ABSTRACT
The ceremony inaugurating a newly-planted forest in the Jerusalem hills named after one of the heads of the CIA, James Angleton, which took place in November 1987, eight months after his death, was an extraordinary event in the annals of US-Israeli relations. This ceremony lifted a tiny corner of the veil of secrecy that shrouded Israel’s relationship with the CIA in the past, a relationship that was not a very well-kept secret, but which official Israel has been at pains, to this day, to keep as vague as possible. Thus it was that the Israeli press - perhaps for the first time without the cover of quoting ‘foreign sources’ - publicized the fact that American super-spy Jim Angleton was one of the first people to forge the special relations between the secret services of Israel and the United States. The Israelis who participated in the ceremony revealed to local journalists facts that had already been published in many books in America and elsewhere, but not in Israel, namely that in the beginning of the 1950s, when America was afraid that the USSR was exploiting the mass emigration of Jews from eastern Europe in order to plant secret agents in Israel, Angleton met with Teddy Kollek and through him, established deep personal friendships with the heads of the Israeli secret services, in order to try to head off this potential hazard.
