Kennedy Assassination: "CIA-Did-It" Theorists Are Covering for Israel
LAURENT GUYÉNOT • Unz Review
NOVEMBER 17, 2023

[snip]

What’s wrong with Douglass?
I was impressed by Douglass’s book (JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters by Catholic theologian James W. Douglass) when I first read it in 2011. It set me on the most fascinating intellectual quest, and I am grateful for that. I found a French publisher and helped with the translation.

But, within a year, as I became familiar with part of Douglass’s bibliography and explored other lines of inquiry, I became aware of the book’s shortcomings, and puzzled by them. Two thick files are missing entirely from Douglass’s material: Johnson and Israel. This is a common characteristic of most works aimed at indicting the CIA, such as Oliver Stone’s recent documentary written by DiEugenio...

I also find the structure of Douglass’s book artful: interweaving Oswald’s story, to prove that he was handled by the CIA, and Kennedy’s story, to prove that the CIA hated him, maintains a constant sense of correlation between those two stories, and it does constitute strong circumstantial evidence that the CIA was involved in the assassination, but it does not prove that the masterminds of the assassination were in the CIA. Far from it.

First of all, what CIA are we talking about? Certainly not the CIA that CIA director John McCone (appointed by Kennedy) knew about. Most CIA-theorists agree that the CIA’s strings attached to Oswald came from the office of Counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton.

In the words of John Newman, a respected CIA-theorist, “No one else in the Agency had the access, the authority, and the diabolically ingenious mind to manage this sophisticated plot. ”But Angleton was certainly not “the CIA.” Rather, as Peter Dale Scott wrote, he “managed a ‘second CIA’ within the CIA.” According to his biographer Jefferson Morley, Angleton operated on his own initiative, sealed from scrutiny and free of any accountability; his supervisor, Richard Helms, “let Angleton do as he pleased, few questions asked,”

McCone had no idea what Angleton was doing. Another biographer, Tom Mangold, notes that Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff “had its very own secret slush fund, which Angleton tightly controlled,” an arrangement “which gave Angleton a unique authority to run his own little operations without undue supervision.”

In fact, Angleton was regarded by many of his peers as a madman whose paranoid obsession with uncovering Soviet moles did great damage to the Agency. The only reason why he was not fired before 1974 (by director William Colby) is because he kept too many files on too many people.

It is inconceivable that Angleton directed the whole operation. But if he was not following orders from Richard Helms — and there is not a single piece of evidence that Helms knew of the assassination —, under whose direction or influence was he operating? That is an easy one: besides Counterintelligence, Angleton headed the “Israeli Desk”, and he had more intimate contacts with the hierarchy of the Mossad than with his own.

He loved Israelis as much as he hated Communists — apparently believing that one man could not be both. Meir Amit, head of Mossad from 1963 to 1968, called him “the biggest Zionist” in Washington, while Robert Amory, head of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence, called him a “co-opted Israeli agent.”

While Angleton was disgraced in the U.S. after his forced resignation, he was honored in Israel. After his death in 1987, according to the Washington Post, five former heads of Mossad and Shin Bet and three former Israeli military intelligence chiefs were present “to pay final tribute to a beloved member of their covert fraternity.” Among the services he rendered Israel, “Angleton reportedly aided Israel in obtaining technical nuclear data.”

Douglass never mentions Angleton’s Israeli connection. He never mentions Jack Ruby’s Israeli connection either, although Seth Kantor had made them very clear in his book Who Was Jack Ruby? written in 1978.