Chapter Seventeen
They Dare Not Speak Out:
The Media's Silence—
Why Israel's Role in the JFK
Assassination Could Not
Be Exposed
The influence of Israel and its lobby over the American
media would have made it difficult for anyone who even
suspected that Israel had a hand in the JFK assassination to
get the word out. The media promoted the conclusions of the
Warren Commission and savaged its critics. And when the
media did place the blame it was on Fidel Castro.
The reporting of syndicated columnist Drew Pearson and
the sensational Oliver Stone film JFK are classic case
studies of how Israeli-linked media sources have manipulated
public perception of the murder of President Kennedy.
"The Kennedy assassination cover-up has survived so long only because
the press, confronted with the choice of believing what it was told or
examining the facts independently, chose the former. Unless and until the
press repudiates that choice, it is unlikely that we shall ever know the
truth." 689
These are the words of longtime JFK assassination researcher Jerry
Pollicoff summarizing the attitude of the Establishment media toward its
coverage of the crime of the century.
The media was content to churn up virtually every theory
imaginable—up to a point—except one: that Israel was behind the
assassination, a theory widely held in the Arab world at least.
However, as we have seen, in Chapter 5, in particular, very little was in
fact known about JFK's secret war with Israel and the major Middle East
foreign policy turn-about that came on the heels of JFK's assassination.
Thus, even the harshest critics of the Warren Commission which
ostensibly "investigated"—most would say "covered up"—the assassination
conspiracy had no reason to suspect that there might be an Israeli connection
to JFK's murder. The final conclusions of the Warren Commission hardly
satisfied anybody—except, of course, for the friends of Israel and the CIA in
the Establishment media who gave the Report's conclusions wholehearted
support.
A CITIZEN'S DISSENT
New York attorney Mark Lane made great headway with his clinical
dissection of the Warren Report in his best-selling Rush to Judgment. A
flurry of other books followed. Lane's second book on the subject of the
JFK assassination, A Citizen's Dissent, is most illuminating, however, on the Establishment's reaction—particularly the media—to the furor caused by
the publication of Rush to Judgment.
Without question—and this is significant—the media almost
unanimously sided with the Warren Report, despite all of the evidence
which proved the report a fraud. The media would not tolerate dissent. As
far as the media was concerned, the JFK controversy was closed. Period.
GARRISON AND THE
CIA-MOSSAD LINK
The media certainly went into a frenzy with its hysterical coverage of
New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's 1967-1969 inquiry into the
JFK murder and his prosecution of Crescent City businessman Clay Shaw.
At the time Garrison began pursuing Shaw, the facts that we now know
today about Shaw and his connections with the Lansky-Mossad-CIA-linked
Permindex operation based in Rome, were not so obvious.
It wasn't, in fact, until 1975 that former CIA official Victor Marchetti
acknowledged publicly that Shaw had ties to the CIA and that the CIA was
very much interested in assisting Shaw during the period of his prosecution
in New Orleans. 690
Former CIA Director Richard Helms himself subsequently admitted
under oath that Shaw had CIA connections. If Jim Garrison had had that
proof at the time of Shaw's trial, the verdict indeed may have been
different.691
ANGELTON'S INTERVENTION
There is yet additional evidence of attempts by the CIA to undermine
Garrison's investigation. This evidence directly implicates the CIA's director
of counterintelligence, James J. Angleton, whose own unique ties to the
Mossad and whose central role in the JFK conspiracy cover-up we examined
in Chapter 8, Chapter 15 and Chapter 16.
Author Anthony Summers, in his recently-released biography of former
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, described how the alleged compromising
photos of Hoover engaged in homosexual activities (described in Chapter 7)
managed to surface in relation to the Garrison investigation.
According to Summers, he was told by former CIA contract operative
Gordon Novel that he (Novel) was shown such photos by James J.
Angleton.
Novel, who operated out of New Orleans, had popped up in Jim
Garrison's investigation as a possible suspect and, as a direct consequence,
he (Novel) had filed a lawsuit against Garrison.
Novel said that he was being urged to pursue his lawsuit against the
New Orleans district attorney by his associates in the CIA, but that Hoover
was opposed to the lawsuit. It was then that Angleton contacted Novel,
displayed the compromising photos, and suggested that Novel discreetly
advise Hoover that he had seen the photos which Novel says he did, much to
the FBI director's dismay. 692
Clearly, Garrison was on the right track. When he launched his
investigation of Shaw, Garrison thought he was doing his patriotic duty. He
was trying to prosecute a man he believed was connected to the JFK
assassination conspiracy. Garrison was trying to bring our president's killers to
justice. However, the New Orleans district attorney was greeted with a
hurricane onslaught by the media—and, in particular, a media outlet with close
ties to elements in the pro-Israel lobby.
THE 'STERN GANG'
The evidence indicates, in fact, that the fine hand of pro-Israel
propagandists were at work, orchestrating the attack on Garrison. Leading the
assault on the district attorney was NBC's New Orleans television (and radio)
affiliate, W.D.S.U.
The owner of W.D.S.U was Edgar Stern, of the powerful New Orleans Stern
family, major contributors to not only the American Jewish Committee and
the American Jewish Appeal, but also the Anti-Defamation League (A.D.L) of
B'nai B'rith. 693 Additionally, a close friend of Clay Shaw was Edgar Stern's
wife, Edith Stern, whose support for Shaw in the face of his prosecution was
prominently noted in James Kirkwood's account of the Shaw trial, American
Grotesque. 694
As we shall see in this chapter, the A.D.L not only functions as a foreign
intelligence operation for Israel, but it also works closely with American
intelligence. More importantly—the A.D.L uses its influence to play a major
role in shaping American media news coverage. This was critical to covering
up the truth about the JFK assassination.
W.D.S.U's malicious attack on Garrison, however, was a much bigger project
than it might have appeared. In fact, NBC national news in New York was
the prime mover behind the propaganda campaign against the district attorney.
NBC's coordinator for the project was a former Justice Department
official, Walter Sheridan, who had also previously worked for the National
Security Agency. According to Sheridan, Edgar Stern was "a courageous,
liberal man who shared our views concerning Garrison and his probe.
W.D.S.U was the only voice in the Louisiana wilderness speaking out against what
Garrison was doing" 695
However, how courageous and liberal the Stern family may have been is
subject to question, in light not only of their attack on Garrison, but also in
light of their widely known support of the A.D.L and its activities, particularly in
New Orleans.
In 1968, during the midst of the Garrison-Shaw controversy, it was the
A.D.L's New Orleans office that provided $36,500 of its own funds toward an
FBI operation designed to entrap Ku Klux Klansman Tommy Tarrants and a
young woman named Kathy Ainsworth. In a shoot-out which erupted, Miss
Ainsworth was slain. 696
Interestingly enough, the A.D.L official in New Orleans who was the prime
player in this bizarre conspiracy was A. L. (Bee) Botnick. It was in Chapter 15 that we noted Botnick's close relationship to Guy Banister, the
ex-FBI official-turned-CIA coordinator of anti-Castro Cuban exile activities
in New Orleans.
It was, of course, out of Banister's office at 544 Camp Street that Lee
Harvey Oswald carried out apparent intelligence activities at Banister's
instruction and portrayed himself as a pro-Castro agitator.
SABOTAGE
The aforementioned Walter Sheridan's involvement in the Garrison case
went far beyond being a reporter who was simply out to do a hatchet job.
Instead, Sheridan was actually trying to sabotage Garrison's investigation by
interfering in the actual course of the inquiry.
As Garrison pointed out, Sheridan and his associates were "going far
beyond word games. They were engaged in an organized effort to derail an
official investigation of a major city's district attorney's office. They were
attempting to persuade witnesses to alter their testimony, even attempting
to move major witnesses permanently to another part of the country." 697
MORE FROM 'THE STERN GANG'
What is additionally interesting is that the A.D.L-linked Stern family-run
W.D.S.U media had actually played a primary part in helping promote Lee
Harvey Oswald's image as a "pro-Castro" activist both before—and after—
the assassination of President Kennedy.
It was on August 16, 1963 that Oswald and a colleague appeared outside
Clay Shaw's International Trade Mart distributing pro-Castro leaflets.
Researcher Dick Russell points out two intriguing facts: "The leafleteers
were there for only a few minutes, yet the demonstration was filmed by
W.D.S.U-TV, which happened to be on hand—apparently alerted in advance.
Jessie R. Core III, the public relations man for the International Trade Mart,
also attended the leafleting and alerted the FBI immediately afterward."698
So it was that not only did the Stern family's television cameras just
happen to be there to capture Oswald, the "pro-Castro" activist, but
Permindex board member Clay Shaw's Trade Mart associate took the effort
to report the young "communist" to the FBI, thus cementing Oswald's
leftist image further.
This, however, was not the end of W.D.S.U's involvement in promoting
Oswald's public image as a pro-communist agitator prior to the
assassination of President Kennedy.
On August 17 William Stuckey of W.D.S.U Radio arranged for a radio
interview with Oswald in which the young man proclaimed his leftist
views. Then W.D.S.U turned a copy of the tape over to the FBI.
There's more. On August 19 W.D.S.U's Stuckey again contacted Oswald
and arranged for Oswald to appear in a debate with an anti-Castro activist
over his radio station. It was at this time that Oswald proclaimed himself a Marxist. The next day W.D.S.U turned a copy of the debate transcript over to
the FBI office in New Orleans.699
In fact, then, on a second occasion—on August 30—W.D.S.U Radio
again made the transcript of the Oswald radio debate available to the FBI.700
W.D.S.U was very public spirited indeed.
OSWALD'S 'FREE PUBLICITY'
The A.D.L-connected W.D.S.U television and radio had thus provided "one
lone nut"—Lee Harvey Oswald—with more free publicity than any other
single leftist in the city of New Orleans could have dreamed about.
But W.D.S.U wasn't finished with Oswald. Immediately after Oswald was
arrested in Dallas on November 22, it was—once again—W.D.S.U that played
a part in portraying Oswald, now to a national television audience, as a pro Castro
agitator.
According to Warren Hinckle and William Turner: "The NBC Network
scored a coup, thanks to its New Orleans affiliate W.D.S.U. Early in the
evening it played a tape of Oswald's voice professing admiration for Fidel
Castro and declaring, 'I am a Marxist.'" 701
An interesting footnote. The young W.D.S.U cameraman who filmed
Oswald's demonstration, Johann Rush, emerged some thirty years later—in
1993—as an "expert" whose "enhancement" of the Zapruder film of the JFK
assassination was hailed as the final proof that Oswald acted alone.
Rush collaborated with author Gerald Posner in the publication of a
volume entitled Case Closed which was widely hailed in the Establishment
media as the ultimate refutation of JFK assassination conspiracy theorists.
U.S. News & World Report, published by outspoken Israeli enthusiast
Mortimer Zuckerman, devoted an extended special issue promoting the book
in its cover story.
However, the Posner-Rush book is rife with errors, contradictions,
misstatements and distortions of fact. The book is quite disingenuous in its
thesis that while the Warren Commission was wrong on some points—thus
sparking criticism—its basic thesis (that Oswald acted alone) was correct.
The authors ignore critical evidence of CIA and other intelligence
connections to Oswald and Ruby and suggest that virtually all of the many
witnesses who were able to provide information which pointed toward a
conspiracy were either mentally unstable or outright liars or both.
So it is that Johann Rush, a veteran of W.D.S.U's conspiracy to frame
Lee Harvey Oswald as a pro-Castro agitator, has once again returned to the
center of the media's cover-up of what really happened in Dallas on
November 22, 1963.
SHERIDAN'S ISRAEL CONNECTION
It was later, of course, that Walter Sheridan, on the payroll of NBC
news, came to New Orleans and, aided by W.D.S.U, launched the effort to
undermine Jim Garrison to a national television audience, W.D.S.U already having done so much to lay the groundwork for the portrayal of Lee Harvey
Oswald as a lone communist agitator.
In later years, it should be noted, it was Sheridan who set up shop—
although he was not a lawyer—at the law firm of Miller, Cassidy, Larroca
and Lewin in Washington, D.C. This was the firm of a former Justice
Department colleague of Sheridan's named Nathan Lewin who, by this
time, had emerged as one of the Israeli lobby's most prominent legmen in
the city of Washington.
It was from his office in Lewin's firm that Sheridan laid the
groundwork for the establishment of a security firm that provided exclusive
services to the Caribbean resort empire known as Resorts International:702
As we noted in Chapter 7, Resorts International is generally perceived as a
joint intelligence operation linking the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Crime
Syndicate alongside the Israeli Mossad.
It is fitting, in this context, to note that JFK assassination researcher
Peter Dale Scott has pointed out that Walter Sheridan's account of his work in
fighting organized crime in the Kennedy Justice Department "omits such
obviously relevant names as those of Meyer Lansky."703 This is not
surprising, of course, in light of all that we have seen regarding Sheridan
and the forces behind the effort to destroy Jim Garrison's investigation of
Clay Shaw and the JFK assassination conspiracy.
GARRISON PILLORIED
In any case, it is very clear that forces with close ties to the Israeli
lobby were among those leading the assault on Garrison. Garrison was
pilloried on national television time and again. He was ruthlessly savaged in
the press. His integrity was questioned and his methods of inquiry were
called into judgment.
So it was with anyone who questioned the "official" word on the JFK
assassination. The CIA even went to the trouble of preparing a review of
Warren Commission critic Mark Lane's best-selling Rush to Judgment that
was distributed to CIA friends and assets in the media
This was all part and parcel of the campaign to discredit those who were
on the brink of uncovering the real truth about the JFK assassination,
something that neither Israel nor its allies at the CIA could permit.
SABOTAGE FROM WITHIN
In his own memoirs, Garrison notes how, time and again, he and his
fellow investigators in the New Orleans District Attorneys office discovered
evidence that their work was being sabotaged from within. Government
infiltrators and others were not only spying on Garrison's activities, but
they were attempting to undermine the whole investigation. To Garrison's
dismay, even some seemingly dedicated volunteers who had offered to help
the professional investigators turned out to be saboteurs.
One "volunteer" helper was a chap whom Garrison describes as "a
young Englishman."704 This young Englishman, in fact, was one Tom
Bethell, who later "broke" with Garrison—if he had ever really been
working on the same side as Garrison to begin with—and became a source
for Garrison's critics. Perhaps we now know what Bethell's reward was,
now that time has passed.
Former CIA man William F. Buckley, Jr. later hired on young Bethell
as an editor for his National Review magazine, touting him as one of the
great young conservative writers of the era. Thanks to Buckley's patronage,
Bethell's career as a journalist moved along quite nicely.
(In Chapter 9, of course, we reviewed the extensive and repeated
connections of Buckley and his family to a wide variety of key players in
the JFK assassination conspiracy—in particular to E. Howard Hunt whose
own role we discussed in further detail in Chapter 17.)
MORE CIA INTERVENTION?
There is other evidence of apparent CIA meddling in the Garrison
investigation. When, in 1968, Garrison critic, author James Kirkwood,
published his book American Grotesque, he inadvertently let the cat out of
the bag regarding an intelligence community-linked effort to sandbag
Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw.
Describing how journalist James Phelan had provided him (Kirkwood)
with his own account of how he (Phelan) was trying to disprove Garrison's
case against Shaw, Kirkwood published a transcript of a taped interview he
conducted with Phelan.
Phelan described how he had arranged to meet with Garrison in Las
Vegas (during a vacation interlude by the tired and worn district attorney). At
this point Garrison was unaware that Phelan was hostile. Phelan told
Kirkwood how Garrison provided him a number of key documents, in
confidence, which he was supposed to return the next morning.
According to Kirkwood's transcription, here is what Phelan said: "When
[Garrison] gave them [the documents] to me he did not put any restrictions
on them. He knew I was writing a piece. He said, 'You'll now understand
my case when you read them." So I got up early and made a call to Bob
Mayhew at the Desert Inn and told him I needed a Xerox and needed it fast. I
had to have two documents Xeroxed and I did not want anyone else reading
them or knowing they were being copied. They Xeroxed the copies for me
and I returned the originals to Garrison and made no comment about the
thing. I wanted to wait for the trial." 705
What is significant, particularly in the context of the time in which
Kirkwood first published this interview (1968) is this: it was not until
some years later that it first came to light that it was former FBI man turned-CIA
contract agent Robert Maheu who was the primary intermediary
between the CIA and organized crime in the joint plotting against Fidel
Castro. When Kirkwood first revealed the Phelan-Maheu machinations,
Maheu's behind-the-scenes activities were still a deep, dark secret.
It was this same Robert Maheu (misspelled as "Mayhew" by Kirkwood) who was assisting Phelan in the attempt to scuttle the Garrison investigation—an investigation that would, if pursued to the ultimate, have exposed the very CIA-organized crime conspiracy against Castro that also implicated many of those involved in the JFK assassination itself.
In Chapter 11 we examined Maheu's involvement with the CIA and such organized crime figures as Johnny Rosselli, Sam Giancana and Meyer Lansky lieutenant Santo Trafficante in detail.
It will also be recalled that the aforementioned Desert Inn (by this time the property of billionaire Howard Hughes) was initially established by Meyer Lansky's trusted associate, Morris Dalitz, whose activities and strange connections we examined in Chapter 10 and Chapter 15.
So it was that the CIA did have its collaborators in key positions to undermine the Jim Garrison investigation.
By pointing his finger in the direction of the CIA, the Garrison critics claimed, the D.A. was trying to take the heat of suspicion off Carlos Marcello who, they said, was the more likely suspect.
This claim is illogical at best. If Garrison were deliberately trying to cover up any Marcello connections—if any—to the assassination conspiracy, he was going about it in the wrong way.
(It was in Chapter 10 where we learned of the campaign against Garrison led by Life magazine's Richard Billings, who promoted the Garrison-Marcello scenario. It was Billings, of course, who later served as a top advisor to the House Assassinations Committee which pointed the finger of blame for the JFK assassination on "The Mafia,"—and Marcello in particular. )
If Garrison was trying to protect Marcello, the last person that he should have picked on was David Ferrie, the Mafia kingpin's sometime personal pilot and occasional legal researcher. Ferrie himself was standing alongside Marcello in a federal courtroom in New Orleans at the very moment JFK was shot.
By first inquiring into Ferrie's activities, Garrison was practically walking right into Marcello's office itself. This fact alone nullifies the creative (but very much flawed) "Mafia cover-up" critique of Garrison that continues to hang over Garrison's memory to this day. Yet, those who push the theory that "The Mafia Killed JFK" ignore this fact.
Evidently the people of New Orleans didn't buy the Establishment's heavy-handed assault on Garrison. He won re-election to the district attorney's office, despite—or perhaps precisely because of—the media barrage. This is all the more remarkable in that it was the very newspapers of New Orleans who were Garrison's fiercest at-home critics.
Garrison clearly was on the right track. He was looking in the right places. It was Garrison who linked Clay Shaw to the JFK assassination conspiracy and it was Shaw who sat on the board of Permindex, the shadowy Israeli Mossad-linked entity that played so central a role in the murder of the American president. How much Shaw knew about the impending murder of the president will never be known, but there is no question that Shaw was tied to the core of the conspiracy.
Despite the vindication, the Internal Revenue Service jumped into the picture and brought a tax evasion indictment against Garrison for not paying taxes on the alleged bribes that he had been acquitted of having accepted. This, of course, seems incredible, but it is absolutely true. Garrison beat that charge, but his Establishment critics continue to allege (in a last desperate effort to pummel Garrison) that the jurors in that case—as in the previous case—may have been bribed to bring in a not guilty verdict.
Kennedy's reputed sex life became the subject matter not of just the tabloids, but of the Establishment press itself. Kennedy, we were told, was not all that he was cracked up to be. His affair with Marilyn Monroe became the subject of conversation at every dinner table. (The strange role of Meyer Lansky's man in Hollywood, Mickey Cohen, in the Kennedy-Monroe liaison—which we examined in Chapter 13—however, was not a staple of the continuing coverage.)
The antics of John Kennedy's brother Edward did little to help things. The media eagerly pounced on the Massachusetts senator's every mistake and—as the 30th anniversary of the JFK assassination approached in 1993— began hyping several malicious books attacking Ted Kennedy with what many people might accurately assume was the purpose of preventing the youngest Kennedy brother from ever reaching the White House.
Even the late Jacqueline Kennedy—subsequently married to Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis—was held up to ridicule by the media in subsequent years. Not even she was free from the media's defamation.
"The CIA's contacts with the publishing world were not confined to attempts to suppress books. Through the U.S. Information Agency as a `cut-out,' the CIA subsidized major publishers to produce books, some of which were then sold in the United States bearing no government imprint to warn the unsuspecting purchaser.
"In 1967 publisher Frederick A. Praeger conceded he had published `fifteen or sixteen' books for the CIA. By the mid-sixties, more than $1 million had been spent by the government on its 'book development' program. The Senate intelligence committee estimated that by 1967, the CIA had produced, sponsored, or subsidized 'well over 1,000' books' here and abroad." 707
(One of Praeger's volumes is interesting in light of the "French connection" to the JFK case. In 1989 Praeger issued Challenging DeGaulle: The OAS and the Counterrevolution in Algeria. Former CIA Director William Colby wrote the introduction to Harrison's book which was described as the first fully documented history of the OAS.)
Wise continues: "The CIA also planted stories in the foreign press, some of which were played back to American audiences. [CIA Director William] Colby assured the House intelligence committee that the CIA would never manipulate [the Associated Press], since it was an American wire service. In addition, the CIA operated two news services of its own in Europe. These 'proprietaries,' or CIA cover companies, serviced American newspapers; one had more than thirty U.S. subscribers." 708
However, there is one other significant force in American life which plays an even bigger part in shaping the media.
However, there are four volumes in particular which give the reader an in-depth look at the way Israel and its lobby in this country have had such a powerful impact on the way news relating to Israel is reported. Each volume deserves careful study:
Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media, edited by Edmund Ghareeb, published in 1983 by the American-Arab Affairs Council;
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby by former Congressman Paul Findley, published in 1985 by Lawrence Hill & Company.
A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute by former diplomat Richard H. Curtiss, published in 1986 by the American Educational Trust;
Conspiracy Against Freedom, issued in 1986 by Liberty Lobby, the Washington-based populist institution which publishes The Spotlight, the newspaper that sparked the lawsuit by E. Howard Hunt (described in Chapter 16) which resulted in a jury's finding that the CIA had been complicit in the JFK assassination conspiracy.
This volume is of particular interest in that it displays documents from ADL files which prove the role of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith in seeking to silence critics of Israel through wide ranging techniques including threats, economic boycott and other unsavory and illegal measures contrary to American tradition. It is the activity of the ADL, in particular, which seems to have had a recurring role in the JFK assassination conspiracy cover-up by the media.
"For years the tentacles of the Israeli Secret Service had reached out into all walks of American life, not in any sinister way, as was sometimes alleged by her enemies, but in a quietly persistent manner which embraced making friends and influencing people, establishing opinion lobbies and gathering intelligence.
Deacon continued: "This influence extended into the U.S. [House] and the Senate, the Pentagon, the defense and electronic industries, the research laboratories and such Jewish-oriented organizations as the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Defense Committee, Bonds for Israel and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.
"Some of these bodies have served as fronts for intelligence-gathering and there are few of the important congressional committees which do not possess one member or staff-assistant who does not feed the Israeli network relevant material." 709
That the ADL, as a voice for Israel, would have an interest in stifling any suggestion that Israel—and for that matter, Israel's allies at the CIA— had a hand in the JFK assassination cannot be disputed.
After all, the ADL has adopted as its mission the defense of Israel and the defamation of its critics—both real and perceived.
THE ADL AND THE LANSKY SYNDICATE
What's more, the ADL has—to this day—very close ties to the remnants of the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate and has throughout its history. Many top Lansky associates were longtime high-level financial backers of the ADL.
According to a 1968 study by Father Dan Lyons, a Jesuit priest, at that time fully $5,500,000 of the ADL's total budget of $6,183,000 came from contributions from the liquor industry. The liquor industry was a virtual fiefdom of powerful Jewish families known for their devotion to Israel, most notably the family of ex-bootlegger Samuel Bronfman. 710
(As we saw in Chapters 7 and 15, the Bronfman family—along with liquor baron Sam Rothberg, head of the U.S. Israel Bonds campaign, were key backers of Israel and tied closely with the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.)
In fact, as we noted in Chapter 10, the ADL is so close to the Lansky Syndicate that in 1983 Lansky's longtime associate, Morris Dalitz, was honored by the ADL with its prestigious annual "Torch of Liberty Award."
(Dalitz's service to the cause of Israel was apparently deemed more significant than his activities in the underworld.)
All of this is, of course, significant when we consider the ADL's activities in the context of the media's assault on those who ponder the possibility of a conspiracy behind the JFK assassination.
However, the ADL has—as we shall see—connections above and beyond the organized crime interests that stood to benefit from the JFK assassination. The ADL has long-standing ties to American intelligence.
"In its early decades, the ADL would approach persons or institutions considered to be anti-Semitic and privately attempt to persuade or reason them into retracting abusive statements and correcting offensive behavior. "In later years, ADL has turned to more public and aggressive measures, which it classifies as "Educational," "Vigilance Work," and "Legislation." In fact, "Vigilance Work" has become outright surveillance of individuals and groups, the results of which are fed into both the Israeli intelligence gathering apparatus, via their consulates and embassy, and American domestic intelligence, via the FBI. To ADL officials have admitted the use of clandestine surveillance techniques." 711
"Today the ADL is much more active than other community relations organizations in the use of its regional offices and constituency for information gathering, and dissemination.
"The central headquarters in New York City provides regional offices with analysis sheets, sample letters to the editor to be placed in local media, biographies of Israeli leaders and anti-Zionist speakers, and directives on how to deal with topical issues.
"The regional offices in turn monitor all Israel-related or Middle East related activities in their areas, such as the media, campus speakers, and films. By bringing the local events to the attention of the central headquarters, they play a pivotal role in ADL's overall supervision of the national scene." 712
"As the file revealed, specific individuals had been assigned to monitor this person's lectures, either by tape recordings and verbatim transcriptions, or by detailed summaries of what the subject spoke about, the context of the lecture, other participants, size of audience, questions from the floor, mood of the audience, and so forth.
"In some cases, these observers successfully penetrated closed meetings in which the subject participated. Subsequently, the ADL prepared and disseminated a short primer on this person, following the 'myth" and "fact' format, and distributed it to their agents for use at future speaking engagements." 713
This, of course, is but one example (of many) which demonstrates the pervasive influence of Israel's ADL and its clandestine efforts to control public discussion of U.S. Middle East policy on all fronts—particularly in the American media.
A spy scandal erupted in San Francisco, enveloping the ADL, one of its longtime paid informants, and a San Francisco police officer who had been selling classified police intelligence information to the ADL.
A raid by the San Francisco Police Department on the offices of the ADL in both San Francisco and Los Angeles revealed that those offices of the ADL were maintaining surveillance on some 12,000 individual Americans and on the activities of some 950 social and political organizations of all political persuasions.
It was subsequently revealed that the ADL was conducting similar spying operations in other major cities around the country, utilizing a network of paid informants who were charged with the responsibility of infiltrating organizations targeted by the ADL.
(In Chapter 15 we considered the likelihood that the ADL's New Orleans spymaster, A. L. (Bee) Botnick, had utilized the good offices of his fellow anti-communist extremist, ex-FBI man, private detective and CIA asset Guy Banister, to spy upon left wing groups in New Orleans, taking advantage of the talents of a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.)
Ironically, among the targets of the ADL's spying included organizations that had, over the years, cooperated with the ADL in a number of joint ventures, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union.
Although the ADL sought to maintain silence about the ongoing investigation, hard-hitting and fact-filled investigative reports by the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times, in particular, received nationwide distribution, doing immense damage to the ADL's long-standing pose as a "civil rights" organization.
Suall's mentor, it will be recalled, was Mossad-allied CIA spymaster James J. Angleton's point man in the CIA's dealings with the Lansky Syndicate-linked Corsican and Sicilian crime organizations.
These foreign crime elements (which handled the Lansky-run drug racket in Europe) were also utilized by the CIA in its campaign against left-wing labor movements in the Mediterranean during the post-war period.
Since James J. Angleton was dismissed from his CIA post after revelations of his involvement in illegal domestic spying by the CIA, we cannot help but speculate that, in light of revelations about ADL spying, Angleton almost certainly relied upon the good offices of his friends at the Mossad-linked ADL for much information.
(In Chapter 15 we pointed out that the FBI also utilized the ADL as a spy asset, noting, in particular the ADL's spying operations aimed at civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.)
In fact, on the first occasion when the Establishment media put forth a theory that perhaps Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed part of a much bigger conspiracy, it was in a news story leaked by two major columnists who were very close to not only the ADL but also to key figures in the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate. The case study we are about to examine is highly significant and illustrates the point all too well.
(This column appeared during the time that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was in the earliest stages of his own controversial assassination inquiry.)
Interestingly, Pearson and Anderson even slanted their column to suggest that somehow then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president's younger brother who was elected to the Senate from New York in 1964, had a hand in setting what became the alleged Castro-sponsored assassination plot in motion.
Pearson and Anderson claimed that: "President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb, an unconfirmed report that Sen. Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother." The assassination plot alleged was one of those hatched between the CIA and "the Mafia." 714
According to what can most charitably be described as the fanciful account by Pearson and Anderson, Castro had captured a number of CIA/Mafia hit men who were gunning for him and then "turned" them; in short, that the anti-Castro hit men then had a change of heart and returned to the United States and killed Kennedy.
It was some years later that Anderson revealed that Mafia figure Johnny Rosselli had, in fact, been the alleged initial source of the story which Anderson said had been told to CIA-linked Washington lawyer, Edward P. Morgan. (In Chapter 11 we reviewed Rosselli's involvement in the Castro assassination plots upon which the Pearson/Anderson story relied, in part, as a basis for its theory.)
"Not mentioned in the column was the simple, powerful argument against Cuban sponsorship of the Kennedy assassination—the powerful risk Castro would run if a plot against the American president was discovered. As the [U.S. Senate's] Church Committee [investigating CIA assassination plots] noted, such a blunder would have 'exposed Cuba to invasion and destruction.'
"Later, it was learned that Castro had opened new channels of diplomacy, at the time of the shooting in Dallas, showing himself, in the words of one diplomat, 'anxious to establish communications with the United States.' Finally, with the benefit of hindsight, Rosselli's story of CIA marksmen being 'turned' seems highly implausible, a product of Korean War recruiting films.
"Nor did Anderson note his own close relationship to his source; that Morgan had no evidence, beyond Rosselli's statements, to back up the Castro retaliation theory; nor that Rosselli may have been pursuing his own, independent agenda." 715
Mafia enforcer and one-time "acting boss" of the Mafia families in California, Jimmy Fratianno, told of a meeting with Rosselli in 1976, around the time that Rosselli was providing congressional investigators with details of CIA-Organized Crime assassination plots aimed at Fidel Castro.
Fratianno's memory of the event suggests that Rosselli himself was never being straightforward about the events as they had really unfolded. Fratianno recalls Rosselli's words as follows:
"They had me up at the Carroll Arms Hotel . . . for a secret session and I really fixed their fucking wagon. All hot, you know, about who killed Kennedy. Sometimes I'd like to tell them the mob did it, just to see the expression on their stupid faces. You know, we're supposed to be idiots, right?
"We hire a psycho like Oswald to kill the President and then we get a blabbermouth, two-bit punk like Ruby to shut him up. We wouldn't trust those jerks to hit a fucking dog.
"Anyway, they start questioning me about this bullshit I'd told Morgan years ago. You know, Castro retaliating against Kennedy because of our attempts on his life. I said, 'I have no recollection of receiving or passing on such information.'
"Well, Jimmy, it's not my fault if Morgan has a vivid imagination. I've also been dropping by Jack Anderson's office and we're getting pretty chummy, having lunch and dinner together. Nice guy, but he's always trying to pump me, but he's cool about it." 716
According to Rappleye and Becker, "Santo Trafficante seems the most likely party." 718 They go even further, however. They believe that the CIA was behind Trafficante actions in this regard:
"Might the CIA have floated the Castro theory, again to deflect the [Jim] Garrison investigation [in New Orleans]? If the CIA were actually involved in the Kennedy assassination, as some leading researchers believe, the scenario would fit.
"Considering his intimate association with the Agency, Rosselli would have accepted their directive as well as Trafficante's. And Ed Morgan himself had close ties to the Agency, both through [CIA contract operative Robert] Maheu and from a prior stint as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee." 719
(As we saw, particularly in Chapter 12, Trafficante was not the major crime boss he has been portrayed by the Establishment media. Instead, he was the immediate deputy of the CIA's longtime collaborator—and Israel's loyalist—Meyer Lansky.)
Floating an anti-communist story (i.e. linking a communist dictator to the murder of the martyred president) then, would also have the side effect of whipping up anti-communist hysteria which would have been helpful to the "anti-communist" offensive in Vietnam that proved so beneficial, as we have seen, not only to the CIA, but also to the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate and its allies in Israel.
The Pearson-Johnson relationship had other implications as well. According to Scott, Pearson had used his column to leak government information about a key witness, one Don Reynolds, who was providing evidence against Johnson's longtime crony and reputed bag-man, Bobby Baker." 721
(Baker, as we saw, in Chapter 6, was not only an independent operator on his own, but a front man for a variety of LBJ's corrupt business ventures. Baker conducted more than a few deals with close associates of Meyer Lansky, most notably Ed Levinson, a director of Mossad operative Tibor Rosenbaum's Banque de Credit International (BCI).
(As we noted in Chapter 15, Rosenbaum's BCI, of course, was one of the chief shareholders in Permindex, the shadowy entity that played so central a role in the CIA-Mossad conspiracy against John F. Kennedy.)
According to Pearson's own longtime legman, John Henshaw, Warren and Pearson had traveled together to the USSR shortly after the JFK assassination. There Pearson was introduced to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Apparently one of the subjects discussed by Pearson and Khrushchev was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 723
Henshaw noted that a "top secret" classified document buried in the National Archives in Washington (signed by CIA Director Richard Helms) was designated, "Discussion between Chairman Khrushchev and Mr. Drew Pearson regarding Lee Harvey Oswald." 724
This was one of the documents that Chief Justice Warren ordered sealed for 75 years. The secret talks between Pearson and the Soviet dictator were never recorded in Pearson's gossip column. It was apparently during this period that Pearson first promoted the Castro conspiracy theory which later came to the public's attention in 1967.
However, at the time of the Warren Commission investigation, the chief justice evidently believed there was a basis for Pearson's story, and thus a consequent need to cover up the truth to prevent the outbreak of war. This apparently was the ruse needed to convince Warren to hide what he mistakenly believed to be the troublesome truth. Pearson's biographer charitably described the columnist's actions: "The purpose of the columnist turned-diplomat was to reduce hysteria, which might upset the delicate balance between the [United States and the USSR]." 725
Whatever the case, the Pearson-Anderson story about the alleged Castro conspiracy against JFK created a sensation and muddied the waters at a time when JFK assassination conspiracy allegations were gaining widespread credibility. However rational the story may have sounded at the time, the evidence was flimsy at best as we have seen. The fact is that the Pearson/Anderson "revelations" are nothing more than deliberate disinformation.
The Pearson-Anderson columns, likewise, shifted focus away from the Garrison investigation in New Orleans which was focusing on likely CIA involvement and which had stumbled upon the Clay Shaw-Permindex connection bringing the inquiry right onto Israel's doorstep.
That Drew Pearson, in particular, would have an interest in shielding any Israeli involvement as well is beyond doubt.
One of Pearson's favorite targets was then-Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. According to Pearson's biographer, "When Forrestal persuaded [President Harry] Truman to take the Arab side against the Jews in Palestine for military reasons, Pearson saw his opportunity. He lathered and shaved Forrestal as a bureaucratic voice for American oil companies with enormous stakes in the Mideast. Walter Winchell and other opinion-makers supported his position." 726
Pearson's hysterical media attack on Forrestal, some believed, led to the Cabinet secretary's mental instability, resulting in Forrestal's suicide. There are many, though, who believe that Forrestal was in fact murdered—precisely because of his powerful opposition to the Israeli lobby.
Pearson himself had cemented his ties with the Israeli lobby and had engaged in behind-the-scenes intrigue with Israel's intelligence and propaganda arm, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith for decades.
Pearson's own former mother-in-law, Washington Times-Herald publisher Cissy Patterson, was less charitable in her description of Pearson. In a fiery editorial attack on Pearson she called him "both undercover agent and mouthpiece for the Anti-Defamation League." 728
What's more, Pearson had a long-standing arrangement with the ADL in which the ADL paid the expenses of his legmen, such as the aforementioned John Henshaw, in return for Pearson floating ADL propaganda in his columns. 729
Stephenson, as we saw in Chapter 7 and Chapter 15 was not only the guiding force behind the assembly of Israel's Mossad, but also the brains behind the Allied intelligence operations during World War II which utilized the resources of Meyer Lansky and his organized crime network. He was also a close associate and mentor of Louis M. Bloomfield, president of the Mossad-backed Permindex entity that was central to the JFK assassination conspiracy.
According to Pearson's biographer, "Stephenson had become acquainted during the war with Pearson as a responsible publicist with the largest serious following in the United States." 730 In at least one instance, Pearson published a story that, according to his biographer, "was spoon-fed to him" 731 by Stephenson.
Pearson's other connections were equally interesting and point further toward his interest in covering for Israel and its allies in the JFK assassination conspiracy—both the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
(In Chapter 6, as we have seen, Humphrey was a product of a Minnesota political machine funded, in part, by the notorious Isadore Blumenfeld, a major cog in the Lansky Crime Syndicate.)
The connections between Pearson and the Israeli lobby in Washington were even more intimate. Pearson's stepson (and the editor of his "diaries"), Tyler Abell, an attorney, had been employed by the law firm of David Ginsburg, a registered foreign agent for Israel.
Ginsburg, like several other top figures known for their interest in promoting Israel's interests in Washington, were among those close to Hubert Humphrey. (Ginsburg himself took a leave of absence from his own firm to work on behalf of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey's unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign.)733
In Chapter 6, of course, we examined the vice president's early political successes in Lansky Syndicate dominated Minneapolis.
According to Cohen, writing in his memoirs, President Johnson arranged for Pearson to call Cohen who was, by then, in jail. Pearson wanted to uncover dirt about Nixon from the former Vice President's days in California when, according to Cohen, he had provided underworld financial backing for Nixon.
"We're going for Humphrey for president," Pearson told Cohen, "And I assure you that if he becomes our president, you're going to be given a medical parole," in return for providing muck against Nixon.
According to Cohen, "I consented to everything that Pearson wanted to do against Nixon." 734 However, Nixon won the election and Cohen never received his medical parole.
Pearson's relationship with the publishers of the National Enquirer newspaper (which has made a specialty out of trashing the Kennedy family and likewise publishing often loony JFK assassination conspiracy stories) is also interesting, particularly in light of the Enquirer's CIA and Israeli lobby connections.
It was owned by the three brothers, Anthony, Fortune and Generoso Pope. They were the sons of Generoso Pope, Sr., an Italian leader of New York City's Tammany Hall political machine which was itself inextricably tied to the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
The Pope family were longtime contributors—through the Generoso Pope Foundation—to pro-Israel causes. The foundation was also widely suspected of being a secret conduit for CIA funds.
Generoso Pope, Jr. owned the National Enquirer. Pope, Jr. had worked for the CIA during the Korean war and was himself famously friendly with Lansky's longtime partner, Frank Costello. In fact, Costello helped finance the Enquirer in its infancy. 735
Pearson had given highly favorable publicity to Generoso Pope, Sr. as the first "prominent Italian American" to oppose Mussolini. In return, Pope promptly gave Pearson a contract to write a weekly column for his El Progresso, the leading Italian language newspaper in the country. The $150-a week contract was more than any other newspaper paid for just one weekly column.
In the mid-1960's Pearson and Fortune Pope, along with Lyndon Johnson's TV-and-radio advisor, Leonard Marks, went into partnership and acquired the Bell-McClure Syndicate and the North American Newspaper Alliance. (Marks was later appointed head of the U.S. Information Agency by Johnson.) 736
Pearson's biographer dismisses the relationship between Pearson and the controversial Pope family as "puzzling." 737 This relationship, however, further cements Pearson's ties to the Israeli lobby and its allies in the CIA.
It was Trento, as we saw in Chapter 16, who co-wrote a controversial article alleging that former CIA man E. Howard Hunt may have been in Dallas on the day JFK was shot.
Trento, as noted, had excellent CIA connections—James Jesus Angleton, in particular, and we know for a fact that Trento was being used as a media conduit by Angleton for whatever insidious purposes of his own. This, of course, we discussed in some detail in Chapter 16.
Greenspun was a protégé of Lansky crony Joseph "Doc" Stacher, a New Jersey mobster who was one of the prime American backers of the Jewish underground in Palestine in the late 1940's. 739 Stacher was later permitted to go into exile in Israel following his conviction in the United States on income tax evasion charges. According to Lansky's friendly biographer, Robert Lacey, Stacher's death affected Lansky greatly. They were very close friends and longtime associates.) 740
Greenspun also functioned as a public relations man for Lansky's boyhood friend—later killed at Lansky's direction—Benjamin Siegel.
According to The Washington Observer, "Early in the Palestine War, Hank Greenspun was dispatched by the Jewish underground to Hawaii to buy surplus U.S. Army arms and equipment. By bribing security guards at the U.S. Naval Air Station on Oahu, he raided a stockpile of armaments and stole 15 tons of .30- and .50- caliber aircraft machine guns. The contraband machine guns were packed in 58 crates marked 'engine parts' and shipped to Los Angeles, then transshipped to Mexico and on to Israel. Greenspun ran the British blockade in a ship delivering arms to Israel. Later he pleaded guilty to violating the U.S. Neutrality Act, and was given a 3-year suspended sentence. He was never prosecuted for theft of Federal government property." 741
Greenspun, who became a major figure in Las Vegas, went on to establish a chain of newspapers in Nevada and Colorado, publishing The Las Vegas Sun.
As we saw in Chapter 7, the Israeli arms-smuggling underworld of which Greenspun was a part, was a very tightly knit little clique. It was, of course, Louis Bloomfield (later chief executive officer of the Permindex entity) who was once a key coordinator for Israeli arms smuggling working with the Lansky Syndicate and, Anderson's associate, Greenspun.
Anderson and Greenspun were themselves involved in yet another venture linked to the Lansky Syndicate. The two, along with CIA-linked attorney Edward Morgan (the alleged conduit for the Castro conspiracy story floated by Pearson and Anderson) were middlemen in the sale of Lansky associate and ADL "Torch of Liberty" winner, Morris Dalitz's Las Vegas gambling palace, the Desert Inn, to Howard Hughes. 742
The case of Pearson and Anderson exemplifies, above all, the insidious nature of Israel's influence over the American media and provides a clear-cut case study of how the media has been manipulated to distort the truth about the JFK assassination conspiracy.
Although the media in general had initially backed the Warren Commission cover-up, public dissent about the conclusions—stirred on largely by the work of pioneer commission critic Mark Lane and his friend, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison—forced Israel's friends in the media to play their hand.
Stories that "The Mafia Killed JFK" and about "Castro" plots against JFK suddenly began emerging. Pearson and Anderson were just two players in the continuing cover-up. And Pearson himself (as we have seen) actually had a hand in convincing Earl Warren that there had been a conspiracy (plotted by Castro) that made it necessary, for the public good, to cover up the truth. In fact, Pearson and his Israeli and CIA allies were seeking to keep the real truth hidden.
The book featured an interview with an international hit man named "Saul" who confessed to McDonald that he was the real murderer of President Kennedy. The hit man said that he was hired by a private group, and not by the CIA for whom he had done contract work in the past.
While many JFK assassination critics were highly skeptical about the book, looking upon it as some form of disinformation (perhaps from the CIA itself)—although not necessarily questioning McDonald's sincerity—it would have been more instructive to consider Geoffrey Bocca's role in the writing of the book. Bocca, in fact, was a propagandist for the CIA-backed and Israeli-financed French Secret Army Organization (OAS) and was known to have "translated some OAS tracts into English at a time when the organization was thinking of appealing to the United Nations for help." 744 Bocca also wrote a heroic account of the OAS entitled The Secret Army.
Needless to say, in light of the "French connection" to the JFK assassination conspiracy, the appearance of an OAS propagandist as the coauthor of a book which effectively "cleared" the CIA of involvement in the crime is interesting, to say the least.
An odd footnote: several years after publishing Appointment in Dallas, McDonald wrote another JFK assassination book. His co-author, who had solid links to the CIA, Robin Moore, was best known, interestingly enough, for his famous book, The French Connection—on the French intelligence- and Lansky Syndicate-linked international heroin racket.
McDonald and Moore's book was entitled LBJ and the JFK Conspiracy. This volume elaborated on the theme of McDonald's first book, saying that the alleged hit man, Saul, had been hired by the Soviet Union to kill President Kennedy.
The theory that the Soviets were behind the assassination conspiracy, of course, falls right in line with the CIA's initial scheme, through its Mexico City Scenario, concocted by James J. Angleton, to pin the crime on the KGB. Whatever the case, McDonald's second book received little, if any, recognition, although it did muddy the waters further.
"Hoffa had JFK killed" screamed the headline on the front page of the January 14 edition of the sensationalist New York Post.
It was the New York tabloid that "broke" the story that Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa had arranged the JFK murder through his Mafia contacts. Not surprisingly, the author of the Post article was Jack Newfield.
The Post, of course, has been one of the media's primary pro-Israel voices—almost to the point of obsession. Any conspiracy that might somehow link Israel—or its allies in the CIA—could not be tolerated.
Almost immediately, the rest of the Establishment media picked up the scandal sheet's "exclusive" and began hyping it. The purpose was to discredit the conspiracy that was finally being exposed to millions of Americans.
In response to Newfield's concoction, even Dan Rather, on CBS, felt compelled to tell the world that the evidence was in: longtime Teamsters' Union leader Jimmy Hoffa had ordered "the Mafia" to kill John F. Kennedy.
The Washington Post, long a CIA disinformation source, also published the story. As did the staunchly pro-Israel conservative weekly, Human Events which consistently maintained, otherwise, that any conspiracy in the JFK assassination—particularly involving the CIA—was a madman's fantasy.
Newfield's article quoted a longtime alleged associate of organized crime, attorney Frank Ragano, as having claimed that Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa told him to order "the Mafia" to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
According to Ragano's unlikely story, Ragano took the message to New Orleans rackets boss Carlos Marcello and to Tampa mob chieftain Santos Trafficante, both of whom, we have seen, were immediate underlings of Meyer Lansky.
Presumably they complied with Hoffa's order, in Ragano's version of the story, because, after all, Kennedy was indeed shot dead.745 However, as Mark Lane has commented, "Hoffa didn't give orders to the Mafia. The Mafia gave orders to Hoffa." 746
Now all of this is most peculiar in that Ragano says that he—a top level criminal lawyer with high-ranking connections—managed to "suppress" these memories until just recently.
Ragano said he was "guilty and ashamed" because of his association with organized crime; according to Ragano, his guilt feelings caused him to suppress those memories. However, he might also have been interested in adding some spice to his memoirs which were later published.
What's more, Ragano, who was appealing a second federal income tax evasion conviction, might also have had something else in mind by telling this story which clears the CIA and any other federal agencies that may have been involved in the assassination and its cover-up.
'Tell the FBI to look into the CIA. And tell the CIA to look into the FBI. Then you'll have the answer [to the Hoffa case.]' And he added that it was his belief that Hoffa's murder was related to those of [Sam] Giancana and Johnny] Rosselli. 747
(In Chapter 11, of course, we examined the strange deaths of Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli and concluded, contrary to popular myth, that the two Mafia figures were not, in fact, the victims of "Mafia" hits at all— but were, instead, snuffed out if not by the CIA itself, certainly at its behest.)
Interestingly enough, it was yet another dedicated pro-Israel polemicist, Max Lerner, writing in The Washington Times, who also came to the defense of the Hoffa-Mafia cover story. According to Lerner, "The Mafia has always figured among the major possible scenarios for the killing, along with the KGB and Cuba's Fidel Castro. But not until the Ragano account had the pieces of the puzzle begun to fall together. Marcello headed the Mafia operation in New Orleans, Trafficante in Tampa and Cuba. They had time to work out their plan. They had an army of skilled killers to draw on."748
Lerner, of course, was playing fast and loose with the facts. He ignored the central part Meyer Lansky played in manipulating the activities of both Marcello and Trafficante.
The Washington Times is funded by the bizarre global conglomerate of Korean cult figure Sun Myung Moon.
Moon himself has been repeatedly linked to the Korean CIA which is, of course, intimately tied with its American counterpart. Additionally, Moon has forged a close working alliance with Israel and its American lobby and has pushed a pro-Israel agenda on the so-called "conservative movement" in the United States.
Moon's editor at The Washington Times at that time was Arnaud deBorchgrave, a former top correspondent for the CIA-linked Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post Company) and a reputed "former" intelligence operative. What's more, deBorchgrave himself is closely connected by marriage to the Rothschild family. The Rothschilds, as we have seen, have been longtime financial backers of the state of Israel.
At the time Mark Lane's Plausible Denial and Oliver Stone's JFK were released, AIM chairman Reed Irvine, seemingly inexplicably, signed on with the rest of the media in denouncing the conspiracy theories presented in the book and the motion picture.
Writing in the pages of the conservative weekly, Human Events, media critic Irvine paid tribute to the Establishment media for its attack on the theories. According to Irvine, "The mainstream media, to their credit, have been nearly unanimous in denouncing Stone as a lying charlatan." 749
(Although, of course, Stone did not, in fact, tell the whole truth.)
Irvine went on to dismiss Lane as a "leftist" and announced emphatically that anyone who believes that there was any kind of domestic conspiracy behind the JFK murder was being taken in by Soviet propaganda. The AIM response was interesting, particularly in the context of the background of some of AIM's leading lights.
It was during his service in Vietnam, as we noted in Chapter 12, that Lansdale worked closely with the Corsican Mafia—an integral part of the Lansky drug smuggling operations conducted in league with the CIA. That Lansdale's former Vietnam era associate would come out swinging against JFK conspiracy theories, then, is no big surprise.
The founder of the ISC was the ubiquitous Dr. Joseph Churba, an ordained rabbi whom we first encountered in Chapter 8 as a protégé of Jay Lovestone who coordinated CIA contacts with the Corsican and Sicilian Mafias on behalf of the CIA's James J. Angleton.
Interestingly enough, Churba (now deceased) was also a key figure in the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and in an entity known as Americans for a Safe Israel (ASI) established in the United States as an outgrowth of the Israeli underground terrorist group, the Irgun.
Among those intimately collaborating with the forerunners of ASI was the Romanian Jewish émigré, Ernst Mantello, whose brother Giorgio, along with Major Louis M. Bloomfield, was one of the founders of the shadowy Permindex entity examined in detail in Chapter 15.751
It might be added, in passing, that AIM has consistently also been a strident defender of Israel and its interests. To even hint at any conspiracy which might involve Israel and its allies in the CIA would be an outrage, insofar as AIM would be concerned. So much, then, for accuracy in media from Accuracy in Media.
Writing in the New York Times on December 20, 1991, Stone asked a rather simple question: "When a leader of any country is assassinated, the media normally ask: 'What political forces were opposed to this leader and would benefit from his assassination?"
The irony, as we shall see, is that although Oliver Stone himself seemed to have asked that very question in a big, big way—through the aegis of his controversial film JFK—the fact is that Stone himself has, in a sense, proven in the end to have become a major factor in the continuing cover-up of the real truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
It is ironic indeed that although Stone's film JFK has focused widespread international attention on the JFK assassination conspiracy, there has been quiet speculation that the media's furor might be part of a high level plan to further cover up the truth about the conspiracy.
Many JFK assassination researchers, Mark Lane in particular, are deeply concerned that Stone's film presents a strange mixture of both fact and fiction. The facts about the assassination conspiracy are sensational enough without fictional details being added, he and others have pointed out. Lane summarized it best: "It was good that Stone called the attention of teenagers and others to the unsolved murder. It was bad that he did so by falsifying the record." 753
The primary conspirators were presented as high-level military men and their allies among the multi-billion-dollar defense contracting companies. The intelligence community's role was understated, to say the very least.
This, in itself, lead some of Stone's critics to suggest that perhaps the ultimate purpose behind the film was not, in fact, to pinpoint those truly responsible for the JFK assassination, but to point the finger in another direction. The evidence for this, as we shall see, is compelling indeed.
It was in 1956 that Chesler, a Lansky front man, established Seven Arts Productions in Montreal, Canada. Although ostensibly a film production company, Seven Arts functioned as a money-laundering facility for Lansky and others among his associates. 754
By 1955, Seven Arts had gone into partnership with a New York-based banking consortium and was flush with money within a decade.
In 1967 Seven Arts shook Wall Street and stunned Hollywood when it gained control of the famous Warner Brothers Studios—in short, a Lansky take-over. The move was a mystery to many at the time, but little did they know of the behind-the-scenes Lansky Syndicate dealings which made the wheeling and dealing possible.
The new operation was dubbed Warner-Seven Arts Studios and, by 1968, was known as Warner Communications.755 Not surprisingly, it just so happens, it was Bernie Cornfeld's Investors Overseas Service (JOS) which "owned major blocks of stock"756 in Warner-Seven Arts.
Cornfeld of IOS, as we saw in Chapter 15, was a front man for Tibor Rosenbaum, former Mossad official and the prime mover behind the Lansky-linked Permindex operation that was so central to the JFK assassination conspiracy.
However, what is particularly significant about the case is that much of the evidence against the aforementioned Weiss, who was senior assistant treasurer of Warner Communications, emerged from records gleaned from the files of the United Jewish Appeal and other pro-Israel philanthropies that were seized by the Justice Department.758
What's more, the Warner Communications investigation repeatedly stumbled upon links to the so-called "Israeli mafia,"—the domestic elements of organized criminal activity operating in Israel.
And, to draw the circle even tighter, the Warner investigation of the aforementioned Stephen Ross by Justice uncovered close links between the media giant and the American Bank and Trust (ABT) scandal.759
It was, as we have seen, ironically enough, on November 22, 1963, that Swiss Israel assumed management of American Bank and Trust. The latter firm, however, ultimately went belly up, having been looted by financier David Graiver, himself a longtime Mossad operative.
One of those tarnished by the ABT scandal—and ultimately linked to the Warner Communications affair—was New York financier Abraham Feinberg who not only served as a director of ABT, but who had also been the individual who arranged John F. Kennedy's first unpleasant meeting with the key money men in the pro-Israel lobby in America (described in Chapter 4). 760
Warner Communications survived the series of scandals and then, ultimately, merged with Time-Life, Inc., the other great media giant which, itself, has been scored by JFK assassination researchers for lending itself to the JFK assassination cover-up.
Billings himself later served on the staff of the House Assassinations Committee which blamed the JFK murder on "the Mafia," working alongside the committee's director, G. Robert Blakey, who several years previously had been employed as a character witness on behalf of longtime Lansky confidant Morris Dalitz, ostensibly "proving" that Dalitz was not linked with the underworld.
So it was that Time-Life and Warner Communications merged, becoming Time-Warner. And, of course, it was one of Time-Warner's subsidiaries, Warner Brothers, which ultimately became the distribution company for Oliver Stone's JFK—which blamed "the military-industrial complex"—not Israel's Mossad, not the Mafia, not even the CIA itself—for the JFK assassination.
(The same company, through its subsidiary, Time-Warner Books, also handled distribution for the biography of Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana that suggested that it was strictly a CIA-Mafia plot against JFK, orchestrated almost solely by Giancana himself.)
It was, as we saw in Chapter 15, Major Louis M. Bloomfield, chief executive operative of the Permindex entity, who had been longtime personal attorney for the Bronfman interests and a major figure in the Israeli lobby in Canada.
That a company which has been intimately tied from its earliest years not only with the inner circles of Meyer Lansky and his international crime syndicate, but also with Israel and its Mossad, should be the sponsor of Oliver Stone's grand conspiracy theory is enough to make one wonder, to say the least. But there's more.
It is somewhat interesting to note that when Stone hired on a public relations agency to handle the publicity and controversy which emerged when the film was released, it was the powerful Washington, D.C. firm of Hill & Knowlton. After all, it was Hill & Knowlton that orchestrated major propaganda in favor of American involvement in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq—and in favor of Israel.
Although Stone hadn't been in attendance at the symposium, he was represented there by one of his associates and it is certain that Stone was aware of the release of Final Judgment. After all, a full-page advertisement promoting a book featuring an introduction by Stone appeared opposite a full-page advertisement for Final Judgment.
When Stone was presented his copy of the book, however, his face froze when he saw the book's cover and he refused to accept the book, saying, "Please send it to me in the mail." The "maverick" self-styled freethinker, Stone, turned his back and walked away, moments later accepting another package of material presented to him by another individual.
Why was Stone so hesitant to accept this book? Perhaps we have information that provides the answer. Stone did, in fact, know of the so called "French connection" to the JFK assassination documented in Final Judgment and referenced in the advertisement in the program of the JFK forum in Dallas.
When Lewis, who served as a consultant to Stone during the filming of JFK, assisted Stone in setting up the movie sets recreating Banister's New Orleans office, Stone included a number of boxes, ostensibly containing arms, that were stenciled in Spanish.
Lewis objected to the Spanish, saying, "The writing on the boxes was in French,"—the arms having been linked to the OAS rebellion, backed by the Israeli-sponsored Permindex operation, against French President Charles DeGaulle. But Stone responded to Lewis by saying, "Spanish serves the theme of the movie better." So, as Lewis commented, "Spanish it was."761
So it also was that Oliver Stone ignored the "French" connection—a connection which, in turn, brings forth the Israeli connection to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A wise move indeed for a filmmaker whose sponsors had intimate ties to the guilty parties involved in the crime that Stone brought to grisly life on film.
Who is Arnon Milchan? Why is his name relevant in our examination of the facts about Israel's role in the JFK assassination conspiracy and the manner in which Oliver Stone has suppressed that critical factor?
According to liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn, writing in The Nation on May 18, 1992, Milchan, the executive producer of JFK, "was identified in one 1989 Israeli report as 'probably [Israel's] largest arms dealer.' A company he owned was once caught smuggling nuclear weapons fuses to Iraq. As part of a joint Israeli-South African government operation— `Muldergate'—he acted as launderer to money scheduled to quell liberal publications opposing apartheid."762
Israeli historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, who has studied Israel's global arms trading, does describe Milchan as a "Mossad man."763 However, in light of JFK's behind-the-scenes battle with Israel over the issue of Israel's nuclear development, what is perhaps even more intriguing is that, according to James Riordan, Oliver Stone's biographer: "Milchan has been in the international headlines for making deals to benefit Israel's nuclear arms program, but he claims defense of his homeland, not profit, has been his motive."764
But that's not all. It also turns out, according to Riordan, that Milchan made available what Riordan described as "French money"765 for the production of Stone's film.
Thus, we have a Mossad figure in the center of Israel's nuclear development program providing the financing—along with his French partners—of a film that not only 1) suppresses the so-called "French connection" (described even by one of the film's consultants, the aforementioned Ron Lewis) but which 2) never once hints at JFK's bitter conflict with Israel, in particular the struggle over Israel's drive to assemble a nuclear arsenal.
It is probably worth noting, additionally, that since Final Judgment was first published I have been told—but have never been able to confirm—that Oliver Stone has been a generous contributor to the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the lobby for Israel. If true, then this is simply another interesting detail which helps further explain why Stone might choose to ignore all of the evidence which does demonstrate a definitive Israeli connection to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
As we have seen, one political force that was opposed to John F. Kennedy and would benefit from his assassination was Israel, yet Stone himself evidently prefers not to name that particular force.
Despite all the criticisms we have aimed at Stone—and they are very much deserved—Stone's film has still led the way for new popular perceptions about the obvious fact that it was a conspiracy that ended the life of John F. Kennedy.
Stone failed to nail down the source of that conspiracy but in the pages of Final Judgment we have done just that. What a shame indeed that Oliver Stone could not have told the entire story of the conspiracy.
Although the media initially supported the Warren Commission's conclusions, public skepticism forced the media to bring forth a wide variety of cover stories and limited portions of the truth. But the Israeli connection has never been considered—until now.
next
The Heir to the Throne
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Israel, Iran, Lansky & the CIA
Chapter Seventeen They Dare Not Speak Out
689 Sid Blumenthal (editor). Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories From Dallas to Today. (New York: Signet Books, 1976), p. 231. 690 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins. (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988), p. 251. 691 Ibid.
692 Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. {New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1992), pp. 244-245.
693 James Kirkwood. American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw-Jim Garrison Affair in New Orleans. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), P . 47.
694 Washington Observer, August 1, 1970.
695 Walter Sheridan. The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), p. 418.
696 Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1970.
697 Jim Garrison. On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation & Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy. (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988), p. 168.
698 Dick Russell. The Man Who Knew Too Much. [New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1992), p. 400.
699 Ibid., pp. 401-402.
700 ° Ibid., p. 430.
701 Warren Hinckle and William Turner. Deadly Secrets. [New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992), p. 252. 578 Reference Notes [481]
702 Executive Intelligence Review. Moscow's Secret Weapon. [Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, March 1, 1986), p. 119.
703 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 187.
704 Ibid., p. 173.
705 Kirkwood, p. 162.
706 Garrison, p. 270.
707 David Wise. The American Police State: The Government Against the People. (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 200-201.
708 Wise, .Ibid.
709 Richard Deacon. The Israeli Secret Service. (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co, Inc., 1978), p. 171.
710 Twin Circle. September 29, 1968.
711 Lee O'Brien. American Jewish Organizations and Israel. (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986), p. 99.
712 Ibid.
713 Ibid., p. 100.
714 Washington Post, March 3, 1967.
715 Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker. All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story. (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 471.
716 Ovid Demaris. The Last Mafioso: The Treacherous World of Jimmy Fratianno. (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), p. 389.
717 Rappleye and Becker, p. 475.
718 Ibid.
719 Ibid.
720 Peter Dale Scott. Crime and Cover-up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection. (Berkeley, California: Westworks Publishers, 1977), p. 26.
721 Ibid., p. 25.
722 Ibid.
723 Washington Observer, April 1, 1967
724 Washington Observer, June 15, 1968.
725 Oliver Pilat. Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized Biography. (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1973), p. 241.
726 Ibid., p. 183.
727 Ibid., p. 17. 728 Ibid., p. 169.
729 Interview with Alec deMontmorency, January 25, 1992.
730 Pilat, p. 183.
731 Ibid.
732 Washington Observer, February 15, 1967.
733 Washington Observer, November 1, 1968.
734 Mickey Cohen with John Peer Nugent. Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), pp. 232-233. [482] Final Judgment 579
735 Uncle Frank: The Biography of Frank Costello (New York: Drake Publishers, Inc., 1973), p. 230. 736 Washington Observer, July 1, 1969.
737 Pilat, p. 233.
738 J. Hougan. Secret Agenda. (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 89.
739 Washington Observer, February 1, 1971.
740 Robert Lacey. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1991), p. 417.
741 Washington Observer, Ibid.
742 Ibid.
743 Hougan. p. 80.
744AlexanderHarrison.ChallengingDeGaulle:TheOASandtheCounterrevolution in Algeria. (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 15.
745 New York Post, January 14, 1992.
746 The Spotlight, February 17, 1992.
747 Dan Moldea. The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob. (New York: Paddington Press, 1978), p. 421.
748 The Washington Times, January 19, 1992.
749 Human Events, January 4, 1982.
750 Covert Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1989.
751 Moscow's Secret Weapon. [Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, March 1, 1986], pp. 82-84.
752 Covert Action Information Bulletin, Ibid.
753 Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment. (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992), p. xxvii.
754 The Spotlight, July 17, 1978.
755 ibid.
756 Connie Bruck. Master of the Game. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 52.
757 The Spotlight, October 5, 1981.
758 Ibid. 759 Ibid., August 10, 1981.
760 Ibid.
761 Ron Lewis. Flashback. (Medford, Oregon: Lewcom Productions, 1993), p. 119.
762 Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, May 18, 1992.
763 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Israeli Connection—Who Israel Arms and Why. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 155.
764 James Riordan. Stone. (Hyperion Books, 1995), p. 364.
765 Ibid., p. 370.
It was this same Robert Maheu (misspelled as "Mayhew" by Kirkwood) who was assisting Phelan in the attempt to scuttle the Garrison investigation—an investigation that would, if pursued to the ultimate, have exposed the very CIA-organized crime conspiracy against Castro that also implicated many of those involved in the JFK assassination itself.
In Chapter 11 we examined Maheu's involvement with the CIA and such organized crime figures as Johnny Rosselli, Sam Giancana and Meyer Lansky lieutenant Santo Trafficante in detail.
It will also be recalled that the aforementioned Desert Inn (by this time the property of billionaire Howard Hughes) was initially established by Meyer Lansky's trusted associate, Morris Dalitz, whose activities and strange connections we examined in Chapter 10 and Chapter 15.
So it was that the CIA did have its collaborators in key positions to undermine the Jim Garrison investigation.
GARRISON & MARCELLO
Some of Garrison's more creative foes in the media cleverly came up with
a new way to discredit the New Orleans prosecutor. Instead of really seeking
the truth about the JFK murder, they said, Garrison was, in fact, trying to
cover it up. Garrison—so they said—was a willing tool of Mafia chieftain
Carlos Marcello. By pointing his finger in the direction of the CIA, the Garrison critics claimed, the D.A. was trying to take the heat of suspicion off Carlos Marcello who, they said, was the more likely suspect.
This claim is illogical at best. If Garrison were deliberately trying to cover up any Marcello connections—if any—to the assassination conspiracy, he was going about it in the wrong way.
(It was in Chapter 10 where we learned of the campaign against Garrison led by Life magazine's Richard Billings, who promoted the Garrison-Marcello scenario. It was Billings, of course, who later served as a top advisor to the House Assassinations Committee which pointed the finger of blame for the JFK assassination on "The Mafia,"—and Marcello in particular. )
If Garrison was trying to protect Marcello, the last person that he should have picked on was David Ferrie, the Mafia kingpin's sometime personal pilot and occasional legal researcher. Ferrie himself was standing alongside Marcello in a federal courtroom in New Orleans at the very moment JFK was shot.
By first inquiring into Ferrie's activities, Garrison was practically walking right into Marcello's office itself. This fact alone nullifies the creative (but very much flawed) "Mafia cover-up" critique of Garrison that continues to hang over Garrison's memory to this day. Yet, those who push the theory that "The Mafia Killed JFK" ignore this fact.
Evidently the people of New Orleans didn't buy the Establishment's heavy-handed assault on Garrison. He won re-election to the district attorney's office, despite—or perhaps precisely because of—the media barrage. This is all the more remarkable in that it was the very newspapers of New Orleans who were Garrison's fiercest at-home critics.
Garrison clearly was on the right track. He was looking in the right places. It was Garrison who linked Clay Shaw to the JFK assassination conspiracy and it was Shaw who sat on the board of Permindex, the shadowy Israeli Mossad-linked entity that played so central a role in the murder of the American president. How much Shaw knew about the impending murder of the president will never be known, but there is no question that Shaw was tied to the core of the conspiracy.
THE FEDS VERSUS GARRISON
No wonder then that the full force of the federal government came down
on Garrison's head. He was hit with a wholly-concocted indictment on
bribery charges but subsequently—and rightly—was acquitted. The key
witness against him, a former friend named Pershing Gervais, admitted in a
press interview (with journalist Rosemary James, herself a Garrison critic)
that the charges against Garrison were a Justice Department concoction.
Gervais said, "They wanted to silence Jim Garrison. That was their primary
objective . . ." It was, according to Gervais, "a total, complete political
frame-up, absolutely." He said "the entire thing" was a whole lie.706 Despite the vindication, the Internal Revenue Service jumped into the picture and brought a tax evasion indictment against Garrison for not paying taxes on the alleged bribes that he had been acquitted of having accepted. This, of course, seems incredible, but it is absolutely true. Garrison beat that charge, but his Establishment critics continue to allege (in a last desperate effort to pummel Garrison) that the jurors in that case—as in the previous case—may have been bribed to bring in a not guilty verdict.
THE MEDIA TRASHES
THE KENNEDY IMAGE
What's more, thanks to the media, the image of John F. Kennedy
likewise has been repeatedly savaged in the years following the
assassination. It virtually became a form of ritual defamation. Kennedy's reputed sex life became the subject matter not of just the tabloids, but of the Establishment press itself. Kennedy, we were told, was not all that he was cracked up to be. His affair with Marilyn Monroe became the subject of conversation at every dinner table. (The strange role of Meyer Lansky's man in Hollywood, Mickey Cohen, in the Kennedy-Monroe liaison—which we examined in Chapter 13—however, was not a staple of the continuing coverage.)
The antics of John Kennedy's brother Edward did little to help things. The media eagerly pounced on the Massachusetts senator's every mistake and—as the 30th anniversary of the JFK assassination approached in 1993— began hyping several malicious books attacking Ted Kennedy with what many people might accurately assume was the purpose of preventing the youngest Kennedy brother from ever reaching the White House.
Even the late Jacqueline Kennedy—subsequently married to Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis—was held up to ridicule by the media in subsequent years. Not even she was free from the media's defamation.
THE HUNT-CIA CONNECTION SUPPRESSED
Despite all the media's fascination with the Kennedy family, the media
was strangely silent about the astounding revelations that came forth in the
E. Howard Hunt-Spotlight newspaper libel trial in Miami in 1985. It was
then, as we saw in Chapter 16, that the jury concluded that the CIA had
indeed played a part in John F. Kennedy's assassination. However, the
CIA's friends at The Washington Post had barely a word to say about
Hunt's stunning loss during the trial. Was this by accident—or by design?
At this juncture the conclusion is all too obvious.
THE CIA AND THE MEDIA
That the CIA, of course, has had a major role in subverting the First
Amendment and influencing the American media is now a widely accepted
truth. According to David Wise, writing in The American Police State,
which examined, in part, the role of the CIA in manipulating the media: "The CIA's contacts with the publishing world were not confined to attempts to suppress books. Through the U.S. Information Agency as a `cut-out,' the CIA subsidized major publishers to produce books, some of which were then sold in the United States bearing no government imprint to warn the unsuspecting purchaser.
"In 1967 publisher Frederick A. Praeger conceded he had published `fifteen or sixteen' books for the CIA. By the mid-sixties, more than $1 million had been spent by the government on its 'book development' program. The Senate intelligence committee estimated that by 1967, the CIA had produced, sponsored, or subsidized 'well over 1,000' books' here and abroad." 707
(One of Praeger's volumes is interesting in light of the "French connection" to the JFK case. In 1989 Praeger issued Challenging DeGaulle: The OAS and the Counterrevolution in Algeria. Former CIA Director William Colby wrote the introduction to Harrison's book which was described as the first fully documented history of the OAS.)
Wise continues: "The CIA also planted stories in the foreign press, some of which were played back to American audiences. [CIA Director William] Colby assured the House intelligence committee that the CIA would never manipulate [the Associated Press], since it was an American wire service. In addition, the CIA operated two news services of its own in Europe. These 'proprietaries,' or CIA cover companies, serviced American newspapers; one had more than thirty U.S. subscribers." 708
However, there is one other significant force in American life which plays an even bigger part in shaping the media.
ISRAEL AND THE AMERICAN MEDIA
The real key to understanding the media's part in the JFK assassination
cover-up is to recognize the incredible influence of the Israeli lobby in the
United States on the American media. It is a subject that deserves far more
consideration than we can provide in these pages. However, there are four volumes in particular which give the reader an in-depth look at the way Israel and its lobby in this country have had such a powerful impact on the way news relating to Israel is reported. Each volume deserves careful study:
Split Vision: The Portrayal of Arabs in the American Media, edited by Edmund Ghareeb, published in 1983 by the American-Arab Affairs Council;
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby by former Congressman Paul Findley, published in 1985 by Lawrence Hill & Company.
A Changing Image: American Perceptions of the Arab-Israeli Dispute by former diplomat Richard H. Curtiss, published in 1986 by the American Educational Trust;
Conspiracy Against Freedom, issued in 1986 by Liberty Lobby, the Washington-based populist institution which publishes The Spotlight, the newspaper that sparked the lawsuit by E. Howard Hunt (described in Chapter 16) which resulted in a jury's finding that the CIA had been complicit in the JFK assassination conspiracy.
This volume is of particular interest in that it displays documents from ADL files which prove the role of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith in seeking to silence critics of Israel through wide ranging techniques including threats, economic boycott and other unsavory and illegal measures contrary to American tradition. It is the activity of the ADL, in particular, which seems to have had a recurring role in the JFK assassination conspiracy cover-up by the media.
THE MOSSAD'S TENTACLES
Intelligence historian Richard Deacon, writing in his history of Israel's
Mossad, has commented on the pervasive role of the Israeli lobby and the
manner in which it has exercised its influence: "For years the tentacles of the Israeli Secret Service had reached out into all walks of American life, not in any sinister way, as was sometimes alleged by her enemies, but in a quietly persistent manner which embraced making friends and influencing people, establishing opinion lobbies and gathering intelligence.
Deacon continued: "This influence extended into the U.S. [House] and the Senate, the Pentagon, the defense and electronic industries, the research laboratories and such Jewish-oriented organizations as the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Defense Committee, Bonds for Israel and the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies.
"Some of these bodies have served as fronts for intelligence-gathering and there are few of the important congressional committees which do not possess one member or staff-assistant who does not feed the Israeli network relevant material." 709
THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE
It is significant that Deacon has made specific reference to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith. Perhaps above any other
organization, it is the ADL which has consistently had a major impact on
the America media. And in the case of the media's coverage of the JFK
assassination, the Warren Commission investigation, and the subsequent
critiques of the commission, the ADL's fine hand is, as we shall see, quite
visible. That the ADL, as a voice for Israel, would have an interest in stifling any suggestion that Israel—and for that matter, Israel's allies at the CIA— had a hand in the JFK assassination cannot be disputed.
After all, the ADL has adopted as its mission the defense of Israel and the defamation of its critics—both real and perceived.
THE ADL AND THE LANSKY SYNDICATE
What's more, the ADL has—to this day—very close ties to the remnants of the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate and has throughout its history. Many top Lansky associates were longtime high-level financial backers of the ADL.
According to a 1968 study by Father Dan Lyons, a Jesuit priest, at that time fully $5,500,000 of the ADL's total budget of $6,183,000 came from contributions from the liquor industry. The liquor industry was a virtual fiefdom of powerful Jewish families known for their devotion to Israel, most notably the family of ex-bootlegger Samuel Bronfman. 710
(As we saw in Chapters 7 and 15, the Bronfman family—along with liquor baron Sam Rothberg, head of the U.S. Israel Bonds campaign, were key backers of Israel and tied closely with the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.)
In fact, as we noted in Chapter 10, the ADL is so close to the Lansky Syndicate that in 1983 Lansky's longtime associate, Morris Dalitz, was honored by the ADL with its prestigious annual "Torch of Liberty Award."
(Dalitz's service to the cause of Israel was apparently deemed more significant than his activities in the underworld.)
All of this is, of course, significant when we consider the ADL's activities in the context of the media's assault on those who ponder the possibility of a conspiracy behind the JFK assassination.
However, the ADL has—as we shall see—connections above and beyond the organized crime interests that stood to benefit from the JFK assassination. The ADL has long-standing ties to American intelligence.
THE ADL & AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE
Writing in American Jewish Organizations and Israel, Lee O'Brien
provides an informative capsule study of the ADL's method of operation: "In its early decades, the ADL would approach persons or institutions considered to be anti-Semitic and privately attempt to persuade or reason them into retracting abusive statements and correcting offensive behavior. "In later years, ADL has turned to more public and aggressive measures, which it classifies as "Educational," "Vigilance Work," and "Legislation." In fact, "Vigilance Work" has become outright surveillance of individuals and groups, the results of which are fed into both the Israeli intelligence gathering apparatus, via their consulates and embassy, and American domestic intelligence, via the FBI. To ADL officials have admitted the use of clandestine surveillance techniques." 711
THE ADL AND THE MEDIA
O'Brien's summary of the ADL's method of operation is quite
interesting in that it pinpoints the ADL's influence on the media and on
public debate over the role of Israel vis-à-vis American Middle East policy
making: "Today the ADL is much more active than other community relations organizations in the use of its regional offices and constituency for information gathering, and dissemination.
"The central headquarters in New York City provides regional offices with analysis sheets, sample letters to the editor to be placed in local media, biographies of Israeli leaders and anti-Zionist speakers, and directives on how to deal with topical issues.
"The regional offices in turn monitor all Israel-related or Middle East related activities in their areas, such as the media, campus speakers, and films. By bringing the local events to the attention of the central headquarters, they play a pivotal role in ADL's overall supervision of the national scene." 712
OPERATING AGAINST
ISRAEL'S CRITICS
O'Brien describes one instance which is typical of the ADL's activities
in defense of Israel: "One Jewish activist critical of Israeli policies
discovered in 1983 that the ADL maintained a file on him going back to
1970; it included information on the subject gathered from local newspapers,
talks on campuses, interoffice memos (from the institution where the
subject teaches), business meetings, talk on radio and TV, and press and
other miscellaneous materials. "As the file revealed, specific individuals had been assigned to monitor this person's lectures, either by tape recordings and verbatim transcriptions, or by detailed summaries of what the subject spoke about, the context of the lecture, other participants, size of audience, questions from the floor, mood of the audience, and so forth.
"In some cases, these observers successfully penetrated closed meetings in which the subject participated. Subsequently, the ADL prepared and disseminated a short primer on this person, following the 'myth" and "fact' format, and distributed it to their agents for use at future speaking engagements." 713
This, of course, is but one example (of many) which demonstrates the pervasive influence of Israel's ADL and its clandestine efforts to control public discussion of U.S. Middle East policy on all fronts—particularly in the American media.
SPY SCANDAL
At the beginning of 1993, however, the ADL's history of covert—and
illegal—domestic spying finally became the topic of widespread public
controversy. A spy scandal erupted in San Francisco, enveloping the ADL, one of its longtime paid informants, and a San Francisco police officer who had been selling classified police intelligence information to the ADL.
A raid by the San Francisco Police Department on the offices of the ADL in both San Francisco and Los Angeles revealed that those offices of the ADL were maintaining surveillance on some 12,000 individual Americans and on the activities of some 950 social and political organizations of all political persuasions.
It was subsequently revealed that the ADL was conducting similar spying operations in other major cities around the country, utilizing a network of paid informants who were charged with the responsibility of infiltrating organizations targeted by the ADL.
(In Chapter 15 we considered the likelihood that the ADL's New Orleans spymaster, A. L. (Bee) Botnick, had utilized the good offices of his fellow anti-communist extremist, ex-FBI man, private detective and CIA asset Guy Banister, to spy upon left wing groups in New Orleans, taking advantage of the talents of a young man named Lee Harvey Oswald.)
Ironically, among the targets of the ADL's spying included organizations that had, over the years, cooperated with the ADL in a number of joint ventures, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union.
SPYING ON EVERYBODY
Contrary to popular perception, the ADL was not spying only on so called "right wing" or "anti-Semitic" groups. Instead, the ADL appears to
have maintained constant surveillance of a wide variety of groups and
individuals. Although the ADL sought to maintain silence about the ongoing investigation, hard-hitting and fact-filled investigative reports by the San Francisco Examiner and the Los Angeles Times, in particular, received nationwide distribution, doing immense damage to the ADL's long-standing pose as a "civil rights" organization.
THE ANGLETON CONNECTION
The longtime chief of the ADL's spy network (euphemistically called
its "fact finding division") was one Irwin Suall who operated out of ADL
headquarters in Manhattan. Formerly active in the labor movement, Suall
was a protégé of Jay Lovestone, whom we first met in Chapter 8. Suall's mentor, it will be recalled, was Mossad-allied CIA spymaster James J. Angleton's point man in the CIA's dealings with the Lansky Syndicate-linked Corsican and Sicilian crime organizations.
These foreign crime elements (which handled the Lansky-run drug racket in Europe) were also utilized by the CIA in its campaign against left-wing labor movements in the Mediterranean during the post-war period.
Since James J. Angleton was dismissed from his CIA post after revelations of his involvement in illegal domestic spying by the CIA, we cannot help but speculate that, in light of revelations about ADL spying, Angleton almost certainly relied upon the good offices of his friends at the Mossad-linked ADL for much information.
(In Chapter 15 we pointed out that the FBI also utilized the ADL as a spy asset, noting, in particular the ADL's spying operations aimed at civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.)
THE ADL AND THE
JFK ASSASSINATION
That the ADL would have a hand in shaping JFK assassination news
coverage was inevitable, particularly in light of the revelations we have put
forth in the pages of this volume. In fact, on the first occasion when the Establishment media put forth a theory that perhaps Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed part of a much bigger conspiracy, it was in a news story leaked by two major columnists who were very close to not only the ADL but also to key figures in the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate. The case study we are about to examine is highly significant and illustrates the point all too well.
THE PEARSON/ANDERSON
COVER STORY
On March 3, 1967, syndicated columnist Drew Pearson and his
understudy, Jack Anderson, floated a story which suggested that Fidel Castro
had been behind the JFK murder. (This column appeared during the time that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was in the earliest stages of his own controversial assassination inquiry.)
Interestingly, Pearson and Anderson even slanted their column to suggest that somehow then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president's younger brother who was elected to the Senate from New York in 1964, had a hand in setting what became the alleged Castro-sponsored assassination plot in motion.
Pearson and Anderson claimed that: "President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb, an unconfirmed report that Sen. Robert Kennedy may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother." The assassination plot alleged was one of those hatched between the CIA and "the Mafia." 714
According to what can most charitably be described as the fanciful account by Pearson and Anderson, Castro had captured a number of CIA/Mafia hit men who were gunning for him and then "turned" them; in short, that the anti-Castro hit men then had a change of heart and returned to the United States and killed Kennedy.
It was some years later that Anderson revealed that Mafia figure Johnny Rosselli had, in fact, been the alleged initial source of the story which Anderson said had been told to CIA-linked Washington lawyer, Edward P. Morgan. (In Chapter 11 we reviewed Rosselli's involvement in the Castro assassination plots upon which the Pearson/Anderson story relied, in part, as a basis for its theory.)
WHY THE COVER STORY
DOESN'T WASH . . .
With good reasons which they cite, Rosselli's biographers, Charles
Rappleye and Ed Becker, don't believe the Pearson/Anderson story in the
least. They write: "Not mentioned in the column was the simple, powerful argument against Cuban sponsorship of the Kennedy assassination—the powerful risk Castro would run if a plot against the American president was discovered. As the [U.S. Senate's] Church Committee [investigating CIA assassination plots] noted, such a blunder would have 'exposed Cuba to invasion and destruction.'
"Later, it was learned that Castro had opened new channels of diplomacy, at the time of the shooting in Dallas, showing himself, in the words of one diplomat, 'anxious to establish communications with the United States.' Finally, with the benefit of hindsight, Rosselli's story of CIA marksmen being 'turned' seems highly implausible, a product of Korean War recruiting films.
"Nor did Anderson note his own close relationship to his source; that Morgan had no evidence, beyond Rosselli's statements, to back up the Castro retaliation theory; nor that Rosselli may have been pursuing his own, independent agenda." 715
Mafia enforcer and one-time "acting boss" of the Mafia families in California, Jimmy Fratianno, told of a meeting with Rosselli in 1976, around the time that Rosselli was providing congressional investigators with details of CIA-Organized Crime assassination plots aimed at Fidel Castro.
Fratianno's memory of the event suggests that Rosselli himself was never being straightforward about the events as they had really unfolded. Fratianno recalls Rosselli's words as follows:
"They had me up at the Carroll Arms Hotel . . . for a secret session and I really fixed their fucking wagon. All hot, you know, about who killed Kennedy. Sometimes I'd like to tell them the mob did it, just to see the expression on their stupid faces. You know, we're supposed to be idiots, right?
"We hire a psycho like Oswald to kill the President and then we get a blabbermouth, two-bit punk like Ruby to shut him up. We wouldn't trust those jerks to hit a fucking dog.
"Anyway, they start questioning me about this bullshit I'd told Morgan years ago. You know, Castro retaliating against Kennedy because of our attempts on his life. I said, 'I have no recollection of receiving or passing on such information.'
"Well, Jimmy, it's not my fault if Morgan has a vivid imagination. I've also been dropping by Jack Anderson's office and we're getting pretty chummy, having lunch and dinner together. Nice guy, but he's always trying to pump me, but he's cool about it." 716
THE CIA CONNECTION
Rosselli's biographers believe that "more intriguing than Rosselli's
motivation [in creating the story told by Pearson and Anderson] is the
question of who actually sponsored the bogus lead that Castro killed
Kennedy." 717 According to Rappleye and Becker, "Santo Trafficante seems the most likely party." 718 They go even further, however. They believe that the CIA was behind Trafficante actions in this regard:
"Might the CIA have floated the Castro theory, again to deflect the [Jim] Garrison investigation [in New Orleans]? If the CIA were actually involved in the Kennedy assassination, as some leading researchers believe, the scenario would fit.
"Considering his intimate association with the Agency, Rosselli would have accepted their directive as well as Trafficante's. And Ed Morgan himself had close ties to the Agency, both through [CIA contract operative Robert] Maheu and from a prior stint as counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee." 719
(As we saw, particularly in Chapter 12, Trafficante was not the major crime boss he has been portrayed by the Establishment media. Instead, he was the immediate deputy of the CIA's longtime collaborator—and Israel's loyalist—Meyer Lansky.)
PEARSON, JOHNSON &
THE LANSKY SYNDICATE
Warren Commission critic, Peter Dale Scott notes, additionally, that
Pearson, himself, was close to then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and that Pearson was backing Johnson's CIA-backed plans to expand the war in
Vietnam (the issue over which JFK and the CIA had been at loggerheads
leading to a final showdown). 720 Floating an anti-communist story (i.e. linking a communist dictator to the murder of the martyred president) then, would also have the side effect of whipping up anti-communist hysteria which would have been helpful to the "anti-communist" offensive in Vietnam that proved so beneficial, as we have seen, not only to the CIA, but also to the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate and its allies in Israel.
The Pearson-Johnson relationship had other implications as well. According to Scott, Pearson had used his column to leak government information about a key witness, one Don Reynolds, who was providing evidence against Johnson's longtime crony and reputed bag-man, Bobby Baker." 721
(Baker, as we saw, in Chapter 6, was not only an independent operator on his own, but a front man for a variety of LBJ's corrupt business ventures. Baker conducted more than a few deals with close associates of Meyer Lansky, most notably Ed Levinson, a director of Mossad operative Tibor Rosenbaum's Banque de Credit International (BCI).
(As we noted in Chapter 15, Rosenbaum's BCI, of course, was one of the chief shareholders in Permindex, the shadowy entity that played so central a role in the CIA-Mossad conspiracy against John F. Kennedy.)
EARL WARREN CONNED
Drew Pearson's own interest in JFK assassination cover stories was of
long standing. In fact, according to Scott's research, it was Pearson himself
who told Chief Justice Earl Warren, early in the Warren Commission
investigation, that the CIA-Organized Crime plots against Castro had
backfired and that Castro had retaliated and ordered the assassination of
Kennedy? 722 According to Pearson's own longtime legman, John Henshaw, Warren and Pearson had traveled together to the USSR shortly after the JFK assassination. There Pearson was introduced to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. Apparently one of the subjects discussed by Pearson and Khrushchev was the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 723
Henshaw noted that a "top secret" classified document buried in the National Archives in Washington (signed by CIA Director Richard Helms) was designated, "Discussion between Chairman Khrushchev and Mr. Drew Pearson regarding Lee Harvey Oswald." 724
This was one of the documents that Chief Justice Warren ordered sealed for 75 years. The secret talks between Pearson and the Soviet dictator were never recorded in Pearson's gossip column. It was apparently during this period that Pearson first promoted the Castro conspiracy theory which later came to the public's attention in 1967.
However, at the time of the Warren Commission investigation, the chief justice evidently believed there was a basis for Pearson's story, and thus a consequent need to cover up the truth to prevent the outbreak of war. This apparently was the ruse needed to convince Warren to hide what he mistakenly believed to be the troublesome truth. Pearson's biographer charitably described the columnist's actions: "The purpose of the columnist turned-diplomat was to reduce hysteria, which might upset the delicate balance between the [United States and the USSR]." 725
Whatever the case, the Pearson-Anderson story about the alleged Castro conspiracy against JFK created a sensation and muddied the waters at a time when JFK assassination conspiracy allegations were gaining widespread credibility. However rational the story may have sounded at the time, the evidence was flimsy at best as we have seen. The fact is that the Pearson/Anderson "revelations" are nothing more than deliberate disinformation.
SHIFTING THE
FOCUS OF CONTROVERSY
The Pearson-Anderson columns, in effect, "cleared" the CIA of
involvement in JFK's murder and pointed the finger at Castro. The Pearson-Anderson columns, likewise, shifted focus away from the Garrison investigation in New Orleans which was focusing on likely CIA involvement and which had stumbled upon the Clay Shaw-Permindex connection bringing the inquiry right onto Israel's doorstep.
That Drew Pearson, in particular, would have an interest in shielding any Israeli involvement as well is beyond doubt.
ISRAEL'S FAVORITE COLUMNIST
Of Jewish extraction, Pearson was a devoted friend of Israel—from the
beginning. In fact, in the period leading up to the establishment of the state
of Israel, Pearson functioned as a hit man for the Israeli lobby in the United
States, pounding away in his column at those perceived inimical to Israeli
interests. One of Pearson's favorite targets was then-Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. According to Pearson's biographer, "When Forrestal persuaded [President Harry] Truman to take the Arab side against the Jews in Palestine for military reasons, Pearson saw his opportunity. He lathered and shaved Forrestal as a bureaucratic voice for American oil companies with enormous stakes in the Mideast. Walter Winchell and other opinion-makers supported his position." 726
Pearson's hysterical media attack on Forrestal, some believed, led to the Cabinet secretary's mental instability, resulting in Forrestal's suicide. There are many, though, who believe that Forrestal was in fact murdered—precisely because of his powerful opposition to the Israeli lobby.
Pearson himself had cemented his ties with the Israeli lobby and had engaged in behind-the-scenes intrigue with Israel's intelligence and propaganda arm, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith for decades.
PEARSON AND THE ADL
According to Pearson's biographer, "Over the years the ADL had helped
Pearson enormously. It had provided information he could not obtain
elsewhere, backed his lecture tours, even assisted in the circulation of his
weekly newsletter." 727 Pearson's own former mother-in-law, Washington Times-Herald publisher Cissy Patterson, was less charitable in her description of Pearson. In a fiery editorial attack on Pearson she called him "both undercover agent and mouthpiece for the Anti-Defamation League." 728
What's more, Pearson had a long-standing arrangement with the ADL in which the ADL paid the expenses of his legmen, such as the aforementioned John Henshaw, in return for Pearson floating ADL propaganda in his columns. 729
PEARSON'S MOSSAD CONNECTION
Pearson, likewise, had acquainted himself over the years with a number
of top-level intelligence operatives close to Israel, in particular, Canadian born British intelligence wizard, Sir William Stephenson. Stephenson, as we saw in Chapter 7 and Chapter 15 was not only the guiding force behind the assembly of Israel's Mossad, but also the brains behind the Allied intelligence operations during World War II which utilized the resources of Meyer Lansky and his organized crime network. He was also a close associate and mentor of Louis M. Bloomfield, president of the Mossad-backed Permindex entity that was central to the JFK assassination conspiracy.
According to Pearson's biographer, "Stephenson had become acquainted during the war with Pearson as a responsible publicist with the largest serious following in the United States." 730 In at least one instance, Pearson published a story that, according to his biographer, "was spoon-fed to him" 731 by Stephenson.
Pearson's other connections were equally interesting and point further toward his interest in covering for Israel and its allies in the JFK assassination conspiracy—both the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
THE ISRAELI LOBBY AND PEARSON
According to Pearson's associate, John Henshaw, Pearson was engaged
in sharp business practices with his partner, attorney Max M. Kampelman,
a key figure in the Israel lobby in Washington and a longtime top-level
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) director.
Kampelman, the personal attorney for then-Vice President Hubert
Humphrey, and Pearson were trying to wrest control of television channel
14 away from a Black-owned station, WOOK, in Washington. 732 (In Chapter 6, as we have seen, Humphrey was a product of a Minnesota political machine funded, in part, by the notorious Isadore Blumenfeld, a major cog in the Lansky Crime Syndicate.)
The connections between Pearson and the Israeli lobby in Washington were even more intimate. Pearson's stepson (and the editor of his "diaries"), Tyler Abell, an attorney, had been employed by the law firm of David Ginsburg, a registered foreign agent for Israel.
Ginsburg, like several other top figures known for their interest in promoting Israel's interests in Washington, were among those close to Hubert Humphrey. (Ginsburg himself took a leave of absence from his own firm to work on behalf of Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey's unsuccessful 1968 presidential campaign.)733
In Chapter 6, of course, we examined the vice president's early political successes in Lansky Syndicate dominated Minneapolis.
THE MICKEY COHEN DEAL
In 1968 Pearson worked hand-in-glove with Meyer Lansky's West
Coast henchman, Mickey Cohen, in an effort to wreck Richard Nixon's
presidential campaign in favor of his Democratic opponent, Humphrey. (It
was in Chapter 13 where we explored Cohen's connection to the JFK
assassination conspiracy in some detail.) According to Cohen, writing in his memoirs, President Johnson arranged for Pearson to call Cohen who was, by then, in jail. Pearson wanted to uncover dirt about Nixon from the former Vice President's days in California when, according to Cohen, he had provided underworld financial backing for Nixon.
"We're going for Humphrey for president," Pearson told Cohen, "And I assure you that if he becomes our president, you're going to be given a medical parole," in return for providing muck against Nixon.
According to Cohen, "I consented to everything that Pearson wanted to do against Nixon." 734 However, Nixon won the election and Cohen never received his medical parole.
Pearson's relationship with the publishers of the National Enquirer newspaper (which has made a specialty out of trashing the Kennedy family and likewise publishing often loony JFK assassination conspiracy stories) is also interesting, particularly in light of the Enquirer's CIA and Israeli lobby connections.
PEARSON AND THE
NATIONAL ENQUIRER
As reported by Pearson's legman, John Henshaw, in the July 1, 1969
issue of the Washington Observer newsletter, the company which published
the Enquirer, World Wide Features, Inc. had interesting origins. It was owned by the three brothers, Anthony, Fortune and Generoso Pope. They were the sons of Generoso Pope, Sr., an Italian leader of New York City's Tammany Hall political machine which was itself inextricably tied to the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate.
The Pope family were longtime contributors—through the Generoso Pope Foundation—to pro-Israel causes. The foundation was also widely suspected of being a secret conduit for CIA funds.
Generoso Pope, Jr. owned the National Enquirer. Pope, Jr. had worked for the CIA during the Korean war and was himself famously friendly with Lansky's longtime partner, Frank Costello. In fact, Costello helped finance the Enquirer in its infancy. 735
Pearson had given highly favorable publicity to Generoso Pope, Sr. as the first "prominent Italian American" to oppose Mussolini. In return, Pope promptly gave Pearson a contract to write a weekly column for his El Progresso, the leading Italian language newspaper in the country. The $150-a week contract was more than any other newspaper paid for just one weekly column.
In the mid-1960's Pearson and Fortune Pope, along with Lyndon Johnson's TV-and-radio advisor, Leonard Marks, went into partnership and acquired the Bell-McClure Syndicate and the North American Newspaper Alliance. (Marks was later appointed head of the U.S. Information Agency by Johnson.) 736
Pearson's biographer dismisses the relationship between Pearson and the controversial Pope family as "puzzling." 737 This relationship, however, further cements Pearson's ties to the Israeli lobby and its allies in the CIA.
THE JOE TRENTO CONNECTION
It is of more than passing interest to note that for a period, Generoso
Pope's Washington bureau chief was journalist Joe Trento, who emerged as
an authority on the intelligence community. It was Trento, as we saw in Chapter 16, who co-wrote a controversial article alleging that former CIA man E. Howard Hunt may have been in Dallas on the day JFK was shot.
Trento, as noted, had excellent CIA connections—James Jesus Angleton, in particular, and we know for a fact that Trento was being used as a media conduit by Angleton for whatever insidious purposes of his own. This, of course, we discussed in some detail in Chapter 16.
JACK ANDERSON'S CONNECTIONS
Drew Pearson's partner and protégé, Jack Anderson, himself had notable
ties to not only the Israeli lobby, but also the Lansky Organized Crime
Syndicate. Not only did Anderson once share his offices with at least one
registered lobbyist for Israel, who was also close to Lansky's protégé,
Carlos Marcello, 738 but he also maintained a close working relationship
with Herman (Hank) Greenspun, a longtime Lansky syndicate associate and
arms-smuggler for Israel. Greenspun was a protégé of Lansky crony Joseph "Doc" Stacher, a New Jersey mobster who was one of the prime American backers of the Jewish underground in Palestine in the late 1940's. 739 Stacher was later permitted to go into exile in Israel following his conviction in the United States on income tax evasion charges. According to Lansky's friendly biographer, Robert Lacey, Stacher's death affected Lansky greatly. They were very close friends and longtime associates.) 740
Greenspun also functioned as a public relations man for Lansky's boyhood friend—later killed at Lansky's direction—Benjamin Siegel.
According to The Washington Observer, "Early in the Palestine War, Hank Greenspun was dispatched by the Jewish underground to Hawaii to buy surplus U.S. Army arms and equipment. By bribing security guards at the U.S. Naval Air Station on Oahu, he raided a stockpile of armaments and stole 15 tons of .30- and .50- caliber aircraft machine guns. The contraband machine guns were packed in 58 crates marked 'engine parts' and shipped to Los Angeles, then transshipped to Mexico and on to Israel. Greenspun ran the British blockade in a ship delivering arms to Israel. Later he pleaded guilty to violating the U.S. Neutrality Act, and was given a 3-year suspended sentence. He was never prosecuted for theft of Federal government property." 741
Greenspun, who became a major figure in Las Vegas, went on to establish a chain of newspapers in Nevada and Colorado, publishing The Las Vegas Sun.
As we saw in Chapter 7, the Israeli arms-smuggling underworld of which Greenspun was a part, was a very tightly knit little clique. It was, of course, Louis Bloomfield (later chief executive officer of the Permindex entity) who was once a key coordinator for Israeli arms smuggling working with the Lansky Syndicate and, Anderson's associate, Greenspun.
Anderson and Greenspun were themselves involved in yet another venture linked to the Lansky Syndicate. The two, along with CIA-linked attorney Edward Morgan (the alleged conduit for the Castro conspiracy story floated by Pearson and Anderson) were middlemen in the sale of Lansky associate and ADL "Torch of Liberty" winner, Morris Dalitz's Las Vegas gambling palace, the Desert Inn, to Howard Hughes. 742
AND ONE LAST INTERESTING POINT:
Jack Anderson was also a
very public and longtime "close friend"743 of Mossad and CIA asset Frank
Sturgis, beginning as early as 1960—three years before Sturgis, by his own
reported later admission, played a part in the events in Dealey Plaza.
A CASE STUDY IN DISINFORMATION
That Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson maintained such intimate ties
with all of the prime movers behind the JFK assassination—Israel, the CIA
and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate—not only casts real
doubt about the Castro assassination plot story that the two columnists
sensationalized, but it points toward the real motivation behind the release
of the tale: to cover for the real conspirators. The case of Pearson and Anderson exemplifies, above all, the insidious nature of Israel's influence over the American media and provides a clear-cut case study of how the media has been manipulated to distort the truth about the JFK assassination conspiracy.
Although the media in general had initially backed the Warren Commission cover-up, public dissent about the conclusions—stirred on largely by the work of pioneer commission critic Mark Lane and his friend, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison—forced Israel's friends in the media to play their hand.
Stories that "The Mafia Killed JFK" and about "Castro" plots against JFK suddenly began emerging. Pearson and Anderson were just two players in the continuing cover-up. And Pearson himself (as we have seen) actually had a hand in convincing Earl Warren that there had been a conspiracy (plotted by Castro) that made it necessary, for the public good, to cover up the truth. In fact, Pearson and his Israeli and CIA allies were seeking to keep the real truth hidden.
MORE DISINFORMATION
One rather interesting JFK assassination story appeared in the form of a
book by former CIA contract agent Hugh McDonald, co-written with
prolific author Geoffrey Bocca. The McDonald-Bocca book, Appointment in
Dallas, received wide distribution. The book featured an interview with an international hit man named "Saul" who confessed to McDonald that he was the real murderer of President Kennedy. The hit man said that he was hired by a private group, and not by the CIA for whom he had done contract work in the past.
While many JFK assassination critics were highly skeptical about the book, looking upon it as some form of disinformation (perhaps from the CIA itself)—although not necessarily questioning McDonald's sincerity—it would have been more instructive to consider Geoffrey Bocca's role in the writing of the book. Bocca, in fact, was a propagandist for the CIA-backed and Israeli-financed French Secret Army Organization (OAS) and was known to have "translated some OAS tracts into English at a time when the organization was thinking of appealing to the United Nations for help." 744 Bocca also wrote a heroic account of the OAS entitled The Secret Army.
Needless to say, in light of the "French connection" to the JFK assassination conspiracy, the appearance of an OAS propagandist as the coauthor of a book which effectively "cleared" the CIA of involvement in the crime is interesting, to say the least.
An odd footnote: several years after publishing Appointment in Dallas, McDonald wrote another JFK assassination book. His co-author, who had solid links to the CIA, Robin Moore, was best known, interestingly enough, for his famous book, The French Connection—on the French intelligence- and Lansky Syndicate-linked international heroin racket.
McDonald and Moore's book was entitled LBJ and the JFK Conspiracy. This volume elaborated on the theme of McDonald's first book, saying that the alleged hit man, Saul, had been hired by the Soviet Union to kill President Kennedy.
The theory that the Soviets were behind the assassination conspiracy, of course, falls right in line with the CIA's initial scheme, through its Mexico City Scenario, concocted by James J. Angleton, to pin the crime on the KGB. Whatever the case, McDonald's second book received little, if any, recognition, although it did muddy the waters further.
A PRO-ISRAEL 'CRITIC'
The tell-tale hand of Israeli sympathizers within even the ranks of the
"critics" of the Warren Commission's conclusions has also now become
apparent. When a group of self-styled Warren Commission "critics" formed
an organization known as the Assassination Information Bureau, one of
them included liberal journalist Jack Newfield, a devout and outspoken
supporter of Israel.
THE `HOFFA KILLED
JFK' COVER STORY
In 1992, when public interest in the JFK assassination conspiracy was
at a fever pitch as a result of the concurrent release of Mark Lane's bestseller,
Plausible Denial, and Oliver Stone's film, JFK, it was Newfield who floated
yet another ridiculous JFK assassination conspiracy story—a new angle on
the theory that "The Mafia Killed JFK." "Hoffa had JFK killed" screamed the headline on the front page of the January 14 edition of the sensationalist New York Post.
It was the New York tabloid that "broke" the story that Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa had arranged the JFK murder through his Mafia contacts. Not surprisingly, the author of the Post article was Jack Newfield.
The Post, of course, has been one of the media's primary pro-Israel voices—almost to the point of obsession. Any conspiracy that might somehow link Israel—or its allies in the CIA—could not be tolerated.
Almost immediately, the rest of the Establishment media picked up the scandal sheet's "exclusive" and began hyping it. The purpose was to discredit the conspiracy that was finally being exposed to millions of Americans.
In response to Newfield's concoction, even Dan Rather, on CBS, felt compelled to tell the world that the evidence was in: longtime Teamsters' Union leader Jimmy Hoffa had ordered "the Mafia" to kill John F. Kennedy.
The Washington Post, long a CIA disinformation source, also published the story. As did the staunchly pro-Israel conservative weekly, Human Events which consistently maintained, otherwise, that any conspiracy in the JFK assassination—particularly involving the CIA—was a madman's fantasy.
Newfield's article quoted a longtime alleged associate of organized crime, attorney Frank Ragano, as having claimed that Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa told him to order "the Mafia" to assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
According to Ragano's unlikely story, Ragano took the message to New Orleans rackets boss Carlos Marcello and to Tampa mob chieftain Santos Trafficante, both of whom, we have seen, were immediate underlings of Meyer Lansky.
Presumably they complied with Hoffa's order, in Ragano's version of the story, because, after all, Kennedy was indeed shot dead.745 However, as Mark Lane has commented, "Hoffa didn't give orders to the Mafia. The Mafia gave orders to Hoffa." 746
WHY THE HOFFA STORY
DOESN'T WASH
Ragano's primary "evidence" that Trafficante was involved in JFK's
murder was a comment made by Trafficante to the effect that "We should
have killed Bobby," referring to then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
Not that Trafficante admitted that "we" killed JFK—only that "we should have
killed Bobby." Now all of this is most peculiar in that Ragano says that he—a top level criminal lawyer with high-ranking connections—managed to "suppress" these memories until just recently.
Ragano said he was "guilty and ashamed" because of his association with organized crime; according to Ragano, his guilt feelings caused him to suppress those memories. However, he might also have been interested in adding some spice to his memoirs which were later published.
What's more, Ragano, who was appealing a second federal income tax evasion conviction, might also have had something else in mind by telling this story which clears the CIA and any other federal agencies that may have been involved in the assassination and its cover-up.
WHO KILLED HOFFA?
Hoffa biographer Dan Moldea shed some interesting "inside"
information regarding the truth about Hoffa—and his murder. Moldea
reports: "Ironically enough, attorney William Bufalino . . . may have
inadvertently pointed a finger in the right direction. He was attempting to
suggest that the mob had nothing to do with Hoffa's murder, preferring to
shift the blame on the government, but he put it this way: 'Tell the FBI to look into the CIA. And tell the CIA to look into the FBI. Then you'll have the answer [to the Hoffa case.]' And he added that it was his belief that Hoffa's murder was related to those of [Sam] Giancana and Johnny] Rosselli. 747
(In Chapter 11, of course, we examined the strange deaths of Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli and concluded, contrary to popular myth, that the two Mafia figures were not, in fact, the victims of "Mafia" hits at all— but were, instead, snuffed out if not by the CIA itself, certainly at its behest.)
Interestingly enough, it was yet another dedicated pro-Israel polemicist, Max Lerner, writing in The Washington Times, who also came to the defense of the Hoffa-Mafia cover story. According to Lerner, "The Mafia has always figured among the major possible scenarios for the killing, along with the KGB and Cuba's Fidel Castro. But not until the Ragano account had the pieces of the puzzle begun to fall together. Marcello headed the Mafia operation in New Orleans, Trafficante in Tampa and Cuba. They had time to work out their plan. They had an army of skilled killers to draw on."748
Lerner, of course, was playing fast and loose with the facts. He ignored the central part Meyer Lansky played in manipulating the activities of both Marcello and Trafficante.
SUN MYUNG MOON,
ISRAEL & THE CIA
That The Washington Times would have an interest in promoting the
Hoffa-Mafia story is no surprise. After all, the Times itself has close links
to the intelligence community and is a strident editorial supporter of Israel. The Washington Times is funded by the bizarre global conglomerate of Korean cult figure Sun Myung Moon.
Moon himself has been repeatedly linked to the Korean CIA which is, of course, intimately tied with its American counterpart. Additionally, Moon has forged a close working alliance with Israel and its American lobby and has pushed a pro-Israel agenda on the so-called "conservative movement" in the United States.
Moon's editor at The Washington Times at that time was Arnaud deBorchgrave, a former top correspondent for the CIA-linked Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post Company) and a reputed "former" intelligence operative. What's more, deBorchgrave himself is closely connected by marriage to the Rothschild family. The Rothschilds, as we have seen, have been longtime financial backers of the state of Israel.
THE CONSERVATIVE COVER-UP
The response to JFK conspiracy allegations from another "conservative"
source is equally interesting. The organization, quaintly named Accuracy in
Media, a self-styled conservative "media watchdog," took great umbrage
with suggestions that there might have been a conspiracy behind the
president's assassination. At the time Mark Lane's Plausible Denial and Oliver Stone's JFK were released, AIM chairman Reed Irvine, seemingly inexplicably, signed on with the rest of the media in denouncing the conspiracy theories presented in the book and the motion picture.
Writing in the pages of the conservative weekly, Human Events, media critic Irvine paid tribute to the Establishment media for its attack on the theories. According to Irvine, "The mainstream media, to their credit, have been nearly unanimous in denouncing Stone as a lying charlatan." 749
(Although, of course, Stone did not, in fact, tell the whole truth.)
Irvine went on to dismiss Lane as a "leftist" and announced emphatically that anyone who believes that there was any kind of domestic conspiracy behind the JFK murder was being taken in by Soviet propaganda. The AIM response was interesting, particularly in the context of the background of some of AIM's leading lights.
WHO'S BEHIND AIM?
Irvine himself was a former economist for the big bank-controlled
Federal Reserve System. Irvine's AIM co-founder, Bernard Yoh, was a
Vietnam-era underling of CIA asset, General Edward Lansdale.750 It was
Lansdale, as we saw in Chapter 11, who was in charge of the anti-Castro
operations being conducted under the name Operation Mongoose in league
with the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate. It was during his service in Vietnam, as we noted in Chapter 12, that Lansdale worked closely with the Corsican Mafia—an integral part of the Lansky drug smuggling operations conducted in league with the CIA. That Lansdale's former Vietnam era associate would come out swinging against JFK conspiracy theories, then, is no big surprise.
AIM'S ISRAELI CONNECTION
The aforementioned Yoh is also affiliated with the International
Security Council (ISC), a think tank notable for its central devotion to the
advancement of Israel's interests in U.S. foreign policy-making. The founder of the ISC was the ubiquitous Dr. Joseph Churba, an ordained rabbi whom we first encountered in Chapter 8 as a protégé of Jay Lovestone who coordinated CIA contacts with the Corsican and Sicilian Mafias on behalf of the CIA's James J. Angleton.
Interestingly enough, Churba (now deceased) was also a key figure in the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and in an entity known as Americans for a Safe Israel (ASI) established in the United States as an outgrowth of the Israeli underground terrorist group, the Irgun.
Among those intimately collaborating with the forerunners of ASI was the Romanian Jewish émigré, Ernst Mantello, whose brother Giorgio, along with Major Louis M. Bloomfield, was one of the founders of the shadowy Permindex entity examined in detail in Chapter 15.751
ANOTHER CIA-LANSKY CONNECTION
Another AIM figure is equally interesting in light of the organization's
critique of JFK assassination conspiracy theories. AIM's president is Murray
Baron, not only a former official with the Lansky Organized Crime
Syndicate-dominated International Brotherhood of Teamsters, but also a member of the CIA-funded Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba and the cofounder of the Citizens Committee for Peace With Freedom in Vietnam.752 It might be added, in passing, that AIM has consistently also been a strident defender of Israel and its interests. To even hint at any conspiracy which might involve Israel and its allies in the CIA would be an outrage, insofar as AIM would be concerned. So much, then, for accuracy in media from Accuracy in Media.
OLIVER STONE
What about Oliver Stone's JFK? Where does this controversial film fit
in the lore of JFK assassination conspiracy theories? What of the media's
hysterical response to the film (which actually brought it greater publicity)? Writing in the New York Times on December 20, 1991, Stone asked a rather simple question: "When a leader of any country is assassinated, the media normally ask: 'What political forces were opposed to this leader and would benefit from his assassination?"
The irony, as we shall see, is that although Oliver Stone himself seemed to have asked that very question in a big, big way—through the aegis of his controversial film JFK—the fact is that Stone himself has, in a sense, proven in the end to have become a major factor in the continuing cover-up of the real truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
It is ironic indeed that although Stone's film JFK has focused widespread international attention on the JFK assassination conspiracy, there has been quiet speculation that the media's furor might be part of a high level plan to further cover up the truth about the conspiracy.
Many JFK assassination researchers, Mark Lane in particular, are deeply concerned that Stone's film presents a strange mixture of both fact and fiction. The facts about the assassination conspiracy are sensational enough without fictional details being added, he and others have pointed out. Lane summarized it best: "It was good that Stone called the attention of teenagers and others to the unsolved murder. It was bad that he did so by falsifying the record." 753
POINTING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION
Although Stone's film referenced, in passing, the CIA connections of
David Ferrie and Clay Shaw—and actually mentioned Permindex—the film's
primary thrust was that the conspiracy originated in the so-called "military industrial" complex. The primary conspirators were presented as high-level military men and their allies among the multi-billion-dollar defense contracting companies. The intelligence community's role was understated, to say the very least.
This, in itself, lead some of Stone's critics to suggest that perhaps the ultimate purpose behind the film was not, in fact, to pinpoint those truly responsible for the JFK assassination, but to point the finger in another direction. The evidence for this, as we shall see, is compelling indeed.
STONE'S LANSKY-ISRAEL CONNECTION
That distribution for Stone's film was handled by Warner Brothers is
somewhat unsettling in light of the conclusions reached in Final
Judgment. In fact, Warner Brothers, a subsidiary of the giant Time-Warner
media empire, evolved from a film production company established by
longtime Meyer Lansky associate, Louis Chesler, a Canadian of somewhat
dubious reputation. It was in 1956 that Chesler, a Lansky front man, established Seven Arts Productions in Montreal, Canada. Although ostensibly a film production company, Seven Arts functioned as a money-laundering facility for Lansky and others among his associates. 754
By 1955, Seven Arts had gone into partnership with a New York-based banking consortium and was flush with money within a decade.
In 1967 Seven Arts shook Wall Street and stunned Hollywood when it gained control of the famous Warner Brothers Studios—in short, a Lansky take-over. The move was a mystery to many at the time, but little did they know of the behind-the-scenes Lansky Syndicate dealings which made the wheeling and dealing possible.
The new operation was dubbed Warner-Seven Arts Studios and, by 1968, was known as Warner Communications.755 Not surprisingly, it just so happens, it was Bernie Cornfeld's Investors Overseas Service (JOS) which "owned major blocks of stock"756 in Warner-Seven Arts.
Cornfeld of IOS, as we saw in Chapter 15, was a front man for Tibor Rosenbaum, former Mossad official and the prime mover behind the Lansky-linked Permindex operation that was so central to the JFK assassination conspiracy.
THE 'ISRAELI MAFIA'
In 1981 a major scandal rocked Warner Communications. Several of its
top figures—Solomon Weiss, Stephen Ross and Jay Emmett—were caught
up in tax fraud, bribery, and assorted other racketeering charges brought by
the Justice Department. Warner's links to organized crime were being
investigated.757 However, what is particularly significant about the case is that much of the evidence against the aforementioned Weiss, who was senior assistant treasurer of Warner Communications, emerged from records gleaned from the files of the United Jewish Appeal and other pro-Israel philanthropies that were seized by the Justice Department.758
What's more, the Warner Communications investigation repeatedly stumbled upon links to the so-called "Israeli mafia,"—the domestic elements of organized criminal activity operating in Israel.
And, to draw the circle even tighter, the Warner investigation of the aforementioned Stephen Ross by Justice uncovered close links between the media giant and the American Bank and Trust (ABT) scandal.759
TIBOR ROSENBAUM, AGAIN
In Chapter 7 we first learned that the New York-based ABT was an
American subsidiary of the Swiss-Israel Trade Bank, upon whose board
served none other than the Israeli Mossad's Tibor Rosenbaum, sponsor of
the aforementioned Bernie Cornfeld of IOS. It was, as we have seen, ironically enough, on November 22, 1963, that Swiss Israel assumed management of American Bank and Trust. The latter firm, however, ultimately went belly up, having been looted by financier David Graiver, himself a longtime Mossad operative.
One of those tarnished by the ABT scandal—and ultimately linked to the Warner Communications affair—was New York financier Abraham Feinberg who not only served as a director of ABT, but who had also been the individual who arranged John F. Kennedy's first unpleasant meeting with the key money men in the pro-Israel lobby in America (described in Chapter 4). 760
Warner Communications survived the series of scandals and then, ultimately, merged with Time-Life, Inc., the other great media giant which, itself, has been scored by JFK assassination researchers for lending itself to the JFK assassination cover-up.
THE GANG AT TIME-LIFE
It was in Chapter 10, for example, that we learned how Life
correspondent Richard Billings went to New Orleans and sabotaged Jim
Garrison's investigation into the JFK assassination. Billings and his team
used Life magazine as a forum to portray Garrison as a tool of "the Mafia."
Billings and company presented Garrison as a shill for New Orleans Mafia
boss Carlos Marcello, but, of course, ignored Marcello's secondary
positioning to Marcello's sponsor, Meyer Lansky. Billings himself later served on the staff of the House Assassinations Committee which blamed the JFK murder on "the Mafia," working alongside the committee's director, G. Robert Blakey, who several years previously had been employed as a character witness on behalf of longtime Lansky confidant Morris Dalitz, ostensibly "proving" that Dalitz was not linked with the underworld.
So it was that Time-Life and Warner Communications merged, becoming Time-Warner. And, of course, it was one of Time-Warner's subsidiaries, Warner Brothers, which ultimately became the distribution company for Oliver Stone's JFK—which blamed "the military-industrial complex"—not Israel's Mossad, not the Mafia, not even the CIA itself—for the JFK assassination.
(The same company, through its subsidiary, Time-Warner Books, also handled distribution for the biography of Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana that suggested that it was strictly a CIA-Mafia plot against JFK, orchestrated almost solely by Giancana himself.)
THE BRONFMANS, AGAIN
Interestingly enough, in early 1993 the Lansky syndicate-linked
Bronfman family, through their Seagram Company, purchased a substantial
controlling interest in Time Warner, further cementing the media giant into
the tightly-knit circles of the CIA-Lansky Syndicate-Israeli Mossad
connection that have swirled around the company since its inception. It was, as we saw in Chapter 15, Major Louis M. Bloomfield, chief executive operative of the Permindex entity, who had been longtime personal attorney for the Bronfman interests and a major figure in the Israeli lobby in Canada.
That a company which has been intimately tied from its earliest years not only with the inner circles of Meyer Lansky and his international crime syndicate, but also with Israel and its Mossad, should be the sponsor of Oliver Stone's grand conspiracy theory is enough to make one wonder, to say the least. But there's more.
It is somewhat interesting to note that when Stone hired on a public relations agency to handle the publicity and controversy which emerged when the film was released, it was the powerful Washington, D.C. firm of Hill & Knowlton. After all, it was Hill & Knowlton that orchestrated major propaganda in favor of American involvement in the Persian Gulf War against Iraq—and in favor of Israel.
STONE'S ADL CONNECTION
What's more, the Hill & Knowlton executive who handled his firm's
efforts on behalf of Stone, Frank Mankiewicz, got his start in the public
relations business working on behalf of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation
League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith in Los Angeles. (In Chapter 18, we shall see,
Mankiewicz himself had a curious role in the circumstances surrounding yet
another Kennedy assassination.)
STONE REACTS TO FINAL JUDGMENT
. . .
In Washington, D.C., on February 16, 1994, an associate of this author
attempted to present Oliver Stone with a copy of the first edition of this
book, Final Judgment. This came several months after the book was first
advertised in the program of the annual symposium on the JFK
assassination sponsored by the JFK Assassination Information Center in
Dallas, Texas. Although Stone hadn't been in attendance at the symposium, he was represented there by one of his associates and it is certain that Stone was aware of the release of Final Judgment. After all, a full-page advertisement promoting a book featuring an introduction by Stone appeared opposite a full-page advertisement for Final Judgment.
When Stone was presented his copy of the book, however, his face froze when he saw the book's cover and he refused to accept the book, saying, "Please send it to me in the mail." The "maverick" self-styled freethinker, Stone, turned his back and walked away, moments later accepting another package of material presented to him by another individual.
Why was Stone so hesitant to accept this book? Perhaps we have information that provides the answer. Stone did, in fact, know of the so called "French connection" to the JFK assassination documented in Final Judgment and referenced in the advertisement in the program of the JFK forum in Dallas.
STONE AND 'THE
FRENCH CONNECTION'
You see, shortly after Final Judgment went to press, Ron Lewis, who
was a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans and who also worked in
Guy Banister's "French"-connected operation, revealed something very
interesting about Stone and the "French" connection. When Lewis, who served as a consultant to Stone during the filming of JFK, assisted Stone in setting up the movie sets recreating Banister's New Orleans office, Stone included a number of boxes, ostensibly containing arms, that were stenciled in Spanish.
Lewis objected to the Spanish, saying, "The writing on the boxes was in French,"—the arms having been linked to the OAS rebellion, backed by the Israeli-sponsored Permindex operation, against French President Charles DeGaulle. But Stone responded to Lewis by saying, "Spanish serves the theme of the movie better." So, as Lewis commented, "Spanish it was."761
So it also was that Oliver Stone ignored the "French" connection—a connection which, in turn, brings forth the Israeli connection to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. A wise move indeed for a filmmaker whose sponsors had intimate ties to the guilty parties involved in the crime that Stone brought to grisly life on film.
STONE'S MOSSAD CONNECTION
However, there is one last rather intriguing fact about Oliver Stone and
his widely-promoted film that deserves mention. Although Stone was,
beyond question, the undeniably talented creative genius responsible for
JFK, one must always remember that in the motion picture arena, it is
ultimately money—pure and simple—that determines whether or not a film
will be made. The all-important task of arranging financing falls into the lap
of the film's producer. If one checks the credits for Stone's JFK, one will
find the name "Arnon Milchan" listed as "executive producer." Who is Arnon Milchan? Why is his name relevant in our examination of the facts about Israel's role in the JFK assassination conspiracy and the manner in which Oliver Stone has suppressed that critical factor?
According to liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn, writing in The Nation on May 18, 1992, Milchan, the executive producer of JFK, "was identified in one 1989 Israeli report as 'probably [Israel's] largest arms dealer.' A company he owned was once caught smuggling nuclear weapons fuses to Iraq. As part of a joint Israeli-South African government operation— `Muldergate'—he acted as launderer to money scheduled to quell liberal publications opposing apartheid."762
Israeli historian Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, who has studied Israel's global arms trading, does describe Milchan as a "Mossad man."763 However, in light of JFK's behind-the-scenes battle with Israel over the issue of Israel's nuclear development, what is perhaps even more intriguing is that, according to James Riordan, Oliver Stone's biographer: "Milchan has been in the international headlines for making deals to benefit Israel's nuclear arms program, but he claims defense of his homeland, not profit, has been his motive."764
But that's not all. It also turns out, according to Riordan, that Milchan made available what Riordan described as "French money"765 for the production of Stone's film.
Thus, we have a Mossad figure in the center of Israel's nuclear development program providing the financing—along with his French partners—of a film that not only 1) suppresses the so-called "French connection" (described even by one of the film's consultants, the aforementioned Ron Lewis) but which 2) never once hints at JFK's bitter conflict with Israel, in particular the struggle over Israel's drive to assemble a nuclear arsenal.
A 'LIMITED HANGOUT'
HOLLYWOOD STYLE?
With all of this in mind, is it really a stretch of the imagination to
suggest then that Oliver Stone's "interpretation" of the JFK assassination
conspiracy was, in fact, a highly sophisticated form of black propaganda
financed by Mossad money? Was the massive media hype given to Stone's
film some form of "limited hangout" on behalf of Israel and its allies in the
CIA? Was the widespread promotion of Stone's film a way of finally
attempting to put an end to the controversy and give the public what it
wanted: some form of explanation as to "what really happened" in Dallas?
This, of course, we will never know. It is probably worth noting, additionally, that since Final Judgment was first published I have been told—but have never been able to confirm—that Oliver Stone has been a generous contributor to the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the lobby for Israel. If true, then this is simply another interesting detail which helps further explain why Stone might choose to ignore all of the evidence which does demonstrate a definitive Israeli connection to the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
AN INVITATION TO DEBATE
. . .
I would relish the opportunity to debate Oliver Stone in a public forum.
After all, we do (apparently) agree that Jim Garrison was on to something
when he launched his investigation of Clay Shaw. That's a good starting
point. Where we part company, it seems, is just how far the conspiracy
really went. Stone draws the line at Shaw's connection to Israel. I don't.
What an interesting debate that would be. If there are any readers of Final
Judgment who could arrange such a debate, by all means let me know.
WHERE STONE FAILED
. . .
As we noted earlier, Stone himself asked this question in the New York
Times: "When a leader of any country is assassinated, the media normally
ask: 'What political forces were opposed to this leader and would benefit
from his assassination?'" As we have seen, one political force that was opposed to John F. Kennedy and would benefit from his assassination was Israel, yet Stone himself evidently prefers not to name that particular force.
Despite all the criticisms we have aimed at Stone—and they are very much deserved—Stone's film has still led the way for new popular perceptions about the obvious fact that it was a conspiracy that ended the life of John F. Kennedy.
Stone failed to nail down the source of that conspiracy but in the pages of Final Judgment we have done just that. What a shame indeed that Oliver Stone could not have told the entire story of the conspiracy.
THE MEDIA REJECTS
A FINAL JUDGMENT
Clearly, the media's coverage—or be it non-coverage---of the JFK
assassination was critical to the cover-up of the real origins of the
conspiracy that resulted in the president's assassination. That the media
played a major part in perpetuating the cover-up is unquestioned and that
Israel and its lobby has a major influence in shaping the American media
can likewise not be questioned. Although the media initially supported the Warren Commission's conclusions, public skepticism forced the media to bring forth a wide variety of cover stories and limited portions of the truth. But the Israeli connection has never been considered—until now.
next
The Heir to the Throne
The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy
Israel, Iran, Lansky & the CIA
Chapter Seventeen They Dare Not Speak Out
689 Sid Blumenthal (editor). Government by Gunplay: Assassination Conspiracy Theories From Dallas to Today. (New York: Signet Books, 1976), p. 231. 690 Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins. (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988), p. 251. 691 Ibid.
692 Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. {New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1992), pp. 244-245.
693 James Kirkwood. American Grotesque: An Account of the Clay Shaw-Jim Garrison Affair in New Orleans. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970), P . 47.
694 Washington Observer, August 1, 1970.
695 Walter Sheridan. The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1972), p. 418.
696 Los Angeles Times, February 13, 1970.
697 Jim Garrison. On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation & Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy. (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988), p. 168.
698 Dick Russell. The Man Who Knew Too Much. [New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1992), p. 400.
699 Ibid., pp. 401-402.
700 ° Ibid., p. 430.
701 Warren Hinckle and William Turner. Deadly Secrets. [New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992), p. 252. 578 Reference Notes [481]
702 Executive Intelligence Review. Moscow's Secret Weapon. [Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, March 1, 1986), p. 119.
703 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 187.
704 Ibid., p. 173.
705 Kirkwood, p. 162.
706 Garrison, p. 270.
707 David Wise. The American Police State: The Government Against the People. (New York: Random House, 1976), pp. 200-201.
708 Wise, .Ibid.
709 Richard Deacon. The Israeli Secret Service. (New York: Taplinger Publishing Co, Inc., 1978), p. 171.
710 Twin Circle. September 29, 1968.
711 Lee O'Brien. American Jewish Organizations and Israel. (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986), p. 99.
712 Ibid.
713 Ibid., p. 100.
714 Washington Post, March 3, 1967.
715 Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker. All American Mafioso: The Johnny Rosselli Story. (New York: Doubleday, 1991), p. 471.
716 Ovid Demaris. The Last Mafioso: The Treacherous World of Jimmy Fratianno. (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), p. 389.
717 Rappleye and Becker, p. 475.
718 Ibid.
719 Ibid.
720 Peter Dale Scott. Crime and Cover-up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection. (Berkeley, California: Westworks Publishers, 1977), p. 26.
721 Ibid., p. 25.
722 Ibid.
723 Washington Observer, April 1, 1967
724 Washington Observer, June 15, 1968.
725 Oliver Pilat. Drew Pearson: An Unauthorized Biography. (New York: Harper's Magazine Press, 1973), p. 241.
726 Ibid., p. 183.
727 Ibid., p. 17. 728 Ibid., p. 169.
729 Interview with Alec deMontmorency, January 25, 1992.
730 Pilat, p. 183.
731 Ibid.
732 Washington Observer, February 15, 1967.
733 Washington Observer, November 1, 1968.
734 Mickey Cohen with John Peer Nugent. Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), pp. 232-233. [482] Final Judgment 579
735 Uncle Frank: The Biography of Frank Costello (New York: Drake Publishers, Inc., 1973), p. 230. 736 Washington Observer, July 1, 1969.
737 Pilat, p. 233.
738 J. Hougan. Secret Agenda. (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 89.
739 Washington Observer, February 1, 1971.
740 Robert Lacey. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1991), p. 417.
741 Washington Observer, Ibid.
742 Ibid.
743 Hougan. p. 80.
744AlexanderHarrison.ChallengingDeGaulle:TheOASandtheCounterrevolution in Algeria. (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 15.
745 New York Post, January 14, 1992.
746 The Spotlight, February 17, 1992.
747 Dan Moldea. The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob. (New York: Paddington Press, 1978), p. 421.
748 The Washington Times, January 19, 1992.
749 Human Events, January 4, 1982.
750 Covert Action Information Bulletin, Summer 1989.
751 Moscow's Secret Weapon. [Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, March 1, 1986], pp. 82-84.
752 Covert Action Information Bulletin, Ibid.
753 Mark Lane. Rush to Judgment. (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1992), p. xxvii.
754 The Spotlight, July 17, 1978.
755 ibid.
756 Connie Bruck. Master of the Game. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), p. 52.
757 The Spotlight, October 5, 1981.
758 Ibid. 759 Ibid., August 10, 1981.
760 Ibid.
761 Ron Lewis. Flashback. (Medford, Oregon: Lewcom Productions, 1993), p. 119.
762 Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, May 18, 1992.
763 Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi. The Israeli Connection—Who Israel Arms and Why. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), p. 155.
764 James Riordan. Stone. (Hyperion Books, 1995), p. 364.
765 Ibid., p. 370.
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