MCP: Israel's Central Role in JFK Assassination

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Israel's Central Role in JFK Assassination

Who's Who In The JFK Assassination
Excerpted from the book
Final Judgment
The missing link in the JFK assassination conspiracy
By Michael Collins Piper
Wolfe Press, 1995, paperback
1-8-10
 

PREFACE
 
THE UNSPOKEN TRUTH: ISRAEL'S CENTRAL ROLE IN THE JFK ASSASSINATION
 
Where in the world could anyone come up with the idea that Israel's Mossad had a hand in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Well, there's more to the story than meets the eye. All of the information which, taken together, proves this contention has already been committed to print. This book, Final Judgment, brings all of these facts together for the first time in a frightening scenario that makes sense.
 
Considering all of the theories about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that have been circulating for years, how could anyone ever suggest that Israel's Mossad was involved?
 
This was the reaction of more than a few people when apprised of the thesis presented in the pages of this book. Yet, I believe, that when you read this volume you will reach the same conclusion: that Israel and its spy agency, the Mossad, did indeed play a critical role in the JFK assassination conspiracy and its cover-up. The evidence, you shall see, is there.
 
It was several years ago that I first stumbled upon a hint that this was indeed the case. I came across a strange reference in the pages of a controversial work about the JFK assassination which alleged that rogue CIA operatives had been behind the president's murder, A. J. Weberman and Michael Canfield's Coup d'Etat in America, first published in 1975. The reference, simple as it was, appearing on page 41, read as follows:
 
"After the assassination, an informer for the Secret Service and the FBI who had infiltrated a Cuban exile group and was in the process of selling them machine guns, reported that on November 21, 1963 he was told, 'We now have plenty of money-our new backers are the Jews-as soon as they take care of JFK.' This man had furnished reliable information in the past."
 
I barely noticed the reference, but it did intrigue me. Who did this source mean when he referred to "the Jews"? This was the question I needed to answer. My immediate conclusion was this: the source meant Jewish gangsters-such as Meyer Lansky-who had a stake in reviving their Cuban gambling interests that they lost when Fidel Castro came to power. This was the logical answer.
 
Frankly, I laid the reference aside. It was just one lone remark out of perhaps millions of words written about the JFK assassination. It was nearly a year that went by before I came across the quotation again-while re-reading the same book. I pondered the quote for a moment, thinking, "This is interesting."
 
However, I once again cast those thoughts aside. I had already reached my own conclusions about the JFK assassination long before: The CIA was primarily responsible, working hand-in-hand with certain elements in "the Mafia" and also in the anti-Castro Cuban movement.
 
However, in the subsequent year that followed, I began to stumble across some interesting information.
 
In David Scheim's book, Contract on America, which contends that "the Mafia" was solely responsible for the JFK assassination, I saw a variation of the same quote referenced in the Weberman and Canfield book.
 
However, Scheim's rendition of the quote had deleted the reference to the alleged Jewish backers of the Cuban plotters. I began to think that there might be something more to the story after all, whatever the accuracy of the story allegedly told to the federal authorities.
 
THE LANSKY CONNECTION
 
It was around this time that I learned that a new biography of organized crime figure Meyer Lansky had been released. It was entitled Little Man:
 
Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. The book-prepared in cooperation with Lansky's family-was little more than a puff piece for the deceased thug. Gossipy, full of inside information, and even entertaining at times, the book still somehow seemed to be missing a lot.
 
It was then that I returned to my library and pulled a book off the shelf that I hadn't re-read in perhaps fifteen years. It was Hank Messick's biography of Lansky. Re-reading this important book I began to see that Meyer Lansky was not just another gangster. He was "the chairman of the board" of organized crime.
 
All of the Mafia figures that had been repeatedly implicated in the JFK assassination were, in fact, Lansky's front-men-his subordinates, his underlings. In short, if "the Mafia" had a hand in the killing of JFK, then Lansky had to have been one of the key players.
 
Yet, as I quickly began to see in reviewing many of the works which allege that "The Mafia Killed JFK," Lansky's preeminent role was being ignored or otherwise under-played.
 
I was aware of Lansky's close ties to Israel. After all, Lansky fled to Israel when the heat was on in the United States. But how deeply did the Lansky-Israeli connection go?
 
My research into that question began to turn up some interesting facts relating to an Israeli connection to the assassination 2f John F. Kennedy.
 
THE ISRAELI CONNECTION
 
Why would Israel have an interest in participating in the JFK assassination conspiracy? That was the burning question.
 
It was just about the time that I had begun to take a second look at the Lansky connection to the Kennedy assassination that several new works about the covert relationship between the United States and Israel were released providing never-before revealed information.
 
These books, cited extensively in Final Judgment, made it all too clear that John F. Kennedy-before his death-was in a pitched battle with Israel. In fact, Kennedy was at war.
 
This was something that long-time JFK assassination researchers had no reason to know about. Much of the material had long been classified. It was a secret-a deep, dark secret.
 
Some of JFK's communications with then-Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion are still classified. Not even top-level intelligence officials with special security clearance have been allowed access to these potentially explosive documents.
 
This discovery made me realize that there was a lot more to the Kennedy relationship with Israel and a lot more about the JFK assassination than we had ever been told.
 
ISRAEL, LANSKY & THE CIA
 
The long and close relationship between Israel and JFK's foes at the CIA is something which is becoming more and more known to the general public. JFK's own war with the CIA is common knowledge.
 
At the time of the president's assassination, however, the depth and breadth of the CIA's relationship with Israel's Mossad, however, was not so commonly known.
 
What's more, as I began to discover, Israel's allies in the Lansky Syndicate had much deeper relations with the CIA than most researchers have realized.
 
And while the stories of CIA-Organized Crime assassination plots against Castro have been told time and again, the evidence I began to discover told an even bigger story.
 
The pieces of the puzzle were all there. They simply needed to be put together. As the research continued, I repeatedly found myself stumbling upon new facts and information that continued to verify what was initially in my mind just a theory, but which I now believe to be the truth.
 
THE PERMINDEX CONNECTION
 
It is the little-discussed Permindex connection to the JFK assassination which is the tie that binds-the final proof that Israel's Mossad was at the center of the assassination conspiracy.
 
In the Permindex connection we find all of the critical elements which tie Israel's Mossad, the CIA and organized crime together in close-knit intrigue linked directly to the murder of President Kennedy.
 
Although researchers, over the years, have devoted much time and energy to pursuing a wide variety of questions relating to the JFK assassination controversy (focusing on controversies that will never be resolved) they have steered clear of the Permindex connection.
 
Those who have made any reference to Permindex have described it as some sort of "neo-Nazi" entity-even a remnant of Hitler's SS-but, as we shall see, nothing could be further from the truth.
 
To understand the forces behind the Permindex connection, which we examine in detail in this volume, is to understand the answer to the biggest mystery of this century: the question of who killed John F. Kennedy.
 
INSIDERS AGREE
 
Just before I began the book I mentioned my theory to a rather well-known former United States congressman. He surprised me when he said, "I think you are on to something. I've believed for years that the Mossad was involved in the Kennedy assassination, but I never really took the time to look into it. I'm glad you're doing it, though. It will be an important book. It's a book I would have liked to have written myself."
 
Then, just after I finished the book, I sent a copy of the manuscript to another former U.S. congressman, thinking that he might have some interest in the subject. His response was perhaps a bit astonishing.
 
After the former congressman received the manuscript he wrote me a surprising letter in which he said, "I will tell you this. A retired Western European diplomat and intelligence officer with whom I've been in correspondence (and who has had disastrous experiences with Israel and the Mossad) has been urging me for the last four years to write the book that you have written."
 
He passed the manuscript on to the Frenchman who in turn wrote me a fascinating letter providing further information confirming my thesis.
 
ONE COMPLETE PICTURE
 
The fruits of my labor appear in this book. I owe so much to all of those JFK assassination researchers who made this book possible. Their pioneering efforts laid the foundation for the construction of a framework which I firmly believe proves Mossad complicity in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
 
All of those who sought the truth-and sometimes risked their reputations (and even perhaps their lives) doing it-cleared the way for a final judgment:
 
Israel was the driving force behind the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It is the Israeli connection that pulls all of the pieces of the puzzle together into one complete picture. The role of 'j Israel in the JFK assassination is, indeed, the until-now "missing link."
 
 
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A WHO'S WHO OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION CONSPIRACY AND COVER-UP
 
While the following selection of names in this special "who's who" is by no means complete, it does provide the reader of Final Judgment with a brief overview of the facts relating to the involvement of the individuals in question with the circumstances surrounding not only the JFK assassination itself, but also the efforts to not only uncover the truth about the assassination-and also to bury it.
 
Following each name and description are references to the particular chapters in Final Judgment where details about that individual appear in pertinent part. The inclusion of any name in particular is by no means intended to suggest that the individual-unless specifically stated-had foreknowledge that the murder of President Kennedy was being planned.
 
As we note in these pages, there were many people who were brought into the JFK assassination conspiracy and the subsequent cover-up who had no idea of the actual role that they were playing.
 
The following "who's who"-if read in this context-provides the reader a quick glance at the key individuals who ultimately prove central to a complete understanding of the entirety of the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of President Kennedy.
 
AT PERMINDEX
 
Clay Shaw - If New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison had been permitted to carry out an unimpeded investigation and prosecution of Shaw, a CIA contract operative and a former director of the International Trade Mart in New Orleans implicated in involvement with Lee Harvey Oswald, David Ferrie, Guy Banister and other figures central to the JFK assassination conspiracy, Garrison would have divined Shaw's connections - through a shadowy corporation known as Permindex - to not only the Israeli Mossad, but also the international crime syndicate of Israeli loyalist Meyer Lansky.
 
Louis M. Bloomfield - Based in Montreal, Bloomfield was a long-time intelligence operative and a front man for the powerful Bronfman family interests. The Bronfmans were not only key international backers of Israel but also long-time figures in the Lansky crime syndicate. Bloomfield, one of the foremost figures in the Israeli lobby in Canada and one of Israel's leading international operatives, not only served as the chief shareholder in the Permindex Corporation on whose board of directors Clay Shaw served, but also had intimate ties to American intelligence.
 
Tibor Rosenbaum - One of the "godfathers" of the state of Israel and the first director for finance and supply for Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, Rosenbaum was a prime financial angel behind the Permindex corporation. His Swiss banking concern, the Banque De Credit International, also served as the chief European money laundry or the global crime syndicate of Miami-based crime chief Meyer Lansky.
 
John King - A close business associate of Tibor Rosenbaum's protégé and sometime front man, Bernard Cornfeld, King showed up in New Orleans in the early stages of Jim Garrison's investigation-before Clay Shaw's name had come up-and sought to persuade Garrison (through a bribery attempt) to give up the inquiry. Fortunately he failed in his scheme.
 
THE MOSSAD CONNECTION
 
David Ben-Gurion - Prime Minister of Israel; resigned his post in disgust with JFK's stance toward Israel. in April of 1963; Said JFK's position threatened Israel's very survival.
 
Yitzhak Shamir - A long-time Mossad officer (based largely at the Mossad's chief European office in Paris), Shamir headed the Mossad's assassination squad at the time of the JFK assassination. A former French intelligence officer has charged that Shamir himself arranged the hiring of JFK's actual assassins through a close ally in French intelligence.
 
Menachem Begin - In 1963, Begin (later prime minister of Israel) was a roving Israeli diplomat; prior to JFK's assassination he was overheard conspiring with Meyer Lansky's California henchman, Mickey Cohen, in a conversation that suggested hostile intentions by Israel against the American president.
 
Luis Kutner - Although known largely as a "mob lawyer," (who was long and closely associated with Jack Ruby, a sometime-client) Kutner also doubled as an international intelligence operative and functioned as an advisor to an ad hoc pro-Israel lobby group in the United States.
 
A. L. Botnick - Head of the New Orleans office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, an intelligence and propaganda arm for Israel's Mossad; a close associate of New Orleans-based CIA contract operative Guy Banister who helped create Lee Harvey Oswald's preassassination profile as a "pro-Castro" agitator. Evidence suggests that Banister's manipulation of Oswald may have been carried out under the guise of an ADL "fact-finding" operation.
 
Arnon Milchan - Israel's biggest arms dealer, Milchan was "executive producer" (i.e. chief financial angel) of Oliver Stone's Hollywood fantasy about the JFK assassination-a fact which may explain Stone's aversion to exploring the Israeli connection to the affair.
 
Maurice Tempeisman - The international diamond merchant and Mossad operative who became the lover of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and used his connections to double-perhaps triple-her substantial fortune, thereby co-opting the Kennedy family forever.
 
THE CIA CONNECTION
 
Rudolph Hecht - An owner of the CIA-linked Standard Fruit concern, Hecht was a prominent figure in the New Orleans Jewish community and as chairman of the board of directors of the International Trade Mart was Permindex board member Clay Shaw's primary sponsor.
 
James Jesus Angleton - Angleton, the CIA's long-time chief of counterintelligence, was the CIA's primary high-level conspirator in the murder of President Kennedy and the subsequent cover-up. Angleton, who had been co-opted by and was totally loyal to the Israeli Mossad, played a major role in the effort to frame Lee Harvey Oswald. Final Judgment is the first JFK assassination study to delve into Angleton's role in the conspiracy.
 
David Atlee Phillips - A long-time high-level CIA official, Phillips was the CIA station chief in Mexico City at the time a strange effort was underway to implicate Lee Harvey Oswald as a Soviet KGB collaborator. If anyone in the CIA knew the truth about Oswald, it was Phillips. He confessed publicly that the story about Oswald being in Mexico City was not precisely what the CIA had long claimed.
 
E. Howard Hunt - Long-time CIA officer and liaison to the anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Testimony by ex-CIA contract operative Marita Lorenz placed Hunt in Dallas, Texas the day before the president's assassination. The full truth about Hunt's actual involvement in the affair may never be known, but there is no question that Hunt was deeply involved in the intrigue surrounding the president's murder. Evidence does indeed indicate that there was a conscious effort to frame Hunt for involvement in the crime.
 
Guy Banister -The former FBI agent-turned-CIA contract operative whose New Orleans office was a central point for international intrigue involving the CIA, the anti-Castro Cuban exiles and the anti-DeGaulle forces in the French Secret Army Organization (OAS). Under Banister's direction, Lee Harvey Oswald established a public profile for himself as a "pro-Castro" agitator in the streets of New Orleans.
 
David Ferrie - An enigmatic adventurer and CIA contract operative, Ferrie was closely involved with Lee Harvey Oswald during Oswald's stay in New Orleans in the summer of 1963, working alongside Oswald out of Banister's headquarters. The investigation of Ferrie by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison ultimately led to Garrison's discovery of Permindex board member Clay Shaw's ties to both Ferrie and Oswald.
 
Marita Lorenz - A former CIA contract operative, she testified under oath that one day prior to the assassination of President Kennedy she arrived in Dallas in an armed caravan of CIA-backed Cuban exiles who were met by not only Jack Ruby, who later killed Lee Harvey Oswald, but also CIA official E. Howard Hunt.
 
Guillermo & Ignacio Novo - Two brothers, veterans of the CIA-backed Cuban exile wars against Fidel Castro. According to Marita Lorenz, the Novo brothers were part of the armed caravan that arrived in Dallas one day before the assassination of President Kennedy. Many years after Dallas, the Novos were later convicted of participating in the murder of a Chilean dissident in collaboration with international adventurer Michael Townley who himself had ties to high-level figures implicated in the JFK conspiracy.
 
John Tower - In 1963 Tower was a newly-elected Republican U.S. Senator from Texas with close ties to the CIA. Shortly after the assassination he told associates of his own inside knowledge of the bizarre story of what really happened in Dealey Plaza. The story told by Tower suggests strongly that there were many unseen forces at work, manipulating many of the key players in the JFK assassination conspiracy. It was not until the release of Final Judgment that Tower's name was ever connected to the mystery surrounding the JFK assassination.
 
Victor Marchetti - A high-ranking CIA official who left the agency in disgust, Marchetti later made a career writing about the CIA. In a 1978 article he charged that the CIA was about to frame its long-time operative, E. Howard Hunt, with involvement in the JFK assassination. A libel suit resulting as a consequence of Marchetti's article resulted in a climactic finding by a jury that the CIA had been involved in the assassination of the president.
 
Robin Moore - A journalist with long-standing close ties to the CIA, Moore co-authored former CIA man Hugh McDonald's book, LBJ and the JFK Conspiracy which promoted James Jesus Angleton's false claim that the KGB was behind the president's murder-another of the disinformation stories that emerged following the assassination.
 
THE LANSKY SYNDICATE
 
Meyer Lansky - Chief executive officer and de facto "treasurer" of the international crime syndicate; active in gun-running on behalf of the Israeli underground; collaborated closely with American intelligence on a number of fronts; later settled in Israel. Researchers who have claimed that "the Mafia Killed JFK" have pointedly refused to acknowledge Lansky's preeminent positioning in the underworld.
 
Carlos Marcello - The head of the Mafia in New Orleans, Marcello owed his status to Meyer Lansky who was his chief sponsor in the crime syndicate. Marcello could not have orchestrated the JFK assassination-as some suggest-without Lansky's explicit approval.
 
Seymour Weiss - Meyer Lansky's chief bagman and liaison with the political establishment in Louisiana, he later served as a director of the CIA-linked Standard Fruit company and may actually have been a high-ranking CIA contract operative in New Orleans at the time of the JFK assassination.
 
Sam Giancana - The Mafia boss of Chicago, Giancana was a player in the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro; later murdered, probably at the behest of Santo Trafficante, Jr. His family says that Giancana admitted having been involved in the planning of the JFK assassination.
 
Santo Trafficante, Jr. - Although best known as the head of the Mafia in Tampa, Trafficante actually functioned as Meyer Lansky's chief lieutenant in the crime syndicate and as Lansky's liaison with the CIA in the Castro assassination plots.
 
Johnny Rosselli - A roving "ambassador" for the Mafia, Rosselli was the primary conduit between the CIA and the mob in the plots against Fidel Castro; may have arranged the murder of Sam Giancana for Trafficante and was later murdered himself.
 
Mickey Cohen - Meyer Lansky's West Coast henchman; Jack Ruby's role model and a gun-runner for the Israeli underground, Cohen collaborated closely with Israeli diplomat Menachem Begin prior to the JFK assassination;. Cohen arranged for John F. Kennedy to meet actress Marilyn Monroe who was assigned the task of finding out JFK's private views and intentions toward Israel.
 
Jack Ruby - A long-time functionary for the Lansky syndicate, Ruby was the Lansky connection man in Dallas and also engaged in CIA-linked gunrunning to the anti-Castro Cuban exiles. Evidence suggests there is more to Ruby's sudden "death" than meets the eye.
 
Jim Braden - A veteran personal courier for Meyer Lansky, Braden was almost assuredly in contact in Dallas with Jack Ruby prior to the JFK assassination. He was briefly detained in Dealey Plaza minutes after the president's murder, but those JFK assassination researchers who have mentioned Braden prefer to cast him as a "Mafia" figure rather than as Lansky's man on the scene in Dallas.
 
Al Gruber - A henchman of Meyer Lansky's West Coast operative, Mickey Cohen, Gruber and Ruby spoke by telephone just shortly before Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald. It is believed that Gruber gave Ruby the contract on Oswald on behalf of his superiors.
 
THE FRENCH CONNECTION
 
Charles DeGaulle - Repeatedly targeted for assassination by Israeli-allied forces in French intelligence and in the Secret Army Organization (OAS) who were angry that DeGaulle had granted independence to Arab Algeria. The Mossad-sponsored Permindex operation that also had a hand in the murder of JFK, laundered money used in the assassination attempts on DeGaulle.
 
Georges deLannurien - High ranking official in the SDECE, the French intelligence agency; pinpointed by a former French intelligence officer as the individual who (at the best of Mossad assassinations chief Yitzhak Shamir) contracted the hit team who killed JFK in Dallas.
 
Michael Mertz - A former French SDECE officer and the Paris connection for the Lansky-Trafficante heroin syndicate; alleged to have been one of the actual gunmen in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Said by some to be the legendary CIA contract killer, QJ/WIN.
 
Jean Soutre - A liaison for the French OAS with the CIA's E. Howard Hunt, Soutre maintained contact with Guy Banister's CIA- and mob-linked gun-running headquarters in New Orleans. Soutre may have been in Dallas at the time of the JFK assassination. There is evidence linking Soutre to James Jesus Angleton's intrigue inside the CIA that affected French intelligence in a dramatic way.
 
Thomas Eli Davis III - A world-traveling mercenary with apparent links to both Jack Ruby and Lee Harvey Oswald, Davis was taken into custody by the Algerian government for his subversive activities alongside Israeli agents in supplying weapons to the French OAS just prior to the JFK assassination. It is said that CIA operative QJJWIN (possibly Michael Mertz, one of the reputed assassins of President Kennedy) helped secure Davis's release from prison.
 
Geoffrey Bocca - A former propagandist for the OAS, Bocca later co-authored former CIA contract agent Hugh McDonald's book, Appointment in Dallas, which pointed the blame for the JFK assassination away from those who were actually responsible-the first of two suspect books put out by McDonald.
 
Christian David - A French Corsican criminal associated with reputed JFK assassin Michael Mertz, David has claimed knowledge of a French hit team involved in the JFK assassination. David himself was the chief suspect in the murder of a Moroccan dissident, Mehdi Ben-Barka, whose killing was orchestrated by the Israeli Mossad through anti-DeGaulle forces in French intelligence.
 
TRUTH SEEKERS
 
Mark Lane - Retained by Lee Harvey Oswald's mother to represent her son's interests before the Warren Commission, Lane's book Rush to Judgment was the first major critique of the Warren Commission Report. In a libel suit filed against The Spotlight newspaper by former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt, Lane proved to the satisfaction of a jury that the CIA had indeed been involved in the JFK assassination. His best-selling book Plausible Denial outlined the circumstances of that libel suit and its ultimate conclusion.
 
Gary Wean - A former detective on the Hollywood beat of the Los Angeles Police Department, Wean discovered how Meyer Lansky's West Coast henchman, Mickey Cohen, was conspiring against John F. Kennedy on behalf of the Israelis. In a meeting with the former sheriff of Dallas County, Bill Decker, Wean learned a portion of the truth about what really happened in Dallas.
 
NEWS TWISTERS
 
Edgar & Edith Stern - Close friends of Clay Shaw, major financial backers of the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith, and owners of the WDSU media empire in New Orleans that not only played a major role in giving vast publicity to Lee Harvey Oswald's preassassination profile as a "pro-Castro agitator" but later sought to undermine Jim Garrison's investigation of Clay Shaw.
 
Johann Rush - As a young WDSU cameraman, Rush was on the scene to record Oswald's "pro-Castro" activities. He emerged-many years later-as the brains behind a "computer-enhanced" version of the famous Zapruder film of the JFK assassination that author Gerald Posner cited as "proof' that Oswald acted alone in the president's murder.
 
Drew Pearson - Accused by his own mother-in-law of being a "mouthpiece" for the pro-Israel ADL, Pearson had close ties to not only the Israeli lobby, but also the CIA and to President Lyndon Johnson and his cronies. It was Pearson who floated an unlikely story that Fidel Castro was behind the JFK assassination and who also played a major influence in shaping Earl Warren's perceptions of the tragedy.
 
Jack Anderson - As protégé of Drew Pearson, Jack Anderson likewise had strange connections that might have biased his own reportage on the JFK affair. Since 1963 Anderson has promoted a number of conflicting versions about "who really killed JFK" ranging from "the Mafia" to Fidel Castro or a combination of both.
 
Jack Newfield - A liberal columnist and some-time JFK assassination buff, Newfield has been a likewise long-standing devotee of Israel. He made a big splash with a highly fantastic story that missing Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa had "ordered" two Mafia figures to arrange the killing of President Kennedy. Not surprisingly, Newfield's ridiculous story was given wide play in the Establishment media.
 
THEORISTS AND/OR PROPAGANDISTS?
 
Oliver Stone - His Hollywood extravaganza, JFK, gave the public a fullblown, full-color, gory-in-every-detail conspiracy theory on the JFK assassination. Yet, Stone's presentation of the conspiracy was far from complete and failed to reach any firm conclusions. He deliberately suppressed the "French connection" which, in turn, was the long-hidden Israeli connection. Not only was Stone's chief financial backer Israel's leading arms dealer but also his film distribution company had its origins in the Lansky crime syndicate. What's more, one of the chief shareholders in the film company was none other than Bernard Cornfeld, long-time associate of Permindex figure Tibor Rosenbaum
 
Frank Mankiewicz - This former publicist for the Israeli Mossad-linked Anti-Defamation League had a peculiar part in the events that took place prior to the murder of Robert F. Kennedy. Then when Oliver Stone began promoting his film JFK, Mankiewicz popped up as his key public relations man.
 
Anthony Summers - Author of one book hinting that the Kennedy family were responsible for the death-maybe the murder-of actress Marilyn Monroe, Summers wrote another book on the JFK conspiracy. In neither book did Summers reveal explosive information (of which he was aware) that could have helped point the direction of those same forces which played a part in both crimes.
 
Robert Morrow - A former CIA contract operative who played a major role in activities on the periphery of the JFK assassination conspiracy, Morrow's book on his experiences is rife with detail, yet suspect in the eyes of many who had looked into his claims. Morrow's book absolves the key CIA conspirator, James J. Angleton, of involvement in the JFK conspiracy and portrays him as being "out of the loop" when, in fact, precisely the opposite was true. Is it a coincidence that Morrow's book publisher is an American affiliate of an Israeli publishing company?
 
G. Robert Blakey - An unlikely choice to serve as director of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Blakey had, just two years previously, served as a character witness for a long-time close associate of crime boss Meyer Lansky. When it came time to point the blame in the JFK assassination, Blakey targeted Lansky's protégé, New Orleans Mafia boss, Carlos Marcello, but looked no further. Blakey, likewise, found no role by the CIA-or any other intelligence agency-in the JFK assassination.
 
David Scheim - The author of a book that pins the murder of President Kennedy on "the Mafia," Scheim refuses to acknowledge Permindex board member Clay Shaw's intelligence connections and paints Israeli loyalist Meyer Lansky as a low-level syndicate figure with no influence of substance. Scheim's book was published by the American front for an Israeli publishing company.
 
Richard Billings - A journalist with close ties to the CIA, Billings played a major role in the media's campaign to undermine New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's investigation of Clay Shaw. Billings emerged as the prime promoter of the outlandish theory that Garrison was a Mafia front man trying to take the focus off the Mafia and direct the attention toward the intelligence community.
 
James DiEugenio - Although a deep admirer of both John F. Kennedy and New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, DiEugenio has tread lightly when inquiring into the ties between Clay Shaw and the Permindex operation with its multiple links to the Israeli Mossad and the crime syndicate.
 
Peter Dale Scott - His years of in-depth research on the JFK assassination have led him directly to the doorstep of the CIA, the Mossad and the Lansky Crime Syndicate, yet he has never been prepared to name names or point in the direction of those very forces, preferring to sidestep the issue.
 
 
 
Comment
Robert Morningstar
 
Thank you , David...
 
I agree with his views.  It was a big kettle of fish with common interests in the same cesspool that converged in Dealey Plaza that day.
 
Significantly, Itzak Rabin was a Mossad man in Dallas that day. His wife, Leah Rabin, wrote in her biography of the assassinated leader that they were both in Dallas the day JFK was shot.
 
I'm sure you know the story that Jack Ruby was accompanied all Friday and Saturday by 2 "foreign journalists" for whom he acted as "translator". Jack Ruby spoke "Yiddish" and Russian. I wonder if one of those "reporters" was actually Itzak Rabin.
 
Regards,
 
Robert M*

http://www.rense.com/general89/isrole.htm

[1949pete]

does crack-smoke republican ever post anything that doesn't reek of his obvious anti-semitism?anti-zionism or anti-Israel? dear God he'll have the jews bombing pearl harbor next and opening the concentration camps themselves so they could pin it on the japanese and "poor" nazis!Everywhere he looks there's a jewish conspiracy going on.Yitzak Rabin in dealy plaza?the mafia guys in the assassination plot all underlings of lansky?absurd in the extreme.if CSR wasn'y so blinded by hate maybe he could do some research and post something of value.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Jews are the guilty party. Prove otherwise.  They had every reason to kill Kennedy -- let's list the motives:

1. Kennedy's support of Arabs during the French suppression of the Algerian insurrection.
2. Kennedy's crack down on Jewish Gangsters and their empires still based in the Carribbean.
3. Kennedy's suppression of the early "Jew Run Heroin-French Connection" via Turkey
4. Kennedy's prohibition on the Jews getting a Nuke bomb via the Dimona Nuke plant (derived from Jewish blackmail of course)
5. Kennedy's attempted stoppage of the Jew take over of Cuba
6. Kennedy's attempt to stop the Jewish Usurious control over the Jew run criminal Federal Reserve.
7. Kennedy's desire to limit the power of the Zionist CIA.
8. Kennedy's likely non-support of Israel during the upcoming Arab-Israeli wars of the 1960s. (This is what likely sealed his fate.)

You sound like a J-Tribe criminal yourself Pete"Jewboy"... let's track the Idiot Jew IPs back to the ADL idiot PeteIdiotJew...  

I guess MCP named your criminal Dad up there in the list of Jewish Criminals...  it's only fitting...  Dumbassess cry A.S. when the Jews are the criminal perpetrators... no?  

The French Connection was a scheme through which heroin was smuggled from Turkey to France and then to the United States, culminating in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it provided the vast majority of the illicit heroin used in the United States. Headed by the Corsican criminals François Spirito and Antoine Guérini, associated to Auguste Ricord, Paul Mondoloni and Salvatore Greco,[citation needed] the French Connection dealt with Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano.[citation needed] Most of its starting capital came from Ricord's assets stolen during World War II when he worked for Henri Lafont, an agent of the Carlingue (French Gestapo).

-- The Criminal Idiot Jew Lansky ran the whole thing... Angleton was Oswald's handler and set him up as the Patsy...  study before becoming a typical jew idiot dumbass on this board...m'kay... T.J.I.D.A.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Hey JewPete,

Why did you come to just attack the CSR???   .  But hey, we are all here to learn, right?   JewTards like yourself really don't know the essential truths of Jews in the 20th Century and their crimes... which is really sad and actually pathetic when you examine Idiotic Jewish Hubris and Jew Scams in depth....  here is just a minor sampling of innumerable Jew Scams and Crimes... yes they are Jewish SCAMS, MURDERS and CRIMES... prove otherwise or STFU... I hope that is perfectly clear to all Zi-o-idiots reading TIU. We come swinging baseball bats at Jew B.S. here you know...

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"Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal,
rape, and pillage with the sanction and the blessing of the All-Highest."
-George White, Federal Bureau of Narcotics & Central Intelligence Agency        


The Strength of the Wolf:
The Secret History of America's War On Drugs
by Douglas Valentine
Verso Press, London/NY, 2004. 554pgs.


Back in the 1980's, during the era of William Casey's CIA, there were reports circulating in the alternative press about an international drug smuggling operation involving the mujaheddin in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pakistani military, including elements of its intelligence service, the Inter Service Intelligence or ISI. At one point the CIA, in an effort to ramp up this smuggling operation, sought to requisition 400 vehicles, including dozens of transport trucks from the Department of Defense. The Pentagon refused, but the CIA appealed to Reagan's Vice President, career spook George H.W. Bush, through the National Security Council. The CIA got its trucks.

At that time there were 17 Drug Enforcement Agents stationed in Islamabad, the largest contingent in the world at the time outside of the United States, according to Alfred W. Mc Coy in his classic history The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. (The number I remember reading at the time was 14 agents, still a formidable number for a single overseas station.) This contingent of DEA agents was "pushing paper" in Islamabad when "n marked contrast ...a single Norwegian detective, [Oyvind Olsen,] broke a heroin case that led directly to the leader of Pakistan, General Zia ul Haq's private banker."

The CIA's close relationship to elements in the Zia regime, including the ISI, were well known. Also the agency's ties to heroin and raw opium smuggler and mujaheddin leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, were becoming problematic as revelations of U.S. complicity in the drug trade bloomed. Hekmatyar has turned on his American allies and is currently battling the CIA-installed Hamid Karzai regime in Afghanistan. This is not surprising. He was a founder of the Islamic brotherhood and led student demonstrations in Kabul in the 1970's and remains a member of the Jamaat-i Islami (Party of Islam), "a fundamentalist and quasi-fascist Muslim group with many followers inside the Pakistani officer corps." The U.S. State Department and the mainstream media never fail to mention in their public comments that Hekmatyar is a "narco-terrorist," as though all those years he worked hand in hand with the CIA he was a choirboy. He was particularly close to another drug dealer, Jesse Helms, former Senator from North Carolina.

What was the Reagan administration's response to this torrent of reports tying the CIA to mujaheddin/ISI drug smuggling? As the Islamabad branch of the DEA began to stir around the reports of convoys of arms going up to Afghanistan and bringing drugs back, the Reagan people reassigned all but two agents, lest they interfere with the CIA drug operation. Pakistan virtually overnight went from a country with a few thousand heroin abusers to 1.3 million addicts.

And this is where Doug Valentine's study of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs, proves itself essential. The FBN was a precursor of the DEA and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, or BNDD; and as such, repeatedly, both worked with and ran afoul of the CIA and the national security apparatus in its pursuit of national and international drug cartels. Valentine draws much of his narrative from interviews with former FBN agents whose frustration with and anger at interference by the CIA and the national security apparatus interference is palpable.

The amount of information Valentine crams into his text is formidable and often takes on the texture of the dense web of law enforcement, felonious behavior, and intrigue he's illuminating. Some sets of passages reveal corruption so deep and pervasive that it's "thrilling", to borrow Dirty Lenny's term. Any one of dozens of cases Valentine touches on could have become one of Mark Lombardi's elegant and complex graphs of corruption.

For example, Valentine quotes from a memo from Ed Lansdale, the head of Operation Mongoose, part of JM/WAVE, which in part plotted to assassinate Castro as well as other Cubans and destroy Cuba's infrastructure. Lansdale wrote: "Gangster elements might prove the best recruitment potential for actions [murders] against police G-2 (intelligence) officials. CW [Chemical Warfare] agents should be fully considered." And recent documents have proven that CW were used as well as biological weapons against crops and the hog population of the island nation. Lansdale is ubiquitous in the annals of U.S. foreign policy. He can be found at the Huk rebellion, Vietnam/Laos, as well as Kennedy assassination. There is a hagiography on Lansdale which has its uses if you can read between the lines. But for biting insight into just how cultural chauvinists like Lansdale or Ted Shackley can fuck things up, read Richard Drinnon's chapters on the former in his Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building.

As it turns out, the gangsters in Lansdale's employ were the very gangsters the FBN was chasing--Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano.

On the very next page, we get Bobby Kennedy et al. Not the indefatigably noble Bobby Kennedy of the current Emilio Estevez hagiography, but the historical Bobby Kennedy:

    While Bobby Kennedy was using Mafia drug smugglers in murder plots against Castro [Robert Kennedy was intimately involved with Operation Mongoose], and thus neutralizing the FBN, the CIA was relocating its Havana station and anti-Castro terror activities to Miami. Known as JM/WAVE, the station was managed by Theodore Shackley, a prot&eacutee;g&eacutee; of Bill Harvey from Germany. It included Lansdale's Mongoose unit, and some 400 CIA case officers. Already the preferred habitat of America's mobsters, Miami was soon packed with dozens of CIA front companies. Thousands of CIA informers and assets, and several drug smuggling terror teams financed by wacky privateers like William Pawley, mentioned in Chapter 5 as having engineered the Pawley-Cooke Advisory Mission in Taiwan.

Reader's Digest Press published career spook Ted Shackley's book The Third Option in 1981. The book is such self-righteous bluster as to be laughable coming from a man who was stung by the Church and Pike committee reports and forced to fake his retirement from the Agency. "Shackley, having met drug lord General Vang Pao in Miami during his cooling off period, was reassigned as station chief to Laos." He needed to chill in Vientiane because "he'd been caught selling 50 kilograms of morphine base to FBN agent Bowman Taylor."

"How could the United States project power into distant lands, thus restoring some control over events which threaten our very survival?" Shackley asks. His answer: counter-insurgency and para-military operations like JM/WAVE, the Phoenix Program, and Operation Mongoose. Shackley is never clear how events in Nicaragua, the Congo, Bangladesh, Chile, Burkina Faso or Haiti etc. ad nauseum "threaten [the] very survival" of the U.S., a piece of political hyperbole obviously designed to disguise naked imperialism. But the global nature of American hegemony is clear in the statement.

So Ted Shackley in Florida! No wonder it was so easy for him to plug into the drugs and illegal arms side of the Iran-Contra affair, along with a bevy of Miami Cubans accused of drugs and arms smuggling, sabotage and murder, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who blew up a Cuban airliner, killing all aboard. Is that in your Bobby Kennedy legacy, Emilio? It's what you often find among American politicians; relatively benign domestic policy – fodder-friendly -- yet a foreign policy, the tool of empire, that is cruel, vindictive, even sadistic.

But wait, it gets better, Golden Triangle fans! "To cover a fraction of the costs of this massive enterprise, former spymaster Paul L. E. Helliwell established and directed a string of drug money laundering banks for the CIA. At the time, Helliwell was general counsel for the Thai consulate in Miami, an active leader in the Republican Party, and a friend of Nixon's cohort, Bebe Rebozo. Among his drug smuggling credentials, Helliwell had worked with Chiang Kai-Shek's intelligence chief, General Tai Li, and had set up the CIA's drug smuggling air force, CAT [Civil Air Transport](later Air America), as well as the Bangkok trading company Sea Supply, which provided cover for CIA officers advising the drug-smuggling Thai border police."

Against this new OSS/CIA backdrop of international criminality disguised as national security, the FBN was assigned the task of keeping America's streets safe from drugs. As Valentine points out, the long and bitter dissolution of the FBN had begun.

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, FBN, which was formed on June 30th, 1930, from the remnants of the Narcotics Division, the corrupt Prohibition Unit of the Internal Revenue Service, and the Treasury Department's Foreign Control Board, antedates the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the precursor to the CIA, by over two decades. The CIA's role in the international drug trade and how it warped, thwarted, and finally made a mockery of U.S. drug policy cannot be stressed enough. Valentine himself begins his introduction with a discussion of how, after finishing work on his excellent study of the 'Phoenix Program', he turned to the FBN. The Phoenix Program was turned over to the CIA by the DoD midstream. This put the CIA in an ideal position to protect its Golden Triangle drug smuggling turf and infiltrate and subvert DEA efforts to stem the international drug trade after the end of the U.S. incursion into Vietnam and Southeast Asia (see mujaheddin story above).

Not that the FBN, anymore than the BNDD or DEA, was a sainted organization. From its inception in 1930 to just under a decade before its dissolution, it was headed by Harry Jacob Anslinger, who was recommended by then head of the Foreign Relations committee, Stephen G. Porter (R-PA), and that paragon of truth and beauty, yellow journalist, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, William Randolph Hearst. Anslinger was a bureaucratic brown-noser with little interest in real drug enforcement and little idea of how to proceed. His main concern was preserving his power and maneuvering his little fiefdom politically while in the shadow of J. Edgar Hoover's far more powerful FBI. Lucky Luciano appropriately nicknamed Anslinger, Harry 'Asslicker.'

Post-World War II American foreign policy is often grotesque, and as Valentine makes clear, the FBN managed to find itself entangled in more than its share of bizarre machinations. Sometimes FBN agents pursuing a case were suddenly told to back off, often without explanation, or removed altogether. Other times they were willing participants eager to take part in the Bureau's sexy, Ed Wood-like cross-dressing fantasies or to abet felonies like drug dealing and murder.

Not that the FBN didn't have its law enforcement moments. One of its best agents was Charles Siragusa, who nearly became Anslinger's heir to head the bureau. Siragusa opened the FBN's first overseas office in Rome and liaisoned there with the CIA.

    Siragusa drew the line at facilitating drug trafficking, but helped the CIA in other ways. For example he helped black-bag CIA money to Italian politicians for James [Jesus] Angleton, the CIA's aggressive counter-intelligence chief...

Siragusa was especially helpful to the CIA when it came to investigating diversions of Marshall Plan aid. In one case he learned through an informer that the commercial attach&eacutee; at the Romanian Embassy [the U.S.'s secret Communist ally] in Berne was diverting American-made ball-bearings to the Soviet Union, which the Soviets used to build tanks for North Korea. According to Siragusa, the attach&eacutee; traded the ball-bearings for heroin as part of a sinister scheme to steal strategic materials with one hand from the West, while the other poisoned it with smack.

As a result of the Berne case, a CIA team was sent to Rome under military cover to stop diversions, and with Siragusa's help it intercepted all manner of strategic items, including uranium for the Soviet atomic energy program. James Jesus Angleton is loosely portrayed by Mat Damon in Robert DeNiro's film 'The Good Shepherd.' But it's doubtful that Damon communicates the very non-photogenic, spidery creepiness of the alcohol-soaked real thing. One retired CIA officer told me about a dinner party he attended where Angleton was also a guest. Angleton turned to the young spook and began asking him questions about his family background, beliefs, aspirations, etc. As he posed his questions, he pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket and began keeping notes on the answers. The paranoid Angleton continued taking notes the entire evening. So much for Emily Post meets Skull and Bones.

The FBN was involved in other notable cases, for example the famous French Connection and agent Frank Selvaggi's Valachi investigation. Much of the FBN's drug enforcement activity, however, was directed at street level dealers and users, especially among America's blacks and disenfranchised. Much like today, street busts were easier and the numbers could be used to justify funding. And if you didn't go too high up you wouldn't run afoul of the powers that be like the CIA and get your ass fired or worse. When in the early 1950's the FBN was closing in on the Pahlavi family and the Shah of Iran through the Shah's brother, Mahmoud Pahlavi, who along with other members of his family owned huge opium farms, they sat on the information because "the CIA was plotting to overthrow the government in Iran, and reinstall the Shah." And indeed in 1953 the CIA overthrew the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh and installed their favorite Persian drug dealers, the Pahlevis. Numerous other drug dealers from the Kuomintang to the Thai royal family and the Contras got a similar free pass flooding the streets of the world's major cities with drugs.

Take a more recent analogy. Reporter Gary Webb, for his reporting on the CIA/Contra drug smuggling connection to the 'Freeway' Ricky Ross and the Los Angeles crack epidemic, was roundly vilified by the mainstream media protecting its masters. Webb was also hounded by various agencies of the U.S. government. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to contradict without explanation its own earlier reporting on 'Freeway' Ricky and his influence on the L.A. crack epidemic in order to protect the CIA in the name of national security. The whole hypocritical episode is laid out by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair in Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and The Press. As for Gary Webb: despondent over the outing of such a fine Ivy League crew as the CIA and their noble 'founding father'-like buddies, the Contras, he allegedly committed suicide à la Danny Casolaro in December of 2004.

Valentine's book also expands on the FBN's role in one of the seediest episodes involving the CIA, the creation of the American counter-culture or MKULTRA. As you might recall, MKULTRA was a program under the supervision of OSS/CIA scientist, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. Gottlieb approached Harry Anslinger to enlist the services of FBN agent George White, in effect making White both an employee of the FBN and the OSS/CIA. All of this is nicely reprised in John Marks' The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control The Story of the Agency's Secret Efforts to the Control Human Behavior. For the perpetually naive I recommend the Church and Pike congressional committee reports or the books of CIA Inspector General Lyman B. Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick, for example, closed the case, ruling the mysterious death of Frank Olson a suicide. The CIA scientist, who specialized in airborne diseases like anthrax, was surreptitiously slipped LSD at a CIA social gathering. After a bad trip, Olson plunged to his death from a window of the Manhattan Statler Hilton several days later, in the presence of CIA psychiatrist Robert Lashbrook. Police initially called the crime scene a homicide until Kirkpatrick stepped in.

The ostensible reason for this CIA 'research' which embraced LSD and other hallucinogens was to create a 'truth serum.' Added to that project were various attempts to control behavior, in effect creating assassins chemically, the Manchurian Candidate. Better assassins through chemistry. But mostly it was used as a party drug by the Agency and a small group of elites who were creating the nascent vocabulary of mind expansion. The OSS project began under the supervision of Dr. Winfred Overholser of St. Elizabeth's Hospital, who also oversaw Ezra Pound's treatment there during the 1950's. Overholser used a dozen unsuspecting guinea pigs from the Manhattan Project, possibly searching for Soviet or German spies. A liquid concentrate of marijuana was used but with no discernible results other than to make the young scientists ill. Whether Overholser was tripping while treating Pound is lost to posterity.

When George White came on board, he had bigger plans. White used FBN 'safe houses' and apartments around the country, including the birthplace of the counter-culture, San Francisco, for illicit trysts and parties among FBN, CIA, and other law enforcement and intelligence people. The 'program' expanded to include unwitting victims, acquaintances, prostitutes, musicians, etc. White would spike the punch with a cocktail of hallucinogens and their variants, often triggering hallucinations & even psychosis in his unsuspecting victims. Many suffered permanent psychological damage. For many more no record exists of what effect this clandestine drugging might have had on them. Years later in a personal letter to Sid Gottlieb, George White wrote an epitaph for his role in the CIA:

    "I was a very minor missionary, actually a heretic, but I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape, and pillage with the sanction and the blessing of the All-Highest?

The breadth of drug-related events in the post-World War II world the FBN had a stake in is extraordinary. Though corruption flourished within the bureau throughout its history, it's the FBN's connection with broad historical events from a relatively unique perspective, often in the agents' own words, that makes Valentine's reprise fresh and informative.

Valentine makes clear that three of the forces most prominent in defining the underlying international drug trade are the Mafia, the anti-Castro Cubans, and the CIA, with the CIA shielding the other two entities at every turn. Of the three, the Mafia is the most pervasive. Its underworld figures, like Arnold Rothstein who, besides running drugs, fixed the 1919 World Series, helped establish a need for a law enforcement agency that focused specifically on drugs. The anti-Castro Cubans were often Mafia figures unhappy about the Commies cleaning up their little island whore house. No more could a U.S. Congressman be lured to Havana with promises of unlimited sex with eight-year old boys in exchange for political favors.

The CIA's connection, of course, began with 'Wild Bill' Donovan's old OSS and its recruitment of Lucky Luciano and the Corsican mafiosi to beat and murder Communist union dockworkers in Marseilles and elsewhere along the Mediterranean Coast, and to seize Sicily from the Communists. With CIA blessing, and using drug running as a way of financing activities, the Mafia set up drug supply routes back to the U.S. Many an FBN operation would trace the drugs back to Mafia sources, in turn supplied through Lebanon, Turkey, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East, only to be thwarted by the far more powerful CIA stepping in and terminating the investigation on national security grounds.

But nowhere has CIA drug smuggling been more pervasive, longstanding, and crucial to the financing of black ops and low intensity conflict than in the Golden Triangle region of Southeast Asia. This raw opium and heroin preserve straddles northern Burma/Myanmar, southern Yunnan province in China, and northern Thailand stretching to Vientiane in southern Laos. The CIA officially took over drug smuggling operations from the French after Dien Bien Phu and along with the Corsicans, and especially the darlings of Washington political establishment, Reader's Digest, and Claire Chennault, Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang.

The Kuomintang were involved in the drug trade in southern China well before there was an American presence in the region. But corrupt allies like Meo tribal leader Vang Pao who now resides in Orange County, California, were actually enlisted by the Agency. Vang Pao, a persistent critic of the godless and comparatively drugless Vietminh and Pathet Lao, helped organize the recent anti-Vietnam protests, in advance of George Bush's visit to Hanoi, with the help of the California Republican Party, as the two have done on many occasions.

Competition for the drug trade remains fierce in the Golden Triangle to this day. As Valentine points out, the CIA then as now remains in the thick of it, even as the FBN proved ineffectual or too corrupt or bureaucratically incompetent to be effective. Drawing from Alfred McCoy's earlier classic The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Valentine reprises a popular story of the CIA's heroic defense of its opium trade and life-and-death free market competition of the Golden Triangle:

    As world attention focused ever more closely on America's conduct in the Vietnam War, the CIA's need to conceal its major role in the regional drug trade became a top priority. The climactic point came in June 1967, when Burmese War Lord Khun Sa decided to sell 16 tons of opium in Houei Sai. Construing this as a challenge to their precious monopoly over supply, the Kuomintang generals mobilized their forces in Burma and marched across the border into Laos. Apprised of the situation, CIA station chief Ted Shackley in Vientiane informed Pat Landry, chief of the CIA's major base in Udorn, Thailand. Landry ordered Air Force Major Richard Secord to send a squadron of T-28s to the rescue. Within hours, the battle had ended with both Khun Sa and the Kuomintang in full retreat, and the Laotians in total control.

Most readers probably first heard of Richard Secord during Iran-Contra when he and his partner, Albert Hakim, supplied the U.S. proxy army fighting against the Sandinistas and flooding U.S. drug markets with Contra cocaine. Especially hard hit was South Central Los Angeles, which Contra and Agency asset Danilo Blandon and 'Freeway' Ricky Ross flooded with Colombian cocaine with the enthusiastic support of the CIA and Reagan administration officials. This is the story Gary Webb broke. And the spread of coke, especially crack, is why you ended up with Crips dealing in Mineola and Duluth and Scranton as well as the AIDS epidemic and the hundreds of millions of dollars made from the mandatory sentencing craze and the penal housing boom it fuels. (The sad saga is also reprised in Cockburn and St. Clair's White Out, cited above.)

CIA agent Ted Shackley, called the Blond Ghost, the consummate 'spook,' shows up in the index of practically every book ever written on the illegal drug trade, political assassination, and sabotage from the earliest days of the U.S. takeover from the French in Vietnam to Operation Mongoose and the Phoenix Program, right through Iran-Contra. He famously said: "I fought the communists for twenty-eight years. I did a lot of bad things for my country. But I loved my country and did what I thought best."

Of course, the case is easily made that Shackley also did a lot of bad things TO his country. Jonathan Kwitny, in his book The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, sums up Shackley's career thus: "Looking at the list of disasters Shackley has presided over during his career, one might even conclude that on the day the CIA hired Shackley it might have done better hiring a KGB agent; a Soviet mole probably could not have done as much damage to the national security of the United States with all his wiles as Shackley did with the most patriotic of intentions."(p.291)

Valentine points out, and as 'Freeway' Ricky Ross and Contra cocaine confirm, [that the FBN as well as the CIA, DEA, FBI, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post et al.] racism and class warfare play an enormous role in who is the enemy in the so-called 'war on drugs.' It was the Danilo Blandon Contra drug connection with 'Freeway' Ricky Ross in Los Angeles than led to the pandemic of crack use in the U.S., and the seeming anomaly of finding Crips establishing drug markets all across the heartland. During the 1980's Ted Shackley and his friends Thomas Clines and Felix Rodriguez were part of the drug smuggling operation out of Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador that fueled that pandemic. CIA asset John Hull served the same function forming what was known as the 'Southern Front' from his ranch in Costa Rica along the Nicaraguan border.

Apropos of the customary targets of the FBN, and the FBN's history of cutting law enforcement corners and corruption, agent Jim Attie summarized his experience as an agent as follows: "I'm not proud of what I did. It was dirty job. It was a form of amorality, and to this day I feel tremendous guilt and have unending nightmares as a result of what I did as a narcotic agent." Attie himself exited the FBN after his fellow agents in the New York office, where he had recently been reassigned, slipped LSD into his coffee. Attie merited the reassignment because he had called his boss Anslinger "a manipulator and a cheapskate" who knew nothing about real narcotics work.

The FBN was involved in myriad aspects of the investigation of the infamous French Connection. The French Connection had its origins in French intelligence, the SDECE, operating in French Indo-China. This drug smuggling operation provided essential funding to the French military and enhanced its ability to wage war against insurgencies in that region. This is the operation the CIA would inherit working with the traditional drug lords in the Golden Triangle and the French Corsican mob. Further, "In 1963 Laos would withdraw from the UN's 1961 Single Convention and, under the guidance of the CIA, start mass-producing narcotics to support the CIA's own secret army of Laotion hill tribesmen, some 450 more of whom just surrendered to Laotian authorities in December of 2006."

The FBN also made the initial bust on Joe Valachi, laboriously working their way up through his contacts. They also elicited some of his notorious revelations about the mob. A rookie agent in late 1958, Frank Selvaggi, along with his senior partner Art Mendelsohn and veteran NYPD narcotic detective Harold Kunin, arrested Helen Streat, a heroin addict and a prostitute in Harlem. Eventually through a series of busts, payoffs and 'vigorous' interrogations, a Selvaggi informant, Robert Wagner, 'gave' the FBN Valachi and he was arrested. Facing sentencing in court, Valachi began to set up and talk about members of the Genovese crime family.

And because the FBN was mandated to pursue illicit drugs, and because illicit drugs were a core business of the Mafia, the anti-Castro Cuban community, and the CIA, the FBN found itself smack dab in the middle of the Holy Grail of all conspiracies, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. But as Valentine points out, you'd be hard pressed to find relevant FBN activity in any official investigation of Kennedy's assassination. For example, in 1958 the FBN was aware that Joseph Civello was Carlos Marcello's "deputy in Dallas" and that Jack Ruby was part of Civello's organization. FBN agent John Cusack linked Civello with Marcello, Santos Trafficante, and Jimmy Hoffa - the House Select Committee on Assassinations' three prime suspects in the Kennedy assassination. But the FBN was never called to testify, nor were their files requested.

Valentine lays out other FBN connections that went unexplored by the Warren Commission and other official investigations, none 'eerier' than the connection with the main figures in the aforementioned MKULTRA project which had for one of its main goals the creation of a Manchurian Candidate, a 'patsy,' to borrow Lee Harvey Oswald's term.

"The three main suspects in the assassination [of JFK] - Marcello, Trafficante, and Hoffa - were million dollar men" e.g individuals who for services rendered and classified information were privy to were shielded from prosecution by the CIA. "And the CIA prevented the FBN from going after these drug traffickers, or investigating CIA agents like Irving Brown - and perhaps even Michael Mertz - in Angleton's French connection."

There's Oswald's claim of being a mere 'patsy' in the assassination of Kennedy. Then there's the connection that FBN files and interviews with former agents reveal between Ruby and the Marcello crime family and a number of other connections that Valentine lays out. In this light, not only Oswald but Ruby himself and Sirhan Sirhan, Robert Kennedy's assassin, could have been patsies.

    On 29 November 1963, a week after the president was murdered, Marshall Carter, the deputy director of the CIA, met with Richard Helms, John Earman, James Angleton, Sid Gottlieb, and Lyman Kirkpatrick. What a group! At this meeting the CIA chiefs agreed to continue testing unwitting subjects through MKULTRA using the FBN and its safehouses. To this end they launched MKULTRA Subproject 149 in New York in January 1964, specifically to provide a replacement for [FBN agent] Charlie Siragusa.

Siragusa had gotten tangled up in MKULTRA, Operation Mongoose plots to murder Castro, and other CIA intrigues when his boss Bill Anslinger sent Siragusa to solicit the help of Cuba's new leader Fidel Castro in the apprehension of 50 major drug traffickers that had formerly called Batista's Cuba their second home. Castro, who was in the Sierra Maestra when Batista was pimping for the mob and the CIA, couldn't be of much help, and Siragusa began to suspect what was eventually to become the obvious, that Trafficante was protected by the CIA and that a recent murder charge in the Albert Anastasia assassination case was dismissed at the Agency's behest.

This review can't do Valentine's book justice. The rich detail of the CIA's effectiveness in blocking FBN efforts to pursue international drug traffickers is worth the price of admission alone.

http://www.flashpointmag.com/cpvalent.htm

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Note the Idiot Jew Tibor Rosenbaum -- as sick as Ugly Jew Sick can get...
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BCI in turn, was headed up by an Israeli banker, Tibor Rosenbaum, former Director for Finances and Supply for the Israeli Mossad.

CMC/Permindex, in turn, proves to be a major point of intersection which brings the shadowy Bloomfield into direct or indirect contact with Clay Shaw (the chief target of the Jim Garrison JFK investigation in New Orleans), Guy Banister, James Jesus Angleton, FBI Division 5 chief William Sullivan (who spearheaded the FBI investigation for the Warren Commission and served as FBI liaison and friend of Angleton), ex-Cuban President Carlos Prio Socarras (provable gun-running business partner of Oswald assassin Jack Ruby), Ernest Israel Japhet (chairman and president of Israeli Bank Leumi), Shaul Eisenberg (a key figure in Israel's nuclear bomb development and participant with Rosenbaum in the Swiss-Israel Trade Bank), elements of the French nationalist Secret Army Organization (OAS), CIA agent Theodore Shackley (the CIA's chief of station in Miami during the CIA-Lansky assassination plots against Fidel Castro), and Abe Feinberg, New York Jewish businessman used by Ben Gurion as the liaison

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Michael Collins Piper's Response To My Critical Summary
Posted to alt.conspiracy.jfk on 2 September 2001

To Whom It May Concern:

      The Good Doctor Rahn has published a "critical summary" of the SECOND EDITION of my book FINAL JUDGMENT: THE MISSING LINK IN THE JFK ASSASSINATION CONSPIRACY on his website. He has also posted it on this newsgroup. This is my formal response.
      I have a few remarks, by way of a preface to my response to Rahn, however.
      I regret that, unlike Rahn, I don't have all sorts of fancy academic titles after my name (although I did get an undergraduate degree), but I do have to say, if anyone cares, that a number of well-known academics have praised my writing and research skills in other areas outside the "controversial" topics of 1) the JFK assassination and 2) U.S. policy toward Israel and the Arab world.
      However, I suppose, that when one dares to mix the two topics, it sets a writer up for some real name-calling and heavy-duty thrashing, which is precisely what I have experienced (even from people who SAY that they are interested in "the whole story" of the JFK assassination).
      I have discovered that, in some respects, you are "allowed" to place the blame on any and all possible suspects with the notable exception of Israeli intelligence which did indeed have a very good reason to want JFK out of the White House and replaced with an "Israel-friendly" president such as LBJ (a topic explored in full detail in my book, based upon the writings of the following:

1) Seymour Hersh: The Samson Option
2) Andrew and Leslie Cockburn: Dangerous Liaison
3) Avner Cohen: Israel and the Bomb
4) Stephen Green: Taking Sides

      In any case, as anyone who has actually bothered to read my book from beginning to end (and that evidently doesn't include Dr. Rahn, by his own admission) knows full well, I do not place absolute singular blame on the Mossad per se.
      It is important to note that Rahn's review of FINAL JUDGMENT was apparently based on the second edition, printed in 1994. The second edition was 335 pages in length and had 677 footnotes. The fifth edition of the book, released in 2000, is a grand total of 760 pages, featuring 1114 footnotes, along with 36 pages of pictures and illustrations.
      (One of the illustrations photographically reproduces hand-written attacks on JFK by "Si" Kenan, one of the founders of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee--AIPAC--the lobby for Israel. These personal documents of Kenan, which are in safe storage, were literally slipped through my office mail-slot just before the fifth edition went to press.
      Accompanying the anti-JFK ravings were other personal documents of Kenan (dating back to 1976) which verify that the handwriting and the documents were his--or otherwise they are very masterful forgeries of a wide-ranging number of documents, even including personal financial records of Mr. Kenan. I have to believe that the documents must have been grabbed by some intelligence agency, possibly the CIA or even Mossad or God knows who, and that after someone heard about my book they decided to provide them to me.
      The very existence of these documents PROVES that the israeli lobby was hostile to JFK, contrary to the general perception--even among some JFK assassination researchers--that JFK was a "fan" of Israel of some sort.
      In any event, Mr. Rahn has obviously not seen the substantially larger and enhanced FIFTH edition of FINAL JUDGMENT, which brings to a total some 30,000 copies of all editions of the book now in circulation. I am going to send him a complimentary copy of the FIFTH edition in hopes that he will read it from beginning to end, rather than dismiss it with a sarcastic comment about my mother as he does in his "critical summary" below.
      Now, let's look at this "critical summary" of FINAL JUDGMENT.
      Mr. Rahn writes:

CRITICAL SUMMARY

"Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Controversy"
Michael Collins Piper (1993) The Wolfe Press, Washington, 335 pp.

      There are four basic things about this strange book
      PIPER RESPONDS: The use of the word "strange" is an obvious attempt to bias the reader of the summary in the first place. However, Webster's Third New International Dictionary says that strange can mean "new, unfamiliar" "not before known, heard or seen." In that regard Rahn is correct, because FINAL JUDGMENT is the first book ever to explore, in depth--in perhaps excrucating detail, more than anyone really wants to know--the theory that Israel's intelligence agency, the Mossad, played a hand alongside the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Crime Syndicate (which includes the subset known as "the Mafia") in the assassination of President Kennedy.

that every student of the JFK assassination should know. First, it proposes that Israel's intelligence agency the Mossad was the driving force behind the assassination.
      PIPER RESPONDS: Yet, Rahn does not point out that the book explores the Mossad and Israeli lobby connections of many of the key, commonly "recognized" players in many of the diverse JFK assassination theories. That is what I call "the tie that binds" in the assassination conspiracy: the fact that so many people, in the CIA, the "right wing," the military-industrial complex, the FBI, and organized crime (often incorrectly called "the Mafia") had intimate and significant ties to the Mossad.

Second, the conspiracy and subsequent cover-up were so large as to contain something for everybody.
      PIPER RESPONDS: If Rahn had read my book--any edition of it--he would have noted in the "Conclusion" that I say precisely the opposite: that the actual numbers of participants in the planning (and execution) of the assassination were very small in number: perhaps no more than 20 people in the actual planning itself. Those whom I implicate were all closely connected at the highest levels of the CIA, the Mossad and organized crime. And the more I look at things, the less I think it is likely that commonly-accused "conspirators" such as Giancana, Marcello, and Traficante were actually directly involved in any planning whatsoever. As far as the cover-up is concerned, my book documents the little-known (but very real) connections to Israel  and to Permindex (that spooky permindex) and to the Mossad of several key figures on the Warren Commission and in the major media. To say that "the conspiracy and subsequent cover-up were so large as to contain something for everybody" is quite simply a total misrepresentation of my book and its thesis.

Third, Michael Collins Piper offers not a shred of solid (physical) evidence for any of this.
      PIPER RESPONDS: I have been the first to admit, from the beginning, and in the book, that there is no forensic evidence to PROVE that the Mossad had a hand in the assassination. However, there are those who will argue that there is no forensic evidence to PROVE that Lee Harvey Oswald was indeed THE assassin or ONE OF the assassins. What "evidence" that does exist pinning Oswald has been dissected at length from the beginning and most people find it lacking.

And fourth, the book convinced Piper's mother.
      PIPER RESPONDS:  How cute of Rahn to bring my mother into this. I'm sure he uses that line with his students. It's probably good for a laugh, but it's dirty pool at the least. She was mentioned in passing in the acknowledgments to the book and as I have pointed out in response to Rahn in another posting, and as I have mentioned elsewhere, I think the fact that my mother--who is indeed my worst critic--read my book and found it convincing is significant.
      Why is my mother's opinion significant?
      My mother is a reasonably intelligent woman, pretty well read in a lot of areas--probably much better read than most Americans--and she has read many of the other books on the JFK assassination. When I first described my thesis to her in about six or eight sentences, she said, "I don't know about that."
      Then she read the book and commented, "It makes as much sense to me as anything else I have read on the subject." And that is precisely the average comment of the average person who has read the book (and who has read other books on the subject).

      Point three, the total lack of solid evidence, is a consequence of the coexistence of upwards of one hundred conspiracy theories, many of them mutually exclusive, which means that the evidence for none of them can be solid. That in turn follows from the complete absence of strong evidence for conspiracy in general in this assassination-had such evidence existed, it would have been shouted from the rooftops many years ago, and someone would have long since won a Nobel prize for it, to say nothing of reaping millions from the book and the blockbuster movie. The lack of such an occurrence should make us view each new conspiracy offering with extreme skepticism. More strongly, the total lack of hard evidence for conspiracy requires us to approach all proposals about conspiracy with the time-tested working hypothesis that they will not contain any hard evidence.
      PIPER RESPONDS: This is a mouthful from Rahn. But it's all about "theories" in general and does not address ANYTHING in FINAL JUDGMENT at all. In addition, Rahn's suggestion that someone would have "shouted" from the rooftops, etc etc is highly unlikely. Anyone who really did have inside knowledge about the conspiracy was either smart enough to keep his mouth shut or was silenced.
      One reader of FINAL JUDGMENT described my theory to Walter Cronkite at a personal meeting with the famed broadcaster who said, "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."
      It should be noted that E. Howard Hunt privately offered a certain journalist based in Canada the "whole story" of what he knew about the JFK assassination in return for $14 million. The journalist asked Hunt why $14 million. He said: "That is what I've calculated I would need to protect myself for the rest of my natural life," or words to that effect. This incident involving Hunt has never been reported, but I got it second-hand from a well-known JFK assassination investigator who got the story from the journalist who got the offer from Hunt. The journalist in question later wrote an entertaining piece about Hunt in a recent issue of a popular magazine that left the reader to believe that Hunt was indeed "involved" or otherwise "connected to" the events surrounding the JFK assassination. The journalist did not mention Hunt's offer. It should also be noted that the journalist was working for ANOTHER publication when he first intereviewed Hunt and received the offer. The story of Hunt's offer was not mentioned in the final published article that appeared in another publication.
      Anyway, the point is that at least one person has offered to "tell". There are others who contend that Frank Sturgis also gave a written confession to involvement in the assassination. In addition, Marita Lorenz says that Sturgis confessed to her. There is also the confession of James Files. There are those who doubt these stories, but if even ANYTHING any of them have said is true about their connections to the JFK assassination, then--as Rahn has said--somebody HAS shouted or otherwise "whispered"--if not from the rooftops.

      As for Piper's mother, he notes that she has always been his severest critic. If Mama now believes his book, it must be true.
      PIPER RESPONDS: We've already talked about my mother. Then to call her "Mama" is the ultimate. The next thing we know, Rahn will be wondering if "Mama" nursed me correctly or whether she nursed me at all. Is Rahn one of these Freudian types or something. He's starting to get absolutely Bevilaquian here! (No wonder they get along so well.)

      Michael Collins Piper proposes that the Mossad was at the center of a very large conspiracy and cover-up.
      PIPER RESPONDS: Again, I say that it was a very SMALL conspiracy and cover-up.

It starts with JFK during the first years of his presidency sufficiently angering the CIA, the Mafia, and Israel that they all wanted to kill him.  The reasons for the anger by the CIA and the Mafia have been advanced for many years (failure to fully support the Bay of Pigs operation, wanting to make peace with Castro, and wanting to scale down the Cold War or end it entirely, etc.);
      PIPER RESPONDS: Finally, Rahn got something right!

the reasons for Israel's anger have been overlooked until now, according to Piper,
      PIPER RESPONDS: Note the phraseology: "according to Piper." A deliberate attempt to make it appear as though all of the documentation I provide regarding JFK's bitter relationship with David Ben-Gurion AND Ben-Gurion's successor are all just "according to Piper." No, in fact, it is according to the following sources, which I will repeat for the record:

1) Seymour Hersh: The Samson Option
2) Andrew and Leslie Cockburn: Dangerous Liaison
3) Avner Cohen: Israel and the Bomb
4) Stephen Green: Taking Sides

      These books did not come out until the late 1980s and into the 1990s, so up until that time there was very little published information about JFK's relationship with Israel. So, yes, according to Piper, --and it's true-- there was very little information about JFK's relationship with Israel and therefore no one who was looking into the JFK assassination had any reason to look in the direction of Israel since many people believed the popular claim (largely put forth by the israeli lobby, that "JFK loved Israel and the Jewish people." etc etc. Sure, that's why he was determined to stop Israel from building the nuclear bomb and that's why top jewish leaders threatened to cut off his re-election money in 1964 if he didn't back off.

and center around Kennedy's desire to create a balanced Middle East policy and to thwart Israel's nuclear ambitions. Israel feared that these changes would threaten the survival of their nation.
      PIPER RESPONDS: The sources cited above verify all of the things that Rahn summarizes about my foundation for the claim that the Mossad would have had an interest in removing JFK from office.

So they decided to kill him.
      PIPER RESPONDS: Yes, I do believe that the Mossad did play a hand alongside the CIA and the Lansky Crime Syndicate. I believe that the Permindex grouping (well known to JFK researchers) was a part of the conspiracy and that you will find Mossad connections--intimate connections--at all relevant levels. Frank Sturgis did work for the Mossad as early as the late 1940s and well into the 1960s. Fact fact fact fact fact.

      Israel turned to the Mafia to help, through kingpin Meyer Lansky and what Piper calls the "Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate."
      PIPER RESPONDS: As time goes by, I find less and less reason to believe that "the Mafia" was a major player really and that is made clear in subsequent editions of the book. Meyer Lansky, however, was part of the permindex crowd through his relationship with the Banque de Credit Internationale of Geneva, run by Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum, a major Mossad figure.

Along the way, they also involved West Coast mobster Mickey Cohen,
      PIPER RESPONDS: Although Mickey Cohen is mentioned in the book in regard to intrigue against JFK, the book does not specifically say that Cohen was involved in the assassination conspiracy. If you had read the book, Dr. Rahn, you would have seen that.

Jack Ruby,
      PIPER RESPONDS: Oh yes, Jack Ruby. You've heard of him. And yes, according to FBI documents, Ruby had connections to Israel through gun-running back to the 1950s. In addition, Ruby had a connection to israel through his friend and attorney Luis Kutner, who was a major intelligence figure with ties to the Mossad. And--get this--Ruby met with Lawrence Myers the night before the assassination. Myers was often called a "Mafia" figure but he was also linked to a company implicated in illegal arms smuggling to israel. None of this "PROVES" ANYTHING, but it does bring forth Israeli connections to Jack Ruby that are passed by in all of the literature regarding the JFK assassination--with the exception of FINAL JUDGMENT, which does indeed make the book "singular, unique, peculiar." (as in "strange" as in Webster's Third)

Melvin Belli,
      PIPER RESPONDS: Rahn is quite reckless here. I simply pointed out that Belli acted as a defender of the Warren Commission. Anyone who read what Rahn has written would think that I implicated Belli in the assassination conspiracy.

Permindex,
      PIPER RESPONDS: Permindex is what ties the CIA, the Mossad and the Lansky Crime Syndicate together--along with elements of French intelligence.

James Jesus Angleton of the CIA,
      PIPER RESPONDS: Oh yes. There's a monument in Israel to Angleton. You can't understand the CIA and its history without considering Angleton. And you can't consider Angleton without recognizing his role as the devoted CIA liaison to the Mossad. Most JFK researchers who have talked about Angleton's links to the JFK conspiracy and cover-up (if they have done so at all) are hesitant to mention the Mossad connection.

E. Howard Hunt,
      PIPER RESPONDS: You can't talk about the JFK assassination without talking about E. Howard Hunt, if only because he has been involved in two lawsuits on the subject and has been written about extensively. In FINAL JUDGMENT I try to make sense of what has been written and been said about Hunt and put it in a context that explains what did--or didn't--happen on November 22, 1963. And if Dr. Rahn had read my book carefully he would see that I don't necessarily contend that Hunt was INVOLVED in the assassination per se, but only that he was involved in activities that circled around the assassination itself.

French Corsican gangsters,
      PIPER RESPONDS: Maybe. Maybe not. But I did have a French source, former French intelligence operative Pierre Neuville, clearly identified, with his whole story told, in the FIFTH edition of FINAL JUDGMENT, also including French intelligence documents relating to Neuville, who was supposed to be a patsy in a Mossad plot to kill Nasser of Egypt.

to name a few.
      PIPER RESPONDS: This, again, is disingenuous. I state very clearly in the summary of the book that only a small handful of people were actually involved in the assassination planning and execution.

They piggy-backed their efforts on a fake-assassination scheme described by Gary Wean in "There's a FISH In The COURTHOUSE." Hunt had developed the idea of pretending to try to assassinate the president but failing. It would leave a false trail that would lead directly to Fidel Castro and rouse American sympathies for an invasion of Cuba that would depose Castro once and for all. Hunt sold the plan to other high-ranking anti-Castro people in the Kennedy administration, up to and including his Cabinet. JFK was kept unaware of it for his own "protection". (I'm not making this up, folks.)
      PIPER RESPONDS: This is indeed, roughly, what Gary Wean contends in his book. The truth is, however, that the thesis of FINAL JUDGMENT does not stand or fall on what Gary Wean has written. Even if Gary Wean had NEVER written his book, everything else in FINAL JUDGMENT stands on its own. So Rahn is way off the beam by trying to suggest that my whole thesis rests on Wean's claims about this "dummy assassination attempt."
      And by the way, although Rahn calls Gary Wean my "favorite informant," Gary Wean (to my surprise) has actually attacked FINAL JUDGMENT. Despite that, Rahn doesn't seem to be aware that Wean has now identified the name of the person who told the story about a "dummy assassination" that was manipulated from and that person is former Sen. John Tower of Texas. Wean disguised his identity in his book THERE'S A FISH IN THE COURTHOUSE by saying "John" was a big man, when, in fact, as everyone knows, John Tower was a little man. Now that Tower is dead, Wean felt that he could identify him and has done so.

      The Mossad had a spy in their midst, however, and seized the opportunity to sneak in their own shooters and do the job for real. Naturally, Hunt and the others were devastated when Kennedy was actually killed. They considered it a giant double-cross by somebody;
      PIPER RESPONDS: I don't believe that Wean himself believes it was the Mossad, but that's really neither here nor there.

only now does Piper reveal that it was the Mossad from the outside rather than a double-cross from the inside.
      PIPER RESPONDS: Oh, isn't Rahn clever: "Only now does Piper reveal" Piper isn't "revealing" anything. Piper is stating his thesis based on a wide-range of information. This kind of sarcasm is typical of those who can only cast aspersions on "conspiracy theories" by using sarcastic tones such as this.
      Anyway, I'm not sure that if there was a Mossad double-cross that it was "from the outside" rather than from the inside, since the Mossad was very much "inside" the CIA through the good offices of James Jesus Angleton.

      Piper stresses how other writers have glimpsed part of this murky scenario, but have not been able to put it all together. Dick Russell, in "The Man Who Knew Too Much," sensed that some other group usurped Oswald's "relationship with the CIA." Gerry Patrick Hemming was said by Russell to have noticed a third force of anti-Castro exiles that seemed to be controlled by an agency other than the CIA. Donald Freed and Mark Lane's "Executive Action" proposed that Oswald had gotten involved in some outside action, as did Robert Morrow's "Betrayal." Don DeLillo's "Libra" contained a fake assassination attempt that went awry. None other than Chauncey Holt related his involvement in a faked assassination attempt that was to be blamed on Castro. Michael Milan's "The Squad" says that the guns were aimed at Connally rather than Kennedy, and that LBJ and Hoover were ultimately responsible. James Reston, Jr., wrote similarly that Connally had been the target. Lastly, former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky wrote in "By Way Of Deception" that the Mossad taught its recruits that Connally had been the true target.
      PIPER RESPONDS: Yes, these other individuals have made such statements, although  without responding in detail to each, it seems to me that Rahn is trying to suggest that all of these things are somehow "contradictory." Quite the contrary. Instead, they all point to the idea that perhaps there were other elements at work, manipulating different people in different ways, bringing them together in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

      After all this, one would expect some pretty strong evidence from Piper. It is absent.
      PIPER RESPONDS: It is rather interesting to me that Rahn has focused on what is the one chapter in the book where I actually try to make sense of anything that did -- or did not -- actually happen in Dallas. I have never suggested that this chapter is "proof" of anything, but it does show the manipulation surrounding the E. Howard Hunt story (and the Angleton connection thereto) and demonstrates how the oft-discussed "French connection" may well indeed be the very real "Israeli connection" to the assassination.
      Rahn does not address any of the Mossad connections of Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, Frank Sturgis, James Angleton, Louis Bloomfield nor, most pointedly, does he want to seem to address the very real MOTIVE for the Mossad and supporters of Israel in the CIA to want to get JFK out of the way.

Although I didn't comb every single page of the book,
      PIPER RESPONDS: Not very academic of Dr. Rahn.

I was unable to find a single piece of solid evidence to support any single aspect of Piper's multi-tentacled "explanation." It's all connections, all loose and indirect.
      PIPER RESPONDS: The connections are not "loose" and "indirect." E.G. Would Rahn say that the fact that Louis Bloomfield, a henchman of the Bronfman family and a top Israeli lobby figure, was chairman of Permindex and that Clay Shaw--out of all of the trade executives in the world--was on the board of Permindex was "loose" and "indirect." Or that Permindex ties back to the Mossad and to the Lansky Syndicate as well. That old saw that "it's all connections" doesn't wash. "Connections" are what life is all about. It's Rahn's "connections" that have made him the esteemed academic that he is today.

Unfortunately for conspiracists, connections do not a conspiracy or an assassination make.
      PIPER RESPONDS: An assassination couldn't happen if people planning the assassination didn't have the "connections" to make it happen.

Piper's entire book is wishful thinking.
      PIPER RESPONDS: That's what you say. Those who have read the book say that it does make sense; that the conspiracy presented is no more outlandish or no more illogical than other conspiracy theories regarding the subject; further, that my book is the one that ties ALL of the seemingly disparate conspiracies together in a WAY THAT MAKES SENSE.

      The astute reader will have sensed from the beginning that this is coming, however, for the first chapter glosses over any need for conclusive evidence by stating, "The purpose of 'Final Judgment,' you see, is not to prove, once and for all, that there was indeed a conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and to perpetuate a cover-up of that conspiracy. That has been proven, time and again, in an endless array of books, monographs, magazine articles-even in the pages of several novels." That chapter then goes on to assert that "Final Judgment" builds on the foundation of several "generally accepted" conclusions about the assassination, which include that it was a conspiracy, that it involved the CIA, the Mafia, anti-Castro Cubans, Lee Harvey Oswald (himself involved with U.S. Intelligence), and Jack Ruby (as part of the Mafia), that Oswald was killed to silence him, and that the CIA, the Warren Commission, and the House Select Committee on Assassinations were all directly and knowingly involved in covering it up.
      PIPER RESPONDS: Thank you, Dr. Rahn, for making the point that I made RIGHT UP FRONT in the book: the fact that I didn't feel the need to rehash all of the forensic and other evidence that numerous other researchers, beginning with Mark Lane, Josiah Thompson and many, many, many others have successfully brought out over the years. My purpose was not to determine HOW the crime was committed in Dealey Plaza, but, having been "convinced" by other researchers that it was more than "one lone nut," I wanted to find out WHO WAS ULTIMATELY BEHIND THE CONSPIRACY. There's nothing more that the real conspirators want than to have people debating ballistics and autopsy records that may or may not be genuine and avoiding the ULTIMATE QUESTION: Who really killed JFK--and why?

If you don't feel the need to produce any evidence that the WC (with the Chief Justice of the U.S.), the HSCA, and the CIA deliberately covered up the crime of the century, for reasons that included protecting the Mafia, you certainly won't feel the need to produce any evidence for the huge conspiracy they were allegedly covering up. Come to think of it, that may be the only logical thing in the whole book.
      PIPER RESPONDS: This is very interesting. Rahn obviously believes it is impossible for the Chief Justice of the United States or members of Congress to commit crimes or cover-up for the crimes of others. Oh my! How dare anyone suggest that the Chief Justice of the United States was less than perfect. I won't dare mention the frying pan murder of Earl Warren's bootlegger/whorehouse keeping father who evidently upset his son by refusing to give up the family business after putting the kid through law school. (Whoops! Another conspiracy theory. I better not go any further with that one.)

      Across the front cover of "Final Judgment" runs a red bar that announces it as "The New Underground Best-Seller."
      PIPER RESPONDS: Just about 30,000 copies in circulation. Pretty good.

After reading the book, I have concluded that "underground" is just the place where it deserves to be.
      PIPER RESPONDS: You're really funny. I trust that you will publish my response, word for word, on your website. That's a fair thing to do. I would also be willing to come at my own expense to talk to your class and let them ask me questions about my book. I'll even send you multiple copies for your class to read. I was invited to speak before an advanced honors class for seniors in political science at a high school in Ohio and got very good reviews from these college-bound kids. I would be especially delighted to talk to some college kids and hear what they have to say. Do you DARE invite the author of a "strange" book such as me to speak to your class?

Cordially,

MICHAEL COLLINS PIPER