James Jesus Angleton ran counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years. He personally controlled the Agency’s relationship with Israeli intelligence, handling the Israel account from his own office, in his own safe, bypassing the normal chain of command. He was also the CIA officer who personally tracked Lee Harvey Oswald’s Soviet contacts before the Kennedy assassination, the man whose office held the Oswald file, and the official who later served as the CIA’s primary liaison to the Warren Commission. After his death, Israel built two memorials to him in Jerusalem.
Teddy Kollek was David Ben-Gurion’s chief of staff in the 1950s, the operational head of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, and the founding architect of Israel’s intelligence relationship with the United States. He later spent twenty-eight years as mayor of Jerusalem.
The friendship between these two men has been described in published accounts for decades. What has not been published, as far as I can determine, is the primary documentation of it.
I went looking in the Israel State Archives. In a slim folder labeled Angleton, James, file ג-2838/146, are five letters Kollek sent to Angleton’s home in Arlington, Virginia between December 1955 and April 1958. Christmas gifts. Olive wood sent three weeks after Suez, while the United States was diplomatically punishing Israel. A reference to an aqualung Angleton “obtained” for Kollek that ended up with the Israeli combat commander who drove to Sharm el-Sheikh during the 1956 Sinai Campaign. Fishing tackle Angleton left behind at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, which, Kollek noted, “Reuven’s driver would know where” to find. Reuven Shiloah was the founder of the Mossad.
These letters do not appear in Jefferson Morley’s The Ghost (2017), the most thoroughly researched Angleton biography in print, or in any other major English-language work on Angleton I have been able to check. The American documentary record on Angleton’s Israel relationship is mostly silence- his personal papers were destroyed or removed, and the CIA’s internal twelve-volume history of his tenure remains classified in full. What survives in the Israeli archive is this folder.
Here is what is in it:
