WASHINGTON, July 3:Mobsters declined a $ 150,000 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) offer to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro with poison pills in the early 1960s but volunteered to do the job for free, according to newly released documents.

A 1962 CIA memo released by the state department says officials believed underworld figures might be able to carry out the killing through contacts developed from their former gambling interests in Cuba. After contacts with legendary mafioso Sam Giancana and an associate named John Rosselli, the CIA in the autumn of 1960 approved a payment of $ 150,000 on completion of the operation to kill Castro, who had seized power in 1959.

The payment was to be made to the actual killers. But an intermediary, private investigator Robert Maheu, ``reported that Rosselli and Giancana emphatically stated that they wished no part of any payment,'' the once top-secret memo says.

Although more than $ 11,000 were paid out for expenses and communications equipment, the operation was called off after the failed April 1961 bay of pigs invasion of Cuba by US backed Cuban exiles.

The memo was sent a year later by then-CIA director of security Sheffield Edwards to attorney general Robert Kennedy, brother of president John Kennedy. It is included among some 450 documents in a new state department history of US foreign relations from 1961-63. So sensitive was the memo at the time that only two copies were made and only six people knew at the time of the project, which straddled the presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and Kennedy. ``It's not even clear whether the president knew about it,'' deputy state department historian David Patterson said. ``We haven't found that kind of smoking gun.''

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.