The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (9 page)

Further Reading

Michael Bar-Zohar,
Bitter Scent: The Case of L’Oréal, The Nazis, and the Arab Boycott
, 1996

FIDEL CASTRO

For years Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz complained about CIA plots to kill him. For years the CIA denied doing anything so improper. As it turned out, the Bearded One was right. The CIA had Castro in its crosshairs for a decade or more.

Born in 1926, Castro led the 1959 Cuban Revolution, which established a socialist state ninety miles off the coast of Florida. As Wayne Smith, former head of US Interests Section in Havana, once memorably put it, socialist Cuba’s effect on the capitalist US was that of “a full moon on a werewolf ”. Neither was Castro’s socialist makeover of Cuba exactly popular with the Mafia (which had interests in Havana’s casinos), or the supporters of the overthrown Fulgencio Batista. And so the CIA, the Mafia, the Batistas all started hatching schemes to rid Cuba of the hirsute leader. Initially the CIA’s plots centred on merely humiliating Castro; in the psy-op, “Good Times” postcards were to be dropped over Cuba showing a corpulent Castro living the high life (“should put even a Commie dictator in the proper perspective with the underprivileged masses” stated the authorizing memo); another plan called for an LSD-like drug to be sprayed in the air at the radio station Castro used for his speeches so he would start ranting nonsense. No less whacky, was an idea to dust the Cuban leader’s shoes with a depilatory powder so the hair on his beard would fall out.

When humiliating Castro failed, the CIA tried invading Cuba (the Bay of Pigs debacle) before settling on assassinating him. Most of CIA’s assassination plans were apparently drawn from a bad Bond novel, and included:

No less than eight separate plans were drawn up by the CIA between 1960 and 1965 for the final solution of the Castro problem, only one of which was rooted in reality. Rolando Cubela Seconde, a major in the Cuban army and head of Cuba’s International Federation of Students, handily contacted the CIA offering to do their job for them. (Cubela had form as an assassin; as a young student he’d murdered Antonio Blanci Rico, head of Batista’s secret police.) The CIA gave Cubela the code name AMLASH and a syringe disguised as a Paper Mate pen and told him to inject Black Leaf 40 (an insecticide) into Castro. Eventually, the CIA gave Cubela what he asked for: a Belgian FAL rifle so he could pot Castro from afar. Before Cubela could pull the trigger, however, he was arrested by Castro’s security service. With quite remarkable generosity, Castro asked the court for clemency on Cubela’s behalf, and the putative assassin was sentenced to jail instead of a firing squad. Cubela was released in 1979 and went to live in Spain.

By then the truth of the CIA’s “Get Castro!” campaign had been dragged into the open, following an investigation by US Senator Frank Church. The Church Committee’s “Interim Report” of 1975 detailed the CIA’s hapless history of trying to undermine, then kill, Castro, and for good measure delineated CIA involvement in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba of Congo, Rene Schneider of Chile, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam. The most spectacular proof of the CIA’s anti-Castro antics, however, came in 1993, with the declassification of the “Inspector General’s Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro” (see Document, p.57), which had been commissioned by President Johnson in 1967. So controversial, incriminating – and maybe embarrassing – was the report that the CIA refused its declassification for thirty-six years. Even presidents were refused access to the full document.

On the recommendation of the Church Committee, President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905, which ruled that “no employee of the US government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination”. Jimmy Carter strengthened this proscription with Executive Order 12036, as did Reagan, through Executive Order 12333. Because no subsequent executive order or piece of legislation has repealed the prohibition, it remains in effect.

Only a smooth White House lawyer, however, was able to reconcile EO 12333 with the Reagan administration dropping bombs on Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s home in 1986, or President Bush’s instruction to the CIA and US military to engage in “lethal covert operations” against Osama bin Laden, or indeed Obama’s green light for the eventual offing of the al-Qaeda leader. According to the White House, the ban on political assassination does not apply to wartime or counter-terrorist operations.

Meanwhile, back in Cuba jokes about Castro’s apparent indestructibility ran rife. One told of him being given a present of a Galapagos turtle. He declined after learning that it was only likely to live for a hundred years, saying, “That’s the problem with pets. You get attached to them and then they die on you.”

Further Reading

Fabian Escalante,
Executive Action: 638 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro
, 2007

DOCUMENT: CIA INSPECTOR GENERAL’S REPORT ON PLOTS TO ASSASSINATE FIDEL CASTRO [EXTRACTS]

The report was drawn up in 1967 at the insistence of President Johnson – who was not allowed by the Agency to see the full version. Neither was President Nixon. Indeed, the CIA regarded their own report as so incriminating that all but one copy was destroyed. The report was only approved for release in 1993.

23 May 1967: MEMORANDUM FOR THE RECORD

SUBJECT: Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro

This report was prepared at the request of the Director of Central Intelligence. He assigned the task to the Inspector General on 23 March 1967. The report was delivered to the Director, personally, in installments, beginning on 24 April 1967. The Director returned this copy to the Inspector General on 22 May 1967 with instructions that the Inspector General:

Retain it in personal, EYES ONLY safekeeping

[...]

This ribbon copy is the only text of the report now in existence, either in whole or in part. Its text has been read only by:

Richard Helms, Director of Central Intelligence

J. S. Earman, Inspector General

K. E. Greer, Inspector (one of the authors)

S. E. Beckinridge (one of the authors)

All typing of drafts and of final text was done by the authors.

[...]

It became clear very early in our investigation that the vigor with which schemes were pursued within the Agency to eliminate Castro personally varied with the intensity of the U.S. Government’s efforts to overthrow the Castro regime. We can identify five separate phases in Agency assassination planning, although the transitions from one to another are not always sharply defined. Each phase is a reflection of the then prevailing Government attitude toward the Cuban regime.

a. Prior to August 1960: All of the identifiable schemes prior to about August 1960, with one possible exception, were aimed only at discrediting Castro personally by influencing his behavior or by altering his appearance.

b. August 1960 to April 1961: The plots that were hatched in late 1960 and early 1961 were aggressively pursued and were viewed by at least some of the participants as being merely one aspect of the over-all active effort to overthrow the regime that culminated in the Bay of Pigs.

c. April 1961 to late 1961: A major scheme that was begun in August 1960 was called off after the Bay of Pigs and remained dormant for several months, as did most other Agency operational activity related to Cuba.

d. Late 1961 to late 1962: That particular scheme was reactivated in early 1962 and was again pushed vigorously in the era of Project MONGOOSE and in the climate of intense administration pressure on CIA to do something about Castro and his Cuba.

e. Late 1962 until well into 1963: After the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 and the collapse of Project MONGOOSE, the aggressive scheme that was begun in August 1960 and revived in April 1962 was finally terminated in early 1963. Two other plots were originated in 1963, but both were impracticable and nothing ever came of them.

We cannot overemphasize the extent to which responsible Agency officers felt themselves subject to the Kennedy administration’s severe pressures to do something about Castro and his regime. The fruitless and, in retrospect, often unrealistic plotting should be viewed in that light.

Many of those we interviewed stressed two points that are so obvious that recording them here may be superfluous. We believe, though, that they are pertinent to the story. Elimination of the dominant figure in a government, even when loyalties are held to him personally rather than to the government as a body, will not necessarily cause the downfall of the government. This point was stressed with respect to Castro and Cuba in an internal CIA draft paper of October 1961, which was initiated in response to General Maxwell Taylor’s desire for a contingency plan. The paper took the position that the demise of Fidel Castro, from whatever cause, would offer little opportunity for the liberation of Cuba from Communist and Soviet Bloc control. The second point, which is more specifically relevant to our investigation, is that bringing about the downfall of a government necessarily requires the removal of its leaders from positions of power, and there is always the risk that the participants will resort to assassination. Such removals from power as the house arrest of a [?] or the flight of a [?] could not cause one to overlook the killings of a Diem or of a Trujillo by forces encouraged but not controlled by the U.S. government.

There is a third point, which was not directly made by any of those we interviewed, but which emerges clearly from the interviews and from review of files. The point is that of frequent resort to synecdoche – the mention of a part when the whole is to be understood, or vice versa. Thus, we encounter repeated references to phrases such as “disposing of Castro,” which may be read in the narrow, literal sense of assassinating him, when it is intended that it be read in the broader, figurative sense of dislodging the Castro regime. Reversing this coin, we find people speaking vaguely of “doing something about Castro” when it is clear that what they have specifically in mind is killing him. In a situation wherein those speaking may not have actually meant what they seemed to say or may not have said what they actually meant, they should not be surprised if their oral shorthand is interpreted differently than was intended.

The suggestion was made that operations aimed at the assassination of Castro may have been generated in an atmosphere of stress in intelligence publications on the possibility of Castro’s demise and on the reordering of the political structure that would follow. We reviewed intelligence publications from 1960 through 1966, including National Intelligence Estimates, Special National Intelligence Estimates, Intelligence Memorandums, and Memorandums for the Director. The NTE’s on “The Situation and Prospects in Cuba” for 1960, 1963, and 1964 have brief paragraphs on likely successor governments if Castro were to depart the scene. We also find similar short references in a SNIE of March 1960 and in an Intelligence Memorandum of May 1965. In each case the treatment is no more nor less than one would expect to find in comprehensive round-ups such as these. We conclude that there is no reason to believe that the operators were unduly influenced by the content of intelligence publications.

Drew Pearson’s column of 7 March 1967 refers to a reported CIA plan in 1963 to assassinate Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Pearson also has information, as yet unpublished, to the effect that there was a meeting at the State Department at which assassination of Castro was discussed and that a team actually landed in Cuba with pills to be used in an assassination attempt. There is basis in fact for each of those three reports.

a. A CIA officer passed an assassination weapon to an Agency Cuban asset at a meeting in Paris on 22 November 1963. The weapon was a ballpoint pen rigged as a hypodermic syringe. The CIA officer suggested that the Cuban asset load the syringe with Black Leaf 40. The evidence indicates that the meeting was under way at the very moment President Kennedy was shot.