Final_Judgment

631 Questions & Answers [535]
Angleton, the CIA's director for counterintelligence. These are not "low
level" operatives who went astray. These are men at the top. There's no
question about it. What about somebody such as E. Howard Hunt?
Although Hunt was certainly lower on the CIA totem pole than Phillips or
Angleton, he was still very much a long-time CIA figure who had played a
major role in the CIA's clandestine affairs. Hunt, likewise, was no "rogue"
operative.
There is no evidence that John McCone—a longtime Kennedy family
friend—who was JFK's appointee as CIA director (replacing Allen Dulles,
who had been fired by JFK), had anything to do with the conspiracy. In fact,
as noted in Final Judgment, McCone himself was a bitter critic of Israel's
nuclear bomb program and earlier, at the close of the Eisenhower
administration where he was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission,
it was McCone who first leaked the truth about Israel's nuclear intentions.
It's interesting to note that when the Kennedy administration ordered
the CIA to begin spying on Israel's secret nuclear development program, the
spying was being done out of McCone's office. In other words, JFK did not
trust the spying operation to be conducted by Angleton, whom everyone
knew was a co-opted agent of Israel in the CIA, but JFK did trust McCone.
So although McCone had nothing to do with JFK's assassination, those who
surrounded him at the highest levels certainly did.
Nor should one forget that many of the people in the CIA at the time of
the JFK murder remained loyal to long-time director Allen Dulles who had
been sacked by Kennedy. The CIA's involvement in the assassination was
very much an institutional response to JFK who had threatened to splinter
the CIA and cast it to the winds.
All of this is not to suggest that there was a general staff meeting at the
CIA one day when John McCone was out with a head cold where Angleton
announced, "We're going to kill the president. Let's work together on this
and keep Mr. McCone out of the loop." Things don't work that way. The
actual conspirators in the loop were a tightly-knit group with vast resources
at their command, including not just the CIA bureaucracy and its infamous
black budget, but they also had the skills of the Mossad network on call.
What's more, with the CIA's inter-action with peripheral groups such
as the anti-Castro Cuban exiles, not to mention contacts in organized crime,
there were enough people who could be manipulated in enough ways that
they wouldn't even necessarily know that they were being
manipulated—and implicated. And once those people were implicated, it
was in their interests to not only shut up, but help cover up. There were
undoubtedly many people in the CIA and elsewhere who were involved in
some aspect of the conspiracy who had no idea that they were being used to
achieve the ultimate goal of eliminating JFK.
As far as the Mossad is concerned, Mossad operatives could not have
acted without the direct orders of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and
Mossad assassinations chief Yitzhak Shamir. The Mossad is actually a very
small organization institutionally, as former Mossad operative Victor
Ostrovsky has pointed out. It is even more tightly knit than the CIA. In fact,