From Poisoned Cigars To Exploding Seashells: How Half A Century Of Crackpot CIA Plans To Overthrow Fidel Castro Were Born When JFK Invited James Bond Author Ian Fleming To Dinner

 

In a LIFE magazine piece in the early 1960s, President John F. Kennedy listed his favorite 10 books. One of the ten listed was Ian Fleming's James Bond thriller From Russia With Love.  

 

Darren Boyle at the Daily Mail writes about the 1960 meeting between presidential hopeful and then-Senator Kennedy and Ian Fleming.

 

According to the piece, the dinner conversation about Fidel Castro led the Kennedy administration to order the CIA to kill Castro and overthrow his communist government.

 

At the dinner Kennedy asked Fleming, a former British naval intelligence officer who came up with daring and offbeat intelligence plots in WWII, how to deal with Castro. Fleming told Kennedy that Castro had to be humiliated as well as killed.

 

Although the Daily Mail piece does not mention this, the Fleming suggestions were made partly in jest.

 

According to Christopher Moran in the Journal of Cold War Studies: 'Fleming suggested flooding the streets of Havana with pamphlets explaining that radioactive fallout from nuclear testing caused impotence and was known to be drawn to men who had beards.

 

'As a result, Cuban men would shave off their facial hair, thus severing a symbolic link to Castro and the revolution. If this did not work, the CIA should build a religious manifestation, ideally a cross of sorts, and fly it over the Havana skyline in order to induce the Cubans to look skyward.'

 

Between 1960 and 1965 the CIA considered at least eight plots to assassinate Castro.

 

On July 25, 1962, a Top Secret document was prepared for the White House outlining Operation Mongoose, which considered the overthrow of Castro.  

 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2878730/The-ill-fated-schemes-upend-Castro.html 

 

Note: In my view, if Castro had been killed the Cuban people would have been spared decades of living under his murderous communist dictatorship, and the world would have been a far better place. I believe the Devil has a nice hot spot in Hell waiting for Castro when he finally dies.

Meet The Beatles, Johnny Carson, James Bond And The Cuban Missile Crisis: October 1962 Brought Not Just The Arival On Screen James Bond, But A History Book Full Of Enduring Pop Culture Icons

 

Joe Neumaier at the New York Daily News wrote an interesting piece that looks back at October 1962.

It’s been noted that 1962 was one of the great years — if not the greatest — in pop culture.

Let’s pinpoint things even more precisely: 50 years ago, October 1962, is when it all changed.

As the Cuban missile crisis brought the world closer than ever to its end, there was an explosion of beginnings whose aftershocks are still being felt.

One of the biggest was James Bond’s debut stroll across the screen — seen through the barrel of a gun — in “Dr. No.” The first 007 film, featuring Sean Connery as the British superspy and the blueprint for every Bond flick and so many other thrillers since, still holds up beautifully.

... Meanwhile, on television, Oct. 1, 1962, saw Johnny Carson's debut as host of “The Tonight Show.” Today, some half a dozen Carson heirs and aspirants stroll onto the air between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. In music, the Beatles released their first single, “Love Me Do,” in the U.K. the same day “Dr. No” opened. (Its flip side: “P.S. I Love You.”) In America, the Beach Boys’ debut album, “Surfin’ Safari,” was released on Oct. 1. (It’s title track, from the previous June, is one of the original “songs of summer.”)

On Oct. 24, James Brown recorded his classic “Live at the Apollo,” backed by the Famous Flames. And on Oct. 26, Motown Records launched “The Motortown Revue” in Washington, D.C.,, featuring Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, the Miracles, the Marvelettes, Mary Wells and 12-year-old sensation Little Stevie Wonder.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/october-1962-brought-arrival-screen-james-bond-a-history-book-full-enduring-pop-culture-icons-article-1.1163940?pgno=1#ixzz27OOmq6BM

Note: I remember October 1962 well, as I was 10-years-old at the time. I became a big fan of the Beatles and Ian Fleming's character James Bond, and I recall that I was frightened of our heading towards a nuclear world war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Berlin 1961: When Kennedy Blinked

Charles McCarry, a former CIA deep cover agent and the author of The Tears of Autumn, The Better Angels, and other outstanding spy novels, wrote an interesting review of Frederick Kempe's Berlin 1961 in The Wall Street Journal.

Readers skeptical of the Camelot myth may experience twinges of schadenfreude while reading this meticulously researched, elegantly written account of John F. Kennedy's mortifying encounters with the Soviet Union's Nikita Khrushchev during the first year of his presidency. Others, on coming to the end of Frederick Kempe's molecule-by-molecule deconstruction of the Kennedy reputation for toughness, vigor, smarts and unshakable cool, are more likely to breathe a sigh of relief that civilization somehow survived the confrontation.

"Berlin 1961" revolves around the question of whether Kennedy's decision to countenance the erection of the Berlin Wall was, in Mr. Kempe's words, "a successful means of avoiding war, or . . . the unhappy result of his missing backbone." On those terms, the book is a scholarly history of the crisis that culminated on Aug. 13, 1961, when East Germany, convinced that its economic and political survival depended on stopping the hemorrhage of refugees to the West, cut the city in two with the Berlin Wall, thereby imprisoning its people for the next 26 years. Since 1945, 2.8 million, or one in every six East Germans, had fled their benighted country.

You can read the rest of Charles McCarry's review via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704816604576335594159928256.html?mod=googlenews_wsj