Clay Shaw and OSS, page 1

reply to post by KilgoreTrout

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Just thought I'd chime in here although I admit that I am out of my depth in these matters. When you mentioned Churchill and Shaw, I thought of Sir William Stephenson, the financier, friend of Churchill and man in charge of UK skulduggery in the US during WW2.

If the following linked material is accurate, there is an overt connection between Stephenson and Shaw, which may have been preceded by a covert wartime connection. That brings you to one degree of separation between Shaw and Churchill.

Here's the link.

scribblguy.50megs.com...

The (Stephenson founded) World Commerce Corporation also played a useful part in the development and rehabilitation of economically backward countries. As one American newspaper editorial put it at the time, "if there were several World Commerce Corporations, there would be no need for a Marshall Plan". Barter trade was facilitated on a massive scale. A typical transaction took place in the Balkans in 1951. Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were short of dollars and also short of medicinal drugs. But each country had about $300,000 worth of paprika on its farms. World Commerce accordingly exchanged a year's supply of penicillin and sulfa for the paprika, which they then sold on other markets. While normally working on a commission basis, the Corporation would sometimes forgo its profit if it felt it could help an impoverished or economically backward country by giving it the facilities of its international connections."

The North Jamaican Hillowton property was later transformed to Tryall, the exclusive club of John Connally, Paul Raigorodsky and many others of the cabal. World Commerce Corporation received funds from the U.S. International Cooperation Agency and worked closely with Clay Shaw's World Trade Development Commission and Permindex's various World Trade Centers.

Originally posted by ipsedixit
Just thought I'd chime in here although I admit that I am out of my depth in these matters. When you mentioned Churchill and Shaw, I thought of Sir William Stephenson, the financier, friend of Churchill and man in charge of UK skulduggery in the US during WW2.

Me too and thanks for chiming in! I have been searching Google and books for any kind of link between Stephenson and Shaw, but it has eluded me, your input therefore is most welcome. There is, of course, the Canadian link with Bloomfield, and I have also found some indication that Oswald may have been in Montreal in 1963. Very tantilising. Stephenson is a larger than life character, but often the information on him is not only contradictory but contested. He set up a training camp in the US for training OSS operative in counter sabotage and intelligence, they would then be sent out to the UK for more specialised training if deemed necessary, in the case of Black Propaganda, usually under Kim Philby, who later became the FBI/CIA and MI6 liaison

Originally posted by ipsedixit
If the following linked material is accurate, there is an overt connection between Stephenson and Shaw, which may have been preceded by a covert wartime connection. That brings you to one degree of separation between Shaw and Churchill.

Just what I was looking for…although I am still seeking a ‘harder’ source, as I am for more detailed information about Shaw’s war record. I found this on Shaw’s wartime service.

After a stint as Administrative Officer with the 127th General Hospital Unit, he was transferred to the Supply Corps and made aide de camp to General Charles Thrasher, Commanding Officer of the United States Forces in the southern half of England. He was soon promoted to be Thrasher's Deputy Chief, and continued on with Thrasher when the general took command of forces in northern France and Belgium. According to Shaw, his unit was responsible for stockpiling supplies for the Normandy invasion. He would later credit his organizational skills to the time he spent coordinating supplies for three armies at that time.

At the time of his discharge in 1946, Shaw had reached the rank of major and received decorations from three nations. In Belgium he was named Chevalier of the Order of the Crown of Belgium; from France he was the recipient of the title of Chevalier de l'Ordre du Merite and the Croix de Guerre; from the United States he received the Bronze Star and Legion of Merit.

www.jfk-online.com...

It is the most information I have found so far. Now I don’t know about you, but he seems to have won an awful lot of medals as a supply clerk, Major or otherwise.

Thanks again for your post, it was most helpful.

I understood that Clay was involved with ALSOS and Borris Pash of the OSS.

I found this reference linking Clay Shaw with the FBI:

The Defense Industrial Security Command is the police and espionage agency for the U.S. munitions makers. DISC was organized by J. Edgar Hoover; William Sullivan, his chief assistant, is in direct command. We shall later examine the involvement of a large number of the DISC agents including Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and others with Permindex's Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of Montreal, Canada in charge....

www.mail-archive.com...@listserv.aol.com/msg87748.html

I did some digging around and found an FBI document whose subject is Kim Philby, but which mentions a letter from a Mrs. Handley alleging that she met Clay Shaw in Britain during WW2 and that he was using the name Victor de Mario. There is no other source referenced for this information and no indication whether the FBI believed this information to be true or not.

www.maryferrell.org...

Another page on the web said that Shaw's wartime record is classified and unavailable. Don't know if this is true. I tried and failed to find a record of his enlistment in an archive of records of US servicemen of WW2 vintage.

After the war:

Apparently it is known that he was an informal contact agent for the CIA, as were thousands of other businessmen who travel internationally. He made several reports on various subjects, mostly his travels in Latin America and the Carribean.

While that is not so strange or noteworthy, there is a CIA document that runs through a self described sanitized version of Shaw's contacts with them that includes the understanding that he was the one who introduced the Deputy Director Central Intelligence, C.P. Cabell's speech to a foreign policy group in New Orleans in 1961.

www.jfklancer.com...

That is an interesting fact, which for me argues a more overt, public relationship with the CIA, than a covert one. I don't think a serious secret operative of the CIA would be chosen for that kind of occasion.

I think it boils down to whether Shaw was a serious staff officer of General Thrasher or was that some kind of cover up. If I had to lay money on it, I would bet that Shaw was a hard working shipping clerk for several hard working armies. He rose in rank through the war and was discharged as a Major General, with a chestful of fancy medals.

That kind of stuff doesn't happen to OSS agents. They get no promotions, get their Medal of Honour in a private ceremony attended by three people and get their butt kicked out the door at the end of the war. My two cents worth.

One webpage did assert that Shaw had testified under oath that he had served with the OSS during the war, but I couldn't find the testimony. It wasn't sourced on that page. During the Garrison trial of Shaw, his war record was skipped over lightly in his testimony under oath. I'm not sure if he appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. That's the only other place I can think of where he might have said something like that under oath. I'm betting against it.



[edit on 21-2-2009 by ipsedixit]

Originally posted by ipsedixit
I did some digging around and found an FBI document whose subject is Kim Philby, but which mentions a letter from a Mrs. Handley alleging that she met Clay Shaw in Britain during WW2 and that he was using the name Victor de Mario. There is no other source referenced for this information and no indication whether the FBI believed this information to be true or not.

www.maryferrell.org...

I would very much like to see the letter itself as this is quite odd really and I can't figure it out. Clay Shaw aside, whoever Mrs Handley was she moved in some interesting circles, and if Shaw was also part of that group then it would indicate to me that the allegation that he was connected in some way to the French resistence movement could have some validity. Or may be, given his subsequent involvement in Lation America, there may be a Spanish connection.

Apart from Philby, Mrs Handley also mentions, Victor Rothschild, Augustus John and Dick Brooman-White.

During the war, Victor's London house was a congregating point for many people working in intelligence and it would seem to me that this is most likely where Mrs Handley would have met those named in the letter.

Augustus John is a bit of a wild card. At first glance he would seem an unlikely addition to that group. He was an important portrait artist, he painted the famous portrait of TE Lawrence and while he was a fully fledged pacifist his son was Sir Casper John, a high ranking member of the Admiralty. He also had a child by his mistress, Ian Fleming's mother. However, I would hazard that it was an artist that he was of use to the group and that he was probably brought in by Anthony Blunt.

According to Roland Perry's The Fifth Man, Victor(Rothchild's) would bring home new technology developed in the SOE/SIS labs and then Blunt would sketch the item or copy the plans. As John was described as a skilled draughtsmen it would fit that he may be engaged in this kind of work too. The information would then be passed to the Soviets.

Dick Brooman-White is also mentioned in the letter, he brought Philby into Section V (Iberian Division) when he took it over from MI5. This was one of the most important strategic divisions of wartime intelligence operations handling ISOS transmissions.

What is worth noting is that the ISOS decryptions were the responsibility of Oliver Strachey. Strachey like, Blunt, Rothschild, Burgess and Maclean was a former member of the secret society the Cambridge Apostles, as was Michael Straight, who later became an advisor to President Kennedy. Tangled webs!!

Now where would Shaw fit in to all that I wonder...

I found this article on the same site though

www.maryferrell.org...

Evidently Garrison wanted to call Allen Dulles to testify about Kim Philby's knowledge of US intelligence operations. Most interesting.

Originally posted by KilgoreTrout
Evidently Garrison wanted to call Allen Dulles to testify about Kim Philby's knowledge of US intelligence operations. Most interesting.

Just to play devil's advocate here, there are those, Clay Shaw among them, who would say that Garrison believed a lot of nonsense about Shaw.

One of the non-sensical things that Garrison believed was that Shaw had been active for the OSS in Italy during the war.

mcadams.posc.mu.edu...

Even Bill Davy, a strong advocate of Garrison's case and one of Shackelford's main sources for his article, acknowledges that Shaw's onetime involvement with the Special Operations Section hardly connotes spooky "black ops" of the sort conspiracy theorists whisper about, but rather the "responsibility to direct, supervise and coordinate the activities of the intelligence and counter-intelligence groups and to disseminate this intelligence as appropriate . . . not unlike what the CIA was originally chartered to do" (emphasis added).(12)

Author Patricia Lambert has pointed out that Garrison advocates like Davy are wrong about even this seemingly innocuous allegation. In her review of yet another Garrison hagiography, A Farewell to Justice by Joan Mellen, Lambert notes that Shaw never worked in the fields of intelligence or counter-intelligence as part of the "Special Operations Section" (SOS), but rather he served in a different Army "S.O.S.": their Services of Supply. "The job of that SOS," Lambert writes, "was to keep allied forces equipped with everything from 'toothpaste to tanks' as they fought their way to Germany. Shaw, who began as Thrasher's aide-de-camp and became his deputy chief of staff, later said that supplying three armies as they spread out across Europe honed his 'organizational skills.'"

"Shaw was a former high ranking CIA operative in Italy, and according to Garrison, a contract employee in the New Orleans area from the late 1950's until his death in the early 1970's." Notice that Blackmer does not distinguish between the veracity or reliability of these two statements, though he only credits the second one explicitly to Garrison. Yet, while the second statement at least represents a viable theory, the first is demonstrably untrue; Shaw could not have been a "high ranking CIA operative in Italy," as Shaw had never lived or worked in Italy at all. The conclusions are Garrison's, not Blackmer's.

I think the attempt to get Dulles to talk about Philby and what Philby knew at the trial, might have been a way for Garrison to link Shaw with the OSS through an imagined relationship with Philby.

When Philby was made head of the Iberian sub-section of Section V of MI-6, it's purview was Spain and Portugal, but it was later expanded to include North Africa and Italy, the alleged stomping ground of Garrison's "Clay Shaw of the OSS".




[edit on 23-2-2009 by ipsedixit]

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