CIA officials get paid pretty handsomely. And their job-description is pretty clear: to assess foreign threats against our national security and defend us against them.
So you’d really hope the American taxpayer was getting an honest return on their “investment” and CIA officials were really "putting on their thinking caps" and really "burning the midnight oil" attempting to bump-off a mass-murdering Soviet satrap and terrorist who set up shop 90 miles from our shores during the height of the Cold War.
HAH! Hope again. “So far as I have been able to determine,” revealed E. Howard Hunt who, during the early 1960s, served as head of the political division of the CIA’s “Cuba Project,” “no COHERENT plan was ever developed within the CIA to assassinate Castro, though it was the heart’s desire of many exile groups.”
Interestingly, Hunt stressed that killing Castro was his own recommendation. But he couldn’t get any serious takers within the agency.
Now let’s head over to the famous Church-Committee hearings in the mid 70’s when all these (so-called) assassination attempts were first “revealed.” Sen. Frank Church (D-ID), by the way, was a notorious pinko just panting to smear anti-communists. Yet here’s among the items his (highly-embarrassed) Committee (grudgingly) discovered and reported:
“In August 1975, Fidel Castro gave Senator George McGovern a list of twenty-four alleged attempts to assassinate him in which Castro claimed the CIA had been involved… The Committee has found NO EVIDENCE that the CIA was involved in the attempts on Castro’s life enumerated in the allegations that Castro gave to Senator McGovern.”
“Coherent” is probably the key word by Hunt. All those “assassination plans” the Fake News Media transcribes and parrots from Castro’s disinformation officers (both in Cuba and in the U.S.) were probably mostly brainstorming speculations by half-drunken officials. A few might have gotten half-heartedly halfway off the ground.
Felix Rodriguez, the Cuban-American CIA man who played a key role in capturing Che Guevara, also noticed the “incoherence” of these assassination plans. “While we were training for the Bay of Pigs me and a friend volunteered to kill Castro,” Rodriguez recalled to your humble servant. “We were given a rifle with a telescopic sight and we attempted to infiltrate Cuba… after the third attempt, we returned and they (CIA handlers) told us that the plan had been changed, had been canceled, so they took the rifle away.”
Oh, I know, I know, the Fake News Media has been flogging these “finely-tuned dastardly assassination attempts” against poor innocent little Castro for decades, and more recently jump-started the fake-history campaign with the “revelations” from the declassified JFK assassination documents.
In fact, the overwhelmingly liberal and most Ivy League “educated” CIA suits of the time may have found offing Fidel Castro too heart-wrenching of an operational flip-flop. To wit:
“Me and my staff were all Fidelistas” (Robert Reynolds, the CIA’s Caribbean Desk chief from 1957 to 1960).
“Everyone in the CIA and everyone at State was pro-Castro, except [Republican] ambassador Earl Smith” (Robert Weicha, CIA operative in Santiago Cuba).
“Don’t worry. We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto “Che” Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever” (crackerjack Havana CIA station chief Jim Noel, 1958).
“Without U.S. help Fidel Castro would never have gotten into power. The State Department played a large part in bringing Castro to power. The press, the Chief of the CIA Section are also responsible… we are responsible for bringing Castro in power. I do not care how you want to word it" (Earl T. Smith U.S. Ambassador to Cuba, 1957-59).
“A friendly and persuasive CIA representative who had an opportunity of talking to Fidel Castro for an hour (when the Soviet satrap visited Washington D.C. in April 1959) emerged in a state of ecstasy about Castro’s receptivity, responsiveness and understanding” (Steven Bonsal U.S. ambassador to Cuba 1959-61).
In fact, Raul Castro had a KGB handler since 1954, and when arrested in Mexico in 1956, Ernesto "Che" Guevara was found to have, in his very wallet, the calling card of the KGB's top Latin American agent, Nikolai Leonov. During his Mexico exile, Fidel Castro was also plotting the future Stalinization of Cuba in meetings with both Leonov and with his Cuban KGB colleague Osvaldo Sanchez.
But never mind all those tacky Cuban “deplorables” frantically warning U.S. agencies of the above. They often wore ill-fitting suits and reeked strongly of “McCarthyism,” a most offensive odor to the (mostly) Beltway blueblood CIA suits. Much better, sniffed the CIA suits, to rely on our socio-economic counterparts in Cuba like the Bacardis, who concur with us that the Castro brothers, Che Guevara and their colleagues are all as pure as the driven snow.
Consequently, thanks in part to recommendations from our crackerjack CIA sleuths based in Cuba, January 7, 1959, marks a milestone in U.S. diplomatic history. Never before had the U.S. granted diplomatic recognition (benediction) to a Latin American government as quickly as we bestowed this benediction on Fidel Castro’s that day. In fact, nothing remotely as fast had been bestowed upon “U.S.-backed” (as the Fake News Media habitually refers to him) Fulgencio Batista.
Oh, I know, I know, the Fake News Media, Fake History Channel and Fake Academics all swear up and down that Castro was a smitten Jeffersonian Democrat strumming his guitar and crooning love songs under our balcony -- until a mean ‘ole Uncle Sam bullied him (kicking and screaming) into the arms of Mother Russia.
In fact, that yarn ranks right up there with “Cuba’s Free and Fabulous Healthcare!” and indeed with the “Dastardly CIA’s Assassination Plots!” in the pantheon of Castroite/Fake News Media fables.
The CIA /Castro assassination meme (like so many others) was hatched by the KGB and Cuban DI (Directorio de Intelligencia) –more specifically by multi-decorated for meritorious service DI colonel Fabian Escalante, seen here with his commander-in-chief. The fairy-tale/meme really took off with Escalante’s “book” (i.e., KGB-mentored disinformation pamphlet) "638 Ways to Kill Castro."
There was a day when honest historians and reporters laughed-off the obvious propaganda tracts of a totalitarian regime’s counterintelligence executives, especially from one who, far from having defected, still functioned as a full-fledged and high-rolling Stalinist official.
Alas when it comes to documenting Cuban totalitarianism, the normal rules of historiography and reporting, and even of decency, logic and common sense, have long been turned on their heads.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member