Chapters Five - Eight

excerpted from the book

Final Judgment

The missing link in the JFK assassination conspiracy

by Michael Collins Piper

Wolfe Press, 1995, paperback

p40
By mid-1963 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion hated Kennedy with a passion. In fact, he considered JFK a threat to the very survival of the Jewish State.

... Former high-ranking U.S. diplomat Richard H. Curtiss, writing in 'A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute', elaborated on Kennedy's attitude toward the Middle East controversy. In a chapter appropriately titled: "President Kennedy and Good Intentions Deferred Too Long," Curtiss comments:

"It is surprising to realize, with the benefit of hindsight, that from the time Kennedy entered office as the narrowly-elected candidate of a party heavily dependent upon Jewish support, he was planning to take a whole new look at U.S. Mideast policy.

"He obviously could not turn the clock back and undo the work of President Truman, his Democratic predecessor, in making the establishment of Israel possible. Nor, perhaps, would he have wanted to.

"Kennedy was determined, however, to develop good new personal relationships with individual Arab leaders, including those with whom the previous administration's relations had deteriorated.

p42
Soon after Kennedy assumed office, Israel and its American lobby began to understand the import of Kennedy's positioning in regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel was not happy - to say the very least - and began putting heat on the White House through the egis of its supporters in Congress, many of whom relied upon support from the Israeli lobby for campaign contributions and political leverage.

p44
The American President cited four areas causing a strain in U.S.-Israel relations: 1) Israel's diversion-from the Arab States-of the Jordan River waters; 2) Israel's retaliatory raids against Arab forces in border areas; 3) Israel's pivotal role in the Palestinian refugee problem; and 4) Israel's insistence that the United States sell advanced Hawk missiles to Israel.

The President outlined to Mrs. Meir what has come to be called the Kennedy Doctrine. Kennedy told Meir that U.S. interests and Israel's interests were not always the same. The Talbot memorandum described Kennedy's forthright stance:

"We know," [said Kennedy] "that Israel faces enormous security problems, but we do too. We came almost to a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union last spring and again recently in Cuba... Because we have taken on wide security responsibilities we always have the potential of becoming involved in a major crisis not of our own making...

p44
"Our security problems are, therefore, just as great as Israel's. We have to concern ourself with the whole Middle East. We would like Israeli recognition that this partnership which we have with it produces strains for the United States in the Middle East... when Israel takes such action as it did last spring [when Israel launched a raid into Syria, resulting in a condemnation by the UN Security Council]. Whether right or wrong, those actions involve not just Israel but also the United States."

Stephen Green believes that Kennedy's position vis-a-vis Israel was an important stand: "It was a remarkable exchange, and the last time for many, many years in which an American president precisely distinguished for the government of Israel the differences between U.S. and Israeli national security interests."

Thus it was that John F. Kennedy informed Israel, in no uncertain terms, that he intended - first and foremost - to place America's interests - not Israel's interests - at the center of U.S. Middle East policy.

p45
Israel had been engaged in nuclear development during the past decade but continued to insist that its nuclear programs were strictly peaceful in nature. However, the facts prove otherwise.

... When Kennedy was coming into office in the transition period in December 1960 the Eisenhower administration informed Kennedy of Israel's secret nuclear weapons development at a site in the desert known as Dimona. Israel had advanced several cover stories to explain its activities at Dimona.

... Israel had kept the nuclear weapons program as secret as possible, but US intelligence had discovered the project. Kennedy termed the situation "highly distressing." Kennedy, upon taking office, determined that he would make efforts to derail Israel's nuclear weapons development. Nuclear proliferation was to be one of Kennedy's primary concerns.

Israel's intended entry into the nuclear arena was, as a consequence, a frightening prospect in JFK's mind, particularly in light of ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

p46
Kennedy's friendly overtures to the Arab states were only a public aspect of what ultimately developed into an all-out 'secret war' between Kennedy and Israel.

According to Seymour Hersh: "Israel's bomb, and what to do about it, became a White House fixation - part of the secret presidential agenda that would remain hidden for the next thirty years."

p46
ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR AGENDA

There was an added wrinkle. although Israel and the American CIA had established a longtime close and ongoing working relationship, the CIA was monitoring Israel's nuclear weapons development.

In March, 1963, Sherman Kent, the Chairman of the Board of National Estimates at the CIA, wrote an extended memorandum to the CIA's Director on the highly controversial subject entitled "Consequences of Israeli Acquisition of Nuclear Capability."

According to Stephen Green, for the purposes of this internal memorandum, Kent defined "acquisition" by Israel as either (a) a detonation of a nuclear device with or without the possession of actual nuclear weapons, or (b) an announcement by Israel that it possessed nuclear weapons, even without testing. Kent's primary conclusion was that an Israeli bomb would cause 'substantial damage to the U.S. and Western position in the Arab world.

According to Green's accurate assessment, "The memorandum was very strong and decidedly negative in its conclusions" which were as follows:

"Even though Israel already enjoys a clear military superiority over its Arab adversaries, singly or combined, acquisition of a nuclear capability would greatly enhance Israel's sense of security. In this circumstance, some Israelis might be inclined to adopt a moderate and conciliatory posture...

"We believe it much more likely, however, that Israel's policy toward its neighbors would become more rather than less tough. [Israel would] seek to exploit the psychological advantages of its nuclear capability to intimidate the Arabs and to prevent them from making trouble on the frontiers."

In dealing with the United States, the CIA analyst estimated, a nuclear Israel would "make the most of the almost inevitable Arab tendency to look to the Soviet Bloc for assistance against the added Israel threat, arguing that in terms of both strength and reliability Israel was clearly the only worthwhile friend of the U.S. in the area.

"Israel," in Kent's analysis, "would use all the means at its command to persuade the U.S. to acquiesce in, and even to support, its possession of nuclear capability."

In short, Israel would use its immense political power - especially through its lobby in Washington - to force the United States to accede to Israel's nuclear intentions.

However, the CIA did not make known its concerns about Israel's determination to produce a nuclear bomb. According to Green, "It is perhaps significant that the memorandum was not drafted as a formal national intelligence estimate (NIE), which would have involved distribution to several other agencies of the government. No formal NIE was issued by CIA on the Israeli nuclear weapons program until 1968."

... According to [New York financier Abe] Feinberg, "B.G. [Ben Gurion] could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man." The "old man" in this case was the president's father, former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, long considered not only an "anti-Semite" but a Hitler partisan.

Ben-Gurion's contempt for the younger Kennedy was growing by leaps and bounds-almost pathologically. According to Hersh, "The Israeli prime minister, in subsequent private communications to the White House, began to refer to the President as 'young man.' Kennedy made clear to associates that he found the letters to be offensive."

Kennedy himself told his close friend, Charles Bartlett, that he was getting fed up with the fact that the Israeli "sons of bitches lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability."

Obviously, to say the very least, there was no love lost between the two leaders. The U.S.-Israeli relationship was at an ever-growing and disastrous impasse, although virtually nothing was known about this to the American 4) public at the time.

p49
President Kennedy's efforts to resolve the problem of the Palestinian refugees also met with fierce and bitter resistance by Ben-Gurion. The Israeli leader refused to agree to a Kennedy proposal that the Palestinians either be permitted to return to their homes in Israel or to be compensated by Israel and resettled in the Arab countries or elsewhere.

Former Undersecretary of State George Ball notes in his book, The Passionate Attachment, that "In the fall of 1962, Ben-Gurion conveyed his own views in a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington, intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated: 'Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than all of Nasser's missiles and his Soviet MIGs... Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man."

Clearly, then, by this point, Ben-Gurion perceived the American president's policies to be a very threat to Israel's survival.

p50
According to Alfred Lilienthal: "Congress continued to maintain pressures on the White House. The "Israel first" bloc in the Senate attacked the administration for failing to conclude a defense pact to protect Israel and to call an embargo on all arms shipments to the Middle East.

"The legislators reechoed the Ben-Gurion contention that Israel had fallen behind in the arms race. Nasser, they claimed, was ready for a pushbutton war. Israel [was] easy to pinpoint and destroy and [could not] retaliate against four or five Arab states at once."

By this time-behind the scenes-Kennedy had ordered continuing surveillance of the Israelis and their push for the nuclear bomb. It was a top priority for Kennedy, by all estimations. However, to ensure that Israel's access to intelligence regarding the American spy operation against Israel was limited, the surveillance was being conducted directly out of then-CIA Director John McCone's office.

American inspectors the opportunity to come to Israel's nuclear operation at Dimona to verify that-as Israel claimed-the program was peaceful in nature. This was the president's last-ditch effort, apparently, to pacify Israel and, at the same time, find out precisely what was going on at Dimona. But Israel would not permit the inspection.

By this time there was a general understanding at the highest ranks of the Kennedy administration that there was a major problem at hand. The president's inner circle had begun to realize that Israel deemed Kennedy's refusal to knuckle under to Israel's demands as a dire threat to Israel's survival.

According to then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, speaking in retrospect, "I can understand why Israel wanted a nuclear bomb. There is a basic problem there. The existence of Israel has been a question mark in history, and that's the essential issue."

The Israelis - and particularly Ben-Gurion - would no doubt agree. In their view, John F. Kennedy himself was emerging as a threat to Israel's very existence:

JFK would simply not countenance a nuclear Israel and Israel's leaders believed that a nuclear Israel would ensure the continued survival of the Jewish State.

p52
John Hadden, the former CIA station chief in Tel Aviv at the time believes that John F. Kennedy was the last American president to have really tried to stop the advent of the Israeli atomic bomb. "Kennedy really wanted to stop it," said Hadden, "and he offered them conventional weapons [for example, the Hawk missiles] as an inducement.

"But the Israelis were way ahead of us. They saw that if we were going to offer them arms to go easy on the bomb, once they had it, we were going send them a lot more, for fear that they would use it."

p55
By spring of 1963, Kennedy and Ben-Gurion were at loggerheads, more seriously than ever before. What's more, Ben-Gurion was suffering a deep personal crisis (part of which, we now see, stemmed from his unhappy relationship with John F. Kennedy).

According to the Israeli prime minister's biographer, Dan Kurzman: "Lonely and depressed, Ben-Gurion felt strangely helpless. Leadership of Israel was slipping from his withered hands... Ben-Gurion began to show signs of paranoia. Enemies were closing in on him from all sides. A mere declaration by Egypt, Syria and Iraq in April 1963 that they would unite and demolish the "Zionist threat" threw him into near-panic."

... All of this, of course, contributed immensely to the problems between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion. Seymour Hersh writes: "Kennedy's relationship with Ben-Gurion remained al an impasse over Dimona, and the correspondence between the two became increasingly sour. None of those letters has been made public."

... Like much of the secret government files on the JFK assassination, the Kennedy exchanges with Ben-Gurion also have not been released - not even to U.S. government officials with full security clearances who have attempted to write classified histories of the period.

"It was not a friendly exchange," according to Ben-Gurion's writer, Yuval Neeman. "Kennedy was writing like a bully. It was brutal." Ben-Gurion's response was not passive either.

All of this exacerbated tensions-fierce tensions-between the American President and the Israeli leader. Kennedy's impatience was building. Relations between the United States and Israel were unlike they had ever been before. According to Hersh, "The resident made sure that the Israeli prime minister paid for his defiance." When Ben-Gurion once again sought the opportunity for a formal, ballyhooed state visit to Washington, Kennedy rebuffed him.

... It was then that Ben-Gurion made his position all too clear. He was convinced that what he perceived to be Kennedy's intransigence was an all-out threat to the continued survival of the Jewish State. JFK was perceived as an enemy of the Jewish people.

In one of his final communications with Kennedy, Ben-Gurion wrote: "Mr. President, my people have the right to exist.. . and this existence is in danger." It was at this time that Ben-Gurion demanded that Kennedy sign a security treaty with Israel. Kennedy refused.

On June 16, 1963 Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned as prime minister and defense minister. Thus, the "prophet of fire" ended his fifteen year career as grand old man of Israel. At the time, the Israeli press-and indeed the world press-told the world that Ben-Gurion's sudden resignation was a result of his dissatisfaction with domestic political scandals and turmoil that were rocking Israel.

However, the primary reason behind Ben-Gurion's departure was the Israeli leader's inability to pressure JFK into accepting Israel's demands. According to Hersh: "There was no way for the Israeli public... to suspect that there was yet another factor in Ben-Gurion's demise: is increasingly bitter impasse with Kennedy over a nuclear-armed Israel."

... In Ben-Gurion's eyes, John F. Kennedy was an enemy of the Jewish people and of his beloved state of Israel.

It is the thesis of this volume that Ben-Gurion, in his final days as Prime Minister, ordered Israel's Mossad to orchestrate the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Based upon additional evidence uncovered, we believe that the Mossad took the necessary steps and achieved that goal.

A MOSSAD HIT SQUAD

... Israel's respected Haaretz newspaper reported on July 3, 1992 that it was former Jewish underground terrorist-turned-Mossad operative Yitzhak Shamir (later Israeli Prime Minister) who headed a special Mossad hit squad during his service in the Mossad.

The Israeli newspaper reported that Shamir headed the assassination unit from 1955 until 1964 - the year after JFK's assassination. "The unit carried out attacks on perceived enemies and suspected Nazi War criminals," according to an account of the newspaper's report.

... With Israel's intimate ties to not only the American CIA but also the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate-(which we will examine in much further detail-)-the Israeli prime minister and his Mossad operatives had in place a network of allies with whom they could easily collaborate in orchestrating the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

Each of these powerful forces had good reason to take drastic action to put an end to the threat posed by JFK.

p59
THE COMING OF THE MESSIAH: LYNDON JOHNSON RUSHES TO ISRAEL'S RESCUE; U.S. MIDDLE EAST POLICY IS REVERSED

Within weeks of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Israel was perhaps the most immediate primary beneficiary of Kennedy's death - although this was not something that the controlled media told the American people.

The most immediate individual beneficiary of JFK's death was, of course, Lyndon Johnson who was a political favorite of Israel and its allies in Meyer Lansky's Organized Crime Syndicate.

It was Johnson who promptly reversed Kennedy's Middle East policy and who, for all intents and purposes, according to one historian, established Israel as America's 51st state.

There can be no question but that the assassination of John F. Kennedy accomplished several very specific things insofar as the U.S.-Israeli relationship was concerned:

1) It removed from the White House a president-John F. Kennedy who had - to put it lightly - greatly displeased Israel with his firm neutral stance and his refusal to be bullied by Israel's demands;

2) It placed in the Oval Office a president-Lyndon Johnson-who completely reversed long-standing U.S. Middle East policy and placed the United States firmly in Israel's camp-with a vengeance.

3) It allowed Lyndon Johnson to reverse JFK's Vietnam policy and begin escalating U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. This permitted Israel :o advance its own geo-political stance in the Middle East; and

4) It enabled Israel's allies in the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Organized rime Syndicate to gain a lock on drug-trafficking in Southeast Asia as an approximate result of U.S. involvement in the region.

Israel was clearly-and beyond doubt-the primary international beneficiary of Lyndon Johnson's presidency which only became possible through the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

p66
In the 1964 presidential election -which was Johnson's to lose - Lansky and his partners in Israel were assured a dream ticket come November. Both Johnson and his vice president [Hubert Humphrey] were bought and paid for.

Lansky and Israel made sure there wouldn't be any problems with any independent upstart second-generation multi-millionaire Irishmen like John F. Kennedy who was not only the son of a notorious anti-Semite but a bullheaded proponent of America's interests to boot.

Thus, having become ensconced in the presidency, Lyndon Johnson was in a position to do many favors for Israel.

Perhaps his most drastic efforts in service to Israel involved massive increases in U.S. taxpayer-financed foreign aid giveaways. Although John F. Kennedy himself had been generous to Israel in that regard, Johnson made Kennedy look like a piker.

Former Undersecretary of State George Ball comments that in the foreign aid realm: "The Israelis were proved right in their assumption that Johnson would be more friendly than Kennedy."

p68
It was clearly Lyndon B. Johnson who set the precedent for unlimited aid to Israel. All told, however, the death of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's assumption of the Oval Office marked a major change in overall U.S. policy. As Stephen Green writes, in all too clarifying detail in 'Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A Militant Israel':

"In the years !948-1963, America was perceived by all of the governments in the Middle East as a major power that acted upon the basis of its own, clearly defined national self-interest. Moreover, U.S. Middle East policy was just that - Middle East policy; it was not an Israeli policy in which Arab countries were subordinate actors.

"In the years 1948-1963, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy firmly guaranteed Israeli national security and territorial integrity, but just as firmly guaranteed those of Jordan, Lebanon, and the other nations of the region. That was what the Tripartite Declaration of 1950 was all about.

"For successive Israel governments in this period, the boundary line between U.S. and Israeli national security interests was drawn frequently, and usually decisively. Truman's policies on arms exports to the middle East, Eisenhower's stands on regional water development and on territorial integrity during the Suez Crisis, and Kennedy's candor with Mrs. Meir - all of these were markers on this boundary line.

"Nevertheless, during this time U.S. financial support for Israel far exceeded that given any other nation in the world, on a per capita basis. And U.S. diplomatic support for Israel in the UN and elsewhere was no less generous.

"But the limits to U.S. support for Israel were generally understood by all of the countries of the region, and it was precisely these limits that preserved America's ability to mediate the various issues that composed the Arab-Israeli dispute.

"Then, in the early years of the Johnson administration, 1964-1967, U.S. policy on Middle Eastern matters abruptly changed. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that it disintegrated. America had a public policy on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, but suddenly had a covert policy of abetting Israel's nuclear weapons program. We had a public policy on arms balance in the region, but secretly agreed, by the end of 1967, to become Israel's major arms supplier.

"Officially, the United States was "firmly committed to the support of the political independence and territorial integrity of all the [Middle Eastern] nations," while consciously, covertly, the Johnson "Middle East team" set about enabling Israel to redraw to her advantage virtually every one of her borders with neighboring Arab states.

"It was, of course, a policy without principle, without integrity. But it was also ineffective, in the sense that Israel steadily continued to act in ways that ignored U.S. national security interests."

p69
According to [Stephen] Green [Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A Militant Israel]:

"In a period in which the Johnson White House was becoming increasingly obsessed with the war in Vietnam, Israel's military leaders offered to impose stability upon the peoples and countries of the Middle East-it was to be a 'Pax Hebraeca.'

"There were, of course, costs involved for America. The United States would have to take the initial steps toward becoming what three previous Presidents had said we never would be-Israel's major arms supplier. We would also at least temporarily forfeit our role as primary mediator of the multifaceted Arab-Israeli dispute.

"The new arrangement would necessitate throwing our long-standing nuclear nonproliferation treaty to the winds, the 1968 treaty to the contrary notwithstanding.

"Perhaps most important, U.S. national security interests in the region would become merged with Israel's to a degree that was, and is to this day, unique in the history of U.S. foreign relations."

p71
... Israel's friends in the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate stood to benefit from the Vietnam conflict...

The Lansky crime empire began operating major global drug trafficking, largely under CIA cover, throughout Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, during which time the drug problem began escalating to a major degree in the United States and elsewhere.

Now, many years later, the CIA's role in the global drug market is only now just coming to the surface. The Iran-contra scandal, for example, shed some light on this little known aspect of the underbelly of world affairs. Thus, the joint Israel-Lansky-CIA combine shared a major benefit from American involvement in Vietnam.

p71
Israel and its covert allies did indeed have a messiah in Lyndon Baines Johnson. In his book, The Passionate Attachment, former Undersecretary of State George Ball summarized the results of Johnson's Middle East policies: First, the [Johnson] administration put America in the position of being Israel's principal arms supplier and sole unqualified backer.

"Second, by assuring the Israelis that the United States would always provide them with a military edge over the Arabs, Johnson guaranteed the 'escalation of an arms race... Third, by refusing to follow the advice of his aides that America make its delivery of nuclear-capable F-4 Phantoms conditional on Israel's signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Johnson gave the Israelis the impression that America had no fundamental objection to Israel's nuclear program.

"Fourth, by permitting a cover-up of Israel's attack on the Liberty, President Johnson told the Israelis in effect that nothing they did would induce American politicians to refuse their bidding. From that time forth, the Israelis began to act as if they had an inalienable right to American aid and backing."

As Stephen Green concluded in his discussion of the incredible changes in U.S. policy toward Israel that took place during the Johnson era [Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A Militant Israel]:

"By June of 1967, for a variety of reasons that prominently included 'domestic political considerations,' Lyndon Johnson and his team of foreign-policy advisors had completely revised U.S.-Israeli relations. To all intents and purposes, Israel had become the 51st state."

p72
ISRAEL'S GODFATHER: THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE MEYER LANSKY, THE CIA, THE FBI & THE ISRAELI MOSSAD

If it had not been for international crime boss Meyer Lansky there might not be a state of Israel today. This is something that Israel would rather be forgotten.

Israel was established as a state, in major part, through the political, financial and moral support of Meyer Lansky and his associates and henchmen in Organized Crime. Lansky's interests and Israel's interests were almost incestuous. In fact, Lansky's chief European money laundering bank was an operation run under the auspices of a high-ranking, longtime officer of Israel's Mossad.

Lansky's intimate ties with not only American intelligence (including both the CIA and the FBI) made the Russian-born mobster the "untouchable" leader of the global organized crime syndicate.

p72
In the years prior to Kennedy's ascendancy to the presidency, a little-known, but immensely powerful underworld figure by the name of Meyer Lansky had schemed and shot his way to the top of the crime syndicate.

That syndicate was not just national-it was international-and the uncrowned king of crime was Meyer Lansky-the so-called "chairman of the board" of that incredible criminal empire which spanned the globe.

It was Meyer Lansky, early in his criminal career, who had emerged as one of the leading sponsors of the state of Israel and whose most intimate associates were among the chief financial patrons of the influential Israeli lobby in America.

What's more, Lansky had also forged close ties with Israel's allies in the American CIA - an agency that, in itself, had entered into a bitter war with John F. Kennedy.

Thus, when JFK came to blows with not only Israel and its allies in the Lansky Organized Crime empire, but also with the CIA, the American president had unwittingly forged a deadly alliance among his fiercest foes.

p82
THE ADL AND ORGANIZED CRIME

The liquor industry, largely controlled by Jewish families such as the Bronfman family, and others, have been major contributors to the ADL [Anti-Defamation League] financing a large portion of its budget over the years. These same liquor interests had longtime contacts with [Meyer] Lansky from his earliest years in the bootlegging and rum-running rackets.

p85
Meyer Lansky was very much a "godfather" in organized crime, far more influential than even the most powerful Mafia boss in any city in America. All of this, then, accounts for Lansky's preeminent role in the underworld.

It is for this reason, then, that when we refer to the "Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate" we are referring to not only the "Mafia" but also to the powerful Jewish interests that are inter-connected here.

It was the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate that played a pivotal role in the establishment of Israel. Lansky, you see, was Israel's modem-day "Godfather." Lansky was with Israel from the beginning.

p86
It was Lansky's connection with the OSS-Naval Intelligence enterprise known as "Operation Underworld" that brought him into a strange global network that ultimately paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel.

Operation Underworld was stationed at Rockefeller Center in New York and supervised by a British intelligence operative named William Stephenson (who was said to be Ian Fleming's inspiration for the fictional character, James Bond.) It was Stephenson who worked closely with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith as well as the FBI in coordinating anti-Nazi intelligence operations in the United States.

(In later years, following the establishment of Israel, the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate-financed ADL emerged as an unregistered foreign agent for Israel, handling intelligence and propaganda operations for the Jewish State, in collaboration with the FBI and the CIA.

... it was Operation Underworld's William Stephenson who became a critical player in the establishment of Israel's Mossad.

Stephenson's top aide was Louis Bloomfield, later an attorney for the Lansky-linked Bronfman bootlegging family and himself a key player in the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.

There is little question but that Stephenson and Bloomfield were in close contact with Lansky and his henchmen during this period. Lansky himself, as we have seen, acknowledged his own role in Operation Underworld.

Following World War II, the activities of Operation Underworld and many of the key players shifted to a new front: the establishment of Israel.

p87
The real key to the Lansky connection with Israel is money. The newly established State of Israel not only needed money to exist, but the organization of a new government was an ideal opportunity for Lansky and his confederates to establish their own worldwide financial-and criminal network. In its early years Israel was "untouchable." The emotional memories of the experiences of the Jewish people during World War II - indeed throughout history -were the foundations upon which Israel had been established. Criticism of Israel was verboten. The new Jewish State was an ideal cover under which Lansky and his criminal syndicate could operate unfettered.

p95
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON AND THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISRAEL, THE CIA AND THE MEYER LANSKY ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE

By 1963 John F. Kennedy was not only at war with Israel and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate, but he was also at war with their close ally in the international intelligence underworld-the CIA. That was a deadly combination.

The CIA and Israel had forged a close-working strategic alliance in the previous decade. Their joint enterprises around the globe tied the CIA and Israel together inextricably. Israel's interests-and the CIA's interests-were often one and the same, perhaps too often. Likewise with the Meyer Lansky crime network.

What's more, Israel's chief contact at the CIA in Washington, James Jesus Angleton, ultimately played a pivotal role in the JFK assassination conspiracy cover-up. Angleton, too, had close links with the same forces in the Lansky Syndicate.

At the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters at Langley, Virginia there was one man-just one man alone-who knew perhaps better than any other American, Israel's intentions and attitudes toward President John F. Kennedy. This was the enigmatic James Jesus Angleton.

Angleton was so close to the Israelis during his tenure at the CIA that, following his death in 1987, a monument was unveiled in Israel by its government in his honor.

This is evidently one of the few known public monuments to any American CIA official anywhere in the entire world. Clearly quite an honor for Angleton but actually one of several memorials to Angleton in Israel.

According to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, co-authors of Dangerous Liason: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, Angleton was "a man who for nearly a quarter of a century was one of the most powerful and mysterious figures in the CIA."

According to the Cockburns, "Angleton was involved in many strange and secret dealings in the world of intelligence, but the Israelis like to talk of him as having been especially close to them, which is why they paid public homage to his memory."

Recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) while at Yale University, Angleton was a fast-rising star in the world of clandestine activities, and following the abolition of the OSS after World War II, Angleton entered into service with the Central Intelligence Agency after the CIA was established in 1947.

By 1954 Angleton assumed the highly sensitive post of chief of CIA counterintelligence. What's more, Angleton's influence within the CIA itself was of a greater magnitude than what otherwise might be expected. Angleton was a very powerful-and secretive-man.

p95
According to Tom Mangold, Angleton's biographer, CIA Director Allen Dulles and his deputy, Richard Helms, who later went on to become CIA director during the administration of Lyndon Johnson, were Angleton's mentors. However, Mangold says, Helms was Angleton's "chief patron."

(Dulles, of course, was later fired as CIA director by John F. Kennedy and then, in a twist of fate-or by design-served on the Warren Commission which ostensibly investigated JFK's murder.

(And it would be Helms, along with Angleton, who would later sign off on a controversial intra-agency memo that would ultimately-and apparently unwittingly-blow the lid off the CIA's involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.

p97
BEN-GURION'S MAN IN WASHINGTON

Most important to Angleton, however, was his relationship with the Mossad. In fact, he was the CIA's longtime, self-appointed man at the agency's Israel desk.

Angleton's biographer, Tom Mangold, points out that "The legends alone surrounding his twenty years as head of the Israeli Desk would fill another book, as indeed would the truth."

And although Mangold's account of Angleton's career devoted hardly any attention to Angleton's intimate ties with Israel and its Mossad, Mangold does state flatly: "I would like to place on the record, however, that Angleton's closest professional friends overseas, then and subsequently, came from the Mossad and that he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death."

Angleton, in fact, had long-standing direct ties with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion himself, dealing with the Israeli leader on an intimate basis. If there was anyone in the CIA who knew of Ben-Gurion's distaste for JFK, it was Angleton. As a devoted friend of Israel-and chief liaison with the Mossad-Angleton had to be fully aware of the raging conflict between the Israeli prime minister and the American president who refused to bow to Israel's demands.

And considering President Kennedy's efforts to build bridges with the Soviet Union and his efforts to wind down the Cold War, one knows, beyond question, that Angleton-hard-line, even fanatical anti-communist that he was-viewed Kennedy's overtures with outrage and disgust.

KENNEDY A THREAT

Clearly, John F. Kennedy was not only a threat to Israel and the CIA and their allies in the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate, but also to James Jesus Angleton himself. Kennedy's war with the CIA could spell an end to Angleton's career and the world-wide intelligence empire that the strange and calculating counterintelligence boss had assembled.

The ties between Angleton's CIA and the Mossad were such, according to historian Steven Stewart, that they "had the effect of ensuring that virtually every CIA man in the Middle East was also working at second hand for the Israelis ... as the CIA's policy changed almost overnight, in an extraordinary volte-face, from being largely pro-Arab to becoming almost totally pro-Israeli" - a close relationship indeed.

THE CIA AND ISRAEL: EARLY DAYS

It is the CIA's relationship with Israel that is most significant in terms of that agency's global intrigue-and, of course, in light of the CIA's documented role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And it was Angleton who was the prime mover behind the CIA-Israeli Mossad's close working relationship-in fact, from its very beginnings.

The late Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former advisor to the CIA and former member of the policy-planning staffs of the White House and Pentagon, had written extensively on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. In his book, Ropes of Sand, Eveland reviewed the beginnings of what Andrew and Leslie Cockbum call the "dangerous liaison"-America's covert relationship with Israel.

This covert relationship was conducted primarily through the egis of Angleton's Israeli desk at the CIA. Eveland writes of its origins:

"CIA operations had started before Allen Dulles became director that had long-range implications from which the United States might find it difficult to disengage.

"Stemming from his wartime OSS liaison with Jewish resistance groups based in London, James Angleton had arranged an operational-intelligence exchange agreement with Israel's Mossad, upon which the CIA relied for much of its intelligence about the Arab states."

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ASSASSINATION PLOTS

The CIA and the Mossad had many joint ventures over the years, all conducted under Angleton's watchful eye.

Some of those ventures, of course, included assassination plots. In fact, after President Eisenhower commented that he hoped that "the Nasser problem could be eliminated" (referring to what he perceived to be an intransigent stance by the Egyptian president) - CIA Director Allen Dulles and Angleton launched a plan to kill Nasser.

However, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (brother of the CIA director) intervened and called off the CIA dogs.

The CIA was also engaging in covert actions against Israel's enemies in Syria. One CIA conspiracy in 1958 to overthrow the nationalist government of Syria-which anti-communist fanatics such as Angleton considered to be "leftist"-fell apart when the CIA's paid henchmen, Syrian nationals (who evidently were patriots), turned themselves in and exposed the CIA's plot to the Syrian government.

At the time, CIA director Dulles commented, "I guess that leaves Israel's intelligence service as the only one on which we can count, doesn't it."

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According to intelligence historian Richard Deacon, Israel's relationship with the CIA (and Angleton, in particular) had been firmly cemented: "On the American side the Israelis had won a certain amount of unofficial support from the CIA even during the Eisenhower era. The CIA had been realistic enough to realize that the Eisenhower appeasement policy towards the Arab world would ultimately be disastrous for every American interest, military or economic.

"For this reason they had maintained a policy of allowing all intelligence operations in Israel to be carried out entirely by the Mossad. In short, what this meant was that the CIA had no office or station chief in Tel Aviv, but that certain officers in the US Embassy there co-operated with the Mossad.

"In theory this entailed an exchange of intelligence between the two sides and in practice this worked rather better than one could have expected normally.

"The key figures in this arrangement were originally [Mossad chief] Isser Harel, Ephraim Evron, who later became deputy Israeli ambassador in Washington, and James Angleton, chief of the CIA Counter-Intelligence."

According to intelligence historian Deacon, Angleton exploited the new intimate relationship between the CIA and the Mossad for use internationally:

"Angleton, having seen the folly of U.S. foreign policy during the abortive Suez operation, decided to counteract the State Department's bias towards the Arabs by close cooperation with Israel. It was he who first saw the need for a new policy in the Middle East and safeguards against increasing Russian influence.

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Revelation of either a CIA role or an Israeli role in the murder of JFK would have inevitably destroyed not only America's relationship with Israel, but it would have brought the international house of joint CIA-Mossad-Lansky Crime Syndicate conspiracies tumbling down.

And James Jesus Angleton, as the CIA's intimate liaison with Israel, would have been destroyed in the process. Likewise with his CIA patrons, Allen Dulles and Richard Helms.

Angleton's "chief patron" Richard Helms left the CIA in 1973. This was the beginning of the end of the CIA career of James Jesus Angleton. Angleton himself was fired from the CIA on December 20, 1974. Revelations about Angleton's involvement in the CIA's domestic spying and other covert activities on American soil were too much for even the CIA to handle.

Final Judgment

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