Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The CIA, Castro, and Cuba
26 Plays5 years ago
Join Josh and M as they travel to Cuba in the Sixties to tell a story of Dirty Tricks, Bingo, the Northwoods and more!
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at:
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding?
Recommended
Transcript
Critique of Josh's Singing and Political Mood
00:00:00
Speaker
A one, a two, a one, two, three, four. Take me to the April sun in Cuba. Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
00:00:11
Speaker
Josh, what is up with you? You're normally the best singer on this podcast. Your pitch, your timbre, it's typically top class, but today? Well, today it's like someone died, crawled down your throat and it's their voice coming out of you. Ah, it's Cuba, man. Every time we start singing that song, all I can think of is US intervention and a socialist paradise and it gets me down.
00:00:37
Speaker
Look, I know it's topical in that of the two of us you are the more overtly political but with your extreme socialism and your hatred of all things imperial. But you've got to get it together. This song will not record itself.
00:00:52
Speaker
we hit that chorus I don't see the April sun in Havana or cocktails on the beach or people being paid a decent wage no matter their position in society no all I can think of is Marco Rubio Cuban exiles in Miami it's not dirty dancing Havana nights no it's dirty tricks operation Northwood all I can see is Fidel Castro going to lighter and exploding cigar and you just feel your voice straining away look
00:01:17
Speaker
I know how you feel. I'm not a monster. Operations Mongoose and Bingo, they give me sleepless nights as well. But we're recording this song, Joshua, for the people. Think of the joy it'll give them. The smiles. The people of Cuba.
00:01:35
Speaker
Possibly, I mean if we have any people in Cuba who listen to this podcast, well hello! No, I mean our regular listeners. They're practically begging for musical content. They're crying out for a classic Josh Addison singing extravaganza.
00:01:52
Speaker
Well, if it's for the fans, then I guess I can push my love of the Cuban people and my hatred of America to one side, but only for the fans. Okay, that's the spirit. Once more, from the top. A one, a two, a one, two, three, four.
00:02:19
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. Brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Dettith.
Podcast Introduction and Listener Engagement
00:02:28
Speaker
Hello, you're listening to The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. I am Josh Addison sitting next to me, as usual, as Dr. M. R. X. Dettith, and the skull decanter is back, I suppose. It is indeed, and is the skull shotgast? Shotgast? Shotgast, yes, it may not be Halloween anymore, but this is a shotgast, and it is quite ghastly.
00:02:49
Speaker
And both of these were gifts from Joshua, not the actual whiskey and sign. He nearly gifted me whiskey. It's one of your chief failings is A, not gifting me whiskey and B, not knowing what kind of whiskey to buy someone when you're gifting them whiskey. Just talk to Nick. Well anyway, before you hit the sauce too hard, is there anything we need to get out of the way before we pile straight into this episode?
00:03:13
Speaker
Is this a leading question? No, I think it is actually. Something that we meant to get out of the way. I wasn't aware. We got that comment. Oh yeah. That was a fun one. So we can speak about this comment because we are quietly confident. The person who left the comment hasn't listened to the podcast. It certainly will not listen to this episode after.
00:03:34
Speaker
So it was a podcast on Charles Manson and how Charles Manson is a plant for the CIA or something and it's a thousand words long and it has no paragraphing or character turns in any way shape or form and frankly that makes it almost impossible by almost I mean for me impossible to read.
00:03:54
Speaker
It was a comment left. You may not be aware, I put the videos of these episodes up on a YouTube channel, but being hosted through Podbean also, they'll automatically generate sort of a YouTube version of the podcast, so it's just sort of audio only, but it gets posted to YouTube.
00:04:10
Speaker
And so input puts those end up as well. And both versions of it got the same thousand word comment. So I'm quite certain a person saw, hey, something to do with Manson and the CIA. I will post my thousand word spiel on the news. And it did have a, please listen to my podcast for more information or something at the end. Which we want. Which we want. No. No, we've moved on. But even though who Charles Manson is. No, exactly. Isn't he? Is it an Ellen Moore impersonator? Something like
Humor in Political Discussions
00:04:38
Speaker
that. Yeah, gotta be.
00:04:40
Speaker
You see Alan Moore's voting Labour. Alan Moore's a very strange man. He is very strange. You know, he put a thing on like Facebook or something saying, now this may be strange coming from a social media phobic anarchist, but I plan to vote Labour at this election, purely because he hates the Tories so much. Are you sure that isn't some kind of coded message by Alan Moore saying, look, I've been kidnapped. Come and rescue me. I'm using social media as my only way of getting the message out. Well, it could be. I don't know.
00:05:07
Speaker
Maybe it's just another second. Alan Moore, if you are in trouble and happen to be listening to this podcast, our lines are open.
00:05:15
Speaker
Anyway, we're not here to talk about, well actually I was going to say we're not here to talk about weird beardy people, but we are. We're about to talk about another famous beard that attached to Fidel Castro. Sorry, when you talk about, there's, you know, there's the slang term talking about someone's beard. Someone's beard, yes. No, I'm not talking in that sense. I'm talking about an actual beard. An actual beard. Here growing out of a person's face.
00:05:37
Speaker
You've got hair growing out of your face. I've got hair out of my face. So did Manson. So does Ellen Moore. So did Fidel Castro. Draw your own conclusions. I already have. So in that case, now that we've got that inexplicably lengthy YouTube comment off our chests.
US-Cuba Relations and Conspiracies
00:05:55
Speaker
Let's proceed with the actual content and let us now take the April sun to Cuba. Yes. Well, hey. Doesn't make much sense, but I'll take it. To Cuba? Good.
00:06:12
Speaker
I'm surprised it's taken us this long to talk about it really, because it's a bit of a staple. Yeah, it is actually. I don't think we've ever said exploding cigars. Don't you think we've ever talked about exploding cigars? Five years, but we haven't talked about exploding cigars. So we're talking about Cuba, and we're talking about the large number of false flag operations the US at least intended to run against the Cuban government.
00:06:37
Speaker
And of course, this is a weird kind of evidence. So we've talked about false flags in the past, and we've talked about actual false flag operations, which really did occur. And we've talked about planned false flag operations, and the way in which even a government talking about running a false flag operation and not going through with it is kind of contributing
00:07:03
Speaker
evidence towards the notion that these things are things that governments are at least keen to do, which should be considered when we start talking about whether they are in fact doing them. And Cuba has been kind of a thorn in the side of the US for quite some time, for reasons which aren't actually entirely clear,
00:07:25
Speaker
well it's just hatred of socialists on our southern border just just sort of cold war anti-communism and it also was as the the pro-russia aspect to cuban but the sustained anti-cuban
00:07:40
Speaker
Cuban, anti-cuba narrative or rhetoric that continues to emanate from the US, which was halted briefly under Obama, but is back in force under Trump, continues to be a bit of a mystery for those of us who aren't in the American government. And especially for those of us, which is probably everyone listening to this podcast, who weren't actually around in the 1960s,
00:08:04
Speaker
and so on, just how wacky things became. I probably should have actually talked to my parents before we started, before we took notes. Just so you could go, okay boomer? Well I could and so I could actually ask human beings who were alive during the Cuba Missile Crisis what exactly it was. So you're saying we should bring my mother down from upstairs? Well I mean you could if you wanted to.
00:08:27
Speaker
But, I mean, this event, which, like, is talked about as the closest the human race ever came to a full-on nuclear war, these days it's just kind of a bit of a historical footnote. It doesn't seem to mean a lot. Let me begin actually talking to people who weren't alive in the 80s about how close we came to nuclear Armageddon.
00:08:47
Speaker
is also kind of fascinating. We belong to a generation that grew up with the threat of nuclear warfare in our lifetime. We had the Cold War, we had the threat of communism, what was going on with the Berlin Wall and the like.
00:09:04
Speaker
And being a university educator and also briefly a primary school teacher talking with people who weren't alive in the 80s or early 90s about the geophysical situation at that time, you go, oh, I mean, things are bad now. Things are the climate's a catastrophe. The economy is crashing.
00:09:29
Speaker
But that threat of nuclear war, that was a really unique feeling. You always remember when you learn about nuclear weaponry for the first time in a way that you're told that they might even be dropped on you. Yeah, I think maybe it's just because I never watched threads, but the whole spectre of nuclear war always just seemed very abstract to me.
00:09:52
Speaker
See, this is what I don't understand because like most Western nations, we got those endless TV movies of the week about nuclear warfare. I've seen multiple cases on TV and Z screens or TV1 and TV2 back in the day of simulated explosions killing people for movies of the week. I have to assume you just weren't paying attention. Well, no, I
Cultural Context of Nuclear Fear
00:10:17
Speaker
probably wasn't. I read the books.
00:10:18
Speaker
You don't read books. I mean, this is a clear line. Well, I was in school. They made me. I read My Brother in the Land and Z for Zachariah and stuff like that. Sort of the teen-lit post-nuclear apocalypse stuff that came out in the 80s and what have you.
00:10:34
Speaker
Anyway, getting slightly off topic here, which is neither of us actually knows what things were really like in Cuba, but from reading about it, pretty wacky. So, America... Very much
Influence of Exiled Cubans on US Policy
00:10:44
Speaker
so. Ever since Castro came to power just after World War II, wasn't it, I think? And yeah, America never too keen on the fellow and actually quite, quite keen on getting him out of there. And there were a lot of various operations that they had planned to either
00:11:00
Speaker
get rid of, just kill him to assassinate him in some way or else to basically help along a revolution in Cuba.
00:11:14
Speaker
And of course, I must say, things were a little bit wonky because you had the Cuban exiles living in America who were kind of the rich folks who got booted out in the communist revolution to begin with, I understand. So they might have been colouring things a little bit from there as well. Yeah, I mean, there's actually a big role played by Cuban exiles living in Miami.
00:11:34
Speaker
particularly people who were moneyed interests in Havana who went to Miami to basically re-establish themselves like the Cuban Mafia and the like. It also occurs to me that some people are going to think we're doing our episode on Cuba
00:11:49
Speaker
because we're not talking about Bolivia, because of course, we're talking about American intervention in Cuba. We also could be talking about American intervention in South America in general. And of course, the Bolivian crisis is ongoing at this particular point in time. But this is me coincidence. And we will talk about that at some point. This is an hour. It's too hot to touch. It's mostly coincidence. Or is it?
00:12:19
Speaker
Yeah, probably. It is, yes. Yeah, it's weird. I think this was sparked because I saw someone put up a tweet a little while ago, pointing out one of the things we're going to be talking about here. And the article they linked to was from 1997. It was like a Washington Post one or something.
00:12:39
Speaker
Because yeah, it turns out in 1997 a whole bunch of documents were declassified and we got to see all the details of all these little plans America had back in the 1960s. So I'm not quite sure why people were talking about it last week, but they were and I saw it and now we're talking about it today.
00:12:54
Speaker
Twitter, no one understands how it really works. No, no one does.
Operation Mongoose and Covert Actions
00:12:58
Speaker
So we have a bunch of operations. We have Operation Mongoose, otherwise known as the Cuba Project or the Cuban Project. We have Operation Northwoods, Operation Northwoods included within it, Operation Dirty Trick, Operation Bingo, and probably a whole bunch of other operations as well. Those are just the names that happened to pop out when I was reading about this to begin with.
00:13:17
Speaker
Was Operation Bingo the one that involved the English? I say Bingo, time to go to Havana and cause a bit of problems for those old Cuban exiles. No, I think it was something to do with a farmer who had a dog. Ah, Bingo was his name. Yeah, no. So, Mongoose and Northwood seem to be the two big ones. Operation Mongoose
00:13:38
Speaker
was authorized in 1960 under President, then President Eisenhower. Good old Dwight. Old Dwight, and then 1961, you know, had JFK was president. What did that happen to him? Ah, I don't know. He kind of disappears from history. Yeah, yeah. Certainly nothing that would concern a conspiracy theory podcast. No, not at all.
00:14:03
Speaker
In 1961, there was the whole Bay of Pigs invasion, which is another, an entirely different kettle of fish. But that was, what was it? America backed an invasion to try and start a revolution and it all just failed horribly. Yes, I mean, that is the short version of a rather long story, which is
00:14:21
Speaker
often taken to be related to this guy called Lee Harvey Oswald. Well, yes, there's the Oswald connection. But I'm not quite sure what role he has in history. Yes, no. Given our previous comments about whatever happened to JFK. Yes. But no, so Mongoose
00:14:39
Speaker
Basically, the plan was, it was a covert plan. It wasn't plans to, you know, bomb Cuba flat or anything. Covert plan to, through various methods like sabotage and psychological warfare, propaganda, intelligence gathering and so on, would try and destabilize Cuba in such a way as to make a revolution more likely.
00:15:03
Speaker
Yes, so it's a classic case of if we destabilise the government and the economy
CIA's Unusual Assassination Plans
00:15:09
Speaker
of a nation state,
00:15:11
Speaker
then we are basically fomenting revolution, if we do it secretly, people won't even be aware that we're responsible, they will blame the government of the day, the people will rise up, they will topple their communist government, and it will just naturally follow that the next government that comes into existence will be a pro-American one and everything will be fine, because this always works out swimmingly. Yeah, so especially 1961 after the Bay of Pigs,
00:15:40
Speaker
business went all a little bit pear-shaped. Operation Mongoose, I gather from reading that, sort of became the, okay, we're not going to try the whole invasion thing, we're just going to do it more covert now in Mongoose. Apparently, it's called Operation Mongoose because it involved 33 different plans for destabilizing Cuba, and there are 33 species of Mongoose. Now, I got that fact from Wikipedia, I would not stake my life on it.
00:16:06
Speaker
However, we will not question it because it's wonderful. It is funny. Yeah. So this then became the thing, more and more sort of covert interference in Cuba to do things like sabotage, sabotage. So when I say the Beastie Boys in Albert. No, not the Beastie Boys track. No, actual sabotage, breaking things and stuff. Roddy McDowell's in that.
00:16:34
Speaker
Beastie Boys song. Yeah. In the music video. Yeah, that's totally irrelevant. But interesting. Yeah. No, so there were plans to destroy things like bridges, factories, power plants, plans to destroy the sugar crops. I felt like it was fight for my right to party that Roddy McDowell's. Oh, that's much older. Yeah. I feel very, very ashamed of myself. Well, you should.
00:16:58
Speaker
They were talking about mining harbors, doing various things to destabilize, to damage infrastructure, destabilize the economy, things like that. Then things get a little bit more false flaggy. They talked about simulating the downing of planes or sinking of ships to sort of provide some sort of a pretext. It's like, oh, oh, yeah, looks like you're having a bit of trouble there, Cuba. And oh, oh, no, now we're American things. Well, we've just got to get involved.
00:17:25
Speaker
the spoiler won't want to. And that's more to justify the action to people back home. So you might get a situation where the American people go, isn't it terrible that things in Havana are horrible?
00:17:39
Speaker
Dum dee dum dee dum dee doo. Well, so if you then get a case of, oh, and by the way, they just sank one of our ships with all of our good troops upon it, then people go, oh my God, what are the Cubans up to? We must invade immediately. Which of course is one of the motivating factors for many false flags is getting people at home angry about what you're doing abroad covertly to then allow you to get away with doing what you want to do openly.
00:18:08
Speaker
But I may be getting ahead of myself a little with the false flag, so there's going to be a false flag Stravaganza in just a little bit. That's true, but first we must talk about cigars. There were lots of plans to assassinate Castro. I think more sounds of things, more pre-bay of pigs than post-bay of pigs, but it sort of carried on right the way through.
00:18:29
Speaker
First of all, we have the exploding cigar. Supposedly the CIA wanted to swap one of Castro's famous cigars for one that would explode when he lit it and blow his head up. Not actually certain if that's true though. Yes, this is one of these things which is probably an urban myth based upon knowledge that there were plans by organizations like the CIA.
00:18:53
Speaker
to at least think about assassinating Fidel Castro, and there was talk about poisoning the cigar, supporting some kind of coating on the cigar, or coating the interior of the cigar, the actual dried tobacco leaves itself, to cause them to die, because apparently lung cancer is going to take far too long.
00:19:13
Speaker
And so the exploding cigar probably came out of that particular kind of narrative. There was a little, I did see just one little note of people suggesting that there could have been some sort of a disinformation thing, that it was a story that the CIA was happy to allow to circulate because it would distract from their real plans to poison cigars and do other stuff like that.
00:19:37
Speaker
Yeah, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for that, but there isn't more evidence, I think, from these 1997 declassified papers that, yeah, they wanted all sorts of plans to poison him, wanted to poison his cigars, poison his writing pen, poison ice cream, just generally inject him with poison. There's a bunch of stuff about the poisons that they selected. They eventually went for
00:20:03
Speaker
botulism or bot botulinum or whatever it is, the more poisony form of botulism because they could get it in tablets and dissolve it in liquid. And I think the plan was just for someone to walk up and stick Castro with a needle or something like that. But then, then they hit upon an idea which I would never have thought of myself. Fungus in the diving suit. Fungus in the diving suit. Which sounds like the weirdest accusation in Cluedo you can possibly make. I mean, it's not even on the cards. No, you'd have to write it on the back of a different one, yeah.
00:20:31
Speaker
Apparently there were also plans to get some sort of bacterial fungal spores inside his dive, specifically things that are very bad for you if you breathe them in. So they put them in the breathing apparatus of his diving suit when he went diving, as he was known to do, and he'd breathe in these spores that would poison his lungs.
00:20:47
Speaker
And so apparently they sort of, you know, got all the way through the planning stages, but they never quite seemed to work out. There were people, the supposed poisoners would get cold feet or, you know, the plans, they could get to this place where they thought Castro was going to be, but then Castro ended up not going there and so on and so forth. So none of these things really worked out. But it wasn't just...
00:21:10
Speaker
wasn't just poisoning to kill him, they were also sort of more looking at more subtle ways of chemically influencing Castro just as more of a propaganda thing. No, he'd start giving his speech in front of the brave Cuban people and then he'd start to slur his word ever so slightly and maybe
00:21:30
Speaker
forget a bit to this speech or refer to very large handwritten notes saying I did not collude there is no quid quo pro things that would make it make him as a leader look very embarrassing to his people
00:21:46
Speaker
Yes, so they're not just exploding his cigars and poisoning his cigars. Another plan was to put some sort of mind-altering drugs in his cigars. The idea that they were going to put drugs on his shoelaces, apparently they reckon they had someone
00:22:04
Speaker
they knew Castro would go somewhere and leave his shoes outside and they had someone, and the plan was to sprinkle the stuff on his shoelaces, some thallium salts I think it was, which are a really strong depilatory agent, which would make his beard fall out.
00:22:20
Speaker
and everyone would think how silly he was to destroy without his beard. The leader of Cuba, with his beard starts falling out, the people are bound to revolt. Indeed. And there were also plans to somehow spray his broadcasting studio with LSD, so that in the end, in the middle of his speeches, he'd suddenly start grooving to the colours or something and things would get very wacky, but none of those
Operation Northwoods and False Flag Plans
00:22:45
Speaker
worked out. And then there was just more sort of propaganda-y
00:22:49
Speaker
They were talking about making fake photos of Castro, quote, with two beauties in any situation desired. All right. I mean, that could really backfire on you, though. Oh, Castro, he's a man. Well, exactly. Have you ever seen the I'm not sure if it was Dr. Zeus or someone else who was known for having not seen a picture of Dr. Zeus with
00:23:15
Speaker
wartime doctor zeus it was someone like him or someone like him did um that makes it sound like a missing doctor who episode the wartime doctor no well gold theodor geesele during world war ii apparently did um pornographic propaganda cartoons which would be things like sort of hitler and musselini in a in a homosexual situation and such stuff like that um and yeah that i i'm not sure i think um
00:23:44
Speaker
Values are a bit different back then, so simply being intimate with a lady friend could perhaps be enough of a scandal that it would, I don't know. But supposedly there were also plans to distribute one-way tickets to Mexico City or Caracas to try to, I don't know,
00:24:03
Speaker
Hey, you want to get out of Cuba? Well, you can, and there'd be some flight out of, you know, Massachusetts. Well, you tell me where, free holiday? Free holiday, yeah. Well, there was only a one-way ticket, but I guess you only have to afford a one-way ticket home. Precisely. And you've just halved the cost of going to Mexico City. So that's some of the 33 plans of Operation Mongoose. But in 1960... I read you asked you to list all three, all 33 species of Mongoose. Well, I have no, all 33 species of Mongoose. No, that would...
00:24:33
Speaker
I was going to say be interesting, but it almost certainly wouldn't. 1962, though, the American military types started bringing up this Operation Northwoods. And this is where things get 100% false flaggies. As far as I can see, Operation Northwoods consisted entirely of various false flag attacks America could perpetuate and blame on Cuba as a pretext to invading Cuba.
00:25:00
Speaker
No, should we point out these did not occur. These did not occur. And these did not occur because when they got to the president's desk, the president went, oh no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, Kennedy vetoed Northwoods on the spot. It never actually happened, but it was all planned. Yeah, it was things that military heads thought was really, really a good idea. So...
00:25:23
Speaker
What's the quote I have?
00:25:40
Speaker
So they are standard false-flare games, really. And so they talked about possibly assassinating Cuban nationals, I assume the exiles in America, sinking boats of Cuban refugees, hijacking planes, blowing up an American ship, orchestrating violent terrorism in American cities. Pretty extreme stuff, really. And do it in such a way that you could blame the Cubans for it.
00:26:08
Speaker
So basically you assassinate Cuban exiles in Miami and make it look as if the Cubans were responsible for it. So blame it on Havana. Sink boats of Cuban refugees suggest that the Cubans do not want anyone leaving Cuba whatsoever. And of course hijacking planes and blowing up US ships is quite obvious. Blame that on Cuba.
00:26:33
Speaker
And so, and then you had these sort of sub-operations in there. Operation Bingo was supposedly your plan to fake a Cuban attack on Guantanamo Bay. And Operation Dirty Trick, now this is how we got into it in the third place. This is the source. This is why we're talking about it, because that tweet I mentioned a while ago, basically just out of the blue was saying, hey remember guys, if the Mercury spaceflight had turned out to fail, you know America was going to blame it on Cuba?
00:27:01
Speaker
And obviously you looked at, okay, well, that's your classic false flag, this deserves looking into. There was the particular one that got called out a little while ago. So Operation Dirty Trick. In February of 1962, you had the Mercury Atlas Mission 6.
00:27:16
Speaker
The first American orbital space flight when John Glenn, who would... He's a name I know of from the space program. Was he involved in the lunar missions or was he just... I believe so, yes. Famous American astronaut, he was going up on the Mercury 6 mission. And obviously, there's the middle of the space race as well. So it wasn't just Cuba where America was interested in. They also wanted to beat the Soviets out into space.
00:27:45
Speaker
But yeah, risky experimental, there's always the chance of failure. So they knew that the Soviet space program, their cosmonaut program had suffered some quite terrible setbacks. And so arguably, one of the rationales the Americans had with blaming Cuba for any potential issue with their military launches,
00:28:07
Speaker
was to go, our mission is much safer and much more rigorous than that of the Ruskies, so if something goes wrong it must be because someone interfered. So yeah, they just sort of, it was just a case of two things coming together really, I think they wanted a contingency plan if things went wrong and they also wanted to make life difficult for Cuba, so
00:28:32
Speaker
killed two birds with one stone, isn't it? No, April, so in Cuba that year. No, none at all. So yeah, you had this this catalog of false planned false flag attacks, basically, there was one, some of them suggested a quote, remember the main incident. Remember the main was a slogan Americans adopted when this is Google all the way going back to the end of the 19th century, apparently,
00:28:57
Speaker
Spain has sunk an American warship called the main in Cuban waters And there was there was war with Spain and all that business. This is a bit of a historical illusion. It's like ah, they're damn it. They're at it again This would be sort of the the Spirit that want to tap into with one of their false flag. Now this makes me think we haven't actually done the American-Spanish war before
00:29:18
Speaker
And Randolph her sending reporters down there on the notion of you to play the pictures I also play the war which is actually a fairly interesting story which probably does deserve an episode of this podcast We just keep on generating content by doing other content This episode I mean the series actually just runs itself now. We're just here for the ride
Scaling Back US Operations Post-Crisis
00:29:41
Speaker
Now, as we mentioned, Operation Northwoods never happened, because Kennedy said no. The Mercury flight didn't fail, so no need for Operation Dirty Trick. And then the Mongo stuff, I mean, some of it, around sort of the intelligence gathering and so on, I think some of these plans were put into action, but obviously Castro died, when did he die? Not too long ago now. Fairly recent there, yeah. So he survived well past all of this. Longer than Kennedy, I believe.
00:30:09
Speaker
Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Whatever happened to JFK? Weird. But, but, but, Mongoose, they probably would have kept going on with it if it went for something else that happened near the end of 1962.
00:30:24
Speaker
was? Was the Cuba Missile Crisis. Really? Yeah. That sounds pretty bad. It sounds fairly crisis-ish, yeah. So yeah, the Cuba Missile Crisis comes along and suddenly, suddenly Russia's involved, suddenly nuclear war is a very real possibility and after that got resolved it seemed pretty much like, okay guys, let's
00:30:47
Speaker
Just back away from Cuba, let's just call it on Cuba a little bit, okay? We got away from it this time. It's a weird name for what really occurred, which was Russian nuclear missiles stationed on the island of Cuba, which was a missile crisis on Cuba, but they weren't Cuban missiles, they were Russian missiles. But suddenly you had Russian nuclear armaments
00:31:13
Speaker
right on America's doorstep, metaphorically speaking, not literally. Yeah, so I mean, this was massive. Again, I really wish I'd spoken to a boomer and said exactly how much were people shitting their pants during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Because I gather that a lot of people thought, oh, well, this is it. This is, you know, nuclear war. It was about seven days long. That was 13, I think. It was, yeah.
00:31:41
Speaker
That's more than seven. It's more than seven. That's number-wang. It is. As soon as you said 30, I went yes, I know that. Why did I say seven? I don't know. You must have made me. I probably did. That's your mess, mister. So yeah, so after Kennedy said no to Northwood's Operation Dirty Trick didn't need to happen, and then the Cuba Missile Crisis kind of put paid to Operation Mongoose, sort of. I mean,
00:32:07
Speaker
they these plans are very much put on ice but apparently even after Kennedy vetoed Northwoods apparently the Joint Chiefs were still still coming up with these schemes I think you know maybe they thought they could come up with something that Kennedy would like and and the Mongoose things there you know it was still bubbling along but it never really never really never really took off basically I mean that might be in part because there were there were other conflicts overseas post Kennedy that ended up taking
00:32:37
Speaker
Taking the brunt. Taking the heat off Cuba anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, history has kind of had its way. But yeah, it is like, you know, when you talk about the CIA and Cuba and all that, people tend to go for the exploding cigars. The articles I've read are mostly, here are all the silly things. Here's the wacky stuff that the CIA, all those silly plans are going to make Castro's beard fall out and make him look silly. But there were also plans to do some fairly nasty stuff. Oh, yes. Yes, it was.
00:33:07
Speaker
I think as you say, it'd be quite useful to have someone in the room who actually lived through
Enduring US Hostility and Trade Restrictions
00:33:13
Speaker
it. Because in retrospect, it all seems a little bit weird and possibly slightly silly, especially given how big America is compared to how tiny Cuba is. And yet at the time, this was a major diplomatic issue.
00:33:28
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's quite and it sort of resonated for a long time afterwards, I think, especially after these papers came out.
00:33:38
Speaker
Agitation towards Cuba is still a thing in American politics to this day. But in the other direction, sort of colouring Cuba's attitudes towards America with the fact that all these plans came out and I believe it was sort of early 21st century when sort of there was some amount of people saying, yeah, we probably shouldn't have done that.
00:34:01
Speaker
Now, do you know related to Cuba, but not to America? Actually, it's kind of related to America. There's a weird rule with respect to importing goods into Cuba, which is that if you import goods into Cuba, you can't dock your ship in an American port for several months, which actually makes it hard to import goods into Cuba, because if you're carrying a container load of goods for Cuba, you probably want to go to an American port at the same time, and you can't.
00:34:30
Speaker
Now, because of this, exporting stuff from Cuba is also difficult, because once again, if your ship goes onto a Cuban port, you can't go to a North American port, at least not in the US. You probably can go to Canada. However,
00:34:46
Speaker
Interestingly enough, a New Zealand coffee roastery, People's Coffee, had until recently, and that just actually still might be true, the only coffee export license for Cuban coffee beans.
00:35:03
Speaker
So this country had access to coffee that you could either drink in Havana or down in Wellington. Weird. And it's good coffee, Tom. It's now available in supermarkets all around the country. Well, how about that?
00:35:18
Speaker
I was actually very tempted when I went to the US the year before last to actually take Havana coffee beans with me to then import Cuban coffee beans into America. But then I realized that actually if I got stopped by a border, I probably wouldn't have a sense of humor. I probably wouldn't find it funny.
00:35:37
Speaker
Even though technically as a product roasted in Aotearoa, New Zealand, it would actually count as locally sourced in some way, shape or form. But I imagine trying to explain that, particularly when you've got a connecting flight, would be quite difficult. Yes, no, probably better that you
Episode Conclusion and Listener Support
00:35:54
Speaker
didn't.
00:35:54
Speaker
So there you go. CIA, Cuba, Castro, there are words to start with C. That's irrelevant, but I've run out of other facts and I think that means it's time to end this episode. But not for everyone. Not for everyone, no. Patrons get bonus content and you can too. If you slip us a dollar a month or more via our Podbean or Patreon funding campaign, links in the description, in the
00:36:21
Speaker
Links in the podcast description or on the Podbean page you might be using to get access to this particular podcast. It all made sense in the end. And what a news cornucopia we've got for you. We've got an update on that whole Russia Brexit thing.
00:36:38
Speaker
We've got an update on Jeffrey Epstein, we've got an update on Julian Assange, we've got a small note about what's going on in Bolivia, an Australian far-right terrorist document which apparently is Monty Python satire, and of course we have our traditional, by now, Trump update. Will we be playing the sting? Of course we'll be playing the sting. Actually, I just thought now we should probably have a false flag sting as well.
00:37:07
Speaker
Like just any time it comes up just like like DJ's on a crappy radio show You just sort of push a button. It's like full flag or something like that. Yeah But not today today is not that day
00:37:21
Speaker
I'm still actually just a little bit getting over the cold, which was the reason why... We delayed our recording last week. So I should stop talking and save my vocal chords for our patrons, because they get the best of me. They do. They get the completely naked Josh recording.
00:37:38
Speaker
I was in shorts last week, naked from the knees down baby. I had naked from the knees to the ankles really because I was wearing shoes as well. But all the shin action you could ask for. I mean I was just disappointed that when you tweeted that you said ladies, anyone could find your legs sexy Josh. Anyone could find them sexy. I suppose. Stop being so heteronormative. I just assume the homosexual community has no interest in me because I'm
00:38:04
Speaker
Josh, you're a bear. I am a bear. I'm a beady bear. Well, I don't know. I thought, isn't there an amount of huskiness, an amount of bulkiness involved in being a bear? You could be husky and bulky if you really tried. Well, I probably could, yes.
00:38:20
Speaker
I'm not even sure how we ended this episode talking about about homosexual body type fashions, but it's literally literally going down around us because it turns out that the Batra reportage on some of these lights
00:38:35
Speaker
No, I suspect actually the batteries themselves are not particularly good. And so the lights doing their best to try and report the amount of battery in them. But rather than relying on using the same batteries twice in a row, I think I just recharged them every single time now.
00:38:53
Speaker
And that's of course of no interest to our podcast listeners, but the video listeners will be interested to know why the light to do it keeps getting things. But until next week, I think it's time for Josh to give his customary goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
00:39:17
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extenta, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:40:18
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.
00:40:33
Speaker
Brilliant! That is the best thing I've ever heard. Josh, you are on fire. This is going to be a number one hit all around the globe. I cannot believe just how good your pitch and timbre are. You will get better and better every single time we record. I am amazed by your ability. It is astounding.
00:40:59
Speaker
You haven't memorised it word for word. Do you memorise your script word for word? Let's say yes, that I don't just have to flip that over and we'll start from the beginning. Ah well you see that I need it for the psychological thing. And also it'll probably just crash me.