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United States and continental European governments

from embarking on an independent economic and polit­
ical policy profile contrary to the interests of the British
oligarchy. Permindex director Louis M. Bloomfield was
an asset of the Radcliffe Commission at the time of the
John Kennedy assassination and the aborted attempts
on General de Gaulle.
In the past week, under the guise of the MI-5 "spy
revelations," British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
has announced the reactivation of the Security Commis­
sion, now called the Diplock Commission after its
The Permindex
chairman, Lord Diplock.
by Linda de Hoyos
The Diplock Commission consists of seven long­
time secret service executives who report only to the
Royal Household. The members of the Commission This brief outline of the Permindex organization is based
are: on an investigation by the EIR's Investigative Leads staff,
• Lord Diplock, Law Lord also using the results of the New Orleans District Attorney
• Lord Bridge of Harwick, Lord of Appeals and a Jim Garrison's 1967 investigation and the suppressed Per­
former member of the High Court mindex papers written by .. William Torbitt" (an apparent
• Lord Greenhill of Harrow, former director of the pseudonym), itself based on reports by U.S. and French
Diplomatic Service and former director of British Petro­ intelligence agencies. A full expose of the Permindex
leum organization will appear in the second edition of Dope,
• Lord Allen of Abbeydale, former permanent under­ Inc., by Investigative Leads' Jeffrey Steinberg and David
secretary of the British Home Office Goldman, published by the New Benjamin Franklin House
n
• Ge eral Sir Dudley Ward, former commissioner of Publishing Company, due for release this spring.
the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers
• Admiral Sir Horace Law, former commander-in­ In the spring of 1963, a series of planning sessions
chief of the Naval Home Commission was held at an exclusive resort club in Montego Bay,
• Sir Allen Cottrell, former science adviser to the Jamaica, called the Tryall Compound, built at the close
government and to the Defense Ministry, currently the of World War II by Britain's Chief of Special Operations
Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. Executive (SOE) William Stephenson.Present at various
times for the planning sessions were: Major Louis
The disinformation factor Bloomfield, still an officer, then of British SOE; Ferenc
It should be noted that much of the detailed infor­ Nagy, a wartime cabinet minister in the pro-Hitler Hor­
mation coming out of public sources will tend to have a thy government in Hungary and later its prime minister;
strong disinformation factor. It is for this reason that a Georgio Mantello, a Romanian-born Jew who had
broad range of leads bridging different levels of the served as trade minister under Mussolini; Col. Clay
assassination command have been identified in this Shaw, a former officer of the U.S. Office of Strategic
preliminary memorandum. Simultaneous pursuit of all Services and in 1963 the director of the New Orleans
five levels of the investigation is one of the most International Trade Mart; Jean de Menil, a White Rus­
effective insurances against severe misdirection. It is the sian emigre and president of the Houston-based Schlum­
overall environment that produces the terrorist capabil­ berger Corporation; and Paul Raigorodsky, another
ities activated on March 30 that is the propeJi. subject of White Russian emigre who had served as Special Repre­
any serious investigation. The agencies cited above have sentative to Europe for NATO and was a high-ranking
the capacity to deploy thousands of Hinckleys provided official of the Tolstoy Foundation.
that they themselves remain aloof from criminal inves­ Without exception, each of these people was also a
tigation. member of the board of directors of Permindex (Perma­
In addition to the areas of investigation cited above, nent Industrial Expositions). The subject of their meet­
special critical attention must be devoted to establishing ings: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in
the reasons behind the security breach that allowed Dallas, Texas on Nov. 22, 1963.
Hinckley to enter the immediate environment of the President Kennedy was not the first target of the
President after his October 1980 detention in Nashville. Permindex international assassination bureau. In 1 967,
The rigorous pursuit of that line of investigation will the French intelligence agency SDECE released the re­
most surely lead to the opening up of leads that are yet sult of a five-year investigation into the 1962 aborted
to surface and that represent crucial evidence. assassination attempt against President Charles de

. 32 Special Report EIR April 1 4, 1 981

© 1981 EIR News Service Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited.
 Puerto Rico hotel. Bannister himself had died a year
earlier under similarly mysterious circumstances, and
his files removed by officers of Division Five, never to
show up again.
It would take the unexplained deaths of 17 key
prosecution witnesses and the launching of a nationwide
media witch-hunt against the New Orleans D.A. to
bring a halt to the Garrison investigation.

connection
At minimum, Garrison had "cracked" the Kennedy
assassination plot at the operational level directed by
New Orleans case officer Clay Shaw. On March 14,
1967, Garrison brought Perry Raymond Russo, an
insurance salesman from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, be­
fore a three-judge criminal district court panel. Russo
Gaulle, carried out by the right-wing Secret Army Or­ testified that during the middle of September 1963, he
ganization (OAS). While the SDECE report traced the had been witness to a conversation between Clay Shaw,
origins of the assassination plot to the Brussels head­ his coworker David Ferrie, and an individual named
quarters of NATO and to a specific group of disgruntled "Leon Oswald." The topic of the conversation-which
French and British generals, as well as remnants of the took place at Ferrie's house in New Orleans-was the
old Nazi intelligence apparatus, it also singled out Major murder of the President. In the conversation, Ferrie, an
Bloomfield's Permindex trading company as the agency agent of Division Five, emphasized the importance of
responsible for conduiting $200,000 into the OAS to using at least three marksmen to produce a "triangula­
bankroll the attempt. tion of fire."
In February 1967, three days before Garrison was to
The Division Five role take Ferrie into custody, he was found dead of a massive
French intelligence traced the funds to Division Five hemorrhage of the brain.
(counterespionage) of the Federal Bureau of Investiga­ According to the Garrison investigation, the person
tion, whose chief contract recruitment officer was Ca­ introduced to Russo as "Leon Oswald" at the Septem­
nadian Major Louis Bloomfield. According to the ber 1963 meeting was in all likelihood not the Lee
SDECE investigation, $200,000 in black-market reve­ Harvey Oswald charged by the Warren Commission
nues were channeled into the Banque de Credit Inter­ with being the "lone assassin" who killed thePresident.
nationale accounts maintained by Permindex. Among The individual was more likely William Seymour, one
the sources of those funds was the Bank Hapoalim, the of several persons assigned to impersonate Lee Harvey
Israeli bank owned by the Histadrut, for which Major Oswald in the several-month period leading up to Nov.
Bloomfield was the primary Canadian fundraiser. 22, 196 3.
The funds were then passed from Bloomfield's Mon­ Seymour was an agent for a Miami-based detective
treal law offices to the New Orleans station chief for agency called Double-Check, a U.S. subsidiary of the
Division Five, Guy Bannister. From there, Bannister Rome Centro Mondiale Commerciale (World Trade
dispatched .one of his agents, Jerry Brooks Gatlin, to Center), an offspring of Permindex. Double-Check was
Paris with a suitcase full of cash for hand delivery to the reported to be the CIA channel for weapons into the
OAS generals. Bay of Pigs invasion force. These weapons were provid­
The address of Bannister's Division Five offices, 544 ed through the Schlumberger company of Houston,
Camp Street, had also been the address Lee Harvey Texas, whose president was Permindex's Jean de Menil.
Oswald had placed on the bottom of his Fair Play for Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald
Cuba Committee leaflets he passed out in New Orleans in the basement of the Dallas police headquarters, is
in September 1963. also known to have been associated with Permindex
The samePermindex organization was named in the through David Ferrie and Clay Shaw, with whom he
investigation of the Kennedy assassination by New was involved in gun-running and other ventures in
Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. In 1969, Gar­ Cuba. It is presumed that Ruby drew the "short straw"
rison managed to win an indictment in a case against in the plot to assassinate the President, and was given
Colonel Clay Shaw for the conspiracy to kill the Presi­ the task of shootil1g the "patsy."
dent. Garrison had other evidence linking Ferrie et al. to
At the outset of Garrison's investigation in 1967, the Kennedy murder. In February 1964, a Winnipeg
Gatlin, the bagman for the OAS, had died when he was businessman overheard a conversation between a man
thrown out of a sixth-floor window in a San Juan, (whom he later identified "100 percent positive" as

EIR April 14, 1981 Special Report 33

 ..

David Ferrie) and another man (tentatively identified as Operations Executive, to which he was recruited in
Major Louis Bloomfield) in the Winnipeg International 1938. Under SOE commission and through the SOE's
Airport: The topic of the conversation was the success­ prewar special relationship with the United States, he
ful completion of the assassination plot against Kenne­ was given an officer's rank in the U. S. Army and
dy. The businessman reported the conversation to the assigned to the newly created Office of Strategic Ser­
FBI, who several months later told him he should forget vices-although he was a Canadian national. As a
about the episode as it was "too big, " and "we can't major in the OSS, Bloomfield was detailed to the FBI,
protect you in Canada. " especially its counterespionage Division Five, where he
When the businessman saw David Ferrie's picture in remained up to and throughout the period of the
the paper with a report of the Garrison investigation, Kennedy assassination.
he reported the incident anew, and gave an interview on Until 1968, when President de Gaulle exposed the
the exchange to McLeans magazine. role of Bloomfield's Permindex, Bloomfield's name was
A massive campaign was mounted by the Justice on the letterhead of the law firm Phillips, Vineberg,
Department to quash the Garrison investigation. Not Bloomfield, and Goodman. The firm's most prominent
only had 17 key witnesses died before they could take client is the Bronfman family, whose vast Seagram
the stand. On Oct. 13, 1967, a few days after his empire and holdings are itself a front for the Eagle Star
confirmation as attorney general of the United States, insurance group of top British financial interests and
Ramsey Clark delivered a speech at the University of the $200 billion a year British drug cartel.
Virginia Law School, stating: "Much as'l hate to do it, Bloomfield also assumed the directorship of the
I just might have to prosecute Jim Garrison . . . [who] Israeli-Canadian Maritime League and became the
took a perfectly fine man, Clay Shaw, and ruined him Consul-General in charge of the Western Hemisphere
just for personal aggrandizement. " Twenty-four hours of the African state of Liberia. Liberia is, of course, a
later, the public relations office at the Justice Depart­ tax shelter and smuggler's port of call, whose unregu­
ment was forced to issue a full retraction of Clark's lated banks account for $7 billion in average daily
statement. transfers, most of it related to black-market transfers.
The guts of the operation to discredit the Garrison In 1952, Bloomfield became a ranking official of the
investigation was carried out by Walter Sheridan, the United Nations Organization, from his position as
head of Robert kennedy's "Get Hoffa Squad, " who Overseas Representative of the InternatiotJal Executive
was hired by NBC-TV just long enough to prepare a Board of the International Law Association. Bloom­
"white paper " against the Garrison probe in July 19'67. field's area o'f expertise: international terrorism, air
Sheridan has interesting connections of his own. Now piracy, and civil aviation. To this day, the International
the chief investigator for the Senate Labor Committee, Law Association has representatives in nearly every
he had started his career, after graduation from Jesuit nation, including the socia:list bloc, with a heavy com­
Fordham University, with Division Five of the FBI, ponent of so-called international terrorism experts.
and had then entered the counterintelligence division of Bloomfield's abbreviated dossier places him, first,
,

the National Security Agency, the most secretive of all squarely in British intelligence, and mak�s him a point-
government intelligence agencies and the creation of man both for dirty-money operations and international
British SOE chief William Stephenson. terror. He maintains his headquarters in Montreal.
By July 1967, Garrison had won four indictments Joining Bloomfield on the board of Permindex are
against Sheridan on charges of public bribery in efforts four operatives of the White Russian Solidarist move­
to wreck the Garrison investigation. ment, centered in the United States in New York City's
Tolstoy Foundation:
Who is Permindex? • Ferenc Nagy, the late wartime cabinet minister in
According to evidence presented in the course of the the pro-Hitler Horthy government in Hungary who
Garrison inquiry, Clay Shaw, Georgio Mantello, and attended the TryaU Compound planning sessions;
Ferenc Nagy, all members of the board of Permindex • Paul Raigorodsky of the Tolstoy Foundation, who
and the Centro Mondiale Commerciale, were in place in was associated with Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas when
New Orleans, Dallas, and Los Angeles on Nov. 22, Oswald returned to the United States from the Soviet
1963, handling aspects of the assassination and coverup. Union in 1961;
Their deployment had been arranged months earlier • Jean de Menil, of the Schlumberger Corporation.
by Bloomfield, and Bloomfield is perhaps the best After fleeing from Russia, de Menil's family settled in
starting point for a brief outline of the apparatus that is France, where Jean de Menil married into the Neufliz,
the international assassination bureau calledPermindex. Schlumberger, Mallet banking empire. In 1958, de
Throughout his life, Bloomfield, of Romanian Jew­ Menil became president of the Schlumberger oil diag­
ish extraction, was an agent of the British Special nostic equipment company, which accounts for 50 per-

34 Special Report EIR Aprill �, 1981

cent of all such equipment in the industry. During the Phoenix, now deceased, and chairman of the board of
mid-1960s, de Gaulle's intelligence services established the Lionel Corporation;
that the Neufliz, Schlumberger, Mallet Bank was chan­ • Major-General John Bruce Medaris, former direc­
neling funds to OAS leader Jacques Soustelle for the tor of the Defense Industrial Security Command, which
purpose of bankrolling OAS terrorist activities; attempted in the late 1950s to place all U.S. space
• Ferenc Simonfay, former Nazi collaborator in programs under armed forces instead of civilian control,
Hungary, leader of the Solidarist movement. and a member of the board of directors of the Lionel
The Italian component of the Permindex board Corporation in 1958.
centers around the figures of:
• Prince Guttierez di Spadafora, former undersecre­ Permindex today
tary of agriculture under Mussolini, sponsor of the The international assassination capability of Per­
Sicilian separatist movement, and the chief oligarch and mindex has not been downgraded since its board mem­
landowner in Sicily, whose name has come to light in bers met to plan the assassination of John Kennedy in
the continuing terrorist activities in Italy and in connec­ British SOE's Tryall Compound in the spring of 196 3.
tion with the semisecret terrorist cult, the Muslim Rather, the success of the MK-Ultra project launched
Brotherhood, which is the power behind the Khomeini by British intelligence, led by Aldous Huxley, to create
regime. Spadafora is undoubtedly associated with an­ the drug counterculture in the United States and the
other Permindex board member, Munir Chour Bagi, ensuing spawning of hundreds of cults and left- and
uncle of King Farouk of Egypt; right-wing terrorist organizations out of that culture
• Carolo D' Amelio, attorney in Rome, representing has provided the Permindex assassination bureau with
the financial holdings of the House of Savoy and the a "sociological" screen for targeted assassinations.
House of Pallavicini. D'Amelio is also the attorney for This applies to the professional assassins who oper­
the "Circolo Rex" of Italy's black nobility and is ate in the name of the terrorist Red Brigades in Italy,
general counsel for the Centro Mondiale Commerciale; and the terrorist Baader-Meinhof of West Germany.
• Giuseppe Zigiotti, head of the Italian political In the case of the March 30 assassination attempt
party, Fascist National Association for Militia Arms; against President Ronald Reagan, the Yippie organiza­
• Georgio Mantello, financial adviser and invest­ tion is a case in point (see above).
ment banker to the House of Savoy. A Romanian The Yippie connection to Permindex runs through
Jewish emigre, Mantello is a chief suspect for the 1977 its sponsorship and bankrolling by the Playboy Foun­
kidnap-murder of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo dation, also a bank roller for the marijuana lobby
Moro. He is the owner ofPermindex's subsidiary Capo­ NORML. Playboy's editor Robert Gutwillig is also a
cetto, which was revealed by Italian journalists to be the principal shareholder in the Munich-based publishing
liaison between the B'nai B'rith International and such house NewMag. In 1980, NewMag deployed one Hans
terrorist gangs as the Red Brigades of Italy and the Magnus Enzensberger to the United States for a profil­
Baader-Meinhof of West Germany. ing operation against Democratic Party leader Lyndon
Central Europe is represented on the board of H. LaRouche, Jr., whose name appeared on a 1977 hit
Permindex by: list of the Baader-Meinhof and who has been the target
• Hans Seligman, the head of the Seligman Bank of of assassination threats continuously since. Enzensber­
Basel, Switzerland. Seligman is the last remaining Eu­ ger is also a member of the Playboy-bankrolled P.E.N.
ropean-based member of the Seligman family that made International-an organization of literary radical jour­
its vast fortune in the United States during the 19th nalists, who specialize in giving literary support to
century. The Seligmans originated in Bavaria as part of terrorist operations.
the Hofjuden entourage built up around the Wittelsbach NewMag itself fits squarely in the networks identi­
and Hapsburg courts; fied with Permindex. Its publisher, von Nouhuys, was
• Max Hagerman, editor in Munich of the National the Munich control point for the OAS would-be assas­
Zeitung, a neo-Nazi publication. sins of de Gaulle. Jacques Soustelle himself is a director
In the United States, members of the board of of NewMag, and arranged for NewMag to provide the
Permindex aside from Clay Shaw are: safehousing of the OAS terrorists in the early 1960s.
• Roy Marcus Cohn, attorney, New York City, The fact that another bankrolled organization of the
former general counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Aside Playboy Foundation-this time the Yippies-is now
from representing members of the dope-linked mafia in publicizing its desire to kill the President of the United
New York City, Cohn was a member of the board of States should not be taken lightly. It must be assumed
directors of the Lionel Corporation in 1958, when the that the Permindex international assassination bureau
corporation was an initiating stockholder inPermindex. has many options available for the murder of a U.S.
• . Joseph Bonnano, syndicate boss of Montreal and President. The Yippies are but one of them.

EIR April 14, 198 1 Special Report 35