Clay Shaw’s “Centro Mondiale Commerciale” and its Israeli connections

[Peter Lemkin]

I'd take a few things in this article with more than a grain of salt, but there are many truths in here too....too little research has been done on Permindex and Bloomfield/Shaw et al....and much too much chaff has been shot out by the disinformation machines of the intelligence agencies [several of them].

Montreal Permindex ties revealed to JFK murder, 1001 Club

Matthew Ehret / February 12, 2013

By Jeffrey Steinberg and Joseph Brewda

This year will mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963. Five decades after the "crime of the century," the Kennedy assassination is still shrouded in mystery and controversy.
Executive Intelligence Review's (EIR) own continuing investigation into the JFK murder recently turned up startling new evidence that not only strongly supports the late New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's charges that there was a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, and that New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw was guilty as charged of participating in the murder plot. The new documents reveal that the Permindex organization based out of Montreal Canada, identified by Garrison as the "assassination cabal" behind the JFK killing was never dismantled. Many of the culprits caught in Garrison's investigation, as well as parallel 1960s assassination probes by French and Italian authorities, later surfaced as members of a shadowy organization called the "1001 Club," founded by Prince Philip Mountbatten, the Duke of Edinburgh, and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1971. Prominent Canadians who played a key role in the forming of this club include Peter Munk, of the Munk School of Global Affairs and CEO of Barrick Gold, Lord Conrad Black, Maurice Strong, and Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield.
The 1001 Club, a by-invitation-only organization, was nominally founded as a "Nature Trust" whose primary goal was to fund the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), now known as the World Wide Fund for Nature. However, as EIR reported on Oct. 28, 1994, the WWF-1001 apparatus is a vast secret intelligence network engaged for the past 53 years in a war of genocide against the population of Africa and other continents to further the political goals of the British House of Windsor and the Club of the Isles.
The idea that lurking under the WWF's well-known Panda logo is a contemporary Permindex assassination bureau is not only a chilling prospect. It has immediate implications for the security of world leaders!

Part I: Shaw could have been convicted

On March 1, 1967, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison filed an arrest warrant against local businessman Clay Shaw, charging him with conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Shaw was tried on these charges and acquitted. Yet, but for a legal technicality, Shaw would have been found guilty and his conviction would have led the investigation of the Kennedy murder directly to the door of Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, who helped found Permindex, shattering the Warren Commission "lone assassin" cover-up and tying the greatest political crime of the second half of the 20th century to a conspiracy of unheard-of scale.
Almost immediately after the assassination of JFK, Garrison had opened a quiet probe of the "New Orleans" angle on the killing. Lee Harvey Oswald had been living in New Orleans on and off during the year leading up to the assassination in Dallas. Following his arrest, Oswald had been initially referred to New Orleans attorney Dean Andrews by a man using the name "Clay Bertrand." Garrison's investigation had established that "Clay Bertrand" was actually Clay Shaw.
The probe placed Shaw, the director of the New Orleans International Trade Mart and a board member of Perm index, in the orbit of Oswald, former FBI Division Five official Guy Banister, and David Ferrie. In the spring and summer of 1963, all these men had been in and out of Banister's private detective office at 544 Camp Street. That office had served as a covert operations center for the training and arming of Cuban exile mercenaries who continued to carry out military raids against Cuba after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Oswald was a regular visitor to Banister's office. The former U.S. Marine who had "defected" to the Soviet Union and returned unimpeded to the United States had used Banister's office as the address for a local chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, a pro-Castro outfit that was clearly out of sync with Banister's anti-communist crusade. Nevertheless, according to Banister's personal secretary Delphine Roberts, Banister had described Oswald as a part of the covert operation: "He's with us, he's associated with the office," he told Roberts, according to author Tony Summers.

A trail of corpses

By the time Garrison filed the arrest warrant against Clay Shaw, Oswald, Banister, and Ferrie were all dead. Oswald had been shot inside the Dallas police headquarters by local mobster Jack Ruby. Back in the 1950s in Chicago, Banister had been the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI office, and Ruby had been one of his informants. Banister apparently died of natural causes, but Ferrie's death was a mystery, ostensibly a suicide.
The opening statements in the trial against Shaw began on Feb. 6, 1969, following lengthy jury selection. Ultimately, the case came down to the question of whether it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Clay Shaw was indeed the "Clay Bertrand" who had arrange for the New Orleans lawyer to represent Oswald moments after his arrest in Dallas.
Although a number of witnesses testified for the prosecution that they had seen Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw together during 1963, and one witness, Perry Russo, had claimed he had been at a party where Ferrie and Shaw had discussed details of a plot to assassinate JFK, the Garrison case nevertheless lacked hard proof to convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Shaw and Ferrie had been associates. Two crucial pieces of evidence, either one of which would have provided the "smoking gun," were never presented to the jury.
The first was the booking form that was filled out at New Orleans police headquarters the day Shaw was arrested. Police officer Aloysius Habighorst, a decorated veteran of the police department, had booked Shaw on March 1, 1967. When Habighorst asked Shaw if he ever used an alias, Shaw carelessly responded, "Clay Bertrand." However, for reasons that still remain murky, trial judge Edward Haggerty refused to allow the booking form to be presented to the jury, and he blocked Habighorst from testifying.
The other piece of hard evidence was a pair of photographs apparently taken at a 1949 house party for supporters of WDSU radio station, showing Clay Shaw and David Ferrie clowning around together. The pictures had been published in the May 1967 issue of The Councillor, a right-wing newsletter from Shreveport, Louisiana. Ironically, a reporter covering the Shaw trial had copies of the pictures in his briefcase in the courtroom, but the incriminating photos were never presented by Garrison's prosecution team.
At the close of the defense case, Clay Shaw had taken the witness stand and lied repeatedly, under oath, that he had never met David Ferrie. What would the jury have done had Garrison countered Shaw's denials by producing the pictures of him and Ferrie? Other witnesses had already testified that Ferrie had described Shaw as an "old friend." Old enough friends to have been partying together in 1949? In the wee hours of March 1, 1969-two years to the day after Clay Shaw's arrest and two years and one week to the day after David Ferrie's body was discovered at his dingy apartment-Judge Haggerty charged the jury. One hour later, they returned with their verdict: not guilty.
Interviewed after the acquittal, the majority of jurors had said that they had been convinced by Garrison's evidence that President Kennedy had been killed as the result of a conspiracy. However, they had not been convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Shaw was part of the conspiracy with Banister, Oswald, Ferrie, and others. Shortly before his death, Judge Haggerty told WLAE-TV reporter Stephen Tyler that he was convinced that Shaw had committed perjury.
"Shaw lied through his teeth," he had told the reporter. Shaw "pulled a con job on the jury." Garrison himself was undeterred by the jury verdict. Shortly after the acquittal, Garrison indicted Clay Shaw again, on charges of perjury. Garrison had a damning case against Shaw. However, in a rare move, the U.S. District Court ruled that Garrison could not go ahead with the perjury prosecution, on the grounds that it constituted double jeopardy and was therefore unconstitutional.
Imagine the consequences of a Shaw conviction on March 1, 1969. An international spotlight would have been cast on New Orleans, and every facet of Shaw's life would have come under scrutiny. The day of his arrest, police had hauled off a collection of sado-masochistic paraphernalia, evidence of Shaw's bizarre homosexual lifestyle (yet another thing he shared in common with David Ferrie).
But the aspect of Shaw's life that would have drawn the greatest amount of attention was his relationship to Maj. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield and the Permindex outfit that Bloomfield established in Montreal and in Rome, Italy in the mid-1950s. On March 16, 1967, shortly after Clay Shaw's arrest, the Montreal daily Le Devoir published an expose of Permindex, linking the company to a 1962 assassination plot against French President Charles de Gaulle. Two Italian daily newspapers, Paese Sera and Corriere della Sera, had also covered the Permindex scandal, with Paese Sera running a six-part series on March 4, 11, 12, 14, 16, and 18, 1967.

Part II: Oswald and J. Edgar Hoover

Had the Shaw-Bloomfield connection to the JFK assassination become a subject of wide scrutiny in 1969 as the result of a conviction of Clay Shaw, another element of the cover-up would been exposed: Lee Harvey Oswald's relationship to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, particularly during the days leading up to Nov. 22, 1963.
"Defector" Oswald was allowed to return home to the United States in the summer of 1962 with his Soviet-born wife, Marina. Despite the fact that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered a massive expansion of the Bureau's Security Index, its tracking of suspected subversives, Lee Harvey Oswald's name never appeared on the index. That is not to say that the Bureau had not taken an interest in Oswald. Not only had "retired" Division Five official Guy Banister brought Oswald into the 544 Camp Street apparatus, but Dallas FBI Special Agent Jules P. Hosty Jr. had been assigned to keep in touch with him, apparently as part of Oswald's understanding with the FBI that he would provide information about subversives. Some books on the Kennedy assassination have alleged that Oswald was a paid FBI informant during the period prior to the JFK murder.
On approximately Nov. 9, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald paid a visit to the FBI's Dallas office, asking to speak with Special Agent Hosty. Hosty was not in the office, and Oswald left a handwritten note. According to the FBI version of the story, the note contained a threat against Hosty, demanding that he stop harassing his wife. However, other versions of the story suggest that Oswald's note contained a warning that there was a plot to assassinate the President. After his visit to the FBI office, Oswald fired off a telegram to J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, reportedly repeating his warning about a plot to kill the President.
Had Oswald begun to figure out that he might be being set up as a patsy in a presidential assassination? If Oswald were the assassin, he would not likely have paid a visit to the FBI just weeks before the killing, a visit certain to draw FBI attention to him. The content of Oswald's note to Hosty and the telegram to Hoover will never be known. Within two hours of Oswald's assassination, Hosty was called into the office of Special Agent in Charge J. Gordon Shanklin and ordered to destroy the note and a memorandum that Hosty had prepared on Oswald right after his arrest in Dallas on the afternoon of Nov. 22. Shanklin told Hosty: "Oswald's dead and there can't be a trial now." Hosty flushed the incriminating note down the toilet.
J. Edgar Hoover had suspended Hosty for 30 days without pay in 1964, charging him with "negligence" for failing to adequately monitor Oswald's activities in Dallas. Hosty was later transferred to Kansas City. In 1975, when Hosty tipped off reporters to the destroyed note, Rep. Don Edwards (D-Calif.) held House Judiciary Committee hearings on Oswald's relationship to the FBI. By that point, however, Hoover was dead, and all the relevant FBI files and notes had been long since destroyed.

Part III: Major Bloomfield, Permindex, and WWF

The late Maj. Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, the boss of Clay Shaw, oversaw the planning and direction of the murder of top targets of the British royal family in the postwar period. Permindex was a de facto subsidiary of Prince Philip's World Wildlife Fund, operating in collusion with J. Edgar Hoover.
Bloomfield's career begins in World War II when, as a major in the Royal Canadian Service Corps, he was detailed to the FBI to serve as the contract (recruitment) agent of its counterespionage division, Division Five. This curious arrangement, whereby a British subject could occupy a highly sensitive position in U. S. intelligence, was made possible by Churchill's personal emissary Sir William Stephenson, another Canadian. Stephenson oversaw the merging of certain limited wartime operations of British intelligence with the FBI and elements of U.S. military intelligence. Through such conniving the British effectively took over whole sections of U. S. intelligence and law enforcement, especially in the FBI, which had been set up under strong British influence in the first place just prior to World War I.
Stephenson oversaw all British Secret Intelligence Service operations in the Western Hemisphere from his base in New York City; Bloomfield was one of his agents. Stephenson had been part of Prime Minister Winston Churchill's prewar circle, and a protégé of Lord Beaverbrook, a fellow Canadian who became the British Minister of War Supply and Churchill's key adviser on propaganda and intelligence. This Beaverbrook apparatus is the mother of Permindex, and the World Wildlife Fund.
Following World War II, Bloomfield returned to Montreal to resume his law practice, but he continued to be Division Five's recruitment agent. His law firm, Philips and Vineberg, managed the Bronfman organized crime interests which emerged into prominence during Prohibition. The Bronfman syndicate has always functioned as a covert capability of British intelligence. The story of the Bronfman family's role in North American organized crime on behalf of the British Crown is detailed in the bestselling book Dope, Inc., by the editors of EIR.
To facilitate his operations, Bloomfield became the chairman of the Canadian subsidiary of Credit Suisse (a bank which Oliver North later used for the Reagan-Bush administration's Iran-Contra operations), and the representative of such corporations as Israeli Continental Corp. and Heineken Breweries. He also became the consul general for Liberia and director of the Israeli-Canadian Maritime League. In 1952, Bloomfield became an executive in the International Law Association, a British oligarchical intelligence apparatus whose leading families, the Wilberforces, Buxtons, and Cadburys, played an instrumental role in the creation of the WWF. Bloomfield used his position as chairman of its piracy and hijacking committee, and his emergence as a U.N.-linked expert in counter-terrorism, to build his network.

Bloomfield's WWF friends

Prince Philip created the World Wildlife Fund in 1961 to provide an umbrella for diverse privatized intelligence capabilities operating under the British royal family. According to his obituaries, Bloomfield was the co-founder of the WWF in Canada, and served as its vice president from 1970 to 1978, and as a director from 1978 until his death in 1984. Bloomfield was also a member of the 1001 Club, an organization created in 1971 to fund the WWF. The 1001 members of the club include Indian maharajas, Caribbean narcotics bankers, and dozens of European counts and princes.
The common characteristic of its members is that they are either officers of the British royal family or of European oligarchical families acting in collusion with the British royal family. This is the international capability which provided backup to Bloomfield's assassination bureau. Although the Permindex corporate front of Bloomfield was shut down before the end of the 1960s, the capability for organizing and covering up such high-level terrorism as the assassination of a popular American President was not dismantled along with the temporary corporate address. In fact, many of the pivotal players in Bloomfield's assassination bureau showed up in the early 1970s as charter members of the 1001 Club-along with Bloomfield himself. It is no stretch of the truth to say that the 1001 Club represents one line of continuity from Bloomfield's Permindex to the current generation of British Crown assassins.
Here are some of the most egregious cases of Permindex- 1001 Club overlap.
-Maurice Strong: Recruited from the private sector as Vice President of Power Corp (1963-1965), Strong became a leading figure heading the Department of External Affairs under Lester Pearson, and creator of the Canadian Investment Development Agency (CIDA) under Prime Minister Trudeau. In this function, Strong promoted the program of depopulation and "appropriate technologies" onto third world countries seeking foreign aid. Strong became a main recruiter of corporate Canada to the WWF agenda, becoming co-founder of the 1001 Club alongside Bloomfield in 1971, and taking over as Vice President for the WWF from Bloomfield from 1978-1981 (while Prince Philip was still serving as its President).
David Ogilvy: Founder of the advertising firm Ogilvy Mather, who worked out of Stephenson's New York City office as the British SOE (Special Operations Executive) liaison to OSS during the war. Ogilvy and Stephenson later established the British American Canadian Corp. It was out of that firm that Permindex was spawned. Ogilvy was the cousin of the Angus Ogilvy, the patron and partner of Tiny Rowland in Lonrho (London-Rhodesia Ltd.), the British intelligence proprietary responsible for orchestrating numerous civil wars in Africa in collusion with the WWF. Angus Ogilvy's wife, Princess Alexandra, is the cousin of the Queen. Princess Alexandra recently succeeded Prince Philip as president of WWF-U .K. Some of the WWF's first staff were drawn from Ogilvy and Mather.
Jean Riboud: Chairman of Schlumberger Ltd. Schlumberger is owned by Dominique Schlumberger de Menil of Houston, Texas. Her husband, Jean de Menil, was a Permindex board member and a close collaborator of Bloomfield since the war. Involved in oil diagnostics, the firm served as a cover for Permindex operations internationally. During World War II, de Menil had been the head of de Gaulle's Free French forces in Venezuela together with Jacques Soustelle. Soustelle later formed the OAS unit (Secret Army Organization) that attempted to kill de Gaulle.
James S. Schlesinger: Schlesinger was the owner of the only South African firm listed in the Permindex's internal phone directory (which is now in EIR's possession). In 1962, President Charles de Gaulle forced the Swiss and Italian governments to expel Permindex after it was caught orchestrating a failed attempt to kill him that year. Permindex moved to Johannesburg, South Africa. Schlesinger's firm was financed by, and was a partner with, Hambros Bank, the WWF bank.
Sir Max Aitken: Aitken was the son of Lord Beaverbrook, Stephenson's mentor. Beaverbrook's nephew, Howard Aitken, was one of Bloomfield's closest associates in the postwar period. He shared an office building with Bloomfield in Montreal.
Baron Alain de Gunzberg: The French husband of Minda Bronfman, sister of Seagram Corp. chairman Edgar Bronfman. Bloomfield was the Bronfman family's attorney from the pre-World War II period until his death.
Sir Brian Mountain: Chairman of Eagle Star Insurance, which has been the financial patron of the Bronfman interests for much of the postwar period. It has had more members of Britain's titled aristocracy on its board than any other British firm. Eagle Star was a majority owner of Edper, a Bronfman flagship firm. Mountain was also a partner with Schlesinger in South Africa Eagle.
Edward Plunkett Taylor: The founder of Argus Corp. (later the Hollinger Corp.), which had been formed as a postwar spinoff of the Beaverbrook-Sir William Stephenson network. The Hollinger apparatus and the Bloomfield network have infamously shared common personnel. For example, Hollinger Corp. had the Bronfman syndicate on its' board: Peter Bronfman, and Bronfman operatives Peter Reichmann, a leading real-estate speculator, and former Canadian ambassador to the United States, Alan Gottlieb. Daniel K. Ludwig, a partner of Taylor in real-estate ventures and horse racing, was another 1001 Club member. Ludwig ran the "Great Lakes navy" that shipped Bronfman whiskey to Moe Dalitz's Purple Gang during Prohibition. Dalitz was involved in the Kennedy assassination according to some investigations.
Lord Conrad Black: Former chairman of Hollinger and son of the Taylor subordinate who formed Argus/Hollinger. A recruit of Maurice Strong and co-founder of the 1001 Club, Black had taken a fall in 2006 when he was found guilty for fraud and sent to 17 months prison in Florida. Since his release, Lord Black has since retaken control of his powerful rightwing mouthpiece the National Post and is once again shaping leading popular opinion among Canadians.
Edmond Safra: The money man whose wife now sits on the WWF-International Board of Trustees, and who is part of the general Bronfman apparatus. Safra, one of the world's biggest dirty money managers, is the heir to the networks of 1001 Club member Tibor Rosenbaum, the first head of Israeli intelligence's financial department, who had been a heavy investor in Permindex. Rosenbaum's Banque de Credit International was used to launder Permindex money to finance the assassination of de Gaulle.

Part IV: How Permindex was created

In 1945, in the aftermath of World War II, the British monarchy ordered the privatization of several wartime intelligence agencies and networks. The purpose of this privatization was to obscure the British oligarchy's far-flung capabilities while facilitating its penetration of the corporate and oligarchical elite of the United States. Permindex was created as a stepchild of a combination of several of these privatized capabilities established in the immediate postwar period.
In May 1945, just a few days after the end of the war in Europe, Sir William Stephenson incorporated the British American Canadian Corp. in Panama, but with offices in New York. The firm was soon renamed the World Commerce Corp. According to Stephenson's wartime aide David Ogilvy, the purpose of the firm was to "form a profitable company of merchant adventurers" composed of British intelligence veterans. Ogilvy drafted the corporate papers and became vice president. John Pepper, the head of Stephenson's wartime staff in Washington, became the firm's president.
Stephenson's founding partners in the World Commerce Corp. included former SOE director Sir Charles Hambro, and Sir Rex Benson, who had been the resident British intelligence liaison to Washington during the war. Benson put up much of the money for the firm. Both had worked closely with Stephenson during the war. He was assisted by Col. Louis Franck, the banker who had been Hambro's wartime deputy.
Both Benson and Hambro later became founder-trustees of the WWF. Officials of their family banks, Kleinwort Benson and Hambros, have always served as WWF trustees since its creation. As for Franck: He became WWF treasurer. It was out of the World Commerce Corp. that Permindex was formed.
In order to provide himself a secure base of operations for this sensitive project, Stephenson moved to the British Crown Colony of Jamaica in 1946. He pioneered a property development in Montego Bay, which soon attracted several of his wartime colleagues as residents. Among these colleagues were Lord Beaverbrook; Ian Fleming, the famous "James Bond" spy novelist and SOE spy whose family later helped form the WWF; and Sir William Wiseman, the World War I British intelligence boss in New York whose networks had been taken over by Stephenson. Beaverbrook and Fleming were both closely associated with Stephenson's new firm.
From its inception, the World Commerce Corp. worked closely with the World Trade Mart of New Orleans, nominally to promote world trade. The founder and chairman of the World Trade Mart was Col. Clay Shaw, who had first hooked up with the British in World War II when he was an OSS liaison officer to Winston Churchill's headquarters. Shaw had considered renouncing his U. S. citizenship and remaining in London, but in 1945, he returned to the United States to establish the World Trade Mart.
Shortly after he had overseen the first phase of this privatization, Stephenson transformed his Jamaican property into the curiously named "Tryall Club." The elite British club became a watering hole for de Menil, Bloomfield, and others implicated in the JFK conspiracy.
While Stephenson and Shaw were establishing the World Commerce Corp. and the World Trade Mart, Edward Plunkett Taylor was setting up yet another firm dedicated to world trade. Taylor had been Winston Churchill's personal secret representative in wartime Washington. He had been detailed to the United States from Toronto in 1940 to obtain war supplies for Britain at a when such purchases were still illegal under the U. S. law. Taylor worked directly under fellow Canadian Lord Beaverbrook in close coordination with Stephenson.
In 1945, Taylor was ordered to form Argus Corp. as a private, postwar continuation of his wartime procurement and intelligence staff. The firm had been renamed Hollinger Corp., grew rapidly, perhaps through funds acquired outside legal channels during the war, and certainly through British oligarchical patronage. Among Hollinger's key figures have included Rupert Hambro from the SOE banking family; Sir James Goldsmith, a top British intelligence officer and leading controller of the World Wildlife Fund, and Sir Henry Keswick whose Hong Kong banking family has always played a dominant role in the WWF.
Simultaneously, Stephenson's agent, Major Bloomfield, was detailed back to Montreal to oversee the postwar expansion of the Bronfman syndicate. In 1956, Bloomfield incorporated Permanent Industrial Expositions, Inc., Permindex merging the capabilities of the World Commerce Corp. (which soon formally dissolved) and Clay Shaw's World Trade Mart. In 1959, Permindex formed the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, the World Commerce Center, in Rome, as its subsidiary.
In 1962, the Secret Army Organization (OAS) of Permindex board member Jacques Soustelle, a decades-long partner of Permindex board member Jean de Menil, oversaw an assassination attempt against French President Charles de Gaulle financed by Clay Shaw's FBI crony Guy Banister.
De Gaulle forced Switzerland and Italy to expel Permindex's offices from their territories as a result. In 1962, the Permindex networks were implicated in the sudden death, in a mysterious plane crash, of Italian state oil industrialist Enrico Mattei, who was working on a political track parallel to de Gaulle's.
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