Final_Judgment

[104] Final Judgment 165
Angleton had been quietly running all on his own since 1955.” 288
Through an aide, Stephen Millet, who was the counterintelligence officer
who handled the Israeli desk for Angleton, the CIA spymaster was
maintaining close links with the criminal underworld in Italy and France.
For details on the activities of Angleton and his Lansky-linked
organized crime associates we turn to the work of Robert I. Friedman. In his
biography of militant New York-born Rabbi Meyer Kahane (later a member of
the Israeli parliament), we learn that it was the aforementioned Lovestone who
provided Kahane and his closest associate and fellow rabbi, Dr. Joseph Churba,
with financing and support. (Lansky, himself, as we saw in Chapter 7,
was a contributor to Kahane's later activities in support of Israel.) In the
1960’s Churba and Kahane functioned as CIA assets in churning up Jewish
support—and otherwise—for the war in Vietnam, a venture, we have seen,
which proved fruitful for not only the CIA, but its allies in Israel and their
allies in the Lansky Syndicate.
THE CIA'S HIRED GUNS
According to Friedman, "Churba and Kahane also received support from
legendary cold warriors Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown, who had been top
officials of the American Communist Party in the 1920s before undergoing
a 'Damascus Road' conversion and who subsequently ran the AFL-CIO's
powerful International Affairs Department under the tutelage of the CIA. It
was under the CIA's direction that Lovestone and Brown—using Corsican
and Italian mafiosos—set up right-wing death squads in Marseilles and other
European cities after the Second World War to break the burgeoning leftwing
labor movement. Thanks to Brown, by 1953 his key contact in the
Marseilles underworld, Pierre Ferri-Pisain, had control of the city's port,
where he built an international heroin trafficking empire.
"This was not the first time that American intelligence purchased the
services of the Mafia. Prior to the Allied invasion of Sicily in the Second
World War, the OSS established contacts with the Sicilian Mafia through
the same Lucky Luciano who allowed [the Jewish underground] to smuggle
weapons from Hoboken to the Irgun in Palestine. The Sicilian Mafia
provided intelligence on the Germans, and after the war assassinated hundreds
of Italian left-wing political activists." 289
According to historian Alfred McCoy, "After the CIA withdrew from
active involvement] Marseille's Corsicans won political protection from
France's intelligence service, the SDECE, which allowed their heroin
laboratories to operate undisturbed for nearly 20 years. In partnership with
Italy's Mafia syndicates, the Corsicans smuggled raw opium from Turkey
and refined it into no. 4 heroin for export. Their biggest customer was the
United States .. . 290
(In Chapter 7 we examined Lansky's pivotal role in arranging the
accommodation between the OSS and the Sicilian Mafia in the famed
"Operation Underworld." In Chapter 12 we will examine the Lansky-CIA
manipulation of the Corsican and Sicilian organized crime elements in the