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On this day in 1962, two CIA officers met in New York with Las Vegas mobster Johnny Roselli to discuss plans for assassinating Fidel Castro. Roselli, an illegal immigrant from Italy who had worked for Al Capone in Chicago in the 1920s, shaken down producers in Hollywood in the 1940s, and skimmed the profits from casinos in Las Vegas and Havana in the 1950s, promised the CIA that he could find someone in Cuba who would be willing to kill Castro for the right price. The April 1962 conspiracy involved poison pills, which distinguishes it from the other CIA plots against Castro using poisoned cigars, bombs, exploding seashells, deadly fungi, LSD spray, mafia hit men, depilatory dust, and poison-filled syringes disguised as ballpoint pens.
The plots against Castro began in August 1960, during the Eisenhower administration, when some CIA officials decided to try to “undermine Castro’s charismatic appeal by sabotaging his speeches,” in the words of a U.S. Senate report. They plotted to spray his broadcast studio with hallucinogens; to douse his cigars with psychedelic drugs; and to dust his shoes with thallium salts, which would destroy his image as “The Beard.” Soon the CIA decided that these assaults on Castro’s image were inadequate, and moved on to actual assassination plots. After the first few schemes failed, agency officials thought of calling in some men who despised Castro as much as they did — and had considerable experience with killing people.
Castro had chased the mafia out of Havana in 1959 along with the other capitalists. As a result, some of America’s most notorious criminals were pleased to cooperate with their government in disposing of Cuba’s comandante. The CIA viewed Sam Giancana, the mob boss of Chicago, and Santo Trafficante, the mafia chieftain of Miami and formerly of Cuba, as “businessmen with interests in Cuba who saw the elimination of Castro as the first essential step to the recovery of their investments.” The attorney general saw them as two of the most dangerous men in the country and put them on his ten most-wanted list. In one of many ironies, the FBI was hunting them down while the CIA was hiring them to commit crimes.
At the meeting 47 years ago today, the CIA agents gave Roselli poison pills to drop in Castro’s drinks. When that scheme failed, they came up with more creative options. CIA scientists customized a diving suit for Castro by dusting it with a skin-destroying fungus and contaminating its breathing tubes with the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. They also developed an exploding seashell to be placed in Castro’s favorite scuba-diving bay. On November 22, 1963, as President John Kennedy was waving at the crowds in Dallas, one of his CIA operatives was delivering a hypodermic needle concealed in a ballpoint pen to a Cuban in Paris. The CIA planned for the Cuban to fill the pen with poison and stab Castro with it.
As I discuss in my new book, the Castro plots provide great source material for conspiracy theories about the assassination of John Kennedy. It’s easy – though not necessarily correct – to spin off theories about tales of betrayal, revenge, and retribution involving characters like Giancana, Roselli, and the target of the plots himself. Everyone has a favorite theory. For his part, Lyndon Johnson believed that “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.”
The plots were thoroughly documented in the 1975 report of Frank Church’s Senate Select Committee to Investigate Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (a misleading title, as the plots are not alleged but proven in the report itself). The report is essential reading for anyone interested in the secret foreign policy of this period, with its tales of undercover agents, with their unworkable James Bond devices, venturing into Johnny Roselli’s underworld.
The plots did not end well for Giancana or Roselli. Giancana was gunned down in his kitchen just days before he was to testify to the Church Committee in 1975. Roselli gave a colorful accounting of his many exploits to the committee, but did not show up when they recalled him for more testimony. His dismembered body was later found floating in an oil drum off the coast of Miami. But Fidel managed to outwit them all, and reminded us yesterday that he is not dead yet.
I know I’m a bit late noting this but given our past interest I want to remark this development in the John Yoo episode:
Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed…. The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon’s general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.
Though I do wonder what experiences led them to charge for extra emails:
We discourage any lengthy-frequent-repetitive contacts with this journal. For the complexity of AEQ review process see Flowchart. The Journal’s ten year publishing experience suggests maximum 8 e-mail/postal contacts
between the author and AEQ as the norm
- 1) submission
- 2) submission clarification
- 3) copyright
- 4) extra contact
You must complete the above 3 in maximum 4 e-mail/postal contacts. Otherwise, your submission
will be rejected or rescheduled for consideration until the next available issue.
- 5) reviews
- 6) reviews clarification
- 7) final copy
- 8) extra contact
Exceeding eight contacts may disqualify your submission from further consideration or require $45 redactory fee. as it drives up journal’s administrative cost above the
forty-fivefifty-seven dollars average per one submission.
Hence, in order to work efficiently, we had to establish “eight contacts limit” per one submission.
Love the strikethrough of the “forty-five” in the last paragraph. “See how much our costs are going up!”
Are there charges for facebooking them? Twitter?
The flowchart link leads to the following (after the jump, so as not to suck up the entire front page).
That’s the program title. If you’re really, really interested in listening to me talk about the New Deal at some length, with France Kassing on our local one and only KDVS, it’s here.
[A follow-up to this post. Cross-posted here.]
In counterinsurgencies, military effort can create the conditions for ending the war, but it (usually) can’t end the war by itself. That depends on the political accommodation of enough of the constituencies supporting the insurgents to undercut their military effort. Without that, the insurgency is likely to start again. In the Philippines in 1899-1902, the US was careful to recruit insurgents and their supporters to the American side through a variety of methods. A number of local warlords “surrendered” to American forces and then were immediately appointed governors of their areas. At a lower level, insurgent soldiers who surrendered were given amnesty and sent back to their homes. The result was that the Filipino insurgency was defeated not only militarily, but had the oxygen of support sucked away from them.
In Iraq, the political tensions have largely been between the Shi’ite majority, which dominates the Iraqi government, and the Sunni minority, which had held power in Hussein’s government. The Anbar Awakening was a reconciliation between American forces and the Sunni militias which had been fighting against them. The U.S. recruited the militias over to our side, with generous payments to leaders and militia members alike. The Sunnis, for their part, saw this as an opportunity to have influence in the larger polity. The Awakening, and the effectiveness of renewed counterinsurgency efforts in Baghdad essentially brought the insurgency down to a manageable level in 2007-2008.
Read the rest of this entry »
America is too exceptional; and American soldiers are people too.
Updated: here’s Obama’s ‘exceptionalism’ answer:
In one sense, of course, it’s nearly vacuous. But in “threading the needle”, as someone put it, in building a principled frame within which cake may be both eaten and had, it resembles the lightning-strikes of insight familiar from psychotherapy or religion.
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Forty-one years ago today, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King, Jr. dead on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. To memorialize this grim anniversary, LIFE has released a gallery of photographs taken at the Lorraine on April 4, 1968 and the following day. For some reason, the second and ninth pictures (of the Lorraine’s sign and of the contents of Dr. King’s briefcase) hit me the hardest. Perhaps it’s the juxtaposition of that Americana and American history (the images of the blood-soaked balcony and of Dr. King’s friends and colleagues from the SCLC mourning his loss) that’s so affecting. I honestly don’t know.
On this day in 1916, the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed decision on Woodrow Wilson’s nomination of Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court of the United States so it could wrangle further over whether he had “the temperament” to be a Justice. Anti-Semites.
Or perhaps they were more than anti-Semitic. Maybe the real problem was that Brandeis, as Senator Thomas Walsh (Democrat of Montana) said, “has exposed the iniquities of men in high places in our financial system. He has not stood in awe of the majesty of wealth.”
What had Brandeis done? He had, of course, stood for laborers’ rights numerous times, but principally he had written Other People’s Money: and How the Bankers Use It (hint: not well).
In it he included his earlier Harper’s Weekly article, “A Curse of Bigness”, where he argued that banks had made excessively large securities issues.
Size, we are told, is not a crime. But size may, at least, become noxious by reason of the means through which it was attained or the uses to which it is put.
Brandeis proposed limiting the uses of securities. “[W]e shall, by such legislation, remove a potent factor in financial concentration. Decentralization will begin.”
In other parts of the book, Brandeis goes on to challenge the conventional stereotype of the banker as conservative—on the contrary, he noted their “financial recklessness”—and he argued that Americans had systematically been “confusing the functions of banker and business man.” He argued for a system of smaller, more local banks.
I’ve been thinking of this lately, as our old friend urbino (who, alas, doesn’t come around here no more) has beaten almost every major pundit to the punch in arguing that if banks have grown too big to fail, then perhaps they ought to be stopped from supersizing themselves. (urbino: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.)
*You didn’t think I would stoop to calling this post “Size matters”, did you?
I remember as a teenager feeling completely betrayed when I realized that the Just Say No Just-So Story that everyone who tried pot ended up friendless and alone and with Bs on their homework was false! Some even went to Harvard! The war on drugs would clearly be the dumbest policy we’d come up as a society with if only it didn’t have so much competition.
That said, I don’t think much of this kind of anecdote argument. Not that I don’t agree with the conclusions. But I suspect that the productivity of Wilkinson and others like him has less to do with the fact that pot isn’t dangerous and more to do with the fact that if one is well-educated and well-off one has to really screw up before anything affects one’s expected life outcomes. They have a safety net made of money. Upper middle class kids enjoy heroin and cocaine, too, but I wouldn’t take their general success as a reason to legalize either of those. Even if the kids go to Harvard!
Still, if I imagine a world where coffee, alcohol, and marijuana had been discovered and analyzed chemically yesterday, I have a hard time imagining that anyone in that world would be all that worried about marijuana.
Though as a parent I have the predictably mixed feelings toward Elmo, I can nevertheless appreciate the brilliance of Kevin Clash (see, for example, this interview).
And this is even better:
On this day in 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey premiered.
I’ve revisited it a few times over the years, and I always have different reactions, but they usually include
1. Where’s my goddamn moon shuttle?
2. “Bell.” Heh. “Pan-Am.” <snif>
3. We really are, as a culture, poorer for not having the Soviets as staple villains. (Not that you can’t muff that, too.)
My favorite recycling of 2001 is of course Wall-E. But I really wanted to point you to my favorite critical reading of 2001, by Michael Bérubé—part 1 and part 2. If you haven’t read it, please do.
And when you do, let me know: do you think the silence of the movie’s final chapter covers the “unmentionable” or “what goes without saying”?
Conservatives are upset at the classless behavior of the Obamas when they met with the Queen and Prince Philip today, and I must say, they have a point. An iPod loaded with show tunes and the footage she requested of her 2007 visit to the States? Show tunes? Even if they matched the ones in the signed Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook, and even if that songbook would be rare given that Rodgers died in 1979, the Queen is a cultural icon of taste and sophistication. She would never stoop to listening to, much less having songs from hackneyed musicals performed during some sort of formal summit. Outrageous . . . but not the worst of the Obamateurisms the world witnessed today:
He is a complete idiot, but OMG did you see Michelle’s arms?
She’s actually quite petit and feminine, for a sasquatch.
At least Lady MacBeth had the decency to cover up those ham-slabs she calls arms when going to meet the Queen. Too bad it looked like a cat spit up on her head, though.
Michelle is a monster, the Isle of Man could fit under that tent!
She walks like a baboon. And she’s obviously packing on the pounds.
MSM, stop comparing MO with Jackie Kennedy. It makes you look silly. Jackie was about as big around as one of MO’s thighs.
Horrible outfit on our First Wookie.
As my British mother-in-law would say, “What common people.”
Set aside, for the moment, the fact that the people who bemoan the Obamas’ ostensible classlessness mock his wife with all the maturity of the kids who mistakenly thought they ran with the popular crowd, because I’ve not yet revealed the most horrifying Obamateurism of the day. It seems the fairer Obama may have slighted Prince Philip in some small manner of decorum. Under normal circumstances, that would not have been alright, but . . .
They started wars over less in history.
They have! And to have slighted, of all people, Prince Philip, why I’m almost embarrassed to call Obama my Presi—wait, that wouldn’t be acclaimed the dontopedalogist would it? Really? Give me a fuc—on second thought, take it away Eddie:
In lieu of a real post (and in celebration of moving back to the Mission): tour San Francisco’s Balmy Alley.
Photo by Flickr user dogwelder used under a Creative Commons license.
Updated: of course, with bonus Sendak.
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