Prologue: Strike Two Against JFK
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 airport and 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.
The man whom Cuban President Batista called upon to run Autobuses Modernos--the Havana bus company taking tourists to Mafia-run casinos in the 1950s. The man Ike, Vice President Nixon and CIA Director Allen Dulles relied upon to organize thousands of exiles fleeing Castro. 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 advanced $150,000 of his own money for fighter planes to make sure Operation PBSUCCESS was a successful coup.
The man who was called upon by Ike 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?”
As he returned to his office in Miami where he would amass an army of three hundred Cuban exiles awaiting their next marching orders to retake their homeland, it became apparent to William Douglas Pawley that President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his cadre of liberals in the State Department and the adoring press were allowing the communist menace to thrive in the Western Hemisphere.
This weak, inexperienced president already had one strike against him when he blew the Bay of Pigs invasion by not providing the air cover essential for success. Now 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.
Following his May 6, 1961 White House confrontation, Pawley knew his mission: If the New Frontier doesn’t include a free Cuba, then President Kennedy should never serve a second term. This goal must be pursued with the same determination that he had brought to all his activities in the Caribbean, Far East and Europe as the éminence grise of the American Century.
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The journey to William Douglas Pawley’s pathological obsession with ridding Cuba of Fidel Castro that evolved into an intense disdain for JFK began at the end of the 19th century as the “Cuba Libre” movement to free Cuba from Spain’s grip was gaining support in America, and 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 U.S. military leaders 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—as the CIA’s psychological warfare and covert operation experts at the vast JMWAVE center on the southern campus of the University of Miami spread the war fever beyond the Cuban exiles chanting “Cuba si, Castro no!” and into Mafia families in Tampa, Chicago and New Orleans.
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. His interaction three years later with the DRE anti-Castro Cubans in Miami—whose members later engaged Lee Harvey Oswald in a debate in New Orleans in the summer of 1963—would make him a top priority for testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations reviewing the Warren Commission finding that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. But Pawley never testified, having shot himself to end the pain of shingles.
The following tells William Douglas Pawley's story which began for me with a footnote on page 361 of The Invisible Government followed by my Freedom of Information Act request in 1976 for the top-secret Doolittle Committee Report and continuing with the slow trickle of declassification of hundreds of Pawley-related CIA and FBI files that has lasted into 2024. Both President Trump and President Biden refused to declassify and release the final batch of 3,400 documents some including numerous pages.1
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 significant friends embedded in the various Kennedy assassination investigations headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.
Information specifically about Pawley's covert activities when the CIA gave him the cryptonym QDDALE to hide his identity can be found at https://qddale.blogspot.com/ as well as within the chapters covering his entire life below.
CHAPTERS
- Prologue: Strike Two Against JFK
- 1: Love, “Cuba”
- 2: Aviation Crusaders
- 3: The "I" of The Flying Tigers
- 4: Ambassador to Peru and Brazil Pawley
- 5: "The Bogotázo” in Colombia
- 6: Men and Women of Letters
- 7: Truman Likes Ike
- 8: Father of the Groom of Elizabeth Taylor
- 9: Forrestal Plunges into the Cold War
- 10: Defense Department Troubleshooting
- 11: Going Bananas in Guatemala 1954
- 12: The Doolittle Report on CIA Covert Activities
- 13: CIA Director Allen Dulles Survives the Doolitt...
- 14: Pawley's Caribbean Oyster
- 15: Suspicious Minds
- 16: Find Me Someone to Kill Castro
- 17: QDDALE
- 18: Controlling Cuban-Exile Chaos
- 19: CIA Informant R-1
- 20: Hitmen
- 21: Dictating to Dictator Trujillo
- 22: QDDALE'S Deep Pockets for Special Proposals
- 23: Presidents Come and Go; CIA Remains
- 24: Pig in a Poke
- 25: The Name Game
- 26: Days of Swine and Rose's Boys: Bay of Pigs Inv...
- 27: Brigade 2506 Hostage Negotiations
- 28: Cuba Cacophony: Northwoods, Mongoose, JMWAVE a...
- 29: Strange Dreadfellows: Citizens Committee for a...
- 30: Bayo, Pawley & CIA TILT Against JFK
- 31: JFK Disapproves the Somoza Plan Backed by Pawley
- 32: "What it is ain't exactly clear"*
- 33: Shockwaves
- 34: The Warren
- 35: Our only hope, Goldwater
- 36: Back to Business: Talisman Sugar
- 37: Garrison's Gumbo
- 38: Anna Chennault's Halloween Surprise
- 39: The Détente Betrayal
- 40: The Rocky Report
- 41: Was Dallas A Target, Too?
- 42: Luce Lips
- 43: Sunset
- 44: Life and Death
- 45: Culture of Conspiracy
- 46: Assassination Scenarios
- 47: Timeline
- 48: Pawley's Spheres of Influence
- 49: What did Zapruder film?
- 50: Cold War Replay
- 51: Resources
- 52: The Full Doolittle Committee Report (1954)
- 53: Doolittle Committee Bios (1954)
- 54: 2023 Flying Tiger Spirit
- 55: Former U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha Arrested i...
Every chapter has a link to additional content and footnotes. Just click on Read more >> above Labels.
Labels: assassination, aviation, Brazil, Castro, China, CIA, Cuba, FBI, Flying Tigers, Guatemala, JFK, Kennedy, Mafia, Miami, Nixon, Pawley, Peru, Pigs, Shackley, United Fruit