John Roselli and the CIA Family Jewels
New information and evidence is coming out all the time about the
complex relationships between Exner, Kennedy, Roselli, Giancana and
the CIA. One recent example of this is the CIA TOP SECRET "Family
Jewels" documents released on June 25, 2007.
It seems strange that documents marked TOP SECRET would be released to
the public, until one reads them and realizes that they are largely
old news that were leaked to journalists years ago and have long since
become the grist of rumor mills.
Nevertheless, some of the revelations are new and shocking.
The item that made the biggest news when the "Family Jewels" came out
was that the government particularly under the Nixon Administration
was spying on political dissidents. Others may have found this
shocking, but I was not shocked by this. I have always assumed that my
telephone is tapped and that they have been spying on me since 1966. I
am so deeply disappointed to find out that this seems not to be true.
However, I really am shocked to learn that during the Kennedy
Administration the telephones of prominent newspaper journalists were
tapped, such as for example ABC Reporter Brit Hume. Their telephones
were tapped because certain news reporters consistently reported on
top secret information that they were not supposed to know. The
purpose of these telephone taps was to find out the sources of the
leaks.
This was part of what was called "Project Mockingbird". It was, of
course, highly illegal. It was approved by Attorney General Robert F.
Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
The result of this project was that 12 Senators, 6 members of
Congress, 12 Congressional Staff Members, a staff member of the White
House, members of the Vice-President’s Office and an Assistant
Attorney General were all identified as the sources of leaks. In fact,
so much data and so many TOP SECRET documents were leaked to the
newsmen that they could not use it all and distributed some of the
material to other newsmen, which created the illusion that more
newsmen were receiving the leaked material than was actually the case.
In short, the United States Government leaked like a sieve.
The Family Jewels documents were compiled by then CIA Director William
Colby at the time that the Watergate Affair was unraveling. The
previous CIA Director, James R. Schlesinger, had commissioned the
report after two former CIA Employees, E. Howard Hunt and James
McCord, had been implicated in the Watergate Break-in.
The purpose of assembling the "Family Jewels" was damage control, to
identify areas of possible embarrassment to the CIA, should they ever
become public, such as, for example, the unsuccessful attempts by the
CIA to assassinate Congolese President Patrice Lumumba.
However the ultimate effect was the opposite. The "Family Jewels",
which are dated May 16, 1973, put together in one neat pile all of the
secrets of the CIA from 1959 forward. This infuriated Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger. At a meeting with President Ford on January 4,
1975 in the Oval Office, Kissinger said:
"What is happening is worse than the days of McCarthy. You will end up
with a CIA that does only reporting, no operations. He has turned over
to the FBI the whole of his operation . . . Helms said all these
stories are just the tip of the iceberg. If they all come out, blood
will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the
operation on the assassination of Castro. . . . . The Chilean thing,
that is not in any report -- that is sort of blackmail on me."
Kissinger wanted for Colby to be suspended, but realizing how that
could backfire suggested that he be transferred to a less sensitive
position. Colby was eventually replaced by future president George H.
W. Bush. Colby later died in a mysterious "canoeing accident" at
night. There was immediate speculation that he had been murdered, as
why would Colby, a real-life "spook" who had twice parachuted behind
enemy lines during World War II, go canoeing in the Potomac River in
the middle of the night without the life-jacked that he usually wore?
This incident seems to be the inspiration of a similar scene in the
2004 version of the movie "The Manchurian Candidate".
The last quotation above, regarding "The Chilean Thing", probably
refers to September 1970 when President Nixon informed the CIA that an
Allende regime in Chile would not be acceptable, and the CIA attempted
to kidnap a top supporter of Allende. It could not refer to the actual
overthrow of Allende on September 11, 1973, because that occurred a
few months after the date of the "Family Jewels" reports.
Although the Family Jewels documents, which are 702 pages long, deal
with a wide variety of CIA operations, more attention is paid to John
Roselli than to anybody else. This is because the CIA had contacted
Roselli to kill Fidel Castro.
Roselli was the ideal man for the job because, prior to the takeover
of Cuba by Castro, he had been the supervisor of Mafia operations in
casinos in Havana. After Castro had thrown out the mob and closed the
casinos, Roselli still had been running forays into Cuba, using high
speed power boats to cross the 90 miles from Florida to Cuba without
being detected. Once his boat was shot out from under him by the Cuban
Navy but another boat picked up Roselli and carried him to safety.
Jack Anderson later wrote:
"The full story reads like a script of a James Bond Movie,
complete with secret trysts at glittering Miami Beach Hotels and
midnight powerboat dashes to secret landing spots on the Cuban coast.
For the first try, the CIA furnished Roselli with special
poison capsules to slip into Castro’s food. The poison was supposed to
take three days to act. By that time Castro died, his system would
have thrown off all traces of the poison and it would seem like a
natural death. . . . . A couple of weeks later, just about the time
for the plot to have been carried out, a report out of Havana said
that Castro was sick, but he recovered."
Too bad our CIA can just never get it done right! The Gang that
couldn’t shoot straight! Things are much better now however. They did
such a fine job of detecting Saddam Hussein’s "weapons of mass
destruction".
An aside to this issue is to compare the "Family Jewel" documents,
with the so-called "Killian" documents that brought down CBS News
Reporter Dan Rather in 2004. Dan Rather produced six pages of
memorandums which stated that future president George W. Bush had
failed to report as required for National Guard duty in September
1972. Rather claimed that the memos had come from an "unimpeachable
source" and had been authenticated by "experts". These memos were
intended to demonstrate that Bush was unfit to serve as President of
the United States.
By comparing the Killian documents from 1972 side-by-side with the
Family Jewel documents from 1973 one can easily see that the Killian
documents are fake. The Killian documents were obviously made with a
modern computer word processor using Times New Roman typestyle
proportional spacing fonts that did not even exist in 1972. For
example, the "th" in 187th could not have been made by any typewriter
that existed in 1972. The "Family Jewels" were created with an old
fashioned manual typewriter. The comparison is ridiculous, not to
mention the fact that the "Family Jewels" were created by the Director
of the CIA whereas the Killian documents were supposedly created by a
local national guard grunt. The networks have every justification for
kicking out Dan Rather. Even today, Dan Rather claims the Killian
documents are genuine, even though the person who gave him the
documents has admitted that they are fake.
The Family Jewels contain numerous shocking revelations regarding John
Roselli. The CIA had ex-FBI agent Robert Maheu contact Roselli and
claim that he represented businessmen who had been kicked out of Cuba
by Castro and who were willing to pay $150,000 to have Castro bumped
off. Later, on September 25, 1960, Roselli met Maheu in Miami and
introduced him to "Sam Gold" and "Joe". Sam Gold was, of course, our
own lovable Sam Giancana. "Joe" was Santo Trafficante, Jr., the mob
boss in Miami who had operated several legal casinos in Cuba until he
had been kicked out by Castro.
The Family Jewels, on page 13, state that weeks later Maheu saw
pictures of Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante, Jr. in Parade magazine
and identified them as being the same persons as "Sam Gold" and "Joe".
Both men were on the Attorney General’s "Ten Most Wanted" list. Our
super-sleuths had scored again! However, they did not have Giancana
and Trafficante arrested. Rather they gave them poison pills that were
supposed to kill Castro, but failed.
To their credit, John Roselli and "Sam Gold" told Maheu that they did
not want the $150,000. They were probably surprised by the
ridiculously small amount that was being offered to kill Castro. One
wonders how long it took them to realize that they were not dealing
with disaffected businessmen but with the CIA itself.
Both John Roselli and Sam Giancana had personal reasons for wanting to
do business with the CIA. Roselli was an illegal alien. His real name
was Filippo Sacco and he had been born in Esperia, Italy in Frosinone
Province. As he was in the US illegally, he wanted to have some
leverage to avoid deportation. Later, when he was being prosecuted,
Roselli told the CIA that if the prosecution was not dropped he would
reveal to newspaper reporters the plot to kill Castro. Richard Helms,
Director of the CIA, made a decision not to help Roselli. Roselli, by
then in federal prison, carried out his threat and the plot to kill
Castro became public knowledge through a Jack Anderson column in the
Washington Post dated January 13, 1970 entitled "6 Attempts to Kill
Castro Laid to CIA".
All this is detailed in the "Family Jewels" documents.
Needless to say, I have written a book about this:
The Judith Exner Story, The Life of the Mistress of John F. Kennedy by
Sam Sloan ISBN 0-923891-90-0
http://www.samsloan.com/exner.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0923891900/slavesofthomasje
Sam Sloan
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