Final Judgment: the Missing Link
in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy
Since November 22, 1963 many have spent vast amounts of time researching the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, putting forth a wide variety of theories.
Most of the research has been devoted to what one more perceptive critic described as "a consuming preoccupation [with] the microanalytic searching for facts of how the assassination was accomplished," while at the same time, he points out "there has been almost no systematic thinking on why President Kennedy was killed."
So while people have focused on how many assassins were involved, and how many shots they fired at JFK and where the shots came from and where the bullets hit, the real question of who was ultimately responsible for the assassination-not who fired the bullets, but who sponsored the assassins who fired those bullets-has been ignored.
Thus, to find out who is responsible for JFK's murder, we have to find out WHY he was murdered-what motivated those who orchestrated his assassination.
Consider the wide-ranging array of suspects that have been put forth:
Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone;
The Soviet KGB;
Fidel Castro;
Anti-Castro Cubans;
The "Mafia";
Rogue CIA operatives and anti-Castro Cubans in collaboration with elements of "the Mafia";
J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI;
Lyndon Baines Johnson;
Former Nazi intelligence officers;
The Texas Oil Barons; and
The Military-Industrial Complex.
Ten years ago, in 1992, a new suspect was added to the list. Former Rep. Paul Findley (R-Ill.) made the little-noticed but intriguing comment in the March 1992 issue of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs that "it is interesting but not surprising to note 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."
What Findley did not know was at that very time I was in the process of preparing a volume contending that the Mossad role alongside the CIA in the JFK assassination, was, in fact, the big secret-the "missing link"-that explained the entirety of the JFK conspiracy.
The Mossad role is what I have also called "the secret picture on the other side of the jigsaw puzzle" of the JFK assassination conspiracy. My book summarizing this theory is entitled Final Judgment.
What I find quite remarkable is that while many Israelis today believe that Israeli intelligence played a part in the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, many of Israel's friends in America have reacted quite hysterically to my contention that the Mossad played a role in the assassination of America's president.
In addition, although there are many who 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."
Cockburn's words are a rough overview of the thesis that I have presented in Final Judgment.
Although Final Judgment has never been in any major bookstore since it was first published nearly a decade ago, some 30,000 copies are in circulation-more copies than more widely-publicized books on the topic. It is truly an "underground best-seller." It is now in its 760-page fifth edition, documented with 1,114 footnotes. And on November 9, Dar El Ilm Lilmalayin, the oldest and largest privately-owned publishing house in the Middle East released the first-ever Arabic-language edition.
In many respects, Final Judgment is more than a book about the JFK assassination. It also reveals the hidden global power politics of the last half of the 20th century.
Final Judgment documents 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."
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 never considered an Israeli connection until Final Judgment supplied the missing pieces, assembling "the secret picture on the other side of the jigsaw puzzle."
While all of this presents a strong motive for Israel to strike against JFK, Final Judgment also documents what Israeli journalist Barry Chamish says is "a pretty cogent case" for Mossad collaboration with the CIA in the assassination conspiracy.
The fact is that when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison prosecuted trade executive 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 served on the board of a Rome-based company, Permindex, which was actually a front for a Mossad-sponsored arms procurement operation.
A primary shareholder in Permindex, the Banque De Credit Internationale of Geneva, was not only the fiefdom of Tibor Rosenbaum, a high-level Mossad official, but also the chief money laundry for Meyer Lansky, "chairman" of the crime syndicate and long-time Israeli loyalist.
Chief executive of Permindex was Louis Bloomfield of Montreal, a top figure in the Israeli lobby and an operative of the Bronfman family, intimate Lansky associates and leading patrons of Israel.
Permindex was clearly the Israeli link to the JFK assassination, so much so that Jim Garrison himself later circulated the manuscript for a never-published novel in which he fingered the Mossad as prime mover behind the conspiracy although Garrison never otherwise mentioned a Mossad connection publicly.
You may ask why Hollywood's so-called "radical film-maker" Oliver Stone, whose film JFK was a virtual tribute to Garrison never mentioned any of this.
I would contend that Stone failed to mention these details in JFK because the film was financed by Arnon Milchan, an Israeli arms dealer linked to smuggling of materiel to Israel's nuclear program-the very point of contention between JFK and Israel.
Milchan's role in the production of JFK is no secret, by the way. He is listed in the credits as "executive producer," which, in Hollywood parlance, means that he was the "money man," so to speak, behind the film.
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.
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.
Although the American media today promotes the idea that somehow John F. Kennedy was a dedicated friend of Israel and some sort of 'special friend" of the American Jewish community, nothing could be further from the truth.
First of all, The Kennedy family's own suspected anti-Semitism didn't do anything to improve JFK's relations with Israel and its American lobby. Secondly, 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.
There was a long history of bitter enmity between John F. Kennedy and his powerful father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and Russian-born Jewish 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.
By the end of his presidency, however, Kennedy had reneged on his deals, not only with 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.
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 Jewish 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.
T
he 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:
= The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy by Pulitizer Prize-winning veteran New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh.
= 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
= 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.
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, "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:
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 the letter. Instead, 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."
Immediately upon 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 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'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."
Kennedy's pressure on Israel did not end with the resignation of Ben-Gurion. Instead, it clearly intensified.
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.
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