The Silence Around Israel’s Role in the JFK Documents: What’s Being Protected?

For more than six decades, the official story of John F. Kennedy’s murder has been defined as much by what the government buried as by what it reluctantly disclosed. Yet among the thousands of newly declassified records, one thread stands out for the extraordinary lengths taken to obscure it: the quiet, complicated overlap between CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton’s secret Israeli channels and the agency’s surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald in the years before the assassination.

This is the part of the record that successive investigations tiptoed around, redacted into oblivion, or ignored altogether. Why? Why were references to Israel, its operatives, its cities, even its name, blacked out of Church Committee transcripts and presidential commission files for generations? Why did the government cloak the identities of Angleton’s Israeli contacts with such obsessive care that even today, many pages remain hollowed out by heavy black ink?

The newly opened files sharpen the puzzle. They reveal that Angleton, already notorious for his shadow-world methods, ran a covert Israeli liaison network parallel to official CIA chains of command, precisely at the time he controlled the sensitive 201 surveillance file on Lee Harvey Oswald. That file, kept under tight compartmentalisation, was fed in part by Reuben Efron, the Counterintelligence Staff officer assigned to monitor Oswald’s correspondence. Efron’s own background, his Zionist affiliations, his time in Israel, and his curious, unacknowledged presence at Marina Oswald’s Warren Commission questioning raise further questions about why this corner of the story remained sealed off for so long.

All of this unfolded in a charged political moment. Kennedy, increasingly wary of Israel’s nuclear ambitions at Dimona, was pressing for intrusive inspections and pushing back against a lobby whose influence he believed was growing too fast. And yet, inside his own intelligence services, the man overseeing the Oswald file was simultaneously conducting clandestine intelligence exchanges, assassination-related communications, and off-the-books operations with Israel, relationships he concealed from Congress and perhaps from parts of the CIA itself.

These details do not resolve the mystery of who killed JFK. However, they do illuminate a different mystery, one that speaks to institutional instinct, political pressure, and the fear of explosive geopolitical fallout: Why did the U.S. government decide that the American people should never be privy to this side of the story?

Why was the connection scrubbed so thoroughly that even the existence of redactions became a clue in itself?

After 60 years, the new disclosures force the question back into public view. If these intersections were benign, why hide them so aggressively? And if they were not, what does the pattern of secrecy tell us about how the official narrative was crafted, and who it was designed to protect?

The following article, authored by Harrison Berger, a correspondent at The American Conservative. steps directly into that long-avoided terrain…

Harrison Berger reports for The American Conservatives…

Why Is the Establishment Ignoring the Recently Declassified JFK Files?

New documents expose how CIA spymaster James Angleton concealed Lee Harvey Oswald’s movements, hid a secret Israeli liaison, and lied to Congress.

Overshadowed by the recent revelations in the Epstein files, the 62nd anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination came and went with little notice. Yet new documents relating to that still-unsolved murder—released only recently by the Trump administration—deserve far more scrutiny than they have received from corporate media.

From the moment the latest batch of disclosures emerged this past March, the Democratic Party and their allies in corporate media assumed their familiar role as CIA stenographers, either overlooking—or outright refusing to look at—what more than 60,000 documents revealed. At an April 1 House hearing, Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX)—illustrating the Democratic Party’s loyalty to the U.S. security state—confidently insisted that the JFK files “show no evidence of a CIA conspiracy,” and complained that even hearing testimony from Oliver Stone, Jefferson Morley, and Jim DiEugenio amounted to “platform[ing] conspiracy theories.”

The New York Times’ Julian Barnes echoed the Democratic congresswoman nearly word for word, announcing definitively that “the CIA did not kill JFK…Oswald acted alone,” despite the sheer volume of documents that no reporter could have seriously reviewed in such a short span of time. Speed-readers Lalee Ibssa and Diana Paulsen of ABC News likewise asserted that, by calling for Congress to reopen the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination, filmmaker Oliver Stone was “reviv[ing] unfounded conspiracy theories.”

But despite committed insistence from Democrats and their corporate media allies, the Trump administration’s JFK disclosures, along with troves of previously released files, do in fact suggest a CIA conspiracy. We have ample documentation from unsealed congressional records of who worked hard to cover it up—among them a consortium of CIA officials who systematically lied to the Warren Commission, misleading the public investigation about the prime suspect in the president’s murder, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Perhaps the main architect of that cover-up was the CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, who, despite being the counterintelligence chief presiding over what was supposedly the worst intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, wound up deeply involved in the CIA’s official investigation into the assassination.

Though Angleton insisted that the agency was inattentive to Oswald and unaware of the purpose of his activities leading up to Dallas, it has since been disclosed through unclassified JFK assassination records that Angleton personally maintained a classified 201 intelligence/surveillance file on Oswald for the four years preceding Kennedy’s assassination, strictly controlling which officials inside the CIA were permitted to see it through compartmentalization.

Angleton’s deceptions to investigators are so numerous that 60 years later they are still being uncovered; in one notable instance only revealed this year, Angleton committed perjury before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, claiming he knew almost nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting. In another, Angleton concealed the fact that Oswald had visited the Cuban embassy in Mexico City—a visit the CIA publicly claimed it only discovered after the assassination. As Jefferson Morley, author of The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton, explained, the  counter-intelligence chief “preferred to wait out the Warren Commission rather than explain the CIA’s knowledge of and interest in Oswald’s visit to the Cuban consulate” in Mexico.

Though Angleton left the CIA in disgrace, dismissed by many colleagues as a paranoid obsessive, his legacy has been consistently venerated by Israel’s intelligence services. In his memoir, the former director of the Mossad, Meir Amit, famously described James Angleton as “the biggest Zionist of the lot,” adding that “his total identification with Israel was an extraordinary asset for us.” As Morley writes, “Angleton’s loyalty to Israel betrayed US policy on an epic scale,” probably allowing the Israelis to build a nuclear bomb using stolen materials from the U.S.-based Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) facility at a time when it was the expressed policy of the U.S. government to prevent Israel from acquiring one.

Angleton had regular professional and personal contact with at least six men aware of Israel’s secret plan to build a bomb. From Asher Ben Natan to Amos de Shalit to Isser Harel to Meir Amit to Moshe Dayan to Yval Ne’eman, his friends were involved in the building of Israel’s nuclear arsenal. If he learned anything of the secret program at Dimona, he reported very little of it. If he didn’t ask questions about Israel’s actions, he wasn’t doing his job. Instead of supporting U.S. nuclear security policy, he ignored it.

Among the most sensitive questions revived by the Trump administration’s releases is whether Israel may have had a role in or foreknowledge of the plot against Kennedy, who spent his final months battling the Israeli government over its nuclear program, its lobby power in the U.S., and the resettlement of Palestinians from the land the Israelis had expelled them from.

The mere suggestion that Israel may have been involved in Kennedy’s assassination, much more so than allegations against the CIA, produces the swiftest denunciations from across the establishment. When podcaster Theo Von made the allegation against Israel on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, for example, Israel loyalists like Amit Segal rapidly denounced the claim as a “blood libel” and  “antisemitic.” CyberWell, an Israeli-helmed censorship outfit staffed by former Israeli intelligence officials that partners with every major social-media platform, has likewise labeled the allegation an antisemitic conspiracy theory and worked with those platforms to censor it from the internet.

The intensity with which critics denounce anyone who raises the question mirrors the vigor with which the government spent decades scrubbing any trace of the connection from its own files. For decades, dozens of references to “Israel,” “Tel Aviv,” and even the identities of Angleton’s Israeli operatives were blacked out of congressional testimony, including the Church Committee records.

In his 1975 Church Committee testimony, now available with many of the old redactions removed, Angleton confirms that during the CIA’s “Cuban business”—the covert campaign of sabotage and assassination plots against Castro run through Bill Harvey and Task Force W—he arranged for an Israeli intelligence officer in Havana to act as Harvey’s secret channel. According to Angleton, this “Israeli man” sent reports from Havana to Tel Aviv, from where they were passed directly to Angleton and then to Harvey. This setup kept some of the agency’s most sensitive operations outside the normal CIA chain of command. A now-missing page of that same testimony uncovered by Aaron Good shows Angleton downplaying any need to brief CIA Director John McCone about his Israeli liaison, even while admitting that “what they were doing was enormous.”

Good also highlights how Angleton’s Israeli channel intersected with Lee Harvey Oswald. The Counterintelligence Staff officer assigned to read Oswald’s mail and collect it for the 201 surveillance file that Angleton maintained before the assassination was Reuben Efron—a committed Zionist who had lived in Israel, published on espionage in a World Zionist Organization–affiliated journal, and, as Jefferson Morley notes, sat in on Marina Oswald’s Warren Commission interview with no official role listed.

At the very moment a U.S. president was seeking to restrict Israel’s nuclear ambitions and limit the political power of its lobby in Washington, the CIA official in control of the Oswald file was secretly sharing intelligence channels, assassination communications, and off-the-books operatives with Israel—and lying to both Congress and potentially some of his own CIA colleagues about it. The government spent 60 years redacting those facts, and Americans have a right to know why.

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/12/08/the-silence-around-israels-role-in-the-jfk-documents-whats-being-protected/