im Braver of Newton, Massachusetts, is researching an idea for a project about espionage and Israel. He wanted to pick my brain. Jim is a nice guy and was particularly enthusiastic about introducing me to one of his Israeli friends. He said his name was “Dovie.” Could I schedule a video conference with him? Sure, I am always glad to help aspiring writers. I asked him to tell me who “Dovie” was.
“Dovie is short for Dov Shiloah. His father was Reuven Shiloah.” Then the light bulb went on. Dov’s father not only founded the Mossad, but he was also a key player in obtaining the extra votes in the United Nations that led to the creation of the State of Israel. He did all that and a lot more.
Jim explained that Dov wanted to talk to me about his father, who had died at the age of 49, when he was only 18 years old. When the video call started, Dov said to me, “I think you may know more about my dad than I do.” How do you deny an 80-year-old man the truth about his father? We began to talk.
Back in 2008, I had written a historical novel about Reuven Shiloah with my Canadian friend and co-author Brendan Howley. Our book, The Witness Tree, was fiction based on fact, but putting it out as a novel made it considerably easier for me to circumnavigate the censors at CIA.
Despite five-star reviews, the only copies ever published were by Random House Canada and are difficult to find in print. Apparently, The Witness Tree is simply too sensitive ever to be published in America, even as fiction. It exposes the families of two CIA directors as money launderers for the Nazis. Worse, The Witness Tree tells the truth about how Reuven Shiloah used his knowledge of those secret Nazi connections to blackmail Nelson Rockefeller into creating the State of Israel.
Dov Shiloah asked how he could corroborate this. There are no Israeli government files about his father’s role in the UN partition.
“Yes, there are,” I told him. “I was visited by an Israeli scholar in 1983 who confirmed everything I had read in the US intelligence files. He clearly knew all about the blackmailing of Nelson Rockefeller. In fact, I think he was one of the Zionist leaders who visited Rockefeller.”
“Who was he?”
“Dov, I will be 71 next week. I don’t remember his name.”
Dov chuckled and remarked that I was still a child; he will be turning 80 this year.
“What else do you remember about the Israeli scholar?” he wanted to know. “When did you meet him?”
It was a year after I became “famous.” In 1982, I had been the subject of a double segment on the 60 Minutes news show. It won the Emmy Award for outstanding investigative journalism. As a former federal prosecutor at the Justice Department, I exposed Nazi war criminals who had been hired by some US and NATO intelligence agencies. For a few months I was a two-bit celebrity. Then it was all forgotten.
The next year, I worked at a law firm in Brockton, Massachusetts. I received a phone call inviting me to have lunch with an important Israeli scholar. Someone from the Israeli Consulate would drive him down from Boston and accompany him. We met at a restaurant in Brockton. He was a charming older man, bald spot on top, white hair on the sides, and sharp as a tack. We got along well, and then he came to the purpose of his visit. What did I know about the UN vote on the partition of Palestine?
Siblings and Saboteurs
As readers of my column know, before World War II, Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles set up a series of front companies to disguise the fact that their client, Nelson Rockefeller, had invested heavily in the Third Reich industrial complex and was supplying Hitler with oil. Prescott Bush, father of future president George Herbert Walker Bush, did as he was told and agreed to become the American fall guy, sitting on the boards of half a dozen Nazi front companies as a placeholder for Rockefeller.
Prescott Bush had nothing to fear. The Dulles brothers were the best lawyers in the world at hiding illegal investments, or so they thought. You see, their sister, Eleanor Dulles, knew all her brothers’ dirty secrets.
Eleanor was the “family scandal.” She had married a Jewish professor. Having a Jew in the Dulles family created a bad image for their German clients. Eleanor always blamed her brothers for driving her Jewish husband to commit suicide. So she started making copies of the records concerning her brothers’ front companies for Nazi money laundering, including some of the Nazi codes. According to my sources, she gave them all to a man named Reuven Shiloah.
