Character Assassination
David Hume Kennerly/Getty ImagesFidel Castro smokes a cigar in his office in Havana, Cuba. Circa 1977.
Lorenz’ failure to carry out her mission kicked off a period of increasingly deranged scheming by the CIA under the rubric of Operation Mongoose. Thwarted in multiple efforts to kill the man, the CIA resorted to a propaganda war to discredit him personally.
By this point, the Cuba Project had a budget of $50 million a year. It also devoted attention of around 2,500 full-time operatives, mostly Cuban exiles and around 500 American citizens working at the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Defense.
It was led by an Air Force Brigadier General who reported directly to the White House, where cabinet-level officials coordinated special assistance for the project from the State Department, Justice Department, Immigration and Naturalization, and the U.S. Information Agency. There’s no reference in the files to involvement on the part of the Patent Office, NASA, or the Department of Health and Human Services, but given the project’s scope by the end of 1962, it wouldn’t have been surprising.
The propaganda war against Fidel Castro opened after the Bay of Pigs disaster when the U.S. government put bounties on the lives of senior Cuban officials and distributed flyers all over Cuba by air. Rewards for assassinating communist officials ranged as high as $1 million, but not for killing Castro.
In an apparent effort to humiliate him – or perhaps out of the purest sour grapes in history – the CIA’s bounty on Castro was only 2 cents. When that failed to shame him into suicide, the CIA hatched what is now the most famous of Fidel Castro assassination attempts.
They plotted to smuggle him a cigar with a small bomb inside it. After lighting it, the explosive would blow his face off. You know, like the ones in those old Bugs Bunny cartoon, except a lot more gruesome.
At least some sources claim this “plot” was never serious, but just a cover story for “more serious” plans, like the better-attested 1963 plot to lace a cigar with LSD and put Castro on an acid trip. A development of this plan was to gas the studio he was in during one of his interminable radio broadcasts with an aerosolized LSD compound and then enjoy listening to him trip on the microphone.
The CIA also reportedly considered contaminating Castro’s SCUBA regulator with tuberculosis bacilli, while another was to lace his wetsuit with thallium salts to make all his hair fall out.
In one of the most ludicrous Fidel Castro assassination attempts, the Agency also seems to have rejected a plan to wire a bomb into a colorful seashell and set it to blow when Castro got close during a dive.
