As part of the new policy, meanwhile, the President struck directly at the Cuban Revolutionary Council, the government-in-exile that had grown out of the anti-Castro front created by the CIA two years earlier, by cutting off financial support. Its leader, José Miró Cardona, resigned in fury, accusing Kennedy of breaking his pledges.
In the wake of the clampdown on exile activities, the head of the Miami Police Intelligence Unit, Charles Sapp, had begun receiving alarming information from his sources. What he learned on April 4, 1963, moved him to alert his superiors. “Since President Kennedy made the news release that the U.S. government would stop all raiding parties going against the Castro government,” he wrote, “the Cuban people feel that the U.S. government has turned against them… . Violence hitherto directed toward Castro’s Cuba will now be directed toward various governmental agencies in the United States.”
From then on, Sapp told the author, his unit and the Miami Secret Service felt that public officials were under threat, the President especially. The inflamed temper of the exiles aside, the Florida authorities saw signs of danger from the lunatic fringe of the American Right. Just after the clampdown, a sinister handout appeared in mailboxes around Miami. It advised the exile community that only one development would now make it possible for “Cuban patriots” to return to their homeland: “… if an inspired Act of God should place in the White House within weeks a Texan known to be a friend of all Latin Americans.” It is hard to interpret this as anything but a call for the death of President Kennedy and his replacement by Lyndon Johnson. The handbill, which had the hallmarks of the John Birch Society, was signed, “A Texan who resents the Oriental influence that has come to control, to degrade, to pollute and enslave his own people.”
If the sulfurous mix of violent exiles, recalcitrant CIA operatives, and political extremists were not enough, the President was faced with threats from a different quarter. CIA folly, combined with Kennedy zeal, had inflamed another foe—the Mob.
Sixteen weeks before Kennedy had become President, four immaculately suited gentlemen had chatted over cocktails in the Boom-Boom Room of Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel. They might have been businessmen discussing a deal, or politicians planning strategy. In fact, two of the distinguished-looking men were Mafia hoodlums, and—with a go-between—they were meeting with a representative of the CIA. The topic on the agenda was the proposed assassination of Fidel Castro, the latest and most dangerous in a series of CIA schemes. Some fifteen years later, the plots would become known following an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The CIA already had a unit with responsibility for kidnapping and murder, and the advent of Fidel Castro had been tailor-made for its attention. Top CIA officers had within a year been writing memoranda recommending that “thorough consideration be given to the elimination of Fidel Castro,” and by summer 1960, it was clear they meant it. Cables between Washington headquarters and the Havana CIA station discussed the “removal of top three leaders” and—in the case of Castro’s brother Raúl, who in effect leads Cuba today—a plan for “an accident to neutralize this leader’s influence.”
The plots hatched against Castro himself would defy belief were it not that they have long since been documented. The wizards of the CIA’s Technical Services Division, at first, fooled with the notion of impregnating Castro’s shoes with chemicals that would cause all his hair to fall out—including the trademark beard. Without it, went the theory, Castro would lose his appeal to the masses. It was a small conceptual step from Castro beard to Castro cigars, to a plan to slip the leader of the revolution a spiked cigar—in the hope he would go berserk during one of his famous speech marathons. Some genius proposed trying for the same result by spraying Castro’s broadcasting studio with a form of the drug LSD.
The CIA moved from silly schemes to murderous toys, and then to the real thing. By autumn 1960, the Technical Services Division had prepared cigars treated with a lethal poison. Castro, it was hoped, would die within moments of placing it in his mouth. In the months that followed, there would be a fungus-dusted diving suit impregnated with a strain of tuberculosis, and an exploding seashell to be planted in Castro’s favorite skin-diving spot. Attempts were made to have the Agency’s little surprises delivered by agents inside Cuba. In such an atmosphere, it should perhaps not be surprising that high officials eventually recruited criminals to help.
The dalliance between American intelligence and the Mafia had begun in World War II. Then, the Office of Naval Intelligence had obtained the help of Lucky Luciano, at the time the “don of dons,” in preventing German sabotage in U.S. dockyards. Through Meyer Lansky, his close associate, Luciano had mobilized his network of waterfront thugs accordingly and been rewarded by leniency for his own crimes. In Europe, the crime boss’s Sicilian brothers helped Allied operations in the Mediterranean. All this is well documented, not least in the War Report of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.
Meyer Lansky, a financial wizard, went on to use the old-fashioned methods—murder and corruption—to adapt the structure of the Mob to the modern world, a process that led to what came to be known as “organized crime.” The rival gangs now operated within a nationwide syndicate that Lansky himself reportedly described as “bigger than U.S. Steel.” The difference was that the income came from the exploitation of human beings, the discipline from torture and killing, and the proceeds were salted away in legal investments.
It is now clear that a loose working relationship between organized crime and the CIA existed at least until the Vietnam War years, when Mob heroin-trafficking and CIA counterinsurgency found mutually convenient hunting grounds in Southeast Asia. There was an even clearer coincidence of interest during the secret war against Fidel Castro.
Castro’s predecessor, Batista, had been a puppet on strings pulled by U.S. intelligence and the Mafia. In 1944, when the United States feared trouble from the Cuban left, Lansky reportedly leaned on Batista to step down for a while. He returned in 1952 after the then incumbent, Carlos Prío Socarrás, had been persuaded to resign—a departure reportedly eased by a massive bribe and a major stake in the casino business. It was then that the gambling operation in Cuba became a full-scale bonanza for the Mafia.
The gangster bosses established a glittering nexus of casinos and hotels that attracted American spenders like moths to a flame. The gaming tables and the nightlife—including prostitution on the grand scale—made Havana more lucrative for the syndicate than even Las Vegas. As a bonus there were rich pickings from narcotics, with Havana the crossroads of international trafficking. Estimates suggest the Mafia’s Havana operation netted more than a hundred million in 1950s dollars a year—that translates as almost nine hundred million a year today.
When the Batista regime began to crumble, the Mob hedged its political bets by courting Fidel Castro. Many of the guns that helped him to power in 1959 had arrived courtesy of Mafia gunrunners, but the favor was not reciprocated. Lansky, who saw disaster coming, flew out of Havana the day Castro marched in. For a while, the casinos were allowed to continue operating under government control. Then Castro ordered the arrest of Lansky’s associate Santo Trafficante who is believed—his casino interests aside—to have been responsible for moving European heroin shipments through Havana to the United States. Then, with the casinos closed down once and for all, Trafficante and other remaining casino operators were packed off to Florida. There, brooding mightily over the loss of their Havana goldmine, dreaming of return, the mafiosi were tailor-made coconspirators for the CIA’s plans to kill Castro.
Lansky, the CIA learned, was offering a million-dollar bounty for Castro’s murder. Other mobsters were already trying to kill him—by using a woman to slip poison into Castro’s food—and may have come close to succeeding. An Assassinations Committee report noted that Castro suffered a serious “sickness” in the summer of 1960. The CIA decided it was time to join forces with the
Mob, and an extraordinary operation began.
Top-level CIA conferences on teaming up with the Mafia to kill Castro included the Agency’s Director Allen Dulles—a fact he would not reveal three years later as a member of the Warren Commission. With Dulles’ and Deputy Director Richard Bissell’s approval, the CIA’s Office of Security went into action. A first step was to appoint a go-between, someone trusted by the CIA but sufficiently independent to protect the Agency in case of exposure. Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent with the FBI in Chicago, fit the bill.
So it was that Maheu and three other men convened for the fall 1960 meeting in the tawdry splendor of Miami’s Fontainebleau Hotel. Two of them, both gangsters, used the names of “Sam Gold” and “John Rawlston.” “Gold” was Chicago’s crime boss Sam Giancana, who had had a piece of the Cuban rackets. “Rawlston” was Johnny Roselli, who had risen from humble beginnings running liquor for Al Capone in Illinois to the top of organized crime in Las Vegas. A decade earlier, the Kefauver Committee had identified him as a leading racketeer with close links to Meyer Lansky. The fourth man present, Joe Shimon, was a former Washington police inspector whom Giancana trusted.
It was Shimon who, during initial research for this book, explained to the author how the Mob side of the conspiracy worked. “Johnny called Sam and told Sam what he needed,” Shimon said, “You had to have some individual who knew a lot of Cubans and knew the type of Cubans that could be prevailed upon to get into such a plot. They would have to be lawbreakers, but you had to have somebody who really knew the Cubans.” The man who “really knew the Cubans,” Shimon said, was Santo Trafficante.
Trafficante—whom the House Assassinations Committee was one day to suspect of involvement in the killing of President Kennedy—had a suitably dishonorable heritage. His father, who had come to the United States in the early twentieth century, had established a Florida power base that would never be seriously challenged. The young Trafficante inherited the Florida rackets and the Sans Souci Casino in Havana. The extent of his power had been recognized since 1957, when Albert Anastasia, at that time regarded as the most efficient and vicious gang leader in America, died riddled with bullets while sitting in a barber’s chair. Anastasia had been attempting to move in on the Trafficante interests in Cuba.
Shortly after the first meeting at the Fontainebleau, Giancana came with Trafficante—who used the name Joe Pecora—to a second meeting with a CIA “support chief.” The assassination of Fidel Castro was again discussed, and Trafficante made obliging noises. He, in his turn, introduced CIA officers to Antonio de Varona—a former Cuban prime minister who was soon to become vice president of the exiles’ Cuban Revolutionary Council—and he was supplied with poison. The plan was for the poison to be slipped into Castro’s food by an employee at his favorite restaurant. It never happened, supposedly because Castro gave up frequenting the restaurant. Had the plan worked, Castro would have died at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961—soon after President Kennedy took the reins of power.
After a year-long lull in assassination plans, the CIA’s William Harvey supervised another episode involving poison pills and, as established by the Senate probe, “explosives, detonators, rifles, handguns, radios and boat radar.” These devices were delivered to the same Cuban contact at a meeting in a Miami parking lot. Again nothing happened. The House Assassinations Committee was to speculate that the Mafia bosses had by that time soured on the notion that the Cuban revolution could be reversed simply by killing Castro. After 1962, so far as is known, CIA attempts to murder Fidel Castro did not involve the Mob.
There has been prolonged polemic over whether and when President Kennedy learned of the plots against Castro, and whether he supported them. That he knew something of the plots by late 1961 is not in doubt. While being interviewed by the New York Times’ Latin America correspondent, Tad Szulc, Kennedy suddenly leaned forward in his rocking chair and asked, “What would you think if I ordered Castro to be assassinated?”
Szulc replied that political assassination was wrong in principle and in any case would do nothing to solve the Cuba problem. Kennedy, Szulc wrote later, explained that “he was under great pressure from advisers in the intelligence community (whom he did not name) to have Castro killed, but that he himself violently opposed it on the grounds that for moral reasons the United States should never be a party to political assassinations.”
Senator George Smathers, himself a passionate opponent of Castro, also had a conversation with the President on the subject. Smathers would recall that Kennedy expressed himself “horrified” at the idea of assassination. “I remember him saying,” Smathers said, “that the CIA frequently did things he didn’t know about, and he was unhappy about it. He complained that the CIA was almost autonomous.”
CIA officials, for their part, were to say that, while it was not proper to discuss such things with the President, they assumed he was aware of and approved of the assassination plots. As for Attorney General Robert Kennedy, one reading of the record suggests he was furious when he learned of the Mafia role in the plots. This occurred when, in early 1962, he discovered the CIA was trying to protect Sam Giancana from prosecution, insisted on finding out why, and was then briefed on Giancana’s part in the early murder plans by CIA attorney Lawrence Houston.
According to Houston, the information upset Robert Kennedy, who expressed “strong anger.” “I trust,” he said, “that if you ever try to do business with organized crime again—with gangsters—you will let the Attorney General know.” Houston testified, “If you have ever seen Mr. Kennedy’s eyes get steely and his jaw set and his voice get low and precise, you get a definite feeling of unhappiness.”
Much later, in a discussion about the Castro assassination plots with two aides, Robert Kennedy claimed, “I stopped it… . I found out that some people were going to try an attempt on Castro’s life and I turned it off.”
It may be, though, that the Kennedys voiced disapproval only to create a smokescreen. In his biography of CIA Director Richard Helms, Thomas Powers argued that senior CIA officials refrained from saying on the record that President Kennedy approved such schemes—either because they had no proof, or because it was traditional for a secret service to “take the heat.”
In his autobiography, written just before his death in 2002, Helms recalled the key role of the “Special Group,” the term for a group of top presidential advisers first used during the Eisenhower administration. A key role of the Group, he wrote, aside from providing authorization for CIA covert action, was “to establish a screen, protecting the President from having to assume personal responsibility for every risky covert operation.” When during the Kennedy administration the Group became the focal point for decision of Cuba activity, Helms noted drily, “Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, added himself to the roster.”
“There were ways we would speak about assassination off the record,” former CIA Deputy Director Richard Bissell said in 1994, “ways we would speak about it without using the word. We had to protect the President,” he added drily.
William Harvey, head of the Cuba task force in 1962 and early 1963, told the Agency’s Inspector General that plans to kill Castro were an integral part of the CIA’s contingency plan for murder in general—which “was developed in response to White House urgings.” A former officer at JM/WAVE, the CIA’s Florida headquarters, claimed Harvey was removed from the project in part because he “wasn’t having Castro killed fast enough.”
George Smathers, former U.S. Senator from Florida and the President’s close friend, was to expand on his previous statements on the subject. “Jack,” he said in 1994, “would be all the time, ‘If somebody knocks this guy off, that’d be fine.’ … But Kennedy obviously had to say he could not be a party to that sort of thing with the damn Mafia.”
Did Robert Kennedy know, too? “Sure,” Smathers said.
And then there are the claims of Judith Campbel
l, the California woman who was one of President Kennedy’s lovers between 1960 and the late summer of 1962.2 Campbell claimed that John Kennedy’s personal relations with members of organized crime ran in direct conflict with his brother Robert’s crusade to break the Mafia. In 1960, according to Campbell, there were secret contacts between Kennedy and Mob boss Sam Giancana to discuss Mafia support for his election campaign. There were also later contacts, she said, during the presidency, that “had to do with the elimination of Fidel Castro.”
Campbell’s account was specific in dates and details and supported by travel documents, by her annotated appointment book, and by official logs recording three of her visits to the White House. A credible source said Campbell told him the gist of her story soon after the events in question.
Finally, there was Robert Kennedy, monitoring anti-Castro operations on his brother’s behalf after the failure at the Bay of Pigs. According to Sam Halpern, a former senior CIA official who worked the Cuba desk, the younger Kennedy ordered the Agency to have a case officer meet with Mafia figures. According to Halpern, Kennedy himself supplied the Mafia contacts.
President Kennedy was playing a horrendously dangerous game. For, throughout the presidency, his brother was vigorously pursuing his investigation of the Mafia—not least of Sam Giancana. As a quid pro quo for support during the election that brought Kennedy to power, Giancana and other top mobsters had evidently hoped for leniency under a Kennedy administration. By early 1962, however, Giancana would be overheard on an FBI wiretap saying, “The President will get what he wants out of you … but you won’t get anything out of him.”
Not in Your Lifetime: The Defining Book on the J.F.K. Assassination Page 20