NPR reporter mockingly said Snowden thought CIA might send the MAFIA after him.

[Octafish]

"He actually suggested in that interview that the CIA might send the Mafia after him. That seems probably a little far-fetched." -- Tom Gjelten to Linda Wertheimer

It's no joke. Doesn't anyone at NPR remember how the CIA hired the Mafia to kill Castro?

FTR: That was 1960 when Ike was president, Nixon was veep, and Dulles headed CIA.

[Daniel537]

1. Not surprising. NPR went far right during the Bush years.

They are no better than the assholes in the rest of the MSM.

[Octafish]

5. You are correct, during the Reagan-Bush years.

Pruneface tried to defund public broadcasting. Congress, for a while, kept the funding going, but it has been reduced over time. Plus, the leadership was replaced with ideologues loyal to trickle down money trumps peace thinking.

[b.durruti]

50. Reich-wing to be sure. -nt-

[WinkyDink]

2. I'm always amused by those who STILL insist on ANY govt actions' being "far-fetched."

9/11 MIHOP? Far-fetched!

Gulf of Tonkin? Far-fetched!

11/22/63? Far-fetched!

Injecting syphilis into unsuspecting African-Americans? Far-fetched!

Don't get me started.

[Octafish]

9. Johnny Roselli, found strangled, stabbed and cut to pieces inside a drum floating in a Miami bay...

...was approached by FBI, CIA and Howard Hughes types...

The Puppet and the Puppetmasters

THE MAGIC BOX

an investigative report by Larry DuBois and Laurence Gonzales
Playboy.com

Hughes was extremely anxious to get himself into an alliance with the CIA that would protect him from investigation by other Government agencies.
-- ROBERT MAHEU

A CIA cover organization is a strange and very useful thing. It's like having a magic box. You can put things in and you can take things out. You can take things out that you never put in and you can put things in that will never come out. Or you can get into the box yourself and go away somewhere -- or perhaps ago away forever. If the box is large enough, you can put an entire country inside it and no one will ever know.

The Hughes organization is such a box, the biggest and most useful of its kind. According to information given to us by a highly placed intelligence source, there is nothing else like it in the world, as far as intelligence fronts go. It is no secret to most foreign governments, most of which stand in awe of its ineffable, elegant vastness. From within this magic box, an important part of the United States' covert intelligence operations emanate. But by 1971, it had begun to crack. So much had been put into the box that things were beginning to come out. The magic was fading.

Hughes's alliance with the agency started as early as 1949. Only two years after the CIA got its charter, it began giving contracts to Hughes.

April 1, 1975, The Washington Post reported, "Hughes Aircraft has been mentioned as a potential hotbed of interrelationships with the CIA." The New York Times on March 20, 1975, quoted high Government officials as saying the HAC had been building satellites for intelligence purposes for years and "employs a number of high-ranking CIA and military men." As early as 1960, Maheu had Hughes's blessing in taking on one of the agency's most sensitive assignments: the assassination of Fidel Castro. Maheu worked out several unsuccessful plots with gangsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli.

The affinity between Hughes and the agency was natural: America's most secretive billionaire and the most secretive part of America's Government. In a way, Hughes was a kind of modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, an eccentric genius who pushed to the cutting edge of the 20th Century, whether in early talking movies or in space satellites. Just after his death was reported, Newsweek quoted a top-ranking Washington intelligence official as saying, "Hughes gravitated into areas that other people refused to go into or didn't believe in." HAC pioneered the synchronous-orbit satellite, built the first Early Bird satellite and the Surveyor spacecraft that made the first soft landing on the moon and sent pictures back to NASA in preparation for the manned moon shots. Without Hughes's signal-amplifying microwave tubes, pictures from Mars would have been impossible. HAC is responsible for three-dimensional radar that is used for tracking hundreds of planes simultaneously. And the world's first operating laser arced across the labs of HAC. Laser weapons are now one of the hottest topics within the Pentagon -- they may someday make nuclear weapons obsolete. The secrets of laser-weapon technology are so closely guarded that Pentagon insiders will discuss it only in state-of-the-art terms.

CONTINUED via Internet Archive cache:

http://web.archive.org/web/20051224225453/http://www.playboy.com/features/features/puppetmasters/index.html

If you've the time, feel free to have at it, WinkyDink. Democracy and Fascism are in the balance.

[QC]

3. NPR = Nice Polite Republicans n/t

[Octafish]

10. It IS sick.

During the run-up to the Iraq invasion, rah-rah war.

Now, it's blame-the-Democrat that the nation's turned into a police state.

[hopemountain]

66. except for the rude, impolite interviewers

who use slanted, suggestive comments and questions to steer the interviews to insure they reflect, & support the conservative gop ideology and talking points.
i hardly listen to them anymore.

[backscatter712]

4. The CIA's probably got even worse thugs to send after him. n/t

[Octafish]

11. True, that.

They don't leave much evidence behind or to chance.



Know your BFEE: 1984 Death of Outstanding Congressional Staffer Buried Poppy-Moon Relationship

...

The Suspicious, Disturbing Death of Election Rigger (and a decent human being) Michael Connell

...

Of course, somebody had to write a U.S. Government issued training manual.

[Recursion]

6. The same guys who can't stop a few Libyans from blowing up a consulate?

What's really funny is how all these myths about CIA power end up doing the CIA's work for them...

[Octafish]

13. Whatcha gonna do?

Trojan Horse:

The National Endowment for Democracy

excerpted from the book

Rogue State

A Guide to the World's Only Superpower

by William Blum
Common Courage Press, 2000

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate-the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the House and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-the National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.

It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism. Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to "support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts". Notice the "nongovernmental"-part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/National%20EndowmentDemo.html

[struggle4progress]

7. Organized crime had a particular beef against Castro, because Cuba was once their playground

[Octafish]

14. Meyer Lansky owned a bank there. Gave Big Money in our time inspiration...

Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.

[napoleon_in_rags]

30. Didn't he say the triads, not the mafia?

Triads being Chinese mafia. The Castro stuff was decades ago, but isn't foreign intelligence agencies siding with organized crime inside a country they are trying to get in par for the course? Like aren't the Russian mobs in other countries remnants of the KGB? That's what I heard somewhere. That's a notably different thing than intelligence siding with mafia in their OWN country...

[struggle4progress]

31. You are right:

"... Or they could pay off the Triads ..."
US intelligence worker Edward Snowden fears retribution over NSA program PRISM leak
by: AFP in Washington
From: AFP
June 10, 2013 9:20PM

[thucythucy]

52. So why, if he's afraid of the Chinese mafia,

would he flee to China as a safe haven?

[struggle4progress]

53. And why stay only blocks from the US consulate he identifies as a CIA center?

I think perhaps one ought to sprinkle salt heavily on whatever he says

[southernyankeebelle]

8. The mafia helped during WWII with the invasion of Italy. I don't know why they

would mock him after all he knows alot of stuff. Maybe the mafia is involved with alot of things we don't know about.

[Octafish]

15. Like when the head of the New York Stock Exchange hugged the Columbian narco-terrorist?

It's just business.

[southernyankeebelle]

17. I didn't say it was morally right. I just made a comment. It was a fact.

[Octafish]

18. I'm sorry, southernyankeebelle. I didn't mean to imply that you did.

The Mafia helped the US Navy clean out the NAZI spies and sympathizers from the nation's dockyards in World War II. What I'm trying to make clear is that the Washington-Wall Street axis to Switzerland still does business that they learned from the Mafia, whether its laundering trillions in drug profits or making friends with terrorists to turn a buck off war without end.

Something else about the Mafia and members of the national security apparatus of the United States: The employees of one government agency apparently continued the practice without telling JFK about their special relationship or reporting said contacts to the Warren Commission after his assassination.

[alcibiades_mystery]

12. There's no such thin g as the mafia

[Octafish]

16. Know your BFEE

Corrupt Craftsmen Hoover and Dulles



Before his hunting days, Dick Cheney often enjoyed taking the controls of a bumper car.

I know you know, alcibiades_mystery. Just want our more junior friends at NSA to know.

[alcibiades_mystery]

32. The what now?

[Octafish]

35. Bush Family Evil Empire -- the War Party who've hijacked Democracy.

You know, the Wall Street-Washington insiders who make money off war.

I don't find them funny. That's why I spend time writing about them on DU.

[alcibiades_mystery]

40. Oh, right

Well, good luck to you, sir.

[Octafish]

45. Thank you. Good luck to you, sir or madame. BTW, on the etymology of the 'BFEE'...

Bartcop coined the phrase as a way of putting a handle on the powerful interests, many of whom are fascists, who make money off war. Know your BFEE series started out as a way of bringing the real elite's present crimes in line with their past treasons through DU.

Here are some that weren't written then:

Know your BFEE: WikiLeaks Stratfor Dump Exposes Continued Secret Government Warmongering

Know your BFEE: John Roberts earned his Sgt. Pepper stripes as an Iran-Contra cover-up artiste.

Know your BFEE: David Vitter was pampered by the DC Madam

Henry Paulson, Banker to the BFEE

Rupert Murdoch Pushed Poodle to Join GOP-BFEE Rush to Iraq War

In all, the BFEE series number less than 100. My sincere hope is they serve as a guide for criminal investigators in the very near future.

[alcibiades_mystery]

47. Yeah, I

didn't read any of that.

[Octafish]

48. Figured as much. No biggie.

Karl Rove's team worked overtime to see their version of events got out first. I just want the dots to be connected, should someone need them down the road.

[msanthrope]

19. Well, doesn't it seem a bit far-fetched? We're talking about a supposed plot

that took place over 50 years ago. Doesn't it seem the tiniest bit silly to you?

[Octafish]

20. Remember that assassination program that Cheney ran?

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff, said he thought the Cheney-linked assassination program was active, not a hypothetical thing. Wilkerson said ambassadors and diplomatic staff overseas reported kidnappings and other nefarious operations in their posted nations.

Well, if Cheney's secret program was killing people overseas, what was to stop them from killing people within the United States? The CIA wasn't supposed to operate domestically by law, but they do. Specifically, I'd like to know if Cheney's secret team was involved with these convenient deaths:

Michael Connell (Election Fraud Technical Guru)

John Kokal (No WMDs in Iraq)

David Kelly (No WMDs in Iraq)

Cliff Baxter(ENRON #2)

Gary Webb (CIA drugs)

Jim Hatfield (Bush bin Laden connection)

Deborah Palfrey (Washington Madame knew everybody from Congress-White House-CIA-Contracting Scam)

Raymond Lemme (Election Fraud)

Athan Gibbs (Election Fraud)

Paul Wellstone (Official White House Enemy)

Here are more people who died under suspicious circumstances while investigating, eh, government perfidy:

Danny Casolaro (Octopus investigator)

Abbie Hoffman (October Surprise investigator)

Steve Kangas (Powers-That-Be investigator)

Mark Lombardi (Conspiracies In Action investigator)

More details here:

Know your BFEE: Dead Men Tell No Tales

and here:

Know your BFEE: 1984 Death of Outstanding Congressional Staffer Buried Poppy-Moon Relationship

One more thing: Why did Cheney take the heat for the assassination program? Sneer was veep to Smirko. The little turd from Crawford was very horny for war.

Know your BFEE: Bush has Killed a Million Innocent People for Their Oil.

Bush even said Money Trumps Peace. Sometimes.

That's where the Big Money is these days: War.

[msanthrope]

22. Ok. Dick Cheney's gonna order the BFEE to assassinate this man? nt

[Octafish]

23. No. The point is assassination isn't ancient history.

What do you think President Obama is doing with his drones, either CIA or Blackwater directed?

We live in a time when the government of the United States kills people without charge. Depending on where one stands, it's called assassination or murder. When such power gets put into private hands, like Erik Prince of Blackwater, it's called business.

Don't know about you, but either way it's a problem for me: assassination is about the most un-democratic thing there is, apart from lying America into a war for profit.

[msanthrope]

24. So President Obama is going to assassinate him? WTF? nt

[Octafish]

25. That's what you said. Not me.

What I said: These programs are not ancient history.

[msanthrope]

27. So was Osama Bin Laden assassinated, or murdered, based on your last post? nt

[Octafish]

33. Don't know. Maybe it's classified.

For all I know, he's living next door to Kenny Lay.

[msanthrope]

34. You think Osama Bin Laden is alive? nt

[Octafish]

36. I said I don't know.

Do you know he's dead? Or when he died? Or the circumstances surrounding his death?

What do you know about these questions, other than what the government told you?

Are your opinions shaped by that recent film, "Zero Dark Thirty"?

PS: You seem intent on proving something, msanthrope. If you have a problem with what I wrote, just say so.

[msanthrope]

37. You think President Obama lied?

[Octafish]

38. Why do you keep haranguing me? I said I don't know.

I took his word on it, but I wasn't there.

Obama has said some things that I knew were false. For instance:

Obama repeated Bush line that Taliban refused to turn over bin Laden.

Answer a question for me: Why did Obama let Bush and his cronies off the hook for lying America into war?

[msanthrope]

39. No one is haranguing you. I find you fascinating. nt

[Octafish]

42. Really? Must be a bad word choice on my part. So, why do you continue to harass me?

More importantly, why don't you answer my question?

Why did Obama let Bush and his cronies off the hook for lying America into war?

[msanthrope]

44. No one is harassing you. And I won't answer your question because I

do not accept its premise.

[Octafish]

46. Right, apart from stating things I didn't state.

As for the question, it's very straightforward. Perhaps one day you will venture an answer.

[msanthrope]

49. Nope. If you aren't sure if Osama Bin Laden is dead or not,

I don't feel obligated to engage with you in a Q&A. It's kind of like having a convo with someone who thinks that Bubba Ho-Tep might be based on a true story.

[Octafish]

51. Not really, as I didn't put words in your mouth.

That would be disingenuous.

[zappaman]

58. How do you know the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor? Were you there?

How do you know we landed on the moon? Were you there?
How do you know the Titanic was sunk after hitting an iceberg? Were you there?

See, you can't know Bin Laden is dead because you weren't there!!!

CT logic in a nutshell...

[msanthrope]

59. Wait!! The Germans didn't bomb Pearl Harbor? nt

[zappaman]

60. No...they did.

Saw it in this documentary...

[msanthrope]

61. That particular operative became a Senator, if I remember correctly. nt

[zappaman]

62. Indeed he did.

He is also a member of the BFEE which is responsible for not only killing JFK but making sure you can only buy hot dog rolls in packs of 8, while hot dogs themselves come in packs of 10!

[Octafish]

65. I should have known you and zappaman were acquainted, msanthrope.

That association makes your posts more understandable.

[avaistheone1]

21. There is a long history that EVEN the goverment acknowledges of the Mob doing dirty business for the

government. The veil was uncovered decades ago during "Church Committee" named for its chairman, Senator Frank Church .

[Octafish]

43. Frank Church was about the last Senator to stand up to the national security state.

He warned us regarding the National Security Agency and its ability to eavesdrop on all communication (before the World Wide Web made it easy):

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

"I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” -- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3510598

Regarding what's developed since '76:

Top Secret America

Thank you, avaistheone1 for understanding what this is about. Secret Government means some citizens have access to information their fellow citizens do not. On Wall Street, that's inside trading. In the Beltway, that's business as usual, whether it's to make a killing on the DJIA or whether it's to cover up a killing by the FBI.

[kenny blankenship]

26. Oh come on, it's been literally YEARS since we've needed to contract that stuff out to the mafia

Although there are some spots -like HK- where using a drone would be dicey.

[leveymg]

28. That's Blackwater's job, now.

[Octafish]

57. Makes the meteoric rise of conservatism almost understandable.

CIA Director Porter Goss Resigns

[Laelth]

29. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[Octafish]

54. NPR seldom connects the dots to the criminality at the heart of the national security state.

Mocking the fact the Mafia and CIA were in the assassination business together prevents people from asking, "How else do they conspire?"

[Rex]

55. Ah yes, the other branch of the CIA

the mafia.

[Octafish]

56. Seems like the place to go when headhunting for management types.

Top CIA Spy Accused of Being a Mafia Hitman

BY ROBERT BECKHUSEN
Wired.com 06.27.128:33 AM

Enrique “Ricky” Prado’s resume reads like the ultimate CIA officer: veteran of the Central American wars, running the CIA’s operations in Korea, a top spy in America’s espionage programs against China, and deputy to counter-terrorist chief Cofer Black — and then a stint at Blackwater. But he’s also alleged to have started out a career as a hitman for a notorious Miami mobster, and kept working for the mob even after joining the CIA. Finally, he went on to serve as the head of the CIA’s secret assassination squad against Al-Qaida.

That’s according to journalist Evan Wright’s blockbuster story How to Get Away With Murder in America, distributed by Byliner. In it, Wright — who authored Generation Kill, the seminal story of the Iraq invasion — compiles lengthy, years-long investigations by state and federal police into a sector of Miami’s criminal underworld that ended nowhere, were sidelined by higher-ups, or cut short by light sentences. It tracks the history of Prado’s alleged Miami patron and notorious cocaine trafficker, Alberto San Pedro, and suspicions that Prado moved a secret death squad from the CIA to Blackwater.

“In protecting Prado, the CIA arguably allowed a new type of mole — an agent not of a foreign government but of American criminal interests — to penetrate command,” Wright writes.

SNIP...

Years later, in 1996, Prado was a senior manager inside the CIA’s Bin Laden Issue Station, before the Al-Qaida mastermind was a well-known name. Two years later, the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania elevated Prado to become the chief of operations inside the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, headed by then-chief Cofer Black, later an executive for the notorious merc firm Blackwater. “As the title implied, the job made Prado responsible for all the moving pieces at the CTC — supervising field offices on surveillance, rendition, or other missions, and making sure that logistics were in order, that personnel were in place,” according to Wright.

Prado was also reportedly put in charge of a “targeted assassination unit,” that was never put into operation. (The CIA shifted to drones.) But according to Wright, the CIA handed over its hit squad operation to Blackwater, now called Academi, as a way “to kill people with precision, without getting caught.” Prado is said to have negotiated the deal to transfer the unit, which Wright wrote “marked the first time the U.S. government outsourced a covert assassination service to private enterprise.” As to whether the unit was then put into operation, two Blackwater contractors tell Wright the unit began “whacking people like crazy” beginning in 2008. Prado also popped up two years ago in a report by Jeremy Scahill of The Nation, in which the now ex-CIA Prado was discovered to have built up a network of foreign shell companies to hide Blackwater operations, beginning in 2004. The Nation also revealed that Prado pitched an e-mail in 2007 to the DEA, explaining that Blackwater could “do everything from everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations,” carried out by foreign nationals, “so deniability is built in and should be a big plus.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/cia/

Truman tried to warn us about this on Dec. 22, 1963...

http://www.maebrussell.com/Prouty/Harry%20Truman's%20CIA%20article.html

[MinM]

63. Sam Giancana, one of the Mafia members hired to kill Castro

Howard Hughes knew before President John Kennedy and his brother Robert Kennedy did that the CIA was trying to kill Castro. Hughes found out when Maheu had to ask for a leave of absence to run the operation.

The Kennedy brothers found out about the plots shortly after the FBI uncovered a bugging operation in Las Vegas.

Sam Giancana, one of the Mafia members hired to kill Castro, had suspected his mistress Phyllis McGuire was having an affair with Dan Rowan (of the Rowan and Martin “Laugh-In” comedy team). Maheu, as a favor to Giancana, hired a Florida detective to bug Rowan’s hotel room. But the detective left his equipment in plain sight, and the maid reported the equipment to the police, who contacted the FBI. The CIA admitted to Hoover that CIA was directly involved in the bugging and convinced Hoover not to further investigate. The CIA then told Robert Kennedy about the CIA’s use of Giancana in a plot to kill Castro.

Given that Robert Kennedy had faced Giancana down in a courtroom (where he famously accused Giancana of giggling like a little girl), trying to prosecute him for Mafia activities, Robert was understandably furious at CIA for using the Mob, and furious at them trying to kill Castro...

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/MinM/25

Unfortunately even those on 'our side,' who consider themselves historians, don't know the real history...

@MJayRosenberg:

Chris Matthews: JFK/RFK were civil rights heroes.

Chris Hayes: they ordered spying on Dr. King.

Difference: Chris Hayes reads history.

https://twitter.com/MJayRosenberg/status/344609636059590658

[Octafish]

64. On behalf of CIA, Johnny Rosselli brought in mob bosses Giancana, Trafficante and Marcello...

That is some kind of outfit, dose guys dere.

What Rosselli could have brought up, had he not met his end:

Richard Nixon's Greatest Cover-Up

His Ties to the Assassination of President Kennedy

by Don Fulsom

EXCERPT...

During the Nixon years, pressure from Washington eased off on Sam Giancana. And long-standing deportation proceedings against CIA-connected mobster Johnny Roselli were dropped. Without going into specifics, government lawyers explained in court that Roselli had performed "valuable services to the national security." A Giancana henchman, Roselli was an important contact man in the Mob/CIA assassination plots against Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

Roselli and Jack Ruby are reported to have met in hotels in Miami during the months before the JFK assassination. Years later, Roselli told columnist Jack Anderson: "When Oswald was picked up, the underworld conspirators feared he would crack and disclose information that might lead to them. This almost certainly would have brought a massive U.S. crackdown on the Mafia. So Jack Ruby was ordered to eliminate Oswald . . ."

In the mid-‘70s, as congressional committees probed the Mob and the CIA, Roselli was dismembered, squeezed into an oil drum, and tossed off the Florida coast; Giancana was gunned down in his kitchen; and Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.

Back in the Eisenhower years, Vice President Richard Nixon and CIA agent E. Howard Hunt were principal secret planners of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that failed so miserably when it was later launched by President Kennedy. Some historians are convinced Nixon was a prime mover in an associated — and also ill-fated — plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. For example, onetime Nixon aide Roger Morris says Nixon "had been an avid supporter of the Eisenhower administration's covert operations to overthrow Castro, including the alliance with organized crime to assassinate the Cuban leader." For his part, Hunt has readily admitted his role in efforts to murder Castro.

For the "executive action" mission, potential assassins were recruited from Mafia ranks, so that if any of their activities were disclosed, organized crime could be blamed.

CONTINUED...

http://dirtypolitics.50megs.com/dirty.htm

On his way to the top of the world of Top Secret National Security No Reporters Allowed Get Out of Jail Free, young Roselli found himself under Al Capone's wing, who took a shine on the young dope dealer and bookie hiding out in Chicago. The story in PDF form:

Rosselli Under the FBI Microscope

All sorts of guys, friends of the up-and-coming, almost.