Israeli Assassinations and American Presidents

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MosadThere is evidence that in 1991 an Israeli undercover team planned to assassinate a U.S. president. The intended victim was George Herbert Walker Bush.

The first person to write of the plot was a former 11-term Republican congressman from Illinois, Paul Findley. In a 1992 article in the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs, Findley described the alleged scheme and how it was revealed.

Findley wrote that the U.S. Secret Service had received a warning that elements of Israel’s spy agency might target Bush when he went to Madrid for the opening day of the peace conference to be held that year.

According to Findley, a former Mossad agent named Victor Ostrovsky, who had written a book exposing Israel’s spy agency, told a group of Canadian parliamentarians that he had received secret intelligence suggesting that the “the Mossad’s hatred of Bush — and support for Vice President Dan Quayle — might lead to an attempt on the president’s life.”

Israel considered Quayle much closer to Israel than Bush. Bush had particularly angered Israel by attempting to pressure Israel into ending its illegal settlement expansion on confiscated Palestinian land by withholding loan guarantees until Israel ended this practice.

Ostrovsky wrote that the Israelis planned a “false flag” operation, in which they would pin the assassination on Palestinians. They kidnapped three Palestinian militants from Beirut who were to be the scapegoats, took them to Israel’s Negev desert, and held them incommunicado.

“Meanwhile,” Killgore writes, “Mossad-generated threats on the president’s life, seemingly from Palestinians, were leaked. These were designed to throw suspicion on the organization of rogue Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Names and descriptions of the three terrorists were leaked to Spanish police so that, if the plot was successful, blame would automatically fall on them.”

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