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 president who had just thrown him out of the Oval Office for recommending a full-blown U.S. military attack on Cuba's Fidel Castro.

How could President Kennedy ignore the recommendations of an international troubleshooter who had been trusted by presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower? The troubleshooter handpicked by Ike and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954 to oversee the CIA's Operation PBSUCCESS to overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. The troubleshooter who expedited the coup by advancing $150,000 of his own money for fighter planes. 

The troubleshooter also called upon by Ike in 1954 to assist General James Doolittle in examining the effectiveness of the CIA in counteracting an implacable communist global enemy—and recommended that the CIA 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." 

Is young Kennedy really more well-versed on the potential danger Castro poses to the U.S. than the former U.S. Ambassador to Peru and Brazil who witnessed Castro's evil during the 1948 Bogotázo in Colombia where the heads of multiple nations gathered for the 9th Pan-American Conference? 

Does JFK really have more insight on Cuban affairs than the man who spent his childhood at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, launched Cuban National Airlines in the 1920s, and was called upon by Cuban President Batista in the 1950s to run the Havana bus company, Autobuses Modernos, which carried tourists to casinos run by Meyer Lansky, Santos Trafficante and other American Mafia figures? 

Pawley was so serious about ridding Cuba of Castro that he had asked Batista to step aside so a buffer government could be established. When Batista refused and Castro ascended to power, Pawley immediately offered to pay any amount to anyone who would assassinate Castro. 

Even the initial planning meeting for what evolved into the April 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion had taken place in William 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). 

The CIA soon set up its vast JMWAVE anti-Castro psychological warfare and covert operations a few miles away from Pawley's Sunset Island home at the south campus of the University of Miami. Details (in red) of JMWAVE's structure were finally released in 2025.


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. To Pawley, JFK 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 gave Pawley the cryptonym QDDALE and they worked together to spread invasion fever to all Americans: the Cuban exiles chanting “Cuba si, Castro no!”, the Mafia families in Tampa, Chicago and New Orleans eager to regain their Cuban casino revenues, and  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 U.S. 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, instead shooting himself to death in his home in January 1977 to end the pain of shingles, just four months after I had attempted to interview him at his Miami office.

My interest in William Douglas Pawley began with a footnote on page 361 of The Invisible Government+ 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 some 3,400 classified and redacted JFK Assassination documents.

Many of these long-buried government files 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 vetted Cuban exiles for the CIA as they arrived in Florida after fleeing Cuba with the help of the CIA's David Morales who later became head of the JMWAVE operation focused on eliminating Castro. 

>> Pawley approved for the Bay of Pigs Brigade Alberto Fowler who later volunteered to be a translator for 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 there with William while brothers, Edward and Eugene, handled the company's business dealings in China. Nelson Rockefeller's 1975 investigation of CIA abuses found no connection between the CIA, Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby. Rockefeller never requested testimony from Pawley about his plot to discredit JFK shortly before the assassination. Was it because William Pawley, in support of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, had been a business partner in the 1950s in World Commerce Corporation with Nelson Rockefeller and his attorney John J. McCloy who served alongside former CIA Director Allen Dulles on the Warren Commission which also failed to question Pawley?   

Details of Pawley's extraordinarily complex 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.   

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posted by David Price Cannon @ 2:30 PM  

December 12, 2009

29: Strange Dreadfellows: Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba

On December 29, 1962 at the Orange Bowl in Miami, President Kennedy told Manuel Artime (center) and other Brigade 2506 members that their "flag will be returned to them in a free Havana." The attendees clapped and cheered believing JFK was prepared to go to war. 

But as 1963 unfolded, a more diplomatic approach was taking place, involving negotiations with Cuba and the Soviet Union. Soon a group of prominent U.S. citizens decided it was time to turn up the heat on Kennedy. Freedom House, headed by Leo Cherne called upon Americans on March 25, 1963, to unite in a movement for a Free Cuba, without communist influence.1 In May, his rallying cry would lead to the formation of the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba. Cherne himself had been trying, like Pawley, to organize exiles for several years.2

Politically, Cherne had begun as a Wendell “Willkie Republican.” Willkie had switched from Democrat to Republican in 1939 as Hitler moved across Europe. With conservative Republicans viewing him as an “internationalist,” he lost the 1940 Presidential election to the re-elected Democrat Franklin W. Roosevelt. Willkie then helped Roosevelt push through the Lend-Lease policy to aid Great Britain and the Allied nations. Before dying in 1944, Willkie also served as FDR's liaison to Chiang Kai-shek which reportedly evolved into an affair with Madame Chiang. At the same time, Mrs. Willkie became a member of The Committee to Defend America by Aiding Anti-Communist China along with Clare Boothe Luce.

As director of the Willkie Memorial, Leo Cherne undoubtedly knew Willkie’s aide-decamp, Lamoyne (Lem) Jones, who in the 1960's became spokesman for the CIA's Cuban Revolutionary Council.3

Cherne in 1951 received “Covert Security Clearance to provide cover under Project BLANKET”—a program permitting “the subject to receive information about National Security Council 5412/2 matters on a need-to-know basis.” The CIA viewed individuals with international contacts as assets that could be tapped for gaining foreign country insights and for making contacts with potential informants, opinion influencers and future leaders. In 1954, Cherne received “Covert Security Clearance for use by Central Cover Division in providing cover under Project QKENCHANT.”4 This provided “Provisional Covert Security Approvals (PCSA) and Covert Security Approvals (CSA), with the Office of Security in connection with acquisition of Corporate Cover for Action.”5

A 1952 memo about using the Research Institute of America to provide cover for agents revealed that “Leo Cherne and Carl Novgard have been given covert operational clearances.”

Within less than a week of President Kennedy cutting funds to the Cuban Revolutionary Council, newspapers announced the establishment of the Cherne’s Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba (CCFC), comprised of prominent Americans with backgrounds in the academia, the military, news, labor, science, religion, government, and other walks of life.

Lyle C. Wilson’s article in The Oakland Tribune referred to it as a blue-ribbon committee on Cuba and stated the “CCFC is nonpartisan.” Its sponsors intended “to develop considerable political muscle, however” and had already developed an eight-page mimeographed pamphlet. The organization’s Executive Secretary, Daniel James, was listed as Editor in 19636 and served until Paul Bethel became Editor the following year. Bethel was a friend of the CIA’s anti-Castro propagandist in Mexico, David Phillips, who oversaw the activities of the exile student movement, Directorio Revolutionario Estudiantil (DRE), which the agency referred to by the cryptonym AMSPELL, according to Jefferson Morley’s Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA.7

The Free Cuba News (FCN) Vol. 1, No. 1 pamphlet dated May 4, 1963, stated that the Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba saw an urgent need for an effective U.S. Cuban policy embracing a method of freeing the island from communism.” Adding to the dread of communism in Cuba was the assertion that “the enslavement of 6 million Cubans may now lead to the enslavement of 200 million persons in the remaining 19 Latin American republics” which is “wholly part of an offensive designed to enslave the United States.”

The pamphlet also promised a “punishing non-partisan attack” on President Kennedy whom “does not now have an effective U.S. Cuban policy.” The group believed it could rally Democrats against JFK, noting that it was “evident that the 1964 Republican presidential and congressional campaigns will make Cuba a major issue.”

The first issue of FCN further asserted that the overall situation in Latin America is much worse than the American people realize. “What CCFC is trying to tell Americans is not merely that it can happen here but that it probably will happen here unless Americans move to defend themselves now.”8

The American public however had faith in JFK’s handling of the Cuba situation. Nearly six out of ten polled believed that a war over Cuba in the next five years was unlikely.9

Among the fear-mongering Citizens Committee for a Free Cuba sponsors listed were former Bay of Pigs invasion co-planner, Admiral Arleigh Burke, and Pawley’s old friend Clare Boothe Luce.10

At the time that the CCFC was formed, the public would not know that Luce, Leo Cherne, Jay Lovestone, Irving Brown and Ernest Cuneo, had connections with the CIA. Nor would many be aware that Cherne, Luce, Lovestone, Christopher Emmet, Dr. Sidney Hook, Sal B. Hoffman, and Edgar Ansel Mowrer had previously supported the pro-Chiang Kai-shek China Lobby11 that had long benefited from Pawley’s activism. Two decades earlier, Mowrer had been the reporter who was hired to draft a final report for “Colonel William J. Donovan, U.S. Coordinator of Information concerning a mission to the Far East in autumn of 1941” prior to setting up a U.S. intelligence infrastructure there after getting input from Colonel Chennault of the Flying Tigers.12

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posted by David Price Cannon @ 2:13 PM  

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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posted by David Price Cannon @ 2:09 PM  

33: Shockwaves

The Kennedy assassination shook the nation, but one of JFK’s friends took it harder than others. When Edward Grant Stockdale’s Irish eyes stopped smiling there may have been more to his depression than was ever revealed.

Stockdale was the former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland. On November 26th, he flew to Washington and talked with Robert Kennedy and Edward Kennedy. Upon his return to Miami, Stockdale told several of his friends that “the world was closing in.” On December 1st, he spoke to his attorney, William Frates, who later recalled their conversation. “He started talking. It didn't make much sense. He said something about ‘those guys’ trying to get him. Then about the assassination.” William Snow Frates and his partners, Peter Thorp Fay and Robert Lester Floyd, coincidentally were the subjects of a December 6th memo seeking CIA covert security approval for the three attorneys “who will be used as officers in KUVEST” which appeared to be a funding mechanism “through notional companies for JMWAVE payroll companies.”1

On December 2, 1963, Grant Stockdale fell to his death from his office window on the thirteenth floor of the exquisite art deco Alfred I. duPont Building, Miami’s first commercial skyscraper at 169 East Flagler Street.2 The building lobby housed a major branch of Florida National Bank & Trust Co. headquartered in Jacksonville which Alfred duPont had purchased in 1929 and named his wife Jessie Ball duPont to the Board of Directors. Upon Alfred’s death in 1935, Jessie’s brother, Ed Ball, took charge of bank through his leadership of the Alfred I. duPont Testamentary Trust.

The Alfred I. duPont Building from which Stockdale plunged should not be confused with the DuPont Plaza Center building at 300 Biscayne Boulevard Way (U.S. 1), Miami, where Life magazine was located on the eighth floor. That building sat at a sharp turn in the road— similar to the Dealey Plaza presidential motorcade route—just before it turns past Bay Front Park where 15,000 family members and friends had gathered waiting for the return of the Cuban exiles involved in the Bay of Pigs invasion.3 Three decades earlier, five shots rang out in Bay Front Park shortly after President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivered a short speech. The disgruntled, lone-nut, would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara missed Roosevelt, but five people were struck by bullets and Chicago Mayor Cermak would die later from complications. Zangara died in the electric chair just 14 days after Cermak died.4 

A rightwing plot—lead by Joseph Milteer of the National States Rights Party—to assassinate President Kennedy with a rifle from an office building in Miami on November 18th was publicly revealed in 1967 as I drove along S.W. 8th Street in Miami after eating breakfast at The Skillet. In 1963, the threat was taken seriously enough by the Secret Service that President Kennedy's motorcade was canceled and instead he and  Senator George Smathers were driven to a helicopter that flew them to Miami Beach where he delivered a speech to the Inter-American Press Association signaling a desire for peace in the Caribbean which was not what Pawley and Cuban exiles wanted to hear.5




JFK and Senator George Smathers at Miami International Airport 11/18/1963 awaiting a helicopter ride after cancelling a motorcade out of security concerns four days before Kennedy was assassinated 1,300 miles away in Dallas. (Photo: Joe Rimkus/State Archives of Florida)


According to FBI reports printed in Don Adams's From an Office Building with A High-Powered Rifle: A Report to the Public from an FBI Agent Involved in the Official JFK Assassination Investigation, the 62-year-old Joseph Adams Milteer from Quitman, Georgia who sometimes lived with a prostitute in Valdosta, Georgia believed John Kennedy, Nikita Kruschev, Martin Luther King and Jewish people were undermining America. (His patriotic zealotry didn't extend to what he drove: a 1962 Volvo and her Volkswagen.)  Milteer had inherited $200,000 from his father and spent it printing pamphlets spreading his segregationist point of view as a member of the White Citizens Council of Atlanta. He supported Strom Thurman for President in 1962 and attended a rally in Fort Lauderdale for Barry Goldwater shortly after revealing his belief that President Kennedy would be shot in Miami from building with a high-powered rifle. Coincidently, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Palm Beach Goldwater delegate and the honorary chairman of the Florida Republican Party campaign for Goldwater was William Douglas Pawley. FBI Special Agent Don Adams included in his book a reprint of a photo he had seen in the Harrison Edward Livingstone and Robert J. Groden book High Treason: The Assassination of JFK and the Case for Conspiracy which possibly shows Milteer at Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. The picture is odd because Milteer is in a short sleeve shirt while others wear coats and he is taller than many others despite his FBI reported height of 5'4". 

A December 2, 1963 Miami News report stated that Ambassador Grant Stockdale had looked at a Life magazine covering the Kennedy assassination."After smoking a cigarette, he lept out a window, "hitting a ledge eight floors below.” He was to have hosted Senator Ted Kennedy’s visit to Miami on the occasion of the University of Miami’s homecoming ceremony on December 14th. Stockdale was the chairman of the homecoming event, which was cancelled when he died.7 (In 1969, I received my AB degree in American Civilization from the University of Miami.)

Stockdale did not leave a suicide note but Miami Homicide Detective Robert Utes said Pawley’s friend, Senator George Smathers, who had an office in the same building, claimed that Stockdale had become depressed as a result of the death of John F. Kennedy. Stockdale had been Smathers’ administrative assistant in 1946. As word was being spread by the DRE that Oswald was associated with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, no doubt Smathers recalled that his proposal to cut to U.S. sugar imports from Cuba by 10% was ridiculed in the FPCC's May 13, 1960 Fair Play newsletter under the headline "Sweetening the Bitter Tea of Senator Smathers."     

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posted by David Price Cannon @ 2:07 PM  

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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posted by David Price Cannon @ 1:53 PM  

42: Luce Lips

In 1956, Clare Boothe Luce was close enough to the Kennedy family that she received a postcard from JFK’s mother, Rose, written when Jackie and John lost a baby. “Pray—please—dear Clare.”1 

But in August of 1970, it was revealed that Henry Luce had voted a decade earlier for Richard Nixon—instead of John F. Kennedy—yet spent the night of the election with Joseph and Rose Kennedy and months later attended JFK’s inaugural.2

In August 1971, an article appeared in the Miami Herald detailing Pawley’s role in Operation TILT, the effort to extract Soviet missile technicians from Cuba and have them state missiles still existed on the island despite the Kennedy administration’s claim that the weapons had been removed. FBI Special Agent in Charge Francis M. Farrell attached the article to his memorandum noting that “Pawley has been of interest to our organization and its predecessor for many years.”3

In 1975, the Washington Star contacted Pawley for follow up to a story that had appeared in City, a short-lived San Francisco publication. City’s story had been co-authored by former FBI agent William Turner and Warren Hinckle, who had been with Ramparts magazine when the publication revealed CIA funding of foundations. The Washington Star story dealt with Operation TILT and reported that Pawley “said yesterday that Life joined the party and paid the commandoes in exchange for exclusive rights to the story.”4

Another account of the tale was published in the spring 1976 issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Written by Miguel Acoca, a former Life staff writer, and Robert K. Brown, the publisher of Soldier of Fortune, the exclusive article was titled “The Bayo-Pawley Affair: A Plot to Destroy JFK and Invade Cuba.” It was excerpted from Brown’s 1967 manuscript, Ripped Cloak, Rusty Dagger: JFK, LBJ and the CIA’s Secret War Against Castro. The article included photos taken by Terence Spencer, the Life photographer who accompanied the Bayo-Pawley operation part of the way.

The Soldier of Fortune article asserted that “Operation Red Cross” (a name created by Life) “was a plot to destroy President Kennedy politically, and the CIA played a major role— with “its agents, planes, ships and communications” involved.

Bayo, whose real name was Eduardo Perez, had earlier in the year been involved in a failed attempt “to topple Haiti’s President Francois Duvalier, the hated ‘Papa Doc’” believing that “Haiti was the ideal base for attacks against Cuba.” At one of the first planning meetings, Bayo met with Tony Questa and Ramon Font of Commando L, Mario Fontela of FORDC and “and the boys from DRE.”5 Other Bayo-Pawley planning meetings were attended by INTERPEN’s Frank Fiorini6 and Gerald Patrick Hemming.7

Pawley was interviewed briefly on October 15, 1975 for the Spring 1976 article and stated that he felt that the June 1963 Operation TILT was a “‘one-thousand-in one chance.’”8

As it turned out the odds were not even that good.

When CIA documents were finally declassified decades later they provided details including weapons and points of rendezvous for an operation that was plagued with problems. The radar was out of order and the “operation delayed twenty four hours due to engine trouble Mr. Pawley yacht.” His “Flying Tiger anchored at Point G” had to wait for a replacement part to make emergency repairs. “Bill, States intentions to continue operation independently unless unknown factors exist,” the “Op procedding [sic] as planned X due navigational difficulties involved.” Then there was loss of contact with the and the futile search for the missing TILT team members.9

A memo referring to QDDALE’s May 23 contact with JMWAVE Station Chief Reuteman detailed how John “Martino had tried to talk [Richard] Billings [of Life] out of participating in the Soviet defector operation but Billings had refused to be excused ... This resulted in QDDALE learning that Mr. George P. Hunt, Managing Editor of Life Magazine, planned to be in Miami 23 May” and “Life was willing to pay each of the Soviets $2500 for their story.”10

Richard Billings was not a mere employee. His father, John, had been the first managing editor of Life. Richard was part of the team that purchased the Zapruder film of the JFK assassination. A few years later, he endeared himself to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison and Tom Bethal who were looking into Oswald’s associates in New Orleans. Months later, Life began questioning Garrison’s integrity.

In the next decade, Billings became the editorial director for G. Robert Blakey who was named chief counsel to the House Select Committee on Assassinations in September 1976. In the book, they co-wrote after the hearings ended, they concluded that Oswald and an unnamed shooter from the Grassy Knoll were part of a conspiracy organized by Carlos Marcello who ran the Southern mafia from New Orleans and had been deported by the Kennedy administration after the “underworld figure, was ruled an undesirable alien.”11

On October 25, 1975, after Pawley was interviewed about TILT, Life magazine’s Clare Boothe Luce called her friend CIA Director William Colby to try to explain how she was able to so very quickly identify Oswald as being pro-Castro. (Colby had overseen the CIA's covert activities in Italy when Luce was the U.S. Ambassador there two decades earlier and was trying to stop communists from taking over the country.) Luce's 1975 call to Colby took place as Senator Schweiker was reopening the Kennedy
assassination in wake of the Watergate Rockefeller hearings. The entire conversation, transcribed by Barbara Pindar along with her parenthetical notes, offers many insights into the Luce and Pawley mission, their DRE allies and associates, and her spin:

Mrs. Luce: I have a big problem, a case in conscience. I got rather deeply involved during and after the Bay of Pigs, and up to the time of the missile crisis, with a group called the (Directorate Revolutionario Estudiante; Barbara Pindar Note: the spelling of that is just a guess), the DRE. Whether you know this or not, it was me who fed the missile stuff to Keating. I knew a number of these leaders well; they were going in and out of Cuba, and I paid for one of the motor boats. Bill Pawley did too. We thought we were doing another Flying Tiger. The missile crisis came, and I got a telephone call from Allen telling me that the Secrets Act had gone into effect and that henceforth there would be no voluntary American efforts. That ended that, and I don't know what I was doing— maybe I went back to Arizona, or whatever. Then came the assassination. The night of the assassination, right after Oswald was caught, one of my boys telephoned me from New Orleans. Didn't I ever tell you this?

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posted by David Price Cannon @ 1:50 PM