The CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro, Part 3
I revealed the identity of the mysterious Cuban exile leader who was passed the poison pills by the CIA via John Rosselli
Introduction
I recently watched the six-part series, Mafia Spies, on Paramount/Showtime that premiered on July 16. Although I have some disagreements with its content, I believe that it was an entertaining, noble, and sincere effort to present what is known about the events revolving around the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Notably, I investigated the CIA-Mafia plots and published the results in my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, about the rise and fall of Jimmy Hoffa. Mike Ewing, a brilliant researcher and scholar, worked with me in 1977, bringing to my attention the connections between Hoffa and several of his gangster associates who were involved in Cuba before and after Castro took power.
Because this subject is back in vogue, I recount our research from 47 years ago that included my exclusive interviews about the CIA-Mafia plots with, among others, William Bufalino, Charles Crimaldi, Irving Davidson, Robert Maheu, Rolland McMaster, Edward Partin, Ralph Salerno, Walter Sheridan, Joe Shimon, Charles Siragusa, and Frank Ragano—all of whom are now gone.
Part 1: “The CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro: The pre-Maheu, pre-Rosselli period,” August 25, 2024
Part 2: “The CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro: My interviews with Robert Maheu about what he knew and what he did not know,” September 1, 2024
Part 3: “The CIA-Mafia plots against Fidel Castro: I revealed the identity of the mysterious Cuban exile leader who was passed the poison pills by the CIA via John Rosselli,” September 15, 2024
Antonio de Varona, aka Tony Varona
Shortly after the inauguration of John Kennedy on January 20, 1961—and without the new President’s knowledge—Chicago mobster Johnny Rosselli made contact, through Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, with the treacherous aide to Fidel Castro designated to poison him with the special pills provided by the CIA.
“The aide went back to Cuba and sent his family to the United States,” Robert Maheu explained to me. “Then he lost his stomach, and he left the island, too. The pills were then given to a leader of the Cuban exile forces.”
During my investigation of the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro, I successfully identified that mysterious Cuban exile leader—who was passed the poison pills by the CIA via Johnny Rosselli—as Antonio de Varona, aka Tony Varona, a former president of the Cuban Senate.
Upon the release of my 1978 book about Jimmy Hoffa, Newsweek credited me, above, with discovering and revealing de Varona’s identity.
Since then, everyone has left the scene: Sam Giancana was murdered in 1975, a month before Hoffa disappeared. Johnny Rosselli was killed and dismembered in 1976. Santo Trafficante expired in 1987. Antonio de Varona died in 1992. And Bob Maheu passed away in 2008. . . . Ironically, Fidel Castro outlived them all, dying at age 90 in 2016.
The Las Vegas wiretapping case
Because of poor planning and all the unsavory alliances, the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17-20, 1961, was a dismal failure. After an appropriate amount of time, President Kennedy fired both CIA Director Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, the CIA’s director of plans.
But publicly, President Kennedy courageously accepted full responsibility for the debacle—even though he opposed the invasion and wanted to scrap the project, conceived and engineered by the previous Eisenhower Administration.
Meantime, after the inauguration, Attorney Robert Kennedy and the Kennedy Justice Department—having no knowledge of the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro—launched an aggressive and unprecedented war against the Mafia and its associates, including Jimmy Hoffa, Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Sam Giancana, among many others.
The Kennedy brothers wanted to build on the experience and intelligence they had collected about corrupt businesses, labor racketeering, and organized crime during their work on the U.S. Senate Rackets Committee from 1957 to 1960.
Near the end of the committee’s term, Robert Kennedy, its chief counsel, identified Sam Giancana as public enemy number one.
Thus, debunking two popular conspiracy theories, it was unthinkable 1) that Giancana would have helped John Kennedy win the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois during the 1960 presidential election and 2) that the Kennedys would have accepted or allowed Giancana to play any role, directly or indirectly, with the United States Government.
On the second day of the Cuban invasion, the FBI received information that the CIA had some unexplained involvement with the illegal wiretapping of comedian Dan Rowan’s hotel room as a favor to Giancana, who suspected that his girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, was having an affair with Rowan.
Shortly after that, an FBI special agent contacted Bob Maheu as part of the Bureau’s investigation. But Maheu refused to say anything more than “see Colonel Edwards” at the CIA.
A month later, J. Edgar Hoover sent Attorney General Kennedy an internal memorandum about the Las Vegas wiretapping case. He wrote that, during a discussion with Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the CIA’s director of security, the FBI learned that the CIA, through Maheu, had solicited Giancana’s assistance “in attempting to accomplish several clandestine efforts in Cuba.’’
In response and for all the obvious reasons, Attorney General Kennedy wrote a curt note in the margin of the Hoover report, saying: “I hope this will be followed up vigorously.”
On November 29, 1961, John McCone, a California industrialist who headed the Atomic Energy Commission, replaced Allen Dulles as CIA Director. Like the Kennedy brothers, McCone was not briefed about the assassination plots by Dulles, Bissell, or William Harvey, who had succeeded James O’Connell as the coordinator of operations against the Cuban leader.
On the day after McCone took over the CIA, a new program, “Operation Mongoose,” officially became operational with the full support of the President and the attorney general. The covert plan was designed for the CIA to use its authority and available resources to infiltrate and organize the Cuban population and to incite a counterrevolution.
There were no official directives in Mongoose for an assassination plot against Castro and/or a collaboration with the Mafia.
Hoover reacts
In February 1962, Richard Bissell was succeeded by his deputy director, Richard Helms. Soon after the change in command—and without the knowledge of the Kennedys—William Harvey discussed the murder plots against Castro with Helms. (At this point, it is unclear what CIA Director McCone knew.)
On February 27, Hoover sent a memorandum to Robert Kennedy and Kenneth O’Donnell, a special assistant to the President, stating that Colonel Edwards of the CIA had opposed the anticipated prosecutions in the Las Vegas wiretapping case.
The memo continued that during the FBI investigation of Rosselli’s role in the matter, the Bureau discovered that he had maintained a friendship with Judith Campbell, who was having affairs with Sam Giancana and, shockingly, President Kennedy.
Hoover cross-checked the allegation by reviewing the woman’s phone records, which showed that she had called the general number for the White House on several occasions.
On March 22, Hoover and President Kennedy had a private lunch during which the Campbell matter was presumably discussed.
And, since the FBI had just uncovered some kind of working relationship between the CIA and the underworld, they probably discussed that, too.
Later that afternoon, the President made his last known call to the woman from the White House.
It is not known what the President and the attorney general discussed after Hoover briefed the President.
The next day, Hoover wrote to CIA General Counsel Lawrence Houston discussing the status of the Las Vegas wiretapping investigation. Hoover explained that Colonel Edwards had asked the FBI not to pursue the case, adding, “We were also informed that introduction of evidence concerning the CIA operation would be embarrassing to the Government.”
In a stunning turn of events, the FBI inquiry into the wiretapping activities in the Rowan case of Maheu, Giancana, Rosselli, and their cohorts was quietly dropped.
Within two weeks after Hoover wrote to the CIA, Helms ordered the new anti-Castro coordinator, William Harvey, to cease the CIA’s ties with Giancana and Maheu but to continue the relationship with Rosselli and Trafficante, whose name had yet not surfaced in the FBI’s investigation.
Bob Maheu told me: “Helms probably didn’t know everything that was going on because O’Connell and I had severed our relationship with the people involved in the plots after the Bay of Pigs invasion.
“We had been very critical about the fiasco, and it was a mutual decision among all of us that we leave. Rosselli and Harvey handled everything after that.”
Following the Hoover memorandum, Harvey met secretly with Rosselli and passed another set of poison pills for delivery to Antonio de Varona, aka Tony Varona, the Cuban exile leader.
Robert Kennedy meets with the CIA
On the afternoon of May 7, 1962, Robert Kennedy met with Richard Helms at the CIA and then three hours later with Sheffield Edwards and Lawrence Houston. During these meetings that blindsided the attorney general, he was informed—for the first time—of the CIA’s assassination plots with Maheu, Rosselli, and Giancana.
Apparently, there was still no official notification that Santo Trafficante, a top target of the Kennedy Justice Department, was involved.
The CIA officials told Kennedy that the killing of Castro was originally intended to coincide with the Bay of Pigs invasion but was called off when the operation failed.
Attorney General Kennedy was absolutely furious. As Lawrence Houston stated, “If you have 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.”
“I trust,” Houston quoted Kennedy as saying slowly and deliberately, “that if you ever try to do business with organized crime—with gangsters—you will let the attorney general know.”
Still stinging from his May 7 meeting with the CIA officials, Robert Kennedy met with Hoover two days later. Commenting on the meeting in a memorandum for his personal file, Hoover wrote:
The Attorney General told me he wanted to advise me of a situation in the Giancana case which had considerably disturbed him. He stated a few days ago he had been advised by CIA that in connection with Giancana, CIA had hired Robert A. Maheu, a private detective in Washington, D.C., to approach Giancana with a proposition of paying $150,000 to hire some gunmen to go into Cuba and to kill Castro.
Frank Sinatra and Judith Campbell
According to the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee[*]—which later publicly revealed and officially investigated the CIA-Mafia plots—Hoover’s memo gave two reasons for the attorney general’s anger: First, the CIA had put itself in a position where:
it could not afford to have any action taken against Giancana or Maheu. [And second,] Stated as [Kennedy] well knew the “ gutter gossip” was that the reason nothing had been done against Giancana was because of Giancana’s close relationship with Frank Sinatra who, in turn, claimed to be a close friend of the Kennedy family. The Attorney General stated he realized this and it was for that reason that he was quite concerned when he received this information from the CIA about Giancana and Maheu.
Sinatra, also a close friend and business associate of Giancana, was the person who introduced Judith Campbell to President Kennedy. Years later, a married Judith Campbell Exner—still an attractive brunette with a pretty smile—wrote a self-serving, undocumented autobiography in which she claimed to have met John Kennedy in early February I960 at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She insisted that, at the time, she did not know either Giancana or Rosselli.
Between March 7 and April 12, 1960, she wrote that she had slept with Kennedy on three occasions and that he had telephoned her almost daily.
If true, the FBI’s discovery threatened grave consequences for the Kennedy Presidency. And the grim reality of the Mafia’s involvement with the CIA—even though the President and the attorney general neither approved of nor were involved in the plots—carried more potential devastation.
Accordingly, the probability existed that major Mafia figures might attempt to blackmail the White House and the Justice Department—which was their likely motive for getting involved with the CIA from the outset. Already, the charges against Rosselli and Giancana in the Las Vegas wiretapping case were quashed because of fear that the CIA-Mafia plots against Castro—which had compromised and corrupted the CIA—might become public.
The Hoffa unsupported claim
Shortly before his July 1975 murder, Jimmy Hoffa was interviewed by Detroit reporter Jerry Stanecki, on assignment for Playboy, about his knowledge of the Kennedys’ sex lives.
The top target of Attorney General Kennedy and the Department of Justice, Hoffa—who was allegedly involved in the earliest CIA-Mafia plots against Castro (see Part 1)—responded: “I already had a tape on Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy which was so filthy and so nasty—given to me by a girl—that even though my people encouraged me to [release] it, I wouldn’t do it. I put it away and said the hell with it. Forget about it.”
Stanecki asked, “What was on the tape?”
Hoffa replied: “Oh, their association with this young lady and what they did, and so forth. I got rid of the tape. I wouldn’t put up with it. [Pause.] Pure nonsense.“
Considering how provably corrupt and dishonest Hoffa was, that hardly rings true.
In fact, a top Hoffa associate, Teamsters Vice President Harold Gibbons of St. Louis, told me with no equivocation and in no uncertain terms: ‘‘If Jimmy had something on the Kennedys, he would have used it. The pressure was on him, and he would’ve done just about anything to turn it off.”
Whatever leverage Hoffa and his underworld friends thought they had against the Kennedys—real or imagined—was not enough to keep him out of trouble.
On May 19, 1962—twelve days after Robert Kennedy learned about the CIA-Mafia connection to Cuba—federal prosecutors indicted Hoffa for his role in the Test Fleet labor extortion scheme.
Four months later, in September 1962, Santo Trafficante met with a Florida businessman, Jose Aleman, about a Teamsters pension fund loan they hoped to receive from Jimmy Hoffa.
When their discussion turned to politics and the upcoming 1964 Presidential election, Aleman predicted that Kennedy would win reelection.
Trafficante replied very directly: “No, Jose, he’s going to be hit.”
According to Aleman, who was then an FBI informant, Trafficante “made it clear” that it was Hoffa who was making the arrangements for the President’s murder.
Next in Part 4 (TBA): “The mob did it. It’s a historical fact.”
ENDNOTE
[*] The U.S. Senate voted to create the Church Committee on January 27, 1975. Its official name was the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities. The panel’s final report was released on April 29, 1976.
Great Read. Filled with so much needed information
I urge all Americans to read Dan Moldea's writings which are an accurate insight to what really happened involving the secret government departments in Washington; incontestable and unquestionable. This scarce reporting, reveals and exposes the secret cabals that are a factual snapshot of history. If I were a major network producer, Dan would have a show. His show would make 60 Minutes look like 60 seconds.