Most reviews try to extract facts or anecdotes from the book in
question to give a summation of its central thesis, or bring in
contradictory evidence to prove the book's unreliability.
The epic sweep and scale of the story told by these authors, the
fact that they are working with "soft" evidence from which they
draw hard and disturbing conclusions, indeed the essential
unprovability of many of their assertions, argue against this
approach in the present case. The sheer size and
multi-generational nature of this Twentieth Century epic almost
demand that the entire book be read and carefully digested.
I worked my way through it slowly, consulting every footnote and
in some cases, outside sources, to make sure what I was reading
made sense and was not explainable by more innocent historical
reasoning. It appears to me that the authors got enough of
it right for their central thesis to stand. Even though it
was published eight years ago, it is as relevant today in a post
9/11 world as it ever was during the mid-1990s.
The book's subtitle presents its central thesis: "How Western Intelligence Betrayed the Jewish People." One of its authors, John Loftus, was a former prosecutor with the U.S. Justice Department's Nazi-hunting unit, and was granted access to classified CIA and NATO archives. He probably developed the big picture, his central thesis, from his prodecutorial days, and went about filling it in and updating it by interviewing a bevy of old spooks, retired spies from the CIA, MI6, KGB, Mossad, and the French and German intelligence agencies, among others. Small, independently-verifiable, portions of this larger story have already appeared on CBS News's 60 Minutes and ABC's Prime Time, but this is the first place of which I am aware where a consistent narrative carries through from the discovery of Middle Eastern oil deposits and the rise of Nazism in the 1920s and 1930s to the Intifada and the Persian Gulf War in the 1980s and 1990s. If a mere ten per cent of what this book alleges is true, Twentieth Century history as written by the victors is a shameful distortion, and my hunch is that a lot more than ten per cent of this book is accurate.
Of course, the question of why retired spooks would talk, and the
verifiability of their information when they are granted
anonymity, is a valid one. No doubt many retired
intelligence officers are still in the disinformation game,
honestly believing that their roles as hidden puppet masters
served a higher end, and even those who are cleansing a guilty
conscience must be assayed for self-serving statements and
exculpatory diversions. Many of the confidential sources
cited herein ae backed up,
however, by newly declassified documents, and build upon
assertions already published elsewhere. What follows is a
brief precis.
The modern world begins, the authors suggest, at the end of World
War I, when British diplomat/adventurers Jack Philby (father of
Soviet spy Kim Philby and legendary Arabist) and Lawrence of
Arabia endeavour to unify a bunch of warring Bedouin tribes into
nationhood, best represented by Saudi Arabia. Aware that
black gold (oil) lies underneath the desert sands, Philby gingerly
befriends Ibn Saud, and makes him the first Saudi king. But
Philby is not solely interested in empire, even his own British
one; he is interested in making money, and forges an alliance with
an American intelligence agent in charge of Middle Eastern
affairs, Allen Dulles. By the 1930s, Ibn Saud and Philby are
secret supporters of the Nazi rise to
political power in Germany, and bring Dulles, a NYC-based
corporate lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell, in on their
scheme. It is a triple game driven by their hatred of
Zionism and the Jews, motivated by their obsessive seeking of
profits, and designed to completely transform the landscape of the
Middle East. Philby and Dulles convince Ibn Saud to allow
limited Jewish immigration to Palestine, assuring him that the
numbers will never challenge or upset his control. When Jews
leave Germany, their assets are confiscated by Hitler, who shares
a percentage of these with dummy corporations established by
Philby, Dulles, and their allies. Some of this money is used
to arm Ibn Saud, and intelligence disclosures to him by Philby
enable Ibn Saud to become king of Saudi Arabia over other Arab
leaders supported by the British government. This
double-dealing by British and American corporations continues
throughout World War II, and incredibly is never halted by the
Western allies, who would rather that Dulles stay in place
andround up German intelligence agents after World War II's end
for the upcoming Cold War against a previous ally, the USSR.
One of the reasons that Jews are so hated by this clique, which
includes Rockefeller's Standard Oil, is that many Jews were
supporters of the left, anathema to corporate internationalists.
After World War II ended, and the dimensions of the Nazi
Holocaust became clear, it was politically impossible for men like
these to constrict immigration of the survivors to Palestine, and
ultimately impossible for them to stop the formation of the state
of Israel. They tried, as did their successors, but in a
delicious irony, some of the very left-wing Jews they
detested discovered these perfidious schemes with the help
of the USSR's own intelligence agencies (Remember, the Soviets
were the first to get to
Berlin and they seized many Nazi intelligence documents, as well
as many Nazi spies themselves). Also, Soviet intelligence
had long used "fascist Jews" to penetrate the inner circles of the
Third Reich and assist the USSR in its struggles on the Eastern
Front. Many of these Jews were communist double agents, but
others defected to Zionism after the war, and told Israeli
founding fathers like David Ben-Gurion of secret deals between the
British and the Americans, and the Nazis. The Zionists
blackmailed Dulles's successor in Europe, James Jesus Angleton, to
allow Jews to be smuggled into Palestine, and blackmailed the USSR
(by threatening to disclose Soviet penetration of the CIA and MI6)
so that anti-Semite Joseph Stalin actually
supported the partition of Israel. That the nation-building
Zionists played just as dirty as the communists and capitalists,
the authors assert, is the reason that Israeli historians did not
welcome the book's disclosures any more than the other duplicitous
parties.
In the first days of Israeli statehood, survival was not
assured. Arms from communist Czechoslovakia helped them win
their first war with the surrounding Arabs. But the early
Israeli leaders knew that they could not depend upon the USSR for
continued support, so Ben-Gurion politically isolated the
communists from his government and warned Angleton, now USA's
intelligence officer for Israel, that Kim Philby (disgusted by his
father's anti-British, pro-Nazi leanings, so much so that he
himself became a traitor to the UK and a secret convert to
communism, even as he rose in the ranks of British intelligence)
was a Soviet mole inside MI-6. Angleton buried these
warnings, because subsequent investigation of such charges would
have
revealed Angleton's and Dulles's financial collaborations with the
Nazis.
During the Eisenhower era, John Foster Dulles became Secretary of State and brother Allen was appointed director of the CIA. Vice-President Richard Nixon encouraged the immigration to America of European ethnics, Eastern European ex-fascists, who were intended to counterbalance the consistently Democratic-voting American Jews. Allen Dulles betrayed both Britain and Israel in his push to secure American access to Saudi oil deposits through companies like Aramco. In fact, a revolving door between the intelligence community and the oil companies that allowed ex-spooks to become oil executives, dictated American Middle East policy, and contributed to Nixon's razor-thin loss to JFK in 1960. In 1967, while outwardly supporting Israel in its Six Day War against the united Arab armies, both the USA and the UK shared Israeli defense plans with Arab oil producers. This is why the Israelis knocked out the American surveillance ship the USS Liberty, though at the time all sides agreed it was an accident.
Similarly, the official history of the Yom Kippur War of 1973 credits the intervention of an American Jew, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, with saving Israel by warning off the USSR and airlifting arms to Israel. Loftus and Aarons provide a different take on this. In their view (or that of many intelligence officers whom they interviewed), Kissinger was a military incompetent and created a climate for war by sabotaging the Sadat/Rogers peace negotiations because he could not claim credit for these. Kissinger dithered with intelligence, mobilization, and re-supply, and Israel would have been in serious danger without the intervention of White House chief-of-staff (and ex-military man) Alexander Haig. Kissinger scapegoated CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton for these blunders, forcing Angleton's retirement.
When Reagan was elected, a parallel to the Eisenhower years
re-emerges. Vice-President Bush organized shadow
intelligence operations out of his offices, the best established
of these being the Iran/Contra arms deal. Bush dispatched
CIA man Bill Buckely to Lebanon in a scheme to kidnap Arab
terrorists. Instead, Buckley himself was seized and held
hostage. Bush
authorized a secret arms shipment to Iran, hoping Iranian pressure
on terrorist groups it supported would get Buckley back.
This shipment was unwittingly intercepted by Israel (with the help
of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard), who thought the shipment was
destined for the PLO. Bush was in a tight position, and
subsequently hoodwinked Israeli intelligence to assist in this
scheme a year later in 1985, and then deflected blame on them so
he could preserve his political chances to become president.
Just one more modern example where ill-advised and venal secret
schemes make a mockery of the official history. Bush's
intermeddling continued with secret arms sales to Iraq, then a
punishing Gulf War against Iraq when Iraq became a bigger
threat than its rival Iran.
While the focus of this book is the secret war against the Jews,
it raises larger questions about how clandestine intelligence
operations have distorted our appreciation of history and made it
nearly impossible for the average citizen to follow rationally his
country's foreign policy initiatives. For this reviewer, it
has placed the events of 9/11, the war on Afghanistan and the
impending war on Iraq, in a larger, more disturbing perspective
and suggests rather sad answers to seemingly logical questions
like: "Why didn't America retaliate against Saudi Arabia (15 of
the 19 suicide hijackers in the 9/11 attacks were Saudis) after
9/11?" and "What kind of secret game is George W. Bush and his
advisors playing with their post-9/11 saber-rattling?"
I should add one final caveat. My summary of eighty years'
history is cursory at best, and omits much connective tissue and
many fascinating ancillary stories. It also leaves out the
massive documentation provided by the authors. The serious
reader is cordially invited to dive in and digest the entire
detailed story, and judge its accuracy for himself.
Dialogue on favorite books with Deane Rink before and during his latest trek to Antarctica, with a note from Bill Ransom and a digression about Frank Herbert (a.k.a Bookbabble 101) -- a very long and rapidly growing document:
Book reviews by Richard Seltzer |
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