Major Ralph P. Ganis, The Skorzeny Papers: Evidence
for the Plot to Kill JFK
Written by Michael Le Flem
From Michael's conclusion: Ganis’ book is an
uncomfortable, freewheeling careen down strange dead-end tracks, with
unannounced detours through cold dark streets full of faceless characters, and
later, journeys through mirror-filled fun houses of speculation, with a final
twist and turn that spits you out right over Niagara Falls, barrel and all.
When I heard that a previously undiscovered
collection of personal correspondences from SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny had
recently surfaced, I was truly interested. Besides his famous exploits in WWII,
including the daring mountaintop rescue of Benito Mussolini and the kidnapping
of Hungarian regent Miklós Horthy’s son from his Bucharest palace, Skorzeny was
infamous for his postwar dealings with a number of intelligence agencies the
world over. As a child, my grandfather, Marcel, a French resistance fighter,
used to tell me stories of Otto’s exploits during car rides. I thought I was in
for a real treat when I found this book. That Skorzeny could have had a hand on
the team that killed President Kennedy was also an interesting hook.
The subtitle of this book is “Evidence for the Plot
to Kill JFK,” and therein lies its true problem: if by evidence we are
referring to clear-cut forensics, incriminating memos, newly declassified
documents, newly discovered tapes, or reliable eyewitness testimonies that
place Skorzeny either at the scene or in a position directly responsible for
the assassination of JFK, then we have little to no “evidence” to justify the
book’s subtitle. What the author of the book, Major Ralph Ganis, USAF (retired)
seems to suggest is largely tangential to the actionable plot that took
Kennedy’s life; that is, Skorzeny, from his position in Madrid as a jack of all
trades with ties to postwar Nazis, Texas oil moguls, the Mossad, and French
intelligence operatives, could have been a link in a long and winding chain of
figures who eventually connected to those who executed the crime of the
century. And yet, as we will see, even that supposition is largely based on
fantastical leaps of logic, a primary source base that we are never allowed to
verify—or see a picture of, or direct reference to—and a conclusion that is not
only ridiculous but insulting to the JFK research community.
Dick Russell, who wrote the introduction to The
Skorzeny Papers, rightly claims that the book provides a “chronological tracing
of the dark alliances that sheds fresh light on how long-suspicious CIA
officials like William Harvey and James Angleton wove Otto Skorzeny into their
tangled web, or vice versa.” I will give Ganis and Russell that—most of the
book is largely this, an extremely dry, almost colorless list of dozens and
dozens of figures who were responsible for placing Skorzeny in a secure
position from which to run his operations after the war: within only a few
pages in chapter seven we have “Enter Major General Lyman L. Lemnitzer and the
NATO Link,” “Enter Clifford Forster,” “Enter Don Isaac Levine.” I like to think
I have a pretty good memory, but the sheer volume of second- and third-string
players in this book is bewildering, with connections seemingly drawn from any
and all personnel affiliated with anything remotely clandestine, few of which
are ever revisited, and none of which seem truly important given the book’s
central thesis, which is that Otto Skorzeny was somehow a key aspect of the
Kennedy assassination.
The so-called “Skorzeny Papers,” which Ganis
acquired through an American auction house bid in 2012, are alleged
correspondences between Skorzeny and some of these underworld and
intelligence-based figures, along with letters to his wife, who aided him in
his dirty work to some degree. “As the story goes, many of the papers were
burned over time, but a fragmentary grouping of documents (the ones used for
the research in this book) survived. The archive ranges from 1947 to around the
period of Skorzeny’s death.” (xv).
But since we are not allowed to view them or
translate them from the German ourselves, we must take the author’s word that
they are not mistranslated or even fraudulent.
Ganis begins his book’s preface with a bold
proclamation: “Why was President John F. Kennedy killed and who carried it out?
All of the investigations, commissions, and academic works have not answered
these questions. This book integrated startling new information that does
resolve the mystery.” (p. xxi) Let’s unpack that for a moment. Not all
commissions are equal. The Warren Commission is not the same as Jim Garrison’s
investigation of Clay Shaw, the HSCA, or the later ARRB. The latter three found
quite compelling evidence that a domestic intelligence outfit indeed murdered
JFK. The former was staffed by Allen Dulles and was essentially a
disinformation campaign whose objective was to obfuscate the truth and put the
story to bed for the nightly news, which had also been compromised through the
Central Intelligence Agency’s media liaisons. As much has been exhaustively
detailed in scholarly works, from John Newman’s Oswald and the CIA, to Jim
DiEugenio’s Destiny Betrayed, to Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable.
That we cannot say with certainty who pulled the trigger on the fatal shot so
vividly captured in the Zapruder film is ultimately inconsequential; for all
intents and purposes, given the time elapsed since that fateful November
afternoon fifty-five years ago, we do have a clear picture of the likely
suspects behind the plot’s orchestration, along with compelling motives for why
JFK was targeted. Bold claims like Ganis’s require even bolder evidence, and to
open with a whopper like that, one would presume that Skorzeny’s purported
personal papers contain something akin to the map of Dealey Plaza’s sewer
system that investigators found in Cuban exile Sergio Arcacha Smith’s
apartment, or a handwritten “thank you” note from James Angleton after the
Warren Commission had ended for services Skorzeny rendered to the CIA. And yet
not only is Otto Skorzeny himself only a tangential part of a book
entitled The Skorzeny Papers, but the “evidence for the plot to kill
JFK” is awkwardly squeezed into the last two pages of a 346-page
work, with a final revelation that made me both angry for investing hours of my
life reading the tome, and confused as to how an author with a true breadth of
working knowledge about postwar intelligence networks could presume so myopic
an assassination motive.
II
Otto Skorzeny was an Austrian by birth who joined
the Nazi party somewhat reluctantly, mainly as a way to make a living as the
outbreak of the Second World War ramped up in the late 1930s. A mechanic by
trade, and a semi-professional fencer, his notorious scar across his face from
a missed parry and his 6’4 stature made him something of an icon in the German
army. Skorzeny was known for his fearlessness, guile and unconventional
approach to commando warfare. As he once said in a postwar interview, “My
knowledge of pain, learned with the sabre, taught me not to be afraid. And just
as in dueling when you must concentrate on your enemy’s cheek, so, too, in war.
You cannot waste time on feinting and sidestepping. You must decide on your
target and go in.” (Charles Whiting, Skorzeny, 1972, p. 17) In many ways,
his belief that small units could actually move world history in a similar or
even greater fashion than regiments and divisions was affirmed after his
thirty-man glider-borne SS unit spirited away Mussolini from the Gran Sasso
Hotel with not even a single shot fired. Even Winston Churchill heaped praise
on him for his bravery in the face of incredible odds.
Rearranging signposts during The Battle of the
Bulge, his commandos, who wore captured American uniforms and spoke fluent
English with almost no accent, attempted to sow chaos behind Allied lines,
seeking to misdirect troops and armored units away from key areas. While the
entire Wacht am Rhein [“Watch Along the Rhine”] operation, which was
the German code name for Hitler’s last desperate gamble to capture the Belgian
port of Antwerp and cut the British and American forces in two, was ultimately
a futile dying gasp of an already-defeated Nazi war machine, it proved so
devastating to Allied morale (and killed 75,000 Americans) that some planners
did reconsider whether the war would be over any time soon. And when a handful
of Skorzeny’s men were captured in their false uniforms during that bitterly
cold winter of 1945, panic spread throughout SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied
Expeditionary Force), leading to a comical scene in which General Eisenhower
frantically argued with his staff who insisted he station twenty guards with
sub machine guns around his Paris office at all times in case Skorzeny tried to
kill or abduct him. In the middle of the night, the future Director of the CIA,
Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s aide-de-camp, ran out with his staff in
pajamas and started firing his carbine into the brush just beyond the
headquarters’ window.
He and his men later found the dead cat that had
been scurrying about in the dark, but the legend of Otto Skorzeny had taken
hold.
Dubbed “the most dangerous man in Europe,” Skorzeny
finally surrendered to the Allies in occupied Germany, after seeing the futility
of carrying out Hitler’s final order for his “werewolves” to continue the war
after the end of hostilities. He was summarily booked and processed, and
awaited trial for his role as a top Nazi official and a one-time personal
bodyguard of Adolf Hitler. He was later approached by OSS officers as he
languished in his holding cell at Darmstadt Prison and it is from this first
contact that Ganis believes the true exploits of Skorzeny began. While stories
differ as to the mechanics of his escape—Skorzeny claimed in his memoirs that
he stole away in the trunk of a car and had a German driver unwittingly smuggle
him through the checkpoints; while Arnold Silver, his American point of contact
and debriefer said he was released on official terms—he nonetheless was a free
man by 1948. After relocating to Paris, where he was unofficially used as a
conduit through which CIA officials could monitor communist activity in postwar
Europe, Skorzeny was quickly identified due to his conspicuous face and looming
profile, and was outed by the French press during one of his many strolls down
the Champs-Elysée with his wife Ilse.
Relocating to Madrid, it is here that Ganis believes
his real work began, work that—Ganis believes—would ultimately find him
involved with dark forces that killed JFK a decade later. Set up in a
comfortable office that saw Skorzeny ostensibly managing a construction company
that also handled imports and exports of mechanical parts to places in Central
Africa and elsewhere, he for all outward purposes seems to have lived a quiet
life. Writing memoirs, consulting with foreign governments for a variety of
clandestine work, and running a low-key commando training school whose members
included some of his former comrades from the SS, French OAS soldiers, American
special forces officers, and a rogue’s gallery of other unsavory characters,
his postwar life had little in common with his daring exploits during WWII.
The bulk of The Skorzeny Papers deals
with the nebulous formation of both the CIA and its shell companies from the
remains of the OSS, with familiar figures like Frank Wisner, Arnold Silver,
Bill Harvey, and William Donovan featured prominently in Ganis’ narrative. The
central portion of the book meanders from French anti-communist hit teams and
their American handlers, to the also newly-formed Mossad and its eventual use
of Skorzeny for the removal of Egyptian nuclear scientists, to a whole host of
West German ex-Nazi intelligence personnel and their largely dull exploits
passing mostly fabricated evidence of an impending Soviet invasion to
Washington in exchange for their freedom and a career on the American payroll.
Somewhere in this tangled web, Ganis situates Skorzeny who, because of his
extensive contacts and personal daring during the Second World War, seems—in
Ganis’ estimation—uniquely positioned to wrangle these disparate forces into
something of a rogue network that is totally off the books. Ganis reiterates
this throughout the book, seeking to distinguish ostensible layers of the spy
world from what he considers its truly dark realm, which he identifies as a
series of assassination teams bankrolled through corporate shell organizations
like SOFINDUS, which eventually morphed into the World Commerce Corporation
(WCC).
In The Skorzeny Papers the WCC is akin to SPECTRE from the old
James Bond novels; a looming, impenetrable evil menace whose tentacles reach
into almost every aspect of Cold War politics and planning, Ganis spends a
considerable amount of the book detailing its creation, key operators, possible
ties to international Nazi groups and ultimately its potential role as the dark
budget from which Skorzeny was able to fund his various international commando
operations after the war. In reality, while I’m sure this is all very
interesting to someone truly looking for an exhaustive account of postwar dirty
money, it has very little to do with Skorzeny, and almost nothing to do with
the domestic assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.
The book then delves into the French OAS, focusing on
the enigmatic Captain Jean René Souètre, who of course was allegedly deported from Fort Worth,
TX, the afternoon of the JFK assassination. And while I am not denying that
Souètre could have indeed been on the ground in Texas in some capacity, Ganis
goes to great lengths—even putting him on the book’s cover next to Skorzeny and
Kennedy—to implicate him in the plot: “The actual sniper, or team of snipers,
was directed by Jean René Souètre, the former OAS officer wanted by French
security services for an attempt on the life of President Charles de Gaulle in
1962.”
While Souètre was a known paramilitary outlaw who hated the idea of
Algerian independence from France—which Kennedy firmly championed from the
Senate floor in the mid 1950s—he seems from the available evidence to have been
a rogue player who drifted through these turbulent times, training commandos,
taking exotic posts with his OAS buddies, and advising the CIA on a handful of
ultimately uninteresting developments in the Third World. To suggest, as Ganis
does, that he was the lynchpin of the ground operations in and around Dealey
Plaza, while ignoring the more probable Cuban exile culprits, seems strained.
The Souètre chapter ends with a few lines that
reveal a frustrating and repeated aspect of this book, where the author assumes
that one’s proximity to a situation necessarily guarantees association and
willing complicity. For example, Ganis argues:
The movements of Skorzeny during this
period point to his being in attendance at the Lisbon meeting between
Souètre and the CIA. In fact, Skorzeny made several trips to Portugal between
March and July 1963 concerning his businesses. With the OAS cause now
unsustainable, it appears Souètre left the meeting with a new option
for employment, signing on with Skorzeny. Captain Jean René Souètre was now a
soldier of fortune working for Otto Skorzeny in one of the most
guarded secret organizations in the history of American intelligence.” (p. 248,
italics added)
It’s not at all clear that these conclusions can be
verified, and as Skorzeny’s whereabouts are only deduced from “the Skorzeny
Papers,” which are never directly quoted—here or anywhere in the book to my
knowledge—one must once again have faith that Ganis is being honest and
accurate.
III
The book then spends a considerable amount of time
on the Third World and its myriad decolonization movements, with a quite
lengthy digression into Ganis’ analysis of the Congo Crisis, exploring the
potential for Skorzeny to have been the mysterious QJ/WIN assassin the CIA
hired to kill Patrice Lumumba. Ganis takes a fairly condescending approach to
his analysis of Lumumba’s rise to power, claiming “As well-founded as Lumumba’s
words may have been, they were politically ill-advised. This tense atmosphere
was further compounded by the lack of a plan for the organized transition to
power.” (p.279). As I have detailed in my article, “Desperate Measures in the Congo,”
the United States destroyed any hope for a free Congo before Lumumba had risen
to anything nearing real power. In fact, both Belgium and the CIA had planned
on separating Katanga, the Congo’s richest area, from the
country before it became independent. Belgium had stolen the
country’s gold reserves, brought them to Brussels and refused to return them.
President Eisenhower refused to meet with Lumumba after the Belgians had landed
thousands of paratroopers inside the country. By the time Lumumba’s plane had
landed back in Africa, Allen Dulles and friends all but marked Lumumba for
death. For Ganis to say he had no plan for an “organized transition to power”
smacks of paternalism: given his eloquence, popular appeal and vision of a new
dawn for his recently unshackled nation, Lumumba may well have succeeded if he
had not been undermined in advance.
The assassination mission was later aborted when the
CIA and Belgian intelligence aided Katangese rebels with Lumumba’s capture
after he fled his UN protection in a safe house. While I can see where Ganis is
going, and how it could be possible, given that Skorzeny seems to have been in
the Congo around this time, to my knowledge it’s been pretty strongly
established that QJ/WIN, the CIA digraph of one of two selected assassins for
the Congo plot, was actually Jose Marie Andre Mankel.
To have sent a person as instantly recognizable as Otto Skorzeny into an
unfolding international crisis involving the Soviet Union, Belgian and
Congolese troops, U.N. officials from multiple nations, and American station
personnel seems, to put it mildly, unwise. Indeed, WI/ROGUE, another
CIA-sponsored hit man and agent sent on the assignment, had had plastic surgery
and was said to be wearing a toupee during his visit. No matter Skorzeny’s
connections to Katanga Province’s mining operations, which were real, he was
more likely a visiting business opportunist rather than an actionable agent
during the Congo Crisis, if he was present there those critical weeks
surrounding Lumumba’s capture and execution at all.
Ganis then details Skorzeny’s one
brief interview with a Canadian television program in September 1960,
in which he boasts about being in high demand by both the enemies of Fidel
Castro and Fidel himself, explaining a plot which he takes credit for being the
first to discover. This was Operation Tropical, in which the CIA was allegedly
training Skorzeny and his commandos for a kidnapping of the Cuban premier in
early 1960. Ganis bases his description on an unnamed newspaper clipping found
in the papers he secured in his winning auction bid. Curiously, I happened
upon Operation Tropical in a
perusal of the CIA’s online reading room months before I’d read this book, and
searched in vain for the newspaper they cite as having outlined the plot, which
they claim is the Sunday supplement edition of the Peruvian newspaper, La
Cronica, dated August 7, 1966. I would be interested to read it if anyone can
secure a copy. It would go a long way in verifying the validity of Ganis’ main
body of evidence, and would be an interesting find for researchers more
broadly. In any case, with the aborted Castro plot and a mainstream boilerplate
description of the “failed Bay of Pigs invasion,” which of course Ganis
attributes to Kennedy’s refusal to release nearby carrier-based air support
(something Kennedy staunchly forbade before the operation was underway, a point
which Ganis’ omits), we now enter the final stretch of the book, which looks
directly at Skorzeny’s role in the JFK assassination.
Spoiler alert—there is none.
IV
“General American Oil Company,” “Colonel Gordon
Simpson,” “Algur Meadows,” “Sir Stafford Sands,” “Colonel Robert Storey,”
“Jacques Villeres,” “Permindex,” “Judge Duvall,” “Paul Raigorodsky,” “Thomas
Eli Davis III,” “ Robert Ruark,” “Jake Hamon,” and about twenty other
sub-headings flash across the first dozen or so pages of the final chapter
of The Skorzeny Papers. The organization of the book centers on these
disjointed, one-to-two-page sub-chapters which give the reader the disorienting
and queasy feeling of reading it through glasses with the wrong prescription.
Not only did Ganis miss the opportunity to style the life and times of Nazi
Germany’s most infamous commando personality along the lines of a thrilling
narrative, with exotic locales and shady deals over drinks and cigars, but he
arranged the book in so awkward a fashion that he constantly has to end
sentences with “and we will get back to him shortly,” or “and I will show you
how this ties in later.” Even if one were to storyboard his entire panoply of
tertiary personalities, it would look more like a Jackson Pollock art
installation than a coherent plot with a compelling impetus culminating in the
JFK assassination as we understand it. A story should be clear enough to draw
the reader in with its simple facts, and should sensibly unfold on its own
accord so as to prevent the need to constantly handhold during the descent into
the labyrinth.
Conspicuously absent in The Skorzeny
Papers are any substantial sub-headings detailing Cuban exiles, Allen
Dulles, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or any of the genuine suspects of the JFK
assassination, save for meanderings on James Angleton’s and Bill Harvey’s roles
in the creation of Staff D, the CIA’s executive action arm. Ruth and Michael
Paine are nowhere to be found. Neither is a description of the aborted Chicago
plot, or any substantive explanation of how Lee Harvey Oswald was moved into
the Texas School Book Depository, or a note about David Phillips’ role in the
whole affair from his Mexico City station. While these very real aspects of the
actual JFK plot are infrequently touched upon in passing—Ganis cannot ignore
the entire body of evidence, despite his best efforts—he insists on
crow-barring his newfound “primary source data” into a story that at this point
doesn’t permit much unique interpretation. It’s safe to say, in 2018, that
President Kennedy was assassinated by a domestic, military-industrial-intelligence
apparatus that viewed his foreign policy as anathema to both the “winning” of
the Cold War and to their image of the United States’ role in world affairs.
That Kennedy was a staunch decolonization advocate, a friend and champion of
Third World leaders like Sukarno in Indonesia, Nasser in Egypt, Lumumba in the
Congo, and sought diplomatic solutions to prevent the impending nuclear
Armageddon with Nikita Khrushchev’s Soviet Union is all but ignored in Ganis’
conclusions as to why JFK was shot in Dallas. None of it is suggested. What
ultimately led to the tragedy in Dealey Plaza, according to Ganis, is something
much bigger.
It all comes down to JFK’s sexual indiscretions,
folks. That’s right. Jack Kennedy just couldn’t resist the advances of the
hundreds of femme fatales who threw themselves at him, and according to Ganis,
the high command had to take him out when he cavorted with the ultimate Cold
War honeypot.
I wish I were kidding. But unfortunately I’m not.
The author submits to the reader that the act to
assassinate President Kennedy was carried out for reasons that far exceeded
concerns over U.S. National security. In particular, they arose out of a
pending international crisis of such a grave nature that the very survival of
the United States and its NATO partners was at risk. At the source of this
threat was breaking scandals that unknown to the public involved President
Kennedy. To those around the President (sic) there was also the impact these
scandals had on the president’s important duties such as control of the nuclear
weapons and response to nuclear attack. It also appears the facts were about to
be known. The two scandals at the heart of this high concern were the Profumo
Affair and the Bobby Baker Scandal. (p.294)
I will spare anyone reading this a rebuttal of the
relevance of this assertion, but suffice it to say, Ganis places the final
straw at Kennedy’s—demonstrably disproven—affair with Eastern Bloc seductress
Ellen Rometsch. Ganis claims, “Historians are taking a hard look at this
information, but preliminary findings indicate Rometsch was perhaps a Soviet
agent.” (p.295) He continues, “Her potential as a Soviet agent is explosive
since Baker had arranged for multiple secret sexual liaisons between her and President
Kennedy.” (p. 295)
He then scrapes together a weird narrative of how
Attorney General Robert Kennedy was pleading with J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI
to withhold these revelations in a “desperate effort to save his brother and
the office of the presidency.” (p.296), He argues that “As President Kennedy
was arriving in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, a very dark cloud of doom
was poised over Washington, and the impending storm of information was hanging
by a thread.” (p. 296). That’s when Skorzeny—from Madrid—was activated to save
the Western world. It seems pointless to add that retired ace archive
researcher Peter Vea saw the FBI documents on this case. The agents had
concluded there was no such liaison between the president and Rometsch. In
other words, to save himself, Baker was trying to spread his racket to the
White House. Bobby Kennedy called his bluff.
Ganis pretentiously concludes, “In the end, the
assassination network that killed JFK was the unfortunate legacy of General
Donovan’s original Secret Paramilitary Group that included as a key adviser
from its early inception—Otto Skorzeny. Furthermore, the evidence would seem to
indicate Skorzeny organized, planned and carried out the Dallas assassination,
however, we may never know what his exact role was.” (p. 342)
Indeed we may never, because there does not seem to
be any. Ganis continues, “On November 22, 1963, an assassination network was in
place in Dallas; it was constructed of associates of Otto Skorzeny and
initiated by his minders in the U.S. Government and clandestine groups within
NATO.” Wrapping up, the author reiterates, “The events that led to this killing
were triggered by a limited group of highly placed men in the American
government. They were convinced that the West was in imminent danger and posed
to suffer irreparable damage, and, for some of them, imminent exposure to
personal disgrace beckoned. All of this sprang from reckless debauchery in the
White House and beyond. With the situation breached by Soviet intelligence and
ripe for exploitation, it became untenable for this group. They took action.”
I’ll give you a few minutes now to wipe the tears
from your eyes. Okay, good. Are you still with me?
Overall, The Skorzeny
Papers could, I suppose, serve as something like a compendium or
glossary for those who just have to know the minutest details of the inner
workings of this or that shell corporation that may or may not have had a hand
in some world affair during the Cold War. But there are much better books on
that. Ultimately, Ganis’ book is an uncomfortable, freewheeling careen down
strange dead-end tracks, with unannounced detours through cold dark streets
full of faceless characters, and later, journeys through mirror-filled fun
houses of speculation, with a final twist and turn that spits you out right
over Niagara Falls, barrel and all.
Michael Le Flem
Michael Le Flem is an independent researcher and a
university lecturer in history and philosophy in Chicago. He holds a Master's
degree in Western Intellectual History from Florida State University.
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