CIA allegedly plotted to kill President Maduro: A look at CIA-led assassination attempts on three notable world leaders

On Saturday (September 14), Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said that three US citizens, two Spaniards and one Czech national had been detained on “suspicion of plotting to destabilise” the country. Cabello claimed that the arrested people were CIA agents.

Here are three instances when the CIA led or supported elaborate efforts to execute global leaders.

Fidel Castro

The most high-profile and best-documented target of the CIA is former Cuban President, Fidel Castro. Between 1960 and 2000, Castro was subject to at least 638 assassination attempts under nine US Presidents. This led him to declare in interviews over the years, “If surviving assassinations were an Olympic event, I would win the gold medal.”

No option was too outlandish to consider. For instance, the agency tapped Castro’s former lover, Marita Lorenz, to poison his drink with pills she had hidden in her cold cream jar and planned to sprinkle thallium salt on his shoes to cause his iconic beard to fall out. The CIA also considered poisoning Castro’s beloved cigars with the deadly botulinum toxin and booby-trapping a conch for him to discover on one of his diving expeditions. All these, in addition to the run-of-the-mill shooting attempts.

The last known attempt on Castro’s life by the CIA was in 2000 during his visit to Panama where he would address a crowd on a stage. His own personal security team foiled a plot to place 90 kilograms of high explosives under his podium.

He would eventually step away from power in 2006 following an intestinal disease, entrusting the Cuban presidency to his brother, Raul Castro.

Castro died of natural causes in 2016, aged 90.

Muammar Gaddafi

The CIA had allied itself with Gaddafi’s Free Officers movement, which overthrew the monarchy led by King Idris in a bloodless coup in 1969, and formed the government.

However, he soon became an American foe, with his vocal support for Palestine and efforts to establish Libya’s new political system as a third alternative that rejected Western capitalism and Marxism-Leninism. In 1979, the US designated Libya as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Things came to a head when the CIA led an effort to assassinate Gaddafi in 1984. A declassified news report by journalists Jack Anderson and Dale van Atta, in June 1985, detailed how the CIA backed an assassination group named the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL). The group was led by Gaddafi’s former auditor-general, Mohammed Youssef Magarieff. CIA agents trained NFSL recruits in Western Europe, Sudan, and Morocco, and advised their leaders.

These efforts went in vain. According to the news report, “The Central Intelligence Agency backed, trained and continues to support the exile group that tried to assassinate Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi last year, according to intelligence sources. The plot failed. Afterwards, Qaddafi executed perhaps as many as 200 dissidents and imprisoned thousands more.”

Gaddafi was eventually killed in 2011 by rebel fighters belonging to the National Transitional Council after a prolonged civil war. The US played a prominent role in the war, using both diplomacy and military strategy to empower the rebels and unseat Gaddafi from power.

Saddam Hussein

Former Iraq President Saddam Hussein was also a CIA ally turned target.

Hussein was actively involved in the Ramadan Revolution, a coup led by the Ba’athist party and the CIA to overthrow Prime Minister Abdul-Karim Qasim in 1963. The two countries remained close over the following decades, as the US viewed Iraq as a means to keep Iran in check, even more so after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The US extended military support to Iraq in the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War.

However, the tides changed by 1990 when Iraq commenced its invasion of Kuwait, demanding the annexation of the country as payment for its troubles. This led to the US imposing sanctions against Hussein, and deploying troops in Iraqi neighbours. This was compounded by Hussein’s refusal to comply with UN resolutions.

Hussein faced at least eight attempts on his life between 1969 and 1983, according to his half-brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, who accused the CIA, Mossad, and the Muslim Brotherhood of playing a hand. In 1995, CIA’s directorate of operations, Bob Baer, allied with Kurdish rebel leader, Ahmad Chalabi to plot Hussein’s assassination. This effort fizzled out when Iranian intelligence caught wind of and reported on the supposed CIA coup.

Saddam Hussein was captured in the 2003 US invasion of Iraq in what was primarily a CIA-led effort, as part of the US’s war on terror following 9/11.