About 10 years ago, the former head of Cuban intelligence, Fabian Escalante, told a British documentary team the CIA had tried to kill Fidel Castro more than 600 times, over a period of about 40 years.

In a series of bungled and harebrained schemes - like something out of Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, Get Smart, or any other James Bond parody ever - the CIA overwhelmingly failed to kill Castro.

Who didn't kill Castro? Escalante's list of assassination attempts per US administration: Eisenhower: 38

Kennedy: 42

Johnson: 72

Nixon: 184

Carter: 64

Reagan: 197

Bush Sr: 16

Clinton: 21

So successfully did US spies not kill the Cuban leader, that he was able to die of natural causes last week, aged 90.

Was Escalante exaggerating? Hard to say, but we know from declassified CIA reports, as well as the testimony of some would-be assassins, that the agency did try to kill Castro plenty of times. Not all these plots were executed; many were ideas plucked from the fevered imagination of the world's most powerful spy agency. They inevitably shriveled up when exposed to reality. Somewhere behind this list of exploding cigars and flesh-eating wetsuits are a bunch of nameless inventors, and what must have been a pretty surreal office culture.

More than anything, the list suggests a complex, tangled bureaucracy that was able to insulate personnel from external review, while giving them unlimited resources to kill a distant, powerful figure of myth; the phantom menace of the United States.

This went on for years, and in that time President John F. Kennedy was shot dead by a gunman in Dallas. The Kennedy administration had tried to kill Castro 42 times, according to Escalante.

A series of newspaper reports in the 1970s led to a government investigation of the CIA's abuses of power. President Ford banned political assassinations in 1976, but according to Escalante they continued for two more decades, including in the '90s under President Clinton.

1. Exploding Cigar

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Where: New York

When: 1966

Who: Police officer

How: A newspaper reported in 1967 that a year earlier the CIA had approached a New York City police officer with the idea of slipping Castro a cigar packed with enough explosives to take his head off. This has never been confirmed, though we know the CIA did use cigars for another, separate assassination attempt. In 1960, the CIA laced a box of Castro's favourite kind of cigars with poison, but the package never made it to Castro.

Close but no cigar.

2. Mafia ice cream surprise

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Where: Havana

When: 1961

Who: Waiter

How: Castro loved ice cream as he loved cigars, and the CIA hit upon a plan to poison his dessert. To do this, they asked for help from the casino mafia who had been kicked off the island after Castro took power and outlawed gambling. According to some accounts, the mafia was able to slip a jar of poison pills to a cafe worker in the capital of Havana.

Some say the worker was meant to slip the poison into an ice cream cone, other say it was a milkshake. But at the crucial moment, the poison could not be dislodged from inside the freezer. It was frozen stuck.

Either way, this was the closest the CIA came to getting the marked man.

3. Exploding seashell

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Where: Under the sea

When: 1963

Who: A Commie-hating mollusc

How: Castro loved diving as he loved cigars and ice cream, and the CIA looked into the idea of luring him to his doom with a large, brightly painted sea shell packed with explosives. It would be rigged to explode and then dropped in an area where Castro commonly went diving. The CIA purchased a large number of shells for this purpose, but there's no evidence the weaponised marine life were ever deployed.

4. Flesh-eating wetsuit

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Where: Under the sea, slowly

When: 1961

Who: Lawyer

How: This plan got quite far. The gadgets arm of the CIA dusted the inside of a diving suit with fungus that caused a chronic skin disease, and put tuberculosis in the breathing apparatus. All they needed to do now was get Castro to put it on. It was decided a high-profile American lawyer who had been leading negotiations with Castro would become their unwitting accomplice, and present the suit to the Cuban leader. The plan fell apart when the man was tipped off by a CIA lawyer.

5. Character assassination

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Where: On air

When: 1960

Who: The periodic table

How: The idea was to undermine Castro's public image by making him behave strangely while he was speaking to the nation. To do this, they would spray the radio broadcasting studio with a chemical similar to LSD, so that he would hallucinate on air. Another idea was to give him a box of cigars that would temporarily disorient him while he was giving a speech on television. Yet another scheme was to dust the inside of Castro's shoes with a chemical that would make his iconic beard fall out.

In the end, Fidel had the good fortune of growing old, bearded and not tripping balls.