February 05, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -The January 2nd American
assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani of Iran was
an event of enormous moment.
Gen. Soleimani had been the
highest-ranking military figure in his nation of 80
million, and with a storied career of 30 years, one
of the most universally popular and highly regarded.
Most analysts ranked him second in influence only to
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s elderly Supreme
Leader, and there were widespread reports that he
was being urged to run for the presidency in the
2021 elections.
The circumstances of his
peacetime death were also quite remarkable. His
vehicle was incinerated by the missile of an
American Reaper drone near Iraq’s Baghdad
international airport just after he had arrived
there on a regular commercial flight for peace
negotiations originally suggested by the American
government.
Our major media hardly
ignored the gravity of this sudden, unexpected
killing of so high-ranking a political and military
figure, and gave it enormous attention. A day or so
later, the front page of my morning New York
Times was almost entirely filled with coverage
of the event and its implications, along with
several inside pages devoted to the same topic.
Later that same week, America’s national newspaper
of record allocated more than one-third of all the
pages of its front section to the same shocking
story.
But even such copious
coverage by teams of veteran journalists failed to
provide the incident with its proper context and
implications. Last year, the Trump Administration
had declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard “a
terrorist organization,” drawing widespread
criticism and even ridicule from national security
experts appalled at the notion of classifying a
major branch of Iran’s armed forces as “terrorists.”
Gen. Soleimani was a top commander in that body, and
this apparently provided the legal figleaf for his
assassination in broad daylight while on a
diplomatic peace mission.
But consider that Congress
has been considering
legislation declaring Russia an official state
sponsor of terrorism, and Stephen Cohen, the
eminent Russia scholar, has argued that no foreign
leader since the end of World War II has been so
massively demonized by the American media as Russian
President Vladimir Putin. For years, numerous
agitated
pundits have denounced Putin as “the new
Hitler,” and some prominent figures have even called
for
his overthrow or death. So we are now only a
step or two removed from undertaking a public
campaign to assassinate the leader of a country
whose nuclear arsenal could quickly annihilate the
bulk of the American population. Cohen has
repeatedly warned that the current danger of global
nuclear war may exceed what which we faced during
the days of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and can
we entirely dismiss his concerns?
Even if we focus solely upon
Gen. Solemaini’s killing and entirely disregard its
dangerous implications, there seem few modern
precedents for the official public assassination of
a top-ranking political figure by the forces of
another major country. In groping for past examples,
the only ones that come to mind occurred almost
three generations ago during World War II, when
Czech agents assisted by the Allies assassinated
Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1941 and the US
military later shot down the plane of Japanese
admiral Isoroku Yamamoto in 1943. But these events
occurred in the heat of a brutal global war, and the
Allied leadership hardly portrayed them as official
government assassinations. Historian David Irving
reveals that when one of Adolf Hitler’s aides
suggested that an attempt be made to assassinate
Soviet leaders in that same conflict, the German
Fuhrer immediately forbade such practices as obvious
violations of the laws of war.
The 1914 terrorist
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to
the throne of Austria-Hungary, was certainly
organized by fanatical elements of Serbian
Intelligence, but the Serbian government fiercely
denied its own complicity, and no major European
power was ever directly implicated in the plot. The
aftermath of the killing soon led to the outbreak of
World War I, and although many millions died in the
trenches over the next few years, it would have been
completely unthinkable for one of the major
belligerents to consider assassinating the
leadership of another.
A century earlier, the
Napoleonic Wars had raged across the entire
continent of Europe for most of a generation, but I
don’t recall reading of any governmental
assassination plots during that era, let alone in
the quite gentlemanly wars of the preceding 18th
century when Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa
disputed ownership of the wealthy province of
Silesia by military means. I am hardly a specialist
in modern European history, but after the 1648 Peace
of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War and
regularized the rules of warfare, no assassination
as high-profile as that of Gen. Soleimani comes to
mind.
The bloody Wars of Religion
during previous centuries did see their share of
assassination schemes. For example, I think that
Philip II of Spain supposedly encouraged various
plots to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England on
grounds that she was a murderous heretic, and their
repeated failure helped persuade him to launch the
ill-fated Spanish Armada; but being a pious
Catholic, he probably would have balked at using the
ruse of peace-negotiations to lure Elizabeth to her
doom. In any event, that was more than four
centuries ago, so America has now placed itself in
rather uncharted waters.
Different peoples possess
different political traditions, and this may play a
major role in influencing the behavior of the
countries they establish. Bolivia and Paraguay were
created in the early 18th century as shards from the
decaying Spanish Empire, and according to Wikipedia
they have experienced nearly three dozen successful
coups in their history, the bulk of these prior to
1950, while Mexico has had a half-dozen. By
contrast, the U.S. and Canada were founded as
Anglo-Saxon settler colonies, and neither history
records even a failed attempt.
During our Revolutionary War,
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and our other
Founding Fathers fully recognized that if their
effort failed, they would all be hanged as rebels by
the British. However, I have never heard that they
feared falling to an assassin’s blade, nor that King
George III ever considered such an underhanded means
of attack. During the first century and more of our
nation’s history, nearly all our presidents and
other top political leaders traced their ancestry
back to the British Isles, and political
assassinations were exceptionally rare, with Abraham
Lincoln’s death being one of the very few that come
to mind.
At the height of the Cold
War, our CIA did involve itself in various secret
assassination plots against Cuba’s Communist
dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders
considered hostile to US interests. But when these
facts later came out in the 1970s, they evoked such
enormous outrage from the public and the media, that
three consecutive American presidents—Gerald
R. Ford,
Jimmy Carter, and
Ronald Reagan—issued successive Executive Orders
absolutely prohibiting assassinations by the CIA or
any other agent of the US government.
Although some cynics might
claim that these public declarations represented
mere window-dressing,
a March 2018 book review in the New York
Times strongly suggests otherwise. Kenneth M.
Pollack spent years as a CIA analyst and National
Security Council staffer, then went on to publish a
number of influential books on foreign policy and
military strategy over the last two decades. He had
originally joined the CIA in 1988, and opens his
review by declaring:
One of the very first
things I was taught when I joined the CIA was
that we do not conduct assassinations. It was
drilled into new recruits over and over again.
Yet Pollack notes with dismay
that over the last quarter-century, these once solid
prohibitions have been steadily eaten away, with the
process rapidly accelerating after the 9/11 attacks
of 2001. The laws on our books may not have changed,
but
Today, it seems that all
that is left of this policy is a euphemism.
We don’t call them
assassinations anymore. Now, they are “targeted
killings,” most often performed by drone strike,
and they have become America’s go-to weapon in
the war on terror.
The Bush Administration had
conducted 47 of these
assassinations-by-another-name, while his successor
Barack Obama, a constitutional scholar and Nobel
Peace Prize Laureate, had raised his own total to
542. Not without justification, Pollack wonders
whether assassination has become “a very effective
drug, but [one that] treats only the symptom and so
offers no cure.”
Thus over the last couple of
decades American policy has followed a disturbing
trajectory in its use of assassination as a tool of
foreign policy, first restricting its application
only to the most extreme circumstances, next
targeting small numbers of high-profile “terrorists”
hiding in rough terrain, then escalating those same
such killings to the many hundreds. And now under
President Trump, the fateful step has been taken of
America claiming the right to assassinate any world
leader not to our liking whom we unilaterally
declare worthy of death.
Pollack had made his career
as a Clinton Democrat, and is best known for his
2002 book The Threatening Storm that
strongly endorsed President Bush’s proposed invasion
of Iraq and was
enormously influential in producing bipartisan
support for that ill-fated policy. I have no doubt
that he is a committed supporter of Israel, and he
probably falls into a category that I would loosely
describe as “Left Neocon.”
But while reviewing a history
of Israel’s own long use of assassination as a
mainstay of its national security policy, he seems
deeply disturbed that America might be following
along that same terrible path. Less than two years
later, our sudden assassination of a top Iranian
leader demonstrates that his fears may have been
greatly understated.
The book being reviewed was
Rise and Kill First by New York Times
reporter Ronen Bergman, a weighty study of the
Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service,
together with its sister agencies. The author
devoted six years of research to the project, which
was based upon a thousand personal interviews and
access to an enormous number of official documents
previously unavailable. As suggested by the title,
his primary focus was Israel’s long history of
assassinations, and across his 750 pages and
thousand-odd source references he recounts the
details of an enormous number of such incidents.
That sort of topic is
obviously fraught with controversy, but Bergman’s
volume carries glowing cover-blurbs from Pulitzer
Prize-winning authors on espionage matters, and the
official cooperation he received is indicated by
similar endorsements from both a former Mossad chief
and Ehud Barak, a past Prime Minister of Israel who
himself had once led assassination squads. Over the
last couple of decades, former CIA officer Robert
Baer has become one of our most prominent authors in
this same field, and he praises the book as “hands
down” the best he has ever read on intelligence,
Israel, or the Middle East. The reviews across our
elite media were equally laudatory.
Although I had seen some
discussions of the book when it appeared, I only got
around to reading it a few months ago. And while I
was deeply impressed by the thorough and meticulous
journalism, I found the pages rather grim and
depressing reading, with their endless accounts of
Israeli agents killing their real or perceived
enemies in operations that sometimes involved
kidnappings and brutal torture, or resulted in
considerable loss of life to innocent bystanders.
Although the overwhelming majority of the attacks
described took place in the various countries of the
Middle East or the occupied Palestinian territories
of the West Bank and Gaza, others ranged across the
world, including Europe. The narrative history began
in the 1920s, decades before the actual creation of
the Jewish Israel or its Mossad organization, and
extended down to the present day.
The sheer quantity of such
foreign assassinations was really quite remarkable,
with the knowledgeable reviewer in the New York
Times suggesting that the Israeli total over
the last half-century or so seemed far greater than
that of any other nation. I might even go farther:
if we excluded domestic killings, I wouldn’t be
surprised if the body-count exceeded the combined
total for that of all other major countries in the
world. I think all the lurid revelations of lethal
CIA or KGB Cold War assassination plots that I have
seen discussed in newspaper articles might fit
comfortably into just a chapter or two of Bergman’s
extremely long book.
National militaries have
always been nervous about deploying biological
weapons, knowing full well that once released, the
deadly microbes might easily spread back across the
border and inflict great suffering upon the
civilians of the country that deployed them.
Similarly, intelligence operatives who have spent
their long careers so heavily focused upon planning,
organizing, and implementing what amount to
officially-sanctioned murders may develop ways of
thinking that become a danger both to each other and
to the larger society they serve, and some examples
of this possibility leak out here and there in
Bergman’s comprehensive narrative.
In the so-called “Askelon
Incident” of 1984, a couple of captured Palestinians
were beaten to death in public by the notoriously
ruthless head of the Shin Bet domestic security
agency and his subordinates. Under normal
circumstances, this deed would have carried no
consequences, but the incident happened to be
captured by the camera by a nearby Israeli
photo-journalist, who managed to avoid confiscation
of his film. His resulting scoop sparked an
international media scandal, even reaching the pages
of the New York Times, and this forced a
governmental investigation aimed at criminal
prosecution. To protect themselves, the Shin Bet
leadership infiltrated the inquiry and organized an
effort to fabricate evidence pinning the murders
upon ordinary Israeli soldiers and a leading
general, all of whom were completely innocent. A
senior Shin Bet officer who expressed misgivings
about this plot apparently came close to being
murdered by his colleagues until he agreed to
falsify his official testimony. Organizations that
increasingly operate like mafia crime families may
eventually adopt similar cultural norms.
Israeli operatives sometimes
even contemplated the elimination of their own
top-ranking leaders whose policies they viewed as
sufficiently counter-productive. For decades, Gen.
Ariel Sharon had been one of Israel’s greatest
military heroes and someone of extreme right-wing
sentiments. As Defense Minister in 1982, he
orchestrated the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which
soon turned into a major political debacle,
seriously damaging Israel’s international standing
by inflicting great destruction upon that
neighboring country and its capital city of Beirut.
As Sharon stubbornly continued his military strategy
and the problems grew more severe, a group of
disgruntled officers decided that the best means of
cutting Israel’s losses was to assassinate Sharon,
though the proposal was never carried out.
An even more striking example
occurred a decade later. For many years, Palestinian
leader Yasir Arafat had been the leading object of
Israeli antipathy, so much so that at one point
Israel made plans to shoot down an international
civilian jetliner in order to assassinate him. But
after the end of the Cold War, pressure from America
and Europe led Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin to sign
the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords with his Palestinian
foe. Although the Israeli leader received worldwide
praise and shared a Nobel Peace Prize for his
peacemaking efforts, powerful segments of the
Israeli public and its political class regarded the
act as a betrayal, with some extreme nationalists
and religious zealots demanding that he be killed
for his treason. A couple of years later, he was
indeed shot dead by a lone gunman from those
ideological circles, becoming the first Middle
Eastern leader in decades to suffer that fate.
Although his killer was mentally unbalanced and
stubbornly insisted that he acted alone, he had had
a long history of intelligence associations, and
Bergman delicately notes that the gunman slipped
past Rabin’s numerous bodyguards “with astonishing
ease” in order to fire his three fatal shots at
close range.
Many observers drew parallels
between Rabin’s assassination and that of our own
president in Dallas three decades earlier, and the
latter’s heir and namesake, John F. Kennedy, Jr.,
developed a strong personal interest in the tragic
event. In March 1997, his glossy political magazine
George published an article by the Israeli
assassin’s mother, implicating her own country’s
security services in the crime, a theory also
promoted by the late Israeli-Canadian writer Barry
Chamish. These accusations sparked a furious
international debate, but after Kennedy himself died
in an unusual plane crash a couple of years later
and his magazine quickly folded, the controversy
soon subsided. The George archives are not
online nor easily available, so I cannot easily
judge the credibility of the charges.
Having himself narrowly
avoided assassination by Israeli operatives, Sharon
gradually regained his political influence, and did
so without compromising his hard-line views, even
boastfully describing himself as a “Judeo-Nazi” to
an appalled journalist. A few years after Rabin’s
death, he provoked major Palestinian protests, then
used the resulting violence to win election as Prime
Minister, while once in office, his very harsh
methods led to a widespread uprising in Occupied
Palestine. But Sharon merely redoubled his
repression, and after world attention was diverted
by 9/11 attacks and the American invasion of Iraq,
he began assassinating numerous top Palestinian
political and religious leaders in attacks that
sometimes inflicted heavy civilian casualties.
The central object of
Sharon’s anger was Palestine President Yasir Arafat,
who suddenly took ill and died, thereby joining his
erstwhile negotiating partner Rabin in permanent
repose. Arafat’s wife claimed that he had been
poisoned and produced some medical evidence to
support this charge, while longtime Israeli
political figure Uri Avnery published
numerous articles
substantiating those
accusations. Bergman simply reports the
categorical Israeli denials while noting that “the
timing of Arafat’s death was quite peculiar,” then
emphasizes that even if he knew the truth, he
couldn’t publish it since his entire book was
written under strict Israeli censorship.
This last point seems an
extremely important one, and although it only
appears just that one time in the body of the text,
the disclaimer obviously applies to the entirety of
the long volume and should always be kept in the
back of our minds. Bergman’s book runs some 350,000
words and even if every single sentence were written
with the most scrupulous honesty, we must recognize
the huge difference between “the Truth” and “the
Whole Truth.”
Another item also raised my
suspicions. Thirty years ago, a disaffected Mossad
officer named Victor Ostrovsky left that
organization and wrote By Way of Deception,
a highly critical book recounting numerous alleged
operations known to him, especially those contrary
to American and Western interests. The Israeli
government and its pro-Israel advocates launched an
unprecedented legal campaign to block publication,
but this produced a major backlash and media uproar,
with the heavy publicity landing it as #1 on the
New York Times sales list. I finally got around
to reading his book about a decade ago and was
shocked by many of the remarkable claims, while
being reliably informed that CIA personnel had
judged his material as probably accurate when they
reviewed it.
Although much of Ostrovsky’s
information was impossible to independently confirm,
for more than a quarter-century his international
bestseller and its 1994 sequel The Other Side of
Deception have heavily shaped our understanding
of Mossad and its activities, so I naturally
expected to see a detailed discussion, whether
supportive or critical, in Bergman’s exhaustive
parallel work. Instead, there was only a single
reference to Ostrovsky buried in a footnote on p.
684. There we are told of Mossad’s utter horror at
the numerous deep secrets that Ostrovsky was
preparing to reveal, which led its top leadership to
formulate a plan to assassinate him. Ostrovsky only
survived because Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who
had formerly spent decades as the Mossad
assassination chief, vetoed the proposal on the
grounds that “We don’t kill Jews.” Although this
reference is brief and almost hidden, I regard it as
providing considerable support for Ostrovsky’s
general credibility.
Having thus acquired serious
doubts about the completeness of Bergman’s seemingly
comprehensive narrative history, I noted a curious
fact. I have no specialized expertise in
intelligence operations in general nor those of
Mossad in particular, so I found it quite remarkable
that the overwhelming majority of all the
higher-profile incidents recounted by Bergman were
already familiar to me merely from the decades I had
spent closely reading the New York Times
every morning. Is it really plausible that six years
of exhaustive research and so many personal
interviews would have uncovered so few major
operations that had not already been known and
reported in the international media? Bergman
obviously provides a wealth of detail previously
limited to insiders, along with numerous unreported
assassinations of relatively minor individuals, but
it seems strange that he came up with so few
surprising revelations.
Indeed, some major gaps in
his coverage are quite apparent to anyone who has
even somewhat investigated the topic, and these
begin in the early chapters of his volume, which
include coverage of the Zionist prehistory in
Palestine prior to the establishment of the Jewish
state.
Bergman would have severely
damaged his credibility if he had failed to include
the infamous 1940s Zionist assassinations of
Britain’s Lord Moyne or U.N. Peace Negotiator Count
Folke Bernadotte. But he unaccountably fails to
mention that in 1937 the more right-wing Zionist
faction whose political heirs have dominated Israel
in recent decades assassinated Chaim Arlosoroff, the
highest-ranking Zionist figure in Palestine.
Moreover, he omits a number of similar incidents,
including some of those targeting top Western
leaders. As
I wrote last year:
As far as I know, the early
Zionists had a record of political terrorism almost
unmatched in world history, and in 1974 Prime
Minister Menachem Begin
once even boasted to a television interviewer of
having been the founding father of terrorism across
the world.
In the aftermath
of World War II, Zionists were bitterly hostile
towards all Germans, and Bergman describes the
campaign of kidnappings and murders they soon
unleashed, both in parts of Europe and in Palestine,
which claimed as many as two hundred lives. A small
ethnic German community had lived peacefully in the
Holy Land for many generations, but after some of
its leading figures were killed, the rest
permanently fled the country, and their abandoned
property was seized by Zionist organizations, a
pattern which would soon be replicated on a vastly
larger scale with regard to the Palestinian Arabs.
These facts were new to me,
and Bergman seemingly treats this wave of
vengeance-killings with considerable sympathy,
noting that many of the victims had actively
supported the German war effort. But oddly enough,
he fails to mention that throughout the 1930s, the
main Zionist movement had itself maintained a strong
economic partnership with Hitler’s Germany, whose
financial support was crucial to the establishment
of the Jewish state. Moreover, after the war began a
small right-wing Zionist faction led by a future
prime minister of Israel attempted to enlist in the
Axis military alliance, offering to undertake a
campaign of espionage and terrorism against the
British military in support of the Nazi war effort.
These undeniable historical facts have obviously
been a source of immense embarrassment to Zionist
partisans, and over the last few decades they have
done their utmost to expunge them from public
awareness, so as a native-born Israeli now in his
mid-40s, Bergman may simply be unaware of this
reality.
Bergman’s long book contains
thirty-five chapters of which only the first two
cover the period prior to the creation of Israel,
and if his notable omissions were limited to those,
they would merely constitute to a blemish on an
otherwise reliable historical narrative. But a
considerable number of major lacunae seem evident
across the decades that follow, though they may be
less the fault of the author himself than the tight
Israeli censorship he faced or the realities of the
American publishing industry. By the year 2018,
pro-Israeli influence over America and other Western
countries had reached such enormous proportions that
Israel would risk little international damage by
admitting to numerous illegal assassinations of
various prominent figures in the Arab world or the
Middle East. But other sorts of past deeds might
still be considered far too damaging to yet
acknowledge.
In 1991 renowned
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published
The Samson Option, describing Israel’s secret
nuclear weapons development program of the early
1960s, which was regarded as an absolute national
priority by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, There
are widespread claims that it was the threatened use
of that arsenal that later blackmailed the Nixon
Administration into its all-out effort to rescue
Israel from the brink of military defeat during the
1973 war, a decision that provoked the Arab Oil
Embargo and led to many years of economic hardship
for the West.
The Islamic world quickly
recognized the strategic imbalance produced by their
lack of nuclear deterrent capability, and various
efforts were made to redress that balance, which Tel
Aviv did its utmost to frustrate. Bergman covers in
great detail the widespread campaigns of espionage,
sabotage, and assassination by which the Israelis
successfully forestalled the Iraqi nuclear program
of Saddam Hussein, finally culminating in the
long-distance 1981 air raid that destroyed his
Osirik reactor complex. The author also covers the
destruction of a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 and
Mossad’s assassination campaign that claimed the
lives of several leading Iranian physicists a few
years later. But all these events were reported at
the time in our major newspapers, so no new ground
is being broken. Meanwhile, an important story not
widely known is entirely missing.
About seven months ago, my
morning New York Times carried
a glowing 1,500 word tribute to former U.S.
ambassador John Gunther Dean, dead at age 93, giving
that eminent diplomat the sort of lengthy obituary
usually reserved these days for a rap-star slain in
a gun-battle with his drug-dealer. Dean’s father had
been a leader of his local Jewish community in
Germany, and after the family left for America on
the eve of World War II, Dean became a naturalized
citizen in 1944. He went on to have a very
distinguished diplomatic career, notably serving
during the Fall of Cambodia, and under normal
circumstances, the piece would have meant no more to
me than it did to nearly all its other readers. But
I had spent much of the first decade of the 2000s
digitizing the complete archives of hundreds of our
leading periodicals, and every now and then a
particularly intriguing title led me to read the
article in question. Such was the case with “Who
Killed Zia?” which appeared in 2005.
Throughout the 1980s,
Pakistan had been the lynchpin of America’s
opposition to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,
with its military dictator Zia ul-Haq being one of
our most important regional allies. Then in 1988, he
and most of his top leadership died in a mysterious
plane crash, which also claimed the lives of the
U.S. ambassador and an American general.
Although the deaths might
have been accidental, Zia’s wide assortment of
bitter enemies led most observers to assume foul
play, and there was some evidence that a nerve gas
agent, possibly released from a crate of mangos, had
been used to incapacitate the crew and thereby cause
the crash.
At the time, Dean had reached
the pinnacle of his career, serving as our
ambassador in neighboring India, while the U.S.
ambassador killed in the crash, Arnold Raphel, had
been his closest personal friend, also Jewish. By
2005, Dean was elderly and long-retired, and he
finally decided to break his seventeen years of
silence and reveal the strange circumstances
surrounding the event, saying that he was convinced
that the Israeli Mossad had been responsible.
A few years before his death,
Zia had boldly declared that the production of an
“Islamic atomic bomb” was a top Pakistani priority.
Although his primary motive was the need to balance
India’s small nuclear arsenal, he promised to share
such powerful weapons with other Muslim countries,
including those in the Middle East. Dean describes
the tremendous alarm Israel expressed at this
possibility, and how pro-Israel members of Congress
began a fierce lobbying campaign to stop Zia’s
efforts. According to longtime journalist Eric
Margolis, a leading expert on South Asia, Israel
repeatedly tried to enlist India in launching a
joint all-out attack against Pakistan’s nuclear
facilities, but after carefully considering the
possibility, the Indian government declined.
This left Israel in a
quandary. Zia was a proud and powerful military
dictator and his very close ties with the U.S.
greatly strengthened his diplomatic leverage.
Moreover, Pakistan was 2,000 miles from Israel and
possessed a strong military, so that any sort of
long-distance bombing raid similar to the one used
against the Iraqi nuclear program was impossible.
This left assassination as the remaining option.
Given Dean’s awareness of the
diplomatic atmosphere prior to Zia’s death, he
immediately suspected an Israeli hand, and his past
personal experiences supported that possibility.
Eight years earlier, while posted in Lebanon, the
Israelis had sought to enlist his personal support
in their local projects, drawing upon his sympathy
as a fellow Jew. But when he rejected those
overtures and declared that his primary loyalty was
to America, an attempt was made to assassinate him,
with the munitions used being eventually traced back
to Israel.
Although Dean was tempted to
immediately disclose his strong suspicions regarding
the annihilation of the Pakistani government to the
international media, he decided instead to pursue
proper diplomatic channels, and immediately departed
for Washington to share his views with his State
Department superiors and other top Administration
officials. But upon reaching DC, he was quickly
declared mentally incompetent, prevented from
returning to his India posting, and soon forced to
resign. His four decade long career in government
service ended summarily at that point. Meanwhile,
the US government refused to assist Pakistan’s
efforts to properly investigate the fatal crash and
instead tried to convince a skeptical world that
Pakistan’s entire top leadership had died because of
a simple mechanical failure in their American
aircraft.
This remarkable account would
surely seem like the plot of an implausible
Hollywood movie, but the sources were extremely
reputable. The author of the 5,000 word article was
Barbara Crossette, the former New York Times
bureau chief for South Asia, who had held that post
at the time of Zia’s death, while the piece appeared
in World Policy Journal, the prestigious
quarterly of The New School in New York City. The
publisher was academic Stephen Schlesinger, son of
famed historian Arthur J. Schlesinger, Jr.
One might naturally expect
that such explosive charges from so solid a source
might provoke considerable press attention, but
Margolis noted that the story was instead totally
ignored and boycotted by the entire North American
media. Schlesinger had spent a decade at the helm of
his periodical, but a couple of issues later he had
vanished from the masthead and his employment at the
New School came to an end. The text is no longer
available on the World Policy Journal
website, but it can still be accessed via
Archive.org, allowing those so interested to
read it and decide for themselves.
The complete historical
blackout of that incident has continued down to the
present day. Dean’s detailed Times obituary
portrayed his long and distinguished career in
highly flattering terms, yet failed to devote even a
single sentence to the bizarre circumstances under
which it ended.
At the time I originally read
that article a dozen or so years ago, I had mixed
feelings about the likelihood of Dean’s provocative
hypothesis. Top national leaders in South Asia do
die by assassination rather regularly, but the means
employed are almost always quite crude, usually
involving one or more gunman firing at close range
or perhaps a suicide-bomber. By contrast, the highly
sophisticated methods apparently used to eliminate
the Pakistani government seemed to suggest a very
different sort of state actor. Bergman’s book
catalogs the enormous number and variety of Mossad’s
assassination technologies.
Given the important nature of
Dean’s accusations and the highly reputable venue in
which they had appeared, Bergman must certainly have
been aware of the story, so I wondered what
arguments his Mossad sources might provide to rebut
or debunk them. Instead, I discovered that the
incident appears nowhere in Bergman’s exhaustive
volume, perhaps reflecting the author’s reluctance
to assist in deceiving his readers.
I also noticed that Bergman
made absolutely no mention of the earlier
assassination attempt against Dean when he was
serving as our ambassador in Lebanon, even though
the serial numbers of the anti-tank rockets fired at
his armored limousine were traced to a batch sold to
Israel. However,
sharp-eyed journalist Philip Weiss did notice
that the shadowy organization which officially
claimed credit for the attack was revealed by
Bergman to have been a Israel-created front group
used for numerous car-bombings and other terrorist
attacks. This seems to confirm Israel’s
responsibility in the assassination plot.
Let us assume that this
analysis is correct and that there is a good
likelihood that Mossad was indeed behind Zia’s
death. The broader implications are considerable.
Are You Tired Of
The Lies And
Non-Stop Propaganda?
Pakistan was one of the
world’s largest countries in 1988, having a
population that was already over 100 million and
growing rapidly, while also possessing a powerful
military. One of America’s main Cold War projects
had been to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, and
Pakistan had played the central role in that effort,
ranking its leadership as one of our most important
global allies. The sudden assassination of President
Zia and most of his pro-American government, along
with our own ambassador, thus represented a huge
potential blow to U.S. interests. Yet when one of
our top diplomats reported Mossad as the likely
culprit, the whistleblower was immediately purged
and a major cover-up begun, with no whisper of the
story ever reaching our media or our citizenry, even
after he repeated the charges years later in a
prestigious publication. Bergman’s comprehensive
book contains no hint of the story, and none of the
knowledgeable reviewers seem to have noted this
lapse.
If an event of such magnitude
could be totally ignored by our entire media and
omitted from Bergman’s book, many other incidents
may also have escaped notice.
A good starting point for
such investigation might be Ostrovsky’s works, given
the desperate concern of the Mossad leadership at
the secrets he revealed in his manuscript and their
hopes of shutting his mouth by killing him. So I
decided to reread his work after a decade or so and
with Bergman’s material now reasonably fresh in my
mind.
Ostrovsky’s 1990 book runs
just a fraction of the length of Bergman’s volume
and is written in a far more casual style while
totally lacking any of the latter’s copious source
references. Much of the text is simply a personal
narrative, and although both he and Bergman had
Mossad as their subject, his overwhelming focus was
on espionage issues and the techniques of spycraft
rather than the details of particular
assassinations, although a certain number of the
latter were included. On an entirely impressionistic
level, the style of the Mossad operations described
seemed quite similar to those presented by Bergman,
so much so that if various incidents were switched
between the two books, I doubt that anyone could
easily tell the difference.
In assessing Ostrovsky’s
credibility, a couple of minor items caught my eye.
Early on, he states that at the age of 14 he placed
second in Israel in target shooting and at 18 he was
commissioned as the youngest officer in the Israeli
military. These seem like significant, factual
claims, which if true would help explain the
repeated efforts by Mossad to recruit him, while if
false would surely have been used by Israel’s
partisans to discredit him as a liar. I have seen no
indication that his statements were ever disputed.
Mossad assassinations were a
relatively minor focus of Ostrovsky’s 1990 book, but
it is interesting to compare those handful of
examples to the many hundreds of lethal incidents
covered by Bergman. Some of the differences in
detail and coverage seem to follow a pattern.
For example, Ostrovsky’s
opening chapter described the subtle means by which
Israel pierced the security of Saddam Hussein’s
nuclear weapons project of the late 1970s,
successfully sabotaging his equipment, assassinating
his scientists, and eventually destroying the
completed reactor in a daring 1981 bombing raid. As
part of this effort, they lured one of his top
physicists to Paris, and after failing to recruit
the scientist, killed him instead. Bergman devotes a
page or two to that same incident, but fails to
mention that the French prostitute who had
unwittingly been part of their scheme was also
killed the following month after she became fearful
at what had happened and contacted the police. One
wonders if numerous other collateral killings of
Europeans and Americans accidentally caught up in
these deadly events may also have been carefully
airbrushed out of Bergman’s Mossad-sourced
narrative.
An even more obvious example
comes much later in Ostrovsky’s book, when he
describes how Mossad became alarmed upon discovering
that Arafat was attempting to open peace
negotiations with Israel in 1981, and soon
assassinated the ranking PLO official assigned to
the task. This incident is missing from Bergman’s
book, despite its comprehensive catalog of far less
significant Mossad victims.
One of the most notorious
assassinations on American soil occurred in 1976,
when a car-bomb explosion in the heart of Washington
D.C. took the lives of exiled former Chilean Foreign
Minister Orlando Letelier and his young American
assistant. The Chilean secret service were soon
found responsible, and a major international scandal
erupted, especially since the Chileans had already
begun liquidating numerous other perceived opponents
across Latin America. Ostrovsky explains how Mossad
had trained the Chileans in such assassination
techniques as part of a complex arms sale agreement,
but Bergman makes no mention of this history.
One of the leading Mossad
figures in Bergman’s narrative is Mike Harari, who
spent some fifteen years holding senior positions in
its assassination division, and according to the
index his name appears on more than 50 different
pages. The author generally portrays Harari in a
gauzy light, while admitting his central role in the
infamous Lillehammer Affair, in which his agents
killed a totally innocent Moroccan waiter living in
a Norwegian town through a case of mistaken
identity, a murder that resulted in the conviction
and imprisonment of several Mossad agents and severe
damage to Israel’s international reputation. By
contrast, Ostrovsky portrays Harari as a deeply
corrupt individual, who after his retirement became
heavily involved in international drug-dealing and
served as a top henchman of notorious Panamanian
dictator Manuel Noriega. After Noriega fell, the new
American-backed government gleefully announced
Harari’s arrest, but the ex-Mossad officer somehow
managed to escape back to Israel, while his former
boss received a thirty year sentence in American
federal prison.
Widespread financial and
sexual impropriety within the Mossad hierarchy was a
recurrent theme throughout Ostrovsky’s narrative,
and his stories seem fairly credible. Israel had
been founded on strict socialistic principles and
these still held sway during the 1980s, so that
government employees were usually paid a mere
pittance. For example, Mossad case officers earned
between $500 and $1,500 per month depending upon
their rank, while controlling vastly larger
operational budgets and making decisions potentially
worth millions to interested parties, a situation
that obviously might lead to serious temptations.
Ostrovsky notes that although one of his superiors
had spent his whole career working for the
government on that sort of meager salary, he had
somehow managed to acquire a huge personal estate,
complete with its own small forest. My own
impression is that although intelligence operatives
in America may often launch lucrative private
careers after they retire, any agents who became
conspicuously wealthy while still working for the
CIA would be facing serious legal risk.
Ostrovsky was also disturbed
by the other sorts of impropriety he claims to have
encountered. He and his fellow trainees allegedly
discovered that their top leadership sometimes
staged late-night sexual orgies in the secure areas
of the official training facilities, while adultery
was rampant within Mossad, especially involving
supervising officers and the wives of the agents
they had in the field. Moderate former Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin was widely disliked in the
organization and one Mossad officer regularly
bragged that he had personally brought down Rabin’s
government in 1976 by publicizing a minor violation
of financial regulations. This foreshadows Bergman’s
far more serious suggestion of the very suspicious
circumstances behind Rabin’s assassination two
decades later.
Ostrovsky emphasized the
remarkable nature of Mossad as an organization,
especially when compared to its late Cold War peers
that served the two superpowers. The KGB had 250,000
worldwide employees and the CIA tens of thousands,
but Mossad’s entire staff barely numbered 1,200,
including secretaries and cleaning personnel. While
the KGB deployed an army of 15,000 case officers,
Mossad operated with merely 30 to 35.
This astonishing efficiency
was made possible by Mossad’s heavy reliance on a
huge network of loyal Jewish volunteer “helpers” or
sayanim scattered all across the world, who
could be called upon at a moment’s notice to assist
in an espionage or assassination operation,
immediately lend large sums of money, or provide
safe houses, offices, or equipment. London alone
contained some 7,000 of these individuals, with the
worldwide total surely numbering in the many tens or
even hundreds of thousands. Only full-blooded Jews
were considered eligible for this role, and
Ostrovsky expresses considerable misgivings about a
system that seemed so strongly to confirm every
traditional accusation that Jews functioned as a
“state within a state,” with many of them being
disloyal to the country in which they held their
citizenship. Meanwhile, the term sayanim
appears nowhere in Bergman’s 27 page index, and
there is almost no mention of their use in his text,
although Ostrovsky plausibly argues that the system
was absolutely central to Mossad’s operational
efficiency.
Ostrovsky also starkly
portrays the utter contempt that many Mossad
officers expressed toward their purported allies in
the other Western intelligence services, trying to
cheat their supposed partners at every turn and
taking as much as they could get while giving as
little as possible. He describes what seems a
remarkable degree of outright hatred, almost
xenophobia, towards all non-Jews and their leaders,
however friendly. For example, Margaret Thatcher was
widely regarded as one of the most pro-Jewish and
pro-Israel prime ministers in British history,
filling her cabinet with members of that tiny 0.5%
minority and regularly praising plucky little Israel
as a rare Middle Eastern democracy. Yet the Mossad
members deeply hated her, usually referred to her as
“the bitch,” and were convinced that she was an
anti-Semite.
If European Gentiles were
regular objects of hatred, peoples from other, less
developed parts of the world were often ridiculed in
harshly racialist terms, with Israel’s Third World
allies sometimes casually described as “monkeylike”
and “not long out of the trees.”
Occasionally, such extreme
arrogance risked diplomatic disaster as was
suggested by an amusing vignette. During the 1980s,
there was a bitter civil war in Sri Lanka between
the Sinhalese and the Tamils, which also drew in a
military contingent from neighboring India. At one
point, Mossad was simultaneously training special
forces contingents from all three of these three
mutually-hostile forces at the same time and in the
same facility, so that they nearly encountered each
other, which surely would have produced a huge
diplomatic black eye for Israel.
The author portrays his
increasing disillusionment with an organization that
he claimed was subject to rampant internal
factionalism and dishonesty. He was also
increasingly concerned about the extreme right-wing
sentiments that seemed to pervade so much of Mossad,
leading him to wonder if it wasn’t becoming a
serious threat to Israeli democracy and the very
survival of the country. According to his account,
he was unfairly made the scapegoat for a failed
mission and believing his life at risk, he fled
Israel with his wife and returned to his birthplace
of Canada.
After deciding to write his
book, Ostrovsky recruited as his co-author Claire
Hoy, a prominent Canadian political journalist, and
despite tremendous pressure from Israel and its
partisans, their project succeeded, with the book
becoming a huge international best-seller, spending
nine weeks as #1 on the New York Times list
and soon having over a million copies in print.
Although Hoy had spent 25
years as a highly successful writer and this book
project was by far his greatest publishing triumph,
not long afterwards
he was financially bankrupt and the butt of
widespread media ridicule, having suffered the sort
of personal misfortune that so often seems to visit
those who are critical of Israel or Jewish
activities. Perhaps as a consequence, when Ostrovsky
published his 1994 sequel, The Other Side of
Deception, no co-author was listed.
The contents of Ostrovsky’s
first book had mostly been rather mundane, lacking
any shocking revelations. He merely described the
inner workings of Mossad and recounted some of its
major operations, thereby piercing the veil of
secrecy that had long shrouded one of the world’s
most effective intelligence services. But having
established his reputation with an international
bestseller, the author felt confident enough to
include numerous bombshells in his 1994 sequel, so
that individual readers must decide for themselves
whether these were factual or merely a product of
his wild imagination. Bergman’s comprehensive
bibliography lists some 350 titles, but although
Ostrovsky’s first book is included, his second is
not.
Portions of Ostrovsky’s
original narrative had certainly struck me as rather
vague and odd. Why had he supposedly been
scapegoated for a failed mission and drummed out of
the service? And since he had left Mossad in early
1986 but only began work on his book two years
later, I wondered what he had been doing during the
intervening period. I also found it difficult to
understand how a junior officer had obtained such a
wealth of detailed information about Mossad
operations in which he himself had not been
personally involved. There seemed many missing
pieces to the story.
These explanations were all
supplied in the opening portions of his sequel,
though they are obviously impossible to verify.
According to the author, his departure had occurred
as a byproduct of an ongoing internal struggle at
Mossad, in which a moderate dissident faction
intended to use him to undermine the credibility of
the organization and thereby weaken its dominant
leadership, whose policies they opposed.
Reading this second book
eight or nine years ago, one of the earliest claims
seemed totally outlandish. Apparently, the director
of Mossad had traditionally been an outsider
appointed by the prime minister, and that policy had
long rankled many of its senior figures, who
preferred to see one of their own put in charge. In
1982, their furious lobbying for such an internal
promotion had been ignored, and instead a celebrated
Israeli general had been named, who soon made plans
to clean house in support of different policies. But
instead of accepting this situation, some
disgruntled Mossad elements arranged his
assassination in Lebanon just before he was
scheduled to officially take office. Some evidence
of the successful plot immediately came to light and
was later confirmed, igniting a subterranean
factional conflict involving both Mossad personnel
and some members of the military, a struggle that
ultimately drew in Ostrovsky.
This story came towards the
beginning of the book, and struck me as so wildly
implausible that I became deeply suspicious of
everything that followed. But after reading
Bergman’s authoritative volume, I am now not so
sure. After all, we know that around the same time,
a different intelligence faction had seriously
considered assassinating Israel’s defense minister,
and there are strong suspicions that security
operatives orchestrated the later assassination of
Prime Minister Rabin. So perhaps the elimination of
a disfavored Mossad director-designate is not so
totally absurd. And Wikipedia does indeed confirm
that
Gen. Yekutiel Adam, Israel’s Deputy Chief of
Staff, was named Mossad Director in mid-1982 but
then killed in Lebanon just a couple of weeks before
he was scheduled to take office, thereby becoming
the highest-ranking Israeli ever to die on the
battlefield.
According to Ostrovsky and
his factional allies, powerful elements within
Mossad were transforming it into a dangerous, rogue
organization, which threatened Israeli democracy and
blocked any possibility of peace with the
Palestinians. These individuals might even act in
direct opposition to the top Mossad leadership, whom
they often regarded as overly weak and compromising.
Early in 1982, some of the
more moderate Mossad elements backed by the outgoing
director had tasked one of their officers in Paris
to open diplomatic channels with the Palestinians,
and he did so via an American attache whom he
enlisted in the effort. But when the harder-line
faction discovered this plan, they frustrated the
project by assassinating both the Mossad agent and
his unlucky American collaborator, while throwing
the blame upon some extremist Palestinian group. I
obviously can’t verify the truth of this remarkable
story, but the New York Times archive does
confirm Ostrovsky’s account of the mysterious 1982
killings of
Yakov Barsimantov and
Charles Robert Ray, puzzling incidents that left
experts searching for a motive.
Ostrovsky claims to have been
deeply shocked and disbelieving when he was
initially informed of this history of hard-line
Mossad elements assassinating both Israeli officials
and their own colleagues over policy differences,
but he was gradually persuaded of the reality. So as
a private citizen now living in Canada, he agreed to
undertake a campaign to disrupt Mossad’s existing
intelligence operations, hoping to sufficiently
discredit the organization that the dominant
factions would lose influence or at least have their
dangerous activities curtailed by the Israeli
government. Although he would receive some
assistance by the moderate elements that had
recruited him, the project was obviously an
extremely dangerous one, with his life very much at
risk if his actions were discovered.
Presenting himself as a
disgruntled former Mossad officer who was seeking
revenge against his past employer, he spent much of
the next year or two approaching the intelligence
services of Britain, France, Jordan, and Egypt,
offering to assist them in uncovering the Israeli
espionage networks in their countries in exchange
for substantial financial payments. No similarly
knowledgeable Mossad defector had ever previously
come forward, and although some of these services
were initially suspicious, he eventually won their
trust, while the information he provided was quite
valuable in breaking up various local Israeli
spy-rings, most of which had previously been
unsuspected. Meanwhile, his Mossad confederates kept
him informed of any signs that his activities had
been detected.
The detailed account of
Ostrovsky’s anti-Mossad counter-intelligence
campaign occupies well over half the book, and I
have no easy means of determining whether his
stories are real or fantasy, or perhaps some mixture
of the two. The author does provide copies of his
1986 plane tickets to Amman, Jordan and Cairo,
Egypt, where supposedly he was debriefed at length
by the local security services, and in 1988 a major
international scandal did erupt when the British
very publicly closed down a large number of Mossad
safe-houses and expelled numerous Israeli agents.
Personally, I found most of Ostrovsky’s account
reasonably credible, but perhaps individuals who
possess actual professional expertise in
intelligence operations might come to a different
conclusion.
Although two years of these
attacks against Mossad intelligence networks had
inflicted serious damage, the overall political
results were much less than desired. The existing
leadership still held a firm grip on the
organization and the Israeli government gave no sign
of taking action. So Ostrovsky finally concluded
that a different approach might be more effective,
and he decided to write a book about Mossad and its
inner workings.
His internal allies were
initially quite skeptical, but he eventually won
them over, and they fully participated in the
writing project. Some of these individuals had spent
many years at Mossad, even rising to a senior level,
and they were the source of the extremely detailed
material on particular operations in the 1990 book,
which had seemed far beyond the knowledge of a very
junior officer such as Ostrovsky.
Mossad’s attempt to legally
suppress the book was a terrible blunder and
generated the massive publicity that made it an
international bestseller. Outside observers were
mystified that the Israelis had adopted such a
counter-productive media strategy, but according to
Ostrovsky, his internal allies had helped persuade
the Mossad leadership to take that approach. They
also tried to keep him abreast of any Mossad plans
to abduct or assassinate him.
During the production of the
1990 book, Ostrovsky and his allies had discussed
numerous past operations, but only a fraction of
these were ultimately included in the text. So when
the author decided to produce his sequel, he had a
wealth of historical material to draw upon, which
included several bombshells.
The first of these came with
regard to Israel’s major role in the illegal sales
of American military equipment to Iran during the
bitter Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a story that
eventually exploded into the headlines as the
notorious “Iran-Contra Scandal,” although our media
did its utmost to hide Israel’s central involvement
in the affair.
The arms trade with Iran was
an extremely lucrative one for Israel, soon expanded
to the training of military pilots. The deep
ideological antipathy that the Islamic Republic held
for the Jewish State required that this business be
conducted via third parties, so a smuggling route
was established through the small German state of
Schleswig-Holstein. However, when an effort was
later made to enlist the support of the state’s top
elected official, he rejected the proposal. The
Mossad leaders were fearful that he might interfere
in the business, so they successfully fabricated a
scandal to unseat him and install a more pliable
German politician instead. Unfortunately, the
disgraced official raised a fuss and demanded public
hearings to clear his name, so Mossad agents lured
him to Geneva, and after he rejected a large bribe
to keep quiet, killed him, disguising the death so
that police ruled it a suicide.
During my original reading,
this very lengthy and detailed incident, which ran
over 4,000 words, seemed quite doubtful to me. I’d
never previously heard of Uwe Barschel, but he was
described as a close personal friend of German
Chancellor Helmut Kohl, and I found it totally
implausible that Mossad had so casually removed a
popular and influential European elected official
from office, then afterward murdered him. My deep
suspicions regarding the rest of Ostrovsky’s book
were further magnified.
However, in recently
revisiting the incident, I
discovered that seven months after the book
appeared, the Washington Post
reported that the Barschel case had been
reopened, with German, Spanish, and Swiss police
investigations finding strong indications of a
murder committed exactly along the lines previously
suggested by Ostrovsky. Once again, the surprising
claims of the Mossad defector had apparently checked
out, and I now became much more willing to believe
that at least most of his subsequent revelations
were probably correct. And there were quite a long
list of those.
(As an aside, Ostrovsky noted
one of the crucial sources of Mossad’s growing
internal influence in Germany. The threat of
domestic German terrorism led the German government
to regularly send large numbers of its security and
police officials to Israel for training, and these
individuals became ideal targets for intelligence
recruitment, continuing to collaborate with their
Israeli handlers long after they had returned home
and resumed their careers. Thus, although the
topmost ranks of those organizations were generally
loyal to their country, the mid-ranks gradually
became honeycombed with Mossad assets, who could be
used for various projects. This raises obvious
concerns about America’s post-9/11 policy of sending
such large numbers of our own police officials to
Israel for similar training, as well as the tendency
for nearly all newly elected members of Congress to
travel there as well.)
I vaguely recalled the early
1980s controversy surrounding UN Secretary-General
Kurt Waldheim, who was discovered to have lied about
his World War II military service, and left office
under a dark cloud, with his name becoming
synonymous with long-hidden Nazi war-crimes. Yet
according to Ostrovsky, the entire scandal was
fabricated by Mossad, which placed incriminating
documents obtained from other files into that of
Waldheim. The UN leader had become increasingly
critical of Israel’s military attacks on South
Lebanon, so the falsified evidence was used to
launch a smear campaign in the media that destroyed
him.
And if Ostrovsky can be
credited, for many decades Israel itself had engaged
in activities that would have occupied center-stage
at the Nuremberg Trials. According to his account,
from the late 1960s onward, Mossad had maintained a
small laboratory facility at Nes Ziyyona just south
of Tel Aviv for the lethal testing of nuclear,
chemical, and bacteriological compounds upon hapless
Palestinians selected for elimination. This ongoing
process of deadly testing allowed Israel to perfect
its assassination technologies while also upgrading
its powerful arsenal of unconventional weapons that
would be available in the event of war. Although
during the 1970s, the American media endlessly
focused on the terrible depravity of the CIA, I
don’t ever recall hearing any accusations along
these lines.
At one point, Ostrovsky had
been surprised to discover that Mossad agents were
accompanying Israeli doctors on their medical
missions to South Africa, where they treated
impoverished Africans at an outpatient clinic in
Soweto. The explanation he received was a grim one,
namely that private Israeli companies were using the
unknowing blacks as human guinea-pigs for the
testing of medical compounds in ways that could not
legally have been done in Israel itself. I obviously
have no means of verifying this claim, but I had
sometimes wondered how Israel eventually came to
dominate so much of world’s generic drug industry,
which naturally relies upon the cheapest and most
efficient means of testing and production.
Also quite interesting was
the story he told of the rise and fall of British
press tycoon Robert Maxwell, a Czech immigrant of
Jewish background. According to his account, Maxwell
had closely collaborated with Mossad throughout his
career, and the intelligence service had been
crucial in facilitating his rise to power, lending
him money early on and deploying their allies in
labor unions and the banking industry to weakened
his media acquisition targets. Once Maxwell’s empire
had been created, he repaid his benefactors in ways
both legal and illegal, supporting Israel’s policies
in his newspapers while also providing Mossad with a
slush fund, secretly financing their off-the-books
European operations with cash from his corporate
pension account. Those latter outlays were normally
meant to serve as temporary loans, but in 1991
Mossad was slow in returning the funds and he grew
financially desperate as his fragile empire
tottered. When he hinted at the dangerous secrets he
might be forced to reveal unless he were paid,
Mossad killed him instead and disguised it as
suicide.
Once again, Ostrovsky’s
claims cannot be verified, but the dead publisher
was given a hero’s funeral in Israel, with the
serving Prime Minister deeply praising his important
services to the Jewish State while three of his
predecessors were also in attendance, and Maxwell
was buried with full honors in the Mount of Olives.
Most recently, his daughter Ghislaine reached the
headlines as the closest associate of notorious
blackmailer Jeffrey Epstein, and the woman is widely
believed to have been a Mossad agent, now hiding in
Israel.
But Ostrovsky’s most
potentially dramatic story occurred in late 1991 and
filled one of the last short chapters. In the
aftermath of America’s great military victory over
Iraq in the Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush
decided to invest some of his considerable political
capital in finally forcing peace in the Middle East
between Arabs and Israelis. Right-wing Prime
Minister Yitzhak Shamir was bitterly opposed to any
of the proposed concessions, so Bush began placing
financial pressure upon the Jewish State, blocking
loan guarantees despite the efforts of America’s
powerful Israel Lobby. Within certain circles, he
was soon vilified as a diabolical enemy of the Jews.
Ostrovsky explains that when
faced with strong opposition by an American
president, pro-Israel groups have traditionally
cultivated his Vice President as a backdoor means of
regaining their influence. For example, when
President Kennedy fiercely opposed Israel’s nuclear
weapons development program in the early 1960s, the
Israel Lobby focused their efforts upon Vice
President Lyndon Johnson, and this strategy was
rewarded when the latter doubled aid to Israel soon
after taking office. Similarly, in 1991 they
emphasized their friendship with Vice President Dan
Quayle, an easy task since his chief of staff and
top advisor was William Kristol, a leading Jewish
Neocon.
However, an extreme faction
in Mossad settled upon a much more direct means of
solving Israel’s political problems, deciding to
assassinate President Bush at his international
peace conference in Madrid while throwing the blame
upon three Palestinian militants. On October 1,
1991, Ostrovsky received a frantic call from his
leading Mossad collaborator informing him of the
plan and desperately seeking his assistance in
thwarting it. At first he was disbelieving, finding
it difficult to accept that even Mossad hard-liners
would consider such a reckless act, but he soon
agreed to do whatever he could to publicize the plot
and somehow bring it to the attention of the Bush
Administration without being dismissed as a mere
“conspiracy theorist.”
Since Ostrovsky was now a
prominent author, he was frequently invited to speak
on Middle East issues to elite groups, and at his
next opportunity, he emphasized the intense
hostility of Israeli right-wingers to Bush’s
proposals, and strongly suggested that the
president’s life was in danger. As it happened, a
member of the small audience brought those concerns
to the attention of former Congressman Pete
McCloskey, an old friend of the president, who soon
discussed the situation with Ostrovsky by phone,
then flew to Ottawa for a lengthy personal meeting
to assess the credibility of the threat. Concluding
that the danger was serious and real, McCloskey
immediately began using his DC connections to
approach members of the Secret Service, finally
persuading them to contact Ostrovsky, who explained
his inside sources of information. The story was
soon leaked to the media, generating extensive
coverage by influential columnist Jack Anderson and
others, and the resulting publicity caused the
assassination plot to be abandoned.
Once again I was quite
skeptical after reading this account, so I decided
to contact a few people I knew, and they informed me
that the Bush Administration had indeed taken
Ostrovsky’s warnings about the alleged Mossad
assassination plot very seriously at the time, which
seemingly confirmed most of the author’s story.
Following his publishing
triumph and his success in foiling the alleged plot
against the life of President Bush in late 1991,
Ostrovsky largely lost touch with his internal
Mossad allies, and instead focused on his own
private life and new writing career in Canada.
Furthermore, the June 1992 Israeli elections brought
to power the much more moderate government of Prime
Minister Rabin, which seemed to greatly reduce the
need for any further anti-Mossad efforts. But
government shifts may sometimes have unexpected
consequences, especially in the lethal world of
intelligence operations, where personal
relationships are often sacrificed to expediency.
After the publication of his
1990 book, Ostrovsky had become fearful of being
abducted or killed, so as a consequence he had
avoided crossing the Atlantic and visiting Europe.
But in 1993, his former Mossad allies began urging
him to travel to Holland and Belgium to promote the
release of new translations of his international
bestseller. They firmly assured him that the
political changes in Israel meant that he would now
be perfectly safe, and he finally agreed to do so
despite misgivings. But although he took some
reasonable security precautions, an odd incident in
Brussels convinced him that he had narrowly escaped
a Mossad kidnapping. Growing alarmed, he called his
senior Mossad contact at home, but instead of
getting any reassurance, he received a strangely
cold and unfriendly response, which included a
reference to the notorious case of a individual who
had once betrayed Mossad and then been killed
together with his wife and three children.
Rightly or wrongly, Ostrovsky
concluded that the fall of Israel’s hard-line
government had apparently given the more moderate
Mossad faction a chance of gaining control of their
organization. Tempted by such power, they now
regarded him as a dangerous and expendable loose
end, someone who might eventually reveal their own
past involvement in anti-Mossad intelligence
activities as well as the highly damaging book
project.
Believing his former allies
now wanted to eliminate him, he quickly began work
on his sequel, which would put the full story into
the public record, thereby greatly reducing the
benefits of shutting his mouth. I also noticed that
his new text repeatedly mentioned his secret
possession of a comprehensive collection of the
names and photos of Mossad’s international
operatives, a claim that whether true or not might
serve as a life-insurance policy by greatly
increasing the risk of Israel taking any action
against him.
This short description of
events closed Ostrovsky’s second book, explaining
why the volume was written and contained so much
sensitive material that had been excluded from the
previous one.
Ostrovsky’s sequel was
released late in 1994 by HarperCollins, a leading
publisher. But despite its explosive contents, this
time Israel and its allies had learned their lesson,
and they greeted the work with near-total silence
rather than hysterical attacks, so it received
relatively little attention and sold only a fraction
of the previous number of copies. Among mainstream
publications, I could only locate one short and
rather negative
capsule review in Foreign Affairs.
However, another book
published at the beginning of that same year on
related issues suffered from a far more complete
public blackout that has now still endured for over
a quarter-century, and this was not merely because
of its obscure source. Despite the severe handicap
of such a near-total media boycott, the work went on
to become an underground bestseller, eventually
having over 40,000 copies in print, widely read and
perhaps discussed in certain circles, but almost
never publicly mentioned. Final Judgment by
the late Michael Collins Piper set forth the
explosive hypothesis that Mossad had played a
central role in the most famous assassination of the
twentieth century, the 1963 killing of President
John F. Kennedy.
While Ostrovsky’s books drew
upon his personal knowledge of Israel’s secret
intelligence service, Piper was a journalist and
researcher who had spent his entire career at
Liberty Lobby, a small activist organization based
in DC. Being sharply critical of Israeli policies
and Zionist influence in America, the group was
usually portrayed by the media as part of the far
right anti-Semitic populist fringe, and almost
entirely ignored by all mainstream outlets. Its
weekly tabloid Spotlight, which usually
focused on controversial topics, had once reached a
remarkable circulation of 300,000 in the unsettled
times of the late 1970s, but then declined
substantially in readership during the more placid
and optimistic Reagan Era that followed.
Liberty Lobby had never much
delved into JFK assassination issues, but in 1978 it
published an article on the subject by Victor
Marchetti, a prominent former CIA official, and as a
result was soon sued for defamation by E. Howard
Hunt of Watergate fame, with the lawsuit threatening
its survival. In 1982 this ongoing legal battle
attracted the involvement of Mark Lane, an
experienced attorney of a leftist Jewish background
who had been the founding father of JFK conspiracy
investigations. Lane won the case at trial in 1985
and thereafter remained a close ally of the
organization.
Piper gradually became
friendly with Lane and by the early 1990s he himself
had grown interested in the JFK assassination. In
January 1994, he published his major work, Final
Judgment, which presented an enormous body of
circumstantial evidence backing his theory that
Mossad had been heavily involved in the JFK
assassination. I summarized and discussed the Piper
Hypothesis in
my own 2018 article:
For decades following the
1963 assassination, virtually no suspicions had
ever been directed towards Israel, and as a
consequence none of the hundreds or thousands of
assassination conspiracy books that appeared
during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s had hinted at
any role for the Mossad, though nearly every
other possible culprit, ranging from the Vatican
to the Illuminati, came under scrutiny. Kennedy
had received over 80% of the Jewish vote in his
1960 election, American Jews featured very
prominently in his White House, and he was
greatly lionized by Jewish media figures,
celebrities, and intellectuals ranging from New
York City to Hollywood to the Ivy League.
Moreover, individuals with a Jewish background
such as Mark Lane and Edward Epstein had been
among the leading early proponents of an
assassination conspiracy, with their
controversial theories championed by influential
Jewish cultural celebrities such as Mort Sahl
and Norman Mailer. Given that the Kennedy
Administration was widely perceived as
pro-Israel, there seemed no possible motive for
any Mossad involvement, and bizarre, totally
unsubstantiated accusations of such a monumental
nature directed against the Jewish state were
hardly likely to gain much traction in an
overwhelmingly pro-Israel publishing industry.
However, in the early
1990s highly regarded journalists and
researchers began exposing the circumstances
surrounding the development of Israel’s nuclear
weapons arsenal. Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book
The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and
American Foreign Policy described the
extreme efforts of the Kennedy Administration to
force Israel to allow international inspections
of its allegedly non-military nuclear reactor at
Dimona, and thereby prevent its use in producing
nuclear weapons. Dangerous Liaisons: The
Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert
Relationship by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn
appeared in the same year, and covered similar
ground.
Although entirely hidden
from public awareness at the time, the early
1960s political conflict between the American
and Israeli governments over nuclear weapons
development had represented a top foreign policy
priority of the Kennedy Administration, which
had made nuclear non-proliferation one of its
central international initiatives. It is notable
that John McCone, Kennedy’s choice as CIA
Director, had previously served on the Atomic
Energy Commission under Eisenhower, being the
individual who leaked the fact that Israel was
building a nuclear reactor to produce plutonium.
The pressure and
financial aid threats secretly applied to Israel
by the Kennedy Administration eventually became
so severe that they led to the resignation of
Israel’s founding Prime Minister David
Ben-Gurion in June 1963. But all these efforts
were almost entirely halted or reversed once
Kennedy was replaced by Johnson in November of
that same year. Piper notes that Stephen Green’s
1984 book Taking Sides: America’s Secret
Relations With a Militant Israel had
previously documented that U.S. Middle East
Policy completely reversed itself following
Kennedy’s assassination, but this important
finding had attracted little attention at the
time.
Skeptics of a plausible
institutional basis for a JFK assassination
conspiracy have often noted the extreme
continuity in both foreign and domestic policies
between the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations,
arguing that this casts severe doubt on any such
possible motive. Although this analysis seems
largely correct, America’s behavior towards
Israel and its nuclear weapons program stands as
a very notable exception to this pattern.
An additional major area
of concern for Israeli officials may have
involved the efforts of the Kennedy
Administration to sharply restrict the
activities of pro-Israel political lobbies.
During his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy
had met in New York City with a group of wealthy
Israel advocates, led by financier Abraham
Feinberg, and they had offered enormous
financial support in exchange for a controlling
influence in Middle Eastern policy. Kennedy
managed to fob them off with vague assurances,
but he considered the incident so troubling that
the next morning he sought out journalist
Charles Bartlett, one of his closest friends,
and expressed his outrage that American foreign
policy might fall under the control of partisans
of a foreign power, promising that if he became
president, he would rectify that situation. And
indeed, once he had installed his brother Robert
as Attorney General, the latter initiated a
major legal effort to force pro-Israel groups to
register themselves as foreign agents, which
would have drastically reduced their power and
influence. But after JFK’s death, this project
was quickly abandoned, and as part of the
settlement, the leading pro-Israel lobby merely
agreed to reconstitute itself as AIPAC.
Final Judgment
went through a number of reprintings following
its original 1994 appearance, and by the sixth
edition released in 2004, had grown to over 650
pages, including numerous long appendices and
over 1100 footnotes, the overwhelming majority
of these referencing fully mainstream sources.
The body of the text was merely serviceable in
organization and polish, reflecting the total
boycott by all publishers, mainstream or
alternative, but I found the contents themselves
remarkable and generally quite compelling.
Despite the most extreme blackout by all media
outlets, the book sold more than 40,000 copies
over the years, making it something of an
underground bestseller, and surely bringing it
to the attention of everyone in the JFK
assassination research community, though
apparently almost none of them were willing to
mention its existence. I suspect these other
writers realized that even any mere
acknowledgement of the existence of the book, if
only to ridicule or dismiss it, might prove
fatal to their media and publishing career.
Piper himself died in 2015, aged 54, suffering
from the health problems and heavy-drinking
often associated with grim poverty, and other
journalists may have been reluctant to risk that
same dismal fate.
As an example of this
strange situation, the bibliography of Talbot’s
2005 book contains almost 140 entries, some
rather obscure, but has no space for Final
Judgment, nor does his very comprehensive
index include any entry for “Jews” or “Israel.”
Indeed, at one point he very delicately
characterizes Sen. Robert Kennedy’s entirely
Jewish senior staff by stating “There was not a
Catholic among them.” His 2015 sequel is equally
circumspect, and although the index does contain
numerous entries pertaining to Jews, all these
references are in regards to World War II and
the Nazis, including his discussion of the
alleged Nazi ties of Allen Dulles, his principal
bête noire. Stone’s book, while
fearlessly convicting President Lyndon Johnson
of the JFK assassination, also strangely
excludes “Jews” and “Israel” from the long index
and Final Judgment from the
bibliography, and Douglass’s book follows this
same pattern.
Furthermore, the extreme
concerns that the Piper Hypothesis seems to have
provoked among JFK assassination researchers may
explain a strange anomaly. Although Mark Lane
was himself of Jewish origins and left-wing
roots, after his victory for Liberty Lobby in
the Hunt libel trial, he spent many years
associated with that organization in a legal
capacity, and apparently became quite friendly
with Piper, one of its leading writers.
According to Piper, Lane told him that Final
Judgment made “a solid case” for a major
Mossad role in the assassination, and he viewed
the theory as fully complementary to his own
focus on CIA involvement. I suspect that
concerns about these associations may explain
why Lane was almost completely airbrushed out of
the Douglass and 2007 Talbot books, and
discussed in the second Talbot book only when
his work was absolutely essential to Talbot’s
own analysis. By contrast, New York Times
staff writers are hardly likely to be as versed
in the lesser-known aspects of the JFK
assassination research community, and being
ignorant of this hidden controversy, they gave
Lane
the long and glowing obituary that his
career fully warranted.
When weighing the
possible suspects for a given crime, considering
their past pattern of behavior is often a
helpful approach. As discussed above, I can
think of no historical example in which
organized crime initiated a serious
assassination attempt against any American
political figure even moderately prominent on
the national stage. And despite a few suspicions
here and there, the same applies to the CIA.
By contrast, the Israeli
Mossad and the Zionist groups that preceded the
establishment of the Jewish state seem to have
had a very long track record of assassinations,
including those of high-ranking political
figures who might normally be regarded as
inviolate. Lord Moyne, the British Minister of
State for the Middle East, was assassinated in
1944 and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace
Negotiator sent to help resolve the first
Arab-Israel war, suffered the same fate in
September 1948. Not even an American president
was entirely free of such risks, and Piper notes
that the memoirs of Harry Truman’s daughter
Margaret reveal that Zionist militants had tried
to assassinate her father using a letter laced
with toxic chemicals in 1947 when they believed
he was dragging his heels in supporting Israel,
although that failed attempt was never made
public. The Zionist faction responsible for all
of these incidents was led by Yitzhak Shamir,
who later became a leader of Mossad and director
of its assassination program during the 1960s,
before eventually becoming Prime Minister of
Israel in 1986.
There are other notable
elements that tend to support the Piper
Hypothesis. Once we accept the existence of a
JFK assassination conspiracy, the one individual
who is virtually certain to have been a
participant was Jack Ruby, and his organized
crime ties were almost entirely to the huge but
rarely-mentioned Jewish wing of that enterprise,
presided over by Meyer Lansky, an extremely
fervent supporter of Israel. Ruby himself had
particularly strong connections with Lansky
lieutenant Mickey Cohen, who dominated the Los
Angeles underworld and had been personally
involved in gun-running to Israel prior to the
1948 war. Indeed,
according to Dallas rabbi Hillel Silverman,
Ruby had privately explained his killing of
Oswald by saying “I did it for the Jewish
people.”
An intriguing aspect to
Oliver Stone’s landmark JFK film should
also be mentioned. Arnon Milchan, the wealthy
Hollywood producer who backed the project, was
not only an Israeli citizen, but had also
reportedly
played a central role in the enormous espionage
project to divert American technology and
materials to Israel’s nuclear weapons project,
the exact undertaking that the Kennedy
Administration had made such efforts to block.
Milchan has even sometimes been described as
“the Israeli James Bond.” And although the
film ran a full three hours in length, JFK
scrupulously avoided presenting any of the
details that Piper later regarded as initial
clues to an Israeli dimension, instead seeming
to finger America’s fanatic home-grown
anti-Communist movement and the Cold War
leadership of the military-industrial complex as
the guilty parties.
Summarizing over 300,000
words of Piper’s history and analysis in just a
few paragraphs is obviously an impossible
undertaking, but the above discussion provides a
reasonable taste of the enormous mass of
circumstantial evidence mustered in favor of the
Piper Hypothesis.
In many respects, JFK
Assassination Studies has become its own
academic discipline, and my credentials are
quite limited. I have read perhaps a dozen books
in the subject, and have also tried to approach
the issues with the clean slate and fresh eyes
of an outsider, but any serious expert would
surely have digested scores or even hundreds of
the volumes in the field. While the overall
analysis of Final Judgment struck me as
quite persuasive, a good fraction of the names
and references were unfamiliar, and I simply do
not have the background to assess their
credibility, nor whether the description of the
material presented is accurate.
Under normal
circumstances, I would turn to the reviews or
critiques produced by other authors, and
comparing them against Piper’s claims, then
decide which argument seemed the stronger. But
although Final Judgment was published a
quarter-century ago, the near-absolute blanket
of silence surrounding the Piper Hypothesis,
especially from the more influential and
credible researchers, renders this impossible.
However, Piper’s
inability to secure any regular publisher and
the widespread efforts to smother his theory out
of existence, have had an ironic consequence.
Since the book went out of print years ago, I
had a relatively easy time securing the rights
to include it in my collection of controversial
HTML Books, and I have now done so, thereby
allowing everyone on the Internet to
conveniently read the entire text and decide for
themselves, while easily checking the multitude
of references or searching for particular words
or phrases.
This edition actually
incorporates several much shorter works,
originally published separately. One of these,
consisting of an extended Q&A, describes the
genesis of the idea and answers numerous
questions surrounding it, and for some readers
might represent a better starting point.
There are also numerous
extended Piper interviews or presentations
easily available on YouTube, and when I watched
two or three of them a couple of years ago, I
thought he effectively summarized many of his
main arguments, but I cannot remember which ones
they were.
Some additional evidence
tends to support Piper’s arguments for likely Mossad
involvement in the death of our president.
David Talbot’s influential
2007 book Brothers revealed that Robert F.
Kennedy had been convinced almost from the first
that his brother had been struck down in a
conspiracy, but he held his tongue, telling his
circle of friends that he stood little chance of
tracking down and punishing the guilty parties until
he himself reached the White House. By June 1968, he
seemed on the threshold of achieving that goal, but
was felled by an assassin’s bullet just moments
after winning the crucial California presidential
primary. The logical assumption is that his death
was engineered by the same elements as that of his
elder brother, who were now acting to protect
themselves from the consequences of their earlier
crime.
A young Palestinian named
Sirhan Sirhan had fired a pistol at the scene and
was quickly arrested and convicted for the murder.
But Talbot emphasizes that the coroner’s report
revealed that the fatal bullet came from a
completely different direction, while the acoustical
record proves that far more shots were fired than
the capacity of the alleged killer’s gun. Such hard
evidence seems to demonstrate a conspiracy.
Sirhan himself seemed dazed
and confused, later claiming to have no memory of
events, and Talbot mentions that various
assassination researchers have long argued that he
was merely a convenient patsy in the plot, perhaps
acting under some form of hypnosis or conditioning.
Nearly all these writers are usually reluctant to
note that the selection of a Palestinian as
scapegoat in the killing seems to point in a certain
obvious direction, but Bergman’s recent book also
includes a major new revelation. At exactly the same
moment that Sirhan was being wrestled to the floor
of the Ambassador Hotel ballroom in Los Angeles,
another young Palestinian
was undergoing intensive rounds of hypnotic
conditioning at the hands of Mossad in Israel, being
programmed to assassinate PLO leader Yasir Arafat;
and although that effort ultimately failed, such a
coincidence seems to stretch the bounds of
plausibility.
Three decades later, JFK’s
heir and namesake had developed a growing public
profile as publisher of his popular political
magazine George, which attracted
considerable international controversy when he
published a long article claiming that the
assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin had
been orchestrated by hard-liners within his own
security services. There were also strong
indications that JFK Jr. might soon enter politics,
perhaps running for the US Senate as a
stepping-stone to the White House.
Instead, he died in an
unusual 1999 light plane crash, and a later edition
of Piper’s book outlined some of the suspicious
circumstances, which the author believed suggested
an Israeli hand. For years Piper had made efforts to
bring his explosive book to the attention of JFK’s
son, and he thought that he might have finally
succeeded. Israeli-Canadian author Barry Chamish
also believed that it was JFK Jr.’s discovery of the
Piper Hypothesis that had led the young Kennedy to
promote the Rabin assassination conspiracy theory in
his magazine.
Last year, French researcher
Laurent Guyenot published
an exhaustive analysis of JFK Jr.’s death,
arguing that he was probably killed by Israel. My
own reading of the material he presents is rather
different, and although there are a number of
somewhat suspicious items, I think that the evidence
of foul play—let alone Mossad involvement—is rather
thin, leading me to conclude that the plane crash
was probably just the tragic accident portrayed by
the media. But the aftermath of the death did
highlight an important ideological divide.
For six decades, members of
the Kennedy family have been wildly popular among
ordinary American Jews, probably attracting greater
political enthusiasm than almost any other public
figures. But this undeniable reality has masked an
entirely different perspective found within a
particular segment of that same community.
John Podhoretz, a leading
scion of the militantly pro-Israel Neocons, was
opinion editor of The New York Post at the
time of the fatal plane crash, and he immediately
published an astonishing column entitled
“A Conversation in Hell” in which he positively
reveled at the death of the young Kennedy. He
portrayed patriarch Joseph Kennedy as an unspeakable
anti-Semite who had sold his soul to the Devil for
his own worldly success and that of his family, then
suggested that all the subsequent assassinations and
other early deaths of Kennedys merely constituted
the fine print of that Satanic bargain. So brutally
harsh a piece surely indicates that those bitter
sentiments were hardly uncommon within Podhoretz’s
small ultra-Zionist social circle, which probably
overlapped with similar right-wing elements in
Israel. So this reaction demonstrates that the exact
same political figures who were most deeply beloved
by the overwhelming majority of American Jews may
have also been regarded as mortal enemies by an
influential segment of the Jewish State and its
corps of Mossad assassins.
When I published my original
2018 article on the JFK assassination, I naturally
noted the widespread use of assassination by Zionist
groups, a pattern that had long predated the
creation of the Jewish State, and I cited some of
the supportive evidence contained in the two
Ostrovsky books. But at the time, I still had
considerable doubts about Ostrovsky’s credibility,
especially regarding the shocking claims in his
second book, and I had not yet read Bergman’s
volume, which had just been published a few months
earlier. So although there seemed considerable
evidence for the Piper Hypothesis, I regarded it as
far from conclusive.
However, I have now digested
Bergman’s book, which documents the enormous volume
of international Mossad assassinations, and I have
also concluded that Ostrovsky’s claims were far more
solid than I had previously assumed. As a result my
opinion has substantially shifted. Instead of merely
being a solid possibility, I believe there is
actually a strong likelihood that Mossad together
with its American collaborators played a central
role in the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s,
leading me to fully affirm the Piper Hypothesis.
Guyenot has relied upon many of the same sources and
has come to
roughly similar conclusions.
Once we recognize that
Israel’s Mossad was probably responsible for the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy, our
understanding of post-war American history may
require substantial reevaluation.
The JFK assassination was
possibly the most famous event of the second half of
the twentieth century, and it inspired a vast
outpouring of media coverage and journalistic
investigation that seemingly explored every nook and
crany of the story. Yet for the first three decades
after the killing in Dallas, virtually no whisper of
suspicion was ever directed at Israel, and during
the quarter-century since Piper published his
ground-breaking 1994 book, scarcely any of his
analysis has leaked into the English-language media.
If a story of such enormity has remained so well
hidden for so long, perhaps it was neither the first
nor the last.
If the Kennedy brothers did
indeed perish due to a conflict over our Middle
Eastern policy, they were certainly not the first
prominent Western leaders to suffer that fate,
especially a generation earlier during the bitter
political battles over the establishment of Israel.
All our standard history books describe the
mid-1940s Zionist assassinations of Lord Moyne of
Britain and U.N. Peace Negotiator Count Folke
Bernodotte, though they rarely mention the failed
attempts on the lives of
President Harry S. Truman and
Britain Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin around
the same time.
But another leading American
public figure also died during that period under
rather strange circumstances, and although his
demise is always mentioned, the crucial political
context is excluded, as I discussed at length in
a 2018 article:
Sometimes our standard
history textbooks provide two seemingly
unrelated stories, which become far more
important only once we discover that they are
actually parts of a single connected whole. The
strange death of James Forrestal certainly falls
into this category.
During the 1930s
Forrestal had reached the pinacle of Wall
Street, serving as CEO of Dillon, Read, one of
the most prestigious investment banks. With
World War II looming, Roosevelt drew him into
government service in 1940, partly because his
strong Republican credentials helped emphasize
the bipartisan nature of the war effort, and he
soon became Undersecretary of the Navy. Upon the
death of his elderly superior in 1944, Forrestal
was elevated to the Cabinet as Navy Secretary,
and after the contentious battle over the
reorganization of our military departments, he
became America’s first Secretary of Defense in
1947, holding authority over the Army, Navy, Air
Force, and Marines. Along with Secretary of
State Gen. George Marshall, Forrestal probably
ranked as the most influential member of
Truman’s Cabinet. However, just a few months
after Truman’s 1948 reelection, we are told that
Forrestal became paranoid and depressed,
resigned his powerful position, and weeks later
committed suicide by jumping from an 18th story
window at Bethesda Naval Hospital. Knowing
almost nothing about Forrestal or his
background, I always nodded my head over this
odd historical event.
Meanwhile, an entirely
different page or chapter of my history
textbooks usually carried the dramatic story of
the bitter political conflict that wracked the
Truman Administration over the recognition of
the State of Israel, which had taken place the
previous year. I read that George Marshall
argued such a step would be totally disastrous
for American interests by potentially alienating
many hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims,
who held the enormous oil wealth of the Middle
East, and felt so strongly about the matter that
he threatened to resign. However, Truman,
heavily influenced by the personal lobbying of
his old Jewish haberdashery business partner
Eddie Jacobson, ultimately decided upon
recognition, and Marshall stayed in the
government.
However, almost a decade
ago, I somehow stumbled across an interesting
book by Alan Hart, a journalist and author who
had served as a longtime BBC Middle East
Correspondent, in which I discovered that these
two different stories were part of a seamless
whole. By his account, although Marshall had
indeed strongly opposed recognition of Israel,
it had actually been Forrestal who spearheaded
that effort in Truman’s Cabinet and was most
identified with that position, resulting in
numerous harsh attacks in the media and his
later departure from the Truman Cabinet. Hart
also raised very considerable doubts about
whether Forrestal’s subsequent death had
actually been suicide, citing an obscure website
for a detailed analysis of that last issue.
It is a commonplace that
the Internet has democratized the distribution
of information, allowing those who create
knowledge to connect with those who consume it
without the need for a gate-keeping
intermediary. I have encountered few better
examples of the unleashed potential of this new
system than
“Who Killed Forrestal?”, an exhaustive
analysis by a certain David Martin, who
describes himself as an economist and political
blogger. Running many tens of thousands of
words, his series of articles on the fate of
America’s first Secretary of Defense provides an
exhaustive discussion of all the source
materials, including the small handful of
published books describing Forrestal’s life and
strange death, supplemented by contemporaneous
newspaper articles and numerous relevant
government documents obtained by personal FOIA
requests. The verdict of murder followed by a
massive governmental cover-up seems solidly
established.
As mentioned, Forrestal’s
role as the Truman Administration’s principal
opponent of Israel’s creation had made him the
subject of an almost unprecedented campaign of
personal media vilification in both print and
radio, spearheaded by the country’s two most
powerful columnists of the right and the left,
Walter Winchell and Drew Pearson, only the
former being Jewish, but both heavily connected
with the ADL and extremely pro-Zionist, with
their attacks and accusations even continuing
after his resignation and death.
Once we move past the
wild exaggerations of Forrestal’s alleged
psychological problems promoted by these very
hostile media pundits and their many allies,
much of Forrestal’s supposed paranoia apparently
consisted of his belief that he was being
followed around Washington, D.C., his phones may
have been tapped, and his life might be in
danger at the hands of Zionist agents. And
perhaps such concerns were not so entirely
unreasonable given certain contemporaneous
events.
Indeed, State Department
official Robert Lovett, a relatively minor and
low-profile opponent of Zionist interests,
reported receiving numerous threatening phone
calls late at night around the same time, which
greatly concerned him. Martin also cites
subsequent books by Zionist partisans who
boasted of the effective use their side had made
of blackmail, apparently obtained by
wire-tapping, to ensure sufficient political
support for Israel’s creation.
Meanwhile, behind the
scenes, powerful financial forces may have been
gathering to ensure that President Truman
ignored the unified recommendations of all his
diplomatic and national security advisors. Years
later, both
Gore Vidal and
Alexander Cockburn would separately report
that it eventually became common knowledge in DC
political circles that during the desperate days
of Truman’s underdog 1948 reelection campaign,
he had secretly accepted a cash payment of $2
million from wealthy Zionists in exchange for
recognizing Israel, a sum perhaps comparable to
$20 million or more in present-day dollars.
Republican Thomas Dewey
had been heavily favored to win the 1948
presidential election, and after Truman’s
surprising upset, Forrestal’s political position
was certainly not helped when Pearson claimed in
a newspaper column that Forrestal had secretly
met with Dewey during the campaign, making
arrangements to be kept on in a Dewey
Administration.
Suffering political
defeat regarding Middle East policy and facing
ceaseless media attacks, Forrestal resigned his
Cabinet post under pressure. Almost immediately
afterwards, he was checked into the Bethesda
Naval Hospital for observation, supposedly
suffering from severe fatigue and exhaustion,
and he remained there for seven weeks, with his
access to visitors sharply restricted. He was
finally scheduled to be released on May 22,
1949, but just hours before his brother Henry
came to pick him up, his body was found below
the window of his 18th floor room, with a
knotted cord wound tightly around his neck.
Based upon an official press release, the
newspapers all reported his unfortunate suicide,
suggesting that he had first tried to hang
himself, but failing that approach, had leapt
out his window instead. A half page of copied
Greek verse was found in his room, and in the
heydey of Freudian psychoanalyical thinking,
this was regarded as the subconscious trigger
for his sudden death impulse, being treated as
almost the equivalent of an actual suicide note.
My own history textbooks simplified this complex
story to merely say “suicide,” which is what I
read and never questioned.
Martin raises numerous
very serious doubts with this official verdict.
Among other things, published interviews with
Forrestal’s surviving brother and friends reveal
that none of them believed Forrestal had taken
his own life, and that they had all been
prevented from seeing him until near the very
end of his entire period of confinement. Indeed,
the brother recounted that just the day before,
Forrestal had been in fine spirits, saying that
upon his release, he planned to use some of his
very considerable personal wealth to buy a
newspaper and begin revealing to the American
people many of the suppressed facts concerning
America’s entry into World War II, of which he
had direct knowledge, supplemented by the
extremely extensive personal diary that he had
kept for many years. Upon Forrestal’s
confinement, that diary, running thousands of
pages, had been seized by the government, and
after his death was apparently published only in
heavily edited and expurgated form, though it
nonetheless still became a historical sensation.
The government documents
unearthed by Martin raise additional doubts
about the story presented in all the standard
history books. Forrestal’s medical files seem to
lack any official autopsy report, there is
visible evidence of broken glass in his room,
suggesting a violent struggle, and most
remarkably, the page of copied Greek
verse—always cited as the main indication of
Forrestal’s final suicidal intent—was actually
not written in Forrestal’s own hand.
Aside from newspaper
accounts and government documents, much of
Martin’s analysis, including the extensive
personal interviews of Forrestal’s friends and
relatives, is based upon a short book entitled
The Death of James Forrestal, published
in 1966 by one Cornell Simpson, almost certainly
a pseudonym. Simpson states that his
investigative research had been conducted just a
few years after Forrestal’s death and although
his book was originally scheduled for release
his publisher grew concerned over the extremely
controversial nature of the material included
and cancelled the project. According to Simpson,
years later he decided to take his unchanged
manuscript off the shelf and have it published
by Western Islands press, which turns out to
have been an imprint of the John Birch Society,
the notoriously conspiratorial rightwing
organization then near the height of its
national influence. For these reasons, certain
aspects of the book are of considerable interest
even beyond the contents directly relating to
Forrestal.
The first part of the
book consists of a detailed presentation of the
actual evidence regarding Forrestal’s highly
suspicious death, including the numerous
interviews with his friends and relatives, while
the second portion focuses on the nefarious
plots of the world-wide Communist movement, a
Birch Society staple. Allegedly, Forrestal’s
staunch anti-Communism had been what targeted
him for destruction by Communist agents, and
there is virtually no reference to any
controversy regarding his enormous public battle
over Israel’s establishment, although that was
certainly the primary factor behind his
political downfall. Martin notes these strange
inconsistencies, and even wonders whether
certain aspects of the book and its release may
have been intended to deflect attention from
this Zionist dimension towards some nefarious
Communist plot.
Consider, for example,
David Niles, whose name has lapsed into total
obscurity, but who had been one of the very few
senior FDR aides retained by his successor, and
according to observers, Niles eventually became
one of the most powerful figures behind the
scenes of the Truman Administration. Various
accounts suggest he played a leading role in
Forrestal’s removal, and Simpson’s book supports
this, suggesting that he was Communist agent of
some sort. However, although the Venona Papers
reveal that Niles had sometimes cooperated with
Soviet agents in their espionage activities, he
apparently did so either for money or for some
other considerations, and was certainly not part
of their own intelligence network. Instead, both
Martin and Hart provide an enormous amount of
evidence that Niles’s loyalty was overwhelmingly
to Zionism, and indeed by 1950 his espionage
activities on behalf of Israel became so
extremely blatant that Gen. Omar Bradley,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
threatened to immediately resign unless Niles
was fired, forcing Truman’s hand.
Forrestal was a wealthy and
pugnacious Irish Catholic, and I think there is very
considerable evidence that his death was the result
of factors quite similar to those that probably
claimed the life of an even more prominent Irish
Catholic in Dallas 14 years later.
There are some other possible
fatalities that follow this pattern, though the
evidence in those cases is far less strong. Piper’s
1994 opus is focused primarily on the JFK
assassination, but over half his 650 pages are given
over to long series of appendices dealing with
somewhat related topics. One of these discusses the
strange deaths of a couple of former high-ranking
CIA officials, suggesting they might have involved
foul play.
Former CIA Director William
Colby had apparently long been regarded as highly
skeptical of the nature of America’s relationship
with Israel, and therefore was characterized by
pro-Israel members of the media as a notorious “Arabist.”
Indeed, while serving as director in 1974, he had
finally ended the career of longtime CIA
counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, whose
extreme affinity with Israel and its Mossad had
sometimes raised serious doubts about his true
loyalties. Piper says that by 1996 Colby had grown
sufficiently concerned about Israel’s infiltration
and manipulation of the US government and its
intelligence community that he arranged a meeting
with high-level Arab officials in DC, suggesting
that they all work together to counter this
disturbing situation. A few weeks later, Colby
disappeared and his drowned body was eventually
found, with the official verdict being that he
supposedly perished near his home in a canoeing
accident, although his former Arab interlocutors
alleged foul play.
Piper goes on to also
describe the earlier death of John Paisley, the
former longtime deputy director of the CIA’s Office
of Strategic Research, and also a strong critic of
the influence of Israel and its close Neocon allies
in American national security policy. In late 1978,
Paisley’s body was found floating in the Chesapeake
Bay with a bullet in the head, and although the
death was officially ruled a suicide, Piper claims
that few believed the story. According to him,
Richard Clement, who had headed the Interagency
Committee on Counterterrorism during the Reagan
Administration, explained in 1996:
LinkBookmark
The Israelis had no compunction about
“terminating” key American intelligence
officials who threatened to blow the whistle on
them. Those of us familiar with the case of
Paisley know that he was killed by Mossad. But
no one, not even in Congress, wants to stand up
and say so publicly.
Piper notes the bitter
political battles that other Washington national
security experts, such as former CIA Deputy Director
Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, had experienced over the years
with elements of the Israel Lobby in Congress and
the media. After Inman was nominated by President
Clinton to lead the Defense Department, a firestorm
of criticism by pro-Israel partisans forced his
withdrawal.
I have made no effort to
investigate the material cited by Piper in his short
discussion. These examples were previously unknown
to me, and all of the evidence he provides seems
purely circumstantial, hardly making a case that
rises above mere suspicion. But I do regard the
author as a reasonably solid investigative
journalist and researcher, whose views should be
taken seriously. Therefore, those so interested can
read his 5,000 word
Appendix Six and decide for themselves.
Although somewhat related,
political assassinations and terrorist attacks are
distinct topics, and Bergman’s comprehensive volume
explicitly focuses on the former, so we cannot fault
him for providing only slight coverage of the
latter. But the historical pattern of Israeli
activity, especially with regard to false-flag
attacks, is really quite remarkable, as I noted in
a 2018 article:
One of history’s largest
terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was
the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as
Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely
destroyed the structure. In the famous
Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents
launched a wave of terrorist attacks against
Western targets in Egypt, intending to have
those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There
are
strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad
agents launched a wave of false-flag terrorist
bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad,
successfully using those violent methods to help
persuade Iraq’s thousand-year Jewish community
to emigrate to the Jewish state. In 1967, Israel
launched
a deliberate air and sea attack against the
U.S.S. Liberty, intending to leave no
survivors, and ultimately killing or wounding
over 200 American servicemen before word of the
attack reached our Sixth Fleet and it was called
off.
The enormous extent of
pro-Israel influence in world political and
media circles meant that none of these brutal
attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in
nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down
the memory hole, so that today probably no more
than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of
them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came
to light due to chance circumstances, so we may
easily suspect that many other attacks of a
similar nature have never become part of the
historical record.
Of these famous incidents,
Bergman only includes mention of the King David
Hotel bombing. But much later in his narrative, he
describes the huge wave of false-flag terrorist
attacks unleashed in 1981 by Israeli Defense
Minister Ariel Sharon, who recruited a former
high-ranking Mossad official to manage the project.
Under Israeli direction,
large car bombs began exploding in the Palestinian
neighborhoods of Beirut and other Lebanese cities,
killing or injuring enormous numbers of civilians. A
single attack in October inflicted nearly 400
casualties, and by December, there were eighteen
bombings per month, with their effectiveness greatly
enhanced by the use of innovative new Israeli drone
technology. Official responsibility for all the
attacks was claimed by a previously unknown Lebanese
organization, but the intent was to provoke the PLO
into military retaliation against Israel, thereby
justifying Sharon’s planned invasion of the
neighboring country.
Since the PLO stubbornly
refused to take the bait, plans were put into motion
for the huge bombing of an entire Beirut sports
stadium using tons of explosives during a January
1st political ceremony, with the death and
destruction expected to be “of unprecedented
proportions, even in terms of Lebanon.” But Sharon’s
political enemies learned of the plot and emphasized
that many foreign diplomats including the Soviet
ambassador were expected to be present and probably
would be killed, so after a bitter debate, Prime
Minister Begin ordered the attack aborted. A future
Mossad chief mentions the major headaches they then
faced in removing the large quantity of explosives
that they had already planted within the structure.
I think that this thoroughly
documented history of Israeli major false-flag
terrorist attacks, including those against American
and other Western targets, should be carefully kept
in mind when we consider the 9/11 attacks, whose
aftermath has massively transformed our society and
cost us so many trillions of dollars. I analyzed the
strange circumstances of the attacks and their
likely nature at considerable length in
my 2018 article:
Oddly enough, for many
years after 9/11, I paid very little attention
to the details of the attacks themselves. I was
entirely preoccupied with building
my content-archiving software system, and
with the little time I could spend on public
policy matters, I was totally focused to the
ongoing Iraq War disaster, as well as my
terrible fears that Bush might at any moment
suddenly extend the conflict to Iran. Despite
Neocon lies shamelessly echoed by our corrupt
media, neither Iraq nor Iran had had anything
whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks, so those
events gradually faded in my consciousness, and
I suspect the same was true for most other
Americans. Al Qaeda had largely disappeared and
Bin Laden was supposedly hiding in a cave
somewhere. Despite endless Homeland Security
“threat alerts,” there had been absolutely no
further Islamic terrorism on American soil, and
relatively little anywhere else outside the Iraq
charnel house. So the precise details of the
9/11 plots had become almost irrelevant to me.
Others I knew seemed to
feel the same way. Virtually all the exchanges I
had with my old friend Bill Odom, the three-star
general who had run the NSA for Ronald Reagan,
had concerned the Iraq War and risk it might
spread to Iran, as well as the bitter anger he
felt toward Bush’s perversion of his beloved NSA
into an extra-constitutional tool of domestic
espionage. When the New York Times
broke the story of the massive extent of
domestic NSA spying, Gen. Odom declared that
President Bush should be impeached and NSA
Director Michael Hayden court-martialed. But in
all the years prior to
his untimely passing in 2008, I don’t recall
the 9/11 attacks themselves even once coming up
as a topic in our discussions.
Admittedly, I’d
occasionally heard of some considerable oddities
regarding the 9/11 attacks here and there, and
these certainly raised some suspicions. Most
days I would glance at the Antiwar.com
front page, and it seemed that some Israeli
Mossad agents had been caught while filming the
plane attacks in NYC, while
a much larger Mossad “art student” spy operation
around the country had also been broken up
around the same time. Apparently, FoxNews
had even broadcast
a multi-part series on the latter topic
before that expose was scuttled and
“disappeared” under ADL pressure.
Although I wasn’t
entirely sure about the credibility of those
claims, it did seem plausible that Mossad had
known of the attacks in advance and allowed them
to proceed, recognizing the huge benefits that
Israel would derive from the anti-Arab backlash.
I think I was vaguely aware that Antiwar.com
editorial director Justin Raimondo had published
The Terror Enigma, a short book about
some of those strange facts, bearing the
provocative subtitle “9/11 and the Israeli
Connection,” but I never considered reading it.
In 2007,
Counterpunch itself published
a fascinating follow-up story about the
arrest of that group of Israeli Mossad agents in
NYC, who were caught filming and apparently
celebrating the plane attacks on that fateful
day, and the Mossad activity seemed to be far
larger than I had previously realized. But all
these details remained a little fuzzy in my mind
next to my overriding concerns about wars in
Iraq and Iran.
However, by the end of
2008 my focus had begun to change. Bush was
leaving office without having started an Iranian
war, and America had successfully dodged the
bullet of an even more dangerous John McCain
administration. I assumed that Barack Obama
would be a terrible president and he proved
worse than my expectations, but I still breathed
a huge sigh of relief every day that he was in
the White House.
Moreover, around that
same time I’d stumbled across an astonishing
detail of the 9/11 attacks that demonstrated the
remarkable depths of my own ignorance. In a
Counterpunch article, I’d discovered that
immediately following the attacks, the supposed
terrorist mastermind
Osama bin Laden had publicly denied any
involvement, even declaring that no good
Muslim would have committed such deeds.
Once I checked around a
little and
fully confirmed that fact, I was
flabbergasted. 9/11 was not only the most
successful terrorist attack in the history of
the world, but may have been greater in its
physical magnitude than all past terrorist
operations combined. The entire purpose of
terrorism is to allow a small organization to
show the world that it can inflict serious
losses upon a powerful state, and I had never
previously heard of any terrorist leader denying
his role in a successful operation, let alone
the greatest in history. Something seemed
extremely wrong in the media-generated narrative
that I had previously accepted. I began to
wonder if I had been as deluded as the tens of
millions of Americans in 2003 and 2004 who
naively believed that Saddam had been the
mastermind behind the September 11th attacks. We
live in a world of illusions generated by our
media, and I suddenly felt that I had noticed a
tear in the paper-mache mountains displayed in
the background of a Hollywood sound-stage. If
Osama was probably not the author of 9/11, what
other huge falsehoods had I blindly accepted?
A couple of years later,
I came across a very interesting column by Eric
Margolis, a prominent Canadian foreign policy
journalist purged from the broadcast media for
his strong opposition to the Iraq War. He had
long published a weekly column in the
Toronto Sun and when that tenure ended, he
used his closing appearance to run a
double-length piece expressing
his very strong doubts about the official 9/11
story, noting that the former director of
Pakistani Intelligence insisted that Israel had
been behind the attacks.
I eventually discovered
that in 2003 former German Cabinet Minister
Andreas von Bülow had published
a best-selling book strongly suggesting that
the CIA rather than Bin Laden was behind the
attacks, while in 2007 former Italian President
Francesco Cossiga had
similarly argued that the CIA and the
Israeli Mossad had been responsible, claiming
that fact was well known among Western
intelligence agencies.
Over the years, all these
discordant claims had gradually raised my
suspicions about the official 9/11 story to
extremely strong levels, but it was only very
recently that I finally found the time to begin
to seriously investigate the subject and read
eight or ten of the main 9/11 Truther books,
mostly those by Prof. David Ray Griffin, the
widely acknowledged leader in that field. And
his books, together with the writings of his
numerous colleagues and allies, revealed all
sorts of very telling details, most of which had
previously remained unknown to me. I was also
greatly impressed by the sheer number of
seemingly reputable individuals of no apparent
ideological bent who had become adherents of the
9/11 Truth movement over the years.
When utterly astonishing
claims of an extremely controversial nature are
made over a period of many years by
numerous seemingly reputable academics and other
experts, and they are entirely ignored or
suppressed but never effectively refuted,
reasonable conclusions seem to point in an
obvious direction. Based on my very recent
readings in this topic, the total number of huge
flaws in the official 9/11 story has now grown
enormously long, probably numbering in the many
dozens. Most of these individual items seem
reasonably likely and if we decide that even
just two or three of them are correct, we must
totally reject the narrative that so many of us
have believed for so long.
Now I am obviously just
an amateur in the complex intelligence craft of
extracting nuggets of truth from a mountain of
manufactured falsehood. Although the arguments
of the 9/11 Truth Movement seem quite persuasive
to me, I would obviously feel much more
comfortable if they were seconded by an
experienced professional, such as a top CIA
analyst. A few years ago, I was shocked to
discover that was indeed the case.
William Christison
had spent 29 years at the CIA, rising to
become one of its senior figures as Director of
its Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
with 200 research analysts serving under him. In
August 2006, he published
a remarkable 2,700 word article explaining
why he no longer believed the official 9/11
story and felt sure that the 9/11 Commission
Report constituted a cover-up, with the truth
being quite different. The following year, he
provided a forceful endorsement to
one of Griffin’s books, writing that
“[There’s] a strong body of evidence showing the
official U.S. Government story of what happened
on September 11, 2001 to be almost certainly a
monstrous series of lies.” And Christison’s
extreme 9/11 skepticism was seconded by that of
many other highly regarded former US
intelligence officers.
We might expect that if a
former intelligence officer of Christison’s rank
were to denounce the official 9/11 report as a
fraud and a cover-up, such a story would
constitute front-page news. But it was never
reported anywhere in our mainstream media, and I
only stumbled upon it a decade later.
Even our supposed
“alternative” media outlets were nearly as
silent. Throughout the 2000s, Christison and his
wife Kathleen, also a former CIA analyst, had
been regular contributors to Counterpunch,
publishing
many dozens of articles there and certainly
were its most highly credentialed writers on
intelligence and national security matters. But
editor Alexander Cockburn refused to publish any
of their 9/11 skepticism, so it never came to my
attention at the time. Indeed, when I mentioned
Christison’s views to current Counterpunch
editor Jeffrey St. Clair a couple of years ago,
he was stunned to discover that the friend he
had regarded so very highly had actually become
a “9/11 Truther.” When media organs serve as
ideological gatekeepers, a condition of
widespread ignorance becomes unavoidable.
With so many gaping holes
in the official story of the events seventeen
years ago, each of us is free to choose to focus
on those we personally consider most persuasive,
and I have several of my own. Danish Chemistry
professor Niels Harrit was one of the scientists
who analyzed the debris of the destroyed
buildings and detected the residual presence of
nano-thermite, a military-grade explosive
compound, and I found him quite credible during
his hour-long interview on Red Ice Radio.
The notion that an undamaged hijacker passport
was found in an NYC street after the massive,
fiery destruction of the skyscrapers is totally
absurd, as was the claim that the top hijacker
conveniently lost his luggage at one of the
airports and it was found to contain a large
mass of incriminating information. The
testimonies of the dozens of firefighters
who heard explosions just before the
collapse of the buildings seems totally
inexplicable under the official story. The
sudden total collapse of Building Seven, never
hit by any jetliners is also extremely
implausible.
Let us now suppose that
the overwhelming weight of evidence is correct,
and concur with high-ranking former CIA
intelligence analysts, distinguished academics,
and experienced professionals that the 9/11
attacks were not what they appeared to be. We
recognize the extreme implausibility that three
huge skyscrapers in New York City suddenly
collapsed at free-fall velocity into their own
footprints after just two of them were hit by
airplanes, and also that a large civilian
jetliner probably did not strike the Pentagon
leaving absolutely no wreckage and only a small
hole. What actually did happen, and more
importantly, who was behind it?
The first question is
obviously impossible to answer without an honest
and thorough official investigation of the
evidence. Until that occurs, we should not be
surprised that numerous, somewhat conflicting
hypotheses have been advanced and debated within
the confines of the 9/11 Truth community. But
the second question is probably the more
important and relevant one, and I think it has
always represented a source of extreme
vulnerability to 9/11 Truthers.
The most typical
approach, as generally followed in the numerous
Griffin books, is to avoid the issue entirely
and focus solely on the gaping flaws in the
official narrative. This is a perfectly
acceptable position but leaves all sorts of
serious doubts. What organized group would have
been sufficiently powerful and daring to carry
off an attack of such vast scale against the
central heart of the world’s sole superpower?
And how were they possibly able to orchestrate
such a massively effective media and political
cover-up, even enlisting the participation of
the U.S. government itself?
The much smaller fraction
of 9/11 Truthers who choose to address this
“whodunit” question seem to be overwhelmingly
concentrated among rank-and-file grassroots
activists rather than the prestigious experts,
and they usually answer “inside job!” Their
widespread belief seems to be that the top
political leadership of the Bush Administration,
probably including Vice President Dick Cheney
and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, had
organized the terrorist attacks, either with or
without the knowledge of their ignorant nominal
superior, President George W. Bush. The
suggested motives included justifying military
attacks against various countries, supporting
the financial interests of the powerful oil
industry and military-industrial complex, and
enabling the destruction of traditional American
civil liberties. Since the vast majority of
politically-active Truthers seem to come from
the far left of the ideological spectrum, they
regard these notions as logical and almost
self-evident.
Although not explicitly
endorsing those Truther conspiracies, filmmaker
Michael Moore’s leftist box office hit
Fahrenheit 9/11 seemed to raise such
similar suspicions. His small budget documentary
earned an astonishing $220 million by suggesting
that the very close business ties between the
Bush family, Cheney, the oil companies, and the
Saudis were responsible for the Iraq War
aftermath of the terrorist attacks, as well as a
domestic crackdown on civil liberties, which was
part-and-parcel of the right-wing Republican
agenda.
Unfortunately, this
apparently plausible picture seems to have
almost no basis in reality. During the drive to
the Iraq War, I read Times articles
interviewing numerous top oil men in Texas who
expressed total puzzlement at why America was
planning to attack Saddam, saying that they
could only assume that President Bush knew
something that they themselves did not. Saudi
Arabian leaders were adamantly opposed to an
American attack on Iraq, and made every effort
to prevent it. Prior to his joining the Bush
Administration, Cheney had served as CEO of
Halliburton, an oil services giant, and his firm
had heavily lobbied for the lifting of U.S.
economic sanctions against Iraq. Prof. James
Petras, a scholar of strong Marxist leanings,
published an excellent 2008 book entitled
Zionism, Militarism, and the Decline of US Power
in which he conclusively demonstrated that
Zionist interests rather than those of the oil
industry had dominated the Bush Administration
in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and promoted
the Iraq War.
As for Michael Moore’s
film, I remember at the time sharing a laugh
with a (Jewish) friend of mine, both of us
finding it ridiculous that a government so
overwhelmingly permeated by fanatically
pro-Israel Neocons was being portrayed as in
thrall to the Saudis. Not only did the plot of
Moore’s film demonstrate the fearsome power of
Jewish Hollywood, but its huge success suggested
that most of the American public had apparently
never heard of the Neocons.
Bush critics properly
ridiculed the president for his tongue-tied
statement that the 9/11 terrorists had attacked
America “for its freedoms” and Truthers have
reasonably branded as implausible the claims
that the massive attacks were organized by a
cave-dwelling Islamic preacher. But the
suggestion that they were led and organized by
the top figures of the Bush Administration seems
even more preposterous.
Cheney and Rumsfeld had
both spent decades as stalwarts of the moderate
pro-business wing of the Republican Party, each
serving in top government positions and also as
CEOs of major corporations. The notion that they
capped their careers by joining a new Republican
administration in early 2001 and immediately set
about organizing a gigantic false-flag terrorist
attack upon the proudest towers of our largest
city together with our own national military
headquarters, intending to kill many thousands
of Americans in the process, is too ridiculous
to even be part of a leftist political satire.
Let’s step back a bit. In
the entire history of the world, I can think of
no documented case in which the top political
leadership of a country launched a major
false-flag attack upon its own centers of power
and finance and tried to kill large numbers of
its own people. The America of 2001 was a
peaceful and prosperous country run by
relatively bland political leaders focused upon
the traditional Republican goals of enacting
tax-cuts for the rich and reducing environmental
regulations. Too many Truther activists have
apparently drawn their understanding of the
world from the caricatures of leftist
comic-books in which corporate Republicans are
all diabolical Dr. Evils, seeking to kill
Americans out of sheer malevolence, and Cockburn
was absolutely correct
to ridicule them at least on that particular
score.
Consider also the simple
practicalities of the situation. The gigantic
nature of the 9/11 attacks as postulated by the
Truth movement would have clearly required
enormous planning and probably involved the work
of many dozens or even hundreds of skilled
agents. Ordering CIA operatives or special
military units to organize secret attacks
against civilian targets in Venezuela or Yemen
is one thing, but directing them to mount
attacks against the Pentagon and the heart of
New York City would be fraught with stupendous
risk.
Bush had lost the popular
vote in November 2000 and had only reached the
White House because of a few dangling chads in
Florida and the controversial decision of a
deeply divided Supreme Court. As a consequence,
most of the American media regarded his new
administration with enormous hostility. If the
first act of such a newly-sworn presidential
team had been ordering the CIA or the military
to prepare attacks against New York City and the
Pentagon, surely those orders would have been
regarded as issued by a group of lunatics, and
immediately leaked to the hostile national
press.
The whole scenario of top
American leaders being the masterminds behind
9/11 is beyond ridiculous, and those 9/11
Truthers who make or imply such claims—doing so
without a single shred of solid evidence—have
unfortunately played a major role in
discrediting their entire movement. In fact, the
common meaning of the “inside job” scenario is
so patently absurd and self-defeating that one
might even suspect that the claim was encouraged
by those seeking to discredit the entire 9/11
Truth movement as a consequence.
The focus on Cheney and
Rumsfeld seems particularly ill-directed.
Although I’ve never met nor had any dealings
with either of those individuals, I was quite
actively involved in DC politics during the
1990s, and can say with some assurance that
prior to 9/11, neither of them were regarded as
Neocons. Instead, they were the archetypical
examples of moderate business-type mainstream
Republicans, stretching all the way back to
their years at the top of the Ford
Administration during the mid-1970s.
Skeptics of this claim
may note that they signed the
1997 declaration issued by the Project for the
New American Century (PNAC), a leading
Neocon foreign policy manifesto organized by
Bill Kristol, but I would regard that as
something of a red herring. In DC circles,
individuals are always recruiting their friends
to sign various declarations, which may or may
not be indicative of anything, and I remember
Kristol trying to get me to sign the PNAC
statement as well. Since my private views on
that issue were absolutely 100% contrary to the
Neocon position, which I regarded as foreign
policy lunacy, I deflected his request and very
politely turned him down. But I was quite
friendly with him at the time, so if I had been
someone without strong opinions in that area, I
probably would have agreed.
This raises a larger
point. By 2000, the Neocons had gained almost
total control of all the major
conservative/Republican media outlets and the
foreign policy wings of nearly all the similarly
aligned thinktanks in DC, successfully purging
most of their traditional opponents. So although
Cheney and Rumsfeld were not themselves Neocons,
they were swimming in a Neocon sea, with a very
large fraction of all the information they
received coming from such sources and with their
top aides such as “Scooter” Libby, Paul
Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith being Neocons.
Rumsfeld was already somewhat elderly while
Cheney had suffered several heart-attacks
starting at age 37, so under those circumstances
it may have been relatively easy for them to be
shifted toward certain policy positions.
Indeed, the entire
demonization of Cheney and Rumsfeld in anti-Iraq
War circles has seemed somewhat suspicious to
me. I always wondered whether the heavily Jewish
liberal media had focused its wrath upon those
two individuals in order to deflect culpability
from the Jewish Neocons who were the obvious
originators of that disastrous policy; and the
same may be true of the 9/11 Truthers, who
probably feared accusations of anti-Semitism.
Regarding that former issue, a prominent Israeli
columnist was characteristically blunt on the
matter in 2003, strongly suggesting that
25 Neocon intellectuals, nearly all of them
Jewish, were primarily responsible for the war.
Under normal circumstances, the president
himself would have surely been portrayed as the
evil mastermind behind the 9/11 plot, but “W”
was too widely known for his ignorance for such
accusations to be credible.
It does seem entirely
plausible that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and other top
Bush leaders may have been manipulated into
taking certain actions that inadvertently
furthered the 9/11 plot, while a few lower-level
Bush appointees might have been more directly
involved, perhaps even as outright conspirators.
But I do not think this is the usual meaning of
the “inside job” accusation.
So where do we now stand?
It seems very likely that the 9/11 attacks were
the work of an organization far more powerful
and professionally-skilled than a rag-tag band
of nineteen random Arabs armed with box-cutters,
but also that the attacks were very unlikely to
have been the work of the American government
itself. So who actually attacked our country on
that fateful day seventeen years ago, killing
thousands of our fellow citizens?
Effective intelligence
operations are concealed in a hall of mirrors,
often extremely difficult for outsiders to
penetrate, and false-flag terrorist attacks
certainly fall into this category. But if we
apply a different metaphor, the complexities of
such events may be seen as a Gordian Knot,
almost impossible to disentangle, but vulnerable
to the sword-stroke of asking the simple
question “Who benefited?”
America and most of the
world certainly did not, and the disastrous
legacy of that fateful day have transformed our
own society and wrecked many other countries.
The endless American wars soon unleashed have
already cost us many trillions of dollars and
set our nation on the road to bankruptcy while
killing or displacing many millions of innocent
Middle Easterners. Most recently, that resulting
flood of desperate refugees has begun engulfing
Europe, and the peace and prosperity of that
ancient continent is now under severe threat.
Our traditional civil
liberties and constitutional protections have
been drastically eroded, with our society having
taken long steps toward becoming an outright
police state. American citizens now passively
accept unimaginable infringements on their
personal freedoms, all originally begun under
the guise of preventing terrorism.
I find it difficult to
think of any country in the world that clearly
gained as a result of the 9/11 attacks and
America’s military reaction, with one single,
solitary exception.
During 2000 and most of
2001, America was a peaceful prosperous country,
but a certain small Middle Eastern nation had
found itself in an increasingly desperate
situation. Israel then seemed to be fighting for
its life against the massive waves of domestic
terrorism that constituted the Second
Palestinian Intifada.
Ariel Sharon was widely
believed to have deliberately provoked that
uprising in September 2000 by marching to the
Temple Mount backed by a thousand armed police,
and the resulting violence and polarization of
Israeli society had successfully installed him
as Prime Minister in early 2001. But once in
office, his brutal measures failed to end the
wave of continuing attacks, which increasingly
took the form of suicide-bombings against
civilian targets. Many believed that the
violence might soon trigger a huge outflow of
Israeli citizens, perhaps producing a
death-spiral for the Jewish state. Iraq, Iran,
Libya, and other major Muslim powers were
supporting the Palestinians with money,
rhetoric, and sometimes weaponry, and Israeli
society seemed close to crumbling. I remember
hearing from some of my DC friends that numerous
Israeli policy experts were suddenly seeking
berths at Neocon thinktanks so that they could
relocate to America.
Sharon was a notoriously
bloody and reckless leader, with a long history
of undertaking strategic gambles of astonishing
boldness, sometimes betting everything on a
single roll of the dice. He had spent decades
seeking the Prime Ministership, but having
finally obtained it, he now had his back to the
wall, with no obvious source of rescue in sight.
The 9/11 attacks changed
everything. Suddenly the world’s sole superpower
was fully mobilized against Arab and Muslim
terrorist movements, especially those connected
with the Middle East. Sharon’s close Neocon
political allies in America used the unexpected
crisis as an opportunity to seize control of
America’s foreign policy and national security
apparatus, with an NSA staffer later reporting
that Israeli generals freely roamed the halls of
the Pentagon without any security controls.
Meanwhile, the excuse of preventing domestic
terrorism was used to implement newly
centralized American police controls that were
employed to harass or even shut down various
anti-Zionist political organizations. One of the
Israeli Mossad agents arrested by the police in
New York City as he and his fellows were
celebrating the 9/11 attacks and producing a
souvenir film of the burning World Trade Center
towers told the officers that “We are
Israelis…Your problems are our problems.” And so
it immediately became.
General Wesley Clark
reported that soon after the 9/11 attacks he was
informed that a secret military plan had somehow
come into being under which
America would attack and destroy seven major
Muslim countries over the next few years,
including Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya, which
coincidentally were all of Israel’s strongest
regional adversaries and the leading supporters
of the Palestinians. As America began to expend
enormous oceans of blood and treasure attacking
all of Israel’s enemies after 9/11, Israel
itself no longer needed to do so. Partly as a
consequence, almost no other nation in the world
has so enormously improved its strategic and
economic situation during the last seventeen
years, even while a large fraction of the
American population has become completely
impoverished during that same period and our
national debt has grown to insurmountable
levels. A parasite can often grow fat even as
its host suffers and declines.
I have emphasized that
for many years after the 9/11 attacks I paid
little attention to the details and had only the
vaguest notion that there even existed an
organized 9/11 Truth movement. But if someone
had ever convinced me that the terrorist attacks
had been false-flag operations and someone other
than Osama had been responsible, my immediate
guess would have been Israel and its Mossad.
Certainly no other nation
in the world can remotely match Israel’s
track-record of remarkably bold high-level
assassinations and false-flag attacks, terrorist
and otherwise, against other countries, even
including America and its military. Furthermore,
the enormous dominance of Jewish and pro-Israel
elements in the American establishment media and
increasingly that of many other major countries
in the West has long ensured that even when the
solid evidence of such attacks was discovered,
very few ordinary Americans would ever hear
those facts.
Once we accept that the
9/11 attacks were probably a false-flag
operation, a central clue to the likely
perpetrators has been their extraordinary
success in ensuring that such a wealth of
enormously suspicious evidence has been totally
ignored by virtually the entire American media,
whether liberal or conservative, left-wing or
right-wing.
In the particular case at
hand, the considerable number of zealously
pro-Israel Neocons situated just beneath the
public surface of the Bush Administration in
2001 could have greatly facilitated both the
successful organization of the attacks and their
effective cover-up and concealment, with Libby,
Wolfowitz, Feith, and Richard Perle being merely
the most obvious names. Whether such individuals
were knowing conspirators or merely had personal
ties allowing them to be exploited in furthering
the plot is entirely unclear.
Most of this information
must surely have long been apparent to
knowledgeable observers, and I strongly suspect
that many individuals who had paid much greater
attention than myself to the details of the 9/11
attacks may have quickly formed a tentative
conclusion along these same lines. But for
obvious social and political reasons, there is a
great reluctance to publicly point the finger of
blame towards Israel on a matter of such
enormous magnitude. Hence, except for a few
fringe activists here and there, such dark
suspicions remained private.
Meanwhile, the leaders of
the 9/11 Truth movement probably feared they
would be destroyed by media accusations of
deranged anti-Semitism if they had ever
expressed even a whisper of such ideas. This
political strategy may have been necessary, but
by failing to name any plausible culprit, they
created a vacuum that was soon filled by “useful
idiots” who shouted “inside job!” while pointing
an accusing finger toward Cheney and Rumsfeld,
and thereby did so much to discredit the entire
9/11 Truth movement.
This unfortunate
conspiracy of silence finally ended in 2009 when
Dr. Alan Sabrosky, former Director of Studies at
the US Army War College, stepped forward and
publicly declared that the Israeli Mossad
had very likely been responsible for the 9/11
attacks, writing a series of columns on the
subject, and eventually presenting his views in
a number of media interviews, along with
additional analyses.
Obviously, such explosive
charges never reached the pages of my morning
Times, but they did receive
considerable if transitory coverage in portions
of the alternative media, and I remember seeing
the links very prominently featured at
Antiwar.com and widely discussed elsewhere.
I had never previously heard of Sabrosky, so I
consulted my archiving system and immediately
discovered that
he had a perfectly respectable record of
publication on military affairs in mainstream
foreign policy periodicals and had also held a
series of academic appointments at prestigious
institutions. Reading one or two of his articles
on 9/11, I felt he made a rather persuasive case
for Mossad involvement, with some of his
information already known to me but much of it
not.
Since I was very busy
with my software work and had never spent any
time investigating 9/11 or reading any of the
books on the topic, my belief in his claims back
then was obviously quite tentative. But now that
I have finally looked into the topic in much
greater detail and done a great deal of reading,
I think it seems quite likely that his 2009
analysis was entirely correct.
I would particularly
recommend his long 2011 interview on Iranian
Press TV, which I first watched just a couple of
days ago. He came across as highly credible and
forthright in his claims:
Sabrosky focused much of
his attention upon a particular segment of a
Dutch documentary film on the 9/11 attacks
produced several years earlier. In that
fascinating interview, a professional demolition
expert named Danny Jowenko who was largely
ignorant of the 9/11 attacks immediately
identified the filmed collapse of WTC Building 7
as a controlled-demolition, and the remarkable
clip was broadcast worldwide on Press TV
and widely discussed across the Internet.
And by a very strange
coincidence, just three days after Jowenko’s
broadcast video interview had received such
heavy attention,
he had the misfortune to die in a frontal
collision with a tree in Holland. I’d
suspect that the community of professional
demolition experts is a small one, and Jowenko’s
surviving industry colleagues may have quickly
concluded that serious misfortune might visit
those who rendered controversial expert opinions
on the collapse of the three World Trade Center
towers.
Meanwhile,
the ADL soon mounted a huge and largely
successful effort to have Press TV
banned in the West for promoting “anti-Semitic
conspiracy theories,” even persuading YouTube to
entirely eliminate the huge video archive of
those past shows, notably including Sabrosky’s
long interview.
Most recently, Sabrosky
provided an hour-long presentation at this
June’s
Deep Truth video panel conference, during
which he expressed considerable pessimism about
America’s political predicament, and suggested
that the Zionist control over our politics and
media had grown even stronger over the last
decade.
The
late Alan Hart, a very distinguished British
broadcast journalist and foreign correspondent,
also
broke his silence in 2010 and similarly
pointed to the Israelis as the likely culprits
behind the 9/11 attacks. Those interested may
wish to listen to
his extended interview.
Journalist Christopher
Bollyn was one of the first writers to explore
the possible Israeli links to the 9/11 attacks,
and the details contained in his long series of
newspaper articles are often quoted by other
researchers. In 2012, he gathered together this
material and published it in the form of a book
entitled Solving 9-11, thereby making
his information on the possible role of the
Israeli Mossad available to a much wider
audience, with
a version being available online.
Unfortunately his printed volume severely
suffers from the typical lack of resources
available to the writers on the political
fringe, with poor organization and frequent
repetition of the same points due to its origins
in a set of individual articles, and this may
diminish its credibility among some readers. So
those who purchase it should be forewarned about
these serious stylistic weaknesses.
Probably a much better
compendium of the very extensive evidence
pointing to the Israeli hand behind the 9/11
attacks has been more recently provided by
French journalist Laurent Guyénot, both in his
2017 book JFK-9/11: 50 Years of the Deep
State and also his 8,500 word article
“9/11 was an Israeli Job”, published
concurrently with this one and providing a far
greater wealth of detail than is contained here.
While I would not necessarily endorse all of his
claims and arguments, his overall analysis seems
fully consistent with my own.
These writers have
provided a great deal of material in support of
the Israeli Mossad Hypothesis, but I would focus
attention on just one important point. We would
normally expect that terrorist attacks resulting
in the complete destruction of three gigantic
office buildings in New York City and an aerial
assault on the Pentagon would be an operation of
enormous size and scale, involving very
considerable organizational infrastructure and
manpower. In the aftermath of the attacks, the
US government undertook great efforts to locate
and arrest the surviving Islamic conspirators,
but scarcely managed to find a single one.
Apparently, they had all died in the attacks
themselves or otherwise simply vanished into
thin air.
But without making much
effort at all, the American government did
quickly round up and arrest
some 200 Israeli Mossad agents, many of whom
had been based in exactly the same geographical
locations as the purported 19 Arab hijackers.
Furthermore,
NYC police arrested some of these agents while
they were publicly celebrating the 9/11 attacks,
and others were caught driving vans in the New
York area containing explosives or their
residual traces. Most of these Mossad agents
refused to answer any questions, and many of
those who did failed polygraph tests, but under
massive political pressure all were eventually
released and deported back to Israel. A couple
of years ago, much of this information was very
effectively presented in a short video available
on YouTube.
There is another
fascinating tidbit that I have very rarely seen
mentioned. Just a month after the 9/11 attacks,
two Israelis were caught sneaking weapons and
explosives into the Mexican Parliament building,
a story that naturally produced several
banner-headlines in leading Mexican newspapers
at the time but was greeted by total silence in
the American media. Eventually, under massive
political pressure, all charges were dropped and
the Israeli agents were deported back home. This
remarkable incident was only reported on
a small Hispanic-activist website, and
discussed in
a few other places. Some years ago I easily
found the scanned front pages of the Mexican
newspapers reporting those dramatic events on
the Internet, but I can no longer easily locate
them. The details are obviously somewhat
fragmentary and possibly garbled, but certainly
quite intriguing.
One might speculate that
if supposed Islamic terrorists had followed up
their 9/11 attacks by attacking and destroying
the Mexican parliament building a month later,
Latin American support for America’s military
invasions in the Middle East would have been
greatly magnified. Furthermore, any scenes of
such massive destruction in the Mexican capital
by Arab terrorists would surely have been
broadcast non-stop on Univision,
America’s dominant Spanish-language network,
fully solidifying Hispanic support for President
Bush’s military endeavors.
Although my growing
suspicions about the 9/11 attacks stretch back a
decade or more, my serious investigation of the
topic is quite recent, so I am certainly a
newcomer to the field. But sometimes an outsider
can notice things that may escape the attention
of those who have spent so many years deeply
immersed in a given topic.
From my perspective, it
seems that a huge fraction of the 9/11 Truth
community spends far too much of its time
absorbed in the particular details of the
attacks, debating the precise method by which
the World Trade Center towers in New York were
brought down or what actually struck the
Pentagon. But these sorts of issues seem of
little ultimate significance.
I would argue that the
only important aspect of these technical issues
is whether the overall evidence is sufficiently
strong to establish the falsehood of the
official 9/11 narrative and also demonstrate
that the attacks must have been the work of a
highly sophisticated organization with access to
advanced military technology rather than a
rag-tag band of 19 Arabs armed with box-cutters.
Beyond that, none of those details matter.
In that regard, I believe
that the volume of factual material collected by
determined researchers over the last seventeen
years has easily met that requirement, perhaps
even ten or twenty times over. For example, even
agreeing upon a single particular item such as
the clear presence of nano-thermite, a
military-grade explosive compound, would
immediately satisfy those two criteria. So I see
little point in endless debates over whether
nano-thermite was used, or nano-thermite plus
something else, or just something else entirely.
And such complex technical debates may serve to
obscure the larger picture, while confusing and
intimidating any casually-interested onlookers,
thereby being quite counter-productive to the
overall goals of the 9/11 Truth movement.
Once we have concluded
that the culprits were part of a highly
sophisticated organization, we can then focus on
the Who and the Why, which
surely would be of greater importance than the
particular details of the How. Yet
currently all the endless debate over the
How tends to crowd out the Who and
the Why, and I wonder whether this
unfortunate situation might even be intentional.
Perhaps one reason is
that once sincere 9/11 Truthers do focus on
those more important questions, the vast weight
of the evidence clearly points in a single
direction, implicating Israel and its Mossad
intelligence service, with the case being
overwhelmingly strong in motive, means, and
opportunity. And leveling accusations of blame
at Israel and its domestic collaborators for the
greatest attack ever launched against America on
our own soil entails enormous social and
political risks.
But such difficulties
must be weighed against the reality of three
thousand American civilian lives and the
subsequent seventeen years of our
multi-trillion-dollar wars, which have produced
tens of thousands of dead or wounded American
servicemen and the death or displacement of many
millions of innocent Middle Easterners.
The members of the 9/11
Truth movement must therefore ask themselves
whether or not “Truth” is indeed the central
goal of their efforts.
Many of the events discussed
above were among the most important in modern
American history, and the evidence supporting the
controversial analysis provided seems quite
substantial. Numerous contemporary observers would
certainly have been aware of at least some of the
key information, so serious media investigations
should have been launched that would have soon
unearthed much of the remaining material. Yet
nothing like that happened at the time, and even
today the vast majority of Americans remain totally
ignorant of these long-established facts.
This paradox is explained by
the overwhelming political and media influence of
the ethnic and ideological partisans of Israel,
which ensured that certain questions were not asked
nor crucial points raised. Throughout the second
half of the twentieth century, our understanding of
the world was overwhelmingly shaped by our
centralized electronic media, which was almost
entirely in Jewish hands during this period, with
all three television networks and eight of nine
major Hollywood studios being owned or controlled by
such individuals, along with most of our leading
newspapers and publishing houses. As
I wrote a couple of years ago:
We naively tend to assume
that our media accurately reflects the events of
our world and its history, but instead what we
all too often see are only the tremendously
distorted images of a circus fun-house mirror,
with small items sometimes transformed into
large ones, and large ones into small. The
contours of historical reality may be warped
into almost unrecognizable shapes, with some
important elements completely disappearing from
the record and others appearing out of nowhere.
I’ve often suggested that the media creates our
reality, but given such glaring omissions and
distortions, the reality produced is often
largely fictional.
Only the rise of the
decentralized Internet over the last couple of
decades has allowed the widespread and unfiltered
distribution of the information needed for serious
investigation of these important incidents. Without
the Internet virtually none of the material I have
discussed at such length would ever have become
known to me. Ostrovsky may have ranked as a #1
New York Times bestselling author with a
million copies of his books in print, but before the
Internet I never would have heard of him.
Once we pierce the concealing
veil of media obfuscation and distortion, some
realities of the post-war era become clear. The
extent to which the agents of the Jewish state and
its Zionist predecessor organizations have engaged
in the most rampant international crime and
violations of the accepted rules of warfare is
really quite extraordinary, perhaps having few
parallels in modern world history. Their use of
political assassination as a central tool of their
statecraft even recalls the notorious activities of
the Old Man of the Mountains of the 13th century
Middle East, whose deadly techniques gave us the
very word “assassin.”
To some extent, the steadily
rising trajectory of Israel’s international
misbehavior may be a natural result of the total
impunity its leaders have long enjoyed, almost never
suffering any adverse consequences from their
actions. A petty thief may graduate into burglary
and then armed-robbery and murder if he comes to
believe that he is entirely immune from any judicial
sanction.
During the 1940s, Zionist
leaders organized massive terrorist attacks against
Western targets and assassinated high-ranking
British and United Nations officials, but never paid
any serious political price. Their likely killing of
America’s first defense secretary and their earlier
attempt upon the life of our president were entirely
covered up by our complicit media. In the mid-1950s,
the leadership of newly-established Israel embarked
upon a series of false-flag terrorist attacks
against American targets during the Lavon Affair,
and even when their agents were caught and their
plot revealed, they received no punishment. Given
such a track-record, perhaps we should not be
surprised that they were then sufficiently
emboldened to probably orchestrate the assassination
of President John F. Kennedy, whose successful
elimination gave them unprecedented influence over
the world’s leading superpower.
During the notorious Tonkin
Gulf Incident of 1964, a U.S. ship involved in
hostile activities off the coast of Vietnam was
attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Our
vessel suffered little damage and no casualties, but
the American military retaliation unleashed a decade
of warfare, eventually resulting in the destruction
of most of that country and perhaps two million
Vietnamese deaths.
By contrast, when the U.S.S.
Liberty was deliberately attacked in international
waters by Israeli forces in 1967, which killed or
wounded more than 200 American servicemen, the only
response of that same American government was
massive suppression of the facts, followed by an
increase in financial support to the Jewish State.
The decades that followed saw numerous major attacks
by Israel and its Mossad against American officials
and our intelligence service, eventually crowned in
1991 by yet another assassination plot against an
insufficiently pliable American president. But our
only reaction during this period was
steadily-increasing political subservience. Given
such a pattern of response, the huge 2001 gamble
that the Israeli government finally may have taken
by organizing the massive 9/11 false-flag terrorist
attacks against our country becomes much more
understandable.
Although more than seven
decades of almost complete impunity has certainly
been a necessary factor behind Israel’s remarkable
willingness to rely so heavily upon assassination
and terrorism in achieving its geopolitical
objectives, religious and ideological factors may
also play a significant role. In 1943, future
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir made
a rather telling assertion in his official
Zionist publication:
“Neither Jewish ethics
nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as
a means of combat. We are very far from having
any moral qualms as far as our national war
goes. We have before us the command of the
Torah, whose morality surpasses that of any
other body of laws in the world: ‘Ye shall blot
them out to the last man.’”
Neither Shamir nor any other
early Zionist leader adhered to traditional Judaism,
but anyone who investigates the true tenets of that
particular religious faith would have to admit that
his claims were correct. As
I wrote in 2018:
If these ritualistic
issues constituted the central features of
traditional religious Judaism, we might regard
it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival
of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is
also a far darker side, primarily involving the
relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the
highly derogatory term goyim frequently
used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly,
Jews have divine souls and goyim do
not, being merely beasts in the shape of men.
Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of
non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with
some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally
stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s
top Sephardic rabbi
used his weekly sermon to declare that the
only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to
serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement
or extermination of all non-Jews seems an
ultimate implied goal of the religion.
Jewish lives have
infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all,
which has obvious policy implications. For
example, in a published article a prominent
Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a
liver, it would be perfectly fine, and indeed
obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take
his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that
today Israel is widely regarded as
one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.
My encounter a decade ago
with Shahak’s candid description of the true
doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly
one of the most world-altering revelations of my
entire life. But as I gradually digested the
full implications, all sorts of puzzles and
disconnected facts suddenly became much more
clear. There were also some remarkable ironies,
and not long afterward I joked to a (Jewish)
friend of mine that I’d suddenly discovered that
Nazism could best be described as “Judaism for
Wimps” or perhaps Judaism as practiced by Mother
Teresa of Calcutta.
It is important to keep in
mind that nearly all of Israel’s top leaders have
been strongly secular in their views, with none of
them being followers of traditional Judaism. Indeed,
many of the early Zionists were rather hostile to
religion, which they despised due to their Marxist
beliefs. However, I have noted that these underlying
religious doctrines may still exert considerable
real-world influence:
Obviously the Talmud is
hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these
days, and I would suspect that except for the
strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis,
barely a sliver are aware of its highly
controversial teachings. But it is important to
keep in mind that until just a few generations
ago, almost all European Jews were deeply
Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the
overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had
Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive
cultural patterns and social attitudes can
easily seep into a considerably wider
population, especially one that remains ignorant
of the origin of those sentiments, a condition
enhancing their unrecognized influence. A
religion based upon the principal of “Love Thy
Neighbor” may or may not be workable in
practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy
Neighbor” may be expected to have long-term
cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond
the direct community of the deeply pious. If
nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand
years were taught to feel a seething hatred
toward all non-Jews and also developed an
enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty
to mask that attitude, it is difficult to
believe that such an unfortunate history has had
absolutely no consequences for our present-day
world, or that of the relatively recent past.
Countries practicing a
variety of different religious and cultural beliefs
have sometimes undertaken military attacks involving
massive civilian casualties or employed
assassination as a tactic. But such methods are
considered abhorrent and immoral by a society
founded upon universalist principles, and although
these ethical scruples may sometimes be overwhelmed
by political expediency, they may act as a partial
restriction against the widespread adoption of those
practices.
By contrast, actions that
lead to the suffering or death of unlimited numbers
of innocent Gentiles carry absolutely no moral
opprobrium within the religious framework of
traditional Judaism, with the only constraints being
the risk of detection and retaliatory punishment.
Only a fraction of today’s Israeli population may
explicitly reason in such extremely harsh terms, but
the underlying religious doctrine implicitly
permeates the entire ideology of the Jewish State.
The major historical events
discussed in this long article have shaped our
present-day world, and the 9/11 attacks in
particular may have set America on the road to
national bankruptcy while leading to the loss of
many of our traditional civil liberties. Although I
think that my interpretation of these various
assassinations and terrorist attacks is probably
correct, I do not doubt that most present-day
Americans would find my controversial analysis
shocking and probably respond with extreme
skepticism.
Yet oddly enough, if this
same material were presented to those individuals
who had led America’s nascent national security
apparatus in the early decades of the twentieth
century, I think they would have regarded this
historical narrative as very disheartening but
hardly surprising.
Last year I happened to read
a fascinating volume published in 2000 by historian
Joseph Bendersky, a specialist in Holocaust Studies,
and discussed his remarkable findings
in a lengthy article:
Bendersky devoted ten
full years of research to his book, exhaustively
mining the archives of American Military
Intelligence as well as the personal papers and
correspondence of more than 100 senior military
figures and intelligence officers. The
“Jewish Threat” runs over 500 pages,
including some 1350 footnotes, with the listed
archival sources alone occupying seven full
pages. His subtitle is “Anti-Semitic Politics of
the U.S. Army” and he makes an extremely
compelling case that during the first half of
the twentieth century and even afterward, the
top ranks of the U.S. military and especially
Military Intelligence heavily subscribed to
notions that today would be universally
dismissed as “anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.”
Put simply, U.S. military
leaders in those decades widely believed that
the world faced a direct threat from organized
Jewry, which had seized control of Russia and
similarly sought to subvert and gain mastery
over America and the rest of Western
civilization.
Although Bendersky’s
claims are certainly extraordinary ones, he
provides an enormous wealth of compelling
evidence to support them, quoting or summarizing
thousands of declassified Intelligence files,
and further supporting his case by drawing from
the personal correspondence of many of the
officers involved. He conclusively demonstrates
that during the very same years that Henry Ford
was publishing
his controversial series The International
Jew, similar ideas, but with a much
sharper edge, were ubiquitous within our own
Intelligence community. Indeed, whereas Ford
mostly focused upon Jewish dishonesty,
malfeasance, and corruption, our Military
Intelligence professionals viewed organized
Jewry as a deadly threat to American society and
Western civilization in general. Hence the title
of Bendersky’s book.
The Venona Project
constituted the definitive proof of the massive
extent of Soviet espionage activities in
America, which for many decades had been
routinely denied by many mainstream journalists
and historians, and it also played a crucial
secret role in dismantling that hostile spy
network during the late 1940s and 1950s. But
Venona was nearly snuffed out just a year after
its birth. In 1944 Soviet agents became aware of
the crucial code-breaking effort, and soon
afterwards arranged for the Roosevelt White
House to issue a directive ordering the project
shut down and all efforts to uncover Soviet
spying abandoned. The only reason that Venona
survived, allowing us to later reconstruct the
fateful politics of that era, was that the
determined Military Intelligence officer in
charge of the project risked a court-martial by
directly disobeying the explicit Presidential
order and continuing his work.
That officer was Col.
Carter W. Clarke, but his place in Bendersky’s
book is a much less favorable one, being
described as a prominent member of the
anti-Semitic “clique” who constitute the
villains of the narrative. Indeed, Bendersky
particularly condemns Clarke for still seeming
to believe in the essential reality of the
Protocols as late as the 1970s, quoting
from a letter he wrote to a brother officer in
1977:
If, and a big—damned
big IF, as the Jews claim the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion were f—- cooked up by
Russian Secret Police, why is it that so
much they contain has already come to pass,
and the rest so strongly advocated by the
Washington Post and the New
York Times.
Our historians must
surely have a difficult time digesting the
remarkable fact that the officer in charge of
the vital Venona Project, whose selfless
determination saved it from destruction by the
Roosevelt Administration, actually remained a
lifelong believer in the importance of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Let us take a step back
and place Bendersky’s findings in their proper
context. We must recognize that during much of
the era covered by his research, U.S. Military
Intelligence constituted nearly the entirety of
America’s national security apparatus—being the
equivalent of a combined CIA, NSA, and FBI—and
was responsible for both international and
domestic security, although the latter portfolio
had gradually been assumed by J. Edgar Hoover’s
own expanding organization by the end of the
1920s.
Bendersky’s years of
diligent research demonstrate that for decades
these experienced professionals—and many of
their top commanding generals—were firmly
convinced that major elements of the organized
Jewish community were ruthlessly plotting to
seize power in America, destroy all our
traditional Constitutional liberties, and
ultimately gain mastery over the entire world.
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