Clay Shaw

[James Lateer]

Here is the first part of my review of Man of a Million Frangments:

The book Man of a Million Fragments by Donald H Carpenter is a book well worth reading if you are interested in the JFK assassination.
The author, Donald H. Carpenter is a forensic accountant and CPA by trade but he is also an excellent writer. His book Man of a Million Fragments: The True Story of Clay Shaw [hereinafter MMF] is a very thorough biography and analysis of the enigmatic Clay Shaw, the only person ever tried for the murder of John F. Kennedy.

The following are the major points that one will discover in the pages of MMF:

1. Carpenter speaks with condescension about JFK "conspiracy theorists." This is ironic because his book treats the alleged JFK conspiracy in more detail than any other book I can think of.
   
2. Carpenter writes "if one set out to examine any individual's life, it would be difficult to find a greater degree of unanimity of good feeling than that expressed toward Clay Shaw by those who had known him." Shaw was, according to Carpenter, a man who urged acquaintances to urinate on him and worse. I was hard for me as a reader to swallow all the glorious references to Shaw, knowing this disgusting background about him. How can you promote respect for someone like that? I'm sorry, but count me out as an admirer of Clay Shaw.
   
3. I can only think of three other figures in the JFK assassination literature who had such a disgusting lifestyle. The others would be Nazi Generals Heinrich Muller, Karl Wolff and James Bond author, Ian Fleming. At least the first two were intimately connected with U.S. intelligence and probably Allen Dulles specifically. Fleming was a British Intelligence employee.
   
4. The most enlightening information which I discovered in MMF is the clue about Jim Garrison assassination witness Thomas P. Breitner. Breitner was a professor at Berkeley in California who contacted various JFK investigators about a connection of Shaw to people Breitner felt were involved with Clay Shaw in the JFK assassination. That was because Breitner reported that Clay Shaw was meeting with Nazi-type people on the day of the assassination in his lab at Berkeley, California. This suggestion fits perfectly with the growing body of evidence that Shaw was closely connected with the worldwide network of fugitive WWII Nazis in the Kennedy murder.
   
5. In the microbiology department at Berkeley (along with Breitner) were several German-connected scientists. One was the lab manager Gerhard Burde (apparently a former member of Hitler Youth). Two others were Peter H. Duesberg (born in Germany and came to the US in 1963) and Gunther Stent (who wrote a book entitled "Nazis, Women and Molecular Biology" published in 2004. Stent had worked for the US military in Germany in 1946. Still another faculty member there, in microbiology, was David Powell Hackett who was murdered in early 1964 in Berkeley (shot with a World War II German-made 38 caliber pistol). An immigrant from Luxembourg was strongly connected to that crime but there was a lack of proof.
   
6. Carpenter reports that Garrison considered the International Trade Mart, (which was led by Clay Shaw from the late 1940's to 1965) to be a sinister building which had other nefarious purposes besides world trade. Carpenter mentions "consulates" as being located there which aroused Garrison's suspicion. Mentioned only indirectly by Carpenter was the fact the German Consulate was located there, at least from 1952 to 1963. In 1954, the German Consulate in the World Trade Center was under FBI investigation. It is important to know that the US and the UK retained control of the locations of West German consulates during that period, even up to 1955 when West Germany officially received back its legal sovereignty.
   
7. Carpenter pleads innocence regarding the endless number of CIA-connected people with whom Shaw was involved personally from the 1940's up until his death in 1974.