim Garrison, had no evidence to support the charge other than the recollections of a witness, Perry Russo, who had been injected with sodium pentothal, a so-called truth serum, and then questioned three times under hypnosis. Yet Russo’s recovered memory—that he had been at a party where participants loosely discussed JFK’s murder—was enough to ruin Shaw’s life.

    The case took two years to go to trial, at which time Shaw was swiftly acquitted. Garrison then charged Shaw with perjury, and it took another two years for that attempted prosecution to be quashed. Shortly afterward, Shaw died of cancer, ruthlessly deprived of not only the best years of his retirement but most of his savings too.

    Back in 1967, naturally, news of Shaw’s arrest had reverberated around the globe. In Rome, Italy, a small Communist–controlled newspaper, Paese Sera, started a series of articles on March 4 claiming that Clay Shaw had been involved in unsavory activities while serving on the board of PERMINDEX/Centro Mondiale Commerciale (PERMINDEX was an acronym for Permanent Industrial Exhibition; CMC translated into English as World Trade Center). This was an Italian corporation founded in the late 1950s to take advantage of the new European common market and make Rome an important trading hub. More specifically, Paese Sera alleged that the CMC was a “creature of the CIA . . . set up as a cover for the transfer to Italy of CIA-FBI [sic] funds for illegal political-espionage activities.” Aside from this central allegation, however, the Paese Sera series was incredibly short on details and relied instead on insinuation and innuendo. Most of the articles traced alleged activities and connections of people other than Clay Shaw who were associated with the CMC. This sentence typified the thrust of the series: “It is a fact that the CMC is nevertheless the point of contact for a number of persons who, in certain respects, have somewhat equivocal ties [and] whose common denominator is an anticommunism so strong that it would swallow up all those in the world who have fought for decent relations between East and West, including Kennedy.”

The second in the series of Paese Sera articles published in March 1967, just after Clay Shaw's arrest in New Orleans. The headline reads, "The CMC (Clay Shaw's company) was in the hands of US espionage"

    The Paese Sera series had all the hallmarks of a compelling lie concocted by a newspaper known for its role in Soviet disinformation schemes, as became vividly clear after the cold war ended, once archives opened and intelligence officers published their recollections. A retired senior KGB officer, Sergey Kondrashev, for example, told Tennent Bagley, former CIA chief of Soviet bloc counter-intelligence, that the “most obvious route toward the broad Western public was, of course, newspapers, and magazines—planting articles in cooperative papers (of the many, Kondrashev remembered Paese Sera in Italy, Blitz in New Delhi, and Die Furche (The Furrow) in Vienna).”[1]