48: Pawley's Spheres of Influence
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- 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.
Pawley & Frank Wisner
While the CIA team on the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz was headed by Deputy Director of Plans Frank Wisner, there was also a State Department team, headed by two rabid anticommunists, Ambassador to Guatemala John Peurifoy and former diplomat to Peru and Brazil William Douglas Pawley.
Professor Peter Dale Scott in his 2012 COPA presentation (William Pawley, the Kennedy Assassination, and Watergate, TILT and the “Phase Three” Story of Clare Boothe Luce) noted that Pawley had told President Eisenhower that someone in the CIA was leaking details of PBSUCCESS planning to the press, to which Ike responded that he wanted Pawley to head an investigation of CIA covert operations. Professor Scott further noted that “Pawley declined to lead the new commission, giving as a reason ‘a possible breakdown in the special relationship Pawley had with Dulles brothers.’ Instead, ‘Pawley’s old friend Gen. Jimmy Doolittle became head of the Commission, with Pawley as a member.’”
In 1976, I received the Doolittle Report under FOIA and attempted to interview the four members of the committee. Doolittle outright refused to discuss it. Pawley was no longer in his Miami office (a few months later, suffering from shingles, he died by suicide as Gaeton Fonzi was pressing Pawley to testify before the House Select Committee on Assassinations about his disdain for JFK}. I did manage to speak by phone to both former Secretary of the Navy William Birrell Franke (retired in Rutland, Vermont) and Morris Hadley (retired partner in Manhattan from the prestigious Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy law firm). Hadley was a longtime friend of CIA Director Allen Dulles who later served with McCloy on the Warren Commission.
Unlike the 2026 precision operation in Venezuela to capture Maduro, PBSUCCESS was nearly an embarrassing disaster. I was told that one US group was bribing ships to blockade the harbor (Operation WASHTUB) while another team bribed ships to sail in. The Doolittle members were critical of the leadership skills of CIA Director Dulles. The declassification of a 1954 memo confirmed Franke’s and Hadley’s 1977 comments to me.
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Memorandum of Conversation
Washington, October 19, 1954.
The President saw General Doolittle and other members of the Committee appointed to investigate the activities of the CIA. The report was presented by General Doolittle, who said they had gone over it with Allen Dulles for three reasons:
(1) to be absolutely fair;
(2) to study Mr. Dulles better to watch for his reactions to a report not wholly favorable;
(3) and their hope that the maximum good would come out of the report.
Mr. Dulles made several recommendations that were incorporated in the report. The President prefaced his remarks by saying that of course Mr. Dulles knew, as does everyone, that no two men would have the same judgments about certain things. That what we wanted to know was did we have a good man for the CIA head, and was he being selective and skillful in getting his assistants, and was his team working together in the best interests of the United States.
General Doolittle emphasized that the report was constructive criticism and in no sense a white wash. Some of the recommendations were very technical.
About Dulles: his principal strength is his unique knowledge of his subject; he has his whole heart in it, his life, he is a man of great honesty, integrity, loyally supported by his staff. His weakness, or the weakness of the CIA is in the organization—it grew like topsy, sloppy organization. Mr. Dulles surrounds himself with people in whom he has loyalty but not competence. There is a lack of discipline in the organization. There is a complete lack of security consciousness throughout organization. Too much information is leaked at cocktail party.
There is the family relationship with the Secretary of State. Such relationship can be important as it leads to protection of one by the other or influence of one by the other. Doolittle feels that it is a relationship that it would be better not to have exist. The President thought, however, there was something more favorable to be said about the relationship; he appointed Allen Dulles in full knowledge of the relationship and thinks it might be beneficial.
About Dulles’ two chief assistants. Frank Wisner is a chap of great promise but not a good organizer.
About Dulles’ readiness to accept criticism, Doolittle said he is highly emotional; wherever criticism was against him he took it well; he fought for his staff people, however, to the point of becoming emotional. Doolittle had said that Bedell Smith had at one time said that Dulles was too emotional to be in this critical spot. He said further he thought his emotionalism was far worse than it appeared on the surface. The President said he had never seen him show the slightest disturbance. He said further that we must remember that here is one of the most peculiar types of operation any government can have, and that it probably takes a strange kind of genius to run it. The President said that what did disturb him was what the Committee reported about his assistants—Wisner and Cabell. Doolittle said in his opinion Allen Dulles did not have an administrative individual in either.
Eisenhower said he was convinced no military man could do the job. President pointed out importance of Allen Dulles’ contacts throughout the world.
President further said, with reference to lack of security, that it was completely frustrating to find always evidence that people are talking. Security Council has gotten pretty good.
President said his next move would be to get Dulles in and talk to him about it. The relationship with Secretary of State did not disturb him because part of CIA’s work is extension of work of State Department. He further feels the confidential relationship between the two brothers is a good thing.
Someone in room said Bissell was not a good man. Also that Amory was an exceptionally fine man. President said we were interested in two things:
(1) improvement within CIA itself;
(2) improvement in relationship and better understanding between CIA and rest of intelligence committees in government.
President said he was astonished at the difficulty of getting good administrators in government; that he had found a good many fine administrators throughout his long career.
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Professor Scott stated, the Doolittle Commission represented a consolidation of control over the CIA by Allen Dulles, Wisner, and the OPC.” They had the added directive to transform the CIA to an “organization more effective, more unique, and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the enemy.”
Scott’s COPA presentation was based on his review of Anthony R. Carrozza’s 2012 biography, William D. Pawley: The Extraordinary Life of the Adventurer, Entrepreneur, and Diplomat Who Cofounded the Flying Tigers which cites in chapter 1, footnote 2, my study, More Ruthless Than The Enemy. They can be found at:
Carrozza's book on page 197, states: "Allen Dulles summoned Al Haney, the CIA station chief in Seoul, to head up the Opa-Loka operation [invasion training that E. Howard Hunt was involved in]. Taking charge, Haney began increasing his role in PBSUCCESS, much to the chagrin of Frank Wisner, who ran the overall operation from Washington."
Labels: China, Cuba, Doolittle Committee, DRE, Frank Wisner, Haiti, India, Pawley, TILT, William Douglas Pawley
posted by David Price Cannon @ 1:35 PM
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