The CIA’s Plots to Assassinate Castro: Part I

Twenty-fourth Chapter in a series chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis

The sixth chapter of this series summarized the Eisenhower and Kennedy campaigns to remove Castro from power (). Chapters 24 and 25 take up the most extreme lengths to which those campaigns went: the CIA’s plots to assassinate Castro.

Castro was not the CIA’s First Target

Castro was not the first post-World War II leader whom the United States had decided to replace. In 1953 the CIA engineered the overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq. In 1954, the CIA forced Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz into exile. Neither leader was assassinated, however.

The Mind-Set of the 1950s

By 1953, an intense fear of a communist take-over had thoroughly infected American society. Two documents reveal that this fear had infected the highest echelons of the U.S. government.

NSC 158

In late June 1953, spurred by an unsuccessful uprising in East Germany, the National Security Council (NSC) called for increased efforts to aggravate existing unrest in the USSR’s satellites (also called “puppet governments”) and to foment new unrest there. One eye-popping clause in this NSC report (“NSC 158”) says the U.S. should “Encourage elimination of key puppet officials.”

“Elimination” is a euphemism for assassination, murder, or other forms of permanent removal. “Encourage,” a much vaguer term, seems to point to American efforts to persuade foreigners to do the eliminating. The identity of the “eliminators” is beside the point, however: by mid-1953 the United States government had committed itself, on paper, to killing officials of communist governments to gain U.S. ends.

The Doolittle Report

In late July 1954, President Eisenhower asked Lieutenant General James H. Doolittle, USAF-Ret, to study the CIA’s covert operations. Doolittle and three colleagues submitted their highly critical report on 30 September.

In their “Introduction,” the panel writes something even more startling than the “elimination” proposal in NSC 158 (emphasis added):

“It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand[,] and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.”

Personal Comment

Focus on the Doolittle panel’s declaration that to prevent “world domination by whatever means,” the United States must outdo the communists at their own game—to become even worse than the communists, in other words, however “repugnant” such a transformation may be. What are the implications of that statement for a society that says it values the rule of law?

At the end of his February 22, 1946 Long Telegram, dispatched from the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the American diplomat George Kennan warned the State Department that Americans

“…must have [the] courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger that can befall us in coping with this problem of Soviet communism, is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”

By 1954 we had made that transformation.

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Sources

The overthrow of the Mossadeq government of Iran and the Arbenz government of Guatemala re discussed in Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes” The History of the CIA. New York: Random House, 2008. Mossadeq: 92-104. Arbenz: 106-117.

Weiner mentions NSC 158 on p. 86. The document can be downloaded from the national Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB50/doc74.pdf.

What I call the Doolittle Report can be downloaded from http://www.foia.cia.gov/helms/pdf/doolittle_report.pdf .

Just about any good web search engine will turn up a copy of the Long Telegram. The following page from the Harry S. Truman Library web site contains a link to the Long Telegram: http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/coldwar/index.php