Henry Hecksher

[Steve Rosen]

These links are a continuation of the online comic by Dan Archer, this time depicting the murder of Rene Schneider in 1970.

http://www.archcomix.com/?p=99

http://www.archcomix.com/?p=103

http://www.archcomix.com/?p=106

I am posting this here only because of the proximity to the other Archer comic links in this thread.

I am not aware of any evidence that Henry Heckscher had anything to do with Rene Schneider's death.

[Paul Brancato]

Bumping this thread in hopes that we can revisit this. Hecksher was OSS, then stationed in Berlin as head of Counterintelligence until 1953, along with William Harvey and Theodore Shackley. Hmm. In the late '50's he was station chief in Laos. Spartacus has a bio on him. He is German born, Hamburg 1910, emigrated to the US in 1938. As part of the OSS in Berlin after the war took part, like Shackley, in interrogations of Nazi officers.

I'm reading Newman's second book on the assassination called Countdown to Darkness, and began by looking up QJWIN. There is a chapter called ZRRIFLE and QJWIN. Harvey's deputy in Berlin was German born Arnold Silver, who in 1960 became chief operations officer in Staff D before Harvey became chief.

I'm posting all this because I can't help but see a pattern here. The entire Berlin based CIA, working with Reinhardt Gehlen, seems to have moved by 1960 to JMWAVE in Miami. The question I have is what if anything is the connection between these OSS interrogators and later Berlin based CIA officers, and the post war Nazi Operation Odessa. One thing is clear, and that is that the Nazis they interrogated were let loose, not punished. So is there a connection between ZRRIFLE/QJWIN and Odessa?

Edited July 11, 2017 by Paul Brancato

[Larry Hancock]

I can't tell you about that specifically Paul but I can say that Harvey actually asked for guidance from the CIA office of security ...which had FBI connections....for directions to known safecrackers, burglars and smugglers in Europe before he made his recruiting trip for ZRRIFLE.  He was looking for assets to break into and steal code books from foreign residencies as well as for strong arm action against couriers etc.  I could recommend several good and more contemporary books that deal with Odessa and former NAZI, mostly SS, smuggling networks but I don't see any immediate connection.  I will say there has been a huge amount of good work on that in recent years and it nails down most of the real details on those post war smuggling networks (both people and money). 

Hecksher is another story entirely, I would recommend Dick Russell's most recent JFK book for details on Hecksher's background ...beyond what is in SWHT. 

 

[David Andrews]

Interesting to speculate on how much our need for Nazi-origin intelligence on Russia may have been caused by the American 20th-century isolationism that resisted our entrance into both World Wars.  That and perhaps a tendency to ignore the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution could not be reversed.

[Paul Brancato]

Agree David. But for me the question is what about after the war? How familiar are you about Nazi efforts to prepare for losing the War? We know about Paperclip of course. But don't you find it weird that this nexus of characters involved in post war Berlin show up in Miami in 1960 and Laos and the Golden Triangle later? Theodore Shackley was Reinhardt's interpreter and then the top CIA guy in Berlin until 1960. William Harvey was with him. I admit it's not so weird to have German born fluent German speakers like Hecksher and Silver involved in OSS dealings with captured Nazis. But given as you say the prewar connections between American elites like Brown Brothers Harriman, and Sullivan and Cromwell, is it so hard to imagine post war collaboration? Have you ever listened to Daniel Sheehan talk about this? His starting point was Iran-Contra, but his research intersected this nexus and he dug deep. And what about the fascist and Nazi connections in Dallas? George DeMohrenschildt? How much distance do we imagine between the far right in Dallas - HL Hunt, Walker etc, and the American Nazis? Dallas police and KKK or Minutemen? Isn't what we call the military industrial establishment an extension of this anti-Soviet hysteria? Isn't the CIA essentially an extension of what was formerly Military Intelligence (ONI and Army) and private corporate security? One can make an argument in favor of collaboration on the basis of fighting a common enemy to capitalism, or fascism, but we tend to deny its existence instead. The very fact that this conspiracy theory is dismissed so readily, that most Americans believe we won the war and vanquished the Nazi power structure, when the opposite is provable, is enough for me to question everything we've been taught. It was the anti-Soviet establishment that took power here and promoted what was first the Cold War, and now has become endless war against terrorists we conveniently created. And it seems obvious to me that JFK figured this out and tried to stop it, in vain. It's the main reason I really care about JFK, and post here, and have spent a lifetime reading and thinking about all this. 

Edited July 11, 2017 by Paul Brancato

[David Andrews]

Paul - I agree.  With the intermingling of US and German corporate entities (GE, IG Farben, etc., operating in both countries) before the war, there had to be extra-governmental intel pooling, which I'm sure helped Sullivan Cromwell mesh Brown Brothers with Thyssen.  Paperclip and the Gehlen network were, more accurately, sold on the basis of the government's isolationism, not the corporations'.

Edited July 12, 2017 by David Andrews