I disapprove of assassination but I've got to admit this one scores 10/10 for sheer style.
A: "We're tasked with killing Castro. Again. Any ideas? Anything? Nothing is stupid! Castro! Go!
B: "Cigars"
C: "Boom!"
A: "I see we're in mind-melt here. No wonder the western world trusts us with their lives during these troubling times"
If you insist on actually successful assassinations, and score it on cruelty as well, using Polonium should win. The victim doesn't only die a miserable death. It takes two weeks during which they can still give interviews, know they're going to die, and even knows exactly who did it.
But it's terrifying. Also that video of the CIA people testifying about the heart attack drug. I find the 'we dont know' if it was natural vs assassination scarier as nefarious people are more able and probably willing to use it. When you see all the type of things the CIA was up to 50/60/70's there must be some crazy stuff we'll never know about.
As to the rest, yeah definitely. Just consider the B2 bomber. I always wonder what's hidden away being tested in the same way that was.
There were 600+ attempts on Castro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/638_Ways_to_Kill_Castro
Granted, that's a figure from Cuban counterintelligence, so maybe slightly too high ;) But most of them are documented. And not only 'weird' ideas like exploding cigars - the last one, in 2000, involved 90kg of explosives: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-38121583
The best that can be said about it is that at least it was a plan that actually worked. The infamous "Operation Mongoose" attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, including the exploding cigars, seem more like episodes of a reality show about trying to assassinate Castro than actual murder plots. In this episode, Felix Leiter puts tuberculosis in Castro's scuba wetsuit. In this episode, Jack Ryan convinces Castro's ex-girlfriend Marita to poison him. In this episode, Tamara Knight tries to shave off Castro's beard and draw a dickbutt on his forehead. In this episode, Sam Fisher puts a gigantic snap trap on Castro's palace patio, and baits it with a can of New Coke. In this episode, Sterling Archer steals Castro's "World's Best Dictator" coffee mug, and replaces it with a poisoned red Solo cup. In this episode, Maxwell Smart removes the non-slip strips from the bottom of Castro's bathtub and gives him a basket of scented bath oil beads.
In contrast, North Korea's plan is "wipe military-grade nerve agent all over his face." Maybe setting it up to look like an episode of a prank-based reality show was an attempt to frame the CIA?
That's what I call dedication!
1. CIA's attempts to assassinate Castro resemble episodes from a long-running prank-based reality show.
2. The Kim assassination got some participants to believe the op was part of a prank-based reality show. It could only have been done by a state actor.
3. (Donning tin foil hat) CIA connection! Looking like a prank show is their calling card!
In any state, ideas flow upward while authority flows downward. Let's consider a dictatorship for simplicity: it's not realistic to expect the dictator to think of everything other than for propaganda purposes. The dictator is presented with an endless supply of conflicting demands and requests, with different cost/benefit ratios. For any given idea, including his own, he needs to know roughly what the consequences are for implementing it.
For that to happen, junior intelligence and policy officials have to buy into and invest their political capital in an idea, and so on down the organizational pyramid of government. And the lower you get to the bottom of the pyramid, the more accessible you are to malefactors. So if you're a minor cog in the Chinese foreign ministry whose brief is to monitor North Korean affairs, North Korea might well take an interest in you and your extended family. And if you were to develop a reputation within the ministry for disliking Kim, it might become risky for your relatives to take foreign holidays, so you are incentivized to be cautious rather than prompting your boss to prompt their boss to Do Something about the Kim regime.
The messiness and made-for-TV aspect of it are the means of leveraging sustained attention. A simple shooting not have garnered anywhere near the same level of attention. It's high-precision terrorism as opposed to the mass casualty variety.
Mossad attempted to use poison to assassinate the head of Hezbollah. It went comically wrong, with his driver chasing down the assassins with a rolled-up newspaper.
Mossad successfully poisoned the head of Hezbollah by spraying a delayed action toxin into his ear. His driver (who did not comprehend what had happened, and whom he was dealing with) chased after the assassins who in turn fled fearing he was a bodyguard. Nazrallah was for certain a dead man and was only saved by the personal intervention of the the Jordanian king who ordered the Israeli ambassador to provide an antidote or deal with the consequences of a hostile Jordanian state.
The Sheik was administered the antidote on his hospital bed and survived.
There was nothing to laugh about.
You are right. My mistake.