In 1902 my late father, Harry Bloomfield, and his brothers made a pilgrimage from Canada to Palestine. As small boys my brother and I never tired of hearing his stories of the Holy Land, and when he died of influenza during the epidemic in 1918, we resolved, young as we were, to keep alive his devotion to the ancient homeland of the Jews.

The years that followed were exciting ones. The [British] Mandate; the gradual dismemberment of the National Home to a quarter of its original area; the riots; the various Commissions culminating in the U.N.S.C.O.P.; partition; the American volt face; the Declaration of the State of Israel; the Arab invasions; bloody battles and ultimate victory.

The sacrifices of the Jews in Israel, the stirring and excitement accompanying the birth of the New State, the first painful stages of its growth, created in us a strong desire to see this phenomenon on the spot.

On March 12, 1949, in a blinding snowstorm that delayed our departure several hours while the runaways were being cleared, we took off from Montreal’s Dorval Airport. Our journey to Israel was circuitous. My brother is an international lawyer and had certain matters to attend to en route. So we traveled via London, Gibraltar, Tangier, Madrid, Rome, Athens and Nicosia. On March 28 our plane landed at Haifa. We traveled extensively throughout Israel from Dan to Beersheba, and, through the courtesy of the Israeli Army, across the Southern Negev Desert over the Scorpion’s Ladder with the first convoy of newspapermen and photographers to reach the Gulf of Aqaba since the war’s end.

I am a businessman and had never written for publication. My wife is an ardent Zionist (her grandmother was a delegate to the Second Congress at Basle in 1898), and wanting her to share my soul-stirring experiences in Israel, I wrote to her at length as I saw, heard, and thought. These letters, together with detailed notes I kept of our travels, form the basis of this diary. Its transformation into a book is due, in great measure, to the painstaking help and encouragement of my friend Abe Goldberg and my brother Louis.

On the barren, eroded slopes of Neve Ilan, a French Maquis kibbutz in the Jerusalem Corridor, Louis and I planted, one bright spring morning, the Bloomfield Memorial Forest, in honor of the man who taught us to be loyal Canadians and good Jews. We planted it in territory allotted to the Arabs under the Partition Plan, but won by the Jews after bitter fighting and many casualties. We did it as a symbol that this ground, stained by the blood of our heroes, must ever remain in Jewish hands.

There is circumstantial evidence suggesting that Bloomfield and Clay Shaw (using the aliases of Colonel René Bertrand and Colonel Beaument in the French spy agency, SDECE) solicited Antoine Guerini - leader of the Guerini Family, the top French-Corsican Mafia at Marseilles, France - to hire hit men to assassinate President Kennedy. The Guerini Family had extensive ties to the CIA since the late 1940s. The men Antoine Guerini selected later became the lieutenants for Auguste Ricord. Their names were Lucien Sarti, François Chiappe, and Jean-Paul Angeletti. Guerini asked a fourth man to participate as well, but he refused. His name was Christian David. Like the other three assassins, David later became one of Auguste Ricord’s top lieutenants. The relationships between Sarti, Chiappe, Angeletti, David, and Ricord were documented by Evert Clark and Nicholas Horrock in their 1973 book, Contrabandista.

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 Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon. Directly under the two-pronged leadership of Division Five and the DIA was the Control Group, their highly secret policy 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, the 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. One can readily observe that DISC is not compatible with an open Democracy and the U.S. Constitution. Consequently, the top secret arms manufacturers' police agency has been kept from the knowledge of even most U.S. officials and Congressmen.

The Defense Industrial Security Command had its beginnings when J. Edgar Hoover in the early 1930's organized the police force of the fledgling Tennessee Valley Authority at the request of David Lillienthal. The police force covered the entire TVA from Knoxville, Tennessee through Huntsville and Florence, Alabama 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 Lillienthal took it forward to cover the Atomic Energy Commission, thus tying it into the Army Intelligence Service.

L.M. Bloomfield, a Montreal, CANADA lawyer bearing the reputation as a sex deviate, the direct supervisor of all contractual agents with J. Edgar Hoover's Division Five, was the top co-ordinator for the network planning the execution. A Swiss corporation, Permindex, was used to head five front organizations responsible for furnishing personnel and supervisors to carry out assigned duties...

The Defense Industrial Security Command is the police and espionage agency for the U.S. munitions makers. DISC was organized by J. Edgar Hoover; William Sullivan, his chief assistant, is in direct command. We shall later examine the involvement of a large number of the DISC agents including Clay Shaw, Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby and others with Permindex's Louis Mortimer Bloomfield of Montreal, Canada in charge.

Since 2004, I have been seeking release of the Louis Mortimer Bloomfield archives collection, hold by Library and Archives Canada (LAC), the Canadian national archives. The collection was given to the Canadian government by L. M. Bloomfield in 1978-1980, on condition it was open to public 20 years after his death, which occurs in 1984. When I asked access to the open collection in summer 2004, LAC restricted access to the archives for at least 10 more years, as a direct result of my request. In April 2005, the day after Library and Archives released to me a few pages of administrative records on the Bloomfield archives, asked under a FOIA request, LAC extended to 25 years the new access restriction to the collection, again as a direct result of my request. In 2005, I open procedures with the Canadian Federal Court to obtain a judicial review of Library and Archives’ decision. After opposition by LAC to release documents in this case, the procedures were put back on a normal course in February 2006, and hearing in the case should be hold before fall 2006.

Does the key to former U.S. President John F. Kennedy's assassination lie buried in Canada's national archives?

Or is it another secret that has pitted Montreal researcher Maurice Philipps against Library and Archives Canada and the widow of a prominent former Montreal lawyer, the late Louis Mortimer Bloomfield.

One thing is certain: Whatever Bloomfield's widow is trying to keep under lock and key out of concern for "privacy and the reputation of Louis M. Bloomfield," it has left Canada's national archives wrestling with a dilemma that goes to the heart of the question of who controls access to private documents donated to the federal government.

A recent Federal Court ruling found the institution cannot arbitrarily extend the restriction on access to Bloomfield's papers well past the original deadline set by Bloomfield himself. Now, archive officials are struggling to decide when to lift the veil of secrecy on papers that have been judged of exceptional interest to Canada.

"We are in the process of reviewing the whole issue, and upon having completed that review we will make it known," Francois Gagnon, spokesman for Library and Archives Canada, said Friday.

Gagnon could not say how long that review is expected to take.

Bloomfield's nephew says he sees no reason to keep the papers shielded from public view. Montrealer Harry Bloomfield says the fight to keep his uncle's papers behind a veil of secrecy is likely fuelling conspiracy theories tying Bloomfield to JFK's assassination - theories that he says are completely unfounded.

At the centre of the controversy are 31 boxes of documents Bloomfield, a well-known lawyer who specialized in international law and was a pillar of a number of Montreal charities, donated to the archives a few years before his death in 1984.

In addition to correspondence with a number of prominent Canadian politicians and with George Bush Sr., the collection includes documents relating to a variety of charities in which Bloomfield was active, cases in which he was involved and papers related to some of his notable clients.

The one condition Bloomfield placed on the donation was that public access to the papers would be restricted for 20 years after his death. Members of the public who wanted to consult the Bloomfield Collection would have to obtain the permission of Bloomfield's widow, Justine Stern Bloomfield Cartier.

Philipps, author of the book De Dallas a Montreal (From Dallas to Montreal), which explores a possible Montreal connection to JFK's 1963 assassination in Dallas, stumbled on a reference to the Bloomfield connection in the mid-1990s and was intrigued - particularly given allegations advanced by some JFK conspiracy theorists that tied Bloomfield to the shooting, a shadowy international company called Permindex, the CIA and the agency that preceded it, the OSS.

While the conspiracy theory connection between Bloomfield and JFK's assassination is a complex one and has evolved over time, it appears to stem from the fact that he was named as a major shareholder in Permindex. There are allegations that Permindex was a front or shell company for the CIA and was used to funnel money for intelligence operations.

While Philipps does not believe the papers implicate Bloomfield in the shooting - in fact, he thinks they may clear Bloomfield's name - he says they might contain clues that could help shed light on JFK's assassination.

In 2004, however, just as the 20-year restriction was coming to an end and Philipps applied in writing for access to the collection, he was told the archives had extended the restriction on access at the request of Mrs. Bloomfield, who was still alive, until 25 years after her death.

When chief archivist Ian Wilson rejected his request to review the decision, Philipps took his case to court, saying the archives should respect Bloomfield's own wishes for a 20-year delay.

Lawyers for the archives argued the terms of Bloomfield's donation allowed his widow to extend the length of the restriction.

In his ruling, rendered in November and made public this month, Judge Simon Noel ruled that the donor's original wishes should be taken into account and the archives' view that Bloomfield's widow had a right to revise the terms of the restriction on his papers was an error in law. He ordered the archives to review the decision.