James Jesus Angleton was one of the most fascinating characters in the 20th-century intelligence community. The gaunt intellectual was the famed CIA spy-catcher whose apparent closest friend, Kim Philby, the famed British double agent, duped him. Angleton’s brief was primarily the Soviet Union’s to implant assets in the United States, but curiously, he also had sole responsibility for the Israel file. He had such close relationships with Israeli intel that he is memorialized in Jerusalem with the “Jim Angleton Corner“ observation post.

Last week’s JFK files release included a short document that the “I’m not antisemitic; I’m just asking questions” crowd has latched onto. In this 1965 doc, the FBI describes a decade-long arrangement (since 1954) that encodes any information received from Angleton’s Israeli contacts, specifically regarding the travels of US citizens to Russia via Israel.

The antisemites of today are focusing on an addendum [in the square brackets] that had been redacted until now: “CIA Directors permitted Angleton to run several intelligence projects, many of them with [the Israeli Intelligence Service].” Per conspiracy theory math, because the JFK files included this file—which seems to have no connection to the assassination—and because the Israel part was purposefully redacted for decades, therefore Israel is culpable in a plot against the president.

Public domain.

Of course, for people cognizant of the history of the intel world and rational enough not to blame the Jews for anything and everything, this document is neither surprising nor incriminating. As it is known now, when Nikita Khrushchev gave his career-making 1956 speech excoriating Stalin for his crimes, that speech was “stolen,” after which Israeli intel gave it to America to disseminate worldwide. This was a propaganda coup that seriously harmed the Soviets and caused many communist sympathizers worldwide to break with the motherland. Some of the intellectual left, their worldview shattered, even turned to conservatism, becoming the neo-con movement that still persists today.

Procuring that speech alone would have sufficed to prove Israeli intel’s importance to America. However, note that Angleton’s note to the FBI is dated from 1954, two years before that coup. What had Israel’s intel done then?

It is still unclear what services Israel had provided through Angleton. But we can guess that it was connected to their presence in Russia. As is known, many of the leading early Zionists came from Eastern Europe, were heavily socialist, even communist in nature, and retained a certain affinity for Russia. The USSR’s “yes” vote on partition in November 1947 was because it viewed Israel as a new socialist ally. One of Ben Gurion’s top advisors was a spy for Russia (Israel Beer, arrested in 1961).

Conversely, the Israelis must have had a very strong presence in Russia. So, what else did Israeli intel know or do in Russia? Well, for one, there are indications that Stalin’s death may not have been natural. When he died, the dictator was purging Jewish medical professionals via the fabricated “Doctors’ Plot.” There were rumors that the paranoid and homicidal Stalin was considering killing the arrested doctors and then ordering a Holocaust of his own. Was it simply fortuitous that he died before his plan could be actuated? Or, in an irony of ironies, could a doctor have hastened his demise?

But back to the JFK documents. The current misinterpretation of the Angleton document is a reminder that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially when antisemitism is involved. However, when one can look at materials objectively and is armed with some knowledge of history and a little cynicism, one can learn much.

Norman Krieg is a pen name.