This episode confirms what earlier experience in Vietnam, where Lansdale had delivered $57,000 to Diem to “get rid of” the sect leader Ba Cut, had already indicated: Lansdale was not averse, if necessary, to assassination as a tool of foreign policy. But in this case he did not know that an assassination plot was already under way and was dubious about its utility; he feared that if Fidel were killed, he would be replaced by Raúl Castro or Che Guevara, both doctrinaire Marxists, and “we might very well [wind up] in something much worse.”68 Years later, Lansdale was to write, probably
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