Clay Shaw and OSS

Mr Marrs

I was fascinated to learn that Clay Shaw claimed to have been the OSS liaison to Winston Churchill during World War Two. However, despite furious Googling I have been unable to find anything to substantiate that claim other than references to the Torbitt book which seems in itself to be much disputed (though that is not to say that it is untrue). I have a fairly extensive collection of books dealing with WW2 intelligence, mostly British SIS, as well as a number on Churchill specifically, but I can find no reference to an OSS liaison by the name of Shaw. This is not unusual, much of the interaction between the US and Churchill was handled under the table, but it is none the less frustrating. Do you have any further information on Shaw's relationship to OSS? Or where/when Shaw made the claim that he worked for OSS?

I have been reading up on Bloomfield, CMC and Permindex - fascinating!!!

PS. I have yet to reach the pages you referenced in your U2U re the Oswald autopsy, as soon as I have I will be reappraising my questions and requesting the additional insight you promised. Many thanks for your help

reply to post by KilgoreTrout

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.

In the linked material in my first post it mentions that "Wild Bill" Donovan was also a participant in post war financial groups involving Sir William Stephenson.

The fact of the medals, particularly the fancy ones that Shaw received, is a sign of "pull" in the right places. You don't get the "Croix de Guerre" on the recommendation of your platoon sargeant. He was definitely doing an important job and being noticed by very high ranking people.

None of these arrows hit the bullseye, but there are quite a group of them near it. The hard info you want is probably out there somewhere, but where? Does England have FOIA-style options for finding things out?

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]

Originally posted by ipsedixit
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.

I tend to agree, and given my limited resources, I am inclined to feel that it is a dead end due to the lack of 'official' documentary information. I could spend months simply going around in circles with this one and I don't have that much time at my disposal to be frank.

Originally posted by ipsedixit
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.

Maybe, maybe. Dulles did keep information from the Warren Commission and he did help ensure that that information was sealed for as long as possible, much of it is still unavailable according to the sources I have read. Either way I think, if Shaw was in some way connected to this group he was relatively small fry and of little consequence to the 'bigger picture'. But, and it is a big but, I do feel there is evidence to suggest that Philby's group, or rather Victor's group may have had some involvement and/or knowledge of the JFK assassination, there are simply too many individuals in common. And, I do think that the French Connection is a very important key to all this.

Originally posted by ipsedixit
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".

I suppose the assumption is that Clay Shaw must have been working for OSS to come into contact with that group, this need not be the case at all. Either way there is inadequate information one way or another so I see no point in pursuing Shaw any further, unless new information comes to the fore, which at this juncture seems unlikely.

It helps to hammer these things out, rather than allow them to rattle around in the head in a one way debate. Most helpful, thanks.

I think your assessment is the right one. Without more details it's difficult to have confidence in any sort of conjecture regarding Shaw.

For example, one could go off on a completly different tangent with regard to him. His position may have made him a key person in the scramble for Germany's scientific and commercial secrets as the allied armies moved forward. Why should supply trucks be empty on their way back from the front?

Shaw might have been the Adolf Eichmann of grand larceny on the allied side as the war ended. Hence the chest full of medals and the classified war record.

[edit on 24-2-2009 by ipsedixit]

Originally posted by ipsedixit
I think your assessment is the right one. Without more details it's difficult to have confidence in any sort of conjecture regarding Shaw.

For example, one could go off on a completly different tangent with regard to him. His position may have made him a key person in the scramble for Germany's scientific and commercial secrets as the allied armies moved forward. Why should supply trucks be empty on their way back from the front?

Shaw might have been the Adolf Eichmann of grand larceny on the allied side as the war ended. Hence the chest full of medals and the classified war record.

[edit on 24-2-2009 by ipsedixit]

Absolutely. In fact what niggles me is the complete lack of information, or rather of further investigation. Surely someone has tried to get hold of his military records or his CIA file, and yet seemingly nothing is forth coming. Nothing even to clearly refute the allegations made against him. He may have nothing to do with the JFK assassination, at least directly, but, I think there may be something of interest there. His homsexuality may be a pointer, simply because so many people do get sucked into intelligence and criminal activities due to having 'desires' that they need to keep secret. Easy blackmail targets, who'll say ad do anything to maintain the respectable facade.

You might check with Greg Hallett of "Hitler was a British Spy". He might be able to shed some light on this.

Originally posted by ReelView
You might check with Greg Hallett of "Hitler was a British Spy". He might be able to shed some light on this.

I've heard tit bits of this, but not read or seen anything in-depth. A gentlemen friend of mine told me of a documentary that attempted to prove that Hitler made frequent visits to the UK, though rather uselessly he couldn't remember the name, and Hitler's sister in law claimed he visited them in Liverpool at least once.

Care to expand...no-one likes a tease...?

Originally posted by KilgoreTrout 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...

It is not likely of assistance here, but I wanted to add that this camp was not in the US, or if it was there were more than one because he also established Camp X ouside of Toronto (Ajax/Whitby). Ian Fleming is said to have trained here.

Info is available on-line...and you never know where one little tip like this might lead you.

(James Earl Ray fled to Toronto after the King assassination, and nobody is quite sure why.)

Originally posted by JohnnyCanuck
It is not likely of assistance here, but I wanted to add that this camp was not in the US, or if it was there were more than one because he also established Camp X ouside of Toronto (Ajax/Whitby).

I appreciate the correction

Originally posted by JohnnyCanuck
Ian Fleming is said to have trained here.

He did indeed. He was, evidently, a 'star pupil', due to the fact that he was able to get past both civilian and military guards to plant a bomb (fake I presume) under train in Toronto station (I have a biography on him that I haven't read yet, I looked it up).

Makes you think. All these well trained saboteurs had to go on and do something in civilian life when the war was over. What's the point in having those skills if you aren't going to pass them on? Alot went into writing, like Fleming, but I am sure a few joined mercenary organisations, trained insurgents and terrorists. It is what they do now, some of them, elite forces and intelligence officers, when they retire. Why should it have been any different then? The fact is it wasn't, I just think it was easier to cover your tracks in the 'good old days'.

Originally posted by JohnnyCanuck
(James Earl Ray fled to Toronto after the King assassination, and nobody is quite sure why.)

I didn't know that. Interesting.