On or Off Cuba Ping!
Posted on 06/27/2007 11:36:22 AM PDT by freedom44
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The CIA worked with three American mobsters in a botched "gangster-type" attempt to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro in the early 1960s, according to documents released by the CIA on Tuesday.
The CIA hauled the skeletons out of its closet by declassifying hundreds of pages of long-secret records that detail some of the agency's worst illegal abuses during about 25 years of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying and kidnapping.
CIA Director Michael Hayden released the documents to lift the veil of secrecy on the agency's past, even as the Bush administration faces criticism of being too secretive now.
Hayden told agency employees in a statement the trove included "reminders of some things the CIA should not have done" and a glimpse "of a very different era and a very different agency." The documents had been requested 15 years ago by a watchdog group.
Much of the information had been released in various congressional investigations in past years, but the pages provide detailed accounts of CIA activities, much of it against the backdrop of the Cold War.
Some of the CIA's "Family Jewels" describe the agency's initial efforts to get rid of Castro, whose 1959 revolution ushered in communism to the island. Despite the U.S. campaign against him, Castro remains Cuban leader at age 80, although he handed over temporary power to his brother Raul after surgery last July.
The agency's leaders determined "a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action" was needed. "The mission target was Fidel Castro," the document said.
The CIA contacted Johnny Roselli, believed to have been a high-ranking member of the Mafia and the person who controlled all the ice-making machines on the Las Vegas strip.
The story Roselli was to be told by a go-between was that several international business firms were suffering heavy financial losses in Cuba as a result of Castro's action and they were willing to pay $150,000 for his removal.
"It was to be made clear to Roselli that the United States government was not, and should not, become aware of this operation," a document said.
In documents that often read like a cheap detective novel, the story is outlined: The pitch was made to Roselli at the Hilton Plaza Hotel in New York. Roselli was initially cool.
But the contact led the agency to two top mobsters, Momo Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficant, who were both on a U.S. list of most-wanted men, who seemed more interested.
Giancana, who was known as Sam Gold, suggested firearms might be a problem and said using a potent pill that could be slipped into Castro's food or drink might work.
Eventually, six pills of "high lethal content" were provided to Juan Orta, identified as a Cuban official who had been receiving kickback payments from gambling interests, who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind.
"After several weeks of reported attempts, Orta apparently got cold feet and asked out of the assignment. He suggested another candidate who made several attempts without success," the document said.
'LOCKPICKER'
There was also plenty in the documents on the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon in 1974, which started with a break-in at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington in June 1972.
A leader in that operation, ex-CIA operative Howard Hunt, that spring requested "a lockpicker who might be retiring or resigning from the agency." Hunt's name surfaces elsewhere in the pages.
There was an extensive effort to infiltrate the U.S. anti-war movement in the 1960s and 1970s with undercover CIA agents to find out if it was financed from abroad. The CIA also investigated student unrest in the same period.
There were concerns that foreigners might try to disrupt the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1972, and one memo said ex-Beatle John Lennon had given money to an anti-war group.
There are also details on such Cold War matters as the three-year incarceration of KGB defector Yuriy Ivanovich Nosenko.
The agency was convinced Nosenko, who defected in 1964, was still working for the KGB but was unable to prove it "even after a long period of hostile interrogation."
And Fidel is such a nice man....
On or Off Cuba Ping!
Who else? Hummmmmmm
Obviously they didn’t use the Corleone family. Big mistake.
Heck, I tried to get my brother to kill Castro......
SO TOMKOW hear of this story ROFL
Yeah, we’ve never heard about this before, except in every conspiracy theory book ever written since 1963.
Yeah that so true ROFL
I think Colrone would done the job RIGHT ROFL
The Bay of Pigs would have worked but JFK refused to provide aircover from the carriers waiting off shore. Castro, a known coward, held his forces back until it was quite obvious the Americans weren’t coming. Cuba always needed a Pinochet or a Franco to liberate them. He died on the beach due to JFK’s treachery.
We just saw a repeat with Chavez. He up and left the country for a few days. When it was obvious we weren’t going to help the people who overthrew him, he came back...and the rest is history.
So far nothing new has been released.
Sounds like the mafia is just as incompetent as the government.
Come to think of it, they are pretty much the same thing today anyway.
I was a kid during the Cuban missile crisis and I remember after it was all over my best friend and I decided we were going to invade Cuba and overthrow Castro. Our plan involved building our own airplanes using old lawn mower engines.
Our scheme seems to have worked about as well as the CIA’s.
Maybe they did? ..but not for Castro?
The MSM must be huffing if the best that they can come up with this week to bash America is some 40 year old, half baked scheme to kill Castro.
Who gives a damn?
I was in 2nd or 3rd grade at that time. I only remember it all because the principal of my school, an ancient Irish nun who walked with a cane—Sister Rita, came on the intercom one day and sent all of us next door to the church to pray because, she said, we were about to be bombed to oblivion. Fortunately, we didn’t know what oblivion was.
I like your lawnmower engines idea. Fly in low under the radar?
My story says that JFK was unaware of the plot until less than 24 hours before the landing. He would not release the support because there was no assessment of the consequences of invading Cuba.
More proof that billions of taxpayers money has been wasted on a bunch of blue blooded, Ivy League incompetents.
Any decently performing clandestine operation in those days could have bumped Castro off in between coffee breaks.
They could have saved Miami and southern Florida if they had been able to GIT R’ DONE.
Now both are lost to the third world forever.
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