Bobby Kennedy's war on Castro - CIA plot to kill Fidel Castro

Washington Monthly, Dec, 1995 by Evan Thomas

The amicable divorce from the mob did not mean an end to attempts to kill Castro. FitzGerald was forced to come up with more schemes. His inclination in these matters was to exploit the hobbies of his targets. With Indonesian President Sukarno, it had been airline stewardesses. With Castro, it was underwater swimming.

Before FitzGerald arrived to take over the Cuban operation, a CIA officer had suggested killing Castro by poisoning his diving suit. The Technical Services Division (TSD) purchased a suit, which it contaminated with fungus spores that would cause a chronic skin disease. The mouthpiece on the breathing apparatus was treated with tuberculosis bacilli. To deliver the suit, the CIA wanted to recruit James B. Donovan, the American lawyer negotiating the return of the Bay of Pigs prisoners from Cuba. Donovan had already given Castro a (noncontaminated) wet suit, however, and the scheme was discarded. It is a mystery how anyone imagined that the plot would not be easily traced--the suit was to be a gift, after all, of the United States.

FitzGerald continued to look beneath the waves for a method of eliminating his target. His idea was an exploding seashell, to be placed on the ocean floor where Castro liked to go skin diving, "He came in with this bright idea," Halpern recalled. FitzGerald's staff asked how he planned to make sure that Castro picked up the right shell. "Put a neon sign on it?" asked Halpern. TSD had boasted they could make a bomb out of anything, but this request stumped even Dr. Gottlieb's men. "Des thought this was a put-up job by me and TSD," said Halpern. "He was really mad. `The President wants this,' he said."

Understanding the relationship between FitzGerald and Robert Kennedy is necessary if one is to make sense of FitzGerald's actions as chief of covert action for Cuba. RFK bewildered FitzGerald. At first, he found the President's younger brother to be bumptious. But as FitzGerald watched the younger Kennedy go to work on the CIA, he was encouraged by Kennedy's boldness, his willingness to cut through the bureaucracy and demand results. But he also found Kennedy imperious and a little reckless. In their father, FitzGerald's children observed wariness and ambivalence toward Kennedy--contempt mixed with deference and even uncharacteristic subservience.

Bobby was a force of nature, willing to bully anyone. "He could sack a town and enjoy it," Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell Taylor remarked after watching the attorney general chew out the Special Group, all senior government officials. "Bob Kennedy was very difficult to deal with," said Thomas Parrott, the Special Group's secretary. "He was arrogant; he knew it all; he knew the answer to everything. He sat there, tie down, chewing gum, his feet up on the desk. His threats were transparent. It was, `If you don't do it, I'll tell my big brother on you.'"

There is more than a little irony to the picture of FitzGerald manipulated by an amateur gamesman. That is precisely the way the "professionals" in the agency had felt about FitzGerald when he arrived from Wall Street in 1950. The difference is that FitzGerald, though cold at times, was a gentleman, while Kennedy, though capable of warmth, was not. FitzGerald had become a professional over time, and he had reason to bridle at the cavalier quality of Bobby Kennedy's leadership. Although FitzGerald was too responsive to Kennedy for Halpern's taste, he was also no pushover. FitzGerald was a formidable figure, and he resisted some of Kennedy's more unreasonable demands. At a meeting on April 3, 1963, RFK proposed sending commando raids of a hundred to five hundred men to blow up factories and attack military bases. FitzGerald calmly noted that "if such groups could be landed, it would probably be impossible for them to survive any length of time."