REDACTED: Declassified Mysteries with Luke Lamana - 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Over decades, the U.S. government orchestrated hundreds of assassination attempts on Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, both serious and absurd, from poison cigars to exploding seashells. Learn how Castro managed to escape death time and again and cemented his place as one of history’s most untouchable figures.Be the first to know about Wondery’s newest podcasts, curated recommendations, and more! Sign up now at https://wondery.fm/wonderynewsletterFollow Redacted: Declassified Mysteries with Luke Lamana on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial by visiting https://wondery.com/links/redacted/ now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to redacted, declassified mysteries early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. In early January 1961, 19-year-old Marita Lorenz landed in Havana, Cuba. She had spent the past six weeks back home in New York City, planning the death of a man she had once loved but now hated. He was charismatic. He was powerful. He was also the Prime Minister of Cuba. His name was Fidel Castro.

Marita met Fidel on her dad's yacht the previous summer, and it was love at first sight. But two months after the whirlwind romance began, Marita got pregnant. Fidel had seemed thrilled at the news, and Marita had never felt so in love. But a few months later, Marita fell mysteriously ill after drinking her morning glass of milk. She blacked out and woke up several hours later in a hospital. The doctor told her she'd miscarried and lost the baby, but every fiber of Marita's being knew that this was a lie. Someone had drugged her milk, and then the doctor had terminated her pregnancy. And Marita was sure Fidel was the one who had given the orders. She felt violated and heartbroken as she fled back home to New York in late 1959. And that was when the CIA approached her and convinced her that Fidel was a poison that would contaminate the free world if left unchecked.

He had to go. In the Havana airport, Marita deboarded her plane and headed toward customs. She was hugging her purse tightly under her arm. Inside was a jar of cold cream, where two pill capsules given to her by the CIA lay hidden. The capsules were filled with a grayish powder. Poison. She was going to slip into Fidel's drink that night. The CIA agent had promised her that Fidel wouldn't feel any pain. He would just go to sleep and never wake up.

Still, the thought made Marita's stomach turn. But she had made her choice. She was going to stick to it. An hour later, her taxi pulled up in front of the Havana Hilton. Marita still had the key to Fidel Castro's private suite. So she walked past the front desk attendant and the armed guards outside his door. She tried to move steadily, even though her heart was pounding out of her chest. She let herself in. Fidel wasn't there yet, but his security guard told her he would be back soon. Marita steeled her nerves

and took the jar of cold cream into the bathroom. She unscrewed the lid and fished out the poison pills. But to her horror, the plastic pills had melted into soggy little lumps. In a panic, Marita dumped the pills into the toilet and flushed, but the pills just floated back up. She flushed again and again, but they kept bobbing back to the surface. It was like something out of a nightmare.

On her fourth attempt, the toilet refused to flush at all. She felt her face grow hot. She took a deep breath. She needed to think a way out of this mess. She was going to get herself killed if she didn't get rid of the poison pills, and fast. Outside the door, she heard the deep voice of Fidel Castro calling her name. She froze, said a silent prayer, and flushed the toilet again. By some miracle, the pills stayed down.

Marita blotted her eyes and rushed out to meet him. When she saw Fidel, she felt weak in the knees. She had tried hard to kill all the love she'd once felt for him, but looking at him now with his signature beard and his green army fatigues, she couldn't help but feel some of the old warmth come creeping back. Fidel pulled Marita in for a kiss, but then his eyes grew cold and he asked her why she'd been hanging around with, quote, all those Miami people. Her heart skipped a beat. She knew that he meant the CIA agents, which meant he knew what she'd been up to and why she was here now. Marita struggled to find words as tears filled her eyes. And to her horror, Fidel drew his gun out of his holster. But he didn't point it at her like she'd expected. Instead, he handed her the gun.

Handle first. Go ahead and kill me, he said. But Marina stayed frozen to the spot. The CIA could never have dreamed of a more perfect scenario. Here was Fidel Castro completely unprotected, vulnerable, an open target. And here was Marina being offered a murder weapon. And yet, she couldn't do it. And Fidel seemed to know it.

He smiled at her. And then he said, No one can kill me. No one. To be continued... and misinformation to reveal the dark secrets our governments try to hide. This week's episode is called 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro was a man of mythic proportions. He was known for his trademark beard, his ever-present cigar,

and the hours-long speeches he gave from his balcony. He was a hero to the Cuban people for overthrowing the previous dictator, Fulgencio Batista, a man who had made the country suffer under his fascist regime. Castro was a celebrity in the U.S. too. Even before his rise to power, Western reporters loved to interview him. When he visited New York City in 1959, he was treated like a rock star, with reporters following him to the Bronx Zoo and children posing for pictures with fake Castro beards. But soon Castro became a threat to the U.S. government. He believed that communism was the way of the future and signed an alliance with the USSR. His goal was to nationalize Cuban industries and break its dependence on foreign corporations that were sucking money out of Cuba.

He also raised the prospect of a communist enemy just 90 miles away from the U.S. mainland. The CIA felt it had no choice. They had to assassinate Fidel Castro and liberate Cuba from this dangerous new dictator. But his death had to look like an accident, or possibly the action of an angry Cuban citizen. There was no way that anyone could trace his death back to the United States. But that was easier said than done, and for decades, each U.S. president was forced to ask themselves the same question. How would they kill Fidel Castro? A year before Marita Lorenz and her poison pills, another man sat in front of Fidel Castro with the order to kill him. The date was January 16, 1959, and the man's name was Alan Robert Nye. He was an FBI agent on a top-secret mission. The U.S. government was working with the previous dictator Batista's

loyal forces and paying Nye $50,000 to embed himself in Castro's inner circle, with the goal of assassinating him. To do that, Nye orchestrated a complex cover to earn their trust. Part one was to have Nye wander through the Cuban jungle with the purpose of being taken prisoner by Castro's revolutionaries. When they picked him up and asked what he was doing way out in the jungle, Nye delivered his story. When they picked him up and asked what he was doing way out in the jungle, Nye delivered his story. He claimed he had been expelled from the U.S. Air Force for conspiring with Cuban agents. He even had phony papers to back it up.

Castro's people looked through his papers and seemed convinced. So they took him with them. Two weeks later, Nye sat at a wooden table in a government building in Havana. It had been 15 days since Castro's regime had established their new government, and Cuba was in chaos. Nye tipped his chair back and looked out the window at the tree-lined street below. Nye had never been to Cuba before, but he saw why Americans liked it. Until just a few weeks ago when Castro came to power, it had been a popular tourist destination. It was a short, cheap plane flight to feel like you had stepped back in time. Honeymooners and families on vacation flocked to the city

to see the old world Spanish architecture and taste the delicious local food. It was also a big hit with businessmen who liked going to the island's American-owned brothels and casinos. Of course, shacks where the poor lived spread out in all directions just to the right and left of these tourist attractions, but visitors found a way to overlook those. In fact, this entire island used to be a cash cow for the United States. Until Castro nationalized Cuban industries, the U.S. had made around $1.5 billion a year from Cuban sugar, cattle, oil refining, and railroads. Between the massive loss of profits and the specter of communism inching closer to America, it was no wonder the U.S. wanted Castro gone.

Nye hadn't come up with a concrete plan for assassinating Castro just yet. Right now, he and the other FBI agents hiding in Havana were just focused on getting Nye into Castro's inner circle. Once he was in and had earned Castro's trust, they'd think of a way to kill him without anyone guessing who was behind it. Nye knew he had his work cut out for him. Technically, he was still under arrest by Castro's army, but he was a comfortable prisoner. Over the past few days, his guards had been letting him return to his hotel at night. Every time they called him in for questioning, he showed up on time and answered all their

questions. Nye thought all of this was helping him earn their trust. A few minutes later, a rebel in military fatigues entered the receiving room and sat down across from Nye. He set a folder on the table and told Nye that they'd been looking into him. Nye smiled. He was sure he would pass any test with flying colors. The man nodded and told Nye that he had great news. They weren't ready to let Nye in on top-secret meetings just yet, but they knew how he could prove himself. It was an initiation of sorts. The former dictator Batista still had faithful military forces scattered throughout Cuba at different military bases, and Castro needed to eliminate them. Luckily, Castro's rebels had acquired a P-51 Mustang fighter aircraft, and since Nye was a pilot, they wanted him to fly

that plane around Cuba and bomb all of the military bases full of his enemies. Nye blinked. He hadn't seen that coming. He knew there was no way the FBI was going to let him bomb military bases as part of some hazing ritual. But he couldn't let on that this was a problem. So he nodded and told the rebel that he'd be glad to do it. The rebel officer smiled. Then he told Nye that he was free to go. They'd be in touch soon with the details. Nye hightailed it back to his hotel room just a few blocks down the street. An FBI agent was waiting for him,

sitting so quietly in the corner chair that Nye jumped when he finally saw him. Nye sat on the edge of the bed and told him about the mission Castro's rebels had come up with. The agent leaned back in his chair and folded his hands under his chin. He seemed to be thinking. Finally, he leaned forward and told Nye that there was no way the American government could let him go blowing up military bases on Castro's command. And not only that, Nye had to prevent anyone else from doing it, which meant Nye was going to have to figure out a way to destroy the plane, sabotage it somehow, and find a way of blaming it on Castro's enemies.

Nye wasn't sure how he could pull that off. There was no way the revolutionaries were going to allow him to be alone with the plane. After all, he was still an outsider, and the plane was way too precious to them. On the other hand, Nye wasn't ready to give up. Somehow, someway, he had to get close to Castro. The agent left his room, which gave Nye time to think. What if the revolutionaries forced him to go up in the plane? What would he do then?

Steal it? Fly it back to the United States? That would mean revealing himself and killing the mission. Still, it sounded better than being assassinated, which is what Castro's people would surely do to him if they found out that he was a spy. The next day, Nye was back at the government building, sitting across from the same rebel officer as the day before. The man said he had some more questions for Nye regarding a few gaps in his background check. Nye told him that wasn't a problem. He practiced his cover story so many times it was practically second nature. The rebel asked him about his hometown, when he arrived in Cuba, and what he brought over with him from America. Nye answered each of the questions

easily. Then the agent asked where he'd been this morning. Nye said he'd been at his hotel, the Hotel Commodoro. The rebel looked at him sharply. Nye read the look on his face, and his heart sank. He had just made a huge mistake. The rebel told Nye to stay put and left the room. Nye nodded, trying to play it cool. to stay put and left the room. Nye nodded, trying to play it cool. But the moment he was alone, he started sweating. Revealing the name of his hotel was a huge mistake, because with a little digging, the rebels could easily find out that Batista's people were footing his hotel bill. That could only mean one thing. He was in league with Castro's sworn enemy. Nye had just put himself in serious danger. Once Castro

knew who he was working with, Nye had no idea what they would do with him. Would they arrest him? Torture him? Kill him? Nye wrapped his fingers on the arm of his chair, wondering if he should try and make a run for it, but that would only make him look guiltier. He leaned back in his chair and looked out the window behind him. Armed guards lined the courtyard. Even if he made a break for it, he could never make it out. Thirty minutes later, the rebel officer re-entered the room, but this time with an armed guard. Nye swallowed hard. He knew it was coming. The officer told Nye that he just had a very interesting talk with a valet at Hotel Commodoro. According to the valet, Nye was staying there under the name

George Collins, but most of the staff called him El Mysterioso, the Mysterious One, because he came and went without notice and received American visitors in his room at all hours of the night, and because his hotel tab was being paid by the ex-dictator. Nye was speechless. He couldn't even think up a convincing lie. Panicked and in fear for his life, he confessed to everything. He told the Cubans all about the plot and who was behind it, and begged the man to spare his life. The rebel almost looked amused, but then he told the guards

to arrest him. Lucky for Nye, he wasn't killed. A month later, the revolutionaries kicked him out of Cuba and sent him back to the US with his tail between his legs. Looking back, Nye realized that the plan had always been doomed to fail. It wasn't well thought out, it was easily exposable, and it suffered from a heavy dose of American arrogance. Who were they to play spy games on Castro's home turf, when he had half the country under his power, and more Cubans converting to his cause every day?

Nye had never even made it into the same room with Castro. The whole mission was a complete and utter failure. Nye Snafu made his superiors at the FBI and their counterparts at the CIA take a step back. They realized that assassinating Fidel Castro was going to be more difficult than they had thought. His government might be young, but Castro knew how to protect himself, and his inner circle was fiercely loyal. If they wanted this man dead, they would need to get creative. In March of 1960, Dr. Edward Gunn was thumbing through a thick medical reference book in his laboratory. It was located on the bottom floor of a CIA building in Washington, D.C.

of a CIA building in Washington, D.C. He didn't find what he was looking for, so he snapped the book shut and squeezed it back into the vast floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that lined one of the walls. He ran his hand along the book bindings, looking for one with answers. Like all medical doctors, Dr. Gunn had once taken the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, but he was also the head of the CIA's Office of Medical Services. They were the ones who invented the types of poisons seen in James Bond movies,

and Gunn was one of their top guys. Knowing the compounds he mixed ended up in the bloodstreams of nameless victims was one of the many moral compromises Gunn had decided to make to serve his country. Suddenly, there was a knock on the door. An agent stepped into the office before Gunn could even say, come in. He was young, maybe late 20s, and wore an easy smile. He told Dr. Gunn that he'd been sent downstairs to order a unique kind of poison. The agent explained that the U.S. government had recently suffered two humiliating mishaps in their mission to assassinate Fidel Castro. First, an FBI agent had made a rookie mistake by exposing Batista as his financial backer

and outing himself as an agent. Then, Castro's ex-girlfriend had fumbled the poison capsules that Dr. Gunn had so thoughtfully made for her. Dr. Gunn winced. He hadn't heard about the FBI agent, but he remembered making all those poison capsules a couple of months ago. The idea of all that hard work coming to nothing hurt his pride. The two failures made the CIA look bad, and even worse, Castro had clearly picked up on the fact that the CIA was out to get him and had upped his defenses. The agent explained that as of now, the CIA no longer wanted to kill Castro. It was too risky, given his ties to the Soviet Union and other communist leaders. It could go badly if he turned up dead. For the time being, they were more interested in assassinating his character, as in discrediting and humiliating him.

They were calling this new initiative Operation Harass Castro. If Dr. Gunn found this funny, he didn't show it. The agent went on to explain that their first target was Castro's beard. The CIA believed it was a key part of his mystique. It's what kept the Cuban people wrapped with attention when he gave hours-long speeches about the country's future. Without it, he'd be reduced to a baby-faced buffoon yelling on soapboxes. The agent asked if Dr. Gunn could come up with a poison that would make Castro's beard fall out. Dr. Gunn was honest. That was going to be a hard one to pull off. First, chemicals that cause hair loss don't target specific follicles like that. Anything they gave Castro would cause all the hair on his body to fall out. Eyebrows, lashes, the hair on his head.

Secondly, no chemical Gunn could think of would work instantaneously. It would require gradual exposure. As in, somebody would have to give Castro several doses. It wasn't like you slipped the man a pill and his beard fell right off. Third, the whole thing just sounded, well, off. Third, the whole thing just sounded, well, ridiculous. But Dr. Gunn kept that opinion to himself. He promised to see what he could do. Gunn got to work experimenting with thallium salts, a natural depilatory that he thought might make Fidel's beard fall out, eventually. But a week later, another agent marched into Dr. Gunn's basement and told him to abandon the beard removal plan. Apparently, the directors of Operation Harass Castro had realized that wasting time on the dictator's beard was a fool's errand. Gunn was actually relieved, since he wasn't having much luck with the thallium anyway.

Instead, they wanted him to switch gears. They'd come up with a new tactic to discredit the Cuban dictator. What if they drugged Castro with LSD before one of his hours-long radio speeches? That would turn him into a droning idiot on national airwaves. His talent as a speechmaker was the true key to his power. And who would get behind a leader who sounded like a stoned teenager? Gunn tried not to roll his eyes. And who would get behind a leader who sounded like a stoned teenager? Gunn tried not to roll his eyes.

How on earth were they going to get Castro to take LSD? But the agent had a plan. They wanted Gunn to create an LSD spray can. It would work just like a bathroom air freshener, only it would dose the room in a light layer of hallucinogenic mist. The can could be smuggled into the radio station ahead of time and sprayed into the recording booth. They could even recruit a radio DJ as a CIA asset and have him dose the studio just before Castro arrived.

Dr. Gunn considered this. A sprayable can of LSD was possible, and it was far easier to pull off than the ridiculous beard-burning mission. So, once again, Dr. Gunn promised to do his best. A few months later, on the morning of August 16, 1961, Dr. Gunn arrived at his desk to find what looked like a gift. It was a beautiful wooden box of cigars, including a note with his name on it. He hadn't been expecting a gift, especially after he'd delivered some bad news to the CIA a few weeks before about the plan to drug Castro. In short, the LSD spray can idea had been a bust.

The spray was just too unreliable to be used effectively. The agents upstairs had been disappointed, but assured Dr. Gunn that they still had a laundry list of other ideas worth looking into. They were also excited about the recent elections. President Eisenhower was out, and John F. Kennedy was in. Unlike his predecessor, Kennedy seemed much more serious about eliminating Castro once and for all. Now, the CIA agents were back to cooking up actual assassination ideas. Of course, it was still true that killing Castro was extremely risky.

It was more important than ever to conceal any evidence of U.S. involvement. But to the agents of Operation Harass Castro, it was a welcome challenge. Dr. Gunn opened the note on the package on his desk and frowned as he realized the cigars weren't a gift, not for him anyway. The wooden box contained 50 of Castro's favorite cigars. The CIA wanted Dr. Gunn to inject them with a poison so toxic that they would kill Castro the moment he put one to his lips. Dr. Gunn smiled. Finally, a mission he could complete. Poisons were his specialty.

He walked from his office to his laboratory down the hallway and into the supply closet in the back of the room. He flicked on the light. supply closet in the back of the room. He flicked on the light. Rising up from the floor, there were stacks of metal boxes and vacuum-sealed jars, each containing different poisons. Some were natural, others chemical. Some were perfectly safe until mixed together, and a few poisons were so rare that he kept them locked away in a safe bolted to the wall. Gunn ran a finger along the shelves, searching for one poison in particular. He grabbed what looked like an empty glass vial, but in reality, it was full of botulinum toxin, one of the most poisonous biological substances on Earth.

It was a bacteria that caused muscle paralysis, and in large enough doses, it was deadly. Gunn tucked it into his breast pocket and hurried back to his office. Three weeks later, on September 6th, Dr. Gunn hand-delivered the box of cigars to the agents of Operation Harass Castro upstairs. Each of the 50 cigars were infused with so much botulinum toxin, they would kill anyone who so much as brushed a cigar against their lips. As long as the agents got the cigars into Castro's hands, he would almost certainly be dead within minutes. The agents were almost giddy as they took the box from Dr. Gunn and passed it around, admiring it. Dr. Gunn asked the agents to let him know how everything turned

out. He was pleased with his handiwork on this one. He thought this might finally be the end for the man who was believed to be unkillable. At the same time that Dr. Gunn had been in his laboratory injecting Cuban cigars, another CIA scientist named Cornelius Roosevelt had been experimenting with toxins of his own. Cornelius was part of a legacy family. He was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. He was also the chief of the Technical Services Division, the lab that created spy gadgets for all of the agents. He was the real-life equivalent of Q from the James Bond movies. One of the agents on Operation Harass Castro had come to his lab to bring Cornelius up to speed

on their operation. He explained that so far, their attempts to assassinate the dictator had failed, largely because the people they recruited kept getting cold feet or bungling the assignments. because the people they recruited kept getting cold feet or bungling the assignments. Now the CIA had a box of poison cigars in their possession, but they still hadn't worked out a way to get them into Castro's hands. That was going to be tough, with Castro becoming so cautious in the last years. In the meantime, they wanted to devise a different murder plot, one that agents could execute without relying on outside recruits. Cornelius asked what they had in mind. The agent flipped open a manila folder and handed Cornelius photos of Castro spearfishing off the coast of Cuba. When he wasn't busy dodging assassination attempts, taking lovers, or filling the airwaves with the sound of his own voice, Castro enjoyed high-risk

sports like spearfishing and skin diving off the coast of Havana. The agent believed they could use his hobby against him. Cornelius nodded as the agent explained the idea they were hoping he could help them out with. The CIA wanted to plant a rare seashell on the ocean floor. Somewhere Castro was bound to find it. A seashell so exotic that Castro wouldn't be able to resist picking it up for a closer look. But that was the trick. They would booby trap the shell with explosives. That way, when Castro grabbed the shell, it would blow him to smithereens. Cornelius fought to keep a straight face. The plan sounded like something from the Wile E. Coyote cartoons. He could practically

see the white cloud billowing up after the explosion. But no one gets ahead by calling their boss's ideas stupid. So Cornelius tried to be more subtle. He asked how he would possibly manage to conceal explosives powerful enough to kill a full-grown man inside a small seashell. The agent didn't have an answer for that. Cornelius had to break it to him. He loved a challenge, but he was a man of science, and he just couldn't imagine how underwater explosives inside a seashell would ever work. But that wasn't the end of the marine-themed weapons. Soon after the exploding shell was rejected, another CIA agent came to Cornelius with a new idea, something that would catch Castro equally unawares on a diving trip.

Enter the poison wetsuit. From the outside, it would look like a normal rubber wetsuit, but the interior would be coated with a fungus that would infect Castro with a debilitating and chronic skin disease called madurofoot. It caused the body to break out in black, pus-filled boils that would eventually split open. It wouldn't necessarily kill Castro, but he would be in too much pain to lead the country. And since the disease would affect Castro gradually, no one would ever suspect that someone was behind it. But as you might have guessed, this idea ended up going the same way as

the explosive shell, which is to say, nowhere. In the spring of 1961, Dr. Gunn sat in his office reading a report on the fate of his poison cigars. He was annoyed. He'd taken weeks to craft them to perfection, meticulously injecting each one with a deadly amount of poison. He read that the cigars were delivered to an unnamed asset on February 13th, but after that, the trail went cold. There had been no reports of Castro or anyone else in his entourage dying of poison. Gunn realized that Castro and his people probably suspected the cigars had been tampered with. His brilliant murder weapons were probably sitting in the bottom of a trash can somewhere.

A complete and utter waste of time. It seemed like Castro dodged everything the CIA threw at him. Gunn had heard of a number of other failed attempts to poison Castro's food. They'd even gone so far as to recruit one of the servers, who worked at the restaurant inside the Havana Hilton where Castro ordered a chocolate milkshake almost every afternoon. They tried to get the server to poison it with the same pills they'd given Marita Lorenz. But the guy got cold feet at the last minute.

Castro really was proving unkillable. It didn't make sense. He was just one man. But then again, he was one of the most fiercely protected men in the world. Gunn often heard agents upstairs complaining about the fortress Castro had created around himself. He had bodyguards, spies, and a network of counterintelligence officers. How could you get to someone so well defended? And then there was Castro himself. His self-preservation instincts were razor sharp. Even if they were able to get a poison or assassin past his guards, they still had to trick Castro himself. and his suspicious nature made

that an impossible task. The entire situation frustrated Gunn as much as it frustrated the agents upstairs. More than a year passed, and Castro remained alive and well, though not for lack of CIA effort. They continued trying, and failing, to kill Castro. But they were bested, time and again, by his paranoia and impenetrable layers of security. So the CIA was forced to go back to the drawing board. No more exploding seashells or poison wetsuits. Those were too flashy, too elaborate. The move was to set a trap so nondescript that Castro would never think to question it. In the early hours of November 21, 1963, Dr. Gunn sat at a metal table in his laboratory, carefully filling a plastic tube

with poison. He glanced at the clock. It was almost four in the morning, and he still had a lot of work ahead of him. Yesterday, he'd arrived at work to find an agent waiting for him outside his office. The agent followed him inside, but didn't bother sitting down. He told Dr. Gunn that they needed a ballpoint pen with a hidden, poison-filled needle that they could use to inject Castro, and they needed it by noon the next day. Dr. Gunn reached for his fourth cup of coffee. He was exhausted, but he couldn't afford to make any mistakes. He filled a syringe with black leaf 40, a common insecticide that wreaks havoc on the human body. If they could manage to penetrate Castro's skin, the poison would

cause respiratory failure, cardiovascular collapse, and eventually death. When the poison was ready and loaded in the syringe, Gunn unscrewed the top of a paper-made pen and injected the poison into the ink tube. Then he replaced the point of the pen with a hypodermic needle so thin that Castro wouldn't feel it when it stuck him. It was the perfect plan. He could have the bodyguards test every drink or bite of food, but who would think to test something as commonplace as a pen? They just needed the right man to get it close enough to Castro. Gunn finished the pen around 11.30 the next morning, November 22nd. With red eyes and drooping eyelids, he took it to the agent upstairs. They were impressed. It was simple, discreet, and deadly. Everything they

wanted. The pen was shipped off to Paris, where it would be delivered to a former Cuban military leader who had flipped and was now working for the CIA. But in the end, the pen never made it into Castro's hands. On the same day the flipped Cuban leader received Gunn's pen, JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Now that he was dead, everything felt unstable. The Cuban asset got cold feet, and the CIA decided to cancel the poison pen plot. feet, and the CIA decided to cancel the poison pen plot. Fidel Castro wasn't lying when he smiled at Marita Lorenz and told her, no one can kill me. No one. Over the course of his lifetime,

the U.S. government made somewhere between 634 and 638 attempts on Castro's life. The Kennedy administration tried to kill him 42 times. Nixon tried 184 times. President Ford banned the CIA from assassination attempts in 1976, but the agency still tried to kill Castro for another 25 years. In fact, President Reagan soon broke the record at 197 attempts. How did the dictator of one small, impoverished island manage to keep escaping death over and over? Was the legend true? Was Castro truly an unkillable man? On November 26, 2016, Fidel Castro lay in bed in his home in Havana. He was 90 years old. He'd been secretly battling Parkinson's for several years,

and today he was feeling more tired than usual. He smiled to himself as he remembered a day back in 1992 when one of his officers brought him a stack of declassified CIA documents detailing the hundreds of failed attempts on his life. He and his officers had laughed at some of the more outlandish attempts. Poison wetsuits, deadly cigars, exploding seashells. The list went on and on. They joked about it for weeks. Later that day, Fidel Castro died in his sleep. News of his death broke across the world. The unkillable man was finally dead, but the CIA had nothing to do with it.

had nothing to do with it. So the question remains, why was Castro impossible to kill? First, there was the CIA's desire to leave no trace. Even though the U.S. was openly opposed to Castro's regime, they knew how fiercely Castro was loved by his people. A U.S.-led assassination would be disastrous. It could trigger a massive uprising. That's why the CIA insisted that every assassination attempt needed to look like a freak accident so that they could never be tied to the crime. Another factor that made Castro hard to kill was his unpredictability. His schedule was

notoriously erratic. It was a strategy to keep people off his tail. He would cancel plans at the last minute or show up in an unexpected location. Even his own people weren't always sure about where he would be throughout the day. But perhaps the most damning reason for America's failures was a certain arrogance. The idea of Castro meeting his end by a poison cigar or exploding seashell feels like a joke to us, but the CIA actually believed they would be able to pull it off. In the end, the time and money spent on these fruitless plans was indeed a joke on the American public. The attempts on Castro mark an unbelievable chapter in the CIA's history. The idea of the serious shadowy agency with access to the most sophisticated intelligence in the world

wasting their time on such ridiculous hijinks makes us question what goes on behind closed doors at CIA headquarters. The greatest irony of all is that with every assassination attempt dodged, the U.S. helped secure the myth of Castro. Follow Redacted, Declassified Mysteries on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to every episode of Redacted early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

From Ballant Studios in Wondery, this is Redacted Declassified Mysteries, hosted by me, Luke LaManna. A quick note about our stories. We do a lot of research, but some details and scenes are dramatized. We do a lot of research, but some details and scenes are dramatized. We used many different sources for our show, but we especially recommend 634 Ways to Kill Fidel by Fabian Escalante, and long-form articles like How the CIA Enlisted the Chicago Mob to Put a Hit on Castro, For Chicago Magazine by Brian Smith, and The Story of Marita Lorenz, Thank you. Executive producers are Mr. Ballin and Nick Witters. For Wondery, our head of sound is Marcelino Villapando. Senior producers are Laura Donna Palavoda, Dave Schilling, and Rachel Engelman.

Senior managing producer is Nick Ryan. Managing producers are Olivia Fonte and Sophia Martins. Our executive producers are Erin O'Flaherty and Marshall Louis. For Wondery.