See the previous post on this topic here.
Did John F. Kennedy's determined (and then secret) behind-the-scenes efforts to prevent Israel from building a nuclear weapons arsenal play a pivotal part in the events that led to his assassination on November 22, 1963?
Was Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, a front-line player in the JFK assassination conspiracy alongside elements of the CIA and international organized crime? Why did Hollywood film-maker Oliver Stone fail to reveal—in his 1993 all-star JFK assassination extravaganza—that the hero of his epic, former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, had privately concluded that the Mossad was ultimately the driving force behind JFK's murder?
With worldwide attention focused on the problems of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East—is it valid or appropriate to raise the question of possible Israeli complicity in the assassination of an American president?
These are just a few of the hotly controversial questions posed in the book, Final Judgment, which has emerged as a proverbial "underground best-seller" in the United States, the topic of heated debate on the Internet and the subject of angry exchanges in a variety of public forums.
What follows is a summary of the findings in Final Judgment, which is a 768-page volume documented with more than 1000 reference notes, an extensive question-and-answer section, 36 pages of photographs and charts, and ten appendices focusing on different aspects of the JFK assassination conspiracy.
In 1992, former U.S. Congressman Paul Findley, a liberal Republican, made the little-noticed but intriguing comment that "in all the words written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned, despite the obvious fact Mossad complicity is as plausible as any of the other theories."
Where in the world could Findley—never known to be an extremist, by any means, and certainly not one given to venting conspiracy theories— have ever come up with such an assertion? Actually, it's no so extraordinary a thesis, if one looks at the historical record, placing all of the conventional theories about the JFK assassination in a new perspective, calculating in previously-little known details that shed stark light on the circumstances surrounding JFK's demise and the geopolitical crises in which the American president was embroiled at the time of his shocking murder.
In truth, even the most recently widely-disseminated exposition of JFK assassination theorizing—Oliver Stone's 1993 blockbuster film, JFK—did not present even the entire picture. Although Stone portrayed former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as a hero for pointing the finger in the direction of elements of the U.S. military and intelligence networks as the guiding force behind JFK's
murder, what Stone didn't tell his audience was something even more controversial: that, privately, after some years of research and reflection,
Garrison had reached an even more startling determination: that the driving force behind JFK's murder was no less than Israel's feared intelligence service, the Mossad.
As astounding as it sounds, there's actually good reason to conclude that Garrison may have been looking in the right direction. And in this day when the debate over "weapons of mass destruction" is in the forefront of global discussion, it is not so extraordinary a thesis as it seems. The 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy approaches and the fascination with the murder of America's 35th president won't go away. Assassination "buffs"—not just in the United States but
around the globe—continue to chip away at the conclusions of the two official U.S. government investigations into the affair.
Although the 1979 report by a special committee of the U.S. Congress formally contradicted the earlier 1964 finding by the presidentially appointed Warren Commission that alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone and concluded instead that there was indeed the likelihood of a conspiracy behind the president's murder— hinting broadly at the involvement by organized crime—the congressional committee's final determination actually raised more questions, in some respects, than it answered.
In 1993 Hollywood's Oliver Stone entered the fray with his blockbuster all-star extravaganza, JFK, which presented Stone's interpretation of the widely-publicized 1967-1969 JFK assassination inquiry by then-New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.
Stone's film—featuring Kevin Costner as Garrison—raised the specter of involvement by elements of the so-called "military-industrial complex," along with a scattering of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, right-wing militants, and rogue Central Intelligence Agency operatives.The film told the story of Garrison's investigation, and ultimately unsuccessful prosecution, of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw (then suspected of being—and later proven to be—a collaborator with the CIA) for involvement
in the JFK conspiracy.
However, as we now know, not even Stone was faithful to his hero. Longtime independent JFK assassination investigator A. J. Weberman has since revealed that, during the 1970s—well after Garrison's prosecution of Shaw—that Garrison was circulating the manuscript for a novel (never
published) in which Garrison named Israel's Mossad as the mastermind of the JFK assassination conspiracy.
Garrison never said anything about this unusual thesis—at least publicly. But beginning in the mid-1980s and well into the present day, new evidence has emerged that not only points to good reason for Mossad motivation to move against John F. Kennedy, but also to the likelihood that not only Clay Shaw (Garrison's target) but other key figures often associated in published writings with the JFK assassination were indeed closely tied to the Mossad and doing its bidding. And what is particularly interesting is that none of the individuals in question—Shaw included—happened to be Jewish.
So the assertion that allegations of Mossad involvement are somehow "anti-Semitic "in nature
fall flat on that fact alone. But Mossad complicity—as the record indicates— is a very real possibility.
Garrison's critics continue to assert that the New Orleans District Attorney couldn't make up his mind as to whom he thought had orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This indeed was the primary complaint against the rambunctious and outspoken and quite colorful prosecutor: that he simply couldn't make up his mind. And this is one of the reasons that even many of Garrison's supporters not only began to question his sincerity, but even as to whether Garrison's
investigation was even worth the trouble.
In truth, Garrison did tend to shoot from the hip. That may have been his biggest mistake—one of many—in the course of his controversial inquiry into the murder of America's 35th president.
At one time or another, during the course of that investigation, Garrison pointed his finger at one or another various possible conspirators— ranging from "right-wing extremists" to "Texas oil barons" to "anti- Castro Cuban exiles" to "rogue CIA operatives." Occasionally Garrison went so far as to say that the conspiracy included a combination of those possible conspirators.
When Garrison finally brought one man to trial, widely respected New Orleans trade executive Clay Shaw, Garrison had narrowed his field, suggesting, primarily, that Shaw had been one of the lower-level players in the conspiracy.
According to Garrison, Shaw was essentially doing the bidding of JFK's SECRET WAR WITH ISRAEL highly-placed figures in what has been described as "the military-industrial complex," that combination of financial interests and armaments manufacturers whose power and influence in official Washington—and around the world—is a very real force in global affairs.
Garrison suggested that Shaw and his co-conspirators had multiple motivations stimulating their decision to move against President Kennedy.
Among other things, he asserted:
• The conspirators opposed JFK's decision to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Indochina;
• They were angry at his failure to provide military cover support for Cuban exiles attempting to topple Fidel Castro in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion;
• They were bitter at JFK for firing longtime CIA Director Allen Dulles, a grand old man of the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and
• In addition, Garrison hinted, JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, may have wanted JFK removed from office for the purpose of claiming the crown for himself, but also because JFK and his younger brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, were not only plotting to remove Johnson from
the Democratic national ticket in 1964, as well as conducting federal criminal investigations of many of Johnson's closest associates and financial backers—even including in the realm of organized crime, many of whom, the historical record shows, had close (albeit little known) ties to
Israel and its intelligence service, the Mossad.
In the end, after a relatively brief deliberation, the jury hearing the Shaw case acquitted Shaw. It was only later—much later—that evidence emerged that Shaw had indeed been a CIA informant, Shaw's protestations the contrary.
Only in recent years has it been determined, for example, that the American CIA was deliberately sabotaging Garrison's investigation from within, not to mention providing assistance to Shaw's defense. And although there are those who continue to say that Shaw's acquittal "proved" that Shaw had nothing whatsoever to do with the JFK conspiracy, the bigger picture suggests quite the contrary.
Shaw was involved with something very murky and so were others in Shaw's circle of friends and associates. And they were, in turn, directly connected to the strange activities of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans, the summer just prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, before Oswald's sojourn to Dallas. Dozens of writers—many with differing points of view—have documented all of this, time and again.
So although the "official" legend is that Jim Garrison believed that the CIA and the military-industrial complex were the prime movers behind JFK's murder, when all was said and done, however, Jim Garrison had privately reached quite a different conclusion, one that remains largely
unknown even to many people who worked with Garrison throughout the course of his investigation.
In fact, as noted, Garrison had decided—based on the entirety of everything that he had learned, from a wide variety of sources—that the most likely masterminds of the JFK assassination were operatives of Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad.
The remarkable truth is that—although Garrison apparently didn't know it at the time, precisely because the facts had yet to be revealed—Garrison may have been on to something, far more than he realized.
The public record now demonstrates that in 1963 JFK was embroiled in a bitter secret conflict with Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion over Israel's drive to build the atomic bomb; that Ben-Gurion resigned in disgust, saying that because of JFK's policies, Israel's "existence [was] in danger."
Then upon JFK's assassination, U.S. policy toward Israel began an immediate 180-degree turnaround.
Israeli historian Avner Cohen's new book, Israel and the Bomb, confirms the conflict between JFK and Israel so powerfully that, Israel's Ha'aretz, declared Cohen's revelations would "necessitate the rewriting of Israel's entire history."
From Israel's perspective, writes Cohen, "Kennedy's demands [on Israel] seemed diplomatically inappropriate ... inconsistent with national sovereignty." In any case, Cohen pointed out, "the transition from Kennedy to [Lyndon] Johnson ... benefited the Israeli nuclear program."
Ethan Bronner, in The New York Times, called Israel's drive to build a nuclear bomb "a fiercely hidden subject." This explains why JFK researchers—and Jim Garrison—never considered an Israeli.
While all of this presents a strong motive for Israel to strike against JFK, even maverick Israeli journalist Barry Chamish acknowledges that there exists "a pretty cogent case" for Mossad collaboration with the CIA in the assassination conspiracy.
The fact is that when Jim Garrison prosecuted Clay Shaw with conspiracy in the assassination, Garrison had stumbled upon the Mossad link. Although (after his acquittal) Shaw was revealed to have been a CIA asset, in 1963 Shaw also served on the board of a Rome-based company, Permindex, which was (the evidence suggests) actually a front for a Mossad-sponsored arms procurement operation.
How and why Shaw happened to end up in association with this operation remains a mystery, but the very clear role of the Mossad in the activities of Permindex is beyond question, protestations notwithstanding. The evidence is strong indeed. Judge for yourself:
A primary shareholder in Permindex, the Banque De Credit Internationale of Geneva, was not only the fiefdom of Tibor Rosenbaum, a high-level and longtime Mossad official—indeed, one of the founding fathers of Israel—but also the chief money laundry for Meyer Lansky, "chairman" of the crime syndicate and long-time Israeli loyalist.
According to Meyer Lansky's sympathetic Israeli biographers: "After Israel became a state, almost 90 percent of its purchases of arms abroad was channeled through Rosenbaum's bank. The financing of many of Israel's most daring secret operations was carried out through the funds in [BCI]." BCI also served as a depository for the Permindex account.
That Tibor Rosenbaum's BCI was a controlling force behind the enigmatic Permindex entity places Israel and its Mossad in the very center of the conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Note also that the chief executive and shareholder of Permindex was Louis Bloomfield of Montreal, a top figure in the Israeli lobby in Canada (and internationally) and a longtime operative of the family of World Jewish Congress chief Samuel Bronfman—an intimate Lansky business partner in the international traffic in bootleg whiskey during Prohibition and, much later, a leading patron of Israel.
Permindex was clearly the Israeli link to the JFK assassination. The Permindex link also explains the "French connection" featured in the documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy, but which failed to tell the entire story:
• That Permindex was also involved in assassination attempts against French President Charles DeGaulle by the French "Secret Army Organization" (OAS) which itself had close ties to the Mossad.
• Like the OAS, the Israelis hated DeGaulle not only because he gave independence to Algeria, a major new Arab state, but also because DeGaulle, who had assisted Israel, had withdrawn support, objecting (as did JFK) to Israel's drive for an atomic arsenal.
• A French intelligence officer alleged to this author, in 1993, that the Mossad contracted out at least one of JFK's assassins—probably a Corsican hitman—through a French intelligence official disloyal to DeGaulle and who hated JFK for supporting Algerian independence. There is also firm evidence—based on revelations by the late respected journalist Stewart Alsop—that JFK was also planning a strike against Red China's nuclear bomb program—a plan scuttled by Lyndon Johnson within
a month of JFK's assassination.
During this same period, according to famed British intellience historian Donald McCormack, (writing under his nom de plume, Richard Deacon, in his book, The Israeli Secret Service) that Israel and Red China were involved in joint secret nuclear bomb research.
We now know, in addition, that a key player in the Permindex web, billionaire Israeli industrialist Shaul Eisenberg, emerged as the Mossad's liaison with China and ultimately played the key role in developing the massive global weapons transfers between Israel and China that came to public attention in the 1980s.
It is also not incidental that James Angleton, the CIA liaison to the Mossad, was a devoted partisan of Israel who not only orchestrated the scenario linking accused assassin Lee Oswald to the Soviet KGB but who also later circulated disinformation to confuse investigations into the assassination. The tales of Angleton's intrigues with the Mossad during the Cold War are legion.
As far as the oft-discussed "Mafia" connection to the JFK assassination, even "mainstream" sources on organized crime note that the Italian- American" Mafia" figures most often accused of being behind the assassination—Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santo Trafficante of Tampa, Florida—were actually subordinates of Mossad-associated Meyer Lansky. Marcello and Trafficante reported to Lansky—not vice versa.
In addition, the nephew and namesake of the infamous Chicago Mafia boss, Sam Giancana—also often fingered as a possible sponsor of the JFK assassination—has recently put forth the assertion that the real boss of the Chicago Mafia was an American Jewish associate of Meyer Lansky—one
Hyman "Hal" Larner—who, while pulling the strings of Giancana and the Chicago Mafia, was also actively collaborating in international intrigue with Israel's Mossad.
It is no wonder that some critics suggest that perhaps Oliver Stone failed to mention these details in JFK because the film was financed by Arnon Milchan, an Israeli arms dealer-turned-Hollywood producer whom even CBS's Sixty Minutes has linked to smuggling of materiel to Israel's nuclear program—which, of course, just happened to be the bitter (and perhaps fatal) point of contention between JFK and Israel.
Although Israeli diplomat Uri Palti has declared all of this—as outlined in detail in this author's book, Final Judgment—to be "nonsense," and CIA connected author Gerald Posner branded it "outlandish," and stridently pro- Israel conservative columnist George Will declared it "vicious intellectual
licentiousness,"
The Los Angeles Times grudgingly admitted in 1997 that the thesis of Final Judgment was "novel indeed," saying it "weave [s] together some of the key threads in a tapestry that many say is unique."
And it should be noted, that although there are many who do believe that the CIA had a hand in the JFK assassination, quite a few of those same people are fearful of mentioning the likelihood of a Mossad role. Yet, as journalist Andrew Cockburn has pointed out:
"There has been since almost the earliest days of the Israeli state and the earliest days of the CIA a secret bond, basically by which Israeli intelligence did jobs for the CIA and for the rest of American intelligence.
You can't understand what's been going on with American covert operations and the Israeli covert operations until you understand this secret arrangement."
There are at least three major books, by well-known journalists, who document the subterranean links between the CIA and the Mossad, not to mention, in one facet or another, aspects of JFK's bitter secret conflict with Israel, not only over nuclear arms policy, but over U.S. Middle East policy
in general. In addition, these volumes demonstrate that U.S. policy did indeed do a drastic 180-degree turn-about upon the death of President Kennedy:
1) The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy by Pulitizer Prize-winning veteran New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh.
2) Dangerous Liasion: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by husband-and-wife team, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, both respected liberal journalists; and
3) Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel by Stephen Green, who has been associated with the very "mainstream" Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Hersh and Green, by the way, are Jewish. All three books were published by respected publishing houses. All of these volumes make it very clear that JFK and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion were at serious loggerheads, to the point that Ben-Gurion believed that JFK's policy was a threat to Israel's very survival- and said so.
Upon JFK's assassination, American policy toward the Middle East did an amazing 180 degree turn-about-the most immediate result of the American president's murder.
This is a cold, hard, indisputable fact not subject to debate. The evidence is all too clear. Hersh has noted that the Israeli press and 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, Hersh went on to say, quite significantly, that there was "no way for the Israeli public" to know that there was "yet another factor" behind the resignation: specifically, in Hersh's words, Ben-Gurion's "increasingly bitter impasse with Kennedy over a nuclear-armed Israel."
The final showdown with JFK over the nuclear bomb was clearly, the "primary reason" behind Ben-Gurion's resignation. As we have seen, the drive to build a nuclear bomb was not only a major aim of Israel's defense policy (its very foundation) and also a particular special interest of Ben-Gurion.
In any event, Seymour Hersh's revelations about JFK and Ben-Gurion have been eclipsed by a more recent volume on the same subject—one by an Israeli scholar, Avner Cohen. When Cohen released his 1999 book Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press), the book created
quite a sensation in Israel. The "nuclear option" was not only at the very core of Ben-Gurion's personal worldview, but the very foundation of Israel's national security
policy.
The Israelis were essentially willing, if necessary, to "blow up the world"—including themselves—if they had to do so in order to defeat their Arab foes.
This is what Hersh notes Israeli nuclear planners considered "the Samson Option"—that, as Samson of the Bible, after being captured by the Philistines, brought down Dagon'sTemple in Gaza and killed himself along with his enemies.
As Hersh put it, "For Israel's nuclear advocates, the Samson Option became another way of saying 'Never again," (in reference to preventing another Holocaust). All of the evidence, taken together in the big picture, clearly demonstrates that it was indeed "The Samson Option" that was indeed the primary cause of Ben-Gurion's resignation.
The bottom line is that—in 1963—JFK's conflict with Ben-Gurion was a secret to both the Israeli public and the American public and remained so for more than 20 years at least and still remains so, despite the release of Hersh's book, followed by Final Judgment and then the book by Avner
Cohen.
Avner Cohen's very powerful book essentially confirmed everything that Hersh had written but went even further. Cohen described how the conflict between JFK and Ben-Gurion reached its pinnacle in 1963 and how, on June 16 of that year, JFK sent a letter to the Israeli leader that Cohen says was "the toughest and most explicit message" yet.
Cohen added: "Kennedy exerted the most useful leverage available to an American president in dealing with Israel: a threat that an unsatisfactory solution would jeopardize the U.S. government's
commitment to, and support of, Israel..."
Ben-Gurion never read JFK's letter. Instead, Ben-Gurion announced his resignation. Cohen said that Ben-Gurion never provided an explanation for his decision, except in reference to "personal reasons." To his cabinet colleagues Ben-Gurion said that he "must" resign and that "no state problem or event caused it." Cohen added that Ben-Gurion had "concluded that he could not tell the truth about Dimona to American leaders, not even in private."
Immediately upon Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's resignation, JFK wrote a letter to the new prime minister. Levi Eshkol, that was evidently even more fierce than JFK's previous harsh communications with Ben-Gurion.Avner Cohen wrote:
Not since Eisenhower's message to Ben-Gurion in the midst of the Suez crisis in November 1956 had an American president been so blunt with an Israeli prime minister. Kennedy told Eshkol that the U.S. commitment and support of Israel "could be seriously jeopardized" if Israel did not let the United States obtain "reliable information" about its efforts in the nuclear field.
Kennedy's demands were unprecedented. They amounted, in effect, to an ultimatum. Cohen noted that:
"From [Eshkol's] perspective, Kennedy's demands seemed diplomatically inappropriate; they were inconsistent with national sovereignty. There was no legal basis or political precedent for such
demands," Cohen says "Kennedy's letter precipitated a near-crisis situation in the prime minister's office."
So, contrary to what some might suggest today, Kennedy's pressure on Israel did not end with the resignation of Ben-Gurion. Instead, JFK's pressure on Israel over its nuclear ambitions clearly intensified. JFK would have no part of a nuclear-armed Israel in any way, shape or form. The Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, published a review of Cohen's book on February 5, 1999, calling it "a bombshell of a book." The Ha'aretz review, by Reuven Pedatzur, is quite interesting. It reads in part:
The murder of American President John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the U.S. administration on the government of Israel to discontinue the nuclear pro-gram. Cohen demonstrates at length the pressures applied by Kennedy on Ben-Gurion.
He brings the fascinating exchange of letters between the two, in which Kennedy makes it quite clear
to [Ben-Gurion] that he [JFK] will under no circumstances agree to Israel becoming a nuclear state.
The book implied that, had Kennedy remained alive, it is doubtful whether Israel would today have a nuclear option. According to historian Stephen Green: "Perhaps the most significant development of 1963 for the Israeli nuclear weapons program, however, occurred on November 22 on a plane flying from Dallas to Washington, D.C., Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United
States, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Green elaborated further, in no uncertain terms::"In the early years of the Johnson administration the Israeli nuclear weapons program was referred to in Washington as the delicate topic.' Lyndon Johnson's White House saw no Dimona, heard no Dimona, and spoke no Dimona when the
reactor went critical in early 1964." Thus, it was that the critical point of dispute between John F. Kennedy and the Mossad-dominated government of Israel was no longer an issue.
The new American president—so long a partisan of Israel— allowed the nuclear program to continue. This was just the beginning. Where does the more conventional thesis that the CIA was the prime mover behind the JFK assassination fit alongside the theory that the Mossad was also a key force in the JFK conspiracy?
By 1963 John F. Kennedy was not only at war with Israel and the crime syndicate dominated by Israeli loyalist Meyer Lansky and his Mafia henchmen, but JFK was also at war with their close ally in the international intelligence underworld—the CIA. The CIA, of course, had its own problems with JFK. Just six weeks before John F. Kennedy was shot, The New York Times itself reported that
a top Kennedy administration official had warned that a CIA-orchestrated coup in America was a fearful possibility. The CIA—like its allies in Israel—had good reason (in its own perception) to want to see JFK removed from the White House and replaced with Lyndon B.Johnson.
JFK's battle with the CIA over the Bay of Pigs debacle was just the beginning. JFK was—by the last days of his presidency—not only fighting the CIA's efforts to involve the United States ever more deeply in Southeast Asia, but he was also moving toward dismantling the CIA entirely. The CIA's very existence was in danger.
This, of course, has brought focus to the CIA as a likely suspect in the JFK assassination and it was a course of investigation followed by Jim Garrison. However, there are other often-mentioned CIA connections to the assassination that also point toward the Mossad.
Note for example that a former mistress of Fidel Castro, CIA asset Marita Lorenz, testified to the U.S. Congress that longtime CIA operative Frank Sturgis, famous as an anti-Castro activist, told her after the assassination that he had been involved in the JFK assassination.
Based on his own extensive study of the JFK assassination Cuba's former chief of counterintelligence, General Fabian Escalante Escalante, told journalist Claudia Furiati that Cuban intelligence had determined that, in fact, "Sturgis was in charge of communications—receiving and
transmitting information on the movement at Dealey Plaza and the motorcade to the shooters and others."
If Sturgis was involved in the actual mechanics of the assassination, the historical evidence suggests that Sturgis could have been functioning as a knowing Mossad tool in the conspiracy. The truth is that going back some fifteen years prior to the JFK assassination, Sturgis had worked for the Mossad.
According to JFK assassination researcher F Peter Model, Sturgis was a "Hagannah mercenary during the first (1948) Israeli-Arab war," and Sturgis also had a girlfriend in Europe in the 1950s who worked for Israeli intelligence and with whom he worked. Sturgis himself said that he assisted
his girlfriend as a courier in Europe in a number of her endeavors on behalf of the Mossad.
According to the late Andrew St. George, a former Time-Life correspondent who spent much time in Cuba during and after Castro's revolution, it was also well known among anti-Castro Cuban exiles that Sturgis had also worked for the Mossad and had done so for a long period of time.
In addition, during the heyday of the CIA's anti-Castro operations in Miami in which Sturgis was a key figure, some 12 to 16 Mossad agents worked out of Miami under the command of Mossad Deputy Director Yehuda S. Sipper, their influence reaching throughout Latin America and
the Caribbean.
Citing a 1976 CIA memo, Professor John Newman who has investigated CIA knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald's activities, says that Sturgis founded the International Anti-Communist Brigade and that "the backers of Sturgis' group have never been fully established."
Information outlined by a number of sources suggests that Sturgis' group could have been an off-shoot of the Mossad's Miami-based operations, intertwined with Sturgis' own CIA-sponsored intrigue in the same sphere of influence. In fact, a unit of Sturgis' Brigade was CIA contract agent Gerry Patrick Hemming's so-called "Interpen" that operated outside New Orleans and Sturgis was connected with those Interpen operations.
Those activities around New Orleans are known to have involved two of the key players surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the JFK assassination: CIA contract agents Guy Banister and David Ferrie (both of whom were investigated by Jim Garrison and both of whom Garrison linked to Clay Shaw in activities involving intelligence intrigue.)
In fact, there is an Israeli connection to Interpen. According to Hemming himself, Interpen's "most important contact in the United States" was New York financier, Theodore Racoosin, whom Hemming described as "one of the key founders of the state of Israel." Hemming frankly says that although he personally has seen no evidence that convinces him the Mossad participated directly in the JFK assassination, he has said that "I have known since the late 1960s that the Mossad was aware of the JFK murder even before it happened, and they later did a full investigation on the matter and have since retained all such files." [Emphasis added.]
In any case, we not only find CIA asset Clay Shaw of New Orleans tied to the Mossad through his association with the Permindex operation (as were Banister and Ferrie), but we also find two other CIA-connected players in the anti-Castro operations out of New Orleans (Sturgis and Hemming) were in the Mossad's sphere of influence. And Lee Harvey Oswald is tied to all of the key players involved.
In any event, we now do know that at least one person who has reportedly confessed to actual involvement in the JFK assassination—Frank Sturgis—did have multiple longtime links to the Mossad for many years prior to (and after) the time of the JFK assassination. And so it goes.
There's much more to the story. But let us close with this: Some years ago, an American gentleman met famed CBS newsman Walter Cronkite at Martha's Vineyard. He apprised Cronkite of the theory
of Mossad involvement in the JFK assassination and Cronkite listened carefully. Cronkite's response was intriguing, to say the least.
Looking out to sea, Cronkite remarked quite succinctly: "I can't think of any group—with the exception of Israeli intelligence—that would have been able to keep the JFK assassination conspiracy under wraps for so long."
The evidence demonstrates that there is a very strong foundation for the thesis. It is a scenario that does make sense, much to the dismay of many critics. The scenario comes closer than anything yet written in summarizing the entirety of the JFK assassination conspiracy.
This admittedly "unusual "and certainly controversial reconstruction of the JFK assassination conspiracy takes a new look at a very big jigsaw puzzle that displays a remarkably complex and somewhat murky picture.
On the immensely confusing picture on the front of the puzzle are all of the various groups and individuals implicated in the JFK assassination conspiracy. However, when one turns the puzzle over, there is a large and very clear picture of the Israeli flag to be found.
Did John F. Kennedy's determined (and then secret) behind-the-scenes efforts to prevent Israel from building a nuclear weapons arsenal play a pivotal part in the events that led to his assassination on November 22, 1963?
Was Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad, a front-line player in the JFK assassination conspiracy alongside elements of the CIA and international organized crime? Why did Hollywood film-maker Oliver Stone fail to reveal—in his 1993 all-star JFK assassination extravaganza—that the hero of his epic, former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, had privately concluded that the Mossad was ultimately the driving force behind JFK's murder?
With worldwide attention focused on the problems of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East—is it valid or appropriate to raise the question of possible Israeli complicity in the assassination of an American president?
These are just a few of the hotly controversial questions posed in the book, Final Judgment, which has emerged as a proverbial "underground best-seller" in the United States, the topic of heated debate on the Internet and the subject of angry exchanges in a variety of public forums.
What follows is a summary of the findings in Final Judgment, which is a 768-page volume documented with more than 1000 reference notes, an extensive question-and-answer section, 36 pages of photographs and charts, and ten appendices focusing on different aspects of the JFK assassination conspiracy.
In 1992, former U.S. Congressman Paul Findley, a liberal Republican, made the little-noticed but intriguing comment that "in all the words written about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned, despite the obvious fact Mossad complicity is as plausible as any of the other theories."
Where in the world could Findley—never known to be an extremist, by any means, and certainly not one given to venting conspiracy theories— have ever come up with such an assertion? Actually, it's no so extraordinary a thesis, if one looks at the historical record, placing all of the conventional theories about the JFK assassination in a new perspective, calculating in previously-little known details that shed stark light on the circumstances surrounding JFK's demise and the geopolitical crises in which the American president was embroiled at the time of his shocking murder.
In truth, even the most recently widely-disseminated exposition of JFK assassination theorizing—Oliver Stone's 1993 blockbuster film, JFK—did not present even the entire picture. Although Stone portrayed former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison as a hero for pointing the finger in the direction of elements of the U.S. military and intelligence networks as the guiding force behind JFK's
murder, what Stone didn't tell his audience was something even more controversial: that, privately, after some years of research and reflection,
Garrison had reached an even more startling determination: that the driving force behind JFK's murder was no less than Israel's feared intelligence service, the Mossad.
As astounding as it sounds, there's actually good reason to conclude that Garrison may have been looking in the right direction. And in this day when the debate over "weapons of mass destruction" is in the forefront of global discussion, it is not so extraordinary a thesis as it seems. The 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy approaches and the fascination with the murder of America's 35th president won't go away. Assassination "buffs"—not just in the United States but
around the globe—continue to chip away at the conclusions of the two official U.S. government investigations into the affair.
Although the 1979 report by a special committee of the U.S. Congress formally contradicted the earlier 1964 finding by the presidentially appointed Warren Commission that alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone and concluded instead that there was indeed the likelihood of a conspiracy behind the president's murder— hinting broadly at the involvement by organized crime—the congressional committee's final determination actually raised more questions, in some respects, than it answered.
In 1993 Hollywood's Oliver Stone entered the fray with his blockbuster all-star extravaganza, JFK, which presented Stone's interpretation of the widely-publicized 1967-1969 JFK assassination inquiry by then-New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.
Stone's film—featuring Kevin Costner as Garrison—raised the specter of involvement by elements of the so-called "military-industrial complex," along with a scattering of anti-Castro Cuban exiles, right-wing militants, and rogue Central Intelligence Agency operatives.The film told the story of Garrison's investigation, and ultimately unsuccessful prosecution, of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw (then suspected of being—and later proven to be—a collaborator with the CIA) for involvement
in the JFK conspiracy.
However, as we now know, not even Stone was faithful to his hero. Longtime independent JFK assassination investigator A. J. Weberman has since revealed that, during the 1970s—well after Garrison's prosecution of Shaw—that Garrison was circulating the manuscript for a novel (never
published) in which Garrison named Israel's Mossad as the mastermind of the JFK assassination conspiracy.
Garrison never said anything about this unusual thesis—at least publicly. But beginning in the mid-1980s and well into the present day, new evidence has emerged that not only points to good reason for Mossad motivation to move against John F. Kennedy, but also to the likelihood that not only Clay Shaw (Garrison's target) but other key figures often associated in published writings with the JFK assassination were indeed closely tied to the Mossad and doing its bidding. And what is particularly interesting is that none of the individuals in question—Shaw included—happened to be Jewish.
So the assertion that allegations of Mossad involvement are somehow "anti-Semitic "in nature
fall flat on that fact alone. But Mossad complicity—as the record indicates— is a very real possibility.
Garrison's critics continue to assert that the New Orleans District Attorney couldn't make up his mind as to whom he thought had orchestrated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. This indeed was the primary complaint against the rambunctious and outspoken and quite colorful prosecutor: that he simply couldn't make up his mind. And this is one of the reasons that even many of Garrison's supporters not only began to question his sincerity, but even as to whether Garrison's
investigation was even worth the trouble.
In truth, Garrison did tend to shoot from the hip. That may have been his biggest mistake—one of many—in the course of his controversial inquiry into the murder of America's 35th president.
At one time or another, during the course of that investigation, Garrison pointed his finger at one or another various possible conspirators— ranging from "right-wing extremists" to "Texas oil barons" to "anti- Castro Cuban exiles" to "rogue CIA operatives." Occasionally Garrison went so far as to say that the conspiracy included a combination of those possible conspirators.
When Garrison finally brought one man to trial, widely respected New Orleans trade executive Clay Shaw, Garrison had narrowed his field, suggesting, primarily, that Shaw had been one of the lower-level players in the conspiracy.
According to Garrison, Shaw was essentially doing the bidding of JFK's SECRET WAR WITH ISRAEL highly-placed figures in what has been described as "the military-industrial complex," that combination of financial interests and armaments manufacturers whose power and influence in official Washington—and around the world—is a very real force in global affairs.
Garrison suggested that Shaw and his co-conspirators had multiple motivations stimulating their decision to move against President Kennedy.
Among other things, he asserted:
• The conspirators opposed JFK's decision to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Indochina;
• They were angry at his failure to provide military cover support for Cuban exiles attempting to topple Fidel Castro in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion;
• They were bitter at JFK for firing longtime CIA Director Allen Dulles, a grand old man of the Cold War against the Soviet Union; and
• In addition, Garrison hinted, JFK's successor, Lyndon Johnson, may have wanted JFK removed from office for the purpose of claiming the crown for himself, but also because JFK and his younger brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, were not only plotting to remove Johnson from
the Democratic national ticket in 1964, as well as conducting federal criminal investigations of many of Johnson's closest associates and financial backers—even including in the realm of organized crime, many of whom, the historical record shows, had close (albeit little known) ties to
Israel and its intelligence service, the Mossad.
In the end, after a relatively brief deliberation, the jury hearing the Shaw case acquitted Shaw. It was only later—much later—that evidence emerged that Shaw had indeed been a CIA informant, Shaw's protestations the contrary.
Only in recent years has it been determined, for example, that the American CIA was deliberately sabotaging Garrison's investigation from within, not to mention providing assistance to Shaw's defense. And although there are those who continue to say that Shaw's acquittal "proved" that Shaw had nothing whatsoever to do with the JFK conspiracy, the bigger picture suggests quite the contrary.
Shaw was involved with something very murky and so were others in Shaw's circle of friends and associates. And they were, in turn, directly connected to the strange activities of Lee Harvey Oswald in New Orleans, the summer just prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, before Oswald's sojourn to Dallas. Dozens of writers—many with differing points of view—have documented all of this, time and again.
So although the "official" legend is that Jim Garrison believed that the CIA and the military-industrial complex were the prime movers behind JFK's murder, when all was said and done, however, Jim Garrison had privately reached quite a different conclusion, one that remains largely
unknown even to many people who worked with Garrison throughout the course of his investigation.
In fact, as noted, Garrison had decided—based on the entirety of everything that he had learned, from a wide variety of sources—that the most likely masterminds of the JFK assassination were operatives of Israel's intelligence service, the Mossad.
The remarkable truth is that—although Garrison apparently didn't know it at the time, precisely because the facts had yet to be revealed—Garrison may have been on to something, far more than he realized.
The public record now demonstrates that in 1963 JFK was embroiled in a bitter secret conflict with Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion over Israel's drive to build the atomic bomb; that Ben-Gurion resigned in disgust, saying that because of JFK's policies, Israel's "existence [was] in danger."
Then upon JFK's assassination, U.S. policy toward Israel began an immediate 180-degree turnaround.
Israeli historian Avner Cohen's new book, Israel and the Bomb, confirms the conflict between JFK and Israel so powerfully that, Israel's Ha'aretz, declared Cohen's revelations would "necessitate the rewriting of Israel's entire history."
From Israel's perspective, writes Cohen, "Kennedy's demands [on Israel] seemed diplomatically inappropriate ... inconsistent with national sovereignty." In any case, Cohen pointed out, "the transition from Kennedy to [Lyndon] Johnson ... benefited the Israeli nuclear program."
Ethan Bronner, in The New York Times, called Israel's drive to build a nuclear bomb "a fiercely hidden subject." This explains why JFK researchers—and Jim Garrison—never considered an Israeli.
While all of this presents a strong motive for Israel to strike against JFK, even maverick Israeli journalist Barry Chamish acknowledges that there exists "a pretty cogent case" for Mossad collaboration with the CIA in the assassination conspiracy.
The fact is that when Jim Garrison prosecuted Clay Shaw with conspiracy in the assassination, Garrison had stumbled upon the Mossad link. Although (after his acquittal) Shaw was revealed to have been a CIA asset, in 1963 Shaw also served on the board of a Rome-based company, Permindex, which was (the evidence suggests) actually a front for a Mossad-sponsored arms procurement operation.
How and why Shaw happened to end up in association with this operation remains a mystery, but the very clear role of the Mossad in the activities of Permindex is beyond question, protestations notwithstanding. The evidence is strong indeed. Judge for yourself:
A primary shareholder in Permindex, the Banque De Credit Internationale of Geneva, was not only the fiefdom of Tibor Rosenbaum, a high-level and longtime Mossad official—indeed, one of the founding fathers of Israel—but also the chief money laundry for Meyer Lansky, "chairman" of the crime syndicate and long-time Israeli loyalist.
According to Meyer Lansky's sympathetic Israeli biographers: "After Israel became a state, almost 90 percent of its purchases of arms abroad was channeled through Rosenbaum's bank. The financing of many of Israel's most daring secret operations was carried out through the funds in [BCI]." BCI also served as a depository for the Permindex account.
That Tibor Rosenbaum's BCI was a controlling force behind the enigmatic Permindex entity places Israel and its Mossad in the very center of the conspiracy behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Note also that the chief executive and shareholder of Permindex was Louis Bloomfield of Montreal, a top figure in the Israeli lobby in Canada (and internationally) and a longtime operative of the family of World Jewish Congress chief Samuel Bronfman—an intimate Lansky business partner in the international traffic in bootleg whiskey during Prohibition and, much later, a leading patron of Israel.
Permindex was clearly the Israeli link to the JFK assassination. The Permindex link also explains the "French connection" featured in the documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy, but which failed to tell the entire story:
• That Permindex was also involved in assassination attempts against French President Charles DeGaulle by the French "Secret Army Organization" (OAS) which itself had close ties to the Mossad.
• Like the OAS, the Israelis hated DeGaulle not only because he gave independence to Algeria, a major new Arab state, but also because DeGaulle, who had assisted Israel, had withdrawn support, objecting (as did JFK) to Israel's drive for an atomic arsenal.
• A French intelligence officer alleged to this author, in 1993, that the Mossad contracted out at least one of JFK's assassins—probably a Corsican hitman—through a French intelligence official disloyal to DeGaulle and who hated JFK for supporting Algerian independence. There is also firm evidence—based on revelations by the late respected journalist Stewart Alsop—that JFK was also planning a strike against Red China's nuclear bomb program—a plan scuttled by Lyndon Johnson within
a month of JFK's assassination.
During this same period, according to famed British intellience historian Donald McCormack, (writing under his nom de plume, Richard Deacon, in his book, The Israeli Secret Service) that Israel and Red China were involved in joint secret nuclear bomb research.
We now know, in addition, that a key player in the Permindex web, billionaire Israeli industrialist Shaul Eisenberg, emerged as the Mossad's liaison with China and ultimately played the key role in developing the massive global weapons transfers between Israel and China that came to public attention in the 1980s.
It is also not incidental that James Angleton, the CIA liaison to the Mossad, was a devoted partisan of Israel who not only orchestrated the scenario linking accused assassin Lee Oswald to the Soviet KGB but who also later circulated disinformation to confuse investigations into the assassination. The tales of Angleton's intrigues with the Mossad during the Cold War are legion.
As far as the oft-discussed "Mafia" connection to the JFK assassination, even "mainstream" sources on organized crime note that the Italian- American" Mafia" figures most often accused of being behind the assassination—Carlos Marcello of New Orleans and Santo Trafficante of Tampa, Florida—were actually subordinates of Mossad-associated Meyer Lansky. Marcello and Trafficante reported to Lansky—not vice versa.
In addition, the nephew and namesake of the infamous Chicago Mafia boss, Sam Giancana—also often fingered as a possible sponsor of the JFK assassination—has recently put forth the assertion that the real boss of the Chicago Mafia was an American Jewish associate of Meyer Lansky—one
Hyman "Hal" Larner—who, while pulling the strings of Giancana and the Chicago Mafia, was also actively collaborating in international intrigue with Israel's Mossad.
It is no wonder that some critics suggest that perhaps Oliver Stone failed to mention these details in JFK because the film was financed by Arnon Milchan, an Israeli arms dealer-turned-Hollywood producer whom even CBS's Sixty Minutes has linked to smuggling of materiel to Israel's nuclear program—which, of course, just happened to be the bitter (and perhaps fatal) point of contention between JFK and Israel.
Although Israeli diplomat Uri Palti has declared all of this—as outlined in detail in this author's book, Final Judgment—to be "nonsense," and CIA connected author Gerald Posner branded it "outlandish," and stridently pro- Israel conservative columnist George Will declared it "vicious intellectual
licentiousness,"
The Los Angeles Times grudgingly admitted in 1997 that the thesis of Final Judgment was "novel indeed," saying it "weave [s] together some of the key threads in a tapestry that many say is unique."
And it should be noted, that although there are many who do believe that the CIA had a hand in the JFK assassination, quite a few of those same people are fearful of mentioning the likelihood of a Mossad role. Yet, as journalist Andrew Cockburn has pointed out:
"There has been since almost the earliest days of the Israeli state and the earliest days of the CIA a secret bond, basically by which Israeli intelligence did jobs for the CIA and for the rest of American intelligence.
You can't understand what's been going on with American covert operations and the Israeli covert operations until you understand this secret arrangement."
There are at least three major books, by well-known journalists, who document the subterranean links between the CIA and the Mossad, not to mention, in one facet or another, aspects of JFK's bitter secret conflict with Israel, not only over nuclear arms policy, but over U.S. Middle East policy
in general. In addition, these volumes demonstrate that U.S. policy did indeed do a drastic 180-degree turn-about upon the death of President Kennedy:
1) The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy by Pulitizer Prize-winning veteran New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh.
2) Dangerous Liasion: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship by husband-and-wife team, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, both respected liberal journalists; and
3) Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel by Stephen Green, who has been associated with the very "mainstream" Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Hersh and Green, by the way, are Jewish. All three books were published by respected publishing houses. All of these volumes make it very clear that JFK and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion were at serious loggerheads, to the point that Ben-Gurion believed that JFK's policy was a threat to Israel's very survival- and said so.
Upon JFK's assassination, American policy toward the Middle East did an amazing 180 degree turn-about-the most immediate result of the American president's murder.
This is a cold, hard, indisputable fact not subject to debate. The evidence is all too clear. Hersh has noted that the Israeli press and 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, Hersh went on to say, quite significantly, that there was "no way for the Israeli public" to know that there was "yet another factor" behind the resignation: specifically, in Hersh's words, Ben-Gurion's "increasingly bitter impasse with Kennedy over a nuclear-armed Israel."
The final showdown with JFK over the nuclear bomb was clearly, the "primary reason" behind Ben-Gurion's resignation. As we have seen, the drive to build a nuclear bomb was not only a major aim of Israel's defense policy (its very foundation) and also a particular special interest of Ben-Gurion.
In any event, Seymour Hersh's revelations about JFK and Ben-Gurion have been eclipsed by a more recent volume on the same subject—one by an Israeli scholar, Avner Cohen. When Cohen released his 1999 book Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press), the book created
quite a sensation in Israel. The "nuclear option" was not only at the very core of Ben-Gurion's personal worldview, but the very foundation of Israel's national security
policy.
The Israelis were essentially willing, if necessary, to "blow up the world"—including themselves—if they had to do so in order to defeat their Arab foes.
This is what Hersh notes Israeli nuclear planners considered "the Samson Option"—that, as Samson of the Bible, after being captured by the Philistines, brought down Dagon'sTemple in Gaza and killed himself along with his enemies.
As Hersh put it, "For Israel's nuclear advocates, the Samson Option became another way of saying 'Never again," (in reference to preventing another Holocaust). All of the evidence, taken together in the big picture, clearly demonstrates that it was indeed "The Samson Option" that was indeed the primary cause of Ben-Gurion's resignation.
The bottom line is that—in 1963—JFK's conflict with Ben-Gurion was a secret to both the Israeli public and the American public and remained so for more than 20 years at least and still remains so, despite the release of Hersh's book, followed by Final Judgment and then the book by Avner
Cohen.
Avner Cohen's very powerful book essentially confirmed everything that Hersh had written but went even further. Cohen described how the conflict between JFK and Ben-Gurion reached its pinnacle in 1963 and how, on June 16 of that year, JFK sent a letter to the Israeli leader that Cohen says was "the toughest and most explicit message" yet.
Cohen added: "Kennedy exerted the most useful leverage available to an American president in dealing with Israel: a threat that an unsatisfactory solution would jeopardize the U.S. government's
commitment to, and support of, Israel..."
Ben-Gurion never read JFK's letter. Instead, Ben-Gurion announced his resignation. Cohen said that Ben-Gurion never provided an explanation for his decision, except in reference to "personal reasons." To his cabinet colleagues Ben-Gurion said that he "must" resign and that "no state problem or event caused it." Cohen added that Ben-Gurion had "concluded that he could not tell the truth about Dimona to American leaders, not even in private."
Immediately upon Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's resignation, JFK wrote a letter to the new prime minister. Levi Eshkol, that was evidently even more fierce than JFK's previous harsh communications with Ben-Gurion.Avner Cohen wrote:
Not since Eisenhower's message to Ben-Gurion in the midst of the Suez crisis in November 1956 had an American president been so blunt with an Israeli prime minister. Kennedy told Eshkol that the U.S. commitment and support of Israel "could be seriously jeopardized" if Israel did not let the United States obtain "reliable information" about its efforts in the nuclear field.
Kennedy's demands were unprecedented. They amounted, in effect, to an ultimatum. Cohen noted that:
"From [Eshkol's] perspective, Kennedy's demands seemed diplomatically inappropriate; they were inconsistent with national sovereignty. There was no legal basis or political precedent for such
demands," Cohen says "Kennedy's letter precipitated a near-crisis situation in the prime minister's office."
So, contrary to what some might suggest today, Kennedy's pressure on Israel did not end with the resignation of Ben-Gurion. Instead, JFK's pressure on Israel over its nuclear ambitions clearly intensified. JFK would have no part of a nuclear-armed Israel in any way, shape or form. The Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, published a review of Cohen's book on February 5, 1999, calling it "a bombshell of a book." The Ha'aretz review, by Reuven Pedatzur, is quite interesting. It reads in part:
The murder of American President John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the U.S. administration on the government of Israel to discontinue the nuclear pro-gram. Cohen demonstrates at length the pressures applied by Kennedy on Ben-Gurion.
He brings the fascinating exchange of letters between the two, in which Kennedy makes it quite clear
to [Ben-Gurion] that he [JFK] will under no circumstances agree to Israel becoming a nuclear state.
The book implied that, had Kennedy remained alive, it is doubtful whether Israel would today have a nuclear option. According to historian Stephen Green: "Perhaps the most significant development of 1963 for the Israeli nuclear weapons program, however, occurred on November 22 on a plane flying from Dallas to Washington, D.C., Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United
States, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Green elaborated further, in no uncertain terms::"In the early years of the Johnson administration the Israeli nuclear weapons program was referred to in Washington as the delicate topic.' Lyndon Johnson's White House saw no Dimona, heard no Dimona, and spoke no Dimona when the
reactor went critical in early 1964." Thus, it was that the critical point of dispute between John F. Kennedy and the Mossad-dominated government of Israel was no longer an issue.
The new American president—so long a partisan of Israel— allowed the nuclear program to continue. This was just the beginning. Where does the more conventional thesis that the CIA was the prime mover behind the JFK assassination fit alongside the theory that the Mossad was also a key force in the JFK conspiracy?
By 1963 John F. Kennedy was not only at war with Israel and the crime syndicate dominated by Israeli loyalist Meyer Lansky and his Mafia henchmen, but JFK was also at war with their close ally in the international intelligence underworld—the CIA. The CIA, of course, had its own problems with JFK. Just six weeks before John F. Kennedy was shot, The New York Times itself reported that
a top Kennedy administration official had warned that a CIA-orchestrated coup in America was a fearful possibility. The CIA—like its allies in Israel—had good reason (in its own perception) to want to see JFK removed from the White House and replaced with Lyndon B.Johnson.
JFK's battle with the CIA over the Bay of Pigs debacle was just the beginning. JFK was—by the last days of his presidency—not only fighting the CIA's efforts to involve the United States ever more deeply in Southeast Asia, but he was also moving toward dismantling the CIA entirely. The CIA's very existence was in danger.
This, of course, has brought focus to the CIA as a likely suspect in the JFK assassination and it was a course of investigation followed by Jim Garrison. However, there are other often-mentioned CIA connections to the assassination that also point toward the Mossad.
Note for example that a former mistress of Fidel Castro, CIA asset Marita Lorenz, testified to the U.S. Congress that longtime CIA operative Frank Sturgis, famous as an anti-Castro activist, told her after the assassination that he had been involved in the JFK assassination.
Based on his own extensive study of the JFK assassination Cuba's former chief of counterintelligence, General Fabian Escalante Escalante, told journalist Claudia Furiati that Cuban intelligence had determined that, in fact, "Sturgis was in charge of communications—receiving and
transmitting information on the movement at Dealey Plaza and the motorcade to the shooters and others."
If Sturgis was involved in the actual mechanics of the assassination, the historical evidence suggests that Sturgis could have been functioning as a knowing Mossad tool in the conspiracy. The truth is that going back some fifteen years prior to the JFK assassination, Sturgis had worked for the Mossad.
According to JFK assassination researcher F Peter Model, Sturgis was a "Hagannah mercenary during the first (1948) Israeli-Arab war," and Sturgis also had a girlfriend in Europe in the 1950s who worked for Israeli intelligence and with whom he worked. Sturgis himself said that he assisted
his girlfriend as a courier in Europe in a number of her endeavors on behalf of the Mossad.
According to the late Andrew St. George, a former Time-Life correspondent who spent much time in Cuba during and after Castro's revolution, it was also well known among anti-Castro Cuban exiles that Sturgis had also worked for the Mossad and had done so for a long period of time.
In addition, during the heyday of the CIA's anti-Castro operations in Miami in which Sturgis was a key figure, some 12 to 16 Mossad agents worked out of Miami under the command of Mossad Deputy Director Yehuda S. Sipper, their influence reaching throughout Latin America and
the Caribbean.
Citing a 1976 CIA memo, Professor John Newman who has investigated CIA knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald's activities, says that Sturgis founded the International Anti-Communist Brigade and that "the backers of Sturgis' group have never been fully established."
Information outlined by a number of sources suggests that Sturgis' group could have been an off-shoot of the Mossad's Miami-based operations, intertwined with Sturgis' own CIA-sponsored intrigue in the same sphere of influence. In fact, a unit of Sturgis' Brigade was CIA contract agent Gerry Patrick Hemming's so-called "Interpen" that operated outside New Orleans and Sturgis was connected with those Interpen operations.
Those activities around New Orleans are known to have involved two of the key players surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the JFK assassination: CIA contract agents Guy Banister and David Ferrie (both of whom were investigated by Jim Garrison and both of whom Garrison linked to Clay Shaw in activities involving intelligence intrigue.)
In fact, there is an Israeli connection to Interpen. According to Hemming himself, Interpen's "most important contact in the United States" was New York financier, Theodore Racoosin, whom Hemming described as "one of the key founders of the state of Israel." Hemming frankly says that although he personally has seen no evidence that convinces him the Mossad participated directly in the JFK assassination, he has said that "I have known since the late 1960s that the Mossad was aware of the JFK murder even before it happened, and they later did a full investigation on the matter and have since retained all such files." [Emphasis added.]
In any case, we not only find CIA asset Clay Shaw of New Orleans tied to the Mossad through his association with the Permindex operation (as were Banister and Ferrie), but we also find two other CIA-connected players in the anti-Castro operations out of New Orleans (Sturgis and Hemming) were in the Mossad's sphere of influence. And Lee Harvey Oswald is tied to all of the key players involved.
In any event, we now do know that at least one person who has reportedly confessed to actual involvement in the JFK assassination—Frank Sturgis—did have multiple longtime links to the Mossad for many years prior to (and after) the time of the JFK assassination. And so it goes.
There's much more to the story. But let us close with this: Some years ago, an American gentleman met famed CBS newsman Walter Cronkite at Martha's Vineyard. He apprised Cronkite of the theory
of Mossad involvement in the JFK assassination and Cronkite listened carefully. Cronkite's response was intriguing, to say the least.
Looking out to sea, Cronkite remarked quite succinctly: "I can't think of any group—with the exception of Israeli intelligence—that would have been able to keep the JFK assassination conspiracy under wraps for so long."
The evidence demonstrates that there is a very strong foundation for the thesis. It is a scenario that does make sense, much to the dismay of many critics. The scenario comes closer than anything yet written in summarizing the entirety of the JFK assassination conspiracy.
This admittedly "unusual "and certainly controversial reconstruction of the JFK assassination conspiracy takes a new look at a very big jigsaw puzzle that displays a remarkably complex and somewhat murky picture.
On the immensely confusing picture on the front of the puzzle are all of the various groups and individuals implicated in the JFK assassination conspiracy. However, when one turns the puzzle over, there is a large and very clear picture of the Israeli flag to be found.
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