Parts of the 105 file on Marilyn were marked “SM-C” for “Security Matter – Communist.” They were withheld under category B1, used to cover foreign affairs matters and national security. Some documents released to me, on first publication of my book, were entirely blacked out by the censor’s pen – except for their subject headings. More recently, they have been released with only minor deletions. A report dated July 13, 1962, less than a month before Marilyn’s death, would certainly have been seen as troubling.
According to the F.B.I.’s source, not named in the document, Marilyn had talked of having “lunched at the Peter Lawfords with President Kennedy just a few days previously. She was very pleased, as she had asked the President a lot of socially significant questions concerning the morality of atomic testing…Subject’s [Marilyn’s] views are very positively and concisely leftist; however, if she is being actively used by the Communist Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles.”
The report was inaccurate in one important respect. President Kennedy was not in California that July. It is entirely possible, however, that Marilyn had lunched with Robert Kennedy in the timeframe indicated—“a few days” before July 13. The Attorney General had been in Los Angeles from the afternoon of June 26 till the morning of June 28. He did see Marilyn during that visit. He would fly West again two weeks later, to Nevada, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor. His purpose: to witness an atomic test.
The possibility of nuclear war—and extreme tension over Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union—was the dominating issue in 1962. In late June and early July—when, according to the F.B.I. report, one of the Kennedy brothers discussed nuclear matters with Marilyn—Castro was expecting a U.S. invasion and was making urgent appeals to Moscow for help. In early July, U.S.S.R. Premier Nikita Khrushchev made the fateful decision to ship ballistic missiles to Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came closer to nuclear war than at any time in history, was only a few months away.
There is no suggestion in the released F.B.I. documents that either Kennedy brother blurted out state secrets to Marilyn. The point, rather, is that any private conversation with the attorney general or the president on the subject of nuclear weapons would have been of the utmost interest to Soviet intelligence – at any time.
On a July evening in 1961, the year before the death of Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana, “boss of bosses” of the Chicago Mafia, master of an organized crime network reaching across huge swathes of the United States, had walked into an airport waiting room to be confronted by a team of F.B.I. agents. The pressure from the Kennedy Justice Department was by now constant, and he lost his temper. The agents reported:
Giancana indicated that he was aware that the Agents intended to report the results of this interview to their boss, who in turn would report the results to their ‘super-boss’ and ‘super super boss’, and he said, ‘You know who I mean, I mean the Kennedys.’ He then said, ‘I know all about the Kennedys…and one of these days we are going to tell all.’ You lit a fire tonight that will never go out. You’ll rue the day.’”
Six months later, the F.B.I. recorded a conversation between Giancana and Johnny Roselli, the mafioso who ran the extortion rackets in Hollywood. The mobsters had been hoping Frank Sinatra might prove useful as a sort of hotline to the Kennedys, but they had been disappointed. Roselli now advised Giancana, “Go the other way. Fuck everybody…. Let them see the other side of you.” Then the two mobsters compared notes on bugging devices:
Giancana: “What I want is something really small.
Roselli: Alright…I got a guy out there…A guy in L.A. who’s got an electronic cap kind of a thing, and showed me that…so I got to find out what the smallest thing is. You got a receiver?…How big was your receiver?
Giancana: The box was only this big, maybe three inches by three inches. We were talking ‘blah, blah, blah’. It picked it up. Think about it.