August 7, 2023

Prologue: Strike Two Against JFK




Imagine that May 6, 1961 day in Washington as William Douglas Pawley walked from the White House where the 64-year-old former Ambassador had been welcomed through multiple administrations. On this day his thoughts must have been aswirl with anger toward the neophyte president who had just thrown him out of the Oval Office.

How the hell does this inept young man whose father handed him the presidency ignore the recommendations of an international troubleshooter trusted by presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower?

Does Kennedy really think he is more well-versed on the potential danger Castro poses to the U.S. than the man who grew up in Cuba, launched the nation's first airport, served as U.S. Ambassador to two South American countries—Peru and Brazil—and had witnessed Castro's evil during the 1948 Bogotázo in Colombia while the heads of nations gathered for the 9th Pan-American Conference?

Who better knows Cuba than someone who spent his childhood there as his father sold merchandise to U.S. sailors at Guantanamo Naval Station? Who better than the entrepreneur who had formed Cuban National Airlines in the 1920s and had manufactured fighter planes in China and India for the Flying Tigers in the 1940s? 

Who better than the man Cuban President Batista called upon in the 1950s to run Autobuses Modernos--the Havana bus company taking tourists to casinos run by Meyer Lansky, Santos Trafficante and other American Mafia figures? 

Who better than the man Ike, Vice President Nixon and CIA Director Allen Dulles relied upon to organize thousands of exiles fleeing Castro? Who better than the man who helped establish a Cuban government in exile focused on retaking the island from the communists?

Who better recognizes the potential dangers the Western Hemisphere faces from the Soviet missiles in Cuba than the man who had warned of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor a year before it happened?

And who better knows the strengths and weaknesses of the Central Intelligence Agency than the man handpicked by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower in 1954 to help the CIA overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala—and who advanced $150,000 of his own money for fighter planes to make sure Operation PBSUCCESS was a successful coup?

Who is more astute on covert activities than the man Ike called upon to assist General James Doolittle in examining the effectiveness of the CIA in counteracting an implacable communist enemy globally—and recommended that the Agency be transformed into an “aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy"? 

Who is more serious about ridding Cuba of Castro than the man who asked Batista to step aside so a buffer government could be established, and when Batista refused, immediately offered to pay any amount to anyone who would assassinate Castro the day after he took control of Cuba? 

                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Among the largest contributors to Richard Nixon's presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy, Pawley immediately called upon Nixon and CIA Director Allen Dulles to remove Castro.  The initial planning meeting took place Pawley's beautiful Miami home on Sunset Island (as noted below in the declassified history of the Bay of Pigs Invasion posted at MaryFerrell.org), and the CIA soon set up its vast JMWAVE anti-Castro psychological warfare and covert operations a few miles away at the south campus of the University of Miami. 


Pawley not only vetted Cuban exiles for the CIA but eventually amassed at his Miami business office an army of three hundred Cuban exiles awaiting their next marching orders to retake their homeland. With Nixon's loss to JFK, and the new president's denial of essential air coverage for the Bay of Pigs invaders, Pawley became convinced that the cadre of liberals in the White House, State Department and the adoring press were allowing the communist menace to thrive in the Western Hemisphere. This joke of a president was failing to listen to the wisdom of a successful, adept warrior who believed 10,000 U.S. Marines needed to be dropped into Havana to eliminate the Castro regime.

William Douglas Pawley’s pathological obsession with ridding Cuba of Fidel Castro and his intensifying disdain for JFK was rooted in his youth on the island at the end of the 19th century as the “Cuba Libre” movement to free Cuba from Spain’s grip gained support in America. At that time, powerful figures hoped for an incident that could justify U.S. intervention. Some six decades later, the success of the 1898 battle cry--“Remember the Maine!”--would inspire a new generation of U.S. warriors to conceive Operation Northwoods—the staging of false flag attacks on the U.S. to gain support for an all-out attack on the Caribbean island. 

The CIA eventually gave Pawley the cryptonym QDDALE and they worked together to spread invasion fever to all Americans. Not just the Cuban exiles chanting “Cuba si, Castro no!” and the Mafia families in Tampa, Chicago and New Orleans eager to regain their Cuban casino revenues but to any American who could be frightened into believing that Cuba was a steppingstone to the communist nuclear attack and takeover of the United States.  

Months before the CIA and organized crime figures developed their assassination plots against Castro, Pawley not only offered to use his vast wealth to pay for Castro’s assassination but bragged at least twice of having his own “hitmen” to do it. 

Was it merely a coincidence that Pawley seriously interacted in Operation TILT with the DRE anti-Castro Cubans (CIA cryptonym AMSPELL) whose militant leader, Carlos Bringuier, engaged Lee Harvey Oswald in a highly publicized scuffle and debate in New Orleans in August 1963—the same week the CIA's General Carter noted that Pawley was seeking an incident that would justify US intervention against Castro (as this 2025 declassified document reveals)? 


Shortly after JFK's assassination, claims linking Castro and Oswald were made by one of Pawley's Operation TILT associates, John Martino, an electronics expert who had served the casino industry in Cuba until his arrest by Castro, and upon his release and return to the U.S. wrote the autobiographical book I Was Castro's Prisoner along with Nathaniel Weyl, author of Red Star Over Cuba.  

Investigator Gaeton Fonzi told me that Pawley's activities made him a top priority for testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations as it reviewed the Warren Commission's finding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. But Pawley never testified, having shot himself at home in January 1977 to end the pain of shingles (a few months after I had attempted to interview him in person).

The following links tell William Douglas Pawley's story which began for me with a footnote on page 361 of The Invisible Government1 followed by my Freedom of Information Act request in 1976 for the top-secret Doolittle Committee Report. Nearly a decade after the committee strengthened the CIA under Allen Dulles, Doolittle sat on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board advising JFK on Cuba policy. 

My pursuit of the truth continued for decades with the slow declassification of many hundreds of Pawley-related CIA and FBI files. In March 2025, President Donald Trump finally released somw 3,400 classified and redacted JFK Assassination documents.

Many of the long-buried government files that were declassified in the past few decades revealed Pawley’s involvement with America’s most powerful political figures, covert policymakers, the Cuban-exile group DRE which also interacted with Lee Harvey Oswald in the summer of 1963, and Pawley's own significant friends embedded in the various Kennedy assassination investigations: 

 >> Pawley had worked closely on foreign coups with CIA Director Allen Dulles who was fired by JFK and then named to the Warren Commission.

>> Pawley had approved for the Bay of Pigs Brigade Alberto Fowler who joined New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison's 1967 investigation of Clay Shaw and David Ferrie.  

>> Pawley's Intercontinent Company aviation offices were in Rockefeller Center as early as 1939 when his brother, Wallace, worked with him there while brothers, Edward and Eugene, handled the company's business dealings in China. Nelson Rockefeller's investigation of CIA abuses found no connection of the CIA to Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby. 

Pawley's extraordinary life can be found in the links below.  

CHAPTERS

Every chapter has a link to additional content and footnotes. Just click on Read more >>  above Labels.   


FOOTNOTES:

1David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government (New York: Vintage Books, Paperback Edition, 1974).

RIF# 104-10312-10174 ~ 9/11/1964 CIA “Memo: Discussions with QDDALE.” To: The Record. From: COS, JMWAVE. Subjects: Pawley, W.D.   

>> Ironically, this CIA memo is about The Invisible Government, the book which triggered my interest in Pawley in the 1970s. Released in 1999, the memo contains a recap of a 1964 discussion between William D. Pawley (CIA cryptonym: QDDALE) and  Theodore “Ted” Shackley (pseudonym: Andrew K. Reuteman) who served from 1962 to 1965 as Chief of the CIA’s Miami Station (cryptonym: JMWAVE) overseeing anti-Castro activities. The memo demonstrates one of many attempted manipulations of the media by the CIA (cryptonym: KUBARK): 

1. On 8 September 1964 QDDALE contacted Reuteman by telephone in order to brief Reuteman on the following topics: 

a. Readers Digest. QDDALE stated that he had not heard from Readers Digest relative to the KUBARK-inspired article on The Invisible Government which QDDALE had forwarded to Readers Digest. Reuteman asked QDDALE to send Readers Digest a follow-up tickler. QDDALE agreed to carry out this action and stated that he would keep Reuteman informed on any further developments.   

Please Note: Some glitches occurred in the process of saving my original Microsoft Word manuscript as an Adobe PDF so I could then copy and paste the chapters into this Google Blogger app. If you come across something I missed correcting, please let me know at pawleyinfo@aol.com

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posted by David Price Cannon @ 2:30 PM