CIA wanted to poison Castro’s wetsuit

A NEW set of bizarre CIA plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro have been revealed by the JFK files.

The outlandish schemes included a plan to infect the communist leader, pictured, with tuberculosis using a contaminated wetsuit and diving apparatus.

Agents also suggested that Castro, a keen diver, might be assassinated using a booby-trap seashell loaded with explosives, hidden at one of his favourite dive spots. The idea was only abandoned after an investigation failed to find a seashell large enough to hold enough explosives to produce a deadly blast.

The CIA made hundreds of attempts to assassinate Castro after the 1959 revolution in Cuba, which left the US with a communist neighbour.

One scheme involved using negotiations over prisoners as a pretext for giving ‘El Comandante’ diving equipment that had been laced with bacteria.

A memo noted: ‘The CIA plan was to dust the inside of the suit with a fungus producing madera foot, a disabling and chronic skin disease, and also contaminating the suit with tuberculosis bacilli in the breathing apparatus.’

In another elaborate plot, the CIA mooted a ‘booby-trap spectacular seashell which would be submerged in an area where Castro often skin-dived’. The shell would be painted in bright colours to attract his attention but loaded with enough explosives to blow apart when the shell was lifted, the files said.

But the idea was dropped after an investigation found there was ‘no shell in the Caribbean area large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosive which was spectacular enough to attract the attention of Castro’.