Citation Needed - Assassination attempts on Fidel Castro

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) made numerous unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. There were also attempts by Cuban exiles, sometimes in cooperation with the CIA. The 1975 Church Committee claimed eight proven CIA assassination attempts between 1960 and 1965. In 1976, President Gerald Ford issued an Executive Order banning political assassinations. In 2006, Fabián Escalante, former chief of Cuba's intelligence, stated that there had been 634 assassination schemes or attempts. The last known plot to assassinate Castro was by Cuban exiles in 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro

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single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts, because this is the internet and that's how it works now. I'm Noah and I'm going to be leading this covert action tonight, but to get it done right I'm going to need my Bay of Pigs, Heath, Eli and Cecil. Okay. Pigs can swim and it's fucking adorable. It's the greatest. I have a lot of TikTok videos to back that up. I feel like the Bay of Pigs is overdone. I prefer like an Aragonola, a Cuman of P pigs. That's much better for carnegrina. Can't have too much garlic, right Cecil? No, of course. You can't actually.

Before we get started, I wanted to address Tom's absence. I can't really go into the details, so I can't really tell you, you know, when he'll be back or whether or not there's a ransom involved in getting him back. But incidentally, there's never been a better time to support us financially over on Patreon. If you'd like to learn how, be sure to stick around to the end of the show. And with that out of the way, tell us, Heath, what person, place, think, concept, phenomenon or event will we be talking about today? We're going to be talking about bots to assassinate Fidel Castro.

All right. So who is Fidel Castro and why do we try to kill him? Fidel Castro was a Cuban revolutionary and the leader of Cuba from 1959 until 2008. And the US government tried to kill him because we didn't like his opinions about macroeconomics. We're very particular about macroeconomics. We didn't like it. And based on his Marxist, Leninist, communist philosophy, he sided with Russia during the Cold War, and he antagonized the Kennedy family. Castro very clearly won that feud against Kennedy, but the American military and intelligence community continued trying to murder Castro for decades, often in cooperation with Cuban exiles who opposed the Castro regime. According to a book by one of Castro's closest advisors. We tried to kill Castro

638 times. Oh, okay. That's only because we couldn't pay Stanley Kubrick to fake the assassination of Fidel Castro Okay, I wonder if they had the same optimism in the 600s that they did when they first started out, you know I know you've got to wonder about the yellow one You got to admire the salesmanship of the guy who convinced him to take that 638 try Another swing at that. Yeah, I know like hear me out though It's what we do it's like our whole thing. It's like their whole thing. You got a feel for them No, you don't so pretty much all the assassination attempts were organized by the CIA. They flagged Castro as a potential target in 1948, which is five years before the Cuban Revolution even started.

But he seemed at least vaguely communist at that point to them. So we started spying extra hard over the next decade Once he took over in 1959 after the revolution succeeded in Cuba He was a top-level threat and by the end of that year US government officials had a plan to overthrow the new Cuban government But they didn't want to get yelled at by the UN which used to like matter I guess so the whole plan was classified as super duper top secret. And the idea of plausible deniability became a focal point of the operation. The first official authorization for an operation against Castro came in March of 1960, when

President Eisenhower allocated $4.4 million, about $47 million today, for an anti-Castro CIA program that had two major facets. The first was teaming up with Cuban exiles to create a paramilitary organization that would depose Castro. That plan would eventually include the Bay of Pigs invasion and one of the biggest failures in US military history. And just to give that failure some extra scope, Bay of Pigs is both a citation needed episode and a lyric from We Didn't Start the Fire by Billy Joel. If your thing is both, you've done something

horribly wrong. Interesting. It's like the opposite of an EGOT, like with Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, whatever the T is, Tony. That exclusive club of being both a lyric in that song and in the title of a citation needed is very small, not including Castro from today. The members are the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Watergate, and the Catcher in the Rye. Just tragic and wrong and evil. But lots of potential for future members of the club, I guess. I had trouble in the Suez. I did that one.

So there's one more. When I first heard that title, though, but yeah. When I first heard that song, I thought that Space Monkey Mafia was a reference to one thing that happened, and I just want to say for the record, if it had been, I totally would have written an essay about it by now. Okay. I would not have let that go. Okay, Space Monkey Mafia, who loops Castro to death, is not gonna be one of the plans that we talk about, but like,

it's really close. CIA comes really close to that. It's as silly. If we found out tomorrow that they had done that too, yeah. They lured him into a hula hooping competition and just passed out. Yeah, adorable space monkey. He's going to get him off his guard. So the other main prong of the CIA's original anti Castro operation was a propaganda campaign To discredit Castro and make the people of Cuba more likely to support his removal

So we didn't go straight to murder but pretty close murder plots are coming up in like a few months But we started with a plan to make him look stupid during speeches the plan to make him look stupid during speeches. The first idea was to sneak into his radio broadcast studio and spray the building with airborne LSD. Huh? What? Apparently we never perfected the aerosol technology for that, like literally scarecrow the Batman villain.

And even if we did, there was no guarantee that Castro would just stop talking about communism during a speech and break into like Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the divine elegance of capitalism during the speech. That doesn't make any sense. The CIA testing of LSD as part of Operation MKUltra led to the conclusion that spritzing Castro with acid paper wasn't going to be very reliable. So we decided to keep brainstorming.

Okay, nobody considered offering him a mint and hoping he didn't notice it was shaped like Bart Simpson? Yeah, but like, okay, so yeah, if there's one thing we knew about lefties in the 60s, it's that they wouldn't listen to a person on psychedelics. Good plans. they wouldn't listen to a person on psychedelics. A good plan. See what. So tell me you've never talked to a person on acid without telling me, right? Talk to a person. I had, they did a whole operation.

So stupid. So they talked to NARC on acid. They talked to cops on acid. Okay. So our next idea after that was to do approximately the same thing as the acid spritzy attack, but with better logistics. We came up with a different chemical that would make Castro disoriented, and rather than a spritzer, we planned to lace a batch of cigars, as Castro was known for being a

big cigar guy. That one never panned out either, but we had another scheme in the hopper that we did move ahead with. The CIA was convinced that a major source of Castro's power was the magic of his majestic communism beard. So they set up an operation to lace his shoes with thallium salts that would cause the beard to fall out and then win or whatever. He was taking a trip outside Cuba and our Intel said he would definitely Leave a pair of shoes outside his hotel room to get polished at which point we did minister the beard boys

We had that plan actually rolling but then Castro canceled the trip and it was back to the drawing board And I wish they had tried to mix a few of these together like give him LSD and then have someone in a giant cigar foam suit try to lure him somewhere like amazing I want to go back to the different chemical get cuz like okay I that means that there is a CIA chemist somewhere who was given the job of trying to find some smokable psychoactive substance in the 60s that you could put in a cigar and he gave up. I don't know anything.

I don't know anything. Why do you keep licking the wall? So now we're back at the CIA drawing board in the summer of 1960 and apparently somebody wrote murder? Everybody was on board. in the summer of 1960, and apparently somebody wrote, murder, question mark? Everybody was on board. And apparently we spent the next 40 years trying to make that happen. We have multiple sources to confirm that.

One source is the book I mentioned earlier. It's actually called 638 Ways to Kill Castro. That book was written by Fabian Escalante, the former head of the Cuban Secret Service, whose job for decades was to protect Castro. According to his account, every presidential administration from Eisenhower to Bill Clinton was doing murder plots, Gerald Ford being the only exception. And Escalante even broke down the numbers by administration. Here's the scoreboard, if you're curious. Eisenhower, 38 murder plots.

Kennedy, 42. Johnson, 72. Nixon, 184. Oh, wow. Tractors, 64. Reagan, the record, 197. To also track as well. Bush, senior 16 16 and then Clinton ramming it back up a little 21 for Bill. Okay, okay

I hate to break it to him, but Castro is not who Clinton was talking about when he mentioned burying a Cuban That is all the people young enough to be offended by that joke don't get that joke. This is perfect. It's perfect. I like it. The lighter numbers you can tell their heart wasn't in it anymore. Right?

16, 21, drop them from 197. They're like, well, yeah, perfunctory numbers. Trey Boucher from the intellect Cuba. Maybe it hits him. I don't know. Okay, is it 638 individual like they They didn't try like just to shoot him twice and count that as like 630 no, I think I think he's detailing 638 different was so like So like shooting with gun I think just counts as well no

Because it's ways. It's not 638. Crazy. It's 638 ways. That's crazy. Yeah. Because I mean, I guess like you could like ricochet a bullet and that would be different than just shooting him too.

So. Well, I think that would explain why they had such weird ways at the end. They're like, guys, we can't do the same one. We're trying to help this guy with a clean title for his book. So. Fucking Eisenhower shot a gun in the air near him, and that's fucking off the table. Well, to be fair, the number six hundred thirty eight might be an exaggeration, but it might not be it might be low.

Escalante might not have heard about every single plot. Maybe not. I don't know. Even if his number was high and the actual numbers like eight. That means the U.S. government attempted eight murders of one guy. Speaking of which, U.S. Congress officially admitted that we did eight attempted murders of Castro just between 1960 and 1965 alone.

That was the finding of the 1975 Church Committee, a Senate select committee that looked into abuses by our intelligence community. And it's the other big source we have to confirm some of these plots against Castro besides Mr. Escalante. The abuses uncovered by the Church Committee include MKUltra, Co-Intel Pro, and a report called Family Jewels. After the Watergate scandal revealed how the CIA was doing so much illegal stuff all the time, the new CIA director, William Colby, commissioned the Family Jewels report, and it consisted of 693 pages of loose-sleeve memos that detailed at least 18 different major crimes by the CIA, including the murder operations.

I think this is again, this is like ways, 18 different types of crime. This led to Gerald Ford, again, the only president who was not mentioned by Escalante, having to make an official rule that said, can't believe I had to do this, but no doing murder plots is our policy now. That happened in 1976. And the CIA was like, totally got it, wink. And they kept doing it for sure.

Yeah, right. No, they were like, no more keeping memos about the murder stuff, heard. Obviously, yeah, that's what that means. You had a memo? Loose-leaf? Yeah. And just to illustrate how much we kept trying to kill Castro, I'm going to skip ahead for

a second. The most recent known attempt by the CIA on Castro's life came in the year 2000. Whoa! He was giving a speech in Panama, and the CIA once again cooperated with Cuban exiles to place 90 kilograms of explosives under the podium where Castro was going to be speaking. But apparently his personal security team found the like giant cartoon bomb with a wick sticking out under the podium and disarmed the device before Castro got there. Castro later said, quote, If surviving assassination was an Olympic event, I'd win the gold medal.

I mean, it feels like a steep curve between gold and silver there. Well, Reagan gets the silver. Well, yes. I mean, look, we record this in advance, but given the state of French politics right now as we record, I don't know that we can rule that out as a competition for the Paris games. Absolutely. Going real bad there. I think it's going great.

Circling back to the timeline, it's the summer of 1960 and the CIA did their first murder plot. So they teamed up with the American mafia in order to maintain plausible deniability. They secretly hired a lawyer to pose as the representative for several international businesses that got nationalized by Castro and approach mafia boss Johnny Roselli about taking out Castro. Did you specify American mafia as opposed to space monkey mafia?

Exactly. Earlier. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. All right. I discussed that earlier. Yeah, that's true. That's what I thought. I am now. Yeah.

And I don't think any like Sicilian people were involved in this one. Maybe they like heard about it and were running. But it was the American. I would totally watch a show that's like space chimp that space chimp show, but it's mafia instead and it's just yeah. As let me let me throw this out at you. Mafia instead and it's just yeah as let me let me throw this out at you chimp reboot of sopranos

Guys we stop we stop and make that yeah That's what we do. Sorry guys Novos, okay. So The mafia had a that was that Yeah, the Romans. Yeah, speak. We're always in. Do you want to do one more verse? Try. You good?

If you want to hop back in with the verse, let me know. So the mafia had a lucrative casino empire in Cuba that got ruined when Castro took over the hotel casinos and outlawed gambling when he took over. So they were happy to help if it meant getting back that revenue stream. Roselli enlisted several other bosses who still had some connections in Cuba and in cooperation with the CIA, they made a plan to poison Castro's food. At some point in 1961, they got poison pills manufactured by the CIA's Technical Services Division and they handed off a jar of that poison to a cafe worker in Havana. The worker was meant to slip the poison into Castro's ice cream or his milkshake, but according

to one account, the plan got foiled because the jar of pills got put in the walk-in freezer at the cafe, and at the crucial moment, they were all stuck together and stuck inside the jar. So it didn't work out. Another fail. You put them in the freezer? Why? So they wouldn't go bad? You got to FIFO the murder pills, people.

Fucking rookie mistake. Somebody could get hurt. Why were they pills? Why pills, though? Why not just a baggie of the stuff. Why would you need a pill? Why would it have to be a pill for it? It's not it's going to his food anyway Isn't he gonna go why are these pills do it with this thing of something? I don't know just how I like my ice cream lots of

Sprinkles and mysterious pills that are not stuck together. Good for eating a five year old's dessert. What the fuck is wrong with you, man? You can't start a communist revolution in a country and then be like, let me get an ice cream. No, you never get to eat ice cream again. You have to eat like dark chocolate cakes and shit. That's the rule. There you go, safe. Thank you. So the mafia wasn't gonna give up

just because one idiot couldn't unstick the poison pills and have them emulate spread out sprinkles. That guy's trying to be such a dumb ass, right? He just sit there going like, oh my God, I have to tell Dave about this box. They're stuck together, he's like licking his fingers to open it and he's like, fuck, I licked, god damn it. They're stuck together. He's like licking his fingers to open and he's like fuck I like god damn it

Yeah, but Dave's a mafia boss this isn't good so yeah, they were like alright. We're gonna try again They took another shot at the poisoned food plan this time using a mole. They had within Castro's administration named Juan Orta This time using a mole they had within Castro's administration named Juan Orta. Apparently he tried and failed several times and then demanded to be let out of the mission. So that one didn't work out. From there, the mafia enlisted the leader of a Cuban exile group to make another attempt using his connections with potential moles in Castro's government. But that got foiled as well when Castro just stopped going to the restaurant they were hoping to use for the poisoning. And I'm just guessing,

but it really seems like Juan Orta and those other guys in Castro's government were clearly just pretending to help the mafia and immediately telling Castro about the murder plots. Either way, the poison pill operation got canceled entirely in April of 1961 with the Bay of Pigs invasion as the next big plan. And once again, as we all know, that was a big fail too. Ah, Heath, you're thinking silly. I mean, who wouldn't want to give up a high ranking position in the Communist Party of the country they live in to be a rat for the government and a traitor for the mob at the same time. That seems like such a great opportunity. To paychecks, yeah.

Yeah. So, the Bay of Pigs was a complete disaster and it made the American intelligence community look like idiots so they ramped up the anti-Castro scheming from there. How dare you make us look stupid by us being stupid? And that brings us to Operation Mongoose, also known as the Cuban Project. It was officially authorized by John F. Kennedy in November of 1961, and it was an extensive campaign of all different attacks on Cuba

and on Castro. The project was led by Air Force General Edward Lansdale from the military side and CIA officer William Harvey from the intel side. And the ideas they came up with for Operation Mongoose were ludicrous. They started by focusing on Castro's hobby of scuba diving and they worked out a plan for a flesh-eating wetsuit. What? That's their first idea. The CIA made a set of diving equipment and they dusted the suit with a fungus that would cause a chronic skin disease that would slowly remove Fidel Castro's beautiful skin and therefore, I guess, defeat communism. They also laced the breathing apparatus with tuberculosis.

Yeah, the CIA lost Occam's razor in a previous assassination attempt, so they had to do these ones instead. They clearly cut to a Bond villain going, this seems overly complicated. I don't know. Why don't you have a crotch laser? Did you guys already used up got all you already used up gun obviously. Yeah, that makes sense. So apparently the plan was to deliver the toxic wetsuit using an unwitting lawyer who

was handling negotiations with Castro about something else. That guy was supposed to show up at a meeting and be like, hey, Fidel Castro, have this normal scuba suit that I got you as a gift. Don't wash it. End of plan. That was the end of the plan. But it all fell apart because, well, because that was extremely dumb.

And it even more fell apart when that unwitting lawyer got briefed on the scheme at the last minute by the CIA. And he refused to do the murder because now he was, you know, witting of the murder. Yeah. All right. So you got the paperwork, you got the contracts. Oh, real quick, we gave you that suit we gave you is poison murder the dictator of the country you're in for us. Thanks. All right. Well, clearly the CIA needs a minute to peruse the fucking ACME catalog. So we're going to take a quick break for some apropos of nothing.

They would have done so much better with the. Yeah, so much better. Falling and the right. You have to mostly. At least they tie, right? You wanted to see me Mr. President? George come in, how's the boy? Oh he's doing okay sir, he's uh, he's not a bright one. No no he's not, I've met him.

Indeed. Anyway, what can I do for you Mr. President? Look George, I'm going over these papers and I see that you and the fellas down at the company, they've been trying to kill this Fidel Castro fella. Yeah, we sure have, Mr. President. I tell you, he's a... he's a waskily wabbit as they say, but we'll get him. We'll get him. Right, so, George, that's what I wanted to talk to you about

I'd prefer you didn't kill people. Oh Well, mr. President, I'm not gonna do it myself. Those days are are long over I just I just meant that in the sense of the company is gonna get right George. I don't want anybody in the CIA To kill people. Well, what the hell do you want us to do then? Gather intelligence? I mean we have a military, George. I know we have a fucking military, Gerald. What do we do if somebody gets caught gathering intelligence?

We call the cops? You sound like a fucking idiot. No, I'm not an idiot. I'm the president. And you don't just get to murder whoever you want. Well yes we do, that's literally why we exist you fucking flyover state buck. I'm sorry, I'm sorry Gerald. Mr. President, that was unfair of me. No, no, I got heated myself so I just... please keep the murders secret, okay? Yeah, yeah sir. Of course, sir. Alright.

Now do I still get to be president for Kelly Kennedy? Of course, George. I'd never take that back. Thank you. And the boy too. Yeah, the boy too. I mean, how stupid is he? Like really fucking stupid. It's fine, we'll figure something out. Thank you. Everyone deserves to be connected.

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I feel like you're being a joke, but that was awesome. That was a really good push scene. We're going to go to jail for that. How did you get that on you? So Heath, tell us, where did the CIA paint the big red X next? Okay, so around the same time as the scuba diving murder plans, Operation Mongoose was also brainstorming plenty of non-murder stuff to complement the murder stuff.

According to a New York Times article from 1997, a trove of documents about Operation Mongoose had just been declassified that year and they detailed some of the absurd ideas that they found. For example, in a proposed mission called Operation Freeride. We plan to have planes go over Cuba and airdrop one way tickets to Mexico City or Caracas, hoping people would just fucking leave and then Cuba would be empty and we'd win. OK, so I was going to make a joke about how dumb that is, but then I remembered I'm in South Georgia in July during an election year

and there's almost nowhere I wouldn't escape to if you airdrop me a one-way ticket. So yeah, that's actually a good idea. That's fair. That was a good one, okay. That was a good one. So we also considered several ridiculous propaganda campaigns aimed at making Castro look evil to his people in Cuba. One project was called Operation Good Times,

and according to that same New York Times article, the plan was to make thousands of fake photographs showing, quote, a fat and happy Castro gorging on food and sex. The documents included a message from Pentagon planners to General Lansdale, that guy in charge of Operation Mongoose, and they said, this should put even a commie dictator in the proper perspective with the underprivileged masses. Operation Good Times, they should have just blown them up with

DYNOMITE! Okay, but Americans believing that Cubans would turn on their leader for not being communist enough is like the Chinese planning to overthrow our government while we're all saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. Like they don't. That's not. No, no.

So another propaganda idea was a dirty trick that was literally called Operation Dirty Trick. Shut the fuck up. No it wasn't. Seriously. It actually was. This one was proposed in 1962, ahead of NASA's Mercury mission that made John Glenn the first American to orbit the Earth. The idea was to make up a bunch of evidence to show that if John Glenn died during that

mission it was somehow Fidel Castro's fault. Don't worry, John, if anything happens to you up there, we have just the guy to pin it on, so no. Yeah. My fellow Americans, it turns out he jerked off too hard to all these real photos of Fidel Castro having sex with a delicious lobster.

Yeah. Is that anything? The George Bush senior you were doing? Is that George Bush on the grassy and all I see next to my wife at the angle that a bullet would enter my skull. This is all accurate. This is all accurate. Documentary. And of course we also considered a bunch of false flag operations in addition that would help justify a full-scale

military intervention to overthrow Castro again from these declassified documents We learned that operation mongoose considered all of the following they considered Blowing up a US warship in Guantanamo Bay and blaming cute name broke in Guantanamo Bay and blaming Cuba. If it ain't broke. Yeah. Developing a fake terror campaign by Cuban communists that was happening in Miami and Washington, DC. Faking a civilian aircraft getting shot down

by the Cuban military and singing a boatload of Cuban refugees on the way to Florida that could be, and this is exact words from the document, quote, real or simulated. Jesus Christ. Oh, hey, how about a two for we have them down in a civilian aircraft into a boatload of refugees, guys? So somebody was like, OK, so we'll fake that. And somebody else is like, why are we thinking it?

And they were like, well, no, you're right. We should have options. Either way, either way. Whichever turns out to be easier. Let's just see which is easier. So the next murder plot from Operation Mongoose also involved Castro's enjoyment of scuba diving. They went for the scuba thing again.

Guys, you gotta let go of the scuba diving thing. They will not let go of scuba diving quite yet. We gotta drop it as an idea generator. Shut up, we're doing one more scuba thing at least so this time the whiteboard I guess said something like exploding seashell and As usual some insane boss the CIA was like wait a minute That just might work and they went with it. So the CIA purchased this is real

I swear to God this is real. I swear to God, this is real. They purchased a huge volume of Caribbean mollusks looking for a shell that was just right for this stupid fucking plan. It had to be big enough to hold a lethal payload of explosives and it had to be cool looking enough that Castro would swim over. Oh give me a fucking break!

So okay, but eventually they found the shell that they wanted and then just to be extra cool they painted it with super bright colors so it was like definitely cool looking enough Castro was definitely gonna swim over. But then somebody I'm assuming was hey, this is fucking dumb. And they aborted the plan. I don't know, feels a little simple. What if we make an explosive seashell and then we bring in trained otters that get close to him?

Forget it. Learn about his fears and his regrets, you know, the otters. Yeah, I feel like, hey, this is dumb needs to happen so much earlier than the painting of the honor. So yeah, I, I feel like, hey, this is dumb. Needs to happen so much earlier than the painting of the explosive mollusk. Yeah. No, right. Like the beginning of the CIA. Yeah. Your hands deep in a fucking bucket of mollusks

looking for the right one. You need to figure it out. Yeah. All right. Next up, we have a plan within operation mongoose called operation bounty. We learned about this one from a top secret document Next up, we have a plan within Operation Mongoose called Operation Bounty. We learned about this one from a top secret document related to the Kennedy assassination by George Senior that was declassified in 2017. Operation Bounty started in 1962, and this one did not involve murdering Castro, but

it was very much adjacent to that. It was all about murdering everyone else in the Cuban government. We planned to fly over Cuba and drop leaflets that promised big rewards to any Cuban people who carried out certain assassinations for us. We offered between $5,000 and $20,000 for killing informants, $57,000 for killing informants $57,000 for department heads $97,000 for foreign communists operating in Cuba and up to one million dollars for high-level members of Castro's government Leaflets also had a reward for Castro himself, but it was only two cents This was meant to make human people see Castro as low value in a road.

Sorry, sorry. It says on the back of the coupon, clearly it says no cash value right here. I can't exchange this. I'm sorry. You got to go to the same office as the state lottery with a severed head and wait in line for your big check. But it's weird that we were so stingy at those bounties though, right? Like, we do we blow our whole fucking budget on the mollusks or what happened here? But it's weird that we were so stingy at those bounties though, right?

Like, we blow our whole fucking budget on the mollusks or what happened here? Yeah, obviously. Yes, we did. All right. Moving ahead to 1963. Right as JFK got assassinated in November of that year, the CIA was in the middle of another murder plot as well, targeting Castro. They lined up another Cuban government mole, hoping he could get close to Castro and pull

off a murder. So they met with the guy in Paris and explained the plan. At the meeting, they handed this guy a pen with a secret needle inside that would inject poison. And then there was like a weird pause and the guy was like, oh, that's the whole plan? No, I'm not doing that. That's dumb.

Yeah. What was he going to say? Oh no, Fidel, you misunderstand. I stabbed you with a pen. Just a normal pen. So stupid. You're only allowed to get that. So apparently the CIA was out of Cuban government moles at

this point. They ran through them and they decided to use one of Castro's ex lovers next named Marita Lorenz. They gave her some poison pills to slip into his drink. No, but don't worry they learned their lesson with the freezer snafu. So they had her hide the pills in her jar of cold cream But but this time the pills melt why are Temperamental poison so much shit is poisonous So many things are poisonous rock we had not rocks are poised this yet. I guess so according to Ms. Lorenz She thought about shoving

cold cream into Castro's mouth while he was sleeping at that moment. But immediately realized that was absurd. And more importantly, Castro had once again been tipped off ahead of time. So he was ready and he decided to go with a brash power move. He met up with Lorenz in his hotel room and then he handed her his gun voluntarily and said, you can't kill me. Nobody can kill me. Lorenz recounted the moment for the New York Daily News saying, quote, he just smiled and chewed on his cigar. I felt deflated. He was so sure of me. He just grabbed me We made love

Cubans are weird. I Don't know. I get it. I get it. That's a sexually charged moment, right? Sure like it is Thank you. Thank you. I think two people see so Doesn't agree you keep reading He's cutting out both shirts In In a way, his opinion is the most powerful. Come on. That's not sexually. That's like a big whole thing. I just love this. The CIA failed so hard they got him late. Right. Like they screwed up so bad. Right. Zero kills. One have sex. Fuck. We really, really lost that one. Yeah. So next up we have the most

well-known of the assassination attempts, the exploding cigar. Hell yeah! This one first got reported in 1967 by the Saturday Evening Post. The article said that during Castro's visit the United Nations in 1966, a CIA operative spoke to NYPD Chief Inspector Michael J. Murphy about a plan to blow up Castro's face with an exploding cigar. But this one is very likely a fake story. For context, a 1963 issue of MAD magazine was making fun of all the rumors about insane CIA murder plots and it had Castro smoking an exploding cigar on the cover of that issue. Some sources claim the CIA did actually consider the exploding cigar plot but never actually tried it while other sources claim

it's entirely made up. One pair of authors though, Lamar Waldron and Tom Hartman, they wrote a book about JFK, they have a theory that the CIA invented this very silly plot and got it publicized on purpose as a smoke screen to discredit any suspicions about their actual very silly murder plots. Regardless though, an exploding cigar with like a fuse, that is not a smart move for doing an assassin. Also, if making the CIA look like incompetent assholes is on their agenda, the CIA OR show money. Come on guys, patreon.com slash citation pod.

Pay out. What I love the most about this theory is that if it's right, then historically a bunch of people at some point had to sit in some CIA fucking conference room or whatever, trying to come up with something dumber sounding than the flesh eating wetsuit thing. Right? We have to do something extra silly. Fuck.

This is tough. Yeah, that was the bar. I guess if that's what happened, they kind of nailed it. So that brings us to one final operation and I saved it for last because it's the most American thing that has ever happened. Oh, that's cool. So it's a joint mission between the US military and the CIA already great right to defeat communism check obviously using Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior really yeah

this was the brainchild and child brain of general Lansdale the guy in charge of operation mongoose and according to Lansdale quote the people of Cuba could be convinced through rumors that the second coming was at hand if only the Satanic Castro were overthrown. Jesus, okay Cubans aren't that stupid guys you're thinking of us right? This one definitely would have worked here. I know I'd fall for it. Thank you. Can we ship one of those Jewish bowls down there? Will that convince people if there's? So here's the details from a report put together

by intelligence officials that was reviewed by the church committee when they looked into the CIA being horribly stupid and evil. Quote, this plan consisted of spreading the word that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and that Christ was against Castro, who was anti-Christ. You would spread this word around Cuba and then on whatever date it was, there would be a manifestation of this thing. At the time, just over the horizon, there would be an American submarine

that would surface off Cuba and send up some star shells. Those are basically like high grade military fireworks. And this would be the manifestation of the second coming and Castro would be overthrown. End exact quote. Skeptics of this operation would call it elimination by illuminating. I'm sorry. Wait, they think that Cubans didn't know about fire. Or I mean, what, what is that? And, um, further sources about that crazy second coming thing added some more

details. These sources aren't quite as good, but according to another account, the plan also included the voice of Jesus Christ himself. At the same time as the fireworks, US Air Force planes would fly above the clouds and broadcast the voice of Jesus Christ telling people to abandon communism because God loves capitalism. And there was also discussion of having an actor portraying Jesus Christ somehow emerge from the scene and show up on a beach in Cuba. Right but Jim Caviezel wasn't born yet so they had to call it off.

I like the airplane idea. I'm coming soon from Angel Studios. Watch, watch pin in that for real life again. Fuck. So if you're keeping score at home, the final tally was something like Castro 638 USA zero Castro eventually died of just being old at age 90 in 2016. All right. If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

God is definitely communist, but not quite as powerful as they claim in the Bible. Right. That's a good lesson. And are you ready for the quiz? I'm ready. All right, Heath. What is for the quiz? I'm ready. All right, Heath, what is a Cuban sandwich? Ooh, good question. It's ham, slow roasted pork legs, salami, and Swiss

with a thin layer of mustard, and then a thin lengthwise cut dill pickle on Cuban bread, which is like a baguette, but it has some shortening used in the baking. And then the sandwich is buttered or oiled and then it on the outside And then that's sort of grilled and pressed flat with like a brick heavy cast iron pan panini press origins of the sandwich are not clear, but it could have originated in Havana, but First recorded mentions are from a neighborhood in Tampa, Florida around 1900. Okay. I don't have any puns this week. I just wanted to

around 1900. Okay. Me, I don't have any puns this week, I just wanted to talk about that sandwich. It sounds delicious. If you wanna plug your other shows, Cecil, just plug your other shows. You're making a Cuban, right? I will, I will make a Cuban. I'm gonna have a plan for a Cuban sandwich,

absolutely, yes. Fucking Lincoln the show notes, everybody. I'm fine, yeah. Also, I mean, like, I'm gonna- Get more mad about it, Eli. I'm gonna- My question's about my dad. And how dear he was to me.

So I'm going to answer C, all of the above, but I will say, Cecil, that was a controversial take. You mentioned Salami. That is the Tampa version. But there's a fucking blood feud about this between Tampa and Miami.

And Miami says no Salami. and they are furious about this. They claim they invented it too. No, no, they didn't. Correct. All right. I have one that's a little more in keeping with the general theme of the show. No offense. So thank you. Anything you want to know? No. So what was that COVID book?

So of all the interventions, the Monte Castro sandwich. What's in that? So of all the interventions America has made in Cuba, which one pisses the Cuban people off the most? A. Bucket their rum up with our Coca-Cola. B. The fact that somebody got rich selling posters of communist revolutionaries. C. The fact that Eli came up with that Bill Clinton burying a Cuban joke before I did or D such a good fucking joke.

White guys who try to pronounce it Cuba. Cuba, Cuba. OK, it's got to be D. That's the fucking. Yeah, it's obviously D. I made it easy. All right, Heath, what was D. That's the fucking- Yeah, it's 100% D. I made it easy. Alright, Heath, what was Fidel Castro's greatest victory over America? A. Convincing a bunch of idiots that they had a picture of him on their edgy hipster t-shirt.

B. Secretly feeding the Republicans their only Hispanic members. Or C. Dying 11 days after we had elected Donald Trump. Yeah, it's see it's the ultimate right. Yeah. He went out right after we elected a game show. He's just giggling to himself as he dies. Yep. Yep. All right. Yeah, well I do just lights a cigar throws it behind him into some gasoline Yeah, a mollusk flies out blows up kills him it's crazy has sex with Heath for some reason because he's allowed to in that moment All right, well he's got the fuck a mollusk. He's obviously the winner this week. I'm thinking next time, let's get a Noah appearance. Alright, well for Cecil, Eli, Heath, and usually Tom, I'm Noah.

Thank you for hanging out with us today. We're going to be back next week and by then I'll be an expert on something else. Between now and then you can hear more from us on Cognitive Dizziness, D&D Minus, Dear Old Dad's Got-All from movies Lawful Assembly, Season Liberally, and The Skeptocrat, and The Scathing Atheist. Shit, I almost missed one. And if you want to hear even more than that you have a problem that there is no medicine for jesus and if you'd like to help keep this

show going and you want to know why tom isn't here this week like a purpose of donation at patreon dot com cessation pot and get pre show shenanigans once more you know so we've a five-star review everywhere you can if you'd like to get in touch with us check check out past episodes, connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citation pod dot com. My God, you it's all here, all the files, everything quick. Agent Smith, back to the chopper. Not so fast, Agent Smith.

Those files belong to me like hell they do. What what are you doing? Agent Smith, those files belong to me. Like hell they do! What? What are you doing? I'm calling the cops. Why though? I'm not allowed to kill you? Why? Why not?

The president said so. Hello, hello? Police? Yeah, there is a henchman here and he's gonna hench me. Yeah, no I can hold. I am so sorry about this. No, it's fine, it's fine. It's time to gather loved ones together for all the holidays best spread. Lens has great prices on all your favorite Thanksgiving items from delicious turkey with all the fixings to mashed potatoes and yummy pies. We have

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