Few plots to kill a government leader have received more publicity than Operation Mongoose, a “super secret” CIA initiative to use the Mafia to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. In time the CIA admitted all— or so the agency said. CIA heads later acknowledged that the plot should never have involved organized crime, but the fact is that the CIA’s confession was itself a form of cover-up.
While the CIA has been advocating the “elimination of Fidel Castro” as early as 1959, it was the mobsters themselves who volunteered to come aboard for such good works. Actually, the mobsters were more interested in getting the intelligence agency in their hip pockets for their own reasons. Most important of all, most mafiosi involved in the plotting actually engaged in a scam, never really trying to kill Castro and instead robbing the CIA of untold sums of money.
There are to this day strong underworld claims that a number of later alleged gangland slayings were actually CIA hits aimed at covering up the agency’s embarrassment at being so easily suckered.
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The first mobster to propose underworld participation in a Castro hit appears to have been Meyer Lansky, who felt Castro’s assassination was the only way to get the mob back in the casino business in Cuba—despite the fact that Castro indicated a willingness to let Lansky back in to run things provided the government shared in the profits, presumably on a 50-50 basis.
Lansky was not overly interested, even though he sent his brother Jake to carry on negotiations, because he doubted that skimming the profits would be possible under Castro’s watch. On a more philosophical, if not dominant, level, Lansky was very anti-communist. It was Lansky who contacted the CIA and explained that some of his people still on the island could carry out the assassination.
Meanwhile, via Moe Dalitz, a syndicate power in the Las Vegas casino business, Howard Hughes learned of this proposal, and as one of the grand exponents of “the Communist threat to America” he ordered Robert Maheu, his chief of staff, to find suitable “Mafia killers” to carry out the operation. Maheu recruited Johnny Roselli and his boss, Chicago syndicate leader Sam Giancana, into the operation. Apparently through them, although possibly independently, Tampa, Florida, crime boss Santo Trafficante Jr. also signed up.
It was then that the grand mafioso scam began. The CIA was involved in all sorts of ludicrous plots, including such bizarre ploys as blowing the Cuban leader off the ocean floor while he was satisfying his passion for skin diving, injecting deadly poison into him with a specially prepared “pen,” letting him puff on some poisoned cigars, or contaminating his clothes with tubercle bacilli and fungus spores. Other zany plots were also abandoned, including one to infect Castro so that his beard would fall out, ruining his macho image.
The first scheme the CIA suggested to Roselli was a nice, simple, Capone-style ambush with machine guns blazing. Greatly amused but maintaining a straight face, Roselli said he doubted such Chicago tactics would work in Cuba, and it would present recruitment difficulties because chances of the machine gunners getting away would be virtually nil. (The survival instinct for hit men has always been a bit higher than that of political assassins.)
Then the CIA was taken down the garden path as the mobsters fed them one phony story after another. Whatever wild plots the CIA came up with, Trafficante sat on, in the meantime conning the intelligence agents with thrilling tales of his men risking their lives—slipping into Cuba and having their boats shot out from under them. The stories, Roselli was later to tell informer Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno, were “all bullshit.”
The CIA scientists came up with a liquid poison that would kill in two or three days and turned it over to Trafficante for transmittal to his phantom Cuban rebels. The stuff was simply flushed down a toilet. There is certainly no record that any of the CIA money and equipment—all kinds of guns, detonators, explosives, poison, boat radar and radios— ever got to Cuba.
Some government aides even developed the theory that Trafficante had sold out to Castro and was feeding him all sorts of information about the anti-Castro movement in Florida, as well as the scoop on CIA plots. It should be remembered that Trafficante had always jockeyed for a more important slice of the Cuban gambling business but that Lansky had cut him short. If Castro ever allowed the mob back in, Trafficante, it was said, would be in a better position to get a major portion of the take.
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In time, the CIA agents involved in the plotting became rather discouraged about the chances of Mongoose succeeding. There must have been a flurry of joy when Giancana reported to them—conversations by Giancana were monitored by the FBI who at the time knew nothing of the CIA’s activities—that, as an FBI report said, “Castro is in advanced stages of syphilis and is not completely rational.” That joy must have given way to severe depression when Castro did not go the blithering way of Al Capone.
Perhaps the only mobster who thought the assassination of Castro was a viable option was Giancana, the mooner of the underworld as his nickname “Mooney” indicated. According to Roselli, Giancana was angry about Trafficante’s foot-dragging. Giancana felt if the mob pulled it off it would have the U.S. government by “the short hairs,” and there would have been little the underworld could not do thereafter with impunity.
Whether his guess was right or not, Giancana soon involved the CIA in some very “X-rated” activities. In the midst of all the anti-Castro plots, Giancana put the CIA’s indebtedness to the underworld to the test. He had, he informed the agency, a little problem requiring CIA assistance. The agency was in no position to refuse the small favor.
However, the favor went wrong when sheriff’s deputies in Las Vegas arrested two men, supposedly in the act of burglarizing the rooms of comedian Dan Rowan. Actually they were planting CIA bugging devices. It turned out that Rowan was going around with singer Phyllis McGuire of the McGuire Sisters, and Giancana wanted a bug placed in Rowan’s room just to see how cozy matters were between the comedian and the woman Giancana considered his private property. The CIA had okayed the venture and then had to engage in a massive coverup, not to mention feeling the heat of embarrassment when the rival FBI learned the details of the caper.
The lid was kept on Operation Mongoose for a few years, but it was a plot that wouldn’t disappear even after it was officially abandoned. In the 1970s there were congressional inquiries, and in 1975 Giancana was slated to go before a Senate committee headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Instead he was murdered. In Mafia Princess Antoinette Giancana, Sam’s daughter, declares, “I’ve always felt very strongly that the subpoena requiring Sam to appear before the committee was the death warrant that led to his murder.”
John Roselli did testify shortly after Giancana’s death. He told of some CIA plots, but led congressional investigators on a merry-go-round by insisting he had no recollection of the key events. Unfortunately, Roselli talked differently in private with gangland friends. He told them of Giancana’s words to him when he had gotten his subpoena: “Santo’s shitting in his pants, but you can’t keep his name out of it. I introduced the guy to the CIA .... This Santo’s crazy to think we can stop his name from surfacing.”
Roselli was also known to be dropping around the office of columnist Jack Anderson, sometimes having lunch or dinner with him. It was not an activity to inspire confidence in Tampa (Trafficante’s bailiwick), in Chicago, or for that matter in Langley, Virginia, CIA headquarters. The old and sickly Roselli’s severed body ended up floating ashore inside a 55-gallon oil drum in Florida’s Biscayne Bay.
To the day he died Roselli firmly held that the CIA had not had Giancana murdered, that it was done on orders of Chicago crime boss Tony Accardo and Joey “Ha Ha” Aiuppa. There is some evidence that Giancana and Aiuppa had had a major falling out over the division of family gambling revenues. It is not known whom Roselli would have blamed for his own murder.
One thing was apparent after Operation Mongoose and the CIA’s forays with the underworld. In a showdown, the Mafia could get the better of America’s top intelligence brains.
