Now Playing
Mongoose: The Assassination Plots That Unravelled a Superpower
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Operation Mongoose promised to remove Fidel Castro by any means necessary — exploding cigars, poisoned milkshakes, mob hitmen, and a fungus-laced diving suit. This is the story of how Cold War fear dismantled the CIA's judgment entirely.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
What Operation Mongoose reveals isn't just the story of a government trying to kill one man. It's the story of what happens when the most powerful intelligence apparatus in the world loses its strategic bearings entirely.
The formal creation of Operation Mongoose came in November nineteen sixty-one. The man Kennedy put in charge was General Edward Lansdale, a counterinsurgency specialist who had worked in the Philippines and Vietnam.
The CIA's Technical Services Division produced some of the most operationally bizarre material in the history of the agency during this period. A box of Castro's favourite cigars, contaminated with botulinum toxin.
Assassination was only one component of Mongoose. That's worth stating clearly, because the popular memory of the operation tends to collapse it into the killing plots.
The Cuban Missile Crisis of October nineteen sixty-two shut Mongoose down, at least in its most aggressive form. When Soviet nuclear missiles were discovered on Cuban soil, the entire frame changed.
The Church Committee findings, published in nineteen seventy-five, were the first time the American public received a systematic account of what the government had been doing in their name. The committee concluded that the CIA had engaged in assassination plots against foreign leaders, that senior officials had been aware, and that the structure of plausible deniability had been deliberately designed to prevent accountability.
The failure to kill Castro is, in one sense, just an operational story. The better question is what the attempt reveals about how the American national security state was operating during the Kennedy years.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.