21: Dictating to Dictator Trujillo

Pawley’s entrepreneurship and bilingual skills led to global success and wealth that gave him easy access not only to U.S. presidents but also to Generalissimo Trujillo, the dictator of the Dominican Republic, who profited so much from the Pawley family’s thriving businesses that William believed he could dictate the course of the country. In 1955, Trujillo asked Pawley to help him write laws to attract U.S. investment in oil and minerals. That same year, Vice President Nixon was criticized for embracing the dictator.

On January 20, 1960, Jane Atherton Roman, who served as liaison between the CIA and FBI as a senior aide to CIA counterintelligence head, James Jesus Angleton, received a document that listed Edward Pawley as the subject. One who read it wondered if it was actually about his brother, William. The document noted that following trips to Florida and Cuba, “Catherine Taaffe, whose activities are well known to the intelligence community” advised that “there was a widespread belief among Cubans that the United States Government, and specifically CIA, was sponsoring anti-Castro plotting” and, according to former Havana lawyer Francisco Rodriguez Couceiro, Edward Pawley was working with the CIA on the effort. The document had a handwritten note: “Probably Wm D. Pawley Miami.” Mrs. Roman wrote beneath it: “Or his brother, Edward, who represents the Pawley business interest in the Dom. Rep.”

An English major graduate from Smith College, Jane Atherton worked in advertising then served in the OSS in 1944. A decade later, she married CIA co-worker Howard Edgar Roman who became a researcher for two books written by CIA Director Allen Dulles. Ten weeks before reading about the Pawleys activities, Jane Roman had opened the CIA's first file on Lee Harvey Oswald, a U.S. Marine Corps radar operator who, after learning Russian and monitoring U-2 flights over Russia, defected to Russia. By the summer of 1963, William Pawley and Lee Harvey Oswald would both interact with the CIA-funded Cuban-exile group DRE.         

In February 1960 an article appeared in the Miami Herald, titled “Smathers at Conference: Miamian Pawley Had a Part in Trujillo’s ‘Free Vote’ Vow.” While it mentions that Edward Pawley lives in Cuidad Trujillo and manages the Pawley mining and oil interests, the article notes that William Pawley is a longtime friend and an informal “economic advisor” to the Dominican Republic Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who accepted his advice and promised “to hold free multiparty elections within a year.”1

At the Dominican Republic press conference, Senator George Smathers was joined by William Pawley who stated that he had recently sold all of his investments in the country, while assuring the media that Trujillo was not in trouble, even though he recently had broken up a plot to overthrow his regime. Pawley “told The Herald from Washington his motives were ‘patriotic—to keep another Communist regime from forming in the Caribbean.’” He claimed that Smathers and Trujillo “each recognized that the Caribbean is entering a new period. A revision of regimes unacceptable to democratic nations has to be made,’ Pawley added.”2

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23: Presidents Come and Go; CIA Remains

In Pawley’s autobiography, he blames two individuals in the State Department for the success of Fidel Castro’s revolution. He put the primary blame on William A. Wieland (left photo) “for engineering the betrayal of Cuba into the Communist orbit.” 

Wieland’s “immediate superior, Assistant Secretary of State Roy Rubottom” (right photo) also was to blame. Pawley saw their complicity as being deeply rooted in ignoring the significance of witnessing “the Red-inspired holocaust in Bogotá featuring Fidel Castro.” Perhaps, intentionally.

During Castro’s rise in Cuba, Pawley noted “Wieland was in charge of Mexican, Central American and Caribbean affairs under Rubottom” and “did all that was humanly possible to brush aside, ignore, short-circuit or refute warnings by experienced American diplomats that Castro was a Communist and that his movement was infested with Soviet agents.”

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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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