Honeypot trap

The Story Of Marita Lorenz, the CIA Agent Who Was Sent To Kill Castro But Slept With Him Instead

The U.S. government invented all sorts of harebrained schemes to kill Fidel Castro—and I mean really, truly off-the-wall plots. There was the time the CIA tried to poison his milkshake. There was the ploy to discredit him by spraying him down with LSD and watching him go insane during a live radio broadcast. There was, I shit you not, an idea to pack his omnipresent cigar with explosives. Then there was Marita Lorenz.

Lorenz was once Castro’s lover, before she turned against him on the basis, perhaps, of the role he played in the abortion of their child. A 1993 Vanity Fairprofile by Ann Louise Bardach does a deep dive into Lorenz’s convoluted history, doing its best to untangle the sticky web of lies that Lorenz herself seems to have been responsible for spinning. But one thing that’s certain is that Lorenz was sent by the CIA to poison Castro, and that she bungled it completely.

According to the piece, Lorenz first laid eyes on Castro as a cruise ship captained by her father sailed into the Havana harbor in 1959. She was taken with him immediately.