See this for the Unione Corse (Corsican Mafia)-CIA-Mossad (which included the assassination specialists Sayeret Matkal, later Netayahu's unit, though not named in this link of Opium Lords, since 1958 they have been the murdering assassins used especially outside of “Israel” by Mossad):
Third World Traveler
Chapters Five – Eight
excerpted from the book
Final Judgment
The missing link in the JFK assassination conspiracy
by Michael Collins Piper
Wolfe Press, 1995, paperback
p40
By mid-1963 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion hated Kennedy with a
passion. In fact, he considered JFK a threat to the very survival of the Jewish
State.
... Former high-ranking U.S.
diplomat Richard H. Curtiss, writing in 'A Changing Image: American Perceptions
of the Arab-Israeli Dispute', elaborated on Kennedy's attitude toward the Middle East controversy. In a chapter appropriately
titled: "President Kennedy and Good Intentions Deferred Too Long,"
Curtiss comments:
"It is surprising to realize, with the benefit of
hindsight, that from the time Kennedy entered office as the narrowly-elected
candidate of a party heavily dependent upon Jewish support, he was planning to
take a whole new look at U.S. Mideast policy.
"He obviously could not turn the clock back and undo
the work of President Truman, his Democratic predecessor, in making the
establishment of Israel
possible. Nor, perhaps, would he have wanted to.
"Kennedy was determined, however, to develop good new
personal relationships with individual Arab leaders, including those with whom
the previous administration's relations had deteriorated.
p42
Soon after Kennedy assumed office, Israel and its American lobby began
to understand the import of Kennedy's positioning in regard to the Arab-Israeli
conflict. Israel was not happy - to say the very least - and began putting heat
on the White House through the egis of its supporters in Congress, many of whom
relied upon support from the Israeli lobby for campaign contributions and
political leverage.
p44
The American President cited four areas causing a strain in U.S.-Israel
relations: 1) Israel's
diversion-from the Arab States-of the Jordan River waters; 2) Israel's retaliatory raids against Arab forces
in border areas; 3) Israel's
pivotal role in the Palestinian refugee problem; and 4) Israel's insistence that the United States sell advanced Hawk missiles to Israel.
The President outlined to Mrs. Meir what has come to be
called the Kennedy Doctrine. Kennedy told Meir that U.S.
interests and Israel's
interests were not always the same. The Talbot memorandum described Kennedy's
forthright stance:
"We know," [said Kennedy] "that Israel
faces enormous security problems, but we do too. We came almost to a direct
confrontation with the Soviet Union last spring and again recently in Cuba...
Because we have taken on wide security responsibilities we always have the
potential of becoming involved in a major crisis not of our own making...
p44
"Our security problems are, therefore, just as great as Israel's. We have to concern
ourself with the whole Middle East. We would
like Israeli recognition that this partnership which we have with it produces
strains for the United States
in the Middle East... when Israel
takes such action as it did last spring [when Israel
launched a raid into Syria,
resulting in a condemnation by the UN Security Council]. Whether right or
wrong, those actions involve not just Israel
but also the United States."
Stephen Green believes that Kennedy's position vis-a-vis Israel was an important stand: "It was a
remarkable exchange, and the last time for many, many years in which an
American president precisely distinguished for the government of Israel the differences between U.S. and Israeli national security
interests."
Thus it was that John F. Kennedy informed Israel, in no uncertain terms, that he intended
- first and foremost - to place America's
interests - not Israel's
interests - at the center of U.S. Middle East policy.
p45
Israel
had been engaged in nuclear development during the past decade but continued to
insist that its nuclear programs were strictly peaceful in nature. However, the
facts prove otherwise.
... When Kennedy was coming into office in the transition
period in December 1960 the Eisenhower administration informed Kennedy of
Israel's secret nuclear weapons development at a site in the desert known as
Dimona. Israel
had advanced several cover stories to explain its activities at Dimona.
... Israel
had kept the nuclear weapons program as secret as possible, but US
intelligence had discovered the project. Kennedy termed the situation
"highly distressing." Kennedy, upon taking office, determined that he
would make efforts to derail Israel's
nuclear weapons development. Nuclear proliferation was to be one of Kennedy's
primary concerns.
Israel's
intended entry into the nuclear arena was, as a consequence, a frightening
prospect in JFK's mind, particularly in light of ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
p46
Kennedy's friendly overtures to the Arab states were only a public aspect of
what ultimately developed into an all-out 'secret war' between Kennedy and Israel.
According to Seymour Hersh: "Israel's bomb, and what to do about
it, became a White House fixation - part of the secret presidential agenda that
would remain hidden for the next thirty years."
p46
ISRAEL'S
NUCLEAR AGENDA
There was an added wrinkle. although Israel and the American CIA had established a
longtime close and ongoing working relationship, the CIA was monitoring Israel's
nuclear weapons development.
In March, 1963, Sherman
Kent, the Chairman of the Board of National Estimates at the CIA, wrote an
extended memorandum to the CIA's Director on the highly controversial subject
entitled "Consequences of Israeli Acquisition of Nuclear Capability."
According to Stephen Green, for the purposes of this
internal memorandum, Kent defined "acquisition" by Israel as either
(a) a detonation of a nuclear device with or without the possession of actual
nuclear weapons, or (b) an announcement by Israel that it possessed nuclear
weapons, even without testing. Kent's
primary conclusion was that an Israeli bomb would cause 'substantial damage to
the U.S.
and Western position in the Arab world.
According to Green's accurate assessment, "The
memorandum was very strong and decidedly negative in its conclusions"
which were as follows:
"Even though Israel
already enjoys a clear military superiority over its Arab adversaries, singly
or combined, acquisition of a nuclear capability would greatly enhance Israel's
sense of security. In this circumstance, some Israelis might be inclined to
adopt a moderate and conciliatory posture...
"We believe it much more likely, however, that Israel's
policy toward its neighbors would become more rather than less tough. [Israel
would] seek to exploit the psychological advantages of its nuclear capability
to intimidate the Arabs and to prevent them from making trouble on the
frontiers."
In dealing with the United
States, the CIA analyst estimated, a nuclear Israel would "make the most of the almost
inevitable Arab tendency to look to the Soviet Bloc for assistance against the
added Israel threat, arguing
that in terms of both strength and reliability Israel
was clearly the only worthwhile friend of the U.S. in the area.
"Israel,"
in Kent's analysis,
"would use all the means at its command to persuade the U.S. to acquiesce in, and even to
support, its possession of nuclear capability."
In short, Israel
would use its immense political power - especially through its lobby in Washington - to force the United
States to accede to Israel's nuclear intentions.
However, the CIA did not make known its concerns about Israel's
determination to produce a nuclear bomb. According to Green, "It is
perhaps significant that the memorandum was not drafted as a formal national
intelligence estimate (NIE), which would have involved distribution to several
other agencies of the government. No formal NIE was issued by CIA on the
Israeli nuclear weapons program until 1968."
... According to [New
York financier Abe] Feinberg, "B.G. [Ben Gurion]
could be vicious, and he had such a hatred of the old man." The "old
man" in this case was the president's father, former Ambassador Joseph P.
Kennedy, long considered not only an "anti-Semite" but a Hitler
partisan.
Ben-Gurion's contempt for the younger Kennedy was growing by
leaps and bounds-almost pathologically. According to Hersh, "The Israeli
prime minister, in subsequent private communications to the White House, began
to refer to the President as 'young man.' Kennedy made clear to associates that
he found the letters to be offensive."
Kennedy himself told his close friend, Charles Bartlett,
that he was getting fed up with the fact that the Israeli "sons of bitches
lie to me constantly about their nuclear capability."
Obviously, to say the very least, there was no love lost between
the two leaders. The U.S.-Israeli relationship was at an ever-growing and
disastrous impasse, although virtually nothing was known about this to the
American 4) public at the time.
p49
President Kennedy's efforts to resolve the problem of the Palestinian refugees
also met with fierce and bitter resistance by Ben-Gurion. The Israeli leader
refused to agree to a Kennedy proposal that the Palestinians either be
permitted to return to their homes in Israel
or to be compensated by Israel
and resettled in the Arab countries or elsewhere.
Former Undersecretary of State George Ball notes in his
book, The Passionate Attachment, that "In the fall of 1962, Ben-Gurion
conveyed his own views in a letter to the Israeli ambassador in Washington,
intended to be circulated among Jewish American leaders, in which he stated:
'Israel will regard this plan as a more serious danger to her existence than
all the threats of the Arab dictators and Kings, than all the Arab armies, than
all of Nasser's missiles and his Soviet MIGs... Israel will fight against this
implementation down to the last man."
Clearly, then, by this point, Ben-Gurion perceived the
American president's policies to be a very threat to Israel's survival.
p50
According to Alfred Lilienthal: "Congress continued to maintain pressures
on the White House. The "Israel
first" bloc in the Senate attacked the administration for failing to
conclude a defense pact to protect Israel
and to call an embargo on all arms shipments to the Middle
East.
"The legislators reechoed the Ben-Gurion contention
that Israel
had fallen behind in the arms race. Nasser,
they claimed, was ready for a pushbutton war. Israel [was] easy to pinpoint and
destroy and [could not] retaliate against four or five Arab states at
once."
By this time-behind the scenes-Kennedy had ordered
continuing surveillance of the Israelis and their push for the nuclear bomb. It
was a top priority for Kennedy, by all estimations. However, to ensure that Israel's access to intelligence regarding the
American spy operation against Israel
was limited, the surveillance was being conducted directly out of then-CIA
Director John McCone's office.
American inspectors the opportunity to come to Israel's nuclear operation at Dimona to verify
that-as Israel
claimed-the program was peaceful in nature. This was the president's last-ditch
effort, apparently, to pacify Israel
and, at the same time, find out precisely what was going on at Dimona. But Israel
would not permit the inspection.
By this time there was a general understanding at the
highest ranks of the Kennedy administration that there was a major problem at
hand. The president's inner circle had begun to realize that Israel deemed Kennedy's refusal to knuckle under
to Israel's demands as a
dire threat to Israel's
survival.
According to then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara,
speaking in retrospect, "I can understand why Israel wanted a nuclear bomb. There
is a basic problem there. The existence of Israel has been a question mark in
history, and that's the essential issue."
The Israelis - and particularly Ben-Gurion - would no doubt
agree. In their view, John F. Kennedy himself was emerging as a threat to Israel's
very existence:
JFK would simply not countenance a nuclear Israel and Israel's
leaders believed that a nuclear Israel
would ensure the continued survival of the Jewish State.
p52
John Hadden, the former CIA station chief in Tel Aviv at the time believes that
John F. Kennedy was the last American president to have really tried to stop
the advent of the Israeli atomic bomb. "Kennedy really wanted to stop
it," said Hadden, "and he offered them conventional weapons [for
example, the Hawk missiles] as an inducement.
"But the Israelis were way ahead of us. They saw that
if we were going to offer them arms to go easy on the bomb, once they had it,
we were going send them a lot more, for fear that they would use it."
p55
By spring of 1963, Kennedy and Ben-Gurion were at loggerheads, more seriously
than ever before. What's more, Ben-Gurion was suffering a deep personal crisis
(part of which, we now see, stemmed from his unhappy relationship with John F.
Kennedy).
According to the Israeli prime minister's biographer, Dan
Kurzman: "Lonely and depressed, Ben-Gurion felt strangely helpless.
Leadership of Israel
was slipping from his withered hands... Ben-Gurion began to show signs of
paranoia. Enemies were closing in on him from all sides. A mere declaration by Egypt, Syria
and Iraq
in April 1963 that they would unite and demolish the "Zionist threat"
threw him into near-panic."
... All of this, of course, contributed immensely to the
problems between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion. Seymour Hersh writes: "Kennedy's
relationship with Ben-Gurion remained at an impasse over Dimona, and the
correspondence between the two became increasingly sour. None of those letters
has been made public."
... Like much of the secret government files on the JFK
assassination, the Kennedy exchanges with Ben-Gurion also have not been
released - not even to U.S.
government officials with full security clearances who have attempted to write
classified histories of the period.
"It was not a friendly exchange," according to
Ben-Gurion's writer, Yuval Neeman. "Kennedy was writing like a bully. It
was brutal." Ben-Gurion's response was not passive either.
All of this exacerbated tensions-fierce tensions-between the
American President and the Israeli leader. Kennedy's impatience was building.
Relations between the United States
and Israel
were unlike they had ever been before. According to Hersh, "The resident
made sure that the Israeli prime minister paid for his defiance." When
Ben-Gurion once again sought the opportunity for a formal, ballyhooed state
visit to Washington,
Kennedy rebuffed him.
... It was then that Ben-Gurion made his position all too clear.
He was convinced that what he perceived to be Kennedy's intransigence was an
all-out threat to the continued survival of the Jewish State. JFK was perceived
as an enemy of the Jewish people.
In one of his final communications with Kennedy, Ben-Gurion
wrote: "Mr. President, my people have the right to exist.. . and this
existence is in danger." It was at this time that Ben-Gurion demanded that
Kennedy sign a security treaty with Israel. Kennedy refused.
On June 16, 1963 Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned as prime
minister and defense minister. Thus, the "prophet of fire" ended his
fifteen year career as grand old man of Israel. At the time, the Israeli
press-and indeed the world press-told the world that Ben-Gurion's sudden
resignation was a result of his dissatisfaction with domestic political
scandals and turmoil that were rocking Israel.
However, the primary reason behind Ben-Gurion's departure
was the Israeli leader's inability to pressure JFK into accepting Israel's
demands. According to Hersh: "There was no way for the Israeli public...
to suspect that there was yet another factor in Ben-Gurion's demise: is
increasingly bitter impasse with Kennedy over a nuclear-armed Israel."
... In Ben-Gurion's eyes, John F. Kennedy was an enemy of
the Jewish people and of his beloved state of Israel.
It is the thesis of this volume that Ben-Gurion, in his
final days as Prime Minister, ordered Israel's Mossad to orchestrate the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. Based upon additional evidence uncovered, we
believe that the Mossad took the necessary steps and achieved that goal.
A MOSSAD HIT SQUAD
... Israel's respected Haaretz newspaper reported on July 3,
1992 that it was former Jewish underground terrorist-turned-Mossad operative
Yitzhak Shamir (later Israeli Prime Minister) who headed a special Mossad hit
squad during his service in the Mossad.
The Israeli newspaper reported that Shamir headed the
assassination unit from 1955 until 1964 - the year after JFK's assassination.
"The unit carried out attacks on perceived enemies and suspected Nazi War
criminals," according to an account of the newspaper's report.
... With Israel's intimate ties to not only the American CIA
but also the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate-(which we will examine in
much further detail-)-the Israeli prime minister and his Mossad operatives had
in place a network of allies with whom they could easily collaborate in
orchestrating the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Each of these powerful forces had good reason to take
drastic action to put an end to the threat posed by JFK.
p59
THE COMING OF THE MESSIAH: LYNDON JOHNSON RUSHES TO ISRAEL'S RESCUE; U.S.
MIDDLE EAST POLICY IS REVERSED
Within weeks of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Israel
was perhaps the most immediate primary beneficiary of Kennedy's death -
although this was not something that the controlled media told the American
people.
The most immediate individual beneficiary of JFK's death
was, of course, Lyndon Johnson who was a political favorite of Israel
and its allies in Meyer Lansky's Organized Crime Syndicate.
It was Johnson who promptly reversed Kennedy's Middle East
policy and who, for all intents and purposes, according to one historian,
established Israel as America's
51st state.
There can be no question but that the assassination of John
F. Kennedy accomplished several very specific things insofar as the
U.S.-Israeli relationship was concerned:
1) It removed from the White House a president-John F.
Kennedy who had - to put it lightly - greatly displeased Israel with his firm
neutral stance and his refusal to be bullied by Israel's demands;
2) It placed in the Oval Office a president-Lyndon
Johnson-who completely reversed long-standing U.S. Middle East policy and
placed the United States
firmly in Israel's
camp-with a vengeance.
3) It allowed Lyndon Johnson to reverse JFK's Vietnam policy and begin escalating U.S. involvement in Southeast
Asia. This permitted Israel
:o advance its own geo-political stance in the Middle East;
and
4) It enabled Israel's
allies in the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Organized rime Syndicate to gain a lock
on drug-trafficking in Southeast Asia as an approximate result of U.S.
involvement in the region.
Israel
was clearly-and beyond doubt-the primary international beneficiary of Lyndon
Johnson's presidency which only became possible through the assassination of
John F. Kennedy.
p66
In the 1964 presidential election -which was Johnson's to lose - Lansky and his
partners in Israel
were assured a dream ticket come November. Both Johnson and his vice president
[Hubert Humphrey] were bought and paid for.
Lansky and Israel made sure there wouldn't be any problems
with any independent upstart second-generation multi-millionaire Irishmen like
John F. Kennedy who was not only the son of a notorious anti-Semite but a
bullheaded proponent of America's interests to boot.
Thus, having become ensconced in the presidency, Lyndon
Johnson was in a position to do many favors for Israel.
Perhaps his most drastic efforts in service to Israel involved massive increases in U.S.
taxpayer-financed foreign aid giveaways. Although John F. Kennedy himself had
been generous to Israel
in that regard, Johnson made Kennedy look like a piker.
Former Undersecretary of State George Ball comments that in
the foreign aid realm: "The Israelis were proved right in their assumption
that Johnson would be more friendly than Kennedy."
p68
It was clearly Lyndon B. Johnson who set the precedent for unlimited aid to Israel.
All told, however, the death of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's assumption
of the Oval Office marked a major change in overall U.S. policy. As Stephen Green
writes, in all too clarifying detail in 'Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A
Militant Israel':
"In the years !948-1963, America was perceived by all
of the governments in the Middle East as a major power that acted upon the
basis of its own, clearly defined national self-interest. Moreover, U.S. Middle
East policy was just that - Middle East
policy; it was not an Israeli policy in which Arab countries were subordinate
actors.
"In the years 1948-1963, Presidents Truman, Eisenhower,
and Kennedy firmly guaranteed Israeli national security and territorial
integrity, but just as firmly guaranteed those of Jordan,
Lebanon,
and the other nations of the region. That was what the Tripartite Declaration
of 1950 was all about.
"For successive Israel
governments in this period, the boundary line between U.S. and Israeli national security
interests was drawn frequently, and usually decisively. Truman's policies on
arms exports to the middle East, Eisenhower's stands on regional water
development and on territorial integrity during the Suez Crisis, and Kennedy's
candor with Mrs. Meir - all of these were markers on this boundary line.
"Nevertheless, during this time U.S. financial support for Israel far exceeded that given any
other nation in the world, on a per capita basis. And U.S. diplomatic support for Israel in the UN and elsewhere was
no less generous.
"But the limits to U.S.
support for Israel were
generally understood by all of the countries of the region, and it was
precisely these limits that preserved America's ability to mediate the
various issues that composed the Arab-Israeli dispute.
"Then, in the early years of the Johnson
administration, 1964-1967, U.S.
policy on Middle Eastern matters abruptly changed. It would perhaps be more
accurate to say that it disintegrated. America
had a public policy on the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, but suddenly
had a covert policy of abetting Israel's
nuclear weapons program. We had a public policy on arms balance in the region,
but secretly agreed, by the end of 1967, to become Israel's major arms supplier.
"Officially, the United States was "firmly
committed to the support of the political independence and territorial
integrity of all the [Middle Eastern] nations," while consciously,
covertly, the Johnson "Middle East team" set about enabling Israel to
redraw to her advantage virtually every one of her borders with neighboring
Arab states.
"It was, of course, a policy without principle, without
integrity. But it was also ineffective, in the sense that Israel steadily continued to act in ways that
ignored U.S.
national security interests."
p69
According to [Stephen] Green [Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A
Militant Israel]:
"In a period in which the Johnson White House was
becoming increasingly obsessed with the war in Vietnam,
Israel's
military leaders offered to impose stability upon the peoples and countries of
the Middle East-it was to be a 'Pax Hebraeca.'
"There were, of course, costs involved for America.
The United States
would have to take the initial steps toward becoming what three previous
Presidents had said we never would be-Israel's major arms supplier. We would
also at least temporarily forfeit our role as primary mediator of the
multifaceted Arab-Israeli dispute.
"The new arrangement would necessitate throwing our
long-standing nuclear nonproliferation treaty to the winds, the 1968 treaty to
the contrary notwithstanding.
"Perhaps most important, U.S. national security
interests in the region would become merged with Israel's to a degree that was,
and is to this day, unique in the history of U.S. foreign relations."
p71
... Israel's friends in the
Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate stood to benefit from the Vietnam
conflict...
The Lansky crime empire began operating major global drug
trafficking, largely under CIA cover, throughout Southeast Asia during the
Vietnam War, during which time the drug problem began escalating to a major
degree in the United States
and elsewhere.
Now, many years later, the CIA's role in the global drug
market is only now just coming to the surface. The Iran-contra scandal, for
example, shed some light on this little known aspect of the underbelly of world
affairs. Thus, the joint Israel-Lansky-CIA combine shared a major benefit from
American involvement in Vietnam.
p71
Israel
and its covert allies did indeed have a messiah in Lyndon Baines Johnson. In
his book, The Passionate Attachment, former Undersecretary of State George Ball
summarized the results of Johnson's Middle East policies: First, the [Johnson]
administration put America
in the position of being Israel's
principal arms supplier and sole unqualified backer.
"Second, by assuring the Israelis that the United States
would always provide them with a military edge over the Arabs, Johnson
guaranteed the 'escalation of an arms race... Third, by refusing to follow the
advice of his aides that America make its delivery of nuclear-capable F-4 Phantoms
conditional on Israel's signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Johnson
gave the Israelis the impression that America had no fundamental objection to
Israel's nuclear program.
"Fourth, by permitting a cover-up of Israel's attack on the Liberty, President Johnson told the Israelis
in effect that nothing they did would induce American politicians to refuse
their bidding. From that time forth, the Israelis began to act as if they had
an inalienable right to American aid and backing."
As Stephen Green concluded in his discussion of the
incredible changes in U.S.
policy toward Israel that
took place during the Johnson era [Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With A
Militant Israel]:
"By June of 1967, for a variety of reasons that
prominently included 'domestic political considerations,' Lyndon Johnson and
his team of foreign-policy advisors had completely revised U.S.-Israeli
relations. To all intents and purposes, Israel had become the 51st
state."
p72
ISRAEL'S
GODFATHER: THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE MEYER LANSKY, THE CIA, THE FBI & THE
ISRAELI MOSSAD
If it had not been for international crime boss Meyer Lansky
there might not be a state of Israel
today. This is something that Israel
would rather be forgotten.
Israel
was established as a state, in major part, through the political, financial and
moral support of Meyer Lansky and his associates and henchmen in Organized
Crime. Lansky's interests and Israel's
interests were almost incestuous. In fact, Lansky's chief European money
laundering bank was an operation run under the auspices of a high-ranking,
longtime officer of Israel's
Mossad.
Lansky's intimate ties with not only American intelligence
(including both the CIA and the FBI) made the Russian-born mobster the
"untouchable" leader of the global organized crime syndicate.
p72
In the years prior to Kennedy's ascendancy to the presidency, a little-known,
but immensely powerful underworld figure by the name of Meyer Lansky had
schemed and shot his way to the top of the crime syndicate.
That syndicate was not just national-it was
international-and the uncrowned king of crime was Meyer Lansky-the so-called
"chairman of the board" of that incredible criminal empire which
spanned the globe.
It was Meyer Lansky, early in his criminal career, who had emerged
as one of the leading sponsors of the state of Israel
and whose most intimate associates were among the chief financial patrons of
the influential Israeli lobby in America.
What's more, Lansky had also forged close ties with Israel's
allies in the American CIA - an agency that, in itself, had entered into a
bitter war with John F. Kennedy.
Thus, when JFK came to blows with not only Israel and its allies in the Lansky
Organized Crime empire, but also with the CIA, the American president had
unwittingly forged a deadly alliance among his fiercest foes.
p82
THE ADL AND ORGANIZED CRIME
The liquor industry, largely controlled by Jewish families
such as the Bronfman family, and others, have been major contributors to the
ADL [Anti-Defamation League] financing a large portion of its budget over the
years. These same liquor interests had longtime contacts with [Meyer] Lansky
from his earliest years in the bootlegging and rum-running rackets.
p85
Meyer Lansky was very much a "godfather" in organized crime, far more
influential than even the most powerful Mafia boss in any city in America.
All of this, then, accounts for Lansky's preeminent role in the underworld.
It is for this reason, then, that when we refer to the
"Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate" we are referring to not only
the "Mafia" but also to the powerful Jewish interests that are
inter-connected here.
It was the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate that
played a pivotal role in the establishment of Israel. Lansky, you see, was Israel's
modem-day "Godfather." Lansky was with Israel from the beginning.
p86
It was Lansky's connection with the OSS-Naval Intelligence enterprise known as
"Operation Underworld" that brought him into a strange global network
that ultimately paved the way for the establishment of the state of Israel.
Operation Underworld was stationed at Rockefeller
Center in New York and supervised by a British
intelligence operative named William Stephenson (who was said to be Ian
Fleming's inspiration for the fictional character, James Bond.) It was
Stephenson who worked closely with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai
B'rith as well as the FBI in coordinating anti-Nazi intelligence operations in
the United States.
(In later years, following the establishment of Israel, the Lansky Organized Crime
Syndicate-financed ADL emerged as an unregistered foreign agent for Israel,
handling intelligence and propaganda operations for the Jewish State, in
collaboration with the FBI and the CIA.
... it was Operation Underworld's William Stephenson who
became a critical player in the establishment of Israel's Mossad.
Stephenson's top aide was Louis Bloomfield, later an
attorney for the Lansky-linked Bronfman bootlegging family and himself a key
player in the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.
There is little question but that Stephenson and Bloomfield
were in close contact with Lansky and his henchmen during this period. Lansky
himself, as we have seen, acknowledged his own role in Operation Underworld.
Following World War II, the activities of Operation
Underworld and many of the key players shifted to a new front: the
establishment of Israel.
p87
The real key to the Lansky connection with Israel is money. The newly
established State of Israel not only needed money to exist, but the
organization of a new government was an ideal opportunity for Lansky and his
confederates to establish their own worldwide financial-and criminal network.
In its early years Israel
was "untouchable." The emotional memories of the experiences of the
Jewish people during World War II - indeed throughout history -were the
foundations upon which Israel
had been established. Criticism of Israel was verboten. The new Jewish
State was an ideal cover under which Lansky and his criminal syndicate could
operate unfettered.
p95
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON AND THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE BETWEEN ISRAEL, THE CIA AND THE
MEYER LANSKY ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE
By 1963 John F. Kennedy was not only at war with Israel
and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate, but he was also at war with
their close ally in the international intelligence underworld-the CIA. That was
a deadly combination.
The CIA and Israel
had forged a close-working strategic alliance in the previous decade. Their
joint enterprises around the globe tied the CIA and Israel together inextricably. Israel's
interests-and the CIA's interests-were often one and the same, perhaps too
often. Likewise with the Meyer Lansky crime network.
What's more, Israel's
chief contact at the CIA in Washington, James Jesus Angleton, ultimately played
a pivotal role in the JFK assassination conspiracy cover-up. Angleton, too, had
close links with the same forces in the Lansky Syndicate.
At the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters at Langley, Virginia there
was one man-just one man alone-who knew perhaps better than any other American,
Israel's
intentions and attitudes toward President John F. Kennedy. This was the
enigmatic James Jesus Angleton.
Angleton was so close to the Israelis during his tenure at
the CIA that, following his death in 1987, a monument was unveiled in Israel
by its government in his honor.
This is evidently one of the few known public monuments to
any American CIA official anywhere in the entire world. Clearly quite an honor
for Angleton but actually one of several memorials to Angleton in Israel.
According to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, co-authors of
Dangerous Liason: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship,
Angleton was "a man who for nearly a quarter of a century was one of the
most powerful and mysterious figures in the CIA."
According to the Cockburns, "Angleton was involved in
many strange and secret dealings in the world of intelligence, but the Israelis
like to talk of him as having been especially close to them, which is why they
paid public homage to his memory."
Recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) while
at Yale University,
Angleton was a fast-rising star in the world of clandestine activities, and
following the abolition of the OSS
after World War II, Angleton entered into service with the Central Intelligence
Agency after the CIA was established in 1947.
By 1954 Angleton assumed the highly sensitive post of chief
of CIA counterintelligence. What's more, Angleton's influence within the CIA
itself was of a greater magnitude than what otherwise might be expected.
Angleton was a very powerful-and secretive-man.
p95
According to Tom Mangold, Angleton's biographer, CIA Director Allen Dulles and
his deputy, Richard Helms, who later went on to become CIA director during the
administration of Lyndon Johnson, were Angleton's mentors. However, Mangold
says, Helms was Angleton's "chief patron."
(Dulles, of course, was later fired as CIA director by John
F. Kennedy and then, in a twist of fate-or by design-served on the Warren
Commission which ostensibly investigated JFK's murder.
(And it would be Helms, along with Angleton, who would later
sign off on a controversial intra-agency memo that would ultimately-and
apparently unwittingly-blow the lid off the CIA's involvement in the conspiracy
to assassinate President Kennedy.
p97
BEN-GURION'S MAN IN WASHINGTON
Most important to Angleton, however, was his relationship
with the Mossad. In fact, he was the CIA's longtime, self-appointed man at the
agency's Israel
desk.
Angleton's biographer, Tom Mangold, points out that
"The legends alone surrounding his twenty years as head of the Israeli
Desk would fill another book, as indeed would the truth."
And although Mangold's account of Angleton's career devoted
hardly any attention to Angleton's intimate ties with Israel and its Mossad,
Mangold does state flatly: "I would like to place on the record, however,
that Angleton's closest professional friends overseas, then and subsequently,
came from the Mossad and that he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli
colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors
after his death."
Angleton, in fact, had long-standing direct ties with
Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion himself, dealing with the Israeli leader
on an intimate basis. If there was anyone in the CIA who knew of Ben-Gurion's
distaste for JFK, it was Angleton. As a devoted friend of Israel-and chief
liaison with the Mossad-Angleton had to be fully aware of the raging conflict
between the Israeli prime minister and the American president who refused to
bow to Israel's demands.
And considering President Kennedy's efforts to build bridges
with the Soviet Union and his efforts to wind down the Cold War, one knows,
beyond question, that Angleton-hard-line, even fanatical anti-communist that he
was-viewed Kennedy's overtures with outrage and disgust.
KENNEDY A THREAT
Clearly, John F. Kennedy was not only a threat to Israel
and the CIA and their allies in the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate, but
also to James Jesus Angleton himself. Kennedy's war with the CIA could spell an
end to Angleton's career and the world-wide intelligence empire that the
strange and calculating counterintelligence boss had assembled.
The ties between Angleton's CIA and the Mossad were such,
according to historian Steven Stewart, that they "had the effect of
ensuring that virtually every CIA man in the Middle East was also working at
second hand for the Israelis ... as the CIA's policy changed almost overnight,
in an extraordinary volte-face, from being largely pro-Arab to becoming almost
totally pro-Israeli" - a close relationship indeed.
THE CIA AND ISRAEL:
EARLY DAYS
It is the CIA's relationship with Israel that is most significant in
terms of that agency's global intrigue-and, of course, in light of the CIA's
documented role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. And it was Angleton
who was the prime mover behind the CIA-Israeli Mossad's close working
relationship-in fact, from its very beginnings.
The late Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former advisor to the CIA
and former member of the policy-planning staffs of the White House and
Pentagon, had written extensively on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. In his
book, Ropes of Sand, Eveland reviewed the beginnings of what Andrew and Leslie
Cockbum call the "dangerous liaison"-America's
covert relationship with Israel.
This covert relationship was conducted primarily through the
egis of Angleton's Israeli desk at the CIA. Eveland writes of its origins:
"CIA operations had started before Allen Dulles became
director that had long-range implications from which the United States
might find it difficult to disengage.
"Stemming from his wartime OSS
liaison with Jewish resistance groups based in London,
James Angleton had arranged an operational-intelligence exchange agreement with
Israel's
Mossad, upon which the CIA relied for much of its intelligence about the Arab
states."
p99
ASSASSINATION PLOTS
The CIA and the Mossad had many joint ventures over the
years, all conducted under Angleton's watchful eye.
Some of those ventures, of course, included assassination
plots. In fact, after President Eisenhower commented that he hoped that
"the Nasser problem could be eliminated" (referring to what he
perceived to be an intransigent stance by the Egyptian president) - CIA
Director Allen Dulles and Angleton launched a plan to kill Nasser.
However, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (brother of
the CIA director) intervened and called off the CIA dogs.
The CIA was also engaging in covert actions against Israel's enemies in Syria. One CIA conspiracy in 1958
to overthrow the nationalist government of Syria-which anti-communist fanatics
such as Angleton considered to be "leftist"-fell apart when the CIA's
paid henchmen, Syrian nationals (who evidently were patriots), turned
themselves in and exposed the CIA's plot to the Syrian government.
At the time, CIA director Dulles commented, "I guess
that leaves Israel's
intelligence service as the only one on which we can count, doesn't it."
p100
According to intelligence historian Richard
Deacon, Israel's
relationship with the CIA (and Angleton, in particular) had been firmly
cemented: "On the American side the Israelis had won a certain amount of
unofficial support from the CIA even during the Eisenhower era. The CIA had
been realistic enough to realize that the Eisenhower appeasement policy towards
the Arab world would ultimately be disastrous for every American interest,
military or economic.
"For this reason they had maintained a policy of
allowing all intelligence operations in Israel to be carried out entirely
by the Mossad. In short, what this meant was that the CIA had no office or
station chief in Tel Aviv, but that certain officers in the US Embassy there
co-operated with the Mossad.
"In theory this entailed an exchange of intelligence
between the two sides and in practice this worked rather better than one could
have expected normally.
"The key figures in this arrangement were originally
[Mossad chief] Isser Harel, Ephraim Evron, who later became deputy Israeli
ambassador in Washington, and James Angleton, chief of the CIA
Counter-Intelligence."
According to intelligence historian Deacon, Angleton
exploited the new intimate relationship between the CIA and the Mossad for use
internationally:
"Angleton, having seen the folly of U.S. foreign policy during the abortive Suez operation, decided to counteract the State
Department's bias towards the Arabs by close cooperation with Israel. It was
he who first saw the need for a new policy in the Middle
East and safeguards against increasing Russian influence.
p107
Revelation of either a CIA role or an Israeli role in the murder of JFK would
have inevitably destroyed not only America's
relationship with Israel,
but it would have brought the international house of joint CIA-Mossad-Lansky
Crime Syndicate conspiracies tumbling down.
And James Jesus Angleton, as the CIA's intimate liaison with
Israel,
would have been destroyed in the process. Likewise with his CIA patrons, Allen
Dulles and Richard Helms.
Angleton's "chief patron" Richard Helms left the
CIA in 1973. This was the beginning of the end of the CIA career of James Jesus
Angleton. Angleton himself was fired from the CIA on December 20, 1974.
Revelations about Angleton's involvement in the CIA's domestic spying and other
covert activities on American soil were too much for even the CIA to handle.