‘Mafia Spies’ Recounts the C.I.A. Plot to Kill Castro

The stories have swirled around for years, often in the form of feverish conspiracy theories. The major players should ring familiar by now: John F. Kennedy. Fidel Castro. The C.I.A. The mob. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK” raised the delirium to operatic heights; Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel “Libra” gave it a jolt of postmodern cool.

But “Mafia Spies,” the new docuseries now streaming on Paramount+, takes a different tack. Based on Thomas Maier’s nonfiction book of the same name, it lays out the true story of how the C.I.A. collaborated with the mafia to plot the assassination of Castro. Much of this is documented in files about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that were released in batches by the National Archives in 2017 and 2018, and which Maier used as the basis of his book.

Maier — who is also a producer on the series — and the showrunners, Tom Donahue and Ilan Arboleda, turn the archive data into a narrative that prompts one double take after another and is often intentionally funny. But however improbable some of it seems, the guiding premise is that it all really happened. One goal of the show is to debunk the many conspiracy theories that swirl around this era of history.

“If we had relied on conspiracy theories, you just wouldn’t believe it,” Donahue, who also directed the series, said in a video interview alongside Arboleda. “As they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.”

The six episodes of “Mafia Spies” feature a labyrinth of plots and a sprawling cast of mobsters, spies, politicians, revolutionaries and entertainers. But the big picture is actually pretty simple.

The C.I.A., led at the time by Allen Dulles, wanted to eliminate the new Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro — or, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it, he wanted Castro “sawed off,” according to the historian Stephen Kinzer, who is featured in the series. Through a “cutout” (or middle man), Robert Maheu, a businessman and lawyer, the C.I.A. enlisted organized crime leaders, chiefly the Chicago Outfit’s Sam Giancana and John Roselli, to assassinate Castro. (The mafia had its own reasons for wanting Castro dead: After he seized power in 1959, Havana’s casinos were no longer a cash-cow haven for them.)

Spoiler alert: They didn’t succeed. Castro died of natural causes in 2016 at the age of 90. “He’s the last man standing,” Donahue said. “Ultimately, that’s the punchline.” At the same time, President Kennedy shared a lover, (Judith Campbell), and a pal (Frank Sinatra) with Giancana, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy zealously went after the mob even as the mob tried to do the C.I.A.’s dirty work. The “Mafia Spies” web is remarkably tangled.

The series encompasses major historical events, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. But there’s nothing dry about “Mafia Spies,” except perhaps the martinis slurped down by the C.I.A. honchos during one of the series’s piquant re-enactments. It may be grounded in fact, but “Mafia Spies” is also quite cheeky.

Arboleda and Donahue lean into the entertainment value of the story. The music and graphics riff off everything from James Bond movies to the “Mission: Impossible” TV series from the 1960s. After we learn that Maheu claimed to be the inspiration for “Mission: Impossible,” we see a stylized rear-projection shot of the actor playing Maheu that matches a nearly identical shot of Peter Graves from the classic spy series. When one high-ranking mobster is shot in the head, his blood splatters over a poster for the Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate.”

Donahue was immediately struck by the potential for humor in the story, which also includes Sinatra, the singer (and Giancana girlfriend) Phyllis McGuire, and the James Bond creator, Ian Fleming. The C.I.A. and its mob partners tried everything from poison pills to a lethal “honey pot” — a woman enlisted to seduce and murder — to achieve its goal. Nothing worked.

“When I read the book I thought, ‘This is the Keystone Kops,’” Donahue said. “That was the tone we wanted from the beginning. You can’t take this too seriously, even though it’s life and death. The C.I.A. is just a bunch of bumbling idiots in this.”

Arboleda added: “We knew we had to play that for comedy.”

Though the series is critical of conspiracy theories in general, and particularly those spawned by “JFK,” it probably wouldn’t exist without that movie. Congress mandated that all assassination-related material be housed in the National Archives largely because of the controversy surrounding Stone’s film.

Maier found a trove of information for “Mafia Spies” when thousands of those Kennedy assassination documents were released. Among them were details on the extent of the anti-Castro planning overseen by Robert Kennedy when he was attorney general. They also shed light on numerous assassination schemes plotted by the C.I.A. to get Castro.

“It was almost like a Whac-A-Mole game,” Maier said in a video interview. “They kept trying with all the poisons and the explosions and all these various different attempts to kill him. How did he evade that?”

A veteran investigative reporter whose book “Masters of Sex” was the basis for the Showtime series about the human sexuality pioneers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, Maier is interviewed on camera throughout “Mafia Spies,” along with an assortment of historians, entertainers, anti-Castro exiles and former Cuban revolutionaries. He views the concerted efforts to kill Castro as a serious turning point, when the C.I.A., established in 1947, pivoted from merely gathering intelligence to also plotting murders.

“It’s the most extreme example of covert operations,” he said. “It’s the planned assassination of a foreign leader as an instrument of our foreign policy.”

Maier, Arboleda and Donahue also see the series as a warning about the consequences of secrecy, and what can happen when accountability is neglected at the highest levels of government. As both the book and the series detail, the public was left in the dark on the Castro plotting and other C.I.A. efforts to remove international leaders until 1975, when the Church Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, held hearings on abuses by U.S. government agencies. Information continues to trickle out, including the National Archives material that Maier used for his book.

Beneath the graphics, the music, the gangsters and the sex, “Mafia Spies” is an intricate parable about the public’s right to know what skeletons might lie in government closets.

“When you have a lack of transparency and you have a cover-up, it doesn’t allow for accountability,” Arboleda said. “When you don’t have accountability, it threatens democracy. So when the public doesn’t have knowledge of the decisions that are made in private, it’s a threat to all of us.”