From - Fri Oct 15 12:22:19 1999
From: 6489mcadamsj@vms.csd.mu.edu (John McAdams)
Newsgroups: alt.assassination.jfk
Approved: jmcadams@execpc.com
Subject: IL PAESE SERA and Communist disinformation
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 1999 17:19:56 GMT
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     From "Communist Forgeries," a Senate Internal Security
Sub-Committee hearing on 2 June 61, testimony of Richard Helms, pp.
2-4:

<Quote on>

	In recent days we have seen an excellent example of how the
Communists use the false news story.  In late April rumors began to
circulate in Europe, rumors charging that the Algerian-based generals
who had plotted the overthrow of President De Gaulle had enjoyed
support from NATO, the Pentagon, or CIA.  Although this fable could
have been started by supporters of General Challe, it bears all the
earmarks of having been invented within the bloc.
	In Western Europe this lie was first printed on the 23rd of
April by a Rome daily called Il Paese.

	Senator KEATING:  Is Il Paese a Communist paper?

	Mr. HELMS:  It is not a Communist paper, as such.  We believe
it to be a crypto-Communist paper but it is not like Unita, the large
Communist daily in Rome.  It purports to be an independent newspaper,
but obviously it serves Communist ends.
	The story charged --

	"It is not by chance that some people in Paris are accusing
the American secret service headed by Allen Dulles of having
participated in the plot of the four 'ultra' generals * * * Franco,
Salazar, Allen Dulles are the figures who hide themselves behind the
pronunciamentos of the 'ultras'; they are the pillars of an
international conspiracy that, basing itself on the Iberian
dictatorships, on the residue of the most fierce and blind
colonialism, on the intrigues of the C.I.A. * * * reacts furiously to
the advance of progress and democracy * * *."

	We found it interesting that Il Paese was the starting point
for a lie that the Soviets spread around the world.  This paper and
its evening edition, Paese Sera, belong to a small group of journals
published in the free world but used as outlets for disguised Soviet
propaganda.  These newspapers consistently release and replay
anti-American, anti-Western, pro-Soviet bloc stories, distorted or
wholly false.  Mario Malloni, director of both Il Paese and Paese
Sera, has been a member of the World Peace Council since 1958.  The
World Peace Council is a bloc-directed Communist front.

	On the next day Pravda published in Moscow a long article
about the generals' revolt.

	Senator KEATING:  May I interrupt there?  Did Pravda pick it
up as purportedly from Il Paese?  Did they quote the other paper, the
Italian paper, as the source of that information?

	Mr. HELMS:  Pravda did not cite Il Paese.  But instead of
having this originate in Moscow, where everybody would pinpoint it,
they planted the story first in Italy and picked it up from Italy and
this is the way it actually went out in point of time [sic].

<Quote off>

This is important context for understanding the PAESE SERA articles
that linked Clay Shaw (correctly) to CMC/Permindex, and connected
CMC/Permindex (falsely) to support for the OAS attempts against De
Gaulle, various fascist and Nazi forces, etc.  The PAESE SERA stories
were quickly picked up and repeated by leftist journals in France,
Moscow, and Canada.

This by no means proves that the CMC/PERMINDEX stuff was a KGB
disinformation operation.  The left-wing journalists at the paper
would have been happy to smear what they considered to be the "forces
of capitalist imperialism" without any direct orders from Moscow.
Indeed, Helms is only *inferring* that the earlier story about anti-De
Gaulle generals was a KGB operation.

But this episode does put the 1967 articles on Shaw/Permindex into
context.  The articles were, in one way or another, motivated by a
communist ideological agenda.

.John