A critical view of the Skorzeny Papers by a knowledgeable historian who has researched and written about the Congo Crisis that plays such an important part in this story, but just doesn't get it.
And I agree with Le Flem that The Papers must be reviewed by independent researchers, I have met Maj. Ganis, talked with him at length, read the book, transcribed one of his radio interviews, and agree with him on most counts. I think The Skorzeny Papers, like the Inheritance of Mrs. Lincoln's papers and related trunks, the ONI Defector File, Richard Sprague's HSCA records, and the Valkyrie and Pathfinder records, the most significant records on the JFK assassination remain outside the JFK Collection at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and are in private hands, not available to the public as the JFK Act required.
This review is not my take on the book or what Major Ganis has to say, but is the opinion of Michael Le Flem, a respected academic, whose criticisms should and will be addressed.
Major
Ralph P. Ganis, The Skorzeny Papers: Evidence for the Plot to Kill JFK
Written
by Michael Le Flem
'
Friday, 19 October 2018
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.
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.
I
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.
V
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.
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