17: QDDALE

An October 2, 1959 dispatch from Miami’s CIA Western Hemisphere Division (WHD) Representative Patrick I. Karnley to the CIA’s WHD Chief J.C. King refers to William Douglas Pawley as QDDALE, the cryptonym established for him by the CIA’s Clandestine Services. Karnley reported that Pawley wished he had a tape recording of his meeting with wealthy Cuban exile Fabio Freye who seeks to topple Castro. Karnley’s dispatch also mentioned a discussion of staging an invasion against Castro from an uninhabited British island, but it was assumed the British government would balk at its usage.1

Eleven days later the CIA’s Martha Tharpe (Margarite Forsythe) recapped discussions of the use of the British island of Nassau and noted that “QDDALE is a prominent U.S. businessman in Miami with good contacts among Cuban exile groups.”2

The QD prefix appears to relate to anti-Castro activities within Cuba. In 1998, the National Archives Kennedy Assassination Collection contained 49 QDDALE documents from 1960 to 1964 in addition to 978 Pawley documents which first appear in 1950.3

Among the earliest of the dozen plus documents on QDBIAS (Pedro Diaz Lanz) is a nearly illegible one from August 1959 discussing a meeting with QDCHAR (Marcos Diaz Lanz) and QDCOVE (Ricardo de la Lorie aka Ricardo Luis de la Lorie-Bals aka Ricardo Lorie Valls) that mentions Frank Fiorini (aka Frank Sturgis) who “talks too much.”4 

A September 4th cable expressed CIA Headquarters “interested learning more about QDBIAS group in Cuba. Proceed as suggested taking due precautions through use of cutout to protect ODACID [U.S. State Department] from charges of abetting counterrevolutionaries.” 

A comment noted that Havana “Station officers had met with
Angel Ros ... a member of the QDBIAS group.”5 Angel Sebastian Ros Escala was the national coordinator of the MRR and a splinter group, who would flee to Miami several months later and become AMPALM-10.6 (In the years that followed he became a double agent for Castro using the name Raul Gonzalez.)7

Read more »