JFK, Nasser and Israel

[James DiEugenio]

If you read that review of Mattson, the Israelis set up a front company.

But it appears that Glenn Seaborg was the guy at the AEC who kind of looked the other way at what was happening.

 

 

[Ron Bulman]

I was referring to Angleton, at I guess a higher level, from Morley's Ghost. Not read much more on the subject than it and your articles.

[James DiEugenio]

There is no doubt that Angleton played a strong role in shifting the balance toward Israel after Kennedy's death.

There is a good BBC video on the Liberty incident that brings him into that affair.

[Paul Jolliffe]

On 5/28/2019 at 1:17 AM, James DiEugenio said:

There is no doubt that Angleton played a strong role in shifting the balance toward Israel after Kennedy's death.

There is a good BBC video on the Liberty incident that brings him into that affair.

I find it mighty curious that David Ben-Gurion in 1966 wrote that Nelson Rockefeller would make a "most worthy" president, and "please convey to him, in my name, my hearty regards."

I wonder why a former Israeli P.M. was thinking about a N.Y. governor from an extraordinarily prominent family a couple of years before LBJ would decide not to run again.

https://www.jta.org/1979/02/07/archive/ben-gurion-and-rockefeller

[James DiEugenio]

I wasn't aware of that one Paul.

Its an issue that bothers me.

AIPAC, as everyone knows today, is a monumentally influential body.  With the decline of the NRA of late, it might be the most influential lobby in America. There is little doubt about how effective it is in channeling the debate about the Middle East into a very narrow path.  It essentially comes down to this: either you favor Israel or you are anti Semitic. 

When JFK was putting pressure on Israel to accept the UN's Joseph Johnson plan about Palestinian repatriation, guess who stepped in and helped the Israelis sidestep the issue?  Martin Peretz, you know the ultra Zionist who, from what I understand, spends half the year in Israel today.  Peretz proposed that Israel should not have to take any of the Palestinians.  They all belonged in Jordan. I always wondered why Peretz was so anti-Kennedy.  That filled it in. As you know, Peretz later bought The New Republic and he very quickly turned it into a mouthpiece for Likud and eventually pretty much a neocon booster club in foreign policy.  

What I am saying is that you have this cross influence process.  To the point that no other alternative voices get heard.  That is the way its been since LBJ took office.  I mean if you can do what he did with the Six Day war and the Liberty incident, then that pretty much spelled the end to Kennedy's attempt at fairness and equity in the Middle East.  I just watched a tape of Joe Biden screaming on the floor of the Senate that Israel was so important that if the country did not exist, America would have to invent her.

Can you believe this? And Biden is supposed to be well versed in foreign policy. It falls down on two points.  First, how does American security rely on the invention of Israel?  I don't see that at all.  Secondly, if you understand how Israel was created, you will see that it was a largely American invention anyway. A good book on this is John Judis' Genesis.  For  a shorter version see Against out Better Judgment by Alison Weir. After reading those, in retrospect, I think Harry Truman really screwed this up.  I am not so sure FDR would have.

 

[Ron Bulman]

1 hour ago, Robert Wheeler said:

If you are referring to NUMEC, it was not a front company. All three predecessor companies were real operating companies at one point. San Toy and Apollo Steel had been around since about 1900 and they were publicly traded. San Toy was once fought over by Schwab (CEO of Beth. Steel) a Carnegie nephew, and a few other Robber Barron Type Names. It would be interesting to know who owned San Toy in 58 when the merger with Apollo, Fastener and NUMEC occurred. 

San Toy’s Maine incorporation means that the real owners used the name of an agent, to remain anonymous. 

I don’t think the Israeli’s stole the HEU, they likely bought it and the sellers were paid by laundering the funds through publicly traded San Toy, Apollo and successors. Laundering funds via exchange listed companies is still done today.

U235 and HEU was the hot commodity back then. Way more valuable than gold. Englehard was one of the largest traders in precious metals and is where Marc Rich got his start. He would broker anything, including Uranium. He is a potential suspect as the broker between the US sellers and Israeli buyers. (NUMEC being the conduit for US Navy Uranium and Israeli cash.)

Rich’s boss at Englehard is also interesting. GL Tugwell left Englehard in 74 shortly after Rich left, to form the metals broker called Tugwell Mueller, with a guy who had worked for DuPont for the previous 30 years. 

Schwab, you mean like Charles Schwab.  Sponsor of the Colonial?  Nice they have the money to do such for their owners and sponsors. 

https://www.star-telegram.com/sports/golf/article230714559.html

BTW, based on your location are you affiliated with this place?

https://chq.org/

 

Edited May 31, 2019 by Ron Bulman

[Don Jeffries]

I think it's great that more researchers are now focusing on JFK's very contentious relationship with Ben-Gurion, and his strong opposition to Israel's developing nuclear program. 

We should give credit where it is due; the much maligned late Michael Collins Piper was the first to delve into this area, in his book Final Judgment. Regardless of any other flaws he had, his contributions should be recognized. 

[Douglas Caddy]

I have always been fascinated by the story of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. Here is a excerpt from the book Watergate Exposed that I co-wrote with Robert Merritt in 2010 in which Merritt writes about meeting Pollard in the D.C. jail:

 

My transfer back to the D.C. jail was part of a strategic plan by Carl and others in law

 

enforcement. This was because I was placed in a cell next to the infamous Israeli spy,

 

Jonathan Pollard, who was in the protective custody wing. Naturally my assignment was

 

to spy upon the spy and learn what I could from him.  This included secretly taping our

 

conversations. Carl had arranged for me to have a small pocket tape recorder to record

 

the exchanges between Pollard and me. Pollard was in the end cell and I was in the cell

 

next to him. Pollard and I were the only white prisoners in the entire wing that housed

 

about 60 prisoners.

 

     During the daytime all the prisoners in our wing were let out of our cells so that we

 

could shower, use telephones, socialize or whatever. It was easy for Pollard and I to

 

become friends because we were both Jewish. Pollard told me that he was a civilian

 

working in U.S. Naval Intelligence where he handled classified sensitive material on the

 

U.S., middle east and Israel. He said that he was appalled that the U.S. was deliberately

 

suppressing and holding back valuable and vital information that affected the security and

 

welfare of Israel.  He maintained the reason was simple: oil and money.

 

      Pollard was no James Bond or 007 but he simply used a dollie and wheeled boxes of

 

confidential and top secret documents out the front door of Navel Intelligence, all the

 

while in the presence of guards. He said that he had lived on 19^th Street, just above
 

Dupont Circle. He took the secret documents to his apartment and rented a copy machine

 

and copied the materials. He did this on many occasions, returning the secret documents

 

to their storage area at Naval Intelligence each day before his co-workers arrived. He told

 

me that he did this until things started to get out of hand. He has become greedy and had

 

removed so much material from Naval Intelligence that he had to store boxes containing

 

the secret documents in the hallway outside his apartment, even though the boxes were

 

clearly marked Top Secret and Confidential.

 

     Finally, one of his neighbors got curious and started asking him questions. He told the

 

neighbor not to pay attention to the boxes because they were thrown away containers

 

from where he worked that he was using on a project conducted from his home.

 

     Pollard told me that he had been in contact all the while that he was copying the

 

documents with two agents from Israel who gave him between $20,000 and $30,000 for

 

expenses he might have incurred in renting the copy machine and buying copy paper. He

 

said that he was told to meet an Israeli Lt. X in New York City to deliver the documents

 

that he had copied.

 

     It was the nosey neighbor that alerted the federal authorities to his activity. When

 

Pollard got home from New York City he noticed immediately that he was under

 

surveillance. So he jumped in a taxi and fled to the Embassy of Israel, where he banged

 

on the door. The person who opened the door refused to let him in. It was at this point in

 

time that FBI agents arrested him. He was charged with espionage. The same day his

 

wife, Esther, was also arrested.

 

     Pollard said the only reason he made a deal to cooperate with the federal authorities

 

was that his wife was extremely ill and as part of the deal his wife was released and

 

charges dropped against her. He told me that the government had kept its word on the

 

deal.

 

     Pollard felt comfortable in my presence in telling me these things because I was a

 

fellow Jew. However, I was already in jail and before meeting Pollard knew nothing

 

about him or his case until being briefed by Carl. So it appears that if Pollard were a

 

traitor, then so was I in a sense when I betrayed his confidence,

 

----------------------------------------------------

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 1, 2019 by Douglas Caddy

[James DiEugenio]

If you read my review of the Mattson book, this is the real kicker:

In 1980, one witness said that when he read newspaper accounts about the losses of enriched uranium at Apollo, he had to chuckle to himself. When asked why, he replied that in 1965 or 1966, he was walking near the loading dock at Apollo and saw people loading containers – the dimensions that were used for HEU packets – into equipment boxes. He noticed that the shipping papers for the boxes revealed that the packages were destined for Israel. This witness then suggested some other workers at the plant who had seen similar activity. (Ibid, p. 272)

Suspicion Shipment

One of these witnesses saw a flatbed truck backed up into the loading dock area with Shapiro pacing around the area while the driver was loading “stove pipes” into a cabinet on the truck. This struck the witness as odd because the plant had regularly assigned workers for loading duties during the day but this shipment was being prepared in the evening. He explained that “stove pipes” were cylindrical containers that the plant used to pack enriched uranium inside. Each stove pipe usually contained three or four packets of HEU.

When he glanced at the clipboard resting on a package, he saw the destination was Israel. The clipboard then was yanked away and an armed guard escorted him off the dock. He also said it was unusual to see Shapiro in this area of the plant, and further, that Shapiro was very seldom there at night. (ibid, p. 275)

 

[James DiEugenio]

In the purest sense, NUMEC was not a front company.

But in my view, once you consider who bought the company, their ties to Israel, and the visits to NUMEC from Israel, which are all described in my review,  and you add in their very bad record of missing atomic materials--at least 200 pounds over about 8 years, enough to build 6 A bombs--plus the fact the CIA traced the materials in the Negev desert back to two American plants, the second being NUMEC, then I think it makes for  a pretty solid case of what the people running NUMEC were all about.

Its difficult not to conclude that:

1.) Ben Gurion, Meir and Eban all lied to Kennedy about what the Dimona reactor was being built for, and this was a coordinated lie at the top level of Israel's government

2.) The actual HEU used in the first construction of the A  bombs came from the USA

 

Edited June 2, 2019 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

On 5/30/2019 at 2:44 PM, James DiEugenio said:

I wasn't aware of that one Paul.

Its an issue that bothers me.

AIPAC, as everyone knows today, is a monumentally influential body.  With the decline of the NRA of late, it might be the most influential lobby in America. There is little doubt about how effective it is in channeling the debate about the Middle East into a very narrow path.  It essentially comes down to this: either you favor Israel or you are anti Semitic. 

When JFK was putting pressure on Israel to accept the UN's Joseph Johnson plan about Palestinian repatriation, guess who stepped in and helped the Israelis sidestep the issue?  Martin Peretz, you know the ultra Zionist who, from what I understand, spends half the year in Israel today.  Peretz proposed that Israel should not have to take any of the Palestinians.  They all belonged in Jordan. I always wondered why Peretz was so anti-Kennedy.  That filled it in. As you know, Peretz later bought The New Republic and he very quickly turned it into a mouthpiece for Likud and eventually pretty much a neocon booster club in foreign policy.  

What I am saying is that you have this cross influence process.  To the point that no other alternative voices get heard.  That is the way its been since LBJ took office.  I mean if you can do what he did with the Six Day war and the Liberty incident, then that pretty much spelled the end to Kennedy's attempt at fairness and equity in the Middle East.  I just watched a tape of Joe Biden screaming on the floor of the Senate that Israel was so important that if the country did not exist, America would have to invent her.

Can you believe this? And Biden is supposed to be well versed in foreign policy. It falls down on two points.  First, how does American security rely on the invention of Israel?  I don't see that at all.  Secondly, if you understand how Israel was created, you will see that it was a largely American invention anyway. A good book on this is John Judis' Genesis.  For  a shorter version see Against out Better Judgment by Alison Weir. After reading those, in retrospect, I think Harry Truman really screwed this up.  I am not so sure FDR would have.

 

      As I recall, (from Alison Weir's account) Truman felt politically pressured to sign off on Israel's declaration of independence-- a decision which was opposed by a number of high level U.S. officials, including James Forrestal, who believed that the establishment of an Israeli state in Palestine would be a long-term disaster for U.S.-Arab relations.    (Forrestal went on to, diplomatically,  jump out of a 16 story hospital window.)

     In contrast, James Angleton tended to view a U.S.-aligned Israeli state as something that would be strategically useful for the U.S.

     In his book, Final Judgment, Michael Collins Piper repeatedly mentioned alleged connections between the JFK/Ben Gurion/Dimona conflict and Mafia figure Meyer Lansky, (and Jack Ruby.)

     Collins claimed that Meyer Lansky was the real "boss" of the Mafia in the U.S., and that there was some sort of operational linkage between the Mossad -- Itzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin-- and mob figures in the U.S.-- Lansky, Micky Cohen, Ruby, etc.

     Anything to it?

    

[James DiEugenio]

I would say you are correct in summing up what Weir's account was centrally about.  And since her account jibes in its outline with Judis, it is what he said also.  Truman was advised by several people about what the creation of Israel would do to the Middle East.  But due to some other people in his administration he went ahead and signed off on it anyway.  FDR was much more sophisticated and insightful about these kinds of sensitive foreign policy matters, so I am not so sure he would have signed the blank check.

I also agree that Angleton was really important in tilting our policy towards the Israelis. That is why there are two statues to him over there.

I never bought Piper's ideas about his conspiracy angle.  I think its really wild and out there.  But his opening chapter on the conflict between Kennedy and Ben Gurion was correct, and it was later proven by the work of Malcolm Blunt which I used in my essay in the current issue of garrison.

[W. Niederhut]

10 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

I would say you are correct in summing up what Weir's account was centrally about.  And since her account jibes in its outline with Judis, it is what he said also.  Truman was advised by several people about what the creation of Israel would do to the Middle East.  But due to some other people in his administration he went ahead and signed off on it anyway.  FDR was much more sophisticated and insightful about these kinds of sensitive foreign policy matters, so I am not so sure he would have signed the blank check.

I also agree that Angleton was really important in tilting our policy towards the Israelis. That is why there are two statues to him over there.

I never bought Piper's ideas about his conspiracy angle.  I think its really wild and out there.  But his opening chapter on the conflict between Kennedy and Ben Gurion was correct, and it was later proven by the work of Malcolm Blunt which I used in my essay in the current issue of garrison.

 

Well, that is helpful.  Piper's theories about Mossad involvement in the JFK assassination seemed mostly speculative to me-- an extrapolation from the JFK/Ben Gurion conflict to some operational link between Jack Ruby, Micky Cohen, and the Mossad.  Factual, operational details are largely absent from Piper's theoretical Mossad narrative.

The same could be said about Laurent Guyenot's related theory that the Mossad had in some way hijacked the CIA/Mafia false flag op in Dallas in order to turn an assassination attempt on the POTUS into an assassination.

[James DiEugenio]

I agree with both of the above.

[Paul Brancato]

5 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

 

Well, that is helpful.  Piper's theories about Mossad involvement in the JFK assassination seemed mostly speculative to me-- an extrapolation from the JFK/Ben Gurion conflict to some operational link between Jack Ruby, Micky Cohen, and the Mossad.  Factual, operational details are largely absent from Piper's theoretical Mossad narrative.

The same could be said about Laurent Guyenot's related theory that the Mossad had in some way hijacked the CIA/Mafia false flag op in Dallas in order to turn an assassination attempt on the POTUS into an assassination.

One thing never mentioned by Piper, nor in Ralph Ganis’ Skorzeny Papers, is the weird fact that Mossad hired Otto Skorzeny in 1961 to carry out operations in Egypt against their nuclear program.