From Yahweh to Zion

by Laurent Guyénot

  In my analysis, authors arguing for a conspiracy hatched within the US military-industrial-intelligence complex (let’s call it the inside job thesis) prove convincingly that the leadership in the CIA and the Pentagon was desperately trying to start a war against Castro, and that they were prepared to deceive the president in order to do that. But they fail to demonstrate that they were prepared to assassinate the president: there is a huge difference between setting up a secret operation behind the president’s back and committing high treason by murdering their own president.

  One solution to the problem has been provided by the already-mentioned Gary Wean in his book There’s a Fish in the Courthouse (1987), quoted by Michael Piper in his groundbreaking Final Judgment. Relying on a well-informed source in Dallas (identified as Republican Senator John Tower in his 1996 second edition), Wean raises the possibility that the Dallas coup was “a double-cross of fantastic dimensions,” in which a failed assassination attempt staged by the CIA was hijacked by what he names the Mishpucka (Hebrew for “the Family”), the Russian Jewish Mafia, whose evil power reaching into the highest spheres Wean has been investigating for years in California. The Mishpucka wanted Kennedy dead and turned the operation into a successful assassination, then escaped investigation by hiding behind the CIA’s scheme. JFK researcher Dick Russell has independently added weight to that theory by interviewing Cuban exiles who believe they were manipulated (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1992).

  The assumption is that the CIA and their Cuban exile associates intended to spare Kennedy’s life but force him to retaliate against Castro. It was a false flag operation: Oswald, the patsy, had been groomed with the “legend” of a pro-Castro communist activist, to be sold to the public by news media on the day of the assassination. According to what Tower told Wean, “There was to be an attempt on the life of President Kennedy so ‘realistic’ that its failure would be looked upon as nothing less than a miracle. Footprints would lead right to Castro’s doorstep, a trail that the rankest amateur could not lose.”

  Israel had no interest in Cuba but wanted Kennedy dead. So did Johnson. So they hijacked the operation, probably by providing the real snipers on the grassy knoll. The national security state was too deeply involved to be able to protest, and had to go along with its original plan to blame Oswald, knowing that if they tried to expose Israel’s coup, they would be the first to be exposed.432

  Several researchers have independently reached the same conclusion that a fake assassination attempt by CIA-led Cuban exiles was turned into a real assassination by a third party, but few succeeded—or, more probably, dared—to name that third party. They are mentioned by the late Michael Collins Piper. One of them was former CIA contract agent Robert Morrow in his 1976 novelized version of events, Betrayal. Another was longtime independent investigator Scott Thompson, who alleged that Howard Hunt was coordinating the fraudulent assassination attempt, but notes that “it remains unclear to this day who intervened into the dummy assassination set-up and turned it into the real thing.” Veteran JFK investigator Dick Russell, in The Man Who Knew Too Much, has also pondered the possibility that the CIA’s relationship with Oswald was “usurped by another group,” and noted: “Many people in the CIA had reasons to cover up their own relationship to Oswald, even if this had nothing to do with an assassination conspiracy. […] what cannot be overlooked is that a third force was aware of the counterspy web [surrounding Oswald] and seized on it to their own advantage.”433

  Whether or not the CIA was implicated in a fake assassination attempt on Kennedy is, after all, secondary—for a person’s or an organization’s vulnerability to blackmail is proportional to the number of illegal activities he or it wants to keep secret, and no organization has more dirty secrets to hide than the CIA. By its privileged access to the media, the Zionist network had plenty of means of keeping the agency on the defensive.

  The Mossad had also placed its mole, James Jesus Angleton, in a key position inside the CIA. Angleton was both the Mossad liaison for the CIA, as head of the CIA “Israel Office,” and the chief of counterintelligence since 1954, which allowed him to conduct massive domestic spying on American citizens in collaboration with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Angleton played a key role in the cover-up after Kennedy’s assassination as liaison between the CIA and the Warren Commission. But many prominent JFK investigators contend that Angleton also played a key role in setting up Oswald as the patsy in the first place. Professor John Newman writes in Oswald and the CIA: “In my view, whoever Oswald’s direct handler or handlers were, we must now seriously consider the possibility that Angleton was probably their general manager. No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot. No one else had the means necessary to plant the WWIII virus in Oswald’s files and keep it dormant for six weeks until the president’s assassination. Whoever was ultimately responsible for the decision to kill Kennedy, their reach extended into the national intelligence apparatus to such a degree that they could call upon a person who knew its inner secrets and workings so well that he could design a failsafe mechanism into the fabric of the plot. The only person who could ensure that a national security cover-up of an apparent counterintelligence nightmare was the head of counterintelligence.”434

  What Newman fails to notice, however, is that Angleton was more Mossad than CIA. He is actually the ultimate source of the conspiracy trail linking the CIA to the JFK assassination, by initiating and then leaking a secret CIA memorandum dated 1966 and intended for recently nominated CIA director Richard Helms, saying that CIA agent Howard Hunt was in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and that an alibi for him to be elsewhere “ought to be considered.” This memo was given to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), and simultaneously to reporters Joe Trento and Jacquie Powers, who reported it in the Sunday News Journal, on August 20, 1978. Trento subsequently revealed to JFK assassination investigator Dick Russell that it was Angleton himself who leaked the memo. Michael Collins Piper, who connected the dots, writes: “It is my contention that Angleton’s conspiratorial activities in regard to the JFK assassination—including his singular involvement in circulating the ‘Hunt in Dallas’ story—unquestionably stem from Angleton’s link to Israel and its role in the JFK assassination conspiracy.”435 Angleton’s links to Israel were such that, according to his latest biographer, Michael Howard Holzman, “after his death, not one but two monuments to Angleton were dedicated at memorial services in Israel” during ceremonies attended by chiefs of Israeli intelligence and even a future prime minister.436 Another biographer, Tom Mangold, states: “Angleton’s closest professional friends overseas […] came from the Mossad and […] he was held in immense esteem by his Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him profound honors after his death.”437

  The theory that the conspiracy trail leading to the anti-communist far right in Kennedy’s assassination was planted deliberately by Israel’s sayanim can explain a number of oddities in some of the clues. How else can we reasonably explain, for example, the full-page advertisement printed in The Dallas Morning News of November 22, bordered in black like a funeral notice and carrying the ironic bold headline “WELCOME, MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS…,” that accused the president of having betrayed the Cubans now “living in slavery”?438 The veiled threat was authored by a nonexistent American Fact-Finding Committee.

  How can any serious investigator take this at face value, and believe that a right-wing group planning to assassinate Kennedy in Dallas on November 22 would sign their crime in such a way, while at the same time trying to blame it on the communists? Yet this is exactly what most “inside job” theorists do. What they usually fail to mention is that the announcement was paid and even signed by a certain Bernard Weissman, a Jewish American who had moved to Dallas no sooner than the 4th of November, and who had been seen on the 14th in Jack Ruby’s strip-tease bar the Carousel Club, in a tw
o-hour meeting also attended by J. D. Tippit, the police officer who would be shot to death one hour after Kennedy, supposedly also by Oswald while resisting arrest.439 The Dallas Morning News advertisement was not the only sign conspicuously posted to point to the anti-communist far right: on the same day, an infamous poster could be seen in the streets of Dallas, with Kennedy’s photo under the headline “WANTED FOR TREASON.”

  While it massively supported the government thesis of the lone gunman, the mainstream media subtly fed suspicions directed at the CIA. For maximal efficiency, the expectation of a CIA coup was even planted into public opinion before the assassination. This was done on October 2 with an article in The Washington Daily News, by an obscure Saigon correspondent named Richard Starnes, picked up the next day by The New York Times’s chief Washington correspondent Arthur Krock. The article denounced the CIA’s “unrestrained thirst for power” and quoted an unnamed “very high official” who claimed that the White House could not control the CIA, and that: “If the United States ever experiences an attempt at a coup to overthrow the Government, it will come from the CIA and not the Pentagon. The agency represents a tremendous power and total unaccountability to anyone.”440 In such a way, The New York Times was planting a sign, a month and a half before the Dallas killing, pointing to the CIA as the most likely instigator of the upcoming coup. Most Kennedy researchers take this sign at face value, and even suggest that Kennedy had himself leaked his worries to the press as a warning to Americans. This, in spite of the fact that Kennedy “was so disturbed” by the article that he brought it up in the National Security Council the same day, asking advice about how to respond. “Kennedy decided to say nothing about the article, but it had shaken him,” comments James Douglass.441

  One month after Kennedy’s assassination, it was the turn of The Washington Post to use a very similar trick, by publishing an op-ed signed by Harry Truman, in which the former president said he was “disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.” “I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations,” at the point of becoming across the globe “a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue […] there are now some searching questions that need to be answered.”442

  Truman was hinting at the CIA’s role in toppling foreign governments and assassinating elected leaders abroad. But given the timing of his article, one month to the day after Dallas, it could only be understood by anyone with ears to hear, and at least subliminally by the rest, as an indictment of the CIA in the Kennedy assassination. This article, widely reprinted in the 1970s after the creation of the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, is regarded as Truman’s whistleblowing. Yet its mea culpa style is completely unlike Truman, and it was in fact not written by Truman, but by his longtime assistant and ghostwriter, David Noyes. Truman probably never saw it prior to its publication in The Washington Post’s morning edition, but he (and not the CIA) may be responsible for its deletion from the afternoon print runs.443 Noyes’s role as Truman’s ghostwriter is documented in Sidney Krasnoff’s book, Truman and Noyes: Story of a President’s Alter Ego (Jonathan Stuart Press, 1997), which the publisher advertises as “an EXTRAORDINARY story of the relationship between a Missouri born Baptist, with no formal education beyond high school & a Russian born Jew with an eighth grade education.”444

  In the 70s, the mainstream media and publishing houses again played a major role in steering conspiracy theorists toward the CIA trail, while avoiding any hint of Israeli involvement. One major contributor to that effort was A. J. Weberman, with his 1975 book Coup d’État in America: The CIA and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy, co-authored by Michael Canfield. According to the New York Jewish Daily Forward (December 28, 2012), Weberman had “immigrated to Israel in 1959 and has dual American-Israeli citizenship,” and is “a close associate of Jewish Defense Organization founder Mordechai Levy, whose fringe group is a spin-off of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane’s militant right-wing Jewish Defense League.” Weberman acknowledged Richard Perle’s assistance in his investigation.445 The Weberman-Canfield book contributed to the momentum that led the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to reinvestigate in 1976 the murders of JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King, while, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Senate had already formed the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (known as the Church Committee).

  It is also in this context that Newsweek journalist Edward Jay Epstein published in The Reader’s Digest (then in his book Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald, 1978) an interview of George De Mohrenschildt, a Russian geologist and consultant to Texan oilmen, who had befriended Oswald and his Russian wife in Dallas in 1962. De Mohrenschildt admitted that Oswald was introduced to him at the instigation of Dallas CIA agent J. Walton Moore.446 That piece of information is dubious for several reasons. First, Moore was officially FBI rather than CIA. Second, it rests on a printed interview given by De Mohrenschildt to journalist Edward Epstein a few hours before his death. So De Mohrenschildt was in no position to confirm or deny the words that Epstein ascribed to him. In fact, De Mohrenschildt’s published interview contradicts his own manuscript account of his relationship to Oswald, revealed after his death.447 Moreover, Epstein’s main source for his book Legend: the Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (1978) is James Jesus Angleton, who was actively spreading disinformation at the time of the HSCA, defending the theory that Oswald was a KGB agent with CIA connections.

  De Mohrenschildt’s death was ruled a suicide. The Sherriff’s report mentions that in his last months he complained that “the Jews” and “the Jewish mafia” were out to get him.448 Needless to say, Epstein doesn’t recall De Mohrenschildt mentioning this fear.

  The “Jewish mafia” is taboo, in Kennedy research as well as in mainstream news. However, much has been said about the involvement of other “mafias”: “MOBSTERS LINKED TO JFK DEATH,” ran a Washington Post headline in 1977, after the HSCA report was released.449 It is commonly admitted that Jack Ruby belonged to the underworld, but saying he belonged to the Jewish community is considered bad taste. His real name is hardly mentioned in the book by Jewish journalist Seth Kantor, Who Was Jack Ruby? (1978, retitled The Ruby Cover-Up in 1980). Note that Kantor, who was working for the Dallas Times Herald in 1963, had then given the Warren Commission false testimony about a conversation he had had with Ruby in front of Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where Kennedy had been taken, during which Ruby had appeared distressed by the death of his beloved president.450

  All the above examples illustrate a fundamental principle of the propaganda destined to maintain Americans in the ignorance of the real nature of the forces that dominate the “deep state.” This propaganda functions on two levels: on the surface is the official lie of the Warren Commission Report (Oswald the lone nut); below that are several lies or half-truths focusing on government and underworld complicity. The involvement of elements from the CIA, implicitly suggested by mainstream media and fully exploited by the controlled opposition, acts as a lure for all skeptics, and keeps most of the conspiracy sphere from going after Israel.

  It is important to stress that investigators who focus their attention on the CIA and ignore Israel are not necessarily involved in conscious deception. I agree with Kevin Barrett that “a big part of this is the semi-conscious knowledge that if you ‘go there’ you will never get serious publishing and distribution.” And in the early stage of the investigation, the CIA was the natural suspect for anybody considering the Warren Report as a fraud.

  For some investigators, however, persistent self-deception may be linked to a deep-seated ethnic loyalty. It happens that the two most influential pioneers of JFK conspiracy theories are journalist Edward Jay Epstein with his book Inquest (1966), and lawyer Mark Lane (born Levin) with Rush t
o Judgment (1966), both indicting the CIA. They are the sole investigators mentioned in a “CIA Dispatch” dated January 1967, marked “PSYCH” and “Destroy when no longer needed,” with the heading “RE: Concerning Criticism of the Warren Report.” It is the earliest known use of the term “conspiracy theories,” and it begins like this: “Conspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization, for example by falsely alleging that Lee Harvey Oswald worked for us. The aim of this dispatch is to provide material countering and discrediting the claims of the conspiracy theorists, so as to inhibit the circulation of such claims in other countries.”451 Indeed, years of reading through the whole spectrum of “JFK research” has convinced me that the evidence linking Oswald to the CIA is at best very weak, whereas there is hard evidence that he was on the payroll of the FBI. This is critically important for two reasons: first, it is well known that FBI and CIA have always been rivals (indeed, spying on each other); second, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, was a longtime neighbor and friend of Johnson, and played a critical role in the JFK assassination cover-up by leaking his conclusions that Oswald acted alone even before the Warren Commission convened. (No one could contradict Hoover, who maintained himself at the head of the FBI for 48 years until his death at age 72, spanning nine presidents, thanks to his secrets files on just about everybody that counted in Washington.) This CIA Dispatch #1035–960 is important as the first government document mentioning “conspiracy theories” and as a propaganda program to discredit them. But it also shows that the CIA was forced to enter into damage control mode by dissenters such as Epstein and Lane who insisted on incriminating the CIA, while never mentioning evidence against Israel.