The
Skorzeny Papers – Evidence For the Plot to Kill JFK,
By Major Ralph P. Ganis, USAF, Ret., with an introduction by Dick Russell. (Hot Books/Skyhorse, NY, 2018)
“The Warren Commission was not created to find the
answer to the JFK murder but to deflect attention away from all intelligence
and operational links to the assassination. Witnesses that should have been
called were not, others acted as agents of deception. Superfluous and irrelevant
data abounds in the documents, obtained by equally worthless witnesses and
individuals called to testify. Mountains of documents were created to confuse,
mislead, and divert attention away from the true conspiracy that was linked to
a covert paramilitary network operating in Dallas and linked to Otto
Skorzeny.” - Major Ralph P. Ganis, USAF,
Reserve Retired
By William E. Kelly, Jr.
It’s seldom when researchers from different areas
and backgrounds come to the same conclusions at the same time, based on totally
different evidence, but that’s what happened when I met Major Ralph P. Ganis
USAF (Ret.) at the JFK Lancer conference in Dallas in November.
I opened the conference with a summary of the sealing
and release of JFK assassination records by the government and gave a list of
my Top Ten records released under the JFK Act. Now I have to expand on those
after meeting Maj. Ganis, reading his book The Skorzeny Papers (Skyhorse, 2018)
and listening to the fascinating radio interview he did that I transcribed.
It was in the late 1970s at the New York Law School
conference on the JFK assassination when I sat in on a lecture by Colonel
Fletcher Prouty, who was describing the procedures used in covert intelligence
operations, and the differences between assets, operatives, agents and
cut-outs, case officers, aliases, code names and safe houses. “You have to
understand these things before you can understand what happened at Dealey Plaza,”
he said, and it took me a long time, but I got it.
It was only when I began to approach the Dealey
Plaza Operation – as I call it – as a covert intelligence operation, that all
of the pieces fall into place.
And it was in the 1980s when former FBI agent Bill
Turner said at a Dallas COPA conference, “We now know what happened at Dealey
Plaza to a fairly good degree of certainty. The motives were piling up –
the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the two-track back channel
to Cuba – the motives were piling up to the point they had to assassinate him. I
think it’s now pretty obvious, with the information we have today, that the
mechanism of it came out of the alliance between the CIA and the Mafia. They
already had an assassination apparatus set up for killing Castro, and they just
switched targets and they killed JFK instead.”
Then I listened to and partially transcribed the
Gene Wheaton interview (w/ William Law), that had been presented at a Lancer
Conference a decade earlier, but one that I had missed until a few months ago,
in which Wheaton says that his friends and business associates claimed that one
of the plans designed by the CIA to kill Castro had been redirected to JFK in
Dallas. And we could trace them – the Cubans and their CIA trainers – some of
who are still alive.
Now we have Major Ralph Ganis saying pretty much the
same thing – that JFK was killed by a covert intelligence operation that was
designed to deceive, Oswald was what he said he was – a patsy, and the real
culprits are entwined in the intelligence network that was operational in
Dallas at the time of the murder. And says Ganis, he learned this from the
private papers of former Nazi commando Otto Skorzeny, that he purchased at
auction.
I first learned about Otto Skorzeny while
researching the background of American ornithologist James Bond, author of The Birds of the West Indies, a book
that Ian Fleming kept on his Jamaican breakfast table. And it was from the author
of that book from whom Fleming appropriated the name for his secret agent 007,
now the most famous spy in history.
And Ian Fleming’s official biography notes that the British
naval commander considered Otto Skorzeny his opposite number in the German
military, and indeed both Skorzeny and Fleming directed elite commando units
that operated behind lines during World War II.
Then when I read the memo (Higgins Report) of the
CIA’s Desmond FitzGerald’s briefing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (on Sept. 25,
1963) informing them that the CIA was “studying in detail” the July 20, 1944
Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler in order to use it against Castro, I began
investigating that incident. I learned that the day after they failed to kill
him, Hitler had a very public meeting with former Italian fascist dictator
Benito Mussolini, who Skorzeny and his band of commandos had abducted from his
pro-Allied captors in an imaginative glider attack on a mountain castle prison.
In the course of that research I also learned that
Skorzeny and his men helped round up and execute some of those co-conspirators involved
in the July 20, 1944 plot to kill Hitler, and many were arrested and killed
while thousands more were imprisoned.
More recently, while reviewing the last few batches
of government records released under the JFK Act I came across one document
with redactions, but one redaction had bled through the whiteout so I could
barely make out the name of a person I had never heard of – Arnold Silver. I immediately
looked him up and learned that he was one of the US Army intelligence officers
who had debriefed Skorzeny when he was in the hands of the U.S. military.
My interest in Skorzeny increased even more when I
read one of the newly released records that one of the JMWAVE anti-Castro Cuban
commandos we have been tracing from the Wheaton names, had contacted Skorzeny
in Spain. These commandos had raided
Cuban industrial targets from Florida, and were paid and trained by the CIA to
kill Castro. Now I learned that one of them was sent to Europe shortly after
the assassination to meet in Spain with Ottor Skorzeny.
So now my interest in Skorzeny has peaked, and I was
quite surprised to learn that Major Ralph Ganis purchased Skorzeny’s private
papers at auction and Ganis says that they implicate Skorzeny in the
assassination of President Kennedy.
While originally incredulous, I now believe Ganis is
on to something as Skorzeny adds another big piece to the Dealey Plaza puzzle –
the overlapping covert intelligence network that supported the Dealey Plaza
Operation.
In the author’s Comments on Sources, Ganis says,
“Through the 1950s and 1960s, Skorzeny’s special experience and skills in
covert operations were increasingly utilized by the most secret agencies of
multiple governments, including the United States. It’s very clear that he
enjoyed the confidence of highly-placed western intelligence officials eager to
use his special skills in highly classified operations to combat the Communist
threat in the Cold War. At an early point, it also became apparent, due to
Skorzeny’s business relationships that linked him intimately to Dallas, that
there was at least the potential for a link to the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy.”
“This line of research continued to expand
dramatically,” Major Ganis writes, “until I was convinced that either Skorzeny
was directly involved in the Dallas affair or that those he was connected to
were. The hypothesis was confirmed.”
Major Ganis’ new book The Skorzeny Papers, could be a game changer, as he shifts the
approach to the assassination of President Kennedy from viewing what happened
at Dealey Plaza as the result of deranged loser or a few disgruntled
CIA-Mafia-Oil men sitting around conspiring to kill the President. Instead of
such a conspiratorial plot, it was a plan, a detailed plan that was already in
place and taken off the shelf.
From what we can now understand, this plan was devised,
ordered, practiced, carried out and paid for as a very distinct and disciplined
covert intelligence operation, and they have left a paper trail that we are
following.
In evaluating the bonafides of a source, if
supplying new places, events and names that pan
out is the barometer, then Ganis comes through in spades, as his book is
full of new names, places and events, that will be delved into.
But the most
important aspect of this book is in redirecting the approach to the crime from
that of a typical homicide investigation to that of a counter-intelligence one.
By recognizing what happened at Dealey Plaza as a
covert intelligence operation – a covert action conducted by an intelligence
network, Ganis narrows the pool of suspects to those who were trained in and practiced
such covert black ops, and those who were operating in Dallas at the time of
the crime.
If a silly conspiracy theorist had put forth this
notation it could be easily dismissed, but Maj. Ganis is a distinguished and
respected, retired Air Force officer who has also served through five wars in
the Army and Marines. He also had the spare time and savings to purchase, at
public auction, the personal papers of former German military commando
commander Otto Skorzeny, and the intelligence training to recognize their
significance.
Ganis reminds me of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the
military intelligence officer who was assigned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to
compile a computerized open source data mine they called Able Danger - an operation
led him to the militant Arab networks responsible for 9/11, before it occurred.
Now Ganis is using the same type of intelligence analysis in retrospect,
applying it to what happened at Dealey Plaza.
Ganis, a military historian, knew Skorzeny from his
World War II exploits – the freeing of deposed Italian fascist dictator Benito
Mussolini and commanding the English speaking Germans, dressed in American Army
uniforms who operated behind the lines during the Battle of the Bulge. For that
he was tried at Nuremberg, but found not guilty, thanks to the testimony of
American intelligence officers who wanted to use Skorzeny in the Cold War.
I knew of Skorzeny’s role in the rounding up some of
the co-conspirators of the failed July 20, 1944.
But Ganis was interested in what Skorzeny did after
the war, and that’s what led him to Dallas.
Major Ganis was surprised he submitted the best bid
for the papers and took custody of them, finding most of them in foreign
languages and many copies on carbon paper, so he had to have them transcribed,
copied and translated. But as he deciphered them he saw the patterns in the
intelligence net that led from Skorzeny’s papers into the heart of the Dealey
Plaza Operation that resulted in the murder of President Kennedy.
One of the oldest books known to man, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has a chapter devoted to
Secret Agents and describes what he called “The Divine Skein,” or “Godly Net,”
as a skein is a fisherman’s net. And Sun Tzu’s net, when all five types of
secret agents are working simultaneously, it is like key information being
pulled in like a net, and what Sun Tzu called “The treasure of the soverign.” To
those unfamiliar with the skein, or such covert operations, it seems like a
magic trick or of divine origin – hence, the divine net.
And today, thousands of years later, we still use
the term “Intelligence Network,” a term that stems from Sun Tzu’s “Divine
Skein.”
And now we know JFK's death was not an act of God but an act of man, one that can be solved and understood.
Whatever you believe happened at Dealey Plaza, and
regardless of Lee Harvey Oswald’s role, whether lone gunman or patsy – it
doesn’t matter, once the assassination is perceived and recognized as a covert
intelligence operation, everything falls into place.
From that very basic realization and verifiable
hypothesis, it can also be deduced that the Dealey Plaza Operation (DPO) was in
some way connected to Cuba, the plots to kill Castro, and as we have seen, more
specifically to the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler and the Pathfinder plans to
kill Castro.
It was the CIA’s plans to topple Castro that led
them to Skorzeny, early on – in 1959-60, during the Eisenhower administration, when
Operation Tropical was reportedly considered as a contingency plan to capture
(or kill) Castro, and utilize the talents of the former German military
commando extradonaire to do it.
Operation Tropical, according to the Skorzeny Papers
and a single published report, expended millions of dollars and included the
training of special commandos over many months, but was not approved by JFK and
the National Security Council (NSC) and its leaders distracted, diverted to
emergency crisis response in the Congo, precisely where some of the JMWAVE
commandos were sent in the months after the assassination of President Kennedy.
While Larry Hancock has noted that the only
published reference to Operation Tropical, a copy of which was apparently among
The Skorzeny Papers, is from a Latin American newspaper and is probably
disinformation and propaganda, I think that’s okay too. Either its real or someone
went way out of their way to manufacture a fake but believable news story and
get it published, and Skorzeny himself thought it important enough to keep it.
Ganis says there were three distinct aspects to the
Dealey Plaza Operation – the Action part – the team of snipers who were led by
French assassin Jean Rene Souetre. Then there was the Deception part - that set
up Oswald as the patsy. And finally there was the Support part, the
intelligence apparatus that took care of communications, safe houses, cover
stories, travel, etc. And each aspect of the operation engaged different
people, but according to Maj. Ganis, all were connected in some way to Skorzeny’s
network, according to The Skorzeny Papers.
In the radio interview Ganis says, “These businesses
that are in these papers are Dallas businesses and Dallas personalities. So the
earliest businesses association between Otto Skorzeny and these businesses that
were intelligence and clandestine cover – starting in 1950-51, were coming out
of Dallas. So when the President came into Dallas in 1963 there were businesses
that were performing operational cover for an intelligence and clandestine network
that included assassinations, years before he ever got there.”
“So Kennedy was killed by an in-house US capability
that was managed by Otto Skorzeny. Now I know I must say that when a lot of
people jump to the conclusion that Nazis killed the President, and that’s the
furthest from the truth. Nazis did not kill Kennedy.”
“The correct way to say it is this - there was an
assassination capability inherent and located within one office of the CIA – that
was highly compartmented and highly controlled. So, it’s not like the entire
CIA was involved. It was literally only one office, and even then, within the
office it was probably on a need to know basis… The capability itself, the
Executive Action capability itself, I equate in the book to the use of Atomic
Weapons. The only way to launch this capability would have been by Executive
Order – by the President, or the National Command authority – that level, - the
Secretary of Defense, at that level. It was a presidential, national command
authority level capability. Somebody at the CIA couldn’t use it. It would even
have been impossible for even rogue use. This was a Command and Control
situation. A target would be designated. But in other words, to use this
capability would have required Executive Approval.”
“So this small office within the CIA – called Staff
D. And the guy who ran it was a man named William K. Harvey, during that time
period. He managed the program. He managed that program – much like maintaining
a nuclear bomber. There are US Air Force personal who man the bomber, and
there’s people who maintain the bomber, but they can’t launch the bomber. That
comes from the President. The same with this capability.”
And this capability – that can only be activated
from the highest executive levels of government, confirms my thesis that
elements of the Valkyrie plan to kill Hiltler were used, especially the aspect
of that plan that had the victim sign off and actually approve the plan and the
operation, as Hitler approved Valkyrie as an emergency measure to call out the
Home Guard, and with the CIA seeking JFK’s approval of their plans to kill
Castro, especially AMLASH and the Pathfinder Operation.
While Ganis doesn’t get into ballistics, forensics
or even bothering to identify the actual assassins, he does provide the basic
backdrop, the overall outline of the covert intelligence network operating in
Dallas at the time. He also details its history from the end of World War II,
and shows how it is all connected by The Skorzeny Papers.
In his radio interview, Ganis says that the Skorzeny Papers provides the "Cut-Outs" used in the Dealey Plaza Operation, and that if they didn't provide the answers to the assassination of President Kennedy, they are the KEY to understanding it.
And I agree, they are a key that will open a lot of new doors, shining some light into some dark corridors that some would prefer to leave locked and dark.
(BK NOTES: I will be going into the names in the Skorzeny Papers in detail ASAP and elaborate further on this line of inquiry. )
