16: Find Me Someone to Kill Castro

Pawley’s reaction to Castro taking control of Cuba was filled with thoughts of violence. Not only did it threaten his investments but embarrassed him personally by showing the folly of his buffer-government plan. He told a reporter in Miami that he would personally pay any amount to anyone who assassinated Castro. Then retracted his angry comment within days. In lieu of contracting an assassin, he began helping CIA Director Allen Dulles organize thousands of exiles fleeing Cuba to make sure the communist rebels in Cuba would be confronted by a force more ruthless than the enemy.1

On February 23, 1959, CIA Director Allen W. Dulles wrote to Pawley, thanking him for his good letter of February 18. “J.C. [King] has brought me up to date on his recent talks with you. As you know, we are running into difficulties in finding a resting place for the person about whom you telephoned me but I shall be working with State on that. I shall speak to Foster about your letter when next I see him. I know he will sincerely appreciate your thoughts. On a whole, he is making as good progress as could be expected and well tolerating the treatment he is receiving.”

In April 1959 Castro visited the United States for eleven days, giving the most optimistic Americans hope that he would not become a total surrogate for the Soviet Union.2 But when Castro returned to Cuba, he put a limit on private land holdings with the state expropriating the remainder under a policy of Agrarian Land Reform. That summer, President Urrutia resigned, and Osvaldo Dorticos Torrado became the country's president.3

On July 27, 1959, Marcos Diaz Lanz (MDL), who was on Raul Castro’s list of government officers to be purged, escaped from Cuba to Florida with the assistance of Bernard Barker (right in photo) who earlier had transferred Marcos to a CIA safehouse in Cuba. Three weeks later, Marcos was “living in Fiorini’s house” in Florida while Barker remained in Cuba for another six months. After finally arriving in Miami, Barker and Frank Fiorini (aka Frank Sturgis; left in photo) would take part in numerous attempts to overthrow the Castro brothers. (A dozen years later, Sturgis and Barker would be arrested with E. Howard Hunt, Virgilio Gonzalez, James McCord, Jr., and Eugenio Rolando Martinez after a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC.)4

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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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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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