The website Israellobby.org — which has posted many FBI surveillance files on Feinberg — wrote this introduction about him:
“Abraham Feinberg is best known lobbying for the state of Israel and organizing Harry S Truman’s “whistle-stop” fundraising tour that saved his 1948 presidential campaign from certain ruin. Feinberg’s [New York Times] obituary hints at a role trafficking arms to Jewish fighters in Palestine.
As founder of Americans for Haganah and Foundry Associates, Inc., Feinberg was deeply involved in the Haganah arms smuggling network in the United States. More recently, authors such as Anver Cohen and Michael Karpin document in the book “Israel and the Bomb” and “The Bomb in the Basement” Feinberg’s role in undermining US nuclear nonproliferation policy.
On October 31, 1958 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion noted in his diary a conversation “he had with Abraham Feinberg, a wealthy Jewish businessman and major Democratic fund-raiser” to raise funds for Israel’s nuclear weapons program among “benedictors” in the United States.
A few years later, President John F. Kennedy fought for biannual international inspections of Dimona and verifiable Israeli assurances that it was not a nuclear weapons production facility. In 1960 Feinberg funded the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as it mounted US disinformation campaigns about Israel’s nuclear weapons program. JFK’s assassination in 1963 marked the gradual end of inspections and the US nonproliferation drive toward Israel.
Feinberg’s [FBI] file reveals the FBI’s ongoing law enforcement interest in Feinberg’s activities as an espionage (offense code 54) threat from the time he was investigated for dodging the WWII draft, arms trafficking through the front company Foundry Associates, and on into the early 1960’s over frequent meetings with Israeli intelligence officers.
In 1952 Feinberg, acting as president of the lobbying newsletter Israel Speaks, (a successor publication to Haganah Speaks) was ordered to begin registering as an Israeli foreign agent. Feinberg and his close associate David Wahl considered selling it to the Jerusalem Post, but later closed it down rather than register. Wahl, among other Feinberg associates, was a longtime undercover Soviet agent (beginning in the 1930’s, code named “Pink”) in the United States.
FBI surveillance coverage of Feinberg stops during a period reporter Seymour Hersh characterizes as Feinberg’s moment of greatest influence over US policy: the Lyndon B. Johnson administration….”
