Final_Judgment

[248] Final Judgment 309
DeGaulle's inquiries into the activities of the SDECE in the year
following the JFK assassination had an interesting consequence. The
Mossad's CIA man James J. Angleton's own machinations—his purported
discovery of KGB "moles" in the SDECE's ranks—had created havoc in
French intelligence forcing the French president to take action.
According to Angleton's biographer, Tom Mangold: "Within the year,
DeGaulle finally lost his patience with the CIA. The French president,
quietly, without any publicity, issued an order terminating all joint
operations between SDECE and the CIA. For the next three years the two
services remained estranged, a break without precedent between the two
friendly countries." 682
This, of course, recalls DeGaulle's decision during the same time frame—
as noted previously—to expel the Mossad from France. In light of all that
we have considered here, it is likely that a large part of DeGaulle's move
against Angleton's CIA and Angleton's Mossad allies arose directly from
his discovery that his own intelligence service had been directly
compromised through the involvement of SDECE officer Georges
deLannurien in helping facilitate the JFK assassination.
PERMINDEX AND THE FRENCH CONNECTION
As we saw in Chapter 15, the Permindex connection (through Clay
Shaw in New Orleans) did indeed tie together not only the CIA and the
Lansky Syndicate and the Mossad—but also the French connection to the
assassination conspiracy. Unfortunately, however, although New Orleans
District Attorney Jim Garrison knew about Permindex, Garrison—at least at
the time of the Shaw trial—according to Paris Flammonde, felt that
Permindex "did not touch directly" 683 on the conspiracy.
Evidently Garrison perceived Permindex as only an indication of Shaw's
intelligence connections and nothing more. However, as assassination
researcher James DiEugenio, in one of his more perceptive comments,
points out: "This is questionable, but even so, Shaw's European
connections would have had some effect on his carefully constructed
image" 684 as some sort of "Wilsonian-FDR-Kennedy liberal." 685
Garrison's own words suggest that he may have had some direction
from French intelligence. At one point Garrison said that he had learned that
the conspirators plotting the JFK assassination had been penetrated by a
foreign intelligence service, but that it had "been for reasons wholly
unrelated to an investigation of the president's murder." 686
In fact, this "unrelated" matter could have been (and this is speculation, of
course) an investigation by DeGaulle into Shaw and the New Orleans
conspirators because of their collaboration with the OAS in plots against
DeGaulle. Unfortunately, at least at first, the "French connection" (which is
actually the Israeli connection) seems to have gone right by Garrison and
perhaps led in part to his failure to convict Shaw in the JFK conspiracy.
We do know that by the late 1970s, the House Assassinations
Committee inquiry was looking into the "French connection." However,