Strange Bedfellows

It's the early nineteen sixties and we're in the hottest hotel in Miami. Beautiful people, beautiful cars. But tonight, in a private room, there will be a secret meeting involving some very strange bedfellows. First, there's a sharply dressed guy with slick back hair and sunglasses. His name is Johnny Rosselli. He's a mafia leader in Las Vegas and Los Angeles. Next to him is Sam g and Coanna, the notorious head of the Chicago Mafia. These mob guys are at

Just days before he was scheduled to testify to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Johnny Rosselli who was found chopped up and stuffed into an oil drum off the coast of Miami. Of course, in the telling of this story's Bill in one piece and very much alive.

Also there is Bill Harvey. Harvey runs the CIA's executive action program known as ZR Rifle. It's a secret program designed to eliminate problematic world leaders. He's meeting with these legendary crime bosses with an official offer from the CIA. He wants to hire them to kill Fidel Castro.

It was only revealed in two thousand and seven that Dulles, the godfather of the CIA, personally approved this arrangement.

When Rosselli and g and Conna were first approached, they were offered one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash to take out Castro, but the mobsters declined the money.

They don't want the job.

They wanted the job, but they said they'd do it for free. After all, they're patriots.

This is who killed JFK. Sixty years later? What can we uncover about the greatest murder mystery in American history? And why does it still matter today? I'm your host, Solidad O'Brien. Okay, so where are we in the story?

We've looked at the weeks leading up to Kennedy's arrival in Dallas, which included the CIA connected Ruth Paine helping Oswald get a job at the Texas school Book Depository, which overlooked Kennedy's motorcade route. We learned about Operation Northwoods, a CIA false flag plan designed to attack a prominent American target blame Castro to justify an invasion of Cuba.

It's hard to believe all of that's real.

But let's look at the motive. In solving any crime, you have to ask who had the most to gain.

And who has the most to gain.

Well, there are three groups. First, the Cuban exiles, whose country had been taken from them by Castro. They were determine to get it back. Second, the mob who suffered a huge financial loss with their hotels and casinos gone, and were furious at Kennedy's brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, for cracking down on organized crime. And third, the hardliners from the CIA in the military, who believed Kennedy had gone soft on communism and was selling the United States out to the Soviet Union.

Remember, after Castro took over in nineteen fifty nine, the CIA trained a group of Cuban exiles to execute a planned invasion to retake Cuba in nineteen sixty one. The attack was called the Bay of Pigs, and it failed miserably. Kennedy, not wanting American fingerprints on the mission, refused to send the requested air support. The exiles were overwhelmed and slaughtered.

So first, let's look at the Cuban exiles.

He knows that followed the Bay of Pig's envision there developed a very hostile attitude and then the ex commute toward Kennedy.

Of that's Fabian Escalante speaking through a translator. He was a leader in Castro's intelligence agency.

They were convinced that he was responsible for the failure of the Bay Bigs invasion and even were saying he was a Communist.

My dad was a member of the Pigs invasion.

That's the son of Ricardo Morales, Ricardo Morales Junior.

My dad thought JFK screwed us at the Bay of Pigs, and then he screwed us after the Cuban missile crisis.

Morales refers to the nineteen sixty two nuclear standoff against the Soviet Union where Kennedy, instead of using the crisis as justification to attack Cuba, made a deal with the Soviet Premier khrus Chef to avoid nuclear war.

And so he was no longer loved or trusted by by that part of the community, especially my dad. He no longer cared for JFK as a as a leader that it helped the Cuban people. They had given up on Cuba, so he had given up on him.

So Ricardo before the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis. Your dad got involved to try to quote get Cuba back from Castro.

Yeah, my dad was a G two agent in Cuba, which is the intelligence branch of the government. Castro takes over and then it starts to evolve where Castro starts going towards Communism, so he has to figure out a way to get out of the country.

Morales comes to the United States.

Then immediately he starts becoming involved in the bombings and killings of Cubans that are working for Castro. And then he he's never home at that point, he's out, you know, doing his thing, and he it's very emotional right now. Honestly, I don't know why. Oh yeah, so, but you know, he we we thought he was. What he was doing was trying to free Cuba.

My mom was Cuban growing up. She talk about the Bay of Pigs and how disappointed she was in Kennedy. So I do understand when they say that for them this was the loss of their homeland, the loss of their family. But while there may have been a shared sentiment among many exiles who had to leave, not everyone acted in the same way. It's important to specify that we're talking about a very particular group of Cuban exiles who took really drastic measures.

These exiles, most of whom settled in Florida and New Orleans, were not going to just sit by idly and accept this. Their property was taken, relatives were killed in jail. They wanted their home back, so they started to organize.

This is a huge turning point for the exiles.

That's Dick Russell.

Listen to what Castro's former head of intelligence, Fabian has Klante told me.

The official of the CIA and.

An official of the CIA came to a Cuban safehouse. He seemed very bothered by this and said, you have to eliminate Kennedy, the pinko of the White House.

The Cuban missile crisis made it even clearer to the exiles that Kennedy was not going to help them get Cuba back. He was looking to forge a path to peace with Cuba and the Soviet Union, and it was made clear by his famous speech that he gave at American University. He took the position that was directly at odds with the exiles who wanted their island back. Kennedy was standing in their way.

So that's the first group you've established the motive for the Cuban exiles.

Next is La Coos Andostra the mafia. The mafia's goals were simple money and power, and in the nineteen sixties they had both. This mob story starts in New Orleans with a burly mob boss named Carlos Marchello.

The New Orleans Crime Commission reported that under Marcello, the local mafia made over a billion dollars annually from gambling, prostitution, and burglaries.

Attorney General Robert Kennedy was going after Marcello as part of his mission of cracking down on organized crime. In nineteen sixty one, Kennedy had Marcello deported. He had him flown out of the United States and unceremoniously dumped in a jungle in Guatemala. Two months later, Marcello returned to New Orleans, and let's just say he wasn't in the best of moods.

Marcello had a deep and abiding hatred of Robert Kennedy by that time, and that was shared by the other organized crime leaders.

That's Jefferson Morley again, the creator of jfkfax dot Org.

The mafia despised the Attorney General, who they felt was targeting them. But as we've come to know, when the mob makes it decision, it's not personal, it's strictly business, and they had a really good business reason to dislike the Kennedys.

In nineteen fifty nine, Castro took power and through organized crime out of Havana.

Marcello and his partner Santo Traficanti ran Cuba. They called it the Las Vegas of the Caribbean. When Castro took over, they lost everything. Cuba was truly a second Vegas to them. Casinos, drugs, women. It's impossible to place a number behind these profits, but the business was huge, massive revenue streams, and growth potential was off the charts. Then Castro cuts them off. He shuts down their boomy casino and drug business. So now

The relationship between the CIA and the American mafia had begun in World War Two when the US invaded it through the South, and they didn't want any problem with the organized crime syndicates. That really controlled that part of Italy, and so they made an agreement with the mafia that they could continue to run their casinos. The US occupation wouldn't bother them, and in return, these crime syndicates would assist the US occupation.

And guess who came up with that idea The poet spy James Jesus Angleton. He was stationed in Italy at the time, and under his guidance the relationship between the CIA and the mafia began. Angleton relied on his contacts with organized crime throughout the nineteen fifties.

So the CIA and the mafia have this history of working together, and in this moment, which is the early nineteen sixties, their motives are aligned against Castro.

The hardliners in the CIA and the military felt that Kennedy was betraying the country. He had gone soft on communism and in order to stop it spread, you get rid of anything or anyone that stand And there was also an additional motive for Allan Dulles, the godfather of the CIA.

I believe that President Kennedy had alienated much of the US establishment by the time he was killed in Dallas.

That's David Talbot again. Author of the book on Alan Dulles, The Devil's Chessboard.

I think he alienated not only much of his own government, but the national security establishment and the military industrial complex that was making so much money, frankly off the state of permanent war. He and his brother who came from Wall Street, a very powerful law firm on Wall Street, the Rockefeller brothers, the oil industry, the weapons manufacturers, these were all their clients. And they had had it with President Kennedy and his efforts at peace.

What exactly does that mean? They had had it with him.

They said this was putting the country at risk. They thought that President Kenny was a week president, that he was a Week leader, that he was an peaser, and he had to be removed from office.

In October of nineteen sixty three, just weeks prior to the assassination, JFK signaled that he was going to start a withdrawal from Vietnam. He put it in writing in National Security Memo two sixty three, which he sent to a Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

National Security Memo two sixty three stated that the president would withdraw a thousand military personnel from South Vietnam by the end of nineteen sixty three.

The memo says, quote, A major part of the US military task can be completed by the end of nineteen sixty five.

Right he was telling everyone that this wasn't our war.

McNamara had gone on the record stating that if JFK had lived, he would have withdrawn the US from Vietnam after the election.

Just think how history could have changed. Memo two sixty three had actually ever gone into effect.

And it was the beginning, in my opinion, to the divide that we have today. When Blenda Johnson became president, he rescinded Kennedy's memo and he issued a new one in which he called for an immediate halt to the withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. Johnson signed the memo on November twenty sixth, nineteen sixty three, one day after President Kennedy's funeral.

Rob has established his belief that the mafia, the Cuban exiles, and the hardliners in the CIA and military all had motive to kill President Kennedy.

Their motives were different, but they were completely aligned. They just needed someone to put it all together, someone who had the means to pull something like this off.

So the popular theory is that the CIA had the means to make it happen.

But not in any what you would think official capacity. Remember, this is all about plausible deniability. To do something this world changing, the assassination of an American president, it would have to be done in a way that couldn't be traced back. A team would have to be assembled on a need to know basis. Certainly people like Alan Dulles, James Angleton, and Bill Harvey would know how to pull this off.

Harvey, you might recall, was the man Dullest placed in charge of ZR Rifle, the CIA's executive action program. In his reporting, Jefferson Morley describes Harvey as quote an assassination specialist.

For most of that time, Harvey was a raging alcoholic. He was a bitter critic of President Kennedy and his brother. Bill Harvey was, in the words of his colleagues, a very dangerous man.

Here's General Lansdale, who was in the Air Force and then the CIA. He was a pioneer in covert operations and psychological warfare. Dick interviewed him decades ago.

Harvey thought of himself as James Bond.

He was convinced.

I think that the anime was after him, so he always went armed.

William Harvey, my dad called him a psycho, a drunk psycho, but he was a dangerous man.

That's Saint John Hunt, son of E. Howard Hunt, the legendary CIA operative who became notorious for his role in Watergate. We'll talk more about E. Howard Hunt later, because you guessed it. He's part of this too.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Harvey was so insubordinate to RFK that he was taken off Cuban policy and banished to Rome. The humiliation only added to Harvey's hatred for the Kennedys.

Harvey became very good friends with Johnny Rosselli, who was the crime boss of Las Vegas.

At that time.

That's Morley again.

Johnny was also a known KI or. The FBI suspected him in about twelve murders. So if you wanted to kill somebody, Johnny Rosselli was the right person to go to.

I loved Roselli.

My husband always said, if I had to write shotgun and that's a guy I'd.

Take with me.

That's CG. Harvey. Bill Harvey's wife, cig was an agent herself. And here she is talking about her husband's close relationship with Johnny Rosselli.

He definitely was mafia and he definitely was a crook, but he was a patriot.

Well that's weird calling a mob boss a patriot, right.

But it shows the connection that he had with her husband, which extended to their feelings about RFK.

Bobby Kennedy and my husband were absolutely enemies, I mean just pure enemies.

And then she goes back to talking about Rosselli.

He knew that my husband was a patriot and that's what drew him to be.

Now, pay attention to what comes next.

And he had been recruited by another guy from the FBI for assassination purposes on.

Kennedy or on cashtill on Kennedy. That's a big slip.

Yes, she said that Johnny Roselli was recruited by someone at the FBI for assassination purposes on Kennedy. Then she quickly realized what she had said and she corrected herself.

Freudian slip, but a big one. The CIA withheld a significant amount of material on Bill Harvey's secret operations from the House Select Committee on Assassinations when they investigated in the mid nineteen seventies.

You'll remember former CIA agent George Joanniedes. He acted as a goalkeeper for the CIA during that investigation. Robert Blakey still has his regrets.

Instead of pulling around with people that joeannadies Davis, I should have been talking to Harvey.

In twenty sixteen, David Talbot filed a Freedom of Information Act request for these records on Harvey, among others.

They refused to release them to me, they said for national security reasons.

The following year he sued the US State Department.

And here we are in twenty twenty three and those Harvey records have still not been released.

The records that have been released reveal that even after the Kennedys banished Harvey to Rome, he continued contact with Dulles and Angleton. They also reveal that he worked with a man named David Attlee Phillips.

What do we know about David Attlee Phillips.

David Attlee Phillips was a trust fund kid from Texas. He inherited a lot of money after the war and moved to Chile and opened up a expat newspaper. It was there he came to the attention of a traveling CIA officer named Howard Hunt, the future Watergate burglar, who recruited him to join the agency, and what his specialty was was deception operations using the press and radio.

He was like an Angleton Junior. After Castro took over a Cuba, Phillips became a point person for anti Castro activities, specifically working with the Cuban exiles in Miami.

There were a number of different groups that formed during this time, and they each had a different method of trying to remove Castro. Some were more diplomatic, while others were outright violent. Alpha sixty six in Operation forty were two of the more violent groups.

OP forty is a special team of operatas basically assassins.

That's Ricardo Moreles Junior again his father, Ricardo Moreles Senior, fought in the Bay of Pigs.

OP forty became more of a CIA run team that was ready to do whatever the CIA needed them to do. Alpha sixty six is just Cubans expats that are furious and want to blow things up. Alphai six wanted to go back to Cuban just assassinate Castro.

Alpha sixty six was led by a Cuban exile by the name of Antonio Vessiana.

Antonio Vessiana was smart and angry, and there was nothing he wouldn't do to get his country back.

Antonia was a wealthy guy in Cuba.

That's David Talbot again.

He had been a banker, had been a member of the middle class there and saw that thought that the castro was taking the country in the wrong direction, so he joined the exiles who fled.

Once he was on us soil, Vessiana started making plans to take Cuba back. He had a plan, but what he didn't have was money. He had left everything he had back in Cuba.

The money for these organization this just has to come from somewhere.

That's Morellis Junior. Again.

You have the materials that are required, the bombs, the explosives and all that also has to be procured.

A lot of the support came from a CIA operative named Maurice Bishop.

So who's Maurice Bishop.

I know I'm throwing a lot of names at you, but stick with me here on Maurice Bishop. This is important. First, what you have to know is that there is no record of anyone at the CIA with that name. Did he even exist? And if he didn't, who was helping Alpha sixty six? In nineteen seventy six, during the House Committee investigation, we got the answer, and it was like something straight out of a movie. Stick with me here

The committee called Antonio Vesciana in for questioning. Vasciana mentioned that he had a handler with the last name of Bishop. Again, nobody recognized the name, so they asked Vasciana to describe what Bishop looked like. The sketch artist starts to draw a compositive Bishop based on descriptions from Vesciana and others who've described.

Him, and then the sketch looked like someone familiar.

When David Attlee Phillips was testifying to the committee, they showed him a copy of the sketch. He said, couldn't identify the person, but it looks like me.

I want to unequivocally state that Maurice Bishop was David Attlee Phillips.

The voice you just heard is Antonio Vessiana's son. He's reading a statement from his father revealing that David Attlee Phillips also used the name Maurice Bishop, the CIA's very own David Attlee Phillips, Angleton's disciple.

David Attlee Phillips was given a chance to respond in his testimony to the houselet Committee on Assassinations, and he denied that he'd ever use the name Maurice Bishop.

Well, he would have to. The implications would have been huge. In March of nineteen sixty three, Alpha sixty six, under the leadership of Antonio Vessiana, with the support and funding of the CIA, through David Attlee Phillips, sank a Russian ship doctor in Cuba.

This is in nineteen sixty three, after the Cuban Missile crisis, in a moment where Kennedy had turned to peace. Did President Kennedy know that Alpha sixty six sunk that Russian ship? He did, and that Alpha sixty six was backed by the CIA.

He did.

He must have been furious, he was.

Remember By the spring of nineteen sixty three, Kennedy had promised Khrushchev that he'd be hands off with Cuba, that Castro wouldn't have to worry about another US invasion. Kennedy knew that this attack on the Russian ship was an attempt to undermine his improving relationship that he was developing with Russia and also with Cuba. He assured kruse Chef that he didn't order the attack and would make these activities stop. And then Alpha sixty six launched another attack on another Soviet ship.

So they were intentionally undermining President Kennedy.

Yes, and they even took it a step further. After the attack, members of Alpha sixty six hold a press conference where they suggest that the American government is supporting their actions. Kennedy, needless to say, was livid.

He had the Coastguards seized the boats of Cuban exiles before they could attack any more Soviet or Cuban vessels. He sent planes and boats into the waters around Cuba, and he banned a dozen Cuban exile leaders from leaving Miami, including Vesianabi.

Strategies theory about the United States. One from the administration, and then there's one of the CIA and the Cuban exiles in the mafia, and they had their own independent objectives, this need to assassinate Kennedy.

And here it is the CIA, the Cuban exiles, and the mafia all in sync the goal assassinate Kennedy.

They were working together. The mob was selling guns to the exiles. The CIA was directly funding and organizing in the exile groups.

And here's Alpha sixty six leader Antonio Vessiana Hill himself in twenty fourteen at a JFK Assassination Researchers conference. He's eighty six years old and a translator is speaking for him.

Over the years of his training and his experience in dealing with the CIA and Bishop and other Phillips and others, he learned how to become a professional conspirator.

What it meant Phillips meaning David Atlee Phillips aka Angleton's protege code name Maurice Bishop.

Correct, correct, Correct.

The CIA never had an official meeting where they said, hey, here's where we're going to plan on the murder of the president. But he happens to know that a group of officials working within the CIA got together with the clear plan to assassinate and murder the president.

And there's one more bombshell from Vessiana, and this is revealed by another translator. It shows how all the pieces start to come together.

I traveled to Dallas at the end of August or beginning of September nineteen sixty three to meet with Maurice Bishop, my CIA hander. We had agreed to see each other in the lobby of a downtown Dallas bank. They are observed Bishop with a young man I later identified without a doubt as Lee Harvey Oswalt.

So you have Oswald meeting with a CIA agent who is a master in counterintelligence. In September nineteen sixty three, pieces were being moved around the board, and Oswald wasn't the only piece being moved. The list of people who were in Dallas on November twenty second will make your head spin. Let's start with someone that didn't have to travel very far, the mayor of Dallas.

How is it possibly news that the mayor of Dallas is in Dallas.

Well, that in and of itself is not news. But what is news is what we've learned about this particular mayor over the years. Do you recall the name Charles Cabell? Remind me okay, He was the former deputy director of the CIA and one of the agents that Kennedy fired after the failed Bay of Pigs evasion.

And how does he fit into all of this?

Well. In nineteen sixty three, the mayor of Dallas was Earl Cable.

Charles's brother, Earl Cabell, himself was a CIA asset.

In twenty seventeen, a batch of newly declassified documents revealed that Earl Cable had secretly worked as an asset of the CIA during his tenure as the mayor of Dallas. Those documents came out fifty four years after the assassination of President Kennedy.

Mayor Cable was responsible for establishing the route the motorcade would take, and that route would pass right in front of the building where Oswald worked. Wait till you hear the roster of people who arrived in Dallas that morning. First up have Tosh Plumley, who was a CIA operative and a mercenary pilot during the fifties and sixties. As you may recall, he was stationed at Nagshead, North Carolina

I was asked to go fly as co pilot on that particular flight.

That's Plumblee.

The flight was to go from West bomb Beach to go over to Tampa, and we flew open water across the New Orleans and some other people got on there at New Orleans and then from there we flew into Dallas.

Plumbley, like everyone else, was on a knee to know basis and doesn't claim to know why he was piloting the flight, but he confirmed that one of the passengers on board was mob boss Johnny Rosselli.

Rose Ella was on board our aircraft, so it was that a couple of other Cubans. I don't know for sure who they are.

There was one other passenger plumb Lee could confirm. His name was Howard Hunt. Hunt was a high level American intelligen and, as we know, became infamous for his role in the Watergate break in. Here's Saint John, his son talking about his dad in Dallas.

Well, at the time, I asked my mom, where's Papa, and she said he's in Dallas on business. And I remember that as if it were yesterday, And at the time I didn't I didn't put it together with the assassination, you know, but later on I thought, wow, that was right there at the same time.

So what would be the role of someone like E. Howard Hunt in Dallas on that day?

Saint John, you once told me that your father was in Dallas as a benchwarmer. What exactly is a benchwarmer?

He knew who was involved, where they would go after, you know, the mission was accomplished, how to get them out, and things like that.

I feel that he.

Knew the points of entry and the points of exit, and he knew safe houses. I think he was someone who we had a grasp on the whole mission.

When we spoke to Ricardo Morales Junior, whose dad was a Cuban exile working for the CIA out of Miami, he said his dad was in Dallas and used very similar language.

Here's Morales Junior translating his father's testimony of that day.

I was there as a cleaning team, just in case something went wrong. Those are the only orders I received, and that's what we did. We were at a safe house in Dallas awaiting orders. So once the assassination took place, they called in for orders. Their orders were to return home, and that's what they did.

Others reported to be in Dallas that day, where Mob connected Charles Nicoletti, Cia operative Jack Cannon, a Cuban exile named Herminio Diaz Garcia, and a former member of French intelligence named John Swetre.

So Dallas at that moment was like the super Bowl of covert operations.

There can only be one explanation for all of them to have been there that day. They had to make sure that the president got killed.

Next episode on Who Killed JFK? We follow Lee Harvey Oswald on November twenty second, nineteen sixty three.

He knows something big was going to happen that day, and he knows that he's on the inside of whatever this thing is.

And so I said, what's in the package?

Lee?

And he said, don't you remember we talked about this sches Today, I've gone to Branks some curtain Rodge to work.

When the shots that get to ring out, people really began to pay.

I think he felt that the plot had been turned against him and he believed that his life was in danger.

Who Killed JFK is hosted by Rob Reiner and me Solidad O'Brien, and our executive producers are Rob Reiner, Michelle r Matt George Jason English, David Hoffman and me Solidad O'Brien. Our writer is David Hoffman, with research by Dick Russell. Our story editors are Rob Reiner and Julie Pinero. Our senior producer is Julie Pinneo. Our producers are Tristan Nash, Dick Russell, Michelle Goldfein and Amari Lee. Our editors are Tristan Nash, Julie Pinneto, and Marcus de Lauro. Our project