While much of the attention regarding the documents that have been released about the Kennedy assassination has focused on the issue of whether Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole perpetrator or whether there was a larger conspiracy that was covered up, my attention was drawn to an item that did not get much attention and that was about one of the plans that the CIA developed to undermine Fidel Castro. We already knew that the US, the very country that is now up in arms about the possibility of the Russian government interfering in US elections by doing things such as the dastardly practice of buying ads on Facebook, tried many times to actually murder Castro.
But the newly released documents say that the CIA floated even more criminal ideas.
After Castro’s revolution succeeded and thousands of Cubans fled to South Florida, the agency actually considered murdering a boatload of refugees, assassinating exile leaders, and planting bombs in Miami — all so Castro could be blamed for the chaos.
The basic idea was to turn world opinion against Castro and possibly justify a U.S. military invasion by pinning the atrocities on him. The details of the sinister plot are included in a summary about Operation Mongoose, a 1960 covert op hatched by the CIA under President Dwight Eisenhower with the aim of toppling Communist Cuba.
The campaign was included in a report on “pretexts” the U.S. could conjure up to justify a military intervention in Cuba. The paper was sent by Gen. Edward Landsdale, a top Cold War officer who worked with the CIA to plot out Operation Mongoose; he sent the report, which included nine other “pretexts,” on April 12, 1962, to Gen. Maxwell Taylor, who would soon become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
So they were planning to murder a large number of innocent people in Miami, including a whole boatload of refugees, just to make Castro look bad. It appears that this plan was thankfully not carried out but it is perfectly consistent with other murderous plans in other parts of the world that the CIA did carry out.
Truly the US is the ‘exceptional nation’ that its leaders love to boast about, just not in the way that those speakers suggest.
They had all kinds of goofy plots to kill Castro -- that’s why there was some concern Castro had had Kennedy killed. They were projecting.
Are you referring to Operation Mongoose or Operation Northwoods? When one reads about the latter, it does make you wonder if the conspiracy theorists were on to something…
I like “utter depravity” as a descriptor and intend to use it.
chigau @ # 2 -- Pls alert us at the release of your next album!