Declassification

Inside the CIA’s Plot to Kill Fidel Castro—With Mafia Help

The conspiracy, including the mobsters’ involvement in it and the CIA’s oversight of it, has been known about for years. But the documents—from the CIA, FBI and other agencies, which had kept the files secret in full or in part for decades—provide several new details about the gangsters, their plot and their friendship. Together, these sources paint the most comprehensive picture yet of America’s first confirmed attempt at state-sponsored assassination of a foreign leader.

The files reveal, for instance, the range of Giancana’s and Roselli’s world of co-conspirators, including CIA spies and handlers, a fellow Mafioso (and former cop) in Chicago, Castro’s double agents in Miami, beautiful Hollywood women, “Rat Pack” entertainers like Frank Sinatra, a snooping J. Edgar Hoover and zealously anti-communist White House officials. The documents also provide new details about the mobsters’ violent schemes to kill Castro, which included everything from explosions and gunfire during midnight boat raids to hidden poisons prepared by the agency’s lab. During the early 1960s, the CIA’s quest to kill Castro turned southern Florida into a secret war zone and became a wild whack-a-mole hunt inside Cuba—all without luck. The ever-elusive despot died of old age in 2016.