The Welcome to JFK in The Enduring Secret.

I'm your host, Jeff Crudell.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast.

Today's episode is episode 116.

I guess you could say this is history lesson number two.

In a series of history lessons, before we get into a few more of the connected details of the JFK assassination.

The CIA and its covert operations, along with the mafia and Cubans and the island of Cuba itself, all collided and co-mangled for a long stretch of time in the decades before and after the assassination.

So what are we here trying to understand about all of that? Well, why would the government be involved in covert acts and why would the mafia fight alongside of the government and why would

the Cubans be involved with the

mafia and the CIA? And finally, why would the CIA and the mafia be as focused on Cuba as the

Cubans themselves were? All of these unnatural relationships, naturally, have pretty logical and

predictable beginnings. And that is why the history of it all

is so important. Because once you hear it all, the pieces will fit together more logically than they

might otherwise, although it still makes for an extraordinary collision of circumstances and events

in history. So let's proceed so that we can better understand how things got the way they were.

As I said, our last episode was a discussion around the CIA and how it was born and why it

became what it did and how the concept of covert operations evolved.

In this episode, we explore the mafia and some of its beginnings in this country and how it got to where it was and is,

and how it grew and how it came to be intertwined in certain ways with the government and the CIA.

And then how history led the mafia to Cuba and brought it riches that even the largest

and most powerful criminal enterprises could not retain in the tide of political and social revolution.

And revenge and reparations then combined when the exiles of Cuba joined forces with the CIA

...