Strangest fact: The overlap between “CIA assassination attempt” and “college prank” is surprisingly large. A few of the CIA’s dumber plots Wikipedia charitably describes as, “aimed not at murder but character assassination.” One involved using thallium salts (a component in rat poison) not to kill Castro but to “destroy his famous beard.” (Thallium poisoning causes hair loss.) Another plan involved dosing Castro with LSD before a nationwide radio broadcast, in an apparent attempt to demoralize Cubans by making them think they were listening to college radio. Other attempts included an exploding cigar, a fungus-infected scuba suit (Castro was an avid diver), and a booby-trapped conch placed on the sea floor.
Thing we were happiest to learn: This story would make a hell of a movie. In 1960, the CIA recruited Castro’s girlfriend at the time, Marita Lorenz, to smuggle poison pills into Fidel’s room in a jar of cold cream. Castro caught her in the act, and according to legend, handed her a gun, told her to go ahead and shoot him, and she lost her nerve.
There’s also a potential mafia movie here, as stories of the CIA recruiting the mob to rub out Castro are true. The Agency reached out to Momo Salvatore Giancana, then running Al Capone’s former outfit in Chicago. Whether or not the CIA actually paid for a hit is still unknown, but Giancana suggested poisoning Castro’s food (as with the poison milkshake we discussed last month.) Two different Cuban exiles were recruited, with the mob as go-betweens, but one abruptly quit after a few unsuccessful attempts; the other snuck botulism pills into a restaurant where Castro was a regular, but the dictator abruptly stopped eating there. Whether he had gotten wind of the plot is unknown.
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: Illegally assassinating foreign leaders has bipartisan support. While Ford attempted (unsuccessfully) to crack down on Castro-killing, there was a steady drumbeat of attempts from Presidential administrations from the time Castro took power until President Barack Obama temporarily normalized relations with Cuba in 2015. (A convicted felon we won’t name here closed U.S.-Cuban relations again in 2017).
As with every shady bit of government overreach in the second half of the 20th century, Nixon and Reagan led the charge, with 184 and 197 attempts under each of their administrations. Even peacenik Jimmy Carter had 64 attempts on his watch. The end of the Cold War slowed the pace considerably, as we only saw 16 attempts under former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, and 21 under Bill Clinton. (Wikipedia doesn’t provide numbers for Ford or George W. Bush.)
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: A lot of what we know about the CIA’s long working relationship with the mafia comes from the Family Jewels. The long-classified report was commissioned by former CIA director James R. Schlesinger during the Watergate era, as two of the Watergate burglars were CIA vets; his successor, William Colby, called its findings, “skeletons in the CIA’s closet.” Famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed some of the Family Jewels findings in 1974, including Nixon’s illegal surveillance of antiwar activists, but the full report (and the mafia connections) wasn’t made public until 2007, after years of Freedom Of Information Act requests.
Further down the Wormhole: At a certain point, the CIA took a break from small botched assassination attempts to stage a big botched regime change. The Bay Of Pigs invasion was an Eisenhower-approved CIA-funded military landing that happened during the early days of John F. Kennedy’s administration. Furious that he had been kept out of the loop, Kennedy withheld air support, and the mission quickly collapsed, harming U.S.-Cuban relations for decades afterwards and entrenching Castro’s hold on power.
Bay Of Pigs looms large in JFK’s presidency, as does the deeply stupid Lincoln-Kennedy coincidence theory which connects the two assassinated presidents by facts both arbitrary (same number of letters in their names) and completely false (Lincoln did not have a secretary named Kennedy). The conspiracy theories were covered by Beyond Belief: Fact Or Fiction, a late-’90s Fox series that was revived in 2021 after a meme of host Jonathan Frakes’ out-of-context dialogue from the show delighted the internet. While the most unbelievable fact regarding Fact Or Fiction is that Frakes took over the show from original host James Brolin, the show covered countless Wiki Wormhole-friendly topics, from the 2016 clown sightings, to the Canterbury Panther, to the Kentucky Meat Shower. We’ll investigate the worst airborne-meat-related disaster since the WKRP Thanksgiving episode next month.
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