The CIA taking murder advice from literal
mobsters. A controversial leader gunned down by her own disgruntled bodyguards. A would-be
emperor trying to take out his own mother with a series of deranged traps that would make
Jigsaw blush, and so, so, so much more. These are the Most Insane Political
Assassinations in History. There’s one guy we just have to start off our list
with. That is the infamous Fidel Castro, who might have broken the world record for assassination
attempts - None of which actually succeeded. He allegedly survived 634 to 638 attempts on his
life, and a good deal of them were from the CIA. Castro became the Bugs Bunny to the CIA’s
Elmer Fudd. One failed attempt involved the CIA poisoning a box of his favorite cigars
with botulinum toxin. It would kill anyone who put one of those sinister stogies in their mouth.
They were delivered to an “unidentified person,” but who even knows what happened to them after
that? They were lost to the pages of history. It’s not even the only time they targeted
Castro on that particular vice. It’s been said that he was given an exploding cigar
when he was at the UN in New York City. Unlucky for the professional wet workers
at the CIA, he actually quit smoking in 1985. This is just another example of how
quitting smoking can save your life, kids. In need of help, the CIA turned to
gangsters for advice on how to kill him. They asked Sam Giancana, the boss of
the Chicago mob, and Santos Trafficant, the head of the mob’s Cuban operations, what
to do - seeing as they all had a joint interest in getting rid of Castro so they could
muscle their operation back into Cuba. In true mafioso fashion, Giancana
had suggested poison pills. The CIA provided six pills to a Cuban
official who had offered to help kill Castro. After a few failed attempts, the
Cuban official got panicky. He backed out, and the CIA had to abandon that plan in the end. A lot of the CIA’s assassination
plots were just outlandish. In 1963, the CIA got creative with a seashell.
In what sounds like a James Bond parody, they were determined to use Castro’s love of scuba
against him. They placed explosives inside a large seashell and then painted it brightly to try and
entice him. This one, however, never left the drawing board. It was considered too impractical.
Can’t say we disagree with that assessment. At one point, they went after him with
a pen that concealed a hypodermic needle laced with poison. It was to be injected
by a Cuban official working with the CIA. The official was unimpressed with the puny pen,
thinking they could come up with something more sophisticated. He must have missed out
on all the other wacky ideas they had. It was also just a bad day to give him the
pen. It exchanged hands on November 22, 1963, the same day JFK was assassinated. The official
wouldn’t even take the pen to Cuba in the end. You can truly say they tried everything,
including the standard femme fatale angle. Marita Lorenz was Castro’s lover in 1959, and she
was recruited as a contract agent for the CIA. They gave her two botulism-toxin pills to put in
Castro’s drink. She would get cold feet, though, as so many of his would-be assassins did. She’d
also stored the poisoned pills in a cold-cream jar. This just made them gunky, and it wouldn’t
be so easy to hide them in his drink anymore. She recounts a harrowing tale after Castro caught
onto her. He pulled out his .45 and told her, “You can’t kill me. Nobody can kill me.” She
felt deflated, but he simply grabbed her and made love to her once again. Castro was right
when he said nobody could kill him. He was 90 years old when he kicked the bucket of
natural causes. Nobody could kill him. The only thing he couldn’t defeat was the
greatest assassin of all - time itself. Moving on from Castro, let’s look into some
of the craziest political assassinations that were actually successful
in taking out their targets. Normally, your bodyguards are the ones
that keep you safe from an assassination, but that was not the case for Indira Gandhi,
the third prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977. She was a controversial figure because she
supported the independence cause in East Pakistan, leading to the creation of Bangladesh. She
also crossed the Sikh community when she ordered Operation Blue Star - where the Indian
Armed Forces removed Sikh separatists and Sikh militant Jarail Singh Bhindranwale from the
holiest site of Sikhism, the Golden Temple. Obviously, this didn’t sit well
with the Sikhs. On October 31st, 1984, she was meant to be interviewed
for a documentary for Irish television, but there was one thing that was going to stop
that from happening: her assassination. She was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards, Satwant
Singh and Beant Singh. They shot her with the very weapons they were meant to protect her with
- Providing a timeless lesson of how important it is not to create grudges with people who
follow you around with loaded guns all day. Let’s go even further back in time to the
Roman empress Agrippina the Younger. In an act that would have Freud salivating, her
own son - all-time weirdo, future emperor, and acclaimed fiddle-player, Nero
- plotted her assassination. It’s said that he once plotted to create a
mechanical ceiling above his mother’s bed that would crush her to death. When
this idea didn’t work out, because real life is sadly not an Indiana Jones movie, he
moved on to an even more complicated idea. This treasonous son would drown his royal
mother at sea in the most convoluted way possible. Instead of pushing her
overboard or anything so plebeian, he designed a ship that would open at the
bottom while at sea. The ship worked as planned. While she was at sea, the bottom
opened up and dropped her into the water. What didn’t work out was the assassination
itself. Agrippina swam back to shore, meaning that Nero had to send an assassin to
kill her the old-fashioned way. He would then claim his mother was plotting to kill him instead
and that she had been responsible for her death, not him. It’s alleged that her dying words to
her assassin were, “Smite my womb.” Nero later commented on how beautiful her corpse was at
her funeral just to make it even more weird. Heading over to 17th century Switzerland,
Jörg Jenatsch was an extremely disliked political leader, which the world seems to
have oodles of. Jenatsch had once killed a political rival with an ax in 1621 and didn’t
seem to lose a wink of sleep over it - Typical politician behavior, if you ask us -
but karma would get him in the end. In 1639, it was Carnival, where everyone
was dressed up in elaborate costumes, making it easy for Jenatsch’s assassin to
sneak by while dressed as a bear - Nicolas Cage would be proud. And somehow, no one seemed
concerned that the bear was carrying an ax, which the bear-suited assassin quickly
buried in Jenatsch with incredible fervor. Ax murdering isn’t the soup du jour these
days, but it’s still far more common than toothpaste murder. That’s what makes Patrice
Lumumba’s assassination story so unique. During the Cold War, Lumumba was the first
democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo in June 1960.
And if you know anything about democratically elected heads of state in the developing
world, you’ll know there was immediately a price on Lumumba’s head. He would become a
target of many failed assassination attempts, including a plot to inject toxins into his food
and toothpaste, courtesy of the CIA. But just like the numerous unsuccessful attempts to
kill Castro, the plan died in its infancy. In 1961, Lumumba was instead executed by
firing squad during a coup. Belgium would apologize for their involvement
in his assassination in 2002. Why were America and Belgium so
involved in his assassination, though? In the United States case, it was
because Lumumba was a pan-Africanist, and he was on good terms with the Soviets.
Belgium was more concerned that he would threaten their stake in Katanga, a
mineral-rich province. Katanga had been trying to separate from the Democratic
Republic of Congo with Belgium’s help. What happened to the poisonous toothpaste?
Larry Devlin, the CIA’s Congo station chief at the time, was stunned when told to
give Lumumba the toothpaste. Instead, he would hide it in his office safe
before throwing it in the Congo River. Next, we’re looking at Admiral-General
Luis Carrero Blanco, the Prime Minister of Spain in 1973. He came into office after
the fascist dictator Francisco Franco, and he had plenty of enemies, including
the ETA, or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, a Basque separatist group. They plotted to
kill him in what they called Operación Ogro. They rented an apartment that was on the driving
route that Blanco took in order to attend mass. To keep the landlords from asking too many pesky
questions, they claimed to be sculpture students, and sculpt they did. They spent five months
making a tunnel underneath the street and packed it with 180 pounds of explosives
they’d stolen from a government depot. On December 20th, 1973, three ETA members
dressed up as electricians and detonated the explosives by command wire when Blanco
passed. The blast sent Blanco and his car flying 66 feet into the air. He went flying
over the five-story church and landed on a second-floor terrace on the other side. Blanco
initially survived the explosion but died in the hospital later on. His bodyguard and
driver also died. Talk about bad luck. Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident writer and
communist defector, had a far less explosive death. He would lose his life to an umbrella.
In what sounds like an episode of Breaking Bad, Markov was killed when he was stabbed in
the leg with an umbrella filled with ricin while standing at a bus stop. He had felt a
sting on his leg, but when he turned around, he only saw a man picking up his umbrella and
walking away. Markov died four days later. They would discover a pellet with
.2 milligrams of ricin in it during the autopsy, but they never found out who was
responsible. Most assume the KGB was behind it, which is a pretty safe bet, given they’re
second only to the CIA for this kind of thing. Coming back to America, you might already be
familiar with Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, but did you know about the assassination
attempt on his Secretary of State, William Seward? While Booth was focused on
killing Lincoln, Lewis Powell targeted Seward, an outspoken abolitionist, at his
home. Seward was recovering after a carriage accident left him with several broken
bones, including his jaw. When Powell arrived, he told Seward’s butler that he
was there to deliver medicine. The butler didn’t fall for it and told him to
wait. But Powell was ready to take on anybody who got in the way of his mission. He pushed
past the butler to head to the second floor, making a beeline for the bedrooms to find Seward. Powell then proceeded to kick butt as he knocked
out Seward’s son, Frederick, and stabbed an army sergeant. As if Seward wasn’t having a bad
enough week, Powell jumped on his bed and stabbed him in the face! But, ironically, Seward’s
existing injuries would be what saved him. The metal brace that was helping mend his
jaw protected him from the full force of the knife. Powell did get one good slice into
his neck. That’s where the majority of Seward’s blood would come from. Powell assumed he must
have killed Seward. When Seward’s other son, Augustus, came into the room, Powell fought
him, too. He stabbed Augie and took off running. Despite all the dramatics,
every single person Powell attacked survived. Powell would
avoid being captured for days, but we have to imagine the complete lack of
success was at least a little embarrassing. When former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died,
many people in Britain celebrated by playing Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead - Seriously, it breached
the top ten of the British music charts that week. So, it’s no surprise that there was at
least one assassination attempt on her life. In 1984, when Bobby Sands, an IRA hunger striker,
died, the IRA wanted to hit the government where it hurt. And that was by assassinating
Margaret Thatcher. They knew she would be attending the Annual Conservative
Party Conference and cooked up a plan. Three weeks before the conference, IRA bomb
maker Patrick Magee checked into the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, under the assumed
name of Roy Walsh. He would place a bomb in Room 629 made from parts of a VCR. The bomb
was timed to explode on October 11 at 2:53 AM on the closing day of the conference. They
planned for the bomb to collapse the entire building with Thatcher inside, killing
plenty of innocent people along with her. The bomb did blow up as planned. The good
news is that it did not destroy the entire building. Bad news: it did kill five people and
injured thirty. And after all that headache, stress, and violence, Thatcher had come out
of it unscathed. She managed to avoid being crushed by a collapsing chimney column
that was only a few feet from her room. Magee was a better bomb maker than he was a
spy. He’d left his fingerprints all over his check-in card and was quickly arrested. He was
sentenced to eight life sentences and given a maximum of 35 years in jail. He was released
in 1999, though under the Good Friday Agreement prisoner exchange. Shockingly, Thatcher’s senior
adviser, Harvey Thomas, has since forgiven him for the bombing and even became friends with
the man. Talk about turning the other cheek. As much as Magee may have changed his
ways, we have to believe that at least a little part of him was celebrating
on the day Margaret Thatcher died. But it doesn’t stop there. We have a few
more failed but wacky attempts for you. Andrew Jackson got extremely lucky when two
pistols misfired, saving his life. Richard Lawrence was an unemployed painter who had
the distinct honor of being the first person to attempt to assassinate the President of the
United States. He took his shot, figuratively and literally, on January 30th, 1835, when Andrew
Jackson was exiting the US Capitol building after attending a House member’s funeral. Lawrence
intercepted him and shot, but nothing happened. The percussion cap ignited, but the gun
misfired. He took out yet another pistol to try again. You have to remember, reloading
guns was an ordeal back then. It was just better to have a backup gun. But fate was on
Jackson’s side when that gun also misfired. Some people say Jackson tried
to beat Lawrence with his cane, but it’s likely that he was rushed
from the scene. We have to say, we like the idea of him just hitting a would-be
assassin with his cane instead, though. Why did Lawrence try to kill him? Well,
Lawrence lived under the delusion that he himself was the King of England. It
seems he was taking back his country from Jackson. Lawrence was placed
in a mental institution afterward. The best part is that one hundred years
later, the Smithsonian tested the guns, and they fired on the first attempt. Maybe we
shouldn’t scoff too loudly at divine intervention. We’ve heard of people being heavy sleepers,
but former President Harry Truman takes the cake on that. He nearly slept through
his own attempted assassination. While the White House was being renovated, Truman
was temporarily living at the official home of the Vice President, Blair House. On November 1st,
1950, Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo, native-born Puerto Ricans, attempted to
shoot their way into the Blair House. At the time, Truman was in one
of the second-story bedrooms, taking a nice little post-lunch nap, when
the pair launched their attack. Torresola and Collazo had planned the attack to line up
with uprisings in Puerto Rico. They got into a shootout with White House Police and Secret
Servicemen, making it to the front steps before being seriously wounded. Torresola
was shot in the head and killed instantly. Before going down, the two were able
to kill police officer Leslie Coffelt, who would die four hours after
the attack at the hospital. Truman heard the commotion and opened his window
to look before being told by the Secret Service to hide inside. Collazo was sentenced to death, but
Truman changed that to life in prison. In 1979, Jimmy Carter commuted his sentence, and
Collazo was able to go back to Puerto Rico. On the surface, the death of Japan’s
former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe doesn’t seem so unusual. But when you
begin to dig deeper, you start to see how utterly insane it really was. He was the
longest-serving leader of modern-day Japan, so it shocked all of Japan when he
was fatally shot at close range. He was out in public, standing at
an intersection outside of a train station in Nara when the gunman struck. Footage
shows there had been an opening to protect him, but his bodyguards had been too slow to
act. Abe was declared dead at Nara Medical University Hospital, having bled to death after
his heart and the front of his neck were wounded. Since Japan has strict gun control laws, it was
a shock to see a politician lose his life to gun violence. Political violence isn’t a common
occurrence in Japan either. So what happened? Things began to get even stranger when
they identified their main suspect as Tetsuya Yamagami. He had been searching online
to find instructions about how to make firearms, then ordering gun parts as well as gunpowder.
It was a bit of a smoking gun, if you will. From 2002 to 2005, Yamagami served in the
Maritime Self-Defense Force, where he would sometimes be expected to do breakdowns and
maintenance on the guns, giving him unfettered access to them. It also meant he had in-depth
knowledge of how a rudimentary gun was built. Yamagami blamed the Unification Church for his
mother’s money problems and believed Abe was a member of that church. The Unification Church is
a cult founded by Sun Myung Moon. In pop culture, members of it are known as “The Moonies”
in reference to Sun Myung Moon’s surname. Yamagami’s mother was also a Moonie, and the
Unification Church had financially sucked her dry. It turns out that Abe wasn’t even
a member of the church, but his family did have ties to them, and he praised them
for their commitment to traditional values. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a list of
utterly insane assassinations without the death of one Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin - The
Russian Mystic who seemed harder to kill than bed bugs. Rasputin was a self-proclaimed holy
man, faith healer, and sex maniac who managed to get into the good graces of the Romanov
family, the Russian royals. This gave him a voice in political matters, and there were a lot
of people who, understandably, didn’t like that. On December 30th, 1916, he was
assassinated in the basement of the Moika Palace. Prince Felix Yussupov,
the richest man in Russia and husband of the Czar’s niece, owned it and selected it
as a perfect venue for a legendary murder. Yussupov was known for living a privileged
life. He had been criticized by Czar Nicholas’s daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, for refusing
to enlist, and he didn’t like his reputation as a less-than-noble noble draft dodger.
While others might go on a Live, Laugh, Love vacation, Yussupov decided he’d
reinvent himself by murdering a man. He wanted to be seen as a man of action, known for
protecting the throne from a malevolent entity. The Romanovs' closeness to Rasputin
had also hurt the reputation of the monarchy. Yussupov saw this as a chance
to redeem the royal family’s standing while he also repaired his own image.
It didn’t hurt that Czar Nicholas II might also go back to listening to his
family more often with Rasputin dead. Those of you who like journaling might relate
to Yussupov writing down the whole event in his memoirs. According to Yussupov, he had invited
Rasputin to his palace so that he could meet Irina, Yussupov’s wife. This, of course, was
a lie. Irina wasn’t even home at the time. Once there, Yussupov offered Rasputin a
platter of cakes and glasses of wine that were laced with potassium cyanide. For most
of us, that would be enough to kill us on the spot. Rasputin was unaffected, and as any of us
would be in his position, Yussupov was stunned. Needing to kill Rasputin some other
way, Yussupov then borrowed a revolver from the Grand Duke Dmitri to just shoot him. The
gunshot didn’t accomplish the job. In his memoir, Yussupov said, “This devil who was dying
of poison, who had a bullet in his heart, must have been raised from the dead
by the powers of evil. There was something appalling and monstrous
in his diabolical refusal to die.” It was said that he must have died of drowning
since they supposedly found water in his lungs. Rasputin’s death became a story that
people passed around for generations, adding mystique and intrigue to
Rasputin even decades later. The man even has a whole song written about
him! Not a lot of people can say that. But here’s the twist. It’s very possible
that Yussupov made the whole ordeal up, and the death was nowhere near
as scandalous or supernatural. Rasputin’s daughter, Maria, wrote her own
book in 1929, Rasputin: The Man Behind the Myth - A Personal Memoir. His daughter had an
almost fantastical ending of her own. She left Russia to join the circus as a lion tamer. She
was known for “performing magic over wild beasts just as her father dominated men.” She also
called herself “the daughter of the famous mad monk whose feats in Russia astonished the world.”
She was a hell of a marketer, to say the least. Maria believed that the murder was
probably far less thrilling than how Yussupov painted it. In the book, she
condemned her father’s murder and outright questioned how much Yussupov might have been
lying about. Her father didn’t like sweets, and she couldn’t imagine him
eating a platter of cakes. She also pointed out that the autopsy report
said nothing of poison or drowning. What it actually stated is that Rasputin was
shot at close range in the head. She accused Yussupov of trying to
sell more books by making her father’s death a spectacle, painting it
as an epic fight between good and evil. Yussupov's plan didn’t even work when it came to
getting Nicholas II and Alexandra back in line. They did not radically change their behavior,
and the murder did not improve the Romanovs' relations with their people. In fact, many of the
poorer people in Russia saw Rasputin as one of them and mourned his death. It was only the upper
class that seemed to lather Yussupov with praise. As far as the Bolsheviks are concerned,
Rasputin was a symbol of the corruption within the Imperial court and proof
that czarism was greatly flawed. After the Russian Revolution, Provisional
Government leader Alexander Kerensky said, “Without Rasputin, there
would have been no Lenin.” We still consider Rasputin’s
death to be pretty crazy, even if you don’t believe a word Yussupov says. Go check out “Insane Ways Vladimir Putin Survived Assassination Attempts.” Or
watch this video instead!
