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 neophyte president who had just thrown him out of the Oval Office.

How the hell does this inept young man whose father handed him the presidency ignore the recommendations of an international troubleshooter trusted by presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower?

Does Kennedy really think he is more well-versed on the potential danger Castro poses to the U.S. than the man who grew up in Cuba, launched the nation's first airport, served as U.S. Ambassador to two South American countries—Peru and Brazil—and had witnessed Castro's evil during the 1948 Bogotázo in Colombia while the heads of nations gathered for the 9th Pan-American Conference?

Who better knows Cuba than someone who spent his childhood there as his father sold merchandise to U.S. sailors at Guantanamo Naval Station? Who better than the entrepreneur who had formed Cuban National Airlines in the 1920s and had manufactured fighter planes in China and India for the Flying Tigers in the 1940s? 

Who better than the man Cuban President Batista called upon in the 1950s to run Autobuses Modernos--the Havana bus company taking tourists to casinos run by Meyer Lansky, Santos Trafficante and other American Mafia figures? 

Who better than the man Ike, Vice President Nixon and CIA Director Allen Dulles relied upon to organize thousands of exiles fleeing Castro? Who better than the man who helped establish a Cuban government in exile focused on retaking the island from the communists?

Who better recognizes the potential dangers the Western Hemisphere faces from the Soviet missiles in Cuba than the man who had warned of the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor a year before it happened?

And who better knows the strengths and weaknesses of the Central Intelligence Agency than the man handpicked by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower in 1954 to help the CIA overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala—and who advanced $150,000 of his own money for fighter planes to make sure Operation PBSUCCESS was a successful coup?

Who is more astute on covert activities than the man Ike called upon to assist General James Doolittle in examining the effectiveness of the CIA in counteracting an implacable communist enemy globally—and recommended that the Agency 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"? 

Who is more serious about ridding Cuba of Castro than the man who asked Batista to step aside so a buffer government could be established, and when Batista refused, immediately offered to pay any amount to anyone who would assassinate Castro the day after he took control of Cuba? 

                                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Among the largest contributors to Richard Nixon's presidential campaign against John F. Kennedy, Pawley immediately called upon Nixon and CIA Director Allen Dulles to remove Castro.  The initial planning meeting took place 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), and the CIA soon set up its vast JMWAVE anti-Castro psychological warfare and covert operations a few miles away at the south campus of the University of Miami. 


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. This joke of a president 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 eventually gave Pawley the cryptonym QDDALE and they worked together to spread invasion fever to all Americans. Not just the Cuban exiles chanting “Cuba si, Castro no!” and the Mafia families in Tampa, Chicago and New Orleans eager to regain their Cuban casino revenues but to 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 US 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, having shot himself at home in January 1977 to end the pain of shingles (a few months after I had attempted to interview him in person).

The following links tell William Douglas Pawley's story which began for me with a footnote on page 361 of The Invisible Government1 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 somw 3,400 classified and redacted JFK Assassination documents.

Many of the long-buried government files that were declassified in the past few decades 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 had approved for the Bay of Pigs Brigade Alberto Fowler who joined 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 with him there while brothers, Edward and Eugene, handled the company's business dealings in China. Nelson Rockefeller's investigation of CIA abuses found no connection of the CIA to Oswald and his assassin, Jack Ruby. 

Pawley's extraordinary 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

45: Culture of Conspiracy

James Pierson in 2007 wrote on the subject of “The Culture of Conspiracy” in the Wall Street Journal and questioned the sensibilities of those who have the audacity to believe that plots are hatched by groups of people. He totally ignored Osama Bin Laden’s cells, the CIA’s PBSUCCESS, and the variety of conspiracies concocted at JMWAVE.

Instead, Pierson continued to make the case that the evidence against Oswald being a lone-nut assassin was overwhelming. He even shot and killed a Dallas policeman, Officer Tippit (pictured here), who had tried to stop Oswald as he was walking through the city. He was then arrested inside a movie theater (Pierson failed to note that theaters are often used for covert meetings and information exchanges). Oswald's purported motive was communism even though President Kennedy was publicly defusing tensions between the Soviets and the U.S. To Pierson, “Oswald was a dedicated communist who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 out of disgust with American capitalism.” 

Ironically, Pierson sees Oswald’s disillusionment “with Soviet life” and return “to the U.S. in 1962” as part of that dedication to communism. Pierson’s communist legend continued when in 1963, Oswald “bought a scoped rifle through the mail and soon used it to fire a shot (which missed) at retired general Edwin Walker, the head of the John Birch Society in Dallas. In the summer of 1963, Oswald was active in street demonstrations in support of Castro. In September 1963, he visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City seeking a travel visa that would allow him to travel to Cuba.”

The problem with Pierson using the General Walker shooting on April 10, 1963 is that it not only shows Oswald (if he pulled the trigger) had trouble hitting a target under circumstances that were far easier than firing from six floors up at a person in a vehicle moving away on a downward curving street. Pierson ignores the fact that a neighbor saw two cars leave the scene, and Oswald did not drive. Also that General Walker--an extreme racist who had been dismissed by President Kennedy--was planning to run against JFK, and one of Walker's friends distributed “Wanted for Treason” flyers displaying Kennedy’s picture on the day of the assassination. The shooting garnered Walker the press coverage he needed to jumpstart his campaign.1

Oswald never had his day in court because he was killed by Jack Ruby, owner of the Carousel Club strip joint, who was carrying a pair of brass knuckles on his morning trip to the post office when he had the sudden impulse to shoot Oswald while surrounded by police officers.2

When one looks at the supposed loner, Oswald, you don’t find a Unabomber-type recluse who hides in the woods from civilization, only emerging when he wants to strike out at perceived enemies. Instead, you see a young man who joined organizations such as the Civil Air Patrol in 1955 and the U.S. Marines in 1957. While stationed as a radar operator in Japan where the CIA launched U-2 planes to spy on Russia, he learned a second language, Russian, not so he could talk to himself in two languages in loneliness.3

Oswald then infiltrated Russia, and upon his return to the U.S. did not undergo the polygraph examination and 30-day debriefing that Pawley’s Soviet defectors were going to face in Operation TILT. In fact, there was no arrest for treason despite Oswald having supposedly shared top-secret information with the Russians.

Instead, Lee Harvey Oswald befriended a worldly geologist, George DeMohrenschildt, went to New Orleans and engaged people on the street by passing out pamphlets which coincidentally are stamped with an address that is located in the same building as anti-Castroites. After his arrest he asked to speak to an FBI agent, then Oswald enabled the DRE to promote its anti-Castro propaganda by debating its leader, Carlos Bringuier, on the CIA’s favorite propaganda medium, radio. Is this the behavior of a loner? Bringuier himself initially thought Oswald may have been an FBI agent attempting to infiltrate his group. Bringuier also described Oswald as “confident in himself” and “a really smart guy and not a nut.”4

In the wilderness of mirrors that was James Jesus Angleton's counterintelligence world, June Cobb appeared. Cobb was a drug trafficker in the early 1950s with her Colombian boyfriend. By the end of the decade, the adventurous, attractive blonde was in Cuba supporting Fidel Castro's movement against Batista and she translated Castro's famous "History Will Absolve Me" speech into English. After Castro cooled to her, June Cobb helped former leftwing Guatemalan President Juan Jose Arevale translate his book, The Shark and the Sardines, into English. In the metaphor, it is hard for sardine nations such as Guatemala to negotiate with a much larger sharks like the U.S. which support the interest of big corporations. The sardines just get eaten as happened to Arbenz when the CIA and Pawley took the side of United Fruit. The Shark and the Sardines was the last book Oswald checked out of the library. Was it a coincidence or something else? 

Despite her left-leaning credentials, June Cobb entered the anti-Castro CIA in 1961with the cryptonym AMUPAS-1. She explored the Fair Play for Cuba Committee prior to Oswald's faux membership. In September 1962, her cryptonym was changed to LICOOKY-1 (aka LICOOKIE) and she was sent toMexico City to work with the likes of CIA Station Chief Winston Scott and his Cuban Desk head David Atlee Philips. She was there when Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in the city purportedly attempting to get into Cuba in an effort to return to Russia. Cobb even learned of Oswald's interactions with Sylvia Duran, the Mexican native at the Cuban consulate who interacted with Oswald concerning his travel plans. After the JFK assassination, Duran's friend Elena Garro de Paz, wife of writer Octavio de Paz, tried to make sure investigators knew Oswald had been seen with Duran at a twist party giving rise to the possibility of conspiracy (rather than the possibility that Duran was trying to determine Oswald's real intention). Cobb tried to quash Garro's assertion. 

Years later when the State Department's Charles Thomas--transferred from Haiti to Mexico City--tried to elevate awareness of the sighting as proof Oswald was part of a Castro conspiracy. He was told to speak to Cobb's superior James Jesus Angleton who did not want Americans questioning the lone-nut assassin conclusion. Thomas died by suicide April 12, 1971. That same month Winston Scott dropped dead after Angleton read his autobiography manuscript.     

In January 2024, JFK Facts reporter Jefferson Morley interviewed Mary Haverstick, author of A Woman I Know: Female Spies, Double Identities and a New Story of the Kennedy Assassination. She detailed to him how her film documentary about astronaut-in-training Jerrie Cobb evolved into a biography about her other possible identity, the cold-as-ice-CIA-asset June Cobb. Cobb admitted to having sat on the runway at Redbird Airport--9 miles from Dealey Plaza--on November 22, 1963 after delivering a Life magazine crew from Miami to cover the day's events. But was this true? Life took no photos that day; it bought the Zapruder film. Jerrie Cobb did have a relationship with Luce's Life having been featured in its pages on August 19, 1960 under the headline "A Lady Proves She's Fit for Space Flight." 

Coincidentally when Haverstick mentioned that her mom's first husband had been shot down twice as a Flying Tiger and that "Catherine Taafe was a real fangirl of the Flying Tigers" aviatrix Jerrie Cobb demonstrated that she "was extremely well-versed in the geopolitical nuances of the entire China-Burma region" as well as the activities of the Flying Tiger pilots. According to Anthony Carrozza's book on Pawley (page 234), "Catherine Taaffe, who worked for Castro but passed information to the CIA, told her contact there was widespread belief in Cuba that the United States was sponsoring anti-Castro plots. Further, 'one of those responsible for this belief appeared to be Edward P. Pawley [a hand-written note in the margin reads “probably Wm. D. Pawley”] who . . . encourages the belief that CIA is backing anti-Castro plotting and that he, Pawley, is working for CIA in this effort.'” Oddly, June Cobb also had worked for Castro before getting cozing up to the CIA.

Haverstick pondered if June Cobb was the inspiration for the Oswalds naming their daughter June because no relatives had that name. But at the time of June Oswald's birth, June Cleaver was the beloved mom on the popular Leave It To Beaver TV comedy series, June Allyson had her own TV series, and June Carter performed with her family at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry where she caught the eye of Johnny Cash and eventually helped him walk the line to greater fame -- his fireplace mantle held gold records (commemorating a million albums sold) which I saw while waterskiing past Cash's home on Tennessee's Jackson Lake in the summer of 1969 with my University of Miami classmate, Del Bryant, whose dad, Boudleaux, wrote hit songs for the Everly Brothers recorded at Monument Records run by Fred Foster who was steering the boat. 

The purported group of plane passengers in Cobb's claim is revealing. Life reporters went on raids with DRE ani-Castro Cubans, and Life was involved with William Douglas Pawley as recently as June 1963 in Operation TILT. Moreover, DRE members were the springboard for elevating awareness of Oswald as a communist and the centerpiece of Life's Clare Boothe Luce's 1975 confessional phone call to CIA Director Colby (Chapter 42: Luce Lips). Haverstick notes that in the summer of 1963, Luce had penned "a blistering op-ed" supporting the Mercury 13 astronaut program in which Jerrie Cobb was a member and that the CIA approved contact between its ZR/RIFLE assassination planner, Rome Chief of Station William King "Bill" Harvey and Luce, the former Ambassador to Rome. 

Silvia Odio, a Dallas resident, claimed that Oswald visited her home on September 26 or 27 of 1963 and discussed plans to kill JFK with two other men. The Warren Commission said she was mistaken because Oswald was on his way to Mexico. It was a doppelganger William Seymour, along with Larry Howard and Loran Eugene Hall, soldiers of fortune involved in anti-Castro activities. Either Odio was wrong or the CIA Mexico City Station group of Scott-Philips-Cobb was seeing a double. Coincidentally during testimony to the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Hall who had befriended Jim Garrison following his March 1, 1967 (my 21st birthday) indictment of Clay Shaw admitted that he had not mentioned to Garrison the Bayo-Pawley Operation TILT which had Hall had initially been involved in but missed the boat.

In 1994, FBI Special Agent James Hosty, who wrote reports on Oswald's activities, told John Newman, the author of Oswald and The CIA, that Odio's visitors might have been Pawley's men. "H.L. Hunt was backing Pawley's people, and they were also getting support from Henry Luce. It could be that Pawley's guys spying on JURE [Junta Revolutionaria Cubana, led by Amador Odio]." 

Newman's book, also relates how West Point cadet Douglas K. Gentzkow turned over documents being gathered by Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley to the CIA's Domestic Contact Division. "Gentzkow's papers also surfaced in William Pawley's files." The documents were intended to be used as leverage to get an investigation into the disappearance of Alexander Rorke who--along with Marita Lorenz--had spoken to June Cobb. "The name of June Cobb as a double agent appears in the Rorke papers." Cobb had forced Lorenz to abort Fidel Castro's love child.  

Marita Lorenz was as complex as Cobb. Lorenz claimed to have been recruited to poison her lover Castro but balked at the last minute. Then, in 1963, she supposedly met Oswald in Miami at an Operation 40 safe house and a second time with Frank Sturgis, E. Howard Hunt, Pedro Diaz Lanz and others at Orlando Bosch's house. Sturgis claimed he never met Oswald. The House Select Committee on Assassinations doubted her assertions. While she was dubbed "a patron saint of conspiracy theories," Lorenz actually was impregnated a second time by another President, Venezuela's Marcos Pérez Jiménez, and who daughter grew up to marry a son of Orlando Letelier, the Chilean academic assassinated in Washington, DC in a bombing conspiracy involving DINA, the Chilean secret police, and CORU, the militant anti-Castro group founded by none otherr than Orlando Bosch.5

Do loners debate anti-Castro DRE members in public and on radio then travel to Mexico to visit two embassies, while followed in line by William George Gaudet, a Central and South American propaganda expert who was hired by pubic relations guru Edward Bernays to write the weekly Latin America Report to enhance the image of Samuel Zemurray's United Fruit Company? The CIA underwrote it by paying for more than 20 annual subscriptions.

“During World War II, Gaudet worked as secret agent in Latin America for Nelson Rockefeller, Coordinator of Latin American affairs under FDR ... he traveled constantly in Latin America and combined his commercial work with his CIA assignments ... basically uncompensated (some expenses were picked up by CIA) and done for patriotic purposes. There were three others in the New Orleans area who did likewise.” 

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posted by David Price Cannon @ 1:41 PM  

46: Assassination Scenarios

In 1992, the National Archives began declassifying documents relating to Pawley’s CIA activities from 40 years earlier, and in 1999 it began releasing his QDDALE documents, which were still trickling out in December 2022 containing previously redacted names. Due to the Freedom of Information Act requesting process and the backlog at the National Archive, and the CIA’s reluctance to share the truth, it has taken from 1976 to 2023 to get close to finalizing this manuscript. 

Some of the still unreleased documents may have information pertinent to the complete picture of Pawley. Some may reveal other truths about Pawley, his associates and their dark diplomacy that transformed America from a beacon of hope for the world's oppressed into a nation where decades of ruthless tactics have helped rally enemies against us.

Some documents will never be found because of the paranoia of James Jesus Angleton and the politics of some officials. One example of this occurred during President Ronald Reagan’s term, when Everett Ellis Briggs, the United States Ambassador to Panama, in the summer of 1985, tried to keep visiting dignitaries away from General Noriega. “‘When Vernon Walters, a high-ranking CIA official, sent the general a very cordial Christmas greeting via the diplomatic pouch, I managed to intercept and destroy the message (without Mr. Walter’s knowledge).’”1

Cuban-born Briggs made the revelation five years after Walters died. For some reason, Briggs considered his judgment superior to the multilingual Walters who was a translator for Secretary of State Marshall at Pawley’s Latin America conference in Bogota when Briggs was just in his teens. Conservative writer and original television host of Firing Line, William F. Buckley, who attended Yale University, then entered the CIA under Case Officer E. Howard Hunt, did not share Briggs’ low opinion of Walters’ judgment and noted in the obituary he wrote for Walters, “Although his business in later years was diplomacy, his craft was intelligence, and the two blended in his hands.” The respect for Vernon Walters was demonstrated in 1980 when he was the guest speaker at the sixth annual national convention of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers whose members included former CIA Director Richard Helms, JMWAVES's George Joannides and former Western Hemisphere head David Atlee Phillips who founded the AFIO as he was coming under congressional scrutiny for his activities surrounding Lee Harvey Oswald.2

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posted by David Price Cannon @ 1:40 PM