April 17 this year marked the 60th anniversary of the failed U.S.-sponsored invasion on the south coast of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The ill-fated plan, approved by Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy enlisted the CIA to recruit and train Cuban exiles to invade the island and overthrow the new revolutionary government led by Fidel Castro.
While the CIA is widely known to have planned multiple assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, both before and after the Bay of Pigs invasion, author and researcher Peter Kornbluh recently uncovered the first known CIA plot against Cuba’s leaders. Kornbluh, director of the Cuba and Chile Documentation Projects at the National Security Archive, revealed a 1960 plot to murder Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul Castro, who at the time was minister of Cuba’s Armed Forces.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Kornbluh, who summarizes details of this earliest known CIA assassination attempt in Cuba, followed by many others which also ended in failure.
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, this was an example of trying to use history to make history. Raul Castro was stepping down as first secretary of the Cuban Communist party on the 60th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs. I was looking for documents that would be new to people to highlight the Bay of Pigs itself. And, of course, Raul Castro, who was stepping down from power in Cuba and leaving the revolution behind, if you will, in retirement and for the first time, Cuba was going to be governed without a Castro since the revolution. So these documents turned out to be in our own collections in the CIA found by my colleague, John Prados.
They revealed a plot that really hadn’t been detailed to its fullest capacity before. It was a plot of opportunity that fell into the CIA’s hands. (The CIA) had an intelligence asset in Cuba after the revolution who was a pilot for Cubana Airlines, the national airlines, and he received an assignment to fly a plane to Prague to pick up Raul Castro and his entourage in July, 1960. And this gave the CIA its first opportunity to do something it wanted to do. It wanted to literally assassinate, terminate, neutralize the entire upper echelon of the Cuban revolution. They wanted to get Fidel Castro, Raul Castro and Che Guevarra, hopefully all together.
But in this case, the very first opportunity to launch an assassination plot was this one. They offered the pilot $10,000 or more in order to arrange a fatal accident with the plane on the way back from Prague. And they gave his handler in Havana an agent named William Jim Murray basically 24 hours to convey this offer to the pilot that the CIA would pay him money if he could arrange this accident and arrange to rescue him if he needed to be rescued.
The CIA guy hopped into the car with the pilot as he drove to the airport to fly off and offered him this money. And, basically made it clear that the CIA wanted to neutralize Raul Castro and what could be done. And they basically tossed around ideas, according to the declassified top secret memos on what to do, including ditching the plane in the ocean on the way back, in a way that somehow might kill Raul Castro, but allow the pilot to somehow escape. But he understood that this could be a suicide mission. So he literally asked, You know, if I die, will the CIA pay for the college education of his two sons? And, the CIA agents told him, Yes, we will. And that’s where it was left.
Shortly after the pilot took off for Prague the kind of wiser minds at the top of the CIA back in Langley headquarters decided this was a terrible idea. A bunch of people could be killed. They wouldn’t get away with it, the whole thing. So they sent another memo, another cable saying, Please drop this manner, you know, nevermind.
But the pilot had already flown off to Prague. There was no way to … This wasn’t like this day and age, we have a cell phone or some type of electronic device. There was no way to communicate to him that the agency was no longer interested in this murderous mission. But in the end, he, of course, didn’t go on a suicide mission. He brought Raul Castro back and everybody was fine. But what we were left with is this very first effort by the CIA, failed, like — all the other efforts fail. The efforts included exploding seashells; poisoned, hypodermic-laden, ballpoint pens and poisoned, scuba diving suits and toxic cigars. All those plots against Fidel Castro failed as well.
SCOTT HARRIS: How many plots were there that we know about in terms of the CIA trying to kill Fidel Castro?
PETER KORNBLUH: So the CIA did its own internal history of the plot it had launched to kill Castro. And it did this history in 1967 and they counted eight concrete plots. There were a few other plots that, according to the CIA themselves, didn’t focus on actually killing Castro as much as discrediting him or embarrassing him. They developed one plot where they would put a chemical powder in his boots while he was traveling abroad; it would make his beard fall out. So this would somehow emasculate him to the Cuban people and expose him as a man, as opposed to the bearded man, the bearded revolutionary that he was. Of course, that plot also failed, as did all of them. And there was another plot that they had to fumigate the radio station where he broadcasted speeches from, that would cause disorientation.
They claimed that these plots weren’t murderous, it’s hard to know. But they themselves counted eight concrete plots. The Cuban intelligence services counted over 600 plots against Fidel Castro. Whether those were all CIA, is doubtful. Many, many of the exiles of the CIA train, of course, wanted to kill Fidel on their own. And many of them tried. So, there were many plots. The one against Raul was not really known with the details that documents have now shared with us since and it got a lot of attention. I like to say that, you know, it reminded us of this dark baggage of our history with Cuba in a way in which we should be talking about leaving that baggage behind and really going forward in a new way with the new Biden administration.
