>https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/12/08/the-silence-around-israels-role-in-the-jfk-documents-whats-being-protected/
The Silence Around Israel’s Role in the JFK Documents: What’s Being Protected?
December 8, 2025 By Global Affairs 1 Comment
For more than six decades, the official story of John F. Kennedy’s murder has been defined as much by what the government buried as by what it reluctantly disclosed. Yet among the thousands of newly declassified records, one thread stands out for the extraordinary lengths taken to obscure it: the quiet, complicated overlap between CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton’s secret Israeli channels and the agency’s surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald in the years before the assassination.
This is the part of the record that successive investigations tiptoed around, redacted into oblivion, or ignored altogether. Why? Why were references to Israel, its operatives, its cities, even its name, blacked out of Church Committee transcripts and presidential commission files for generations? Why did the government cloak the identities of Angleton’s Israeli contacts with such obsessive care that even today, many pages remain hollowed out by heavy black ink?
The newly opened files sharpen the puzzle. They reveal that Angleton, already notorious for his shadow-world methods, ran a covert Israeli liaison network parallel to official CIA chains of command, precisely at the time he controlled the sensitive 201 surveillance file on Lee Harvey Oswald. That file, kept under tight compartmentalisation, was fed in part by Reuben Efron, the Counterintelligence Staff officer assigned to monitor Oswald’s correspondence. Efron’s own background, his Zionist affiliations, his time in Israel, and his curious, unacknowledged presence at Marina Oswald’s Warren Commission questioning raise further questions about why this corner of the story remained sealed off for so long.
All of this unfolded in a charged political moment. Kennedy, increasingly wary of Israel’s nuclear ambitions at Dimona, was pressing for intrusive inspections and pushing back against a lobby whose influence he believed was growing too fast. And yet, inside his own intelligence services, the man overseeing the Oswald file was simultaneously conducting clandestine intelligence exchanges, assassination-related communications, and off-the-books operations with Israel, relationships he concealed from Congress and perhaps from parts of the CIA itself.
These details do not resolve the mystery of who killed JFK. However, they do illuminate a different mystery, one that speaks to institutional instinct, political pressure, and the fear of explosive geopolitical fallout: Why did the U.S. government decide that the American people should never be privy to this side of the story?
Why was the connection scrubbed so thoroughly that even the existence of redactions became a clue in itself?
After 60 years, the new disclosures force the question back into public view. If these intersections were benign, why hide them so aggressively? And if they were not, what does the pattern of secrecy tell us about how the official narrative was crafted, and who it was designed to protect?