◆ SpookStack

...re-r SEt R£1 I've been giving you lessons here about [how] a COPS should know a little about everything ... Well, I promise you, until it came out in 1975, this allegation, at least, that Shef Edwards and Mr. Maheu were working with the Mafia to assassinate Castro, concurrent with the Bay of Pigs Operation, that is the first time I ever heard about it. Ever! •.. My thought, when I saw this, was Jesus Christ, I must have been a little over-compartmented, because we had spent a considerable amount of nervous energy figuring out how are we going to get a shot at the old son-of-a- bitch concurrent with the landing. If anybody with whom I participated in planning for that ••• something that we never had figured out how to do, because so many of our agents went down just prior to the invasion. If anybody that was in- volved in that ever spoke a word about any other exercise going on to get Castro, I never heard iti and my initial reaction when all this came out, during this last year was ..• well ••. why did they give me the idiot treatment? Then it occurred to me that maybe there was very good reason for me not to know. You don't need to know ... compartmentation ... eve9 from COPS is not unheard of ... Well, min~ you, I am not saying what I've just said in any kind of piquei and I certainly don't want to leave you -- or this tape recorder -- with the impression that had I known about this, I would have been opposed. I must say, I don't think I would have enjoyed the instrument very much -- whereas we put out an awful lot of bullshit to the Cubans about the res- toration of democracy and all that. Those Cubans that were working with us were not, I submit, working for the re-establishment of the Mafia as a controlling factor in Havana. I had a helluva lot rather, in - 280 - lUi' SECRET