SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret Technology (12 page)

The killing of President Kennedy was planned and supervised by Division Five of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a relatively small department within the FBI whose usual duties are espionage and counter-espionage activities.

Actually, Division Five acted dually with the Defense Intelligence Agency which was acting on behalf of the Joints Chiefs of Staff (sic) in the Pentagon. Directly under the two-pronged leadership of Division Five and the DIA was the Control Group, their highly secret police agency – the Defense Industrial Security Command. The Defense Industrial Security Command has always been kept secret because it acts, in addition to its two
official
control organizations, on behalf of NASA, the Atomic Energy Commission, U.S. Information Agency, and the arms, equipment, ammunition, munitions and related miscellaneous supply manufacturing corporations contracting with NASA, the AEC, USIA, and the Pentagon….

The Defense Industrial Security Command had its beginnings when J. Edgar Hoover in the early 1930’s organized the police force of the Tennessee Valley Authority at the request of David Lilienthal. The police force covered the entire TVA from Knoxville, Tennessee through Huntsville and Florence, Alabama and into Kentucky and back through the eastern portion of Tennessee into southern Kentucky. This was one of the first federal agencies with a separate police force. This force grew and Lilienthal took it forward to cover the Atomic Energy Commission, thus tying it into the army intelligence service.

….A Swiss corporation, Permindex, was used to head five front organizations responsible for furnishing personnel and supervisors to carry out assigned duties (in the assassination).

The five groups under Permindex and their supervisors were:

1. The Czarist Russian, eastern European and Middle East exile organization called SOLIDARISTS, (sic) headed by Ferenc Nagy, ex-Hungarian premier, and John DeMenil, Russian exile from Houston, Texas, a close friend and supporter of Lyndon Johnson for over thirty years.

2. A section of the AMERICAN COUNCIL OF CHRISTIAN CHURCHES headed by H.L. Hunt of Dallas, Texas.

3. A Cuban exile group called FREE CUBA COMMITTEE headed by Carlos Prio Socarras, ex-Cuban president.

4. An organization of United States, Caribbean, and Havana, Cuba gamblers called the Syndicate…. This group worked closely with a Mafia family headed by Joe Bonanno.

5. The SECURITY DIVISION of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) headed by Werner Von Braun, head of the German Nazi rocket program from 1932 through 1945.
⁶
Headquarters for this group was the DEFENSE INDUSTRIAL SECURITY COMMAND at Muscle Shoals Redstone Arsenal in Alabama and on East Broad Street in Columbus, Ohio.
⁷

These are sensational allegations, indeed, so much so that one might be tempted to dismiss the document entirely, were it not for the fact that it is but a summary of the more unusual aspects of the Garrison investigation.

However, it would be a mistake to dismiss the document out of hand, for careful examination of the components of the conspiracy – in
its
version of the event – reveal that with but one or two exceptions, it is the standard intelligence-military industrial complex-in-cahoots-with-the-Mafia scenario that are common themes among more popular versions of the conspiracy.
⁸

But added to this there are a number of new players:

1. H.L. Hunt and an organization that is basically connected to fundamentalist-evangelical revivalist “Protestantism,” in other words,
big oil
masking behind a missionary organization;
⁹

2. A group of Eastern European exiles of right-wing political complexion, “headed by Ferenc Nagy.”

Let us pause a moment to consider these new players on the scene.

Most JFK conspiracy literature
does
mention Lee Harvey Oswald’s and Marina Oswald’s connection to the Russian and White Russian émigré community in Dallas, and in turn the connections of that community to big oil. Nonetheless, not much is made of this connection. It is as if researchers do not really know what to make of it. About all that one typically encounters is the fact that the Oswalds’ landlord, Ruth Paine, was involved in this community, and that her husband, Michael, worked for Bell Aerospace, the same Bell Aerospace that employed General Walter Dornberger, military head of Hitler’s V-2 project in conjunction with Werner Von Braun. But here most assassination researchers stop, not really noticing that the Nazi connections would multiply like rabbits, if one cared to look for them, for the fact of the matter is, the various societies, organizations, and groups of this Eastern European émigré community were but the North American connections – the leftovers, so to speak – of the vast network of German military intelligence that operated on and behind the Russian front throughout World War Two.

This military intelligence group was called
Fremde Heere Ost
(Foreign Armies East) and was headed by General Reinhard Gehlen. We shall have much more to say both about this intelligence network and its commanding general later. For now, however, it is to be noted that the Torbitt document, by naming Ferenc Nagy as “head” of this émigré community, is perhaps speaking symbolically, pointing the finger to a very hidden Nazi presence in the assassination. We are now in a position to examine the last new player in the assassination that the document mentions:

3. NASA security, headed by Von Braun, working inside the Defense Industrial Security Command (D.I.S.C.!) at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama.

In other words, the third new player in the assassination is the space program, and the Torbitt Document further implies that it is an aspect of the space program that is not only relatively hidden from the general public, but also which is under the direct control of Werner Von Braun, yet another Nazi connection.

But what of the “Permindex Corporation” in Switzerland, the entity allegedly coordinating all this malfeasance for the FBI and DIA? Who was involved with it? What were its purposes? A glance at its Board of Directors indicates why it attracted the attention of District Attorney Garrison, for among those on its board were, of course, Clay Shaw, the man Garrison actually indicted for conspiracy to murder the president. But others included an Italian Fascist who had married into the family of Hjalmar Schacht,
¹⁰
Hitler’s president of the Reichsbank and finance minister, and interestingly enough, also father-in-law to Hitler’s favorite SS commando, Otto Skorzeny. But these men hardly exhaust the unusual characters. There was an uncle to Egyptian King Farouk,
¹¹
the Italian minister of agriculture under Mussolini’s government, and yet another Hungarian ex-Nazi besides Ferenc Nagy, H. Simonfay.
¹²

As if that were not enough, the Torbitt Document then goes on to provide a rather thorough list of Permindex’s principal financial backing, a list that reads like a veritable who’s who of conspiracies and scandals that had
not yet even happened:

The principal financiers of Permindex were a number of U.S. oil companies, H. L. Hunt of Dallas, Clint Murchison of Dallas, John DeMenil, Solidarist director of Houston, John Connally as executor of the Sid Richardson estate, Haliburton Oil Co., Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, Troy Post of Dallas, Lloyd Cobb of New Orleans, Dr. Oechner of New Orleans, George and Herman Brown of Brown and Root, Houston, Attorney Roy M. Cohn, Chairman of the Board for Lionel Corporation, New York City, Schlemley Industries of New York City, Walter Dornberger, ex-Nazi general and his company, Bell Aerospace, Pan American World Airways and its subsidiary, Intercontinental Hotel Corporation…

and last but by no means least

…NASA contractors directed by the Defense Industrial Security Command.
¹³

In reading this bizarre list, one cannot help but think of the scandals-to-come, the Hunts and their attempt to corner the silver market and create a silver-backed currency for Texas(H. L. Hunt), the numerous allegations of conspiracy involved in the death of Karen Silkwood and her exposure of Kerr-McGee(Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma), current allegations that the real motivation for war with Iraq was oil (Haliburton).

And that’s not all. Even Senator Joseph McCarthy’s ghost hovers over the list of Permindex characters in the form of his legal council Roy Cohn. As if that were not enough, one of the banks through which Permindex often allegedly worked or channeled funds was the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro of Italy, a bank linked to many other shady scandals, including that of the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI scandal. And, at the end of this list, as if to highlight its importance, is NASA and its contractors, who, notes the Torbitt Document, “are directed by the Defense Industrial Security Command,” which is headed by Werner Von Braun.

But directed to do what? Why would Werner Von Braun possibly be involved in such an affair?

The answer, perhaps, lies in the Torbitt Document’s stated purposes of the Permindex Corporation:

1. To fund and direct assassinations of European, Mid-East and world leaders considered threats to the Western World and to petroleum interests of the backers.

2. To furnish couriers, agents, and management in transporting, depositing and re-channeling funds through Swiss banks for Las Vegas, Miami, Havana and international gambling syndicate.

3. To coordinate the espionage activities of the Solidarists and Division Five of the FBI with groups in sympathy with their objectives and to receive and channel funds and arms from the financiers to the action groups.

4. To build, acquire and operate hotels and gambling casinos in the Caribbean, Italy and at other tourist areas.
¹⁴

Permindex, in other words,
was
the “Murder Incorporated” referred to by subsequent American Presidents.

But what does all this mean? What do these “purposes” indicate about the real nature of Permindex and its “backers”? Note first of all the purpose of eliminating, by assassination, any threat to the “petroleum interests of the backers.” In other words, big oil once again. Note also, that
any alternative technology such as those represented by cold fusion, or “zero point energy” devices, would represent precisely such a threat.
So one may safely assume that one is to take “the protection of the oil interests” in the widest possible sense, as not only eliminating foreign governments or parties that would threaten these interests’ overseas investments, but also the elimination of anyone presuming to a develop a technology
not
dependent on oil for energy.

Points two and three, however, point to something even deeper, and that is not only a hidden intelligence connection – a group operating
within
or only
in conjunction with
established and official agencies of the U.S. Federal government – but also a means for the independent financing of such groups and means of laundering the money to do it: casinos, ideal vehicles for laundering vast amounts of money quickly. This would explain the Mafia connection and involvement: it was at a “low” level of the conspiracy, the level necessary only for ensuring easy access and flow of dirty money to finance these projects.

All this makes a very strange context in which to view the last component of Permindex’s backers, “NASA contractors directed by the Defense Industrial Security Command.” What possible connection could NASA’s DISC under the direction of Von Braun have to do with this? One answer, perhaps, lies in the implied suggestion that Permindex may have conducted assassinations to protect more than just the oil industry.

The Torbitt Document later provides an indicator of just who might have really been pulling the strings in the “corporation” when it stated “Permindex in Switzerland, basically a NATO intelligence front using the remnants of Adolph Hitler’s intelligence units in West Germany and also, the intelligence unit of the Solidarists headquarters in Munich, Germany.”
¹⁵
Munich was, of course, also General Reinhard Gehlen’s personal headquarters for his Gehlenorg,
¹⁶
the network of spies and “Solidarists” he continued to run both behind the Iron Curtain and elsewhere, ostensibly for the Central Intelligence Agency and the West German
Bundesnachrichtendienst.
The Gehlenorg and its many connections were even implicated in the Generals’ Plot, the assassination attempt on French President Charles DeGaulle, an attempt DeGaulle’s
Sureté
quickly and efficiently traced and eliminated.
¹⁷

But why, again, would Von Braun be involved in such a conspiracy? While the Torbitt Document ultimately does not provide much of an answer to this question, it does hint at an answer that, shorn of its Nazi associations, will become a standard theme in some conspiracy views on the assassination, most notably that of Oliver Stone in his famous movie on the Garrison investigation, JFK. The Torbitt Document raises the prospect of the immense profits to be made from war, namely, the war in Vietnam:

The Nazi scientists are on management level also in the munitions and aerospace industry. Walter Dornberger, the Nazi general, left the space agency in the 1950’s to become a high official in Bell Aerospace Corporation and he was followed by over thirty of the Nazi scientists to control level in the corporations manufacturing munitions and aerospace material. This still left well over sixty of the scientists at command level in NASA.
¹⁸

Of course, in the 1950s the war in Vietnam was ending its French phase and only entering the American one, but in any case, the motive is clearly implied: there were big profits to be made in war.