Clay Shaw in Italy: Amid Permindex and Gladio, Part 2
In Part 1, we have established the enormous influence of Licio Gelli and Propaganda Due, and its association with Permindex/Centro Mondiale Commerciale. This was through someone, only Michele Metta discovered, namely, Roberto Ascarelli. As noted, both groups met in his offices, and he served on the board of Permindex/CMC. Now that we have presented this new and compelling information, it is appropriate to review some already established material before proceeding forward again.
As noted, Clay Shaw always denied he had any association with the CIA. He did this in public, and he also declared it under oath on the stand at his trial. This, of course, turned out to be a canard. The declassified record adduced by the ARRB has proven it as such. As William Davy showed in his book, Shaw had a covert security clearance, and he was so valued that he was issued a Y file. (William Davy, Let Justice be Done, p. 195, p. 199). As Joan Mellen later discovered, Shaw was a highly paid CIA contract agent. (Our Man in Haiti, pp. 54-55) In an internal communication, the ARRB’s CIA analyst, Manuel Legaspi, stated that the Agency had severely altered Shaw’s 201 file. But, as previously mentioned, we do know that Shaw did work for the CIA “over a five year span in Italy.” (Davy, p. 100)
When Ference Nagy first announced plans for a business organization in Basel, this met with criticism in the papers due to some of the people involved. That would include Nagy himself, since the year before he had been referred to as “a long-time asset of CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Frank Wisner.”(Maurice Phillips’ blog, 10/15/10) According to the Soviets, Nagy had a role in the Hungarian uprising of 1956. (New York Times, 11/8/56) In declassified documents by the ARRB, Nagy was revealed to be “a cleared contact of the International Organizations Division. His 201 file contains a number of references to his association with the World Trade Center.” (CIA document of 3/24/67)
When the financial banking for Nagy’s new enterprise was announced, it raised even more controversy. (State Department Memo, 1/15/57) The first bank announced was J. Henry Schroder’s. This bank was closely associated with the CIA and Director Allen Dulles. The Dulles law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell, used Schroder’s in dealing with the Nazis in the late thirties. When Dulles became director, that bank was a repository for a 50-million-dollar contingency fund he controlled. (Davy, p. 96) That financial conglomerate was a prime source as a conduit for CIA fronts like the Kaplan Foundation and a half dozen others like it. (ibid)
So Schroder’s now denied its backing. Another bank stepped in, namely, Hans Seligman’s. The State Department was curious about this since Seligman’s was a much smaller house than Schroder’s. When the American consul interviewed Nagy and Seligman, he found them to be rather cautious in revealing the firms backing the project. But Seligman had a reputation for cooperating with the fascists during the war. And also, like Schroder’s, Seligman’s bank was also in the Sullivan and Cromwell financial orbit. (State Department cables of 2/1/57 and 11/7/58; S. Menshikov, Millionaires and Managers, p. 297)
Due to the characters involved, the questionable backing, plus attacks in the press, the project stalled. But it was now ascertained that the International Trade Mart was a model for Permindex, and that Clay Shaw of the ITM had shown “from the outset great interest in the Permindex project.” (State Department cables of 4/9/58 and 7/18/58) This prompted a visit to New Orleans by certain Swiss officials in 1957. (State Department cable of 11/7/58) In the spring of 1958, Enrico Mantello and his father Giorgio—a main player in the Permindex scheme—traveled to New Orleans and met with Shaw. This was after an exchange of letters between the two parties. (Nagy collection at Columbia University, sourced by Ed Berger.) Nagy seemed to be determined now to move to Rome, and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles somehow heard of this. In a memo of September of 1958 requesting aid for Nagy in Italy, the document originates at Commerce but it has Foster Dulles’ name on it at the end.
Nagy then announced that Permindex would be opening up an affiliate called Centro Mondiale Commerciale in Rome. According to a Time-Life internal memo, Shaw visited their new HQ prior to its official opening. This was a 37,000 square foot office building originally constructed in 1942. Shaw was then reported by the State Department to be on the Board of Directors. (State Department cable of 11/7/58)
As Maurice Phillips and Metta have pointed out, there was a Canadian connection to CMC. This was through former Major Louis Bloomfield. In a letter written by Bloomfield on February 4, 1960, he noted that Nagy had met with David Rockefeller the previous day. Bloomfield was supposed to be there, but due to a temporary health affliction, he could not attend. Bloomfield described the meeting as successful, and he planned on meeting with Rockefeller in a week or so. (From Bloomfield to Ernest Wolf) As the Bloomfield archive, as excavated by Maurice Phillips, showed, it was not just Rockefeller who was in the Permindex outer circle, but also Baron Edmund de Rothschild. Both men were being solicited as investors. In other words, those involved in Permindex were in contact with two of the richest and most powerful men in the world at that time. (Letter by Bloomfield to Abraham Friedman of April 1, 1959)
II
There was another side to Permindex/CMC. As William Davy notes in his book about Jim Garrison, Ferenc Nagy was a close acquaintance to, and supportive of, Jacques Soustelle. (Let Justice be Done, p. 99) Soustelle had been the governor-general of Algeria and had worked for President Charles DeGaulle. But he had broken with the president over his policy of an independence solution to the war with Algerian rebels—a policy which President Kennedy had advocated since 1957. Soustelle had traveled to Washington in the early sixties and met with CIA officers. He was pleading for support for the OAS, a group of breakaway military officers trying to overthrow and/or kill DeGaulle. According to Andrew Tully in his book CIA: The Inside Story, the meeting was a success. Many years later, it was revealed to the Church Committee that the Agency had aided in a scheme to assassinate DeGaulle. (Chicago Tribune, June 15, 1975)
We should also note something on a lower level that is pertinent. In the 1961 raid on the weapons cache in Houma, Louisiana DA Jim Garrison discovered that some of the arms that were lifted and sent to Guy Banister’s office were CIA stockpiled weaponry on loan to the OAS group. (Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, p. 90) In tracing the money used to finance the plots against DeGaulle, French intelligence discovered that about $200,000 in covert funding had been sent to Permindex accounts in the Banque de la Credit Internationale. In 1962, Banister sent to Paris his lawyer colleague Maurice Gatlin, who was a member of Banister’s Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean. Gatlin reportedly had a suitcase full of money for the OAS, estimated at around $200,000. (Jim Marrs, Crossfire, pp. 499-500)
This relates to another explosive disclosure by Michele Metta in his first book on the Centro Mondiale Commerciale. Enrico Mattei was the miracle man who turned the National Fuel Trust (ENI) of the Italian government into a formidable force in petroleum markets on the world stage. Mattei was controversial in his policies as he made key petroleum deals in the Middle East and significant agreements with the USSR. In the former instance, he agreed to lower concessions in order to gain new drilling rights. In the latter case, he agreed to purchase 12 million tons of Russian crude oil. (Time, 11/2/62)
Mattei’s maneuvering weakened the Rockefeller/Shell/British Petroleum-controlled Seven Sisters oil monopoly that had dominated oil markets through the 20th century. (The attorney for that oil monopoly was John McCloy of the Warren Commission.) Mattei also broke with tradition in his policies toward countries where the oil was discovered. He insisted that they get up to 75% of the profits. He stated that he thought the giant foreign oil companies were preying on the Italian market by rigging higher prices. In a clear jab at the Seven Sisters, he once said:
The policy I am following has permitted me not only to free my country from the grip of the cartel, but to benefit from prices lower than those which our neighbors pay. (Ibid)
Mattei was so successful in his endeavors that he expanded the reach of the ENI into motels, cafes, service stations, newspapers and factories producing synthetic rubber. ENI was estimated to be worth 2 billion in 1962. Mattei was said to have played a major role in spurring the enormous growth in the Italian economy during his years as director. He donated his salary to an orphanage. And one should also note this: like Kennedy and DeGaulle, he wanted France out of Algeria.
III
Mattei’s brilliant reign came to an end on October 27, 1962. He perished in a mysterious plane crash, which recalled the murder of Dag Hammarskjold the previous year. (See the book Who Killed Hammarskjold? by Susan Williams) At the beginning of 1962, Mattei’s pilot discovered an attempt to sabotage his plane. Therefore, Mattei now ordered an identical aircraft which he would choose between on short notice. After his death, the wreckage was removed very quickly, and the identical plane was sold off in parts to parties in America. Film director Francesco Rosi commissioned a script after a journalist reported a significant discovery in the case. That journalist then disappeared --forever. But not before he said, “I have a scoop that is going to shake Italy.” (See, “The Mystery of Enrico Mattei’s Death” at Ecco le marche web site; see also La Repubblica, story by Attilio Bolzoni 6/18/2005)
Although Rosi did make his film, it did not get very much exposure in America, and neither did Mattei’s death. But the matter did inspire much private inquiry in Italy. Vincenzo Calia was one of the more important researchers. In fact, Calia changed the verdict about the crash for most later biographies of Mattei. His work altered those references from a plane malfunction to sabotage of Mattei’s aircraft. Calia advanced powerful evidence that the plane went down because of an explosion. (Michele Metta, CMC, p. 132)
Metta was loaned Calia’s research materials. In one of the interviews Calia did, he talked to a writer named Fulvio Bellini. In one of Bellini’s books, he had gone over the problems Mattei was having with his immediate superior, who was opposed to some of his policies and, in fact, was close to Borghese. Bellini referred to the Centro Mondiale Commerciale as: “The terminal in Italy of the group who attend to all the dirty work in world politics, including the assassination of Enrico Mattei.” (Italics added)
Bellini then went even further. He said that, to understand the death of Mattei, one had to follow the trail to none other than Soustelle. Bellini said Soustelle was given the job of performing, what he referred to as, Operation Mattei. He then concluded that Soustelle was given around 100,000 dollars to do so from Montreal through Permindex. (Ibid., p. 133)
We can speculate about the Montreal connection. That is where Bloomfield operated from with the shares of Permindex stock. And he was enlisting the likes of David Rockefeller and Edmund de Rothschild as investors. I do not have to refer to how much interest Rockefeller had in the Seven Sisters: two of the seven were Rockefeller-controlled, Chevron and Exxon.
Two more elements should be mentioned regarding this Metta discovery. A young man named Jules Ricco Kimble was a friend of David Ferrie’s who introduced him to Clay Shaw. One day in late 1961—perhaps early 1962—Ferrie called him and asked if he wanted to take a plane ride with him. Kimble agreed and met Ferrie at the airport, where he learned that Shaw would be joining them. Ferrie made some stops to refuel, but their last stop was Montreal. The trip was for an overnight stay, and Shaw did not rejoin them until the next morning. A bit later, Ferrie called him again to make another flight into Canada, but Kimble declined. (Garrison, p. 118)
Finally, to add more intrigue to what Bellini noted, Metta reports that Soustelle was meeting with former Italian prime minister Fernando Tambroni in Rome in the latter part of 1961. Tambroni had been financed by a member of P2. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 362) Tambroni’s son-in-law was a member of the CMC. Tambroni had been involved in the central government in three different positions for eight years prior to becoming prime minister. But he was so right-wing that riots took place against him, and he lost office after about five months. Tambroni and Soustelle met at the building housing a reactionary group of Tambroni’s called Civil Order. Italian intelligence also suspected it to be the headquarters of the OAS in Italy. (Metta, CMC, p. 131)
IV
Gladio experts Philip Willan and Danielle Ganser mention the role of Frank Gigliotti in reviving masonry, and aiding Gladio in Italy after the war. Willan, for instance, describes Gigliotti as a former OSS and CIA agent. (Puppetmasters, p. 58) Gigliotti, who had spent years in Italy as a young man, was a Presbyterian pastor who was anti-communist and pro-Mussolini in the thirties. He then became an OSS agent against Il Duce during the war. He joined up with the CIA afterwards and, as noted, was quite active in the revival of Italian masonry. In 1960, he was very much pro-Nixon and anti-Kennedy. (Metta, CMC, pp. 10-12)
Beyond that, more than one source has stated that it was Gigliotti who secretly recruited Licio Gelli. The Tina Anselmi P2 Commission thought it was important to note that when Gigliotti left the scene, Gelli took the stage. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 65) According to Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies, it was Gigliotti who instructed Licio to construct an anti-Communist network in Italy associated with the Rome CIA station. In fact, CIA Director Allen Dulles was actually contributing millions of lire to funding this kind of militant neo-fascist network there. (Metta, CMC, p. 15)
What makes this even more intriguing is this: one of Kennedy’s enemies, William Harvey, was stationed in Ganser’s Rome CIA station in 1963. Another enemy, Lyman Lemnitzer, ran NATO forces and, therefore, Gladio, in that same year. Both men had been guilty of insubordination at the White House in 1962.
Lemnitzer’s rise in the Pentagon was largely owed to General Dwight Eisenhower; Lemnitzer planned operations in North Africa and Italy. Once he became president, Eisenhower made him commander of Far East forces, then Army Chief of Staff, and then JCS chair—all in the space of five years. (Cottrell, pp. 86-87) According to James Bamford, “in Lemnitzer’s view, the country would be far better off if the generals could take over.” (Ibid., p. 92)
To put it mildly, this was not what JFK thought. As chair of the Joint Chiefs, Lemnitzer was opposed to Kennedy’s policies in both Vietnam and Cuba. He was close to Col. Edwin Lansdale, who was in charge of Operation Mongoose. Lemnitzer had been in on a false flag plan against Cuba under the Eisenhower administration. (John Newman, Into the Storm, p. 372) Lansdale himself now thought up the idea of staging a fake Cuban attack at Guantanamo in order to provoke an American invasion. This actually preceded the infamous Operation Northwoods, the series of false flag plans devised by the Joint Chiefs to provoke an invasion of the island.
The problem was that not only was Kennedy against such a provocation, he did not even want to hear about it. (Newman, p. 385) Yet on March 13, 1962, Northwoods was presented to JFK. Then Lemnitzer suggested that America did not even need a pretext; we could just invade, which Kennedy was clearly against.
On Vietnam, Lemnitzer said that Kennedy’s policy would lead to “communist domination of all of the Southeast Asian mainland.” He even said Australia and New Zealand would be threatened. (Newman, p. 391) Notably, this was after the November 1961 Kennedy decision that there would be no combat troops in Indochina, only advisors. According to a conversation John Newman had with the present writer, the JCS knew there were ICBM missiles in Cuba before Kennedy did. They wanted to force JFK’s back against the wall to see how he would respond. They did not care for the peaceful and equitable result. Kennedy ended up removing Lemnitzer in the fall of 1962 (Newman, p. 396). But he made a mistake and sent him to Europe to oversee NATO forces.
V
Bill Harvey began his career in the FBI, but he was too much of a hard drinker for J. Edgar Hoover to tolerate. So he joined the CIA, and he liked to needle the Ivy League officers by pulling out his gun during meetings and spinning the cylinder. (David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 469) He supervised the Berlin station and got to know Reinhard Gehlen and his network there. When he returned stateside, he wanted to run the Soviet Russia division, but he was assigned to Staff D, signals intelligence, with which he worked on with the National Security Agency. (ibid., pp. 470-71)
Buried inside Staff D was a project called ZR/Rifle. This was the development of an assassination program commissioned by Dick Bissell. Prior to this, James Angleton supervised a small assassination team run by Colonel Borish Pash. (James Douglas, JFK and The Unspeakable, p. 143) Both men, Angleton and Harvey, visited with British intelligence officer Peter Wright about the subject of assassinations. (Wright, Spycatcher, p. 204) In fact, the Church Committee discovered that Harvey had made notes about blaming an assassination on a communist--either a Czechoslovak or a Soviet. He also noted that the patsy’s CIA 201 file should be rigged in advance. Which, as HSCA staffer Betsy Wolf showed, Oswald’s was. (Vasilios Vazakas, “Creating the Oswald Legend, Pt. 4” at Kennedys and King.) According to the Church Committee, both QJ WIN and WI ROGUE were Harvey’s recruits, and both were sent to Congo to take part in the plot to eliminate Patrice Lumumba. (See Midnight in the Congo, by Lisa Pease, Probe, Vol. 6 No. 3)
In 1962, Harvey was supervising Task Force W, directly involved with Cuba. Bobby Kennedy was the ombudsman of the overall project called Mongoose. Harvey deeply resented RFK’s fastidious veto power over CIA requests for operations. As David Corn showed in his book on Ted Shackley, Allen Dulles approved of these by rote orally. Bobby wanted them in writing and in detail. Harvey grew to hate the Kennedy brothers, especially Robert. He said his actions bordered on treason. (Talbot, p. 472)
What the Kennedys did not know was that Harvey was also in charge of the second phase of the CIA/Mafia plots to kill Castro, which were going on while Mongoose was proceeding. Harvey had teamed with mobster John Roselli to try to assassinate Fidel. This went on for months on end; there is evidence that it extended into the spring of 1963. (Larry Hancock, Someone Would Have Talked, pp. 148-49) But what got Harvey in deep trouble was his actions during the Missile Crisis. At one of the hottest points of that confrontation, Harvey sent teams of “sixty agents into Cuba to support any conventional military operations”. (Dick Russell, The Man Who Knew Too Much, p. 151) Bobby Kennedy was enraged by this. At that moment, the slightest provocation could have brought on atomic warfare. RFK wanted him fired, but Richard Helms shuffled him off to Rome.
VI
While in Rome, Harvey formed an alliance with General Giovanni DeLorenzo, who, as we saw in part one, planned a 1964 coup called Piano Solo. Harvey was also friendly with the notorious Michele Sindona, the fraudster who almost caused the Vatican bank to collapse. Harvey also met with a man who was instrumental in the Strategy of Tension, Renzo Rocca. Harvey gave Rocca a list of names of far-right zealots who would help in carrying out that strategy. As with ZR/Rifle, Harvey wanted to create a team of thugs who would be “capable of killing, placing bombs and firebombs, and promoting propaganda.” One of the first people whom Rocca talked to after this meeting was Valerio Borghese, Angleton’s friend, and the man who would attempt another coup in 1970. (Metta, Accomplishing Jim Garrison’s Investigation, p. 88)
Harvey was continuing an old CIA policy first implemented by Allen Dulles in a 1951 document. Dulles wanted the Christian Democrats to treat the Italian communists not as Italians but as communists. He wanted them discriminated against through legislative enactments, administrative harassment, suppression and also control. The project was called Operation Demagnetize, and it was cooperated on between the CIA and SIFAR, the then Italian secret service. (Ibid., p. 43) Years later, the Christian Democrats were very worried about how their full cooperation with the CIA would look if it was fully exposed to the Anselmi Commission on P2. And in fact, Anselmi’s notes make it clear that the Christian Democrats did all they could to close down her investigation. (ibid., pp. 64-65)
The fear was real. Because eventually Judge Felice Casson came to the conclusion that P2 had been involved in the attacks of the strategy of tension “and that the secret society was acting as a proxy for the CIA.” And that inquiry concluded that P2 and Gelli were not just doing so in Italy but in Argentina, and that Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who later became Pope Francis I, was cognizant of it. This is how powerful Gelli and P2 were. (Paul Williams, Operation Gladio, p. 110) They were involved with the assassination program in South America called Operation Condor. (Cottrell, p. 127)
The only other part of Gladio that was likely as impactful as the P2/ Permindex aspect was Yves Guerin-Serac, who led another CIA shell company called Aginter Press. Guerin-Sac was part of the OAS plots to kill DeGaulle. When they failed, he fled to Portugal for what he called, “ …a truly western league of struggle against Marxism.” (Cottrell, p. 118) And, in fact, Aginter Press was involved in the Strategy of Tension in Italy by blowing up a bank in Milan in 1969. Guerin-Sac and Aginter Press were allied with Otto Skorzeny and his gun-for-hire Paladin Group. At one time, in the Paladin group bureau in Zurich, offices of both Permindex and the CMC were located. (Cottrell, p. 125)
In Rome, Harvey’s deputy was F. Mark Wyatt. Wyatt acted as a buffer between the rather unrefined Harvey and the locals; and unlike Harvey, he spoke fluent Italian. He was knowledgeable about Harvey’s attempts through SIFAR and Rocca to carry out bombings on Christian Democrat offices and blame them on the left. (Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, p. 475). Harvey also entertained the idea of using the Mafia to murder Italian communists. On the day Kennedy was killed, Harvey blurted out some disturbing remarks that stayed with Wyatt the rest of his life. In fact, his children wanted him to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He declined.
But during an interview Wyatt did with a French journalist at his retirement home in Lake Tahoe in 1998, he did say something quite provocative. As the writer left, he said: “You know, I always wondered what Bill Harvey was doing in Dallas in November 1963.” The reporter was shocked. Wyatt explained that he bumped into Harvey on a flight to Dallas a bit before the assassination. When he asked his boss what he was doing there, Harvey said rather nebulously: “I’m here to see what’s happening.” (Talbot, p. 477) And thanks to the Luna committee we have just found out that CAI documents reveal that Harvey had permission to fly under an FAA-approved alias in 1963 in the USA.
As the reader can see, those attempting to label Permindex a Russian disinformation story-- like Max Holland--are simply and utterly wrong. It and P2 and Gladio and the Strategy of Tension were all too real.
