Final_Judgment

158 Thick As Thieves [97]
connections, Angleton was able to manipulate intelligence activities around
the globe. A friend of Angleton recalls: "That's the job that was so sensitive
and that's the one that you don't read about. While he was liaising with
everyone, he was getting them to do favors for either the CIA—things the
CIA didn't want to carry out directly; like they've never killed anyone,
right?—or for his own agenda.
"Even on a more mundane level, he could use his contacts with Israeli
intelligence, which he kept to himself, as authority for whatever line he was
trying to push at the CIA. You know, 'My Israeli sources tell me such and
such,' and no one was going to contradict him, since no one else was
allowed to talk to Israeli intelligence.
"I always had the impression that he used the Israelis in this way,
getting them to say that the Russians had not really broken with the
Chinese or whatever. They would be perfectly happy to do him the favor.
On top of all that he felt that he was getting the benefit of Israeli networks
and connections all over the place, not just in the Communist bloc." 264
One friend of Angleton's (who didn't necessarily share the
counterintelligence chief's infatuation with Israel) commented: "You have to
understand that Jim's central dominating obsession was communism,
something that for him was the essence of absolute and profound evil. For
him nothing else really mattered, but he would use anyone and anything to
combat it. Sure he liked Israelis . . . but he was not a 'co-opted Israeli
agent,' as some people in Washington used to call him." 265
BEN-GURION'S MAN IN WASHINGTON
Most important to Angleton, however, was his relationship with the
Mossad. In fact, he was the CIA's longtime, self-appointed man at the
agency's Israel desk. Angleton's biographer, Tom Mangold, points out that
"The legends alone surrounding his twenty years as head of the Israeli Desk
would fill another book, as indeed would the truth." 266
And although Mangold's account of Angleton's career devoted hardly
any attention to Angleton's intimate ties with Israel and its Mossad,
Mangold does state flatly: "I would like to place on the record, however, that
Angleton's closest professional friends overseas, then and subsequently,
came from the Mossad and that he was held in immense esteem by his
Israeli colleagues and by the state of Israel, which was to award him
profound honors after his death." 267
Angleton, in fact, had long-standing direct ties with Israeli Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion himself, dealing with the Israeli leader on an
intimate basis. If there was anyone in the CIA who knew of Ben-Gurion's
distaste for JFK, it was Angleton. As a devoted friend of Israel—and chief
liaison with the Mossad—Angleton had to be fully aware of the raging
conflict between the Israeli prime minister and the American president who
refused to bow to Israel's demands.
And considering President Kennedy's efforts to build bridges with the
Soviet Union and his efforts to wind down the Cold War, one knows,