4: "Businessman Pawley" Named U.S. Ambassador to Peru and Brazil

Upon the death of President Franklin Roosevelt in April 1945, Harry S. Truman ascended to the presidency. In June, he appointed William Douglas Pawley as Ambassador to the South American nation of Peru. Pawley stated that he was chosen because of his decades of familiarity with Latin America, fluency with the Spanish language and because the U.S. “had a very serious problem” with Peru’s unpaid debt of $150 million. A mutually beneficial resolution to the debt problem was desired because Peru was the first Latin American country to side with the U.S. in World War II.1

On November 13th, the State Department’s Fred Lyon telephonically informed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that Pawley was in Washington, DC and eager to meet with Hoover before the end of the week. The FBI Director received a memorandum detailing facts about William Douglas Pawley—his marital status; the armed services status of Pawley’s two sons; the location of Pawley’s 6700-square-foot-mansion on Pine Tree Drive in Miami Beach; his friendship with President Truman; and Pawley’s appreciation of the FBI’s August security survey of the Embassy in Lima. Hoover also was advised of the wealthy businessman’s history in Cuba, China and Florida; the fact that he has a private plane and yacht in Lima; and that Pawley “has expressed great respect for the FBI and the Director.” The memo also listed FBI personnel assigned to Peru (all nine names were redacted at the time of declassification) and the Legal Attaché, C.E. McNabb, who at the time was under recall as part of a staff reduction program.2

Internally, Peru’s years of border fights with nearby nations—Colombia, Ecuador, and Chile—had led to the development of a leadership of elites and military who were opposed by the center-left, anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA). 

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14: Pawley's Caribbean Oyster

With his Doolittle Special Study Group’s work done, Pawley continued pursuing his lucrative Latin American activities. He was issued a regular passport on December 14, 1954 “to visit Venezuela for an undetermined stay on personal business.”1 As a teenager, he had ridden a donkey into the Venezuelan jungles “to sell stearic acid and paraffin” and in his early twenties returned “to sell diving suits” to pearl hunters. Two decades later, he and Edna “spent Easter in Caracas, Venezuela with Walter Donnelly and his wife.”2

Like his father, the Caribbean region became the focus of Pawley’s expanding financial wealth. In his autobiography, Pawley detailed how he became entwined in business with Trujillo while the guest of honor at the head table of a large dinner attended by “400 Dominicans and Americans, evenly divided.” He “sat between Trujillo and our Ambassador [William Townsend] Pheiffer.” The discussion turned to “mining and oil ventures which led into the subject of the need for the Dominican Republic to develop its abundant natural resources.” Pawley soon became an adviser to Trujillo on how to profitably exploit the island nation’s natural resources and the “results were spectacular, especially in the development of one of the most valuable nickel mines anywhere.3

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