Cohosted by the Smithsonian Associates and the International Spy museum in washington, d. C. Good morning, everyone. It is a good morning. It is a great day. After that, i think it goes downhill. Irc executive director. We are delighted to have all of you here with us. Let us look again thank the smithsonian volunteers for being with us for this event. Toyou would be kind enough turn off your cellphones and so forth. As a c. I. A. Officer who went through the church pike hearings , part of which will be discussed today by vince , attempted assassinations, none of which succeeded, which reflects incompetence or a lack of commitment. Charges almosthe seem quaint because today there is little hesitation by successive administrations of both parties in knocking off the heads of terrorist groups and the leaders right and left. As you know, on a couple of occasions, taking out an american citizen. Looking back on that, it almost seems quaint. However, it will be fun to revisit with my colleague, this who has aghton, phd in diplomatic and military history. The area of his research with scientific was scientific and technological issues or worldpments during the war ii and the early part of the cold war. Vince also got a masters in relations between the soviet union and the United States. You may get questions on that. That is a lively topic today. I should say vince has also taught extensively, both at the university level, high school level, and middle school. I would think middle school would have been the most challenging. [laughter] the worst . Ok. Good for you for being a teacher. He is a u. S. Army veteran and served in the balkans and worked in several capacities with both civilian and military intelligence. It is my pleasure to introduce my colleague, dr. Vince hou ghton. [applause] mr. Houghton thank you, peter. When we planned this series, we talked about doing these four great assassinations with one not so great assassination. Like, it wont really matter that castro is still alive, because we planned these back in october. Things have changed a little bit, but the basic idea behind this is killing fidel, or not killing fidel. For a lot of younger people, castro or the mystique of fidel castro is not as wellknown as it would be for other generations. He had not been in charge for a while. He was not this mean ogre of a , person who was leaving cuba. He was for a lot of people that remember the cold war. A lot of people that lived through that time. For the most part, castro was somewhat of a caricature of himself at the end. I love this cartoon. To me, it really spelled out the end of castros career when he had been retired. [laughter] so when he died, it was a big deal a lot of places. Many college aged students were like, ok. Some old guy who used to be a bad person died. He really did not matter a whole lot when it came to the relationship between the United States and cuba, or the broader world. Here we are going to talk a little bit differently. We will look at the c. I. A. Attempts on castros life. The number 638 is according to castros retired chief of cuban counterintelligence who in an interview said we counted 638 different attempts by the c. I. A. On castros life. The next 638 slides, we will systematically go through each i am just kidding. I included this quote on here that was great. This is from castro. If surviving assassination attempts were an olympic event, i would win the gold medal. We tried 638 times. 639 is the charm. This is a spy museum exclusive. You are all hearing this first before anybody else. I now have acquired the name of the topsecret operation that finally finally got fidel , castro. [laughter] dr. Houghton the name is a little on the nose, they are not as creative as they used to be. This is not an Operation Overlord kind of thing. But we finally paid off. Mission accomplished. [laughter] dr. Houghton we finally got fidel. There is a really funny story for me, and my mom will never let me live this down. My fascination with fidel castro started at a very early age. Fascination is the right word in this case. I grew up in miami. I am not cuban, the blonde hair, green eyes, transparent skin did not give that away. But everyone i knew, all of my friends were. Many of their fathers, mothers, grandparents were refugees from cuba. One of my best friends grandfather was a colonel in the army. These are people who came over because they had to, to miami. The funny story behind this is, my mom still lives in miami, my whole family lived down there for many years. I have lived in washington for the last 10 years. Every thanksgiving i went home to miami. That is where the family was. My wifes family is in miami as well. Every thanksgiving except for this year. The one year i said, i have done a lot of traveling, we have been out of town, lets just stay in washington this thanksgiving. And of course, fidel castro dies two days after thanksgiving. When i would have been in miami for the greatest party in the history of the universe. My mom will never let me live it down. She is like that is what happens , when you dont come home for thanksgiving. [laughter] houghton horrible dictator dies and you miss a good party. It really was, from the very beginning, a question that i had to deal with. The idea of who was this man . , he was somebody i could not reconcile the image of castro that i got from my friends families, the image of this monster with a lot of , information i read from more objective sources. The real problem you run into is there is not a lot of objective sources when it comes to fidel castro. You have people that knew him best, and many were procastro. You cannot get inside the mans head because they are skewed in certain ways. And the other people who knew him best are his arch enemies. You will not get a straight story from them either. How do you learn this . You look at things and say this is a man with an incredible following, incredible charisma who got a lot of people to follow him and do things they probably would not have otherwise. You hear all these stories about cuban education and cuban medicine being the best in the world. About how everything is free. Later in life, i would learn the stories were half true nonsense. , half cuba has some of the greatest medical schools. The doctors are not there because they have been shipped overseas. They were sent to venezuela and traded for oil. The medical care in cuba is not very good for most people. The doctors are the best in the world, but they are not there they are somewhere else. , these are the pictures of castro before he became the dictator. He is playing basketball and baseball. He wanted to be a Major League Baseball pitcher and sort of tried out. The story of the orioles is more apocryphal than anything else. They say his fastball was pretty pedestrian. He was a great athlete, good at basketball. Somebody who was an avid reader , who understood history. It was very difficult to reconcile this with the monster aboutgrown up to think based on my friends and friends family. Lets tackle the broader question of who was fidel . , this will be a controversial topic. There is no one that has a blank objective opinion about this. , there are people who think he was the worlds worst dictator. There are people who think he was a great guy. I will come down somewhere in the middle. Was he a communist . In the end, yes. Did he start out a communist . That is up for historical debate. Ive even asked this question of cuban exiles. People who fought against castro for decades. Did castro start out a communist . Most of them hedge the question because they know it is very difficult to say yes. He came to power, and he worried because hestates started nationalizing companies that we have economic ties to. Or that we owned outright. You might say, this sounds like a communist to me. Couch this inn marxist terms. He catches it as bringing it back to cuba. More of a nationalist, more of what happened in egypt. The idea was we need to bring these Companies Back to the cuban people. Could he have been a potential partner . This is another wonderful counterfactual. Anyone know what country castro visited first when he took power . Yes, he came here. A lot of people are surprised. They think he went to moscow. No, he came to the United States to try to meet with president eisenhower and Vice President nixon. Neither of whom were available. Ike was playing golf. It was purposeful, they did not want to meet with him. It was so purposeful that when castro visited new york, he could not find a hotel except for in harlem. The United States made it very difficult for him to stay in a hotel. Do not get me wrong, i am not saying we pushed him into the hands of the soviets, but there is certainly that argument. The question is broader than that. The idea is, was he ready to embrace a soviet partnership from the very beginning . I think the answer is unknown. He would not have come to the United States if he did not think there was a possibility we could potentially work with him. You call this naive, many of his close advisers did call this naive. Because simultaneously, as he was trying to meet with the americans here in the United States, his brother raul, and che guevara was in moscow. They were in moscow meeting with khrushchev. They knew that we would not allow for the nationalization of the United Fruit Company and other organizations that were billions of for american dollars economics. They knew the writing on the wall before fidel did. One way or another, once fidel castro realized there was no possible way of any kind of relationship with the United States, he does reach out to the soviet union. He puts himself in direct lets call it a direct confrontational situation with the United States. We were not in a position where we would let a soviet satellite state be so close. This was not sort of reaching out to the soviets, this was a full embrace of soviet ideology. I would like to call castro a bornagain communist, in many ways he was. When he came back from his trip and realized he would have to reach out and embrace the other major power in the world, he very quickly started adopting a lot of these marxist and leninists terminology was not using before. It worked. He and khrushchev had a strong alliance, as we know from the missile crisis and the amount of weapons and aid that went to cuba. There is a lot of history here, we will not cover all of it. We will focus more on our attempts to get rid of him. We will get to the bay of pigs, that is one of the big stories. There were schemes that were brought up and thought of prior to the bay of pigs. Some are worth noting. Before 1960, castro takes power on new years day, 1959, if you have seen godfather part two, you know the story. Prior to the Eisenhower Administration, there were some basic schemes. Scheme is a good word here for trying to take castro out. One of them involved a Radio Station. Castro the broadcasts about once a week. He would give a stirring, patriotic, this is what we are doing in cuba to the people in cuba. One of the early ideas was to spray this Radio Station was with lsd so when castro gave his broadcast he would be tripping on acid and say crazy stuff and people would stop following him. Then there was an idea of taking his cigars and putting lsd inside of his cigars so that he would also trip whenever he smoked his cigars. There was an idea to put a substance inside a cigar that would make his hair fall out. And there is another thing here, salts inside his shoes that would make your hair fall out. The idea was that Cuban Society was very macho. People thought that within the United States, if his weird fell the mesh beard if his beard fell out he would lose his machismo, and his charisma. He was called the beard. If you have no beard and eyebrows people would refuse to , follow him. These were ideas that were thought up prior to the big idea. The big idea was the fullfledged invasion, the bay of pigs. In this is when the invasion april 1961, takes place. We could talk for hours about this, i wont because we have other things to talk about. The bay of pigs was designed to take castro out in one fell swoop. The flag you are seeing here is the flag of the assault brigade. Theres a great story behind this. 2506 was named that because each of the members of the brigade had a number. Not their name. It was kind of their codename. 2506 was the number of the first man who died during training so they renamed it after him. The interesting part is, there were not as many people in the brigade. There were about 1500 people. The idea was, to start the Number System higher so that if someone was captured, you say my number is 2605. They would say, my gosh, there are 2600 of you. It was thought up by the Eisenhower Administration. It was dumped on the Kennedy Administration because kennedy was a lieutenant during world war ii and eisenhower was a fivestar general. Eisenhower said this was a good plan and kennedy did not put a lot of thought into it. That is the nicest thing we can say about kennedy. The cubans in miami dont have nice things to say about kennedy when it comes to the bay of pigs. Many of them to this day refuse to vote for a democrat because of what kennedy did many years ago. 50 every one of their statements usually has four letter words that i wont say because cspan is covering this. They are not fans. The most charitable thing we can say is, kennedy did not know what he was getting himself into. The bay of pigs operation was a failure, as we know. It is not oust castro. Many of the members of the brigade were rounded up and captured. In many respects, according to che guevara, the bay of pigs helps castro to consolidate his power inside cuba. Prior to the bay of pigs, people could speak out against castro and there were in paris on it embryonic movements of opposition against castro. After the bay of pigs he was able to crack down violently against these opposition movements and lock in his power. When che guevara met with an american ambassador, who was the secretary of state under kennedy, he said, thank you for that ridiculous operation. It allowed us to lock down power inside of cuba. Lets look quickly at what went wrong. There was a lot of rushed planning when it came to the bay of pigs. We knew through intelligence that the soviets would ship advanced weapons to you that as to cuba as part of the deal that castro has made with khrushchev. We could not wait long to figure out how to get this done right. Eventually, the cuban exiles would be dumped on the beach and running up against technologically advanced cuban weapons. As it was, in 1961, in the early stages of the bay of pigs, they were not going up against state of the art soviet equipment. The idea was to get in quickly so we are not running up against top level equipment. The broader problem was the internal security of the bay of pigs invasion. There is a lot to this. One of them is how good cuban intelligence was. As an aside, cuban intelligence is one of the best in the world. Per capita, arguably the best. They have a huge advantage. Their huge advantage is, they only have one external enemy they are focused on, us. If the c. I. A. Only had one country they had to Pay Attention to, we would be good at what we are doing. We are good, but we have to look at everybody. The cubans only needed to focus on the United States and they were very good at doing it. As many of these refugees passed over into miami, estimates vary. There are numbers that say as high as one out of every 10 refugees was a member of cuban intelligence. When the cuban refugee of miami was planning this operation, there were cuban intelligence assets inside the planning and operation passing information back to cuba. To the point that a week before it actually, five days before the bay of pigs invasion, radio moscow broadcast a message saying, cuban exiles are about to invade cuba and get castro out. You would think that the United States government would say we cannot do this. They obviously know we are coming. This is a problem. What they dont. They just kind of ignore the warning signs. The miami herald was ready to publish a piece weeks before the invasion, detailing there was a group of Training Camps planning to take out castro. And they sat on it. Haroleraldthat the new about this meant that everybody knew. Even assuming they had internal security and the planning was done well, the plan counted on a popular uprising. The idea was the 1500 men would land on the beach and the cuban people would rise up against castro. This was Wishful Thinking. There was no popular uprising, there was no rallying in the streets against fidel. You and up with the 1500 men of of the brigade defending 40 miles of beach along this long coastline against the entire cuban army and militia. It did not go well. This is a picture of me standing on the bay of pigs, this is a big open beach. This is dday. This is not something where you want to drop men on the beach 1500 against the entire cuban army. It is not a great area of operations. It is not a way to effectively start a revolution. Because if you do not get through the beachhead, which they do not you are screwed. , there is not much you can do. The problem stems down to the concept of groupthink. The plan came up during the Eisenhower Administration and kennedy says it was a good idea. Because eisenhower was a fivestar general. No one would stand up and say, mr. President this is stupid. Everyone was convinced that the cuban people would rise up, that is a great idea. Yes, these 1500 guys can start a revolution to defeat castro. That is a great idea. No one had i dont want to put it on their soldiers and say no one had the courage to stand up. I think it is more that people were Wishful Thinking. Everyone began Wishful Thinking that this would be a successful operation. Lets take a look quickly. This is huge. Inspector general of the c. I. A. Did a postmortem after the bay of pigs. It is a massive document. I want to pull ou