Assassination plots

The CIA discovered Castro was the man who couldn’t be killed

There is a safe somewhere in the Central Intelligence Agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va., that very likely contains a sort of tribute to Fidel Castro. It’s a Cohiba, the cigar favored by the Cuban leader, dusted with one of the world’s most lethal poisons — botulin toxin.

“Merely putting one in the mouth would do the job,” John Earman, an inspector general of the CIA, wrote in 1967. By “job” he means assassination. Under orders from Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, the CIA devised numerous plots to kill Castro. The revolutionary turned communist survived White House enmity for half a century.

The Cohiba was uncovered after CIA Director Richard Helms ordered Earman to get the truth behind rumors in the press of the assassination attempts. Earman’s little-noticed 1967 report was finally made public in 1998.

Assassination plots

Myriad ways CIA tried and failed to assassinate Fidel Castro

The father of the Cuban Revolution remains unbeaten by his foes even in death. We look over the most dramatic assassination plots on El Comandante – from character-assassinations by way of LSD, to Italian mobsters, tuberculosis wetsuit, and exploding cigar.

“If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal,” Castro is famously quoted as saying. Cuba’s ex-intelligence chief Fabian Escalante – the person tasked with guarding Fidel’s life – puts the number of attempts at 638. The man also claimed to Reuters in a 2010 interview that the John F. Kennedy assassination could well have been an attempt to expedite the process of removing Castro from power: the American president, some said, was not doing enough. Of course, by the time of Kennedy’s 1963 shooting death in Dallas, Texas, there had already been numerous attempts on Castro’s life – intended to bolster Kennedy’s own reputation back home as a strong president, with his administration exerting great pressure on the CIA to take care of it. It is fitting then to start at the beginning...