On March 29, Seymour Hersh, a US veteran journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, published a new piece of his latest series of Substack stories detailing CIA covert operations and US presidents' unilateral secret overseas actions which were not in line with US national interests.
This time, Hersh revealed how then US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, one of JFK's younger brothers, kicked off a clandestine operation aimed at sowing discord among Sicilian Mafia families in 1962.
Robert Kennedy, also known as RFK or Bobby Kennedy, personally authorized the agency to assign a senior agent to his office for operations against the Mafia. The agent's name was Charles Ford and his alias for his secret work against Mafia bosses was Rocky Fiscalini. Ford aka Fiscalini had to spread disinformation among Mafia families in Sicily, thereby pitting one against the other.
RFK's alleged rationale behind the overseas covert op was that conflict among Mafia families in Italy would lead to a weakening of the Mafia families in the US, according to Hersh. There was some logic in the mission, too. RFK was known as a relentless foe of organized crime since the 1950s, when he was chief counsel for a Senate investigating committee. Having assumed the position of the US attorney general in January 1961, Robert Kennedy launched an unprecedented crusade against gangsters, labor racketeers and vice overlords in the US.
Hersh noted that RFK's travel records show that he visited Rome twice in early 1962 exactly at the time when the operations against the Italian Mafia were getting underway, and apparently it was approved by JFK. The Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist noted that Ford and other RFK agents managed to trigger a major dispute between powerful Sicilian Mafia clans, which soon evolved into nothing short of a mafia war. "The event that would set off a murderous Mafia war in Sicily that ran into 1963 was a US-engineered dispute over the profits from a heroin shipment to New York," the journalist wrote.
According to Hersh, a number of specific targets were named, including President Kennedy, his wife Jackie, RFK and his wife Ethel, as well as their children, but no action was agreed upon. The CIA was well aware of both the meeting and the discussion because its organizer, Salvatore Lima, the mayor of Palermo, was on the agency's payroll. The room where the secret Mafia meeting took place was wiretapped.
Hersh's sources said that the agency's assessment was that the Mafia chatter about the revenge “did not mean that they did it," especially given that there was no message saying "mission accomplished" after JFK's murder.
At the same time, Hersh emphasized that the CIA appeared to be frustrated with the Kennedys' clandestine ops. The journalist cited in particular a breach that grew between the Kennedy brothers and CIA covert operatives "over the Kennedys’ repeated demands that the agency find a way to assassinate Fidel Castro." Hersh also quoted Sam Halpern, a CIA top operative, as saying that RFK's Mafia op was one of the most egregious episodes and came over the objections of many in the operations bureau.
11 February 2023, 15:39 GMT
This historic example of apparent discord between the CIA and the US government followed Hersh's February bombshell concerning the Nord Stream sabotage attack. On February 8, the journalist detailed how the Biden administration and the CIA in collaboration with the Norwegian secret service and Navy destroyed Russia's Nord Stream pipeline network. The blasts occurred on September 26, 2022, at three of the four strings of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 underwater pipelines, which were built to carry a combined 110 billion cubic meters of Russian gas to Europe annually.
In his interviews, the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist repeatedly hinted that the CIA was frustrated by the Biden administration's adventurism and its boasting about the pipelines' destruction.
In his March 29 post, Hersh once again mentioned the sabotage operation, with a vague hint that the leak apparently came on the orders of someone in the US government or the CIA:
"The Kennedys’ successful gambit against the Mafia in Sicily did not reach the American press at the time because it was a highly classified CIA program, and highly classified CIA programs, even those involving the destruction of pipelines, do not leak – unless some inside the government, or the agency, want them to," the Pulitzer-Prize journalist concluded.