Probe V76N: Max Holland Rescues the Warren Commission and the Nation...Holland’s latest and perhaps most ambitious theory involves a successful Communist conspiracy.[126] Eschewing his usual publication outlets and using instead the Central Intelligence Agency’s website, Holland detailed his remarkable new discovery of KGB chicanery. Namely, that via a false story planted in the Italian paper Paese Sera, the KGB had hoodwinked Jim Garrison into believing Clay Shaw had CIA ties, ties that in Garrison’s febrile imagination also bound Shaw to Oswald, and both to Dallas. “The wellspring for his ultimate theory of the assassination was the DA’s belief in a fantasy published by a Communist-owned newspaper.”[127] “Paese Sera’s successful deception,” Holland says, “turns out to be a major reason why many Americans believe, to this day, that the CIA was involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.”[128] But that wasn’t all. The commie concoction left collateral damage extending far beyond doubts about Dallas. “Of all the legacies of the 1960s, none had been more unambiguously negative than the American public’s corrosive cynicism toward the federal government.”[129] As we will see, Holland’s CIA-abetted conspiracy theory is not only difficult to sustain, it may also not even be his own notion.
As evidence of the KGB’s chicanery Holland cites testimony from Richard Helms that proves “Paese Sera’s well-documented involvement in dezinformatsiya.”[130] On 2 June 1961, Richard Helms was the sole witness in a Senate hearing on “Communist Forgeries.”[131] Helms recounted an episode in which Paese Sera was involved in what Holland argues had been a previous, near identical ruse: planting KGB “lies” that the CIA had supported rebellious French generals in a failed coup against President De Gaulle. Holland writes that, “Altogether, Helms observed, the episode was an ‘excellent example of how the Communists use the false news story’ to stunning effect. And it had all started with an Italian paper that belonged ‘to a small group of journals published in the free world but used as outlets for disguised Soviet propaganda … instead of having this originate in Moscow, where everybody would pinpoint it, they planted the story first in Italy and picked it up from Italy… Six years later, a grander and more pernicious concoction originating in the same newspaper, Paese Sera, would go unexamined, unexposed, and unchallenged.” [132] The upshot? A wild-eyed New Orleans district attorney off on a snipe hunt.
But nowhere in the 1967 Paese Sera series was there any mention of the Kennedy case. Only that Shaw had been on the board of directors of an international trade organization headquartered in Rome, Centro Mondiale Comerciale [CMC], and that it had been a CIA front. The fact that the first of Paese Sera’s six articles appeared a scant three days after Shaw’s arrest was taken as more damning evidence against the news outlet. “Paese Sera’s 1967 scoop about Clay Shaw,” Holland reasoned, “matched the earlier story in the speed and pattern of its dissemination.”[133]
Holland’s new, CIA-abetted theory about Garrison would probably have drawn little public attention had it not won praise from an unexpected source, Foreign Affairs Magazine. In an unusual departure from his custom of writing only book reviews,
Foreign Affairs contributor Philip Zelikow wrote a favorable commentary on Holland’s web-only piece. Two well-known Garrison sympathizers took special notice: Oliver Stone and Zach Sklar, the authors of the screenplay of the film JFK. They wrote a letter to Foreign Affairs’ editor, which the magazine refused to run. Ironically, Stone and Sklar then published their snubbed letter as an advertisement in, of all places, The Nation,[134] where Holland has served as a contributing editor. It was a fascinating rebuttal to Holland’s KGB conspiracy theory, which, they said, was based virtually entirely on a single handwritten note of a Russian defector that makes no mention of Clay Shaw, of CMC, or of Jim Garrison.
Moreover, they charged that Holland had published his story without having done as elemental a background check as contacting the editors of Paese Sera. Stone and Sklar cited a respected scholar who had, Joan Melon. Had Holland bothered to do his homework, they said, Paesa Sera’s editors, “would have told him that the six-part series had nothing to do with the KGB or the JFK assassination, that they had never heard of Jim Garrison when they assigned the story six months before [which was also six months before Garrison had charged Shaw], and that they were astonished to see that Shaw might have any connection to the assassination.”
The filmmakers also answered Holland’s assertion that “everything in the Paese Sara story was a lie.” “Two important facts from the Paese Sera story remain true: 1. CMC was forced to leave Italy (for Johannesburg, South Africa) in 1962 under a cloud of suspicion about its CIA connections. 2. Clay Shaw was a member of CMC’s board … .” They also pointed out that an important part of Holland’s case depended on a “released CIA document saying that the Agency itself looked into Paese Sera’s allegations and found that the CIA had no connection to CMC or its parent Permindex.” “Holland,” they continued, “may be willing to accept this as the whole truth, but it is unconvincing to the rest of us who have noticed the Agency’s tendency to distance itself from its fronts, to release to the public only documents that serve its interests, to fabricate evidence, and to lie outright even under oath to congressional committees … .”
They also dismissed as nonsense Holland’s claim that, “the Paese Sera articles were what led Garrison to believe the CIA was involved in the assassination,” noting that, “Garrison’s book On the Trail of the Assassins describes in detail how his uncovering of various pieces of evidence actually led him to the conclusion that the CIA was involved. This gradual process began two days after the assassination when he questioned David Ferrie, a pilot who flew secret missions to Cuba for the CIA and trained Lee Harvey Oswald in his Civil Air Patrol Unit … .”
But Holland fired right back with gusto, answering Stone and Sklar in the letters pages of the The Nation.[135] He apparently correctly pointed out that Garrison had wrongly claimed in his book (Or, as Holland would have it, he “lied.”) that he hadn’t heard of the Paese Sera articles before he tried Clay Shaw in 1969. Holland found notes from Life correspondent Richard Billings dated in March and April 1967 that suggested Garrison had gotten wind of Paese Sera’s charges. Though Holland was probably right that Garrison had heard of the charges from Italy in 1967, it is far from clear that he thought that much about them, that they were the ‘wellspring for his ultimate theory’ of Agency involvement.
Former FBI agent turned FBI critic, William W. Turner, a close confidant of Garrison in that era, told the author that Paese Sera in no way influenced Garrison’s actions. “First of all,” Turner said, “Shaw was arrested before the first article in the series was published in Italy. Second, you can’t name a single action Garrison undertook that can be explained by those articles. Garrison and I spoke all the time in those days, and I can assure you the articles were of peripheral interest at most … Since Garrison couldn’t cite the stories in court, and since he couldn’t afford to send investigators to Italy to prove the charges, they weren’t useful legally.”[136]
Turner proposed a perfectly sensible alternative explanation for Garrison’s “lying” that he didn’t know of the news from Italy until after the trial: he had totally forgotten about them by the time he got around to writing his book. On the Trail of the Assassins was first published in 1988, 21 years after Shaw’s arrest.[137]
Whether Garrison secretly burned with the rumors from Rome may never be known. But it is clear that, other than perhaps to Billings, Garrison thereafter made scant mention of them and probably did forget about them by the time of the trial, two years later. As Edward Epstein has pointed out, during his twenty-six-page interview in Playboy Magazine’s October 1967 issue, Garrison’s most comprehensive review of his position that year, the D.A. ticked off eight reasons to suspect the CIA. None of them included the CMC or Paese Sera. Nor did he mention Clay Shaw, although perhaps because of the pending legal wrangle.[138] Moreover, in 1967 Garrison wrote the foreword to Harold Weisberg’s 1967-published book, entitled “Oswald in New Orleans--Case of Conspiracy with the CIA.”[139] Despite the perfect opportunity, as with Playboy, Garrison again uttered not a word about Paese Sera, the CIA, or Shaw.
Finally, it is unhelpful for the central role Holland has Paesa Sera playing that Garrison never once cited or referred to those reports during the Shaw trial. Nor did he even use them as a basis for questioning Shaw. He never asked Shaw, for example, whether he had worked for CMC or for the CIA. Shaw’s own attorney did that.
“Have you ever worked for the Central Intelligence Agency?” lead defense attorney F. Irvin Dymond asked. “No, I have not,” replied Shaw.”[140]
But as even Holland admits, Richard Helms later disclosed that Shaw’s denial was perjurious. In fact, Shaw had had an eight-year relationship with the CIA, sending the Agency information on 33 separate occasions that the CIA invariably graded as “of value” and “reliable.”[141] Holland hastens to reassure readers that Shaw’s perjury was unimportant, that Shaw’s CIA links “innocuous,” even patriotic. Holland never thought to question whether Helms’s innocent version of its arrangement with Shaw was fully truthful, or whether the Agency files he has seen had been sanitized.
Responding to Holland’s imaginative theory, William Turner published a letter in the May issue of New Orleans Magazine[142] that offered additional insights on whether Garrison was duped.[143]
With Turner’s permission, his letter is reproduced below:
The answer to Max Holland’s “Was Jim Garrison Duped by the KGB?” (February) is no. I am a former FBI agent and author who assisted Garrison in his JFK assassination probe. What Holland omits is that last April he contacted me about my calling Garrison’s attention to Italian press reports on Shaw’s link to CIA-influenced trade organizations. I told him that the DA’s office would not use press clippings as evidence, and that it should have been up to the FBI, which had the resources and the reach to investigate the alleged links. What Holland overlooked is that on March 30, 1967, Betty Parrott, who was in the same social set as FBI agent Regis Kennedy, informed the DA’s office that “Kennedy confirmed to her the fact that Clay Shaw is a former CIA agent who did some work for the CIA in Italy over a five-year span.” Subpoenaed by Garrison, Kennedy refused to testify on grounds of executive privilege.
Holland portrays the Shaw trial as a farce. In fact, Shaw was indicted by a grand jury, and a judge at a preliminary hearing ruled that there was probable cause to bring him to trial. The jury found that Garrison proved a conspiracy but did not produce sufficient evidence to plug Shaw into it. In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations thought Garrison had the right man. “While the trial of Shaw took two years to bring about and did eventually end in acquittal, the basis for the charges seems sound and the prosecution thorough, given the extraordinary nature of the charges and the time,” wrote counsel Jonathan Blackmer. “We have reason to believe that Shaw was heavily involved in the anti-Castro efforts in New Orleans in the 1960s and was possibly one of the high-level planners of the assassination.”
I recount all of the above in my current book Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails.[144]
Besides Betty Parrott’s pre-trial revelation, and Weisberg’s book naming the CIA in 1967, Garrison had other reasons to link the CIA to the crime. The Agency was then well known to have been responsible for the botched Bay of Pigs affair, and Garrison then knew that numerous Oswald associates had ties to that episode. As Philip Melanson has noted, “The shadowy figures who surrounded [Oswald]--de Mohrenschildt, Ferrie, Banister, and some of the anti-Castro Cubans--were CIA-connected.” Melanson added that, “This does not mean the Agency as an institution conspired to assassinate the president … One of the things we learned from the Iran-Contra affair is that in the clandestine world it is difficult to determine who is really working for the government, as opposed to those who pretend they are or who think they are. Elements of the CIA’s anti-Castro network (including the Cubans and their CIA case officers) (sic) could easily have conspired to assassinate the president, using Oswald as the centerpiece of the operation.”[145]
Finally, a key element of Holland’s case for conspiracy is, as Holland put it, “Paese Sera’s well-documented involvement in dezinformatsiya.”[146] That, in other words, Paese Sera really was a “disguised Soviet propaganda” outlet that had disseminated KGB disinformation. Holland’s evidence for the paper’s KGB pedigree is less than perfect. For, as we have seen, it consists primarily of CIA man Richard Helms’s 1961 Senate testimony about an April 23, 1961 Paese Sera’s story. It was the one Helms said had first connected the CIA to the “generals” coup against De Gaulle, a smear that grew as it was retold by other media outlets. Though on the web Holland doesn’t give it, the Paese Sera passage Helms told the Senate was nothing but KGB dezinformatsiya is worth considering here:
“It is not by chance that some people in Paris are accusing the American secret service headed by Allen Dulles of having participated in the plot of the four ‘ultra’ generals … .”[147]
Helms was wrong about the date the story premiered, and about Paese Sera, too. In his authoritative, pro-Agency book (CIA--The Inside Story), Andrew Tully reviewed the case against Paese Sera and cited an American report that the rumors about the CIA had actually started circulating in France on April 22, the day before the story ran in Rome. [148] Thus, “rumors” weren’t planted in Italy first; they were accurately reported in Italy first, by Paese Sera. Tully added that, “the evidence indicates there were CIA operatives who let their own politics show and by doing so led the rebels to believe that the United States looked with favor on their adventure.”[149] Despite printing Agency denials, even The New York Times acknowledged that, “CIA agents have recently been in touch with the anti-Gaullist generals.”[150] Thus, even if the Agency hadn’t conspired, the French had every reason to start rumors that it had.
But ironically, perhaps the most detailed account on the CIA’s role in the failed coup ran in The Nation on May 20, 1961: “Here in Paris,” European correspondent Alexander Werth wrote, “responsible persons are still convinced that the rumors had a solid basis in fact.” Quoting an l’Express report, Werth added that, “[Rebel general Challe] had several meetings with CIA agents, who had told him that ‘to get rid of de Gaulle would render the Free World a great service.’” Presumably, Holland credits Paese Sera with deceiving not only Garrison, but also l’Express, the New York Times, and The Nation. Thus, Holland’s working premise of “Paese Sera’s well-documented involvement in dezinformatsiya” during the failed French coup is not exactly well-documented.
It is fair to wonder at Holland’s embrace of Helms, a man of no small accomplishment in the art of spreading dezinformatsiya.[151] During the very 1961 Senate appearance discussing “Communist Forgeries” Holland cites, Helms displayed what he characterized as fabricated reports alleging an “American Plot to Overthrow [Indonesia’s President] Sukarno.”[152] Although the specific documents Helms displayed may indeed have been false, Helms withheld the vastly greater truth from the Senators: the “fabrications” had gotten the history right--the U.S. had covertly conspired to topple Sukarno.[153] Thus, at least in this instance, foreign dezinformatsiya was closer to the truth than the Senate testimony of a high CIA official.
In relying on Helms, Holland may be forgiven for not knowing the misleading nature of some of Helms testimony in 1961, but he surely could not have forgotten that Helms had lied to the U.S. Senate. Helms told the Senate the CIA had played no role in demolishing Chile’s democracy in 1973. This time he was caught. As the New York Times headlined Helms’s conviction on page 1 of its 5 November 1977 issue, “Helms Is Fined $2,000 and Given Two-Year Suspended Prison Term--U.S. Judge Rebukes Ex-C.I.A. Head for Misleading Panel.”...
http://www.ctka.net/pr900-holland.html 
from shilling for the Warren Commission...