Late 2021 Release of Kennedy Assassination Files Per JFK Records Act Validate Clandestine CIA – Mafia Alliance to Kill Castro
By Dave O’Brien,
author of
Through The ‘Oswald’ Window
and
JFK Case NOT Closed!
A December 15, 2021 release of Kennedy assassination classified files per law mandated by the JFK Records Act of 1992 validates that a clandestine CIA – Mafia alliance to murder Cuban dictator Fidel Castro did occur, raising the possibility that the target may have changed to the U.S. President as reported in this author’s first book.
The CIA – Mafia revelations were part of 1,491 documents released on executive order by President Joe Biden soon after the 58th anniversary of the JFK assassination in Dallas.
Other declassified top secret CIA-FBI documents reveal the interest the CIA and FBI had in Oswald’s visits to both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City mere weeks before the Kennedy assassination on November 22, 1963.
The documents, citing Oswald’s defection to the Soviet Union in 1959 and return to the U.S. in 1962, speculate that Lee Oswald may have visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City in hopes of trying to get back to the Soviet Union with his Russian born wife Marina and their two young daughters.
The visit to the Cuban embassy may have been to pursue a second option to return to the Soviet Union by obtaining a Visa to go to Cuba, a Soviet ally, with eventual passage to Moscow.
After Oswald allegedly assassinated JFK and was himself murdered two days later in police custody by Jack Ruby, the Warren Commission Report did not implicate the Soviet Union or Cuba in the President’s murder, instead claiming that Oswald acted alone.
THE MOB CONNECTION
Released FBI cables indicate efforts to monitor or surveil top level mafia figures such as Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana of Chicago and Santo Trafficante Jr. of Florida, as well as organized crime figures “with interests in Cuba.”
In early 1960’s Cuba, mobsters with interests in the island nation included Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, who under the Batista regime owned and operated multiple casinos in Havana.
When revolutionary Fidel Castro ousted Batista and formed a Communist-leaning government, he deported Lansky and imprisoned Trafficante, where other prisoners have stated Jack Ruby, Oswald’s killer, was a regular visitor to the mafia kingpin.
Organized crime experts have pointed out that when JFK took office in early 1961, he inherited CIA plots to kill Castro, including CIA operated training camps in Louisiana prepping for what would become the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April 17-20, 1961.
Castro learned of U.S. government attempts to assassinate him and publicly issued the following warning – “If the CIA persists in trying to kill Cuban leaders, then American leaders will not be safe.”
In my first book, Through The ‘Oswald’ Window, this author theorized that at some point soon after the failed Bay of Pigs and the peaceful resolve of the 1962 Cuban missile crises, rebel CIA operatives E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis may have independently formed an alliance with mafia figures who had helped to execute several unsuccessful assassination attempts against Castro.
After President Kennedy pulled the government’s intended military air cover during the Bay of Pigs invasion and publicly promised to never again invade Cuba after the scary Cuban missile crises, this sinister alliance shared a hatred of the Kennedy administration for different reasons:
- Betrayal – Some CIA operatives who were training hundreds of Cuban exiles for the planned invasion to oust Castro and re-instate Batista, felt betrayed by Kennedy’s decision to withdraw U.S. military support. Reports suggest that some CIA operatives went rogue and continued their association with the Cuban exiles as their target shifted from Castro to JFK.
- Mafia Money – The mob’s shared goal to get rid of Castro, specifically Lansky and Trafficante, was the millions of dollars in annual revenue taken from them when Castro nationalized the Casino operations.
Organized crime experts doubt that just one mafia family, the Trafficante outfit based in anti-Castro crazed Miami, would have ordered the execution of a national leader such as Castro or Kennedy on its own.
MAFIA REVENGE?
But Lansky and Trafficante had at least two other top level mafia kingpins who hated the Kennedy brothers as much as they did.
Sam Giancana, the boss of Chicago’s crime family, despised John and Robert Kennedy for what he saw was the ultimate betrayal. At patriarch Joseph Kennedy’s request, Giancana helped JFK narrowly win Chicago during the 1960 Presidential campaign.
The inferred return favor was that a Kennedy administration would see organized crime in America as low on its agenda. Instead, JFK appointed his brother Robert as Attorney General and enabled him to go after the mob with a vengeance.
Bobby Kennedy’s war on the mob particularly focused on Carlos Marcello, the organized crime boss of Louisiana and Texas. RFK’s dislike of Marcello even resulted in him dismissing the rule of law in having Marcello privately deported to Guatemala because he falsely claimed that country to be his birthplace.
The Through The ‘Oswald’ Window book postulates that while the CIA, as an agency, likely played no role in the JFK assassination, breakaway CIA operatives in concert with anti-Castro rebels had a powerful ally in wanting to put an end to the Kennedy administration – high level mafia kingpins.
The possibility becomes heightened by the latest release of documents which confirm that the CIA was already in bed with the mafia in U.S. government attempts to assassinate Castro.
There are approximately 13,500 documents still classified in the National Archives that are either redacted or remain sealed in the “interests of national security.”
The withholding is in defiance of the JFK Records Act passed by Congress in 1992 that required all files be declassified and released by October 26, 2017, which has still not happened.
