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JFK documents reveal assassin’s CIA monitor was Reuben Efron, a Jewish spy who loved Midrash
(JTA) — For decades, armchair analysts scrutinizing the mysteries of the President John F. Kennedy assassination have fixated on who, exactly, opened his future assassin’s mail while he was under CIA surveillance.
As the conspiracy theory went, that person would have understood Lee Harvey Oswald’s relationship with the Soviet Union and thus could unlock new information about a possible Communist plot against Kennedy — or a U.S. government plot to obscure his true killer.
Last month, a new document dump in the ongoing declassification of Kennedy documents revealed the identity of the CIA screener: one Reuben Efron, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army and a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania.
The New York Times was the first to report Efron’s identity. “And that means — what, exactly?” the newspaper asked in its report. “A tantalizing clue to unraveling a complicated conspiracy that the government has sought to cover up for decades? Additional proof that the C.I.A. knew more about Oswald than initially acknowledged? Or a minor detail withheld all this time because of bureaucratic imperatives irrelevant to the question of whether Oswald was the lone gunman on the fateful day?”
A deep dive into Efron’s Jewish identity does not answer those questions. But it does reveal that Efron not only worked as a spy but had a deep knowledge of the spies in Jewish tradition.
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency has confirmed that Efron spent time living in Israel before dying on Nov. 22, 1993 — 30 years to the day after Kennedy’s assassination. While there, he contributed five articles in the 1970s to the Jewish Bible Quarterly, a World Zionist Organization-affiliated publication based in Jerusalem, that channeled his expertise in espionage.
“Rahab and her premises were under surveillance of a counterintelligence team of the king of Jericho who soon established that the two men visiting Rahab were actually Israelite spies,” he writes in one of the essays, referring to a Jericho courtesan who, according to the Book of Joshua, assisted the Israelites in preparing to rout the Canaanites. Efron called Rahab “a prototype of a Mata Hari,” the World War I-era exotic dancer-turned-spy.
In one of the essays, Efron directly addresses the problem of spies incorrectly assessing their surveillance target — a critique that has been leveled about his read of Oswald. About the 10 spies who, in the Book of Numbers, returned to the Israelites unsettled by their venture into Canaan, he writes, “The militarily inexperienced scouts apparently had been unduly impressed with the prowess of the enemy and, as is frequent among Easterners, exaggerated his capabilities.”
The essays, three of which appeared in a series called “Military Intelligence in the Bible,” do little to illuminate either the Kennedy assassination or the inner life of the man who read Oswald’s mail. But they do shed light on how he spent his retirement.
Efron was born Ruvelis Effronas in Simnas, Lithuania, on April 12, 1911, and attended a Jewish high school there (a “Hebrew gymnasium,” in his words), followed by Vytautas Magnus University in what is now Kaunas. He practiced law for five years in that city — a thriving hub of Lithuanian Jewish life that would become the site of the country’s largest ghetto under the Nazis — before emigrating, as his brother had done previously.
Efron immigrated to the United States in December 1939, arriving in Miami via Cuba. U.S. immigration documents list his profession as a salesman. According to a family history compiled by a relative, the following fall he enrolled at the Atlanta Law School, a night school that closed in the 1990s. He worked at a clothing store in downtown Atlanta until graduating in 1943.
He spoke Russian, Lithuanian, Hebrew, Yiddish and German and enlisted in the Air Force during World War II as an interpreter, according to a death notice published in the Miami Herald. After the war, the death notice said, he played a role in peace negotiations and in talks related to the resettlement of war refugees — among them, perhaps, members of his own family, but not his mother, who according to the published genealogy was murdered in the Holocaust.
For decades, Efron worked for the U.S. government, playing roles that are only now coming to light as secret government documents are made available to the public. His family history says only: “Reuben worked for the Pentagon.”
In addition to his now-revealed role reading Oswald’s mail, Efron pops up in another declassified document dealing with an area of amateur sleuthing that has garnered a following as intense, if not more so, than the Kennedy assassination.
In October 1955, Efron was traveling by train in the Soviet Union with U.S. Sen. Richard Russell, a Georgia Democrat, and a senior U.S. army official. The three men reported seeing two “circular and unconventional aircraft resembling flying discs or flying saucers … taking off almost vertically one minute apart.”
“After sighting, Soviet train men became excited and lowered curtains and refused permission to look out windows,” says the 1955 report, declassified in 2004. “U.S. observers firmly believe these unconventional aircraft are flying saucer or disc aircraft.”
In retirement, Efron apparently enjoyed the freedom to opine. Living in Washington, D.C., in 1971, he wrote to the New York Times urging the Nixon administration to reject proposals of a joint U.S.-Soviet force to police Egypt-Israel peace, saying it would ”communize the whole area.”
It’s not clear if he ever officially immigrated to Israel using its Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to Jews who move to the country. But the obituary in the Miami Herald said that Efron “commuted between Israel and the United States for many years, during which he studied Israeli law and was admitted to the Israeli bar.” The obituary said Efron was inspired by his mother’s work in Lithuania with Jews who were immigrating to Palestine.
In 1982, Efron lived on Keren Hayesod street in Jerusalem bordering the neighborhood of Rehavia, genealogical records show. Rehavia, now a neighborhood bursting with ostentatious wealth, much of it American, was then a leafy and somewhat decayed enclave of aging “yekkes,” or German Jews, many of them from the university-educated class that had fled the Nazis, arriving in Palestine in the 1930s.
The address would have been a pleasant 10-minute walk from the offices of the Jewish Bible Quarterly.
A staffer at the quarterly checked with surviving retired staff who worked during the late 1970s; no one could recall working with Efron. But his contributions to the quarterly are mostly preserved: JTA was able to locate three of the five essays.
In them, Efron comes across as an enthusiast of the ancients with a fundamentalist’s belief in the Bible as relaying an accurate historical narrative.
“The Bible relates truthfully David’s charismatic personality, physical charm, as well as frailties and ethical shortcomings,” Efron writes, reviewing the clandestine means David and Jonathan employed in the Book of Samuel to determine whether Jonathan’s father, Saul, planned to assassinate David.
As befits someone writing for a World Zionist Organization publication, Efron draws parallels between ancient and modern Israel, and finds much to praise in both national expressions.
“It should be noted that in ancient as well as in recent times the people of Israel adhered to their promises and covenants with their neighbors,” he writes in describing Joshua’s sticking to his pledge to protect the Gibeonites despite their deception, the spycraft that is the article’s focus.
Efron deploys accounts of Israel’s modern spycraft to establish a continuum between biblical times and the 20th century.
“A recent example of such a secret encounter in Israel’s international relations is the now well publicized, but at that time very guarded meeting between the former Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan, with the then Egyptian Deputy Prime Minister, Muhammed Hassan al-Tohami, in September 1977, in Morocco, which laid the groundwork for Egyptian President Sadat’s historic visit to Jerusalem,” he writes in the article about David and Jonathan.
Details about Efron’s identity and background exercised the community of JFK assassination theorists to a much lesser degree than the fact that a senior CIA official was tracking Oswald — and the tantalizing prospect that there was more to learn.
“The memo shows that high-level CIA officers were interested in the smallest details of Oswald’s life 17 months before Kennedy was killed,” Jefferson Morley, an author of multiple books about the CIA, and about Kennedy, said on his blog, JFK Facts, after the revelation. “If Oswald was the ‘lone gunman,’ as a substantial minority of Americans believe, the clandestine service had much more access to his personal information than most know.”
Efron had a wife, Edna, a brother, Irving, and no children. Said the death notice in the Miami Herald: “He was a most diligent and modest person.”
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Iran Unveils New Underground Missile Base Amid Rising Tensions With US, Israel
Iran unveils new underground missile base amid rising tensions with US and Israel. Photo: Screenshot
Iran has revealed a new underground missile base, which officials claim symbolizes Tehran’s growing “Iron Fist,” equipped with thousands of precision-strike missiles to bolster its military power amid rising tensions with the United States and Israel.
The Aerospace Division of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a state military force and internationally designated terrorist organization, revealed the underground base, which Iranian media described as a “missile megacity,” on Tuesday.
This is the third facility of its kind to be revealed in under a month, highlighting the expansion of Iran’s military capabilities — or at least its attempts to put on a brave face for the world.
According to Janatan Sayeh, a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, the regime’s recent missile displays and military drills serve a dual purpose: bolstering domestic support through propaganda while reinforcing its psychological warfare against the US and Israel.
“While Iran inflates its military capabilities, its ballistic missile program remains the primary threat,” Sayeh told The Algemeiner.
However, he also explained that “Iran’s air and naval forces lag significantly behind their American and Israeli counterparts,” posing little challenge to the superior firepower of the US Navy or the Israeli fleet.
WATCH: Iran’s IRGC unveils what it claims is its largest ‘underground missile city,’ housing thousands of precision-guided missiles. pic.twitter.com/RzZLxJzJgp
— Ariel Oseran أريئل أوسيران (@ariel_oseran) March 25, 2025
According to Iranian state media, some of Tehran’s newly unveiled missiles are capable of defeating the United States’ THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system, with some of them designed to evade the system.
“Iran’s Iron Fist is far stronger [today] than before,” Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, Major General Mohammad Bagheri, said in a speech.
“All the [defensive] dimensions that are required for generating a [military] capability that is ten times [stronger than] the one deployed during Operation True Promise II, have been created,” the commander said during the unveiling, referring to the regime’s name for its ballistic-missile attack against Israel in October.
Although the Islamic Republic has the largest missile arsenal in the Middle East, Sayeh explained that its limitations became evident during the October missile barrage targeting the Jewish state.
“Much like its naval swarm tactics, the regime’s missile strategy hinges on overwhelming adversaries — whether the US Navy or Israel’s David’s Sling and Arrow defense systems,” Sayeh told The Algemeiner.
Last April, Iran launched what was then an unprecedented direct attack on Israeli soil. In that attack, Iran fired some 300 missiles and drones at Israel, nearly all of which were downed by the Jewish state and its allies.
The failed assault, dubbed by Tehran as “Operation True Promise,” was in retaliation for an alleged Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Syria’s capital of Damascus that killed seven IRGC members, including two senior commanders.
At the time, Iranian officials said the operation showcased “Iran’s ability to strike Israeli military and intelligence targets with surgical accuracy,” adding that they had only deployed a fraction of their firepower.
Iran’s second direct attack on Israel in October came after Israeli forces killed several top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, both terrorist proxies of the Iranian regime, including the assassination of Hamas’s political chief in Tehran.
According to Sayeh, Tehran views sheer numbers as a way to compensate for its technological shortcomings.
“If Iran were to meaningfully intensify its ballistic missile attacks in the future, it could inflict significant damage with a sufficient volume of projectiles,” Sayeh told The Algemeiner.
“Recognizing this threat, Israel has already targeted missile stockpiles and is likely to do so again should a new round of direct military confrontation arise between the two countries.”
Israel responded in late October to Iran’s second attack with a sophisticated three-wave strike that targeted Iranian missile production sites and air defenses, leaving Tehran vulnerable and crippling its key defensive capabilities.
According to Israeli defense sources, the operation also significantly hindered Iran’s missile systems and production capacity, reducing its ability to launch large-scale attacks. The Islamist regime’s ballistic missile program will need at least a year to recover from the strikes, experts said after the strikes.
Against a backdrop of escalating regional tensions, the US gave Tehran a two-month ultimatum earlier this month to reach a nuclear agreement, warning of severe consequences if it refuses.
During the unveiling of the new underground missile base this week, Iran’s military chief said that the Islamic Republic was advancing its defensive capabilities at a much faster rate than its enemies’ recovery.
“The enemy will definitely fall behind in this balance of power,” Bagheri said during his speech.
Last week, the IRGC deployed advanced missile systems on the islands of Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb, and Abu Musa, reinforcing its military presence in the Persian Gulf. These islands are located along a critical maritime route for global energy transit, with more than one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passing through the strategic corridor.
According to Iranian state media, these islands are now equipped with “dozens of missile defense and air defense systems.” Additionally, the IRGC’s fast-attack and assault vessels patrolling the Persian Gulf are “armed with new cruise missiles and ready for operations” capable of targeting naval assets.
In an effort to counter Tehran’s expanding military position, Washington has reinforced its naval presence in the region by dispatching additional amphibious assault ships and support vessels to mitigate the risk of Iranian threats to the free flow of commerce through the Strait of Hormuz.
The post Iran Unveils New Underground Missile Base Amid Rising Tensions With US, Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Article Suggests Poor Gazans Might Throw Out Food Aid During Ramadan Because of ‘Large Number’ of It
Trucks carrying aid move, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hussam Al-Masri
Hamas mouthpiece Felesteen recently featured an article about how Gazans should fulfill the obligation of zakat (charity), during this year’s Ramadan holiday.
In the article, questions were asked to the Mufti of Khan Younis, Sheikh Muhammad Ihsan Ashour.
There are questions about whether one may transfer money to the recipient’s bank account where they would have to pay high fees to withdraw it, or whether a widow who receives vouchers to get goods for her children can use them to help her mother.
This one opinion from Ashour is noteworthy (translation courtesy of Google Translate and Grok AI translation):
Sheikh Ashour pointed out that it is not permissible for the zakat payer to purchase food parcels for the poor from his zakat money, lest the poor person be forced to sell the food parcels for a low price or throw them out into the streets due to their large number among the people, as we saw previously.
He seems to be saying that there has been so much food aid in Gaza that poor people didn’t know what to do with it all, so they either threw the aid into the streets or they sold them for next to no money since no one needed it. The article specifically references the 2025 Ramadan holiday, though there is no explicit mention of the time period when food was thrown out.
Still, this is the advice being given in 2025.
A famine zone would not have this problem — which raises serious questions about how many in the media could continue to claim that a famine is even close to happening.
The post Article Suggests Poor Gazans Might Throw Out Food Aid During Ramadan Because of ‘Large Number’ of It first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Rashida Tlaib Introduces Anti-Israel Amendment to Bill Meant to Reduce Foreign Influence on US Universities
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) addresses attendees as she takes part in a protest calling for a ceasefire in Gaza outside the US Capitol, in Washington, DC, US, Oct. 18, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Leah Millis
US Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) has introduced an anti-Israel amendment into the Republican-led DETERRENT Act, which aims to crack down on foreign gifts and contracts at American universities, arguing that the Jewish state’s relationships with US institutions of higher education should be closely monitored.
While speaking on the House floor on Tuesday, Tlaib stated that Israel should be added to the “countries of concern” influencing American universities. Tlaib, one of the most outspoken anti-Israel members of Congress, claimed that the Republican Party has advanced the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act in order to “scapegoat” the issues plaguing US higher education on countries such as Iran, Qatar, and China.
The DETERRENT ACT, if passed, would amend the Higher Education Act of 1965 to limit contracts with specific foreign entities and countries adversarial to the United States, mandate faculty and staff reveal gifts and contracts from foreign actors, and require that certain foreign investments within endowments be disclosed.
“We know that President Trump is the biggest threat to our education system in America right now, not someone in North Korea or China, so please give me a break,” Tlaib said in her remarks, adding that she tacked on an amendment to ensure the bill includes “countries whose leaders have active arrest warrants issued against them by the International Criminal Court [ICC]” and “countries actively on trial with the International Court of Justice [ICJ] for violating the Genocide Convention and the Geneva Conventions.”
The ICC issued arrest warrants last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for alleged war crimes in Gaza. Meanwhile, South Africa has been pursuing a case at the ICJ accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
US and Israeli leaders have lambasted both the ICC arrest warrants and ICJ case as baseless, counterproductive, and indicative of a deeply entrenched anti-Israel bias at both institutions.
During her speech, Tlaib pointed to her colleagues’ support for Israel as supposed evidence of their ineffectiveness in “holding countries with human rights abuses accountable” and their unwillingness to “uphold international law.” The firebrand progressive then accused her colleagues of engaging in aggressive action to protect the “Israeli government apartheid regime” by supporting the detainment and arrest of non-citizen college students who protest Israel.
In the 17 months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, Tlaib has levied a series of withering criticisms toward the Jewish state. Tlaib, the only Palestinian American woman elected to the US Congress, has repeatedly accused Israel of committing “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza as well as causing a famine, despite the Israeli military’s efforts during the war to mitigate civilian casualties and allow aid to enter the enclave.
“This is not about transparency, as it is claimed. It’s truly about destroying freedom of speech,” Tlaib asserted.
The DETERRENT Act was advanced due to concerns over American universities being targeted by foreign adversaries, seeking to use their financial influence to censor free speech and distribute anti-Western propaganda. Following the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, the topic became a key issue in Washington as campuses became a hotbed of anti-Zionist and anti-American protests.
Critics have also raised alarms over lavish financial gifts and investments given to American universities by countries with close ties to terrorism such as Qatar, which hosts several high-ranking Hamas leaders who often live in luxury outside of the Gaza Strip.
Some observers argue that Qatar severely curtails academic freedom at American schools. Prestigious universities such as Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, and Northwestern operate campuses in the Middle Eastern country. Texas A&M announced plans to shutter its Qatar campus in February 2024.
The legislation also comes as the Trump administration has moved to detain and deport non-citizens accused of supporting internationally recognized terrorist groups. Specifically, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian legal resident from Syria who completed post-graduate studies at Columbia in December who was apprehended by federal authorities for supporting Hamas, has sparked outrage among liberal lawmakers.
Tlaib decried Khalil’s arrest and penned a letter to Homeland Security Kristi Noem, demanding that Khalil be “freed from DHS custody immediately.” The missive also claimed that the arrest of Khalil represents another example of the Trump administration’s purported “anti-Palestinian racism” and accused the White House of trying to dismantle the “Palestine solidarity movement in this country.”
The post Rashida Tlaib Introduces Anti-Israel Amendment to Bill Meant to Reduce Foreign Influence on US Universities first appeared on Algemeiner.com.