A while back, I promised to tell an odd story about Gore Vidal. Now the time has come.
I don't know how much of what follows is true. I give it to you as it was given unto me by two independent sources, neither of whom I can name. The rules of blogland allow one to offer an account such as this one with the proviso that the reader should not accept without verification. Indeed, the reason why I tell this tale in public is to encourage someone to look into it.
As some of you may recall, Gore Vidal had an odd reaction to Oliver Stone's 1991 film "JFK." Vidal denounced the work as anti-gay, and he switched his theory of the assassination from "the CIA did it" to "the mob did it." (He may claim that he never made this switch, but ink and oxide testify otherwise.) Yet he seemed fascinated by the movie -- perhaps because it contains a screen depiction of Clay Shaw, the man charged by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.
Vidal knew Shaw. Both men were well-educated "same sexers" (to use Vidal's preferred term) with literary leanings, although Shaw had but one completed play to his resume, while Vidal is perhaps the finest American novelist of his generation, and certainly the greatest political essayist since Orwell.
(To read the rest, click "Permalink" below)
In a public lecture which I used to have on tape, Vidal claimed that Shaw resembled his aunt, which may or may not be unfair. I would like to draw your attention to another lady who resembled Clay Shaw. If you watch the film "JFK" again, take careful note of the scene in which everyone files into the courtroom. Tommy Lee Jones, playing Shaw, briefly kisses the cheek of a silver-haired lady who looks for all the world like the real Shaw. Stone never explains her presence.
According to the information I received from two sources, she appeared on screen as an inside joke. That woman was the real-life niece of Clay Shaw, whom Stone had encountered in the course of his research.
During her time on the set, she told inquisitors something quite odd: She said that Clay Shaw did not die of lung cancer in 1974 at the age of 61, in his home in New Orleans, as the press reported.
Of course, others have alleged that the death was mysterious. He did not receive an autopsy, and the death certificate was signed by his personal physician, who told the police that Shaw had developed lesions in the brain. A neighbor contacted police after seeing a body taken out of the residence, covered with a sheet. (According to one rather wild tale, the same neighbor saw a body being taken into the home an hour before. I've never seen that yarn in print and thus do not believe it.) The coroner was so concerned about the speed of the man's burial that he proposed an exhumation -- an idea which was soon nixed.
Previously, I had always dismissed allegations that the death of Clay Shaw (who smoked heavily) was in any way mysterious. Still, it should be noted that his death came just a short while after Victor Marchetti had revealed to the world that Shaw had -- contrary to his sworn testimony -- been involved with the CIA.
Which brings me back to the niece -- or rather, to the woman my sources claim is the niece.
When she announced that the death was staged, her listeners naturally asked what became of Clay Shaw.
She answered that he went off to stay with a friend who maintained a villa in Italy. Presumably, Shaw there spent his few remaining days in peace.
Is this story true? Again, I don't know. That is why I encourage others to double-check.
Anyone attempting to do so should first ask: "Who among Shaw's friends had a villa in Italy?"
16 comments:
One of my favorite Doris Lessing stories has a lot of scenes with cats and ineffable needs at an Italian villa. She won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. Has it occurred to anyone that Vidal may have been at the CIA's drawing of the first circle? This is the guy who gave Nader his 2000 raison d'etre by informing us that there's only one political party in the US, it's "the propertied party" with two right wings called Democrats and Republicans; and who informed us that JFK would hold his fellatrix's head under water as he got off. Why wouldn't he be part of the first CIA? Who were the hot-dog writers of novels, dramas, screenplays, and teleplays they recruited? (Unfortunately we only get the one side of the story, the one about the blacklist.) There was talk that Orwell had been a spook. Hell, there was talk that Christopher Marlowe had been a spook, especially when the Crown intervened and made him a Master of Arts which Cambridge wouldn't do. Orwell had no college, Vidal had none either.
Ah, Joe. I gotta tell ya: it never gets dull around here.
This household is guessing it was Sam Giancana.
Gore Vidal's villa? haha - no- i thought Shaw was buds with the Borgheses among other italian fascists
The complexity of Shaw's associations does not end with the Centro Mondiale Commerciale and Permindex, but extends deeply into his personal relationships in Europe. His private address and telephone book, for example, carries the name and address of the wife of a well-known English Fascist, as well as the name, address, and private telephone number of Principessa Marcelle Borghese (now Duchessa de Bomartao), who is related to Prince Valerio Borghese, sometimes referred to as "the Black Prince," or "the New Duce," leader of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the anti-British, anti-American neo-Fascist organization. The prince was a much-decorated midget-submarine commander during the war, following which he was tried and sentenced to twelve years in prison for cooperating with the Nazis after the Italian armistice with the Allies was signed. However, as he had spent four years in jail awaiting trial, after sentencing, the remaining prison period was suspended.(36)
http://www.maebrussell.com/Articles%20and%20Notes/Kennedy%20Conspiracy.html
Two more possibilities:
"Clay Shaw was a member of CMC’™s board, along with such well-known sympathizers as Gutierrez di Spadaforo, undersecretary of agriculture for Mussolini;...and Giuseppe Zigiotti, president of the Fascist National Association for Militia Arms.
http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2002/09/oliver-stone-on.html
Orwell had no college...except for Eton :-) The Orwell-IRD/SIS link was put out from very dodgy sources in the first instance, notably Celia Kirwan. On the other hand, it's also been attacked by very dodgy commentator Christopher Hitchens.
It wouldn't surprise me if the carbon copy of Orwell's list, released by the British Foreign Office in 2003, was a forgery.
In the recent past one has seen a) an attempt by Tory prime minister John Major to reclaim Orwell, and b) the attempted removal of radical bite from the 'Big Brother' meme, by means of the publicity accorded to a TV programme of the same name. That's in a country where you won't find a main street to walk down without getting filmed by dozens of cameras. Big Brother? Yeah, did you see last night's action?
Could the psy-ops guys have forged it? Sure they could; but did they need to?
Jack Common, a friend of Orwell, was even better in his attitudes in some ways. See stuff at www.revoltagainstplenty.com
b
Well, b, I mentioned Orwell only in passing. That said, I would trust Hitchens on this matter, though on few others.
Marlowe was indeed a spook. That is not in dispute. What IS a matter of dispute is whether his friend Walsingham helped to engineer a fake death.
Which brings us back to the tale of Clay Shaw, eh wot? I might have a bit more to say on that topic soon, if a correspondent gives me permission to repeat in public some scuttlebutt.
I guess I should make clear that one of my reasons for mentioning this had to do with the fact that Gore Vidal did own a villa in Italy -- you can see him in Fellini's Roma, having a grand time -- and someone might want to ask him about this rumor.
I did once look through some released-through-FOIA FBI documents on Permindex, which pretty clearly dashed to smithereens all the wild speculation we saw in the notorious samizdat called the "Torbitt Document." However, I would like further explanation on the relationship between the CMC and the World Trade Center. (Aside fromt he obvious fact that Centro Mondiale Commerciale MEANS World Trade Center.)
I re-read Vidal's work often, but the guy has always bothered me.
In the early 1980s, the Reaganites were pushing for a new Constitutional Convention, with the obvious intention of rewriting our founding document to bring it into strict accordance with the Gospel According to Milton Friedman. AT THE SAME TIME, Vidal tried to sell progressives on the same idea -- which would have been an unparalleled disaster. (Can you imagine what would have happened if Friedman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Pat Buchanan and David Stockman were allowed to rewrite the Constitution?)
As Vidal made that pitch to various progressvie audiences, he also ran for Senate. I've already told the tale of the night I mooched a patty melt off of Vidals' progressive campaigners -- a group of people who genuinely believed that Jerry Brown inhabited a political space somewhere to the right of Ronald Reagan. That was the night I became forevermore replused by the anti-Democratic Party "progressive" movement. (So repulsed, I could barely keep down my free patty melt.)
Ever since, I've been suspicious of Gore Vidal.
Great writer, though.
Cannon can you please give us a more accurate overview of the Kennedy assasination flow chart that we have with Torbett? It is by far the most penetrating analysis of the big picture that I know of in print today. If you have a better or more insightful view prithee pray tell..but your constant finding fault with others than yourself (zounds like Naplolean to my skilled ears), keep you nullified in any serious investigative reporting..like kinda paranoid.
Are you saying that Permandex did or does not exist? Are you saying that Shaw was not associated with it? Or are you saying you just gave up trying to flush out that Nazi org? What are you saying without saying anything?
Also it sounds like you are a "purist" or an "ex purist" that had his illusions crushed by throw away remarks from Vidal, like Kucinich tossing around a remark like a frisbee in flight, that he would consider Paul as his running mate.
His remark is really signslling that he is willing to reach across the aisle and try to heal the "Great Divide"
Also you should know better than to eat patty melts at political gatherings, they will give you that belly ache that the purist "agents" intended, right?
atlas, if you want to believe that nonsense, go ahead. I've sat down with one leading JFK researcher who went through the Torbitt document's claims line by line -- for a page or two -- and let me tell you, the results were hilarious. One howler after another.
Even if you do no independent checking, you will see the contradictions in the document itself, if you read carefully. The author was protected as long as his references went to the Garrison files, which were inaccessible to nearly everyone at the time of writing. But I've spoken to people who have been trying to piece those files back together, and they have NOT reported that Torbitt has been confirmed. Quite the contrary.
Permindex did exist. It was a trade show -- a PERManent INdustrial EXhibition -- in Switzerland in which Soviet bloc nations were represented. It thus became a hotbed for spying, as you might imagine. But to call it an assassination cabal is absurd. One might was well call UCLA an ocean liner.
And then to say that the FBI's "Division 5" is actually a division of Permindex...! Or to say that the American Council of Christian Churches was a subsidiary of a Swiss industrial exhibit...!
Inane. Anyone who accepts these absurdities has entered Wackyland.
(By the way, the Permindex mythos inspired the evil Parallax Corporation, seen in the film "The Parallax View.")
DISC, the Defense Industrial Security Command, appears to be a warped version of the Defense Investigative Service Command, which -- if I recall correctly -- was at the other end of that phone number listed in some versions of Torbitt. I very much doubt whether DIS had anything to do with the assassination, and I know for a fact that neither J. Edgar Hoover nor the Tennessee Valley Authority had anyhing to do with its founding.
CIA agents did, and probably still do, use DIS as a domestic cover (although DIS changed its name in 2000 or therabouts). I do find it odd that Torbitt never mentions CIA, but does refer to folks with known CIA backgrounds as "DISC agents."
Well, one could go on, and on. I've written the above purely from memory; I'm sure that if I were to spend a few nights with the thing (time I cannot afford right now) I could do my own line-by-line deconstruction.
The point is that people like you accept these things without doing any checking. You are attracted to the miasma of conspiracy, to the samizdat nature of the document's distribution. Atmosphere matters to you, not fact.
I have always been curious about the dcument's origins. Supposedly, David Copeland (Torbitt) received the information from two gentlemen who announced themselves as "secret service agents." I doubt that they showed any credentials -- and if they did, I doubt that the creds were genuine. I also STRONGLY doubt that anyone in the real secret service knows or would ever care about the stuff in Torbitt. Since Torbitt carefully lets CIA off the hook, we may need no further clue regarding the employer of those two men. IF they ever existed.
Incidentally, while I am not among the select few to have met Copeland, I did once see a letter he wrote. He took Alternative Three seriously...!
At any rate, if you want to take "Nomenclature" seriously, by all means do so. It's up on the net, has been for many years, will be for as long as the net exists. If you want to do further research into the document's origins, by all means do so. Have fun.
You may want to learn how to spell the name Torbitt correctly, however.
Hans Kammler the most invisable and the third most powerful Nazi after Hitler then Bormann then Hans Kammler, first got Htlers attention with his designs of the death camps, then he designed and built the first bombproof underground aircraft and missile factory sites including the Nordhausen plant in the Harz Mountains where thousands of slave laborers turned out V-1 flying bombs, V-2 rockets, and engines for the Messerschmitt 262, the world's first jet fighter. This underground metropolis (eerily suggestive of the futuristic atmosphere of Fritz Lang"s science fiction film of the same name) was captured undamaged by the U.S. Third Army with a bonanza of complete V-2"s.
( Not coincidentally, this introduces the infamous Clay Shaw, the "accused" participant in the planning of the assasination of John Kennedy eighteen years later.} Shaw was an aide de camp to General Charles Thrasher, and later Deputy Chief of staff of the Oise section in France where Nazi prisoners of war were confined. Shaw was one of the earliest U. S. Army personnel to come into contact with the Nazi scientists and a probable participant in the still Secret "Operation Paperclip", the clandestine and "illegal" transfer of Nazi war criminals into the United states at the end of the war.)
Another source for the Clay Shaw/ Von Braun connection is Paris Flammondes book "The Kennedy Conspiracy". It reads As follows; "Von Braun first met Clay Shaw in l945 when he, Walter Dornberger and about 150 other Nazi rocket scientists abandoned Peenamunde and traveled south to join the American forces in Germany close to the French border. The Nazi's ,were brought to the Deputy Chief of staff"s headquarters where Major Clay Shaw was aide- de -camp to General Charles O. Thrasher, Deputy Chief, European Theater of Operations. Von Braun, Dornberger and Shaw maintained their relationship over the yearsGeneral Staff Files, U.S. Army European Command, OUISE Section)
Ordnance Colonel Holgar Toftoy was in charge of the Nazi scientists and Clay Shaw in the European Command Section gave assistance to the transfer of one hundred twenty seven of them into the United States after they had speant about five months in Europe. In the transfer of the Nazi rocket scientists, the services of Hitlers intelligence agency (the Gehlen Org.) was used extensively and Shaw, Dornberger, and the others began a very close association with the Nazi agency and its commander Reinhard Gehlen. "
(see the Clay Shaw entry in Who's Who in the Southwest l953-64, later editions delete this information.)
See Destiny Betrayed pp. 214-216, by James DiEugenio, Sheriden Square Press, l992 }
Oh Pshaw
http://www.jfkmontreal.com/importance_garrison.htm
There is strong circumstantial evidence that Shaw may have also served as a Colonel in the French espionage organization, Service de Documentation Exterieure et de Contre Espionage (SDECE), under the aliases of a Colonel René Bertrand and Colonel Beaumont. This would tie Shaw directly to professional assassin Christian David who revealed in the late 1980s that French Corsican assassins were hired to kill President Kennedy.
Jim Garrison proved that Clay Shaw often used aliases Clay Bertrand or Clem Bertrand. Danish journalist, Henrik Krüger, wrote in his 1976 book, "The Great Heroin Coup", that a Colonel René Bertrand, alias Colonel Beaumont, worked for SDECE in the 1940s. According to Krüger, Colonel Bertrand used his influence in 1949 to get French gangster Jo Attia’s prison sentence reduced from life to four years. Attia had been convicted in France for illegal possession of weapons and involvement in the death/murder of another gangster, Pierrot le Fou. Attia had saved Colonel Bertrand’s life during World War II and evidently asked Bertrand to return the favor by getting his sentence reduced.5
Jo Attia was one of France’s most colorful criminals, and was the first gangster in that country to become an international spy. It was Jo Attia who, according to Krüger, introduced heroin trafficker Christian David to international espionage. Jo Attia also worked with French Corsican crime family, the Guerini brothers.6 Christian David told an interviewer—in Nigel Turner's documentary, The Men Who Killed Kennedy—that Antoine Guerini, of the Guerini crime family, offered him the contract to kill President Kennedy; but David refused because it was too dangerous. Christian David and Jo Attia were both involved in the 1965 kidnapping and murder of Moroccan political activist Mehdi Ben Barka. They were also closely associated with, according to Henrik Krüger, the men who killed Patrice Lumumba of the Congo.7
Given that Clay Shaw was a Colonel in the US Army in the late 1940s, that he admitted to working for the OSS, and given that he was awarded France’s Croix de Guerre, and given that Shaw resided in New Orleans which has a strong French heritage, and given Shaw’s known propensity to use aliases, it is possible that French SDECE officer, Colonel René Bertrand, alias Beaumont, was actually Colonel Clay Shaw. This "missing link" about Shaw’s background connects the dots to many of Jim Garrison’s discoveries about Shaw’s past, his links to international espionage, and his involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy. In addition, Henrik Krüger wrote that Colonel Bertrand, alias Beaumont, is one of the names most associated with SDECE espionage involving assassination, kidnapping, and other notorious scandals.8
#5 Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup, p. 42
#6 ibid, p. 40
#7 ibid, p. 43
#8 ibid, p. 46
The Italian media reported that [Ferenc] Nagy was president of Permindex and the board chairman and major stockholder was Maj. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, a powerful Montreal lawyer who represented the Bronfman family as well as serving U.S. intelligence services.
(Jim Marrs, Crossfire, p. 499)
I grew up poor too (on welfare), and whilst remaining a 'purist' in that I hope that some century soon a worldwide revolution will occur that wipes away exploitation of all kinds, in the meantime I obviously prefer there to be social welfare, I oppose privatisation, I oppose tax cuts for the rich, etc. etc.; and I have a deep and utterly engrained hatred of the right wing.
I've met lots of jokers who say they're 'ultra-left' or 'anarchist', who hail from privileged middle-class backgrounds, and seem curiously more opposed to the left than to the right. They all seemed to want me to know my place too. So I think I got what you were talking about when you described your former 'purist' acquaintance and his disdain for your bringing your talents to the marketplace.
However, how do you take the facts that the US Democratic and Republican parties cooperate around the world, that guys on both sides take money from the vilely racist Israeli lobby, and so on.
What I would also like to know is...leaving this hypothetical here, for the sake of argument..IF the Democratic Party became like the UK Labour Party (and I'm aware that there's much more radical life on the left of the Democratic Party than there is on the left of the Labour Party, which hasn't got a left), would you still support them? Why?
I remember when Thatcher was PM in the UK. She and her 'government' were widely hated. You had the Labour Party running around saying wait, let's all work together for an eventual Labour Party election victory. Well of course, such a victory eventually came, after a number of electoral losses and 18 years of the Tories being in 'government' office. But by that time the Labour leader was openly praising Thatcher and boasting about how he'd carry on the 'good work' that had been done under the Tories. The fact is that even when it contained a 'lefty' element, Labour electoralism helped the Tories do their stuff, holding out the prospect of an illusory 'overthrow' later, which obviously never came. The rulers were highly successful in the 1980s and early 1990s, and they've been highly successful since then too. Just as in the US, practically everything has been downhill since the early 1970s.
So...just as we got the exact opposite of the sort of dissolution of the old labour movement that we wanted, we got the exact opposite of the sort of dissolution of 'Tory rule' that we wanted... In short, power lies on the streets.
If the Democratic Party had a platform saying vote for them and they will ensure that Bush and the Bushites are arrested and tried in an international court for war crimes, they might have something going for them!
Parliamentary democracy is rubbish... When has it ever stopped anything that deserves to be stopped?
In June 1968 there was a general election in France. The Gaullists won. If the revolutionaries had stopped struggling and all rallied behind the, er, 'left' (but which one? the social-democrats under former Vichyite, and brother of the head of the freemasons, Francois Mitterand? or the Stalinist 'tankies'?), one could have imagined sighs of relief among the rich and among politicians of all stripes...
I think you are reacting, Joseph. I am sure you are right that the 'progressive purists' who paint the 'moderates' in the Democratic Party as worse than the Republicans, are a complete load of tossers. But your own support for precisely those moderates may result from making what is essentially a false choice, that in fact both of the factions would encourage you and every other anti-Republican to make. It's not worth making...
b
Permindex
For France, the old demons were represented by the OAS, who had a long history of assassination attempts on DeGaulle. And on March 6th 1967, Il Paese Sera intimated that the OAS were partly financed by... Permindex. Ference Nagy, President of Permindex "was said by the French press to be a munificial contributor to the philo-fascistic movement of (Jacques) Soustelle."(25)
But what do we really know about the history of Permindex? Very little it seems. What I have pieced together comes primarily from a selection of newspaper clippings from Switzerland in the late 1950's and early 1960's. How accurate these are I can't say: the press cuttings are vague internally inconsistent; Permindex was as much a mystery in the 1950's as it is today.
The origins of Permindex appear to lie in New Orleans in 1948 -- probably with Clay Shaw's International Trade Mart. In 1956 Permindex -- apparent ly representing a "group of American business interests" -- decided to move into Europe and set up in Basle, Switzerland. Two companies were set up under the auspices of the Permindex mother company: Building Finance (AG) and Parkhof (AG). (AG just indicates that this is a private company.) These two companies were supposed to buy land and develop it with skyscrapers, parks, etc.: the press accounts at the time were full of grandiose plans. The President of Permindex was Ferenc Nagy. But it appears that he was not the controller of the companies; more a nominal head, a front man who would appear attractive to Government officials and politicians. The only director who appears to have been identified was George Mantello, a Rumanian in Swiss business and media circles.
Permindex's plans in Basle appear to have generated considerable commercial suspicion. None of its plans came to fruition and the Basle press which had earlier devoted columns and columns to its plans, became critical. In 1961 the Basle Workers' Paper (and that's a literal translation from the German) accused Nagy and Permindex of being a "bunch of swindlers." (It was further alleged that Nagy had been in jail in Rome for fraud.) Nagy sued for libel won the case, but was awarded very small damages (only 3000 old francs.) Shortly after the trial Parkhof (AG) went bankrupt and, as one of the papers put it, it became clear that what Nagy and Permindex had been up to was a basic con. The Public Prosecutor's Office in Basle appears to have been considering criminal charges against the company but were leaned on by various Swiss politicians not to do so. (There is no documentation of this in the Basle paper and its veracity is unknown.)
It appears that all this bad publicity led Permindex to leave Basle of its own accord -- not thrown out as IPS alleges. Permindex next moved to Rome where it set itself up as the World Trade Centre (CMC) in the buildings of what had been the World War 2 World Exhibition Centre.
In the 1990s journalist Max Holland returned to this subject, and with the benefit of numerous new documents produced the definitive account of the Clay Shaw/Permindex disinformation campaign.
In 1962 the Centre was opened at a ceremony attended by top Italian government and political figures. The set-up once again seems to have appeared to be fairly mysterious to outside observers and by 1964 more bad publicity appears to have been generated and they shut down and moved to South Africa.(26)
That, so far, is the extent of the evidence, though I do intend pursuing it further. Obviously such a shadowy company is open to all kinds of theories. It could have been used for economic intelligence, as suggested of Shaw. Equally, it could have been used to finance politicians. But where is the evidence for any of that? If there is such evidence I will bow to it; but for the moment it looks as if "facts" took a back seat to the fascination with international conspiracies.
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/lobster.htm
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