Mafia Spies by Thomas Maier

Author:Thomas Maier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781510741720
Publisher: Skyhorse
Published: 2019-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 31:

THE WAR AT HOME

The “medicine” was still in place.

After months of lethal training in Florida and cultivating spies in Cuba, Johnny Roselli offered some good news in a September 1962 message to his CIA overseer William Harvey. Cryptically, Roselli referred to the “medicine”—a new batch of poison pills recently smuggled into Cuba to kill Castro—and to a second death squad, which would soon be on its way.

These assurances for “Phase Two,” as Harvey called it, sounded similar to an initial poison plot called “Phase One” a year earlier.

This time, a three-man team of assassins, who sneaked into Cuba in June 1962, were still alive and safe with the pills, Roselli reported. And a second team of assassins, he said, would feature “militia men whose assignment was to penetrate Castro’s bodyguard.”

Perhaps if they were fortunate, Castro would be dead and the Cuban crisis over before the mid-term elections that fall.

Despite the Kennedy White House clamoring for results, Roselli had ample reason to believe US officials were satisfied with his assassination planning.

That summer, in a rare moment at home in Los Angeles, Johnny met for lunch with the CIA’s Director of Security Sheffield Edwards and their friend, Robert Maheu. The three men chatted about attempts to assassinate Castro. Maheu had been scrapped already from the top-secret operation at Harvey’s insistence. But Johnny, without authorization, wanted his old friend Maheu at their table. Presumably, no one, not even Shef Edwards, ever told Harvey about this informal California meeting.

Over lunch, the CIA security chief Edwards assured Johnny that the Kennedy administration liked his courageous actions with Cuban exile groups against the dreaded Communist leader. Later recalling that luncheon to the CIA’s inspector general, Edwards “said he took the occasion to express his personal appreciation to Roselli, and told Roselli that he, Edwards, had personally told Attorney General [Robert] Kennedy of what Roselli had tried to do in the national interest. We know that Kennedy was merely briefed on the operation—and only on Phase One at that—but Roselli may have inferred that Kennedy had an active role in the operation.”

Indeed, Robert Kennedy was extremely active with Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s plan to encourage the overthrow of Castro. Both the attorney general and his brother were determined to free thousands of exiled attackers imprisoned after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs raid, including its much admired leader, Manuel Artime.

Ousting Castro was “the top priority of the United States government,” Bobby told the new CIA director John McCone. “No time, money, effort, or manpower is to be spared.” Harvey was instructed by other CIA superiors to keep working with Roselli “because no matter how, when, why or through what means, the President wants to get rid of Castro.”

How much the Kennedys knew about the Mafia’s involvement in the CIA plans to kill Castro remains a matter of historical debate.

In his meeting with Edwards and CIA legal counsel Lawrence Houston, the attorney general had acted surprised when told about Giancana and Roselli’s collusion with the CIA. “I

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