This article is an edited and adapted excerpt from a larger piece I am working on which examines the JFK assassination by focusing on the clandestine deep state. More specifically, the larger piece examines the US national security state, its symbiosis with organized crime, and the Zionist role within the networks that comprise this covert netherworld. I would like to thank Max Arvo for his research skills and advice. Max and I—along with and anyone else who has examined these issues—owe a debt of gratitude to the peerless Professor Peter Dale Scott. His research and insights formed the empirical basis for this article. I am posting this now on the eve of a short trip. This is something of a working paper, since I may correct and/or revise it in the near future. Due to the timeliness of the article, I felt it best to post a version as soon as possible. Lastly, deepest thanks to my Substack and Patreon subscribers. Thanks to their support, I have the wherewithal to do work like this and make it publicly available.

The Three Hats of James Angleton

James Angleton is probably the key official figure in the deep state networks behind Dallas and Watergate. From 1952 to 1971, Angleton is known to have used mob-connected New York Lawyer Mario Brod as a CI Staff agent. From that position, Brod handled other CI agents who were connected to Syndicate-linked US operations. This milieu would include Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown of the AFL-CIO as well as David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers.[1] Perhaps most damningly, Angleton apparently intervened at least once to prevent a section of the CIA from investigating financial fraud involving Meyer Lansky “skim” from Las Vegas. Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department tasked CIA officer John Whitten to investigate certain Panamanian bank accounts that were being used by Vegas gamblers to move money that “they skimmed off the top of their daily take.”[2] Using a pseudonym, Whitten testified to the Church Committee:

At the time we were in an excellent position to do this. […] I thought it was a great idea. And promptly this came to Mr. Angleton’s attention, and we had to brief him on it, and he said, well, we’re not going to have anything to do with this. This is the [FBI’s] business. And whammo, end of conversation. We were called off. I went to Colonel J.C. King, who was at the time the Chief of the [Western Hemisphere] division, and told him this, and J.C. King said, “[W]ell, you know, Angleton has these ties to the Mafia and he is not going to do anything to jeopardize them.” And then I said, “I didn’t know that.” And he said, “[Y]eah, it had to do with Cuba.”[3]

This is a remarkable episode. A CIA officer unceremoniously overrode the authority of the US Attorney General Robert Kennedy—a member of the President’s cabinet—in order to protect the world’s top mobster. After Robert Kennedy was assassinated, photos of the RFK autopsy were found in James Angleton’s safe. The RFK assassination was pinned, dubiously, on an apparent patsy who just happened to be Palestinian. This hapless Palestinian-American also just happened to have worked at the Santa Anita racetrack in Los Angeles. The racetrack was run by mobster Johnny Roselli, the man sent by the Syndicate to handle the wire service in Los Angeles.[4] Roselli was also the man who the CIA tasked with handling the mob side of the CIA-mob plots to assassinate Castro. Another notable former employee at Roselli’s Santa Anita racetrack was one Jack Rubinstein, the man who later changed his name to Jack Ruby.[5]

James Angleton’s oblique but pivotal role within the US clandestine deep state has yet to be fully understood. Peter Dale Scott gets to the heart of it:

Angleton’s defense of Lansky’s skim cannot be separated from his second function in the CIA: as handler of the Israel desk. Angleton’s connections with Mossad dated back to World War II, when he had coordinated OSS operations in Italy with the Jewish underground headed locally by Teddy Kollek (later Israel’s mayor of Jerusalem).[6]

It has been known for some time that former CIA Counterintelligence chief James Angleton wore a second hat as the handler of the “Israeli desk.” The weight of historical evidence supports the argument that he wore a related third hat as the handler of what we could call the CIA’s “Syndicate desk.” Angleton’s recently declassified (without redactions) testimony to the Church Committee touches on these matters. The previous testimony contained redactions throughout—especially in many cases where some variation of a phrase noting “the Israeli desk” or “the Israelis” was redacted.

The 86ed Bombshell in Angleton’s Long-Suppressed Church Committee Testimony

According to Angleton’s testimony to the Church Committee, CIA directors Hillenkoetter, Smith and Dulles were aware of Angleton’s arrangement with Mossad. Based on Angleton’s testimony, the Israeli desk was a highly compartmentalized and very sensitive arrangement. Said Angleton, “[T]here was very little reduced to writing. [I]t is a custom of intelligence that intelligence supersedes writing. [T]here have been very few directors to my knowledge that would put their pen to hand to sign an agreement to some understanding.”

At one point in the testimony, Angleton alludes to Mossad involvement in the CIA’s “Cuban business.”

Bill Harvey, who was working for us, and whom I had put in touch with the Israelis during the Cuban business—had met on a ship with Morris, the Chief of the British Intelligence, who had a background in the war with the Israelis, and had met there and prepared and carried out all the strategic part of the Six-Day war. […] I had introduced Harvey as the only officer to the Israeli operational people on the Cuban business.[7]

Later in the testimony, a committee member revisits this issue and asks Angleton to elaborate:

Earlier you mentioned that you put Harvey in touch with the Israeli’s [sic] during the Cuban business. […] What was the connection between him and the Israeli’s [sic] during the Cuban business?[8]

Angleton’s deceptive response is about as illuminating as anything we can get from this supremely duplicitous figure. His answer is first couched within his dubious and self-serving assessment that the CIA was compromised due to Soviet moles within the agency who had blown secrecy on matters like the Bay of Pigs invasion:

Bill Harvey was put in charge of taking over the Cuban business, the Cuban business being the Clandestine Services activity into Cuba. Now, what struck me, not having had any part of the Bay of Pigs, because of differences with Bissell, was that it seemed to me that both the Cubans and the Soviets knew everything that was being planned. In other words, they had the thing penetrated [by Soviet agents] and it was foredoomed.[9]

Having explained to the Committee his assessment of the CIA’s frighteningly dire counterintelligence crisis, the CIA’s longtime counterintelligence chief stated that due to this crisis, he was compelled to use an Israeli agent in a supremely sensitive role:

[Since Bill and I] were very close friends [I tried] to help him out by getting him a source totally unknown to everybody. And I went to the Israeli’s [sic]. And I had them assign a man to Havana, whom I happened to know very well. He was born in Bulgaria. He can speak Russian and the Balkan countries’ languages. He is today their senior man on Soviet intelligence. [H]e was sent to Havana, which meant that…the communications were from him in…total security, from Havana to Tel Aviv, to me, and from me to Bill. And no one knew of his existence or his identify [sic], except Harvey and myself, and of course Dick Helms. [Helms] knew because even before I went into this I told him what I was going to do, and he agreed, and so on.[10]

When Angleton is asked whether the CIA director at the time, John McCone, knew about this, Angleton stumbles: “I can’t remember whether—yes, McCone would have know [sic], but he wouldn’t have been interested. What I am trying to say is, he knew.”[11] McCone’s knowledge or ignorance of the use of a Mossad agent in such a sensitive role—as the Angleton-Harvey go-between for the “Cuban business”—is a very significant issue. On the whole, the true contours of the “Cuban business” were more than merely “compartmentalized.” Crucial aspects, especially regarding “executive action,” appear to have systematically hidden from high officials—not just President Kennedy, but even the Director of Central Intelligence, John McCone.

To offer some historical context: William Harvey ran Task Force W, the CIA unit attached to Operation Mongoose, the US campaign to subvert the Cuban government. Harvey was also the key CIA officer who interfaced with the mobster Johnny Rosselli when the CIA teamed up with the mob to try to assassinate Castro. Of particular significance is the fact that within Harvey’s Task Force W purview was the notorious Project ZRRIFLE, an executive action program (i.e., an assassination program). An April 1975 memo from the CIA to former Warren Commission staffer David Belin sheds some light on ZRRFILE. The document mentions “a senior CIA officer, who was the Chief of [blank] in 1961 and later became intimately involved in the ‘executive action capability.’” The extreme secrecy surrounding the project is illustrated in the following passage:

The first mention of the ZRRIFLE cryptonym appears in a […] 1961 memo from the Chief [blank] [and it] states that “two copies of all traffic bearing the ZRRIFLE indicator are to be delivered in a sealed envelope directly to Chief, [blank].” No other distribution was to be made without his specific approval. The last paragraph states that the above was personally approved by the DDP [i.e., by Richard Helms].

It is possible the unnamed “Chief” is Counterintelligence chief James Angleton, since Angleton’s Church Committee testimony establishes that Angleton selected and controlled the channel (an unnamed Mossad agent) between Harvey and the CIA regarding the “Cuban business.” If Helms agreed with Angleton that the CIA security situation was so dire that it warranted using a Mossad agent in such a supremely sensitive role, it is logical that Angleton would be the recipient of all the cable traffic related to the most sensitive component of this “Cuban business”—its ZRRIFLE “executive action” component.[12]

More importantly, there is a parallel between (A) Angleton’s Church Committee account that Helms was aware of the Israeli liaison role between Angleton and Harvey, (B) the CIA’s 1975 memo to Belin in which it is disclosed that Helms personally approved that all ZRRIFLE cable traffic be routed to the unnamed “Chief,” and (C) the Helms-Harvey decision not to inform CIA Director John McCone about the plots to assassinate Castro.

These episodes suggest that Helms was the highest-ranking and thus most pivotal Agency figure who enabled the Angleton-Harvey-Mossad-Syndicate nexus to covertly carry out a foreign policy without sanction or oversight from President Kennedy or, apparently, CIA director John McCone. If McCone was unaware of the Castro assassination plots in general, and the ZRRIFLE program specifically, why would Angleton (or Helms) have felt compelled to inform him about Harvey and Angleton’s use of the Israeli agent?

The follow-up question as to whether Angleton informed McCone cannot be found in the version of Angleton’s Church Committee testimony that was released in 2022, nor can Angleton’s answer. Neither can it be found in the 2025 version which has removed the redactions that were present in the 2022 release. When I first read the 2022 version, I surmised that the redactions were mostly pertaining to Israel. That, in and of itself, was very interesting. I created and delivered a presentation to discuss this important document, and virtually all of my inferences about what was being redacted turned out to be essentially accurate. What I noticed at the time was that in the middle of this important transcript, there appeared to be a page missing from the transcript. Sequentially, the page numbers went from 85 to 87. In other words, page 86 had apparently been 86ed.

The page was missing from every version of the document that I could find, except for an older one released, as I recall, in the late 1990’s. This older version containing page 86 was otherwise much less complete than the 2022 and 2025 versions. As I recall, the page did not actually make sense because the pages immediately before—and perhaps after—were missing. See below for a screenshot of the missing (not redacted, but missing!) page 86:

Why is this page missing? I would argue that it must have been 86ed because it contains what is probably the most damning revelation within Angleton’s testimony. The relevant exchange begins with a committee member following up on the issue of whether McCone was aware that Angleton was using a Mossad agent to serve as the go-between for Angleton’s and Harvey’s “Cuban business.” The CIA’s Cuban operations of this era were comprised of some of the most sensitive and sensationally criminal activities in the Agency’s history—including an assassination apparatus. A Church Committee member’s question gets to the heart of the problem for Angleton:

Here was a highly secret matter, and one that you set up in order to facilitate Mr. Harvey’s work. And it was a very delicate matter, and you were trying very hard to keep the secret, because of your belief that other matters weren’t being handled sufficiently secret. [T]he use of the Israeli man was something that you wanted to keep highly compartmented? […] I wonder if you could comment on the likelihood that information might not have been passed to Mr. McCone?

To explain why he supposedly needed to use a Mossad agent rather than an American agent, Angleton cited his own assessment of the Agency’s terrible Soviet mole problem. He wanted the “Cuban business”—and the use of “the Israeli man”—to remain highly compartmentalized and for secrecy to be retained. It may have been only Angleton, Harvey, and Helms who were aware of the arrangement on the American side.

Initially, Angleton answered, dubiously, that he couldn’t remember if McCone knew about the arrangement, before saying that McCone “wouldn’t have been interested,” and then saying that “he knew.” When asked again by the Committee (in the 86ed page 86), Angleton contradicts his earlier statements by saying, “[K]nowing him personally, on an espionage deal of this sort, I don’t think Mr. McCone would want to be bothered to begin with. [A] little thing involving one man was not a thing that you went up and made a fuss to Mr. McCone about.”

Angleton’s answers about this matter are duplicitous, bordering on the absurd. On the one hand, by Angleton’s assessment, the CIA’s counterintelligence capability was so weak that Angleton claims to have believed that he had no other option but to use a Mossad agent to keep the details of the “Cuban business”—including its unauthorized executive action component—from falling into Soviet hands. At the same time, bringing Mossad into the loop and thereby making them privy to some of the most scandalous activities in the CIA’s history to that point…these are mere trifles—nothing to bother the CIA director about. Perhaps Angleton reasoned that since the CIA director had never even been briefed by the Agency on ZRRIFLE or the CIA-mob plots to kill Castro, he wouldn’t even understand why Angleton would need to use the intelligence service of that most benign and loyal American ally, Israel.

Of course, this is all preposterous. Angleton, presumably with the sanction of Dulles—and at least acquiesced to by Helms—created what was functionally a “CIA within the CIA.” Mossad and the National Crime Syndicate, essentially run by Mossad agent Meyer Lansky, were pillars of this clandestine, proto-neocon deep state. Lansky had protection from the heads of the FBI and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics—as well as from Angleton (and thus Helms) in the CIA. The Syndicate/CIA alliance used Swiss banks, Las Vegas, Havana, and (ater the Cuban Revolution) Caribbean banks to launder massive amount of illicit money.

This was a clandestine Anticommunist coalition for mobbed-up imperial capitalism. The Zionist constituency in the US overworld and within this regime-sanctioned underworld was, collectively, ruthless and powerful enough to steer the US, over decades, into a foreign policy that allowed Zionists to first conquer the rest of Palestine and then to incrementally commit genocide against the Palestinians. The 9/11 terror spectacle of 2001 served as the “new Pearl Harbor” which created the pretext for Netanyahu et al’s campaign of regime change wars. The “Arab Spring” spectacle served as a pretext to expand the regime change wars for “Greater Israel.” At present, Al Aqsa Flood is serving as the pretext for the Zionists’ US-financed Final Solution in Gaza.

Who Killed JFK and What Was Zionism’s Role?

All of this is not to argue that “Israel killed JFK.” I surmise that it was obviously the US regime that killed JFK. This is the same regime that called for a global US Empire (an “American Century”) during World War II, allied with Lansky and Luciano during the war, removed Henry Wallace form the Democratic ticket in 1944, created the CIA in 1947, protected the international drug traffic after the war, recognized Israel in 1948, illegally overthrew or subverted democratic and/or nationalistic governments all through the 1950’s, and then assassinated Patrice Lumumba.

President Kennedy’s call for peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union, his support for Third World nationalism, his policy of withdrawal from Vietnam, and his opposition to the national crime syndicate were more than sufficient to compel the US deep state to act. Kennedy’s determination to prevent Israel from acquiring the bomb and his desire to solve the Palestinian refugee crisis were viewed as existential threats to Zionism by its apex. Even with that in mind, if we set aside JFK’s Israel-Palestine policy entirely, his assassination was still overdetermined.

The problem for the deep state—both in the clandestine and Establishment/regime senses of the term—was that John F. Kennedy was the president. As the US head of state, JFK had considerable control over the government. To assassinate JFK, the regime needed to rely on those regime elements which were the most secretive and least accountable. Angleton’s “CIA within the CIA” was crucial. Lansky’s national crime syndicate was a major component of this clandestine US deep state. Mossad also played an indispensable role in this network. As stated at the outset, Angleton was not merely the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence; he also handled the “Israeli account.” Unofficially, he essentially handled what we could call the CIA’s Syndicate account. Recall the words of J.C. King, the CIA’s Western Hemisphere chief from the beginning of this essay: “Angleton has these ties to the Mafia and he is not going to do anything to jeopardize them.” Given Meyer Lansky’s status as an Israeli agent, we could say that the Syndicate account was ultimately a subsidiary of the Israeli account.

Besides the key Mossad role in facilitating the CIA’s murderous “Cuban business”—while keeping the dirty details away from the rest of the CIA, including its director—there are other Israeli angles to the assassination. The Counterintelligence staffer that James Angleton apparently assigned to read Lee Harvey Oswald’s mail for 20 months prior to the JFK assassination was Reuben Efron. As Jefferson Morley notes, Warren Commission records list Efron as being present in the room when they interviewed Marina Oswald. Efron was the only attendee whose role and job title were not listed. Morely believes that he was there so that he could report everything back to Angleton. While Efron cannot be linked directly to Mossad, his commitment to Zionism and belief in spycraft are apparent. As the Times of Israel reported,

A deep dive into Efron’s Jewish identity [reveals] that Efron not only worked as a spy but had a deep knowledge of the spies in Jewish tradition. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has confirmed that Efron spent time living in Israel before dying on November 22, 1993 — 30 years to the day after Kennedy’s assassination. While there, he contributed five articles in the 1970s to the Jewish Bible Quarterly, a World Zionist Organization-affiliated publication based in Jerusalem, that channeled his expertise in espionage.

Whatever one makes of Efron, the most obvious Israeli link to the JFK assassination is in the personage of Jack Ruby. This is not a function of Ruby being Jewish. Rather, it is a function of Ruby’s status as the Syndicate man in Dallas, essentially a lieutenant of sorts. His connections to the Lansky-Teamster Syndicate milieu in Dallas, Chicago, Las Vegas, and the West Coast are detailed in the larger article from which this piece has been excerpted and adapted. Much more is written about this in Peter Dale Scott’s masterpiece, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. I conclude that Ruby was selected for his role in the assassination precisely because he was tied to so many deep political arrangements—especially the national security state’s partnership with the Syndicate—that his presence guaranteed a cover-up. If nothing else, any investigation would have discredited the US as being far too mobbed up to be any sort of legitimate leader of the “free world.” Angleton’s network not only placed a literal nuclear bomb threat in the personage of Oswald, via manipulated intelligence from Mexico City. The use of Ruby placed a political bomb threat into the plot by using Ruby to murder the designated culprit, Lee Oswald.

The Significance of the Zionist Role in the JFK Assassination

If Israel played a key, but not decisive role in the JFK assassination, what is the point of hashing this out in 2025? After much time spent studying the assassination in the context of the post-World War 2 project for US imperial capitalist hegemony over the world, I conclude that Israel has used its pivotal role in the clandestine deep state—including those elements which were brought to bear in Dallas—to essentially blackmail the US deep state/Establishment.

The WASPy postwar apex of US power, represented by President Eisenhower, refused to acquiesce to a Zionist land grab in the 1956 Suez Crisis. In June of 1967, this policy was reversed. The supremely corrupt President at the time, Lyndon Johnson, was tied to Zionist and Syndicate actors. However, the Standard Oil-friendly Arabists at the CIA and elsewhere were an impediment. In this context, we must consider three spectacular events in March 1967, just a few months before the Israel launched the catastrophic Six Day War.

The March 1967 issue of Ramparts magazine (published in February of 1967) included an expose by Sol Stern entitled, “A Short Account of International Student Politics & the Cold War with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc”. As Georgetown professor David Robarge notes in his article, “Getting it Right: CIA Analysis of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War,”

[T]he radical publication Ramparts exposed the CIA’s longstanding secret relationship with the National Students Association. The mainstream press picked up the story and soon compromised the Agency’s elaborate system for funding political action operations through a network of American private organizations, foundations, and cutouts. The embarrassing controversy that ensued prompted President Johnson to direct the CIA to stop providing covert funds to domestic-based voluntary groups. The Ramparts affair seriously disrupted the Agency’s covert political operations and damaged its reputation at home and abroad.

Sol Stern, the author of the expose, has an interesting biography. According to Wikipedia, Stern was born in Mandatory Palestine in 1935. The entry notes that, “His departure from radicalism came after New Left attacks on Israel.” Stern went on to become a professional neoconservative. His author page at the Encounter Books website notes that he went on to become a Manhattan Institute senior fellow. His ultra-Zionist polemic, A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred, was published by Encounter Books. This is ironic and/or absurd given that “Encounter Books draws its name from Encounter magazine, an Anglo-American literary journal founded in 1953 by poet Stephen Spender and journalist Irving Kristol.” As the Encounter Books “About” page notes,

In 1967, Ramparts, a San Francisco-based New Left magazine, published an exposé on the CIA’s infiltration of the National Student Association. As an aside, the piece implied that the CIA also supported The Congress for Cultural Freedom—Encounter’s parent foundation.

The exposé in question was, of course, the 1967 Sol Stern article. How odd that Encounter Books would mention the Ramparts expose without noting that its author has since written books for the publisher.

The second shock of March 1967 came on the 1^st of the month when New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison indicted Clay Shaw of New Orleans, a CIA agent, for conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. This sent shockwaves through the Agency in too many ways to detail here. Garrison has always been a polarizing figure among JFK assassination researchers. Subsequent research shows that Garrison’s overarching theories were sound: Oswald was in New Orleans posing as a communist while working with the ultra-right deep state operative, Guy Bannister. The national security state did remove JFK from office due to his friendly moves toward Cuba and the USSR—and toward ending the Cold War in general. Additionally, Garrison was correct about JFK’s pursuit a withdrawal from Vietnam. However, Jim Garrison was a DA in the supremely mobbed-up city of New Orleans, one of the Lansky Syndicate’s original strongholds dating back to the days of Huey Long. The individual who sent Garrison on the trail of the JFK assassins was none other than Senator Russell Long, the son of Huey Long.

Garrison’s case was undone in part by the efforts of Walter Sheridan—RFK’s point man in his campaign against Jimmy Hoffa. Said Garrison in his 1967 Playboy interview (quoted at JFK-Online, a site specializing in Warren Commission advocacy),

Let me tell you something about Walter Sheridan's background, and maybe you'll understand his true role in all this. Sheridan was one of the bright, hard young investigators who entered the Justice Department under Bobby Kennedy. He was assigned to nail Jimmy Hoffa. Sheridan employed a wide variety of highly questionable tactics in the Justice Department's relentless drive against Hoffa; he was recently subpoenaed to testify in connection with charges that he wire-tapped the offices of Hoffa's associates and then played back incriminating tapes to them, warning that unless they testified for the Government, they would be destroyed along with Hoffa.

The pivotal figure in Hoffa’s conviction was Teamster official Ed Partin. In Walter Sheridan’s book, The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa, Walter Sheridan recounted how a Hoffa associate attempted to bribe Partin into changing his testimony. When Partin asked how he might be protected from the government if he changed his story, he was told, "We've got that fixed. Senator [Russell] Long is the most powerful man in the United States today. Don't you worry about it. You will be protected."

As an aside, it is worth noting that in his Hoffa book, Sheridan also recounts that,

[In 1967] Life magazine published an article charging that [Missouri] Senator Edward Long had been using his committee in an attempt to help Hoffa. The article stated that Long had received thousands of dollars from Hoffa's chief counsel, Morris Shenker, in “referral fees.” It later developed that the figure was well over $100,000 and that Edward Long had not practiced law during the entire time the payments were being made.

Peter Dale Scott once told me that Bernard Fensterwald of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations had Hoffa connections through Senator Edward Long. The useful Spartacus website confirms this:

Long selected Bernard Fensterwald as his Chief Counsel when he had been accused of being corruptly involved with Jimmy Hoffa. The two men lived in the same apartment building in Washington. Long was also connected to Robert Maheu and Sam Giancana. In 1967 Long was called before the Senate Ethics Committee and questioned about his connections to Hoffa. As a result of this investigation Long was forced to resign in December 1968.

Bernard Fensterwald played a pivotal role in the subsequent JFK assassination disclosure campaign which led to the creation of the House Select Committee on Assassinations. He also became the attorney for Watergate burglar James McCord once it was decided that McCord was going to go after the President rather than allow the blame for the Watergate break-in to be placed at the CIA’s doorstep.

The third March 1967 shockwave for the CIA came on the third day of the month when syndicated columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson wrote an article entitled, “Did Bobby’s Plot Backfire?”

President Johnson is sitting on a political H-bomb—an unconfirmed report that [RFK] may have approved an assassination plot which then possibly backfired against his late brother. […] One version claims that underworld figures actually were recruited to carry out the plot. [T]he rumor persists, whispered by people in a position to know, that Castro did become aware of an American plot upon his life and decided to retaliate against President Kennedy. […] For weeks after the tragedy, this column was told, Bobby was morose and refused to see people. Could he have been plagued by the terrible thought that he had helped put into motion forces that indirectly may have brought about his brother’s martyrdom? Some insiders think so.

A second Pearson/Anderson article on March 7 implicated the Agency more explicitly, leading to an unprecedented CIA production, The CIA Inspector General's 1967 Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro. As Peter Dale Scott explains:

The Inspector General's Report of 1967 on CIA Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro is probably the most important CIA document ever released by the Agency. The document that neither Johnson nor (apparently) Nixon was allowed to see in its entirety, despite their asserted interest, the document so tightly held that only a single ribbon copy was retained even within the CIA, is now available to everyone. […] The IG Report was the result of an investigation ordered in 1967 by President Johnson, after a Drew Pearson-Jack Anderson column of March 7, 1967, had published for the first time details of "a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro." However, Johnson never got to see the actual report: Helms merely spoke to him from a set of notes which excluded the key events of late 1963. President Nixon never got to see it either, although it would appear that he had his aide John Ehrlichman try over many months to pry it out of CIA Director Richard Helms.

As detailed by Sally Denton and Roger Morris, the source for the Pearson/Anderson columns on the Castro plots was Arthur Morgan, the lawyer for mobster Johnny Rosselli. According to some historians and Rosselli’s biographers, Roselli’s motivation was to neutralize Garrison’s investigation into the JFK assassination by drawing attention toward Castro and away from the Agency. By this account, “Rosselli was merely following directives from his Syndicate and CIA handlers.”[13] Peter Dale Scott, who in my estimation is far shrewder than Roselli’s biographers, noted in 1994 that, “[T]he Anderson column must have struck Johnson as a convenient opening to gather ammunition against Robert Kennedy and the CIA at the same time.” The columns led Johnson to request the facts from CIA Director Richard Helms, and this led to the creation of the May 23, 1967 Inspector General Report. Scott argues convincingly that the use of the mob to assassinate Castro was extremely foolish:

[T]he CIA gained no protection whatsoever by introducing such sinister outpours as Roselli, Giancana and Trafficante. Far from suppressing the involvement of the CIA, these men advertised it whenever it suited them, as even the IG Report is aware. […] The plot makes much more sense, however, if one imagines that the initiative for it came from below; and that the purpose was to protect, not the CIA, but the mob and its allies (emphasis added).

Given that the impact of the Pearson/Anderson columns of March 1967 was to shock CIA and spur the drafting of what was to that point the most damning internal report in the Agency’s history, it is not plausible that Rosselli’s CIA and Syndicate bosses would have told him to leak the story to help the CIA vis-à-vis the Garrison case. In reality, both developments represented crises for the CIA. In both the Garrison case and the Anderson-Pearson case, the key figures had links to the Lansky/Teamster Syndicate. As I detail further in the upcoming article from which this is excerpted, there is very strong evidence that de facto Syndicate CEO Meyer Lansky and Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa were Zionist agents.

What then is the relevance of the three spectacular CIA crises which emerged in March of 1967? They sent shockwaves through the Agency, putting the outfit in its weakest position since the Agency’s creation. All three of the cases trace their origins either to figures who were fanatical Zionists themselves (Sol Stern and Meyer Lansky), or to actors who were in some way beholden to the Lansky/Teamster Syndicate forces (Russell Long, Jim Garrison, Arthur Morgan, and Johnny Roselli).

While they may have each had their own particular angles that they were working, the net effect was to weaken the CIA as a bureaucratic organization precisely on the eve of a cataclysmic and catastrophic shift in US policy: the Six Day War which Israel launched against Egypt in June of 1967. The war and subsequent illegal landgrab of Palestinian territory are the proximate root causes of the ongoing Gaza Genocide. Viewed objectively in historical context, the current Genocide demonstrates that the apex of Zionism has long been fanatically devoted to stealing the whole of Palestine, no matter the cost in Palestinian lives or how much damage it inflicts on its US benefactor. If one doubts that Mossad would plot and execute such diabollically complex political warfare operations, consider the stranglehold that Zionism demonstrably maintains over the US political system, academia, and the media. If one could dismiss such a critique before Al-Aqsa Flood, events since then compel us to reassess the evolution of US foreign policy in the decades since World War 2—and Zionism’s crucial role in that history.

Angleton, Mossad, and the Syndicate: A Clandestine Proto-Neocon Deep State?

This complex history and analysis warrants a summary. James Angleton, the chief of CIA counterintelligence, used a Mossad agent to facilitate CIA officer William Harvey’s “Cuban business” which included alliances with mobsters and an assassination program. Angleton’s excuse to the Church Committee in 1975 was that US counterintelligence was so horrendous that the only way to avoid letting the Soviets know everything the CIA was doing was to cut the CIA out of the loop and use Mossad instead. The CIA director, John McCone, was never briefed by the Agency about the CIA-mob plots against Castro or the ZRRFILE assassination program.

Angleton dissembled to the Committee by saying that McCone knew about the Israeli acting as the intermediary between Angleton and Harvey over Cuba. When pressed, he admits that McCone (who was still alive) did not know about the affair because it was too insignificant to concern him. According to Angleton’s testimony, Angleton “could see the risk factor [of the ‘Cuban business’…] what they were doing was enormous, and all that.”[14] He then said, “[K]nowing him personally, on an espionage deal of this sort, I don’t think Mr. McCone would want to be bothered to begin with. It looks big to you, but…a little thing involving one man was not a thing that you went up and made a fuss to Mr. McCone about.”[15] Angleton’s casual duplicity is off the charts: “[T]he risk factor [of] what they were doing was enormous,” but it was also “a little thing involving one man.” Is he talking about Schrodinger’s Mossad officer here?

Again, the page with this exchange was omitted entirely from the most recently released versions of this document. The 2022 version contains many redactions. By far the most repeatedly redacted passages involved Israel, as I discerned correctly a year ago and which was confirmed with new 2025 version. The redactions—and especially the missing page—serve as a negative template. Hopefully this article has made it clear why these items were concealed or even disappeared.

If it is not clear, I am in no way arguing that Israel killed JFK. Only the US regime could have murdered a popular sitting president in broad daylight, then have the designated “communist” patsy murdered on television in a police station full of police officers whose chief official objective was to protect the prisoner in question. Due to the power of the presidency, the assassination plotters had to use the most obscure and sinister elements of the US regime, including the Lansky-Teamster National Crime Syndicate. The mob was intertwined with extremely reactionary elements of the national security state which had a symbiotic relationship with the mob, borne in large part from their cooperation in the organization of the postwar international drug traffic. I would wager that the overriding official authority for the assassination came from the military. I consider it a very strong possibility that the operation was conducted under the purview of the “doomsday network” which was ostensibly responsible for maintaining command and control in the event of a catastrophic attack which decapitated US political leadership.

Through Angleton, Jimmy Hoffa, Reuben Efron, Meyer Lansky, the unnamed Mossad “Cuban business” intermediary, and the milieu around Jack Ruby, the Israelis would have had deep insight into the details of the JFK assassination. The events of March 1967 collectively appear to have been, in part, an attempt to leverage this information as political warfare. Collectively, these intrigues contributed to LBJ’s 1967 reversal of the policy Eisenhower established by refusing to acquiesce to a Zionist land grab back in 1956. Furthermore, I believe that these same dynamics played out again during Watergate, the post-Watergate intelligence investigations, the Iran-Contra affair, the exposure of BCCI, and probably the Lewinsky affair as well.

For these and other reasons, the JFK assassination is still extremely relevant in 2025. The US is currently bankrolling and facilitating the Gaza Genocide. An attack on Iran seems increasingly likely. Neither of these policies are remotely in the US national interest. The problem is far deeper than Walt and Mearsheimer’s Israel Lobby critique. The covert fascism of the traditional CIA, a product of Wall Street oligarchy bent on global imperial capitalist empire, was and is bad enough. Zionism and neoconservatism represent something worse than the murderous but rational commercial imperialism of the old CIA. Neoconservatism and its ultra-Zionist core represent a variant of genocidal blood-and-soil fascism. They are as antithetical to the moral and ethical traditions of Judaism as US imperialism is to the Sermon on the Mount. Are there any Americans with the wisdom and power to stop the Zionists’ Final Solution for Palestine? Are there any sane voices within the US regime who can prevent an attack on Iran that would destroy the global economy and potentially spark nuclear doomsday? As in the Kennedy years with the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, countless lives are hanging in the balance, at the mercy of US decisionmakers.

[1] Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 150.

[2] Scott, American War Machine, 151.

[3] Scott, American War Machine, 152.

[4] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 156.

[5] Scott, Deep Politics, 180.

[6] Scott, American War Machine, 152.

[7] Testimony of James Angleton to the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), June 19, 1975, 2025 release under the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Act of 1992, p. 43 of 2025 release (40). The 2025 version is missing the redactions of previous versions, but the cover sheet lists its “CURRENT STATUS” as “RELEASED WITH DELETIONS,” presumably a reference to the 86ed page 86.

[8] Angleton’s Church Committee Testimony, p. 85 of 2025 release (24/83).

[9] Angleton’s Church Committee Testimony, p. 85-86 of 2025 release (24-25/83-84).

[10] Angleton’s Church Committee Testimony, p. 86-87 of 2025 release (25-26/84-85).

[11] Angleton’s Church Committee Testimony, p. 86 of 2025 release (25/84).

[12] Since obsessive secrecy is a near universal trait at the CIA, the “Chief” could very well have been someone else. Perhaps it was Office of Security chief, Sheffield Edwards. Or it could have been the head of Task Force W, William Harvey—though I doubt that heading Task Force W would warrant the title of “Chief.” Furthermore the “chief” could potentially refer to the head of any number of departments throughout the agency. It is likely that what is blanked out is not a name but an acronym for a department. It is even possible that the various “chief” references refer to different chiefs.

[13] Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2001), 296-297.

[14] See the image of the 86ed page 86.

[15] Angleton’s Church Committee Testimony, p. 88 of 2025 release (28/87).