Bloomfield / Osborne

[Peter Lemkin]

John, A little confusing who is saying what in that post...perhaps color coding it might help. Anyway, I continue to be very suspicious about Bloomfield and think/agree the papers given to the Library/Archive were scrubbed by either he or an associate. It is quite usual for 'intelligence-cleared' lawyers to also do very ordinary [non-intelligence] things both in their legal and personal lives, along with the special [intelligence-related] matters they are sometimes asked to do or do of their own volition. While these files do not 'indict' him in any major intelligence operation, the company he knew and kept in contact with is more than a bit suspicious to me. More work needs to be done and find out where the rest of his papers may be [that might be telling even without being able to access them], or if they were destroyed. But this may not be possible to discern. We, at this point, seem to be left with another loose end we can not tied down...the very nature of how intelligence works in scrubbing the actions and documentation of their actions....

James:

Why would he be involved with the King Carol case? Was it intel related?

Bringing both the Romanian and Dutch Royals to Canada, in my opinion, would not be an intel job but a political one. Both countries were under the control of the Nazis, so perhaps the allies wanted them moved to Canada where the Nazis could not coerce them into supporting them. The support of those countries' royal families would have been a boost for Nazis propaganda. He also brought another person to Canada, a man named Priestly, so perhaps he had some special expertise in these types of matters, and given the business and political circles that Bloomfield moved in, someone in the Canadian government may have known about his experience with these matters and asked him to assist them.

2. The lines listing Jewish activities only cover from late 1960's onward. We know he was involved with Israel getting the a-bomb beginning in the early 1950's onward. Where are the files on Jewish Activities in the 1940's and 1950's?

Do not know. If he did provide them with assistance with this, it is unlikely that he would not have donated documents related to it to the archives.

3. Didn't he represent Heineken Breweries? No mention of that.

The 1959 Financial Post Directory of Directors and Directors and Executives indicates that he was president of Heineken Breweries of Canada.

4. He was involved with the Bronfman family. No mention of that.

The Bloomfield collection finding aid would not necessarily mention the Bronfmans because correspondence with them would be in the numerous letter books he gave to the archives.

5. No mention of his military career or papers relating to that.

See question # 8.

6. The papers naming George Bush Sr. were dated from 1976 to 1984. That was when Bush headed the CIA (1976). Do you know why he was corresponding with Bush, Sr?

If you got to Kennedys and King and read appendix 9 of my book review, all of his letters to Bush Sr. are there. There is no information of consequence in them.

7. You posted a letter to Baron Edmond de Rothschild which mentions Promotex company in Switzerland. This company, like the company Adalia (of Malta) also mentioned appear to be "offshoring" companies which might indicate murky international dealings (but that is just a generalization and there are not details apparent about that aspect). There is no mention of the name Rothschild in the list. Why?

See question # 4.

8. Where are his army files? Does the Canadian government release military records on famous veterans like Bloomfield?
Yes they do. I ordered Bloomfield's military records from the archives. They indicate that he never left Canada with the army during the war and that he was in the reserves. These records do not mention intel work. Albert Osborne's, who I also wrote about, WWI records are available online.

9. The letter that you posted to the Honorable Ferenc Nagy, LL D seems to be about setting up a speaking engagement for Nagy. Does that connect Bloomfield to the European "solidarist" movements in the 1950's or 1960's? It doesn't look like that if it is only a single speaking engagement at issue.

The letter itself does not connect Bloomfield to the "solidarists movements" but Bloomfield was a conservative and therefore would have been against communism. How and what he did to oppose it still has to be determined. The club mentioned in the letter "The Canadian Club" is a prominent businessman's club. I am not sure why Bloomfield was helping him but perhaps Nagy wanted to speak to them about fighting communism, and was looking for funding from them for anti-communist activities. More research has to be done to establish what Bloomfield did, if he did anything at all, related to fighting communism.

Bloomfield's files were most likely cleaned up before he donated them to the archives, and because of this, they can contribute only so much to research. What needs to be done is to look for new sources of material about Permindex and CMC. Bloomfield's correspondence indicates that a 200,000,000 lira investment was going to made, who was this from? There is a French intel document that mentions money going to Permindex to assassinate De Gaulle, where is this document? The only documents I have seen about these companies are the ones provided by Bloomfield and by Michel Metta. There has to be more information about them somewhere, and they need to be located if we are going to broaden our knowledge about Permindex's and CMC's role in the cold war.

I didn't realize Nagy held a doctorate in laws. I read his memoirs but frankly, I don't remember anything about Nagy practicing law. He was the former leader of Hungary and allegedly escaped with the treasury money of Hungary, fleeing into Switzerland.

Overall, I can see why you conclude from looking at these papers that Bloomfield was just an ordinary lawyer who handled some important, but not sinister, types of cases. Also involved with a lot of innocuous charity work. But nothing connecting him to intelligence, the OSS or similar stuff.

But these do look like scrubbed files for the above reasons. And the texts of all of the correspondence and the contents of his diaries and appointment books are likely to "tell the tale" on Bloomfield and you can't infer very much about these from the listing.