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DIEM. The coup against Diem was planned with the knowledge of Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman at the State Department, Robert S. McNamara and Roswell Gilpatric at the Defense Department and the late Edward R. Murrow at the U.S. Information Agency. The U.S. hoped Diem's overthrow would halt the domestic turmoil that had weakened South Viet Nam. But the CIA's director, John A. McCone, vigorously opposed the overthrow of Diem on the reasoning that none of the generals enlisted in the coup would be half as effective a leader as the man they wanted to bring down. After the coup, Diem was murdered. Former senior CIA officials insist that the slaying was the private work of the Vietnamese generals' junior officers and was done without the U.S. Government's foreknowledge.
CASTRO. Though Castro is still alive, it is not because the CIA did not consider various ways of doing him in. The design on the "maximum leader's" life burgeoned over a span of some two years into a corpus of schemes. As best the principals remember, the idea first emerged in the late spring or early summer of 1960 as a simple, even simple-minded plot to poison Castro's food or slip him a poisoned cigar. By some accounts, the notion originated with a senior officer in the agency's Western Hemisphere division whose ideas interested Colonel Sheffield Edwards, director of the agency's Office of Security. Edwards passed the idea on to Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr.
He instructed Edwards to explore the feasibility of the project. For help, Edwards turned to a former FBI agent and later Howard Hughes associate, Robert A. Maheu. Maheu, then a private consultant and investigator, was believed to have a line to Mafia interests that had operated gambling casinos in Havana. Through the connection, Edwards sought to find out whether the Mafia could produce, if need be, a man in Havana in a position to liquidate Castro.
Through Chicago Mafia Chieftain Sam Giancana, who was murdered last week in his suburban Chicago home, and his lieutenant, John Roselli, the CIA recruited a gangster reputed to be in Castro's entourage of bullyboys. In late September Bissell and Edwards informed Director Allen Dulles of the results of their tentative explorations. Bissell maintains that his discussion with Dulles was in the most general terms; he was merely encouraged to test the ground further.
The medical section of the CIA produced some exotic pills and even "fixed" a box of fine Havana cigars. The cigars seem never to have left the laboratory, but the pills were turned over to the Mafia. The would-be assassin was to have been paid $150,000 if he succeeded; some earnest money, "a few thousand dollars," was turned over to him. Giancana and Roselli expected something more important than money: both were under investigation by the Department of Justice and hoped to escape prosecution. In due course, the pills moved to Miami but no farther.