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

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25: The Name Game

In the past, Pawley would go straight to the top to argue his position to Presidents Roosevelt, Truman or Eisenhower when he felt that his dealings with underlings were not going well. But in the new Kennedy administration, he did not have that access, so he had to take his case to Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann (photo), whom weeks earlier Pawley had praised as “brilliant” and no “nicer fellow” while chastising him for his friendship with Betancourt.1

Pawley in early March 1961 began sending Mann materials to make the case against Manuel “Manolo” Ray and for the use of others.2 Ray was a former professor of engineering at the University of Habana, who had been selected by the CIA to rally support. Pawley disliked him because he had served as Castro’s Minister of Public Works, although he quit the Castro cabinet position after his friend Huber Matos was arrested by Castro. Ray then defected to the U.S. and became the leader of the anti-Castro counterforce People’s Revolutionary Movement (MRP).3

In the letter to Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Mann, Pawley demonstrated his mastery of the Cuban situation while raising the possibility of a post-Castro civil war if the wrong leaders are selected. “It [is] also thought by important Cubans whom I know here that Ray and three or four of the other prominently mentioned Cubans have already made arrangements through Russian agents and that when Castro falls, Russia will still have their men in power even though they pretend to demonstrate a more friendly attitude toward the United States.” Pawley stated “that the best solution would be a ‘junta’ or ‘frente’ made up of leaders of the various political groups. At no time has this seemed more necessary than now.” He offered four names for this role: de Varona, Carillo, Artime, and Maceo.

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28: Cuba Cacophony: Northwoods, Mongoose, JMWAVE and DRE

Nearly a year after the Bay of Pigs disaster, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara received a memo from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer (pictured left of JFK next to General Curtis LeMay) on the topic of “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba (TS).”

The March 13, 1962 proposal appears to be heavily influenced by the “more ruthless than the enemy” attitude of the Doolittle Committee report. 

It suggested ways to justify to the American public an all-out war on Cuba. It brought Operation Mongoose to a new level of activity outside the borders of Cuba with recommendations that included assassinating anti-Castro Cuban refugees living in Miami or sinking a boatload of refugees escaping the island and blaming it on Castro by using false documents. The most horrific suggestion was faking a Cuban air force attack on a civilian jetliner or blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Castro-planned sabotage, similar to the “Remember the Maine” incident which justified the U.S. entry into the Spanish American War some six decades earlier.

The justification memo also noted that the project should be undertaken “in the event that current covert efforts to foster an Internal Cuban rebellion are unsuccessful” and “a credible internal revolt is impossible of attainment during the next 9-10 months ... It is understood that the Department of State also is preparing suggested courses of action to develop justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba.”

The JCS members who put their names to it in addition to Lemnitzer were (to the right of JFK) General George Henry Decker (Chief of Staff, U.S. Army); Admiral George Whelan Anderson Jr. (Chief of Naval Operations); and General David Monroe Shoup (Commandant, U.S. Marine Corps). 

General Curtis Emerson LeMay (Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force) would become as vociferous a hawk on the issue of Cuba as Pawley, and in October President Kennedy would replace Lemnitzer with General Maxwell Taylor.1 

William Bamford, an expert on the National Security Agency who revealed the document in his 2001 book Body of Secrets, stated that Operation Northwoods “may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.” What’s more amazing is that the proposal was made three weeks after Robert Kennedy had told Air Force General Edward G. Lansdale, the Pentagon’s Deputy Director of the Office of Special Operations (OSO), to focus on intelligence gathering instead of proposing wildly outrageous schemes for Operation Mongoose, which was originally developed by the JCS and Lansdale to foment a revolt within Cuba to overthrow Castro. 

On April 11, 1962, General Lansdale provided a report on the “Status of Operation Mongoose” at week four of the 19-week Phase 1. “Our Center in Miami processed 1,309 refugees last week ... McCone can provide details” of “debriefing visitors to Cuba, at a number of free world ports.” 

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31: JFK Disapproves the Somoza Plan Backed by Pawley

After Operation TILT, William Pawley turned his attention to General Luis Somoza's plan to invade Cuba from Nicaragua with hopes it would justify full U.S. intervention, while John Martino shifted his energy to a new project involving Rolando Masferrer Rojas and an invasion of Haiti in August 1963. The common goal was to eliminate Castro.

A CIA telegram stated, “According to Carlos Zayas Castro, a colleague of Rolando Arcadio Masferrer Rojas, and several other unidentified persons in the Miami area, the recent Haitian activities were organized and supported by Masferrer, a Cuban exile who travels between New York and Miami. (Field comment: General Leon Cantave is generally credited with having organized the 5 August invasion of Haiti. Masferrer may have been seeking personal aggrandizement had the invasion been successful.)”

The telegram further noted that Masferrer “had Cubans in place in the Dominican Republic and in Haiti; he attempted to recruit 30 men from the Commandos L Group through Zayas.” Masferrer planned “to establish Carlos Marquez Sterling, a leading Cuban exile, as the figurehead or President.” Without addressing the source of his money, the telegram stated that “John Martino financed the travel of about 200 Cubans from New York to Miami” who as of August 8th were staying “in the Senate Hotel [probably the Art Deco Senator Hotel on Collins Avenue at 12th Street] and another hotel in Miami. Martino did not know what to do with his men following the collapse of the Haitian invasion.”1

Rolando’s brother, Raimundo Masferrer, who moved to Dallas in 1958 where he worked for the Parks Department as a mechanic, helped raise money for arms, believing the invasion would pave the way to overthrowing Castro who had imprisoned six of their family members and whose forces shot six others in 1959.2

In January 1960, William Pawley had advised the CIA that he had been contacted by Arthur Patton, a Commissioner from Dade County, Miami, Florida, who asserted that one of his police officers had been offered $200,000 to kidnap another of Rolando’s brothers, Rodolfo “Kiki” Masferrer.3

Rolando Masferrer had come to the attention of the intelligence agencies as early as 1948.4 He tried to endear himself to Trujillo in 1956.5 After arriving in the U.S., Rolando lead exile raids against Castro.6 Prior to the Bay of Pigs, the CIA tried to neutralize his activities against Castro7 and the Kennedy Justice Department later indicted Masferrer for plotting an invasion against Cuba.8 He then turned his attention to trying to overthrow Duvalier in Haiti, in the summer of 1963.9

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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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