With America’s leaders eager to supply billions of dollars in weapons to Israel for the genocidal war in Gaza and its world-destabilizing goal of a “Greater Israel,” it’s hard to imagine that an American president ever dared to oppose Israel’s colonialist and military ambitions.

John F. Kennedy was arguably the last US president to seek active restraints on Israel’s dominance of both the Middle East and US foreign policy.

In the early 1960s, Kennedy attempted: to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons into the tinder box of the Middle East by blocking Israel’s development of a bomb; to establish a more balanced US relationship with Arab countries in the region; to return at least some Palestinian refugees to their rightful homes; and to demand that pro-Israel lobbyists in the US register as foreign agents.

Israel’s leaders perceived JFK’s presidency as an existential threat to their fledgling nation. And there is mounting historical evidence that Israel’s intelligence services likely played a key role in financing and covering up JFK’s assassination.

A document released in 2023 from the JFK archive reveals that Reuben Efron, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army and a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, was reading purported triggerman Lee Harvey Oswald’s private mail years prior to the JFK assassination as part of a closely-held CIA surveillance program.

The program was led by James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s counterterrorism chief and its liaison to the Mossad, Israel’s overseas spy agency. Efron, a Zionist whose mother died in the Holocaust, later emigrated from the US to live in Jerusalem.

JFK assassination documents released in 2025 show that Angleton used Mossad operatives to spy on Cuba following the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

Evidence that Angleton was at the very center of the JFK assassination conspiracy has been compiled by many respected JFK researchers, including former army intelligence analyst John M. Newman and former Washington Post reporter Jefferson Morley, founder and editor of the JFK Facts Substack.

The testimony and interviews of Gerry Patrick Hemming, a mercenary and former CIA asset, provides further evidence of connections between JFK’s assassins and the Zionist-backed, terrorist-financing organization known as CMC-Permindex.

Signs of Israel’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination have been ignored for more than 60 years by a mainstream media that still clings to the lies and omissions of the Warren Report, the official, but widely discredited, US government investigation into the assassination.

Even more shamefully, the vast majority of independent researchers who recognize the Warren Report as a botched attempt at a cover-up have failed to explore the Israeli connection for fear of being marginalized and, of course, labeled anti-Semitic.

For those willing to look at all the facts, there is evidence of a broad conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, led by rogue elements of the CIA, Israel’s leaders and intelligence officials, the national crime syndicate under the leadership of Zionist gangster Meyer Lansky, and the French underground army of assassins known as the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS).

There were certainly motives other than the Zionist ones at play in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. He withheld air support during the infamous “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba in 1961, embittering the defeated anti-Castro rebels. There are also indications, in at least one National Security Action Memo, 263, that JFK wanted to withdraw American troops from Vietnam after his likely reelection in 1964.

And his brother, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, had vowed to crack down on organized crime in America, infuriating many mobsters who believed they were responsible for helping JFK gain the winning edge in the swing states of West Virginia and Illinois against Richard Nixon in 1960. These efforts to combat organized crime in America essentially ended after JFK was murdered.

All three of these factors were major sources of dangerous animosity towards the president on the part of right-wing elements, organized crime and the most stridently anti-communist faction in the CIA that most JFK researchers agree ultimately led to the murder of JFK in 1963.

Nonetheless, the Israeli link is the focus of this article in the hope of countering its marginalization by researchers over the decades.

First of all, consider the links between Israel’s Mossad and the OAS, the rebellious secret faction of the French military determined to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle for overseeing his country’s withdrawal from Algeria. Both the OAS and the Mossad shared a deep hatred and distrust of Arabs.

CIA documents show that French OAS assassin Jean Souetre was present in Dallas on the day of the assassination.

There were also deep connections between Israel and Meyer Lansky, a mob boss at the top of America’s national crime syndicate. Lansky, a Zionist, had run guns to Jewish terrorists in Palestine in 1945 and later in life tried unsuccessfully to emigrate to Israel.

Lansky was connected to two gangsters closely involved in the JFK assassination plot. The first of these was Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald before the supposed killer of JFK could testify. “I’m just a patsy,” Oswald had famously said after his arrest.

The second was Eugene Hale Brading (aka Jim Braden). An ex-convict with known ties to a group of hitmen, Brading was also a suspected courier for Lansky. He was stopped by Dallas police for suspicious behavior in a Dealey Plaza office building minutes after the JFK assassination. Brading, who used numerous aliases and had a long criminal history, was taken in for questioning but released.

On the night Democratic Party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed, Brading was once again found in Los Angeles just a mile from the hotel where the younger Kennedy was gunned down. RFK was not only JFK’s brother, but his attorney general.

Brading was later questioned by police, according to JFK researcher Peter Noyes who interviewed the LAPD officer involved. No charges were filed and Brading does not seem to have been arrested.

Ruby – Oswald’s killer – was by no means the small-time pawn of organized crime dismissed by the Warren Commission. By way of the Teamsters Union and the Chicago underworld, he rose to the top of the Dallas area mob. In the early 1950s, Ruby – who used his original surname Rubenstein at the time – befriended Lewis McWillie, the manager of Lansky’s casino operation in Havana. Several months after Castro’s takeover in 1959, Ruby made an unexplained six-day visit to Cuba, where some believe he secured the release of mob boss Santos Trafficante from a Cuban detention camp.

Investigators for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), the short-lived 1976 follow-up to the Warren Commission, found that Ruby had made a minimum of 12 phone calls to at least five organized crime figures in the months and weeks leading up to the JFK assassination.

According to the HSCA, seven of those calls were to one individual: Lewis McWillie, of whom FBI records established that he “at least knew Santos Trafficante, the powerful Florida Mafia leader who played a role in the assassination conspiracies against Fidel Castro.”

And shortly before killing Oswald, Ruby had talked on the phone with Al Gruber, a henchman for Lansky’s West Coast operative Mickey Cohen.

Whatever his reasons, Ruby claimed to fear that a backlash against Jews would follow the Kennedy assassination.

In his 1994 autobiography, My Life as a Radical Lawyer, Ruby’s defense attorney William Kunstler wrote that Ruby repeatedly told him that he had killed Oswald “so they wouldn’t implicate Jews.” On Kunstler’s last visit to his jail cell, Ruby handed him a note that stressed again his wish to protect Jews from a pogrom that he feared would follow the nation’s outrage over the assassination of JFK.

With a few notable exceptions, JFK researchers cautiously avoid any reference to Jews or Israel in their findings.

In Coup D’états in America, first released in 1975, authors Alan J. Weberman and Michael Canfield quote an FBI informant who was in the process of selling weapons to a Cuban exile group just prior to the JFK assassination. The informant reported that a member of the exile group told him the day before the assassination that “we now have plenty of money — our new backers are the Jews — as soon as they take care of JFK.”

While JFK was trying to stop the introduction of nuclear weapons into the volatile Middle East, the CIA’s Angleton, who had long and close ties to Israel’s Mossad, helped hide Israel’s secret nuclear program from Kennedy.

And according to the HSCA testimony of New York Times reporter Tad Szulc, Angleton even provided US technical assistance and access to the enriched US plutonium that Israel needed to produce its bombs.

Szulc later said that Angleton confirmed most of the story to him, but denied providing enriched plutonium.

Angleton’s role in hiding Israel’s nuclear development from US officials has been documented for decades in articles and books, including Avner Cohen’s Israel and the Bomb (1999) and, most recently, Jefferson Morley’s The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton (2017).

Morley wrote in June that the latest declassified pages of Angleton’s testimony before the Senate in 1975 are so heavily redacted that they neither confirm nor deny Angleton’s involvement in Israel’s nuclear effort. What’s clear, Morley says, is that any public discussion of Israel’s nuclear weapons – which by most international estimates is at least 90 warheads – is still forbidden among Washington officials.

Mossad-CIA

Perhaps even more secretive is the history of the working relationship between the CIA and Mossad.

When the administration of US President Jimmy Carter “abruptly cut back [CIA] intelligence liaison with Israel,” Seymour Hersh wrote in his 1991 book The Samson Option, the Israelis thought that Carter’s men “perhaps did not fully understand how entwined Israel’s primary intelligence agency, Mossad, had become with the CIA during the Cold War.”

Hersh went on to write that “the complex amalgamation of American financing and Israeli operations remains one of the great secrets of the Cold War.”

A month after the JFK assassination, Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona went critical.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, an unwavering Zionist sympathizer, reversed Kennedy’s course on the Middle East and established the unquestioning support for Israel that still exists today. Johnson looked the other way as Israel developed its secret nuclear stockpile and began the first shipments of US offensive arms to Israel.

JFK’s opposition to Israel’s nuclear weapons development wasn’t his only threat to Israel’s leaders. It seems that Kennedy believed in the right of return for the 750,000 Palestinians that were expelled by Zionist forces as part of the establishment of Israel in 1948.

Two articles appeared in The New York Times on 21 November 1963 – the day before JFK’s assassination – detailing US efforts at the United Nations to allow Palestinian refugees to return to present-day Israel. They were headlined: “Israel Dissents as UN Group Backs US on Arab Refugees” and “US Stand Angers Israel.”

In addition, in 1962, the Department of Justice, under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, argued that the American Zionist Council – a precursor to AIPAC – was being funded by the Jewish Agency for Israel and ordered the council to register as a foreign agent.

That order was quietly dropped in 1966 by the Johnson administration and, in 1967, an American Zionist Council front group was renamed and reorganized as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) without having to register as a foreign agent.

“Follow the money” has long been an investigative guide for both journalists and lawyers.

New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison, the hero of Oliver Stone’s epic conspiracy film JFK, suspected with good reason that the financial source for the Kennedy assassination was the phony international trade promotion group CMC-Permindex.

Basel-based Permindex (short for Permanent Industrial Exposition), and its Rome-based parent company, Centro Mondiale Commerciale (Italian for World Trade Center), was a labyrinthine money laundering scheme for moving tens of millions of dollars in order to finance acts of right-wing espionage. These included everything from political bribes to terrorist bombings and the assassinations of left-leaning leaders.

CMC-Permindex had ties to any number of right-wing international counter-intelligence operatives and their supporters, from ex-Nazis to Zionists. The Italian leftist newspaper Paesa Sera and the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir were the first to report on the workings of CMC-Permindex in articles published in March 1967.

Paesa Sera wrote that the CMC may have been “the creature of the CIA … set up as a cover for the transfer of CIA … funds in Italy for illegal political-espionage activities.”

Both Permindex and CMC were expelled from their respective countries in 1962. The year before, in September 1961, French President Charles de Gaulle had narrowly escaped an attempt on his life using a roadside bomb. Then in 1962, before the expulsions, de Gaulle narrowly survived another assassination attempt when a hit squad sprayed his Citroën with bullets. He escaped unharmed, joking, “they are such bad shots.”

Underground factions of the French army never forgave de Gaulle for withdrawing French troops from Algeria during its war of independence. As they saw it, he was handing over the French colony to Arab rebels, after nearly 26,000 French soldiers had been killed in suppressing the uprising.

The OAS also hated Kennedy for having pressured de Gaulle to leave Algeria.

The far-right OAS included Nazi sympathizers in its ranks and was alleged to be backed by the CIA. After reports in the French press, believed by the French government, that the CIA had been involved in a failed 1961 coup attempt against de Gaulle, the Kennedy administration privately made clear to France that the US president himself had not been involved.

Could the CIA, via CMC-Permindex, have funded the OAS assassination attempts on de Gaulle? It seems possible.

The connection of the trade groups to the OAS might not seem relevant to the JFK assassination until another piece of evidence is added to the puzzle.

Two days after JFK was killed, Jean René Souetre, an assassin for the OAS, was secretly deported from the US. He had spent the morning of the assassination in Fort Worth, where Kennedy had given a speech in front of the Hotel Texas, and the afternoon of that day in Dallas, where Kennedy was assassinated.

JFK researcher Mary Ferrell stumbled upon the supporting classified document among the thousands that were released by the CIA prior to 1977. The photocopied memo was heavily redacted with a magic marker. But by using strong backlighting and a powerful magnifying glass, Ferrell was able to make out its contents. The memo was later released by the CIA under its Historical Review Program.

Neither Souetre’s deportation from Texas nor the existence of the CIA document was ever reported to the Warren Commission. The CIA generated the memo after the French secret service contacted US diplomats with concerns that Souetre was in Mexico, where de Gaulle was planning a visit.

The newspapers in Rome and Montreal noted in their 1967 articles that the board of directors for CMC-Permindex included New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw, who had recently been arrested as part of Garrison’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination.

Also listed on the board between 1967 and 1970 was an intriguing array of politicians, bankers, businessmen, landowners, royals, and Zionists – including Gershon Peres, the brother of Shimon Peres, in later years the president of Israel.

As Seymour Hersh detailed in The Samson Option, Shimon Peres played a key role in organizing off-the-books funding for some of the most secret of Israeli projects, including the successful effort to develop the Israeli nuclear bomb itself (which was kept away even from the Israeli cabinet).

The main shareholder for both CMC and Permindex was Major Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, who held half the organization’s shares, or $250 million, “for party or parties unknown,” according to Garrison’s investigation.

Singled out by many JFK researchers as a central figure in the assassination, Bloomfield was a prominent Montreal lawyer who represented the wealthy Bronfman distillery family, raised money for Zionist causes, and at one time had worked for US intelligence.

Channeling the money from CMC-Permindex to the suspected JFK assassins was a convoluted path involving Italian fascists and the infamous Trujillo family of the Dominican Republic.

Michele Metta, an Italian journalist who gained access to the CMC files with the help of Italian intelligence officials, discovered that Valerio Borghese, a fascist who was high up in Mussolini’s government and later saved from prosecution because of his cooperation with the CIA, was in charge of a money-laundering bank called Credicomin with financial ties to CMC.

According to ex-CIA agent Gerry Hemming, 10 billion lire were deposited into Credicomin by Rafael Trujillo Jr., son of the assassinated dictator of the Dominican Republic, just before he left for a February 1963 meeting in Haiti to discuss hiring a team of OAS assassins to kill JFK. Prior to that meeting, Hemming says, the elder Trujillo’s intelligence officer, Arturo Espaillat, had been in Montreal where he had “gathered funds from Canada and Europe” to be sent to the French assassins.

Credible JFK researchers now believe that James Jesus Angleton – the CIA’s chief of counterintelligence and the agency’s liaison to Mossad during much of the Cold War – was at the very center of a broad conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.

A deeply paranoid anti-communist who shared little of his intelligence with other CIA departments, Angleton had a long list of motives for wanting to rid America of JFK.

Kennedy’s refusal to back the Cuban rebels with air power during the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, his vow to dismantle the CIA “into a thousand pieces” after learning how the agency had rushed him into the “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba, his peace overtures to the Soviet Union following the Cuban Missile Crisis, and his opposition to an Israeli nuclear bomb, could all be counted as motives.

Angleton more than any other JFK assassination suspect was in a key position of power and secrecy to coordinate the actions among all those with a motive to kill the president, including elements of the CIA, organized crime, the French OAS and Israel’s Mossad.

Angleton’s ties to organized crime went back to his intelligence work in Italy during World War II as an officer in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA.

After the war, Angleton used Mafia deportees from the US to counter the growing power of the Communists in Sicily. In much the same way, Angleton, along with French intelligence, recruited Corsican gangsters to work against the Communists who threatened to take control of the key Mediterranean French port of Marseille, as documented in Alfred W. McCoy’s 1991 book, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.

Angleton’s close relationships with key figures in organized crime included Jay Lovestone of the AFL’s Free Trade Union Committee, who passed on funds from the CIA to the French gangs in Marseille. The Marseille gangs, in turn, worked with the Corsican heroin labs and distributors that crime syndicate boss Meyer Lansky had integrated into the drug-trafficking network known as The Marseille Connection – the mainline of heroin to the United States.

Angleton emerged at pivotal moments in the gathering of evidence in the JFK assassination case.

He was the CIA’s liaison to the Warren Commission investigation – effectively the official cover-up. He was the “friend” who visited the home of CIA Mexico City Bureau Chief Winston Scott following his death in 1971 to confiscate cartons of sensitive files, photos and tapes related to Lee Harvey Oswald, according to Jefferson Morley’s research.

Not long after the assassination, Angleton and friend Ben Bradlee, then the Washington bureau chief of Newsweek, likewise broke into the home of JFK’s closest mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, to confiscate her sensitive diary.

Meyer had just been murdered under suspicious circumstances while walking along a secluded part of the Georgetown Canal towpath from her art studio. Details can be found in Peter Janney’s 2012 book, Mary’s Mosaic: The CIA Conspiracy to Murder John F. Kennedy, Mary Pinchot Meyer, and Their Vision for World Peace.

Only Angleton had the authority and the access to pull off what JFK researcher Peter Dale Scott calls a two-phase “dialectical cover-up.”

The first phase led US leaders, including President Johnson and FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, to initially believe that Oswald had been an agent for Cuba and the Kremlin. The initial phase was designed to generate fear that, if the American public learned this “truth,” it would lead to a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and thus the instant obliteration of tens of millions of people.

But weeks later, when the nation’s leaders realized there was no truth to the Oswald-Soviet connection, they were trapped by their own hastiness inside the second phase of the cover-up – the “lone nut” gunman theory devised by the Warren Commission in 1964 and patched and jerry-rigged over the past 60 years like the wheezing engine of an old jalopy.

“Off limits”

In the epilogue of the 2008 edition of his book, Oswald and the CIA, author and former military intelligence analyst John Newman details how Angleton opened the CIA file on Oswald after he had defected to the Soviet Union, then carefully monitored Oswald’s mail and his political activities before and after he returned to the US. Angleton kept the Oswald file to himself until the day of the assassination when it suddenly emerged like a red flag within the agency.

Yet Newman fails to mention Angleton’s role as liaison to Mossad and his intimate ties to Israeli intelligence officials, whom Angleton had often lunched with at his favorite Washington, DC restaurant. Likewise, in his best-selling 1991 biography of Angleton, Cold Warrior, author Tom Mangold gives short-shrift to Angleton’s partnership with Mossad, writing in a footnote that it was irrelevant to the narrative of his book.

A more telling point, however, may have been made in another of Mangold’s footnotes. There he points out that the CIA’s officially designated historian for the counterintelligence staff, Richard Klise, was told flatly by Angleton in 1968 that the records on the Israeli desk were all “off limits.”

Did Angleton, who was at least complicit in hiding Israel’s nuclear program from JFK and who may have actively aided in its development, partner with Israel in “removing” Kennedy?

Hinting at the answer to that question are documents still under seal by US, Canadian and Israeli officials.

They include not only Angleton’s Mossad files but the heated correspondence between Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion and JFK himself, the personal letters of Permindex chief Louis Bloomfield, and the roughly 3,000 records the CIA still hasn’t released.

Israel’s involvement in the assassination of JFK demands further exploration without demonizing the journalists and historians who venture there as anti-Semites.

With additional research by Asa Winstanley.

Jim DeBrosse, Ph.D., a veteran journalist and retired assistant professor of journalism, is the author of See No Evil: The JFK Assassination and the US Media.

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• Louis M. Bloomfield
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