The CIA Enlisted the Mafia to Kill Fidel Castro in 1960

How the CIA Enlisted the Chicago Mob to Put a Hit on Castro

Ever wonder about the sanity of America's leaders? Take a close look at perhaps the most bizarre plot in U.S. intelligence history

By Bryan Smith
Chicago Magazine
November 2007
(page 4 of 6)

EXCERPT...

By September 1960, the project was proceeding apace. Roselli would report directly to Maheu. The first step was a meeting in New York. There, at the Plaza Hotel, Maheu introduced Roselli to O'Connell. The agent wanted to cover up the participation of the CIA, so he pretended to be a man named Jim Olds who represented a group of wealthy industrialists eager to get rid of Castro so they could get back in business.

"We may know some people," Roselli said. Several weeks later, they all met at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami. For years, the luxurious facility had served as the unofficial headquarters for Mafioso leaders seeking a base close to their gambling interests in Cuba. Now, it would be the staging area for the assassination plots.

At a meeting in one of the suites, Roselli introduced Maheu to two men: Sam Gold and a man Roselli referred to as Joe, who could serve as a courier to Cuba. By this time, Roselli was on to O'Connell. "I'm not kidding," Roselli told the agent one day. "I know who you work for. But I'm not going to ask you to confirm it."

Roselli may have figured out that he was dealing with the CIA, but neither Maheu nor O'Connell realized the rank of mobsters with whom they were dealing. That changed when Maheu picked up a copy of the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade, which carried an article laying out the FBI's ten most wanted criminals. Leading the list was Sam Giancana, a.k.a. "Mooney," a.k.a. "Momo," a.k.a. "Sam the Cigar," a Chicago godfather who was one of the most feared dons in the country—and the man who called himself Sam Gold. "Joe" was also on the list. His real name, however, was Santos Trafficante—the outfit's Florida and Cuba chieftain.

Maheu alerted O'Connell. "My God, look what we're involved with," Maheu said. O'Connell told his superiors. Questioned later before the 1975 U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (later nicknamed the Church Committee after its chairman, Frank Church, the Democratic senator from Idaho), O'Connell was asked whether there had ever been any discussion about asking two men on the FBI's most wanted list to carry out a hit on a foreign leader.

"Not with me there wasn't," O'Connell answered.

"And obviously no one said stop—and you went ahead."

"Yes."

"Did it bother you at all?"

"No," O'Connell answered, "it didn't."

CONTINUED...

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/November-2007/How-the-CIA-Enlisted-the-Chicago-Mob-to-Put-a-Hit-on-Castro/index.php?cparticle=4&siarticle=3

638 ways to kill Castro

The CIA's outlandish plots to bump off the Cuban dictator would put 007 to shame ... poison pills, toxic cigars and exploding molluscs. Once he even offered to shoot himself, reports Duncan Campbell

Duncan Campbell
The Guardian, Thursday 3 August 2006

For nearly half a century, the CIA and Cuban exiles have been trying to devise ways to assassinate Fidel Castro, who is currently laid low in Cuba following an operation for intestinal bleeding. None of the plots, of course, succeeded, but, then, many of them would probably be rejected as too fanciful for a James Bond novel.

Fabian Escalante, who, for a time, had the job of keeping El Commandante alive, has calculated that there have been a total of 638 attempts on Castro's life. That may sound like a staggeringly high figure, but then the CIA were pretty keen on killing him. As Wayne Smith, former head of the US interests section in Havana, pointed out recently, Cuba had the effect on the US that a full moon has on a werewolf. It seems highly likely that if the CIA had had access to a werewolf, it would have tried smuggling it into the Sierra Maestra at some point over the past 40-odd years.

The most spectacular of the plots against Castro will be examined in a Channel 4 documentary entitled 638 Ways to Kill Castro, as well as in a companion book of the same name written by the now-retired Escalante - a man who, while in his post as head of the Cuban secret service, played a personal part in heading off a number of the plots. While the exploding cigar that was intended to blow up in Castro's face is perhaps the best-known of the attempts on his life, others have been equally bizarre.

Knowing his fascination for scuba-diving off the coast of Cuba, the CIA at one time invested in a large volume of Caribbean molluscs. The idea was to find a shell big enough to contain a lethal quantity of explosives, which would then be painted in colours lurid and bright enough to attract Castro's attention when he was underwater. Documents released under the Clinton administration confirm that this plan was considered but, like many others, did not make it far from the drawing-board. Another aborted plot related to Castro's underwater activities was for a diving-suit to be prepared for him that would be infected with a fungus that would cause a chronic and debilitating skin disease.

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Meanwhile, jokes about Castro's apparent indestructibility have become commonplace in Cuba. One, recounted in the New Yorker this week, tells of him being given a present of a Galapagos turtle. Castro declines it after he learns that it is likely to live only 100 years. "That's the problem with pets," he says. "You get attached to them and then they die on you".

SOURCE:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/aug/03/cuba.duncancampbell2

The CIA reveals its family jewels

David Talbot
Salon.com
Sunday June 24, 2007 20:02 EST

EXCERPT...

The CIA's new honesty is also far from complete. There is nothing in the family jewels about agency officials long suspected by congressional investigators and researchers of ties to the Kennedy assassination, including deceased agents such as William Harvey, David Phillips, David Morales and George Joannides. The agency continues to keep these records under wraps, in brazen defiance of the law.

In fact, the agency could not help taking another whack at the Kennedys with the release of its family jewels. Press reports about the declassified CIA secrets laid the blame for the assassination efforts against Fidel Castro directly on then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. What's the original source for this anti-Kennedy smear? None other than Richard Helms, the No. 2 man at the CIA during the Kennedy presidency and a bitter enemy of the two brothers.

Helms, desperately trying to head off congressional investigations into CIA abuses in the post-Watergate period, warned that he would drag RFK -- by then conveniently dead -- into the Castro controversy. By doing this, the wily Helms was clearly trying to intimidate the Democratic-controlled Congress. At a lunch meeting in January 1975, Helms told his friend Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that "Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of Castro" -- confident that Kissinger would spread this around Washington, as he quickly did. Helms knew his accusation against RFK was a lie, and when later pressed by the Church Committee to provide proof, he could not, admitting that the CIA had misled Bobby about its plots. In truth, RFK was appalled when he learned that the agency was collaborating with the Mafia to kill Castro -- and Kennedy believed that he shut down this sinister operation. But he did not succeed -- the CIA continued to conspire against Castro for years after the Kennedys were removed from power.

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http://www.salon.com/books/authors/talbot/2007/06/24/family_jewels/

The Gentlemanly Planner of Assassinations

The nasty career of CIA Director Richard Helms.

By Jefferson Morley
Salon.com
Posted Friday, Nov. 1, 2002, at 6:10 PM ET

Richard Helms, who died last week at age 89, was described by his biographer Thomas Powers as a "gentlemanly planner of assassinations." The epithet captured the essence of the former CIA director's style: socially correct, bureaucratically adept, operationally nasty. In mid-20th-century Washington, this combination proved effective, if not glamorous. Helms gained the confidence of presidents and the admiration of syndicated columnists. Yet ultimately his faith in political assassination was no small part of his fall from power to disgrace.

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Helms professed to be something of a skeptic of assassination. In Powers' biography, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, Helms is quoted as saying that assassination rarely achieved its expected goals. Yet once he took command of the American clandestine service in 1962, his prudence deserted him. President Kennedy and his successors wanted to use the tool of assassination, and Helms gave them what they wanted.

Leaving aside moral questions, his performance was far from impressive. Helms first turned to his good friend William Harvey, a brilliant, pistol-packing operative, who enlisted some of his friends in the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro. They proved unable to pierce Castro's security detail. In the summer of 1963, the deputy CIA director made another poor personnel choice. He activated contact with a disgruntled former hero of the Cuban revolution named Rolando Cubela. Known by his CIA cryptonym, "AMLASH," Cubela was a complex character. While he spoke of killing Castro, he was also loyal to the ideals of the Cuban revolution. Helms' counterintelligence staff advised caution, but Helms overruled them.

This homicidal conspiracy took on a more sinister aspect on Nov. 22, 1963, when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. At the very moment Kennedy died, one of Helms' agents was delivering a poison pen to Cubela in Paris. The revelation of this coincidence in 1975 crystallized a wave of public indignation and revulsion that prompted Congress to slash the agency's budget and restrict its activities.

Helms and his defenders bemoaned the conspiratorial bent of the American public, which often implicated the CIA in Kennedy's death. Yet Helms was hardly in a position to complain about conspiracy-mongering. He himself had been instrumental in the publication of the first JFK assassination conspiracy theory.

CIA files uncovered by a civilian watchdog panel in 1998 revealed what Helms sought to hide. In the summer of 1963, his top psychological warfare specialist in Miami, a dapper, multilingual lawyer named George Joannides, was slipping $25,000 a month to a group of anti-Castro Cuban exile students in Miami. When Kennedy was killed three months later, these same students, using CIA funds from Joannides, published a special edition of their newspaper, proclaiming that accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald had acted at Castro's behest. Dated Nov, 23, 1963, this broadsheet featuring photos of Castro and Oswald was the first concerted effort to articulate a conspiratorial explanation of Kennedy's death—and it was paid for out Dick Helms' budget.

CONTINUED...

http://www.slate.com/?id=2073470

From Dirty Truths by Michael Parenti

(1996, City Lights Books) (Pages 172 - 191)

THE JFK ASSASSINATION II: CONSPIRACY PHOBIA
ON THE LEFT

by Michael Parenti

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Kennedy and the CIA

Chomsky argues that the CIA would have had no grounds for wanting to kill JFK, because he was a dedicated counterinsurgent cold warrior. Chomsky arrives at this conclusion by assuming that the CIA had the same reading of events in 1963 that he has today. But entrenched power elites are notorious for not seeing the world the way left analysts do. To accept Chomsky’s assumptions we would need a different body of data from that which he and others offer, data that focuses not on the Kennedy administration’s interventionist pronouncements and policies but on the more private sentiments that festered in intelligence circles and related places in 1963.

To offer a parallel: We might be of the opinion that the New Deal did relatively little for working people and that Franklin Roosevelt actually was a tool of the very interests he publicly denounced as “economic royalists.” From this we might conclude that the plutocrats had much reason to support FDR’s attempts to save big business from itself. But most plutocrats dammed “that man in the White House” as a class traitor. To determine why, you would have to look at how they perceived the New Deal in those days, not at how we think it should be evaluated today.

In fact, President Kennedy was not someone the CIA could tolerate, and the feeling was mutual. JFK told one of his top officials that he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” (New York Times, 4/25/66). He closed the armed CIA camps that were readying for a second Bay of Pigs invasion and took a number of other steps designed to bring the Agency under control. He fired its most powerful and insubordinate leaders, Director Allen Dulles, Deputy Director Charles Cabell, and Deputy Director for Plans Richard Bissell. He tried to reduce its powers and jurisdiction and set strict limits as to its future actions, and he appointed a high-level committee to investigate the CIA’s past misdeeds.

In 1963, CIA officials, Pentagon brass, anti-Castro Cuban émigrés, and assorted other right-wingers, including FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, hated JFK and did not believe he could be trusted with the nation’s future. They referred to him as “that delinquent in the White House.” Roger Craig records the comments of numerous Dallas police officers who wanted to see Kennedy done away with. Several years ago, on a San Francisco talk show on station KGO, I heard a listener call in as follows: “this is the first time I’m saying this. I worked for Army intelligence. In 1963 I was in Japan, and the accepted word around then was that Kennedy would be killed because he was messing with the intelligence community. When word came of his death, all I could hear was delighted comments like ‘We got the bastard’.”

In his book First Hand Knowledge, CIA operative Robert Morrow noted the hatred felt by CIA officers regarding Kennedy’s “betrayal” in not sending the U.S. military into the Bay of Pigs fiasco. One high-level CIA Cuban émigré, Eladio del Valle, told Morrow less than two weeks before the assassination: “I found out about it last night. Kennedy’s going to get it in Dallas.”2 Morrow also notes that CIA director Richard Helms, “knew that someone in the Agency was involved” in the Kennedy assassination, “either directly or indirectly, in the act itself - someone who would be in a high and sensitive position . . . Helms did cover up any CIA involvement in the presidential assassination.”

Several years after JFK’s murder, President Johnson told White House aide Marvin Watson that he “was convinced that there was a plot in connection with the assassination” and that the CIA had something to do with it (Washington Post, 12/13/77). And Robert Kennedy repeatedly made known his suspicions that the CIA had a hand in the murder of his brother.

JFK’s enemies in the CIA, the Pentagon, and elsewhere fixed on his refusal to provide air coverage for the Bay of Pigs, his unwillingness to go into Indochina with massive ground forces, his no-invasion guarantee to Krushchev on Cuba, his overtures for a rapprochement with Castro and professed willingness to tolerate countries with different economic systems in the Western hemisphere, his atmospheric-test-ban treaty with Moscow, his American University speech calling for reexamination of U.S. cold war attitudes toward the Soviet Union, his antitrust suit against General Electric, his curtailing of the oil-depletion allowance, his fight with U.S. Steel over price increases, his challenge to the Federal Reserve Board’s multibillion-dollar monopoly control of the nation’s currency,3 his warm reception at labor conventions, and his call for racial equality. These things may not have been enough for some on the Left but they were far too much for many on the Right.

CONTINUED...

http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles/conspiracyphobia.htm

The Good Spy

How the quashing of an honest C.I.A. investigator helped launch 40 years of JFK conspiracy theories and cynicism about the Feds.

By Jefferson Morley
Washington Monthly
December 2003

It was 1:30 in the morning of Nov. 23, 1963, and John F. Kennedy had been dead for 12 hours. His corpse was being dressed at Bethesda Naval Hospital, touched and retouched to conceal the ugly bullet wounds. In Dallas, the F.B.I. had Lee Harvey Oswald in custody.

The lights were still on at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., John Whitten, the agency's 43-year-old chief of covert operations for Mexico and Central America, hung up the phone with his Mexico City station chief. He had just learned something stunning: A C.I.A. surveillance team in Mexico City had photographed Oswald at the Cuban consulate in early October, an indication that the agency might be able to quickly uncover the suspect's background.

At 1:36 am, Whitten sent a cable to Mexico City: "Send staffer with all photos of Oswald to HQ on the next available flight. Call Mr. Whitten at 652-6827." Within 24 hours Whitten was leading the C.I.A. investigation into the assassination. After two weeks of reviewing classified cables, he had learned that Oswald's pro-Castro political activities needed closer examination, especially his attempt to shoot a right-wing JFK critic, a diary of his efforts to confront anti-Castro exiles in New Orleans, and his public support for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. For this investigatory zeal, Whitten was taken off the case.

C.I.A. Deputy Director of Plans Richard Helms blocked Whitten's efforts, effectively ending any hope of a comprehensive agency investigation of the accused assassin, a 24-year-old ex-Marine, who had sojourned in the Soviet Union and spent time as a leftist activist in New Orleans. In particular, Oswald's Cuba-related political life, which Whitten wished to pursue, went unexplored by the C.I.A. The blue-ribbon Warren commission appointed by President Johnson concluded in September 1964 that Oswald alone and unaided had killed Kennedy. But over the years, as information which the commission's report had not accounted for leaked out, many would come to see the commission as a cover-up, in part because it failed to assign any motive to Oswald, in part because the government's pre-assassination surveillance of Oswald had been more intense than the government ever cared to disclose, and finally because its reconstruction of the crime sequence was flawed.

Both the story of Oswald and the C.I.A., and the way in which it leaked out in bits and pieces fueled a generation of conspiracy-minded authors, journalists, and filmmakers who mined Richard Helms's dubious legacy--a rich vein of ominous ambiguity and unanswered questions about one of the most jarring events of modern American history. The untimely end to Whitten's investigation, which prevented a public airing of what the government actually knew, also contributed to a generation of public cynicism about Washington--to a national mythology of skullduggery, and the suspicion that secret agencies in Washington were up to no good and the truth never gets out. In the decades since Kennedy's death, the "rogue C.I.A. assassin" has become a stock Hollywood character, his villainy engrained in spy movies and the popular culture.

Whitten's story, told here for the first time, has an uncomfortable new resonance today, as the Bush administration tries to thwart investigations into, among other things, what our intelligence agencies knew about Saddam's WMD programs before we went to war with Iraq. Whitten was a rare C.I.A. hero in the Kennedy assassination story whose personal odyssey is a poignant but unsettling reminder that inquiries into a national tragedy can be compromised early on. Intelligence mandarins, seeking to protect their positions, can override independent subordinates. Official deceptions can take decades to unravel. Embarrassing secrets, however, don't simply go away; eventually, they filter out, as the Kennedy case shows, often doing more harm to the country than they would have had the public known the truth earlier.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.morley.html

"Yeah and I'm gonna give Santo and Marcello a little gift each month from the skim there to keep 'em happy. It's smart business. But there's another guy. Remember the Spruce Goose?"

"Howard Hughes. Yeah, I remember him from the papers."

"Roselli's been talkin' with him. He's one rich cocksucker. He knows how to play the game....He says he's got Vice President Nixon eatin' out of his hand. Military contracts, shit...the guy's got Washington all paid off. And he knows how to make a buck. He likes Vegas...likes the tables. i got a feelin' we can work together real nice."

"This is gettin' to be pretty big stuff, Mooney. What about the coppers? The IRS? You're talkin' about transportin' a lot of dough. Won't so much activity bring them down on the whole operation?"

"Fuck them....You know Banister here, the Chicago FBI guy? And Bob Maheu We know those guys...real well. Hughes knows all the feds. Murray Humphreys does, too. Roselli knows the government guys who work over in Asia....We've been workin' with them in the Philippines for years now. Over the years, we've helped Banister and Maheu on a few deals, tippin' them off to car thieves and musclin' their favorite enemy" -- Mooney laughed -- "Commies." He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "The Outfit's gonna work with the FBI stateside, and outside of the country with the CIA. You can be sure they'll be on our side."

SOURCE: Double Cross: The Explosive, Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America, p. 211, by Sam and Chuck Giancana.

Smedley Butler on Interventionism

-- Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912 (where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

SOURCE: http://www.fas.org/man/smedley.htm

Afghanistan, the CIA, bin Laden,
and the Taliban

by Phil Gasper
International Socialist Review, November-December 2001

The U.S. war on Afghanistan is a brutal attack on a country that has already been almost destroyed by more than 20 years of foreign invasion and civil war.' The Soviet occupation, which lasted from 1979 to 1989, left more than a million people dead. Millions still live in refugee camps More than 500,000 orphans are disabled. Ten million land mines still litter the country, killing an average of 90 people per month. At 43 years, life expectancy in Afghanistan is on average 17 years lower than that for people in other developing countries. The countryside is devastated and is currently experiencing a severe drought, with 7.5 million people threatened with starvation. The death and destruction wrought by the U.S. bombing campaign-and the cut off of food aid deliveries it has caused-have already killed hundreds and produced thousands more refugees scrambling to escape into Pakistan.

But not only is Washington attacking one of the poorest countries in the world, past U.S. government actions are in no small part responsible for the current situation in Afghanistan. The Bush administration claims to be targeting Osama bin Laden, who it says masterminded the September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (even though it has offered no concrete evidence to back up this accusation), and Afghanistan's Taliban government, which is sheltering him. But as the Economist magazine noted soon after September 11, " (U.S.) policies in Afghanistan a decade and more ago helped to create both Osama bin Laden and the fundamentalist Taliban regime that shelters him." An examination of this history will reveal the extent to which U.S. foreign policy is based on hypocrisy, realpolitik, and the short-term pursuit of narrow interests.

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The CIA's anticommunist jihad

President Jimmy Carter immediately declared that the invasion jeopardized vital U.S. interests, because the Persian Gulf area was "now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan. But the Carter administration's public outrage at Russian intervention in Afghanistan was doubly duplicitous. Not only was it used as an excuse for a program of increased military expenditure that had in fact already begun, but the U.S. had in fact been aiding the mujahideen for at least the previous six months, with precisely the hope of provoking a Soviet response. Former CIA director Robert Gates later admitted in his memoirs that aid to the rebels began in June 1979. In a candid 1998 interview, Zbigniew Brezinski, Carter's national security adviser, confirmed that U.S. aid to the rebels began before the invasion:

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan (in) December 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.... We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would....

That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap.... The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."

The Carter administration was well aware that in backing the mujahideen it was supporting forces with reactionary social goals, but this was outweighed by its own geopolitical interests. In August 1979, a classified State Department report bluntly asserted that "the United States' larger interest...would be served by the demise of the Taraki-Amin regime, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan." That same month, in a stunning display of hypocrisy, State Department spokesperson Hodding Carter piously announced that the U.S. "expect(s) the principle of nonintervention to be respected by all parties in the area, including the Soviet Union."
The Russian invasion in December was the signal for U.S. support to the Afghan rebels to increase dramatically.

Three weeks after Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul, Carter's secretary of defense, Harold Brown, was in Beijing arranging for a weapons transfer from the Chinese to the ClA-backed Afghani troops mustered in Pakistan. The Chinese, who were generously compensated for the deal, agreed and even consented to send military advisers. Brown worked out a similar arrangement with Egypt to buy $15 million worth of weapons. "The U.S. contacted me," (then-Egyptian president) Anwar Sadat recalled shortly before his assassination (in 1981). "They told me, 'Please open your stores for us so that we can give the Afghans the armaments they need to fight.' And I gave them the armaments. The transport of arms to the Afghans started from Cairo on U.S. planes."

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Afghanistan/Afghanistan_CIA_Taliban.html