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 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]
Most significantly, the allegations about Shaw and the CMC soon jumped from communist newspapers into the mainstream press. Le Devoir (The Duty in English), an influential French-language daily newspaper published in Montreal, essentially ran the Pravda article in its 8 March 1967 issue. Then, in a longer article on March 16, written by Louis Wiznitzer, Le Devoir’s New York correspondent, the paper emphasized a possible Montreal link to the Kennedy assassination.[2]
Author and professor Clark Blaise subsequently wrote a derivative article, “Neo-Fascism and the Kennedy Assassins,” in the September–October 1967 issue of Canadian Dimension, a small-circulation left-wing magazine. Blaise “expected to see the story spelled out that afternoon in the Montreal Star, or at least to see a solid article or two appear in the liberal journals. Nothing more ever appeared.” He was also disappointed that The New York Times never mentioned any of the details about the allegedly nefarious activities of the CMC. Admittedly, the Le Devoir articles had a “breezy disregard for documentation,” as Blaise himself put it.[3]
The Madness of Jim Garrison
The impact of the allegations leveled by Paese Sera on the New Orleans district attorney is beyond dispute. Garrison was in receipt of this scoop by no later than mid-March 1967. We know this via several contemporaneous sources, including the diary of Richard Billings, a Life magazine writer who had negotiated exclusive access to the DA’s sensational investigation. Billings’s entry for March 22 reads, “Story about Shaw and CIA appears in Humanite [sic], probably March 8 . . . [Garrison] has copy date-lined Rome, March 7th, from la press Italien [sic].”[4]
Insofar as Garrison was concerned, Shaw was now directly linked to the CIA, although the DA’s sole source was a newspaper clipping. In combination with the beliefs of conspiracy buffs, Garrison pivoted away from his initial theory of a locally-based, homosexual/sadism & masochism conspiracy and began talking in public about something much much bigger.
But what exactly was the Montreal connection to the immense conspiracy eventually posited by Garrison?
Paese Sera had alleged that a retired U.S. army major named L[ouis] M. Bloomfield held half the shares of the Centro Mondiale Commerciale and that “he had participated in the espionage activities of the O[ffice of] S[trategic] S[ervices] (now the CIA) during the war.” The series also claimed that Bloomfield was currently a banker living in Montreal “who counts among the companies he controls Le Credit Suisse of Canada, Heineken’s Breweries, Canscot Realty, the Israel Continental Company, the Grimaldi Siosa Lines, etc.” Le Devoir, for its part, claimed the same Bloomfield (misspelled as “Blumfield”) was “a retired army major, [who] served in World War II in the OSS, the precursor of the CIA, and is very well respected in Canada. He was at that time [1963] also the main stockholder of a company named ‘PERMIDEX’ [sic].”
Shortly before Blaise’s Canadian Dimension article appeared, he wrote Robert Scheer, then editor of Ramparts, a radical magazine in the United States that was already drinking Garrison’s Kool-Aid, and would soon drink Paese Sera’s. Blaise beseeched Scheer to investigate further. A former FBI agent named Bill Turner, who was both reporting on the Kennedy assassination for Ramparts and acting as one of Garrison's gumshoes, sent it to Garrison with a note that said, “This [Blaise’s letter] came in while I was gone. There may be some items you don’t already have.”
Ramparts subsequently published “The Garrison Commission” by Bill Turner in its January 1968 issue. The article cited Paese Sera and Le Devoir as its sources on Clay Shaw and the CMC. Nothing better illustrated the lazy carousel and endless recycling of the unsubstantiated allegations during this period than the Ramparts article.
Although Garrison never referred to Louis Bloomfield in public, it is now clear that the DA thought more about him than was understood at the time. A letter in the papers of Bill Boxley, another investigator, advised Garrison that Bloomfield was actually a Montreal lawyer, not a banker as alleged, and that he was known mostly for his charitable activities in Canada and elsewhere. Bloomfield does “great good,” a professor at Sir George Williams University wrote.[5]
On 21 September 1968 Bloomfield’s name came up again during a conference with investigators Turner and Boxley, also attended by conspiracy theorists Richard Sprague and Bernard Fensterwald. The subject was actually James Earl Ray, who had been recently apprehended at London’s Heathrow Airport; after extradition, and in a few months’ time, Ray would to plead guilty to assassinating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. According to page 164 from a transcript of the conference, Garrison observed that
They’ve got different modes of transportation but Montrel [sic] comes up too often. Remember, that’s where Bloomfield is who is in this association with Clay Shaw. Now he’s a banker in Montreal. He’s probably more than a banker. He’s in Montreal and everything happens in Monteal [sic].
Where does Jewells Rico Kimball [sic] go when he runs away? He goes to Montreal. He went on a plane flight with Shaw and [David] Ferrie to Montreal.
In 2001, Garrison’s latter-day disciples Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar wrote that Garrison “had neither the staff nor the resources to go to Europe and follow up [Paese Sera’s] leads.” So why didn’t Garrison or one of his investigators just fly up to Montreal and interview Bloomfield? Alternatively, Garrison could have just picked up the phone and called him. No need for a trip to Europe. Could it be that Garrison preferred the fable and didn’t want it complicated by any facts?[6]
Fantasies about Louis Bloomfield continued into 1969 when Paris Flammonde, a former producer of a radio talk show devoted to parapsychology and conspiracy theories, wrote The Kennedy Conspiracy: An Uncommissioned Report on the Jim Garrison Investigation. The book features an entire chapter on the Paese Sera articles while quoting the articles published in Le Devoir as if they were independent sources of the allegations. Flammonde noted that Bloomfield was “active in the espionage arm of the US government during World War II.”
Garrison, naturally, repeated all of this nonsense in his 1998 book, On the Trail of the Assassins.
One of the major stockholders of the Centro was Major L. M. Bloomfield, a Montreal resident originally of American nationality and a former agent with the Office of Strategic Services, out of which the United States had formed the CIA.*
* This was significant not only because of his espionage background but because of a curious non-scheduled air trip taken by Clay Shaw and David Ferrie to Bloomfield’s home city of Montreal in early 1961 or 1962.
The DA cited Paris Flammonde’s book, Le Devoir, and, of course, Paese Sera as if they were independent sources corroborating the same allegation, when, in fact, there was only one highly unreliable source at the bottom of it all.
The Irony of the JFK Act
The public furor over Oliver Stone’s ode to Jim Garrison, the 1991 film JFK, which closed by alleging that the truth about the assassination was being kept secret in US government archives, led to passage of the John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act in 1992. This unprecedented law soon made available many still-classified documents, chiefly because it turned upside down the normal calculus that governed declassification decisions. The new presumption was that every document should be disclosed unless its originating agency could prove the need for continued secrecy.
Far from revealing the existence of a conspiracy hidden by (much less involving) the US government, newly-declassified documents that became available by the end of the 1990s exposed the raw truth about the allegations that had formed the nucleus of Garrison’s persecution of Shaw. The truth turned out to be complex—but nothing like the lies first propagated by Paese Sera.
First, it turned out that Shaw did indeed have a relationship with the CIA, but one utterly unlike Garrison’s fantasy. Shaw was a voluntary and unpaid domestic contact from 1948 to 1956. The CIA valued information that sophisticated businessmen like Shaw could glean from their trips abroad, and Shaw’s position as head of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans required him to travel frequently and widely. More than 150,000 other US businessmen reported on their trips abroad during this early period in the cold war, reporting to what was then called the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service (DCS). During his eight years of cooperation, Shaw produced a total of eight intelligence reports, which were then disseminated to various US government agencies. The CIA regarded six of these reports as being “of value” and two as being “of slight value.” Although the actual reports seem to have been lost, descriptions of them suggest they were the kind of economic or political intelligence that one might read in the Wall Street Journal or The Economist. The CIA discontinued the relationship “as the shotgun approach to collection efforts waned and it became obvious that Shaw was becoming more and more interested in his private ventures and less and less in the activities of the International Trade Mart.”[7]
In fairness, a few declassified documents seem to contradict the innocuous relationship described above. Yet when one examines them closely, they were all prepared years after the fact and are non-contemporaneous with Shaw’s actual period of engagement with the CIA.
Author Joan Mellen, who wrote a fawning biography of Garrison, claims, for example, that one document she dug up corroborates Paese Sera’s account. Dated 28 June 1978, the document, as (mis)interpreted by Mellen, supposedly describes Clay Shaw’s cooperation with the CIA as running from 1949 through 1972 [sic], and that the agency used Shaw for “services in Italy with US agent Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield.” What Mellen neglects to make clear, though, is that the document did not originate within the CIA. Rather, it consists of notes made by a House Select Committee on Assassinations staffer, which is why it is dated 1978. The damning passages cited by Mellen are there only because the staffer was quoting from a TASS (the Soviet/Russian news wire service) dispatch dated 9 March 1967, which, of course, was derived in turn from Paese Sera.[8]
Another document that seemingly contradicts aspects of Shaw’s relationship with CIA did originate within the agency. Dated 10 February 1992, it states that Clay Shaw “was a highly paid CIA contract source until 1956.” To Garrisonites, this was akin to the Rosetta Stone.
Jefferson Morley, a former Washington Post reporter and prominent JFK conspiracy theorist, made a big deal out of this document on his blog, jfkfacts.org. But there are problems. Shaw was a domestic contact source until 1956; might the word contract be a simple typo? Or perhaps a 1955 document that refers to Shaw as a “valued source” of the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service was misunderstood by the unknown person who compiled this information in 1992. It is important to note the document in question (which is factually unreliable for reasons apart from its description of Shaw) was not prepared contemporaneously during Shaw’s years of service to the Agency, but decades later. It was compiled for the purpose of describing a collection of assassination-related documents the Agency was preparing to release at the order of then CIA Director Robert Gates, months before the Assassination Records Collection Act became law.
Indeed, other documents in the CIA file on Shaw contradict the notion that Shaw was paid or that there is an inkling of truth in the Paese Sera allegations. These were prepared in 1967, during the height of the CIA’s concern that Garrison might actually know about the Agency’s innocuous relationship with Shaw and purposely misrepresent it in public utterances. A document dated 16 October 1967 flatly stated that Shaw was never remunerated for his services. Another CIA memo, undated but also clearly from 1967, noted that “Shaw was never asked to use his relationship with the World Trade Center for clandestine purposes” and that “all of the Pravda charges are untrue.”
The last surprise wrinkle to emerge from newly declassified documents is that in 1959, just as it was starting out, PERMINDEX/CMC did actually offer the CIA an opportunity to place an agent or officer in the company. The offer was extended by Ferenc Nagy, the last democratically-elected prime minister in Hungary, who was a leading member of the CMC board. Along with many other leaders forced into exile by the Communist parties behind the Iron Curtain, Nagy had an excellent relationship with the Agency.
Nonetheless, the mere existence of an offer does not corroborate Paese Sera’s vague if not near-hysterical allegations, or that JFK conspiracy theorists are right to point a finger at Clay Shaw and/or the CMC.
Given the state of the Cold War in the late 1950s, it is not surprising that the CIA might have been interested in using an international trading organization as non-official cover for an officer or agent. The memo describing Nagy’s suggestion goes on to note that “the advantages which in Nagy’s judgment PERMINDEX offers to CIA include the opportunity to develop information on and contacts in many developing countries of Asia and Africa; cover; and the possibility of influencing the economies of these countries to some extent.”
There was a very important caveat, however. Before proceeding the CIA needed “information on the financial condition of PERMINDEX, its business potential, and further comments on the backgrounds of its management.”
On 25 February 1960, an internal memo reported that “we regret to say that up to date information obtained via Agency channels does not provide us with sufficient data to form an opinion” about whether to proceed. Subsequently, a memo dated 24 March 1960 noted “we were hopeful that more valuable information could be obtained through another source. This has now been received and while it is not complete it does furnish considerably more information than heretofore obtained.”
Unfortunately for Nagy's offer, the CIA was not overly impressed with PERMINDEX/CMC. Few American tourists were likely to be interested in the exhibition since “over-the-counter” orders for merchandise were not going to be permitted. The CIA also noted that “at this stage, the venture seems highly speculative from an investor’s point of view.” Unless exhibitors were found soon to occupy all the empty space in the exhibition buildings, the CIA observed, the first year’s exhibit will be unsuccessful with the consequent result that continuation will not be possible on a profitable basis.” Charles White, on the commercial staff of the CIA, concluded his memo by stating that “it will be noted that no contracts are claimed with any of the Soviet Bloc countries, which may be a consideration in your decision whether to inject anyone into the organization’s staff as suggested by the ex-prime minister.”
It is thus clear from such documents and also US government cables that PERMINDEX/CMC was indeed what it purported to be: a Rome-based effort to stimulate international trade. There is not a hint that it was intended or could be used to funnel covert funds to anti-communist organizations. No corroboration for the Paese Sera allegations can be found in any US government document.
In the end, all that can be said about Shaw's relationship with the CMC was that he was indeed a member of its board of directors from 1958–1962. But he never attended a board meeting, indeed, he did not travel to Rome at all during these years, and was “not familiar with their day-to-day operations.”
Bloomfield & PERMINDEX
In addition to US government documents released under the JFK Act that shed light on the Paese Sera disinformation, we coincidentally have irrefutable information from the archives of Louis Mortimer Bloomfield that prove the fabulist nature of the allegations.
Before he died, Bloomfield donated all his papers to the Public Archives Canada in Ottawa (now known as Library and Archives Canada). He stipulated that they were not to be opened until twenty years after his death, which occurred in 1984. In 2004, a researcher named Maurice Phillips tried to get access but was told that Bloomfield’s widow wanted the material to remain closed until ten years after her death. Phillips sued and won greater access. Some material remained restricted, however, and researcher John Kowalski later followed up with a new lawsuit that resulted in the release of still more papers. A debt of gratitude is owed Maurice Phillips and John Kowalski for prying open the files that help put the Paese Sera controversy to bed. Altogether, the Bloomfield papers shed more light on the inner workings of PERMINDEX/CMC than any other single archival collection.
Bloomfield and his law firm were very busy in the 1960s. He sent out more than two thousand letters in 1960 alone, of which about one hundred were delivered to managers of and investors in PERMINDEX. It is worth noting that in all these documents there is not one mention of Clay Shaw in any business letter, personal letter, cable, notebook, birthday greeting, or journal entry.
Bloomfield’s papers further show that there was turmoil within PERMINDEX/CMC from the outset, which undoubtedly was no surprise to the CIA. A variety of real estate deals went south, new investors were constantly being wooed or coming on board, and there was limited information for prospective tenants interested in the exhibition spaces. Overall, there was great consternation about how the company was run. Not one piece of documentary evidence resembles the allegations leveled in the Paese Sera series. Ultimately, the CMC in Rome was evicted from its offices and exhibition halls in 1962 because it couldn't pay the rent. There never was a basis for believing that such an ambitious but troubled and badly-run venture 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.”
Bloomfield’s papers also shed valuable light on how he reacted to the disinformation. He read the 1967 articles in Le Devoir and was deeply troubled by them. He wrote to editor Claude Ryan demanding a retraction, but none seems to have ever been published.
Bloomfield also apparently wrote the editors of Canadian Dimension about Clark Blaise’s article. Unfortunately, that letter is missing from the papers—but a reply from associate editor G. David Sheps that amounts to a full, though not public, retraction does exist.[9]
Unfortunately for Bloomfield, he continued to be a soft target for hare-brained conspiracy theorists for years if not decades. The worst offender in this regard turned out to be the cult-like empire built around Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
While he lived LaRouche was not associated that much with JFK conspiracy theorists, probably because of the sheer number of outlandish beliefs he propagated; a JFK conspiracy was but one among the dozens he touted, and far from the most bizarre. LaRouche also drew more attention for his quixotic campaigns to become America’s president, running for the highest office repeatedly while he sat atop the so-called US Labor Party, the anti-Semitic conspiratorial organization he had created.
LaRouche embraced the alleged PERMINDEX/CMC conspiracy no later than 1978, when the first edition of Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War Against the United States was published. From then on Bloomfield figured prominently in LaRouchian propaganda—indeed, almost as often as the Queen of England herself, who, as every LaRouche devotee knew, was the overseer of the “$200 billion-a-year opium war against the United States,” much of it waged through Britain’s northern “colony” of Canada.[10]
Garrison may finally have met his conspiratorial soulmate in Lyndon LaRouche, though to be fair the quadrennial presidential candidate eventually outdid the New Orleans DA in spreading hallucinatory accusations regarding PERMINDEX/CMC. According to the third edition of Dope, Inc., it turned out that PERMINDEX “employed all the principal players” in the heinous assassination of JFK. Moreover, the Roman connection was just a false flag and/or cover operation. In truth PERMINDEX was Great Britain’s “international assassination bureau.”[11]
The Real Bloomfield
Bloomfield’s biography has unfortunately been corrupted by conspiracy theorists with many “factoids”—a word Norman Mailer coined in 1973 to describe pieces of information that are accepted as true but which are not. So who was he truly? Paese Sera was just plain wrong about virtually every detail of Bloomfield’s life: he was not a former American major; he was a Canadian war veteran. He wasn’t a banker; he was a corporate lawyer. He didn’t own half the shares in PERMINDEX; his clients owned a controlling interest, at least for a while. He was never a member of the OSS much less the CIA, nor did he control all the various companies alleged in the Paese Sera articles.
During World War II, Bloomfield started out as a lieutenant in the Canadian infantry but was soon transferred to a less physically-taxing post because of a heart murmur. In a Canadian Jewish News profile in 1978, Bloomfield said he oversaw “hush-hush secret service jobs,” such as locating German submarines in Mexico. His self-described “biggest coup” occurred when he was able, because of his past dealings with a Polish shipping line, to prevent the Nazis from seizing a number of Polish ships temporarily anchored in New York harbor. Bloomfield blocked them from sailing into the waiting hands of the German navy.[12]
After the war, he became a lawyer specializing in corporate and international law and was the author of many books and articles. He was on the drafting committee for the Helsinki Rules on the uses of International Rivers in 1966. He also served on the board of governors for several hospitals, and raising money in particular for the Reddy Hospital in Montreal. Bloomfield was also the co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund of Canada, and active in several charities relating to Israel. He served on the board of governors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Weizmann Institute of Science, and the Technion in Haifa. He worked hard for a wide variety of Jewish causes, including as honorary counsel for the World Zionist Congress. He was the national treasurer of the Canadian Histadrut Campaign, raising money for that Israeli labor union. He and his brother Bernard built a 2,400-seat stadium in Tel Aviv and, in addition, seventeen trade and vocational schools in Israel.
In 1965, Bloomfield was named the first Jewish Knight of Grace of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, an organization that teaches first aid around the world. He told the Canadian Jewish News in 1978 that “Last year in Canada we trained over 250,000 and in the past 10 years, St. John’s Ambulance has trained more than 12% of our population between the ages of 16 and 60. Every morning it’s the first thing I do at the office—call and find out how I can help with their problems.”
Bloomfield also raised a lot of money for the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada and was a friend of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. Bloomfield died in 1984 while on a trip to Israel, during which he received an honorary doctorate from Bar Ilan University. He was just seventy-eight years old, and the world lost a great humanitarian.
Shame on all the conspiracy mongers who have dishonored the legacy and memory of Louis Bloomfield.
This article is adapted from Fred Litwin’s new book, On the Trail of Delusion (NorthernBlues Books). Litwin, a Canadian, has written articles for the National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Sun, and is often a panelist on the CTV news channel. He is also the author of I Was a Teenage JFK Conspiracy Freak (2018) and Conservative Confidential (2015). He blogs about On the Trail of Delusion here.
[1] Tennent H. Bagley, Spymaster: Startling Cold War Revelations of a Soviet KGB Chief (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013), 175. Il Paese and Paese Sera (The Country and Country Evening) were sister newspapers, both published by Amerigo Terenzi, formerly director of the Italian Communist Party’s official organ, l’Unità. For a more detailed explanation of Paese Sera’s effect on Garrison’s persecution of Shaw, see Max Holland, “The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination,” Studies in Intelligence, Fall/Winter 2001. On Shaw’s background, including details of his involvement with Centro Mondiale Commerciale, see Donald H. Carpenter, Man of a Million Fragments: The True Story of Clay Shaw (Nashville, TN: Donald H. Carpenter, 2014). For an account of Garrison’s discredited probe, see Patricia Lambert, False Witness: The Real Story of Jim Garrison’s Investigation and Oliver Stone’s Film JFK (New York: M. Evans and Company, 1998).
[2] “La Pravda: la CIA avait sous ses ordres Clay Shaw, accusé d’avoir comploté contre JFK” (“Pravda: the CIA had under its orders Clay Shaw, accused of plotting against JFK”), Le Devoir, 8 March 1967; Louis Wiznitzer, “L’enquête du procureur Garrison sur l’assassinat de Kennedy conduira-t-elle à Montréal?” (“Prosecutor Garrison’s Investigation into Kennedy’s Assassination Will Lead to Montreal?”), Le Devoir, 16 March 1967.
[3] Clark Blaise, “Neo-Fascism and the Kennedy Assassins,” Canadian Dimension, September/October 1967; Letter, G. David Sheps to Bloomfield, 22 October 1967, Bloomfield Papers, Library and Archives Canada.
[4] Richard Billings NOLA Journal, 22 March 1967, Billings Papers, Special Collections, Georgetown University. Online here.
[5] Letter, Klaus Hermann to Jim Garrison, Bill Boxley Papers, JFK Assassination Records Collection, NARA.
[6] Letter, Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar to the Wilson Quarterly, 25 May 2001, Patricia Lambert Papers, Sixth Floor Museum.
[7] Holland, “The Lie That Linked CIA to the Kennedy Assassination,” Studies in Intelligence.
[8] Joan Mellen, A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History (New York: Skyhorse Books, 2013), 389.
[9] Letter, G. David Sheps to Bloomfield, 22 October 1967, Bloomfield Papers, Library and Archives Canada.
[10] André McNicoll, “Paranoia and Power: The Marshalling of a US Cult,” Macleans, 29 October 1979.
[11] Editors of Executive Intelligence Review, DOPE, INC.: The Book That Drove Henry Kissinger Crazy (Washington, DC: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992), 364, 452-501. That PERMINDEX was actually a top-secret branch of British intelligence was an allegation leveled in the first iteration of DOPE, INC. See Konstandinos Kalimtgis, David Goldman, and Jeffrey Steinberg, DOPE, INC.: Britain’s Opium War Against the United States (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House Publishing, 1978), 301-329.
[12] Lou Seligson, “Lawyer Knows Boundaries at Home and Around the World,” Canadian Jewish News,” 6 October 1978.
©2020 by Fred Litwin
Fred Litwin performs a useful service by clearing up a lot of the nonsense written about Louis Bloomfield. Nonetheless, Bloomfield was much more than the bland "great humanitarian" depicted here.
Louis and his brother Bernard were both major secret contributors to Israel's covert nuclear bomb program (Michael Karpin, The Bomb in the Basement, 136). Many of the foreign funds for that program were apparently passed through the International Credit Bank of Geneva, whose founder, Tibor Rosenbaum, was on close terms with Israel's defense ministry and foreign intelligence agencies.
Rosenbaum's bank was also a notorious conduit of funds for Meyer Lansky and other U.S. organized crime figures (e.g. Robert Lacey, Little Man, 307-309).
The Bloomfield brothers and Rosenbaum were apparently close. Louis Bloomfield arranged a $15 million loan from Eldee Foundation to the Helvis Trust SA of Liechtenstein, owned by the International Credit Bank, in 1971 (Financial Post, March 22, 1975). Bernard Bloomfield was a director of Atlas Bank, the Bahamian subsidiary of International Credit Bank (Royal Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Failure of Atlantic Acceptance Corporation Limited, 1969 report, 1484-85).
These and other related facts have nothing to do with the JFK assassination, but they shed light on international organized crime, intelligence, and money laundering in the 1960s and 1970s. The LaRouche organization's writings, poisoned perhaps by anti-Semitism, have unfortunately obscured these important aspects of the Bloomfield brothers' careers.
Posted by: Jonathan Marshall | 11 November 2020 at 06:35 PM
I don't know if the Bloomfield brothers contributed to a so-called Dimona campaign. At the time, it was not about nuclear weapons. One thing I do know: while the Bloomfields had some money, they weren't in the same category as the Bronfmans and other wealthy families. Bloomfield wasn't even a shareholder in PERMINDEX/CMC.
I find the other links above to be tenuous. I have gone through Bloomfield's letterbooks. His law firm was very busy--sending out about two thousand letters per year. Most of the letters were mundane corporate work: the dates of annual meetings, signing this paper or that paper, etc. I see no direct connection from Bloomfield to Lansky.
Also, the two Bloomfield brothers ran separate law firms, and there were times when they quarreled; they definitely had their differences.
Posted by: Frederick Litwin | 13 November 2020 at 10:02 AM
The article states that the 1992 document that refers to Clay Shaw as a “highly paid CIA contract source” is “factually unreliable for reasons apart from its description of Shaw.”
Here are some of those reasons specified.
The same 1992 document that calls Shaw a "contract source" refers to “records relating to Gilberto Alvarado, who maintained that he witnessed Cubans passing Oswald cash at a party on the night before the assassination.”
(See this link: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=7302&relPageId=9)
In fact, this description is obviously a confused mashup of two allegations separately made: one by the aforementioned Alvarado in 1963 (which he then retracted), and another by a woman many years later named Elena Garro de Paz.
A different page in the 1992 document correctly describes Alvarado as “the Nicaraguan who claimed he saw Lee Harvey Oswald receive cash in meeting inside Mexico City Cuban embassy.”
(See this link: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=7302&relPageId=12)
Elena Garro de Paz, however, claimed to have seen Oswald and two companions at a “twist party” in Mexico City.
(See this link: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=800#relPageId=153)
The date given for the twist party (November 21) matches neither allegation and is obviously an error, thus suggesting the 1992 document is much less than a reliable accounting of what the CIA's own archival documents actually showed.
On the night before the assassination, Oswald was in Dallas with Marina (thus he could not have received cash in Alvarado's presence or have been at a party in Mexico City). Oswald was only in Mexico City from September 26 to October 3. If he attended a party--which is a big if--it could only have happened during this time period.
(See this link: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=946&relPageId=764)
(And also this: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=946&relPageId=323)
Finally, a researcher named Bill Kelly has done some debunking of the "twist party" allegation.
See:
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2013/11/twisting-with-oswald-in-mexco-city.html
and
http://jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com/2015/04/a-cruel-and-shocking-twist.html
Submitted by Paul Hoch
Posted by: Paul Hoch | 14 November 2020 at 05:19 PM