Tonight: Mafia Spies

Thomas Maier's riveting book on the CIA-Mafia plots to kill Castro gets a masterful treatment on Paramount starting Tuesday

As SpyTalk readers are well aware, the April 17, 1961 U.S.-backed invasion at Cuba’s Bahia de Cochinos (“Bay of Pigs”) was far from the only violence unleashed against Fidel Castro’s regime by its gargantuan neighbor to the north. Starting in 1959, America’s intel overseers at the Central Intelligence Agency, in trying to facilitate the commands of the Eisenhower and Kennedy White Houses, played footsie with the Chicago mob for about four years in hopes of humiliating, harassing, and ultimately decapitating the regime of “The Bearded One.” 

But the ensuing “operations” more often resembled a Keystone Kops movie serial than any traditional spycraft. The public-at-large only became aware of the deadly foolhardiness with the November 1975 publication of a Senate Intelligence Committee report entitled “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” AKA “The Church Report,” so named for the committee’s chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho.

Now, a new six-part documentary, loaded with shiny re-enactments, is set to air, and it saves newcomers the pain of slogging through the “Cuba” chapters of the committee’s minutia-laden, but historically important, 349-page Interim Report. The show’s credits note that it is based on the eponymous book by Thomas Maier, who obviously utilized the Church Report as a jumping off point.