Fidel Castro survived more assassination attempts than any political leader in modern history, and the Castro assassination attempts remain the most thoroughly documented campaign of its kind. Cuban counter-intelligence chief Fabián Escalante counted 638 schemes over roughly four decades. The U.S. Senate’s Church Committee confirmed evidence of at least eight distinct CIA-organized plots between 1960 and 1965 alone.1U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders – Interim Report The gap between those two figures says something about how hard it is to separate confirmed operations from proposals that never left a conference room. What isn’t disputed is that Castro outlasted every one of them and died of natural causes in 2016 at age 90.
Two Very Different Counts
Escalante spent years cataloging every known plot, rumor, and intercepted scheme aimed at Castro from 1959 into the 2000s. He broke the total down by U.S. presidential administration, with the highest concentrations under Nixon (184) and Reagan (197). Those numbers almost certainly sweep in surveillance operations, logistical preparations, and schemes that never progressed past planning.
The more conservative count comes from the Church Committee, the Senate select committee that investigated intelligence abuses in 1975. Its interim report, “Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,” documented CIA involvement in plots against Castro and leaders in the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and South Vietnam. Against Castro, the committee found multiple distinct operational tracks between 1960 and 1965 involving poison, explosives, recruited assassins, and Mafia partnerships. It concluded that “short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order, and morality.”2National Security Archive. CIA Assassination Plots: The Church Committee Report 50 Years Later
The CIA had already investigated itself. In 1967, Inspector General John S. Earman produced a classified report cataloging the agency’s Castro plots, and that document became a foundation for the Church Committee hearings eight years later.3National Security Archive. CIA Inspector General John S. Earman Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro
Who Was Trying to Kill Him
Three overlapping groups drove the campaign: the CIA, the American Mafia acting on the CIA’s behalf, and Cuban exile organizations, some independent and some CIA-backed.
The U.S. effort accelerated after the Bay of Pigs disaster of April 1961, when a CIA-backed force of Cuban exiles was routed within three days.4Office of the Historian. The Bay of Pigs Invasion and its Aftermath, April 1961-October 1962 By November of that year, the Kennedy White House had launched Operation Mongoose, a covert program aimed at destabilizing and toppling Castro’s government through sabotage, propaganda, intelligence gathering, and assassination planning. Attorney General Robert Kennedy pushed hard for aggressive action.5National Security Archive. Kennedy and Cuba: Operation Mongoose Mongoose provided the organizational structure and funding for many of the more elaborate schemes. It wound down after the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when President Kennedy pledged to Soviet Premier Khrushchev that the United States would not invade Cuba. That pledge did not stop CIA plotting; the agency continued pursuing assassination tracks outside the formal Mongoose framework, sometimes without clear presidential authorization.
The Mafia entered the picture in 1960, when the CIA recruited organized-crime figures through Robert Maheu, a private investigator on the agency payroll. Maheu contacted Johnny Rosselli, a lieutenant of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, who brought in Florida boss Santo Trafficante Jr. The mobsters had their own reasons: Castro had nationalized the Havana casinos and hotels that had made Cuba a cash machine for organized crime. The CIA reportedly set a $150,000 fee for the job, but Giancana and Rosselli refused payment and said they would do it for free. The partnership produced poison pills meant to be slipped into Castro’s food or drink. One recruited assassin reportedly lost his nerve before he could deliver the poison. Nothing worked, and the CIA-Mafia relationship continued for several years before the agency finally cut ties.
Cuban exile groups, particularly in South Florida, were a persistent source of plots throughout the entire period. Some received CIA training, funding, and logistical support; others operated on their own. The most dramatic known attempt came in 2000, when exile leader Luis Posada Carriles and three associates were arrested in Panama City during the Ibero-American Summit. Panamanian authorities recovered approximately 200 pounds of dynamite and C-4 explosives intended to kill Castro while he addressed the summit.6National Security Archive. The CIA File on Luis Posada Carriles Cuban intelligence had detected the plot, and Castro himself tipped off Panamanian security.
The Methods
The schemes ranged from clinically efficient to genuinely absurd. What they shared was a consistent failure to account for Castro’s security apparatus or basic operational reality.
Poisons
Poison offered plausible deniability, so it dominated the early plots. The CIA’s Technical Services Division prepared cigars contaminated with botulinum toxin potent enough to kill anyone who put one in his mouth. The cigars never reached Castro. The agency also produced lethal pills for the Mafia intermediaries to deliver.
In one of the more improbable failures, Marita Lorenz, a young woman who had been Castro’s lover, agreed to carry out the killing. She was given botulism capsules and hid them in a jar of cold cream. By the time she reached Havana the capsules had dissolved into the cream. She flushed them down the bidet.
In a separate track, the CIA provided a poison pen fitted with a hypodermic needle to a Cuban military officer codenamed AMLASH. Senior CIA officer Desmond FitzGerald met with AMLASH in Paris, posing as a representative of Robert Kennedy, and offered him the device along with a commercial poison called Black Leaf 40. That meeting took place on November 22, 1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. The plot went nowhere after that.
Explosives and Booby Traps
Castro was an avid scuba diver, and the CIA tried to exploit the hobby. One plan called for placing a large, brightly painted seashell packed with explosives in an area where he regularly dove, on the theory that the unusual shell would attract his attention and detonate when he picked it up. The scheme was abandoned as impractical. A separate “exploding cigar” plan, distinct from the poisoned cigar, involved a small charge that would detonate when lit, reportedly intended as a gift during Castro’s visit to the United Nations. Other proposals included concealing a bomb inside a baseball.
Fungus, LSD, and a Depilatory
Not every scheme aimed to kill. Some tried to destroy Castro’s public image. The Technical Services Division prepared a diving suit dusted inside with a fungal agent intended to cause a chronic, disfiguring skin disease, with the breathing apparatus contaminated with tuberculosis bacteria. American lawyer James B. Donovan was to present the suit as a gift during negotiations over Bay of Pigs prisoners. The plot fell apart when Donovan, unaware of the plan, independently gave Castro a different diving suit on his own initiative.
Another plan involved spraying an aerosol chemical similar to LSD into the radio station where Castro delivered his broadcasts, hoping he would appear incoherent on air.3National Security Archive. CIA Inspector General John S. Earman Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro The CIA also considered dusting Castro’s shoes with thallium salts, a depilatory that would have caused his beard to fall out. Castro canceled the overseas trip that would have created the opportunity.
Why Every Plot Failed
Castro’s survival wasn’t luck, though luck played a part. The main reason the plots failed was Cuba’s counter-intelligence service, known as the G-2, which proved remarkably good at penetrating the organizations trying to kill its leader. Cuban agents infiltrated exile groups in Miami, turned would-be assassins into double agents, and kept sources inside the anti-Castro movement who reported plots as they developed. Escalante’s operatives sometimes learned about a plot before the operational team had finalized it. In at least one case in 1960, Cuban agents identified a CIA-supervised conspiracy and arrested the plotters before they could act.
Castro’s personal security did the rest of the work. His detail ran rigorous inspection procedures for food, gifts, and any environment he was scheduled to enter. He was notoriously unpredictable in his movements, frequently changing schedules and routes. For plots that required him to be in a specific place at a specific time, that unpredictability alone was often enough.
Operational incompetence finished the job. Poison capsules dissolved in cold cream. A contaminated wetsuit was accidentally replaced. Recruited assassins lost their nerve. The CIA compartmentalized its plots so tightly that the left hand often didn’t know what the right hand was doing, and Mafia intermediaries added another layer of unreliability. The Church Committee itself flagged the pattern of poor coordination and lack of accountability.1U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders – Interim Report
The U.S. Ban on Assassination
The Church Committee’s 1975 findings forced a reckoning. It concluded that the CIA’s assassination plots were aberrations incompatible with American values and recommended a formal ban. President Gerald Ford acted first, issuing Executive Order 11905 on February 18, 1976. The order stated: “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”7Federation of American Scientists. Executive Order 11905 – United States Foreign Intelligence Activities
Every president since has kept the prohibition in place. Jimmy Carter’s Executive Order 12036 carried it forward, and Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, issued in 1981 and still in effect, broadened the wording: “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”8National Archives. Executive Order 12333 – United States Intelligence Activities The shift from “employee” to “person employed by or acting on behalf of” closed the loophole that had let the CIA use Mafia cutouts and foreign intermediaries while keeping government employees technically clean.
According to Escalante’s count, plots against Castro continued after Ford’s executive order, with 64 attributed to the Carter years, 197 to Reagan, 16 to George H.W. Bush, and 21 to Clinton. Whether those figures represent genuine assassination operations or a broader category of hostile intelligence activity is impossible to verify independently.
How It Ended
Castro stepped down from power in 2008 due to declining health and died on November 25, 2016. He had outlasted ten U.S. presidents, a Mafia alliance, hundreds of exile operations, and every poison, explosive, and fungal agent the CIA’s laboratories could devise. The campaign to kill him failed completely as an intelligence operation, and it handed him a piece of propaganda he used for the rest of his life: proof that the most powerful nation on earth had spent decades trying to murder him and could not.