Hersh and Green, by the way, are Jewish. All three books were published by respected "mainstream" publishing houses.
No honest JFK assassination researcher can claim to be fully versed in the dynamics of conspiracy until he or she has read these volumes, all of which make it very clear that JFK and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion were at serious loggerheads, to the point that Ben-Gurion believed that JFK’s policy was a threat to Israel’s very survival--and said so.
Upon JFK’s assassination, American policy toward the Middle East did an amazing 180 degree turn-about--the most immediate result of the American president’s murder.
This is a cold, hard, indisputable fact not subject to debate. The evidence is all too clear.
In Final Judgment I pointed out, citing Hersh, that the Israeli press and the world press "told the world that Ben-Gurion's sudden resignation was a result of his dissatisfaction with domestic political scandals and turmoil that were rocking Israel."
However, Hersh went on to say, quite significantly, that there was "no way for the Israeli public" to know that there was "yet another factor" behind the resignation: specifically, in Hersh's words, Ben-Gurion's "increasingly bitter impasse with Kennedy over a nuclear-armed Israel."
The final showdown with JFK over the nuclear bomb was clearly, the "primary reason" behind Ben-Gurion's resignation.
The drive to build a nuclear bomb was not only a major aim of Israel's defense policy (its very foundation) and also a particular special interest of Ben-Gurion.
The fact is that Seymour Hersh's revelations about JFK and Ben-Gurion have been easily eclipsed by a more recent volume on the same subject—this one written by an Israeli scholar, Avner Cohen.
When Cohen released his 1999 book Israel and the Bomb (New York: Columbia University Press), the book created quite a sensation in Israel to the point that journalist Tom Segev writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, declared that "Cohen's book will necessitate the rewriting of Israel's entire history."
In the opening pages of his book, Cohen writes at length about Ben-Gurion's special interest in the construction of an Israeli nuclear bomb and the reasoning behind it.
Cohen has written, in part:
Ben-Gurion was consumed by fears for Israel’s security . . .
In his correspondence with President John F. Kennedy in 1963, he wrote:
Israeli military planners have always considered a scenario in which a united Arab military coalition launched a war against Israel with the aim of liberating Palestine and destroying the Jewish state. This was referred to in the early 1950s as mikre hkol, or the "everything scenario."
This kind of planning was unique to Israel, as few nations have military contingency plans aimed at preventing apocalypse.
Ben-Gurion had no qualms about Israel’s need for weapons of mass destruction . . . Ben Gurion saw Arab hostility toward Israel as deep and long-lasting . . . Ben-Gurion’s pessimism . . . influenced Israel’s foreign and defense policy for years. Ben-Gurion’s world view and his decisive governing style shaped his critical role in initiating Israel’s nuclear program.
On 27 June 1963, eleven days after he announced his resignation, Ben-Gurion delivered a farewell address to the employees of the Armaments Development Authority in which . . . he provided the justification for the nuclear project:
To summarize:
The "nuclear option" was not only at the very core of Ben-Gurion's personal worldview, but the very foundation of Israel's national security policy.
The Israelis were essentially willing, if necessary, to "blow up the world"—including themselves—if they had to do so in order to defeat their Arab foes.
This is what Seymour Hersh notes Israeli nuclear planners considered "the Samson Option"—that, as Samson of the Bible, after being captured by the Philistines, brought down Dagon's Temple in Gaza and killed himself along with his enemies.
As Hersh put it, on page 137 in his book, "For Israel's nuclear advocates, the Samson Option became another way of saying 'Never again," (in reference to preventing another Holocaust).
All of the evidence, taken together in the big picture, clearly demonstrates that it was indeed "The Sampton Option" that was indeed the primary cause of Ben-Gurion's resignation.
The bottom line is that—in 1963—the issue of JFK's conflict with Ben-Gurion was a secret to both the Israeli public and the American public and remained so for more than 20 years at least and still remains so, despite the release of Hersh's book, followed by Final Judgment and then the book by Avner Cohen.
Avner Cohen's very powerful book essentially confirmed everything that Hersh had written but went even further.
Cohen describes how the conflict between JFK and Ben-Gurion was reaching its pinnacle in 1963 and how, on June 16 of that year, JFK sent a letter to the Israeli leader that Cohen says on page 134 of his book was "the toughest and most explicit message" yet. Cohen adds:
The purpose of the letter was to solidify the terms of the American visits [to Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona] in a way that would accord with these minimum conditions on which the intelligence community insisted.
To force Ben-Gurion to accept the conditions, Kennedy exerted the most useful leverage available to an American president in dealing with Israel: a threat that an unsatisfactory solution would jeopardize the U.S. government’s commitment to, and support of, Israel . . . The showdown Ben-Gurion was trying to avoid now appeared imminent.
Ben-Gurion never read the letter. It was cabled to [U.S. Ambassador to Israel Walworth Barbour] on Saturday, 15 June, with instructions to deliver it by hand to Ben-Gurion the next day, but on that Sunday, Ben-Gurion announced his resignation.
Cohen says that Ben-Gurion never provided an explanation for his decision, except in reference to "personal reasons." To his cabinet colleagues Ben-Gurion said that he "must" resign and that "no state problem or event caused it."
Cohen adds on page 136 that Ben-Gurion had "concluded that he could not tell the truth about Dimona to American leaders, not even in private."
And this is saying a lot, considering the effort by critics of Final Judgment to say that Israel and the United States are such "close allies" that the Israelis would never ever think of doing something nasty to an American president—even one who was adamantly determined to stop Israel from establishing a nuclear defense system that the nation's leaders considered critical to the nation's survival.
I should add that French President DeGaulle's reversal on the issue of what was clearly critical French support for Israel's nuclear ambitions is quite significant indeed, particularly in light of what is documented in Final Judgment.
Without going into all of the details here (which can easily be found in Final Judgment in very much detail), the fact is that Permindex, the Mossad-sponsored money laundering and arms procurement operation that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison unearthed during his JFK assassination inquiry had also been connected to assassination attempts on Charles DeGaulle prior to the assassination of President Kennedy.
It is no coincidence that Permindex should be connected to assassination conspiracies aimed against two foreign leaders who happened to be united in their opposition to Israel's nuclear ambitions.
In addition, as Final Judgment also documents, based on a variety of "responsible" sources, the Israelis had yet another reason to oppose DeGaulle:
The French president had granted independence to the French colony of Arab Algeria, an action that inflamed not only Israel, but certain elements in DeGaulle's own military and intelligence services and brought them into alliance with Israel against DeGaulle.
Those interested in the specifics of this matter may refer to Final Judgment, but suffice it to say, there is much more to the French connection.
In any case, what happened between JFK and the new Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, who succeeded Ben-Gurion upon the latter's resignation is significant.
Immediately upon Eshkol's succession, JFK wrote a letter to the new prime minister that was evidently even more fierce than JFK's previous communications with Ben-Gurion. Avner Cohen writes:
Not since Eisenhower’s message to Ben-Gurion in the midst of the Suez crisis in November 1956 had an American president been so blunt with an Israeli prime minister.
Kennedy told Eshkol that the U.S. commitment and support of Israel "could be seriously jeopardized" if Israel did not let the United States obtain "reliable information" about its efforts in the nuclear field.
Kennedy presented detailed technical instructions on how his requirements should be executed.
Kennedy’s demands were unprecedented. They amounted, in effect, to an ultimatum.
Cohen notes on page 159 that: "From [Eshkol’s] perspective, Kennedy’s demands seemed diplomatically inappropriate; they were inconsistent with national sovereignty. There was no legal basis or political precedent for such demands," Cohen says "Kennedy’s letter precipitated a near-crisis situation in the prime minister’s office."
So Kennedy was as equally upsetting to the new prime minister as he had been to David Ben-Gurion!
Kennedy's pressure on Israel did not end with the resignation of Ben-Gurion. Instead, it clearly intensified.
Cohen then describes a "November secret meeting" held in Washington, D.C (November 13-14) between the Israelis and the Americans and says that Israel "had a broader agenda . . . than the United States was willing to discuss."
Yet, Cohen notes the nuclear issue was so sensitive that during face-to-face secret meetings between United States and Israeli officials when they were discussing other issues, the subject of Israel's nuclear bomb was not discussed.
The issue was that inflammatory. It was left for future discussion. But JFK was assassinated eight days later, and the dynamics of the U.S.-Israeli relationship changed dramatically as a consequence.
The Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, published a review of Cohen's book on February 5, 1999, calling it "a bombshell of a book." The Ha'aretz review, by Reuven Pedatzur, is quite interesting. It reads in part:
The murder of American President John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the U.S. administration on the government of Israel to discontinue the nuclear program.
Cohen demonstrates at length the pressures applied by Kennedy on Ben-Gurion. He brings the fascinating exchange of letters between the two, in which Kennedy makes it quite clear to the Israeli prime minister that he will under no circumstances agree to Israel becoming a nuclear state.
The book implied that, had Kennedy remained alive, it is doubtful whether Israel would today have a nuclear option.
I couldn't put it better myself. If this were a court case, I could rightly say, at this juncture, "The defense rests."
According to historian Stephen Green: "Perhaps the most significant development of 1963 for the Israeli nuclear weapons program, however, occurred on November 22 on a plane flying from Dallas to Washington, D.C., Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as the 36th President of the United States, following the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Green writes: "In the early years of the Johnson administration the Israeli nuclear weapons program was referred to in Washington as ‘the delicate topic.’ Lyndon Johnson’s White House saw no Dimona, heard no Dimona, and spoke no Dimona when the reactor went critical in early 1964."
Thus it was that the critical point of dispute between John F. Kennedy and the Mossad-dominated government of Israel was no longer an issue. The new American president—so long a partisan of Israel—allowed the nuclear development to continue. This was just the beginning.
There is an aside to all of this that should be noted: Final Judgment documents a Peking connection to the JFK assassination conspiracy, relating directly to Israel’s secret nuclear allliance with China.
Not only U.S. policy toward Israel reversed upon JFK’s assassination. Although it’s virtually forgotten, John F. Kennedy was planning a military assault on Red China’s nuclear weapons development facilities in the months prior to his assassination. However, one month after JFK’s death, Lyndon Johnson canceled the project and allowed China to proceed with the assembly of its nuclear arsenal.
The big secret is that at the time of JFK’s assassination, Israel’s Mossad and Red China’s intelligence service were working behind the scenes on joint nuclear weapons development.
The evidence suggests that "the China card" played a critical (secret) factor in Israel’s participation in the JFK assassination conspiracy. This is documented in detail in Final Judgment.
I would be remiss in not addressing the question of CIA involvement alongside the Mossad in the JFK assassination.
By 1963 John F. Kennedy was not only at war with Israel and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate, but he was also at war with their close ally in the international intelligence underworld—the CIA.
Final Judgment shows that Israel’s chief contact at the CIA, the Soviet-hating James Jesus Angleton, ultimately played a pivotal role in the JFK assassination conspiracy cover-up.
In light of the Angleton connection, I should note how the worldwide media has given great play to the release of a new book that purported to "prove" that it was the Soviet KGB that concocted the story that the CIA was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
The book purported to be the inside history of the KGB’s secret intelligence operations in the U.S. and Europe The Sword and the Shield by Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge—described as "one of the world’s leading authorities on intelligence history,".
The book was said to be based on extensive notes and transcriptions (secretly compiled over a 12 year period) of vast numbers of files from the KGB archives. The notes themselves were supposedly smuggled out of KGB headquarters by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin who retired from the KGB in 1984 and who then defected to Britain in 1992 after the CIA had rejected Mitrokhin.
One major problem with the Andrew book is that while it is quite thoroughly footnoted, with hundreds of references to a wide-ranging amount of material, it is not always clear (actually, more often than not) whether Andrew is purporting to cite the Mitrokhin archives as his source or whether the information he is presenting is Andrew’s own interpretation, based on the material of others.
In that sense, then, while the book is quite skilfully written in such a way that it appears to present the information presented as having come from the KGB’s supposedly purloined file, that is not always necessarily the case.
It appears Andrew’s book is presenting the Mitrokhin archives as some sort of effort to counter new official histories of the KGB that are being released by the KGB’s post-Soviet era successor, the SVR.
For example, Andrew lashes out at Lolly Zamoysky, the SVR’s literary editor of the new multi-volume official history, as having been "well known" in the KGB "for his belief in a global Masonic-Zionist plot."
Thus, Andrew’s book is effectively an attempt to counter allegations of high-level Zionist intrigue that has been documented by the official post-KGB Russian intelligence services.
In that regard, it is quite remarkable to note that in the entirety of this extensively documented and indexed 700-page volume, there is only one indexed reference to Israel and not a single indexed reference to the Mossad, this despite the widely-known fact that the Mossad played a central role alongside the CIA in its operations in Western Europe throughout the period that Andrew has purported to describe.
Likewise, in the same vein, there are only two indexed references to the CIA’s longtime counterintelligence chief, James Jesus Angleton, even though Angleton, who is best remembered for his strident anti-Soviet stance, having spent decades looking for a "KGB mole" in the upper echelons of the CIA and for KGB moles in allied Western intelligence agencies—was also a devoted Israeli loyalist who jealously guarded his role as the CIA’s liaison to the Mossad.
Perhaps the most glaring evidence of outright fraud, per se, in the Andrew production is the flimsy and quite transparent attempt to absolve the CIA of any involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and, at the same time, make it appear as though so-called "theories" linking the CIA to the crime were exclusively disinformation put forth by the KGB.
In fact, when the news of Andrew’s book was first announced in the major media, most reports focused—sometimes exclusively—on the purported revelation that it was actually the KGB that was behind the theory that the CIA was involved in the president’s murder. Most people who read news accounts of the release of the book would probably have gleaned little more than that.
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