JFKA conspiracy theorist Joan Mellen has died. Vladimir Putin is probably grieving.

Joan Mellen, R.I.P.


JFK assassination conspiracy theorist Joan Mellen died a couple of days ago. The following is an article she wrote in 2006 in response to Max Holland’s review of her anti-CIA / anti-Clay Shaw book in The Nation. My comments are in brackets.

I am the author of A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK's Assassination and the Case That Should Have Changed History, my seventeenth book, whose credibility is attacked by Max Holland. Nation readers might give pause to Holland's five-year campaign of outright falsehoods [Is this KGB disinformation, or just wishful thinking on your part?] about the investigation into the Kennedy assassination by [overly ambitious, scandal-plagued and revengeful], New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison that have appeared in a range of publications from The Wilson Quarterly, The Atlantic, New Orleans and the Washington Post to, now, The Nation.

Garrison focused on the clandestine service of the CIA as sponsor of the Kennedy assassination as a result of facts he discovered about Lee Harvey Oswald, specifically Oswald's role as an FBI informant and low-level CIA agent sent to the Soviet Union by the CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence, James Angleton [We now know, thanks to author John M. Newman, that Oswald was probably sent to Moscow by a KGB “mole” in the CIA to protect said mole from being uncovered], as part of a false defector program. What Garrison had not yet discovered was that Oswald also worked for the US Customs Service in New Orleans.

Contrary to Holland's assertions of the innocence of Clay Shaw, the man Garrison indicted for participation in the murder of President Kennedy was indeed part of the implementation of the murder and was guilty of conspiracy [Nope.]. That Shaw was acquitted does not exonerate him for history. New documents indicate overwhelmingly that Shaw did favors for the CIA. [He was an international businessman and an unpaid confidential informant for the Agency from 1948 to 1956]. On his deathbed he admitted as much. Shaw's [alleged] repeated appearances in Louisiana in the company of Oswald demonstrate that Shaw was part of the framing of Oswald for Kennedy's murder. Shaw took Oswald to the East Louisiana State Hospital [no he didn’t] in an attempt to secure him a job there, one event among many never investigated by the Warren Commission or the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA).

Holland's assertion that Garrison based his conclusion that the CIA sponsored the assassination on a series of articles in an Italian newspaper [Paese Sera, which was owned by a Communist] is also incorrect. Garrison had focused on the CIA long before he learned that Shaw was on the board of directors of a CIA-funded phony trade front called Centro Mondiale Commerciale (CMC), based in Rome [Why, then, did he arrest Shaw on suspicion of having organized a homosexual “thrill-kill” assassination of JFK and change it to “he arranged it for the CIA” after he’d read a translated-for-him Paese Sera knock-off article in a far-left French newspaper which was given to him by your ex-husband, Ralph Schoenman?]. Indeed, the newspaper Paese Sera broke the story of Shaw's involvement after a six-month investigation [there was no such investigation] into CIA interference in European electoral politics, only to discover that Garrison had indicted Shaw a few days before the first article was to appear. Moreover, the new documents reveal that CMC and its parent outfit, Permindex, were indeed CIA fronts. [You’re wrong.]

The 1992 Assassinations Records and Review Act has disgorged dozens of documents showing that Shaw was a CIA operative. This is directly contrary to what Holland suggests--that Garrison was a willing victim of "the KGB's wildest fantasy." To cite one example, Shaw was cleared for a project dubbed QKENCHANT, which permitted him to recruit outsiders for CIA projects. Shaw was no mere businessman debriefed by the CIA. One document [which one?] reveals that among those Shaw recruited in New Orleans was Guy Banister, former FBI Chicago Special Agent in Charge running an ersatz New Orleans detective agency whose side-door address (544 Camp Street) Oswald used on a set of his pro-Castro leaflets, until Banister [allegedly] stopped him.

The former editors of the now-defunct Paese Sera, whom I interviewed, from Jean-Franco Corsini to Edo Parpalione, insisted adamantly that neither the Italian Communist Party, nor the Soviet Communist Party, nor the KGB had any influence on the paper's editorial policy. [LOL!] Outraged by Holland's accusations, Corsini said that he despised the KGB and the CIA equally.

The roots of Holland's charge that Garrison was a dupe of KGB propaganda may be traced to an April 4, 1967, CIA document titled "Countering Criticism of the Warren Report." In it the CIA suggests to its media assets that they accuse critics of the Warren Report of "Communist sympathies." In April 1967 Garrison was at the height of his investigation: He is clearly the critic the CIA had in mind.

In 1961 Richard Helms had already developed the charge that Paese Sera was an outlet for the KGB and for Soviet propaganda. Helms was indignant, but the truth had appeared in Paese Sera: The attempted putsch against Charles de Gaulle by four Algerian-based generals had indeed been supported by the CIA. Holland has merely picked up where Helms, later to become a convicted perjurer, left off--repeating a scenario developed for him by Helms, with the addition of making the accusation of Soviet influence on Garrison.

My book is hardly a "hagiography of the DA," as Holland states. I present a flawed man who exhibited great courage in facing down both the FBI and the CIA in his attempt to investigate the murder of the President. Indeed, Garrison family members were dismayed that I did not present him in a more idealized form. I depicted him as an ordinary man who rose to distinction because of his single-minded commitment to the investigation.

Among the many errors in Holland's latest diatribe is that Shaw died "prematurely," as if somehow Garrison's prosecution hastened his end. In fact, Shaw was a lifelong chain smoker and died of lung cancer. Holland attacks Robert Blakey, chief counsel for the HSCA, for using acoustic evidence to suggest that there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy murder. In fact, the acoustic evidence of at least four shots being fired has been established scientifically by Donald Thomas in the British forensic journal Science and Justice (see also Thomas's well-documented paper, available online, "Hear No Evil: The Acoustical Evidence in the Kennedy Assassination," delivered November 17, 2001).

Blakey certainly can be criticized for his close relationship with the CIA throughout his HSCA investigation. His letters of agreement with the CIA are at the National Archives. The CIA decided how key witnesses were to be deposed, and Blakey acquiesced in all CIA demands and intrusions upon the investigation.

Before Blakey was hired, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg considered accepting the job as counsel. Knowing that the CIA had at the least covered up the facts of the assassination and at worst been involved, Goldberg telephoned CIA director Stansfield Turner and asked him whether, should he take the job, he would have full CIA cooperation. Silence emanated over the wires. Goldberg, naïve perhaps, asked Turner if he had heard the question. "I thought my silence was my answer," Turner said. Goldberg declined the job. Blakey took it. It is no surprise that Holland, who has consistently defended the CIA, does not raise the issue of Blakey's cooperation with the CIA during his HSCA tenure but focuses instead on Blakey's conclusion, forced by the irrefutable acoustic evidence, that there was a conspiracy.

It is one thing for Holland to spread his disinformation in the CIA's Studies in Intelligence. It is quite another for The Nation to allow him continued access without debate to its pages to obfuscate, slander authors like myself and deny evidence fully established--in particular about Jim Garrison and how the new documents establish his credibility and reveal how close he came to the truth, and in general about the Kennedy assassination's sponsors and accessories.

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Max Holland’s reply:

[…] Both Joan Mellen and Mark Lane make much of a CIA document that sounds very sinister–until you actually read it and put it into context. The document was written in April 1967, the height of the bout of madness otherwise known as the Garrison investigation. As one of the government agencies now being accused of complicity in the assassination, the CIA was very concerned about having such allegations gain widespread acceptance abroad in the midst of the Cold War. “Innuendo of such seriousness affects…the whole reputation of the American government,” observed the CIA. So, the agency launched a campaign, using its media assets abroad, to counter criticism of the Warren Report by the likes of Mellen, Lane and others. Is that really shocking?

Joan Mellen’s penchant for accuracy can be summed up in the fact that she cannot even bother to spell correctly (here or in her book) the names of Gianfranco Corsini and Edo Parpaglioni. Ordinarily, this would be nit-picking, but in this instance her elementary sloppiness is as good a window as any into the miasma of bald lies, misrepresentations and truthiness that she calls a book.

The claim that Paese Sera‘s lies about Shaw were the fortuitous result of a “six-month investigation” is a belated fiction embraced by Mellen and other Garrison acolytes. The co-author of the articles in question, Angelo Aver, claimed no such thing when interviewed in 2000, nor did any Paese Sera editors I contacted (including Corsini).

I find it illuminating that Lane has taken no legal action (not even in Britain!) against the authors (Christopher Andrew and KGB archivist-turned-defector Vasili Mitrokhin) and publishers of the 1999 volume that revealed “the [KGB’s] New York residency sent [Lane initially] 1,500 dollars to help finance his research” through an intermediary. That doesn’t necessarily mean it came in a lump sum. And neither Andrew/Mitrokhin nor I alleges that Lane was a witting recipient, just a useful one.

All the reliable forensic and scientific evidence developed around the JFK case either positively supports or does not negate the findings of the Warren Report. An explanation of the so-called acoustic evidence can be found at mcadams.posc.mu.edu/odell.

[…]

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Note: In 1992, CIA historian J. Kenneth McDonald signed off on an 82-page, cobbled-together-by-his-staff memo titled “Survey of CIA’s Records from House Select Committee on Assassinations Investigation,” on one page of which was written, “Clay Shaw was a highly paid contract source for the CIA from 1948 to 1956.” Joan Mellen and others ecstatically proclaimed that this proved that Shaw had committed perjury at his trial when he replied, “No, I have not” to the question, “Have you ever worked for the CIA?” Since Shaw had been an unpaid volunteer for the CIA’s Domestic Contacts Division and had provided the Agency with several valuable reports during those eight years, the memo clearly should have said that he was a “highly valued contact source,” instead. Bottom line: Since Shaw wasn’t paid for his services, he was being truthful when he said he hadn’t worked for the CIA.