CIA Mafia Spies Plot To Kill Castro Hidden From JFK Probe

Robert Riggs

The JFK assassination files recently released by President Trump shed more light on the secret plot by the CIA to use Mafia gangsters to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Investigative reporter Thomas Maier, the author of Mafia Spies, his book about the unlikely alliance between the CIA and mobsters, is back to discuss the latest revelations.

Two Chicago gangsters, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, were central to a Congressional investigation by Senator Frank Church in the mid-1970s.

Both were murdered as Senate investigators sought their testimony.

I was an investigator for another committee working on a related inquiry at the time.

The mob-style hit sent a chill through Senators digging into CIA abuses.

Speculation continues about whether the CIA or a Mafia kingpin silenced the mobsters.

Maier and I discuss the murders and revelations from his new book, “The Invisible Spy.”

His dogged investigation uncovered how former CIA Director Allen Dulles steered the Warren Commission’s investigation of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas away from the plot to kill Castro.

Robert Riggs

We saw how the CIA really escaped scrutiny. It remained a secret about their plot to use the mafia to try to kill Castro, but and then they end up influencing the Warren Commission investigating the murder of President Kennedy. What did you discover happened there?

Thomas Maier

In Mafia spies, the person who essentially executes—bad word—but executes the plan to kill Castro is the head of the CIA a guy named Allen Dulles, and he was the head of the CIA for about 12 years. His tenure included a time period in the Kennedy administration, but he was also involved in the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco that the CIA had essentially put together and gave to Kennedy in the early days of JFK administration. And so when that became very unsuccessful, in fact, a number of the people that were part of that invasion, the Cuban exiles, who were trained under the CIA, they were caught by Castro. So there was a whole prisoner of war exchange. It was a fiasco for JFK. He was very upset with the CIA and he got rid of Allen Dulles, but when JFK was assassinated two years later, President Johnson asked Allen Dulles to be part of the seven member Warren Commission. And so Dulles was on there. And one of the things that Dulles did that came to my attention, one in Mafia spies. My Book “Mafia Spies”, I show how Dulles essentially steered the other commission members away from looking at this plan to assassinate Fidel Castro. Castro said, a few months before JFK’s death, I know you're trying to kill me. And he said that publicly, it was out in the press there, and he said Two can play that game. So if you're doing a murder investigation of the President of the United States, and you're part of a commission, you would think that they would at least identify and thoroughly explore all the possible suspects, if you will. Obviously Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of JFK, but was there other factors involved in that murder? And it was Allen Dulles who steered as a member of the Warren Commission steered away people on the commission from looking at this Castro assassination plot. And so we see that 50-60, years later, these documents that are part of the JFK assassination, they don't really provide any smoking guns about who, who may you know, any other assassins involved with the JFK murder. It was clearly Oswald. But what we do see is a lot of documents about the attempts to kill Castro that were kept confidential the CIA claiming, well, it'll reveal sources and methods and such and so. Dulles on the Warren Commission steered that commission away from that and so much so that about 10 years later, when some of this started to come out in the mid 70s, then President Ford. Gerald Ford, who was a congressman in the in the 60s, on the Warren Commission. He was part of that seven-member Warren Commission. But later on, Gerald Ford said he blamed Dulles for not letting the commission know about the plot to kill Castro. So that was something. And you know, a lot of the my interest in Allen Dulles comes from “Mafia Spies”, but in doing my new book, “The Invisible Spy”, interestingly enough, Allen Dulles is also a factor. He's not the major character, but Allen Dulles was a lawyer, a corporate lawyer, and his spy career really begins with the first agency, the first modern American spy agency. It was called the OSS which was short for the Office of Strategic Services. The focus of my book, Ernest Cuneo, he was the first liaison. He was really the first American spy of World War Two. He dealt with the British spies who were based—Churchill put them in the top levels of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, and it was Ernest Cuneo’s job to deal with them, but one of the earlier folks that was recruited to the OSS was Allen Dulles, and they actually worked together with Ernest Cuneo on some of the early espionage schemes that were put together by the OSS. And then Dulles was so smart and so successful that they sent him to Switzerland, and he dealt with a lot of spy schemes during World War Two. And so Dulles was aware of Cuneo. And then after World War Two, when Dulles becomes the head of the CIA, which is the new and modern spy agency that still exists, obviously today. By the 1950s and even the 60s, Cuneo was an asset. He was in private life. He was working with Ian Fleming, the creator James Bond. But as I show in the invisible spy my new book, there were, there were exchanges between Dulles and Cuneo and would at times be a tipster as an asset, giving information to Dulles and the CIA when Kennedy's assassination takes place, and Dulles is put on the Warren Commission. It was clear that not only is Dulles trying to steer things away from the Castro murder plot, but in the middle of that, one of the big things that was of concern to Dulles, the CIA and the FBI, J Edgar Hoover was they didn't want to be blamed for not protecting President Kennedy sufficiently enough to avoid being assassinated by Oswald. Oswald was already on the radar screen of the CIA. Oswald had gone down to Mexico. He had been to the Cuban embassy. He’d been to the Russian embassy only a few months before JFK’s assassination, so he's on the radar screen. And so when, when Kennedy is murdered by Oswald, the what you see in these recently released papers is that both the CIA and the FBI were very concerned about not being blamed for not protecting the president of the United States. And so what happens is that what I found in my research is that there are some documents, FBI documents that show that Ernest Cuneo, the subject of “The Invisible Spy”, was approached. He was in contact with Allen Dulles while Dulles was on the Warren Commission and Cuneo, who had been a journalist, was preparing to write a story, ostensibly for the “Saturday Evening Post”, which was a very popular magazine at that time, a big inside the Warren Commission by Ernest Cuneo. This is what he was preparing. And his source was Allen Dulles and Cuneo then goes to his friend Hoover at the FBI. And it's documents which are kind of known in bureaucratic terms as cover your ass documents that, in other words, Cuneo came through the door said, I'm talking to Allen Dulles and Hoover and another top FBI official put this in documents that said Cuneo is doing this piece with the help of Allen Dulles. He says that Allen Dulles is talking to. In fact, Hoover says that a federal judge who used to be in the FBI, it's also told him that Allen Dulles is talking to Ernest Cuneo. But Hoover says, No way. The President doesn't want this out. He's going to get in trouble. So to kind of cover their ass, if you will, Hoover writes his memo the other FBI official writes his memo. And those memos from early 1964 I find, and I quote from in my new book “The Invisible Spy”. And what it shows is the first known leak of a of the member of the Warren Commission to an outside source during the deliberations of the Warren Commission into the death of JFK. So I thought that was really very significant, and it also, once again, kind of shows the closeness between Dulles and the subject of my new book, Ernest Cuneo in “The Invisible Spy.”

Robert Riggs

As a former congressional investigator, the significant thing I see is that by not revealing the CIA's involvement with the mafia and the attempts to assassinate Castro, they closed off an avenue of investigation. And then this was really a murder investigation.

Thomas Maier

Yeah, of course. You know, when you do in a murder investigation, you have to try to really pull out all the stops to try to solve it within 72 hours.

Thomas Maier

You know, when you study how murders are investigated by the police, you know, and I've done that as a journalist. I once did a project. We looked at 300 murder cases on Long Island. That's one of the things that they say is within 72 hours, there's that window.

Thomas Maier

In the murder of JFK, the main suspect, Oswald, is murdered by Jack Ruby. So that was already screwed up. There were a number of screw-ups in there. But the fact that the Warren Commission was steered away from...

Thomas Maier

the Castro assassination plans by the CIA, which involved, among others, two mafia characters, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, and they were the focus of my book, Mafia Spies. You know, the fact that Dulles steered them away, it was something that really affects our historical understanding of what went on there and I have written and I've been surprised these new papers that have been released as I say they don't have any smoking gun about who killed Kennedy but they show a lot of detail about this huge CIA operation run out of Florida essentially an undeclared war that was started with Eisenhower carried out by the Kennedy administration

Thomas Maier

And then when the Warren Commission is convened, Dulles is trying to steer the other members away from looking at that.

Robert Riggs

Well, Jack Ruby, who ran a sensational for its time topless club in Dallas, was really a wannabe gangster here. Did you find him linked to Giancana out of Chicago? Did he have links there or links to the boss in New Orleans?

Thomas Maier

Well, you know, I have to say, I'm one of the few people in 25 years that have been writing about the Kennedys where... I've not tried to replicate a murder investigation. So the short answer is I don't know.

Thomas Maier

I think other authors should say the same thing. They don't know. Rather than speculate and create an atmosphere of conspiracy levels and such.

Thomas Maier

I think the biggest scoop, if you will, as a journalist, that has come out of the Kennedy assassination was one that I put 20 years ago in a book.

Thomas Maier

about the Kennedys. And I interviewed Father McSorley, the Jesuit who counseled Jackie Kennedy after the assassination. All of her letters, my taped interview with McSorley, that all came out.

Thomas Maier

But that was really news because Now we know how Jackie Kennedy reacted and all of the grief and the thoughts of suicide that she had.

Thomas Maier

This was all reported back when I did that book in 2003. It was in the New York Times. It was on all of the major news channels, CBS. It was on the Today Show and such.

Thomas Maier

That was real news. That was real historical news. Like Mary Todd Lincoln, you know, just after the Lincoln assassination.

Robert Riggs

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Thomas Maier

But I think in terms of, I think it's important to get, have transparency and have the records related to the JFK assassination all become public, particularly at this late date.

Thomas Maier

But I think that's important historically. But I don't think there's been anything really new either about Ruby or any other conspiracy involving alleged its conspiracy with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Thomas Maier

And I do think it's really unhealthy for the American politic to argue. constantly be engaged in conspiracies. I think people need to put up or shut up, it plain and simple.

Thomas Maier

And so I think it's important to look, always to look, but I think it's it's really important to also not mislead people. So, i know Robert, I don't know the answer with Ruby.

Robert Riggs

Well, one thing that really struck me in the latest batch of JFK documents was that the KGB had Oswald under surveillance when he was in the Soviet Union, even while he was target shooting, and they concluded He was a poor shot.

Thomas Maier

Right.

Robert Riggs

Yet, from you know the sixth story of the schoolbook depository in Dallas, he has a headshot on a moving limousine with the president.

Thomas Maier

right Oh, there's it's loaded with question marks surrounding it. I mean, what murder suspect says, I was a patsy?

Thomas Maier

You know, I've covered plenty of murders where they say, he deserved it.

Robert Riggs

Yes.

Thomas Maier

She deserved it. Blah, blah, blah. I didn't do it. All that type of stuff. Or they say nothing on the advice of their attorney. But what type of murder suspect says, I was a patsy?

Thomas Maier

that is really unnerving to have that come out of Oswald's death. And then he's murdered. It was a fiasco as a murder investigation.

Thomas Maier

And it's all to our detriment, certainly to the detriment of the Kennedy family that are crime victims. And I think that we have to keep that in mind. The closer I got to writing about the Kennedy's private lives, which I did in my first book, and the impact, that's what you realize. They are crime victims.

Thomas Maier

It's terrible what happened to them, and particularly Jackie Kennedy, to watch her husband's brains blown out. But historically for the country, it's been a real disservice for people, including one particular member of the Kennedy family, to be fostering conspiracies and doubts about legitimate authority. You know, it's just a disservice to the country.

Robert Riggs

In the latest batch of JFK documents released by the Trump administration, did you find anything of interest in there of, you know, one of those moments of, oh, you know.

Thomas Maier

Oh, yeah. You know, I found a lot of stuff, particularly from my book Mafia Spies, like, for instance, Johnny Roselli. actually found his code level.

Thomas Maier

The other thing is, in Mafia Spies, the two gangsters, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana, they had brought in another gangster by the name of Santo Traficante. He had been involved...

Thomas Maier

He was a top mobster in Florida, but he was also involved with them when they were running a casino before Castro took over in Cuba. The mob in America were running a number of casinos, including the Sans Souci, which was run by Johnny and Sam Giancana, but also Santo Traficante was involved.

Thomas Maier

And some of the documents that have come out show that not only was there doubt by some of the CIA agents involved handling all of this, like Bill Harvey, who had real doubts about Traficante and whether or not he was a double agent.

Thomas Maier

But there were other documents about whether or not Santo Traficante was a suspect in the murder eventually of Johnny Roselli in 1976.

Thomas Maier

And so those documents, the investigative documents, provide a lot more light about the last man standing, if you will, in mafia spies, which is Santo Traficante.

Robert Riggs

What else is, well, and you think Traficante certainly killed Roselli. Do you think he killed Sam Giancana out of Chicago? And interestingly, Roselli is murdered as he's getting ready to testify again before the church committee investigating intelligence agency abuses.

Thomas Maier

Right. Both of them were supposed to testify. in fact, there were investigators in Chicago about to prep Giancana for his testimony before the Senate about the whole Castro assassination plot.

Thomas Maier

The reason why I think, well, with Roselli, there are documents that indicate investigative documents that are part have been disclosed that indicate that Traficante was the leading suspect in the death of Roselli.

Thomas Maier

But why I think he had a hand in the Giancana murder, who Giancana was murdered in the basement of his home. He had like an apartment that he would hang out at night and somebody came in with a silencer and late at night and popped him with six shots and the shots were formed around his mouth which was a sign of basically as a warning to anybody else who would talk that you're going to wind up like this if you talk as well and that was highly publicized but the documents that were released one of the things is that

Thomas Maier

Whoever it was that killed Giancana, we don't know who killed Giancana. There was never an arrest. But apparently, whoever it was, threw the gun with the silencer out the window of a speeding car after the murder, apparently was...

Thomas Maier

oh maybe heard the police sirens. That's the theory of it. But that gun was found later on. And that gun, when they put the, they traced the serial numbers on that gun, traces back not to Chicago or New York, but to Tampa, Florida, to a gun place in Tampa, Florida.

Thomas Maier

That gun was traced back to Tampa, Florida, which is the home base of Santo Traficante.

Thomas Maier

So I think to the extent that there's a substantial lead about the death of Giancana coming out of these papers, I think that's it. That's why I think Traficante had some hand in the death of both Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana.

Robert Riggs

And do you think the motive for the murder is they violated the mafia's omerta, that you never talk? Or was he worried about what they were about to tell Congress?

Thomas Maier

Well, I think the other gangsters were really upset about the behavior of Giancana and Roselli by getting involved because there was a national commission of mobsters and they were supposed to disclose things like that to their fellow mobsters and they never told them.

Thomas Maier

And also they had garnered a tremendous amount of attention to the operation of the mafia, which was by that by the mid-70s, which much more on the run than they were in the late 50s and early 60s, when the mob in America really was at its height.

Thomas Maier

was making tons of money. And so they paid a price. And I think the murder of both Giancana and Roselli was in response to their behavior.

Thomas Maier

Whether or not it was to keep them quiet about what they knew and, in fact, Johnny Roselli faced the possibility of being deported out of the United States because he actually came here illegally as an Italian immigrant.

Thomas Maier

And so there was talk about deportation. So Roselli kind of intimated that he knew something about the JFK assassination. And what he knew, we don't know, because he was murdered.

Thomas Maier

And so that was really unnerving to a number of senators who were part of that committee looking at all of this. Gary Hart, for instance, that's a name I think people would remember.

Thomas Maier

And he expressed being very unnerved about it. But there were others on the Senate committee, and they were all very upset about these murders.

Thomas Maier

And also the fact that maybe both these gangsters may have been able to provide more light about the circumstances surrounding the JFK assassination.

Thomas Maier

But we'll never know because they were both murdered.

Robert Riggs

Well, since Allen Dulles, who was the former CIA director on the Warren Commission, steers the commission away from the CIA plots with the mafia to assassinate Castro, is this part of the reason it's just spread the conspiracy theories?

Thomas Maier

Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's a if you go to YouTube and you look up Allen Dulles, there's a NBC TV program that he did with John Chancellor of NBC News.

Thomas Maier

And it was a whole documentary about the science of spying was the name of it.

Robert Riggs

Mm-hmm.

Thomas Maier

So you go to YouTube and you look it up. It's there. Dulles is interviewed at his home here on Long Island. And he's actually asked, has the CIA ever tried to murder somebody?

Thomas Maier

And Dulles says, you know, the Russians, they would do so. And that was absolutely accurate. The Russians were involved with a number of different murders and such.

Thomas Maier

But he said, we would never do that. I would never ask other members of the CIA to do something that I wouldn't do. And so You know, it's a complete lie nationwide to the entire country. This is about 1966 or so.

Thomas Maier

And as I said, that tape is on YouTube. You can easily find that. And so it's pretty extraordinary the level of arrogance that people like Dulles had.

Thomas Maier

You know, bear in mind, in Mafia Spies, my book, Mafia Spies, Dulles is, quote unquote, the bad guy. But, you know, in doing my new book, The Invisible Spy, which is not about the 60s, but it's about the World War II era.

Thomas Maier

So Dulles is a factor in the invisible spy, not to the same extent that he is in my book, Mafia Spies. Dulles was involved with Ernest Cuneo, who was the subject of the invisible spy. working together for the OSS at Rockefeller Center in the very early start stages of the World War II.

Thomas Maier

Dulles was a terrific spy for the OSS. He was arguably the most successful spy for the OSS. And so one of the things I think the guys that came, the men and women, who came out of the OSS after World War II, one of the things that was discussed that Dulles was involved with was the plots to kill Hitler.

Thomas Maier

during World War II. There were attempts, there was an attempt to kill Hitler. It was unsuccessful, but Dulles was dealing with those German Nazi spies that were involved in that plot to kill Hitler. And There was also a number of conversations even earlier that if they had killed Hitler, would there have been millions of lives spared?

Thomas Maier

In other words, would history have been different if we had assassinated Hitler? And I think so cut to 20 years later, when Dulles the head of the CIA, as much as it is outrageous to try to kill the head of a foreign leaders to understand where they're coming from.

Thomas Maier

I think when you read my book, The Invisible Spy, you realize that people like Dulles looked at their experiences with Hitler and the fact that they failed to assassinate him and all the terrible consequences of that.

Thomas Maier

And they looked at Castro 20 years later in cahoots with the Russians, threatening to put nuclear weapons in Cuba, 90 miles away from the United States.

Thomas Maier

Cuba and Castro were perceived as existential threats to the United States. John Kennedy himself said that during the 1960 campaign.

Thomas Maier

But I think somebody like Dulles and those people that were in the CIA who really cut their teeth, if you will, during World War II, they had that experience with Hitler and the possibility of assassinating him.

Thomas Maier

And I think that was in the back of their minds as I now see it when you look at it historically. It explains, to some extent at least, some of the background for the Castro assassination plot.

Robert Riggs

You know, as you may know, I was an embedded reporter in Iraq. And in that reporting experience over those years, You know, I met CIA case officers. I know some today that are retired. You know, they've all struck me as professional, ethical, and they came out of a very, very different agency than what's described in Mafia spies. What's your sense of what the spy agency is today and how it changed?

Thomas Maier

Well, I think it has changed a lot. But as you say, it's much more professional. There were a lot more safeguards that were put on the intelligence agencies, including the FBI after Watergate in particular.

Thomas Maier

There was a 10-year term put on the director of the FBI. There was more oversight of the CIA. And then some unfortunately, some of those safeguards are now being dismantled currently.

Thomas Maier

But yeah, I think that the CIA became much more professional. I think what happened with the attempts to kill Castro, as I mentioned, I think a lot of the motivation in retrospect, as I reflect on this and doing the two books and particularly looking at a character like Dulles, I think they were very much influenced by, geez, if we had assassinated Hitler. We were told not to do that.

Thomas Maier

The British discussed it quite a bit in the late thirties. If we had done that, if we had gotten rid of Hitler, how much suffering could have been avoided?

Thomas Maier

How many lives could have been saved?

Robert Riggs

Mm-hmm.

Thomas Maier

And so I think that was part of the excesses with this Castro plot. I think we were at, I think there was also the attempt by the CIA in the early 60s to use buffers, if you will.

Thomas Maier

You know, in the Godfather movie, they actually say, oh, the family has a lot of buffers. Well, the CIA had cutouts. That's what they were termed. And so they didn't want to directly get involved in assassinating Castro.

Thomas Maier

But they did have cutouts who dealt with the mafia. And so when you deal with an entity like the mafia, and they realized this later on and in retrospect, that was a big mistake because you can't control. They have a different agenda.

Thomas Maier

than the good of the United States. And so the CIA members who didn't want to get their hands dirty in this, they kind of relinquished control over some of the plots to kill Castro.

Thomas Maier

And I think that was also one of the reasons why it turned out so poorly.

Robert Riggs

And now, a revealing footnote on the connection between Frank Sinatra and mob fixer Johnny Roselli.

When From Here to Eternity was in production, Columbia Studios had well-known ties to organized crime. Sinatra wanted a role—studio head Harry Cohn said no. So Sinatra took another route. He went through an intermediary to Genovese boss Frank Costello, who tapped Chicago mobster Johnny Roselli to send a message.

Roselli didn’t mince words. When Cohn pushed back, warning he had protection of his own, Roselli reportedly told him, “You’re a fucking dead man if you don’t cast him.”

Cohn cast Sinatra. Sinatra won an Oscar. And in a gesture that said everything, he later sponsored Roselli for membership in the Los Angeles Friars Club.

The source for this account—and for the Genovese family’s deep roots in Hollywood—is retired FBI agent Mike Campi’s gripping new book, Mafia Takedown.

In the next episode, Campi joins me to talk about the real mob—how he led the undercover operation that helped cripple the oldest and most powerful Mafia family in New York. Forget the movies. This is the real story.