‘The CIA worked with two of America’s top Mafia mobsters in a botched attempt to assassinate the Cuban President Fidel Castro with poisoned pills, according to previously classified documents released by the spy agency yesterday.

The extraordinary details of the 1960 plot were contained in more than 700 pages of documents that revealed some of the agency’s past illegal activities, including the targeting of foreign leaders, wiretapping of US journalists, CIA break-ins and thefts.

The documents are known as the CIA’s “Family Jewels” and relate to the period between the 1950s and early 1970s, an era of Cold War dirty tricks when successive administrations became obsessed with domestic radicals and the threat from Communism.

In one sheaf of documents that read like a cheap spy novel, the agency’s efforts to persuade Johnny Roselli, a mobster, to help plot the assassination of Castro are laid out in excruciating detail. A CIA memo, entitled The use of a member of the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro, states that an agency official, Richard Bissell, approached Colonel Sheffield Ed-wards of the agency’s Office of Security in August 1960 to determine whether he “had assets that may assist in a sensitive mission requiring gangster-type action”. It adds: “The mission target was Fidel Castro.”’

Secret Papers Show How CIA Hired The Mafia To Hit Castro