How on Earth did the CIA fail to assassinate Fidel Castro 638 times? In the sweltering summer of 1963, at the height of Cold War paranoia, CIA agent Robert "Bob" Maheu is sent to Cuba on a suicide mission aptly titled Operation Good Times: to humiliate Fidel Castro during a live television broadcast by dosing the dictator with LSD and making his beard fall out. So they tried to remove it with a common depilatory. As Lorenz recalled, “It’s some kind of shit the CIA gives you, that makes you feel very strong, courageous, indifferent. The cafeteria of the Havana Libre Hotel. Thus, he preemptively acted to nullify their plans. The cigars were delivered to an "an unidentified person" in 1961, according to the subcommittee, but it's unclear what happened to them after that. Much of this can be found within a cache of recently declassified documents pertaining to the JFK assassination that are also, a treasure trove of formerly top-secret information. “The most nervous I have ever been was in that room, because I had agents on standby and I had to watch my timing. Castro was ninety years old, he lived a long life in direct defiance to the CIA, which attempted to kill him over six hundred times known. Escalante even tabulated how many attempts were made by each U.S. president: Dwight D. Eisenhower (1959-1961): 38; John F. Kennedy (1961-1963): 42; Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-1969): 72; Richard Nixon (1969-1974): 184 Beyond JFK, on June 19, 1975, Giancana was assassinated by mob hitmen. The film, which is mainly centered on Castro's former protector Fabian Escalante, claimed that over 600 plots were foiled with the majority being attempted by Cuban exiles that had been trained by the CIA. Nope, you can take the word of the CIA, the House of Representatives, the Senate, FBI and countless investigations conducted by the U.S. government, too. Both of them were members of the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. I Was the Man at the Clapperboard for Orson Welles’ Legendary Drunk Wine Commercial, A Salute to ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome),’ Tina Turner’s Forgotten ‘Mad Max’ Anthem, Emilio Estevez and the Scourge of the ‘Brat Pack’ Straitjacket, The Unabashed Male Beauty (and Sexism) of ’80s Hard Rock, The ‘Stingy Men Association’ Walks a Fine Line Between Humor and Hate. I'm guessing the actual number of attempts was probably exaggerated, but still, what happened? ... 4 did a documentary film on it called 638 Ways To Kill Castro. Intelligence officials thought they could use Castro's love of scuba-diving to topple him. The poisoned cigars, however, were never given to Castro. Instead, they wound up in the safe of a CIA deputy director. The idea was to have respected Cold War-era lawyer James Donovan — who’d been tasked with handling negotiations for the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners — give Castro the wetsuit as a goodwill gift. (In the CIA’s own words: “Can we plausibly deny that we plotted with gangster elements to assassinate Castro? Each time he was saved, people got more faith in him. Whether that figure is accurate or not, Cuba's iconic dictator provided an almost-mythical adversary for what became an obsessive, error-prone assassination campaign by the CIA. Production. 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