Paul Thomas: World's greatest power is also its clumsiest assassin

Paul Thomas

After 9/11, United States counter-terrorism agencies asked Hollywood scriptwriters to come up with scenarios for possible future attacks.

On one level it made perfect sense: the failure to anticipate the use of hijacked planes as missiles directed at heavily symbolic targets was as much a failure of imagination as intelligence.

Al Qaeda's offence was more creative than America's defence.

On another level it made no sense at all since writers in the dream factory don't operate under the constraint of having to underpin their imaginings with mundane reality, hence the indifference to pesky detail and unwillingness to subject their premises and storylines to even the most basic feasibility test.

Contemplating the CIA's four-decade campaign to kill Fidel Castro, you could easily assume it contracted the job out to the writers of Get Smart.

In fact, according to the 2006 British documentary 638 Ways to Kill Castro, most of the dirty but ineffectual work was done by proxies, most famously the Mafia, and various wild-eyed, ferociously anti-communist Cuban exile groups which seethed and plotted in Florida with Washington's tacit approval, if not active support.

How do you botch 638 assassination attempts on the same person? Well, for starters they ignored the KISS rule - keep it simple, stupid.

They put poison in a fountain pen hoping that Castro would scratch his beard with it. They tried the old exploding cigar trick, only with added TNT.

They cornered the market in Caribbean molluscs looking for a particularly large, particularly colourful shell which, once packed with explosives and artfully planted on a reef, would catch Castro's eye when he went scuba-diving. His excitement at coming across such a prize specimen would outweigh the suspicion if not paranoia created by 425 attempts on his life, he'd pick it up, and KA-BOOM!

One can only wonder which particular aspect of this plot caused it to be canned. One can only wonder what they did with all the shellfish.

Most of all, one can only wonder about the plots that didn't make it that far, that didn't get beyond the "Hey, why don't we drift silently over the presidential palace at night in a hot air balloon and drop a great white shark into the swimming pool? Then next morning when he does his laps ..." stage.

But it explains a lot. It explains why Castro's beard became increasingly moth-eaten. You'd moult, too, if the stats showed that you could expect 1.3 attempts on your life per month for an indefinite length of time by people who aren't discouraged by failure.

It explains why the US went to the trouble and expense of invading Iraq, instead of just assassinating Saddam Hussein as many suggested. After blowing 638 attempts to knock off a bloke who lives not much further from Key West, Florida, than Great Barrier Island is from downtown Auckland, it would take a brave person to look the President in the eye and declare, "We can do this, sir. We can take Hussein out." Especially given the number of Husseins in the Baghdad phonebook.

It adds weight to the argument that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Two of the would-be assassins are widely believed to have masterminded the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner with 73 people on board.

Today they live in unrepentant retirement in Florida, basking in the approval of the Cuban community and apparently immune to prosecution or extradition.

So why this obsession with a man and a regime which had long since ceased to pose a threat? Like many obsessions, it wasn't always irrational.

Castro chose to be a player in the Cold War. He welcomed Soviet missiles, thereby precipitating the 1963 Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has ever come to full-scale nuclear war.

He tried to export violent revolution to Latin America and Africa. He allowed his soldiers to be used as Moscow's Ghurkhas. When I passed through Luanda Airport in 1983, the tarmac was lined with Soviet transport planes which had flown in Cuban troops to bolster the Marxist side in Angola's civil war.

It's also the case that, as a former US diplomat in Cuba says in the documentary, Cuba seems to have the same effect on American administrations as the full moon had on werewolves.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Each failed plot consolidated both Castro's hold on Cuba and the mythology surrounding him.

According to the New Yorker, there's a Cuban joke that has Castro returning the gift of a Galapagos turtle when he finds out they live for 100 years. "That's the trouble with pets," he says. "You get attached to them and then they die on you."