The Permindex link investigated by Mr. Garrison in New Orleans also explains the “French connection” to the assassination featured in the widely-seen documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy, but which failed to tell the entire story told in Final Judgment. For example:
That the aforementioned Permindex operation (involving Clay Shaw and other CIA assets often publicly connected to the JFK assassination) was also involved in assassination attempts against French President Charles DeGaulle by the French “Secret Army Organization” (the 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Algeria, a major new Arab state, but also because DeGaulle, who had assisted Israel’s nuclear development program, had withdrawn support, objecting (as did JFK) to Israel’s drive for an atomic arsenal.
In the course of my writing of the book, a former French intelligence officer-Pierre Neuville, the son of the former French consul general in Jerusalem-revealed to me that he had learned that the Mossad contracted out 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.
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, in fact, Israel and Red China were involved in joint secret nuclear bomb research with a key player in the Permindex web, Shaul Eisenberg, serving as the Mossad’s liaison with China.
Final Judgment was first to point out 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 later circulated disinformation to confuse investigations into the assassination.
This is a brief overview of some of the more salient points made in Final Judgment-points that have otherwise been largely ignored in the massive amount of material that has been published on the topic of the assassination.
The response to my thesis has been predictable. Israeli diplomat Uri Palti, based at the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles, has described my thesis as “nonsense.”
Pro-Zionist columnist George F. Will, in a column in Newsweek on Sept. 1, 1997, has referred to the thesis as being “vicious intellectual licentiousness.”
The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (the ADL) one of the foremost elements of the Israeli lobby, has repeatedly attacked me in a most malicious fashion. Most notably, the ADL called me a “Holocaust denier”-although my book mentions nothing about the Holocaust-this so as to distract attention from the very powerful thesis that my book does present.
However, one article about the controversy surrounding my thesis and one educator who has endorsed it, appearing in the Los Angeles Times on November 25, 1996 made the assertion that the thesis was “novel indeed” and that it managed “to weave together some of the key threads in a tapestry that many say is unique.”
However, as we all know too well, the reason why the theory presented in Final Judgment is "controversial" is simply because it dares to say something less than flattering about a foreign nation-Israel.
The truth is that the single tie that binds all of the most commonly-believed theories about the JFK assassination is the little-known Mossad connection.
Israel, however, is the central player whose role has been consistently ignored.
The first big question is whether Israel’s Mossad would actually consider assassinating an American president perceived hostile to Israel?
According to ex-Mossad man Victor Ostrovsky, the Israeli spy agency hatched a plan to kill President George Bush in 1991.
There is also evidence that the Jewish underground in Palestine in 1947 sent poisoned letters to President Harry Truman because he was dragging his feet as far as supporting the drive for a Jewish state was concerned. This information comes from Truman’s daughter, Margaret Truman, writing in a biography of her father.
The point is this: if Israel did indeed consider assassinating Bush in 1991 and Truman in 1947, why should we not also consider the possibility that the Mossad was indeed involved in a plot against John F. Kennedy in 1963?
And in this context it should now be noted that researchers in the JFK controversy have repeatedly pointed out the false leads that continue to appear.
Most believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin, was indeed what he claimed to be-the patsy-and that false clues had been laid by the real conspirators to make it appear as though Oswald was an agent of Fidel Castro or the Soviets or both.
A key chapter in Final Judgment points out that Israel has what I call “a bad habit”-that is, the use of what are known as “false flags” in pointing the finger of guilt elsewhere in the course of committing assassinations and acts of terrorism.
That chapter is a virtual catalogue of this little-known phenomenon, which is perhaps best exemplifed by Israel’s notorious Lavon Affair of the 1950s in which Israel staged bombings on American and British installations in Egypt for the purpose of blaming them on Islamic fundamentalist groups and destabilizing the regime of President Nasser.
Although the American media today promotes the idea that somehow John F. Kennedy was a dedicated friend of Israel, nothing could be further from the truth.
There was a long history of bitter enmity between John F. Kennedy and his powerful father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and organized crime boss Meyer Lansky, stemming in part from the senior Kennedy’s deals with the underworld. This, however, did not stop the Kennedy family from cutting deals with the crime syndicate when it came to winning elections.
The Kennedy family’s own suspected anti-Semitism didn’t do anything to improve JFK’s relations with Israel and its American lobby either. As a U.S. Senator, Kennedy’s intervention in the issue of Algerian independence from France also drew sharp criticism from the Israeli lobby as well.
Yet, when John F. Kennedy sought the presidency, he was willing to cut deals with the Israeli lobby-for a price.
By the end of his presidency, however, Kennedy had reneged on his deals, not only with Israel’s Godfather, Meyer Lansky, and his henchmen in organized crime, but also with the Israeli lobby.
What about the so-called “Mafia” or organized crime connections to the assassination? In fact, those connections also point toward the 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.
The evidence firmly indicates that 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.
As I’ve already noted, Lansky’s chief European money laundering bank was an operation directed by one of Israel’s founding fathers, Tibor Rosenbaum, a high-ranking, longtime Mossad officer.
Lansky’s intimate (and quite secret) ties with American intelligence (including both the CIA and the FBI) made the Russian-born Jewisyh mobster the “untouchable” leader of the global organized crime syndicate.
Meyer Lansky’s Louisiana front man, Carlos Marcello, has become a favorite target for JFK assassination researchers who like to claim that “The Mafia--that is, Italian-American crime figures--Killed JFK.”
Marcello was only one cog in the Lansky Syndicate. Marcello also had ties to Israel’s allies in the CIA.
Two other top Italian-AMerican crime figures-Johnny Rosselli and Santo Trafficante, Jr. have often linked to the JFK assassination.
Although both Rosselli and Trafficante were major players in the criminal underworld, both were, in fact-like Carlos Marcello-subordinates of Meyer Lansky.
Rosselli and Trafficante were Lansky’s point men in Lansky’s dealings with Israel’s allies in the CIA in assassination plots against Fidel Castro.
In truth, the Jewish presence in organized crime in America is a little-known phenomenon that the “Mafia”-obsessed media has kept under wraps.
What about Jack Ruby, the Jewish nightclub operator, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the president’s accused assassin?
Ruby’s connections to the criminal underworld are well-documented. However, what is ignored is Ruby’s integral link to the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate-not “the Mafia”- and to Israel’s allies in the CIA.
In Final Judgment I have documented additional connections between Jack Ruby and the state of Israel and its arms-smuggling and financial conduits in the United States.
FBI documents, long suppressed, reveal that Ruby himself traveled to Israel in 1955 and that while in San Francisco that year, Ruby told a friend, “After I leave here I’m going to Florida to buy a load of contraband to send to Israel.”
In addition, note that Lawrence Meyers, Ruby’s long-time friend with whom he met the night before the JFK assassination, was a salesman for Ero Manufacturing, a firm linked to a corporation investigated for illegal arms shipments to Israel.
In addition, we also now know that Jack Ruby was on the payroll of the Lansky Crime Syndicate-connected Bronfman family (now headed by Edgar Bronfman, leader of the World Jewish Congress).
Considering the Bronfman family's intimate ties to the Mossad-sponsored Permindex entity that played a central role in the JFK assassination conspiracy, the Ruby connection to the Bronfman family does point toward yet another Israeli connection to the JFK conspiracy.
The genesis of Israeli involvement in the JFK assassination was JFK’s growing conflict with Israel over Israel’s drive to build the nuclear bomb.
While the history books have told us of John F. Kennedy’s epic struggles with Fidel Castro and with the Soviets in the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban Missile Crisis only in recent years have we begun to learn of Kennedy’s secret war with Israel.
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.
As far as writing specifically about what I have called "JFK's secret war with Israel," I primarily relied on three sources:
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 "mainstream" publishing houses.
No honest JFK assassination researcher can claim to be fully versed in the dynamics of conspiracy until he or she has read these volumes, all of which 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.
In Final Judgment I pointed out, citing Hersh, 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.
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.
The fact is that Seymour Hersh's revelations about JFK and Ben-Gurion have been easily eclipsed by a more recent volume on the same subject-this one written 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 to the point that journalist Tom Segev writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, declared that "Cohen's book will necessitate the rewriting of Israel's entire history."
In the opening pages of his book, Cohen writes at length about Ben-Gurion's special interest in the construction of an Israeli nuclear bomb and the reasoning behind it.
Cohen has written, in part:
Ben-Gurion was consumed by fears for Israel’s security . . .
In his correspondence with President John F. Kennedy in 1963, he wrote:
"Mr. President, my people have the right to exist, both in Israel and wherever that may live, and this existence is in danger." . . .
Israeli military planners have always considered a scenario in which a united Arab military coalition launched a war against Israel with the aim of liberating Palestine and destroying the Jewish state. This was referred to in the early 1950s as mikre hkol, or the "everything scenario."
This kind of planning was unique to Israel, as few nations have military contingency plans aimed at preventing apocalypse.
Ben-Gurion had no qualms about Israel’s need for weapons of mass destruction . . . Ben Gurion saw Arab hostility toward Israel as deep and long-lasting . . . Ben-Gurion’s pessimism . . . influenced Israel’s foreign and defense policy for years. Ben-Gurion’s world view and his decisive governing style shaped his critical role in initiating Israel’s nuclear program.
On 27 June 1963, eleven days after he announced his resignation, Ben-Gurion delivered a farewell address to the employees of the Armaments Development Authority in which . . . he provided the justification for the nuclear project:
"I do not know of any other nation whose neighbors declare that they wish to terminate it, and not only declare, but prepare for it by all means available to them. We must have no illusions that what is declared every day in Cairo, Damascus, Iraq are just words.
This is the thought that guides the Arab leaders . . . I am confident . . . that science is able to provide us with the weapon that will secure the peace, and deter our enemies."
To summarize:
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 Seymour Hersh notes Israeli nuclear planners considered "the Samson Option"-that, as Samson of the Bible, after being captured by the Philistines, brought down Dagon's Temple in Gaza and killed himself along with his enemies.
As Hersh put it, on page 137 in his book, "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 Sampton Option" that was indeed the primary cause of Ben-Gurion's resignation.
The bottom line is that-in 1963-the issue of 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 describes how the conflict between JFK and Ben-Gurion was reaching its pinnacle in 1963 and how, on June 16 of that year, JFK sent a letter to the Israeli leader that Cohen says on page 134 of his book was "the toughest and most explicit message" yet. Cohen adds:
The purpose of the letter was to solidify the terms of the American visits [to Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona] in a way that would accord with these minimum conditions on which the intelligence community insisted.
To force Ben-Gurion to accept the conditions, 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 . . . The showdown Ben-Gurion was trying to avoid now appeared imminent.
Ben-Gurion never read the letter. It was cabled to [U.S. Ambassador to Israel Walworth Barbour] on Saturday, 15 June, with instructions to deliver it by hand to Ben-Gurion the next day, but on that Sunday, Ben-Gurion announced his resignation.
Cohen says 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 adds on page 136 that Ben-Gurion had “concluded that he could not tell the truth about Dimona to American leaders, not even in private.”
And this is saying a lot, considering the effort by critics of Final Judgment to say that Israel and the United States are such "close allies" that the Israelis would never ever think of doing something nasty to an American president-even one who was adamantly determined to stop Israel from establishing a nuclear defense system that the nation's leaders considered critical to the nation's survival.
I should add that French President DeGaulle's reversal on the issue of what was clearly critical French support for Israel's nuclear ambitions is quite significant indeed, particularly in light of what is documented in Final Judgment.
Without going into all of the details here (which can easily be found in Final Judgment in very much detail), the fact is that Permindex, the Mossad-sponsored money laundering and arms procurement operation that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison unearthed during his JFK assassination inquiry had also been connected to assassination attempts on Charles DeGaulle prior to the assassination of President Kennedy.
It is no coincidence that Permindex should be connected to assassination conspiracies aimed against two foreign leaders who happened to be united in their opposition to Israel's nuclear ambitions.
In addition, as Final Judgment also documents, based on a variety of "responsible" sources, the Israelis had yet another reason to oppose DeGaulle:
The French president had granted independence to the French colony of Arab Algeria, an action that inflamed not only Israel, but certain elements in DeGaulle's own military and intelligence services and brought them into alliance with Israel against DeGaulle.
Those interested in the specifics of this matter may refer to Final Judgment, but suffice it to say, there is much more to the French connection.
In any case, what happened between JFK and the new Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, who succeeded Ben-Gurion upon the latter's resignation is significant.
Immediately upon Eshkol's succession, JFK wrote a letter to the new prime minister that was evidently even more fierce than JFK's previous communications with Ben-Gurion. Avner Cohen writes:
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 presented detailed technical instructions on how his requirements should be executed.
Kennedy’s demands were unprecedented. They amounted, in effect, to an ultimatum.
Cohen notes on page 159 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 Kennedy was as equally upsetting to the new prime minister as he had been to David Ben-Gurion!
Kennedy's pressure on Israel did not end with the resignation of Ben-Gurion. Instead, it clearly intensified.
Cohen then describes a "November secret meeting" held in Washington, D.C (November 13-14) between the Israelis and the Americans and says that Israel "had a broader agenda . . . than the United States was willing to discuss."
Yet, Cohen notes the nuclear issue was so sensitive that during face-to-face secret meetings between United States and Israeli officials when they were discussing other issues, the subject of Israel's nuclear bomb was not discussed.
The issue was that inflammatory. It was left for future discussion. But JFK was assassinated eight days later, and the dynamics of the U.S.-Israeli relationship changed dramatically as a consequence.
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 program.
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 the Israeli prime minister that he 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.
I couldn't put it better myself. If this were a court case, I could rightly say, at this juncture, "The defense rests."
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 Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Green writes: “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 development to continue. This was just the beginning.
There is an aside to all of this that should be noted: Final Judgment documents a Peking connection to the JFK assassination conspiracy, relating directly to Israel’s secret nuclear allliance with China.
Not only U.S. policy toward Israel reversed upon JFK’s assassination. Although it’s virtually forgotten, John F. Kennedy was planning a military assault on Red China’s nuclear weapons development facilities in the months prior to his assassination. However, one month after JFK’s death, Lyndon Johnson canceled the project and allowed China to proceed with the assembly of its nuclear arsenal.
The big secret is that at the time of JFK’s assassination, Israel’s Mossad and Red China’s intelligence service were working behind the scenes on joint nuclear weapons development.
The evidence suggests that “the China card” played a critical (secret) factor in Israel’s participation in the JFK assassination conspiracy. This is documented in detail in Final Judgment.
I would be remiss in not addressing the question of CIA involvement alongside the Mossad in the JFK assassination.
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.
Final Judgment shows that Israel’s chief contact at the CIA, the Soviet-hating James Jesus Angleton, ultimately played a pivotal role in the JFK assassination conspiracy cover-up. |
