President Barack Obama has spent the last few days in Cuba as part of his effort to normalize relations with the island that has endured a 50 year embargo. The Chicago Tribune reported that Obama advocated for “human rights, including freedom of speech and assembly and religion” during the trip to which President Raul Castro countered that he believes human rights include universal health care and free education. Castro has also been critical of the existence of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, which still holds suspected terrorists who have never been charged with a crime.
As we all know, Castro’s brother, Fidel, took over the Cuban government in the late 1950s, and then declared himself a Communist to the dissatisfaction of the American government. In an effort to overthrow Castro, the CIA launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation. Undeterred, the CIA contemplated other means to unseat Castro. In declassified documents posted last month by the National Security Archive (NSA), housed at George Washington University, we can read about the CIA’s plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. The trove of documents come from multiple sources, such as the Gerald Ford Presidential Library and the Rockefeller Commission of 1975.
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB543-Ford-White-House-Altered-Rockefeller-Commission-Report/
During President Gerald Ford’s tenure, The White House responded to reports that the CIA had planned assassinations. And what do we learn from the NSA? Well, Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, aka Satan’s Emissary on Earth (thanks, Al Jourgensen), edited the Rockefeller Commission’s report by “inserting recommendations the Commission had not approved, eliminating ones that it had, and significantly moving around passages of the text.” The most significant edit was the removal of an 89 page document, labeled “Top Secret”, called “Summary of Facts: Investigation of CIA Involvement in Plans to Assassinate Foreign Leaders.”
On page 16 of the Top Secret report, “Phase I” planned to assassinate Castro “by placing botulism pills in his food.” Page 38 explains that “taking positive action” against “Fidel, Raul, and Che Guevara” would lead the Cuban Government “leaderless and probably brainless.” Pages 62 and 63 discuss other CIA plans such as giving “Fidel Castro a contaminated skindiving suit. It was known that Fidel Castro liked to skindive. The CIA plan was to dust the inside of the suit with a fungus producing madera foot, a disabling and chronic skin disease, and also contaminating the suit with tuberculosis bacilli in the breathing apparatus.” Another plan was to place a “booby-trap spectacular seashell which would be submerged in an area where Castro often skindived. The seashell would be loaded with explosives to blow apart when the shell was lifted.”
President Obama prefers to kill the boogeyman with drones.
PS: This is classic!
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nsa/elvis/elnix.html
Of all the requests made each year to the NSA, one item has been requested more than any other. More than the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, is the photograph of Elvis Presley and President Nixon shaking hands at The White House. Check out all three tabs, including the photographs, which were taken during a war on drugs campaign! I kid you not.
And here’s newsreel footage of Fidel Castro visiting New York in 1959.
Historian Jim Rasenberger has written a great book about Cuba and America and the Bay of Pigs called, THE BRILLIANT DISASTER: JFK, Castro, and America’s Doomed Invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs
which is definitely worth checking out. For more information, visit the author’s website.
