Plots To Kill CastroThe CIA had pursued missions to kill Fidel Castro in several plots starting in the summer of 1959. A Senate Committee headed by Frank Church documented what had been rumored for several years, that the CIA had pursued assassination as an instrument of foreign policy.

The Church Committee issued the first of 14 reports in 1975, entitled “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.”

Prime among the intended victims was Cuba’s leader, Fidel Castro. Although there is some evidence for plots beginning as soon as 1959, the Church Committee’s first documented plots began in the late summer of 1960. That is when the CIA contacted Johnny Roselli, and through him other organized crime leaders eager to return to the “good old days” in Cuba.

Some of the plots and ideas were of the James Bond variety – poisoned pills, an exploding seashell, and a planned gift of a diving suit contaminated with toxins. This, plus the failure to actually kill Castro, has sometimes allowed journalist and historians to view these as almost harmless Keystone Kops affairs. But there was deadly seriousness at work – other assassination attempts involved high-powered rifles outfitted with telescopic sights.

A particularly interesting assassination plot involved a Cuban revolutionary hero named Rolando Cubela, code-named AMLASH. The contact began as an attempt to recruit someone close to Castro to lead a coup, but then turned into an assassination operation. Strangely, this episode occurred in the fall of 1963, at the same time that the Kennedy administration was initiating secret peace overtures to Castro.