Course, part of which will be discussed today by vince. The attempted assassinations, none of which succeeded which reflects a lack of confidence, we will hear about today. Looking back at that time, the charges almost seemed quite quaint. There is very little success in knocking off these leaders right and left. As you know, at least on a couple of occasions, taking out an american citizen. Looking back at that time it almost seems quaint. It will be fun to revisit with my colleague who has a phd from the university of maryland and democrat diplomatic in American History. Areareas of Research Scientific and technological issues during world war ii and the early part of the cold war. He also got a masters in relations between the soviet union and the United States. You might get questions on the that. That is a lively topic. I should also say that he has taught extensively at the university level, high school level, and will School Middle school. I would think middle school would be the most challenging, the worst. Good for you for being a teacher. He is a u. S. Army veteran and serves served and worked in several capacities in military intelligence. Let me introduce dr. Vince houghton. [applause] vince this is interesting lien of, interestingly enough, we talked about doing these four great assassinations with one not so great thrown in. Things have changed a little bit. The basic idea behind this is killing fidel, or not killing fidel. For a lot of younger people in which i deal with here at the museum, castro, or the mystique of field fidel castro is not as wellknown as it was for other generations. He had not been in charge for a while. He was not a mean ogre of a person leading cuba. A lot of people who lived through this time, for the most castro was somewhat of a caricature of himself. I love this cartoon, to me it spells out the end of his career once he had retired. When he died it was a big deal in a lot of places. For a lot of college aged students or older, it was like, some old guy who used to be a bad person died. He didnt matter a whole lot when it came to the relationship between the u. S. And cuba. Here we will talk differently. We will look at the cia attempts on Fidel Castros life. According to castros retired they of intelligence said counted 638 attempts by the cia on his life. Next 14 hours and 638 slides we will systematically go through im kidding. I included this quote. It is from castro. Attempts assassination if it were an Olympic Event i would win the gold medal. 639 is a charm. This is a spy museum exclusive. You will hear this first before anyone. I have now acquired the name of a topsecret operation that finally, finally got fidel castro [laughter] vince the name is a little on the nose. We finally paid off. Mission accomplished. We finally got fidel. It is a funny story, for me. My mother will that never let me live it down. My fascination started early. Fascination is the right word. I grew up in miami. I am not cuban. The blonde hair, green eyes, transparent skin not give that away. Everyone i knew were. Many of their fathers, mothers, grand parents were refugees from cuba. One of my best friends grandfather was a kernel in the army. These are people that came over because they had to. The funny story behind this is my mom still lives in miami. My whole family was down there for many years. I have been here for 10 years. I have lived in washington for 10 years. Every thanksgiving i went home to miami. My wife is in miami as well. Every thanksgiving except this year. The one year i say, i have done a lot of traveling, we have been out of town, lets stay in washington. Of course, fidel castro dies two days after thanksgiving. Miami. Have been in my mother will never let me live it down. Its like, thats what happens when you do not come home for thanksgiving. A horrible dictator dies and you miss a party. It really was, from the very beginning, a question that i had to deal with. This idea of, who was this man. He was somebody who as a historian, was somebody that i could not reconcile the image of castro that i got for my friends families. The image of this monster with a lot of information that i had read from more objective sources. The real problem you run into is there are not a lot of objective sources when it comes to him. You have the people that knew him best, many are still procastro. You cannot get inside the mans head. The other people who knew him best were his arch enemies. You will not get a straight story from them either. You kind of look at things and say, this is a man. 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 of these stories about cuban education and medicine being the best in the world. About how everything is free. Later in life i would learn those stories were half true, half nonsense. 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 because the doctors are the best in the world, but they are somewhere else. You look at things like, these are the pictures of castro before he became the dictator. Playing basketball and baseball. He wanted to be a Major League Baseball picture. He sort of tried out. The story of the orioles, that was popular. His fastball was history and. Pedestrian. Was good at last couple basketball, an avid reader, he understood history. It was difficult to kind of reconcile this with the monster i had been taught to think about based on my friends. Lets tackle the broader question of who he is. This is going to be an incredibly controversial topic. There is no one who has a blank objective opinion. There are people who think he was the worlds worst dictator. There are people who think he was a great guy. Im going to be in the middle. Was he a communist . In the end, yes. Did he start out a communist . That is up for debate. I was even asked the question of cuban exiles, people who fought against castro, i said, did he start out a communist . Most of them hedge the question because they know it is difficult to say yes. He came to power was worried because he started nationalizing companies that we have economic ties to. You might say this sounds like a communist to me. He did not put this in marxist terms. He counts this is bringing it back to cuba. More of a nationalist, more of what happened in egypt. 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 straight to moscow. No, he came to the United States and tried to meet with president eisenhower and Vice President nixon. Neither of home was available. 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 in new york. 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 and actually many of his close advisers did call this naive. Simultaneously, as he was trying to meet with the americans here in the United States, his brother raul, and che guevara , one of his top lieutenants, were in moscow meeting with nikita khrushchev. They knew that we would not allow for the nationalization of the United Fruit Company and other organizations that were billions of dollars for american 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. Direct, himself in lets call it a direct confrontational situation with the United States. We were not any 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 on break 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 this marxist and leninist terminology that he was not using before. And it worked. He and khrushchev had a strong alliance, as we know from things such as the cuban missile crisis and the amount of weapons and aid that went to cuba. There is a lot of history here, we will not cover it all. We will focus more on our attempts to get rid of him. We are going to 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 of them are worth noting. 1960, castro takes power essentially 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 gave 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 with ellis d. 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 fallout, and there is another thing here as well. Salt that makes your hair fallout. Was that Cuban Society is very macho. People thought that within the beard felles is his out he would lose his machismo, and his charisma. He was called the beard and if he had no more eyebrows or beard 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 peaks in april 1961. Gs in april 1961. This is when the invasion 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. 2506 was named that because each of the members of the brigade had a number. Not their name. It was their codename. 2506 was the number of the first man who died during training so they renamed the prograde after him brigade 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. Oh my gosh, there is 2600 of you. Up by theught Eisenhower Administration and it was essentially dumped on the Kennedy Administration because kennedy was a lieutenant during world war ii and eisenhower was fivestar general. Eisenhower said this was a good plan and kennedy did not put 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 refuse to vote for a democrat because of what jfk did 50 years ago. 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 does 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 actually helps castro to consolidate his power inside cuba. Prior to the bay of pigs, people could speak out against castro and there were embryonic movements of opposition against castro. After the bay of pigs, he was able to crack down violently against these Opposition Movement 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. Because 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 show that the soviets were going to ship advanced weapons 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 stateoftheart, 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 as we can 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 is how good cuban counterintelligence was. Sidesomewhat tangential cuban intelligence is one of the , best in the world. Per capita, arguably the best in the world. Their huge advantage is, they only have one external enemy they are focused on, us. If the cia only had one country they had to Pay Attention to, we would be good at what we are doing. We are good anyway, but we have to look at everybody. The cubans only have to focus on the United States and they are good at doing it. As many of these refugees passed through the florida straits and 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 operation,g this 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, kind of the equivalent of radio for europe or voices for america, broadcast a message saying, cuban exiles are out to invade cuba and get castro out. You would think that the United States government would be like, this is blown. We cannot do this. They obviously know we are coming. They just ignored the warning signs. The miami herald was ready to publish a piece weeks before the invasion, detailing there was a group of Training Camps in guatemala of troops planning to take out castro. They sat on it. The fact that the herald knew about this, they were not in any topsecret briefings. It meant that everybody knew about this. Even assuming they had been internal security, assuming the planning was done well, the plan counted on a Popular Uprising inside cuba. 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. So really what you end up with a brigade 2506 defending 1400 miles of beach along this long coastline against the entire cuban army plus the 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 just drop 1500 relatively well armed men on the beach 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 to the beachhead, which they dont, you are screwed. You will be pushed back into the sea and there is not much you can do. The problem stems down to the group effect. The plan came up during the Eisenhower Administration and kennedy says it was a good idea. No one would stand up and say, mr. President , this is really stupid. Everybody was convinced that the cuban people will 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 just Wishful Thinking and everyone began Wishful Thinking that this would be a successful operation. Lets look at this quickly. This is huge. The Inspector General of the cia the baystmortem after of pigs invasion. I want to pull out big key issues to show why this goes bad. The cia exceeded its capabilities. We have to remember this is the , cia in 1961. 1950s, the cia was argued a little too big for its britches. They had successful operations around the world overthrowing governments in guatemala, iran, fixing operations in italy, but they are not yet the cia we know and love today. They are not capable of running a massive paramilitary operation in 1961. Theyve get really good of it during vietnam and the secret war in laos. By 1961 they are not quite there yet. This is not the same thing as fixing an election in italy, this is a massive paramilitary operation. The idea that the cia is going to run this operation and take out a very popular president was laughable, at this point. Lets go to the next bullet point here. Failure to confidently collect and analyze intelligence about cuban forces. That is a problem when they are not collecting and analyzing cuban forces. That is the basics. Peter can tell you that is probably plan number one, you should be doing if you are thinking about invading cuba. They did