Chapters Nine - Sixteen

excerpted from the book

Final Judgment

The missing link in the JFK assassination conspiracy

by Michael Collins Piper

Wolfe Press, 1995, paperback

p110
A LITTLE UNPLEASANTNESS: JFK'S WAR WITH ISRAEL'S ALLIES AT THE CIA

Just six weeks before John F. Kennedy was shot, a top administration official warned that a CIA-orchestrated coup in America was a fearful possibility. The CIA-like its allies in Israel had good reason (in its own perception) to want to see JFK removed from the White House and replaced with Lyndon B. Johnson.

JFK's battle with the CIA over the Bay of Pigs debacle was just the beginning. JFK was-by the last days of his presidency-not only fighting the CIA's efforts to involve the United States ever more deeply in Southeast Asia, but he was also moving toward dismantling the CIA entirely. The CIA's very existence was in danger.

In 1972 the Washington Observer newsletter published perhaps what was one of the first hints-in print-that the Kennedy family itself suspected that the CIA had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

According to the Observer, "Back in 1963, shortly after President Kennedy's assassination, Robert F. Kennedy, while he was still Attorney General, conducted his own private investigation, which ran parallel with the official inquiry into the assassination conducted by the Warren Commission. Kennedy's investigation featured trips to this country by an Inspector Hamilton, former Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard. Hamilton, an old friend of Joseph P. Kennedy, had been retained by the attorney general to help unravel the real truth about the murder of JFK.

"After long conferring with the members of the Kennedy family and making a few discreet soundings with his own contacts, Hamilton zeroed on the fact that the assassination of John Kennedy had occurred very shortly after his brother Bobby had made some preliminary moves for direct personal control of the CIA, whose leadership he blamed for the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

"Hamilton, following the cui bono ("whom does it benefit?") reasoning, reached the conclusion that Bobby's move to seize control of the CIA had something to do with the murder of his elder brother."

KENNEDY MOVES AGAINST THE CIA

In his best-selling, Plausible Denial in which he pinpoints the CI A's role in the JFK assassination conspiracy, veteran JFK assassination investigator Mark Lane commented on the CIA's move against the president:

"If the CIA operatives, officers, and former officers believed that the defense of their Agency and their nation required the elimination of President Kennedy because he was about to dismantle their organization, one could comprehend, while neither accepting nor condoning their viewpoint, that their concept of self-defense required them to use deadly force. Most relevant, therefore, is not what Kennedy was or was not about to do vis-a-vis the CIA, but what the leaders of the Agency believed he might do.

"John F. Kennedy made it clear that he planned to destroy the CIA. The New York Times reported on April 25, 1966, under a subheadline, "Kennedy's Bitterness,' that 'as the enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, [Kennedy] said to one of the highest officials of his Administration that he wanted 'to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.'

"He clearly was not suggesting a modest legislative proposal or executive order to modify or reform the organization. The total destruction of the Agency was his apparent objective."

p111
CONTROLLING THE CIA

[Mark] Lane points out that Kennedy's preliminary actions against the CIA had already been set in motion and that the president was very clearly moving toward ultimate evisceration of the agency.

"[Kennedy] dealt with the CIA through the implementation of a threepoint emergency program designed to control the agency. He fired its most culpable and powerful leaders, he appointed a high-level committee, the Cuban study group, to investigate the misdeeds of the organization so that he might determine what additional short-range limitations were required and, in the interim, he dramatically reduced the powers and jurisdiction of the Agency and established strict limits as to its future actions through National Security Action memoranda."

"Kennedy then sought to control the Agency by sharply reducing its ability to act in the future through National Security Action Memoranda 55, 56 and 57. These documents, in theory, eliminated the ability of the CIA to wage war. The CIA would not be permitted to initiate any operation requiring greater firepower than that generated by handguns."

That all of these actions upset the CIA and its allies is undoubted. One man on the scene at the time was Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who served as liaison between the Defense Department and the CIA during the relevant period.

According to Prouty, "Nothing I had ever been involved in my entire career had created such an uproar. NSAM 55 stripped the CIA of its cherished covert operations role, except for small actions. It was an explosive document. The military-industrial complex was not pleased."

THE CIA AND VIETNAM

However, Kennedy's conflict with the CIA went well beyond the issue of Cuba. The burgeoning issue of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia had positioned the president at odds with the CIA even further.

By late 1963 JFK's conflict with the CIA was in full force and although it was not the subject of heated public discussion, the word was leaking out through official and un-official channels that there was something afoot at the highest levels.

On October 3 1963, the dean of America's newspaper columnists, Arthur Krock was writing frankly in the New York Times of Kennedy's war with the CIA - a war which was intensifying over the issue of Vietnam. Krock's front page article, in fact, was entitled, "The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam."

But what is so astounding about the column is that Krock quoted a high-level administration source as having suggested that if there were ever a coup d'etat in the United States, one might expect that it would be the CIA which was responsible-this just weeks before JFK was murdered.

The significance of this astounding column is that it was Arthur Krock who affixed his name to this explosive report: Krock was a longtime close friend and confidant of the Kennedy family and had even ghost-written several published works on behalf of the president's father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy.

The columnist was a key Kennedy link in press circles and would have been the first and foremost choice of President Kennedy if JFK had wished to utilize the press to bring his conflict with the CIA into the public arena. As Mark Lane so aptly described the column: "This was John F. Kennedy sending out a message to the American people through his trusted conduit Arthur Krock."

This column remained forgotten in the wake of the president's assassination, but it was in 1992 that Lane surfaced the prophetic warning and began bringing it to the attention of American audiences who now had a renewed interest in the Kennedy assassination.

p113
[Mark] Lane described the column: "Krock pointed out that John F. Kennedy had gone to war against the CIA. He concluded that Kennedy no longer could control the CIA.

"The columnist stated that President Kennedy sent Henry Cabot Lodge, his Ambassador to Vietnam, with orders to the CIA on two separate occasions and in both cases the CIA ignored those orders, saying that it was different from what the agency thought should be done. In other words, the 15 CIA had decided that it-not the president-would make the decisions as to how American foreign policy should be conducted."

Lane pointed out that a source for Krock's column was a report filed for the Scripps-Howard newspapers by foreign correspondent Richard Starnes who had interviewed a number of high-ranking administration officials and others who expressed their concern about the CIA's intransigence.

A CIA-SPONSORED COUP D'ETAT?

According to Krock's column: "Among the views attributed to United States officials ... including one described as a "very high American official ... who has spent much of his life in the service of democracy... are the following:

The CIA's growth was "likened to a malignancy" which the "very high official was not sure even the White House could control... any longer."

"If the United States ever experiences [an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government] it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon." The agency "represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone."

"Whatever else these passages disclose, they most certainly establish that representatives of other Executive branches have expanded their war against the CIA from the inner government councils to the American people via the press.

"And published simultaneously are details of the agency's operations in Vietnam that can come only from the same critical official sources. This is disorderly government. And the longer the President tolerates it-the period already is considerable-the greater the real war against the Vietcong and the impression of a very indecisive Administration in Washington.

"The CIA may be guilty as charged. Since it cannot, or at any rate will not, openly defend its record in Vietnam or defend it by the same confidential press briefings' employed by its critics, the public is not in a position to judge. Nor to this department, which sought and failed to get even the outlines of the agency's case in rebuttal.

"But Mr. Kennedy will have to make a judgment if the spectacle of war within the Executive branch is to be ended and the effective functioning of the CIA preserved. And when he makes this judgment, hopefully he also will make it public, as well as the appraisal of fault on which it is based.

"Doubtless recommendations as to what his judgment should be were made to him today by Secretary of Defense McNamara and General Taylor on their return from their fact-finding expedition into the embattled official jungle in Saigon."

It is ironic, indeed, that Krock's column concluded with its reference to the trip by McNamara and Taylor to Southeast Asia.

For, as Col. Fletcher Prouty points out, upon their return they "reported to the President that it looked to them, after their visit to Saigon, as though things could be put under control and that we would be able to withdraw all personnel [from Vietnam] by the end of 1965.

"Now we can see why they chose that date," comments Prouty. "This was the date the President had used in his own discussions with his closest advisers. They all knew that he planned to announce a pullout once he had been re-elected."

It was soon thereafter, however, that John F. Kennedy was indeed gone from the scene and the president's plans for withdrawal from Vietnam, so carefully drawn, were now being reversed by the new President.

p114
In his book Plausible Denial, Mark Lane summarizes the events which occurred:

"Just four days after the death of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson signed NSAM 273 that began to reverse the policy of withdrawal from Vietnam and signified the beginning of the escalation of the conflict. The f CIA had prevailed. The effort in Southeast Asia was to become a massive land-based war."

' "During March, 1964, Johnson signed NSAM 288 that repudiated Kennedy's plan to end the U.S. military participation in the war that year. In the months that followed, Johnson increased the military commitment from under 20,000 troops to approximately a quarter of a million."

"Years later... after the deaths of more than 50,000 Americans and more than a million Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians, the war finally ended with the military defeat of the United States."

p116
[E. Howard Hunt sued the Washington-based newspaper 'The Spotlight', and his case went to trial in federal court in Miami... ]

Leslie Armstrong, a Miami resident who was jury forewoman in the case, issued a statement in conjunction with the release of [Mark] Lane's written account of the trial:

"Mr. Lane was asking us [the jury] to do something very difficult. He was asking us to believe John Kennedy had been killed by our own government. Yet when we examined the evidence closely, we were compelled to conclude that the CIA had indeed killed President Kennedy."

p118
Evidence now available from former Mossad operative Victor Ostrovsky suggests that Israel's Mossad, was indirectly connected with the [Orlando] Letelier assassination...

p123
... the never-ending cycle which continually links key players in the international intrigue between not only the CIA and the Israeli Mossad, but also the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate-three powerful forces all of which desired the removal of John F. Kennedy from the White House.

Like Israel and the Lansky Syndicate, the CIA was, for all intents and purposes, an aggrandizing international power-unto-itself unwilling to have its influence curtailed by an independent-minded American president with an agenda of his own. Thus it was that the CIA entered into the JFK assassination conspiracy.

With John F. Kennedy now not only at odds with the Lansky Crime Syndicate and Israel, but also their collaborators in the CIA, the American president had arrayed against him a powerful alliance with not only the means and the motive, but also the opportunity to end his presidency.

p188
THE PERMINDEX MYSTERY

WHAT WAS PERMINDEX?

What exactly then was Permindex? How did Permindex fit into the center of the international conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

... The CMC [Centro Mondiale Commerciale] was founded in 1961 by one Giorgio Mantello. The Italian name, however, was an affectation. Mantello was an Eastern European Jew originally named Georges Mandel.

At the time CMC was established, it was asserted that CMC would function as an international commercial organization, that it would aid in the establishing of a permanent worldwide network of trade expositions, and generally assist concerns involved in trade matters.

Permindex was a subsidiary of CMC. The name Permindex is an acronym which stood for PERmanent INDustrial EXpositions.

... the Permindex connection to Israel and its global intelligence network is best personified by the individual who served as chairman of the board of Permindex: Major Louis M. Bloomfield of Montreal, Canada, himself a devoted and influential supporter of the Israeli cause.

It was Bloomfield who held half the shares of Permindex and its parent company "for party or parties unknown." In fact, Permindex had its headquarters in Bloomfield's base of operations in Montreal until 1961 at which time it was relocated to Rome. The facts about Bloomfield indicate, beyond doubt, that Bloomfield was a major player in Israel's international network.

... Bloomfield had been recruited into Britain's Special Operations Executive [counter-intelligence] n 1938, the year that his immediate superior-another Canadian Sir William Stephenson-set up British intelligence activities in the United States in the period leading up to World War II.

THE BRONFMAN CONNECTION

Bloomfield, however, was a man of many parts. He was reputed to control Le Credit Suisse [bank] of Canada, Heineken's Breweries, Canscot Realty, the Grimaldi Siosa [shipping] Lines, Ltd - and, interestingly enough - the Israel Continental Company.

A very busy man, Bloomfield's other ties were equally interesting. He was a founding partner in the Phillips, Vineberg, Bloomfield and Goodman firm which represents the Canadian-based Bronfman family interests. This rather intriguing detail suggests, perhaps, that Bloomfield's wide-ranging financial interests were, in fact, those of the Bronfman family and the Montreal lawyer was, essentially, the Bronfman's front man.

The Bronfman family, which built its fortune working with the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate in the illegal liquor trade, have been key / backers of Israel and leaders in the Zionist cause. Edgar Bronfman most recently served as president of the World Jewish Congress.

p195
ISRAEL'S ROLE COMES FULL CIRCLE

It is the Tibor Rosenbaum-BCI connection with Permindex that points most definitely toward the Israeli Mossad interest in Permindex. BCI ... was very much a creature of Israel and its Mossad.

Among the directors of Rosenbaum's BCI was Ernest Israel Japhet, also chairman and president of the Bank Leumi, the largest bank in Israel. BCI and Bank Leumi were involved in the diamond trade and tied into Far East drug trafficking.

p196
The manager of Rosenbaum and Feinberg's Swiss-Israel Trade Bank was Gen. Julius Klein, a U.S. army counterintelligence officer.

Klein had engaged in illegally re-routing whole shiploads of medical supplies, construction equipment scheduled to go to post-war Germany to the Haganah in Palestine. (The Haganah was the sell-defense forces of the Jews in Palestine and the forerunner of the Israeli Defense Force.) Klein conducted this enterprise during the period when he served as chief of the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps responsible for Western Europe at the end of World War II.

However, Klein's services on behalf of the state of Israel were even more significant. It was Klein who had been involved in setting up Israel's Mossad and in training its officers. Klein worked alongside Sir William Stephenson in this particular venture.

... It was during his days working with the American OSS and Naval Intelligence-and the Lansky Crime Syndicate-that Stephenson had cemented his ties with the Jewish anti-Nazi underground.

THE PERMINDEX PLOT

... the connections (at an intimate level) between Tibor Rosenbaum's Israeli Mossad banking operation, the Banque de Credit International, and a wide-ranging array of figures tied closely to the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate and-even-to Clay Shaw, a member of the Permindex board of directors, brings the conspiracy full circle. That BCI was one of the primary shareholders of the Permindex entity clearly points toward a Mossad role in the Permindex plot that ended the life of John F Kennedy.

p199
A PERMINDEX ASSASSINATION PLOT

Public controversy surrounding Permindex, resulting in its expulsion from Switzerland and Italy, involved the role of Permindex in assassination plots aimed at French President Charles DeGaulle.

... the rebel Secret Army Organization-known by its acronym OAS-was bitterly opposed to DeGaulle's decision to grant independence to Arab Algeria.

The OAS launched numerous assassination attempts against DeGaulle, none of which were successful, of course, but they did later inspire Frederick Forsythe's famous novel (later turned into a popular motion picture), The Day of the Jackal.

Following an investigation of one attempt, in 1962, French intelligence (the SDECE) charged that Permindex laundered money into the OAS coffers to finance the attempt on DeGaulle's life.

According to DeGaulle's biographer, Jean Lacouture, "for moral as well as political reasons, [the OAS leadership] considered it necessary to sacrifice the Head of State, either physically or politically, so that Algeria would remain French."

p200
ISRAEL AND THE OAS

... according to historian Harrison, whose OAS sympathies are apparent, "Some of the most ardent supporters of the OAS in Algeria were Jews." What's more, notes Harrison, "a Jewish branch of the OAS was created."

Another historian, Paul Henissart, has also noted an Israeli connection with the OAS. According to Henissart, "[The OAS] attracted hotheads including some Jews who belonged to Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Israeli underground military organization. They were recruited by the OAS as specialists in clandestine warfare."

He notes additionally that while there were Jewish defense groups established in Algeria, "official Israeli delegations in Algeria to organize emigration of Jews from the coastal cities were not averse to aiding these self-defense groups. The Israeli government, however, never confirmed any connection with them."

Nonetheless as Israeli historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has pointed out, there is evidence of official Israeli support of the OAS: "During 1961 and 1962, there were numerous reports of Israeli support for the French OAS movement in Algeria."

He notes that the Israelis had assisted the French in the Algerian war of independence between 1954 and 1962. Then, when Algeria was finally independent and sought admission to the UN, only Israel voted against it. Beit Hallahmi quotes another historian, Stewart Steven, as saying, "When in 1961 the OAS was created, it was a natural development that Israel, as keen on [French retention of Algeria as a colony] as the OAS themselves, should lock themselves into the [OAS]."

So it was that Israeli intelligence-and its allies in the American CIA - had formed a close working alliance with the very forces that were ( attempting to destroy French President Charles DeGaulle. At the same time, in fact, these same elements were using their Permindex connection in yet another plot, this one aimed at the life of John F. Kennedy.

p204
That the ADL did, in fact, report back to the FBI, a long-standing relationship cemented by J. Edgar Hoover himself, is now common knowledge ...

Both the Mossad and the CIA were intimately tied with the Permindex plot against French President Charles DeGaulle and with the Permindex plot against John F. Kennedy. In the bloody conflict over Algerian-Arab independence both Kennedy and DeGaulle found themselves on the same side of the issue - and on the opposite side of that of the Mossad and its allies in the CIA.

p207
Israel's worldwide connections-particularly with the anti-Kennedy forces within the CIA and the CIA-linked Lansky crime empire, along with the French OAS rebels and Charles DeGaulle's enemies within his own intelligence service - made possible the network through which the plan to kill JFK was carried out. Permindex was in the center of it all.

Through the so-called "false flag" technique in which the Mossad is so skilled, "Mafia" figures, anti-Castro Cubans, low-level CIA operatives and an assortment of other strange figures were drawn into the Permindex web of intrigue that resulted in the JFK assassination.

p208
THE KEY TO THE MYSTERY

Clearly, Permindex is the key to understanding the full nature of the JFK assassination Permindex is the key to understanding the full nature of the JFK assassination conspiracy. It is the focal point in the Mossad-CIA-Lansky-Mafia linkage which manipulated events in New Orleans and Dallas-and within the anti-Castro Cuban community in Miami and elsewhere-that led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

To ignore the Permindex connection is to ignore the reality about the origins of the plot that led to the assassination of America's thirty-fifth president. Obviously the tentacles of CMC/Permindex reached far and wide and they inextricably intertwined the forces of Israel, the CIA and the international Lansky Crime Syndicate.

p244
Although the SDECE was DeGaulle's own service, the agency was as I much apparently out of DeGaulle's actual hands-on control as the CIA was out of JFK's control. As DeGauIle's biographer said of the fight between DeGaulle and the OAS, the conflict was "within the State itself."

In fact, at least one assassination attempt against DeGaulle by the Permindex- and Israeli-backed OAS came as a direct result of "inside" information. What's more, there was one high-ranking SDECE official, Louis Betholini, later discovered to be "an OAS sleeper [secret agent]."

And according to historian Paul Henissart, there was-within the SDECE-a high percentage of anti-DeGaulle officers who were, in fact, sympathetic to the OAS. Like its self-centered American counterpart, the CIA, "the SDECE's main worry, according to well-informed sources, was to protect its own personnel and interests during [the] difficult period [of conflict between DeGaulle and the OAS]."

Intelligence historian Richard Deacon has noted, for his own part, that in France, during this difficult period, there was "a good deal of unofficial support for Israel, notably in the [SDECE]"6 pointing further toward the role of SDECE officers in arranging the assassination of John F. Kennedy on behalf of its allies in the Israeli Mossad.

According to Stewart Steven, an authority on the history of the Mossad, "Brilliant in many respects, the SDECE had the reputation internationally of being the rogue elephant of the world's intelligence circus. The CIA regarded it as being 'leaky as a sieve,' and probably with some justification, for few services had so many departmental heads constantly at loggerheads with one another, all serving different masters, either within France itself or in some cases abroad.

"The Israelis, however, had always got along with the French service very well. As an ally in the tricky world in which the Mossad was obliged to operate, the SDECE had proved itself extremely useful, principally because its officers did not feel obliged to necessarily receive political authority for its operations. This gave the service a freebooting quality very much like the Israelis themselves but without Israeli discipline and order.

"Mossad's contacts within the service," said Steven, "tended to be with the ex-OAS elements, those opposed to DeGaulle for what they believed to be his sell-out of French interests in the Algerian war of independence."

p245
The SDECE was divided into five "services." Service Five was known as "Action" and was dominated by Corsicans. According to Frederick Forsyth's background account of the conflict between DeGaulle and the OAS (the subject of his novel, The Day of the Jackal) these Corsicans, "had been professional thugs from the underworld before being enlisted, kept up their old contacts, and on more than one occasion enlisted the aid of their former underworld friends to do a particularly dirty job for the government.

"It was these activities that gave rise to talk in France of a 'parallel' (unofficial) police, supposedly at the orders of one of President de Gaulle's right-hand men, M. Jacques Foccart. In truth no 'parallel' police existed; the activities attributed to them were carried out by the Action Service strong-arms or temporarily enlisted gang-bosses from the 'milieu."

In light of Forsyth's famous "Jackal," it might be noted that active in Europe during the period of the joint plots against JFK and Charles DeGaulle was a Jewish terrorist group known as the Jewish AntiCommunist League-or JACL. This JACL in fact, collaborated with the OAS. So it seems Frederick Forsyth knew whereof he spoke when he described a fictional OAS-sponsored "Jackal" seeking to destroy DeGaulle

p247
Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman, Israeli historians, commented on the crisis as follows: "De Gaulle, who suspected that his secret agency might be plotting against him, was absolutely furious. He immediately ordered that the secret service's house be put in order. He also directed his anger at Israel."

The French president "ordered that the Mossad's European command be removed from Paris, and he also ordered a cessation of all intelligence cooperation between the two nations."

According to historian Stewart Steven, "As far as President DeGaulle was concerned, the implications were that Israel was dealing with the OAS in France, which was still active, still bent on revenge,(and indubitably involved through its supporters in the SDECE in the killing of Ben Barka) It meant that Israel was involved in illegal activities on French soil, an affront to French nationalism, and it meant that he himself, whose support for Israel had never been challenged, had been dealt with treacherously."

According to Steven, Israeli Mossad expulsion from Paris was "a severe blow, perhaps the most severe the Israeli secret service has ever suffered... DeGaulle was never to forgive Israel."

p249
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."

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 its involvement in the JFK assassination.

p249
The information supplied by the retired French intelligence officer relative to Israeli Mossad orchestration of the JFK assassination through the egis of other intelligence networks, specifically James J. Angleton's CIA, and with pro-Israel forces in the SDECE, meshes with other facts.

The final judgment is inescapable ...

Israel was indeed the driving force behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The role of Israel was the unsuspected "missing link" in the JFK assassination conspiracy.

Final Judgment

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