News release Declassified Documents
FBI files released under the Freedom of Information Act unveil new details about the life of influential lobbyist Abraham Feinberg (1908-1998). Feinberg is best known for funding President Harry S Truman’s “whistle stop” campaign, saving Truman’s 1948 election campaign from almost certain defeat. In an interview, Feinberg summarized his long success in Democratic Party politics: “My path to power was cooperation in terms of what they needed�campaign money.”
According to new histories of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program including “Israel and the Bomb” by Avner Cohen (1998), Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion secretly named Feinberg his chief nuclear weapons fundraising coordinator in 1958. According to Michael Karpin’s “The Bomb in the Basement” (2007) Feinberg and 25 others contributed $40 million to the Israeli nuclear weapons program against opposition from presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.
A newly released 1952 file reveals the FBI’s early awareness of Feinberg’s many secret meetings with Israeli foreign agents: “Feinberg has been in contact with Colonel Ephraim Ben-Arazi, former Israeli Military Attach� to the United States; Theodore H. Kollek, Israeli Minister in Washington; Reuben Shiloah [founder of Mossad], personal advisor to the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs; Nahum Bernstein, Secretary of Israel Speaks. All of these individuals are known to have been active in the Israeli Intelligence Service.”
The Feinberg section of the archive cross-references a separate Senate investigation archive revealing Feinberg’s year 1960 financial contributions to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Simultaneously, the Near East Report (now affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC) released stories into the U.S. media such as “No Bombs Possible” that denied Israel had a secret nuclear weapons program even as AIPAC’s founder closely tracked U.S. news coverage of the issue. News release Declassified Documents