FINAL JUDGMENT
The Missing Link in the
JFK Assassination Conspiracy
By MICHAEL COLLINS PIPER
The Israeli Nuclear Arms Link to the JFK Assassination Now the Subject of WorldwideDiscussion
Chapter Three
A Bad Habit:
Israel's Use of "False Flags"
in Global Terrorism—
Pointing the Finger of
Guilt Elsewhere
Researchers in the JFK assassination controversy have
repeatedly pointed out the false leads that continue to appear.
Most believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin,
was indeed what he claimed to be—the patsy—and that false
clues had been laid by the real conspirators to make it appear
as though Oswald was an agent of Fidel Castro or the
Soviets or both. The use of such "false flags" by Israel's
Mossad to cover up its own role in worldwide assassination
conspiracies and other criminal activity has been documented
time and again. "Arabs," "the Mafia," "right-wing
extremists," and others have repeatedly taken the fall for
crimes committed by the Mossad or carried out under its
coordination.
The use of "false flag" operations by Israel and its Mossad has been
documented repeatedly since the Jewish State first came into being. This
book contends that Israel and its primary collaborator, the CIA, utilized
insidious "false flags" in orchestrating the assassination of John F. Kennedy
and the subsequent cover-up: "the Mafia," "anti-Castro Cubans," "the
Soviets," "Castro agents" and even "right-wing extremists" have all been
fingered as those responsible for the JFK assassination. But the real hard
evidence points in another direction entirely.
'FORGED TRAILS' AND 'FALSE FLAGS'
One major JFK assassination researcher, Professor Peter Dale Scott, has
described what he called "the brilliance of the assassination plot."23 This
was, according to Scott, "that the conspirators had forged trails to induce a
cover-up." Scott cites a number of instances: "There were, for example,
trails that potentially linked Oswald to Fidel Castro or to the K.G.B and
Khruschev—a trail that might lead to war.
"Moreover, there was false evidence given to the Secret Service that led
to a group of anti-Castro Cubans in Chicago whose operations had been
authorized indirectly by Bobby Kennedy himself. This is just one of several
trails that might have led in directions that no one wanted to investigate."24
That Israel has had a long and proven record in planting "false flags" is
the subject of discussion in this chapter.
In preparation for our consideration of Israel's role in the JFK
assassination conspiracy, it is worthwhile to first review some of the more notable instances in which Israel orchestrated assassinations and pinned
those atrocities on innocent parties—"false flags."
In Chapter 2 we noted how former Congressman Paul Findley had cited
two cases in which Israel indicated a willingness to sacrifice American lives
for its own interests: (a) the attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in June of 1967
and (b) the intended attack on an American reconnaissance plane that was
overflying Israel's secret nuclear bomb development site. These incidents are
particularly intriguing in light of what we will ponder in this volume.
The attack on the Liberty—it is generally acknowledged by everyone but
Israel and its defenders—was a deliberate attempt to destroy the Liberty and its
crew and to sink the vessel to the bottom of the Mediterranean. What is
most interesting, however, is the reason behind this bizarre and brutal
attack.
THE U.S.S. LIBERTY
BLAMING THE EGYPTIANS
Israel, in fact, hoped to pin the responsibility on a "false flag"—Egypt—
and draw the United States into the impending 1967 war on the side of
Israel. It is only because the Liberty did not sink and instead was rescued
that the history books don't tell us today that "the Arabs" sunk an American
spy ship and sparked another "Lusitania incident" that forced America to go
to war.
THE NUCLEAR BOMB
The second instance to which Congressman Findley referred is of
special interest inasmuch as the intended attack on an American air force
reconnaissance plane was designed to protect Israel's secret development of
nuclear weaponry. It was Israel's nuclear offensive that led President John F.
Kennedy into the "secret war" with Israel that he conducted with increasing
intensity during the three years of his short-lived presidency.
As we shall see in Chapter 5, it was the very issue of Kennedy's
intransigent opposition to Israel's nuclear arms development that became a
central part of his standoff with Israel and its Mossad. It was this conflict
that played a critical part in setting in final motion the assassination
conspiracy that ended John Kennedy's life.
What follows is an overview of some other notable instances in which
Israel utilized 'false flags" in its international criminal endeavors.
THE LAVON AFFAIR
Perhaps the best-known instance in which Israel used a "false flag" to
cover its own trail was in the infamous Lavon Affair. It was in 1954 that
several Israeli-orchestrated acts of terrorism against British targets in Egypt
were carried out. Blame for the attacks was placed on the Muslim
Brotherhood, which opposed the regime of Egyptian President Gamul Abdul-Nasser. However, the truth about the wave of terror can now be
found in a once-secret cable from Colonel Benjamin Givli, the head of
Israel's military intelligence, who outlined the intended purpose behind the
wave of terror:
"Our goal is to break the West's confidence in the existing Egyptian regime. The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations, and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origin should be totally covered while attention should be shifted to any other possible factor. The purpose is to prevent economic and military aid from the West to Egypt." 25
Ultimately the truth about Israel's involvement in the affair became public and Israel was rocked internally in the wake of the scandal. Competing political elements within Israel used the scandal as a bludgeon against their opponents. But the truth about Israel's use of a "false flag" had come to international attention and demonstrated how Israel was indeed willing to needlessly endanger innocent lives as part of its grand political strategy to expand its influence in the Middle East.
However, the Algerian national news service—which has ties to French intelligence—blamed the Mossad for Rouillan's activities. Angry French intelligence officers were believed to have leaked this information to the Algerians. Several top French security officials quit in protest over this cover up of Mossad complicity in Rouillan's crimes. 26 However, other Mossad orchestrated false flag operations also took place on French soil.
On October 3, 1980 a synagogue on Copernicus Street was bombed in Paris. Four bystanders were killed. Nine were injured. The media frenzy which followed the incident was worldwide. Reports held that "right wing extremists" were responsible. Yet, of all of the "right wing extremists" held for questioning, none was arrested. In fact, all were released.
In the upper echelons of French intelligence, however, the finger of suspicion was pointed at the Mossad. According to one report: "On April 6, 1979, the same Mossad terror unit now suspected of the Copernicus carnage blew up the heavily guarded plant of C.N.I.M industries at La Seyne-sur-Mer, near Toulon, in southeast France, where a consortium of French firms was building a nuclear reactor for Iraq.
"The Mossad salted the site of the C.N.I.M bomb blast with 'clues' followed up with anonymous phone calls to police—suggesting that the sabotage was the work of a 'conservative' environmentalist Troup—'the most pacific and harmless people on earth' as one source put it." 27
On June 28, 1978, Israeli agents exploded a bomb under a small
passenger car in the Rue Saint Anne, killing Mohammed Boudia, an
organizer for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Immediately
afterward, Paris police received anonymous phone calls accusing Boudia of
involvement in narcotics deals and attributing his murder to the Corsican
Mafia. A thorough investigation subsequently established that Mossad
special-action agents were responsible for the terrorist killing.
Suddenly, however, the "hit squad" stories vanished. In fact, it was
ultimately discovered that the source of the story was one Manucher
Ghorbanifar, a former Iranian S.A.V.A.K (secret police) agent with close ties to the Mossad. Even The Washington Post acknowledged that the CIA
itself believed that Ghorbanifar was a liar who "had made up the hit-squad
story in order to cause problems for one of Israel's enemies." 29
The Los Angeles Times itself had already blown the whistle on Israel's scare stories. "Israeli intelligence, not the Reagan administration," reported the Times, "was a major source of some of the most dramatic published reports about a Libyan assassination team allegedly sent to kill President Reagan and other top U.S. officials . . . Israel, which informed sources said has 'wanted an excuse to go in and bash Libya for a longtime,' may be trying to build American public support for a strike against [Qaddafi], these sources said." 30
In other words, Israel had been promoting the former SAVAK agent, Ghorbanifar, to official Washington as a reliable source. In fact, he was a Mossad disinformation operative waving a "false flag" to mislead America. This was yet another Israeli scheme to blame Libya for its own misdeeds, this time using one "false flag" (Iran's SAVAK) to lay the blame on another "false flag" (Libya). (In Chapter 18 we shall see yet another SAVAK crime carried out on behalf of Israel and its allies in the CIA.)
However, intelligence insiders believed that Israel's Mossad had concocted the phony "evidence" to "prove" Libyan responsibility. West Berlin police director Manfred Ganschow, who took charge of the investigation, cleared the Libyans, saying, "This is a highly political case. Some of the evidence cited in Washington may not be evidence at all, merely assumptions supplied for political reasons." 31
Word was leaked that Hindawi had confessed and claimed that he had been hired by Gen. Mohammed Al-Khouli, the intelligence director of the Syrian air force. Also implicated were others including the Syrian Ambassador in London. The French authorities warned the British Prime Minister that there was more to the case than met the eye—that is, Israeli involvement. This was later confirmed in reports in the Western press. 32
New data, coming to light after the murder of two leading Mossad
operatives in Larnaka, Cyprus suggested that the entire operation had been a
Mossad covert action, led by one of its key operatives, Sylvia Roxburgh.
She contrived an affair with King Hussein and served as the linchpin for a
major Mossad coup designed to destabilize the Arabs. 33
In 1982, just when the PLO had abandoned the use of terrorism, the Mossad spread disinformation about "terror attacks" on Israeli settlements along the northern border in order to justify a full-scale military invasion of Lebanon. Years later, even leading Israeli spokesmen, such as former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, admitted that the reports of "PLO terrorism" had been contrived by the Mossad. 34
It is also worth noting that the attempted assassination—in London—of Israeli Ambassador to England, Shlomo Argov, was initially blamed upon the PLO.
The attempted assassination was cited by Israel as one excuse for its bloody 1982 incursion into Lebanon. In fact, the diplomat in question was considered one of Israel's "doves" and inclined toward a friendly disposition of Israel's longtime conflict with the PLO. He was the least likely target of PLO wrath. What's more, one of the suspects in the crime was found carrying a "hit list" which actually included the name of the head of the PLO office in London. 35 Thus, it appears that the assassination attempt was carried out by the Mossad—under yet another "false flag"—for two purposes: (a) elimination of a domestic "peacenik" considered friendly toward the Palestinians; and (b) pinning yet another crime on the Palestine Liberation Organization.
We now know, based upon years of study by numerous JFK assassination researchers, that prior to the JFK assassination, the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was being set up as a patsy. Indeed, Oswald's activities were presented as proof that a "pro-Castro agitator" had been the "lone nut" behind the president's assassination.
If anything—we should note at this juncture—Lee Harvey Oswald's identity as a "pro-Castro agitator"—the role he played prior to the JFK assassination—was tailor-made for (or, perhaps we should say, tailor-made by) the CIA and its allies in the Mossad. What few JFK assassination researchers have noted (or perhaps even understood) was that Fidel Castro's Cuba had long been hostile to Israel and the cause of Zionism. Thus, both the Mossad and the CIA would find a "pro-Castro agitator" an ideal patsy.
In a lengthy essay the Castro government published in the November 4, 1979 edition of Granma—an official newspaper—the Cuban Marxists critiqued Israel and Zionism. Castro's newspaper said, in part:
"The Zionists never did, and never will, forgive the Soviet state and its Leninist Party . . . because the Bolsheviks implemented a correct policy that incorporated the talents and efforts of the Soviet Jews into the tasks of building a new society and thus demonstrated the class origins of discrimination and anti-Semitism, breaking with the past and providing a genuine solution to the Jewish problem, a solution which was not and could never be a massive exodus to Palestine.
"With the outbreak of the cold war the Zionists collaborated in all the subversive and diversionary activities against the USSR and other socialist countries. The secret services of the Zionist state of Israel coordinated their spy activities with the CIA. And to complete the picture there is the Zionist counter-revolutionary action against the national liberation movements.
"The Zionists became a power and succeeded in establishing their own state in 1948. Now their task is to defend oil routes, protect all the interests of U.S. imperialism and block the advance of the Arab revolution. Neither the machinations of Zionist counterrevolution, nor Israeli arms, can hold back the victorious march of the peoples of the world." 36
These are fighting words, to say the least, and do explain perhaps why those who were responsible for framing Lee Harvey Oswald would have selected his profile as a "pro-Castro agitator." The profile would satisfy both the hard-line anti-communists and the Zionists.
In subsequent years, as the initial cover story that Oswald was a pro Castro agitator began to unravel and new fallback targets have been named— primarily "the Mafia." It was the Mossad and its allies in the CIA and in the controlled American media who have been doing all the fingering. Everybody being blamed by the Mossad and its CIA allies were implicated and everybody, as a consequence, had a stake in the cover-up.
The Kennedy family's alleged anti-Semitism didn't do anything to improve JFK's relations with Israel and its American lobby either. Kennedy's intervention in the issue of Algerian independence from France also drew sharp criticism from the Israeli lobby as well. Yet, when John F. Kennedy sought the presidency, he was willing to cut deals with the Israeli lobby—for a price.
By the end of his presidency, however, Kennedy had reneged on his deals, not only with Israel's Godfather, Meyer Lansky, and his henchmen in the Mafia, but also with the Israeli lobby.
John F. Kennedy was very much a product of his father's upbringing— much to the dismay, it might be said, of many of even JFK's most devout disciples. They would, frankly, prefer to forget much of the recorded history of the Kennedy family and present JFK as something just short of being a saint.
That President John F. Kennedy was the son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy long perceived to be, at the very least, neutral to the ambitions of Nazi Germany—and, at the worst, an anti-Semite and even an admirer of Adolf Hitler—has been a lot for Kennedy's admirers to swallow.
Ambassador Kennedy, of course, fought U.S. entry into World War II. Several accounts of the period suggest that Kennedy himself returned from Britain, where he served as American ambassador, with the intent of launching a major campaign against President Roosevelt's war plans.
However, after a meeting at the White House between the ambassador and the president, Kennedy backed off. What happened during that meeting is ripe for speculation.
Joe, Jr., as a student at Harvard, served on the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention in Europe, described as "a reactionary group that petitioned influential government officials and held rallies opposing American entry in the European war effort."37
More significantly, however, it appears that JFK himself was under steady surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI because of his anti-war activities. JFK was accused by the FBI of voicing "anti-British and defeatist sentiments and blaming Winston Churchill for getting the United States into the war . . . It also appears," charged the FBI, "that Kennedy had prepared for his father at least one of the speeches which his father had made, or was intending to make, in answer to criticism of his alleged appeasement policies . . . In addition Jack Kennedy stated that in his opinion England was through, and his father's greatest mistake was not talking enough, that he stopped talking too soon." 38
Young Jack Kennedy, as a Harvard student, was more than neutral toward Hitler, it seems. Having visited Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany, JFK recorded in his diary, according to Time magazine, that he had come "to the decision that Facism [sic] is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and Democracy for America and England."39 Youthful musings, but interesting, to say the least.
Kennedy's biographer, Richard Whalen, has written of a secret meeting between Kennedy and a prominent critic of the Roosevelt administration, the controversial publicist, Lawrence Dennis. Often described (inaccurately) as "America's leading fascist," Dennis was a former diplomat himself and one of the early leaders in the effort to block American intervention in what evolved into World War II. Consequently, he and Kennedy had much in common.
Kennedy's biographer outlined the circumstances of that secret meeting—a meeting which says much about Kennedy's line of thinking:
"In October 1943, Lawrence Dennis received a telephone call from his friend, Paul Palmer, then a senior editor of The Reader's Digest. Before the war, Dennis had contributed to the Digest, but the author of The Coming American Fascism since had become too controversial for his byline to appear in the nation's largest magazine. Now he received a $500-a-month retainer as an editorial consultant.
"One of his recent efforts had been a memorandum sharply critical of unconditional surrender and the rumored plans to break up Germany. Palmer invited Dennis to lunch in his suite in Manhattan's St. Regis Hotel, saying he would meet someone there who was thinking along similar lines.
"It turned out to be Joe Kennedy. Over lunch, Kennedy said he had been seeing Archbishop Spellman almost daily. He said the Archbishop had returned from Rome with word that Hitler's generals might attempt to overthrow him if they were offered terms less hopeless than unconditional surrender.
"Kennedy grew emotional and castigated Roosevelt. He talked of his two sons in the service, and declared that the war could be ended within two weeks if the German generals were given encouragement.
"Of course, no Church official could speak out against the folly of Roosevelt's policy, but Kennedy could, and this had been Palmer's purpose in arranging the luncheon. The editor asked whether the former Ambassador would write, or at least sign, an article condemning unconditional surrender. The impact of such an article, given Kennedy's former standing in the administration, could be enormous. But he did not accept the invitation and the war being fought by his sons and so many other young men raged on.” 40
Ambassador Kennedy no doubt remembered this meeting for the rest of his days. He was very bitter about the war and particularly bitter at Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kennedy once allegedly referred to FDR as "that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son Joe."
(Joe Kennedy, Jr., of course, being the ambassador's eldest son. It was Joe, Jr.'s death that ultimately laid the groundwork for the second son, John, to be groomed for the presidency in his older brother's place.)
However, the senior Kennedy's views most definitely did not change as
time went by. But as the retired ambassador grew older, he became more
pragmatic. This was evidenced in a meeting—in the mid-1950's—between
Kennedy and an associate of Lawrence Dennis—a New York-based
entertainment executive named DeWest Hooker.
In fact, as we shall see, it may have been efforts by Hooker, as a consequence of his meeting with Joe Kennedy, that helped John F. Kennedy win his narrow victory in the 1960 presidential election.
Mr. Hooker hoped to interest Joe Kennedy in a business venture which Hooker believed might be right up the ambassador's alley. Hooker wanted to establish an independent television network, and he felt that Kennedy, himself a veteran movie mogul, might be interested in backing the enterprise. Hooker's memory of that meeting is quite interesting, particularly in the context of the thesis presented in these pages. To appreciate just precisely where Hooker was coming from, however, it is appropriate to review Hooker's remarkable background.
However, there was an aspect to Hooker's persona that made him, to say the least, persona non grata in the entertainment industry: Hooker is unabashedly and frankly anti-Jewish. He will be the first to admit it, no questions asked. A powerfully-built man, Hooker is fearless and not afraid to make his position known.
One of Hooker's proteges was George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. In his memoirs, This Time the World, Rockwell credits Hooker as being a major influence on his thinking. In fact, Rockwell dedicated the book to Hooker, along with several others including Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur. Hooker, Rockwell declared, was the one "who taught me to know the cunning and evil ways of the enemy."41 According to Rockwell, Hooker was "the nearest thing to a Nazi since the Bund." 42
The reason for Hooker's interest in establishing an independent network was highly political: Hooker wanted the new network to be totally divorced from Jewish money and influence. In his judgment, the three existing networks were entirely under the control of Jewish interests. Hooker wanted a network that presented what he called "our way of thinking."
(It was during this period that Sen. John F. Kennedy was then actively seeking the Democratic Party's vice presidential nomination. He lost, but his efforts brought him widespread acclaim within party ranks, and set in place the mechanism for his successful bid for the top spot on the party's national ticket in 1960.)
After Hooker made his presentation to the retired ambassador, Kennedy's response was supportive in spirit, but Old Joe made his final position clear during their four-hour conference.
According to Hooker, "Joe admitted that when he was ambassador to England that he had been pro-Hitler. However, in Kennedy's words, 'we' lost the war. By 'we' he didn't mean the United States. When Kennedy said `we,' he meant the non-Jews. Joe Kennedy believed that it was the Jews who had won World War II.
"Kennedy said, 'I've done everything I can to fight the Jewish power over this country. I tried to stop World War II, but I failed. I've made all the money I need and now I'm passing everything I've learned on to my sons."
“ I don't go with the 'loser'," Kennedy told me. 'I've joined the `winners.' I'm going to work with the Jews. I'm teaching my boys the whole score and they're going to work with the Jews. I'm going to make Jack the first Irish Catholic President of the United States and if it means working with the Jews, so be it. I'm in sympathy with what you're doing, Hooker'," Kennedy said, 'but I'm not going to do anything that will ruin Jack's chances to become president."' 43
Hooker was, of course, disappointed by Kennedy's response and ultimately his "fourth" network failed to get off the ground. However, Hooker at least had the satisfaction of knowing that he and the Kennedy family were on the same wavelength—even if they were willing to compromise those views for political gain.
"Yes, as a matter of fact, there is something you can do." responded Joe Kennedy. "I'd like you to use your contacts in the right-wing. Have them start publishing articles accusing Jack of being controlled by the Jews, of being a Jewish puppet. This will have the effect of neutralizing Jewish opposition to Jack (because of me).
"The Jews know my views and naturally they'll assume that Jack is a chip off the old block. If the right wing starts hitting Jack this will give the Jews second thoughts—at least the ones who do the voting." 44
Hooker promised Kennedy he would do what he could. And being a man of his word, Hooker did influence his right-wing contacts as Kennedy had asked. Hooker encouraged his friend, Nazi leader Rockwell, and other "right wingers" to smear John F. Kennedy as JFK's father had suggested. His efforts succeed.
As one chronicle of the 1960 campaign noted: "The American Nazi Party helped too by throwing its support to Richard Nixon—"Nazis for Nixon, Kikes for Kennedy" was one of its slogans. Another of its placards read, "FDR and JFK mean JEW deal."45
This, of course, was inspired by JFK's father and carried out through the good offices of DeWest Hooker and his friend George Lincoln Rockwell, although the historian who penned the description of Rockwell's sloganeering probably had no idea that it was indirectly the work of Joe Kennedy.
"Frankly," Hooker says to this day, "As far as I'm concerned, it was my work that got Johnny Kennedy in the White House."46 (Hooker's claim is not completely off the mark, inasmuch as American Jewish leaders claimed themselves at the time that it was Jewish support for John F. Kennedy that gave him his narrow victory over Nixon in the 1960 election.)
This interesting—and revealing—episode is not likely to be memorialized at the John F. Kennedy Library at Harvard or in any friendly biographies of the Kennedy family. However, there can be little doubt that Israel and its American lobby had a fairly good idea of what was going on behind the scenes.
Former diplomat Richard Curtiss described Kennedy's surprise entry into the debate over Algeria: "By 1957, as a freshman member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he thought he recognized the tragedy of colonial inflexibility unfolding in Algeria. Already one of the congressional library's heaviest borrowers, he now spent additional time in conversation with William J. Porter, an Arabist and the director of the State Department's Office of North African Affairs.
"Porter feared that Washington's uncritical support of its NATO ally, France, in the increasingly brutal French repression of the Algerian nationalists, threatened the whole future of the United States in North Africa. Kennedy also talked to members of the Algerian F.L.N delegation at the United Nations." 47
On July 2, 1957, JFK rose before the Senate and gave his maiden
foreign policy address on this controversial question. He said, in part: "No
amount of mutual politeness, wishful thinking, nostalgia or regret should
blind either France or the United States to the fact that, if France and the
West at large are to have a continuing influence in North Africa . . . the essential
first step is the independence of Algeria." 48
According to Curtiss: "The speech prompted more mail than any other he delivered as a senator. The foreign policy establishment in New York, a bastion of Atlantic solidarity, expressed righteous indignation." 49 Also, notes Curtiss, "the French were irritated." 50
Some of Kennedy's critics said that the speech was a political move and that he chose the topic of Algerian independence as the subject of his first major foreign policy address because there was neither a "French" vote nor an "Algerian" vote to contend with in his home state of Massachusetts or in the nation as a whole.
While the latter observation is correct, of course, the fact is that there was one particularly powerful American voting bloc (and source of financial contributions) that did take note of Kennedy's support for Algerian Arab independence: the powerful American lobby for Israel.
As we shall see, in the end, it may have been JFK's initiative on the Algerian question that, in fact, played a major part in shaping the entirety of the conspiracy that ended his life in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
This gesture by the young senator also angered many French nationalists who wanted to retain French colonial control of Algeria. Many of these nationalists later banded together in the so-called Secret Army Organization—the Israel-backed O.A.S—and fought against French President Charles DeGaulle who ultimately granted Algerian independence.
In Chapter 12, Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 we will learn more about the so called "French connection" and how, indeed, it ultimately played a role in the JFK murder, manipulated by Israel's Mossad.
According to JFK assassination expert, Jim Marrs: "In 1927, a shipment of bootleg whiskey on its way from Ireland to Boston was hijacked in southern New England. Almost the entire guard was killed in the resulting shootout. The hijackers were part of the Luciano-Lansky mob, while it was rumored that Joseph P. Kennedy was involved in the shipment. Kennedy reputedly lost a fortune on the deal and was besieged by widows of the guards seeking financial assistance. Lansky later told biographers he was convinced that Kennedy held a grudge against him personally from that time on and, in fact, had passed the hostility on to his sons."51
Long-time Lansky henchman Michael Milan lends support for Marrs’ allegation. According to Milan, "Ask Meyer Lansky about Joe Kennedy and you'd see one of the few times that Mr. L. would actually get conniptions. What they said back during Prohibition was that you can't trust Joe Kennedy to keep his word. He stole from his friends so much that he had no friends. And right before World War II, the sonovabitch turned around and said that we should all get on Hitler's side, that the Jews could go to Hell.
"Meyer was ready to bust a blood vessel. His temples were actually throbbing when Sam Koenig told him what Kennedy had said. And then Meyer, almost like he was a born Sicilian, swore a blood revenge on the entire family. 'The sins of the father,' he kept on saying to himself, mumbling like an old zeydah vowing revenge. ‘The sins of the father.’”52
The conflict between Lansky and Joseph P. Kennedy was but one facet of Kennedy's relationship with organized crime. It was a relationship of many parts, and, in the end, clearly had a significant role in helping shape the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of Ambassador Kennedy's son who had, in fact, finally achieved the presidency.
However, notes Fox, "For such an extraordinary murder—to kill a president—they must have been extraordinarily provoked. In their terms, it could only have involved a double cross. The Kennedy's must have dealt with the underworld in compromising ways. When the Kennedy's then turned around and nonetheless went after organized crime, they breached the code and put a contract on the President." 54
Fox notes that while old Joe Kennedy was an inveterate gambler, with many ties to the underworld, "given his vast wealth, no matter how much he lost the underworld could never have 'owned' him." 55
Joe Kennedy himself was a regular visitor to Meyer Lansky's Colonial Inn, which Lansky co-owned with New York Mafia boss Frank Costello and an assortment of smaller shareholders including a little-known Dallas nightclub keeper named Jack Ruby. Lansky himself used to brag that among his clients included, "judges, senators, respectable businessmen. Joe Kennedy used to come four or five times a week."56
However, as the senior Kennedy's son Jack moved upward in the political arena, his father tried to shut out his past relationship with Frank Costello. According to one of Costello's friends, "The way [Costello] talked about [Joe Kennedy], you had the sense that they were close during Prohibition and then something happened. Frank said that he helped Kennedy become wealthy. What happened between them I don't know." 57
According to the Giancanas, Detroit's "Jewish Mafia," the so-called "Purple Gang" had put out a contract on Joe Kennedy's life for bringing illegal liquor through their territory without their permission during the Prohibition days. However, Kennedy Sr. had gone to Chicago to beg for his life and the Chicago Mafia bosses intervened on his behalf, saving his life. As the Giancana's put it: "Ever after, Kennedy was in Chicago's debt." 58
The relationship went much deeper, however. According to the Giancanas: "Kennedy's ties to the underworld intersected at a hundred points. Besides making a fortune in bootlegging, Kennedy had made a financial killing in Hollywood in the twenties—with the help of persuasive behind the-scenes New York and Chicago muscle.
"When Prohibition came to a close, as part of a national agreement between the various bootleggers, Kennedy held on to three of the most lucrative booze distributorships in the country—Gordon's gin, Dewar's, and Haig & Haig—through his company, Somerset Imports." 59
The Giancanas also say that it was Sam Giancana who smoothed things over with Frank Costello on Joe Kennedy's behalf after Ambassador Kennedy had snubbed the New York mobster. According to the Giancanas, Kennedy was concerned about his son's burgeoning political career and it was at that point that he agreed to cut a deal with organized crime in order to ensure smooth sailing—and in order to get Frank Costello, in Kennedy's words, "off my back." 60
Kennedy responded: "I can. And I will. You help me now, Sam, and I'll see to it that Chicago—that you—can sit in the goddamned Oval office if you want. That you'll have the President's ear. But I just need time."
Kennedy told Giancana, "He'll be your man. I swear to that. My son— the President of the United States—will owe you his father's life. He won't refuse you, ever. You have my word." 61
Mafia money poured into critical primary states such as West Virginia (where many local political leaders were on the Mafia "pad") and by convention time, JFK was virtually assured the presidential nomination. Although New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello preferred Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson, an agreement was cut, and a Kennedy-Johnson ticket was set in place. The Democratic ticket was ready for the fall election.63
(In Chapter 10 we shall explore the relationship between Carlos Marcello and Meyer Lansky in detail. Marcello, in fact, was a protege of Lansky—his New Orleans front man, pure and simple.)
It turns out, too, that JFK himself was busy with other mob figures other than Sam Giancana, although the history books have discreetly ignored JFK's other crime connections, preferring instead to focus on the Italian-American "Mafia" figures.
According to FBI documents and wiretaps, JFK himself had "direct contact"64 with Meyer Lansky himself during the 1960 presidential campaign, presumably for the purpose of shoring up mob support for his presidential campaign—a pact that would ultimately prove to have been a proverbial deal with the devil.
During this same period JFK was also engaged with critical negotiations with another important power bloc in American political affairs: the pro Israel lobby. For obvious reasons, as we have seen, there was indeed no love lost between JFK, his father, Ambassador Kennedy, and the American Jewish community.
Writing in his book, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy, Edward Tivnan comments: "Senator Kennedy's record on Israel was vague, certainly not as staunchly supportive as Hubert Humphrey's. And unlike Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy did not rush to Israel's defense during the Suez affair.
"He was also a Catholic. Many Jews associated American Catholics with right-wing, pro-McCarthy, and anti-Semitic causes. Worse, there was the touchy issue of the candidate's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who, as ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930's, had been a supporter of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing the Nazis." 65
Kennedy's 1957 speech calling for Algerian independence, as we have seen, had not gone over well with Israel's American supporters. Angering the Israeli lobby further, Senator Kennedy had once offered an amendment that would have slashed economic assistance to Africa and the Middle East from $175 to $140 million, this despite the fact that pro-Israel senators said that this was harmful to Israel. 66
However, John F. Kennedy was ready to deal, and he made moves to
appease the pro-Israel lobby. JFK, according to Edward Tivnan, "turned out
to be a better diplomat than his father." 67
Kennedy's contact with the Israeli lobby was New York apparel manufacturer and financier, Abraham Feinberg. Feinberg was president of the Israel Bond Organization and was helping raise private money to finance Israel's secret nuclear development program.
(The financing was done through private, covert means and outside the normal Israeli budget process because the nuclear development program was controversial, in the eyes of not only the Eisenhower administration in Washington but also in the eyes of many Israelis.)
Referring to Kennedy, Feinberg later said, "My path to power was cooperation in terms of what they needed, campaign money." 68 (Feinberg, himself had previously supported JFK's fellow Senator Stuart Symington, a rival for the 1960 Democratic nomination.)
Recognizing the need for not only critical Jewish money, but also Jewish votes, Kennedy arranged to meet with Feinberg and a host of other wealthy Jewish Americans in Feinberg's New York apartment. Following a discussion with Kennedy, Feinberg and his associates agreed to come up with $500,000 on Kennedy's behalf. According to Feinberg: "I called him right away. His voice broke. He got emotional" with gratitude.69
"Kennedy was anything but grateful the next morning in describing the session to Charles L. Bartlett, a newspaper columnist and close friend. He had driven to Bartlett's home in northwest Washington and dragged his friend on a walk, where he recounted a much different version of the meeting the night before. "
`As an American citizen he was outraged,' Bartlett recalled, "to have a Zionist group come to him and say: 'We know your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy.' Kennedy, as a presidential candidate, also resented the crudity with which he'd been approached. `They wanted control.' he angrily told Bartlett.
"Bartlett further recalled Kennedy promising to himself that `if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it.'"70—that is, special interest lobbies particularly foreign pressure groups, dictating American election campaigns and foreign policy through their financial and political clout.
But Kennedy had already cut his deals. Not only organized crime—but the Israeli lobby (of which Meyer Lansky was a critical supporter)—had their claims on John F. Kennedy. After the election, they expected Kennedy to pay up. In the general election, it was a narrow Kennedy victory over the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
The role of the Chicago Democratic political machine (under the thumb of Mafia boss Sam Giancana) in stealing Illinois votes on behalf of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket is now well known and a widely accepted part of American political history.
Sam Giancana and his allies in organized crime—including Meyer Lansky and the Israeli lobby—were confident that they had themselves a president.
According to Seymour Hersh, "Ben-Gurion was surprised by the frankness and evaded the question by answering, 'You must do what is best for the free world."' However, Ben-Gurion's real reaction to Kennedy was somewhat different. “What a politician!" is how the Israeli leader described the American leader. 73
It was the beginning of a bitter and unpleasant relationship between the two men that came to its finish in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. (In Chapter 5 we will examine that unfortunate relationship in detail.)
According to Sam Giancana, "It's a brilliant move on Joe Kennedy's
part. He'll have Bobby wipe us out to cover their own dirty tracks and it'll
all be done in the name of the Kennedy 'war on organized crime.' Brilliant.
Just fuckin' brilliant." 74
Meyer Lansky's West Coast henchman, Mickey Cohen, reflected in
later years upon the Organized Crime-Kennedy alliance and what it meant,
particularly after Bobby Kennedy launched his campaign against the
underworld.
"I know that certain people in the Chicago organization knew that they had to get John Kennedy in. There was no thought that they were going to get the best of it with John Kennedy. See, there may be different guys running for an office, and none of them may be . . . what's best for a combination.
"The choice becomes the best of what you've got going. John Kennedy was the best of the selection. But nobody in my line of work had an idea that he was going to name Bobby Kennedy attorney general. That was the last thing anyone thought." 75
(In Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 we shall examine Cohen's own strange and critical role in the JFK assassination conspiracy and its ultimate cover up yet another piece of the puzzle brought together in these pages.)
Ultimately, as we shall see, JFK's war against his former allies in the underworld, would lead him to the very doorsteps of the real brains behind the national and international crime syndicate, Meyer Lansky.
However, he had already double-crossed his immediate underworld collaborators. That alone was enough to spell JFK's doom.
According to Seymour Hersh, "In a statement that was far more heartfelt than the public or the press could perceive, Kennedy criticized the current method of financing campaigns as 'highly undesirable' and 'not healthy' because it made candidates `dependent on large financial contributions of those with special interests.'" 77
In 1962 Kennedy submitted five bills to reform campaign financing to Congress and in 1963 two more such bills. But none of those bills survived, having been beaten back by the very special interests that Kennedy sought to counter. 78
Not only had Kennedy double-crossed his allies in organized crime, but he had crossed his pro-Israel financiers. Israel, as we shall see in Chapter 7, was long close to the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
And Israel, as we shall see in Chapter 8, was particularly close to the American CIA. Kennedy, too, by the middle of his presidency, was also at war with the CIA. This we shall discuss in Chapter 9.
All of these powerful special interests had very special reasons to want to see JFK removed from the presidency and replaced with Lyndon Johnson. There was clearly no love lost between John F. Kennedy and the powerful forces which had helped bring him to the presidency.
A reform-minded President Kennedy also had other long-range plans in the works. The scion of an independent and essentially self-made man who "played the game" to gain power and influence—and to get his son elected president—JFK was indeed very much his father's son. As a consequence, in another important realm, JFK was moving in a direction that could rock the international banking establishment to its core.
There have been widespread rumors, for nearly a generation, that JFK was planning to issue interest-free money—so-called "greenbacks"— independent of the stranglehold of the privately-owned Federal Reserve System. In fact, interest-free United States Notes were issued during JFK's presidency—some remain in private hands today—but there have been many myths about what some have called "JFK's Greenbacks" and in Appendix Five we will examine this controversy in detail.
This alone could have assured JFK's removal from the White House. However, there were other more immediate and ultimately dangerous conflicts at work between the forces whose influence JFK sought to dismantle and the hard-driving new Kennedy administration.
To begin the process of untangling this hidden web of intrigue, we must first review the long-hidden story of Israel's secret war with John F. Kennedy.
Yet, only in recent years have we begun to learn of Kennedy's secret war with Israel. Much of the conflict stemmed from Israel's determination to build a nuclear bomb. This is a hidden history that helps explain in part the dynamic forces at work resulting in Kennedy's assassination.
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.
One of John F. Kennedy's first presidential appointments was naming his former campaign aide Myer (Mike) Feldman as his point man for Jewish and Israeli affairs—an important post, especially considering JFK's tenuous relationship with Israel and its American lobby.
According to author Seymour Hersh, "The President viewed Feldman, whose strong support for Israel was widely known, as a necessary evil whose highly visible White House position was a political debt that had to be paid." 79
However, the administration was determined to make certain, according to Hersh, that nobody—Feldman in particular—would be able to circumvent any administration policy insofar as the Middle East was concerned.
"The President's most senior advisers, most acutely McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, desperately sought to cut Feldman out of the flow of Middle East paperwork." 80 Hersh quotes another presidential aide as having said, "It was hard to tell the difference between what Feldman said and what the Israeli ambassador said." 81
Bartlett recalls a visit with the new President at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts one Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath). Talk turned to Feldman's role in the White House bureaucracy. "I imagine Mike's having a meeting of the Zionists in the cabinet room," the president said, according to Bartlett. 82
The President's brother, Robert Kennedy, himself said that his brother admired Feldman's work, but added, "His major interest was Israel rather than the United States." 83
However, while Myer Feldman was busy promoting Israel's interests at the White House, the president was sending out a message to the rest of the foreign policy-making establishment in Washington.
Kennedy was making it clear that he was very much interested in finding a path to peace in the Middle East and was, in particular, looking for ways to solve the problem of finding a home for the Palestinian refugees who had been displaced by Israel in 1948.
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.
"As a result, various leaders of newly independent countries were surprised to find their pro forma messages of congratulations upon Kennedy's assumption of office answered with personalized letters from the young American President." 85
According to Kennedy associate, Theodore Sorensen, "Nasser liked Kennedy's Ambassador, John Badeau, and he liked Kennedy's practice of personal correspondence. Kennedy put off, however, an invitation for a Nasser visit until improved relations could enable him to answer the political attacks such a visit would bring from voters more sympathetic to Israel." 86
(Unfortunately, however, as noted by Richard Curtiss, "As with most good intentions deferred, the invitation to Nasser for a personal meeting with Kennedy was never issued." 87)
Thus, it was that upon assuming office, Kennedy made positive attempts to contact Arab heads of state asking how the U.S. could help each country in its individual disputes with Israel.
According to America's most noted longtime Jewish critic of Israel, Dr.
Alfred Lilienthal: "While the President, more often through Vice President
Lyndon Johnson, gave much lip service to Israelist aspirations, his
administration continued to resist pressures, including a round-robin petition
signed by 226 Congressmen of both parties (aided by a large New York
Times advertisement on May 28, 1962) to initiate direct Arab-Israeli
negotiations. Kennedy had decided to shelve his pledge in the Democratic
platform to bring Israeli and Arab leaders together around a peace table in
order to settle the Palestine question." 89
Five years and one day after Kennedy's Senate speech calling for Algerian independence, Algeria became a sovereign state on July 3, 1962. According to former diplomat Richard Curtiss, "Algeria's revolutionary leaders had not forgotten the American senator who had championed their cause and they publicly hailed his election." 90
"Kennedy in turn sent William Porter, the U.S. Foreign Service officer who had explained to him the Algerian cause, as the first U.S. Ambassador to Algeria. [Algerian leader] Ahmad Ben Bella visited Washington the same year. Afterward, in the words of Ambassador Porter, Ben Bella 'ascribed to Kennedy everything he thought good in the United States.'" 91
Although pro-Israel propagandists and some American conservatives with close ties to the Israeli lobby said that an independent Algeria would be a "communist" outpost in the Middle East, Algerian Premier Ahmed Ben Bella banned the Communist Party of Algeria on November 29, 1962.92 In fact, Algeria was very much an Islamic state and it was precisely this which created so much concern for Israel.
(In subsequent chapters, in greater detail, we shall see further how JFK's CIA enemies were, in fact, collaborating with DeGaulle's enemies in the OAS, and traitors within his regime—along with the Israeli Mossad.)
Twenty years after Algerian independence, the Washington Post commented on the effect that Algerian freedom had upon DeGaulle's Middle East policy and, in turn, upon Israel:
"Diplomatically, France shorn of Algeria, returned under president Charles DeGaulle to its traditional policy of friendship with the Arabs— much to the chagrin of Israel and the 200,000 Algerian Jews who had lived peacefully alongside their Arab neighbors until emigrating to France." 93
Israeli historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi notes that "when Algeria, finally independent, joined the United Nations, only Israel voted against its admission." 94 In fact, as we shall see, the Algerian question would ultimately play a part in the events that led to JFK's assassination.
At the same time, JFK was shaping a Middle East policy that put him at loggerheads with Israel. Yet, cognizant of Israel's political influence in the United States, JFK made overtures to Israel and arranged to meet in Palm Beach, in December of 1962, with Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir.
However, the president tempered that pledge with a hope that Israel recognized that America also had interests in the Middle East. According to President Kennedy, referring to U.S.-Israeli relations, "Our relationship is a two-way street." 95
"The United States, the President said, has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs. But for us to play properly the role we are called upon to play, we cannot afford the luxury of identifying Israel, or Pakistan, or certain other countries, as our exclusive friends." 96
According to Green, the thrust of Kennedy's message to Israel was this: "The best way for the United States to effectively serve Israel's national security interests, Kennedy said, was to maintain and develop America's associations with the other nations of the region. America's influence could then be brought to bear as needed in particular disputes to ensure that Israel's essential interests were not compromised." 97
"'If we pulled out of the Arab Middle East and maintained our ties only with Israel this would not be in Israel's interest,' Kennedy said." 98
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 . . .
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.
In order to thoroughly examine Kennedy's conflict with Israel over the Zionist State's nuclear intentions, we once again refer to Stephen Green's aforementioned work, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, a treasure trove of little known information relating to U.S.- Israeli relations from the period of 1948 through 1967. Green writes of JFK's discovery that Israel was engaged in nuclear arms development.
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'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.
From the very beginning of his presidency, John F. Kennedy found himself at severe odds with the government of Israel. It was a conflict that would never really be resolved until the day JFK died in Dallas. It was not an auspicious start for the New Frontier.
In Paris, Charles DeGaulle's reaction mirrored that of Kennedy's. His government had been providing nuclear technology assistance to Israel, but with the assurance from Ben-Gurion that the nuclear development was peaceful in nature.
According to Israeli historians Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman: "There was also pressure from President DeGaulle in Paris. The French attitude toward the Middle East began to change just after he took office in 1958 . . . He suspected that the Dimona reactor was destined for military uses and this greatly annoyed the French president." 104 (DeGaulle's later decision to grant Algerian independence, already described, simply exacerbated his own already growing tensions with Israel.)
In Washington, JFK was determined to settle the matter once and for all. Stephen Green described Kennedy's next step: "In May Kennedy and Ben-Gurion met in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Kennedy had already written to Ben-Gurion expressing his extreme concern about the Dimona project, and suggesting regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In New York, Ben-Gurion agreed to a compromise—(approximately) annual inspections by U.S. scientists at times and on terms to be determined by the Israeli Defense Ministry.
"Later, Myer Feldman, Kennedy's aide for Middle East matters, would reveal that in return for the periodic U.S. inspections, Ben-Gurion had exacted a promise of provision of advanced Hawk ground-to-air missiles.
"There is no reason to doubt Kennedy's seriousness in wanting to track Israeli nuclear research and forestall weapons development, but whether annual inspections under the terms indicated achieved this result [was, as events unfolded] open to question." 105
So it was that John F. Kennedy unintentionally found himself already at loggerheads with Israel behind the scenes.
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."106
As Hersh notes, quite profoundly we see in retrospect, this secret war with Israel was never once noted by any of Kennedy's biographers.107 If indeed it had been, as we shall see, the mystery behind the JFK assassination might have been unraveled long, long ago.
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.' 108
According to Green's accurate assessment, "The memorandum was very strong and decidedly negative in its conclusions" 109 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." 110
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."111
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 (N.I.E), which would have involved distribution to several other agencies of the government. No formal N.I.E was issued by CIA on the Israeli nuclear weapons program until 1968."112
That the CIA—or at the very least, elements within the CIA—would be interested in protecting Israel's interests is no surprise. As we shall see in Chapter 8, the ties between Israel and the CIA were quite intimate—perhaps too intimate in too many, many ways.
Although Israel's nuclear program was ostensibly "peaceful" in nature, the fact is that the project was entirely controlled by Israel's Ministry of Defense. This alone made the project controversial, even in Israel. It was for this reason that it was critical for Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to neutralize JFK's opposition.
There was enough domestic opposition to the program in Israel itself that Kennedy's own steadfast refusal to support Israeli nuclear development could have killed the project altogether.
In the early months of his administration, Kennedy maintained regular contact with Ben-Gurion in an effort to stop the nuclear development. The two leaders had an ongoing private correspondence over the issue.
Ben-Gurion sought to have a private meeting with Kennedy—in the course of an official state visit to Washington—but the president refused to provide a formal invitation.
It was then that, in May 1961, Ben-Gurion pulled his strings at the White House and contrived a meeting with Kennedy through the intervention of New York financier Abe Feinberg.
It was Feinberg, as we have seen in Chapter 4, who had initially smoothed over Kennedy's relations with the American Jewish community during the 1960 presidential campaign and arranged for a massive infusion of Jewish money into JFK's campaign.
(It was this experience, as noted previously, that soured Kennedy's attitude toward Israel and its powerful lobby to a significant extent.)
Feinberg arranged for the American president and the Israeli leader to meet during Ben-Gurion's unofficial visit to the United States where he was scheduled to be honored at a convocation at Brandeis University, a Jewish oriented center of learning near Boston.
Following the affair at Brandeis, Ben-Gurion journeyed to New York City where he met with Kennedy at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. According to Hersh, "The meeting with Kennedy was a major disappointment for the Israeli prime minister, and not only because of the nuclear issue. " 114
"'He looked to me like a twenty-five-year-old boy,' Ben-Gurion later told his biographer. 'I asked myself: 'How can a man so young be elected President?' At first I did not take him seriously.'"115
What's more, the Israeli Prime Minister had an additional reason to be suspicious of the young American's motives. According to Feinberg, "B.G. could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man." 117 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."118
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."119
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 public at the time.
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 M.I.G's . . . Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man."120
Clearly, then, by this point, Ben-Gurion perceived the American president's policies to be a very threat to Israel's survival. Ben-Gurion was vowing to fight, as we have seen, "down to the last man."
Kennedy offered to sell Israel Hawk missiles for defensive purposes—as Israel had been demanding—but Kennedy continued to drag his feet on the sale. The president refused to be pushed to the limit by Israel.
Kennedy finally relented and approved the sale, but only after pressure from Israel and its allies in the American Congress. By then, however, it was probably too late. The twig had been bent.
"The legislators reechoed the Ben-Gurion contention that Israel had fallen behind in the arms race. Nasser, they claimed, was ready for a push button war. Israel [was] easy to pinpoint and destroy and [could not] retaliate against four or five Arab states at once."121
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. 122
(This, of course, still did not guarantee that Israel's friends in the CIA [whom we will consider in Chapter 8] did not tip off the Israelis to the hostile operations being conducted.)
Kennedy was still willing, however, to attempt to settle the matter and requested that Israel permit 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."123
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.
One of those called into action was Abe Feinberg, the New York businessman who had helped raise critical funds for Kennedy during his presidential campaign. However, even Feinberg was unsuccessful.124 However, Feinberg did send a message to the president that continued demands for inspection of the plant might "result in less support [from the Israeli lobby] in the 1964 presidential campaign."125
According to Hersh, "In the end Feinberg and Ben-Gurion could not overcome the continued presidential pressure for inspection of Dimona. BenGurion's categorical public denial of any weapons intent at Dimona had left the Israeli government few options: refusing access would undercut the government's credibility and also lend credence to the newly emerging anti-nuclear community inside Israel. 126
It was all very carefully orchestrated. Even the Israeli guides who took the Americans through the facility were accompanied by translators who gave the Americans fraudulent translations of the remarks made by the Israeli engineers at the plant.
According to Hersh, "Ben-Gurion took no chances: the American inspectors—most of them experts in nuclear reprocessing—would be provided with a Potemkin Village and never know it."127
Ben-Gurion's deception—however successful it may have been—still did not convince JFK that Israel was indeed fully committed to peaceful nuclear development. Kennedy, of course, knew better.
A standoff between Kennedy and Israel was already in place and it did not bode well for the future.
"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 to send them a lot more, for fear that they would use it."128
In fact, it went much deeper than that. Overall Kennedy administration policy toward the Middle East left Israel and its American lobby most dissatisfied. In his memoirs, I. L. Kenan of the pro-Israel American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, a registered lobby for Israel, described 1963 as “the turbulent year" between John F. Kennedy and Israel. In a chapter in those memoirs, entitled "A Multitude of Promises"—Kennedy presumably the promiser—Kenan scored Kennedy's Middle East policies:
"Kennedy's neutralist strategy, his hope to please both sides in every troubled area, plunged him into a multitude of predicaments in the turbulent year of 1963. His pursuit of former enemies whom he sought to befriend alarmed our allies, whose fears he constantly sought to ally by strong but quiet commitments." 129
The "enemies" whom Kenan referred to were those Arab leaders—Nasser of Egypt most especially—to whom JFK offered peace. Those "allies"—at least in Kenan's context—really meant just one country—Kenan's foreign principal, Israel.
Kennedy's "strong but quiet commitments," however, were apparently not enough as relations between Israel and the Arab states were strained. War appeared imminent, at least in the eyes of the Israeli leadership.
By the end of April, 1963 Israel's David Ben-Gurion sensed that the Arabs were going to attack the Jewish State, but John F. Kennedy did not share that pessimistic view. Kennedy still hoped for peace in the region and he continued his efforts.130
On August 14, 1963 the government of Algerian premier Ben Bella accused Israel of plotting to topple the new Arab regime. The Algerian authorities captured 20 Algerians and 10 foreigners who were engaged in a conspiracy to bring down the government.
"Those foreigners are nearly all Israelites," declared the Algerian information minister. "We are led to believe that we are facing a plot with far-flung ramifications and that behind it is the hand of Israel which is trying to oppose the march of our revolution.
"Ben Bella has made clear the Algerian position on the enclave of imperialism called Israel but which is really Palestine. It is not strange that they are trying to interfere in our internal affairs." 131
Israel and its allies in the French Secret Army Organization (O.A.S)—now officially disbanded, but effectively still functioning—were determined to reverse the course of history.
This, however, is not the last time in these pages that we will find the fine hand of Israel and the O.A.S interfering in the life and work of John F. Kennedy.
This, in effect, temporarily—at least—scuttled JFK's peace efforts. His hand of friendship to the Arab world and its leaders, Nasser of Egypt in particular, was being cut off—at the shoulder.
Israel's chief (registered) lobbyist in Washington—I. L. Kenan—described John F. Kennedy's final Washington press conference.
"Kennedy ruefully surveyed the debris of his Nasser policy at a press conference on November 14, 1963. He was sharply critical. The Senate amendment required him "to make a finding which is extremely complicated," and he did not believe that this language would strengthen our hand or our flexibility in dealing with the UAR.
"[Kennedy] went on: 'In fact, it would have an opposite effect. I think it's a very dangerous, untidy world, but we're going to have to live with it; and I think one of the ways to live with it is to permit us to function.
"If the Administration did not function, the voters would throw it out. Kennedy asked Congress not to make it impossible to function by means of `legislative restraints and inadequate appropriations.'
"These words," Kenan notes, "were uttered at his last White House press conference." 132
On many fronts, indeed, JFK's Middle East policy was angering the Israelis, including—perhaps especially—JFK's determination to solve the problem of the Palestinian refugees.
The London Jewish Chronicle reported the reaction of the Israelis: "Prime Minister Levi Eshkol summoned the U.S. ambassador . . . and told him that Israel was 'shocked' by the pro-Arab attitude adopted by the U.S. delegation." Golda Meir, the Chronicle reported, "expressed Israel's `astonishment and anger' at the attitude of the U.S." 133
For its own part, the Chronicle noted editorially, "Israel, which has neither been consulted nor informed about the American intention, is not surprisingly questioning the good faith of the United States." 134
It is not likely that JFK ever got to read the defamatory comments about his Middle East policy published by the London Jewish Chronicle. They were printed on November 22, 1963.
So it was that even as John F. Kennedy was preparing to leave Washington for his final journey as president, he was plagued with the problem of Israel and its powerful influence in Washington.
As it turned out, it was during Kennedy's trip to Dallas that one last memorandum was prepared on his behalf relating to the touchy issue of global nuclear arms development.
Although JFK had forcefully opposed French production of nuclear weapons—much as he opposed that of Israel—the American president had, however, begun taking a new look at his stance vis-à-vis the French.
Thus it was that while John F. Kennedy was triumphantly touring downtown Dallas, there was being prepared a "Top Secret, Eyes Only" memorandum from JFK's adviser, McGeorge Bundy, outlining the new, perhaps more lenient, Kennedy policy toward France, which, as we have seen, had itself played a major role in Israel's nuclear development and, unwittingly (much to the disgust of French President DeGaulle) in the drive for atomic weaponry. The memorandum regarding the new policy toward France was also dated November 22, 1963. 135
By this time, however, John F. Kennedy's fate was sealed. He had pushed Israel and its leaders to the brink.
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." 136
"It was not a friendly exchange," according to Ben-Gurion's writer, Yuval Neeman. "Kennedy was writing like a bully. It was brutal."139 BenGurion'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 president made sure that the Israeli prime minister paid for his defiance.” 140 When Ben-Gurion once again sought the opportunity for a formal, ballyhooed state visit to Washington, Kennedy rebuffed him.
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." 141 (emphasis added) 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.142
In Ben-Gurion's eyes, John F. Kennedy was clearly a modern-day Haman—an enemy of the Jewish people. In Jewish folklore, Haman was a descendant of the Amalekites who served as prime minister to King Ahasueros of Persia. It was Haman who sought to convince the king that all of the Jews of his empire should be exterminated forever.
However, according to legend, a beautiful Jewish temptress named Esther used her feminine wiles on Ahasueros and, in the end, it was Haman who was instead put to death. The important Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the deliverance of the Jews from Haman's intended holocaust.
In the Bible—Deut 25:19, I Sam. 15:8—the ancient Hebrews were urged to "blot out the memory of the Amalekites" from whom Haman descended.
In Israel—in 1963—David Ben-Gurion certainly looked upon John F. Kennedy as a modern-day Haman, a son of the Amalekites. As he pondered the brutal conflict with JFK, Ben-Gurion no doubt remembered the meditation that is read on Purim:
"A wicked man, an arrogant offshoot of the seed of Amalek, rose up against us. Insolent in his riches, he digged himself a pit, and his own greatness laid him a snare. In his mind he thought to entrap, but was himself entrapped; he sought to destroy, but was himself speedily destroyed . . . he made him a gallows, and was himself hanged thereon."
Andrew and Leslie Cockburn have summarized it well: "Ben-Gurion is the father of Israel. He really steered the state to independence, steered his people to independence, wrote the Israeli declaration of independence, was prime minister all the way through, with a brief interval, until 1963. The Israel you see today is really the creation of David Ben-Gurion."144 We can thus see why Ben-Gurion was indeed so frustrated by his failure to back down John F. Kennedy. It was a time of crisis and a time for action.
It is the thesis of this volume that Ben-Gurion, in his final days as Prime Minister, ordered the Mossad to participate in the JFK assassination conspiracy. Based upon evidence that we will outline in Final Judgment, we believe that the Mossad carried out Ben-Gurion's order.
On November 22, 1963, the American president whom Ben-Gurion considered a threat to Israel's very survival came to an inglorious end in Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
That Israel and its leaders believed that drastic measures might be needed to influence the course of history and to ensure the survival of Israel cannot be doubted.
Isser Harrel, who was head of the Mossad until mid-1963, has been
quoted as saying that "The government of Israel must act to root out the evil
of racism and the monster of anti-Semitism . ." and that if it could not be
done diplomatically, it was to be done in other ways, including, according to
Harel, "the secret services, as was the case in my times." 145 In short, by
means of murder, if necessary.
Former Undersecretary of State George Ball summarizes the impact of John F. Kennedy's assassination on U.S.-Israeli relations quite succinctly, if somewhat cryptically: "However Kennedy would have succeeded in his relations with Israel must remain one of the many intriguing questions for which his assassination precludes any answer." 146
Israel's respected Ha'aretz 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,"147 according to an account of the newspaper's report.
"In February 1963 Mr. Shamir dispatched squads on two unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Hans Kleinwachter, a German scientist suspected of helping Egypt develop missiles. Another German scientist working for the Egyptians, Heinz Krug, disappeared mysteriously in September 1962."148 Shamir's operatives were suspected of having been responsible.
According to the Israeli newspaper, Shamir had recruited members for his Mossad hit squad from former members of the Stern Gang, the underground terrorist group that Shamir led during Israel's fight for independence. The Stern Gang was responsible for the murder, in 1944, of Lord Moyne, Britain's resident Mideast minister, and for the slaying of U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. 149
We have already seen that Kennedy—like Moyne and Bernadotte—was a "perceived enemy" of Israel and its embittered Prime Minister, David BenGurion. And now we know of the existence of the Mossad hit squad that played a major role in the conspiracy that brought about the death of John F. Kennedy. In Chapter 16 we shall learn precisely how this Mossad orchestrated conspiracy came about.
Each of these powerful forces had good reason to take drastic action to put an end to the threat posed by JFK. That they undoubtedly came together in a joint conspiracy we shall document in this volume.
next
The Coming of the Messiah:
footnotes
Chapter Three A Bad Habit
23 Tikkun, March/April 1992.
24 Ibid
25 Livia Rokach. Israel's Sacred Terrorism. (Belmont, Massachusetts: AAUG Press, 1986), p. 34. 556 Reference Notes [459]
26 Spotlight, September 6, 1982.
27 The Spotlight, November 10, 1980
28 Ibid.
29 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era. (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1987), p. 217.
30 Ibid.
31 The Spotlight, April 21, 1986.
32 The Spotlight., November 10, 1986 33 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., September 27, 1982.
Chapter Four No Love Lost
36 Granma, November 4, 1979.
37 C. David Heymann, A Woman Named Jackie. (New York: New American Library, 1989), p. 151.
38 Ibid.
39 Time, October 19, 1992., p. 28.
40 Richard Whalen. The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy. (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 366-367.
41 George Lincoln Rockwell. This Time the World. (Liverpool, West Virginia: White Power Publications, 1963), p. v.
42 Ibid., p. 123.
43 Interview with DeWest Hooker, January 20, 1992.
44 Ibid.
45 Edward Tivnan. The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 54.
46 Interview with De West Hooker.
47 Richard Curtiss. A Changing Image. [Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1986), p. 65.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., p. 66.
50 Ibid.
51 Jim Marrs. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1989), p. 175.
52 Michael Milan. The Squad: The U.S. Government's Secret Alliance With Organized Crime. [New York: Shapolski Publishers, 1989], p. 166.
53 Stephen Fox. Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth Century America. (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1989), p. 307.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., pp. 313-314.
56 Ibid., p. 314.
57 Ibid., p. 315.
58 Sam Giancana and Chuck Giancana. Double Cross. (New York: Warner Books, 1992), p. 75.
59 Ibid., p. 227.
60 Ibid., p. 229.
61 Ibid., p. 230.
62 Ibid., p. 280.
63 Ibid., p. 284
64 Heymann, p. 234.
65 Tivnan, p. 52.
66 Victor Lasky. JFK: The Man & The Myth. (New Rochelle, New York, 1966), p. 143.
67 Tivnan, Ibid.
68 Seymour M. Hersh. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 94.
69 Ibid., p. 96.
70 Ibid., p. 97.
71 Alfred M. Lilienthal. The Zionist Connection II. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: North American, 1982), p. 548.
72 Ibid.
73 Hersh, p. 103.
74 Giancana, p. 296.
75 Mickey Cohen with John Peer Nugent. Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), p. 236.
76 Hersh, p. 97.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
Chapter Five Genesis
79 Seymour Hersh. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 98.
80 Ibid., p. 99.
81 Ibid
82 Ibid
83 Ibid p. 100.
84 Ibid., p. 113.
85 Richard Curtiss. A Changing Image (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1986), p. 65.
86 Ibid., p. 67.
87 Ibid.
88 New Outlook Magazine, January, 1964, p. 5.
89 Alfred Lilienthal. The Zionist Connection II. (New Brunswick, New jersey: North American, 1982), p. 545. 558 Reference Notes [461]
90 Curtiss, p. 66.
91 Ibid., p. 66
92 Washington Post, November 20, 1962.
93 Washington Post, March 20, 1982.
94 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Israeli Connection—Who Israel Arms and Why. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 45.
95 Stephen Green. Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1984), p. 182.
96 Ibid., p. 181.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid., pp. 181-182.
100 Ibid., p. 182.
101 Ibid., pp. 182-183.
102 Ibid., p. 154.
103 Ibid., p. 159-160.
104 Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman. Every Spy a Prince. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990), pp. 71-72.
105 Ibid., pp. 159-160.
106 Hersh, p. 100.
107 Ibid.
108 Green, p. 164.
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid., pp. 164-165.
112 Ibid. , p. 164.
113 Hersh, p. 101.
114 Ibid., p. 102.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid., p. 103.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., p. 105.
119 Ibid., p. 118.
120 George Ball and Douglas Ball. The Passionate Attachment. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), p. 51.
121 Lilienthal, p. 547.
122 Hersh, p. 107.
123 Ibid., p. 109.
124 Ibid., p. 108.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid., p. 109.
127 Ibid., p. 111.
128 Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn. Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship. (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), p. 91. [462] Final Judgment 559
129 I. L. Kenan. Israel's Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington. (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981), p. 166.
130 Ibid., pp. 166-167.
131 Washington Post, August 13, 1963.
132 Ibid., p. 187.
133 London Jewish Chronicle, Nov. 22, 1963.
134 Ibid.
135 Hersh, pp. 125-126.
136 Dan Kurzman. Ben-Gurion: Prophet of Fire. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), pp. 440-441.
137 Hersh, pp. 120-121.
138 Ibid., p. 120.
139 Ibid., p. 121.
140 Ibid.
141 Ibid.
142 Ibid., pp. 121-122.
143 Ibid., p. 124.
144 Interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, September 1, 1991.
145 Quoted by Yossi Melman in the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 28, 1993.
146 Ball, pp. 51-52.
147 Washington Times, July 4, 1992.
148 Ibid.
149 Ibid.
"Our goal is to break the West's confidence in the existing Egyptian regime. The actions should cause arrests, demonstrations, and expressions of revenge. The Israeli origin should be totally covered while attention should be shifted to any other possible factor. The purpose is to prevent economic and military aid from the West to Egypt." 25
Ultimately the truth about Israel's involvement in the affair became public and Israel was rocked internally in the wake of the scandal. Competing political elements within Israel used the scandal as a bludgeon against their opponents. But the truth about Israel's use of a "false flag" had come to international attention and demonstrated how Israel was indeed willing to needlessly endanger innocent lives as part of its grand political strategy to expand its influence in the Middle East.
BLAMING 'RIGHT-WING EXTREMISTS'
A shadowy "right wing" group known as "Direct Action" was accused
of the attack on Goldenberg's Deli in Paris on August 9, 1982. Six people
died and 22 were injured. The leader of "Direct Action" was one Jean-Marc
Rouillan. Rouillan had been operating in the Mediterranean under the cover
name of "Sebas" and had been repeatedly linked to the Mossad. All
references to Rouillan's Mossad links were deleted from the official reports
issued at the time. However, the Algerian national news service—which has ties to French intelligence—blamed the Mossad for Rouillan's activities. Angry French intelligence officers were believed to have leaked this information to the Algerians. Several top French security officials quit in protest over this cover up of Mossad complicity in Rouillan's crimes. 26 However, other Mossad orchestrated false flag operations also took place on French soil.
On October 3, 1980 a synagogue on Copernicus Street was bombed in Paris. Four bystanders were killed. Nine were injured. The media frenzy which followed the incident was worldwide. Reports held that "right wing extremists" were responsible. Yet, of all of the "right wing extremists" held for questioning, none was arrested. In fact, all were released.
In the upper echelons of French intelligence, however, the finger of suspicion was pointed at the Mossad. According to one report: "On April 6, 1979, the same Mossad terror unit now suspected of the Copernicus carnage blew up the heavily guarded plant of C.N.I.M industries at La Seyne-sur-Mer, near Toulon, in southeast France, where a consortium of French firms was building a nuclear reactor for Iraq.
"The Mossad salted the site of the C.N.I.M bomb blast with 'clues' followed up with anonymous phone calls to police—suggesting that the sabotage was the work of a 'conservative' environmentalist Troup—'the most pacific and harmless people on earth' as one source put it." 27
BLAMING THE CORSICAN MAFIA
BLAMING THE NEO-NAZIS
In October, 1976 the same Mossad unit kidnapped two West German
students named Brigette Schulz and Thomas Reuter from their Paris hotel.
Planted "clues" and anonymous phone calls made it appear that a Bavarian
"neo-nazi" formation had executed the abduction. In fact, French
intelligence established that the two German youths had been secretly flown
to Israel, drugged, tortured, coerced into a false "confession of complicity" in
PLO activities, and then anonymously incarcerated in one of the Israeli
government's notorious political prisons.
BLAMING THE SOUTH KOREANS
In February 1977 a German-born, naturalized U.S. citizen named
William Jahnke arrived in Paris for some secretive business meetings. He
soon vanished, leaving no trace. Paris police were anonymously informed
that Jahnke had been involved in a high-level South Korean bribery affair
and "eliminated" when the deal went sour. A special team of investigators
from S.D.E.C.E, the leading French intelligence agency, eventually determined
that Jahnke had been "terminated" by the Mossad, which suspected him of
selling secret information to the Libyans. Along with other details of this
sordid case, the S.D.E.C.E learned that Jahnke had been "fingered" to the
Mossad by his own former employer, the CIA.28
BLAMING THE LIBYANS
One of Israel's most outrageous "false flag" operations involved a wild
propaganda story aimed at discrediting Libyan leader Muamar Qaddafi—one
of Israel's favorite enemies. In the early months of the administration of
President Ronald Reagan, the American media began heavily promoting a
story to the effect that a "Libyan hit squad" was in the United States for the
express purpose of assassinating Reagan. This inflamed public sentiment
against Libya and there were repeated calls for blood. The Los Angeles Times itself had already blown the whistle on Israel's scare stories. "Israeli intelligence, not the Reagan administration," reported the Times, "was a major source of some of the most dramatic published reports about a Libyan assassination team allegedly sent to kill President Reagan and other top U.S. officials . . . Israel, which informed sources said has 'wanted an excuse to go in and bash Libya for a longtime,' may be trying to build American public support for a strike against [Qaddafi], these sources said." 30
In other words, Israel had been promoting the former SAVAK agent, Ghorbanifar, to official Washington as a reliable source. In fact, he was a Mossad disinformation operative waving a "false flag" to mislead America. This was yet another Israeli scheme to blame Libya for its own misdeeds, this time using one "false flag" (Iran's SAVAK) to lay the blame on another "false flag" (Libya). (In Chapter 18 we shall see yet another SAVAK crime carried out on behalf of Israel and its allies in the CIA.)
BLAMING LIBYA AGAIN
Israel's Mossad was almost certainly responsible for the bombing of the
La Belle discotheque in West Berlin on April 5, 1986. However, claims
were made that there was "irrefutable" evidence that the Libyans were
responsible. A U.S. serviceman was killed. President Ronald Reagan
responded with an attack on Libya. However, intelligence insiders believed that Israel's Mossad had concocted the phony "evidence" to "prove" Libyan responsibility. West Berlin police director Manfred Ganschow, who took charge of the investigation, cleared the Libyans, saying, "This is a highly political case. Some of the evidence cited in Washington may not be evidence at all, merely assumptions supplied for political reasons." 31
BLAMING THE SYRIANS
On April 18, 1986 one Nezar Hindawi, a 32 year old Jordanian was
arrested in London after security guards found that one of the passengers
boarding an Israeli plane bound for Jerusalem, Ann Murphy, 22, was
carrying a square, flat sheet of plastic explosive in the double bottom of her
carry-on bag. Miss Murphy told security men that the detonator (disguised
as a calculator) had been given to her by her finance, Hindawi. He was
charged with attempted sabotage and attempted murder. Word was leaked that Hindawi had confessed and claimed that he had been hired by Gen. Mohammed Al-Khouli, the intelligence director of the Syrian air force. Also implicated were others including the Syrian Ambassador in London. The French authorities warned the British Prime Minister that there was more to the case than met the eye—that is, Israeli involvement. This was later confirmed in reports in the Western press. 32
BLAMING THE PLO
In 1970, King Hussein of Jordan was provided with incriminating
intelligence that suggested the Palestine Liberation Organization was
plotting to murder him and seize power in his nation. Infuriated, Hussein
mobilized his forces for what has become known as the 'Black September'
purge of the PLO. Thousands of Palestinians living in Jordan were rounded
up, some of the leaders were tortured, and in the end, masses of refugees
were driven from Jordan to Lebanon. In 1982, just when the PLO had abandoned the use of terrorism, the Mossad spread disinformation about "terror attacks" on Israeli settlements along the northern border in order to justify a full-scale military invasion of Lebanon. Years later, even leading Israeli spokesmen, such as former Foreign Minister Abba Eban, admitted that the reports of "PLO terrorism" had been contrived by the Mossad. 34
It is also worth noting that the attempted assassination—in London—of Israeli Ambassador to England, Shlomo Argov, was initially blamed upon the PLO.
The attempted assassination was cited by Israel as one excuse for its bloody 1982 incursion into Lebanon. In fact, the diplomat in question was considered one of Israel's "doves" and inclined toward a friendly disposition of Israel's longtime conflict with the PLO. He was the least likely target of PLO wrath. What's more, one of the suspects in the crime was found carrying a "hit list" which actually included the name of the head of the PLO office in London. 35 Thus, it appears that the assassination attempt was carried out by the Mossad—under yet another "false flag"—for two purposes: (a) elimination of a domestic "peacenik" considered friendly toward the Palestinians; and (b) pinning yet another crime on the Palestine Liberation Organization.
WHY FRAME OSWALD
AS A 'PRO-CASTRO AGITATOR'?
These instances cited here are but a handful of Mossad-orchestrated
"false flag" operations blamed on a wide variety of alleged "suspects." The
evidence that we shall be examining in Final Judgment suggests that the
assassination of John F. Kennedy was yet another "false flag" conspiracy by
Israel's Mossad and its collaborators in the American CIA. We now know, based upon years of study by numerous JFK assassination researchers, that prior to the JFK assassination, the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was being set up as a patsy. Indeed, Oswald's activities were presented as proof that a "pro-Castro agitator" had been the "lone nut" behind the president's assassination.
If anything—we should note at this juncture—Lee Harvey Oswald's identity as a "pro-Castro agitator"—the role he played prior to the JFK assassination—was tailor-made for (or, perhaps we should say, tailor-made by) the CIA and its allies in the Mossad. What few JFK assassination researchers have noted (or perhaps even understood) was that Fidel Castro's Cuba had long been hostile to Israel and the cause of Zionism. Thus, both the Mossad and the CIA would find a "pro-Castro agitator" an ideal patsy.
In a lengthy essay the Castro government published in the November 4, 1979 edition of Granma—an official newspaper—the Cuban Marxists critiqued Israel and Zionism. Castro's newspaper said, in part:
"The Zionists never did, and never will, forgive the Soviet state and its Leninist Party . . . because the Bolsheviks implemented a correct policy that incorporated the talents and efforts of the Soviet Jews into the tasks of building a new society and thus demonstrated the class origins of discrimination and anti-Semitism, breaking with the past and providing a genuine solution to the Jewish problem, a solution which was not and could never be a massive exodus to Palestine.
"With the outbreak of the cold war the Zionists collaborated in all the subversive and diversionary activities against the USSR and other socialist countries. The secret services of the Zionist state of Israel coordinated their spy activities with the CIA. And to complete the picture there is the Zionist counter-revolutionary action against the national liberation movements.
"The Zionists became a power and succeeded in establishing their own state in 1948. Now their task is to defend oil routes, protect all the interests of U.S. imperialism and block the advance of the Arab revolution. Neither the machinations of Zionist counterrevolution, nor Israeli arms, can hold back the victorious march of the peoples of the world." 36
These are fighting words, to say the least, and do explain perhaps why those who were responsible for framing Lee Harvey Oswald would have selected his profile as a "pro-Castro agitator." The profile would satisfy both the hard-line anti-communists and the Zionists.
In subsequent years, as the initial cover story that Oswald was a pro Castro agitator began to unravel and new fallback targets have been named— primarily "the Mafia." It was the Mossad and its allies in the CIA and in the controlled American media who have been doing all the fingering. Everybody being blamed by the Mossad and its CIA allies were implicated and everybody, as a consequence, had a stake in the cover-up.
JFK AND SECRET DEALS
To achieve the presidency in 1960, John F. Kennedy was forced to cut
secret deals—behind the scenes—with a variety of powerful forces intricately
linked to Israel. In Chapter 4 we shall examine the history of those deals and
how they played a part in the JFK assassination conspiracy.
Chapter Four
No Love Lost:
JFK, Meyer Lansky,
the Mafia & the Israeli Lobby
There was a long history of bitter enmity between John
F. Kennedy and his powerful father Ambassador Joseph P.
Kennedy and organized crime boss Meyer Lansky, stemming
in part from the senior Kennedy's deals with the underworld.
This, however, did not stop the Kennedy family from cutting
deals with the crime syndicate when it came to winning
elections. The Kennedy family's alleged anti-Semitism didn't do anything to improve JFK's relations with Israel and its American lobby either. Kennedy's intervention in the issue of Algerian independence from France also drew sharp criticism from the Israeli lobby as well. Yet, when John F. Kennedy sought the presidency, he was willing to cut deals with the Israeli lobby—for a price.
By the end of his presidency, however, Kennedy had reneged on his deals, not only with Israel's Godfather, Meyer Lansky, and his henchmen in the Mafia, but also with the Israeli lobby.
John F. Kennedy was very much a product of his father's upbringing— much to the dismay, it might be said, of many of even JFK's most devout disciples. They would, frankly, prefer to forget much of the recorded history of the Kennedy family and present JFK as something just short of being a saint.
That President John F. Kennedy was the son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy long perceived to be, at the very least, neutral to the ambitions of Nazi Germany—and, at the worst, an anti-Semite and even an admirer of Adolf Hitler—has been a lot for Kennedy's admirers to swallow.
Ambassador Kennedy, of course, fought U.S. entry into World War II. Several accounts of the period suggest that Kennedy himself returned from Britain, where he served as American ambassador, with the intent of launching a major campaign against President Roosevelt's war plans.
However, after a meeting at the White House between the ambassador and the president, Kennedy backed off. What happened during that meeting is ripe for speculation.
JFK, HITLER AND THE WAR IN EUROPE
What is interesting to note (and definitely little known) is that at the
same time Ambassador Kennedy was fighting against American
involvement in what became the Second World War, his sons Joe, Jr. and
John were also promoting the same agenda.Joe, Jr., as a student at Harvard, served on the Harvard Committee Against Military Intervention in Europe, described as "a reactionary group that petitioned influential government officials and held rallies opposing American entry in the European war effort."37
More significantly, however, it appears that JFK himself was under steady surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI because of his anti-war activities. JFK was accused by the FBI of voicing "anti-British and defeatist sentiments and blaming Winston Churchill for getting the United States into the war . . . It also appears," charged the FBI, "that Kennedy had prepared for his father at least one of the speeches which his father had made, or was intending to make, in answer to criticism of his alleged appeasement policies . . . In addition Jack Kennedy stated that in his opinion England was through, and his father's greatest mistake was not talking enough, that he stopped talking too soon." 38
Young Jack Kennedy, as a Harvard student, was more than neutral toward Hitler, it seems. Having visited Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany, JFK recorded in his diary, according to Time magazine, that he had come "to the decision that Facism [sic] is the thing for Germany and Italy, Communism for Russia and Democracy for America and England."39 Youthful musings, but interesting, to say the least.
KENNEDY AND THE 'FASCIST'
After the war was underway, JFK's father, Ambassador Kennedy,
actively considered involvement in a scheme to cut the war short—in
opposition to President Roosevelt. Kennedy's biographer, Richard Whalen, has written of a secret meeting between Kennedy and a prominent critic of the Roosevelt administration, the controversial publicist, Lawrence Dennis. Often described (inaccurately) as "America's leading fascist," Dennis was a former diplomat himself and one of the early leaders in the effort to block American intervention in what evolved into World War II. Consequently, he and Kennedy had much in common.
Kennedy's biographer outlined the circumstances of that secret meeting—a meeting which says much about Kennedy's line of thinking:
"In October 1943, Lawrence Dennis received a telephone call from his friend, Paul Palmer, then a senior editor of The Reader's Digest. Before the war, Dennis had contributed to the Digest, but the author of The Coming American Fascism since had become too controversial for his byline to appear in the nation's largest magazine. Now he received a $500-a-month retainer as an editorial consultant.
"One of his recent efforts had been a memorandum sharply critical of unconditional surrender and the rumored plans to break up Germany. Palmer invited Dennis to lunch in his suite in Manhattan's St. Regis Hotel, saying he would meet someone there who was thinking along similar lines.
"It turned out to be Joe Kennedy. Over lunch, Kennedy said he had been seeing Archbishop Spellman almost daily. He said the Archbishop had returned from Rome with word that Hitler's generals might attempt to overthrow him if they were offered terms less hopeless than unconditional surrender.
"Kennedy grew emotional and castigated Roosevelt. He talked of his two sons in the service, and declared that the war could be ended within two weeks if the German generals were given encouragement.
"Of course, no Church official could speak out against the folly of Roosevelt's policy, but Kennedy could, and this had been Palmer's purpose in arranging the luncheon. The editor asked whether the former Ambassador would write, or at least sign, an article condemning unconditional surrender. The impact of such an article, given Kennedy's former standing in the administration, could be enormous. But he did not accept the invitation and the war being fought by his sons and so many other young men raged on.” 40
Ambassador Kennedy no doubt remembered this meeting for the rest of his days. He was very bitter about the war and particularly bitter at Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kennedy once allegedly referred to FDR as "that crippled son of a bitch that killed my son Joe."
(Joe Kennedy, Jr., of course, being the ambassador's eldest son. It was Joe, Jr.'s death that ultimately laid the groundwork for the second son, John, to be groomed for the presidency in his older brother's place.)
A BUSINESS VENTURE
In fact, as we shall see, it may have been efforts by Hooker, as a consequence of his meeting with Joe Kennedy, that helped John F. Kennedy win his narrow victory in the 1960 presidential election.
Mr. Hooker hoped to interest Joe Kennedy in a business venture which Hooker believed might be right up the ambassador's alley. Hooker wanted to establish an independent television network, and he felt that Kennedy, himself a veteran movie mogul, might be interested in backing the enterprise. Hooker's memory of that meeting is quite interesting, particularly in the context of the thesis presented in these pages. To appreciate just precisely where Hooker was coming from, however, it is appropriate to review Hooker's remarkable background.
UNABASHEDLY ANTI-JEWISH
Born to wealth and privilege and a descendant of one of the signers of
the Declaration of Independence, Hooker had a varied career. Not only did he
act on the Broadway stage, but he also modeled in cigarette advertisements.
Hooker also served for a period as a talent agent with the powerful firm M.C.A and was, at a time during the 1950's one of the highest-paid talent
agents in America. Hooker also dabbled in television production and was
equally successful. However, there was an aspect to Hooker's persona that made him, to say the least, persona non grata in the entertainment industry: Hooker is unabashedly and frankly anti-Jewish. He will be the first to admit it, no questions asked. A powerfully-built man, Hooker is fearless and not afraid to make his position known.
One of Hooker's proteges was George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. In his memoirs, This Time the World, Rockwell credits Hooker as being a major influence on his thinking. In fact, Rockwell dedicated the book to Hooker, along with several others including Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy and General Douglas MacArthur. Hooker, Rockwell declared, was the one "who taught me to know the cunning and evil ways of the enemy."41 According to Rockwell, Hooker was "the nearest thing to a Nazi since the Bund." 42
The reason for Hooker's interest in establishing an independent network was highly political: Hooker wanted the new network to be totally divorced from Jewish money and influence. In his judgment, the three existing networks were entirely under the control of Jewish interests. Hooker wanted a network that presented what he called "our way of thinking."
JOE KENNEDY SPEAKS FRANKLY
It was in 1956 that Hooker had a private meeting in Palm Beach,
Florida with Kennedy. After a game of golf, Kennedy and Hooker got down
to business. Hooker was there to solicit Kennedy's financial, political and
personal backing for his proposed network. (It was during this period that Sen. John F. Kennedy was then actively seeking the Democratic Party's vice presidential nomination. He lost, but his efforts brought him widespread acclaim within party ranks, and set in place the mechanism for his successful bid for the top spot on the party's national ticket in 1960.)
After Hooker made his presentation to the retired ambassador, Kennedy's response was supportive in spirit, but Old Joe made his final position clear during their four-hour conference.
According to Hooker, "Joe admitted that when he was ambassador to England that he had been pro-Hitler. However, in Kennedy's words, 'we' lost the war. By 'we' he didn't mean the United States. When Kennedy said `we,' he meant the non-Jews. Joe Kennedy believed that it was the Jews who had won World War II.
"Kennedy said, 'I've done everything I can to fight the Jewish power over this country. I tried to stop World War II, but I failed. I've made all the money I need and now I'm passing everything I've learned on to my sons."
“ I don't go with the 'loser'," Kennedy told me. 'I've joined the `winners.' I'm going to work with the Jews. I'm teaching my boys the whole score and they're going to work with the Jews. I'm going to make Jack the first Irish Catholic President of the United States and if it means working with the Jews, so be it. I'm in sympathy with what you're doing, Hooker'," Kennedy said, 'but I'm not going to do anything that will ruin Jack's chances to become president."' 43
Hooker was, of course, disappointed by Kennedy's response and ultimately his "fourth" network failed to get off the ground. However, Hooker at least had the satisfaction of knowing that he and the Kennedy family were on the same wavelength—even if they were willing to compromise those views for political gain.
THE NAZIS 'ENDORSE' NIXON
As they parted at the end of their Palm Beach meeting, Hooker asked
Kennedy if there was anything he could do to help the Kennedy family. "Yes, as a matter of fact, there is something you can do." responded Joe Kennedy. "I'd like you to use your contacts in the right-wing. Have them start publishing articles accusing Jack of being controlled by the Jews, of being a Jewish puppet. This will have the effect of neutralizing Jewish opposition to Jack (because of me).
"The Jews know my views and naturally they'll assume that Jack is a chip off the old block. If the right wing starts hitting Jack this will give the Jews second thoughts—at least the ones who do the voting." 44
Hooker promised Kennedy he would do what he could. And being a man of his word, Hooker did influence his right-wing contacts as Kennedy had asked. Hooker encouraged his friend, Nazi leader Rockwell, and other "right wingers" to smear John F. Kennedy as JFK's father had suggested. His efforts succeed.
As one chronicle of the 1960 campaign noted: "The American Nazi Party helped too by throwing its support to Richard Nixon—"Nazis for Nixon, Kikes for Kennedy" was one of its slogans. Another of its placards read, "FDR and JFK mean JEW deal."45
This, of course, was inspired by JFK's father and carried out through the good offices of DeWest Hooker and his friend George Lincoln Rockwell, although the historian who penned the description of Rockwell's sloganeering probably had no idea that it was indirectly the work of Joe Kennedy.
"Frankly," Hooker says to this day, "As far as I'm concerned, it was my work that got Johnny Kennedy in the White House."46 (Hooker's claim is not completely off the mark, inasmuch as American Jewish leaders claimed themselves at the time that it was Jewish support for John F. Kennedy that gave him his narrow victory over Nixon in the 1960 election.)
This interesting—and revealing—episode is not likely to be memorialized at the John F. Kennedy Library at Harvard or in any friendly biographies of the Kennedy family. However, there can be little doubt that Israel and its American lobby had a fairly good idea of what was going on behind the scenes.
KENNEDY RILES THE ISRAELI LOBBY
In 1957, while serving in his first Senate term, John Kennedy became
involved in a festering international issue that was little noticed among the
average American voters, but which was of special interest to Israel and its
lobby in America: the question of Algerian independence. The giant Arab
colossus, long a French colony, was seeking its freedom and in France itself
the nation was engaged in a heated debate over the question. Israel, of
course, saw the emergence of another independent Arab republic as a threat
to its security and anyone favoring Algerian independence was, thus,
advocating a policy deemed threatening to Israel's survival. Former diplomat Richard Curtiss described Kennedy's surprise entry into the debate over Algeria: "By 1957, as a freshman member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he thought he recognized the tragedy of colonial inflexibility unfolding in Algeria. Already one of the congressional library's heaviest borrowers, he now spent additional time in conversation with William J. Porter, an Arabist and the director of the State Department's Office of North African Affairs.
"Porter feared that Washington's uncritical support of its NATO ally, France, in the increasingly brutal French repression of the Algerian nationalists, threatened the whole future of the United States in North Africa. Kennedy also talked to members of the Algerian F.L.N delegation at the United Nations." 47
According to Curtiss: "The speech prompted more mail than any other he delivered as a senator. The foreign policy establishment in New York, a bastion of Atlantic solidarity, expressed righteous indignation." 49 Also, notes Curtiss, "the French were irritated." 50
Some of Kennedy's critics said that the speech was a political move and that he chose the topic of Algerian independence as the subject of his first major foreign policy address because there was neither a "French" vote nor an "Algerian" vote to contend with in his home state of Massachusetts or in the nation as a whole.
While the latter observation is correct, of course, the fact is that there was one particularly powerful American voting bloc (and source of financial contributions) that did take note of Kennedy's support for Algerian Arab independence: the powerful American lobby for Israel.
As we shall see, in the end, it may have been JFK's initiative on the Algerian question that, in fact, played a major part in shaping the entirety of the conspiracy that ended his life in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963.
This gesture by the young senator also angered many French nationalists who wanted to retain French colonial control of Algeria. Many of these nationalists later banded together in the so-called Secret Army Organization—the Israel-backed O.A.S—and fought against French President Charles DeGaulle who ultimately granted Algerian independence.
In Chapter 12, Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 we will learn more about the so called "French connection" and how, indeed, it ultimately played a role in the JFK murder, manipulated by Israel's Mossad.
KENNEDY AND LANSKY
Kennedy had other powerful enemies. An ancient enmity also stood
between Joseph P. Kennedy and Meyer Lansky, the foremost Jewish mob
boss in America. (In Chapter 7 we shall examine Lansky's history in more
detail.) The conflict between JFK and Lansky, however, went back to the
days of the president's father's own bootlegging activities. According to JFK assassination expert, Jim Marrs: "In 1927, a shipment of bootleg whiskey on its way from Ireland to Boston was hijacked in southern New England. Almost the entire guard was killed in the resulting shootout. The hijackers were part of the Luciano-Lansky mob, while it was rumored that Joseph P. Kennedy was involved in the shipment. Kennedy reputedly lost a fortune on the deal and was besieged by widows of the guards seeking financial assistance. Lansky later told biographers he was convinced that Kennedy held a grudge against him personally from that time on and, in fact, had passed the hostility on to his sons."51
Long-time Lansky henchman Michael Milan lends support for Marrs’ allegation. According to Milan, "Ask Meyer Lansky about Joe Kennedy and you'd see one of the few times that Mr. L. would actually get conniptions. What they said back during Prohibition was that you can't trust Joe Kennedy to keep his word. He stole from his friends so much that he had no friends. And right before World War II, the sonovabitch turned around and said that we should all get on Hitler's side, that the Jews could go to Hell.
"Meyer was ready to bust a blood vessel. His temples were actually throbbing when Sam Koenig told him what Kennedy had said. And then Meyer, almost like he was a born Sicilian, swore a blood revenge on the entire family. 'The sins of the father,' he kept on saying to himself, mumbling like an old zeydah vowing revenge. ‘The sins of the father.’”52
The conflict between Lansky and Joseph P. Kennedy was but one facet of Kennedy's relationship with organized crime. It was a relationship of many parts, and, in the end, clearly had a significant role in helping shape the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of Ambassador Kennedy's son who had, in fact, finally achieved the presidency.
A DOUBLE CROSS
Commenting on the theory that organized crime killed JFK (a theory
with which Fox concurs), historian Stephen Fox noted that "Gangsters did
not normally harm honest lawmen," 53 such as a president like Kennedy whose administration had begun cracking down on the national crime
syndicate. However, notes Fox, "For such an extraordinary murder—to kill a president—they must have been extraordinarily provoked. In their terms, it could only have involved a double cross. The Kennedy's must have dealt with the underworld in compromising ways. When the Kennedy's then turned around and nonetheless went after organized crime, they breached the code and put a contract on the President." 54
Fox notes that while old Joe Kennedy was an inveterate gambler, with many ties to the underworld, "given his vast wealth, no matter how much he lost the underworld could never have 'owned' him." 55
Joe Kennedy himself was a regular visitor to Meyer Lansky's Colonial Inn, which Lansky co-owned with New York Mafia boss Frank Costello and an assortment of smaller shareholders including a little-known Dallas nightclub keeper named Jack Ruby. Lansky himself used to brag that among his clients included, "judges, senators, respectable businessmen. Joe Kennedy used to come four or five times a week."56
However, as the senior Kennedy's son Jack moved upward in the political arena, his father tried to shut out his past relationship with Frank Costello. According to one of Costello's friends, "The way [Costello] talked about [Joe Kennedy], you had the sense that they were close during Prohibition and then something happened. Frank said that he helped Kennedy become wealthy. What happened between them I don't know." 57
KENNEDY AND CRIME
It took the family of Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana to fill in the
missing pieces of the puzzle. According to Sam Giancana (nephew of the
Windy City mobster) and Chuck Giancana (brother of the mobster), JFK—
and his father—had indeed double crossed organized crime. According to the Giancanas, Detroit's "Jewish Mafia," the so-called "Purple Gang" had put out a contract on Joe Kennedy's life for bringing illegal liquor through their territory without their permission during the Prohibition days. However, Kennedy Sr. had gone to Chicago to beg for his life and the Chicago Mafia bosses intervened on his behalf, saving his life. As the Giancana's put it: "Ever after, Kennedy was in Chicago's debt." 58
The relationship went much deeper, however. According to the Giancanas: "Kennedy's ties to the underworld intersected at a hundred points. Besides making a fortune in bootlegging, Kennedy had made a financial killing in Hollywood in the twenties—with the help of persuasive behind the-scenes New York and Chicago muscle.
"When Prohibition came to a close, as part of a national agreement between the various bootleggers, Kennedy held on to three of the most lucrative booze distributorships in the country—Gordon's gin, Dewar's, and Haig & Haig—through his company, Somerset Imports." 59
The Giancanas also say that it was Sam Giancana who smoothed things over with Frank Costello on Joe Kennedy's behalf after Ambassador Kennedy had snubbed the New York mobster. According to the Giancanas, Kennedy was concerned about his son's burgeoning political career and it was at that point that he agreed to cut a deal with organized crime in order to ensure smooth sailing—and in order to get Frank Costello, in Kennedy's words, "off my back." 60
A PROMISE TO THE MOB
After Joe Kennedy begged for Giancana's assistance at a meeting in
Chicago, Giancana reportedly said, "I've heard nothing today that leads me
to think that you can promise me anything in return for my assistance." Kennedy responded: "I can. And I will. You help me now, Sam, and I'll see to it that Chicago—that you—can sit in the goddamned Oval office if you want. That you'll have the President's ear. But I just need time."
Kennedy told Giancana, "He'll be your man. I swear to that. My son— the President of the United States—will owe you his father's life. He won't refuse you, ever. You have my word." 61
JFK, THE MAFIA AND MEYER LANSKY
It was during the 1960 Democratic Presidential primary campaign that the
Kennedy's once again turned to Giancana for critical Mafia support. In fact,
according to the Giancanas, the Kennedys—father and son—actually met
with Sam Giancana to work out a joint agreement of mutual support, before—
and after—the election. As Giancana summarized the agreement: "I help get
Jack elected and, in return, he calls off the heat. It'll be business as usual." 62 Mafia money poured into critical primary states such as West Virginia (where many local political leaders were on the Mafia "pad") and by convention time, JFK was virtually assured the presidential nomination. Although New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello preferred Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson, an agreement was cut, and a Kennedy-Johnson ticket was set in place. The Democratic ticket was ready for the fall election.63
(In Chapter 10 we shall explore the relationship between Carlos Marcello and Meyer Lansky in detail. Marcello, in fact, was a protege of Lansky—his New Orleans front man, pure and simple.)
It turns out, too, that JFK himself was busy with other mob figures other than Sam Giancana, although the history books have discreetly ignored JFK's other crime connections, preferring instead to focus on the Italian-American "Mafia" figures.
According to FBI documents and wiretaps, JFK himself had "direct contact"64 with Meyer Lansky himself during the 1960 presidential campaign, presumably for the purpose of shoring up mob support for his presidential campaign—a pact that would ultimately prove to have been a proverbial deal with the devil.
PROBLEMS WITH THE ISRAELI LOBBY
During this same period JFK was also engaged with critical negotiations with another important power bloc in American political affairs: the pro Israel lobby. For obvious reasons, as we have seen, there was indeed no love lost between JFK, his father, Ambassador Kennedy, and the American Jewish community.
Writing in his book, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy, Edward Tivnan comments: "Senator Kennedy's record on Israel was vague, certainly not as staunchly supportive as Hubert Humphrey's. And unlike Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy did not rush to Israel's defense during the Suez affair.
"He was also a Catholic. Many Jews associated American Catholics with right-wing, pro-McCarthy, and anti-Semitic causes. Worse, there was the touchy issue of the candidate's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who, as ambassador to Great Britain in the late 1930's, had been a supporter of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasing the Nazis." 65
Kennedy's 1957 speech calling for Algerian independence, as we have seen, had not gone over well with Israel's American supporters. Angering the Israeli lobby further, Senator Kennedy had once offered an amendment that would have slashed economic assistance to Africa and the Middle East from $175 to $140 million, this despite the fact that pro-Israel senators said that this was harmful to Israel. 66
ABRAHAM FEINBERG
Kennedy's contact with the Israeli lobby was New York apparel manufacturer and financier, Abraham Feinberg. Feinberg was president of the Israel Bond Organization and was helping raise private money to finance Israel's secret nuclear development program.
(The financing was done through private, covert means and outside the normal Israeli budget process because the nuclear development program was controversial, in the eyes of not only the Eisenhower administration in Washington but also in the eyes of many Israelis.)
Referring to Kennedy, Feinberg later said, "My path to power was cooperation in terms of what they needed, campaign money." 68 (Feinberg, himself had previously supported JFK's fellow Senator Stuart Symington, a rival for the 1960 Democratic nomination.)
Recognizing the need for not only critical Jewish money, but also Jewish votes, Kennedy arranged to meet with Feinberg and a host of other wealthy Jewish Americans in Feinberg's New York apartment. Following a discussion with Kennedy, Feinberg and his associates agreed to come up with $500,000 on Kennedy's behalf. According to Feinberg: "I called him right away. His voice broke. He got emotional" with gratitude.69
KENNEDY'S 'OUTRAGE'
However, there was much more to the story according to author
Seymour Hersh who has investigated Kennedy's relations with Israel and its
American lobby: "Kennedy was anything but grateful the next morning in describing the session to Charles L. Bartlett, a newspaper columnist and close friend. He had driven to Bartlett's home in northwest Washington and dragged his friend on a walk, where he recounted a much different version of the meeting the night before. "
`As an American citizen he was outraged,' Bartlett recalled, "to have a Zionist group come to him and say: 'We know your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy.' Kennedy, as a presidential candidate, also resented the crudity with which he'd been approached. `They wanted control.' he angrily told Bartlett.
"Bartlett further recalled Kennedy promising to himself that `if he ever did get to be President, he was going to do something about it.'"70—that is, special interest lobbies particularly foreign pressure groups, dictating American election campaigns and foreign policy through their financial and political clout.
PARTIALITY 'DANGEROUS'
In a private letter to Jewish American historian Alfred Lilienthal,
himself a vocal critic of Israel, Kennedy did, however, reveal his feelings
toward the Middle East conflict. The letter, written on September 30, 1960,
read in part: "I wholly agree with you that American partiality in the Arab/Israeli
conflict is dangerous both to the U.S. and the Free World" 71 In
Lilienthal's judgment, Kennedy's comment was "one of the most significant
and perspicacious Middle East statements" ever made by any American
political figure. 72 But Kennedy had already cut his deals. Not only organized crime—but the Israeli lobby (of which Meyer Lansky was a critical supporter)—had their claims on John F. Kennedy. After the election, they expected Kennedy to pay up. In the general election, it was a narrow Kennedy victory over the Republican candidate, Vice President Richard M. Nixon.
The role of the Chicago Democratic political machine (under the thumb of Mafia boss Sam Giancana) in stealing Illinois votes on behalf of the Kennedy-Johnson ticket is now well known and a widely accepted part of American political history.
Sam Giancana and his allies in organized crime—including Meyer Lansky and the Israeli lobby—were confident that they had themselves a president.
KENNEDY & BEN-GURION
THE FIRST ENCOUNTER
Shortly after his inauguration as president, Kennedy arranged to meet
with Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. At this meeting, Kennedy
said, "I know I was elected because of the votes of American Jews. I owe
them my election. Tell me, is there something that I can do for the Jewish
people?" According to Seymour Hersh, "Ben-Gurion was surprised by the frankness and evaded the question by answering, 'You must do what is best for the free world."' However, Ben-Gurion's real reaction to Kennedy was somewhat different. “What a politician!" is how the Israeli leader described the American leader. 73
It was the beginning of a bitter and unpleasant relationship between the two men that came to its finish in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. (In Chapter 5 we will examine that unfortunate relationship in detail.)
KENNEDY TURNS THE TABLES
It was not much longer afterward that Kennedy's organized crime friends
began to realize that Kennedy was not proving to be the loyal ally that they
had expected he would be. Soon after JFK assumed the presidency, an
unexpected war on organized crime began. Robert Kennedy, who had cut his
teeth prosecuting mobsters as a counsel for the Senate's "rackets
committee," was named attorney general and it was apparent that he was
taking his new job seriously. "I know that certain people in the Chicago organization knew that they had to get John Kennedy in. There was no thought that they were going to get the best of it with John Kennedy. See, there may be different guys running for an office, and none of them may be . . . what's best for a combination.
"The choice becomes the best of what you've got going. John Kennedy was the best of the selection. But nobody in my line of work had an idea that he was going to name Bobby Kennedy attorney general. That was the last thing anyone thought." 75
(In Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 we shall examine Cohen's own strange and critical role in the JFK assassination conspiracy and its ultimate cover up yet another piece of the puzzle brought together in these pages.)
Ultimately, as we shall see, JFK's war against his former allies in the underworld, would lead him to the very doorsteps of the real brains behind the national and international crime syndicate, Meyer Lansky.
However, he had already double-crossed his immediate underworld collaborators. That alone was enough to spell JFK's doom.
JFK MOVES AGAINST
THE ISRAELI LOBBY
However, Kennedy was also engaged in some legislative sleight-of-hand
that could also prove dangerous to Israel's political leverage in American
election politics. Angry at his campaign experiences with the Israeli lobby's
fundraisers, Kennedy appointed a bipartisan commission in 1961 to
recommend ways to broaden "the financial base of our presidential
campaigns." 76 According to Seymour Hersh, "In a statement that was far more heartfelt than the public or the press could perceive, Kennedy criticized the current method of financing campaigns as 'highly undesirable' and 'not healthy' because it made candidates `dependent on large financial contributions of those with special interests.'" 77
In 1962 Kennedy submitted five bills to reform campaign financing to Congress and in 1963 two more such bills. But none of those bills survived, having been beaten back by the very special interests that Kennedy sought to counter. 78
SECRET WARS
However, Kennedy was more deeply engaged with Israel than on this
more subtle level. As we shall see in Chapter 5, Kennedy, in fact, was at
war with Israel. Not only had Kennedy double-crossed his allies in organized crime, but he had crossed his pro-Israel financiers. Israel, as we shall see in Chapter 7, was long close to the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
And Israel, as we shall see in Chapter 8, was particularly close to the American CIA. Kennedy, too, by the middle of his presidency, was also at war with the CIA. This we shall discuss in Chapter 9.
All of these powerful special interests had very special reasons to want to see JFK removed from the presidency and replaced with Lyndon Johnson. There was clearly no love lost between John F. Kennedy and the powerful forces which had helped bring him to the presidency.
A reform-minded President Kennedy also had other long-range plans in the works. The scion of an independent and essentially self-made man who "played the game" to gain power and influence—and to get his son elected president—JFK was indeed very much his father's son. As a consequence, in another important realm, JFK was moving in a direction that could rock the international banking establishment to its core.
There have been widespread rumors, for nearly a generation, that JFK was planning to issue interest-free money—so-called "greenbacks"— independent of the stranglehold of the privately-owned Federal Reserve System. In fact, interest-free United States Notes were issued during JFK's presidency—some remain in private hands today—but there have been many myths about what some have called "JFK's Greenbacks" and in Appendix Five we will examine this controversy in detail.
THE MONEY MONOPOLY
There is no question, however, but that JFK—once firmly established
in the presidency—fully intended to move against the Federal Reserve
money monopoly. In fact, during his private meeting with DeWest Hooker,
described earlier in these pages, JFK's father, Ambassador Joseph P.
Kennedy assured Hooker that an ultimate long-term aim of the Kennedy
dynasty would be the destruction of what the senior Kennedy described as
"the Rothschild-dominated Federal Reserve." This alone could have assured JFK's removal from the White House. However, there were other more immediate and ultimately dangerous conflicts at work between the forces whose influence JFK sought to dismantle and the hard-driving new Kennedy administration.
DIVERSE ENTITIES
Let us move forward and examine the strange and intimate connections
between all of these Kennedy foes and the dynamics at work between them.
However, as we shall see, it is the central thread of Israel and its Mossad
that ties all of these diverse entities together. To begin the process of untangling this hidden web of intrigue, we must first review the long-hidden story of Israel's secret war with John F. Kennedy.
Chapter Five
Genesis:
JFK's Secret War With Israel
The history books have told us of John F. Kennedy's epic struggles with Fidel Castro and the Soviets in the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet, only in recent years have we begun to learn of Kennedy's secret war with Israel. Much of the conflict stemmed from Israel's determination to build a nuclear bomb. This is a hidden history that helps explain in part the dynamic forces at work resulting in Kennedy's assassination.
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.
One of John F. Kennedy's first presidential appointments was naming his former campaign aide Myer (Mike) Feldman as his point man for Jewish and Israeli affairs—an important post, especially considering JFK's tenuous relationship with Israel and its American lobby.
According to author Seymour Hersh, "The President viewed Feldman, whose strong support for Israel was widely known, as a necessary evil whose highly visible White House position was a political debt that had to be paid." 79
However, the administration was determined to make certain, according to Hersh, that nobody—Feldman in particular—would be able to circumvent any administration policy insofar as the Middle East was concerned.
"The President's most senior advisers, most acutely McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, desperately sought to cut Feldman out of the flow of Middle East paperwork." 80 Hersh quotes another presidential aide as having said, "It was hard to tell the difference between what Feldman said and what the Israeli ambassador said." 81
'ZIONISTS IN THE CABINET ROOM'
President Kennedy himself had his own suspicions about Feldman, according to the president's close friend, Charles Bartlett (to whom Kennedy in 1960 had previously voiced concerns about Israeli influence as noted in Chapter 4). Bartlett recalls a visit with the new President at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts one Saturday (the Jewish Sabbath). Talk turned to Feldman's role in the White House bureaucracy. "I imagine Mike's having a meeting of the Zionists in the cabinet room," the president said, according to Bartlett. 82
The President's brother, Robert Kennedy, himself said that his brother admired Feldman's work, but added, "His major interest was Israel rather than the United States." 83
However, while Myer Feldman was busy promoting Israel's interests at the White House, the president was sending out a message to the rest of the foreign policy-making establishment in Washington.
Kennedy was making it clear that he was very much interested in finding a path to peace in the Middle East and was, in particular, looking for ways to solve the problem of finding a home for the Palestinian refugees who had been displaced by Israel in 1948.
KENNEDY'S GOOD INTENTIONS
According to Hersh, "State Department Arabists were pleasantly
surprised early in 1961 to get word from the White House, according to [one
source], that 'just because 90 percent of the Jewish vote had gone for
Kennedy, it didn't mean he was in their pocket.'"84 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.
"As a result, various leaders of newly independent countries were surprised to find their pro forma messages of congratulations upon Kennedy's assumption of office answered with personalized letters from the young American President." 85
OLIVE BRANCH TO NASSER
The key Arab leader at the time was Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, the
voice of Pan-Arabism. Kennedy was especially intrigued with the
possibility of opening up relations with Nasser. According to Kennedy associate, Theodore Sorensen, "Nasser liked Kennedy's Ambassador, John Badeau, and he liked Kennedy's practice of personal correspondence. Kennedy put off, however, an invitation for a Nasser visit until improved relations could enable him to answer the political attacks such a visit would bring from voters more sympathetic to Israel." 86
(Unfortunately, however, as noted by Richard Curtiss, "As with most good intentions deferred, the invitation to Nasser for a personal meeting with Kennedy was never issued." 87)
Thus, it was that upon assuming office, Kennedy made positive attempts to contact Arab heads of state asking how the U.S. could help each country in its individual disputes with Israel.
STANDING BY TRADITION
However, Kennedy wanted one thing in particular understood by all sides
in the conflict: the new U.S. president wanted "to make it crystal clear that the
U.S. meant what it said in the Tripartite Declaration of 1950—that we will
act promptly and decisively against any nation in the Middle East which
attacks its neighbor." 88 This policy was directed not only to the Arabs, but
Israel as well. Kennedy did indeed mean business.
ISRAEL'S LOBBY REACTS
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 aegis of its supporters in Congress,
many of whom relied upon support from the Israeli lobby for campaign
contributions and political leverage.
ALGERIA, AGAIN
It was mid-way into Kennedy's presidency that he had the satisfaction of
seeing French President Charles DeGaulle grant independence to Algeria—
something, of course, as we saw in Chapter 4 that was not looked favorably upon
by Israel and its American lobby. Five years and one day after Kennedy's Senate speech calling for Algerian independence, Algeria became a sovereign state on July 3, 1962. According to former diplomat Richard Curtiss, "Algeria's revolutionary leaders had not forgotten the American senator who had championed their cause and they publicly hailed his election." 90
"Kennedy in turn sent William Porter, the U.S. Foreign Service officer who had explained to him the Algerian cause, as the first U.S. Ambassador to Algeria. [Algerian leader] Ahmad Ben Bella visited Washington the same year. Afterward, in the words of Ambassador Porter, Ben Bella 'ascribed to Kennedy everything he thought good in the United States.'" 91
Although pro-Israel propagandists and some American conservatives with close ties to the Israeli lobby said that an independent Algeria would be a "communist" outpost in the Middle East, Algerian Premier Ahmed Ben Bella banned the Communist Party of Algeria on November 29, 1962.92 In fact, Algeria was very much an Islamic state and it was precisely this which created so much concern for Israel.
DeGAULLE'S MIDDLE EAST
TURN-ABOUT
However, the debate over Algerian independence had sparked a major
crisis within France and the French Secret Army Organization (O.A.S), which
fought Algerian freedom, considered John F. Kennedy an enemy only second
to Charles DeGaulle. (In subsequent chapters, in greater detail, we shall see further how JFK's CIA enemies were, in fact, collaborating with DeGaulle's enemies in the OAS, and traitors within his regime—along with the Israeli Mossad.)
Twenty years after Algerian independence, the Washington Post commented on the effect that Algerian freedom had upon DeGaulle's Middle East policy and, in turn, upon Israel:
"Diplomatically, France shorn of Algeria, returned under president Charles DeGaulle to its traditional policy of friendship with the Arabs— much to the chagrin of Israel and the 200,000 Algerian Jews who had lived peacefully alongside their Arab neighbors until emigrating to France." 93
Israeli historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi notes that "when Algeria, finally independent, joined the United Nations, only Israel voted against its admission." 94 In fact, as we shall see, the Algerian question would ultimately play a part in the events that led to JFK's assassination.
At the same time, JFK was shaping a Middle East policy that put him at loggerheads with Israel. Yet, cognizant of Israel's political influence in the United States, JFK made overtures to Israel and arranged to meet in Palm Beach, in December of 1962, with Israeli Foreign Minister Golda Meir.
`A TWO-WAY STREET'
It was during that meeting that Kennedy actually went so far as to
emphasize American support for Israel, probably the farthest that any
American president had gone since Israel was first established. However, the president tempered that pledge with a hope that Israel recognized that America also had interests in the Middle East. According to President Kennedy, referring to U.S.-Israeli relations, "Our relationship is a two-way street." 95
NO 'EXCLUSIVE FRIENDS'
Phillips Talbot, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs,
who was present at the Kennedy-Meir conference prepared a memorandum
for the State Department summarizing that meeting. According to the
memorandum, summarized by Stephen Green in his monumental study,
Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel: "The United States, the President said, has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs. But for us to play properly the role we are called upon to play, we cannot afford the luxury of identifying Israel, or Pakistan, or certain other countries, as our exclusive friends." 96
According to Green, the thrust of Kennedy's message to Israel was this: "The best way for the United States to effectively serve Israel's national security interests, Kennedy said, was to maintain and develop America's associations with the other nations of the region. America's influence could then be brought to bear as needed in particular disputes to ensure that Israel's essential interests were not compromised." 97
"'If we pulled out of the Arab Middle East and maintained our ties only with Israel this would not be in Israel's interest,' Kennedy said." 98
FOUR PROBLEMS WITH ISRAEL
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. 99 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 . . .
AMERICA'S NEEDS IMPORTANT
"Our security problems are, therefore, just as great as Israel's. We have
to concern our self 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." 100
AMERICA—NOT ISRAEL—FIRST
Stephen Green believes that Kennedy's position vis-à-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." 101 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.
NUCLEAR EXPANSION
This set the groundwork for further tension between the U.S. and Israel
over an even more explosive issue: Israel's determination to build a nuclear
bomb. 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. In order to thoroughly examine Kennedy's conflict with Israel over the Zionist State's nuclear intentions, we once again refer to Stephen Green's aforementioned work, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel, a treasure trove of little known information relating to U.S.- Israeli relations from the period of 1948 through 1967. Green writes of JFK's discovery that Israel was engaged in nuclear arms development.
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.
A 'HIGHLY DISTRESSING' SITUATION
Israel had kept the nuclear weapons program as secret as possible, but
US intelligence had discovered the project. Kennedy termed the situation
"highly distressing.”102 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.
From the very beginning of his presidency, John F. Kennedy found himself at severe odds with the government of Israel. It was a conflict that would never really be resolved until the day JFK died in Dallas. It was not an auspicious start for the New Frontier.
KENNEDY 'NOT AMUSED'
AND DE GAULLE 'ANNOYED'
According to Stephen Green: "The next year-1961—was to be an
important one in the process of the nuclearization of the Middle East. In
January, [Israeli Prime Minister] David Ben-Gurion informed the Israeli
Knesset and the rest of the world that the Dimona reactor was in fact not a
textile plant or a pumping station, but 'a scientific institute for research in
problems of arid zones and desert flora and fauna.' A new American
president, John Kennedy, was not amused." 103 In Paris, Charles DeGaulle's reaction mirrored that of Kennedy's. His government had been providing nuclear technology assistance to Israel, but with the assurance from Ben-Gurion that the nuclear development was peaceful in nature.
According to Israeli historians Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman: "There was also pressure from President DeGaulle in Paris. The French attitude toward the Middle East began to change just after he took office in 1958 . . . He suspected that the Dimona reactor was destined for military uses and this greatly annoyed the French president." 104 (DeGaulle's later decision to grant Algerian independence, already described, simply exacerbated his own already growing tensions with Israel.)
In Washington, JFK was determined to settle the matter once and for all. Stephen Green described Kennedy's next step: "In May Kennedy and Ben-Gurion met in New York at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Kennedy had already written to Ben-Gurion expressing his extreme concern about the Dimona project, and suggesting regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. In New York, Ben-Gurion agreed to a compromise—(approximately) annual inspections by U.S. scientists at times and on terms to be determined by the Israeli Defense Ministry.
"Later, Myer Feldman, Kennedy's aide for Middle East matters, would reveal that in return for the periodic U.S. inspections, Ben-Gurion had exacted a promise of provision of advanced Hawk ground-to-air missiles.
"There is no reason to doubt Kennedy's seriousness in wanting to track Israeli nuclear research and forestall weapons development, but whether annual inspections under the terms indicated achieved this result [was, as events unfolded] open to question." 105
So it was that John F. Kennedy unintentionally found himself already at loggerheads with Israel behind the scenes.
THE SECRET WAR
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."106
As Hersh notes, quite profoundly we see in retrospect, this secret war with Israel was never once noted by any of Kennedy's biographers.107 If indeed it had been, as we shall see, the mystery behind the JFK assassination might have been unraveled long, long ago.
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.' 108
According to Green's accurate assessment, "The memorandum was very strong and decidedly negative in its conclusions" 109 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." 110
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."111
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 (N.I.E), which would have involved distribution to several other agencies of the government. No formal N.I.E was issued by CIA on the Israeli nuclear weapons program until 1968."112
That the CIA—or at the very least, elements within the CIA—would be interested in protecting Israel's interests is no surprise. As we shall see in Chapter 8, the ties between Israel and the CIA were quite intimate—perhaps too intimate in too many, many ways.
KENNEDY AND BEN-GURION
In the meantime, President Kennedy was well aware that Israel's nuclear
project at Dimona would enable Israel to produce at least one bomb per
year—and that was enough to start a world war. Although Israel's nuclear program was ostensibly "peaceful" in nature, the fact is that the project was entirely controlled by Israel's Ministry of Defense. This alone made the project controversial, even in Israel. It was for this reason that it was critical for Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to neutralize JFK's opposition.
There was enough domestic opposition to the program in Israel itself that Kennedy's own steadfast refusal to support Israeli nuclear development could have killed the project altogether.
In the early months of his administration, Kennedy maintained regular contact with Ben-Gurion in an effort to stop the nuclear development. The two leaders had an ongoing private correspondence over the issue.
A POISONED RELATIONSHIP
According to Seymour Hersh, "Israel's bomb program, and the
continuing exchange of letters about it, would complicate, and eventually
poison, Kennedy's relationship with David Ben-Gurion." 113 Ben-Gurion sought to have a private meeting with Kennedy—in the course of an official state visit to Washington—but the president refused to provide a formal invitation.
It was then that, in May 1961, Ben-Gurion pulled his strings at the White House and contrived a meeting with Kennedy through the intervention of New York financier Abe Feinberg.
It was Feinberg, as we have seen in Chapter 4, who had initially smoothed over Kennedy's relations with the American Jewish community during the 1960 presidential campaign and arranged for a massive infusion of Jewish money into JFK's campaign.
(It was this experience, as noted previously, that soured Kennedy's attitude toward Israel and its powerful lobby to a significant extent.)
Feinberg arranged for the American president and the Israeli leader to meet during Ben-Gurion's unofficial visit to the United States where he was scheduled to be honored at a convocation at Brandeis University, a Jewish oriented center of learning near Boston.
Following the affair at Brandeis, Ben-Gurion journeyed to New York City where he met with Kennedy at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. According to Hersh, "The meeting with Kennedy was a major disappointment for the Israeli prime minister, and not only because of the nuclear issue. " 114
"'He looked to me like a twenty-five-year-old boy,' Ben-Gurion later told his biographer. 'I asked myself: 'How can a man so young be elected President?' At first I did not take him seriously.'"115
HATRED
Following the meeting, Ben-Gurion complained to Feinberg about his
unhappy first meeting with JFK. It was not an auspicious start, and as we
shall see, it set a trend. According to Feinberg, "There's no way of
describing the relationship between Jack Kennedy and Ben-Gurion because
there's no way B.G. was dealing with JFK as an equal, at least as far as
B.G. was concerned. He had the typical attitude of an old-fashioned Jew
toward the young. He disrespected Kennedy as a youth." 116 What's more, the Israeli Prime Minister had an additional reason to be suspicious of the young American's motives. According to Feinberg, "B.G. could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man." 117 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."118
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."119
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 public at the time.
'A MORE SERIOUS DANGER'
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 M.I.G's . . . Israel will fight against this implementation down to the last man."120
Clearly, then, by this point, Ben-Gurion perceived the American president's policies to be a very threat to Israel's survival. Ben-Gurion was vowing to fight, as we have seen, "down to the last man."
KENNEDY'S GESTURE
Despite all of this, the American president remained determined to find a
solution to the potential crisis presented by Ben-Gurion's obstinacy. Kennedy offered to sell Israel Hawk missiles for defensive purposes—as Israel had been demanding—but Kennedy continued to drag his feet on the sale. The president refused to be pushed to the limit by Israel.
Kennedy finally relented and approved the sale, but only after pressure from Israel and its allies in the American Congress. By then, however, it was probably too late. The twig had been bent.
ISRAEL RELENTLESS
Even the arms sales to Israel did not assuage Israel and its lobby.
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 push button war. Israel [was] easy to pinpoint and destroy and [could not] retaliate against four or five Arab states at once."121
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. 122
(This, of course, still did not guarantee that Israel's friends in the CIA [whom we will consider in Chapter 8] did not tip off the Israelis to the hostile operations being conducted.)
Kennedy was still willing, however, to attempt to settle the matter and requested that Israel permit 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.
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.
THREATS AGAINST JFK
The American president continued to demand that Israel permit
American inspection of Israel's nuclear development facilities. In response,
Israel called on its American lobby to apply pressure on Kennedy behind the
scenes. One of those called into action was Abe Feinberg, the New York businessman who had helped raise critical funds for Kennedy during his presidential campaign. However, even Feinberg was unsuccessful.124 However, Feinberg did send a message to the president that continued demands for inspection of the plant might "result in less support [from the Israeli lobby] in the 1964 presidential campaign."125
According to Hersh, "In the end Feinberg and Ben-Gurion could not overcome the continued presidential pressure for inspection of Dimona. BenGurion's categorical public denial of any weapons intent at Dimona had left the Israeli government few options: refusing access would undercut the government's credibility and also lend credence to the newly emerging anti-nuclear community inside Israel. 126
DESERT DECEPTION
So it was that Ben-Gurion finally agreed to allow American nuclear
experts to come to Dimona. However, Ben-Gurion had a clever trick up his
sleeve. The Israeli Prime Minister hurriedly ordered the construction of what
amounted to a phony nuclear plant—one that didn't give evidence of the
construction of a nuclear bomb. False control rooms were set in place and
dummy operations were displayed. It was all very carefully orchestrated. Even the Israeli guides who took the Americans through the facility were accompanied by translators who gave the Americans fraudulent translations of the remarks made by the Israeli engineers at the plant.
According to Hersh, "Ben-Gurion took no chances: the American inspectors—most of them experts in nuclear reprocessing—would be provided with a Potemkin Village and never know it."127
Ben-Gurion's deception—however successful it may have been—still did not convince JFK that Israel was indeed fully committed to peaceful nuclear development. Kennedy, of course, knew better.
A standoff between Kennedy and Israel was already in place and it did not bode well for the future.
THE 'LAST AMERICAN PRESIDENT'
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 to send them a lot more, for fear that they would use it."128
`THE TURBULENT YEAR'
By the fateful year of 1963, John F. Kennedy and Israel were decidedly on
two different sides, and not only in the realm of the secret—and critical—
nuclear controversy. In fact, it went much deeper than that. Overall Kennedy administration policy toward the Middle East left Israel and its American lobby most dissatisfied. In his memoirs, I. L. Kenan of the pro-Israel American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, a registered lobby for Israel, described 1963 as “the turbulent year" between John F. Kennedy and Israel. In a chapter in those memoirs, entitled "A Multitude of Promises"—Kennedy presumably the promiser—Kenan scored Kennedy's Middle East policies:
"Kennedy's neutralist strategy, his hope to please both sides in every troubled area, plunged him into a multitude of predicaments in the turbulent year of 1963. His pursuit of former enemies whom he sought to befriend alarmed our allies, whose fears he constantly sought to ally by strong but quiet commitments." 129
The "enemies" whom Kenan referred to were those Arab leaders—Nasser of Egypt most especially—to whom JFK offered peace. Those "allies"—at least in Kenan's context—really meant just one country—Kenan's foreign principal, Israel.
Kennedy's "strong but quiet commitments," however, were apparently not enough as relations between Israel and the Arab states were strained. War appeared imminent, at least in the eyes of the Israeli leadership.
By the end of April, 1963 Israel's David Ben-Gurion sensed that the Arabs were going to attack the Jewish State, but John F. Kennedy did not share that pessimistic view. Kennedy still hoped for peace in the region and he continued his efforts.130
THE ALGERIAN PROBLEM
Although then-Senator John F. Kennedy's 1957 speech calling for
independence for Algeria from France had helped pave the way for that end
result, newly-won Algerian freedom came at great cost. Israel was actively
seeking to undermine the new regime. On August 14, 1963 the government of Algerian premier Ben Bella accused Israel of plotting to topple the new Arab regime. The Algerian authorities captured 20 Algerians and 10 foreigners who were engaged in a conspiracy to bring down the government.
"Those foreigners are nearly all Israelites," declared the Algerian information minister. "We are led to believe that we are facing a plot with far-flung ramifications and that behind it is the hand of Israel which is trying to oppose the march of our revolution.
"Ben Bella has made clear the Algerian position on the enclave of imperialism called Israel but which is really Palestine. It is not strange that they are trying to interfere in our internal affairs." 131
Israel and its allies in the French Secret Army Organization (O.A.S)—now officially disbanded, but effectively still functioning—were determined to reverse the course of history.
This, however, is not the last time in these pages that we will find the fine hand of Israel and the O.A.S interfering in the life and work of John F. Kennedy.
THE LAST PRESS CONFERENCE
Kennedy's efforts to conduct a balanced U.S. Middle East policy were
being frustrated at each and every turn. The bitterness was apparent—on
both sides. As a result of Israel's manipulation of Congress, both the House of
Representatives and the Senate voted in late 1963 to cut off aid to Egypt, a
country central to Kennedy's drive for peace. This, in effect, temporarily—at least—scuttled JFK's peace efforts. His hand of friendship to the Arab world and its leaders, Nasser of Egypt in particular, was being cut off—at the shoulder.
Israel's chief (registered) lobbyist in Washington—I. L. Kenan—described John F. Kennedy's final Washington press conference.
"Kennedy ruefully surveyed the debris of his Nasser policy at a press conference on November 14, 1963. He was sharply critical. The Senate amendment required him "to make a finding which is extremely complicated," and he did not believe that this language would strengthen our hand or our flexibility in dealing with the UAR.
"[Kennedy] went on: 'In fact, it would have an opposite effect. I think it's a very dangerous, untidy world, but we're going to have to live with it; and I think one of the ways to live with it is to permit us to function.
"If the Administration did not function, the voters would throw it out. Kennedy asked Congress not to make it impossible to function by means of `legislative restraints and inadequate appropriations.'
"These words," Kenan notes, "were uttered at his last White House press conference." 132
On many fronts, indeed, JFK's Middle East policy was angering the Israelis, including—perhaps especially—JFK's determination to solve the problem of the Palestinian refugees.
JFK'S 'GOOD FAITH' IN DOUBT
On November 20, 1963, Kennedy's delegation at the United Nations
called for continuing movement toward the implementation of the 1948 UN
resolution which called for the right of displaced Palestinian Arabs to return
to their homes (in Israel) and for those who chose not to return to their
homes to be compensated. The London Jewish Chronicle reported the reaction of the Israelis: "Prime Minister Levi Eshkol summoned the U.S. ambassador . . . and told him that Israel was 'shocked' by the pro-Arab attitude adopted by the U.S. delegation." Golda Meir, the Chronicle reported, "expressed Israel's `astonishment and anger' at the attitude of the U.S." 133
For its own part, the Chronicle noted editorially, "Israel, which has neither been consulted nor informed about the American intention, is not surprisingly questioning the good faith of the United States." 134
It is not likely that JFK ever got to read the defamatory comments about his Middle East policy published by the London Jewish Chronicle. They were printed on November 22, 1963.
So it was that even as John F. Kennedy was preparing to leave Washington for his final journey as president, he was plagued with the problem of Israel and its powerful influence in Washington.
As it turned out, it was during Kennedy's trip to Dallas that one last memorandum was prepared on his behalf relating to the touchy issue of global nuclear arms development.
Although JFK had forcefully opposed French production of nuclear weapons—much as he opposed that of Israel—the American president had, however, begun taking a new look at his stance vis-à-vis the French.
Thus it was that while John F. Kennedy was triumphantly touring downtown Dallas, there was being prepared a "Top Secret, Eyes Only" memorandum from JFK's adviser, McGeorge Bundy, outlining the new, perhaps more lenient, Kennedy policy toward France, which, as we have seen, had itself played a major role in Israel's nuclear development and, unwittingly (much to the disgust of French President DeGaulle) in the drive for atomic weaponry. The memorandum regarding the new policy toward France was also dated November 22, 1963. 135
By this time, however, John F. Kennedy's fate was sealed. He had pushed Israel and its leaders to the brink.
BEN-GURION: 'SIGNS OF PARANOIA'
The straw that broke the camel's back, had actually taken place some
six months earlier. 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." 136
SECRET CORRESPONDENCE
'INCREASINGLY SOUR'
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 at an impasse over Dimona, and the
correspondence between the two became increasingly sour. None of those
letters has been made public."137
KENNEDY A 'BULLY'
(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.) 138 "It was not a friendly exchange," according to Ben-Gurion's writer, Yuval Neeman. "Kennedy was writing like a bully. It was brutal."139 BenGurion'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 president made sure that the Israeli prime minister paid for his defiance.” 140 When Ben-Gurion once again sought the opportunity for a formal, ballyhooed state visit to Washington, Kennedy rebuffed him.
ISRAEL'S 'EXISTENCE IS IN DANGER'
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." 141 (emphasis added) 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.142
A BITTER IMPASSE
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: his increasingly
bitter impasse with Kennedy over a nuclear-armed Israel." 143 Ben-Gurion
had failed. The battle had been lost, but the war between the two men was
still to be won.
A MODERN-DAY HAMAN?
What was on Ben-Gurion's mind as he turned over the reins of
government to his successor? What was David Ben-Gurion's final act as
Prime Minister of the Jewish State? In light of Ben-Gurion's explicit
comment to John F. Kennedy that "my people have the right to exist . .
and this existence is in danger," we can certainly make a good presumption. In Ben-Gurion's eyes, John F. Kennedy was clearly a modern-day Haman—an enemy of the Jewish people. In Jewish folklore, Haman was a descendant of the Amalekites who served as prime minister to King Ahasueros of Persia. It was Haman who sought to convince the king that all of the Jews of his empire should be exterminated forever.
However, according to legend, a beautiful Jewish temptress named Esther used her feminine wiles on Ahasueros and, in the end, it was Haman who was instead put to death. The important Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the deliverance of the Jews from Haman's intended holocaust.
In the Bible—Deut 25:19, I Sam. 15:8—the ancient Hebrews were urged to "blot out the memory of the Amalekites" from whom Haman descended.
In Israel—in 1963—David Ben-Gurion certainly looked upon John F. Kennedy as a modern-day Haman, a son of the Amalekites. As he pondered the brutal conflict with JFK, Ben-Gurion no doubt remembered the meditation that is read on Purim:
"A wicked man, an arrogant offshoot of the seed of Amalek, rose up against us. Insolent in his riches, he digged himself a pit, and his own greatness laid him a snare. In his mind he thought to entrap, but was himself entrapped; he sought to destroy, but was himself speedily destroyed . . . he made him a gallows, and was himself hanged thereon."
A FINAL ORDER?
The Israeli leader could not help but ponder further how he might
deliver his people from what he perceived to be certain destruction. BenGurion
had devoted a lifetime creating a Jewish State and guiding it into the
world arena. And, in Ben-Gurion's eyes, John F. Kennedy was an enemy of
the Jewish people and of his beloved state of Israel. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn have summarized it well: "Ben-Gurion is the father of Israel. He really steered the state to independence, steered his people to independence, wrote the Israeli declaration of independence, was prime minister all the way through, with a brief interval, until 1963. The Israel you see today is really the creation of David Ben-Gurion."144 We can thus see why Ben-Gurion was indeed so frustrated by his failure to back down John F. Kennedy. It was a time of crisis and a time for action.
It is the thesis of this volume that Ben-Gurion, in his final days as Prime Minister, ordered the Mossad to participate in the JFK assassination conspiracy. Based upon evidence that we will outline in Final Judgment, we believe that the Mossad carried out Ben-Gurion's order.
On November 22, 1963, the American president whom Ben-Gurion considered a threat to Israel's very survival came to an inglorious end in Dealey Plaza in Dallas.
That Israel and its leaders believed that drastic measures might be needed to influence the course of history and to ensure the survival of Israel cannot be doubted.
Former Undersecretary of State George Ball summarizes the impact of John F. Kennedy's assassination on U.S.-Israeli relations quite succinctly, if somewhat cryptically: "However Kennedy would have succeeded in his relations with Israel must remain one of the many intriguing questions for which his assassination precludes any answer." 146
A MOSSAD HIT SQUAD
We know precisely who would have coordinated Mossad participation in
the assassination on John F. Kennedy, working in concert with Israel's
allies in the CIA and in Organized Crime (about more of which we shall
discuss in these pages.) 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,"147 according to an account of the newspaper's report.
"In February 1963 Mr. Shamir dispatched squads on two unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Hans Kleinwachter, a German scientist suspected of helping Egypt develop missiles. Another German scientist working for the Egyptians, Heinz Krug, disappeared mysteriously in September 1962."148 Shamir's operatives were suspected of having been responsible.
According to the Israeli newspaper, Shamir had recruited members for his Mossad hit squad from former members of the Stern Gang, the underground terrorist group that Shamir led during Israel's fight for independence. The Stern Gang was responsible for the murder, in 1944, of Lord Moyne, Britain's resident Mideast minister, and for the slaying of U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. 149
We have already seen that Kennedy—like Moyne and Bernadotte—was a "perceived enemy" of Israel and its embittered Prime Minister, David BenGurion. And now we know of the existence of the Mossad hit squad that played a major role in the conspiracy that brought about the death of John F. Kennedy. In Chapter 16 we shall learn precisely how this Mossad orchestrated conspiracy came about.
THE ENEMIES COME TOGETHER
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. That they undoubtedly came together in a joint conspiracy we shall document in this volume.
THE COMING OF THE MESSIAH
With John F. Kennedy lying in a grave in Arlington National
Cemetery, Israel was safe—for the time being at least. The modern-day heir
of Haman's legacy had been destroyed. That Lyndon Johnson—a man with a
steadfast history of loyalty to Israel and its American lobby—was in line to
assume the American presidency was a fact not gone unnoticed. Israel's
messiah had come.next
The Coming of the Messiah:
footnotes
Chapter Three A Bad Habit
23 Tikkun, March/April 1992.
24 Ibid
25 Livia Rokach. Israel's Sacred Terrorism. (Belmont, Massachusetts: AAUG Press, 1986), p. 34. 556 Reference Notes [459]
26 Spotlight, September 6, 1982.
27 The Spotlight, November 10, 1980
28 Ibid.
29 Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter. The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era. (Boston, Massachusetts: South End Press, 1987), p. 217.
30 Ibid.
31 The Spotlight, April 21, 1986.
32 The Spotlight., November 10, 1986 33 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., September 27, 1982.
Chapter Four No Love Lost
36 Granma, November 4, 1979.
37 C. David Heymann, A Woman Named Jackie. (New York: New American Library, 1989), p. 151.
38 Ibid.
39 Time, October 19, 1992., p. 28.
40 Richard Whalen. The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph P. Kennedy. (New York: New American Library, 1964), pp. 366-367.
41 George Lincoln Rockwell. This Time the World. (Liverpool, West Virginia: White Power Publications, 1963), p. v.
42 Ibid., p. 123.
43 Interview with DeWest Hooker, January 20, 1992.
44 Ibid.
45 Edward Tivnan. The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 54.
46 Interview with De West Hooker.
47 Richard Curtiss. A Changing Image. [Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1986), p. 65.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., p. 66.
50 Ibid.
51 Jim Marrs. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1989), p. 175.
52 Michael Milan. The Squad: The U.S. Government's Secret Alliance With Organized Crime. [New York: Shapolski Publishers, 1989], p. 166.
53 Stephen Fox. Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth Century America. (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1989), p. 307.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid., pp. 313-314.
56 Ibid., p. 314.
57 Ibid., p. 315.
58 Sam Giancana and Chuck Giancana. Double Cross. (New York: Warner Books, 1992), p. 75.
59 Ibid., p. 227.
60 Ibid., p. 229.
61 Ibid., p. 230.
62 Ibid., p. 280.
63 Ibid., p. 284
64 Heymann, p. 234.
65 Tivnan, p. 52.
66 Victor Lasky. JFK: The Man & The Myth. (New Rochelle, New York, 1966), p. 143.
67 Tivnan, Ibid.
68 Seymour M. Hersh. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 94.
69 Ibid., p. 96.
70 Ibid., p. 97.
71 Alfred M. Lilienthal. The Zionist Connection II. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: North American, 1982), p. 548.
72 Ibid.
73 Hersh, p. 103.
74 Giancana, p. 296.
75 Mickey Cohen with John Peer Nugent. Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), p. 236.
76 Hersh, p. 97.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
Chapter Five Genesis
79 Seymour Hersh. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. (New York: Random House, 1991), p. 98.
80 Ibid., p. 99.
81 Ibid
82 Ibid
83 Ibid p. 100.
84 Ibid., p. 113.
85 Richard Curtiss. A Changing Image (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Trust, 1986), p. 65.
86 Ibid., p. 67.
87 Ibid.
88 New Outlook Magazine, January, 1964, p. 5.
89 Alfred Lilienthal. The Zionist Connection II. (New Brunswick, New jersey: North American, 1982), p. 545. 558 Reference Notes [461]
90 Curtiss, p. 66.
91 Ibid., p. 66
92 Washington Post, November 20, 1962.
93 Washington Post, March 20, 1982.
94 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Israeli Connection—Who Israel Arms and Why. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 45.
95 Stephen Green. Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1984), p. 182.
96 Ibid., p. 181.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid., pp. 181-182.
100 Ibid., p. 182.
101 Ibid., pp. 182-183.
102 Ibid., p. 154.
103 Ibid., p. 159-160.
104 Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman. Every Spy a Prince. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1990), pp. 71-72.
105 Ibid., pp. 159-160.
106 Hersh, p. 100.
107 Ibid.
108 Green, p. 164.
109 Ibid.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid., pp. 164-165.
112 Ibid. , p. 164.
113 Hersh, p. 101.
114 Ibid., p. 102.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid., p. 103.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., p. 105.
119 Ibid., p. 118.
120 George Ball and Douglas Ball. The Passionate Attachment. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), p. 51.
121 Lilienthal, p. 547.
122 Hersh, p. 107.
123 Ibid., p. 109.
124 Ibid., p. 108.
125 Ibid.
126 Ibid., p. 109.
127 Ibid., p. 111.
128 Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn. Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship. (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), p. 91. [462] Final Judgment 559
129 I. L. Kenan. Israel's Defense Line: Her Friends and Foes in Washington. (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1981), p. 166.
130 Ibid., pp. 166-167.
131 Washington Post, August 13, 1963.
132 Ibid., p. 187.
133 London Jewish Chronicle, Nov. 22, 1963.
134 Ibid.
135 Hersh, pp. 125-126.
136 Dan Kurzman. Ben-Gurion: Prophet of Fire. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), pp. 440-441.
137 Hersh, pp. 120-121.
138 Ibid., p. 120.
139 Ibid., p. 121.
140 Ibid.
141 Ibid.
142 Ibid., pp. 121-122.
143 Ibid., p. 124.
144 Interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, September 1, 1991.
145 Quoted by Yossi Melman in the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 28, 1993.
146 Ball, pp. 51-52.
147 Washington Times, July 4, 1992.
148 Ibid.
149 Ibid.
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