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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28: Cuba Cacophony: Northwoods, Mongoose, JMWAVE and DRE

Nearly a year after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara received a memo from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer (pictured left of JFK next to General Curtis LeMay) on the topic of “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba (TS).”

The March 13, 1962 proposal appears to be heavily influenced by the “more ruthless than the enemy” attitude of the Doolittle Committee report. 

It suggested ways to justify to the American public an all-out war on Cuba. It brought Operation Mongoose to a new level of activity outside the borders of Cuba with recommendations that included assassinating anti-Castro Cuban refugees living in Miami or sinking a boatload of refugees escaping the island and blaming it on Castro by using false documents. The most horrific suggestion was faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner or blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Castro-planned sabotage, similar to the “Remember the Maine” incident which justified the U.S. entry into the Spanish American War some six decades earlier.

The justification memo also noted that the project should be undertaken “in the event that current covert efforts to foster an Internal Cuban rebellion are unsuccessful” and “a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months ... It is understood that the Department of State also is preparing suggested courses of action to develop justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba.”

The JCS members who put their names to it in addition to Lemnitzer were (to the right of JFK) General George Henry Decker (Chief of Staff, U.S. Army); Admiral George Whelan Anderson Jr. (Chief of Naval Operations); and General David Monroe Shoup (Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps). 

General Curtis Emerson LeMay (Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force) would become as vociferous a hawk on the issue of Cuba as Pawley, and in October President Kennedy would replace Lemnitzer with General Maxwell Taylor.1 

William Bamford, an expert on the National Security Agency who revealed the document in his 2001 book Body of Secrets, stated that Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.” What’s more amazing is that the proposal was made three weeks after Robert Kennedy had told Air Force General Edward G. Lansdale, the Pentagon’s Deputy Director of the Office of Special Operations (OSO), to focus on intelligence gathering instead of proposing wildly outrageous schemes for Operation Mongoose, which was originally developed by the JCS and Lansdale to foment a revolt within Cuba to overthrow Castro. 

On April 11, 1962, General Lansdale provided a report on the “Status of Operation Mongoose” at week four of the 19-week Phase 1. “Our Center in Miami processed 1,309 refugees last week ... McCone can provide details” of “debriefing visitors to Cuba, at a number of free world ports.” 

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32: "What it is ain't exactly clear"*

On October 4, 1963, The New York Times reported that Republican conservative candidate for President Barry Goldwater believed President Kennedy was helping the Soviets. The President was considering a wheat sale to the Russians, which former Vice President Nixon also spoke adamantly against asserting it would be “harming the cause of freedom.”1

Six days later, asserting it was good for the US economy, JFK announced his approval of the $250 million wheat sale to the Soviet Union while ruling out sales to Cuba and China. A schism between Red China and Russia had appeared at about the same time, and the intelligence and defense communities would debate whether it was real and or a treacherous ploy to deceive the United States.2

The President issued a denial that the CIA was pursuing an independent course in South Vietnam where a “serious disagreement over United States policies” had developed “between Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency there.” The New York Times had reported “that Mr. Lodge would be happier with a new C.I.A. chief.”3  The 6' 3" tall Lodge, also felt that South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem should be overthrown by the country’s military because of his harsh treatment of the nation's Buddhists.4

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38: Anna Chennault's Halloween Surprise

As male baby boomers, like myself, graduated high school in record numbers and faced the possibility of being drafted and sent to Southeast Asia, Americans focused more on the escalating war in Viet Nam than the threat in the Caribbean. And Pawley’s dire warnings about Cuba got less and less ink.

It was a turbulent time in America. On April 4, 1968, civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, was assassinated by another “lone gunman,” James Earl Ray. Riots broke out across America. White flight from the inner cities separated the human race even more. Two months after delivering an eloquent speech calling for calm and reconciliation in the wake of Dr. King’s murder, Presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated by yet another loner, Sirhan Sirhan.1

In July, Pawley was honored for his glory days in China. “Bill Pawley received the first CNAC Award for contribution to aviation in China” at a reunion of the CNAC and Flying Tiger “‘Old China Hands.’” He gave a rousing banquet speech to the attendees including Edna Pawley, his brothers, Gene and Ed, and their wives.” Eugene Pawley first went to China in 1939, returned in June 1942 to drive CNAC supplies, then switched over to intelligence, heading the OSS China Desk. Ed helped organize the Flying Tigers, while Bill built planes. The celebrity attraction at the CNAC event was 1950s heavyweight champion boxer Rocky Marciano, who ironically died the following year in an airplane crash. One of the other CNAC Award highlights was a party hosted by Edna and William Pawley at their Miami home during which they gave the attendees a cruise on Biscayne Bay aboard his Flying Tiger yacht.

Anna Chennault, widow of the Flying Tiger leader General Claire Chennault, sent a letter of regret that she could not attend the July 22, 1968 event “due to urgent business matter I have to leave for the Far East and Southeast Asia.”2 

Anna had served as an advisor to Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the region. She had developed close relationships with the top tier of the South Vietnam leadership. When President Johnson halted U.S. bombing of the communist North Vietnam, Anna, two days after Halloween, conveyed to a representative of the South Vietnamese government that it should stall the Paris Peace Talks until after Nixon was elected President, promising a better outcome. Anna received Nixon’s instruction from a longtime friend of Pawley and Anna—Chiang Kai-Shek—according to author George J. Veith in 2022.3

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39: The Détente Betrayal

William Douglas Pawley’s support of Richard Nixon in 1968 was based upon a longstanding relationship that began while Nixon was Vice President to Eisenhower, and it was reinforced by a mutual disdain for communists shared by all conservatives including E. Howard Hunt. But the times they were a changing as much as Bob Dylan switching from folk to country rock with his release in April 1969 of Nashville Skyline.

Once sworn in, President Nixon began to head down a different path from ruthlessly battling communism toward embracing détente. In February 1970, Henry Kissinger began secret talks with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho outside Paris, while the more public, formal peace process ground slowly away in the city. Pawley, like most Americans, was out of the loop on Nixon’s new strategy. 

Kissinger, a Harvard professor, had entered government service after John J. McCloy chose him in 1956 to "chair a study on Soviet American relations" then get a job as a speechwriter for Nelson Rockefeller. McCloy was a hawk who believed peace talks showed U.S. weakness.   

Early in the Nixon’s first term, Pawley, unaware of his friend's evolving policy, had called the White House and told Rosemary Woods to pass along to the President a few comments: “How tremendously proud I am of the great job our friend is doing. All of the disbelievers around here—at clubs, restaurants, etc. are coming around saying—‘Bill, the man’s got it.’ It is excellent—we are getting it from all sources.” Pawley went on to say he spent “several days in Santo Domingo and talked to the President [Balaguer] there for an hour. He is probably one of the finest Presidents ever to have served in the Western Hemisphere. He is not interested in making any money—he is interested in country ... it is fantastic the progress that has been made since Trujillo’s death.”

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40: The Rocky Report

When William E. Colby rose to CIA Director in late 1973, he inherited the 693-page “Family Jewels” compilation from the departing Agency head, James Schlesinger. The CIA links to the Watergate burglars had triggered Schlesinger’s demand for information. A year later Seymour Hersh brought the Jewels to public attention in The New York Times. This then gave rise to the launch of a number of investigations: the Rockefeller Commission;1 the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities under the chairmanship of Frank Church;2 and the House Select Intelligence Committee led by Congressman Otis Pike.3

Senator Schweiker was the only Senator permitted to see all of the classified Warren Commission’s documents in 1975, according to Robert Sam Anson in an interview with Arlene Francis on WOR-AM, December 3, 1975. However, he was guided by the CIA’s Counterintelligence head James Jesus Angleton and his assistant, Raymond Rocca, who after resigning a year earlier had returned to the CIA to help the assassination investigators and suggest Cuban and Soviet agents to question.4

Rocca, in 1944, was “Angleton’s executive aide” in Rome in the OSS X2 group involved in counterintelligence. In 1955, Rocca joined Angleton’s CIA Counterintelligence (CI) operation which previously “had been submerged in foreign intelligence.” He “was assigned to be the Chief of the Research and Analysis” where he remained “until 1969 when he became Angleton’s” Deputy Chief of the Counterintelligence which penetrated other agencies through identification of their agents or placing CIA agents within them. CI also developed double agents, handled defectors, intercepted and deciphered communications, and conducted research. Rocca left “the CIA on December 31, 1974.”5 

Rocca denied any knowledge of Lee Harvey Oswald’s CIA 201 File prior to the JFK assassination pointing out that the file was opened erroneously in the name Lee Henry Oswald and further that Oswald would have been considered a military defector thus falling under the scrutiny of “the FBI and the responsible military arm” which “was the Navy.” The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) communications show that FBI Director Hoover, State Department Security Officer Otepka and others were aware of Oswald’s Russian and FPCC activities before the assassination.6 [Bold emphasis added by D.P. Cannon.]

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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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47: Timeline

1896/9/7 ~ William Douglas Pawley born in Florence, South Carolina.

1899 ~ After the Spanish American War when Teddy Roosevelts “Rough Riders” helped liberate Cuba from Spain, Pawley spends his early childhood at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station where his father had a store, earning him the nickname “Cuba” from classmates at Gordon Military Academy in Georgia.

1925/5/20 ~ Gerardo Machado becomes the 5th President of Cuba. He is overthrown in 1933.

1928 ~ William Douglas Pawley creates Cubana National Airlines which is sold to Pan American Airlines in 1932.

1929 ~ China Airways financed by Curtiss-Wright and controlled by Clement M. Keys begins flying mail from Shanghai to Hankow, Peiping and Canton. With pressure from the government, it evolves into China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC).

1932 ~ Pawley establishes Intercontinent Corporation run by him and his brothers Edward and Eugene.

1933 ~ Pawley becomes President of China National Aviation Corporation.

1940/12/23 ~ Pawley partners with India in establishing Hindustan Aircraft Limited near Calcutta (Bangalore).

1941 ~ Pawley begins China Aircraft Manufacturing Company CAMCO to manufacture planes for the American Volunteer Group (The Flying Tigers headed by General Clair Chennault) to defend Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists against Japanese planes. CAMCO airplane assembly plants moved from Hangzhou to Wuhan to Lowing (on the China-Burma border) to India.

1941/9 ~ David Harold Byrd, wealthy oil man and owner of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, co-founds the Civil Air Patrol to watch for enemy submarines and border crossings as well as enemy aircraft over the U.S. and provide other civilian support for the U.S. Army Air Force. Byrd is a cousin of Antarctic explorer Richard Byrd and West Virginia politician Harry F. Byrd. 

1942 ~ CNAC based in Calcutta until 1945.

1945/7/20 ~ Pawley named U.S. Ambassador to Peru.

1945/10/13 ~ Carlos Prio Socrarrás becomes 5th Prime Minister of Cuba. 

1946/6/13 ~ Pawley named U.S. Ambassador to Brazil.

1947 ~ Antonio de Varona appointed leader of the parliamentary committee of his party under Prio. Previously, de Varona was involved in the overthrow of Gerardo Machado and was elected to the Cuban congress and the senate.

1948/10/10 ~ Carlos Prio becomes President of Cuba, succeeding Ramon Grau.

1949/9 ~ Negotiated taking over the Havana trolly system.

1950/1 ~ Pawley runs Havana Autobuses Modernos, removing trolley car tracks.

1951/2/4 ~ Daughter Annie Hahr's wedding.

1951/2/19 ~ Pawley enters State Department as special assistant to Dean Acheson.

1951/6 ~ In India re wheat and monazite

1951/9 ~ Son Clifton Pawley died, left Washington for Mexico and Miami. 

1951/11/20 ~ Resigned from State Department effective the 30th. 

1951/12/3 ~ Pawley enters Defense Department as special assistant to Lovett.

1952/1/17 ~ Sailed with Edna and Anita Pawley and his assistant Ed Harris to Europe; stayed until May, but returned to Washington to settle a strike in Miami then flew to Lisbon Conference with Lovett. Took a two week trip for consultation with Defense Department

1952/5 ~ Resigned as assistant to Lovett.

1952/6 ~ At Belvoir House farm in Virginia.

1952/9 ~ In Europe and Middle East with Edna.   

1952/3/10 ~ Fulgencio Batista overthrows Prio; de Varona begins fight against Batista.

1953 ~ In Miami. Owner president and general manager of the Miami Beach Railway Co. since 1941 and of Miami Transit Co. since 1948. Also owner of South Miami Coach Line and Tropical Coach Line Inc. and Grayline Sightseeing Co. of Miami.

1953/4/4 ~ CIA coup against Mossadegh in Iran (Operation AJAX) is hatched by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, CIA Director Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner and Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.  Mossadegh is replaced by the Shah of Iran Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, coincidentally a former classmate of future CIA Director Richard Helms.

1954/6 ~ Pawley works with the CIA on PBSUCCESS, the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala.

1954/6 ~ William Pawley, William Franke, Morris Hadley and General Jimmy Doolittle appointed by President Eisenhower to review the Central Intelligence Agency and recommend that it become “more ruthless than the enemy.”

1955/7/27 ~ Lee Harvey Oswald joins the Civil Air Patrol in New Orleans which also includes Captain David Ferrie

1956/10/24 ~ Oswald drops out of high school in Texas and joins the U.S. Marine Corps where he is trained as a sharpshooter.

1958/10/5 ~ Oswald is stationed at the Air Force base in in Atsugi, Japan where the U.S. dispatches U-2 planes to spy on Russia and Oswald learns Russian.

1959/Spring ~ Oswald, back in the U.S., becomes friend of Kerry Thornley 

1959/9/4 ~ Oswald applies for a passport a week before he is discharged from active duty in the Marine Corps.

1959/9/20 ~ Oswald departs the U.S. 

1959/10/2 ~ Pawley given the CIA cryptonym QDDALE.

1959/10/15 ~ Pawley installs a tape recorder to tape discussions with Cuban exiles.

1959/10/31 ~ Oswald defects to the Soviet Union offers U-2 secrets.

1959/11/16 ~ Oswald interviewed by Priscilla Johnson.   

1959/12 ~ Pawley tries to convince Batista to step aside so an interim government could be put in place as a buffer against Castro.

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