A compendium of pertinent questions addressed to Michael Collins Piper, the author of Final Judgment, and Piper’s responses thereto.

To Pierre Neuville.

This brave French patriot, who risked his life to expose Israel’s scheme to assassinate Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, provided me critical information and insights that brought the thesis put forth in Final Judgment full circle.

The title of this series of questions and answers on the JFK assassination has a double meaning. On the one hand, it’s a play on the title of Final Judgment, with all due credit to Mark Lane whose Rush to Judgment, was the first major work to explode the Warren Commission Report. On the other hand, however, it is critical to understand precisely what a “default judgment” is in order to appreciate the irony of the title: A default judgment is what is issued in one’s favor in a court of law when the opposition fails to appear in court to defend itself against your allegations. I believe that I have essentially won a default judgment in the JFK assassination conspiracy case. Here’s why:

In Final Judgment I believe that I painted a complete picture which essentially tied all of the most commonly accepted JFK assassination conspiracy theories together in a tightly knit format that explained how and why the conspiracy to kill John F. Kennedy evolved and precisely who was behind it. More than 25,000 copies of Final Judgment are now in circulation throughout the United States (and around the world) yet not one person has yet come forward to refute in any way any single fact relating to my theory as it appears in Final Judgment.

So I do feel that I’ve won an un-contested “default judgment” in the JFK case and that the basic thesis of the book has been confirmed, not only because no one has been able to refute it, but, more importantly, because the several lame attempts to refute the book have failed.

Now I’m trying to answer many of the questions and comments and a few criticisms that have come to me from many, many readers. I’m pleased to say that of several hundred cards, calls and letters that I received from readers there was absolutely only one who said that they didn’t like the book and that person’s complaint was that he said that he considered my writing “sophomoric.” But he didn’t have any substantive criticism of the contents of the book itself. Frankly, it seemed to me that the person just wanted to complain.

One other individual, the very well known newspaper columnist Sam Francis told somebody that although Final Judgment contained what he called “much valuable information,” that he still believed that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in the JFK assassination. (I won’t comment on that.) All in all, I was pleased by the number of intriguing and thought-provoking questions that were addressed to me by my readers. Often they had very pointed questions, asking why I didn’t make reference to some matter or another or why I passed by some subject that they felt deserved further discussion.

In Default Judgment, now being published in an updated and revised format as a supplement to Final Judgment, many of the questions addressed are just as they came directly to me from readers of Final Judgment. In other instances we have combined a number of related inquiries coming from different sources. And it is interesting to point out that many, many people had precisely the same interests addressed in their questions.

Although there is no particular order in which the questions and answers appear in these pages, we’ve tried to categorize the questions in a free-flowing fashion that leads logically from one subject to another. The questions cover a broad range of subject matter and are arranged in such a fashion that even someone who has not actually read Final Judgment will be able to understand the subject matter without having first read Final Judgment, although needless to say I do suggest that before reading this material that the reader first refer to Final Judgment.

I think that people will find the material enlightening and that it gives the readers new insights into various aspects of the JFK assassination controversy. If I’ve missed anything, I hope people will feel free to write me and ask me to address those questions that they might have. I believe that Final Judgment does stand on its own as, at least for now, the last word on the JFK assassination but I also believe that Default Judgment helps bring into focus some of the gray areas that people may have questions about. So, yes, I believe that there has been a default judgment entered in favor of Final Judgment.

What follows are questions addressed to Michael Collins Piper, author of Final Judgment, and his responses to those questions. The questions focus on both a wide variety of matters discussed or subjects otherwise not mentioned—in the pages of Final Judgment. The questions appear in boldface text. Piper’s responses are in regular text.

How did you first come up with the theory that the Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad, had a hand in the assassination of President Kennedy? That’s a highly controversial allegation considering all of the other theories that have been presented. How did you come about researching and writing this book?

That’s not a simple question to answer for the reason that the process of developing the idea for the book was something that I suppose, ranged from the very beginning of the time that I began reading about the JFK assassination as a grade school student in the late 1960’s. I’ve touched on various aspects of the answer to this question in the pages of Final Judgment, but since so many people have still asked this question, I will elaborate further and perhaps provide some new insights to readers.

As anyone who is even vaguely familiar with the subject is well aware, there have been literally thousands of books written on the subject. I’ve probably read about 100 of them at the most. I do have an extensive personal library on the subject (and on many other matters as well, in particular, I might note, U.S. Middle East policy) and I’ve read many of the JFK books many, many times over the years and, in the process, absorbed the primary details.

I do recall that at some point while I was in college and was discussing the JFK assassination with my mother (who was very well read on the subject herself) and she said: “Why don’t you write a book on it?” I responded: “Well, that would basically be a waste of time. There’s very little new information to write about. The books have already essentially been written.” (Little did I know what I would later discover!)

At any rate, it was essentially, however, around the time of 1992 that my interest in the assassination was beginning to develop more extensively, largely because of the fact that The Spotlight, the newspaper by which I had been employed for a decade, had been involved in the E. Howard Hunt libel trial. In 1991 Mark Lane’s book, Plausible Denial, had been released and that was the book that outlined the circumstances of the Hunt libel case involving The Spotlight and this was also the time that Oliver Stone’s film, JFK, was in the process of being made and released. Consequently there was a newly revived and reinvigorated interest in the JFK assassination.

As I read Mark Lane’s book, which focuses on the CIA’s role in the assassination of President Kennedy, it became clear to me that one of the primary high-level CIA players behind the scenes in manipulating events which made it appear that the president’s alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was perhaps some sort of “pro-Castro agitator” with ties to the Soviets, was James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s director of counterintelligence.

Angleton was not only the number three man in the CIA and one of its veterans, but he was, more importantly, in our context, very close to the Israeli Mossad as a consequence of his role as the very jealous guardian of the CIA’s Mossad desk. This is information that has long been in the public domain. Angleton’s ties to the Mossad were no real surprise.

However, the very fact that Angleton was the central player in the CIA’s relationship to the circumstances surrounding the JFK assassination was interesting to me, inasmuch as over the years although there has been a lot of research and inquiry into what one might call “who’s who in the JFK assassination?” and the conspiracy and cover-up, Angleton’s prominent role had never been given the scrutiny it certainly deserved. He is mentioned in some (but not all) of the books on the subject, but generally only in passing. In fact, Angleton is only looked upon as some sort of “right wing anticommunist” who was involved in the CIA.

Parenthetically, I might note that a lot of the JFK assassination researchers who have looked into the CIA’s intrigue in relation to the assassination seem to have this desire to deny any institutional involvement by the CIA and present those conspirators from the CIA or who were linked to the CIA and who were involved in the assassination, as somehow being “rogue elements.”

However, as Lane showed in Plausible Denial and as I think I firmly amplified upon in Final Judgment, these CIA figures were working institutionally. They weren’t “rogue elements” but were working on behalf of the CIA itself, in collaboration with the Israeli Mossad and elements of organized crime, to both of which they had long been intimately tied. In any case, Plausible Denial cemented in my own mind the fact that the CIA player—in this instance, Angleton—who was involved in the assassination conspiracy was, in fact, the Mossad’s key man at the CIA.

Now during this same time frame there were other things that started me looking further in the direction of the Mossad. I have to give credit where credit is due. The Lyndon LaRouche organization’s journal, Executive Intelligence Review, had issued a thoroughly documented book entitled Dope, Inc. in the mid-1980’s and in that volume they did focus on the role of the Permindex corporation on whose board of directors Clay Shaw served.

Shaw was the New Orleans trade executive whom New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison charged with involvement in the assassination conspiracy. The Shaw-Garrison trial was, needless to say, the focus of Oliver Stone’s JFK film. In Dope, Inc., the editors highlighted the fact that two of the prime movers behind this secretive corporation, Permindex, were Major Louis M. Bloomfield and Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum.

However, frankly, I must admit that although I had read Dope, Inc., it was never clear to me as to precisely why the Israelis, per se, would have an interest in becoming involved in a plot to assassinate JFK. Now here’s a note of criticism for Dope, Inc.: in the book the editors state that the Israeli Mossad is essentially nothing more than a tool of British intelligence and that it was British intelligence that was responsible for the murder of President Kennedy.

I don’t agree with this assessment, but this is not to suggest that the LaRouche organization is not a reliable source. In fact many different people (including their critics) have acknowledged the outstanding and extensive research done by the LaRouche people, even if the critics don’t necessarily agree with the LaRouche organization’s particular conclusions. As far as the material relating to Permindex is concerned, the LaRouche organization relied largely on materials already published in the European press, so the material was not anything out of the ordinary by any means.

However, Dope, Inc. never examines JFK’s Middle East policy which, of course, would be the primary interest of the Israelis in their national context, and which, at the same time, would explain the interest of Bloomfield and Rosenbaum in being involved in the conspiracy to assist the financing and orchestration of the JFK assassination.

I must also take note of a recorded monologue by one Dr. John Coleman who says that he is a former British intelligence agent. Coleman claimed in his report that, as he put it, “Zionism” was behind the JFK assassination and he essentially echoed the Permindex connections between Bloomfield, Shaw, Permindex, etc that had already been documented. However, in certain respects Dr. Coleman was actually incorrect in some of his “facts” regarding the JFK assassination. So I was familiar with his work, but I hasten to point out that he never explained why, as he puts it, “Zionism,” would have reason to remove JFK from the White House.

So, you see, there has been some literary basis for the allegations that I put forth in Final Judgment (and, I think, tied together in a nice neat package that makes sense) but these allegations have been buried in a hodge-podge of other material. Frankly, I am surprised that no one prior to myself had picked up on this other research.

There was another item I came across that intrigued me for a long time. It appeared in Paris Flammonde’s The Kennedy Conspiracy, a highly sympathetic and thoroughly fascinating account of Jim Garrison’s investigation of Clay Shaw. In that book, Flammonde points out that the primary individual involved in the liquidation of Permindex and its relocation from Rome, Italy to South Africa was Dr. David Biegun.

Biegun was described as a “high-level financial backer” of Permindex and was the national secretary of the National Committee for Labor Israel in New York. So here’s another key figure in the Israeli network who was a key figure in the Permindex operation. Now there again this fact was noted in the book Coup d’etat in America by A. J. Weberman and Michael Canfield. They point out that former CIA officer Philip Agee has described the National Committee for Labor Israel as some sort of CIA proprietary. That’s all well and good, but the fact is that there is a very distinct Israeli connection here.

In reference to Weberman and Canfield, it’s probably worth noting (as I point out in Final Judgment) that they were the source of perhaps the thing that I found the most intriguing of all—and indeed, the first real reference to any suggestion that somehow there was a “Jewish connection,” so to speak, to the JFK assassination.

I refer to their statement in their book that “After the assassination, an informer for the Secret Service and the FBI who had infiltrated a Cuban exile group and was in the process of selling them machine guns reported that on November 21, 1963 he was told, ‘We now have plenty of money— our new backers are the Jews—as soon as they take care of JFK.’ This man had furnished reliable information in the past.”

This was the first time ever that I had seen anything suggesting that “the Jews” were involved in the JFK assassination. I read this particular book and this quotation for the first time in 1978 (well before I ever heard of the research appearing in Dope, Inc. or any of the allegations by Dr. John Coleman, among others.).

Then, time and again, over the subsequent years, as I leafed through and re-read Coup d’etat in America, the meaning and impact of this unusual reference began to come into focus as I explored all of the different facets of not only the JFK assassination but all of the different forces that were aligned against the American president at the time of his murder.

Obviously it wasn’t a “Jewish plot” to assassinate JFK, but I did, of course, ultimately come to realize that there was indeed an Israeli connection to the murder involving highly-placed individuals who happened to be Jewish and who were interested in furthering the conspiracy to advance the interests of the Jewish state.

Many of the more naive and perhaps “liberal” of the JFK assassination researchers (particularly those who never explored JFK’s Middle East policy, which put him at loggerheads with Israel) would no doubt have been flustered and puzzled by the suggestion that “the Jews” would have any desire to “whack” John F. Kennedy. After all, as even one of my young critics said, “Why would the Jews want to kill John F. Kennedy? They voted for him in 1960.” I told him: “Read Final Judgment. The book will answer your question.” (After he finally read the book, he commented: “That’s pretty interesting. I never knew that.” And I’ve heard that comment quite often, needless to say.)

Needless to say, despite all these allegations and Dr. John Coleman’s charge that “Zionism” was behind the JFK assassination, I never found any motive put forth. I’ve always been told that any murder investigation must inquire into possible motives. Well, lo and behold, as my own research continued, I did indeed begin to find motives for Israeli involvement in the JFK assassination.

My first indication of an Israeli motive came when Seymour Hersch’s book, The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy was issued in 1991. In this book Hersh very clearly outlines the fact that JFK and Israel were seriously and dangerously at odds over Israel’s drive to build a nuclear bomb, which Israel perceived as critical to its very survival. Hersh also delved into James J. Angleton’s status as Israel’s preeminent advocate at the CIA.

At the same time another critical volume was published: Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship. This book explored the conflict between JFK and Israel in similar detail and, like Hersh’s book, began to shed an interesting new light (to me, and to others) on a little known facet of JFK’s foreign policy and I began to see how it all did tie directly to some of the very forces that had an interest in his assassination.

Then I began considering the aspects of Organized Crime’s involvement in the JFK assassination and how there might indeed be a connection between Israel and Organized Crime.

I started looking at the connections between organized crime and the CIA and thence to the Israeli Mossad. I knew that Meyer Lansky, the organized crime figure, had actually settled in Israel but I never realized, until I began my research, how intimately connected he was to the Jewish state. Nor did I realize how inaccurate the term “the Mafia” really is when describing the Organized Crime syndicate.

Ultimately, if one seriously wishes to examine the history of organized crime you absolutely cannot take a realistic look at that history without considering the role of Meyer Lansky. It is critical because when one turns over Lansky’s tombstone you find the worms of the CIA and the Israeli Mossad crawling around there, perhaps even feeding upon one another.

So I began to find that there were very close ties between the CIA and the Mossad and organized crime and that not only were all three working together in a number of spheres of influence over a long period of time, but that all of them had a distinct motive in wanting to remove JFK from the American presidency.

As it is, of course, over the years, many of those who suggested that the CIA had some sort of role in the assassination are fearful of suggesting that it was an institutional role, and instead say that they were “rogue” CIA elements. That, in my view, is quite a limp-wristed stance.

To the best of my knowledge the one and only author (other than myself, of course) to say that the CIA had an institutional role in the affair was Mark Lane, writing in Plausible Denial. So, for whatever reason or reasons, there have been many “researchers” who have been unwilling or unable to acknowledge the depths of detail that have been unearthed in Plausible Denial that pinpoint institutional CIA involvement in the president’s murder.

Now I would be remiss in not giving credit to former Los Angeles police detective Gary Wean whose book, There’s a Fish in the Courthouse, provided me many valuable nuggets of information suggesting Israeli involvement in the JFK assassination.

Gary’s little-known book contains some particularly interesting information about strange CIA-related activities in Dallas, related to Gary and to former Dallas Sheriff Bill Decker in the company of the late film actor and war-hero, Audie Murphy (a mutual friend of Wean and Decker) and I was pleased to be able to give Gary’s book some additional publicity that it would not have otherwise received.

Ironically, however, Gary has since suggested that Final Judgment is off the mark because my book focuses on the Mossad and does not blame the Jewish community in general for the JFK assassination. He has also attacked me in various venues. I guess you can’t please everybody.

The actual “birth” of the book, Final Judgment, I suppose actually took place one evening when I sat down with a piece of paper and wrote down eight or nine key phrases, among them: “JFK’s Middle East policy,” “Mossad,” “Lansky,” “The Mafia,” a few key names. At that juncture I began pulling a number of books off the shelf and began researching, then and there, the suspicions that were evolving no longer in the back of my mind but right there up front at long last.

I was actually surprised at what I came across. I was amazed when I pulled Stephen Green’s 1984 book Taking Sides: America’s Secret Relations With a Militant Israel off the shelf and discovered what a goldmine it was. Ironically, I had read the book some seven years before but it made no impression upon me at the time that Green pointed out—and I think this is quite profound—that upon JFK’s assassination U.S. Middle East policy did an amazing 180-degree turnabout.

This hit me like a sledgehammer since I hadn’t even turned to Green’s book until after my basic thesis for Final Judgment had begun to evolve. This set me on a road of research that, frankly, as I moved forward, I was amazed by the amount of factual detail pointing toward an Israeli connection that I was uncovering in so-called “mainstream” sources.

I found also, quite ironically, that in my course of research I was not necessarily relying heavily on JFK assassination-related books for many of the details that ultimately appeared in Final Judgment. This in itself is interesting, if only in that it highlights the fact that no JFK researchers had ever made a serious inquiry into a possible Israeli role.

As I’ve said time and again, I’m willing to excuse many of the JFK assassination researchers for their negligence if only for the reason that there was very little public information until relatively recently (perhaps beginning with Green’s book, but certainly with the Hersh and Cockburn books) about the very difficult relationship between Israel and JFK. However, of course, I myself had overlooked it in reading Green’s book.

Needless to say, there’s all this literature about “The Mafia” being behind the JFK assassination, etc etc, but as we’ll see further (and as I’ve pointed out in Final Judgment), you can’t stop your research into Organized Crime involvement when you come to Carlos Marcello, the Mafia boss of New Orleans, and Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss of Tampa.

You have to look further and that is toward Meyer Lansky. Looking at Lansky brings you back to both American and Israeli intelligence. As I’ve laid it out in Final Judgment you find that all of these aspects and individuals did intersect very clearly in Dealey Plaza in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

So the research for Final Judgment was underway. The actual writing of the book involved setting up various sections which ultimately became chapters in the book and I organized the research material into those chapters. During that time I realized that there was indeed a great deal of material available and much of it I found in my own extensive personal library. It was very much like putting a jigsaw puzzle together and it was falling into place. All in all a very interesting process indeed.

The initial research time and the assembly of the material for inclusion in the book probably took roughly two months. The actual writing was another process altogether, but I have to say that as I was writing I was continually researching what I was writing about and looking into other areas. I continued to find that there was a story to be told.

Although I kept thinking until the very end of the writing process that I was going to find some fact or detail that would contradict my thesis, never once did I actually find anything that did. There were times when I thought perhaps I might be overstating the case and when I double and triplechecked facts or details as much as I possibly could, I never found anything contradictory whatsoever.

While I was already in the process of writing the book I came across an article by former Congressman Paul Findley (R-Ill.) in the March 1992 issue of The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a publication issued by a group of former American diplomats who are somewhat hostile to Israel (to put it lightly). I was surprised when Findley said that, “It is interesting—but not surprising—to note that in all the words written and uttered about the Kennedy assassination, Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, has never been mentioned. And yet a Mossad motive is obvious… Mossad complicity is as plausible as any of the other theories.”

Needless to say as I was already some four months into the writing of the book, I was amazed and delighted to see that Findley had taken the effort to write such a controversial column, but it certainly received no publicity outside the pages of that limited-circulation magazine. So while Findley presented no firm evidence, I got the distinct impression that perhaps somebody had been talking to Findley and that there were some people “in the know” who were talking about the possibility of Mossad involvement and I found this quite heartening.

I told very few people that I was writing the book, to be honest, because I realized that the thesis was quite sensational. When I did tell one person, he commented, somewhat sarcastically: “Everyone wants to blame everything on the Jews.” Well, I suppose this was the ultimate allegation. However, I became absolutely convinced as I was writing the book that I was truly digging into an area of JFK assassination that had never been seriously mined before. In a sense, I suppose, it was a gold mine that had never yet been discovered. So I can understand why many people never looked in this direction.

Another important thing to consider in relation to all this is that JFK assassination research has (and continues to be) a remarkably and particularly incestuous field. People were relying upon others’ research and re-writing and re-hashing the information to the point that no real new ground was being broken.

As an aside, I have to say that after Mark Lane came out with Rush to Judgment, most of the books on the JFK assassination (with a few notable exceptions) have essentially rehashed the initial material that Mark uncovered. He laid the groundwork for and publicized and popularized the national and international body of opinion that there was another story that needed to be told: that the Warren Commission Report was a fraud and that Lee Harvey Oswald was not “one lone nut,” by any means.

Suffice it to say that Rush to Judgment laid the groundwork for all future efforts. However, if future “researchers” had investigated further, a book similar to Final Judgment might have been written a year or two after Rush to Judgment came forth. As it stands, that wasn’t the case and the whole controversial project had to land in my lap.

Did you have any secret sources that you can’t name?

No, I didn’t have any “secret sources,” per se. Most of the material that I used in the preparation of Final Judgment was essentially in the public domain insofar as it was all published—all material that had appeared in popular magazines, books distributed by eminent publishing houses that are household names, etc. Everything is carefully documented and there were a total of 746 footnotes in the third edition alone (up from 677 footnotes in the previous editions). Now, of course, this fourth edition is substantially expanded and even more thoroughly documented.

Frankly, the only “non-Establishment” source used in the writing of Final Judgment was the material put together by the LaRouche organization’s Executive Intelligence Review. Now most of this material related to the secretive Permindex organization, but, in fact, much of that material itself was a rehash of material that had originally appeared in Paris Flammonde’s The Kennedy Conspiracy (which, itself, had relied upon foreign press reports relating to Permindex).

So there was nothing “out of the ordinary” that I used—no “right wing” or “left wing” extremist literature (however defined). I used no “antiSemitic” sources either. Even those sources that were critical of Israel could hardly be called “anti-Semitic,” particularly the works by Stephen Green and Seymour Hersh who are both respected authors who do happen themselves to be Jewish.

My sources were not “alternative press” or “offbeat” either. All the primary material on all the key points in Final Judgment came from “respectable” and “mainstream” and “responsible” sources. The one “secret source” that I did rely upon was a former French intelligence officer, Pierre Neuville, whose name I had kept under wraps until this, the fifth edition of Final Judgment.

However, I must point out, I did not rely on Pierre as a source until after the first draft of Final Judgment had been completed. And when Pierre came along I was ultimately satisfied that the thesis put forth in Final Judgment was complete and on the mark and that I had exhausted all resources available. I was in for a very intriguing surprise, however, when Pierre Neuville finally came along.

How did you come in contact with your French source, Pierre?

The circumstances as to how I came across this source are interesting in themselves. Upon the completion of the first draft of Final Judgment I made a telephone call to highly regarded former longtime Congressman Paul Findley (R-Ill.) very well known as a “liberal,” who had been somewhat critical of Israel and of its lobby in the United States.

I thought that Findley might find the book of some interest and called him up and said, “I’d like to send you a copy.” He didn’t know me, but he was familiar with The Spotlight newspaper (which, in fact, had been critical of him in the past) and I did send him a copy of the first draft of the book (which, at that juncture, I thought would essentially be the final draft, pending a number of minor editing recommendations, etc.)

I was surprised when he acknowledged receipt of the book by saying that, as he put it in his letter, “I will mention that over the past four years I have had lengthy correspondence with a retired diplomat from a western European nation whose family (including himself) has had disastrous experiences with Israel and the Mossad. He has been prodding me all that time to do what you have done.”

As you can imagine I’d spent all this time writing the book and trying to get it published and here was a former congressman of great repute (and certainly no “extremist” by any means) telling me that a retired diplomat had been urging him to write a book that contained the very thesis put forth in Final Judgment.

Well, obviously, I realized, I was not alone in my thinking. He told me he was going to send the diplomat the manuscript with my permission and I, of course, said, “please do.”

I was subsequently surprised when I got a letter from Findley saying that while he thought it was a good book that it was inconclusive and that I had not proved my thesis. This was after he had read the first draft. (Frankly, I don’t think, in any case, he would endorse it. He simply doesn’t want to be accused of being a “conspiracy theorist” on top of the frequent accusation that he is somehow an “anti-Semite” for being critical of Israel. In any case, I must say, in retrospect, knowing what was in that first draft (and which I thought was good) that the final draft—what was ultimately published—was far superior and far more complete.

Nonetheless, I did also receive a letter from the intelligence officer who was now living in Canada. This gentlemen, who told me that he was a former French intelligence officer, did not at first reveal his name but he provided me details that filled in the blanks and which pointed toward what we will call in shorthand “The French Connection.”

On the one hand the Frenchman suggested that I was aiming in the right direction, but he was emphatic in pointing out that I was, I suppose, using the wrong ammunition. I was trying to bring down an elephant with a cap gun or using a shotgun when a rifle would be better.

In any event, the Frenchman supplied me what I needed to bring my theory on target. He specifically stated to me that information to which he was privy did confirm my contention in the first draft of the book that James J. Angleton, Israel’s man at the Mossad desk at the CIA, had been directly involved in the assassination plot.

He also specifically named Colonel Georges deLannurien, a highranking figure of the French intelligence service, the SDECE, as having been involved in the conspiracy in a critical way. He also singled out Yitzhak Shamir as a conspirator and in my own first draft of Final Judgment I had pointed out that Shamir had been the Mossad’s European station chief, based in Paris, and, more importantly, had been head of the Mossad’s special assassinations team that had been publicized by an Israeli newspaper at the time I was writing Final Judgment.

The Frenchman told me that Shamir had arranged, through the assistance of deLannurien, a French assassination team that had been involved in the JFK murder. This material pointed toward a new angle, so to speak, in the JFK assassination conspiracy. It added an additional element of the conspiracy that, frankly, I didn’t at the time fully understand myself. However, this so-called “French connection” was something that other researchers had touched upon but either refused to pursue to its utmost— that is, the Israeli connection—or didn’t understand. That is, to reiterate, the ‘French Connection,” which one might also call the “Algerian Connection,” is most definitely the Israeli connection.

So having been alerted, I began to review all of the material I could find relating to the relationship between France, its long-time colony, Arab Algeria, Israel and the United States and all of the key players involved.

For those who are not immediately familiar with this aspect, I would refer them to the famous novel by Frederick Forsyth and the film based on the novel, The Day of the Jackal. This is a novel, based on fact, explaining the story of a conspiracy by former high-ranking French military officials and diplomats to kill French President Charles DeGaulle. They were upset with him, to put it lightly, because of his decision to grant independence to the long-time French colony of Algeria, a major Arab state in North Africa.

These French nationalists considered Algeria as a distinct part of France itself and viewed DeGaulle’s surrender of Algeria to the native Algerian nationalist rebels as a betrayal of France. As a consequence, the French critics of DeGaulle formed the so-called Secret Army Organization known as the OAS. The OAS was operating in opposition to DeGaulle both in France and in Algeria, indeed worldwide. As it was the OAS and the French elements working both for and against the OAS involved an amazing and intriguing cross section of French society and, most specifically, French intelligence.

Although DeGaulle, in fact, had a long and friendly relationship with Israel, supplying the Jewish state vital material used in its nuclear development, not to mention other support, the fact is that Algerian independence was not something that the Israelis wanted since this, obviously, would create a giant new Arab state in opposition to Israel.

As a consequence the Israelis began to develop a strong and distinct alliance with elements in the French military and in French intelligence who were opposed to Degaulle’s decision to grant independence to Algeria. This presented an interesting configuration of conflicts. You had DeGaulle at the top ruling over a divided nation beneath him.

You had the so-called French Corsican Mafia elements that were allied with the Lansky Crime Syndicate and who had also been allied in the past with the CIA, stemming back to the CIA’s use of the Corsican Mafia to fight communist infiltration of French labor unions after World War II. Yet, you also had these French Corsican Mafia elements, at the same time, being utilized by DeGaulle’s intelligence service against the Israeli-allied OAS.

This is interesting in itself because you find the Corsicans in a strange triangle. On the one hand you had the Corsicans tied up with the Lansky Crime Syndicate which, in turn, was close to Israel’s Mossad. On the other hand you had the Corsicans doing DeGaulle’s work in fighting the OAS. In turn, however, the OAS was working with the Israeli Mossad and, interestingly, a Jewish anti-communist group known as the Jewish AntiCommunist League (JACL, for short), all fighting DeGaulle over the issue of Algeria. Nor can you forget the fact that the OAS itself was also receiving covert support from the Mossad’s allies at the CIA. So, in short, what you had were diverse French elements interacting with those who were working both for and against Israel’s interests.

It was the same OAS group working to bring down DeGaulle that also happened to be tied to Guy Banister in New Orleans. Banister, of course, is the former FBI agent who had gone to work as a CIA contract agent financing and supplying anti-Castro Cuban exiles during the period prior to the JFK assassination. And it was Banister who had a very close and peculiar relationship with none other than Lee Harvey Oswald during the time of Oswald’s unusual period in New Orleans.

All of this not to mention the fact, as pointed out in Final Judgment (and even by some JFK assassination researchers who avoid the Israeli connection, however) that the secretive Permindex entity, which included New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw on its board, was also linked to OAS attempts on the life of Charles DeGaulle, with money laundered through Israeli Mossad official Tibor Rosenbaum’s Banque De Credit Internationale. A small world indeed.

The bottom line is that this “French Connection” or “Algerian Connection” is really the Israeli connection to the JFK assassination, any way you cut it.

To get back to my French source: he had pointed me in a direction, at that point, that I didn’t totally understand. It required an immense amount of additional research on my part to understand the history of French Algeria, DeGaulle’s conflicts with the OAS, DeGaulle’s alliance with the Corsican Mafia who fought the OAS on his behalf, and, of course, the conflicts within DeGaulle’s own intelligence agencies where there were immensely conflicting loyalties over the Algerian controversy.

All of this was unfamiliar to me and it became apparent in the end that it was an area that even many of the “veteran” JFK assassination researchers were not familiar with although quite a few of them had talked about the “French Connection.” Henry Hurt, writing in Reasonable Doubt and Dick Russell, writing in The Man Who Knew Too Much, had written about the French angle, but neither of them attempted to analyze the entirety of the dynamics at work in the French Connection. Those fighting DeGaulle were the very ones allied with Israeli intelligence, but these researchers just didn’t get it, so to speak.

Even the Establishment histories of the Algerian conflict acknowledge that, in fact, the Israelis and people sympathetic to Israel’s interests were working with the OAS. It’s all in the history books. So if there is anyone who wants to try to pin the JFK assassination on the OAS, they cannot honestly do that without fingering the Israeli connection.

To deny the Israeli connection is doing a disservice to the research. The Israeli and OAS connection ties back to Clay Shaw in New Orleans and, of course, to Guy Banister as well. You cannot ignore the Israeli connection to Permindex vis-à-vis the JFK assassination any more than you can ignore the critical Israeli connection to Permindex vis-à-vis OAS attempts to assassinate Charles DeGaulle.

The reason why Permindex would be interested in killing Charles DeGaulle was because Permindex was an Israeli front and DeGaulle’s policies on Algeria were inimical to the interests of Israel, just as, in turn, JFK’s policies were inimical to Israel. Therefore anyone who prefers to be ignore all of this is being disingenuous, at the very least. The French Connection is vital to understanding the JFK assassination.

In any case, in light of all these French connections, I substantially revised Final Judgment‘s first draft and this proved somewhat startling to me inasmuch as I had not expected that I would have to do this, having been highly satisfied with the first draft itself.

However, having pursued the French Connection, I did indeed realize that there was a French Connection which, of course, was ultimately the Israeli connection. So it was that I revised the book and it was sent to press.

Upon publication of the first edition, I sent Final Judgment to the French diplomat who wrote me back saying “good work” and added that JFK would have been proud of me. That was satisfying, to say the least.

How reliable was your French source, Pierre Neuville?

Frankly, I don’t know how reliable he is, any more than anyone knows how reliable any source is on any aspect of anything involving the JFK assassination. No one can vouch for the total reliability of any source. However, everything that I know about him (based upon the information that he provided about himself, plus the endorsement he received from exCongressman Paul Findley who put me in touch with him) leads me to believe that my French source is not only sincere, but totally reliable.

Pierre Neuville himself said “in the suspicion business there are no nice guys, only bad guys.” In other words, what appear to be “friendly” sources from the “suspicion business” [i.e. the world of intelligence] might, in fact, by enemies providing you disinformation and misinformation. And it was even the Mossad’s man at the CIA, James Jesus Angleton, who called the world of intelligence “a wilderness of mirrors.”

At any rate, the bottom line is that Final Judgment can stand or fall on its own merits, without the specific input of this French source. In addition, as I noted earlier, I could have easily published the book without delving into the French Connection and still, I believe, provided the readers a very strong case for Mossad involvement in the JFK assassination.

What I believe I have done, though, in Final Judgment is to draw a very fine and significant line between the French Connection to the JFK assassination and the New Orleans Connection (so to speak) that involves the two CIA assets, Guy Banister and Clay Shaw, right to the Israel Connection. Anyone could have done it without my French source.

After Final Judgment was published, did anyone come forth with any “inside” information that wasn’t included in the original edition?

There has not been anything that I have received, other than the communications from my French source who ultimately identified himself by name and gave me his complete history, including some rather striking details about his own interesting family and its background. In the postscript to Final Judgment I’ve provided background on Pierre’s own experiences with the Mossad. However, since the book was published, no one has come forward with any new information which is of an “inside” nature. I myself have discovered further published information confirming other details that appeared in the original edition of Final Judgment and in the revised editions, including this most recent edition.

How long did it take you to write the book?

From the time the idea actually began to formulate in my mind when I began the serious research to the time the first draft was completed was roughly seven months. After I began researching the French Connection after my French source read the first draft and pointed me in that direction, it took an additional three months to fine tune my manuscript and add the new findings that I’d uncovered. However, it was a never-ending process, as I found out after the book was published and that’s why in the third edition of the book I included many, many new details that brought the thesis even more full circle. The subsequent editions contain much more. I’m amazed, at this point, at how much I’ve come across.

I cannot help but recall that literally one day before the book was scheduled to go to the printer for the first time and I felt that I had put everything that I could possibly put in the pages of the book and was content that the volume was complete (including all of the additional information regarding the so-called French Connection), I happened to be sitting on my living room floor flipping through a bound volume of a nowdefunct newsletter. At that time I stumbled across something that literally made me say out loud to myself: “Oh my God!” I had discovered something else that unquestionably hadto be added to the manuscript.

I had discovered a very, very significant fact, which ultimately appeared in Chapter 15 of Final Judgment, wherein I dissect the Permindex mystery: the connections between the Mossad, the CIA, the Lansky syndicate, the French OAS and the plot to kill JFK. What I discovered were details about a gentleman who had come to visit New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison when he was still in the earliest stages of his investigation into the assassination.

Bear in mind that at this point Garrison had not yet come across the name of Clay Shaw. It was at this time that Garrison received a visit from a businessman named John King. The visit to Garrison by King has been mentioned in several JFK books and the authors continue referring to King as a “Denver oilman” with ties to the Republican Party, etc. The other JFK writers suggest that King was interested in interfering with the Garrison investigation, obviously, because he was a bad man and was possibly trying to help cover up for someone, presumably the Republican Party and Richard Nixon and other such villains.

Well, King was obviously aware that Garrison was on the right track and he offered Garrison a deal: if Garrison dropped the investigation King promised to arrange Garrison’s appointment to a federal judgeship. I repeat again that this was before Clay Shaw’s name came up. However, it just so happens, as I pointed out in Final Judgment, that it was during the very period of King’s visit to New Orleans that this “Denver oilman” was also involved in lucrative international business dealings conducted jointly with Bernard Cornfeld, head of the corrupt financial venture known as Investors Overseas Services (I0S).

Cornfeld, in fact, was a close friend and protégé and front man for none other than Tibor Rosenbaum, the veteran Israeli diplomat and Mossad official who was a key financial figure behind Permindex on whose board served none other than Clay Shaw!

Other JFK assassination researchers had focused on King’s “Republican” connections and his ties to the oil industry but they missed the real smoking gun: King had very close connections to Clay Shaw, the Permindex board member, whom Garrison hadn’t even yet identified as a suspect in the conspiracy. Somebody somewhere (and we now know who that was) had an interest in preventing Garrison from going any further and latching onto Clay Shaw (which, of course, Garrison ultimately did).

King—the so-called “Denver oilman”—is yet another Israeli Connection in the JFK assassination conspiracy, as hard as that fact might be for those researchers who try to use King’s interference in the Garrison investigation as “proof” that, for example, King’s friend Richard Nixon was behind the JFK assassination. (Nixon truly is a convenient villain, isn’t he?)

I was surprised myself to learn of King’s Israeli connection, inasmuch as I already knew about King. But, as I say, I didn’t know about his ties to Permindex until just a day before I was getting ready to send Final Judgment to the printer.

This is just one example, but a significant one, of the un-ending process of researching into the JFK assassination conspiracy. I suppose the bottom line is that unless you have all of the information that you need in front of you (and many JFK researchers for many years did not) you cannot make, shall we say, a “final judgment.”

Perhaps some day in the distant future there will indeed be a final judgment, the title of my own book notwithstanding, if someone has before them everything that I’ve written and everything else that will be written and which can all be compiled together into the final judgment.

Is it possible there were so-called “rogue elements” in the Mossad that participated in the JFK assassination and that they did so acting on their own without official sanction?

This is not possible. Involvement by the Mossad in the JFK assassination was ordered at the highest levels. Based upon what I’ve learned about the structure of the Mossad, I firmly believe that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion was the individual who ordered Mossad collaboration in the assassination conspiracy and that it was probably his last act before resigning his post in disgust with JFK’s stand toward Israel. I believe that the Mossad’s involvement was institutional in nature. Likewise, I would add, with the CIA.

However, in the case of the involvement of the French SDECE’s Colonel Georges deLannurien—as I point out in Final Judgment—this was a classic case of a “rogue” operator. This French conspirator was most definitely not doing the bidding of French President Charles DeGaulle, but he was assisting his Mossad ally, Yitzhak Shamir, and his CIA ally, James Angleton, with whom deLannurien spent the day at CIA headquarters in Langley on November 22, 1963. And you can bet the family silver that deLannurien and Angleton were not together on that particular day for the purpose of discussing the weather.

What did Mark Lane have to say about Final Judgment?

I did not indicate to Mark during the writing of Final Judgment that I was writing the book. As I’ve pointed out, I actually told very few people that I was writing the book. I didn’t want Mark—or anybody else—to judge the book prior to its completion based on a sketchy overview. I wanted Mark (and others) to read the book in its entirety. I presented the completed first draft to him and said, “Well, let me know what you think.”

Mark’s response was heartening. He said that the book did make a “strong case” for Mossad involvement and he did not believe that the book conflicted in any way with his own book, Plausible Denial, which pinpointed the CIA’s role in the assassination of President Kennedy.

Whether the actual idea for the assassination first originated at the CIA or at the Mossad, the fact remains that those at the CIA who were the prime CIA players in the assassination conspiracy were intimately tied to the Mossad and were operating in its spheres of influence, even including in the so-called “French Connection.” So in the JFK assassination the CIA and the Mossad were essentially two sides of one coin.

As far as Mark Lane’s opinion of Final Judgment is concerned, it was suggested to me prior to publication that I ask him to write an introduction to the book. I rejected this suggestion out of hand. Not that it wouldn’t have been an honor and a privilege to have Mark write the introduction. However, the fact is that Mark has stirred up a hornet’s nest with his own books on the JFK assassination and on other subjects for that matter.

Mark had not researched the Mossad aspect as I had, so I didn’t feel it would be appropriate to expect him to put his name in defense or endorsement of a thesis—quite a revolutionary one, I suppose—that he himself had not originated. Additionally, because of the very fact that Final Judgment tied Israel to the JFK assassination I did not think it would be appropriate for Mark to have his name appended to an introduction to the book, precisely because of the fact that Mark himself had become involved in the Middle East controversy and had been a critic of Israel.

I recognized that the thesis of Final Judgment was inflammatory on its own and I didn’t want to put Mark in the position of having to defend my work. He’s been busy enough as it is fighting off the efforts of the CIA and the FBI and the media to ignore or suppress or distort his own efforts.

Doesn’t Final Judgment conflict with Mark Lane’s book, Plausible Denial, which contends the CIA was responsible for the JFK assassination?

There is no conflict whatsoever. Plausible Denial is first and foremost an account of Mark Lane’s defense of The Spotlight newspaper against E. Howard Hunt’s libel suit. Final Judgment, in my view, amplifies many of the findings in Plausible Denial and further confirms the conclusions of Plausible Denial and adds further details that prove that the CIA was indeed involved in the assassination. The greatest strength of Mark’s book, I believe, is that it demolishes the myth that there were “rogue elements” of the CIA involved in the president’s murder. These were not “rogue elements.” The assassination was an act that involved the CIA at its highest levels—and specifically James Angleton, the Mossad’s ally at the CIA.

Someone once described Final Judgment as a “sequel” to Plausible Denial and I would like to think that this is an accurate description. But you can’t make a serious study of the JFK assassination without having read Plausible Denial.

What have the media reviewers said about Final Judgment?

With the exception of the frenzied media coverage that I’ve discussed in the introduction as of January 1998 there have not been any formal reviews of any kind of Final Judgment in the major “mainstream” media, although there have been a handful of reviews such as these:

The first review appeared in my own national weekly newspaper, The Spotlight, and it probably won’t surprise anyone to learn that the review was quite laudatory. I am pleased to say, however, that the review in question was unsolicited and was submitted by none other than Eustace Mullins, one of the most respected and most prolific writers and researchers in the populist movement in America. The second review of Final Judgment appeared in the Washington Jewish Week on April 28, 1994 and is discussed in Final Judgment in the afterword.

The third review appeared in the aforementioned Steamshovel Press in its undated issue Number 11. Although the reviewer suggested that the book was perhaps anti-Semitic in tone, he did say this about my allegation that the Mossad had a hand in the conspiracy: “The thesis certainly has been under-examined in the past and raises some interesting historical questions about the relationship between the Kennedys and Israel that date back to Joseph Kennedy’s Neville Chamberlain-like nods to the Nazis.”

Other than this cautious commentary, Steamshovel has been remarkably reticent about mentioning the book or providing me the opportunity in its pages to debate, for example, one Dave Emory, who actually contends that there is a “Nazi” connection to the JFK assassination.

Other than these reviews (along with several others discussed elsewhere in these pages, there have been none, although I have sent review copies to all of the key editorial staff members of the Washington Post, the Washington Post Book World and the New York Times, among many, many other media outlets. I personally presented Michael Isikoff of Newsweek a copy of the book, but I’ve yet to hear even a whimper from him.

I think the deafening silence speaks for itself.

What kind of sources did you rely on when writing Final Judgment?

Following the release of earlier editions of Final Judgment there were several attempts to suggest that the book relied upon less-than-reliable sources—that my sources were biased, that they were “anti-Israel” or otherwise perhaps “too right wing” in nature. That’s nonsense. Don’t believe it. For the record, let’s review the sources that I cited.

By anyone’s standards, of the 111 volumes referenced in the bibliography of the third edition of Final Judgment, at least 85% of those sources were from “mainstream” or “major” publishers. Additionally, roughly 73% of the references cited didn’t even have anything to do with the JFK assassination itself.

By my count, only 2% of the sources cited in the third edition came from “pro-Arab” publishing houses. What’s more, as I have noted in Final Judgment, my primary sources on JFK’s struggle with Israel come from sources such as Seymour Hersh, Stephen Green and Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, none of whom can be described as extremists in any way.

Only 7% of the sources referenced in the bibliography of the third edition could be clearly cited as being from sources that are “right wing” in nature and one of those sources—the memoirs of former American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell—is cited in the bibliography only because I make passing reference to the fact that Rockwell dedicated his book to a gentleman, DeWest Hooker, who is quoted in Final Judgment.

The Rockwell book was referenced in the bibliography only for the record and is not provided as “proof’ or “evidence” of Israel’s involvement in the JFK assassination. So please, critics, don’t try to cite Rockwell as one of my sources. By so doing you will only demonstrate how determined you are to try to discredit my theory in any way possible.

One effort to discredit my research falls flat if you look at the facts. Take a look at the trick that Richard Morrock of Bay Terrace, New York played on people when he wrote a letter to Steamshovel Press (which was published without comment) in which he claimed that “about a third” of the sources cited in Final Judgment came from publications of the Lyndon LaRouche organization. In fact, of the 746 citations appearing in the third edition of Final Judgment, only 30 of them—four percent—came from LaRouche sources and most of them were passing historical references that didn’t even touch on the actual thesis of Final Judgment itself. And for the record, here’s an analysis of the LaRouche citations.

Eight (that is 27%) of the 30 notes citing LaRouche publications were passing references to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith and its connections to a number of bankers with ties to the Lansky syndicate, etc. Only one of these ADL references had anything even directly to do with the JFK assassination per se: the fact that New Orleans intelligence operative Guy Banister was close to the ADL’s self-described “super communist hunter” A. I. Botnick.

Four of the LaRouche citation footnotes (13% of the total) appeared in two appendices (in the third edition) which were supplemental in nature and not central to the basic thesis of the book. (One of the appendices in question, the one dealing with the strange activities of government informant Roy Frankhauser, was added for the first time when the third edition of Final Judgment was published.)

Two notes were biographical details about Rabbi Tibor Rosenbaum and one was about an Israeli banker who served on the board of Rosenbaum’s Banque De Credit International.

Two notes were about gun-running to Israel in the 1940’s. One additional such note pointed out that the brother of a Permindex founder was active in running guns to Israel’s Irgun.

One note was about Meyer Lansky’s ties to the famed “Operation Underworld” which utilized the mob against the Axis powers.

Three notes were about various mob- and Mossad-connected banking and business connections that had no direct bearing to the Kennedy assassination itself.

One note pointed out that Permindex Chairman Louis Bloomfield’s law firm had ties to the Bronfman interests.

Four notes contained background information on four persons connected to Tibor Rosenbaum’s Permindex operation.

One note dealt with the French OAS reportedly receiving money from Guy Banister.

One note dealt with former FBI operative Walter Sheridan’s connections to Resorts International.

One note dealt with the Hunt’s family’s possible ties to Israel’s nuclear development. (Two additional such notes were among those, mentioned earlier, that dealt with the ADL in passing.)

One note was an extensive quote from former federal undercover informant Roy Frankhauser about which I comment “how much of what Frankhauser says is true is beyond the scope of this volume.” In fact, this is the only LaRouche citation on the subject of the JFK assassination per se.

I’ll note additionally that much of the above-referenced material taken from LaRouche sources also appears in other works on the JFK assassination and the history of organized crime, among other places.

When I contacted the aforementioned Morrock—who admitted to me that he considered himself “a Zionist”—and confronted him about the misinformation, he advised me in no uncertain terms that he wouldn’t believe “anything” that I had to say. He also admitted that he had never done any substantive investigation of the JFK assassination—a fact which suggests that his real motivation in trying to discredit me was stimulated largely by the fact that I had dared to bring Israel into the picture. Morrow also made the outlandish claim that it was clear that my employer, Willis Carto, was essentially the real author of the book and that Carto had “dictated” the book, which, of course, is just simply not true. But this is the kind of criticism that I’ve had to deal with.

In this edition of Final Judgment I have incorporated quite a bit of new information from additional sources, and I have incorporated other information taken from a number of sources that were cited in the reference notes of the previous editions. However, I will add, for the record, that the inclusion of this new information does not substantially alter in any way the statistics cited above. My sources are broad-ranging and come from differing points of view. The vast majority of them are cited for the firsttime ever (as in the previous editions) in any book on the JFK assassination. I remain quite happy with my choice of sources and I think that the open-minded reader will agree that the sources complement one another quite well. As always, I’ll let the reader make the final judgment.

How did you know which sources were reliable?

As I mentioned earlier, I relied on many, many sources and an overwhelming majority of those sources are “mainstream” sources, even among those in the lore of the JFK assassination conspiracy. Not on any major point in any area of the book did I find anything that didn’t seem to be backed up by other sources. The fact is that the book does rely on standard sources. I do suppose the biggest problem in research in any area such as this is that you find many sources that are actually putting out socalled “black propaganda”: disinformation that is designed to confuse. However, I did make a serious effort to try to continually have (especially where I had any doubts) a number of sources that confirmed the basic facts of the particular area that I happened to be writing about.

What have authors of other JFK books said about Final Judgment?

This is a very interesting question, to say the very least. Let’s take Jim Marrs, for example. Marrs is the author of the mammoth volume, Crossfire, examining virtually all of the JFK assassination conspiracies. This book came out before Final Judgment and Marrs’ book does, to its credit, get into the Permindex connection and quotes the LaRouche organization’s Executive Intelligence Review in regard to Permindex.

However, Marrs only goes so far as to mention the possibility—although he never necessarily acknowledges it as fact—that Permindex had ties to the international drug trade. (Marrs never mentions Lansky. It’s only “the Mafia” as far as he’s concerned.) And, of course, Marrs never ever gets into the Israeli Connection, even though, as I’ve pointed out earlier, Marrs’ own source, Executive Intelligence Review, focuses on Mossad figure Tibor Rosenbaum’s role in Permindex.

Be all of this as it may, I sent Marrs a copy of Final Judgment after it was first released. However, I do have to admit that in my letter to Marrs I did point out some things about Oliver Stone that led me to be suspicious of Stone’s motives in bringing JFK to the screen in the fashion that he did. I pointed out to Marrs that I had been told (although I’ve never actually confirmed it, to be completely honest) that Stone was a major contributor to AIPAC, the registered lobby for Israel. I also pointed out that Stone had ignored the “French Connection,” (as I noted earlier).

Now at this juncture I will mention (as I did in Final Judgment) that Oliver Stone paid some $200,000 or more to Jim Marrs at the time Stone was putting JFK together. So I understand why Marrs would be hesitant to criticize or to acknowledge criticism of a man who had obviously made him rich overnight.

And don’t forget that the “moneybags” behind Oliver Stone and the film JFK was Arnon Milchan, the film’s executive producer, who has been described by liberal columnist Alexander Cockburn as “Israel’s largest arms dealer.” However, more recently, Marrs has said some friendly things about Final Judgment, although he’s not endorsed it altogether.

I likewise sent a copy of the book to William Turner, who has been an assassination investigator and the co-author of Deadly Secrets (formerly titled The Fish is Red) which is about the joint CIA-Organized Crime plots against Fidel Castro that seem to intersect with the JFK assassination conspiracy. I also sent a copy of Final Judgment to Gaeton Fonzi, author of The Last Investigation, who was an investigator for the House Assassinations Committee inquiry into the JFK murder. I even pointed out to Fonzi that he and I had at least one mutual acquaintance. However, I never received an acknowledgment from either Turner or Fonzi.

Neither likewise have I heard from Jack Newfield of the New York Post to whom I sent a copy of the book. Newfield’s most recent claim to fame is his story that Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa was behind the JFK murder—a theory that got wide play. Newfield’s “Hoffa Killed JFK” story stemmed from his relationship with Frank Ragano, a former lawyer for Hoffa and Santo Trafficante, the Tampa Mafia boss. I even challenged Newfield to debate me on the subject on a national radio talk show, Radio Free America, hosted by my colleague at The Spotlight, Tom Valentine.

I also sent a copy of my book to David Scheim, author of Contract on America, that contends the “The Mafia Killed JFK.” Scheim’s book, in my opinion as an author and editor with an eye for these things, is nothing more than an enriched, expanded re-write of the book The Plot to Kill the President by G. Robert Blakey who was director of the House Assassinations Committee investigation and who, in that capacity, was determined not to find any CIA or FBI or intelligence community involvement in the murder of the president.

As I pointed out in Final Judgment, Scheim tended to portray Meyer Lansky as an insignificant figure who was a low-level mob figure, a flunky to the Mafia, when, in fact, obviously, he was much bigger than that. Scheim— dare I say it?—is Jewish and it could well be that this may have been some element in his bias. Nonetheless, whatever his bias, Scheim does have some credibility in some circles. Still, he has never acknowledged receipt of the book nor has he agreed to debate me as I asked.

If my theory is so obviously ridiculous, I would think that Scheim would relish the opportunity to demolish the theory, not only because he believes that “The Mafia Killed JFK” but because, as a Jewish American (and perhaps a devotee of Israel), he would have the chance to refute the claim that the Jewish state had a hand in the assassination. I would think that he would take this golden opportunity to demolish me publicly. But Scheim never took me up on the offer to debate.

A good friend of mine, Donald L. Kimball, has written three books on the JFK assassination. He’s a prolific writer and a dedicated American, but to the best of my knowledge he has never even read Final Judgment. But I’ve learned that Don dismissed Final Judgment out of hand after he heard about the release of the book saying, “Oh, well, Mike gets into all that stuff about the Mossad.” What can I say? I think that Don has the same attitude that the better-known JFK assassination researchers have and that is that they are willing to write and talk about the JFK assassination as long as they don’t step on the toes of Israel and its American lobby.

Let’s face it: the Israeli lobby has close ties to the American media, and particularly the book publishing and distribution industry. Anybody who denies that there is a strong pro-Israel bias in the American media is again, either a liar or a fool or both. So I understand why the authors of books on the JFK assassination don’t want to cross the media. It’s not in their financial interest to do so.

In the “Final Word?” section of this book, I discuss my adventures on the Internet discussion groups devoted to the JFK assassination, trading ideas (and insults) with an unusually eclectic group of people—some openminded, some close-minded, but all with a variety of opinions. To be sure, there was a lot of hostility toward my particular approach, but I was pleasantly surprised (as you shall see) to find more than a few people who were willing to give me friendly input and who were not prepared to dismiss my theory outright. At the same time, though, I did find that even some of the most able critics of my theory were, in fact, unable to refute my theory (at least as far as I was concerned) and that was actually a relief to me, for I was frankly concerned that perhaps I had missed some detail somewhere that would bring the thesis of Final Judgment come crashing down. But that didn’t happen—and I don’t think it ever will.

What about the JFK Assassination Research and Information Center in Dallas? Until the center recently went out of business, they held an annual confab in which JFK “buffs” and “fanatics” came to Dallas to talk about their favorite subject—to ponder every possible theory about whether the fatal shot was fired from a storm drain or from a flying saucer. They will debate these subjects for hours on end. However, when I asked to come to Dallas to speak about Final Judgment which had already sold 8,000 copies all over America, I never even received an acknowledgment from these people who are ostensibly dedicated to finding out the truth.

Now either I am a total crank or I am right on the mark and they don’t want to discuss it. I leave it up to the readers of Final Judgment to make their own determination. I don’t believe that anybody who has read Final Judgment with an open, honest approach considers me a crank. Yet the people at the JFK Center in Dallas adopted the attitude of my friend Don Kimball who is afraid to get “into all that stuff about the Mossad.”

The JFK Center was a money-making venture and it needed publicity. They wouldn’t get good publicity (or any publicity, for that matter) if they started talking about possible Israeli involvement in the assassination.

I did advertise Final Judgment in the 1993 program of the JFK Center’s annual conference and I did a mailing to roughly 300 people from that conference and I received several friendly letters from a number of researchers. I have reached the conclusion, however, that these people are more interested in debating things that can never be answered: how many shots were fired; what kind of bullets were used; where the bullets hit; etc. The list of such questions—and missing answers—goes on and on.

However, these are not the questions we need to resolve. What we need to resolve is who really killed John F. Kennedy and why. To pursue that question is to come across that most unpleasant answer: that the Israelis were indeed involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy. That is something that the pantywaists do not wish to acknowledge.

Have you made any major changes in the conclusions that you reached in Final Judgment since the book was first published?

There were many typographical errors in earlier editions of the book. But, more importantly, the minor errors of fact that appeared in previous editions have been corrected and in my special “challenge to the readers” I have outlined those errors for the record and point out that they have nothing to do with the thesis of the book Other than those corrections, I have not revised the original thesis as it was put forth in the first edition.

I have tightened up the book here and there but I have not deleted any substantive material relative to the thesis itself. The book thus stands essentially as it was first written but is now much stronger and far more comprehensive than ever, covering areas related to the assassination and the cover-up that were not discussed in the previous editions, particularly the new findings that I’ve unearthed regarding longtime CIA operative Frank Sturgis’ little-known work for the Mossad—an explosive detail indeed.

Since the first edition was released, I’ve also come to the conclusion that the so-called “Mafia” connection to the JFK assassination is more a distraction than anything and in summarizing my findings I have cited that reassessment for the benefit of the readers, although those who have read even the first edition will find that, from the start, I had very carefully delineated the likelihood that “Mafia” involvement was cursory at best.

You have been critical of Oliver Stone’s film, JFK. Why? Hasn’t Stone done good work by exposing new facts about the JFK assassination to a bigger audience than anyone has ever done?

Stone’s defenders have pointed out that Stone had a very complicated subject to deal with in the film and that he couldn’t include everything and that’s absolutely true. I cannot disagree with that. Stone’s defenders also say: “Well, if he wanted to get out at least part of the story, Stone couldn’t very well delve into the Israeli connection—even if he wanted to—because then he couldn’t get any financing or distribution for the film.” That’s true.

However, the financial interests behind the production, distribution and promotion of Oliver Stone’s “alternative history” or “alternative theory” of the JFK assassination are tied to both Israel and the Lansky Crime Syndicate which itself had ties to both the Mossad and the CIA, even, most especially, during the period of the CIA-Mob plots against Castro that all JFK assassination researchers seem to agree played at least a peripheral role in the events leading up to the president’s murder.

I thus have to ask Stone’s defenders: what is their opinion of Stone’s film in light of what I think is significant evidence indeed that the Mossad played a key part in the JFK assassination? Was Stone’s film actually “black propaganda” designed to give a popularized “final judgment,” so to speak, to the American people about what supposedly happened in Dallas? That is, in effect, what the film has done, and it has done it in a fashion such that the “solution” is far from anything but that.

What is your opinion of the film, Executive Action?

Mark Lane was one of the prime movers behind this film, but Lane himself ultimately was unhappy with the final version of the film in that it did not, in his view, adequately address the role of the CIA in the assassination of President Kennedy. All in all, however, Executive Action is a good film and very well constructed and there’s no doubt that Stone relied heavily on the foundation laid by Executive Action in structuring his own film. Like Stone’s film, Executive Action, does not name any high-level conspirators per se. The film, like Stone’s film, does betray a certain “liberal” bias, if you will. I always find watching the film very instructive, however, in that it does outline a theory, in a very concise fashion, of how a small group of conspirators could have carried off the JFK assassination. I would urge anyone who wants a capsule overview of the basic JFK assassination conspiracy to see Executive Action.

What has been the reaction in the Arab world to your book, inasmuch as it does lay the blame for the JFK assassination on Israel?

There have been Arab-Americans who have read the book and have said it’s a great book. One Arab-American—not a stereotypical “Rich Arab” by the way; he’s a Christian minister, no less—bought precisely 102 copies of the book. I’ve sent copies to all of the Arab embassies and received one letter of acknowledgment, saying, essentially: “Looking forward to reading your book.”

The Libyan Embassy in New York bought three additional copies of the book after receiving my complimentary copy. But the book hasn’t been subsidized by the Arabs and it isn’t Arab propaganda. It wasn’t conceived by the Arabs, either. It wasn’t until even after the publication of the fourth edition that a single Arab publishing house finally decided to publish an Arabic translation of the book. So Arab money was never a factor behind the publication and distribution of the initial publication of the book and the truth is that even the Arabic-language publisher of the book has not provided the book the kind of distribution that I would have expected.

I must say, though, that I was delighted when I received an invitation to address the Second Green Dialogue for an Alternative World Order held in Tripoli, Libya under the sponsorship of the Vienna-based Jamahir Society for Philosophy and Culture. Unfortunately, because of restrictions against travel to Libya (imposed upon Americans by the pressure of the Israeli lobby), I was unable to attend. However, the organizers asked me to submit a written statement which was read aloud to the participants who had come from all corners of the globe. In the aftermath I received wonderful letters from people as far away as Malta, Ghana, Guyana and New Zealand who were, it seems, profoundly surprised to learn there are a few Americans unafraid to raise questions about the U.S. relationship with Israel. I am grateful to those people from the so-called “Third World” who took the time to write and am thankful that there are a few places where freedom of speech (when it comes to the subject of Israeli intrigue) still exists.

I might mention, additionally, that when my publisher attempted to purchase a full-page advertisement for Final Judgment in the pages of an “Arabist” publication, The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, the editors rejected the advertisement. Not because the advertisement was “controversial,” but because the editors were afraid that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith would use the publication of the advertisement to suggest that they were tied in some way to my then-employer, Liberty Lobby, which the ADL claimed was “anti-Semitic.” (The Washington Report did, however, publish a letter to the editor from me—a minor concession, I suppose). Yet the influence of the ADL is felt even among those who are inclined to the “Arabist” point of view.

As recently as the Oct/Nov 1999 issue of The Washington Report, a letter writer, Tim Hanley, commented that “There is considerable evidence linking the Israelis to the assassination of JFK. It’s too hot a subject to touch in the [Washington Report], but nevertheless there is evidence… How come I doubt that that subject will ever come under public scrutiny?”

To Mr. Hanley’s letter, the editor responded: “… Let us add that while we know that lots of people in the Middle East associate JFK’s assassination with the possibility that he was on the verge of re-orienting U.S. Middle East policy toward a more even-handed approach, there is no hard evidence linking that to his death.”

Clearly the editors at The Washington Report are not going to lend themselves to publicizing Final Judgment, despite the fact that many of their readers have obviously read Final Judgment or otherwise heard about the book. I question their judgment, but the decision is theirs to make. In March of 2003 I did have the unique opportunity to lecture at a leading Arab think tank in the Middle East, the Zayed International Centre for Coordination and Follow-Up—much to the dismay of the Anti-Defamation League, which raised a major ruckus about my appearance there— but the subject of Final Judgment was only mentioned in passing in the course of my lecture about U.S. media bias in favor of Israel.

Has there been any reaction in Israel to your book?

At this juncture, the reaction in Israel has been limited. The first was a rather interesting Internet review of Final Judgment written by Barry Chamish, the maverick Israeli journalist, who said that Final Judgment “makes a pretty cogent case for the Mossad being the moving force behind the assassination of JFK.” A self-described “Zionist” who says he is “committed to the strength and survival of Israel,” Chamish has helped stir a tempest in Israel recently by documenting to the satisfaction of many that Israeli intelligence was involved in the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

In his review of Final Judgment, he says that he accepts my contention that the Permindex corporation was indeed a Mossad front for covert operations. That’s an important concession indeed, considering the debate among JFK researchers as to what Permindex was—or was not.

Chamish did have several criticisms, but none of which were damaging to the basic thesis which Chamish has essentially endorsed. He said that while, in his view, “Piper gets lots right and lots wrong… what is bothersome is it doesn’t take much of what he gets right to make a case for Israeli involvement” in the JFK assassination.

One of the things Chamish said I got “wrong” was labeling former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin (whom Chamish admires) as a former “terrorist.” That description is a matter of opinion, subject to debate. Begin killed British officers in Palestine. He blew them up with bombs. That’s terrorism, by my definition anyway.

However, Chamish does concur that my suggestion that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (angry at JFK for trying to stop Israel from building the nuclear bomb) may have thus decided, in Chamish’s words, “to contribute Mossad expertise to [JFK’s] assassination” is reasonable speculation. Chamish said that, in his view, “the assassination’s core plot was American and its genesis predated any possible Israeli involvement.” He believes that “America corrupted Israel and not the other way around.”

Chamish said that he would have been inclined, previously, to dismiss my thesis “as a fantastic yarn,” except that in his research into the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin that he “independently discovered too many facts in common with Piper’s.”

Noting that I was a correspondent for The Spotlight (about which Chamish probably heard a few choice rumors) Chamish said that this “is not really thrilling to me” but he points out that “about half of Piper’s sources are Jewish” and that “all in all, Piper doesn’t sound like an anti-Semite and I can spot one. I believe he is a sincere truthseeker.”

Chamish says that “the weight of [Piper’s] evidence” is “circumstantial” but still “impressive,” although “far from conclusive.” However, I have been the first to point out that although the evidence presented in Final Judgment is circumstantial, it is no less circumstantial than evidence put forth by those who contend, for example, that “the Mafia killed JFK.”

Chamish has also gone so far as to make a connection between Final Judgment and the death of JFK, Jr., son of the late president. Chamish pointed out—as I noted in the fourth edition of Final Judgment a year before young Kennedy’s demise—that JFK Jr. had published an extended report in the March 1997 issue of his George magazine alleging Israeli intelligence was behind the Rabin assassination. Thus, concludes Chamish, “We don’t know what drove [JFK Jr.] to stand alone in seeking the Rabin truth, but it may have had much to do with the information contained within Final Judgment.” From an Israeli, needless to say, this is a very powerful endorsement and an honest one.

More recently, internationally known Israeli dissident Israel Shamir cited Final Judgment in one of his writings. Shamir—not to be confused with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir—has been hotly critical of Israel’s continuing violence and international intrigue against its enemies.

In Final Judgment you charge that long-time Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was directly involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy. Aren’t you afraid of a libel suit from Shamir?

Shamir headed the Mossad’s official hit team at the time of the JFK assassination, so he is not very likely to want to bring attention to that fact by bringing a libel suit against me. It would open up an unpleasant can of worms that the Israelis would simply prefer to keep sealed.

You never actually say whom you believe the actual assassins were who killed President Kennedy in Dallas. Who were they?

I do point out in the book that there have been several names put forth as the possible “French” assassin in Dallas, most notably one Michael Mertz. He had ties to not only the French intelligence service and to the anti-DeGaulle forces in the OAS, but also to the Lansky-Trafficante drug smuggling network and to the so-called Corsican Mafia whose members were—in turn—fighting the OAS. So you see, this one possible assassin has ties in multiple directions to various factions in French intelligence and to all of the very non-French elements that were working against JFK.

There is strong evidence that anti-Castro Cuban exiles were involved in some way in the events in Dealey Plaza. We have the Novo brothers (Guillermo and Ignacio) whom former CIA contract operative Marita Lorenz says accompanied her to Dallas arriving the day before the assassination. We must not forget that the individual who was the “handler” for Miss Lorenz and the Novos was Frank Sturgis who worked for years for both the CIA and the Mossad and Sturgis himself later told Lorenz that his team was involved in the assassination, although he never said that they were the shooters, per se. Miss Lorenz testified that she had been told by Sturgis that she would be acting as a “decoy” in the operation and it wasn’t until after the assassination that she realized her activities had brought her into the sphere of the assassination conspiracy.

There were probably many people brought to Dallas as part of potential or possible assassination teams and who were never in fact utilized or who may have played some part, one way or another, either before or after the crime took place. In the end, the actual assassins were only “trigger men” for people at much higher levels. What does matter is who ultimately planned the assassination. This is what really matters.

Why don’t you ever address such issues as where the shots were fired from or where the shots hit or what kind of bullets or weapons were used? Don’t these elements, taken together, help solve the JFK assassination mystery?

The bottom line is: “Who killed John F. Kennedy and why?” In Final Judgment I quoted long-time JFK assassination researcher Vincent Salandria who said: “While the researchers have involved themselves in consuming preoccupation with the microanalytic searching for facts of how the assassination was accomplished, there has been almost no systematic thinking on why President Kennedy was killed.” I think that this summarizes it quite well.

John F. Kennedy died that day in Dallas. As a direct consequence of his death, U.S. foreign policy not only changed vis-à-vis Vietnam, but it also did a 180-degree turn in the realm of American policy toward Israel and the Arab world. I think that the big problem with many JFK assassination researchers is that they have failed to look in the direction of the Middle East controversy and that is a major problem they have failed to overcome.

Those who are responsible for the murder of John F. Kennedy find nothing more amusing than the spectacle of “serious researchers” tripping over one another and rehashing second, third and fourth-hand information, trying to determine where shots came from thirty years after the crime took place. This does nothing to resolve the controversy.

Mark Lane proved in Rush to Judgment that there was much more to the story and subsequent books such as, notably, Josiah Thompson’s Six Seconds in Dallas, analyzed the forensic aspects in a convincing fashion. However the question of conspiracy and cover-up was no longer in doubt after such volumes appeared.

Therefore we’ve known for thirty years that there was a conspiracy, that multiple assassins were involved. It doesn’t matter how they carried out the crime, in the end, since the crime was a success. The weapons used in the crime have never been found and much of the autopsy and ballistic evidence that does exist may itself be forgeries. We are not likely to ever find a “smoking gun” that was bought by a known Mossad assassin either.

So let’s get away from trying to answer questions that will never be answered and start looking into the connections of those who have been implicated in the conspiracy in some fashion or another: Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, Guy Banister, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, the French assassins and many others. When we look into the connections of these well-known names, as I did in Final Judgment, you cannot help but keep tripping over the Israeli Connection. It is a connection that is ever-present.

Why didn’t anyone ever come across the Israeli connection to the JFK assassination before the publication of Final Judgment?

As I pointed out earlier, it wasn’t until relatively recently that there was very much in the public domain about the difficult relations between John F. Kennedy and Israel. So most people wouldn’t even know to look in the Israeli direction in the first place. When liberal author Richard Reeves appeared on the Pat Buchanan radio program touting his new history of the Kennedy administration, I phoned in and asked about JFK’s Middle East policy in the context of possible Israeli involvement in the JFK assassination. Reeves briefly acknowledged that JFK was engaged in a lessthan-friendly state of affairs with Ben-Gurion but before I could pursue the matter further, Buchanan’s co-host, Ben Wattenberg, a devotee of Israel, broke in—cutting me off the air, I might add—and switched the discussion to the subject of JFK’s health. So much for JFK’s Middle East policy!

Why didn’t New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison ever reveal Clay Shaw’s ties to the Israelis and the Lansky Crime Syndicate through Shaw’s membership in the Permindex board of directors? Garrison certainly knew about Permindex.

I think this comes back to the fact that Garrison himself was evidently not initially cognizant of the Israeli connection here, nor did he actually have any reason to suspect Israeli involvement, inasmuch as—at that time in the late 1960′ s—JFK’ s conflict with Israel was truly a deep, dark secret.

However, as we now know, according to JFK researcher A. J. Weberman, Garrison himself evidently later did come to the conclusion that there was a Mossad connection evidenced by his circulation of a manuscript for a novel (never published) in which he pinpointed the Mossad as the driving force behind the assassination conspiracy.

As I have pointed out in Final Judgment, Garrison did not (at least at first) actually consider Shaw’s ties to Permindex to be central to the events in Dallas. That suggests that Garrison missed the boat in a very big way since he had stumbled on the key to Clay Shaw’s intelligence connections and evidently did not understand them. One of my biggest regrets is that Jim Garrison didn’t live long enough to read Final Judgment.

As I mentioned earlier, those who did pinpoint the Permindex Connection such as Dr. John Coleman and Executive Intelligence Review failed, however, in adequately exploring precisely why the Israelis themselves would have an interest in eliminating JFK. They did not examine JFK’s Middle East policy and how that policy was reversed upon JFK’s death, not to mention the fact that JFK was trying to stop Israel from building the nuclear bomb, which, ultimately, was almost certainly the driving force behind Israel’s involvement in the assassination conspiracy.

Actually, after I finished writing Final Judgment I did come across two very old and relatively obscure published articles that actually pinpointed the role of the Mossad and the Lansky Crime Syndicate in the conspiracy.

The one article had appeared at some point in the 1980’s in Metairie, Louisiana-based Christian Defense League Report and this article actually encapsulated the basic thrust of the theory laid forth in Final Judgment in about ten paragraphs saying, essentially, that it was likely that the Israelis had a hand in the JFK assassination because of JFK’s problems with the Israelis and that the so-called “Mafia”—which is often blamed for the assassination—was in fact dominated by Israel’s disciple, Meyer Lansky.

I told Dr. James K. Warner of the Christian Defense League about this and told him that I had to give credit where credit was due. At the time Warner had even forgotten that the article had even been published! But it’s interesting that this short article covered the subject quite well.

I also have to give credit to the late Ned Touchstone, also of Louisiana, who was the publisher of a journal called The Councilor. Touchstone had actually done some investigating into the JFK assassination and I have now learned that it was Touchstone who was one of the first people to stumble across CIA contract operative David Ferrie and this is discussed in some detail in Appendix Three.

To Touchstone’s credit, he did actually point out the high-level Israeli lobby connections of the powerful Stern family of New Orleans who were the owners of WDSU radio and television in New Orleans and close friends of Clay Shaw. As I thoroughly document in Final Judgment it was the Stern’s WDSU outlets that were very much a part of the media effort that laid the groundwork for Lee Harvey Oswald’s pre-assassination profile as a “pro-Castro agitator.” It was Touchstone who suggested that somehow the Sterns might have been a key to the JFK assassination puzzle, but, obviously, he didn’t have any firm evidence, perhaps again because no one actually knew how much of a problem had developed between JFK and the Israelis prior to the assassination.

Touchstone first discovered the picture of Clay Shaw at a party sponsored by the Stern family’s WDSU network in New Orleans. For many years people believed Ferrie was also in the picture. Recently, serious doubts have been raised as to whether Ferrie is actually the person shown in the photo with Shaw, but there have been other sources who have said that Shaw and Ferrie did know each other. So whether it was Ferrie in the picture or not is largely irrelevant at this point in time.

There is much more to be told about JFK’s relationship with Israel. It wasn’t until just recently, in 1995 in fact,—after the publication of Final Judgment—that the State Department released a massive volume of previously-unpublished documents relating to U.S. relations with Israel during the Kennedy administration. And these are documents that verify that JFK and Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion were engaged in very bitter behind-the-scenes conflict over Israel’s drive to build a nuclear weapon.

The State Department volume, issued through the Government Printing Office, is Foreign Relations of the United States (1961-1963) Volume XVII – Near East (1961-1962). A sampling of the documents are cited in this edition of Final Judgment and do provide solid evidence of the bitter conflict between JFK and Ben-Gurion over Israel’s nuclear bomb program.

In addition, of course, Avner Cohen’s new book, Israel and the Bomb, has provided a vast wealth of new information about JFK’s behind-the- scenes war with Israel. Cohen has told people that he rejects my theory of Israeli involvement in the JFK conspiracy, there is no question but that his book (however unintentionally) gives credibility to my thesis—whether Cohen likes it or not.

There were many repetitions in Final Judgment. In many instances you told us what you would be telling us about in later chapters or referred to in previous chapters. Wouldn’t the book be much more effective if you had an editor who would have deleted those repetitive references from the book?

This is an interesting question. Of my immediate circle of acquaintances who read the book either before publication or afterward, the repetition is something that they have almost all invariably commented upon when I asked them what they did like—or not like—about the book. As it was, actually, roughly seven out of ten of them said that they liked the repetition saying that it tied all of the complex subject matter together.

The book itself is quite detailed and does attempt to tie together matters that initially do not appear to be related (although they most certainly are). So in the process of writing the book I made the conscious decision to try to tie all of these things together as often as possible. It would shorten the book if these repetitive references were edited, but for someone who was not familiar with a lot of the details of the JFK assassination, details about the history of JFK’s relations with Israel, details about Organized Crime, it may have been more difficult for them to understand the whole thesis were it not tied together in the repetitive fashion that I utilized.

In any case, I do appreciate the critical comments from readers because it is always interesting to see how others view my work. Still, even in retrospect, despite some criticism from a number of people I know well and whose opinions I respect, I believe my judgment in this matter was correct.

In Final Judgment you never precisely state whether it was the CIA or the Mossad that was the prime mover behind the JFK assassination. In other words, who do you believe was the “senior partner” in the JFK assassination conspiracy? You can’t have it both ways. Was it the CIA or the Mossad?

I don’t know whether it was the CIA or the Mossad which was the prime mover behind the conspiracy. I would note that in the realm of U.S. policy in the Middle East the CIA and the Mossad were, as I’ve mentioned earlier, virtually two sides of the same coin. James J. Angleton, the Mossad’s ally at the CIA, turned many CIA agents essentially into Mossad agents, working on behalf of Israel’s interests, not only in the Middle East but throughout the world.

In many cases there were no doubt many CIA operatives—and CIA contract operatives, likewise—who were doing the work of the Mossad and didn’t know it, not only in the matter of the JFK assassination but in various covert activities globally. I do think the assassination conspiracy was largely a cooperative effort