Final_Judgment

Chapter Eight
Thick as Thieves:
A Dangerous Liaison—
James Jesus Angleton and the Unholy Alliance
Between Israel, the CIA
and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate
By 1963 John F. Kennedy was not only at war with Israel
and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate, but he was
a l s o a t w a r w it h t h eir c l o s e a l l y i n t h e internatio n a l
intelligence underworld—the CIA. That was a deadly
combination.
The CIA and Israel had forged a close-working strategic
alliance in the previous decade. Their joint enterprises around
the glo be tied the CIA and Israel together inextricably.
Israel's interests—and the CIA's interests—were often one
and the same, perhaps too often. Likewise with the Meyer
Lansky crime network.
What's more, Israel's chief contact at the CIA in
Washington, Ja mes Jesus Angleton, ultimately played a
pivotal role in the JFK assassination conspiracy cover-up.
Angleton, too, had close links with the same forces in the
Lansky Syndicate.
At the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters at Langley, Virginia
there was one man who knew perhaps better than any other American,
Israel's intentions and attitudes toward President John F. Kennedy. This was
the enigmatic James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was so close to the Israelis
during his tenure at the CIA that, following his death in 1987, a monument
was unveiled in Israel by its government in his honor. This is one of the
few known public monuments to any American CIA official anywhere in
the entire world but actually one of several memorials to Angleton in
Israel.
According to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, co-authors of Dangerous
Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship, Angleton
was "a man who for nearly a quarter of a century was one of the most
powerful and mysterious figures in the CIA." 258
According to the Cockburns, "Angleton was involved in many strange
and secret dealings in the world of intelligence, but the Israelis like to talk
of him as having been especially close to them, which is why they paid
public homage to his memory." 259
Recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) while at Yale
University, Angleton was a fast-rising star in the world of clandestine
activities, and following the abolition of the OSS after World War II,
Angleton entered into service with the Central Intelligence Agency after the