CIA, mafia plotted JFK's assassination, says new book

The Central Intelligence Agency and the mafia plotted to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, says a new book.

New York, May 1 : The Central Intelligence Agency and the mafia plotted to assassinate President John F. Kennedy, says a new book.

According to David Talbot, the author "Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years," John Kennedy's younger brother, Robert, made secret efforts to expose the plot.

RFK's contacts in Florida's Cuban exile community actually may have told him of Lee Harvey Oswald's existence months before the Dallas tragedy.

Talbot goes to the extent of saying that Robert Kennedy stunned one anti-Castro leader by telling him,"One of your guys did it."

Besides confiscating autopsy evidence (including JFK's brain), Robert visited Mexico City in 1964 to find out more about Oswald, who'd traveled south of the border before the assassination. While there, RFK was put under surveillance by Mexican intelligence and the CIA.

Within hours of Jack Ruby's murder of Oswald, Robert learned that Ruby was a mafia "errand boy" paid by associates of Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, according to the riveting book. RFK later met with longtime nemesis Hoffa to try to learn more.

Talbot believes Bobby was on the right trail. Among the evidence of CIA involvement was a deathbed confession by Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt to attending a 1963 meeting at a "CIA safe house" in Miami where other operatives tried to recruit him for "the big event," namely killing Kennedy.

Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover "snooped on the Kennedys with more relish than he did on organized crime bosses, the book says.

ANI