August 7, 2023

Prologue: Strike Two Against JFK




Imagine that Washington spring day in 1961 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?

Who does Kennedy think is more well-versed in the potential danger Castro poses to the U.S. than the man who had served as 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. 

The man whom Cuban President Batista called upon to run Autobuses Modernos--the Havana bus company taking tourists to Mafia-run casinos in the 1950s. The man Ike, Vice President Nixon and CIA Director Allen Dulles relied upon to organize thousands of exiles fleeing Castro. 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 who helped the CIA overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala during Operation PBSUCCESS in 1954—and then was called upon by President Eisenhower 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?”

As he returned to his office in Miami where he would amass an army of three hundred Cuban exiles awaiting their next marching orders to retake their homeland, it became apparent to William Douglas Pawley that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his cadre of liberals in the State Department and the adoring press were allowing the communist menace to thrive in the Western Hemisphere.

This weak, inexperienced president already had one strike against him when he blew the Bay of Pigs invasion by not providing the air cover essential for success. Now 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 knew to eliminate the Castro regime.

Following his May 6, 1961 White House confrontation, Pawley knew his mission: If The New Frontier doesn’t include a free Cuba, then President Kennedy should never serve a second term. This goal must be pursued with the same determination that he had brought to all his activities in the Caribbean, Far East and Europe as the éminence grise of the American Century.

~~~~~

The journey to William Douglas Pawley’s pathological obsession with ridding Cuba of Fidel Castro that evolved into an intense disdain for JFK began at the end of the 19th century as the “Cuba Libre” movement to free Cuba from Spain’s grip was gaining support in America, and 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 U.S. military leaders 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—as the CIA’s psychological warfare and covert operation experts at the vast JMWAVE center on the southern campus of the University of Miami spread the war fever beyond the Cuban exiles chanting “Cuba si, Castro no!” and into Mafia families in Tampa, Chicago and New Orleans.

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 execution but bragged at least twice of having his own “hitmen” to do it. His interaction three years later with the DRE anti-Castro Cubans in Miami—whose members later engaged Lee Harvey Oswald in a debate in New Orleans in the summer of 1963—would make him a top priority for testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations reviewing the Warren Commission finding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. But Pawley never testified.

The following tells William Douglas Pawley's story which began for me with a footnote on page 361 of The Invisible Government followed by my Freedom of Information Act request in 1976 for the top-secret Doolittle Committee Report and continuing with the slow trickle of declassification of hundreds of Pawley-related CIA and FBI files that has lasted into 2023. Both President Trump and President Biden refused to declassify and release the final batch of 3,400 documents which often are multiple pages.1 

Many of the long-buried government files that were declassified 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 significant friends embedded in the investigations of the Kennedy assassination headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.

Information specifically about Pawley's covert activities when the CIA gave him the cryptonym QDDALE to hide his identity can be found at https://qddale.blogspot.com/ as well as within the chapters covering his entire life 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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