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.   

Read more »

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

posted by David Price Cannon @ 2:30 PM  

December 12, 2009

34: The Warren

The November 22, 1963, 12:30 pm (CST) JFK assassination was quickly painted as the act of a disgruntled loner with a communist taint who expertly picked off his target as President Kennedy traversed past Dealey Plaza moving away on a downward curving road from the sniper's nest on the 6th Floor of the Texas School Book Depository. 

Within 48 hours of the shooting, the alleged shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot by Jack Ruby who owned The Carousel nightclub, a strip-tease joint strategically located across from the popular Dallas hotel, The Adolphus. Ruby's club not only was frequented by tourists as well as local politicians and businessmen but also by members of the Dallas Police Department. The policemen not only came to imbibe in drinks and titillation but often were employed by Ruby as security guards. This fact created the possibility of a complex conspiracy. 

Did Ruby know Oswald? Did a Dallas cop tipoff Ruby or expedite Ruby's ability to enter the Dallas Police Department basement on November 24th at 12:20 pm, precisely when Oswald was in the process of being transferred to the county jail? Was Ruby connected to any mob boss—Joseph Civello in Dallas, Sam Giancana in Chicago or Carlos Marcello in New Orleans—who had put out a hit on Oswald?   

Oswald’s death triggered U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to write a memo to President Johnson's aide Bill Moyers, stating: "The public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin that he did not have confederates who are still at large and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial." 

Katzenbach emphatically insisted on a coverup: "Speculation about Oswald’s motivation ought to be cut off and we should have some basis for rebutting thought that this was a Communist conspiracy or (as the Iron Curtain press is saying) a right-wing conspiracy to blame it on the Communists. Unfortunately the facts on Oswald seem about too pat—too obvious (Marxist, Cuba, Russian wife, etc.). The Dallas police have put out statements on the Communist conspiracy theory and it was they who were in charge when he was shot and thus silenced." Katzenbach wanted the Assistant FBI Director Cartha DeLoach to declare Oswald acted alone and suggested that it may become necessary for President Johnson to appoint a blue ribbon panel to prevent Congressional hearings that may arrive at a different conclusion.  

But even FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a problem. He told President Johnson that there was a very confusing angle about Oswald's visits to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City between September 27 and October 2, 1963. 

"We have up here the tape and the photograph of the man who was at the Soviet Embassy using Oswald’s name. That picture and the tape do not correspond to this man’s voice nor to his appearance."  

In response to the FBI's inquiry to the CIA about the Agency's knowledge about Oswald, Birch O’Neal of the Counterintelligence Staff  replied “there was nothing on him in CIA file other than material filed furnished to CIA by FBI and Department of State.” In fact, however, the CIA's Special Investigations Group had been monitoring Oswald since November 1959 and within its dozen Oswald documents was a report that Oswald was in contact with the diplomatic offices of the Soviet Union and Cuba. Hoover wanted the FBI's legal attaché in Mexico City to look into the possibilities of a fake Oswald and Russian involvement.

For those who began decades of exploring Oswald-Ruby connections, it was a journey that entered a labyrinth that went around the world to Japan and Russia and back to the U.S. and Mexico; what emerged from the warren left many questioning why LBJ's "unimpeachable" Warren Commission left out of its investigation so many unusual connections. 

In the decades that followed, the Rockefeller Commission, House Select Committee on Assassinations and Church Committee would look into the connections and classify much of what they found. Sixty years later, thousands of declassified CIA, FBI, State, Army and other documents were still trickling out, and some documents such as those about the DRE’s CIA case officer, George Joannides, whose name did not surface until a half-century after the Bay of Pigs invasion, were still being withheld.

A lawsuit by reporter Jefferson Morley led to a court decision in December 2007 regarding declassification of documents relating to Joannides involvement with the DRE, the group that interacted with Oswald. Jefferson Morley wrote in The Washington Independent, that a circuit court had “ordered the CIA to search its operational files for more material on Joannides” and “explain why 17 reports on Joannides’ secret operations in 1962, 1963 and 1964, are missing from CIA archives. In legal briefs, agency officials have claimed that more than 30 documents about Joannides’s actions in the 1960s and 1970s cannot be made public in any form—for reasons of ‘national security.’”

The suit had been filed after it was learned that Joannides in the 1970s had become the CIA liaison carrying requested documents pertaining to Oswald’s possible co-conspirators from the Agency to the House Select Committee on Assassination (HSCA).

Read more »

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

posted by David Price Cannon @ 2:06 PM  

43: Sunset

On January 7, 1977, while many Americans were coping with one of the worst winters in U.S. history, an 80-year-old Miami Beach resident, whose fortune had been made off the public’s desire for refuge from the cold, composed a note in his Sunset Island home. Then he lifted a pistol to his chest and fired a bullet into his heart.1 

He was still alive when the ambulance arrived, “but died a short time later” according to the Miami police who told reporters William Pawley “had been in failing health.”2 His death came as Frank Sinatra fans mourned the death of his mother, Dolly Sinatra, in a plane crash that also claimed the life of her close friend from New Jersey, Ann Carboni, coincidentally the wife of the former China National Aviation Corporation dentist in Calcutta.3

That night, the national broadcast of CBS Evening News devoted less than half-a- minute to reporting that William Douglas Pawley, a former Ambassador to Brazil, had committed suicide. 4

The Washington Post two days later referred to him as an aviation expert and devoted 309 words to his life.5

The New York Post announced “‘Flying Tigers’ Founder Dies” and noted that Pawley had raised over $250,000 for the election campaign of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 and another $100,000 for Vice President Nixon's unsuccessful race against John F. Kennedy in 1960.6

Time magazine noted William Pawley’s passing in its customary inch of coverage which stated that in 1958 President Eisenhower had dispatched Pawley to Cuba on a secret mission to persuade President Fulgencio Batista that a caretaker government should be installed to prevent revolutionaries from taking control of the island.7 Batista refused to step down, and three weeks later Fidel Castro took power. The underpinnings and aftermath of the incident would lead to animosity between Pawley, State Department members and the next President, John F. Kennedy.8

Pawley’s life as a world financier, envoy and philanthropist merited 15 inches in The New York Times.9

Down in South Carolina, where an island is named for the Pawley family, The Florence Morning News obituary pointed out that General James Doolittle had “once served as a test pilot for Pawley” when he sold planes to China.

Read more »

Labels: , , , , , , ,

posted by David Price Cannon @ 1:49 PM