20: Hitmen

Before entering politics in 1945, Sen. Homer E. Capehart (R-Indiana) had been a highly successful businessman known as “the father of the jukebox industry.” Back then, a jukebox contained dozens of 45-rpm, 7-inch records that could be heard on a pay-for-play basis by depositing a coin and pushing buttons that corresponded to the song selection. Jukeboxes quickly became fixtures in diners, bowling alleys, military installations, laundromats, college campus lounges and other gathering spots. Record companies embraced them because this new platform provided another way for songs to get heard and for artists to become bigger stars, such as country & western singer Marty Robbins. In an age of 2 minute records, his 4-minute-38-second song about a gunslinger in the west Texas town of “El Paso” became a No. 1 hit while Pawley was planning Castro’s demise through his own hit squad. As for Capehart, he became an astute politician before losing his seat after three terms to Birch Bayh.1

In the spring of 1960, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans sent FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover a memo from the Department of State that remained classified until 2011 and was not released for several more years. In the memo, the U.S. Counselor of Embassy for Economic Affairs in the Dominican Republic reported that he had talked on February 23, 1960 to Wallace B. Rouse, a long-time construction engineer who had traveled a few months earlier to Ciudad Trujillo with Senator Homer E. Capehart (R- Indiana). The group had hoped to seal “a large business deal” that collapsed at the “last minute” when Generalissimo Trujillo called the group “‘thieves’” which greatly upset Rouse.

Rouse told the Senator that “Pedro Moreles (presumably an American citizen) was recently given $5,000 ‘earnest money’ in Miami as a downpayment to bump Castro off. Rouse implied this was arranged by [Arturo] Espaillat acting for Trujillo, and also implied that former U.S. Ambassador William Pawley was implicated.” After describing how Moreles would be smuggled into Cuba, Rouse stated that “William Pawley had asked him why he, Rouse, had not sent gunmen to kill Castro; and that Pawley told him if that didn’t work ‘he would send his own gunmen’ to do the job. On arrival in Port- au-Prince, the Embassy Administration Officer, unaware of the Rouse conversation, coincidentally said he had been seated next to William Pawley on a flight from New York to Port-au-Prince during which Pawley had made the identical remark to him.”2 Bold emphasis added by D.P. Cannon

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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).

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44: Life and Death

On October 4, 1977, Bob Woodward, the Watergate reporter from The Washington Post spoke in New Jersey at Montclair State College (now a University) and bet the audience that no one could name all of the infamous Watergate burglars just five years after the crime. I won his $20 bet because my interest in JMWAVE and the anti-Castro Cubans associated with E. Howard Hunt, Frank Sturgis and William Pawley had been rising not waning during the investigations by the Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, between 1975 and 1978.

Those probes also were creating an intriguing cluster of dead fellows within the JMWAVE-AMSPELL-TILT milieu.1 Some were heart attacks, perhaps brought on by the stress of revelations of dark secrets. Some suicides. Some murders by shooting and car bombing.

On the morning of January 7, 1977, hours before Pawley took his own life, Juan Jose Peruyero “was shot twice in the back” as he left his home in Miami’s Little Havana “shortly after at 8 a.m.” Before he died at “Jackson Memorial Hospital,” Peruyero said he knew who fired the shots, but the assailant in the passing “1967 Cadillac” was never prosecuted, and it has remained a cold case for decades. He “was the seventh exile leader to die in the last three years.”2

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46: Assassination Scenarios

In 1992, the National Archives began declassifying documents relating to Pawley’s CIA activities from 40 years earlier, and in 1999 it began releasing his QDDALE documents, which were still trickling out in December 2022 containing previously redacted names. Due to the Freedom of Information Act requesting process and the backlog at the National Archive, and the CIA’s reluctance to share the truth, it has taken from 1976 to 2023 to get close to finalizing this manuscript. 

Some of the still unreleased documents may have information pertinent to the complete picture of Pawley. Some may reveal other truths about Pawley, his associates and their dark diplomacy that transformed America from a beacon of hope for the world's oppressed into a nation where decades of ruthless tactics have helped rally enemies against us.

Some documents will never be found because of the paranoia of James Jesus Angleton and the politics of some officials. One example of this occurred during President Ronald Reagan’s term, when Everett Ellis Briggs, the United States Ambassador to Panama, in the summer of 1985, tried to keep visiting dignitaries away from General Noriega. “‘When Vernon Walters, a high-ranking CIA official, sent the general a very cordial Christmas greeting via the diplomatic pouch, I managed to intercept and destroy the message (without Mr. Walter’s knowledge).’”1

Cuban-born Briggs made the revelation five years after Walters died. For some reason, Briggs considered his judgment superior to the multilingual Walters who was a translator for Secretary of State Marshall at Pawley’s Latin America conference in Bogota when Briggs was just in his teens. Conservative writer and original television host of Firing Line, William F. Buckley, who attended Yale University, then entered the CIA under Case Officer E. Howard Hunt, did not share Briggs’ low opinion of Walters’ judgment and noted in the obituary he wrote for Walters, “Although his business in later years was diplomacy, his craft was intelligence, and the two blended in his hands.” The respect for Vernon Walters was demonstrated in 1980 when he was the guest speaker at the sixth annual national convention of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers whose members included former CIA Director Richard Helms, JMWAVES's George Joannides and former Western Hemisphere head David Atlee Phillips who founded the AFIO as he was coming under congressional scrutiny for his activities surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald.2

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