A teenage German girl met Castro on a cruise ship, became his lover, was recruited by the CIA to poison him — and then told him the whole thing. Her story only got stranger from there.
Marita Lorenz was born in Germany in 1939 to a German navy captain and an American actress mother. During World War II, her family was interned in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After the war, they emigrated to the United States, where her mother went to work for U.S. Army intelligence. By the time Marita was a teenager, she had already lived several lifetimes' worth of history. None of it prepared her for what came next.
In February 1959 — weeks after Fidel Castro had won the Cuban Revolution — Marita arrived in Havana on her father's ship, the MS Berlin. Castro came aboard for a visit. He was 32, recently victorious, magnetic. She was 19. He was taken with her. Within days, he had sent a plane to bring her back to Cuba. She moved into his quarters at the Havana Hilton and began what she later described as a months-long affair. She was, improbably, one of the most intimate witnesses to the early days of the Cuban Revolution.
Then the CIA came calling. Frank Sturgis — an American adventurer and intelligence operative who had fought with Castro's guerrillas and then turned against him — recruited Lorenz to return to Cuba with a mission. She was given two poison pills, disguised in a cold cream jar, to slip into Castro's food or drink. She flew back to Havana. Whether from doubt, guilt, or love — her accounts vary — she couldn't go through with it. She found the pills melted. She told Castro about the plot. By one telling, he handed her his own pistol and told her to shoot him if she wanted to. She didn't.
Sturgis and the CIA remained in Lorenz's orbit for years afterward. In 1977, she gave a stunning interview claiming she had been present in November 1963 at a gathering in Miami's Little Havana where Lee Harvey Oswald was present, maps of Dallas were studied, and what she believed was an assassination plot was discussed. She said she drove with the group to Dallas but flew home before anything happened. The House Select Committee on Assassinations investigated her testimony and found it unreliable.
Lorenz spent decades in the strange penumbra of Cold War conspiracy. She worked for the FBI spying on Eastern Bloc diplomats. She gave depositions in E. Howard Hunt's libel trial. She wrote two memoirs and was the subject of a German documentary. A Vanity Fair profile from 1993 described her as 'a patron saint of conspiracy buffs,' noting that about half of her claims were corroborated by FBI records and other sources, while the other half 'lacks any corroboration and at times flies in the face of existing evidence.' She died in 2019, at 80. Jennifer Lawrence was reportedly cast to play her in a biopic; as of the mid-2020s it remained in development.