FSU victim was the son of a legendary CIA operative who claimed to have trained Lee Harvey Oswald

Roberto Morales, the university dining coordinator at Florida State University, was one of two people killed during Thursday’s mass shooting.

The 57-year-old was the son of an infamous Cuban American CIA operative who allegedly trained presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

His father was Ricardo “Monkey” Morales, an active counterintelligence operative throughout the 1960s and ’70s who worked for the CIA, FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency and intelligence agencies in Israel and Venezuela.

Ricardo Morales was also a sniping instructor in the early 1960s at secret camps where Cuban exiles and others trained for missions against Fidel Castro’s regime, according to “Monkey” Morales’ surviving son, Ricardo Morales Jr.

During an October 2021 radio interview, Morales Jr., who has co-authored a forthcoming book about his father, said that following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, his father recognized Oswald as a former trainee.

“When my old man was training in a CIA camp — he did not tell me where — he was helping to train snipers, other Cubans, Latin Americans, and there were a few Americans,” he told Actualidad Radio 1040 AM in Miami.

“When he saw the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald (after Kennedy’s assassination), he realized this was the same character he saw on the CIA training field. He saw him. He saw the name tag. But he didn’t know him because he was not famous yet. But later when my father sees him, he realizes he is the same person.”

The elder Morales also took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion and various other covert operations, bombings and alleged drug trafficking. The Instagram account MiamiStadium has footage of him leaving court after being found not guilty of marijuana charges. Many other charges failed to stick to “Monkey,” fueling speculation that he remained under federal protection.

He was portrayed in the Netflix series “Griselda” by actor Goya Robles.

He was shot and killed at 43 in a Key Biscayne bar fight in December 1982. Police ruled it was a justifiable homicide. A document on the CIA website references the incident, stating, “During his two-decade involvement with a variety of causes, Morales had been an intelligence officer for the Cuban government, chief of counter-espionage for the Venezuelan secret police, an anti-communist mercenary in the Belgian Congo, and an informant for the FBI, CIA and Drug Enforcement Agency.”

Miami documentarian Alfred Spellman compiled several headlines about “Monkey” Morales and his death in a 2017 Medium post that references another book about the man’s exploits titled “Hotel Scarface: Where Cocaine Cowboys Partied and Plotted to Control Miami.”

El Nuevo Herald, which reported on the Actualidad radio interview in 2021, published a report Friday connecting Roberto Morales and his notorious father. The report followed a Thursday post on X by Morales Jr., who wrote, “Today we lost my younger brother. He was one of the victims killed at FSU. He loved his job at FSU and his beautiful Wife and Daughter. I’m glad you were in my life.”

The post has since been viewed more than 335,000 times.

The identity of the second person killed has not yet been released.

The 20-year-old shooter is the son of a Leon County Sheriff’s deputy. Six others hospitalized following the attack are expected to recover, according to CBS News.