The CIA’s Endless Attempts to Kill Fidel Castro
By the mid-1960s, the U.S. government was getting pretty good at “taking out” foreign leaders that didn’t share its global ambitions.
But Fidel Castro, the socialist leader of Cuba, was crafty, and the agency just couldn’t nail that furry little rascal. Not that it didn’t try. By some accounts, the CIA tried to kill Castro 638 times. The plans reportedly involved feeding him an exploding cigar, gifting him a poison pen, and enlisting a girlfriend to murder him, among many other bizarre plots. The CIA even reached out to the mafia to get a little help, to no avail. In an effort to make Cuba look bad, America’s Joint Chiefs notoriously plotted to commit terrorist attacks in U.S. cities and blame them on the Castro regime, thus provoking war. Classy!
News of many of these plots wouldn’t emerge until decades after the fact, but they still caused quite a stir when they did. Pro tip: partnering with organized crime is never a good look, even when you really, really need to kill somebody!
