Smoking Out Castro

Today we wanted to share a bonus mini-episode. Here’s how George White’s LSD adventures tied in with the CIA’s increasingly bizarre attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. We’ll be back with a new installment next Wednesday.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
We've reached the halfway point in the series, and we'll
be back with a new episode next Wednesday. Today, we
wanted to share a bonus mini episode, Smoking Out Castro
for I Heart Radio. This is Operation Midnight Climax. I'm
your host, Noel Brown. George White's adventures and LSD experimentation

(00:33):
had serious consequences for national security. If he was successful
in proving LSD could be used as a bioweapon, it
could change the intelligence game forever. The end goal was
always to be one step ahead of the nation's enemies,
and for a time it seemed like LSD would be
the solution to America's problem with Fidel Castro. But White

(00:57):
was occupied with espionage of his own, which will hear
about an upcoming episodes, and so Sidney Gottlieb and the
CIA mounted a campaign involving acid and other drugs designed
to topple the Castro regime. Actually killing Castro, however, was
another matter. Entirely to do it, Gottlieb would think about

(01:18):
poison cigars, homicidal mistresses, and exploding seashells. If you don't
know a lot about Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro, you probably
know his iconography, green fatigues, a forest of a beard,
an ever present cigar clamped between his teeth. From the

(01:39):
time he seized power in nineteen fifty nine, he was
the most worrisome kind of communist for the CIA, Powerful, charismatic, and,
at least in his native Cuba, revered. He was a firebrand,
a symbol of defiance. In short, he had to go.

(01:59):
That realization brought about years of increasingly bizarre assassination attempts
on the part of the CIA. One of Gottlieb's earliest
plans was to dip cigars in a lethal poison and
slip the fatal stokeies to Castro. The poison was the
easy part. Gottlieb had chemists working like Santa's elves on

(02:21):
a variety of dangerous chemicals, including baculinum toxin, the same
kind of neurotoxic protein found in spoiled canned goods and
the faces of aging entertainers. But gottli wasn't looking to
improve Castro's looks. Inhaled, the toxin would cause difficulty breathing, paralysis,

(02:41):
and death of Castro and maybe communism itself. The hard
part was getting a deadly cigar into his hands. To
accomplish that, the CIA turned to experts in the matter
of international criminality. They met with the Mafia. A CIA

(03:01):
memo uncovered years later described quote a sensitive mission requiring
gangster type action end quote. With the approval of CIA
director Alan Dulles, the agency paid Mafia member Johnny Roselli
a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in nineteen sixty to
arrange for Castro's death. The mob had a personal score

(03:24):
to settle with Castro, who had seized mafia properties in Cuba.
Roselli enlisted fellow organized crime figure Santos Traficante. The CIA
then delivered baculinum pills and some dosed cigars to Trafficante,
who passed them along to a man named Jorge Orta,
who worked on Castro's executive staff and was a cooperative

(03:46):
co conspirator or to like to gamble and owe the
mob of debt. This was how he'd repay it. The
CIA held their collective breath, waiting to hear whether Orta
had succeeded in poisoning Castro. Not long after, reports out
of Cuba said Castro had suddenly fallen ill. This was it.

(04:09):
The US stood ready to send troops into the country,
but Castro recovered. If he had been poisoned, it wasn't enough.
More likely, Orta was more scared of Castro than the mafia,
and he couldn't bring himself to do it. The illness
was likely a coincidence. Roselli had a plan B. He

(04:31):
got more of the pills and used Dr Manuel Antonio
de Verona, leader of the anti Castro Democratic Revolutionary Front.
Verona passed them on to a waitress who worked at
a restaurant Castro loved. The idea was that he'd get
some very poor service in the form of a deadly
toxin mixed into his milkshake or ice cream. Accounts very

(04:54):
on what happened next. It's possible Castro suddenly stopped visiting
the business and the pill is when unused. Other declassified
documents state that the poison pills had been hidden in
a freezer and broke open, rendering them useless either way.
Following the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco in nine, when
Castro's forces beat back CIA funded exiles, Verona wanted out

(05:19):
of the scheme entirely. Goli wasn't about to give up.
The CIA's plans grew bolder. During intelligence meetings, the agency
discussed something other than assassination. What if Castro could be humiliated.
The leader often gave rousing speeches. Maybe a cigar dipped

(05:40):
an LSD would cause him to lose his mind in public,
shaking their confidence. Then the CIA had an even better
idea Castro broadcast some of his speeches from a radio station.
A plot was hatched to deliver an aerosolized version of
l s D to directly into the broadcast booth in Havana,

(06:02):
with Castro inhaling the odorless hallucinogen. If Castro started tripping
on national radio, he'd be discredited on you know. But

(06:33):
the CIA could never figure out how to enact the plot.
Getting to Castro was always the problem. Then they discovered
he'd soon be in New York City to visit the
United Nations. They began mulling over thallium salt, a deadly
substance once he used in rat poisons. They didn't necessarily
want him to ingest it. Once exposed to his skin,

(06:54):
it would force Castro's iconic beard to fall out as
though he were Samson, and his facial air gave him
his powers the CIA planned to spread the thallium over
his shoes and nightstand at a New York City hotel,
but the trip was canceled. There was another idea to
construct a fountain pen with a deadly tip that one

(07:16):
got as far as being given to a CIA contact
named Rolando Cubella that same day. In nineteen sixty three,
John F. Kennedy was assassinated and Cubella lost his nerve.
The CIA looked at Castro's habits. He liked to go diving,
so a scuba suit and breathing apparatus contaminated with tuberculosis

(07:37):
and a deadly fungus was designed. The CIA believed that
could offer the scuba suit as a gift to Castro
when negotiating for the release of prisoners in the Bay
of Pigs Aftermath. When that proved difficult, the CIA started
looking into exploding seashells. If the CIA could find one
so spectacular, so beautiful that Castro would have to pay

(08:00):
get up then It never happened, but the CIA did
eventually find someone to get close enough to Castro to
expose into the CIA's chemical ingenuity. They recruited a woman

(08:23):
named Marita lorenz A lover of Castro's who intended to
slip poison into his drink. She hid the poison and
a container of cold cream, but had trouble fishing it out,
which made Castro suspicious. Castro began questioning her and then
handed her a gun to use instead. He told her
that no one could kill him, and well he wasn't wrong.

(08:47):
Years after the fact, a CIA agent who kept one
of the botulinum talks and cigars brought it out of
storage to test its remaining potency. It was still lethal
even to the touch. But what got even the CIA
learned was that it didn't matter how dangerous the weapon
was if he didn't have the right person for the job.
Maybe all they were missing was George White. A happy

(09:11):
and healthy Castro busied himself allowing the Soviet Union to
build nuclear testing sites in Cuba, leading to a standoff
between the US and Russia that flirted with war. He
accused the United States of sabotage in Cuba's crops and
introducing dangay fever to its population, claiming it was biological warfare.

(09:31):
He went on to rattle the nerves of eleven U
S presidents, reigning for nearly fifty years before old age
began to mimic the effects of the CIA's plans. The
speeches became less coherent. He passed away in twenty six
of what one assumes were natural causes. During his life,

(09:52):
Castro was not only aware of the CIA's foiled plots,
he was delighted by them. He ordered a Havana museum
to create exhibits about the failed attempts. Their Cubans could
visit and get a tour of the CIA's inability to
eliminate their target. Castro thought there were over six hundred
attempts on his life, roughly thirty by the CIA. In

(10:15):
sent an investigation, the CIA swore it had only been
five or six. No matter how many times he tried.
Sidney Gottlieb never got his man. As it turns out,
he was more effective and hastening the demise of the
CIA's own employees, and that would make George White's life
very difficult. Indeed, that's next time on Operation Midnight climax

(11:01):
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