Vidal was scooped on this story by last year's 912-page "Ultimate Sacrifice" -- the work of two investigative reporters who spent two decades scouring the archives and talking to eyewitnesses concerning JFK-era linkages among the Mafia, CIA and Cuban expats. The most reasonable conclusion is: JFK had it coming to him. Here's Liz Smith's column when the book came out:
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November 15, 2005 — At last, the mysteries surrounding JFK's death are fully explained by the startling revelations in this book. Its fresh, groundbreaking research documents how the blow-back from the Kennedys' actions against the Mafia and Cuba led to the death of JFK." So writes former FBI agent William W. Turner of the hefty new book "Ultimate Sacrifice," which tells in excruciating detail how John and Robert Kennedy, along with the CIA, planned a coup in Cuba that then led to Jack's death. The authors of this Carroll & Graf tome are Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann. They have worked on this book, reading the most important of 4,000,000 documents, and it has taken them 17 years to write it.
A lot of this has been hinted about and written about before, but until the CIA and Kennedy papers are all finally released in 2017, this book will do as the "last word." Conspiracy buffs can settle down for a long winter's read.
And for the first time ever anywhere, this column can tell you the never-before-revealed CIA-Kennedy plan to stage a coup against Castro and actually to invade Cuba had a name. The CIA code for this unrealized action, which they hoped to effect on Dec. 1, 1963, was AMWORLD. The authors of the book, however, refer to the plan in their work as "C-Day" because the AMWORLD name was classified until last summer.
According to Waldron/Hartmann, the Mafia had people inside Washington who knew of the C-plan. Angry at Attorney General Bobby Kennedy's serious battle against them, the Mafia set up three assassination attempts on President Kennedy - the first in Chicago, the second in Tampa, Fla., (only four days before Dallas) and the third, fatally, in Texas. The authors name the three Mafia bosses - Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante Jr. and Johnny Rosselli as the men who organized the death of the 35th president. These mobsters felt the president's death was the only way to avoid their being deported or sent to prison.
It's all in here — ... And it explains why the Mafia effort to kill JFK in Tampa was withheld from the Warren Commission and other investigators for years . . . Most importantly it shows why Bobby Kennedy never followed up his brother's death by revealing the Mafia as JFK's killers (although he told many intimates what he believed)—because the secrecy of the coup plan had to continue to be protected. And in some ways it is being protected to this day. I believe this book is the closest we are going to get to the truth until 2017.
<http://ultimatesacrificethebook.com/node/9>
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Carl