“THE AGENCY WAS NOT INVOLVED WITH [MAJOR ROLANDO] CUBELA IN A PLOT TO ASSASSINATE FIDEL CASTRO, NOR DID IT EVER ENCOURAGE HIM TO ATTEMPT SUCH AN ACT”

—CIA DIRECTOR RICHARD HELMS1

“You blew it!” exclaimed the cantankerous Joseph Kennedy, patriarch of the Kennedy clan, greeting his son John after the Bay of Pigs debacle.² The scolding was administered at the Kennedy family compound in West Palm Beach, Florida, according to James Stevenson, the FBI agent in charge of the Cuba Desk at the time. As far as Joe was concerned, his son had placed his trust in the wrong hands. “I know that outfit,” he ranted with reference to the CIA, “and I wouldn't pay them one hundred bucks a week.”

For all practical purposes, the decision to make a second try at overthrowing Fidel Castro was made in that room that day. The Kennedys were too humiliated by the drubbing at what the Cubans now triumphantly alluded to in a single word: Girón. It was all too much for the brothers to take lying down, Bobby especially. They sought encouragement from the Nixon camp to try again. The day after the white flag went up, Tricia Nixon took a phone message for her father. “JFK called,” she said. “I knew it wouldn't be long before he gets into trouble, and has to call on you for help.” Nixon returned the call immediately.³ “What would you do now to Cuba?” Kennedy got right to the point, and Nixon did likewise. “I'd find a proper legal cover and go in. There are several justifications that could be used like protection of American citizens living in Cuba and defending our base at Guantanamo.” Kennedy was dubious. “If the United States grabbed Cuba, Khrushchev might grab Berlin.”4

So the Kennedy brothers began a new phase of the Cuba Project called Operation Mongoose. As General Edward Lansdale, who was to lead this new beginning in cooperation with the CIA, described it, the Kennedys were obsessed with the idea of regime change. “Bobby felt even more strongly about it than Jack,” Lansdale said.⁵ “He was protective of his brother, and he felt his brother had been insulted at the Bay of Pigs. He felt the insult needed to be redressed rather quickly.”

Operation Mongoose was a secret program of propaganda, psychological warfare, and sabotage against Cuba to remove the communists from power, which became a prime focus of the Kennedy administration, according to Harvard historian Jorge Domínguez.⁶ A document from the US Department of State confirms that the project aimed to “help Cuba overthrow the Communist regime,” including its leader Fidel Castro, and it aimed “for a revolt which can take place in Cuba by October 1962.”⁷

Lansdale was chosen due to his experience with counterinsurgency in the Philippines during the Huk Rebellion,⁸ and also due to his experience supporting the Diem regime in South Vietnam. Samuel Halpern, a CIA co-organizer, conveyed the breadth of involvement: “CIA and the US Army and military forces and Department of Commerce, and Immigration, Treasury, God knows who else—everybody was in Mongoose. It was a government-wide operation run out of Bobby Kennedy's office with Ed Lansdale as the mastermind.”⁹ Lansdale's idea was that the project “take a very different course” from the “harassment” operations of the past and try to crack the Castro regime from within.

With the support of Bobby Kennedy, Lansdale outlined the coordinated program of political, psychological, military, sabotage, and intelligence operations, as well as assassination attempts on key Cuban political leaders. Each month, a different method was in place to destabilize the communist regime, including the publishing of views against Fidel Castro, armaments for militant opposition groups, the establishment of guerilla bases throughout the country, and preparations for an October military intervention in Cuba. Plans to discredit Castro in the eyes of the Cuban public included contaminating his clothing with thallium salts that would make his trademark beard fall out, dosing his daily cigars with a depilatory for the same result, and spraying a broadcasting studio with hallucinogens before a televised speech.10

The first initiative came from the Commerce Department—the imposition of a commercial embargo.¹¹ Walter Rostow, an adviser on national security for the Kennedy team, was sent as an envoy to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to tell its allies that the United States would look favorably on the Western European governments if they stopped trading with Cuba. A number of Japanese and European companies, importers and exporters alike, were pressured to cut economic ties.

Historian Jorge Domínguez states that the scope of Mongoose included sabotage actions against a railway bridge, petroleum storage facilities, a molasses storage container, a petroleum refinery, a power plant, a sawmill, and a floating crane in a Cuban harbor. Domínguez states that “only once in [the] thousand pages of documentation did a US official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to US government–sponsored terrorism.”¹² Many assassination ideas were floated by the CIA during Operation Mongoose. The most infamous was the CIA's alleged plot to capitalize on Castro's well-known love of cigars by slipping into his supply a very real and lethal “exploding cigar.”¹³ While numerous sources state the exploding-cigar plot as fact, at least one source asserts it to be simply a myth, and another, mere supermarket-tabloid fodder. Another suggests that the story does have its origins in the CIA, but that it was never seriously proposed by them as a plot. Rather, the plot was made up by the CIA as an intentionally “silly” idea to feed to those questioning them about their plans for Castro, in order to deflect scrutiny from more serious areas of inquiry.¹⁴

Other plots to assassinate Castro that are ascribed to the CIA include poisoning his cigars (a box of the lethal smokes was actually prepared and delivered to Havana); planting exploding seashells at a scuba-diving site; giving the gift of a diving wetsuit impregnated with noxious bacteria and mold spores or with lethal chemical agents; infecting Castro's scuba regulator apparatus with tubercle bacillus (which causes tuberculosis); and dousing his handkerchiefs, his tea, and his coffee with other lethal bacteria. The US Senate's Church Committee of 1975 stated that it had confirmed at least eight separate CIA-run plots to assassinate Castro. Fabian Escalante, who was long tasked with protecting the life of Castro, contends that there have been 638 separate CIA assassination schemes or attempts on Castro's life.15

One plan involved the CIA's favorite inside man in Havana, Rolando Cubela. It was now two years after the revolution, and Rolando Cubela was still sulking.¹⁶ It had been his unexpressed desire to snatch the presidency away from Castro as the Batista administration collapsed in January 1959. For his service to the revolution, the leader of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) had been promised a “high post” in the nascent government, as had Carlos Prío. Now he was certain that the top post promised by Castro wasn't that at all, but a deliberate slight. Actually, Cubela had been given a middling position in the diplomatic corps as the Cuban delegate to the International Federation of Students, which required his absence from Havana most of the time. But he made trips back to the capital, which gave him access to Castro. What Fidel didn't know was that Cubela's huge ego was gnawing away at his judgment. Given his temperamental makeup, it was perhaps inevitable that Cubela would seize the opportunity for payback. He had been cultivated by the CIA through a lifelong friend aligned with the American service. He was deemed a valuable resource by the Agency because of his access to Castro and freedom of movement. To make an appointment to see the president, all he had to do was pick up the phone and call Castro's aide, Juan Orta. And the more he sulked, the more he became determined to act. The Agency set up AMLASH, a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro using Cubela's close proximity to the Cuban leader.¹⁷ The plan has been referred to as a “basically one-person Cubela operation.” By March 1961, Cubela let it be known that he was ready to defect, but the operation was called off when it appeared that Cuban police were suspicious of Cubela. Operation Mongoose became the new platform for Cubela.

In July 1962, Cubela met with the CIA in Helsinki and agreed to stay in Cuba, since he “felt that if he could do something really significant for the creation of a new Cuba, he was interested in returning to carry on the fight there.”¹⁸

The following month, however, Cubela refused to take a polygraph test, a standard request at the time for all anti-Castro assets at the Agency.19 This led some to suggest that he was perhaps a double agent. A cable from CIA headquarters in August 1962 ordered “that no physical elimination missions be given directly to Cubela.”²⁰ The Agency determined that it would be better for them and for the US government if Cuban dissidents began supplying Cubela with weapons, particularly the Belgian FAL rifle with a silencer that he had long requested. They decided that Manuel Artime was perfect for the operation. In 1964, a new plan, facilitated by E. Howard Hunt, was set in motion.

Cubela and Artime met several times in Madrid from December 1964 through early 1965 to discuss equipment and planning.²¹ Cubela received a handgun with a silencer and a long-range rifle with a silencer and a scope. He took the devices back to Havana in his diplomatic pouch and began recruiting his coup cabal, but the operation was penetrated by a Cuban security double agent.²² On June 23, 1965, the CIA sent out cables terminating all contacts with AMLASH (Cubela). It had become obvious that too many people knew about the project and the CIA's association.

In March 1966, Cubela was arrested, tried, and convicted, along with five others. He was sentenced to death by firing squad, but Castro, remembering their collegial days at the University of Havana, personally intervened to save him from execution and later sent him books to read in prison.

When he read about it in the New York Times, Secretary of State Dean Rusk asked CIA director Richard Helms what role the Agency might have played. “The Agency was not involved with Cubela in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro,” Helms responded, “nor did it ever encourage him to attempt such an act.”²³

Lansdale's master plan for Mongoose had proposed the use of “gangster elements” for attacks on “key leaders.”²⁴ So the CIA's head of covert action in the late 1950s, William Harvey, a heavy-drinking, two-gun-toting, womanizing secret agent in the James Bond mode, reinforced his contacts with the Mafia, in particular with Johnny Rosselli, for the purpose of reactivating one of their classic assassination schemes, the poison capsule in Castro's food.25 Harvey had ridden shotgun with Rosselli on earlier attempts to kill Castro, so their relationship was well-established. But Harvey didn't know his Cuban contact, who turned out to be the ubiquitous Tony Varona.

The plan took a while to get off the ground because the Agency decided to improve the poison capsules. Earlier versions had proved problematic. The laboratories were asked to produce some capsules that were easier to manipulate and would dissolve in any liquid.

In April 1962, the improved capsules were ready, but Varona was forced to rely on a CIA agent, a Spanish diplomat named Alejandro Vergara,²⁶ to get the capsules into Cuba, since the frequent flights between Miami and Havana no longer existed. Vergara agreed to carry them in the name of friendship. He arranged to meet with a member of Varona's insider group, Rescate, by the name of Alberto Cruz Caso. Rescate immediately met to study how they could carry out the plan. They decided to use their contacts at the Havana Libre Hotel. Caso and other members of the group met with some coconspirators who worked there, ultimately selecting two maître d's and a bartender. Rescate explained that the job was to take advantage of any opportunity when Fidel Castro appeared in the cafeteria of the hotel or any of the restaurants and add the poison capsules to his drink.²⁷

During the balance of 1962, Castro went to the hotel several times, but apparently his visits never coincided with the working hours of the conspirators. One of them, Santos de la Caridad, carried out a ritual—every day he worked—of placing the capsules inside one of the tubes in the freezer of the cafeteria. In March 1963, Castro entered the cafeteria with some companions, sat down at a table, and ordered a milkshake. The barman on duty that day was Caridad. Seizing the opportunity, he began his preparations for the drink, then hurried to the freezer to retrieve the poison. But due to the effects of a higher refrigeration temperature that day, the capsules had frozen and stuck to the tube. In his efforts to work them loose, Caridad broke them and the poison spilled.²⁸ Castro had once more dodged a bullet with his incredible luck.

Operation Mongoose, as with the earlier Bay of Pigs invasion, is widely acknowledged as an American policy failure against Cuba. According to Noam Chomsky in 1989, Operation Mongoose “won the prize for the largest operation of international terrorism in the world.”29According to Chomsky, it had a budget of $50 million per year, employing 2,500 people, including about 500 Americans, and still remained secret for fourteen years, from 1961 to 1975. It was revealed in part by the Church Commission in the US Senate and in part “by good investigative journalism.” As Chomsky put it, “here is a terrorist operation that could trigger a nuclear conflict,” because of operations during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. He said that “it is possible that the operation is still ongoing [1989], but it certainly lasted throughout all the ’70s.”