11: Going Bananas in Guatemala 1954

As George C. Marshall was being honored for the Marshall Plan designed to spur a peaceful economic recovery in Europe, his friend William Pawley was becoming involved in more hostile activities. In response to Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman calling for agrarian reform that would impact profits of United Fruit and coffee growers, the CIA drew up a contingency plan to overthrow him. CIA Director Allen Dulles wanted “a coordinated effort in the political field.” Dulles felt that “the exact steps which might be politically feasible are matters beyond our competence here” nonetheless “we have a legitimate interest, it seems to me, in seeing that the climate is right for the types of action in which we may be engaged.”

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested  to President Eisenhower “sending a two-fisted guy to the general area on a trip of inspection and to report to the President.” Who did he have in mind? “Bill Pawley or someone of his type might be considered. I recognize that Pawley is hard to control, but he is fearless and gets things done even though he may break a little crockery in doing it. I would suggest that he might also spend a little time in the countries bordering on one of our chief concern.”1

Prior to Dulles envisioning Pawley’s new role, covert “Security Clearance” had been requested by the CIA’s Branch 4 of the Western Hemisphere (WH-IV aka WH/4)—the Caribbean region—for Pawley to “be used in Project DTROBALO as a means of offering employment and resettlement to rehabilitated disposees [sic].” Pawley it was noted “has many contacts and business interests in Latin America which will be valuable in the resettlement phase of the Project. He is not to be used as a consultant. He will be used on a witting basis” and his cover story would be “Governmental” rather than “Commercial” or “Other.” 

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14: Pawley's Caribbean Oyster

With his Doolittle Special Study Group’s work done, Pawley continued pursuing his lucrative Latin American activities. He was issued a regular passport on December 14, 1954 “to visit Venezuela for an undetermined stay on personal business.”1 As a teenager, he had ridden a donkey into the Venezuelan jungles “to sell stearic acid and paraffin” and in his early twenties returned “to sell diving suits” to pearl hunters. Two decades later, he and Edna “spent Easter in Caracas, Venezuela with Walter Donnelly and his wife.”2

Like his father, the Caribbean region became the focus of Pawley’s expanding financial wealth. In his autobiography, Pawley detailed how he became entwined in business with Trujillo while the guest of honor at the head table of a large dinner attended by “400 Dominicans and Americans, evenly divided.” He “sat between Trujillo and our Ambassador [William Townsend] Pheiffer.” The discussion turned to “mining and oil ventures which led into the subject of the need for the Dominican Republic to develop its abundant natural resources.” Pawley soon became an adviser to Trujillo on how to profitably exploit the island nation’s natural resources and the “results were spectacular, especially in the development of one of the most valuable nickel mines anywhere.3

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21: Dictating to Dictator Trujillo

Pawley’s entrepreneurship and bilingual skills led to global success and wealth that gave him easy access not only to U.S. presidents but also to Generalissimo Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, who profited so much from the Pawley family’s thriving businesses that William believed he could dictate the course of the country. In 1955, Trujillo asked Pawley to help him write laws to attract U.S. investment in oil and minerals. That same year, Vice President Nixon was criticized for embracing the dictator.

On January 20, 1960, Jane Atherton Roman, who served as liaison between the CIA and FBI as a senior aide to CIA counterintelligence head, James Jesus Angleton, received a document that listed Edward Pawley as the subject. One who read it wondered if it was actually about his brother, William. The document noted that following trips to Florida and Cuba, “Catherine Taaffe, whose activities are well known to the intelligence community” advised that “there was a widespread belief among Cubans that the United States Government, and specifically CIA, was sponsoring anti-Castro plotting” and, according to former Havana lawyer Francisco Rodriguez Couceiro, Edward Pawley was working with the CIA on the effort. The document had a handwritten note: “Probably Wm D. Pawley Miami.” Mrs. Roman wrote beneath it: “Or his brother, Edward, who represents the Pawley business interest in the Dom. Rep.”

An English major graduate from Smith College, Jane Atherton worked in advertising then served in the OSS in 1944. A decade later, she married CIA co-worker Howard Edgar Roman who became a researcher for two books written by CIA Director Allen Dulles. Ten weeks before reading about the Pawleys activities, Jane Roman had opened the CIA's first file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a U.S. Marine Corps radar operator who, after learning Russian and monitoring U-2 flights over Russia, defected to Russia. By the summer of 1963, William Pawley and Lee Harvey Oswald would both interact with the CIA-funded Cuban-exile group DRE.         

In February 1960 an article appeared in the Miami Herald, titled “Smathers at Conference: Miamian Pawley Had a Part in Trujillo’s ‘Free Vote’ Vow.” While it mentions that Edward Pawley lives in Cuidad Trujillo and manages the Pawley mining and oil interests, the article notes that William Pawley is a longtime friend and an informal “economic advisor” to the Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who accepted his advice and promised “to hold free multiparty elections within a year.”1

At the Dominican Republic press conference, Senator George Smathers was joined by William Pawley who stated that he had recently sold all of his investments in the country, while assuring the media that Trujillo was not in trouble, even though he recently had broken up a plot to overthrow his regime. Pawley “told The Herald from Washington his motives were ‘patriotic—to keep another Communist regime from forming in the Caribbean.’” He claimed that Smathers and Trujillo “each recognized that the Caribbean is entering a new period. A revision of regimes unacceptable to democratic nations has to be made,’ Pawley added.”2

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55: Former U.S. Ambassador Manual Rocha Accused of Being Cuban Agent

Colombian-born former U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia Manuel Rocha was arrested in Florida, accused of serving as an agent of Cuba. He had been in the diplomatic corps for 25 years serving in Argentina, Italy, Honduras, Mexico and the Dominican Republic, and worked as a Latin America expert for the National Security Council. "His diplomatic postings included a stint at the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba during a time when the U.S. lacked full diplomatic relations with Fidel Castro’s communist government."

https://apnews.com/article/fbi-cuba-bolivia-former-ambassador-arrested-af9d80a4f268099364dff249dd74b3ec

Phillip Linderman in his December 11, 2023 article "Manuel Rocha: Fanatic, Spy--and My Colleague" on The American Conservative website stated that the FBI's revelation that Rocha was a mole caused him "deep sadness and outrage." He believed Rocha was recruited as "a young idealist in 1973 Chile, influenced both by Allende’s Marxism and Pinochet’s coup against it." 

Linderman noted, "Natural gifts in dealing with people serve diplomats well, and they serve spies even better. Like the notorious Hiss, Rocha had attended all the right Ivy League schools and had made extensive connections with everybody in the Washington foreign-policy establishment who worked Latin America. Rocha was clearly a rising Foreign Service star, destined for an ambassadorship which he later got in his Bolivia assignment."