# The CIA ran a secret program to overthrow Castro and plotted his assassination

**Verdict: Proven.** Confirmed by declassified records and the Senate's Church Committee: a real CIA-run destabilization program existed, and separate CIA assassination plotting against Castro is documented, though exactly what Kennedy personally approved remains contested.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Cold War era · First circulated: 1975 (program dates to 1961) · Believed by: Confirmed history, not a fringe theory
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/operation-mongoose

## Summary
Operation Mongoose, also called the Cuban Project, was a real, government-wide covert program authorized by President Kennedy in November 1961 to sabotage and overthrow Fidel Castro's government after the Bay of Pigs disaster. Alongside it, and separately, the CIA ran assassination plots against Castro (some using organized-crime contacts) later confirmed in detail by the Senate's Church Committee. The program is not a theory; it is documented history. What remains genuinely contested is how far up the chain of command the assassination plotting was known and approved.

## The claim
That the Kennedy administration, through the CIA and an interagency 'Special Group Augmented,' ran a secret campaign of sabotage, propaganda, and economic warfare against Cuba after the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and that this program included, or ran alongside, CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro, including collaboration with organized-crime figures, that were authorized at some level of the U.S. government.

## Origin and timeline
- Apr 1961: The CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, intended to topple Castro, collapses within three days, embarrassing the new Kennedy administration.
- Nov 1961: President Kennedy authorizes a new covert program against Cuba. Attorney General Robert Kennedy is given effective oversight, and Air Force Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale is named Chief of Operations, coordinating the CIA, State Department, Defense Department, and USIA.
- 30 Nov 1961: A formal directive on 'the Cuba operation' authorizes what becomes known as Operation Mongoose, or the Cuban Project, placing it under Lansdale's day-to-day direction and an interagency 'Special Group (Augmented).'
- Jan–Feb 1962: Lansdale circulates a phased plan (intelligence gathering, political and economic action, and if needed guerrilla operations) targeting an internal Cuban revolt, with an ambitious internal deadline of October 1962.
- 1961–1962: Separately, the CIA's Technical Services Division and officers including William Harvey continue contact (first opened under the Eisenhower administration in 1960) with organized-crime figures Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante to pursue Castro's assassination by poison.
- Oct 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis erupts; active Mongoose sabotage operations are suspended as the administration focuses on the missile standoff.
- Jan 1963: Operation Mongoose is formally wound down in the aftermath of the missile crisis and the U.S.–Soviet understanding that followed it.
- 1975–76: The Senate's Church Committee investigates CIA covert action and, in its interim report 'Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders,' documents at least eight distinct CIA-connected plots or plans to kill Castro between 1960 and 1965.
- 1997: The State Department publishes declassified Operation Mongoose planning documents in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) Cuba volumes, filling out the paper trail the Church Committee had only partly seen.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The U.S. government ran a real covert program to destroy Castro's government.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the documents themselves. Declassified planning papers, including Lansdale's own program reviews, describe an interagency effort (sabotage of refineries, power plants, and mills; propaganda; economic pressure; intelligence collection) aimed explicitly at 'help[ing] the Cubans overthrow the Communist regime,' run under a Special Group (Augmented) that included the Attorney General, the CIA Director, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
- Claim: The CIA plotted to assassinate Castro, including through the Mafia.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the Church Committee's 1975 investigation, which found CIA officers had contacted Mafia figures Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante beginning in 1960 to arrange Castro's poisoning, and separately pursued poisoned cigars, contaminated diving equipment, and other schemes. The committee documented at least eight distinct plots or serious planning efforts through 1965.
- Claim: President Kennedy or Attorney General Robert Kennedy personally ordered Castro's assassination.
  Evidence: Not established with certainty. The Church Committee itself concluded it could not determine conclusively whether formal authorization for assassination reached the president or attorney general, noting that CIA officials used deniable, euphemistic language up the chain and that direct evidence of presidential sign-off was never found, a genuine, still-debated gap in the record, not a resolved fact in either direction.

## Why people believe it
- Because almost every distrustful instinct about it turned out to be correct: this was not a paranoid inference from gaps in the record, but a real, government-wide secret war run by the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Attorney General's office, hidden from the public for over a decade.
- The assassination-plotting revelations broke during the mid-1970s alongside Watergate and domestic-surveillance abuses (COINTELPRO, MKUltra), a period when 'the CIA does things far outside the law and lies about it' stopped being a fringe claim and became a congressionally confirmed pattern.
- The unresolved question of exactly who authorized the assassination plotting, a genuine, honest gap in the historical record, keeps the story open-ended in a way that invites people to fill it with more certainty than the evidence supports, in either direction.

## Open questions
- The Church Committee's own tally of 'at least eight' distinct CIA plots or serious planning efforts against Castro between 1960 and 1965 is a count of what investigators could document, not a claim that the list is complete. Some episodes, like the Mafia poison-pill attempts, are detailed in testimony and CIA records; others survive only in outline, and no one, the committee included, has claimed the full roster of attempts is closed.
- Exactly how far up the chain of command explicit authorization for the assassination plotting went (to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and above him to President Kennedy) remains genuinely unresolved. The Church Committee could not establish that either man ordered it, but found that CIA officers habitually used vague, deniable language when briefing superiors, meaning the surviving paper trail may have been built to be ambiguous rather than simply left incomplete.
- Whether Edward Lansdale, Mongoose's own chief of operations, knew the specifics of Harvey's ZR/RIFLE assassination work is a separate, disputed question. Lansdale testified to the Church Committee that he had no knowledge of any such plotting, but historians have called that denial hard to square with his close, detail-oriented control over Task Force W, and no surviving document resolves it either way.
- Because Robert Kennedy oversaw the anti-Castro campaign and Castro was an active target of U.S. assassination planning, researchers have long asked whether any of it bore on Kennedy's own assassination two years later. The Church Committee found that the CIA never disclosed the Castro plots to the Warren Commission in 1964, despite Warren Commission member Allen Dulles's own CIA background, and flagged that non-disclosure as a serious gap in the original investigation. Whether the gap is meaningful or coincidental is unresolved, a genuinely open question about the adequacy of the 1964 investigation, not an endorsement of any particular theory about who killed Kennedy.

## Sources
- Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders: An Interim Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (S. Rept. 94-465), U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities (Church Committee) (1975): https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/ir/pdf/ChurchIR_3B_Cuba.pdf
- CIA Inspector General John S. Earman, 'Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,' May 23, 1967, National Security Archive, George Washington University (JFK Assassination Records collection) (1967): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/33578-document-19-cia-inspector-general-john-s-earman-report-plots-assassinate-fidel
- Memorandum, 'Present Status of the Cuba Project' and related directive summarizing decisions on the Cuba operation, November 30, 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume X, Cuba, 1961–1962 (Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State) (1961): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10
- Brig. Gen. Edward Lansdale, 'The Cuba Project' program review, January 18, 1962, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, Volume X (Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State) (1962): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v10/d291
- William Harvey, Memorandum, 'Covert Activities,' August 7, 1962, National Security Archive, George Washington University (1962): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/19625-national-security-archive-doc-14-cia-william
- William Harvey, Memorandum for Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, 'Operation MONGOOSE — Sabotage Actions,' October 11, 1962, National Security Archive, George Washington University (1962): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/19627-national-security-archive-doc-16-cia-william
- Kennedy and Cuba: Operation Mongoose (briefing book with linked declassified documents), National Security Archive, George Washington University (2019): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/cuba/2019-10-03/kennedy-cuba-operation-mongoose
- CIA Assassination Plots: The Church Committee Report 50 Years Later, National Security Archive, George Washington University (2025): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2025-11-20/cia-assassination-plots-church-committee-report-50-years
- The Cuba Project (declassified U.S.-Cuba documents collection), National Security Archive, George Washington University: https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/cuba-project

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