December 12, 2009

48: Pawley's Spheres of Influence

William Douglas Pawley garnered influence around the world and within important circles. Cuba, China, India, Peru, Brazil, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Spain, United States. CIA, Warren Commission, Garrison JFK Investigation, Rockefeller Commission, House Select Committee on Assassinations, Bay of Pigs, Operation TILT, DRE. 

Click on images to enlarge.




As of 60 years later:
  • Neither President Trump nor Biden would release the final few thousand JFK documents as mandated by Congress. (My experience is a single document  can range from one page to hundreds of pages.) Biden cites “National security” 60 years later as the reason he won’t release.
  • Jefferson Morley who runs the JFK Facts substack and podcast has had a decade-long lawsuit trying to obtain 33 documents about George Joannides a CIA officer who oversaw the DRE. That group gained press attention when in August 1963 it encountered Oswald handing out pro-Castro literature (printed with an anti-Castro address, 544 Camp Street, as if it was an attempt by the CIA to gather names of Castro supporters). 
  • Carlos Bringuier of the DRE then debated Oswald on radio elevating more publicity for him shortly before Oswald went to Mexico and tried to gain access to Cuba. Keep in mind Oswald had learned Russian in the Marines and was stationed in Japan monitoring U-2 flights. He then “defected” to Russia offering secrets--only to return to the U.S. without being interrogated for weeks like other defectors or jailed for treason. 
  • Joannides in the following decade served as liaison for the CIA to the House Select Committee on Assassinations (which was unaware of Joannides previous role with the DRE).
  • When William Pawley became involved in CIA Operation TILT (aka Operation Red Cross aka Bayo-Pawley Affair in the 1975 Soldier of Fortune article) he was attempting to prove JFK had been duped by Castro and there were still missiles in Cuba—justifying bombing Cuba and electing Goldwater. TILT failed to bring out Soviet Technicians and the members of the crew that Pawley helped get to Cuban waters never returned. They were also members of the DRE. 
  • The Oswald debate occurred shortly after TILT failed. 
  • Pawley (who spent his youth in Cuba, headed Cuba National Airlines in 1930, ran the Havana Bus System in 1950s, and tried to get Batista to step aside to slow Castro’s ascent) immediately said after Castro took power that he would pay anything to have Castro killed. 
  • Later, a long withheld document shows Pawley twice bragged of having his own Hitmen to do the job. 
  • Pawley was involved in the initial approval of Cuban exiles for Brigade 2506 and the planning of the Bay of Pigs operation with Nixon, CIA Director Dulles and others. 
  • Pawley who had been a cofounder of the Flying Tigers became furious that JFK didn’t provide air cover for the Brigade. 
  • Pawley personally put up $25,000 to ransom back one of the Brigade members.
  • Pawley had been welcome in the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower White House but was thrown out of the Oval Office by JFK after advocating bombing Cuba. 
  • Pawley had been one of 4 men appointed by Eisenhower to look into the CIA’s capabilities during the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala (which Pawley participated in). In addition to Pawley and General Doolittle, Morris Hadley (John McCloy’s law  partner served on the Committee).The Doolittle Committee recommended that the CIA become more ruthless than the enemy. 
  • Pawley was given a CIA cryptonym QDDALE and worked with JMWAVE in Miami, the CIA’s then largest operation. Joannides ran it in 1963.
  • When JFK was shot, Pawley’s DRE contacts immediately announced Oswald was pro Castro.
  • Pawley was a friend of Allen Dulles and John McCloy on the Warren Commission.
  • When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began looking into a CIA connection to the JFK assassination, the CIA launched a campaign to discredit him. 
  • Pawley had passed on a CIA article to Readers Digest to print as a rebuttal to the 1964 Wise and Ross expose of the CIA, The Invisible Government
  • Alberto Fowler volunteered to be Spanish translator for Garrison. Fowler had received Pawley’s recommendation to be part of Brigade 2506. Fowler leaked details of Garrison's investigation to Bringuier of the DRE who had debated Oswald on radio.
  • On the day Lee Harvey Oswald became a suspect in the assassination, he worked in the Texas School Book Depository owned by David Howard Byrd. Oddly he was in Africa hunting with General Doolittle.
  • HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi told me that Pawley would have been his first witness had Pawley not shot himself in 1977--a few months after I had driven to Miami to interview him but he was bedridden with shingles from head to toe, the excruciating pain of which drove Pawley to kill himself).
  • Paul Landis, the Secret Service Agent who found the almost pristine bullet in the back seat of JFK’s limousine and put it on the stretcher, believed a shot came from the front. 
  • He and other agents never were called to testify by the Warren Commission. They had been trained to watch crowds for pistols (because all other assassins of presidents used pistols) instead of riflemen in buildings or on the grassy knoll. According to the lawyer for Landis (interview on Morley’s JFK Facts podcast) all agents who were feet from JFK had PTSD, got no sleep, yet worked for the next few days even having to guard hundreds of country leaders who came for the funeral. 
  • My opinion is Oswald was a patsy as he stated. His fluency in Russian made him a good CIA asset to defect to Russia. His defection to Russia and highly publicized pro-Castro debate in New Orleans with the DRE made him a good asset to try to infiltrate Cuba but when he was turned away by the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City he became expendable to his CIA control officer (name perhaps in the unreleased documents; perhaps William Harvey when he went to Russia; David Phillips when he went to Mexico). 
  • Oswald would have been the perfect patsy for someone who thought Castro could be blamed if Oswald was fingered as the assassin. 
  • Joannides who oversaw the DRE or Pawley who worked with DRE members and had deep knowledge of how the CIA would try to obscure any Agency connections could have gained knowledge of Oswald's employment in Dallas.
  • Pawley had bragged of having hitmen on two documented occasions. One could have easily fired a shot from the Grassy Knoll as my analysis of Zapruder Film Frame 413 shows.
  • Jefferson Morley wrote this recently: "For instance, a 1977 CIA memo, not fully declassified until last year, shows that the agency itself probed the possible involvement of anti-Castro Cubans in the assassination." In 1977, Donald Heath, a now-deceased undercover officer, told congressional investigators that in the days after Kennedy was killed, his bosses in the CIA’s Miami station had spurned the “lone-gunman” theory. Instead, they ordered a secret investigation of anti-communist Cubans in South Florida for a possible role in the Dallas ambush. The CIA has never shared results of this “fairly massive undertaking” with investigators or the public.
  • President Kennedy's brother, Robert, also suspected anti-Castro Cubans had a hand in the Dealey Plaza ambush, according to David Talbot’s definitive 2008 book, Brothers. Through extensive interviewing of RFK’s associates, Talbot showed that Bobby concluded some combination of CIA operatives, anti-Castro Cubans, and organized-crime figures were behind his brother’s murder. I believe it only required an organizer, a shooter, and a getaway driiver; no massive conspiracy.
  • On July 14, Peter Baker of The New York Times reported that the Trump and Biden administrations’ claims of full disclosure were called into question by a 1962 CIA memo, not declassified until May 2023, which yielded a fascinating detail: the name of the CIA official who read the mail of Lee Harvey Oswald.
  • The man who read Oswald’s mail was Reuben Efron, the deputy chief of the CIA’s illicit mail-surveillance program in the early 1960s. The program spied on thousands of Americans from 1955 to 1974, a gross violation of the agency’s charter banning covert operations against US citizens.
  • The memo showed that Efron had learned that a former radar operator at the CIA’s top-secret base in Atsugi, Japan, named Lee Oswald had returned from a two-year stay in the Soviet Union. Efron shared a purloined July 1961 letter written by Oswald’s mother with a colleague in the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff.
  • Efron’s name was the very last detail from the CIA’s pre-assassination Oswald file to be declassified. Between Nov. 11, 1959, and Nov. 22, 1963, the agency collected at least 42 documents about Oswald, his travels, his politics, his personal life, and intercepted six letters from his mother. It only took 61 years for the CIA to disclose fully what it knew about Oswald—and who knew it. "The Times story hinted at, but did not disclose who told Efron to read Oswald’s maiI. It was almost certainly Efron’s boss at the Counterintelligence Staff, James Jesus Angleton, a metaphysician of espionage, tricky, spooky, obtuse, and alcoholic. The CIA won’t comment, because any statement would confirm that this controversial character and his minions were paying attention to Oswald while JFK was preparing for a political trip to Texas. Not a good look, especially for the CIA’s 3.4 million followers on Twitter."
  • Efron also observed widow Marina Oswald’s first appearance before the Warren Commission in February 1964. No mention of his CIA affiliation was made in the Warren Report.


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