TARGET CASTRO!
A poison pen. An exploding seashell. A wetsuit laced with TB . . . the CIA’s most bizarre efforts to kill the Cuban leader were dreamed up by the spook whose granddaughter is dating Poldark . . .
The assassination plot was the last word in Cold War deviousness. A hollowedout Paper Mate ballpoint pen contained a hypodermic syringe so fine that when it was poked into the skin of Fidel Castro, the communist dictator would feel only a slight nick — nothing worse than a scratch from an over- starched shirt, boasted the CIA techies.
This would be enough though for the pen to deliver the poison — Black Leaf 40, a nicotine-based insecticide fatal to humans — it contained within.
The great man and his army of bodyguards would suspect nothing, CIA operatives assured the would-be assassin at a secret meeting in Paris on November 22, 1963. Major Rolando Cubela Secades, a Cuban army officer and revolutionary comrade of Castro who was plotting to replace him, wasn’t too impressed.
he’d have preferred a high-powered, silenced rifle with a telescopic sight rather than this ‘toy’, he complained. even so, he put the pen in his pocket, hoping to find a more lethal poison later.
he never got the chance to use it, however, as President John F. Kennedy was assassinated the same day — and with him, the U.S. determination to kill the Cuban dictator.
As for the man who had devised the plot and recruited Cubela in Paris weeks earlier, CIA deputy director and head of operations Desmond FitzGerald would always complain that the U.S. missed its chance to take down Fidel.
But plots and subterfuge of a different kind now enfold the CIA chief ’ s granddaughter — and, oddly, the setting is once again Paris.
It emerged at the weekend that Caitlin FitzGerald is the mystery woman in the life of Poldark’s Aidan Turner, who turns 35 today. The actress, also 35, was spotted with him during a romantic trip to the French capital. They met last year when making the forthcoming film The Man Who Killed hitler And Then The Bigfoot.
her grandfather was one of the stalwarts of the CIA’s department of dirty tricks — officially known as the Directorate of Plans. FitzGerald was adventurous and charming, but also autocratic and pompous.
he joined the CIA in 1950 and cut his teeth directing operations against Communist China. he was not always successful.
WheNFitzGerald armed the leader of a 12,000- strong group of anticommunist insurgents, instead of attacking China, the man set himself up as a drug lord.
FitzGerald had more success in the Philippines, albeit by encouraging maverick U. S. air force colonel edward Lansdale, whose unscrupulous ‘ psychological warfare’ tricks included leaving corpses drained of blood to look like the victims of vampires.
FitzGerald urged his operatives that ‘we are here not to monitor communism, we are here to destroy it’. One of his last acts in the Far east was to hatch a plan to ‘ biologically immobilise’ Indonesia’s President Sukarno, a communist sympathiser.
It was common knowledge that Sukarno had an ‘insatiable’ sex drive and bedded a long string of air stewardesses. The CIA identified one of them and planned — through her — to infect Sukarno with venereal disease in 1959. ‘We did find a stewardess whose job it was to keep him happy, but even at our worst, we couldn’t do it,’ said Bob King, a former CIA official. The agency was to do a lot worse in years to come.
FitzGerald took over CIA operations in 1963, two years after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs — the U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba.
President Kennedy was obsessed with unconventional warfare, once reflecting: ‘You always assume that the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals.’
events proved that was a mistaken assumption. FitzGerald’s predecessors came up with various far-fetched ideas, most famously a box of 50 Cohiba cigars (Castro’s favourite) dusted with the deadly botulin toxin. They were never delivered amid doubts that he would ever smoke them.
The agency also recruited Castro’s lover, Marita Lorenz, who was to have poisoned his evening cup of hot milk. That plot curdled, too, after she concealed the pills in cold cream and ruined them.
When FitzGerald took over, the ideas got even madder. To be fair, he was goaded continually by JFK and his brother, Robert, after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis brought the world near to catastrophe.
FitzGerald and another senior CIA official ‘ would think up operations over lunch’ said exagency official Chester Cooper. ‘It might start in jest, but about halfway through they’d begin to believe they could work it out.’
Keen to at least destabilise Castro, FitzGerald brought in Colonel Lansdale, who came up with a stream of wacky ideas.
The most outrageous involved helicopters at night equipped with searchlights and loudspeakers to pose as the ‘eye of God’. Lansdale proposed to flood Catholic Cuba with rumours of a Second Coming in the hope that Castro would be seen as the Antichrist.
ASA FINAL apocalyptic touch, Lansdale wanted a U.S. submarine to surface off the coast in darkness and fill the sky with starbursts. Colleagues mockingly dubbed his crazy plan ‘elimination by illumination’. It never left the drawing board.
Nor did many of FitzGerald’s bold plans to kill Castro. The dictator was a keen scuba diver and the CIA developed a wetsuit impregnated with fungus spores that would cause a chronic skin disease. The mouthpiece on the breathing apparature was treated with tuberculosis bacteria.
The suit was to have been delivered by a lawyer negotiating the return of Bay of Pigs prisoners to the U.S. But the priority was to kill Castro without America being blamed, which seemed impossible this way.
The CIA worked out the stretch of coral reef where Castro liked to swim. FitzGerald devised a plan for a midget submarine to carry a bomb hidden inside a brightly coloured seashell and plant it on the seabed in his path.
Of course, he’d pick it up, FitzGerald told sceptics. Yet again, blowing up the seabed was hardly subtle, so the plan was dropped.
FitzGerald became so desperate to find an assassin he ignored pleas not to go to Paris and meet Rolando Cubela. his staff feared Cubela was a double-agent.
That possibility reared its head when JFK was assassinated weeks later. had Castro learned of America’s murderous intentions and killed Kennedy first?
When Lee harvey Oswald was assassinated in turn by Jack Ruby, FitzGerald began to cry. ‘Now we’ll never know,’ he told his wife, cryptically.
Most historians, however, believe neither the Russians nor the Cubans were involved in killing Kennedy. FitzGerald would later fight communists in Vietnam, but never revisted the wild excesses of his attempts to kill Castro.
Whenever Cold War CIA chief Richard helms was confronted by U.S. skulduggery, he liked to sneer: ‘We’re not in the Boy Scouts.’
A pity, as the average Scout could have pointed out the flaw in a harebrained Des FitzGerald plot in seconds.