After Fidel Castro’s death in 2016, his longtime security officer, Fabian Escalante, told CNN that the Central Intelligence Agency had devised precisely 638 assassination plots against the dictator, including an exploding cigar, a cigar laced with botulin, and a pen with a hidden needle that would poison him. After Castro gained control of Cuba in 1959, and colluded with the Soviet Union to install missiles on Cuban soil that were aimed directly at the United States, the dictator became Enemy No. 1 for the CIA. “If surviving assassination attempts were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal,” Castro once said.
A femme fatale, and other crazy ideas: