[suspenseful music]
♪ ♪
People in the 1950s had very little idea
of what the CIA was or what it did.
The original mission was to know the world,
to gain knowledge of what was happening abroad.
It was an all-male, all-white environment.
The Georgetown set, pipe-smoking WASPs
who believed they controlled the world
and could mold it to their will.
It's really hard to overstate
the sense of panic that Americans
were thrust into when the CIA was being formed.
Given the Cold War mindset,
it was a huge panic that Americans were feeling
about the Soviet Union.
There was a sense that a nuclear attack from Moscow
could happen at any time.
♪ ♪
Cuba's Fidel Castro emerged triumphant after two years
of guerrilla warfare against...
When Castro took power,
that kind of changed everything.
Because he was starting to build up power,
the United States felt threatened.
This literally could be it.
[speaking Spanish]
There is fear about what Castro is going to do.
Tremendous paranoia and near panic.
The CIA did not want a Communist beachhead
90 miles from Key West.
This was a time in our history
when the world came closest to nuclear Armageddon.
This island nation could be used
to launch missiles.
♪ ♪
The message had come-- there's no living with Castro.
The CIA is going to hire the mafia to kill Castro.
They made a deal with the devil
to get this job done.
If this comes out, what will this do to our image
in the eyes of the world?
What cannot happen is that it gets found out.
♪ ♪
[muffled gunshot]
It's an incendiary fuel that's going to blow
♪ ♪
One of the most difficult things in telling this story
is that almost everybody lies.
When you have a world of liars, fabricators,
half truths, what is the truth?
[soft dramatic music]
A lot of the story as I've pieced it together
relied on documents that I could find.
The National Archives has released
thousands of previously classified documents.
They describe decades of spying and surveillance,
assassination plots, and tension among
U.S. intelligence agencies.
In 2017, documents became available
that provided a lot more detail
about what was going on
in the attempts to kill Castro.
♪ ♪
There's literally thousands of documents--
Senate hearings, FBI documents, even testimony.
Telling this story, it's almost like
you're putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
Declassified documents is the gift of history
that keeps on giving.
The CIA has held on to so many records.
We have these incredible reports
that were far more detailed than anybody knew.
This is in the CIA memo. It's not in a CIA memo.
It's in the--
In the CIA memo, Eisenhower states,
"I want him sawed off."
♪ ♪
Oh shit.
[suspenseful music]
The government is supposed to pride itself on democracy,
checks and balances, freedom of the press,
and yet so much of this story is about concealing
and about trickery and about the surface
being different than the agenda
that's going on underneath it.
It took almost 50 years for the CIA
to even acknowledge that they indeed hired
two gangsters to kill Fidel Castro.
It is the job of journalists and historians
to illuminate what we as citizens
need to know about what the government
has done in our names.
There are mysteries that still remain,
but I think all the secrets are out.
♪ ♪
When does the CIA become a player
in what's happening in Cuba?
It does start to take shape long before
Fidel Castro has arisen.
[upbeat Latin jazz music]
♪ ♪
In the '50s, people who lived
in New York and Chicago in the winter time,
they didn't go to Las Vegas. They went down to Havana.
♪ ♪
Havana, Cuba, really starts to take shape
as a gambling Mecca.
[spirited orchestral music]
High style gets aboard for a flying trip to Havana, Cuba.
It's only 90 miles from Miami.
Caribbean island. Good cigars.
The good life.
It was easy to get to,
and people from all over the world came there.
[upbeat Latin jazz music]
My parents would go party in Cuba.
It was like a cool place--
open gambling and drinking,
and where all these rules were over here,
they didn't have any of that over there.
♪ ♪
Shows were so, you know, lewd.
Anything was possible in Havana.
It's a very sensual and seductive place.
If you wanted something naughty,
it was pleasure island.
♪ ♪
What happens in Havana stays in Havana.
♪ ♪
All bets down.
From really about '52 to '58,
the mob essentially controlled the tourism market in Havana.
Long before Vegas has them,
they have these thriving casinos.
And the mob is in there in full force
with a golden goose.
[bright jazz music]
It became the place of which they had always dreamed,
where they could promote all kinds of vice,
break every American law without worrying
because they weren't in America.
♪ ♪
The mob's infiltration and control in Havana
couldn't have happened without Meyer Lansky.
♪ ♪
Meyer Lansky was a very high-profile
mob syndicate leader out of New York.
He was involved in developing Las Vegas, casinos in Florida.
Lansky had cultivated a relationship
with Fulgencio Batista,
the repressive dictator of Cuba.
Batista says he is a friend of the people
as his soldiers patrol the streets to establish
what he calls disciplined democracy.
In the 1950s, the Batista regime
started really investing in casinos, hotels,
and gambling establishments.
And he started making deals with mafia bosses.
So Battista literally paid Meyer Lansky a salary
to be the gambling czar of Havana.
Lansky knew that the first thing
that needed to be done was to make
all the other heads of the mob
feel that they had a piece of it.
Otherwise, they would assert their selves in it
through violence and thuggery.
Everyone was going to get their piece of the pie--
a casino, a club.
This is what was so wonderful about that metaphor
in "Godfather II."
The scene on the rooftop, the mafiosi
who were there with a cake which is the island of Cuba,
and he literally cuts up the pieces
and hands it to all the mafiosi.
This is what Lansky was doing in Havana.
We have now what we have always needed,
real partnership with the government.
A smaller piece.
The idea was there's plenty for everyone.
New York interests are involved in Havana,
Las Vegas interests.
And then you have the Chicago Outfit.
[dramatic jazz music]
[gunfire]
And those guys in Chicago ran things a little different
than the Five Families in New York.
♪ ♪
[indistinct chatter]
The Chicago Outfit has essentially monopoly
over organized crime in the Chicagoland area.
This was a multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise.
The boss of the Chicago Outfit at the time
was Sam Giancana.
Giancana is put in as the operating boss
of the Outfit, which is essentially
the organized crime equivalent of a CEO in a corporation.
He runs it on a day-to-day basis.
The Outfit really had control over what was
West of the Mississippi, including Las Vegas
and then of course Havana.
[upbeat Latin jazz music]
♪ ♪
The Chicago mob had interests
in some of the casinos, some of the nightclubs,
some of the prostitution,
some of the live sex shows that are going on in Havana.
♪ ♪
My father Sam had some stuff doing in Cuba.
Meyer Lansky and he turned out the best of friends.
They were involved in a couple of hotels down there.
Did you ever go to Havana as a teenager?
No. I want to go now.
[relaxed acoustic music]
To see the people and the food and walking through the hotels
that my father and his gang were involved with--
I just crave going down there.
[upbeat Latin jazz music]
♪ ♪
One of the people the Chicago Outfit
relied on down in Havana was Santo Trafficante.
Trafficante spoke Spanish.
Most of the mobsters did not.
So Trafficante was always there
as the translator dealing with the Cuban connections.
[birds chirping]
Santo Trafficante Jr.
grew up in Tampa, Florida,
in a neighborhood that was predominantly Cuban.
That's why he spoke Spanish, understood the culture.
And eventually, he's involved in the casino industry
and some of the more illicit activities
that were going on in Havana.
This mode of business is extraordinarily profitable
to the mafia and Batista.
The money did not trickle down to anyone.
The Cuban people were not happy with that arrangement.
[soft dramatic music]
♪ ♪
[speaking Spanish]
♪ ♪
An unequal society had developed
where a certain small percentage of people
had all the power and all the money,
and the campesinos didn't get much education.
There was a high level of illiteracy.
They didn't own the property they lived on.
[speaking Spanish]
[gunshots]
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
[speaking Spanish]
It was a show of military authority
that kept people in their place,
and Batista was a big part of that.
♪ ♪
Batista was an American-backed dictator.
We didn't care about his repressive ways in Cuba
because he was in the pocket of the United States,
both in terms of U.S. foreign policy
and American business interests.
Batista orders the suspension
of all civil rights.
Nothing is to be broadcast or printed
that is displeasing to Batista.
♪ ♪
Many Cubans felt really cut out of democratic life,
which they thought they deserved.
This led to the emergence of dissident groups.
One of them was led by Fidel Castro.
[bright acoustic music]
♪ ♪
Fidel Castro was a reluctant revolutionary.
I mean, he was a lawyer. He was a civil rights lawyer.
He ran for political office in the early 1950s
as a senator, and he was probably going to be elected
until Batista rolled into Havana
and took over the country in a coup d'état.
It threw a wrench into Fidel Castro's career,
and so it laid the groundwork in many ways for Fidel Castro
as this figure who was determined
to take down Batista.
He went to the hills to join guerrilla groups.
Castro and the revolutionaries
starts to develop power away from Havana,
but you're not going to get this in a newspaper
or a television news report.
I grew up on a farm just north
of where Fidel Castro set up his revolution.
At first, it was sort of like a Robin Hood story.
We had about 35 families,
and some of the older kids would tell us, "You know what?
"We're going to own all this.
"Fidel is going to take it all away from you,
and he's going to give it to us, to the poor people."
I took that lightly, and they took it lightly too.
They never thought it would happen either.
[soft dramatic music]
Castro was from a wealthy family
and was well-educated,
but everyone else was the peasantry.
And this is partly why those in power
couldn't take it seriously.
How could farmers and campesinos
rise up and take down the most powerful military
in the Caribbean? How could that be possible?
♪ ♪
The CIA and the mob had put in all their chips
with Fulgencio Batista.
But the mob did not have what the CIA had,
which was spies and people
out gathering information about what was
really happening politically in Cuba.
They were blind.
♪ ♪
Before he took power, Castro remained
an obscure figure to the CIA.
The American media would seek out
Fidel Castro in the mountains.
All the people of the Sierra Maestra are with us.
This is only the beginning.
"The New York Times" reports that there's a sizable group
up there in the mountains.
But the CIA, being the CIA, said to Eisenhower,
"This is not a problem. We can handle this."
"Don't worry, we'll come up with a solution."
That's what essentially they tell the president.
"We've got it. We've got a handle on it."
And actually, they don't have an answer for it,
and they're not really sure what the right answer is.
♪ ♪
Really what it is is about the blindness
of those in power.
It's about the hubris and the belief
that your power is so supreme
that you don't see your vulnerability
until it's too late.
♪ ♪
Many of the early CIA leaders came
from a background in which if you made a mistake,
there was always daddy to pick you up and fix it.
So they thought that was true in the world,
that whatever happened, they'd be able
to control the blowback.
♪ ♪
And the mob is stuck in denial.
They put everything behind the man in power, Batista.
And so the mob didn't care about what was
really happening politically.
In the late 1950s, there was always money
to be made from corruption in Cuba.
[upbeat Latin jazz music]
♪ ♪
There are still whole loads of Americans coming down
to enjoy the lush, tropical sexiness of Havana,
including celebrities,
be it a Frank Sinatra
or a young JFK.
♪ ♪
In the '50s, John F. Kennedy comes to Havana.
I mean, he's like a brand-new senator
known for having an interest in women,
and he was sniffing around at the local talent.
And he puts out the word, probably through an underling
who goes to the mobsters and says, you know,
"The Senator would very much like it
if you could maybe possibly connect him with a young lady."
Trafficante would say, "We can do that."
[eerie music]
♪ ♪
They set John Kennedy up in a room
that had a two-way mirror.
He had a three-way,
him and two other Cuban prostitutes.
Trafficante was on the other side of the mirror
with another gangster.
The other gangster says, "Hey, we should be
"filming this 'cause this would make
tremendous blackmail material."
Well, they didn't have a camera.
But the idea of sex, that anything goes,
was part of the debasement of Cuban society,
and it had moral implications for the Cuban people.
[gunshots]
Summer 1958, Castro records his broadcasts
for the Rebel Radio.
His men now will come down from the mountains
and fight on the plains.
Castro's revolutionaries started out
in the eastern part of the island.
Amazingly, in a very short time,
they had come very close to Havana.
Batista had an army, but it really was
mainly used for rounding up dissidents
and torturing people in prisons.
They weren't prepared to fight real battles.
Castro's revolutionaries were.
[gunshots]
[dramatic jazz music]
♪ ♪
On New Year's Eve and on into New Year's Day
of 1959, the revolution was arriving.
Tanks and soldiers were rolling into Havana.
♪ ♪
When the revolutionaries arrived
from the Sierra Maestra, there was no opposition.
The opposition picked up and left.
♪ ♪
Actually, Batista evacuated, ran away,
and Castro happened to just drive
into town in a Jeep with about 40 people,
and there it was to take.
[cheering]
New Years Day 1959,
the news spreads through Havana--
Batista is finished.
With Batista in flight to the Dominican Republic,
the celebrating soon turns to mob action
and looting.
[sirens wailing]
The situation before long is completely out of hand.
Mobs loot and pillage. Gangs roam the streets.
Anarchy reigns.
They have that scene in "Godfather Part II."
People started to flood into the casinos,
and they dragged the slot machines
out into the street,
and they started brush fires using gambling tables.
[people shouting indistinctly]
The mafiosi were thinking, "How do I get out of here?"
[car horn blaring distantly]
They realized their lives were in danger.
It was a full-fledged uprising.
[people shouting indistinctly]
[tense music]
♪ ♪
[speaking Spanish]
The same way that a heroin addict
goes cold turkey, the mob had to go cold turkey
over the Havana casinos.
Many people were surprised when it fell as fast as it did,
none more so than the mafia.
♪ ♪
The people of Cuba see that it's happening,
the revolution is here, and there's
a spontaneous outbreak of joy.
[bright acoustic music]
♪ ♪
Every town and hamlet cheering welcome
greeted the revolution.
♪ ♪
[soft dramatic jazz music]
♪ ♪
Well, this is the spontaneous,
unrehearsed enthusiasm
greeting the Cuban premier, bearded Fidel Castro,
visiting the big town.
Only a few months after the success of the revolution,
Castro was invited to come to the United States
by the American Newspaper Guild.
He's on "Face the Nation."
He's talking to Ed Sullivan.
You are in the real American tradition
of a George Washington,
of any man who started off with a small body,
fought against a great nation, and won.
♪ ♪
He was not invited on a state visit
by the Eisenhower Administration,
which, of course, had opposed his revolution.
Fidel Castro had his admirers.
Many people in the U.S. saw him as a young Kennedy.
He was extremely charismatic.
And I think there were people who thought that change
was necessary and that Castro seemed
to have the backing of the Cuban people behind him.
So I think there were a lot of people
who thought that this could portend
a good future for Cuba.
[cheering]
The CIA actually took the opportunity
of Castro's visit to try and recruit him.
They wanted him to purge Cuba of all the Communists.
Fidel made the point to the CIA
that they were overly concerned
about Communism in Latin America
and what they really should be concerned about
was inequality.
The U.S. government was prepared to try
and offer him some aid,
but the Cubans did not come to beg for money.
The revolution was proud. It was young.
Fidel was not gonna continue the same relationship
that previous sycophantic-type leaders of Cuba had had.
[soft dramatic music]
It was clear that the United States
was not going to be able to control Fidel Castro,
which scared the shit out of the CIA.
♪ ♪
[tense jazz music]
Back in Cuba, Castro clamps down.
♪ ♪
The mafia was losing its assets.
Their casinos had been expropriated.
They'd been kicked out of their hotels.
They'd all been forced to flee back to Florida.
That was something that the mobsters
particularly resented,
and they were gonna want revenge.
♪ ♪
Lansky gets off the island pretty quickly.
Santo Trafficante gets left behind,
and he gets arrested by military police.
♪ ♪
Trafficante is put in the Trescornia Detention Center.
♪ ♪
Castro announced to the public,
I'm not only aware of the gangsters in Havana,
I'm inclined to want to execute them.
[cheering]
[gunshots]
♪ ♪
Trafficante was understandably nervous
when he was hearing these firing squads going off.
[gunshots]
♪ ♪
So the story is that Santo Trafficante's lawyer
Frank Ragano comes to see him.
And Ragano says, "Well, I'm gonna try
"to set up a meeting with Raul Castro
to get you out of here."
Supposedly, a $1 million cash payment
was delivered to Raul Castro, and Santo Trafficante
was released for that reason.
♪ ♪
[bright acoustic music]
When Santo Trafficante leaves Cuba
and comes back to the United States,
he sets up operations in Miami.
He's really still fixated on this concept
of getting back into Cuba
and getting those casinos running again.
♪ ♪
[bright jazz music]
Back in Chicago, Sam Giancana
was so angry about what happened
with their casinos in Havana.
And I guess my father was in a bad mood.
I mentioned that Fidel Castro was very sexy
because he was just what I thought I would like,
a little rough on the edges.
My father just tore into me
and said, "Don't you ever bring that man's name up
in this house again."
And his temper showed no end.
And I'd seen him get enraged.
If some man aggravated him, his temper just blew up.
[explosion]
In the last year of Eisenhower's presidency,
there was a huge explosion of a French ship
called "La Coubre" in Havana Harbor.
[sirens wailing]
It was a horrendous tragedy.
75 people on the docks were killed
and on board the ship.
More than 200 Cuban dock workers were injured.
Smoke billows around the helicopter on which
Castro himself is surveying the scene.
Castro's reaction to the explosion of the ship
was to blame it on the United States.
Castro says the ship has been blown up
by United States agents.
US-Cuban relations were spiraling downward.
From then on out, it was low-intensity warfare
against the Cuban Revolution.
At the time, with Cold War mania
and paranoia, there is a lot of fear
about what Castro is going to do.
Will he embrace the Soviet Union?
Will he become Communist?
[tense music]
In the 1950s, there was a sense
of tremendous paranoia and near panic.
There was a sense that a nuclear attack
could happen at any time.
Newspapers were even printing little clocks
about how many minutes it would take
a Russian missile to destroy New York.
Our cities are prime targets for atomic attack.
It's estimated over 4 million
will die in New York City.
[explosion]
Eisenhower was under pressure.
You have this island nation so close
to the United States that could be used
to launch Soviet missiles.
You're going to just let this happen?
This is our backyard.
[tense jazz music]
The CIA officers in that era believed
that they knew more than anybody
about how intense the threat was.
And therefore, they were motivated
to do absolutely whatever was necessary to defend
against this threat.
Allen Dulles was in charge of the CIA,
looking out to protect America's interests
in a very dangerous world.
Dulles was the scholarly,
pipe-smoking master spy.
Allen Dulles was the dominant figure
in the early age of the CIA.
It was actually the golden age for covert action.
[soft dramatic music]
Allen Dulles comes from
a politically-connected family--
grandfather, secretary of state.
Brother becomes secretary of state.
These are connected people.
♪ ♪
Allen Dulles was fascinated
with what we now call intelligence ever since
he was a little boy.
He discovered the novel "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling.
It became his favorite book.
"Kim" is written in 1901,
and it's often considered the great novel
about what it is to become a spy.
You have this young guy who literally is gonna
make a name for himself.
One of the things that he learns
is what he calls the great game,
and the great game is the power
of having information.
"Here was a new craft that a man
"could tuck away in his head;
"and by the look of the wide world
"unfolding itself before him, it seemed
that the more a man knew, the better for him."
Information. Everything.
And that's what he discovered.
From the days of Socrates,
mankind has been seeking knowledge.
Intelligence is nothing really other than information
and knowledge.
♪ ♪
Dulles was very aware of what the Soviet intent was,
and he was determined to stop it.
♪ ♪
[case beeping]
♪ ♪
The CIA knew quite rightly that the United States
was a colossus that bestrode the world,
and they saw themselves as the force that would slay
the beast of Soviet Communism.
Dulles was intensely interested in cultivating
the public image of the CIA
as this shadowy super force
that could accomplish miracles.
It was Allen Dulles who was the head of the CIA,
but right below him was Richard Bissell.
Rick Bissell was regarded as a genius,
a product of great wealth,
educated at Groton and Yale
and the London School of Economics.
Bissell was a man who wasn't the traditional spy.
He believed in the high-tech aspects of it.
He thought in big terms.
He's reported as a guy who couldn't sit still.
He was always pacing in his office.
And when he had to sit at meetings,
he would compulsively bend and re-bend paper clips
or crush pieces of paper up into tiny balls.
Eisenhower and Allen Dulles had become strongly convinced
that Fidel Castro was a mortal threat
to the United States.
They didn't want a Communist beachhead
90 miles from Key West.
And to avert that, they had to do something.
Eisenhower was a passionate supporter of covert action.
There were all sorts of ideas--
commando raids, sabotage, and arson.
And Eisenhower said, "These are not
"going far enough.
I want things that might be more drastic."
In memorandum of conference with the President
dated May 13, 1960, Eisenhower states,
"I want him sawed off."
[tense music]
The meaning of that would have been
very clear to everyone who was present.
Eisenhower was a tough guy behind that smile.
This became Allen Dulles's responsibility to carry out.
He asked his Covert Operations Director Bissell
to take on the project.
Bissell proposed in a written memo
to Dulles "the elimination of Fidel Castro."
Well, Dulles, perhaps a little more politically savvy,
suggested "elimination" had more
than a tinge of murder in it
and edited that to say, "the removal
of Castro from power."
And that's when the ball started rolling.
♪ ♪
The whole strategy by the CIA was two-tiered.
It was, one, to try to assassinate Castro,
and then also to plan for an invasion
by an army of Cuban exiles
that would establish
a new American-friendly government in Havana.
Dick Bissell tells the vice president
that the CIA is gonna need
500 trained Cuban exiles to do the job.
So hundreds of Cuban exiles are being trained
in an invasion plan.
While all these Cuban exiles are being trained in Florida
and Latin America, CIA officials
had gotten the approval of President Dwight Eisenhower
to go ahead with this assassination attempt
against Castro.
President Eisenhower was adamant
that there would be no fingerprints
on the Castro plot.
For the CIA, the big question was,
how do we do this so that the President could
plausibly deny that he approved the attempts
to kill a foreign leader?
"Plausible deniability" means even if people
don't believe you when you say
you're not involved in this operation,
there's no clear evidence.
They wanted somebody else to do it
as opposed to the government.
They want a middleman, if you will.
[Morse code beeping]
So the plan to get rid of Castro
goes down the hierarchy of the CIA,
from Dulles to Bissell
to Head of Security Shef Edwards
In the CIA memo dated August 1960,
Bissell asked Sheffield Edwards
"if Edwards could establish contact
"with the U.S. gambling syndicate
that was active in Cuba."
Bissell is gonna hire the mafia to kill Castro.
The idea of the mafia
created a great cover for the CIA.
The mafia had a grievance against the Cuban Revolution.
If they were identified as the assassins of Fidel Castro,
everybody would go, "Oh, yeah, sure, that makes sense."
[suspenseful music]
But government shouldn't be assassinating
foreign heads of state to start with.
But if you've already crossed that line in the Rubicon
and now you've decided
to become partners with the mafia,
it's a whole different operation.
[gunfire]
The CIA can't be seen
directly dealing with the mafia.
So what they have to do is use a cutout,
somebody that they know knows mafiosos.
Shef Edwards told Bissell that he had a friend,
a private investigator through whom syndicate elements
in Cuba could be reached.
That was the path to Robert Maheu.
Now, Bob Maheu had been an FBI agent in the 1940s.
And then during the '50s, he had gone
into private practice as a private investigator in DC.
He had several clients, and one of them was the CIA.
So he could be trusted.
The mission, should you decide
to accept it, is to put them out of business permanently.
["Mission Impossible Theme" plays]
Robert Maheu claimed that he was the inspiration
for "Mission Impossible"--
very popular, very suave 1960s spy show.
♪ ♪
And one of his big clients becomes
Howard Hughes, the wealthiest man in the United States.
Obviously, working for Howard Hughes,
he was somebody that had a lot of access.
Remember, if you get around powerful people,
you're going to get information.
[indistinct chatter]
[soft dramatic music]
Sheffield Edwards from the CIA reached out
to Bob Maheu and said, "Hey, this is something
we want to do."
Maheu was reluctant to get involved in this
because, hey, we're talking about assassinating
the head of a government.
But the argument was made, "Hey, this is a war.
"You're doing this for your country.
This is a patriotic thing for you to do."
♪ ♪
Patriotism justifies people
doing all kinds of things--
in this case, to have a murder arranged.
♪ ♪
Maheu is conflicted.
Here he is a good Catholic boy,
went to Holy Cross.
Can I kill Fidel Castro in all good conscience?
And he ultimately decides that if he had been able
to kill Hitler in World War II,
he could have saved lives.
So he says yes.
♪ ♪
People had no idea that this sort of stuff
was going on.
The activities of the CIA must be secret.
People really thought that the FBI,
the CIA were slaying the dragons of evil.
[gunfire]
They were presenting a public image of rectitude
and always being on the right side of the law.
♪ ♪
So the United States being involved in assassinating
a head of state at the height of the Cold War,
this thing's fraught with peril.
♪ ♪
Maheu himself was nervous about the whole operation.
♪ ♪
Maheu voiced concerns with the CIA contacts,
like, "Are you really sure
this is the direction you want to go?"
If this comes out, what will this do to our image
in the eyes of the world?
But the CIA at that time was so arrogant
that it didn't even think about
the operation falling apart.
So Maheu sets up a meeting with his connection
to the mafia, Johnny Roselli.
♪ ♪
Who is Johnny Roselli?
I would say that the answer to that question
depends upon who's asking it.
In terms of all of the characters
throughout this story, Johnny Roselli,
the gangster, is at the root of everything.
Roselli would team up with the CIA
to create one of the strangest
and most illegal chapters
in the history of the United States.