Fidel Castro survived, according to this film's count, 638 separate assassination plots hatched by the CIA and Cuban exile groups over decades of Cold War hostility. Director Dollan Cannell catalogs the methods on record: an exploding cigar, a poison-tipped ballpoint pen, a radio station rigged to pump out noxious gas, and femme fatale operatives sent to get close enough to kill him. The film uses interviews and archival material to work through how seriously each plan was pursued and how many never got past the planning stage, treating the sheer volume of schemes as evidence of Washington's obsession with removing one man. It also surfaces the stranger footnotes, including John F. Kennedy asking novelist Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, for ideas on ousting Castro, a detail that places the whole operation somewhere between covert war and Cold War fiction. Behind the absurdity of individual plots, the film keeps returning to the same fact: an American president wanted a foreign head of state dead, and the agencies under him spent years trying to make that happen.