Final_Judgment

[98] Final Judgment 159
beyond question, that Angleton—hard-line, even fanatical anti-communist
that he was—viewed Kennedy's overtures with outrage and disgust. All of
this not to mention Kennedy's own conflicts with the CIA which we will
review in Chapter 9.
KENNEDY A THREAT
Clearly, John F. Kennedy was not only a threat to Israel and the CIA
and their allies in the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate, but also to
James Jesus Angleton himself. Kennedy's war with the CIA could spell an
end to Angleton's career and the world-wide intelligence empire that the
strange and calculating counterintelligence boss had assembled. The ties
between Angleton's CIA and the Mossad were such, according to historian
Steven Stewart, that they "had the effect of ensuring that virtually every
CIA man in the Middle East was also working at second hand for the Israelis .
. . as the CIA's policy changed almost overnight, in an extraordinary volteface,
from being largely pro-Arab to becoming almost totally pro-Israeli" 268 —a
close relationship indeed.
THE CIA AND ISRAEL: EARLY DAYS
It is the CIA's relationship with Israel that is most significant in terms
of that agency's global intrigue—and, of course, in light of the CIA's
documented role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy (which we
examine in more detail in subsequent chapters). And it was Angleton who
was, as we have seen, the prime mover behind the CIA-Israeli Mossad's
close working relationship—in fact, from its very beginnings.
The late Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former advisor to the CIA and former
member of the policy-planning staffs of the White House and Pentagon, had
written extensively on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. In his book, Ropes of
Sand, Eveland reviewed the beginnings of what Andrew and Leslie Cockburn
call the "dangerous liaison"—America's covert relationship with Israel.
This covert relationship was conducted primarily through the aegis of
Angleton's Israeli desk at the CIA. Eveland writes of its origins: "CIA
operations had started before Allen Dulles became director that had longrange
implications from which the United States might find it difficult to
disengage. Stemming from his wartime OSS liaison with Jewish resistance
groups based in London, James Angleton had arranged an operationalintelligence
exchange agreement with Israel's Mossad, upon which the CIA
relied for much of its intelligence about the Arab states." 269
This relationship, however, was not necessarily initially based on
mutual trust. According to Wolf Blitzer, longtime Washington
correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, the CIA-Mossad relationship began on a
basis of mutual distrust. Blitzer notes that after Iranian militants seized the U.S.
Embassy in Tehran (sparking the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981), the
militants seized CIA documents which they later released.