An Antisemitic History Lies Buried at CIA
How the deathbed confession of a Middle East analyst ripped the cover off ugly chapters in the agency's history with Jews and Israel
MARTHA NEFF KESSLER WAS DYING OF LUNG CANCER, and she had a secret to tell.
Kessler’s life was full of secrets. She spent nearly 40 years at the CIA and was an expert on the Middle East. With her daughter at her bedside, she needed to say something.
“I told Dad I didn’t want to raise you Jewish,” Kessler said to her daughter a few weeks before her death on Dec. 4 last year. “He wanted to, but I was afraid of what might happen to you if you identified that way.” She begged her daughter not to raise her children as Jews. “It’s too dangerous of a religion,” Kessler said. “I don’t want that target on their backs.”
Kessler’s daughter was stunned. Justine El-Khazen (she took the name of a Lebanese Catholic immigrant she married in 2001) had never suspected that her mother had any anxiety about her father’s religion or that her secular upbringing had been chosen for her. The question was, why was her mother so anxious about it? Did it have something to do with her mother’s job at the CIA? Her effort to answer that question became the subject of a moving and thought-provoking article in Tablet, a Jewish magazine about world events, that explored the pro-Arab bias of her mother’s aging colleagues and stirred up an age-old debate about antisemitism at the CIA.
In Kessler’s final weeks, she began to despair as TV news broadcast scenes of angry protests against Israel and Jews on U.S. college campuses. As a Middle East expert, she was not surprised by the explosion of anti-Israel hatred and pro-Hamas sentiment across the region, but the appearance of it here left her bereft. The Israeli military’s pounding of Gaza had unshackled rank antisemitism lurking beneath the surface of American life. “She was totally beside herself,” her daughter says.
She wasn’t alone. Hamas’ savage Oct. 7 attack against Israel and the war in Gaza has inflamed passions at the CIA, just as it has in the rest of American society, news reports and our own interviews have found. The agency had to admonish employees to keep their politics to themselves after The Financial Times reported that a senior CIA analyst changed her Facebook cover photo on Oct. 21 to an image of a man waving a Palestinian flag.
The analyst’s gesture was loaded with meaning at the CIA. In its early days, the spy agency was squarely in the pro-Arab camp, even as the United States quickly recognized Israeli statehood in 1948 and, over the decades, cemented the alliance.
Federal workforces tend to reflect society at large, and it must be said that today’s CIA is a different place than it was in Kessler’s day. Jews can spend entire careers at the CIA without encountering antisemitism. Its deputy director, David Cohen, is Jewish, as are others in senior management. Mark Zaid, an attorney who often represents current and former CIA officers, said he disagrees with some of his clients who think that today’s CIA, as an institution, is antisemitic. “There are tons of Jews everywhere within the CIA at all different levels,” said Zaid, who is Jewish. “I just don’t see it as a systemic problem. It would be an isolated problem.”
Like all federal agencies, the CIA says it doesn’t track the religion of its employees. “CIA is committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful environment that has no tolerance for prejudice of any kind, including antisemitism or Islamophobia,” a CIA spokesperson told SpyTalk. “We always strive to learn from our history.”
That view was echoed by several people who spoke to SpyTalk both off and on the record, including Robert Gorelick, a Jew who joined the agency in 1981 and retired in 2008 as a division chief. “I never encountered any antisemitism or any reflection of that,” says Gorelick, who also married an Israeli. “I never felt it.”
Others, like former CIA case officer Doug London, saw a different side of the agency in his 35-year career. In his unsparing and revealing 2021 memoir The Recruiter, London wrote that many of his colleagues and superiors in the 1980s “tended to hold anti-Semitic*, or at least negative perceptions, of American Jews.”* London’s first station chief was an “anti-Semitic alcoholic” who he says called him “my Jew” and snarled at him, “Fucking stubborn Jews.”
Lindsay Moran, a Jewish former case officer who left the agency in 2003, says she felt the chill of antisemitism at the CIA, too. Moran’s colleagues were perhaps more unguarded with her than they otherwise would have been because her name suggested she was Irish Catholic. “There was a low-key, anti-Jewish vibe that you could just feel,” says Moran, whose specialty was the Balkans.
Mostly, it bubbled beneath the surface. One exception was Moran’s encounter in the bowels of CIA headquarters with an older, somewhat disheveled man who manifested his disdain for employees like her who were known to be planning to leave and write books. He looked like he hadn’t left his windowless office, piled high with papers, in decades.
“Are you perchance Jewish?” he asked, apropos of nothing.
“I am,” Moran replied.
“There are not a lot of Jews at the agency, are there?” the aging curmudgeon opined, touching his fingers together “like some evil character in a Bond movie,” Moran told SpyTalk.
“I’ve never really thought about it,” she replied, “but I guess there aren’t.”
The man looked at Moran and pronounced, “The world of espionage is distasteful to Jews.”
The exchange was a throwback to the blue-blooded elitism and Ivy League snobbery of the CIA’s early years. Former Yale history professor Sherman Kent is often called the father of modern intelligence analysis at the CIA, and an agency training school in Reston, Virginia, bears his name. Yet, Kent’s private papers are filled with disdain toward Jews, women, and the mentally ill. Writing in the 1920s, decades before the CIA came into being, Kent cursed the “little Jew boys” who worked at the Yale Law Library. He rented an apartment from a “Sheeney” (a slur for Jews) and described a commuter train car as a “little Jerusalem.” Writing in the Yale Historical Review in 2014, Antonia Woodford observed that Kent saw Jews as “incompetent and undesirable, though they remained a source of frustration rather than an object of hatred.”
WASP Dominance
Jews were not welcome in the early CIA, which Ivy League WASPs dominated. “Throughout the 1950s and for some time beyond, the agency was less than a welcoming place for Jews and racial minorities,” Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, a notorious CIA chemist and chief of technical services, told a reporter two years before he died in 1999. “Those who were actually ever hired or involved in operations learned rather quickly to keep their heads down when certain matters were discussed.”
Born in the Bronx to Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Gottlieb grew up in a different world than the CIA aristocrats who hired him for the dirtiest of dirty jobs. Gottlieb ran MK-ULTRA, the agency’s mind control program. His team tested LSD on Americans, often without their knowledge or consent. (One unwitting subject, Frank Olson, leaped to his death; some lost their minds.). Gottlieb also ran brainwashing experiments on prisoners and hospital patients.
“I think one reason he was hired may have been that the WASPs at the top knew that he would be gruesomely torturing and killing people and that this might at some point cause problems,” journalist Stephen Kinzer, author of a Gottlieb biography, Poisoner in Chief, told SpyTalk. “They’d be able to throw him under the bus more easily than they could with one of their own.”
The record shows that the CIA division responsible for the Middle East was firmly biased against Israel from the start and covertly supported the Arab cause. Books and declassified CIA documents released over the past decade chronicle the intrigues and pro-Arab bias of the agency’s Near East and South Asia division (known today as the Near East Mission Center). For nearly a quarter-century, the division covered every country in the Middle East except Israel. For years, it was a toxic environment for Jews.
The first head of covert action at what was then called the Near East and Africa Division was Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt Jr., Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson. The Groton- and Harvard-educated Roosevelt is best known for orchestrating the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected leader and lit the slow fuse that eventually ignited the country’s Islamic Revolution. Less known is the story of Roosevelt’s other brainchild, a CIA front organization that lobbied Americans for the Arab cause. While serving in Cairo with the CIA’s World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, Roosevelt became an opponent of Zionism, the movement to establish a Jewish homeland in what was then British-controlled Palestine. In the interregnum between World War Two and the creation of the CIA, Roosevelt became an outspoken critic of President Truman’s support for a Jewish state.
According to a CIA history declassified in 2014, “antisemitism was not the principal root of this opposition.” (Indeed, Roosevelt was close friends with active anti-Zionist Jews and became godfather to one of their children.) Roosevelt believed that America’s support for Israel could turn the Arabs against the United States, endanger oil supplies, and allow Moscow to gain a foothold in the region. A counterweight was needed to what Roosevelt saw as an aggressive Zionist propaganda campaign that had hoodwinked Congress, the White House, and the press into supporting what he called the region’s newest “so-called” democracy, said history professor Hugh Wilford, who profiled Roosevelt in his 2017 book, America’s Great Game.
At the CIA, Roosevelt's political passion became a covert action, one that pointed at the pro-Arab, anti-Israel direction the Near East division would follow for decades. In 1951, Roosevelt organized American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), an avowedly anti-Zionist group that championed Arab nationalists like Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt. The CIA poured millions into AFME and used its overseas offices for cover purposes, among other things. (Operational details remain classified.) According to the CIA’s official history, AFME was designed to enhance America’s image in the Middle East and fight Communism there. Still, Wilford observed that the group “had a domestic agenda that barely related to the Cold War.”
AFME was a covert CIA organization that sought to alter U.S. Middle East strategy. The group’s leaders and staffers, some hand-picked by Roosevelt, felt a calling to take up the Arab cause. According to Wilford, a young CIA officer on Roosevelt’s staff, Mather Greenleaf Eliot, became an ardent anti-Zionist while working undercover at AFME and even lobbied members of Congress—an egregious violation of the agency’s charter against domestic operations. AFME wrote letters to Congress and used CIA funds to place ads in major newspapers urging America not to take sides in the Middle East—in effect, to abandon Israel. Even Middle East hands in the State Department saw AFME as little more than a “mouthpiece for pro-Arab and anti-Israel sentiments,” but it survived until Ramparts magazine exposed it in 1967 as a CIA front. According to the agency’s official history, President Johnson abandoned AFME “not because it had worked against Israel,” but because it had been implicated in manipulating student groups on American campuses.
With the Near East division hopelessly biased against Israel from the start, the CIA’s relationship with Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, was handled elsewhere. For nearly 25 years, the “Israeli account” was the sole purview of James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s secretive counterintelligence chief. Angleton set up the CIA’s liaison with Israel in 1951 and tightly controlled the Israeli account with a small group of trusted aides. “Everything should be on the grounds of need to know,” Angleton told the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee in a closed session in 1975 that was declassified in 2022. The Israeli account “should not go into the Arab [Near East] division until there was peace in the area.” (For more on this, see Angleton biographer Jefferson Morley’s recent SpyTalk piece, “The CIA and Zionism: A Complex History.”) Strict adherence to this need-to-know policy became problematic during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Former CIA Director William Colby wrote in his memoir that he was “shocked” to learn that the CIA station in Israel could not communicate with stations in neighboring Arab countries.
Like Sherman Kent, Angleton had evinced antisemitism as a Yale undergrad. But the Israelis came to view him as a tremendous asset and “the biggest Zionist of the lot,” as Meir Amit, a Mossad chief in the 1960s, told author Tom Segev. (A small monument in Jerusalem bears Angleton’s name today.) They were unhappy when Colby forced him to retire in December 1974, and the Israeli account fell under the control of the Near East division. Alan Wolfe ran the division, and Wolfe was an admitted anti-Semite. “That’s damn right,” Wolfe told an Israeli diplomat in an anecdote captured in Kai Bird’s The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames. “I‘ve dealt with all those Semites, and none of you are worth a damn.”
The leadership posts in the Near East division were filled by “Arabists,” experts in Arabic language and culture who were seen as overly sympathetic to the Arabs. It’s a perception that has stuck somewhat unfairly in the eyes of today’s Arabists, who say their support of a two-state solution in Israel and Palestine has been in step with every modern presidential administration until Donald Trump’s.
In the 1970s and 1980s, behind the scenes of the historically warm embrace of U.S. and Israeli leaders, the CIA’s Arabists simmered with resentment and hostility towards Israel. Tensions in the Near East division boiled over when Israel went on a campaign of vengeance after 11 Israeli athletes were massacred at the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. Some CIA sources were killed, including Ali Hassan Salameh, Yassir Arafat’s intelligence chief, who was a close friend and contact of Near East division legend Robert Ames. Robert Gorelick told SpyTalk he understood how Israel could rub CIA operations officers the wrong way. “The Israelis believe they are fighting for their survival. Mossad is ruthless. They are going to look at Israel’s survival first,” Gorelick said. “I can imagine that could make some people angry.”
Some Arabists viewed Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, as a rival, even an adversary. Former CIA Director John Brennan, a NESA analyst and an Arabist himself, told Kessler’s daughter that there was a need for “greater evenhandedness towards the region among some in the CIA.” Doug London was less discreet. The workforce in the operations side of the Near East division in the 1980s was “generally anti-Israeli,” he wrote.
Martha Kessler spent most of her career as an analyst in the Near East and South Asia division. (The analysts called the division “NESA;” the operations side referred to it as “NE.”) A tall, striking Midwestern blonde, Kessler ran the Arab-Israeli Division inside NESA for six years, with Brennan as her deputy. Before that, she was an assistant to Robert Ames, who was killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.
When Kessler joined the CIA in 1970, Jews were not welcome in the Near East division, she told her daughter. The perception in the agency was that Jews were suspected of dual loyalty to Israel—an age-old accusation widely viewed as antisemitic. As Kessler explained it, there was also a sense among the largely Christian workforce that every time Jews set foot in a synagogue, they were reminded that Israel was the land promised to them by God. That ticked the box of potential conflicts of interest with a foreign entity, for which the CIA, like all intelligence agencies, was always on the lookout.
Even being married to a Jew may have been enough to raise suspicion. In the mid-1990s, Kessler was the subject of an internal security investigation. One night, her daughter snuck out of the house at two o’clock in the morning and happened upon white men in suits rifling through her family’s trash. Kessler also suspected she was being tested at work in ways that seemed tinged with antisemitism. While walking down an empty corridor at Langley, Kessler came across a large money clip. A wallet turned up near her car. Kessler turned the money and the wallet over to the lost and found.
A few years later, Kessler was passed over for promotion and retired from the CIA. Her daughter told SpyTalk that Kessler was called back after 9/11 to investigate “the politicization of intelligence” at NESA. The CIA declined to comment.
Things weren’t much better on the division’s operational side. Doug London sensed antisemitism was part of the office culture in 1984 when he joined the Near East division as a case officer. He quickly learned he needed to keep the fact that he was an inner-city Jewish kid from the South Bronx in the closet. London wrote that one supervisor at Langley told him in 1984 that being Jewish was a “handicap” in the Near East division.
“Aren’t you required to support Israel?” a division chief for personnel and assignments asked him. “You know, when you go to synagogue, by the rabbi, isn’t it a religious requirement?” London hadn’t been to synagogue since his bar mitzvah.
Women, Blacks, Gays
Of course, Jews were not the only ones who faced discrimination at the CIA. For the first half-century of its existence, the agency denied employment to known gays and lesbians, a policy that the CIA says was rescinded in 1994. The agency acknowledged the following year that it had systematically discriminated against women when it settled a class-action lawsuit brought by several hundred women case officers, bestowed 25 retroactive promotions, and provided nearly $1 million in back pay. A five-year diversity in leadership study from 2015 to 2020 sought to change an agency culture that limited the numbers of women, Blacks, and other historically underrepresented minorities in the senior ranks. Today, the CIA honors the women and minorities who blazed a trail for others to follow. In a documentary posted on the CIA’s YouTube channel in 2016, the agency recounted the struggle of the agency’s gay and lesbian employees to win acceptance in the workplace.
But there has never been a formal acknowledgment that many Jews faced institutional discrimination, too. Even as the CIA has become a more tolerant workplace over the past few decades, it is still wrestling with the ghosts of its antisemitic past. For London, Martha Kessler’s daughter, and other retired Jewish CIA employees and their families who spoke to SpyTalk, the past remains an open wound.
“It’s not an organization that does accountability well,” Doug London tells SpyTalk. “They can’t acknowledge the antisemitism, just like they refused to even reconsider Havana Syndrome findings outside experts are offering, which contradict their own. It has always been a circle-the-wagons mentality, which does it and the workforce no good.”
One former CIA official said the agency’s reckoning with its past was not simple. “Never forget that the CIA is the worst form of federal government bureaucracy except for all the others,” the agency veteran said, asking for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. “When you go through things to atone for past sins, there’s going to be a bureaucratic cookie crumb trail that leads to that.” And only likely if pressure is applied. Lawsuits, orders from the White House, and goading from Congress play a role in how the agency will grapple with its past. “It’s not just all of a sudden the CIA says, ‘We need to atone for past sins.’”
The closest thing to such an admission came in 2008 when former CIA Director George Tenet gave a speech before the Anti-Defamation League. “We had a problem once at CIA,” Tenet said, according to an article on the ADL’s website. “There is no doubt that there was antisemitism at stake. With the help of ADL trainers, we educated an entire bureaucracy and taught people about how their words could be misinterpreted in a manner that was detrimental to the interests of the country.”
It seemed like an effort to acknowledge past wrongs, but Tenet backtracked when questioned about his remarks in a later deposition. “I don’t know if I said those words in that way,” Tenet said in 2010. He could not, therefore, explain what he meant by “antisemitism at stake.”
Tenet hired the ADL in response to allegations raised by Adam Ciralsky, a former CIA attorney who sued the agency in 2000, claiming he was targeted for investigation and fired for suspected dual loyalty to Israel because he is an observant Jew. The CIA said it revoked Ciralsky’s top-secret clearance for his “lack of candor” regarding his relationships in college with two people with possible ties to Israeli intelligence.
Evidence unearthed in the lawsuit, however, showed that the CIA counterintelligence officers who investigated Ciralsky harbored antisemitic prejudices. A CIA polygraph examiner questioning Ciralsky described him to a colleague as “that little Jew bastard!” A memo labeled Ciralsky as a “rich Jewish” employee with a “wealthy daddy.” It also took note of his “pro-Israeli baggage” and compared him to Jews at the CIA “who think in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them.’
Jews in the CIA were furious when CBS’s 60 Minutes broadcast a report on Ciralsky’s case revealing those remarks. One employee wrote in 2000 on the CIA’s internal “Repsonsa” database for Jewish employees that “the antisemitic documents that these so-called ‘security professionals’ created in the course of their investigation corrupt and contaminate everything associated with this case.” Tenet met with a group of 16 Jewish employees and heard their concerns. He publicly acknowledged that the statements about Ciralsky’s “wealthy daddy” and others were “insensitive, unprofessional, and highly inappropriate.” However, none of the counterintelligence officials involved in the case were punished.
Another damning document that surfaced in Ciralsky’s lawsuit stated that Tenet himself had dictated the case's outcome. “Tenet says this guy is outta here for lack of candor,” a senior counterintelligence official wrote in an internal memo two weeks before Ciralsky’s polygraph exam. “Once that’s over, it looks like we’ll be waving goodbye to our friend.” That gave credence to Ciralsky’s claim that the CIA’s antisemitism masqueraded as counterintelligence investigations, but Tenet furiously denied prejudicing the case. “The DCI did not lean in and preordain an outcome for a CIA employee, period,” he said in his 2010 deposition.
The Pollard Debacle
Jews in the CIA paid a price in the wake of the Jonathan Pollard case. Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy, was arrested in 1984 and served 30 years in prison for providing Israel with classified documents on Arab militaries. The CIA’s Counter-Intelligence Center (CIC), charged with rooting out moles in the agency, became convinced that other Israeli agents had burrowed deep into the agency.
“CIC had a complete obsession with the Israelis,” Robert Gorelick told SpyTalk. “I don’t think it was antisemitic. They were convinced after Jonathan Pollard that the Israelis were recruiting spies all over the United States.” Those fears were renewed in 1997 when the National Security Agency intercepted a conversation between a Mossad officer in Washington and a superior in Tel Aviv discussing a source code-named "Mega" and an attempt to obtain a sensitive American document. No such source was ever identified, but the shadow of distrust lingered. George Tenet threatened in 1998 to resign if President Clinton agreed to Israel’s demands to release Pollard.
In Gorelick’s experience, the uproar over Israeli spies was a non-starter because Mossad avoided recruiting Jews outside Israel. He recalled one joint US-Israeli intelligence operation where Mossad’s role was to recruit somebody in a third country. Mossad officials told Gorelick there was a problem. “We cannot recruit this guy because he’s Jewish,” Gorelick recalled being told. “We would need permission from the Prime Minister’s office to recruit a Jew in another country because we don’t want to be accused of being a fifth column.”
Nevertheless, fears of Israeli penetration lingered in the CIA’s Counter-Intelligence Center. A former officer told SpyTalk that being Jewish in the agency was “a little bit of a handicap” and was most insidious in the way the counterintelligence staff viewed Jews. “I think there was a double standard,” she said. “They kind of viewed Jews as having suspected dual loyalty between Israel and America.”
CIA polygraph examiners wield tremendous power and are virtually untouchable. In one polygraph session, Lindsay Moran says she was asked inappropriate and discomfiting questions about her sex life. Polygraph examiners “don’t have any of the training or expertise of actual CIA officers, but they’re the gatekeepers,” Moran says. “They’re like mall cops on power trips.”
Ciralsky’s lawsuit lasted 12 years before it was dismissed. “These events took place a generation ago and, as far as I’m concerned, do not represent—and should in no way define—today’s CIA,” Ciralsky told SpyTalk. “I’m proud of the work I did at the agency. I value the dedication and sacrifice of those who serve there, and I do not feel I am owed an apology.”
The case marked a turning point for Jews in the agency. Tenet declared workforce diversity a mission necessity and dedicated a senior Black officer, Donald Cryer, to the job. Over the past two decades, the agency has made strides toward becoming a more diverse workplace, and Jews have benefited.
Things had improved when London retired in 2019 with a Career Intelligence Medal, he said. Antisemitism at the CIA was no longer expressed openly. “It’s certainly not in your face,” London told SpyTalk. “It’s on a par with the prevalence of antisemitism across the United States.”
The story of Martha Kessler, however, shows that the CIA’s antisemitic past, as Faulkner wrote, is never dead. It isn’t even past. Lately, Justine El-Khazen has been wondering about something her mother told her. Martha Kessler had once said that her colleagues in NESA viewed her as one of the Arabists who sympathized with the Arab cause. However, her mother's warm embrace from Israeli diplomats and military officials suggested her views were more balanced.
Justine El-Khazen suspects her mother may have played up her reputation as an Arabist as a defense mechanism. As with agency operatives who require a false identity or “cover” to protect themselves and their informants, Kessler may have needed a cover—as an Arabist who shared her colleagues’ biases against Jews and Israel—to survive in an intolerant workplace.
I worked for the CIA from 1968-74. I was assigned to Africa Division (AF). Kermit's cousin and fellow Arabist Archie Roosevelt was the division chief when I and my newly minted case officer colleagues were welcomed aboard at AF. Given that all of North Africa except Egypt (which belonged to NE) was part of AF along with other majority Muslim countries, maybe in retrospect it's unusual that I didn't see much in the way of anti-Semitism. In fact, both of my mentors were Jews. We used the fact that the Soviet Union tried hard to wean its millions of Muslim citizens away from Islam as something we could use against our Communist foes.
Like most, I was surprised when I found that there was no Israeli desk in NE, and that Angleton handled the Israel account. I wondered at the time whether that was due to counterintelligence concerns that perhaps Mossad was attempting to penetrate the CIA. Or was it the reverse: Mossad's concern that Israel's enemies might have penetrated the Agency.?
The nature of some of the protests now taking place on college campuses show that the dark underbelly of anti-Semitism is alive and well in our country. And the Pollard case only fed fuel to those who might have had a tendency to look at Israel as a counterintelligence threat.
What is unfortunately true is that both the CIA and Mossad missed the signs that Hamas was preparing to attack. If anti-Semitism played any role in our failure to see those signs, that would mean that the CIA has a serious problem with which it needs to deal.
Larry Brown
An informative article on the abhorrent behavior of some the people working on the Middle East that rightfully is labeled as anti-Semitism. Although I didn't experience any such views working on China at CIA, the charges in the article ring true. My only concern is the tendency of some to label those who take exception to the Israeli government's decisions, especially those concerning the war in Gaza, as anti-semitism. The criticisms are not based on the fact that these actions are made by Jews, but because they are not sound militarily and likely will harm Israel's long term interests.