JFK files include plan to have Mafia kill Castro
Poisoned swimsuits, exploding seashells also part of the mix
Cuban assassination plots involving exploding seashells and poisoned swimsuits. Bounties on the heads of high-profile communists. A secretive investigation that tracked John F. Kennedy’s assassin into Mexico.
As scholars, journalists and the merely curious on Friday pored through a tranche of nearly 3,000 newly released secret documents related to the 35th U.S. president’s assassination, there were few if any major plot twists about what happened that day in Dallas in 1963.
Instead, the files — which include secret FBI memos, handwritten notes from top White House officials, and CIA field reports — tell the story of America’s paranoid underworld in the 1960s, where shadowy figures chased secrets at home and abroad and hatched plots to change the course of history.
The records shine a light into America’s covert operations during a turbulent period that included the Kennedy administration’s disastrous attempts to overthrow communist revolutionaries in Cuba, records which were examined by investigators to see if those operations somehow played a role in inspiring Kennedy’s assassination.
Some records provide insight into investigators’ hunt for details involving the only suspect ever officially identified, Lee Harvey Oswald. One newly released FBI file shows how agents tracked Oswald’s bus trip to Mexico City in October 1963. It included information that Oswald was wearing a “short sleeve light coloured sportshirt and no coat,” seemingly innocuous information that had been classified to protect the FBI’s “operations in foreign country.”
The most tawdry accounts only loosely involved Kennedy’s assassination, focusing instead on the U.S. government’s own plots to kill foreign government leaders and politicians.
One top-secret White House document detailed a proposal to create “Operation Bounty” to assassinate prominent Cuban communists — suggesting up to $20,000 US to kill communist informers, up to $100,000 for Cuban government officials, and a morbidly cheeky two cents for the death of Fidel Castro.
Some ideas to assassinate Castro included using the Mafia, which displeased Kennedy’s brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, “because at that time he felt that he was making a very strong drive to try to get after the Mafia,” one 1975 document stated. “His comment was to us that if we were going to get involved with the Mafia, in the future at any time, to make sure you see me first.”
That document alludes to the existence of a 1967 memo from then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover titled “Central Intelligence Agency’s Intentions to Send Hoodlums to Cuba to Assassinate Castro.” Hoover’s memo stated that one CIA-offered payout for the Mafia killing Castro wasn’t two cents, but $150,000, and noted skeptically that one Mafia member was “using his prior connections with CIA to his best advantage.”
As a result, Robert F. Kennedy “issued orders that CIA should never again take such steps without checking with the Department of Justice.”
Some of the proposed plots involved placing botulism pills in Castro’s food, with the CIA’s director of security at one point testing the pills on some guinea pigs “because I wanted to be sure they worked.” Pills were sent to “assets” in Cuba who tried to poison Castro at a restaurant, but failed.
Another CIA plot was based on Castro’s fondness for diving, and proposed “to dust the inside of the suit with a fungus that would produce a disabling and chronic skin disease, and also contaminating the suit with tuberculosis bacilli in the breathing apparatus.”
Another one involved a “boobytrap spectacular seashell which would be submerged in an area where Castro often skindived. The seashell would be loaded with explosives to blow apart when the shell was lifted.” But plotters dejectedly discovered that “there was no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive.”
That document also reviewed the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to assassinate other foreign leaders, including discussions about killing Democratic Republic of the Congo leader Patrice Lumumba, who was shot to death in 1961, three days before Kennedy’s inauguration. The agency denied playing a role.