By Anthony Boadle Thu Jul 5, 4:11 PM ET
HAVANA (Reuters) - The closest the CIA came to killing Cuba's Fidel
Castro was a 1963 attempt with a poison pill delivered by American
mobsters that was to be slipped into a chocolate milkshake, a former
Cuban intelligence chief said.
But the capsule stuck to the freezer where it was hidden in the
cafeteria of the Havana Libre (ex Hilton) Hotel and ripped open when the
would-be assassin waiter went to get the poison.
"That moment was the closest the CIA got to assassinating Fidel,"
retired state security general Fabian Escalante told Reuters in an
interview this week.
Castro, who seized power in a 1959 revolution that turned Cuba into a
communist state 90 miles away from the United States, has survived
hundreds of attempts on his life by his enemies, from car ambushes to
grenade attacks in baseball stadiums, Escalante said.
Some of the most imaginative cloak-and-dagger plots were the brainchild
of the Central Intelligence Agency, he said.
They included poisoned cigars, an exploding shell meant to be planted in
his favorite underwater fishing location and a scuba diving wet suit
tainted with toxins.
Among early attempts devised by the CIA to discredit Castro was a plan
to place chemical powders on his boots that would cause his beard to
fall out when he was in New York to speak at the United Nations in 1960.
When that failed, the CIA planned to slip him a box of cigars tainted
with LSD so that he would burst into fits of laughter during a
television interview, said Escalante, author of a book that documents
167 plots against Castro.
But it was the CIA's plans to poison Castro with botulinum toxins in the
early 1960s that came closest to succeeding.
The agency acknowledged last week for the first time that the plot to
assassinate Castro was personally approved by the Kennedy
administration's CIA director Allen Dulles.
"FAMILY JEWELS"
The CIA declassified nearly 700 pages of secret records detailing some
of its illegal acts during 25 years of overseas assassination attempts
and domestic spying.
The agency's so-called "Family Jewels" describe the initial efforts to
get rid of Castro by using a go-between to convince two top mobsters,
Salvatore Giancana and Santos Trafficant, the head of the Mafia's Cuban
casino operations, to assassinate Castro. Giancana suggested poisoning him.
Six potent pills were provided in 1961 to Juan Orta, identified as a
Cuban official who had been receiving kickback payments from gambling
interests, who still had access to Castro and was in a financial bind.
But Orta got cold feet.
Escalante said more poisoned pills, one batch disguised in a bottle of
Bayer aspirins, were delivered through the Mafia to an opposition group
that almost succeeded in March 1963 when Castro went for a milkshake.
Much of the information declassified by the CIA had been released in
congressional investigations in the past.
Escalante, who detailed the poison pill plot in his book "The Secret
War" published in 2005, said the agency was trying to "purify" itself
but continues its skulduggery today.
While there is no evidence that the CIA has plotted to kill Castro since
the Ford Administration banned assassination plots against foreign
leaders in 1976, Escalante sees the hand of the CIA in more recent
attempts by anti-Castro militants trained by the agency for the failed
Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.
Despite U.S. hostility, Castro remains Cuban leader at age 80, although
bowel surgery forced him to hand over formal power to his brother Raul
last July.
Escalante said effective Cuban security measures around Castro and the
Cuban leader's intuitive "nose" for danger has kept him alive.
To this day, few Cubans know Castro's whereabouts, whether he is in a
hospital or at home in a residential compound in western Havana called
"Point Zero."
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