FIDEL’S HELL
Scant JFK info, but details on Castro plot
NEWLY-RELEASED government documents shed little immediate light on President John Kennedy’s assassination but they did provide some quirky details about America’s strategy to kill Fidel Castro.
While the plan, dubbed Operation Mongoose, had been an open secret for years, the means discussed to carry it out had been under wraps for decades.
But in files once labeled “top secret” but now available for the world to see, memos lay out a zany American murder plot that looks like a script from a “Get Smart” episode.
There were the standard assassination strategies like infiltration and guerilla warfare. Then there were the downright weird ideas like the exploding seashell.
“Discussions about preparing a booby-trap spectacular seashell which would be submerged in an area where Castro often skindived,” one of the memos said.
“The seashell would be loaded with explosives to blow apart when the shell was lifted.”
But officials determined that there was no shell in the Caribbean large enough to hold a sufficient amount of explosives.
Another plan involved Castro’s love of skin diving, with the idea to plant a wet suit contaminated with tuberculosis.
Among the other methods considered to whack the Cuban leader, who died in 2016, were poison, botulism pills and the use of Cuban exile groups, according to the memo.
“The plans involved a number of bizarre schemes, and, in at least one instance, involved some contact with organized crime elements,” another memo said.
Kennedy’s advisers had concluded that any change-ofregime effort would have to have been covert.
The Castro plot was among the government operations detailed in 2,800 pages of documents released Thursday night by the National Archives in accordance with a 1992 law mandating the release of the JFK files in 25 years.
After a day filled with anticipation, only a fraction of the pages were released after President Trump said he was holding the rest back.
“I have no choice — today — but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security,” the President wrote in a memo the White House released Thursday evening ahead of the documents.
Trump, who had the authority to block their release if their contents threatened national security, announced last week he’d let the files be seen.
Historians believe the papers won’t back the conspiracy theories that have swirled for years around Kennedy’s death.
The decision to withhold the bulk of the documents left some historians and conspiracy theorists frustrated.
“The government has had 25 years-with a known end-date to prepare #JFKfiles for release,” University of Virginia historian Larry Sabato tweeted. “Deadline is here. Chaos.”